On the way out I passed my full-length mirror. The dress served its purpose, so I didn’t pay any attention from the neck down. What caught my eye was the head and face.
I’ve been told many times that I am beautiful. My father, a small-time hood, said it every day that he and I shared this earth. There was a temporary white-stain tattoo under my left eye. It was a perfect circle, two inches across with a dime-size white dot off-center inside. That was my signature. Even Theon didn’t know it was a stain. He wanted to mark me, to deform me, but I never could go with that.
My straightened, bleached-white hair came down way past my shoulders. Sometime during the night I had taken out the deep-sea-blue contact lenses, so my eyes were their natural dark brown color.
I took a pair of chrome-plated scissors from the dresser and began to hack away at the hair that so many men had yanked on and women had caressed while penetrating my sex and rectum, slapping a black ass that would swell but never blush.
“I like your hair, Deb,” Lana said when I finally made it to the kitchen. She was still naked.
“Really? I left most of it on the bedroom floor. You can hardly tell it from the white shag but I suppose you could pull it up with a vacuum cleaner.”
“I mean I like it short, silly. It’s so cool how uneven it is. You turned from Marilyn Monroe to punk-slut with just a few snips.”
“Who was on the phone?” I asked.
“Richard Ness.”
“What did that fool want?”
“Theon. I told him what happened and he hung up.”
Just then the kettle began to whistle and Lana turned her attention to the French-press pots. She’d prepared them with the Italian roast coffee I loved.
There was low-fat turkey bacon sizzling on the grill and egg-white omelets cooking in their special Teflon pans. Lana gestured at the breakfast nook, which was nestled in between three mostly glass walls that looked out on Theon’s pride and joy: a lawn of Kentucky bluegrass.
He’d look forward to every late spring when the green grass bore its blue flowers.
“I love that grass as much as your ass,” he used to tell me.
The memory of those words almost pierced the veil and brought Theon back from the dead, so much so I feared that my mind could conjure him and lose something that was waiting for the girl in the ugly dress and down-at-the-heels blue tennis shoes.
“I made a decision last night,” Lana said, breaking through my fears.
“Oh? What’s that?”
The breakfast had been served while I fought off the dead. I had juice and coffee, turkey bacon, a grilled slice of tomato, and an Egg Beaters omelet on an oblong plate.
“I know this is your moment, Deb,” she said, “that you lost your husband and all. But when I saw him and that girl in the bathtub I realized how awful what we do is. It was like everything in there had a meaning. His half-hard dick and her draped over him like that — the camera in the water and the house all shorted out. I realized that I had to quit this business and break away from Linda.”
“What would you do?” I asked. I really wanted to know.
“Get a straight job and maybe a boyfriend or something.”
“Is Leer really your last name?”
“No. It’s Koski. Kristin Koski. Linda gave me the name Lana Leer. She said that it sounded better and that you should never use your real name in the credits of a film.”
“Were you ever on camera?”
“That’s how I met Linda. She could tell how much I hated it and took me in.”
“Why not go by your old name if you’re not acting anymore?”
“I don’t know,” she said, letting her head loll to the side like Perry Mendelson had done the night before. “My parents kind of disowned me and I guess having a new name was me letting go of them. Is Dare your name?”
“Peel,” I said. “Sandra Peel. I was born in Inglewood to Aldo and Asha. She was a seamstress for a Jewish tailor downtown and he was a thug but I loved him.”
Lana smiled and then she laughed.
“What’s funny?” I asked.
“I always like the way you talk, Deb. Most people... most people say one thing and then somebody else has to ask for more. You know, like if you said your real name was Sandy Peel and stopped there. But it’s like you tell the whole story. Like you were on a stage or somethin’ and the rest of us were at the play.”
Skinny little Lana was probably in her early thirties with short-short brown hair that showed a few gray sprouts here and there. Her big eyes were gray — almost white.
“What are you looking at, Deb?”
“Hmm?”
“You were staring.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. I just wanted to see you. You know, my great-grandmother Henrietta used to say that people are always going so fast that they never appreciate where they are, who they’re talking to.”
“So you were appreciating me?” Lana asked behind a half smile.
The question didn’t want answering. Lana was happy under my watchfulness and I was aware that something had come to an end, like a crescendo in a piece of classical music or at the conclusion of a scene in a play where the lights are still up and maybe even the actors are still onstage but there’s no movement or speaking, only a pause before the next action. This, I thought in that brief moment, punctuated by Lana’s half smile, was the beginning of the beginning after Theon’s foolish end.
“Where the fuck are you, motherfucker?” a man yelled.
We could hear him stomping in through the entrance room, into the wide hallway, and from there to the door of the kitchen.
Tall and broad, Richard Ness was both ugly and oddly attractive. He was a white man with darkish skin clad in a ridiculous light green suit. His nose had been broken so often that it looked like a pillow with the indentations of a night’s sleep left on it.
I clutched my bright blue leather bag, the weight of my father’s gun feeling like a premonition.
“Where the fuck is he, Deb?”
“What are you doing here, Dick?” I replied.
“Don’t fuck with me, bitch.”
“Never have, never will.”
There was something soft about the thug Ness; you could see it in his eyes. My playful disdain for his manhood stung him. He was just a boy posturing the way boys think men are supposed to be.
“I’m lookin’ for Theon.”
“He’s dead, Dick.”
“Yeah, right.”
“He was electrocuted in the bathtub with some girl he probably promised a job in my new movie.”
Lana had both hands on the table, her fingers curled into hardscrabble landbound bird claws. There was a tremor going through her.
“I will tear this house apart,” Richard promised.
“He’s down at Threadley Brothers Mortuary. The cops said it was a stupid accident. Why don’t you call down there if you don’t believe me?”
Lana’s eyes were pleading with mine. I smiled at her. I really felt relieved; Dick’s interruption was easier to deal with than my world turning upside down.
“Why don’t you suck my dick?” Richard said.
“Dick’s dick,” I said lightly.
My calm caused him to clench his fists and scowl. He really didn’t know what to do in the absence of fear.
“What would it cost you to call, Dick?” I asked. “I don’t know what business Theon had with you, but I certainly wouldn’t let you mess up my house if I knew where he was.”
“You know something?” he said, his mouth puckering up like a baby’s when it tastes its first lemon. “I always hated your cool bullshit. You think you’re better than everybody, but I will kick your ass like Theon should have. I will make you crawl like a fucking worm.”
Ness took two long steps forward.