On impulse she rummages in her desk drawer, finds the poisonous file, and buzzes next door for Boyce. She’s never told him anything about this, never discussed it, and he’s only worked for her two years; maybe he doesn’t know the story. Though everyone must know it, surely: this is gossip city. “Boyce, your honest opinion. What do you think?”
What she hands him is an eight-by-ten colour glossy of Zenia, a studio portrait, the same one they’d used for Wise Woman World when Zenia was the editor, and also the one Roz herself passed to the private detective when she was going through that humiliating snoop act. A dark dress with texture, plushy, V—necked of course—if you’ve got it, flaunt it, even if it’s sryrofoam; the long white throat, the dark electrical hair, the left eyebrow quirked, the mulberry-coloured mouth curved up at the edges in that maddening, secretive smile.
My own monster, thinks Roz. I thought I could control her: Then she broke loose.
Boyce assumes, or pretends to assume, that Zenia is someone Roz is considering as a model for Lookmakers. He holds the photo between thumb and forefinger as if it has germs, purses his lips. “The chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, etcetera,” he says. “The leather garterbelt brigade, I’d say. Whips and chains, and overdone; I mean, that hair looks like a wig. Definitely not the nineties, Ms. Andrews. Vieux jeu, and don’t you think she’s a little old for our target market?”
Roz could cry with relief. He’s wrong, of course; whatever
Zenia had, whatever her magic was, it transcended image-ofthe-month. But she loves what he just said. “Boyce,” she tells him, “you’re a goldarn jeweclass="underline" ”
Boyce smiles. “I try to be,” he says.
Roz parks the Benz in an outdoor lot off Queen and hopes that nobody will flatten her tires, jimmy her trunk, or scratch her clean, recently polished dark blue paint while she’s in having lunch. True, it’s broad daylight, the car’s in a supervised lot, and this isn’t New York. But things are deteriorating, and even while she locks the door she’s conscious of a dozen shadowy forms, out there on the sidewalk, huddled cloth-covered shapes, undernourished red eyes sizing her up, calculating whether she’s good for a touch.
It’s the Hearts, the Eyes, the Kidneys, and the Livers, but at a more basic level. She carries a clutch of pink two-dollar bills, ready in her pocket so she doesn’t even have to slow down to open her purse. She will dole to left and to right as she runs the gauntlet from here to the Toxique. To give is a blessing, or so her father used to say. Does Roz agree? Do chickens have lipsg To give is basically a drag these days, because it doesn’t get you anything, it won’t even buy you a scratch-free car, and for why? Because those you give to hate you. They hate you because they have to ask, and they hate you for being able to give. Or else they’re professionals and they despise you for believing them, for feeling sorry for them, for being such a gullible dork. What happened to the Good Samaritan, afterwards? After he’d rescued the man fallen among thieves, lugged him off the roadside, carted him home, fed him some soup, and tucked him into the guest room overnight? The poor sappy
Samaritan woke up in the morning to find the safe cracked and the dog strangled and the wife raped and the gold candlesticks missing, and a big pile of shit on the carpet, because it was just stick-on wounds and fake blood in the first place. A put-up job.
Roz has a quick flashback to Zenia. Zenia standing on their front steps, hers and Mitch’s, after one of those dinner parties in the early eighties, the ones when Roz was still susceptible to Zenia’s act, still promoting her, still inviting her. Zenia, in a tight red suit with jutting shoulders, a flared peplum at the back of the jacket skirting the curve of her neatly packed bum; Zenia in spike heels, hip cocked, one hand on it. She was only a little drunk; same with Roz. Zenia kissed Roz on the cheek because they were such friends, such pals and cohorts, and smiled mischievously at wretched Mitch, whose wretchedness Roz had stupidly failed to recognize. Then she turned to go down the steps, lifting her hand in a gesture oddly reminiscent of a newsreel general saluting the troops, and what was it she’d said? Fuck the Third World! I’m tired of it!
So much for the proprieties. So much for earnest old Roz and her poky, boring charities, her handouts to the Raped Moms and Battered Grannies, and, at that time, the whales and the famine victims and the village self-helpers, dowdy plump mommy Roz, shackled to her boring old conscience. It was a selfish, careless remark, a daring remark, a liberated remark—to hell with guilt! It was like speeding in a convertible, tailgating, weaving in and out without signalling, stereo on full blast and screw the neighbours, throwing your leftovers out the window, the ribbons, the wrapping paper, the half-eaten filo pastries and the champagne truffles, things you’d used up just by looking at them.
The worst of it was that Roz—although shocked, although gabbling, Oh Zenia, you don’t mean that!—had felt an answering beat, in herself. A sort of echo, an urge to go that fast, be that loose, that greedy, herself, too. Well, why not? You think they’d lift a finger, in the T1ird World, if it was you? It was like that ad, for a car if she remembers rightly: Make Dust Or Eat It. Those were the choices on offer, then.
And Roz made dust, a lot of it, gold dust, and Zenia made a lot of dust too, though of a different kind. And now she is dust. And ashes, and so is Mitch. That’s the taste Roz has now, in her mouth.
Roz teeters across the gravel, hits the sidewalk, and hurries towards the Toxique, as fast as her tight skirt will let her. There’s a random flutter of hands held out, of thin murmuring voices. pale unhappy voices like those at the edge of sleep. She presses crumpled balls of money into the shaking fingers, the worn gloves, without looking, because if there’s anything they resent it’s your curiosity. So would she in their place. Ahead of her she spots Tony, coming along at her even-footed pony’s trot. Roz waves an arm and yoo-hoos, and Tony stops and smiles, and Roz feels a warm rush of pleasure. Such a comfort!
And Charis is a comfort, too, sitting at the table already, flapping her hand in welcome. Kiss kiss, goes Roz, to either cheek, and plops herself into a chair, digging in her purse for her cigarettes. She intends to enjoy this lunch, because these two women are safe: of everyone she knows, her kids included, these two alone want nothing from her. She can slip her shoe~ off under the table, she can hold forth and laugh and say whatever she likes, because nothing’s being decided, nothing’s being demanded; and nothing’s being withheld either, because the two of them know everything already. They know the worst. With them, and with them alone, she has no power.
Along comes the waitress—where do they get these clothes? Roz truly admires the nerve, and wishes she had some of it herself. Leopard-skin tights and silver boots! These are not outfits, these are costumes, but who are these people trying to be? Celebrants. But of what? What strange religion? Roz finds the
Toxique denizens fascinating, but also a little scary. Every time she goes to the ladies’ she’s afraid of opening the wrong door down there, by mistake, and stumbling upon some kind of unholy rite. Orgies! Human sacrifices! No, that’s going too far. But something she shouldn’t know about, something that will get her in trouble. Some awful movie.
That’s not the real reason she’s drawn to the Toxique, however. The real reason is that, try as she may, she can’t keep her hands off the laundry. She cruises her kids’ rooms like a bottomfeeding fish, retrieving a dirty sock here, some underpants there, and she found a Toxique match folder in the pocket of Larry’s crumpled shirt, and another one the next week. Is it so unnatural, to want to know where your son spends his time? At night, of course; he wouldn’t be there at lunch. But she’s compelled to keep an eye on the place, check in once in a while. It gives her more of a handle: at least he goes somewhere, he doesn’t just vanish into thin air. But what does he do here, and who does he do it with?