Rainey Royal (19 page)

Order to self: Go to a normal party and be normal about it. Leave in thirty minutes.
Go
.

The bird-boyfriend’s party hemorrhages music. It’s in the Flower District, all dirty-windowed lofts. Leah feels an internal coiling—that’s twenty-three feet of small intestine, telling her to go home.

Stupid girl. She will look stupid; she will say stupid things. But she only has to look stupid till she finds Rainey or the boyfriend.

Up five flights, joins a semisolid volume of humans. Whirling molecules, all of them, wedging through a doorway into the bird-boyfriend’s enormous loft. Grace Slick sings in a slow, throbbing Spanish.
Para escapar
, Leah hears—
to escape
.

Loft is packed. From the hall she sees people inside dancing to Grace. Young man tacks ahead of her, pocking the
air with invisible drumsticks and jostling her into the wall. His movement opens a slender channel. She steps into it and is subsumed. Where are the bird-boyfriend’s parrots? Stashed in bedroom? Impossible to spot Rainey or the boyfriend, Clayton, or Tina Dial. Needing purpose, Leah squeezes upstream and locates the rum punch. There’s no ladle, just take a baby Dixie and dunk.

She dips and drinks, and drinks again. Libations flow straight through the blood-brain barrier. Lacing self through crowd, she tries to keep the third punch from sloshing. Cigarettes bob and jab in inattentive hands. Reaches a wall, finally. Plasters self to it. Posture is her cloak.
My friend just went for drinks
, her eyes say.
Why don’t you drop dead?

Miss L looks hot, though. Leah admits it. Strappy pink leotard, deliberate clash with red hair. Black Genny skirt, fifteen amazing dollars in the Irvington thrift shop. Also men’s black Tony Lama boots, size eight and a half. They cost even less than the skirt. When she wears them to work, they collect a dun-colored dust from the ankles down—particulate traces of Purina mouse chow, which she parcels out in the lab.

Notice me
, she thinks.
Stay away
.

Someone changes the record, and Jefferson Airplane comes on loud: rabbits, dormice, pills. Now Leah sees them, deep in the crowd.
Together
, they are dancing
together
, Rainey, Tina, Clayton. Leah, riveted, can’t tell who is the third, the odd one out.

What would happen if she squeezed through the crowd and tried to become the fourth? Rainey would turn to dance with Clayton. That would leave Tina, who should first do no harm. But Tina would turn away.

Then Leah would be dancing alone. So forget it.

She manages a good five minutes this way, partying by proxy, when a woman comes and stands nearby.

Her body language is far more fluent than Leah’s.
I’ve never been nervous a moment in my life
. Her hair is a fountain of ringlets, and her feet are bare, in red stilettos.

Leah looks at her from the white of her eye, and the woman turns to her.

“There is a smaller party,” she says, “in the last room down the hall.” Then she pushes off from the wall.

Leah knows a rabbit hole when she sees one.

Touch base
, says her brain. But she pushes off, too, and heads for the hall. Passes the bathroom, so noted by the line, and comes to the final door, posted with a sign that reads
OFF LIMITS.

Surely not to Those Who Are Following a Sylph?

The bedroom is empty of people, crowded at the far end with large, covered birdcages on wheeled stands. The birds under their cloths are silent. Stunned by darkness or rock and roll? A high, open window gapes onto the night.

No sylph. Either she has chosen the wrong room or the wrong party, where she has made the narcissistic, puppyish mistake of following a woman with a Laeliocattleya mouth.

Outside the open window, a match ignites. The woman is floating out there in the night. No: she is sitting on the fire-escape stairs. “What took you so long?” she says.

She probably got out there with a neat little hop. Leah folds herself through and squats, facing her, trembling, fishing for a cigarette. “I’m Leah.”

The woman reaches out. Leah’s right hand obediently goes to hers. Instead of shaking it the woman turns it over, examines the small print on her palm.

“I’m a skeptic,” says Leah, and pulls it back.

“Most intelligent people are,” says the woman. She reaches for Leah’s hand again. “May I? You have a powerful head line. Deeply incised.” She looks up. “It correlates nicely to the phalange of logic.” She strokes the base of Leah’s thumb. “You do your own taxes. Numbers don’t intimidate.”

“Ha,” says Leah, trying to be neutral. She pulls her hand back again, but the woman holds it firm.

“Your heart line is less pronounced,” she says. “Put it this way. Your head line is a river. Your heart line is a drip from the kitchen faucet.”

