30
Minnie’s Burlesque
Three weeks later, Wesley and I had dinner at the Jane West. We had started sleeping in the same bed again two nights before.
After we parted ways on the sidewalk, I watched Wesley disappear down Washington Street to make his call time covering for Chap, walloped with a flu after the raucous summer, as emcee at the club on the corner of Eleventh.
Dr. French’s regimented weaning had helped even my keel back out, as much as taking it the first few times made me think of Lake Sumner with a stinging, gut-turning avoidance. I stole down the very small pinch of my evening dose from my new compact in the back seat of the taxi taking me north along streets fizzing with traffic.
Going alone to Forty-Second Street would have scared me once—the unknown, the furtive desperation of sex clubs, the profusion of loitering men who stared at women as though any would be brave enough to charge if only the price was right. But now, any fear slid from my mind like oil on water.
By all counts, I didn’t fit there. I wasn’t dressed to entertain, and I wasn’t a man in a suit looking to be catered to. I’d arrived early. I ordered a drink and sat neatly at the far end of the bar, avoiding eye contact and enjoying a martini just dirty enough to count, and watched the dancer onstage perform a number about losing her clothes piece by piece in a wind tunnel.
I could feel people looking at me. I didn’t have to look back.
I was unafraid of myself.
I was free.
At nine-twenty, I hailed one of the bartenders and asked to see Jesse. He came around the counter and led me into the back. As I followed him, I caught my reflection in the low red light throwing itself off the glass of several framed, racy show posters. I looked powerful.
The bartender knocked on an unlabeled door, bowed neatly at me, and returned to the club room. Come in, Jesse’s voice called muffled through the jamb.
He went without a hat, and a silk shirt hung open over his scarecrow shoulders—he sported another massive belt buckle, this one made of hammered silver and inlaid with chips of turquoise around a curved tooth.
“Mrs. Margaret Shoard,” he said, mocking a hat tip, holding out his hand. I shut the door behind me and gave him a firm handshake. “Love the haircut.”
“Thank you, it was a rash decision.”
“My favorite kind.” Jesse had several stacks of cash counted out across the heavy desk behind him and two different ledgers splayed open among them. “So, how can I help?”
I hadn’t done much thinking about what I would say to him when I got here. Preparing for a conversation with this man was like preparing for a storm that was going to level the whole block anyway. I only knew I didn’t want to waste his time.
“You know one of the crew didn’t come back with us,” I said, averting my eyes to the abstract painting hanging ever so slightly off-center across the room.
Jesse hummed the affirmative. In my periphery, he put his hands on his hips. “I did recall hearing about that.”
“He had ties.” I took a pause to taste the words, the reality of them: I was telling someone. “To me and Wesley.”
“I figured something of the sort,” Jesse said, entirely unbothered.
“I want to make sure nobody will ever find out about it.”
Jesse was smiling at me when I looked up at him. “Do you know what our plan for that place has been from the get-go?” I shook my head, and his grin sharpened. “Our old friend Vaughn took out a handsome insurance policy on the playhouse. Dry air and the piss-poor electricians he hired, you know how it goes—fires break out all the time in the desert, even with a wet summer.” Jesse examined his knuckles, the faded smears of tattooed letters punctuating the ends of each fist. “Whole place is cursed now. Nobody will look at that land for years.”
“If…they find him,” I said haltingly, and tried to continue but couldn’t corral my thoughts into a single question that made sense.
Jesse gave me a calm smile as he skimmed a mind-boggling number of bills from the top of one of the piles. “Cross my heart, Cherokee Park, nobody will find him. He’d been overstepping all sorts of boundaries, thinking he and Vaughn could get one over on the rest of us. Far as I’m concerned, I’m in your debt.”
I stared at the cash. “I don’t—”
“Come on, don’t wound my pride. It’s a few cents above the dollar on market price, same as I’d have given anyone to take him off my hands.” He gestured with the money. “It’s a figure of speech. I’m not trying to put you in a net. Just paying you for your work. One and done, if that’s how you want it to go. Buy yourself something nice; take your mab out somewhere fancy, my treat.”
I dug into my purse and retrieved the knife, which I had washed and stowed and kept in my lipstick drawer like a talisman.
Jesse lit up. “There she is! Clean as a whistle, too. Hell, you treat your tools nicer than half my guys.”
I looked Jesse straight in his bright, laughing eyes. “I don’t want debts,” I said. “We’re square. Nobody finds out—that mab of mine is real tore up about it all, and I need to be able to mean it when I tell him he can relax.”
Jesse nodded his chin at the knife. “Don’t worry. This one doesn’t kiss and tell. She’s a good girl.”
“Are you?”
“Yes, ma’am. When it matters.”
I accepted the money. He took the pocketknife back.
Jesse spat on his palm and held it out to me.
