by Anne Rice
“Scott!” she shouted suddenly. “Scotty!” And she jerked away as I let her go. “Scotty!” she screamed.
She caved in onto one of the kitchen chairs, heaving, dry sobs coming out of her, her hair hanging down in front of her face.
Scott and Richard were in the room, and Richard went around me with a darting motion and came up behind her shoulder and asked her very softly if she was all right.
The very sight of him bending over her, the solicitous sound of his voice, made me go right out of my head.
I didn’t do anything. I just turned and I went out of the room. I was in a blind rage. I wasn’t walking on the same earth with anybody else. I could have knocked a brick wall down with one blow. That she could call out for that guy, that she could call out like I was hurting her!
The next thing I knew I was sitting in the courtyard on the little wrought iron bench and I had somehow managed to light a cigarette and I was staring at the dark glossy tangle of the little overgrown yard. My face was pumping with heat. I couldn’t hear anything. I was deliberately memorizing the fountain, the broken-down little cherub in it, the conch and the slimy water, and the choke of spiderwebs in the cherub’s eye. I don’t know whether they were talking to me or not.
But a long time passed, maybe twenty minutes or so. My heartbeat was pretty regular again. And I was so miserable and getting so much more miserable by the moment that I thought I was going to break. I was going to go to pieces or something.
I mean like I might really, really hurt somebody. These geniuses of pain, for instance, these clever, sophisticated masters of The Club. These guys! These fucking bastards! I swallowed it over and over. And then I heard someone coming out of the room, and I looked up and saw it was Scott, the guardian angel.
“Come inside,” he said. You would have thought somebody had just died and I was the chief mourner, and he was the undertaker. And here I was ready to commit murder. “She wants to talk to you. She has something to say.”
She was sitting in the rocker again with the linen handkerchief in her hand. She had for reasons utterly unbeknownst to me put on her shoes. And Richard was standing behind her like another guardian angel, and Scott hovered around me like I might all of a sudden take a poke at somebody. I might.
“I don’t blame you for being mad, Elliott,” she said.
“Save it, lady,” I said. “Don’t say anything else like that.”
She winced like I’d hit her right between the eyes. I couldn’t stand looking at the way she bowed her head. But she looked at me again, very straight, right through a fresh film of tears.
“Elliott, I’m begging you to go back,” she said. “I’m begging you for my sake to go back to The Club and wait there for me.”
Tears sliding down her face, quavering voice.
“I’m begging you to go back,” she said again, “and wait for me just a couple of days till I . . . till I come.”
I hadn’t expected this. I looked at Richard. A model of candor and compassion. And Scott, who had slipped in along the wall behind me, just watching her with his head lowered and to the side, rather sad.
“They won’t make you do anything, Elliott. They won’t, you know . . . nothing.”
“Absolutely correct,” Scott said under his breath.
“Just let everyone see you get off the plane,” Richard said. “And it’s your choice what you want to do after that.”
“Elliott,” she said, “I promise you I will be back.” Her mouth was working again, twisting the lower lip pressed between her teeth. “I just need those days. I need them alone to understand why I cracked, why I did this. But I promise you that I will come back. Whatever you think about this, I will be back and you can tell me. You can tell me just what you think I deserve to be told. And if you want to leave The Club then, it can be arranged properly and officially for you to leave.”
I glanced at Richard, and he nodded.
“Just cooperate a little with us,” Scott said.
“I’m begging you,” she said. “Will you do it for me?”
I didn’t answer for a minute. It seemed like it was crucial to wait that one moment, just looking at her, the little wet-faced, straggle-haired waif, shoes or no shoes, with the rhinestone straps fallen down off her ankles, as she huddled, knees bare, dress all messed up, on the edge of the chair.
“Are you absolutely sure,” I asked as quietly as I could, “that you want me to leave you here?”
“Believe me, Elliott,” she said in the same tremulous voice, her eyes black and glistening. “It is the only thing I want.”
For a second I couldn’t breathe.
I was so hurt and the pain was so pure that I guess my face was blank. The pain felt like a mask that was spreading and tightening over my face. I didn’t look at the other men, but I knew that Richard was looking at me, and that Scott had respectfully bowed his head and moved closer to the door.
There was an astonishing innocence to her expression, her large eyes so beautiful even with the smudges of mascara, and so tired.
The mask of pain was getting tighter and tighter. I could feel it pull at every tissue, feel it close over my throat. But gradually it broke and it melted, and I felt like something was being comfortably, miraculously drained away.
“It’s just like everything else you’ve said and done,” I said to her. “It could mean at least two different things!”
We looked at each other, and I could have sworn something happened, some little private thing. Maybe that her eyes softened, that it was just the two of us for one split second, or maybe it was only that I had caught her off guard with some little idea she didn’t expect.
When she spoke again now, she had to take her time and the tears rose up in her eyes.
“My life’s falling to pieces, Elliott,” she said in a near whisper. “It’s just coming down around me like the walls of Jericho. I need you to go back and wait for me to come.”
Richard and Scott both took that as a cue. Richard bent down and kissed her on the cheek, and Scott was gently pushing me towards the door.
