“No!” I chortle. “A guess. She didn’t.”
Wyatt grins sheepishly. “Yep. In her best garb too. Flowers in her hair, some crazy kimono thing.”
“I bet they loved her,” I say with a rueful shake of my head. I’m sharply jealous but grateful for the lighthearted, casual tone the evening has taken thus far, and I don’t want to create drama. Above all, I want to avoid talking about that night.
“And, uh, Paris?” Wyatt asks, looking intently at the smooth red of his Pinot Noir.
“Good. Magical. Expensive,” I answer nonchalantly. No one in Hector knows about Nico, and I’d prefer it that way. I’m listening to the banjo jiving in the background, gazing at the dwindling liquid in my glass, and fixating on the possibility of another when the bartender catches Wyatt’s eye and hands him a bag filled with our dinner. Wyatt nods and shakes the guy’s hand in a hearty gesture that would make anyone else look absurd. He is uncannily likable. I shake my head, smiling privately.
Wyatt leads me out of the bar, which is quickly filling up with locals. A handful of young, dandily dressed twentysomethings, but mainly weathered-looking farmers, wearing dirty shirts and worn jeans, their brown faces wrinkled and furrowed by decades without sunscreen. I nod politely at another neighbor, who doesn’t nod back. I can’t tell if it’s because he’s drunk or if there’s some sort of angry undertone. I wonder if everyone over here on the lake judges me for leaving. Or maybe he thinks I’m my sister. Ah, country living.
As we walk across the parking lot, I hear someone hollering behind us and instinctively whirl around. Some guy with a thin blond mustache and ropy muscles in his neck is heading toward me, yelling.
“You fucking cunt. Where the fuck is my sister? Where the fuck is she?”
“Whoa, cowboy,” Wyatt says, stepping between us. He’s a gentle soul, but I’ve seen him throw a punch or two when he’s appropriately riled. His arm curls around me, protecting me. “Kyle, right?”
“Fuck you, asshole. I’m talking to her!” The guy is short and has to sort of leap around Wyatt to point his hand at me in a distinctly menacing way. “She’s the goddamn lesbo been fucking my little sister!”
“I think you have me confused with someone else,” I say slowly, my eyebrows raised. Oh, really, Zelda. “I’m Ava Antipova. Zelda’s twin sister.”
The angry guy looks barely convinced by this, but he does back off. “Fuck you. I know what she and Kayla been up to. When I find Kayla or Zelda, they’re both fucking dead! They better both stay disappeared,” he spits out, making that absurd roosterlike gesture that men make when they’re trying to be assertive. “Bitch.” He strides back toward the bar in a self-satisfied stroll.
“Uh…” I say to Wyatt.
“You remember Kyle Richardson? Upperclassman? A real prick. His little sister is Kayla Richardson. She and Zelda were, uh, friends.”
I make a note to see if she’s the girl on Zelda’s Facebook page. “Were they having sex?” I ask tonelessly.
“I don’t really know. Zelda could be real secretive. And she and I hadn’t. I mean we weren’t—” He coughs uncomfortably. I shrug.
As I jump up into the cab of Wyatt’s truck, I realize that I am starving. I fish out our falafel and start devouring my own, not minding the tzatziki that is leaking into the bag in my lap. Wyatt watches in amusement, silently unwrapping his own sandwich. He neatly, almost daintily, polishes it off in a few bites.
“Well, Ava? Where am I taking you?” he asks, poised in the parking lot.
I hesitate for a moment. He’s staring at me with an expression I can’t read.
“Kuma’s.”
“Are we thinking of the same Kuma’s?” he asks with a raised eyebrow.
“I only know the one. I’m looking for a guy named Jason,” I explain. “I think he has something to do with…what happened to Zelda.”
“What do you mean?”
“Zelda texted him from her burner phone the night of the fire, asking him to meet her at the barn at eleven. I don’t know if Jason met Zelda or not.” I pause again, wondering whether to disclose the rest of what the cops told me. “But the cops are looking for him too. I guess there were some chains on the barn doors.”
Wyatt goes entirely white, and his hands grip the steering wheel. “Jesus, Zelda,” he says quietly. “Does it have to do with the money? Or the drugs?”
“I have no idea. I’ve never heard of this guy. But…I think Zelda wanted me to find him and talk to him.”
Wyatt frowns again, and I know he suspects something. I don’t know what he’s thinking, so I roll down the window and stare out at the trees lining the highway.