I spat on mine and clapped it together with his. As we shook, Jesse weighed the pocketknife in his free hand. “You sure you don’t want to keep it? Looks nice on you.”
“I’m sure.”
“Will you have a drink?”
Jesse offered his elbow. I took it.
“It’s a shame you’re a dangerous man, Jesse,” I said breezily as he led us from the office.
He grinned at me. “And why’s that?”
“You have a way about you.”
Jesse clicked his tongue and held two fingers up to someone across the room. He steered us to a table right at the front of the stage with a small Reserved plaque beside its tea candle. “Now, now, Mrs. Shoard. I’m flattered, but I really do prefer blonds.”
I shot Jesse a smile as he pulled out my chair for the best seat in the house. “So does my husband.”
As I slid my shoes off in the foyer, I saw the bathroom door spilling light into the hall.
Wesley was in the tub. His hair was wet, slicked back from his forehead, and he had a cigarette burning between two fingers. His knees were drawn up to his chest, his skin warmed lobster-pink.
I wanted to have our life back. I wanted to see him smile with his whole face again, the effortless brightness that used to emanate from him and fill a room.
“I’m going to take a bit of a break,” Wesley said before I could speak.
I blinked. “What?”
He took a shallow mouthful of smoke. “I’m taking a page out of your book. Hiatus. We have plenty of money left after the last Sumner paycheck, so I’m going to take a few months to—I don’t know. Get my nerves back under control. I’m not…alright, right now, Jack. Ezra agrees. Once Two Gentlemen is done, I’m taking a season off.”
I stared at him.
“Is it really that bad?” I asked gently. “For you?”
Wesley’s gaze flashed. His lips twitched, holding in what I could tell from the tightness in his jaw was a bitter smirk. He shut himself up with another quick drag. “Yes. It really is That Bad. For me.”
I swallowed. “Nobody’s ever gonna find out.”
Wesley huffed one dry, bitter chuckle. “How—” He stopped himself, his tone barely breaking its glassy surface, and rubbed his thumb briefly against one temple. He shook his head and gestured at the water. “Come here. Get in.”
I stripped down and left my clothes in a pile on the floor. I flinched at the heat of the water but soldiered ahead to sink in down to my shoulders, facing him and drawing my legs in to mirror him. Wesley held out the cigarette.
“How can you be so sure,” Wesley asked with trained-in evenness, “that we’re in the clear?”
“Withhold your judgment.”
“What?”
“Promise me you won’t say anything until I’m done explaining. Withhold your judgment.”
Wesley took a steadying breath. With his elbow on the lip of the tub, he tilted his chin into one hand. “Fine,” he said lightly.
I began to draw shapes on the surface of the water with meandering fingertips and told him the truth, the whole of it: Haas’s drugs, Jesse’s affinity for me, how I got the pocketknife, and the promise I’d received earlier tonight that our hands were clean.
Wesley was very still for a very long time when I finished. He stared at me with a serious draw to his brow and his mouth firmed by deep concentration. The ends of his hair curled lightly in the rising steam.
“It is extremely risky for you to be talking to that man,” he said, his voice shaking softly. “I know what they’re like, they—”
“So do I. My mother was married to one of them.”
Wesley shut his eyes. We were silent for a long, humid stretch.
“The hardest part,” he finally said, so gently it almost sounded like innocent wonder, “is that it doesn’t stop. You know? Nobody calls scene, or hold, or gives us a—a fucking five; it’s real. It’s all real. I need to…I don’t know. Figure out who I am now.”
I held out a hand for the cigarette again. “Are you still my husband?”
He passed it to me and watched as I nursed a shallow draw. “Of course I am,” he whispered.
I slid my feet forward under the water, touching our ankles together. He didn’t move out of the way.
“I’m angry at myself for going along with it,” Wesley said after a long moment. “I’m angry at myself for even…starting that arrangement in the first place; I’m angry at him for hurting you; I’m angry at you for getting wrapped up in his—his shit; I’m angry at you for moving on; I—I mean, I know I must sound like a broken record, Jack, but I’m angry.”
His eyes were heavy and sad and so bright with his own truth that it made me ache.
I passed him the cigarette. “At least you’re feeling something. I’d be more concerned if you were numb.”
Wesley nodded distantly before finishing off the last puff and leaning down to tap the end out in the ashtray on the floor. “Yeah. It’s something.”
We were silent for another dense stretch. I made more shapes in the water.
“The Players are doing Hamlet next,” I said to my wavering reflection. “I’m going to audition.”
The body is with the King, but the King is not with the body.
I looked up and found Wesley watching me. “Ezra’s hoping you will. Says he’s seen a change in you.”
“It’s the hair,” I hazarded at joking.
Without ceremony, Wesley produced a fresh bottle of Wild Turkey from the floor on the other side of the tub. “Congratulations, Jack,” he said, quietly emphatic, and managed to smile back before cracking open the top. He took the first pull and passed it to me.