Ally Hughes Has Sex Sometimes

by Jules Moulin

  “Sasha? No. She was with me. In the pantry. She was with me.”

  Fishman handed a MetroCard to Lizzie. “Take this. It doesn’t expire until next month.” He crossed to his briefcase.

  Lizzie watched as he slipped out some bills and pulled out a phone. “Take these.” He handed them to her. “Emergency phone, until you get a new one, and here’s money to pay for new keys or a lock for your place.”

  Lizzie took the phone and the fifty-dollar bills, the newest-looking money she’d ever seen, clean and smooth. “Thank you,” she said.

  “Take your purse,” Fishman said. “Even to the bathroom.”

  Lizzie nodded.

  “Anything else we can do to help?”

  “No,” she said quietly, feeling as if she was being played.

  Fishman nodded and sat back down. “Someone’s rolling our rooms for sure.”

  Josh nodded and cracked his gum.

  —

  An hour later, Lizzie felt faint in the humid heat. On a Henry Street corner, next to a mailbox, she slipped off her heels, changed into flip-flops, took off her wig, and stuffed it, hard, down into her bag. She then took off through Carroll Gardens, through Cobble Hill, toward Brooklyn Heights.

  She knew they’d try to track her with the phone. Powering off would achieve nothing. She put it in flight mode and took out the battery. Then she remembered the second battery, the weaker one, there to maintain contacts and time.

  What she needed, she decided, was a booster bag. A Faraday cage. The kind Weather had made with foil when they were twelve, to shoplift; an electromagnetic shield.

  She stopped at a market, bought five rolls of foil, and wrapped the phone like a birthday gift until it was the size of a brick.

  Ninety minutes later, she reached Pineapple, then Orange, then, finally, Cranberry Street. She climbed the stoop, knocked, but found the brownstone empty and dark. Her spare key was home in Stuyvesant Square.

  So she headed east and hoofed it over the Brooklyn Bridge, watching the golden sun dip west.

  When she got home, she discovered her superintendent was gone, in the DR, and wouldn’t be back for another day. No one but Julio had a spare key.

  —

  Ally had spent the afternoon there, across the street. At nine thirty, she got up and left. She missed Lizzie, and Lizzie missed her mother, by less than five minutes.

  —

  That night at eleven, Ally, at home, climbed into an Escalade. Jake’s car. The driver dropped her at Tenth and Sixteenth at a hotel in the Meatpacking District.

  She checked the address and wandered in and waited in the lobby behind two women who looked like models.

  One was over six feet tall, in a Sid Vicious T-shirt, four-inch shorts, and stiletto heels. She also wore a mink-fur vest and striped ski hat with a pom-pom on top. Odd for August, thought Ally, but cute.

  The other one wore a T-shirt too, except hers was ripped. She didn’t wear shorts or a skirt or pants. She did wear a thong, so the bottom of her butt cheeks peeked from her shirt when she laughed or bent over, and Ally thought she looked ready for bed. Then, she thought, maybe that was the point.

  When she stepped up, the concierge winked. “Love the look. So uncommitted.”

  Ally looked down. What was she wearing that was so uncommitted?

  Tretorns. Jeans. A button-down shirt in a yellow and pink floral print. The blouse, she thought, might pass for Liberty, except that she bought it for three ninety-nine on sale at Old Navy. The cotton was sheer, the buttons were plastic, the hems were fraying.

  “Hunt Club, love. That’s downstairs.” The concierge pointed to a door across the lobby with a tiny brass sign. It read, “The Hunt Starts Here.”

  Ally didn’t know about the separate entrance that led to a hall to a secret door that led to a second secret door that led to a bouncer and a red velvet rope, and a guest list, then down a stone stairway that spiraled around and stopped in front of a gold beaded curtain in the corner of the basement.

  She finally found Jake and Marty tucked behind a table, shouting to talk over bottles of Patrón. The music was loud and thumping and grating. Apparently it was Hip-Hop Wednesday.

  “The unsung American teenage girl!” Jake called to Marty, handing him the extra-long script. “It’s totally new! Never been done! These girls, they started a revolution! And they wore clothes!”

