"One day my friend didn't get to the market, or something went wrong, whatever, they didn't buy fresh meat. It was like from yesterday, but who cares, right? The customer comes in for his filet. When it's served, instead of taking a bite, he immediately bends over and sniffs it. Then he cuts a tiny piece, tastes it, and puts down his silver. 'This meat isn't fresh.' Calls for the bill and walks out. They never see him again. My grandmother used to say, 'Love and eggs must be fresh to be enjoyed.' What I can't understand is why they didn't just tell the man the steak isn't fresh today – have something else."
"Come on, Veronica, you don't lie at all?"
She emptied her drink. " 'It's easy to believe in yourself when you're lying, because you're talking about someone else.' You wrote that. I have it stuck above my desk."
I put up both hands in surrender. "But writers are notorious liars. You have to be."
"Could I ask you not to lie to me? I promise I can take a punch. You don't have to impress me because I already am. I like what you look like, and I swear to God it doesn't matter to me if you were on the varsity football team or know aikido."
"What if I tell you I was married three times and all my exwives think I'm a dog?"
"I knew about the wives because I read all the articles I could find about you. I don't care about them because they're them and I'm different. Give me a chance and I'll show you."
"Boy, you really take it to the hoop, don't you?"
"The day we met, at your book signing? I was dying to talk to you. But when we did, I chickened out. I wanted to tell you . . . No, I can't do it even now. I'm afraid."
"What about the truth you were talking about?"
"Okay. I guess there's no difference between chickening out and lying. I want to go out with you, I want to be with you."
"No boyfriend?"
"No boyfriend. No AIDS. I'm not a feminist and I'm not promiscuous, but sitting here with you this close, I just want to kiss your mouth for a long time."
She sang in her sleep. It was only one of a number of unanticipated discoveries I was to make that eventful night. We went back to her apartment, but everything happened so fast after we got there that I forgot to look around the place to see how she lived.
We walked in the door, she kicked it shut with her foot – boom! – and took me straight into the bedroom. No matter how much experience you've had, no matter how cool or worldly you think you are, nothing prepares you for a woman who leads you into the bedroom two seconds after you've entered her apartment on the first date. I felt twelve again and as innocent as a member of the Mickey Mouse Club. She took off her clothes first while staring at me the whole time. Shoes first in the most impossibly erotic way I had ever seen. Then the white shirt fell open more and more as she undid the buttons until there were none left. She hitched her shoulders and it fell off. No bra. Breasts worth fighting a war for.
A thick silver belt buckle that she unhitched with a couple of quick movements of her hand – right, left, open. The khakis were open as quickly and then that sound any man will remember when he's old and horizontal and gasping for his last breath – the hiss of a zipper going down. Black panties. Off.
"Come here."
I'd been sitting on the bed but stood quickly and went over to her. She wouldn't let me touch her until she'd undressed me. "Not yet. Enjoy no for a few minutes."
Unlike her own strip, she undid the buttons on my shirt very slowly, stopping frequently to look at me and smile. I could smell her hair. It was some innocent child's shampoo. She had broad shoulders but her arms were thin and denned.
When my shirt was on the floor, she ran her fingertips across my chest, shoulders, down my arms and across my hands. She came in close and her hands went up my back. When I bent to kiss her, she shook her head no and turned away, although her hands continued to move.
"Veronica?"
Her hands stopped and she pulled back.
"I don't have a condom."
She bent down, reached into the pocket of her trousers and brought out a handful.
"How could you know?" I tried to sound lighthearted and skeptical in one.
"I didn't. I hoped."
Although my novels are much too full of sleazy sex, I won't even attempt to describe what it was like to sleep with Veronica Lake. Translating sex into words is not meant to be. Sure, you can whip up all sorts of steam and whipped cream for dummies by verbally throwing body parts together, but it's so far from the real thing that it's like saying a picture postcard looks like the place itself.
Much of what she knew and did I had experienced before, but what thrilled me was the combination of her fluidity and ardor. Like being out on the floor with a superb dancer who knew every step, never wanted to sit down and made you feel like you were Fred Astaire.
I don't know when we fell asleep but I awoke in the middle of the night with her hair across my throat and a quiet, sleepy voice somewhere nearby singing Billy Joel's "Uptown Girl." At first I thought we'd left the radio on, but then remembered there had been no radio on. Then through the cobwebs of sleep I thought it came from out on the street until I realized the singing was too close. I pushed the hair off my face and turned toward the woman I'd fallen asleep next to.
"Veronica?"
