Dressed to Kill (2 page)

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

ONE

1

S
he had passed the place a hundred times before tonight, watching those who went inside, watching them as they moved beneath the discreet neon and through the doors—and sometimes, when the doors swung back briefly, she could hear the noise of music. It had something to do with the music, she thought. Something to do with how it seemed to emerge in broken phrases like a series of quick invitations.
Come in. It’s the easiest thing in the world. Just come in.
She turned away and crossed the narrow street. On the sidewalk opposite she paused, put her fingers up to the edges of her dark glasses, shivered. But it wasn’t cold. Nerves. Maybe it came down to that failure of nerve in the end, something that simply snapped and left you suspended in a vacuum. She raised a hand to the strand of blonde hair that had fallen across her forehead, and she wondered how she looked, if she looked good enough to compete in a place like that.

Compete. What kind of thinking was that? She didn’t have to compete with anybody. She had only to cross the street and push the doors back and she would be inside—but the thought paralyzed her. Now she saw a man go through the doors. She saw how the neon was reflected off his thinning hair. Don’t be nervous, she told herself. Go back across the street. Go inside. Follow the music. She looked at her image in the darkened window of a shuttered drugstore. The dark glasses almost obscured her face. Dark glasses at night: maybe that was pretentious. And the short fur jacket seemed to emphasize her height, making her feel awkward, ungainly. She pushed the strand of hair away once more.

You fought nerves with nerves, she thought. You didn’t just yield to fear. You turned it around so that it was something positive, not this negative energy.

She put her hands inside the pockets of the jacket. She shrugged so that the purse slung around her shoulder wouldn’t slip. Then she turned away from her own reflection and moved slowly back across the street. Nothing to fear, she thought. You go through those doors like anybody else. She closed her eyes a moment under the neon.
Somebody might come and try to pick you up, and you might be attracted, and you might want to spend the night with the man, you might want the sweet careless moment of anonymous fucking in a dark room
. . .

She shivered again, realizing now that she’d gone through the doors, that the music was louder, the room lit only by a series of dim shaded lamps, as if you might come and go with the stealth of a shadow. She moved towards the bar. She thought: Sharks. A room of dark sharks shifting through the shallows of light. The barman was leaning towards her, saying something. She couldn’t hear. He repeated his words. And then her mind was empty, she couldn’t think what to say, couldn’t think of anything she wanted to drink, conscious only of sensations—the music that sounded like the crying of rooks, the smell of sweat and deodorant hanging around her, the weight of her purse against her shoulder.

“Let me,” somebody said. “If you don’t mind.”

She stared at the face of the man who had spoken. A fleshy face, middle-aged, with the kind of expression you associated with people who had stood too long in a line, waiting for a ticket or to make a complaint in a department store. She could feel herself smile. The man moved closer to her.
Peppermint.
The smell enveloped her. She sighed, trying to relax.

“What’ll it be?” he asked.

She gazed at him. There was something flat in the accent, something that suggested the great emptiness of the plains and prairies; it didn’t have the hard nasal quality of the city. His hand fell on her wrist.

“Scotch. On the rocks,” she said. But her voice seemed faint, coming from a great distance. The drink was poured and pushed across the surface of the bar towards her, then the man was helping her on to a stool, the palm of his hand covering her elbow.

“Walter,” the man said. “Walter Pidgeon.”

“Eva,” she answered. “Eva Braun.”

The man laughed. “I’m serious. That’s my real name. Nobody ever believes it.”

She watched him a moment. Walter Pidgeon from the Midwest. Maybe in a bar like this everybody had a pseudonym. Maybe they came armed with the artillery of false identities. Fear of reprisal. Plain old fear.

“If you’re not Eva, who are you?” he said. He was drawing a stool towards her, then climbing up on it. He leaned close to her. She could feel his arm against her own. She said nothing for a moment She sipped some of the scotch. Then she turned to face him. There was something soft and forlorn in his features, a loneliness, a suffering.

“Bobbi,” she said.

“Bobbi.” He appeared to suck on the word, like a lozenge whose flavor he wasn’t sure he liked.

“With an i,” she said.

“Bobbi,” he said again. “Do you have a second name?”

“Sometimes.” She finished the drink, put the empty glass down, and looked around the room. It was funny how all the fears had dispelled themselves now; it was weird to think how terrified she’d been. Through the dim lights she could make out the shapes of groups of men, girls, standing around looking confident, almost arrogant; and she could feel a certain conspiratorial quality about the place, like everybody knew they had come here to try to score. To score, she thought. A sporting metaphor. The game of fucking. The gladiatorial arena of a singles bar.

“Is that your second name?” Walter asked. “Sometimes?”

She smiled, turning back to look at him. Bobbi Sometimes. Then something moved inside her head, a shadow, a flicker of darkness, a thing she couldn’t put a name to.
Bobbi Sometimes.
She stopped smiling, feeling the rise of a tiny panic inside herself. Maybe he wasn’t making a joke, after all. Maybe he had seen through her. Like one of those laboratory slides you hold up to the light. A pinned butterfly. A blood specimen.
Seen through her.
What was she thinking? There wasn’t anything to see through. There wasn’t anything at all.

“Another drink?” he said.

She nodded, looking down at the empty glass. She heard him call the bartender. Then she felt his hand close around her knee and she let it lie there for a time before she pushed it gently aside. Walter laughed.

“Moving too fast,” he said. “Impulsive. Can’t help it. It’s in my blood.”

She raised her second glass and said, “Where do you come from, Walter?”

“Small place you probably never heard of,” he said. “Pocatello, Idaho.”

