Ms. Taken Identity

by Dan Begley

  I get out of the chair and give my foot a shake, to get a clump of hair off my shoe.

  “But I do need some of that styling stuff,” I say. “The pomade.”

  “You sure do.” She reaches for her container. “Take this one, I’ve got plenty.”

  “No, I want to buy it.”

  She shrugs. “Suit yourself, Moneybags. Samantha will get you a new one.”

  I reach into my pocket and pull out a five and try to slip it to her. “For a tip, at least.”

  “Oh, pu-leeez,” she says, brandishing her scissors, threatening to cut Abe Lincoln in half. “You want to pay me back? Give me some dance time on Monday, instead of letting Marie hog you. That’s what you can do for me.”

  “Deal,” I say.

  She does a little salsa step and points at me. “I’m holding you to that.”

  Marie and I go up to the counter, where Samantha rings me up, then Marie walks me to the front door.

  “So, how’s the day been?” I ask.

  “Extremely busy, all morning and most of the afternoon.” She’s wearing a lace cami in lilac and ivory palazzo pants, her hair flat-ironed and brushing her collarbone. She always looks decent for lessons, but I’ve never seen her like this, so sophisticated, stylish, feminine. “We just slowed down about twenty minutes ago. So good timing on your part.”

  “And you get off soon?”

  “Less than an hour. I have one more appointment.” She tilts her head and fingers one of her hoop earrings. “Actually, Rosie and Samantha and I are planning to head out for a rush-hour movie, then off to dinner. I’m sure they wouldn’t mind if you wanted to join us.”

  Absolutely, I’d love to join them. Spend some time with Audrey Hepburn and Rosie and this version of Marie. But my little outing here has already cost me time I’d planned to spend writing. “You know, as much as I’d like to, I think I’ll have to pass…”

  She gives me a coaxing look. “You sure?” The way she’s standing in the light, her eye shadow brings out the tiniest flecks of green in her eyes.

  Of course, maybe I could pick up some good tidbits for the book, in which case it wouldn’t be pleasure at all, but work. “Well … maybe just for the movie.”

  “Great!” she says, her face brightening.

  Their plan is to leave at four, so I have about forty-five minutes to kill. I tell her I’m just going to walk around, investigate the neighborhood. I lean into the door with my elbow and push it open.

  “Oh, and Jason?” Her gaze doesn’t quite meet mine, then she nudges it up a bit. “Rosie did a good job with your hair. You look great.”

  “As ‘Customer Jason’?”

  “Nah. Just Jason.”

  Remember that sensation as a kid, getting a brand-new pair of sneakers with spongy new soles, and lacing them up and tearing through your backyard or up the street, thinking you were faster, lighter, springier, and look out rabbits and squirrels, I just might catch up with you? Didn’t you feel quick as the wind? I did. Walking down Wilshire Boulevard, passing other people strolling on the sidewalk and greeting them, that’s a bit how I feel right now: changed, springier, more confident, ready to take on anything, like I want to make eye contact, see and be seen. I feel… better about myself. And it’s silly, really, because nothing has changed: a few hairs trimmed, a few others pushed a different way, some goop mixed in, just like nothing had changed all those years ago with the shoes. It’s all in my head. But sometimes, I guess, that’s really the only place you need it.

  I duck into the antique shop first, and they have all the things you might expect—old dishes, lamps, jewelry—but they also have a book in the glass case: a first edition of The Hound of the Baskervilles. I loved Sherlock Holmes as a boy, and I’d be tempted to spring for it if the eight on the price tag had only one zero after it, not two. So I head to the bakery. The place smells great, the air swirling with vanilla and cinnamon and butter and cocoa and ground espresso beans. I grab a coffee, then something decadent for the girls for dessert tonight.

  After Rosie locks up the salon, we pile into Marie’s car, top down. Rosie and Audrey are willing to surrender their claim to shotgun, provided I let them choose the music. Fine. Marie pops in a mix CD that has Gwen Stefani and Coldplay and Shakira, so the entire way over I’m serenaded by The Three Stylists (never to be confused with The Three Tenors), who let me know in all manner of vocal stylings and shrill notes and head bobbing that their hips don’t lie and they ain’t no hollaback girls. As if I ever doubted it.

