15
The Lake Sumner motel, room number five
A tidy tapping at the edge of the storm door woke me the next morning like a small bird pecking at a tree to check for breakfast.
I blinked in the early light pushing through the curtains and sat up before remembering Haas had come over to our room after dinner, where we eventually fell asleep on the floor in a nest of blankets and pillows pulled down from the beds after more of his product and the blitz of pleasure.
Behind me, Wesley was in the middle. Haas had an arm thrown across him, and Wesley’s nose had been nuzzled against my neck. They were both still out cold.
Taktaktak.
I stood up before the noise could wake them too. Dragging at my cheeks to tug my consciousness to the surface, I shrugged my robe around my shoulders and unfastened the safety chain to slip outside and shut the door softly behind me.
“Can I help you?” I held in a yawn and looked up as I crossed my arms over my chest. The pale sun was still eking its way up from the endless, flat horizon smattered only distantly with the heavy hips of mountains.
The cowboy from that backstage alcove removed his hat and nodded at me. He was wearing a plain white undershirt beneath a tan jacket and a matching pair of trousers, held up by a belt buckle studded thick with lapis stones. A pair of mirrored sunglasses over his eyes showed me my distended reflection. “Morning, ma’am.”
I frowned and angled myself away from him ever so slightly. “Morning.”
“Pardon the hour,” he said, gesturing humbly with his hat. “I was wondering if I might make a small request, as you haven’t the particular mantle of responsibility as the rest of our fine company.”
Tread on the wrong part of his pride, and it all goes up in smoke. I nearly shrank further into myself for just a moment, but held my ground and looked the man directly where I assumed his gaze was meeting mine. “And what might that be, Mr…. ?”
The man ducked his pepper-haired head and put his hat back on with practiced ease. “Jesse. Nothing serious at all, Mrs. Shoard. I’d only appreciate it if you’d keep those lovely brown eyes of yours peeled here among the rabble for any, shall we call it, subterfuge.”
He held out a hand. I took it, prepared to give him a farewell and ignore the strange request—then balked when the feeling of tightly rolled dollar bills met my palm. I peered at him, our hands still clasped. “I don’t make a habit of taking hush money, sir.”
“Please,” he said with a smile, charming to the bone, “call me Jesse. And that’s not for keeping quiet.”
“Then what’s it for?”
“Consider it an advance.”
The sunlight glinted from the edge of Jesse’s sunglasses. I took my hand back without taking the money and crossed my arms again. “I don’t snitch.”
Jesse’s grin twitched, as though picking up an unexpected scent. “Perish the thought,” he said. “I only value knowing any information to which my attentions might not be directly privy from a little higher up the mountain.”
“Then make your own way down every now and then to look for it yourself.”
Jesse made a wry expression and spread his hands. He glanced pointedly up and down the empty breezeway, silently asking, What the hell do you think I’m doing out here?
“I’ve known dozens of men like you,” I said.
Jesse looked pleased, like I’d done a card trick for him. “And how’s that?” He set his weight back on his heels and rested his thumbs on his belt. He didn’t have a holster strapped to it, but I wouldn’t have written off the high possibility of a shoulder harness under his jacket.
Dozens of men like him.
“Pardon the assumption, but you look like the sort of lady who’d rather cross the street if you saw a ‘man like me’ coming your way.”
“Well maybe you aren’t one of ’em, then.” I raised my eyebrows. “They usually sweep in without bothering to ask my preference first.”
Jesse regarded me keenly. “Where you from, Mrs. Shoard?”
“Grew up in Cherokee Park, in Lexington.” The name still bit at my tongue on the way out.
“No shit? One of the guys in the outfit is from thereabouts.”
“You think we had homeroom together in junior high?” I said tartly.
We watched each other in a long stretch of silence. Far away—the desert was flat enough that the sound might have carried from clear across the county—a dog barked with a quick, asymmetric report.
“Any of the other boys know any of this about you?” Jesse asked. He had an easy tone for speaking everything as though we were having any old conversation between friends, the texture of it like well-worn denim. It had dropped to placid secrecy, as though he trusted me differently with this new knowledge.
“As far as I’m concerned, they don’t even know my name.”
“Good. Keep it that way.”
“So you are that kind of man.”
Jesse tipped the brim of his hat at me and pocketed the money. “Not always myself, but some of the others never quite learned their manners.”
“Noted,” I said, shifting to cinch my robe more tightly around my waist.