“You’re right. I never heard of it.” She looked at him over the rim of her glass now, conscious of the fact she was flirting vaguely with him, flirting in a way that was almost halfhearted. “What brings you to the big city?”

“Convention,” the man said. “But you don’t want to talk about that. Sugar beets don’t make for interesting conversation, honey.”

Honey, she thought. She felt warm suddenly. The drinks. The sound of the word
honey
, the way he said it, as if it were a solitary word that had strayed from the lyric of some song. Honey honey. She felt his hand close around her knee again.

“Why don’t you take off the glasses?” he said.

“I like them—”

“I want to see your eyes. I bet they’re blue.”

She shook her head. “I like the glasses,” she said again. “They make me feel . . .”

“Secure?” Walter said.

“Secure, right.”

Walter bumped against her. The drink in her hand shook. She felt a spot of spilled liquid seep through the material of her pants. But it didn’t matter. She shut her eyes and listened to the music. Soft rock. Gordon Lightfoot.
Sundown, you better take care
. . . She lowered her hand so that it covered Walter’s. She moved her head a little from side to side, feeling her hair against the sides of her face. A cocoon. A place where you could withdraw. A whole little world of make believe.
Somehow you’ve known this man for years, you’ve been lovers for a long time, you’re the little number he keeps in the city, where his wife doesn’t know, you’re the very first person he calls when he arrives, the person you’ve been waiting for, aching for . . .

“I’m at The Americana,” he was saying.

His words, his voice—why did they intrude like that?

“Room six-oh-nine.”

She didn’t want to open her eyes. The song held her. The touch of hands.
I can see you lying there in your satin dress
. . . She thought: Say honey to me again. Call me that. Say it to me one more time.

“You want to leave here?” he asked.

She opened her eyes. The real world. The room of predators.

“We could have drinks in my room,” he was saying.

She put her glass down. She shook her head.

“Why not?” he said. “We could have some drinks sent up. We’d have some fun.”

She shook her head a second time. “I’ve got someplace else to go.”

“Another date? Something like that?” Walter took his hand away from her knee. She felt exposed when he did so, vulnerable, as if she’d been betrayed somehow.

“Something like that,” she answered.

“Lookit, you could call, you could say you’ve got this bad headache, make an excuse . . .”

She stared at him. The music stopped. There was a strange silence in the bar. She imagined every conversation coming to a halt at exactly the same time, words slithering over precipices into silence. She felt unnerved The Americana. Room six-oh-nine.

“I can’t,” she said.

“You don’t find me as attractive as I find you, that it?”

She smiled.
He finds me attractive.
Me! She looked down at her empty glass. “It’s not that,” she said.

“This other appointment—a guy?”

“Right,” she said.

Walter sighed. He rolled his eyes in exaggerated frustration. “Tomorrow night, honey, I catch a plane back to Idaho. I don’t know when I’ll be back again. I don’t know if I’ll
ever
be back.”

She hitched her purse up over her shoulder. I want to go with you to your hotel, Walter, I want to ride with you in the elevator, go to your room, have those drinks, have that thing you call fun, I want to fuck you with the lamps turned off and the TV playing silently, I want all these things . . .

“I can’t,” she said. Dear God, I can’t. And she felt a sudden surging of an old anger, a rage the color of scarlet, as if she could see her own blood course through her body. And she was sucked into the wild stream of it, sucked and drawn along, a prisoner in her own arteries, choking on the mad tide of herself. I can’t, I can’t . . .

“It’s not just a one-nighter,” he was saying. He looked pathetic, pleading. “I like you. Soon’s you came through that door, I liked you. I don’t go in for one-night stands, honey. It’s not my style.”

She looked into the palms of her upturned hands, thinking how large the hands seemed, how clumsy—unmade for the intricate delicacies of love. She got down from the stool and moved towards the door. I shouldn’t have come in here, she thought. Walter was hurrying along behind her. She passed through the door. She heard him call to her. She stopped. She turned to face him. He placed his hands on her shoulders and she saw his face come close, closer, his lips slightly parted, as if with one last kiss he might convince her to stay with him. She felt darkness press in on her. The kiss was hot and damp. His hand went inside her fur jacket, the palm fumbling for her breasts. She closed her eyes and let the kiss take her over, a peppermint kiss, and she thought again of his hotel room and what it might be like to have him inside her, giving herself like that, a total yielding, all the goddamn barriers broken down at last—then she pulled herself away, chilled, horrified, turning aside from him.

“Hey, what’s the matter?” he said.

But she wasn’t listening, she was walking quickly away from him, then running, hearing her name called along the sidewalk.
Bobbi. Bobbi!
She turned a corner. The heel of her shoe broke, snapped, and she limped hurriedly, trying to catch her breath, her shoulder purse slipping, her ankle all at once sore. She came to a diner, the only place lit on a dark block. She went inside and sat at a table away from the window and ordered coffee when a waitress came. Her hands were shaking when she lit a cigarette. Goddamn. How could she have?

Try and relax, Bobbi.

Take it easy now. Breath deep, breath slow.

There was a lipstick mark on the rim of her coffee cup. Trembling, she turned the cup to the other side and drank the tasteless liquid. A telephone, she thought. There had to be a phone in this dump. She looked around. A chef in a greasy apron was wiping a hot plate, talking to the waitress as he did so, conversing in a language that didn’t make any sense—Italian? Turkish? She didn’t know. She got up from the table and went inside the lady’s rest room. The smell of urine was sickening. On top of the trashcan there was a discarded tampon, crumpled, bloodied. She gazed at it for a moment, then looked at her face in the cracked mirror, trying to see . . . See what? A cubicle door opened, a woman lurched out, staggered past her, went back inside the restaurant.

Calm now, Bobbi.

Put the panic away. The anger.