Belladonna

by Moline, Karen

  Silly cows. That’s as close as they’ll ever get to her, slurping down an intoxicating concoction. No one can have the real Belladonna.

  No one knows how to try.

  “Did you see what she looked like?”

  “Who?”

  “Who else? The only woman everyone in New York is desperate to see. The woman everyone is talking about. Belladonna, you fool.”

  “Oh, I thought you meant the dog.”

  “Honestly, I don’t know why I bother talking to you sometimes.”

  “Did she have a diamond collar on, too?”

  “Who?”

  “Belladonna. I already know about the dog.”

  “No, she had diamonds on her shoes. I swear. She was wearing high heels studded with diamonds, so she glowed from behind. You couldn’t not see them, because she had a very thin strand of diamonds around her ankle, too. Plus, she had the most enormous pearl necklace I’ve ever seen, hundreds of pearls. And her rings. She was wearing them on the outside of her gloves. On both pinkies and her thumbs. Giant pearls and rubies looped with these thin chains dangling from them. Unbelievable. But there’s more.”

  “What can compete with diamonds on shoes and ropes of pearls all over the place?”

  “Well, first of all, there was her clothing. Not clothing"it was a costume. She must have had it made specially. Totally outlandish, like she was Marie Antoinette or something. I mean, her bosom, you should have seen it. It’s the corset underneath, I suppose, pushing her up. It was practically obscene. And the ruby, at the end of her pearls, dangling down between her breasts. Now, that jewel wasn’t as big as the aquamarine she was wearing one night. Anderson says it was the size of a robin’s egg. No matter. You could practically hear every man in the room salivating. Not that they got near enough to her even to say hello.”

  “I suppose I should get a corset and an embroidered bodice. Brocade would be nice.”

  “Can’t you ever have an original idea in your head? That’s what she was wearing. A gold-and-red brocade bodice, tightly laced up the back. And a long brocade skirt over all these petticoats, but not so long that you didn’t see her shoes and ankles. But it’s not just the dress that’s so amazing.”

  “What? Tell me.”

  “It’s the whole package, I guess. First, there are her eyes. Why, Rhonda dared to ask her what she used for eyeliner, and she told Rhonda that she used an ultra-fine nib of a calligraphy pen dipped in India ink.”

  “I never thought to do that for eyeliner.”

  “It can’t be, silly. How would she get it off?”

  “Maybe it’s really just plain old Max Factor.”

  “Oh, you drive me crazy! Belladonna’s just too, too much. Too much dress, too much jewelry, too much eyeliner, too much wig"”

  “Really? What color?”

  “Honey. Ringlets of honey, and loops of pearls braided into it”

  “It must have weighed a ton.”

  “Don’t be so silly. How much can a wig weigh? She certainly didn’t seem bothered. Of course it was hard to tell, because she had that stupid mask on. So no one can tell what she really looks like.”

  “Black velvet?”

  “No, you goose, it was lace, the same gold as her dress. It was fastened on somehow under her wig. She simply doesn’t want you to see her face.”

  “Maybe she’s missing a nose or something.”

  “How can you be so stupid? She’s not missing anything. All you can tell is that she has piercing green eyes. And lips the same color as her rubies.”

  “Like the dog’s toenails, you mean.”

  “You really are hopeless.”

  Almost immediately, she starts a mania for rings worn on the outside of kidskin gloves of the softest colored leather. Not that most of the patrons of the Club Belladonna can afford rubies like hers. They copy the pearls with the dangling chains, and the clever rings she likes to wear, rings with tiny golden-hinged boxes, their lids pierced with tiny holes so she can wave them under her nose for a waft of scent.

  My favorite is the fountain ring. If someone tries to kiss her hand, she’ll let loose with a fine spray of perfume. It is an ingenious thing, filled like a fountain pen. Soon copies appear in boutiques all over town.

  But nothing comes close to the original.