  “Talk to me!” Marty called and popped dried wasabi peas into his mouth. Marty was known for his films about men: men and gangs, men and sex, men and money.

  “It starts with the fire!” Ally yelled over the table. “We see the girls jump from the ninth floor and die! The city wakes up! One girl survives and fights the good fight: Safer conditions! Eight-hour workdays! Overtime pay! Show the whole trial!” Ally looked down and drained her shot, then turned to Jake. “Do you show the trial?” She shuddered and her insides grew warm. Jake shook his head.

  “What’s the trial?” Marty yelled because he had to. “Is that the third act?”

  The music grew louder.

  “What’s a third act?” Ally yelled. The DJ in the corner was blasting his favorite Kanye West, a song about hoes and shoving his fist into Asian pussy. Jake refilled Ally’s glass. “No more!” she yelled. “I never drink!” Then she grew still.

  “The third act is the last part,” Jake explained, turning to Ally.

  She didn’t hear him. She saw someone . . . or thought she did. She froze and focused across the bar as if she were a lioness spotting prey.

  “Is that the third act? The trial?” Marty asked.

  “Is that Lizzie’s agent?” Ally said.

  “Cybil Stern?” Jake turned, scanning the crowd. “Which?”

  “The one in black? We met last Christmas.” Ally straightened. “I’m sorry. Hold on a sec.” She slid from her seat. “Maybe she knows . . . where Lizzie is.”

  Marty looked concerned. “Everything okay?”

  Ally paused. “She told my daughter to fix her nose and dye her hair.” She couldn’t take her eyes off Cybil.

  “Ally, wait,” Jake pleaded as Ally straightened her Old Navy blouse, looking ready for a fight.

  “And lose thirty pounds and skip grad school.”

  “Ally, come on.” Jake reached out as she walked off. He tried to follow but found himself wedged behind the table. “Ally!”

  —

  Cybil was sipping a Virgin Slut. She and the models from up in the lobby chatted in a circle out on the dance floor, crushed by the sweaty, rowdy crowd.

  “Now she’s doing this cam-girl thing! To make money—to get this procedure—that you recommended!”

  “Me? No!” Cybil yelled over the hip-hop. “I recommended? No, Mrs. Hughes!”

  “You didn’t?” said Ally.

  “Lizzie with a nose job? That’s nuts!”

  “Really?” said Ally, realizing Lizzie had lied to her. “Can you call her then? And knock some sense into— Whoa! Whoa!” A man squeezing by—an enormous man, over six feet tall and three hundred pounds—bumped into Ally. “Sorry!” he said as Ally caromed, hard, into Cybil, who then knocked into a woman behind her. The woman fell forward onto her friends, then righted, turned, and yelled, “Scumbag, bitch! Motherfucker!”

  “Sorry!” yelled Cybil, meaning it, as the dancers circled her irritably.

  “Sorry? Sorry? I’ll fuck you up!”

  Swiftly, and instinctively, Ally and the models stepped in and formed a line of defense.

  “I got pushed,” Ally said. “I bumped into her. She bumped into you. It was my fault. Sorry.”

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “No one,” said Ally. “I’m no one at all.”

  “I’ll fuck you up.”

  Holy smokes, Ally thought, as she considered the gauntlet thrown down. I’ll fuck you up. Did that me
an fight?

  Suddenly she was in one of those shows: the catfight shows with the housewives or sisters or someone’s ex-wives; women with blowouts, in heels and makeup, in shift dresses, bickering. Except no one here, tonight at the club, was fully dressed. Bras and pajama shorts, Ally thought as she studied the girls; and truck driver hats. At least they were keeping the sun off their skin. She didn’t want to fight. She wanted to dress them and put them to bed.

  “Motherfucking bitch,” the woman said.

  Ally raised her hands, palms out, in surrender. “We’re not fighting! This is— She didn’t mean to bump you! Really! I swear! Come on! We’re friends! We’re all women! We’re on the same side! Right? Right?”

  —

  Ally had never been smacked before.