We’re both lost in thought as we drive toward the strip club, and I keep checking Zelda’s phone, expecting a new message or clue to pop up at any second. I wonder how she’s keeping track of me—if she’s watching me somehow or if she just knows me too well. Is she trying to escape her debt? Is it just some elaborate ploy to keep me sucked into her chaotic life? And why did she come to France?
Wyatt drives exactly at the speed limit, stoically silent. I imagine that he has questions, too, but he’ll keep them under wraps until he’s swollen and sore with anger. He’ll be all calm silence and quiet support until something snaps, and then he’ll be blind fury and raging emotion. That’s a dangerous trait to have around us Antipovas; we like to wind people up and then release them, like some bored Greek deity with a flair for chaos. And Wyatt is a soft touch. Once, feeling mischievous, I asked Zelda to pretend to be me on the phone—we could never play switcheroo with Wyatt in the flesh; he knew us both too well—and he realized what we were up to after a few minutes of suppressed giggles. He hung up, and I assumed that was the end of it. But the next time I saw him, he was livid. He asked me, “How could you? Why would you make me reveal things to your sister that were meant only for you?” His cheeks were pink and he hollered at me, pacing and upset. Taken aback and suddenly feeling very guilty, I watched him with wide eyes, saying very little. It didn’t occur to me how very much he cared. He finally said, “I say things to you I would never say to another person.” I melted and let him lift me into his arms.
Some ten miles later, we pull into the parking lot at Kuma’s, and my heart starts thumping. I’ve never been to a strip club, and I feel strangely nervous. I examine this anxiety. I’m not afraid of the female body, no matter how buck-nekkid or bedazzled. I don’t think I’m afraid of seediness, or of male desire. Which suggests I’m afraid of what Zelda has left waiting in there. I glance at Wyatt as I slide down from the truck, and he looks deeply uncomfortable.
“You can wait in the truck, you know,” I offer gallantly. I’m tough, independent. I can do this alone.
“And let you go in by yourself to confront this guy? You have to be kidding, Ava.” He shakes his head as though I’m deranged, and I am relieved in spite of myself. I take a deep breath and stride across the parking lot. There are only a handful of cars here tonight, and I look around to see if I recognize any. It’s mostly nondescript pickups. With a deep breath, I open the door.
It’s dim inside, and very gritty. There’s an elevated stage, with a pole in the middle, and a scatter of seats upon which half a dozen men are slumped, blankly ogling the fake-tanned limbs of a bland-looking dancer. I reflect, not for the first time, that film and television have robbed us of shock, of seeing things for the first time. Kuma’s looks like the cheap strip club it is.
The bouncer by the door immediately asks us for seven dollars each, and I hand over a twenty. I’m appalled by how cheap the cover is. The bouncer doesn’t even look twice at me, and I suspect I’m not the first woman to have shown up here. Fuck knows why any woman would come here, though. Any man either, for that matter. It can’t be for the eroticism.
I can’t help suspecting that the other men in the room feel the same ambivalence, though maybe not for the same ludicrous reasons. I marvel again at male sexuality—these men must be somehow getting off on this. Do they go into the p
arking lot to jack off? Or the bathroom? Do they fuck each other there? Or is it all oneiric, psychic wankery? And then I wonder about the woman dancing. Is she getting off too? Or is this just a marginally better paid job than waitressing, where you exchange physical and emotional labor for pocket change rather than dollar bills tucked into your G-string? I shudder with a wave of both guilt and relief that I will probably never know.
Wyatt is staring at the walls, seemingly trying to take in the decor. The walls are mostly empty, though, and the interior decorator seems to have gone for minimal ambience. We are both trying not to look at the clientele; something instinctive tells me that they would not appreciate our gaze, while theirs is so fully fixed. I glance around and am surprised that there is no bar.
“There’s no booze,” I whisper to Wyatt, even though the Lady Gaga song is playing so loudly that I wouldn’t be overheard even if I shouted.
He nods. “Illegal in New York State. She’ll probably, uh, take off that…”
I smile as he blushes again.
“Her thong?”
“Uh, yeah. They can’t serve alcohol if it’s full nudity.”
“Oh.” This is disappointing. “So they just go and drink in the parking lot?”
Wyatt shrugs. “I don’t know. I’ve never been here, Ava.”