  At the theater I buy a bag of candy, but I quickly find out that the Sno-Caps I paid good money for are not mine at all; they’re community property. Marie instructs me to dump them into the tub of popcorn she bought, along with Rosie’s Milk Duds and Audrey’s Whoppers. As she mixes it all up, Marie brings me up to speed on the rules for partaking in this buttery/chocolatey confection. No hogging the bucket for more than sixty seconds. No rooting around to find the good stuff. Chew with your mouth closed. Rosie tries to add a special rule, which applies only tonight and only to her: I must make out with her before the lights come back up. I break it to her as gently as possible that I’ll probably just stick to the rules about the popcorn and chewing with my mouth closed.

  Our movie turns out to be the one with Hugh Grant and Kate Hudson where he plays a washed-up former teen TV heartthrob who’s making a comeback, thanks to Kate, the spunky publicist who used to be president of his fan club when she was a chubby twelve-year-old in pigtails and braces. They wind up falling in love. (Surprise.) It’s all right, if you like Hugh Grant. Of course, there are the tear-jerking moments, like when Hugh breaks up with Kate because he thinks he’ll ruin her life if they got too serious because he knows he’s a cad, and she flies away to Greece brokenhearted, then he flies off to win her back, which he does, under the moonlit steps of the Parthenon. Marie and Rosie and Audrey do their share of crying, along with every other female in the theater. At one point, Marie even passes me a Kleenex.

  “I’m fine, thanks,” I whisper.

  “Not for you, for Rosie,” she says, unable to pull her tear-stained eyes off the screen.

  Sure enough, Rosie has the same glassy-eyed devastated look. I slip it into her hand and she starts using it without even knowing how it got there.

  After the movie, we drive back to the salon lot. They ask me once again if I want to join them for dinner, since the restaurant’s only just down the street, and it’s Thai and delicious. But I tell them I really do need to go. Over at my car, I open the door and the smell of the pastries hits me right away.

  “Oh, hey, wait up,” I call out. “I forgot something.”

  I grab the bag and trot over. Marie meets me halfway, the designated envoy. Rosie and Audrey hang back.

  “What’s up?” she asks.

  “I forgot to give you these.”

  I hand her the bag, and even though it’s only one of those plain white, waxy ones, her face instantly lights up.

  “Noni’s!” she says excitedly. She peeks inside: amoretto truffles and cannolis and dark chocolate tortes and apple fritters.

  “Jason, how’d you know?”

  “I asked. Noni told me the three of you come in all the time. She said those were your favorites. She also said the calories don’t count, since I bought them. So enjoy.”

  She gives me a quick hug. “That was so sweet. Thanks.”

  I slow down and give a little wave to the girls as I drive by—Rosie pats her stomach and blows me at least a dozen kisses. It’s a pleasant evening, the temperature’s perfect, but I keep the windows rolled up; it still smells like Noni’s inside and I wouldn’t mind savoring the aroma a little longer.

  Bradley takes a rain check on our Sunday basketball and day of watching football; he’d forgotten that he and Skyler have plans for brunch and a matinee with another couple. But I don’t mind, since the writing went well last night and even better this morning. That’s how it’s been every time I sit down, flowing through me quickly, w
ith ease, and it’s almost like I’ve taken an enema, which means what’s coming out should be… well, you know. But it’s not. It’s good, great actually. And if it keeps up like this, I could be finished in a couple months.

  This pace is outrageous. Writing is like chess for me, a move every hour, or ten, and I’ve been known to spend an entire day working on a single paragraph, fretting over commas, pulling out Moby Dick because I want the sky to be the same gray color as Melville used for the underbelly of the great fish. But this writing is different; it’s crisper, quicker, more bang bang: get those characters on stage and get them talking or laughing or kissing or shopping or taking their clothes off. Get them living, I guess you’d call it. So it’s not like chess at all. It’s more like riding a bike: popping wheelies, letting go of the handlebars, freewheeling and having fun, and maybe there’s some pedaling on level ground, or an uphill stretch, but mostly it’s coasting downhill, the wind in my hair.