“You have a lovely day now, Mrs. Shoard,” Jesse said.
I watched him lope to the Corvette. The tapered legs of his pants revealed brief flashes of rich brown boots crunching over the dust, the block heels and pointed toes wrapped in hammered silver. Jesse vaulted over the convertible door into the driver’s seat and saluted me in one last farewell as he gunned the engine. Dust peeled behind him in great clouds as he steered northward, toward the lake.
I leaned back against the motel façade and slipped my cigarette case from the pocket of my robe. I lit and smoked one down with brutal efficiency.
Glaring into the distance, the empty silence of early morning, I tried to unshoulder the incessant pressing of old memories clawing against the walls I had very purposefully built to keep them out.
When I slipped back into the room and safety-latched the door, I found Haas had risen. Wesley was still heavily asleep—he had kicked free of the sheets twisted around his body, and his arms held a pillow in a chokehold with his face pressed fast to the lumpy down.
The soft clatter of preparing coffee came from the kitchenette. Haas, awake and industrious.
Haas, who had become a conduit in the low light and long shadows of the bedroom lit only by a single lamp; his mouth on me, his hands gripped hard to my hips, the communicable patter of sex working its way up his body as Wesley ministered to him like another limb from the same body.
I blinked. Coffee. I needed coffee.
I sidled through the pocket door to the other half of the suite and pulled it shut behind me. Haas had the percolator going on the hot plate, three of the mismatched cups on the counter, and was smoking the last of a tidily rolled cigarette.
“Good morning,” I said.
Haas turned to me with a small, tired smile. Despite the minimal sleep we’d all gotten, he looked shoddily immaculate: hair parted, a shirt hanging open over his shoulders, satin shorts hitched back up over the subtle severity of his hips. The easy line of his freckled torso twisted, lithe, as he leaned back against the counter.
“Morning. Did you sleep well?”
I yawned behind the back of one hand. “I did, yes. Deeply.”
Haas made an amused sound around another peck of smoke. I recalled the sight of him looking up from between my knees with a similar look, an angle of victory. “You enjoyed yourself, then?”
I peered at him for a moment. “Yes,” I admitted, the whole and simple truth. “I did, very much.”
“Good.”
Haas turned back to the hot plate. I fiddled with the flyaway hairs at the back of my neck. “How long have you been up?”
“Oh, not long,” he said as he rummaged through the paltry cabinets. “Is there any sugar?”
I hunted the box I’d bought the first day here and passed it to Haas. Our thumbs brushed. “Do you know a man called Jesse?” I asked.
Haas glanced at me with a frown. “Jesse?”
I considered the truth for a moment. “The—one with the hat, and the boots. And the convertible. He offered me money for information.”
Haas’s cheek flexed ever so slightly as he clenched his teeth, staring at the stovetop. “Jesse Malus,” he said crisply—his gaze went a touch faraway for a moment. When he came back to himself, the light flaring across the back of his gaze, he gave me a brittle smile. “You’d be smart not to take whatever it is he offered. He isn’t the sort to be trusted.”
“How do you know him?”
Haas sized me up keenly before measuring out two dinged-up spoons of sugar into his own cup. “I could ask the same of you.”
“I haven’t the faintest. If anyone knows the first thing about this outfit,” I said, frowning, “it’s Ezra. And he isn’t in the habit of giving details—he tells his company to jump, we ask how high.”
“Ezra.” Haas sighed knowingly. He glanced over his shoulder to find me still frowning. “What?”
“You said it yourself, Ezra—what’s the connection?”
Haas rolled the tip of his tongue across his top teeth under his lip and tapped out his cigarette in the chipped crystal dish beside the burner. “Less than legal lending sources,” he said steadily and gave me a wan grin. “That’s about the sum of it.”
“Then what about you?”
Haas tipped his head ever so slightly. “What about me?”
He was still smiling, but with a sharpness; diversion. I raised an eyebrow and nodded backward over my shoulder at the bedroom. “Call me old-fashioned, but if we’re going to make this a regular thing, I’d like to know a little more about you besides the fact you’re dealing drugs for someone who offers hush money. My husband has been burnt before.”
Haas pursed his lips and crossed his arms loosely over his chest. “And you haven’t?”
I said nothing.
“I was born in Austria,” Haas recited, as though ticking through a mental list, “came up as a tailor’s apprentice, moved with my mother to New York between the wars, and found a haven of particular taste in the theater, as well as the American privilege of supplementing my income with discreet dealings for Jesse and his ilk through my workshop. Anything else you need to file away for your records, Mrs. Shoard?”