“I’m shocked.” I glance around, trying subtly to spot the guy who was in the photo with Holly Whitaker. With his tatted beefcake arms, I should be able to pick him out reasonably well, but he’s not here.
“What now?” Wyatt looks at me helplessly. I settle down onto a stool, and Wyatt lurks protectively by my shoulder. I’m not quite sure what I was expecting. Wyatt’s hand rests on my leg.
Another song comes on, and a new dancer appears on the stage. I immediately recognize Holly Whitaker; her crimpy hair and overplucked eyebrows are hard to mistake. Why is Zelda’s closest friend a stripper?
“Wyatt,” I say uneasily, “you don’t think Zelda was…” I trail off.
His eyebrows lurch toward the ceiling. “Jeez. You think she was…dancing?” He sounds physically pained. I don’t blame him. I’m suddenly nauseous, the falafel roiling in my pickled stomach.
“I don’t know. With the debt…She’s always been sort of reckless….”
“It is the sort of thing that would appeal to her,” Wyatt acknowledges.
“It makes for a good story. She gets into stupid amounts of debt, tries to pay it off by dancing at a strip club for a while, privileged girl learns the ropes of seedy underworld…the sort of extreme narrative she would like.” I’m convincing myself. Fuck, Zelda. It could explain what she’d been living off. All that cash. I fish around in my fringed bag for more money and sidle up toward the stage, waiting for the song to end. Holly is upside down on the pole, her inverted face appearing surreal and almost grotesque. Blue eye shadow. A tough look to rock. She rights herself, and I can hear her thighs squeaking along the pole even through the Katy Perry cacophony. I’m uncannily reminded of playgrounds, of sliding down poles wearing skirts, the slight burn of dry skin against warm metal. A sensation maybe only little girls and pole dancers know. The image of the playground in this place seems both deeply disturbing and fundamentally appropriate, especially since Holly is (well, was) wearing a schoolgirl outfit.
As the song ends, I lean forward with my twenty and try to catch Holly’s eye. She sees me immediately, and her stage smile collapses.
“Can you meet me outside? In the back?” I ask in the lull between over-amped pop music tunes.
She regards me suspiciously but nods. “I’ll try. I have to get changed, though.” My hand stays where it is, holding the twenty extended, but she just looks at it, clearly disgusted, before collecting the other bills that have accumulated on the stage. She saunters off, and as she turns I get another glimpse of her neatly waxed nether regions. I wonder how Zelda felt about that. She was fervently anti-waxing. Predictably. She always liked things messy.
I nod to Wyatt and we walk back outside; I flash a pack of cigarettes at the bouncer by way of explanation.
“You smoke now?” Wyatt says in the parking lot.
“France. You know,” I say, lighting up.
Wyatt looks distressed. “I always thought…never mind.”
“What? Zelda smoked,” I say, taking a drag. I smoke occasionally with Nico, because it seems like the right thing to do on a Parisian street while you’re flirting outside a café. But I don’t like cigarettes. I appreciate them as a prop, but there is something essentially dirty about inhaling them. I don’t tell Wyatt this, just watch as he battles disappointment in who I’ve become. “Want one?” I tease.
“No,” he says humorlessly. We walk around the side of the building; I have no idea what’s out back, but I figure there has to be somewhere for patrons to sip inconspicuously out of their flasks. Surely. I’ve driven by this place dozens, maybe hundreds of times, always assuming that it was a bar, imbued with the cozy safety inherent in a public drinking place. Knowing that it’s technically dry transforms its architecture into something suddenly strange, unreadable. It no longer makes abstract sense to me.
We loaf around the back, near a door I’m hoping leads to the stage. The cigarette is making me feel light-headed, a replacement high in the absence of booze. I know it will very shortly lead to nausea, but whatever. We mill around uncomfortably, and I check Zelda’s phone and Facebook again. Could she be here? I scan the exterior walls, as though I might be able to suss her out with some twinly X-ray vision. I tell myself I’m not a prude, that I wouldn’t care, but I really hope she hasn’t been working here.
After a few minutes, Holly walks outside, a cheap kimono covering her schoolgirl costume. My addict reptile brain notes almost immediately that she has a bottle of something under her arm.
“You’re Ava,” she says huskily. The blue eye shadow is even more jarring away from the stage lights.
“You’re very sharp,” I say, before I can stop myself. I need this girl to like me, answer my questions. But I imagine that if she’s friends with Zelda, she has to be used to some emotional abuse. “And this is Wyatt.”
