Cease to Blush

by Billie Livingston

  Shit. “Oh. Is she back in Vancouver?”

  “No. She’s in San Francisco. You want the number? And if you do,” he added in a sardonic singsong voice, “you better watch your wallet.”

  I chewed off some fingernail and watched people pass my car, nipping into little shops, talking to one another on the street as though the whole world were on a first-name basis. There was hardly a soul under fifty.

  Into my silence, he said, “I just think people should know what she’s capable of.”

  “Ah … did you say Marcella? I haven’t talked to her in—well, hardly since you guys got married. I guess things didn’t work out.”

  “You might say that. Perhaps if you get hold of her you might ask her how it felt to drain my insurance policy while I was on the brink of death in the hospital. Tell her she’s not going to get another cent out of me and if I have it my way, she’ll get her ass deported.”

  “Oh. Ah … let me get a pen. Just a second.” I copied down Erin’s number. “Okay. George. I’m sorry things didn’t … I hope you’re feeling better.”

  I dialed Erin and voice mail picked up. “Hi …” I paused. “Kiddo. It’s Vivian. Hey, I’m in California, not far from you, and I wondered if you might want to get together over a drink and catch up.” I left my number and got out of the car. Looking up and down the block, I couldn’t even spot a fast-food joint. I wandered down the sidewalk. Maybe I should go see if I can find a motel with a kitchenette, I thought, and stopped at the window of a second-hand bookstore.

  The bell jangled overhead as I entered. The guy behind the desk had hair the colour of spent coal and wore steel-rimmed glasses. He kept his head in a book. Clearing my throat, I asked if he had anything that dealt with mobsters and politicians in the early sixties.

  He settled his gaze on me three or four seconds. “Non-fiction?” he asked in a distant flat tone. His own book appeared to be on beekeeping.

  “Yeah. The whole sixties … entertainer/political/organized-crime crossover, I guess. And anything to do with stripteasers from that era? Have you heard of Judy Campbell?”

  He rose, opening like a mechanical flower, and led me down an aisle. “Judy, Judy, Judy,” he said in a corpsey attempt at Cary Grant. “She married,” he added and pulled a tattered blue hardcover entitled Judith Exner: My Story. Between her name and the title, was a quotation: “I knew them when the dream of Camelot was real—Jack Kennedy, Frank Sinatra, Sam Giancana, and John Rosselli.” He pulled a memoir of Tempest Storm, The Last Superstar of Burlesque. For his next trick he pointed out a celebrity biography section, two shelves of mafia books, and three of Kennedys.

  I put Campbell Exner under my arm and slid The Chic Mafioso off the shelf. A book on John Rosselli. His name was spelled differently everywhere I looked. Black-and-white shots of the man they called the Silver Fox were in the centre of the book along with his known cohorts. Flipping to the index, I scanned down the D’s and found Dare, Celia and a single page notation. My stomach lurched. I flipped madly to page 229, scanning the words for Dare. “… by the end of 1967, the FBI had begun targeting not only Rosselli’s friends but any and all of his sexual conquests including Vegas showgirl Maggie Gale and stripper Celia Dare who had come under scrutiny as a result of a reputed romance with Senator Robert F. Kennedy. According to sources in New York, Dare was subpoenaed and subsequently driven underground by the fear of testifying against Rosselli, her sometime lover and benefactor.”

  I leaned back against the shelf and reread the passage twice before I added The Chic Mafioso to my armpit. Another book caught my eye: Mob Wife. I flipped it open to find it was a memoir, the woman’s own story “as told to” a journalist. This one would come too.

  I paid for the books and drove off to hunt for a motel.

  My pad for the night had a queen-size bed and a kitchenette. All rooms opened out to a cool blue pool about the length of three cars end to end. Sixty-five bucks. I didn’t dicker this time, just tossed my card down and signed.

  Closing the door, I heaved my suitcase onto the bed, unzipped and pulled out a pair of shorts and a clean T-shirt. The trunk sat in the corner. I went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. My hair was still up in the topknot. Like something that got dragged out of Nashville, it mushroomed around my skull, bits slipping down from my temples and jaw and down the back of my neck.