I stepped out into the garden, a little baffled that I was doing it, and I stood there looking at nothing, thinking nothing, hearing Richard talking to her behind me, something cold and reserved in the tone:
“Now are you certain that you . . .”
“I will be all right,” she said, wearily, in an almost sing-song voice. “If you will just go. I promise you. I won’t leave this hotel. I’ll plug in the phone. I’ll be here. Station one of the goons out there, but tell him to stay out of sight. Just let me have what I need right now.”
“Very well, my dear. You call us day or night.”
I was staring at the distant glass doors to the front hall of the hotel. The soft heat of the night was pulsing with the sounds of the katydids. The sky had a violet light to it still in a sharp rectangle formed by the high brick walls.
“Look, this is going to work out,” Scott said. He looked perfectly miserable for what it was worth.
“Leaving her here like this?” I demanded.
“We have a man watching her. He’s in the bar. She’s going to be okay.”
“Are you sure about that?” I asked.
“Listen, man, this is what she wants,” Scott said. “She’s okay, I know her.”
You know her.
I took a few steps away from him across the flags. I lit another cigarette. Private gesture that, lowering your head, cupping your hands around the flame. Just for a second blow them all away.
Richard had come out and he appeared beside me, glancing back at her furtively as he spoke under his breath.
“You’re doing exactly the right thing,” he said.
“Back off, asshole,” I said.
“You love this woman?” he asked, deep-set eyes narrowing, voice like ice. “You want to ruin everything for her? She won’t come back to The Club unless you’re waiting for her there.”
“Play this one out with us, Elliott,
” Scott said, “for her sake.”
“You guys have got everything figured, haven’t you?”
I turned around and looked back at her. She had risen and come towards the french door, her ankles unsteady in the perilous shoes. She had her arms folded, and she looked shattered, absolutely broken to bits.
I stamped out the cigarette on the stones, and pointed my finger at her.
“In a couple of days,” I said.
She nodded.
“I won’t break my word,” she said.
I wanted to tell her coldly and calmly that I didn’t care whether or not she ever came back. I wanted to call her every bad name for a woman I knew, every snarling bad name in every language that I had ever heard. But she wasn’t all those names to me. She was Lisa. And the one lie she had told, she had admitted to that first morning at the Court of Two Sisters. And there had never been any lies from her after that, or any promises, or any commitments of any kind.
Yet I had the feeling of something so vital and so precious being destroyed, something so extraordinary and so crucial, that I couldn’t even look into her face anymore. It was like some door had opened, and the horror that had always been behind the door, the awful thing I’d feared all my life, was finally standing there.
LISA
Chapter 29
Visit to Church
All we are asking is that you explain it to us, that you let us try to understand. How could you do it?
It was a dump, a hole, joint, any name you can think of for a seedy tourist trap built like an alleyway with a bench down one wall for the customers, and the stage a garishly lighted strip behind the bar opposite.
And a man who looked exactly like a giant of a woman was dancing, if you could call it that, or more truly shuffling back and forth in satin mules, the light flickering on her white satin gown, her heavily made-up cheeks, the spun glass of her white wig, her vapid unfocused eyes. She/he was watching herself in the mirror, dancing with herself, mouthing the words to herself of the recorded song as it crackled through the speakers, a dreary leakage of rhythmic sound, the silver boa shivering over her smooth and powerful arms, her whole appearance strangely, undeniably sensuous as it was manufactured, beautiful as it was ghastly.
To me anyway. You are all angels. You have transcended everything into the pure theater of yourselves. I am worshipping.
I mean you are the mentor, the guardian angel of this whole system, and you tell me not to ask you any questions!
I sat motionless against the wall, watching her, the heavy, almost lumbering steps of her big feet, dime-store pink of her waxed mouth, dull, straight-ahead stare beneath fringe of false lashes. Reek of urine from the little bathroom just beyond the filthy red velvet curtain. Stench of dirty carpet, damp, mildewed on the narrow floor. Faint sweet stink of pancake makeup, dirty costume. Like the giant marble angels in church who hold out the shells full of holy water for us to dip our fingers. Larger and smoother than life, undeniably perfect creatures.
It had been hours that I’d been sitting here.
How could you do it to him, to him, I mean whatever the reason? Play games with him like this? What do you think this guy is that you can manipulate him, use him like this? You are the one who taught us to never, never underestimate the psychological dynamite we are dealing with.
Two hundred-dollar bills to keep the place open. Ten, eleven, twelve rip-off seven-ounce nightclub bottles of beer, Bourbon Street almost empty outside, and only one other person in the club, I mean this dump, not The Club, this hole, this dive, this alleyway, this chapel of the perverse, this catacomb, an emaciated man hunched over his drink at the end of the bar, checkered jacket. How could you do it?
Now and then the barker came in. Nobody bothered me.
One female/male after another gliding back and forth on the tinseled strip over the rows and rows of dimly lighted bottles, bare shoulders, sleek pink arms, hint of cleavage under the dirty strip of sequined satin, shoes down at the heel, high sheen of artificial estrogen all over.