  The joke is always on everyone else. That’s why we decide to create a unique perfume, one made from the essences of plants that are toxic if ingested. Called Profumo B, it is an intoxicating concoction of lily of the valley, azalea, iris, black locust, yellow jasmine, and hyacinth, with a hint of oleander. It is poured into bottles of dark crimson glass, cut cunningly to resemble multifaceted pyramids, and a tiny golden B for Belladonna is etched into the stopper. It is sold by the dour Josie to guests as they file out, reluctant to leave this fairyland behind to pick up their coats. One bottle only, one hundred dollars, cash, thank you very much, and goodbye. Practically everyone buys one, whether they like the highly unusual scent or not. They simply have to display it on their living room cocktail tables to prove that they have indeed been worthy, and lucky enough to breathe in the same delectably scented air as Belladonna herself.

  Oh ho, how Belladonna radiates such a strange mixture of fire and ice. She terrifies everyone in the club, fascinates them, renders them dumb with amazement and envy. She sits masked, her melancholy most exquisite, as if she’d risen straight from the grave, exhumed after a long burial and powdered with the pale mold of decay, seemingly untouched by feeling.

  Yes, Belladonna inspires awestruck admiration more than pleasure, doesn’t she, sitting at her table like a colossal fallen face of a statue, sublime at a distance, terrifying in her stony unblinkingness up close, carved of cold marble, unreal, yet breathing.

  She is both passionate and frozen. You can’t melt the ice round her heart, because she won’t let you close enough to try.

  Yet when Belladonna disappears from sight, she never gives any one of the club’s revelers, glowing with smug happiness that they’d actually made it inside, another thought. To her, they no longer exist.

  She is waiting. She has patience. Think things through, that’s what Leandro taught us. Be cunning, be crafty. Plan, plot, keep it direct. Do not stray from the path.

  We are going to find them.

  Sooner or later, one of them will come crawling, and she’ll open the beautiful golden-hinged top on her ring, and a whiff of sweet poison will invade his senses and he’ll swoon in delirious pleasure.

  Pretty poison is her cry.

  5

  The Night of

  public Tenderness

  Now I suppose you’re wondering about a few logistical kinds of things. For one, how does no one discover where Belladonna lives? Aren’t there the lingering curious, waiting after the club closes every night, hoping for a glimpse of her? Usually. That’s why we hire a body double to wear near duplicates of her costumes and wigs and masks. It is a good-paying gig"less than an hour of work each night “Belladonna” makes an appearance"to dress up and walk out into a waiting car. A different car each time, so the license plates can’t be traced. These cars are driven by a professional, our conductor, Richard, who could lose any tail in Manhattan. That’s why Vivienne, our cigarette girl and Richard’s wife, usually plays Belladonna. And when she can’t, Geoffrey, Matteo’s assistant doorman with the lovely green eyes, is happy to fill in.

  Don’t people lurk around the club all day? Hardly. The musicians and staff are expected in no earlier than an hour before the club opens. Delivery people are allowed only in the late afternoon, grumbling that they have to carry everything through the narrowing hallway in the front. There is always a hopeful crowd waiting as soon as Matteo pushes open the crimson door at 9:00 P.M. sharp. But during the day, few come by. When the wind blows the wrong way off the Hudson, a few lungfuls of eau de rancid beef fat wafting over from the meat packers in the neighborhood send most hurrying on their way.

  The truth is, nobody really wants to know the true i
dentity of Belladonna. It’s much more delightful trying to decipher her mystery. People are starting to throw Belladonna parties all over town, expecting their guests to show up in masks and costumes, with exotic hounds straining at jeweled leashes.

  What about our own exotic hounds? Simple. They have the run of the interconnected backyards behind our brownstones and so don’t need to be walked. Whenever they get too rambunctious and deserve a proper romp, we bundle them into a van that pulls into the former loading dock of Kiss-Kiss, then drive them up to a park in Westchester or across the river to Hoboken. Around the house, we call Andromeda “Drome-dee,” which has always been Bryony’s name for her. When Andromeda is devoid of her diamond collar and her nail polish"we always take it off at the club so Bryony won’t see it and inadvertently say something to one of her classmates"she really looks like any other Irish wolfhound.