"Uptown Girl . . ."
"Veronica?"
"You've been livin' . . ."
"Veronica?"
Her head was turned away from me. It came slowly around. "Hi," in that same sweet singing voice.
"You sing in your sleep!"
"I know."
"You were singing 'Uptown Girl'!"
"Press my nose and the song'll change. Kiss me?"
In the morning I woke before her and had a chance to look around. Her apartment and the things in it kept saying the word shipshape to me. It was tidy but not obsessively clean. There were a few hairpins and women's things lying around the bathroom, some dirty cups in the kitchen sink. Despite that, there was an overall pleasing neatness and order to the place. There was only a bedroom and a living room that doubled as her study. The nicest thing about the apartment was sun, which came through the windows making everything feel more airy.
Writers are inveterate snoops and these are some of the other things I noticed about my new lover's home. She read mostly books on film, some history, poetry and biographies of artists. The furniture was cozy rather than sleek and her living room was full of exotic cut flowers in vases of wildly different colors and sizes.
What was most interesting was an unfinished letter that had been left on her desk. I glanced at it, then looked again because the handwriting was magnificent. If I hadn't known it was hers, I would have thought a man had written it. Each letter was bold and perfectly vertical, extremely distinctive and artistic. Nearby was a fountain pen. Very large, it was a luminous blue with gold cap. I carefully picked it up.
"Isn't it a beauty?"
"I love fountain pens."
She came over and leaned her chin on my shoulder. "Are you looking around? That's what I like to do too after I've spent a night with someone. See them through where they live. What conclusion did you reach? Don't lie."
I put the pen down and kissed her temple. "Shipshape. Everything is right where it should be. You'd make a good sailor."
"Fair enough. And what about my things? Do you get a read from them?"
"Let's see. You like bundles of color, yet none of your flowers are alive. Which says you're not into high maintenance. Biographies of mostly maniac geniuses, but your apartment says you're orderly. Books on how great films were made and how things are designed. Let me guess – you're an Aquarius?"
"Nope. Virgo."
"Veronica, one of my wives was a Virgo. You are not a Virgo. Virgos don't make love like you do. They make fists and look at the ceiling."
She yawned and stretched languorously. When she was done, she brought those long arms down around me. Her breath was stale and warm and I wanted to kiss her.
"I make love the way I
am, not because I'm a Virgo."
The next time I went back to Crane's View, Cassandra came along. It was the week before school started and she was supremely cranky about having to go back to the grind for another year. When I suggested we spend a day in my hometown she lightened up and agreed to go on the condition I didn't regale her with stories of my glorious good old days. I said that was no problem because I didn't have many of them back then. I was a good enough student, I had some unmemorable experiences, I watched too much television.
"Okay, Mr. Happy Days, so what is your greatest memory of high school?"
"I guess finding Pauline Ostrova."
"Dad, that's not a memory, it's a horror. I mean normal stuff. You know, like the prom or the homecoming game."
"Being in love. Learning how to be in love. One day girls went from just being there to being the center of everything."
"When did it happen with you?"
I lifted a hand off the steering wheel and turned it palm up. "I don't really remember. I just know I walked into school one day and everything was different. There were all these swirling skirts and bosoms and beautiful smiles."
She rolled down the window. The wind whipped her hair across her face. "You know what I think sometimes? When I'm really sad or depressed, I think he's out there somewhere and sooner or later we'll meet.
"Then I wonder, what's he doing this minute? Does he ever think the same thing? Does he ever wonder what I'm like or where I am? He's probably reading Playboy and dreaming of boobs."
I thought about that a moment and had to agree. "Boys do tend to do that. Judging from my own experience, he's either already somewhere in your life but hasn't materialized in your thoughts yet. Like people when they're beaming up in Star Trek? You know, when they're halfway there but still look like club-soda bubbles? Or else he's in Mali or Breslau and you won't see him for a while. But you can be sure no matter where he is, he thinks about you a lot."
She shrugged. "Speaking of such things, what's with your new girlfriend?"
"I don't know yet. She's still in a fuzzy pink frame for me."
"What does that mean?" Cass put her bare feet up on the dashboard.
"It means she's still too much of a sweetie pie for me to have any perspective on the situation. Everything she does is adorable."
"What's her name again, Greta Garbo?"
"Don't be a wise guy; you know her name – Veronica Lake."
"When do I get to meet her?"
"The next time I come into the city and can wrest you away from your mother. We're all going to have dinner together."
