I ransacked my closet, looking for the perfect gown to get out of. Who was I? A stripper? Yeah. Something spectacular. Something…very frustrating. My fingers hesitated over the black velvet thirties Nora Charles gown. Perry Mason had returned it with a disturbing message: no DNA on it other than mine. Not even Snow's? What was he, invisible? In that case, Claude should have left a traceable memoir of his playful butt pinch. Time to figure that out later.
The gown? No. Too Snow. I didn't like to mix my…encounters.
At last my fingers slid along the slippery surface of one of my oldest vintage gowns. Made to order for my querido amigo. I smiled wickedly. Yes.
I wore a long, black velvet thirties cloak when Ric called at my door.
"That's it? That's all?"
I shrugged and slipped out the door before Quicksilver could get a piece of my cloak or of Ric. The cloak had an ivory satin lining that almost caught in the door of the Corvette as Ric ushered me in.
Ric was wearing an off-white blazer that looked as smooth as clotted cream over an ice-blue silk shirt carelessly open at the neck. His trousers were black wool-silk with a formal satin stripe up the side. Las Vegas dressy casual.
We skipped the line of gaggling tourists in front of the elevator to the Palms Hotel's Ghost Bar, the city's hottest destination, and fifty-five stories up. No shorts, no hats, no tennis shoes, no baggy or torn jeans allowed. Dressy sandals permitted, no flip-flops.
The Ghost Bar. I knew I'd be uneasy there. My kind of medium had not been defined yet when this place had been created. Sitting in this nineteen-sixties meld of blue and green furniture against silver and ice-white, I let my cloak fall back to swathe the chair behind me and studied the holographic photos of motion picture stars on the wall.
I knew Ric was studying my pale satin gown, all buttoned up to the neck in back and down to my wrist, thinking of my all too solid flesh beneath it. Nothing intrigues like extreme modesty.
I inspected the ghostly faces on the wall. The images blurred as you moved past them. They simulated life. Only, I felt them. Even the animate silver necklace around my neck thickened with my second-hand emotions and tightened into a dog collar under the pale satin.
I sensed their unspoken anxiety at being reduced to dead icons and instantly knew the weaknesses their fame had hidden. Watch me, love me, pick me! Hadn't I felt that all in the orphanage, on my own lonely stage? And hadn't I also found fulfillment in front of a camera? Playing a persona, a crusading journalist in my case.
I felt their pain. Idolized. Commercialized. So much more than mere image.
Clark Gable. Carole Lombard. Mae West. Gary Cooper…Cary Grant. Irene Dunne. Joan Crawford. Bette Davis. Katharine Hepburn. John Wayne…Tyrone Power. All dead and harried. All silver screen stars. Some had lived into Technicolor days before fading into forgotten idols. All had made their marks in silver nitrate in shimmering black and white. Glowing. Vibrant. Powerful.
That was their heyday. I felt it in my soul. But it wasn’t gone. Their images began to move in the hokey holograms. Some of them had been lovers, I sensed. Some of them had even been Howard Hughes's lovers! They were much better off captured in this holographic Hall of Fame, not preserved as Hughes was, old and at his worst, still trying to hang on to his money and power no matter the cost, to himself or anyone else.
No, these kings and queens of old-time Hollywood were best viewed through a Vaseline-coated camera lens of memory. They sensed that I was simpatico, sensed my admiration, my emotional guardianship. Delilah, they sighed. You see us. You love us. You will preserve us.
How?
Ric touched my hand. The music had a relentless, funky beat. Pre-orgasmic. "This place speaks to you."
Right. Shut it up!
"You speak to me," I said.
He was…the Sheik of Araby…Rudolph Valentino…Ricardo Montalban…Ricky Martin…my Latin lover. He pulled me up from the cocktail table and led me onto the glass-floored balcony at the Ghost Bar lounge with its fifty-some-floor drop to the Nude Bar far below. People were swimming nude below, and even at this impossible distance I must have felt exposed.
"I don't notice any lingerie impressions under this gown," Ric murmured in my right ear.
"It would ruin the lines." I struggled to keep my composure as the migrating silver familiar became a thong panty, delicate but way too intimate and…cold!
He looked down those tens of floors. "So the people looking up from the Nude Bar far below-?"
"-would see France if they had fantastic vision." And no silver thong in the way, Irma added impishly.
"Not as fantastic as my imagination," Ric said. "You ready for…dinner?"
"Sounds like a plan."
The Paris restaurant was only a third of the way up the Eiffel Tower but the view of the Strip and its lights was fabulous.
We were shown to the primo table, at the exact right angle of the restaurant overlooking the Bellagio's dancing fountain light show. The dinner had a dozen courses, small and exquisite.
Each approach of the head waiter and underlings, each sweep of new people being seated, gazing at us as they passed and were ushered to a lesser table, wondering how we rated the primo spot, locked us into public behavior that only intensified our hidden private agenda: calculated seduction.
When dessert was finished, I passed on the after-dinner coffee. While Ric sipped his, I slipped the rhinestoned lipstick case holding the small bottle of Lip Venom from my purse and brushed it carefully over my lips. It was almond-colored and super-shiny, like my gown.
Ric's eyes, coffee dark, devoured my every gesture. I was becoming quite the femme fatale where he was concerned, but this femme had butterflies as well as fine food in her stomach.
"Something new?" he asked, eyeing the gown.
"This is a wedding gown."
"I can see the something blue," he said, gazing into my eyes. "What's old and borrowed?"
"The gown is old."
"I guess I'll have to find something that you can borrow."
"I can think of something of yours I'd like to borrow already."
After our highly visible dinner on the Strip, Ric drove me onto the highway and its river of headlights. We headed north of the city until it became dark and deserted. No one was going this far. I'd never gone this far. We turned onto a narrow straight road like the one to Los Lobos, except there were no mountains. We were deep into the desert itself. The car stopped on this path to nowhere. Ric opened my car door. I unclasped the cloak. He escorted me out, eying the modest front of my ivory satin gown in the moonlight.
He lifted my left arm, studied the twelve satin buttons closing the sleeve from wrist to elbow.
"I've decided tonight that you're a really promising sadist, my darling Delilah."
I lifted an eyebrow.
"I'm even more afraid that I like being your masochist," he conceded.
Well, that revved my engines! Ric mine, to do with what I pleased. What pleased me, pleased him. And vice versa.
He rested my hand on his shoulder and began undoing the buttons along my left arm.
It had taken me forty minutes to do the sleeve buttons and the back of the gown except for six inches between my shoulder blades. For that stretch I'd needed the kitchen witch. She had cackled over every button and had made me describe Ric in lewd, loving detail. Poor thing had been dead for several centuries and was now a domestic drudge. A little vicarious kick seemed the least I could do for her.
When the sleeve was undone, Ric did the Latin lover bit and kissed my knuckles, my wrist and my arm up to the elbow. Then he relinquished that arm and lifted my right hand to his shoulder. I managed to brush my knuckles across his lips before he started to undo that sleeve.