  She’d never been slapped or shoved or punched.

  The seconds flew as a blur of screams and limbs and pain, scratching and clawing and lights, as swearwords were screeched and clothes were ripped and stretched and pulled. Ally was yelling “Stop! Stop!” above the music and cheers and jeers from all sides. Partyers stopped and whipped out their camera phones, laughing, pointing.

  “What the—? Please!” She tried her best to budge from Jake’s grip as he lifted her out of the scuffle. “I’m in the middle of a—” Jake threw his arms around her waist and carried her off through the throng. “Ow! Hey!” she said, protesting. “Stop!”

  “They’re on coke! Stop squirming!”

  “What?” Ally said.

  He led her into a short dark hall, where they stopped for a moment and caught their breath. “How should I know?” Ally complained.

  “Oh, I don’t know. The dilated eyes? The fine white powder above their lips?” Jake tried the restrooms, but both were locked. “What happened? Are you okay? Were you and Cybil on the same side?”

  “Nothing!” she said and looked away. “We all got bumped and they got mad! I got smacked . . . I think . . . my jaw.” Ally felt the side of her face.

  “Are you hurt?” He leaned in to see her chin.

  “Coke? Really?” No one Ally knew used cocaine at Brooklyn College or at Brown. Wine was popular, vodka, for sure, lattes and chocolate and Skittles abounded, Colace and Advil, but no one she knew used hard drugs. “That was— What are we doing here, Jake?” She smoothed her blouse and touched a tiny scratch on her hand. She wrung out her wrist.

  “It looks okay,” Jake said.

  She looked at the ceiling. “What is this music?” She rubbed her eyes. “I can’t believe . . . They jumped us! Girls!” Someone in the bathroom was smoking something. “What is that smell?”

  Jake looked concerned. “It’s so good to see you. Can I say that? I’m sorry you— This. This is my fault. I’m sorry.”

  “Say it.”

  “Thanks. It’s so good to see you.”

  “I need a cab.”

  “Does it hurt? Your face?” He reached out and touched it.

  “It’s fine, but this music, it makes me want to—”

  “What? Makes you want to what?”

  “Curl up and die.”

  —

  They rode in the Escalade back to Brooklyn.

  “We didn’t say good-bye,” Ally said. “That was rude.”

  “Don’t worry. I texted. He texted me back.”

  “I didn’t get to—”

  “I did,” Jake reassured her. “We talked about it before you came. He said he would call her, Marty did, and talk her out of it.”

  Ally gazed at the twinkling lights on the East River. She pressed an ice cube against her jaw. “Lizzie wants it herself,” she said sadly, wondering if it was only a phase. “Not Cybil. But maybe—maybe—if we make her wait. Just long enough. She’ll change her mind. It’s happened before.” Like her obsession with eyeliner, black. That lasted only half of ninth grade. And Ally’s obsession with Dave Matthews. That lasted only half of her twenties.

  “She can only live the way people expect—for so long.”

  “What?”

  “Before she settles back into default: her true self. And starts to do what she’s meant to do . . .”

  “And what’s that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Lizzie was gorgeous. Always. Tall. Lanky. Like Claire, she had an impossible figure: narrow shoulders, small waist and hips, full bust. And legs that started below her ribs and went on and on.

  Friends, teachers, everyone, assumed she’d make her mark in front of a camera because she could.

  But what would become of that pesky IQ? That 143? The Mensa invitation? The Johns Hopkins people, the giftedness researchers, nosing about?

  “You know,” Jake offered, “it’s okay if Lizzie’s not perfect.”

  Ally turned to him. “What do you mean?”

  “She knows, you know, that she was an oops. She told me that.”

  “And?”

  “I’m sure you don’t agree, but—”

  “I don’t,” Ally snapped. “She wasn’t a mistake. I think chance plays a role in this life.”

  “That’s not—”

  “The universe—God, whatever—makes plans that sometimes have nothing to do with our own.”

  “Okay,” Jake said, “but you don’t have to prove—she doesn’t have to be the most perfect person ever born to prove she wasn’t a mistake.”