  I kicked off my boots, tossed my T-shirt and bra and tugged off my jeans. Tomorrow I will get a sundress, I vowed. My thong yanked at the crack of me, all the cracks of me, and I kicked it into the pile at my feet. Heat like this, in my opinion, dictates that nothing should be wedged between the cheeks of one’s ass. I got into the shower and soaped off the day.

  Back in the main room, I opened the door to let in some air and flopped on the bed. There was a message on my cell from my acting agent. “Vivian, it’s Corinne. If you’re not going to an audition, I’d appreciate a phone call. Also, you should know that I’ve decided to cut back my roster. So you’ll need to find new representation. Good luck.”

  I took the cell from my ear and stared at it. Snapping it closed, I reached for the hotel phone and called Frank. His line went to voice mail. “Hey, it’s me,” I said. “I’m in California, um, about forty minutes outside San Francisco, I think. Just wondering how you are. I haven’t heard from you. I … um …” I picked at a hangnail. “I found that lady I was looking for. She wasn’t very friendly. But I’m going to try her again tomorrow. So, I’m just hanging out in a motel. Erin split up with her husband. Sounds like it was messy … Well, I miss you.” A fat pause followed. I was lonesome, but in truth, I didn’t know what for. “Call me.”

  I piled up the pillows and broke open Mob Wife. It was odd to read “I” and know it was a woman. Everything I’d seen so far had said she. “The woman formerly known as Conquest,” I murmured. She wrote about running away from home at fifteen, heading for New York to be near the action, going on dates with cops and gangsters both, dining and dancing at the Copacabana, the Boom Boom Room and acting as a beard for mobsters at business dinners. Her side of the story.

  After a couple hours, I put down the book, wandered to the door and stood in the frame, looking outside thinking of mob bars in Little Italy and Miami. The motel was quiet, a few chaise lounges around the pool but no one in them. A door opened two rooms to the right of me and I heard a woman’s laughter and running water. A man called back as if over a crowd, “Why don’t we have ourselves a cocktail before we start dinner.” The water stopped.

  “I’m on it, hon. Just adding a few more ice cubes and the strawberries.”

  A loud crunch and whirr followed.

  Blender drinks. I mentally licked my chops.

  The whirring stopped. Foot-slaps against the pavement. I looked over to see a man in his late fifties, thick rubber flip-flops on his feet, staring at the pool. He patted his broad chest then stretched his arms, fingers scratching the air, turned his head and drawled, long and Southern, “Get on out here, darlin’, it’s beautiful. Must be eighty degrees still.”

  I bet it wasn’t even fifteen degrees in Vancouver. Leaning in my doorway, I rubbed a bare foot over my prickly shin-skin trying to figure what 15 Celsius would be in Fahrenheit, when Darlin’ herself came out, a tall blender-container of frozen drinks in one hand and two motel drinking glasses in the other. She looked a few years younger than he was with red curly hair to her shoulders and an ankle-length sleeveless dress, slit up both calves to the knee.

  “Honey, can you take this and I’ll get us some towels to sit on.” Her drawl was prettier than his.

  “I certainly will, my darlin’.” He took it all off her hands.

  I wished someone would call me Darlin’, and decided to head for the store, get some tequila and frozen strawberries of my own before the sun went down.

  Shading my eyes, I squinted toward Honey and Darlin’ on the other side of the pool as they drank and gazed through the chain-link fence across the highway to the setting sun. “Excuse m
e, sorry to bother you.” Both heads turned. “Do you recall which way the supermarket is?”

  “Honey?” Darlin’ said.

  “I believe it’s to your right as you come out the parkin’ lot.”

  “Are you fixin’ to get yourself some dinner?” Darlin’ asked.

  “Yeah, I think it’s about that time.” I returned her smile and started off. “Thanks.”

  “Excuse me, you’re not dinin’ alone, are you?”

  “Yes, I am. Don’t worry, I’m fine.”

  “Would you like to join us? Abe and I just bought a whole heap of food—do you like chicken? We’d love the company, wouldn’t we, Abe?”

  Abe nodded. “That’s the joy in travelling, all the folks you meet.”

  “I wouldn’t want to trouble you.”