I watched him and thought back to the first time Wesley had told me of Andrew. “Does Wesley know any of this?”
“He knows exactly what I just told you,” Haas said, turning to shut off the hot plate as the percolator came to a soft, growling boil. “As you’ve seen, it hasn’t stopped him getting on his knees for me, so I would say he at least marginally approves.”
I didn’t love his tone, but I couldn’t begrudge him finally being forthcoming. He swirled the percolator, turning the handle of each empty mug to face the same way.
“Come, Margaret, don’t be silly.” Haas glanced up at me as he set to pouring three coffees from the spotty urn. He took up the sugar box again and wagged it jauntily at me before putting it back in the cupboard. “Das Leben ist kein Zuckerschlecken.”
I made a doubtful face. “Which means?”
“Life is not all licks of sugar. But we make the best of the hands we’ve been dealt. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t do the same to look after yourself; I see you, Margaret, there’s fight in you.”
I regarded him with measured patience. Perhaps that was why I was so drawn to him—deep down, I could feel the current of danger in him and longed to spark my own skin by drawing close.
“How are you so sure of that?” I asked.
Haas’s brows drew softly at their middle. “How do you mean?”
“You hardly know me.”
Haas gave me a soft, knowing smile. “I saw you in Othello, have I told you that?” he murmured. “You are a truly extraordinary actress. But you knew that.”
The particularity of his body, the liquid iron of his limbs, seemed to soften while he beheld me. However brief the moment, it intoxicated me entirely. I swallowed.
“I used to be.” My voice was pale, no contrarian left in it.
Haas took up two of the coffees. “We will pass a very fine summer here,” he said brightly, “you’ll see. Steer wide of Jesse and his ilk, and it will be a very sweet lick of sugar.”
He moved past my demurring half-step out of his way and drew so near I could smell the sylvan whiff of pomade still clinging to his hair. Haas leaned sideways and caught me lightly with a kiss on my cheek.
The thought hit me gently, like the wafting scent: “Othello was years ago,” I said.
“Was it?” Haas hummed blithely. “Time flies.”
I stood there peering at a peeling corner of the kitchenette linoleum and listened to him go—soft steps along the carpet before setting one mug on the nightstand and kneeling to wake Wesley with a murmur.
I took up the third coffee. The first sip scalded the tip of my tongue.
Later that week, I knocked on the open archway of Haas’s workshop in the theater and waited for him to look up from his sewing machine. Under the yellow halo of light from the bulb above him, its wires running like exposed veins along the bare wooden beams, he looked like a fastidious saint of rich fabrics and hand-stitched pockets.
“Are you using the van?” I asked.
I hadn’t stopped to think until then how many hours of work Haas must have put into the costuming, all on his own—Kline didn’t seem to have any other tailors in his file that he could convince to come along.
Haas’s glasses were perched low on the tip of his nose. He peered at me over the frames and didn’t stop the pedal, the chatta-chatta-chatta of its rhythmic, hurried churn.
“Right now?” he said flatly, with a wink of humor behind his eyes. “I don’t know, perhaps I might be.”
I gave him my most enticing smile. “Could I trouble you for the key?”
“So you can abscond into the untamed wilderness?” He looked back down at the needle, steering the fabric in a smooth arc around an edge. I strolled into the space and drew up beside him to peer over his shoulder.
“So I can get my hair done properly before I go insane,” I said lightly, bending down to flirt at his ear.
Haas made a neutral sound but didn’t stop working. I waited, hovering at his shoulder, the warmth of his cheek in the narrow space between us as I watched the fine stitch run under his dancing needle.
“Who taught you to drive?” he asked, not looking up.
“My mother,” I said. She’d taken me to the empty parking lot of the liquor store the first Sunday after my thirteenth birthday. My feet only just reached the pedals.
“How terribly modern,” Haas said breezily. “The key is in my left front pocket.”
“And which of us is going to reach for it?”
“Which of us indeed.”
I pressed up along his side to reach my arm around his back, creeping my fingers brazenly, slowly along the ridge of his waist. Inside his pocket, warmed by his body, I closed my fingers around the key and took my time sliding it back out.
“Do you need it back anytime soon?” I asked, my teeth barely teasing his earlobe.
