Vixen (22 page)

“I’m decent,” Clara whispered, opening her door a crack. “You can come in.”

Marcus was slumped on the floor of the dark hallway outside her room, right where she had left him a few minutes before. She’d told him she needed privacy to change out of her wet clothes—which was true—but she also was petrified there would be another cryptic note waiting.

She had cased the room but found nothing. Thank the Lord.

Now Clara eyed Marcus’s slim frame as he preceded her into the light of her room.

Marcus sized her up in her plush, terry-cloth robe. “You look brand-new.”

“I
feel
brand-new.” She was still toweling dry her hair as
she stood awkwardly before him. “Though I really should remove my stockings.” She looked at her legs. She shrugged, realizing she was more nervous around him than she’d thought. “So … this is my room.”

Marcus gave her a wounded-puppy look. “You don’t remember I was here before?”

She thought back to their initial encounter, her first week in Chicago. “That’s right,” she said, walking over to the old Victrola Aunt Bea had parked here and putting on a Marion Harris 78.

The opening strains of “After You’ve Gone” filled the room. Clara had been aiming to make the temperature in the room more casual—just two friends hanging out—than romantic, but somehow that had backfired.

Best to shrug it off. “You left me with quite the first impression,” Clara said, trying not to reveal
too
much. “I’m still not over it.”

“You mean you found me irresistibly attractive?”

“More like irredeemably aggressive.”

“I thought I redeemed myself after our date!” Marcus protested, sliding down to the floor and leaning against the bed.

She raised one eyebrow. “Date?”

“When we went to the movies. To see Buster Keaton.”

“I thought that wasn’t a date,” Clara said. “I thought you were merely saving me from Ginnie Bitman’s tea party.” Marcus plunked the carton of ice cream between his bent
legs. “It was a date for me. At least, I wanted it to be. It was the best date I’ve ever been on.”

Clara didn’t know how to respond. She thought for a moment, then decided her shrewdest move would be to ignore his comment. “I think I’m finally ready for that ice cream.”

“If it’s not soup by now.” He held out a spoon, gesturing for her to sit. Clara kept the distance between them wide. “I like Neapolitan,” he said, scrutinizing the chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry stripes, “but I do hate having to choose.”

“Agreed.” It felt so natural, sitting here with him. “Is Gloria home?” she asked, suddenly registering that Gloria’s door had been closed when they had quietly snuck upstairs. It was strange how often Gloria seemed to be mysteriously absent recently. And at odd hours.

“Claudine said she was over at Lorraine’s, doing some group project,” Marcus said, sounding bored.

“A ‘group project’ is the oldest excuse in the book,” Clara said, skimming off the top of the strawberry ice cream with her spoon.

“And how would you know?”

“I
did
go to high school, Marcus,” she said. “And I wasn’t born yesterday. In fact, I do believe I’m older than you.”

“Older, maybe. Wiser? Not a chance.” He gave her a wry grin, shoveling all three flavors onto his spoon and lifting it to her mouth.

“I have my own,” she said, waving her spoon in his face. His gesture was sweet—very sweet, in fact—but Clara
couldn’t let this evening go in that direction. She had to keep reminding herself that Marcus had some sort of “plan” with Gloria and Lorraine. He couldn’t be trusted. She dunked her spoon into the chocolate, avoiding his eyes. “So, seriously, what were you doing over here if Gloria isn’t even home?”

“So, seriously, you’re not going to tell me who you were out with on your date?” Marcus shot back, licking the rejected spoonful. “Whoever it was, he clearly didn’t satisfy your sweet tooth.”

“I told you, he was just a friend!” Clara insisted. “An old friend—”

“From back east?”

“You could say that.”

“Oh no, don’t tell me”—he gasped melodramatically—
“Pennsylvania.”

Clara shrugged, neither agreeing nor disagreeing, tapping her hands against her thighs to the beat of the song.

“You definitely didn’t have half as much fun on your date tonight as you would have had with me.”

Clara playfully knocked her knees into Marcus’s. “And what if I did?”

“Impossible,” Marcus said. “I want to hear exactly what happened. Step by step, blow by blow.”

“I can’t. It really was … indescribable.”

“Fine, I’ll describe it for you,” he insisted. “He arrived fifteen minutes early, smelling of his mother’s rose water.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Try again.”

“Fine, his grandmother’s. Because he has a fetish for the way Gran smells and thought that was a good way to impress you.”

She played along. “It was strong. I had to roll down the window.”

“And he was wearing a tweed blazer. The first red flag for a bad date.”

“The rose water was the first red flag.”

“Oh, but you’d snuck a cigarette earlier, and you didn’t smell that until you got into the closed cabin of the car. And almost choked to death.”

Clara held her hands up. “Guilty as charged.”

“He drove like his grandmother, too. In fact, it was his grandmother’s car—a wheezy old Model T that she’s driven only on Sundays to get to church and back.”

“That’s the meanest thing you’ve ever said to me. God forbid I should ever be caught dead in one of those.” Clara laughed and remembered how good it felt just to do that. “Besides, I have proof: I came home in a taxi.”

“The taxi became necessary when the old tin lizzie broke down along the lakefront.”

“Oh no,” Clara dismissed. “I don’t
do
lakefronts.”

“I should hope not: Lakefront parking is so beneath you. But he wanted to get you alone in the struggle buggy—”

“I’m not a backseat kind of girl, Marcus.”