  And what about Belladonna’s ring? Not the cherished sapphire ring Leandro had given her, but the other one, the huge emerald flanked by two yellow diamonds that’s fastened on so tightly she hasn’t been able to get it off for years. She can’t bear to look at it one more minute, she confides to me one day, so Jack finds us a jeweler in Chinatown. The jeweler doesn’t ask any questions. He turns on a strange-looking power tool and deftly cuts the ring off with a hideous whir and display of sparks. She’s always hated that ring; she still hates the sight of the stones, unmounted, in my hand, and she makes me promise to throw them into the Hudson. They’re evil, she claims. I do as she asks, of course.

  She’s never asked me what became of the emerald necklace. The one that"

  Botheration. I am getting distracted again.

  The expression on her face at the sight of her finger frightens me. Belladonna is staring at the circle of dead-white skin around her finger; it hasn’t seen the light of day in seventeen years. The ink of the tattoo is as horridly black as ever. She shudders, then slides Leandro’s ring over the tattoo and says no more about it

  Of course this particular point is really a bit immaterial, because she always wears gloves in the Club Belladonna. Brilliant-colored skintight kidskin, fuchsia or teal or citron or aqua, coordinated with her gowns, the pearl and golden rings dangling from the leather. Her fingers remain invisible to all in the club, the guests, the staff. No one touches her, and she touches no one.

  This, our staff knows well. Trust me, it was hard to find an all-ex-and-current spy band, but Richard is well connected, especially with many of the Europeans who established themselves in New York after the war. The band members have only a small dressing room, but they don’t complain. They need little. Like all the employees, they work fixed hours, and that’s it. The club opens at nine, and shuts at two in the morning, so we don’t have to worry about the 3:00 A.M. entertainment curfew in the city. We never open on Sundays and Mondays. Five days a week, five hours a day. No exceptions. Sometimes, as I’ve already told you, we close just for the hell of it continuing to pay the staff’s salaries, naturally. The staff have been instructed to come in through the front, and they leave that way as well. They are given a lovely cold platter of food and any drinks they want when they arrive. They are paid exorbitantly well and warned not to gossip, to come to us immediately if and when approached with bribes. Like I’ve said, it’s such a good gig that no band members snitch, or louse up. None of the waiters do, either. They’re making too much money from the tips palmed off from desperate guests, and having too much of a blast hanging around with the world’s best and brightest, dazzling and dumbest

  And we are all masked. Don’t forget about that. The band members, the waiters, the busboys, everyone. We wear simple stiffened silk masks, colored deep crimson. They cover only our eyes and nose, so they aren’t too hot, and we get used to them quickly. Masks are great equalizers, I soon realize; that’s why they were so popular in centuries gone by. They let the nobility mingle with the rabble.

  That’s what we’re doing in the Club Belladonna. Or rather, the rabble are trying their best to get close to her. They will try anything to mingle with her serene highness. I say that because those lacking in imagination compare Belladonna to that appalling creature down in Argentina, Eva Perón. What, my darling Belladonna bleach her hair? Never.

  When it is bitterly cold outside, Matteo and Geoffrey wear cloaks of darkest crimson wool, with hoods shadowing their faces. Belladonna tries to avoid seeing them clad so. I actually thought she was going to faint when I showed her a prototype.

  They remind her too much of His Lordship.

  We had worried, you see, that by some bizarre coincidence someone might recognize us at the door. Well, we needn’t have fretted. The costumed doormen and the jeweled dog have become part of the mystique of the Club Belladonna. It starts from the moment you see and hear the crowd on the street, hoping for a passage into paradise. It grows as you inch your way closer, hoping that you will not be one of the rejected, still milling around aimlessly in disbelief if indeed you are. It spreads into your very pores as Andromeda sits silent and, by some major miracle, you are admitted into the secret world.

  “Don’t you know who I am?” they scream when the dog barks. “Yes, I know perfectly well who you are,” Geoffrey says calmly as Matteo stands hulking, the dog at his side. “According to Andromeda, you are a spoiled, rude, mannerless twit. Andromeda is never wrong.” “I’ll get you,” they screech, “you and your blasted dog! You’ll be sorry.” Geoffrey rolls his eyes and that’s when one of the off-duty cops"”the shadow bouncers,” we call them"appears as if by magic to escort the twits gracefully to the corner, where they are thrown into a cab. Then the shadow bouncers palm the driver a large tip so he won’t be insulted by the babbling belligerents in his backseat.