Like what is this guy supposed to do now? Like he gets ready for the sensuous experience of a lifetime and you up and yank him out of it? You unilaterally decide that you will bring down the curtain? I want to be understanding, but how much understanding would I have gotten from you if I had done it, if I had up and taken Diana or Kitty Kantwell or any one of them out like this? Do you think you would have flown a thousand miles to talk it over with me, Miss Perfectionist?
I was no longer at all certain that I could walk back. I had to stop and think to remember where it was, a map I drew in my mind. Like two blocks that way and then this way. And what about the goon they have hiding out there somewhere, would he appear if I fell on my face in the street? It’s not a matter of the expense, or the talk on the island. Think of this man and what you have done to him. What the hell are we going to say to Martin? Martin sent him to us.
I got up to see whether or not I could walk, and then I was standing on the sidewalk and asking the barker where I could find a phone. I looked down and I saw the most peculiar thing, that I was wearing those ugly, tacky thong sandals we’d bought in the discount store. Elliott looked terrific in the safari shorts and the white shirt and the white tennis shoes.
What we are asking is why? Why did you do it? What we are asking is that you just come back, now, that you get on the plane, help us to get him back, sit down and talk this thing over . . .
I was out in the street in these awful sandals, and I had some sort of raincoat on, some burgundy-colored poncho raincoat that I vaguely remembered getting in San Francisco at a store on Castro Street called the All American Boy with my sister saying, “I don’t care, being right in the middle of them makes me nervous.” She meant the homosexuals. She should see these angels, my angels. It was too heavy for New Orleans, this raincoat, even on this spring night when it was not hot, it was as Elliott had said, sublime, but I remembered now why I was wearing it. I didn’t have anything on under it.
When I had started to throw up, I had torn off that lovely dress, my favorite dress, my very best favorite dress. I had ruined that dress and it was the dress I’d worn when we went dancing, and when we made love in the back of the car, and when we slept on top of the sheets at the Monteleone together, and when we drove back.
That dress was just gone forever, ripped up and ruined forever on the bathroom floor. When I had gotten up off the bed I had thought, I will simply put this on, this poncho. This is fine. I did have the cotton slip on under it.
And no underwear, that secret naked feeling of no underwear. It doesn’t matter. All opened up by love, that wonderful naked feeling of no covering there.
You owe him that, you owe us that. Get on the plane with him now. God, that is the least you can do! Come with us.
So I was standing on Bourbon Street and I was drunk, and I was in this burgundy-colored rain poncho with nothing but a slip on under it. I had money in my pockets, too much money. I had hundred-dollar bills and coins and coins. I had given out the bills the way Elliott did it, folding the bill in half and just slipping it to the person, making no big deal of it, smiling, and that was all. And one of those girl/men, the big beautiful brunette with the voice stuck right in the top of her throat like the throb of a kid’s toy electric organ, had sat down by me and called me honey and talked to me. Pink and sleek, like an angel or a giant seal, depending . . .
. . . Doesn’t anything mean anything to you? Do you know what you are jeopardizing if you do not come back with us?
They were all of them having operations, the girls. The angels. They did it piece by piece. She had her balls still, tucked up someplace into her body, and her penis all bound down so that it wouldn’t show when she stripped down to the G-string, and she had breasts and the estrogen injections.
She knew she was beautiful, that she looked like some lovely Mexican woman who knows she’s prettier and smarter than all her sisters and brothers, the one who gets the job as the hostess in the roadsi
de restaurant so that she wears the low-cut black dress with the cleavage showing and gives out the menus while all the rest of them are working as cooks and busboys, that kind of beauty, the Miss Universe of the pots and pans. Look, we’re trying to understand, we’re trying. Castration for this?
“You don’t really let them, I mean, they won’t cut off your balls, will they?”
“Honey, we don’t think those things are very ladylike!”
He said, “There’s the phone.”
“What did you say?”
“The phone, honey. Honey—” (confidential, like we’d just fallen in love, slimeball) “—is there somebody who can come down here and meet you?”
Well, what do you call it then, if not flat-out victimization? You took advantage, you just took total advantage of your position and your power. You want to hear the truth, you acted like a goddamned stereotypical, selfish, and emotional woman.
“What time is it?”
“Two o’clock.” He looks at his cheap watch. Two o’clock in the morning. Elliott gone now exactly seven hours. We could have been to Mexico by now. And headed for Panama. Bypassing El Salvador.
What do you think is going on in his head right now? Two years he absents himself from his business, his career, his life, and the boss lady wants a fucking five-day fling in New Orleans?
“Honey, we’re closing now.”
Go ahead and close up the Dreamgirls Club. See if I care. Crackly music playing to the empty stage behind the bottles. Now they all grow white satin sequined wings and they fly out the back door and up into the dark damp sky over the rooftops of New Orleans and they are gone out of the squalor of the chapel forever. (Though in the distance and under cover of night they do look to mortals remarkably like giant flying roaches.) Mirrors reflecting the empty rows of benches and tables where I had just been sitting at the very end, unbothered, by myself. The street full of garbage, enormous, glistening, green-plastic sacks of garbage. Roaches. Don’t think of roaches.