“A federal marshal,” Sam said. “Sorry. I was a history major. And my dad watches all those old Westerns. They’re his life.”
“Mine too. How weird is that? Did you know how many famous stars got their start onGunsmoke?”
“I do. I’ve heard a hundred times. So please don’t tell me.”
Sam would probably have gotten along well with Patrick the Pure, if things had gone that far. I told him, “My dad builds houses. He used to tell me that there were a lot of bad guys involved with things that got delivered on trucks. I never believed him. He has a flair for the dramatic.”
“Well, there are. I don’t mean like in the movies, Reenie. I don’t mean likeThe Untouchables. But wherever there’s something somebody wants, a Porsche or a carton of cigarettes, there’s going to be somebody else who finds a way to hijack that process. Hijack that truck. Make a big profit.” He went on, “And it’s not two jamokes sitting at a diner on a Saturday night who decide that would be fun. It’s someone who has a boss who has a boss who has a warehouse or two or ten.”
“Why did she stop loving him? Because he was married?”
Sam paused for a few moments and considered his answer. “No, because he would have divorced his wife for her, even thoughhe’s a strict Catholic. Something happened, I don’t know what it was, that made her afraid of him. She left the club because she didn’t want to be with him anymore but also because she needed to make some big money, maybe off her private clients? I think it was to get away from Jack.”
“Could you ever get away from somebody like that?” I noticed that there were blue broken birds’ eggs on the asphalt surface of the parking area, a tiny trail of ruined robins, which seemed almost too metaphorical. “In the movies, they always find you. Or people try to come back and get caught.”
“Sure, you could get away. People transform themselves all the time, they even change their name and their birth date. That’s why there are skip tracers.” He could tell the term puzzled me and explained, “They’re private detectives who look for missing people. They trace people who skip, who skip town, as they used to say in the old days.” If Jack didn’t go after Felicity, Sam said, it might have been because he was a man who understood appropriate social behavior, which meant that you didn’t track down a woman who had made it clear that she didn’t want you anymore. Or for all he knew, something could have happened between them that ruptured the dream for Jack as well. When I suggested that the breach could have occurred because Felicity slept with other men, Sam assured me that Jack certainly would already have known and accepted that. “At least he would have accepted it for the short term. Maybe he wanted her to give that up and she refused. I just don’t know. I do know, he would have done anything she asked.”
What was it about Felicity?
There were women I knew, pretty women, smart women, talented women, whose boyfriends cut them off because they danced with another guy at a bar. Felicity apparently wrote her own ticket with the men who loved her.
What was it about Felicity?
What earned her not only money, but the dreamy kind of devotion that was almost unimaginable in her role as a paid escort? That was what I needed to know. I was putting together the edges of the jigsaw puzzle: She let men come to her rather than playing up to their vanity; she dressed like an old-money heiress; she listened better than anyone they’d ever met; she remembered the small gestures, the tea, the scent, the double Windsor knot. Perhaps that was it, the entire point. She was present. She was like those old party invitations that you used to get, the ones that urged guests not to bother with gifts, notes that said your presence was your present. I couldn’t prove it, but I believed that Felicity, who was analytical, turned away many more men than she admitted into her life. She chose wisely, in that she chose whose needs met her needs and whose means met her needs—or at least, they met her needs until her needs turned terribly real, not just a matter of financial means. But until then, when she was with those lonely men, she exalted them; she made them the focal point. Sure, maybe those guys had no right to feel lonely. Maybe they had everything: loving wives and beautiful children, plenty of money, enviable jobs, secure homes. That didn’t matter. Who among us is not longing for the kind of understanding that passes all understanding? That, which Felicity gave them, was her talent. Her presence was her gift. What was that worth to her guests? It was worth big money. It was worth whatever she wanted. I would have bet everything I had on that notion, and I would have won.
Sam and I parted with a cursory farewell. I couldn’t tell what he felt, but none of my feelings for him had abated since that lost weekend. If anything, they had intensified.
Can new love be denied? The love cannot but the exercise of it can. I was setting myself a test, setting a test of Sam and me, if what we felt would survive outside the rarefied and undeniabledrama of the trial... or if that connection, so fragile and new, would be strangled in the tentacles of that huge event. I was doing it for all the right reasons. There would be no romantic pollutants in the story I would write forFuchsia. I would write a story about being me without trying to be his. The fact that it was the right thing to do was no better, and much lonelier.
I woke at night in my maiden’s bed with the sheets as sweaty and tangled as they’d ever been when I was seventeen and so madly in love with Lucius McCool that I thought I would go mad—as I had.
“Who’s Sam?” Nell asked me. I hadn’t told her about him; I knew that she would say some lawyerly thing that would be unwelcome.
“Why do you ask?”
“I heard you say his name in your sleep.”
“You heard me say his name from your room?”
“I could have heard you from Denver.”
My sister started bugging me then, as she had for days, about my love life, or my now ex–love life, which she didn’t really know about, but bugging me more often about my strip-club job, which she did know about. What was it like? Was it disgusting? Was it sexy? Was everyone there a sleaze? Could she come and watch while I worked? I agreed to the latter, because despite how much of a pain she could be, Nell was a sharp observer. My only request was for a little more time to get myself sorted out there.
I wanted to find ways to talk to people who’d known Felicity. As it turned out, that happened pretty naturally.
At the end of the first week, Archangel came to the bar near the end of the night.
“You hungry?”
“I am,” I said. I never ate at work, the old axiom holding true; you couldn’t eat food you saw made. I used to love chili.Now, like a kid who craved mint chocolate chip until she got a summer job scooping ice cream, I gagged when I smelled the chili bubbling in the prep kitchen.
“Let’s go for breakfast,” Archangel said. She had just started working double shifts, short-term, to sock away what she described as her “do-over” stash, money she would use to move to Ireland for a couple of years, see if she could give up the crazy life. She now ate one massive meal on a working day, a predawn breakfast and dinner combined, and nothing but apples and coffee after that. Her appetite was so prodigious that her stomach would protrude during her dances if she ate all that she was capable of eating.
Walking with her into The Eggs-Ham-iner (the sign featured a picture of a newspaper with a giant plate of sunny-side-ups) was quite an experience. The whole joint, which was packed, paused, forks held aloft in hand. Six-two, in full stripper makeup, a crop top, and miniskirt, topped by a fuzzy white fur jacket, which I could tell was not faux fur, she must have attracted those kinds of stares no matter where she went.
Archangel confided, “People think I’m trans. I don’t care if they think I’m trans of course. But I’m not. Born this way.”
Only her hair, which she freed from the tight topknot she wore onstage, looked the way it would look in the wild. Cascades of blond twists falling past her shoulders, she then looked like a big raw girl, perhaps off a farm, at least off a farm a generation ago, the kind of long-legged, strong-limbed, big-shouldered girl who might have been an athlete. That was exactly what she had been, a track star who could hurl a discus and a javelin like paper plates and vault over a pole as if it were a backyard croquet wicket, all through high school and a single semester of college. Then she wrecked her shoulder, and the scholarship collapsed along with generations of hope for Archangel Kolowitz, for her and for all her very tall family, and sheslipped into a netherworld of not having planned what else she wanted to do besides pray for the next Olympic trials.