He looked offended. “You don’t need to tell
me
. Who necks in a car anymore? Not I, certainly.”

“Why, Marcus, do I detect a hint of jealousy?”

“Don’t insult me.” He stood, dropped his spoon, and said, “Come on, let’s dance.”

“Here?” she asked hesitantly, looking around as if someone might be watching. Someone
might
be. But it wasn’t that. No, it was that she knew herself all too well. Being in the strong arms of this boy was begging for trouble. “I’m too worn out.”

“Don’t be such a Goody Two-shoes. Come on!” He pulled her up to her feet just as “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” came on.

How ironic
, Clara thought, and was about to protest when his hands met her hips. She tensed up, her arms stiffening. “Marcus, I don’t know if this is—”

“Shhhh,” he said, taking her hands and placing them around his neck. “Just relax.”

Clara had never danced like this before, with anyone. At the jazz clubs and parties of New York, it was never about the dance itself but about how many men you could dance with in one night, flinging yourself from one pair of arms to the next. It was sweaty, out-of-breath, heel-clacking dancing. Comparatively, this was not dancing at all: This was being held.

And for a moment, leaning against Marcus’s broad shoulder, Clara felt protected. Nothing from her past could harm her—no notes, no threats—while they were moving, together, to the tender longing of Marion Harris’s voice and the synchronized rhythm of their breathing.

His face moved closer to her neck until she could feel his breath in her ear. “What if I
were
jealous?” he whispered, breaking the silence between them.

The song had ended, and the record player emitted a soft pop every few seconds, barely audible in the calming patter of the now lighter rain against the windowpanes.

Clara didn’t know what to say. If Marcus
was
jealous, she didn’t want to encourage it. Or maybe it was just a line that a playboy would easily pull out of his hat. She slid from his embrace.

“I’m serious, Clara. I can’t stop thinking about you,” he said, his eyes darkening. “I’ve never felt this way about anyone before.”

“I’m sure that’s not true. You’ve had a hundred girlfriends, from what I’ve heard—”

“Don’t believe everything you hear.” Marcus paced the room for a quick second before turning back to her with sudden urgency. “And besides, I’m telling you how I feel about you now. The past isn’t important.”

“Do you really believe that?” It was nice to think the past didn’t matter.

“I believe in clean slates,” he said with conviction. “And I believe in being honest about my feelings.”

“I appreciate your honesty, but—”

“I don’t want your appreciation, Clara. I want you to tell me how you
feel.
”

She searched his pleading blue eyes for some flicker of
insincerity, but they were unblinking. She didn’t want to hurt him. But she didn’t want to get hurt, either. Her wounds had yet to be stitched up; they marked her heart like unraveled dress seams. “I don’t know,” she said finally, shaking her head.

“That’s bushwa, you
do
know,” Marcus said. “Why do I feel as if you’re lying to me?”

“I’m not,” Clara said weakly, but it came out sounding like a lie.
So many lies
, she thought.
When will they stop?
“It’s just too complicated. You’re Gloria’s best friend, and Lorraine likes you—”

“Forget about Lorraine. I like
you
, Clara. I’m smitten by
you.
”

He touched her cheek then, and Clara leaned into his palm. She wanted so much to lose herself in his embrace—

But she couldn’t.
He doesn’t like
me.
He likes Country Clara
.

“You have to stop thinking about me like that, Marcus. For your own good.” Though she knew it was exactly the opposite. She wasn’t a man-eater anymore; she was afraid. She went to the door, opened it, and gestured for him to leave. “I’ll only cause you trouble.”

He walked to her. Clara thought for a second that he was going to kiss her. But he stopped mere inches before her. “You already have.”

A few minutes later, Clara heard Marcus’s car start up in the drive. She felt her heart tighten in her chest like a fist.

As she was mindlessly rolling down her stockings, one got caught on her topaz cocktail ring and tore right down the front. Heat pounded through her temples. She took both stockings in her hands and tore them savagely.

But she wasn’t finished. Nothing could stop this wild animal rage.

Clara dumped the contents of her dresser out onto the floor: brassieres, scanties, satin tap shorts, stockings, garters, silk teddies—everything went flying, including three pieces of cream-colored paper. She picked them up, shredding the first, then the second, until they fell like scattered snowflakes across the pink carpet. If it hadn’t been for
him
, for his false promises and false hopes, she could have kissed Marcus, she could have been open to his affection.

But her heart had been locked up, and
he
had kept the key.

She was about to rip the last of the notes when she stopped: The photograph of her in New York fluttered to the floor.

Out of breath, she picked it up. The last remnant, the only artifact of her previous life. Evidence of the only time when she had ever been truly happy, when life had been without beginnings or endings.

She slipped it safely inside a pair of lacy red panties. She used to wear them beneath her favorite sheer red dress, which she had left behind in New York. She folded the
underthings up, placed them back in the bottom of the drawer, and slid the drawer back into the dresser.

She slowly swept the cream-colored scraps of paper into her cupped palm. Gathered in her hand, they were no more than flimsy fragments of fractured words—
found, I, you, inside
. She took them into the bathroom and dropped the scraps into the toilet.

And then she flushed them away.

LORRAINE

Heart-to-hearts were not Lorraine’s thing.

But that was why she figured Gloria had called, asking to come over, on a Saturday morning. Which, in theory, should have thrilled Lorraine: Hadn’t she been wanting her best friend back, or at least the opportunity to confront Gloria about all the secrets she’d been keeping?