  Now that I’ve gotten the hang of it, I’ve even jazzed up the original plot. Old storyline: Valerie is a second-tier model who gets discovered and leaps to the big time. New storyline: Courtney (like the name?) is a hairstylist (thanks, Rosie and Marie) in her late thirties with an ex-husband who left her for a younger woman (though she still, god help her, pines after the asshole) and a teeny-bopper daughter; it’s the daughter who wants to head to the mall for an open casting call for models, and Courtney takes her, but it’s Courtney who gets discovered. Hello extreme makeover and unlikely runway star, and handsome young studs who love the idea of bedding an older woman, and lots of exotic trips and food and sex, and a husband who now wants her back, and she takes him, and everything is on track for sorta happily ever after—but hold on—because she’s getting caught up in a web of glitz and glamour, and losing her daughter and her way and her self-respect, and she realizes all this with the help of her lifelong male friend from college who’s always loved her from afar but could never tell her how he truly felt, but eventually he does, and so now she must choose between staying with her ex-husband in this seductive world that’s sucking the life out of her or starting a new life with the soulful and quietly handsome man who thinks she’s the most beautiful woman in the world, even without makeup or fancy clothes or touched-up photo spreads. Hmm. Who do you think she should choose?

  And I’ve even come up with a title: Catwalk Mama. Kinda catchy, if I do say so myself.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  One of my favorite books of all time is a book I can’t even read because it’s written in Latin. It’s called Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry and it’s an illuminated manuscript, one of those medieval books with fancy first letters and lots of calligraphy and gold leaf pages and illustrations of churches and palaces and angels. (Mine is a reproduction, obviously.) A few years back, I bought a cheap calligraphy kit because I wanted to learn how to do it. But I didn’t. In fact, I never opened it. On Monday, I bring the kit and another copy of the book to the studio and give them to Fran.

  “I thought you might like these,” I tell her. “Since you do such creative things with your hands.”

  Now it’s not like I’ve gone out and spent a fortune: the kit, as you know, I had lying around the apartment, and the book’s under twenty-five bucks. But from Fran’s reaction, you’d think I gave her a Cadillac. She starts getting teary eyed and gives me a hug, and I realize I’ve made a huge mistake because it’s all turning into a scene, and the fewer people who know that our resident pharmaceutical rep has literary tastes more along the lines of a certain medievalist PhD candidate named Mitch, the better.

  Fortunately, Fran and I are off in the corner and everyone else is out on the dance floor, buzzing about something. I calm her down as quickly as I can, then offer to take her goodies out to her car so she won’t have to lug them out after the lesson, and thankfully, she gives me her keys. By the time I come back in, her eyes are dry and she’s retired her Kleenex, and it’s just like nothing ever happened.

  The reason for all the commotion on the dance floor, I discover, is that we have guests. Dancer guests. Shandi and Tony, Latin Champions, Midwest Region 2008, friends of Adonis. They’re certainly dressed the part: Shandi, with heels and a shimmery outfit that must be taped on in places to keep it from showing more; Tony, with slicked hair and a satiny shirt. And despite his questionable judgment in leaving so many buttons unbuttoned (though I suppose when you’ve got a chest like that, you want people to see it), they look great together. They do a demonstration, and it’s a little breathtaking the way he whips her around, and she doesn’t break, but looks sultry and sexy and makes faces at him that suggest she’s having an orgasm.

  After their bows, she comes over to work with the men, Tony with the women. I catch myself glancing over to their side every now and again, and it’s pretty revolting the way they’re fawning over him, laughing for no reason, making googly eyes, though I guess it’d be fair to say we’re doing our share of tripping over ourselves on this side. I realize this whole Shandi/Tony thing is a mixed blessing. On the plus side, it lights a new fire under all of us, makes us want to do better, rise to the occasion of dancing with such a partner. But it also sets expectations off kilter. After tonight, we go back to dancing with the likes of Rosie and Vicky and Gina, and worse, they go back to dancing with the likes of Steve and Dave and me.

  Afterwards, we go out to the bar and have the type of conversation you’d expect after a lesson like that: given the chance, would you sleep with either of them? Rosie jumps right in.

  “Va-voom!” she whoops.