  “Nonsense, we’d love it.” Her voice jumped high on love. “I’m Charlene and this is Abe.” We shook hands. Charlene gave a splashy grin and blinked up a moment before she gently asked what my name was.

  “Oh! Ha!” I slapped fingers to my forehead. “Vivian.”

  Charlene suggested I join them in a daiquiri while the sun set and I ran to get a glass and a towel from my bathroom.

  As I parked my lounger on Charlene’s side, she took my glass and poured. “Look at that big mess a’yellow hair, Vivian. You look like a sweet little buttercup.”

  Buttercup. Her southern accent made me shy. I felt as if she was going to spout down-home wisdom any second, tell me she saw through me like a possum does darkness or something.

  “Here you go,” she said. “Abe and I are having a little celebration tonight, so there’s lots where this came from.”

  I lay back, the relief of icy berries and rum in my mouth. “What are you celebrating?”

  “Oh, a little adversity.”

  I smiled into my glass. “I’d never be sober again …”

  “S’all you can do sometimes,” Charlene said, laying her head back. “Our motorhome broke down not far from here. But that’s okay. The mechanics promised her to us by morning.”

  “We’re gonna concentrate on the right-now instead,” Abe said. “A daiquiri, a sunset and we’re happier than gophers in soft dirt.” He raised his glass to me.

  “Where are you from, Vivian?” Charlene asked.

  “Vancouver.”

  “Canada?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Vancouver’s real beautiful, I hear.”

  Abe grunted, adding, “Get some real frog-stranglers up there, don’tcha? Like Seattle.”

  “S’cuse me?”

  Charlene translated. “It rains a lot?”

  “Oh! Yeah, we strangle frogs all the time.”

  We all three laughed and then they asked where I was heading and what I did up in Canada.

  “That’s a tough business any way you slice it,” Charlene said. “We have a friend who’s an actress in a Christian soap opera and she’s getting somewhat disenchanted herself. Everything comes down to ratings and sponsors.”

  “Hmm.” I stared into the orange sunlight. “I went to church with my mother when I was a kid and it seemed like there was a built-in market for Christian bands and books and movies. Surprised they even have to worry about ratings.”

  Abe looked around Charlene at me again. “Which church did you go to?”

  “Lifeline Christian Assembly.”

  “What sort of church is that?” he asked. “Pentecostal?”

  “Just basic evangelical I guess.”

  Abe set down his glass and reached into his shorts for his wallet. “This is what we do.” He handed over a peach-coloured business card, which Charlene passed on to me.

  Christian Ministry Center

  Pastor: Arnold (“Abe”) Abraham

  Gathering of God Church

  10th & Jones, Bartle, California

  Services: Sunday at 6:00 p.m.

  “We’ve been settled in Bartle a little while now, but before that we were on the road two years, taking God’s word to the streets. We travelled and listened to God until He said it was time to go on home.”

  Bullshit! I heard my mother yell inside my head. “You guys don’t speak in tongues, do you?”

  “We have prayer in tongues in our church,” Abe said.

  Charlene chimed in. “There’s two different kinds of tongues: prayer in tongues, which God just gives you the words for. God understands your problems and puts the holy words—a sort of gibberish—right in you so it’s as if your prayer comes straight from the Lord. The other type is a more holy language and sometimes there’s someone there to interpret. If not, you’re supposed to keep the words to yourself.”

  I mulled that over. “Don’t they say if there’s no interpreter in the room then it’s the devil talking through you?” Erin had told me this years ago—she came from a long line of Bible-thumpers.

  Their heads shook in dismay.

  “That’s not in the Bible,” Abe said. “Some churches believe you’re not born-again without tongues but that’s not in the Bible either. Paul said there will be times for tongues and times not. Paul told a story of foreigners and God’s intervention so that they could understand one another. That’s where the word babble comes from.”

  “Oh, right …” I said, thinking still of Erin. “A friend of mine, her father was the pastor of a Pentecostal church, and when she was a teenager, she felt this intense pressure to speak in tongues. Everyone said she wasn’t full of the Holy Spirit until she did so she finally just faked it. She felt better.”

