Having your makeup applied by another person is a very intimate experience. It wasn’t my first time (there had been the Met Gala debacle) but I was very aware of Lily’s physical presence in this sanctum of women’s bodies. She leaned in close and I smelled her breath, like wintergreen, and the scent she wore, some kind of spicy oud, if I had to guess. When she finished, I looked like an elegant vampire, all cheekbones and deep, mysterious eyes.
“As I said, it’s a strip club, not a library. You don’t push drinks but you do sell drinks. You offer to top people off. You’re a bartender, you know that. And you’re pretty, so why not let that work for you? You get a share of the tips from the pool too.” She removed my four earrings and gave me a little zip bag to keep them in. “You don’t want to have your earlobes ripped off if someone gets into fisticuffs. The dancers all wear clip-ons.” She handed me a shiny pair with faux rhinestones.
When Lily opened the door leading back into the club from the dressing room, it was like taking the lid off a box of noise:clattering, shouting, raucous laughter, an old Billy Joel song about his uptown girl. I scuttled behind the bar and set up as many beers and backs as I could. I was sweating as if I’d run a 5K, not that I had any idea what it was like to run a 5K, but the front of my regulation black shirt was soaked; thankfully, it was from Target. The night went quickly; even six inches of sugary spring snow apparently didn’t scare off Ophelia’s regulars.
I left a message for my mother, telling her I would come up in a day or so. I left a message for Nell telling her that I would be working nights. I left a message for Sam telling him that I was staying at Nell’s. In truth, I no longer knew where I lived. What I did know was that I wished I were back on the stone porch at Sam’s house, listening to the mourning in the snow for an ancestral home they’d probably never seen. With a serving of self-pity and a dash of drama, shaken not stirred, I allowed myself to identify with those displaced lions.
The third night, I made drinks for a table of men, one beer and five ginger ales. I watched them curiously. Their conversation was low-pitched but I remembered what Ross had told me and studied the silences. When people converse, they fidget, crack their knuckles, glance around them, maybe even stretch. But these men were motionless as they looked into each other’s eyes. When one talked, the others attended, their hands flat on the table. Finally one of them made a fist and quietly pressed it into his palm. He got up. He was handsome, not large but graceful and strong-looking, and I knew his suit had to go fifteen hundred dollars easy. He walked away from the table and spoke to me.
“Hello, Irene,” he said. “I’m Jack Melodia. I own this place. Welcome.”
“Hello,” I said, putting out my hand, which he took. His palm was warm and dry. He held my hand just a beat longer than necessary and raised it slightly, as if he meant to kiss my hand, then released it with a wide white smile.
“Have fun here. Make lots of money. Be careful.”
What did he mean by that?
Maybe he referred to those very occasional outbreaks of customer fisticuffs.
Nights passed quickly. I slammed drinks, watched mesmerized as the tongues of patrons literally protruded from their mouths during the shows, and practiced some very inventive dance steps in case I ever wanted to impress somebody with my strut-and-grind capabilities. My hunch that I really had the personality of someone born in 1965 was confirmed by my instinctive response to the disco music. I broke up one fight with a single short bark (“Stop that now!”) that I borrowed from my mother, but had to duck under the bar when another brief brawl ensued that required Kelly, the bouncer, to step in, taking hold of two full-size men by the backs of their collars and dragging them to the exit with the ease of a cat moving her kittens.
Still, I found myself physically exhausted, my desk-riding days doing me no favors as I sprinted in my ultrasupportive black leather tennies from one end of that shiny granite bar to the other, as I hunkered down on bended knees to wash glasses and pull beers and replenish ice, and the combination of that workout and cold temperatures was so potent that I got twinges in my ankles and fingers and had to rub them out with Aspercreme. It was worse than my old days as waitstaff at Angel on the Rock, when I’d struggled with sudden leg cramps in the middle of the night, so painful I had to jump out of bed and stretch until they went away—at least until I learned the old hack of self-medicating with a spoonful of pickle juice. Possibly, I was just a wimp.
I remembered then listening aghast to the tale told by two of my grad school friends who had hiked to Everest Base Camp the previous spring. They described the misery of altitude sickness and huddling in all their layers of down as temperatures suddenly fell to zero at night, and that was barely even the startingpoint! Those same two friends, now a couple, had contacted me not long ago, inviting me to join them on the Kenosha Dunes Trail, which they referred to as a “cute little baby hike.” At the time, I agreed, imagining this would be a breeze, but now, taxed even by a few shifts tending bar, I realized this might be the apex of my athletic destiny.
My windowless bedroom at Nell’s Victorian hellhole was unexpectedly comforting, as if I were a mouse in the hollow of a fallen tree. My single bed, demulcent with one of my Grandma Bigelow’s hand-pieced comforters, was cozy and warm. I fell into bed at night and plunged into sleep, sometimes still fully clothed, with the light still on and my paperback, opened to the single page I’d stayed awake long enough to read, splayed over my face. In the morning, I would often find one of my false eyelashes stuck to the book and an imprint of my lip-sticked mouth, as if I’d kissed the page.
It was more than just unaccustomed physical exertion and the new employment of old skills, of course. It was grief.
I longed for Sam, my desire for him an affliction like a headache that crouched in my forehead always waiting to spring. I longed for him, so I made a conscious decision to fill every hour with things that would help me avoid even the thought of him. I was not about to fall apart, especially over a guy. The effort felt like removing the bulb from a light that wouldn’t turn off. I signed up for a baking class. With a group from the local chapter of the writer’s guild, I volunteered to read a chapter twice a week to elders over lunch. I built all these distracters around my new job.
You can only keep yourself so busy for so long, though.
I was never particularly one for lots of reflection. I told myself that I did things rather than mulling them over. But now I was forced to admit that staying upbeat, for me, required a hefty daily dose of denial. When it came to deep thoughts about the kind of person I was, my chosen rationale had beenwhat I didn’t know wouldn’t hurt me. The truth was that it already had.
One afternoon, as I left my sister’s house, I got a text from Sam:Need to talk to you. Personal.
I responded as though he’d invited me to jet to Bali for the weekend. But I forced myself to hold off for two hours before responding:When? Where? Why?
I’ll call you, he texted, and my heart went still. Would he call to set up a time for us to meet, during which meeting we would, quite naturally, drift back together (although that would be wrong!)?
Instead, he called nearly immediately. I was struck silent just hearing his voice.
“Reenie,” he said. “I heard that you were working at Ophelia. It’s not a good idea. I say this as a friend.”
The term stung. Was that all I was to him? Was that all I ever was?
Quickly, he recalled for me a moment when I’d asked him if he was ever disgusted by his work, by the people he had to defend. He’d told me that yes, he’d defended people who did what they said they did and he’d gotten them off, but never anyone whose guilt so offended him that he couldn’t discharge his duty in good conscience. I agreed that I remembered the conversation, and I remembered asking, “Do I know any of them? Mass murderers? Heartless career criminals?”
“You know one of them,” he said.
“You mean Felicity.”
“I mean John Marco Melodia, who owns that club where you work. Jack.”
“He’s just a businessman. And I’ve barely even seen him. He’s not a gangster.”
“Well, he is, Reenie, he is a gangster. He doesn’t traffic fourteen-year-old girls from third world countries, or importheroin, that I know of. He doesn’t get his hands dirty, but he has friends who don’t mind. He has a great many friends, including one of my partners at Damiano, Chen, and Damiano, who grew up with him. I didn’t work with him directly, but I did indirectly, because I assisted his counsel.”