Haas reached the end of his stitching and snipped off the end of his thread. He slid his right hand under my skirt and squeezed high up on the inside of my thigh—I flinched, twitching closer to him and leaning heavily on his broad shoulders.
“I’ll let you determine how quickly you need to return,” he said around one end of the thread held between his incisors, still not looking at me, and neatly tied off the stitching with one hand. His grip persisted, intensifying for a moment that nearly bordered on pain—I bit my lip when he let go, sensation rushing back into my flesh.
“Run along.” I could see at the edge of Haas’s lips that he was smiling to himself, so subtly it only barely lit the corners of his gaze.
I straightened my dress and took a few steps back. The flush on my cheeks had a hot, cottony burn to it. “Tell Wesley I’ll be back before sundown,” I blurted, and hurried to the dock for a ride back to the shore.
The town of Santa Rosa was a single step up from Lake Sumner in terms of liveliness. At least here, wrestling with the gear shift and steering wide around every turn, I saw handfuls of people on the sidewalk going between storefronts or driving alongside me.
The salon I found was called Connie’s, on the corner of the only road I could hazard to call anything close to busy. I manhandled the van into a parking spot, did my best to touch up my makeup in the side mirror, and went inside to see what passed for a salon this far west.
Salons in the city were an ecosystem all their own—the ultimate bastion of femininity, the germinated seed of status and the ground floor of the social climber’s starting ascent. Hair, nails, tweezing and plucking and bleaching and waxing: one of the only realms in the world we could truly call our own.
The bell above the lintel chimed as I pushed the door in. A few heads turned toward me, some lined with curlers under the massive hoods of dryer chairs, others with their legs crossed only sparing a glance up from a glossy magazine. A young woman behind a front desk with a wedge of cardboard under one of its legs gave me a once-over.
“Cut or color?” she drawled.
I gave her my least obtrusive smile. “Just a set and shellac.”
The woman looked down at the wrinkled agenda book in front of her. “Appointment?”
“No, walk-in.”
Turning in her chair, peering around the shop, the woman called out, “Darla!” When she turned frontward again, it was straight back to the crossword on her folded-over newspaper without another look at me. “Third chair,” she said, and licked the tip of her pencil.
Darla was a woman with a broad, pretty smile who looked like she’d been made from still-proofing dough by a very attentive, affectionate sculptor. Her fingers against my scalp were warm and quick as she asked me what I was doing in town.
“We don’t get many unfamiliar faces,” she said, smiling through the mirror.
I adjusted my smile, watching the edges of my top teeth come into view with the angle Edie tended to call my I Promise smile—as in I really am fine, I promise, now quit asking.
“Just passing through,” I said.
Darla pulled a brush from the apron around her waist and began to section my hair. The narrow-faced woman letting bleach work at her roots in the chair beside me glanced up from her magazine. The cape draped over her shoulders swallowed the rest of her body into an amorphous, off-red blob. “Heading east,” she asked, “or west?”
“West,” I said, making nice through the mirror. The woman hummed around the plastic end of her long, yellowed cigarette filter.
“You going to Albuquerque?”
I thought of Wesley. “California.”
She hummed again, knowingly. “Could have guessed. You’re too glamorous for Albuquerque.” A cloud of white smoke pistoned up from the corner of her thin, creped lips painted beet red. I tried to divine how old she was—either younger than expected for her leathery suntan, or much older and aided by the lightness of her hair. The bleach tickled at my nostrils.
The blonde woman didn’t look up from her magazine as she slowly turned the page, her gaze tracking it lazily as though she hadn’t quite finished reading it yet. “My brother lives in Albuquerque,” she appended, sucking on the plastic filter again.
I made a vaguely interested sound of acknowledgment. Behind me, Darla chuckled.
“The idiot or the Casanova?”
Both women shared a laugh—Darla’s throaty and rounded, the blonde’s brittle as a crow’s cackle.
“The idiot,” the blonde said. “I tell you he went looking for work with those wiseguys?”
Darla, who had begun winding my hair into rollers with swift and tidy habit, scoffed in response. I watched all three of us through the mirror. The blonde woman shifted in her seat and looked at me as though stooping to give an aside to the audience.
“All those families out east,” she said, her voice pitched to mock-lowness, “a few of ’em tried to burrow into those Italians who set up shop in Albuquerque before the war.”
“Lots of Italians there,” Darla muttered as though it was a secret. They both said it with a long i, eye-talians.