  Marie gives her a look. “So just like that, you’d do it?”

  “Yep. Just like that. And like this, and like this, and like this,” she says, making comically vulgar gyrations with her hips. “Did you see him, Marie? Did you see that body and that face?”

  She did. We all did.

  Marie mulls this over. “Great. So let’s say you meet a guy at Wal-Mart, same body, same face, and he asks you if you want to have sex. Then what?”

  Rosie is horrified. “Then what? I’d smack him upside the head with his tackle box, is what.”

  “But it’s the same guy.”

  “But he’s at Wal-Mart.”

  “So are you. You love Wal-Mart.”

  “For my soap and toothpaste and paper towels. Not for my guys.” Rosie swirls the ice in her drink. “Come on, Marie. One’s a professional dancer. The other guy’s just a guy at Wal-Mart.”

  “So? One guy has a fancy outfit and fancy steps, the other guy just likes to fish. That’s why you’d rip your top off for one and knock the other guy upside the head.”

  “Yeah, more or less. Plus Tony’s… someone.” She shrugs, at a loss. “What can I say?”

  We’re all at a loss. What can you say?

  Steve clears his throat. “May I?” he asks. He’s been quiet and patient up to this point.

  “He roomed for a year with a psychology major in college,” Jennifer adds proudly, explaining his expertise.

  He leans in to us and lowers his voice. “Is it all right if I get a little graphic?”

  By all means, we tell him.

  “What it sounds like to me is the star-fuck syndrome. First, take a reasonably attractive person, which itself gets the sexual juices flowing, then give him a position where he’s in the spotlight, say rock singer or actor or dancer, where his skill is viewed and admired by a lot of people, so that he becomes desired by a lot of people. This gives him power and stature, and he becomes a sort of prize, so that if he chooses to take you to his bed, you’re not just sleeping with any person, but a person everyone wants, and you’re bringing him pleasure or he’s pleasuring you, controlling him or being controlled, depending on which fantasy you have. There’s a sweetness and luridness about a star-fuck that makes you drop your inhibitions, get swept away, do things you normally wouldn’t do.”

  We all sit in silence.

  Rosie begins to fan herself. “Whatever it is, Dr. Freud, I’m getting all hot and b
othered just thinking about it. It’s still a no to Wal-Mart guy, but I’m in for the dancing man. Who else?” She looks around. “Gina?”

  Gina shrugs, waggles her head, can’t make up her mind. “Probably,” she says weakly. “I think.”

  Rosie turns to Marie. “Miss Priss, no. Jennifer, I hope not. So not much competition for me, other than Gina. Now, how about you boys, with the tiny dancer girl. David?”

  Dave nods and gives a thumbs-up and smiles from ear to ear and starts rocking eagerly on his stool. “Yes, please,” he adds, in case there was any mistake. “Dancer or Wal-Mart girl.”

  “Little Steven, no. Which leaves us with Jason. How about it, mystery man?”

  “You really know how to put a guy on the spot.”

  “I can think of another spot I’d like to put you on.” She says it with a wink, and even though it makes no sense at all, it still sounds sexual; Rosie has a way of doing that. “Come on, handsome. Shandi girl walks in here in that outfit, shakes her little tail feather in your face, says she’d like a little company tonight. You’re single. She’s single. Up for it?”

  “Honestly?”

  “Honestly.”

  So here’s honest. She looked great, fantastic, sexy: Jessica Biel with sparkles and longer legs. What guy wouldn’t entertain the thought? But I really don’t need another notch, just to say I bedded the star dancer girl (not that I’ve had thousands and thousands of notches, by the way). And if I just want to have an orgasm, well, I know ways to take care of that. So if I’m going to sleep with her, I’ll need to know a few things first; not worthless sappy things like her sign or does she come here often, but just things to let me know she likes to laugh and has a little bit going on upstairs so that the next time I see her, in clothes, I’ll like her that way, too. And some people might disagree and say sex is just sex, and if you get stirred up or worked up or hot enough, then by god, just do it, and who cares if you like them or know a name. Which is fine. It’s just not me. And since Shandi seemed like the type who wouldn’t bother too much with the names, I’m left with this: