Jessie sat in the fluorescent gloom of a rocking subway car, feeling guilty about ditching Frank—reluctantly, irritably guilty. She was attracted to Frank, kind of, just not in the way that Frank was attracted to her. Seeing his talent reflected in a pack of clever kids tonight made her feel warmer about him—for two hours anyway. So why didn’t Frank use that talent? He could become a success if he set his mind to it. He called it purity, but Jessie called it waste.
She got off at Forty-second Street and rode the escalator up from her bad mood into the weird, white light of Times Square. Bright canvas billboards like full-page ads from Variety or Vogue hung overhead. Headlines raced around digital zippers two stories up. Digital images played in big monitors or over the curves of a black glass building.
Jessie always felt like a beetle in a website here, a cockroach in cyberspace. Worse, the electronic canyon was full of nice-smiling people, happy families grinning skyward. Everything was so damned boojhee nowadays. She missed the old Times Square, even though it had smelled like ass and been full of wackos. It’d been real, unlike this galactic shopping mall. Jessie herself felt quite real tonight, tough and businesslike, briefcase under her arm, trench coat snapping around her legs. She was a woman on a mission—and what a mission. She dug into the coat pocket and took out the smooth stone of her wireless, flipped it open, and poked in the new number.
“Hello? Skull? Jessie here. Digger’s friend? I’m in Times Square. Where do you want to meet? Five minutes? Sure.”
She clicked off, then checked the clock overhead, under the quarter-scale replica of the Concorde soaring on a roof. Perfect. She’d meet this guy at ten and have plenty of time to get to Henry in his dressing room at the Booth Theatre after the curtain.
Beautiful giants in their underwear, male and female, lounged behind the Concorde, continents of skin with sulky lips as big as sofas. Frank looked nothing like those men, but then Jessie looked nothing like the women. She was thirty-three but, depending on her dress and haircut, could pass for a twenty-five-year-old woman or a sixteen-year-old boy. Jessie was regularly cruised on the street by nearsighted chicken hawks.
She was suddenly sorry Frank had said no to a late-night visit. She’d offered it only as a consolation prize for breaking their date. Their one time in bed had been perfectly enjoyable, although it had clearly meant more to Frank than it had to her. Still, his refusal tonight made sex ticklishly attractive, itchily necessary. Surely Frank wanted to get laid. Maybe he hadn’t understood that that’s what she’d offered. He was a nice guy, sweet and considerate, but with nice guys you sometimes had to spell things out. If only he were ten pounds lighter. If only he were more serious about theater. If only he didn’t love her more than she was ready to love anyone.
Jessie was marching west on Forty-second Street, past the Disney Store and Disney theaters, under Madame Tussaud’s giant hand. Back when she was a kid, this street had been lined with third-run movie houses, old shells of the Great White Way showing kung fu flicks and soft-core porn. Now even the sad ranks of white marquees were gone. Broadway was a postmodern theme park, a virtual unreality. All the good theater work was being done downtown or in the shoe boxes on the far stretch of Forty-second Street beyond Port Authority. How pitiful that Henry Lewse had to work in this phony-baloney Las Vegas.
She went up Eighth Avenue, past the last surviving porno theater to the Milford Plaza Hotel. She entered a white marble hall like a deserted corner in an airline terminal. Muzak “Oklahoma” played in the lobby upstairs. She followed a sign down a passage to a coffee shop of fumed oak and red vinyl. The same Muzak played louder here. She glanced over the middle-aged couples in crayon-colored sweats before she spotted a twentyish guy sitting alone in a booth, in preppy glasses and sweater, not what one expected for a man named Skull. And he had a full head of hair. But a Mickey Mouse shopping bag lay on the table, the agreed-on signal.
“Skull?” she said softly. “I’m Jessie.”
“Heeeeeey,” he drawled. “Digger wasn’t lying. You are pretty.”
He was not stoned, yet grass gave him his style. “This your office?” she joked as she sat across from him. She wanted to seem like an old hand at this.
“I do a rotation. Here and there. I prefer the Edison. Old dude agents sitting around making deals? Nobody looks twice at a man on a cell phone. And I love their blintzes. Sooooo.” He stretched out vowels like a Bob Dylan impersonator. “Bring the book?”
“Uh, I brought a play. I hope that’s okay.” She took a copy of Chaos Theory from her briefcase, the new Samuel French edition bound like a pamphlet in raspberry construction paper.
“Right. Yeah. Digger told me you’re Caleb Doyle’s sister. Bummer about his last show.” He flipped through pages until he came to the swatch of new hundred-dollar bills. “Cooool.” He patted the plastic Mickey Mouse bag. “You’ll love this.”
It seemed bad manners to peek but suspicious to onlookers if she didn’t. Skull acted like they were being watched—illegality turned any act into theater. Jessie looked in the bag. A neatly rolled Baggie lay nestled between two wads of rolled-up newspaper.
“Oh thank you! I always wanted one of these.” She folded the plastic bag and stuffed it in her briefcase.
Skull was looking through the play, like he actually intended to read it. “Times sure was mean to your brother,” he said. “What’s the word on when they’re doing the movie of Venus in Furs?”
“No word. But hey. Hollywood.” She was surprised a drug dealer knew so much about this. “Uh, are you an actor yourself? This is just your day job?”
“No way. Not me.” He laughed. “But I read Variety. To keep up with my market base. And I deal tickets now and then. When that line’s more profitable.” He pointed at her briefcase. “For him?”
“Oh no. Uh-uh,” she said quickly. “All for me.”
“Heeeeey. None of my business. Most uncool to ask.”
Jessie had brought the playscript tonight simply because she had a whole box of them at home. The publishers had jumped the gun on this one. But she enjoyed the idea of inadvertently starting a rumor that her brother was now a pothead.
When a waitress stopped by to ask for an order, Jessie used the interruption to say good night.
“Great seeing you again,” she told Skull. “Until next time.”
“Sure thing, doll. You know where to reach me.” He mimed using a phone. “We’re like all connected.”