“You know Sherry, with the baby?” The blonde woman asked. Darla nodded. “She told me once her uncle-in-law and a few of his old friends stood watch at the train station out there when they got word a bunch of bosses had hitched a car to come and try staking their claims. Whole row of ’em with their big mustaches and bowler hats, standing on the platform in Sunday best with their rifles! Train car rolled open, wiseguys found themselves cross-eyed looking down the barrels; stay on the train, they said, keep moving.”
The blonde paused for another long mouthful of smoke, her tobacco wrapped with pink paper the color of stomach medicine. Darla was already more than halfway done placing the rollers in my hair.
“Few of ’em turned around and dug in here instead—didn’t want to go home empty-handed,” Darla supplied, like a human footnote. “Their gals are pretty as anything, all gussied up—dumb as bricks, bless their hearts, but sweet as can be. They tip real good, too.”
“All that to say,” the blonde woman sighed in conclusion, turning back to her magazine with an air of finality, “my brother’s a real character. I told him if he wants work, it should be honest work. Set him up with a mechanic instead.”
Darla laughed again, with the surprised gusto that indicated a long-standing inside joke. The blonde woman looked pleased with herself.
I chuckled gamely to play my part as the amused out-of-towner. If nothing else, it was heartening to know there was still gossip outside of the city. Darla herded me to one of the open dryers and indicated a stack of magazines from 1954.
Staring through an old spread of Lambert’s “Best Dressed Women,” I realized I felt more centered amid a gaggle of chatty strangers than I did anymore in a theater. I didn’t trust myself enough to turn that revelation over without a dose of powder—I was still trying to be good with my rations. I didn’t want to ask for too much from Haas. He was already fucking me. Wouldn’t want to get greedy.
When my hair was done, I looked fresher than I had in weeks. I tipped Darla real good.
Two scattered blocks away from the salon, a phone booth baked in the sun. I waited for an old man inside to vacate it. When he came out, three nickels later, he jerked a thumb at the machine.
“My mother’s a real piece of work,” he said. He nodded at my hair. “You go to Darla?”
I glanced up from digging in my purse for change. “Yes, I did.”
“Darla’s a real piece of work. Have a nice day, sweetheart,” he said with a pinched frown and shuffled down the sidewalk.
I watched him go as I thumbed my own coins into the slot. The exchange connected me to New York, and I waited for the line to pick up.
“Bishop.”
“Margot again. I have news.”
“Oh, do tell—the well is dry as a dowager here without you all.”
I told her about the shady men of the outfit, Jesse and his ilk, how I’d been offered money for open ears and loose lips. Edie sounded unaffected.
“Of course they’re shady,” she said. “When has anything Ezra Pierce touched not been at least halfway tainted? He used to be a mess with gambling.”
“Did he?”
“His only taste of it now is pissing away whatever time he’s got left with those snobbish imps of his—although I suppose hinging his hopes on a man who drops him once something more exciting crosses his path is less embarrassing than a losing streak at craps.”
“At least he’s getting exercise,” I said flatly.
Edie made a doubtful sound. “I’ve always preferred thinking of him as sexless, like an eel.”
“Eels don’t have sex?”
“What time is it over there, one in the afternoon? Are you drunk?”
“No.” I peered at my nails. “I’ve been having some very good sex myself.”
I could hear Edie’s demeanor light up like a hound to the scent. “With Wesley?”
She sounded in awe. I snorted. “Not just.”
I told her about Haas, just the essentials—Austrian, handsome, undiscerning, and eager to show off. Edie laughed when I told her nobody had ever used their mouth on me before, her disbelieving laugh, as though a punch line had caught her off guard.
“God, you are getting an education. Well, as much as I wish I could stay for more,” she said, clearly bustling with the phone cradle in one hand to cart it with her through the apartment, “there’s a luncheon I’ve already rain checked twice and really can’t miss again. You must call back with more details later.”
“So long as you don’t take dictation,” I said, grinning into the mouthpiece.
“Oh, you know I can’t type. Ooroo, darling. Do keep having fun. It becomes you.”
Back in the van, I turned on the radio. I glanced at my purse before cranking the gear into drive—I could do with a dose, but I felt fine.
I looked at myself in the rearview mirror as the engine grumbled and gave my most dazzling smile: hair neatly done, nerves set back to rights after a good cackle with Edie, all of me right where I should be.
I would be fine.
As I steered back toward Lake Sumner, I turned up the foggy planging of a slide guitar on the fuzzing radio band.
I would be fine.