This woman has looked in Leah’s mirror. She has seen the flaw. “Remind me to call the super,” says Leah, and then, “Oh, shit,” because how will she find Rainey in an off-limits room?

The woman looks up as if Leah has finally revealed something of interest. “Someone needs to teach you how to have fun,” she says, and drops Leah’s hand.

Leah jams the hand in her jacket pocket. “I should go in. Have some fun,” she adds.

The woman stands, nearly losing a heel to the gaps in the fire escape. “Maybe it’s not your kind of party. There’s a secret way out.” The alley, five stories below, is an abyss with trash cans. “Not down,” says the woman. “Up.”

One flight to the roof. The woman removes her right shoe, kisses it, and throws. It sails over the parapet. She hands Leah the other shoe. “Here,” she says. “Throw.”

“I can’t.” The shoe seems to pulse in her hand like a heart. Leah backs away. “I’m meeting someone. You want me to go fetch that?”
Fetch
. Like a puppy.

“Someone?” says the woman musically.

“It’s her party,” says Leah. “I mean it’s her boyfriend’s loft—”

“Spare me,” says the woman, “I was married to the boyfriend.”

Across the lit room, the door opens. Rainey peers in. “Leah?”

Leah cups her cigarette and freezes. Rainey sniffs. She smells their smoke, Leah thinks. “Hey,” she says. It comes out half croak. “Out here.”

“Levinson, I’ve been looking for you for an
hour
.” Rainey sticks her head out the open window. “Zola,” she says.

Zola exhales a rope of smoke toward Rainey while Leah falls in love with her name.

“I was looking for you for an hour, too,” says Leah. “I got claustrophobic.”

“Hello, Rainey.” Zola laughs, a raspy, private sort of chuckle.

“You guys
know
each other?” says Rainey.

“We just met,” says Leah.

“We’re old friends,” says Zola. “We were just leaving.” A sash of her smoke dissolves between them.

Rainey looks at Leah hard. “We’re not going anywhere,” Leah says.

“If you leave with her,” says Rainey, “you’re going somewhere.”

Leah would like to go somewhere, actually. She would go somewhere with Rainey—but Rainey has sealed herself unto Tina Dial since something like sixth grade. Tina shadows Rainey like a twin, and Leah wants to taste that kind of dangerous alliance, something deeper even than friendship, a collusion that sucks up the oxygen in its sphere and thrives on tiny cruelties.

Zola looks at the two women. “Leah, darlin’, is there glue on that shoe?”

Leah kisses the shoe quickly and hurls it. Rainey says, “Big mistake,” but Leah gives her what she hopes is a mysterious smile and turns away. Zola starts up the ladder. Her bare feet flash on the dark rungs. Leah follows her to the roof. Zola waits barefoot at the top while Leah crunches across the tar paper and trots back wearing a shoe on each hand, flapping them in triumph.

In the stairwell they shoulder into a chain of people,
thread their way outside, meet up in the silvery bath of a streetlight.

“Well,” says Leah, fear setting in. “That was fun.”

“Climbing a fire escape? That’s not fun, my heart,” says Zola. “Spending my alimony, that would be fun. Champagne at the Brasserie, that would be fun.”

Leah can’t talk.

“I think we must get you a cab,” says Zola. She looks down the empty block. “Let’s try Eighth,” she says. Then, her voice low: “Drop me?”

Not a normal person
, warns Leah’s brain. Her heart bangs against the bars, the molecules flying apart. Mysterious stranger might move in too close, breathe her air. Leah is a person who requires much space, even in her fantasy life.

But she wraps arms around self in lucky leather jacket and murmurs: “Drop you where?”

R
AINEY TELEPHONES EVERY FOUR
or five days. Leah is never free.

“I’m gonna sic Tina on you,” says Rainey. “You used to be almost fun. What’s happening?”

“I’m just busy.” Leah lowers her voice. She’s in the lab office, where she has no privacy and is not supposed to take personal calls. She works, when she is not handling mice, under a greenish bank of lights. The lab manager, Lawrence, makes notes in a data book; the other lab tech, Marina, waters leggy plants. “Work is happening,” says Leah.

“Maybe Zola’s happening.”

Leah blushes so hard she is sure Rainey can hear her capillaries expand over the phone. Her brain starts mocking her.
Naïveté’s happening. Proclivities are happening
. How does Rainey sense these things? But maybe Leah can sense things, too. Maybe Rainey never noticed, in high school, the current between Tina and Howard flowing so strong it electrified the follicles of Leah’s hair.