“I know,” she says with a flirtatious smile, and both Wyatt and I raise our eyebrows in alarm. I shoot him an arch look, but he seems as surprised as I do. “I’ve seen pictures,” she explains. She turns back to me and holds out the bottle. “Drink?”
I take a swallow; it’s cheap coconut-flavored rum. It tastes god-awful, like sunscreen, but I’m grateful.
“So,” Holly says after she’s taken a slug. “Zelda’s dead.”
“So it would seem.”
“Idiot girl. I told her to lay off the smack.” I think her expression softens, though I can’t really tell. “I assume that’s what happened?”
“You were friends?” Wyatt asks, not answering her implied question.
“Yeah. Zelda came here looking for Jason a few months back and ended up in the dressing rooms. She brought nice Scotch with her, and we got talking.”
“Jason? You know him?” I say quickly.
“Everyone does. His brother’s the manager. Jay takes care of the…side business.”
“Drugs?” I blurt out. She just smiles back coyly, like I’m a fucking idiot.
“Was she dancing? Here?” I ask, not able to completely conceal the note of anxiety in my tone.
Holly looks surprised, though not offended. “God, no. Zelda just wasn’t the type, you know. And her tits were too small.” She smirks and regards me sympathetically. My tits are no bigger than Zelda’s. She reaches over and plucks my cigarette away. She takes a long drag, eyes half-closed in pleasure.
“You smoke the same brand,” she says, amused. “She said you were every bit as crazy as she was,” she continues. “Damn. That girl was something.”
“Can I ask you something?” I say, lighting up another cigarette. She nods. “Why did you post that photo on Facebook earlier today? I mean, had you not heard about the fire?” I can’t bring myself to say “t
hat Zelda is dead,” because I’m worried that it will sound like the lie I know it to be.
“No, I had. But a few days earlier, she asked me to post the photo at ten A.M. on the twenty-fourth. She was really insistent about it, said it was really important and she needed me to do it at exactly that time. Even if it looked weird.” Holly shrugs. “Zelda was pretty damn weird, though, so I didn’t think too hard about it. I owed her some favors.” She smiles that mysterious smile again, sleepy and supremely relaxed.
“And Jason? Is he ever here? I kind of need to talk to him,” I say.
“Is this because he went over to the house? Before the fire?” Holly says innocently.
“Yes. I need to know what he was doing there.”
“Well, how about you ask me?” a voice behind me says. I whirl around to face the man from Zelda’s Instagram photo. He’s only a few inches taller than me, but he is wide and muscular. His arms are huge, each one the size and color of a small ham, and his shirt is tight across an inflated chest. That has to be uncomfortable, I think. All that muscle. It looks unwieldy. The Maori tattoo from the photo curls out from under one taut shirtsleeve. I realize that he’s probably been lurking there for a while. Absurdly, I stick out my hand.
“Holly told me you showed up. Wanted to introduce myself,” he says, shaking my hand with a slight smile. He has a chin dimple. Of course he does. “And you are?” he asks coolly, rounding on Wyatt. Testosterone is thick in the air.
“Wyatt Darling. Old friend of Zelda’s. And Ava’s,” he adds, and I feel a slight niggle of hurt at being second.
“Huh. Zelda didn’t mention you,” Jason says casually, and I see Wyatt clench his teeth. He turns back to me. “But she did say you were going to pitch up here eventually.” He pokes my collarbone to emphasize the “you,” and I recoil. He’s standing too close. “C’mon back inside, I got something for you.” He turns and waves us back toward the strip club. He goes in through the back door, and the three of us follow, Holly confident, Wyatt and me tentative.
The dressing room is brightly lit and smells of perfume, cigarette smoke, and something chemically clean—feminine hygiene spray? I don’t quite recognize it. The blonde who was onstage when we came in is reapplying lipstick, and a petite girl with wide-spaced eyes is back-combing her hair, teasing it into a frizzy, voluminous halo. I try not to stare, but it is a wonderfully foreign world. I wonder if Zelda really has been back here. She would love its tawdry disarray. We’re led into a hallway, and through a glass door, I glimpse a small room bathed in red light. A completely naked woman is grinding mechanically, a spookily empty expression on her face, and I can see a pair of knees poking out from beneath her. Wyatt coughs behind me, and I know he’s noticed.
Dead Letters Page 15