  “She felt better or she felt like a hypocrite?” Charlene poured some more daiquiri into Abe’s glass, a little in her own, the last in mine. She waited for an answer, holding her pitcher midair.

  “I guess she felt better being a hypocrite if it relieved the pressure of being a pastor’s daughter who couldn’t speak in tongues. She’s not really in touch with her family anymore.”

  Charlene shook her head and tsked. “Goes to show you how these silly ideas undermine not only Christ but family.” She stood. “I’m going to get our dinner ready.”

  “Let me help you,” I said, jumping up after her.

  My job was to make more drinks. Dumping frozen strawberries into the blender, I poured rum over them and tossed in a few ice cubes. Charlene, meanwhile, took out a plate of fried chicken that she’d been keeping warm in the oven.

  Pressing the cover down on the blender, I flipped the chop button. The blades growled and bleated then choked.

  “You gotta stop it and stir,” Charlene explained.

  The breaking ice whirred into motion again as Charlene pulled out containers of potato salad and a Jell-O mould from the fridge. Her tone seemed cooler and I wondered if she was pissed off with me mentioning Erin and her fake tongue-talk.

  I took the blender top off and splashed a little more rum in. Maybe it would relax us.

  Charlene started organizing our plates and silverware. She spooned potato salad and a wiggling hunk of gelatinous red with suspended bits of indiscernible fruit onto each and asked if I could manage all three out to the pool deck.

  “Sure, I used to be a waitress. A lousy one but then again the plates aren’t ours.”

  Abe looked up as I set the food down. His glass sat empty and his eyes were beginning to look dopey with sun and rum.

  “More daiquiri? I just made another pitcher.” I was gone before he could answer. I didn’t want to sit alone with Abe. Though I supposed we wouldn’t be alone exactly, since Jesus clearly would be there. I giggled before I could stop myself.

  “What’s so funny?” Charlene asked, taking the container of drinks off the blender.

  “Nothing. Just my friend in school who faked the tongues. Silly.”

  “We’re all tempted to do silly things when we look for worldly acceptance rather than God’s.”

  “Do you and Abe speak in tongues?”

  “Yes, we do!” Charlene handed me the plate of chicken and we headed for poolside. “We’ve been speaking in tongues a lo-o-
ong time now.”

  Soon we were all staring at the last glow of the sun, biting off hunks of fried chicken. Charlene had said they’d been speaking in tongues about twenty-six years. I was dying for a demonstration. Erin did it once for me but we were in a bar and I couldn’t hear well over the music. I asked instead if they’d ever experienced the Toronto Blessing.

  “Funny you should mention that.” Abe gazed at his drumstick. “We first experienced it at our old church in Houston. And recently we got it in Bartle.”

  “I’ve only seen it on the news.” I’d seen a story on a church out by the airport in Toronto with an entire congregation literally rolling in the aisles, gales of laughter spewing out of each parishioner as the Holy Spirit sailed through the pews. “I heard some people felt it had no place in a church.”

  Abe reached for another bird limb. “I guess I’ve heard stories of it getting out of hand.”

  “Out of hand?”

  “People grunting and making pig noises, things like that.”

  “I think, like your friend,” Charlene suggested, “they’re trying to copy what they see and they’re not actually being blessed by God, so that’s the way it comes out.”

  Charlene asked if I had any children then confided that they had four kids, youngest eighteen. “I was a little wild before I met Abe,” she said and put her nose back into her glass.

  By the time we finished dinner, the electric lanterns around the deck had flickered on. This time all three of us went inside to replenish the blender drinks.

  I used their bathroom and came out in the midst of Charlene and Abe discussing Debbie. Debbie, Abe said, was a parolee who lived with them. She had done six years for armed robbery. He reached into his wallet and took a picture out: Debbie was pious, smiling, arms crossed over her chest. I felt obliged to comment and was about to say she had gentle eyes then stopped. They were more dead than anything.

  Debbie was their first and now they brought in a new parolee every few months.

  “Oh, we’re almost out of strawberries,” Charlene said. “How bout peach? We got a whole bag of peaches! We’ll have our dessert in a blender!” She set to cutting open fruit and tossing the pits before Abe and I could say a word.