  She studied him a moment. She knew he was right. Her eyes grew cool and she pressed her lips together and then released them. She looked out the window. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  She gazed at the river, the Brooklyn skyline. “Someone sent gifts. Was it you?”

  “Maybe. What if it was?”

  Ally said nothing.

  “How is your face?”

  —

  The Escalade pulled up to the brownstone. Ally climbed out and walked toward the stoop, fishing for her keys at the bottom of her purse.

  Jake followed. “Are you okay?”

  “Fine,” she said.

  “I only have two more days in town.”

  She climbed the stoop, tipsy, jaw aching, hardly hearing him. “Where are my—?”

  Jake stood at the bottom and waited. “By the way. Your friend, Ted?”

  Ally looked up. What about him?

  “That toy company? I made some calls. It’s pretty sketch.”

  She found her keys. “Sketch?”

  “The guys who run it.”

  “How are they sketch?” She thought of what Weather had told her. “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what I heard.”

  Ally turned and unlocked the door.

  Jake stayed and watched. “If you need me, I’m at the St. Regis.”

  “Are you?” she said and turned again, before she went in. “I tried you there. They said you weren’t.”

  “Try again, Ally,” Jake said and smiled. “Please. Try again.”

  AT MIDNIGHT, A WEDDING party arrived, two dozen revelers, drunk, post-reception, including the bride. Ally and Jake joined them in singing “Don’t Stop Believin’,” a full-bar rendition, and Ally thought she might burst from joy. Jake excused himself to the restroom, and Ally wandered over to the dartboard to get a closer view of the bride.

  The dress was magnificent, Ally thought. The perfect white. A cool ivory, to match the bride’s pale freckled skin. The bodice was embroidered in pearl and lace. The waist was high, with a beaded sash, and the layered tulle skirt swept across the sawdust floor. “It’s beautiful,” Ally said breathlessly, feeling tipsy. “You look beautiful.”

  The bride smiled. “Thank you,” she said and aimed her dart. As it flew from her fingers, the groom swept in, lifted her up, and carried her off to dance to the song playing on the jukebox. Eric Clapton, Ally thought. Wonderful.
>
  She sighed and peered around the room. Where was Jake? Alone, she felt that feeling again, that sad-single-woman-at-the-wedding feeling, the one she’d endured twice a year for a decade; there it was again, the sinking moment of humiliation when everyone seated at the table rose, all but Ally; they all took flight, off to the dance floor, because the band had broken into “Brown Eyed Girl” or “Walk This Way” or “Play That Funky Music” . . . again.

  Again.

  And, again, Ally would reach for her clutch, push back, rise, and beeline to the bathroom, somewhere, anywhere, quiet, to call Claire and check on Lizzie. “Did she eat? How is she?” And Lizzie was fine. Always fine.

  “Can I have this dance?” Jake said, breaking her reverie. Oh, right. She wasn’t alone. Jake was back. “The bride is pretty.” Ally nodded. “Pretty dress. You would look pretty in a dress like that.” Ally rolled her eyes and sighed as he pulled her close and wrapped his arms around her waist. “You’d make a pretty, pretty bride.” She wrapped her wrists around his neck, and they danced and danced, next to the darts.

  —

  “Hey, Yaz?”

  “Hey what?”

  “You have plans?”

  “Not really.”

  At quarter past two, heavy limbed and happy, Ally made her way to the door. One step in front of the other, she thought, with Jake on her heels. Walk straight. Keep your head high. Look forward. He’s right behind you.

  The room was tilting. Then it was spinning.

  That is the door, she reminded herself. Walk toward the door. It will take you outside.

  “Drive me home?” Ally said, out in the lot. Jake was a few yards behind. “Want to? Want to, Yaz?”

  “Yep,” he said. “I do. Want to.”

  The night was black, streaked with patches of red and gold light. The air was warm and salty and fresh. The pebbles crunched under their shoes as they walked toward Jake’s car in the corner of the lot.

  “That’s it there.” She pointed to the Chevy. Jake caught up and wove his fingers through her fingers.

  Quiet for a moment, they strolled and gazed at the stars.