“I’m running an experiment,” she says. Lawrence looks up from the data book and starts to talk. She makes wild arm movements in his direction.

“Don’t tell me,” says Rainey. “You’re studying what happens when you put crazy lying ex-wives together with tall sexy lab technicians who don’t know remotely what they’ve gotten into.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” says Leah.

O
H,
FUCK
.
Y
OU KNOW
why Zola lied? Leah wouldn’t have come, that’s why. She has rat duty in the morning, and when Zola steps out of their taxi on Tenth Avenue, Leah can see they’re not at a nightclub. Meaning it’s not like Area or wherever people go.

And Zola—impatiently tapping her foot on the sidewalk, which is sort of her way of laughing—Zola is not a hostess.

For evidence Leah has the orange-neon silhouette glowing in the window—a homunculus of hair, bosom,
and flank, burning against black glass. Then there’s the name, Treasure Chest, and the truck-rumbled neighborhood, not the best.

“I don’t think so,” she says, and steps back off the curb. But their cab has pulled away.

Zola tugs her, in pulses, back onto the sidewalk. “Ten minutes,” she says.

Leah’s silent. It’s less entangling than
yes
.

Zola says, “There are two little things you have to get straight.” Leah shakes her head. “Your drink,” says Zola, “and your cover story.”

Hail another fucking cab
, says the cerebral cortex. But somewhere around the brain stem Leah’s also thinking: Move and she drops your hand, is that what you want?

“Tonight,” says Zola, “you order Jack and ginger. Or Jack and Coke.”

“Why?”

“Because all the girls do,” says Zola, “and trust me, in this business, you don’t want to stand out.”

“I’m not in this business.”

“If a customer talks to you, be sweet.”

“No customers,” says Leah.

Zola swings Leah’s hand like a child. “If he asks why you’re there, say something mindless. Say you’re writing an article on exotic dancers, if it makes you happy.”

“For what magazine?”

Zola snorts. “He doesn’t care what magazine. He’s going
to say, Really? You a writer? Or Really? You a Virgo? Say yes. Be nice.”

“I’m not going in,” says Leah. “There are naked people in there.”

“Not really,” says Zola. “The men have to keep their clothes on.”

“I can’t.”

Oh, and her name—

Her name, Zola says, is Lacey. An alliterative to Leah. An easy, cheerleader Lacey. All blonde hair and boyfriends. Lacey Chase, two words that slide on the same string easy as pearls.

But Zola is just Zola.

“I gave up my last name when I was fourteen,” she says. “You won’t find a trace of me anywhere.”

“F
REDDIE
, I’
D LIKE YOU
to meet my girlfriend, Lacey.”

Is that
girlfriend
as in
girl friend
, or
girlfriend
as in
girlfriend
? Leah’s brain starts chewing on it: one word or two? Then it stops, distracted by the slightly seductive note—deferential, with a twist of helpless—Zola’s taking with this Freddie.

The man turns on his barstool and inspects them. His eyebrows step down toward the bridge of his nose, and his hair is pulled into a ponytail. He wears a black jacket over a navy T-shirt. Leah hates that, black with navy. It took her all of college to get used to black with brown.

She spends about two seconds on Freddie, however,
because a woman is doing something fluid on a stage behind him. The woman wears shiny black panties that lace at the crotch, and something papery bristles out of her waistband. A misnomer, waistband—this garment stops way south of her navel. Leah stares a little harder, realizes she’s looking at money. Bills, folded and refolded lengthwise, inserted under the elastic at the hip.

Also, she has no top on, which Leah finds mesmerizing, and one breast is larger than the other, which she finds revelatory. Why isn’t this a disqualifying flaw?

“Your girlfriend Lacey,” Freddie repeats, and Leah realizes he’s watching her watch the dancer. She looks back at him with alarm.

“Mm-hmm,” says Zola musically, “the one I told you about.” Told him about? “We’re going downstairs now, okay?”

A thought floats into Leah’s brain:
She’s afraid of him
.

“You do that,” says Freddie. “See you real soon, Lace.”

Zola leads her past the stage and through a curtain of plastic beads, clicky and clear like drugstore diamonds, and down a flight of stairs. Under bare bulbs, Leah watches their shadows spill ahead of them, then slink around behind. She follows Zola into a basement bathroom marked
ADIES.