Her long slim fingers plucked at a piece of Neal's grilled octopus and she swallowed it down. Didn't ask. Just took. Her privilege.
John offered her his barstool. She said she'd stand, thank you. And that was fine with us because leaning on the bar the way she was her breasts were straining one way through the tank top and her butt the other. In those jeans it was a sight to see. She was beautiful.
I didn't like her one bit. But she was beautiful.
Her blonde hair glowed, a luscious fog about her head. She smelled like musk and roses. Her eyes were so damn bright they seemed to blur like neon whenever she moved her head.
Men are from Mars, they say. And women are from Venus. War on the one side, love on the other. Well, sometimes that's simply not the case. Sometimes it's the woman who wants a conquest, sexually speaking. Wants sex the way a man will. Doesn't care to be wined and dined, doesn't want to hold hands in the park and get flowers on Valentine's Day, couldn't care less for kissy-face and all that lovey-dovey bullshit.
She wanted what we wanted. You didn't see it every day. It was intriguing.
"I know what you're thinking," she said to me.
"Huh?"
"I know what you're thinking. You do play the game, don't you? Most of you guys do."
"What game? What am I thinking?"
Her entire face seemed to give off light. "You're thinking, 'is she or isn't she?'"
I just looked at her. I didn't know what the hell she was talking about. "Is she or isn't she what?" John slurred. By now he was piss-drunk. Her gaze scanned us.
"Is she or isn't she dead?"
She reached over for Neal's cocktail fork and no! I thought as she buried the fork into the wide-open palm of her left hand, slamming it through like a ball into a baseball glove and suddenly I could see the tiny pitchfork tines sticking out the other side.
No blood.
She didn't even flinch.
She just kept looking at me. And smiled.
"Fooled you, didn't I. All three of you."
I think we breathed then. I know what we must have looked like, open-mouthed, staring down at her hand while she pulled the fork out again and tossed it on Neal's plate. There were still a couple of oysters there. She held her hand up and turned it, showing us the bloodless punctures. "Fooled us?" Neal said. "Ma'am, that's an understatement."
What you have to realize is that for us this girl was a fucking bombshell, and I don't just mean in the looks department. If anybody in this freaky city were experts on telling the dead from the living we figured it was us, or at least that we were well into the running. And we didn't have a clue — not with her. She was right. She'd fooled us all completely. "Your skin," I said, "your hair…?"
"Diet supplements. Magnesium, Vitamin E and Potassium mostly. Some of us are learning." She sighed. "Okay, boys, who wants to blow this pit stop and get on with it?"
"Wait a minute," I said. "If you're dead, how come you're drinking…whatever the hell it is you're drinking and…?"
"Eating octopus?" Her eyes narrowed. "You believe everything you hear? What? We can't go into bars but you can? We don't like a drink now and then? You buy into all those moronic stories about how we can't eat anything but human flesh? Isn't that the same thing as saying all Irish are drunks, all blacks like watermelon? I'd hoped you guys were a little more evolved than that."
I saw her point. She was whitebread just like us but now that she was dead she was different too, she'd slipped into a new minority group — and one we little understood. So who were we to make judgments about her?
"It's a different society now," I said. "We hear things about you, you hear things about us. I guess the only way any of us is going to get it right is to talk to one another."
"Oh, gee, isn't that sensitive," she laughed. "Get real. You don't want to understand the dead any more than we want to understand you. There's plenty of what I guess you'd call common ground though." Her eyes went to my pants. "Isn't that what this is all about?"
She was putting it right on the line. I wondered why the living so rarely did that. Why we always played these goddamn games.
"I hear you," I said. "You call it."
The next piece of octopus she picked off Neal's plate she seemed to swallow whole.
"Okay. Who's going home with me?"
The question was for all three of us but she directed it straight at me. Those eyes again. A beautiful, perfect dead girl's eyes.
"Who wants to know what it's really like…to do it with someone like me?"
I finished my drink and called for the tab. "She's not beating around the bush," I said, sounding a whole lot more confident than I felt. "Gentlemen? Neal?"
He shook his head. "I'm a married man, boys. No can do.”
“John?"
His face went blank. You could practically hear his brain ticking off the countless possibilities, all the pros and cons. Then he stood up. "I'm there," he said.
We paid and followed her to the street.
It was hot that day but the night seemed hotter still. The streets were more crowded than usual, a forced march of barhoppers searching out liquid relief.
"If you don't mind my asking," I said, "how did you…?"
"Die?" The question didn't faze her. "Brain tumor. Simple."
I wanted to ask her more. It was common wisdom that it was the brain that mobilized the dead and that destroying it was how you put them down for good. So it stood to reason that any damage there, like a tumor, would at least cause some dysfunction. But she was functioning perfectly. I wondered why.
I didn't ask, though. Too clinical, too damn anti-erotic. And we were moving along at the fast pace she set for us like a couple of slightly woozy dogs trotting behind their mistress.
Booze, beauty and forbidden sex. It'll make a dog of you every time. "Can you believe we're actually doing this?" I whispered to John.
He shot me a look and a grin. "Well, yeah!"
"I dunno…something's not right."
"Hey. You're the one who's always mouthing off about how the dead should have equal rights. So what about equal shtupping rights? She wants some action, we're the guys who're gonna give it to her. And she's the one who asked for it. So what's the problem?"
It made sense, I guess.
He nudged me. "And if she gets froggy? Relax." He flipped up the front of his shirt and I saw the snubnose stuck in his belt.
"Come on, guys," she called over her shoulder. Her voice lilting like a song. "I mean, exactly who's dead here?"
She lived in a split row house up on 89th and Amsterdam. Welfare housing. Not exactly a total dump but pretty damn close. Her high heels tapped up the stairs. You could smell piss faintly in the dimly-lit stairwell — did the dead still piss? — and half-erased graffiti swirls decorated the walls. Nothing to deter us. Not when you could look up and see that Class-A butt riding up and down in those jeans. We were beyond the point of no return now. That primordial toggle in the male brain had been switched to the on position for the duration.
She unlocked triple deadbolts. It looked like somebody'd smeared shit on the door. I hoped it was just more bad graffiti. Then she opened the door and switched on the lights and stepped inside. For a moment we just stood there.
"You gotta be shitting me," John said.
Inside it looked like the Presidential Suite at the St. Regis. Whatever that might look like. Russet wall-to-wall carpet, long sable couches, finely crafted Hepplewhite furniture and one of those fifty-inch-screen tube TV’s in the corner. Some pretty high-end art hung from the walls and the curtains could've been Byzantine tapestries.