  The cabbies love the corner by the Club Belladonna.

  One night, a reject is so astonished by Andromeda’s bark that he’s practically frothing in incredulity. “Don’t you know who I am?” The same old same old. They are always so original. “I can break you. I can break you in two. Do you have any idea who I am?”

  Geoffrey turns on the microphone, which is kept there for crowd control at the police’s request, and picks up a powerful square camping flashlight usually kept hidden in the dark corner. “Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please,” he says, tapping the mike and turning his light on to sweep over their expectant faces. The crowd is instantly stilled into a thrilled silence. What can this mean? Will they, perhaps, be admitted en masse? Or will Belladonna herself be making an entrance onto the street to see them and comfort them? Or will"

  No no no. Of course not. Fools.

  “Your attention, please,” Geoffrey repeats. “I have a gentleman here who seems entirely baffled that he doesn’t know who he is.” The light sweeps the crowd to land on the face of the belligerent would-be guest, whose eyes squint painfully shut against it. “If anyone can help him find his identity, please come see me immediately.”

  A loud ripple of laughter sweeps through the crowd. The man shouts something, which can’t be heard over the merriment, and slinks off, the light following him to the corner where he hurriedly hails a cab. He’ll wind up in some less exclusive watering hole more sympathetic to the color of his money, where he can nurture his grievances and mutter about his identity crisis.

  Oh ho, just another night at the Club Belladonna!

  There are many things you notice about human nature when you open a nightclub. For one, society might occasionally be delightful if people actually listened to one another. Or if they had something interesting to say. For another, there are those who have more dinners than appetites, while others have more appetites than dinners. They’re the nervous eaters, even though we serve only cold snacks to keep the drinkers’ bellies full.

  You can imagine what Belladonna does to these fools. When she wants to wind them up, she orders a luscious basket of fruit. She helps herself to a succulent bunch of grapes, plump, juicy cherries, dozens of blueberries, carefully slicing each in half with devastating p
recision with a petite fruit knife studded with emeralds, flashing like her eyes. Then she gets up, plate in one hand and knife in the other, and walks around the room, dropping a grape in a drink here, a berry in a drink there. Or she trails the shimmering hilt of her knife along a guest’s shoulders. Sometimes she does this without saying a word; other times, she murmurs a greeting or a remark about someone’s jewels or Balenciaga gown or the color of their gloves.

  She comes close enough to make you shiver.

  This perfect fastidiousness sets a trend at dinner parties all over town: to serve a cold supper, accessorized by gem-encrusted knives and forks with delicate tines. I’m sure you understand which parties I mean"the ones devoted to endless discussion of the club the guests aren’t allowed into at the moment.

  Other evenings, Belladonna will stroll by the tables, fan waving languidly. Sometimes she sits down to play a hand of poker or move a cribbage peg at one of the tables reserved for games. Everyone holds their breath, hoping beyond hope that she’ll stop to talk to them. She’s as completely capricious with her movements and her conversations as Andromeda is with her barks. Both inside and outside the club, the rich and famous, movie stars and moguls alike, are ignored for the shop girls and obvious unsophisticates nervously fussing with their rhinestone earrings and too-tight waist cinchers.

  On the rare occasions when she bestows a genuine smile upon her guests, they feel as if they have been kissed by the very breath of heaven.

  Quite often, though, Belladonna sits at her center banquette, watching. If the mood strikes her, one of the waiters will deposit a pile of blood-red chips on her table, and she’ll point her fan at a lucky guest, who blissfully scurries over for a game of cribbage or poker. To be chosen to play a game with the goddess herself is simply, utterly, too divine. Unnerving, too; her prepossession makes her partners flub their moves. Still, they can’t say a private game with Belladonna isn’t worth it. Worth their losses; worth all the waiting outside with other desperate hopefuls; worth the creepy stare of the big man at the door.