We stopped for lunch at Scrappy's Diner and surprisingly Donna the waitress remembered me from the last visit. She asked if I had gone to see her uncle Frannie yet. I said today was the day. She looked at Cass curiously so I introduced them.
"Donna, this is my daughter Cassandra. Donna's uncle is Frannie McCabe."
Cass whistled loudly, thoroughly impressed. "Frannie McCabe is my father's hero. Every bad guy in every book he ever wrote has some of Frannie in him."
Donna giggled and asked if I would like her to call the station to see if he was in. I said sure. She went off and was back in five minutes. "He remembered you! He says to come down."
Half an hour later we walked through the door of the Crane's View police station. I found myself unconsciously shaking my head. "The last time I was in here, a whole bunch of us were dragged in for fighting at a football game."
A young policeman passed on his way out and gave Cass an appreciative look. The dad in me clenched but I kept moving. Just inside the door a woman in uniform sat at a desk. I asked if we could speak to the chief. After asking my name, she picked up a phone and called. A moment later the door behind her opened. A gaunt man in an expensive dark suit emerged wearing a smile I'd know a thousand years from now.
"Fuckin'-a, it's Bayer aspirin! I just want to know one thing – you got cigarettes?"
"Frannie!"
We shook hands a long time while staring at each other, checking the wrinkles, the signs, the years across each other's faces.
"You aren't dressed too sharp for a famous author. That last book of yours – I laughed so loud at the end, I got a sore throat."
"It was supposed to be sad!"
He took hold of my chin and squeezed it. "Our bestseller. Sammy Bayer on the New York Times bestseller list. You can't imagine how happy I was when I saw your name there the first time."
His hair was brushed back and gelled into place, GQ magazine style. His rep tie was elegant and understated; the shirt as smooth and white as fresh milk. He looked either like a successful stockbroker or a professional basketball coach. The same crazy energy I remembered so well glowed on him, but his face was extremely pale and there were deep blue circles under his eyes. It looked like he was halfway through recuperating from a serious illness.
"Who's this?"
"My daughter Cassandra."
He put out a hand to shake, but Cass surprised both of us by stepping forward and embracing him. He looked at me over her shoulder and smiled. "Hey, what's this?"
She took a step back. "I know you already. I've been hearing stories about you since I was a baby."
"Really?" He was embarrassed and very pleased. "What'd your dad say about me?"
"I know about the Coke-bottle bombs, the VFW Hall, Anthony Scaro's Chevelle –"
"Whoa! Come on into my office before you get me arrested."
The office was huge and bare of anything but a big scarred desk and two chairs facing it.
"It looks exactly the same as it did twenty years ago!"
Sitting on the other side of the desk, Frannie looked over his shoulder at the room. "I took the Rembrandt down so you'd feel at home. How many times did they have us in here, Sam?"
"You more than me, chief. They should have put up a memorial plaque for you in here."
"I got tired of sitting on your side of the desk and havin' someone hit me on the head with the Yellow Pages. I thought I'd take over and get to do the hitting."
My daughter the pacifist stiffened. "Do you really do that? Hit people with telephone books?"
"Nah, Cassandra, the good old days are over. Now they make us use psychology. But now and then if they get fresh we sneak in and poke 'em with an electric cattle prod."
As I so well remembered, his face gave away nothing. All innocent calm and empty, that perfected poker face had gotten him out of a lot of trouble twenty-five years before.
"Tell her you're joking, Frannie."
"I'm joking, Cass. So, Mr. Bayer Aspirin, how come you've graced us with your presence after two decades?"
"Before we get into that, tell me how in God's name you ended up chief of police? I was sure you'd be –"
"In jail? Thank you. That's what everyone says. I didn't have a religious conversion, if that's what you're worried about. Better – I went to Vietnam. Things happened. Good guys died but I didn't. You remember Andy Eldritch? He was eating a can of Bumble Bee tuna his mom had sent and then suddenly he was dead two feet away from me. I'd just asked him if I could have a bite. Things like that. I got pissed off. Life couldn't be that worthless, you know? When I got out, I went to Macalester College in St. Paul and got a B.S. Then, I don't know, I became a cop. It made sense."
"Are you married?"
"Was, but no more. Now I'm single as a thumb."
"Dad's been married three times."
Frannie opened a desk drawer and took out a pack of Marlboros. "Doesn't surprise me. Your dad was always odder than a Brussels sprout. I guess he still is."
"You can say that again. Now he's dating a woman named Veronica Lake."
"Isn't she dead? Well, it takes all kinds."
"Fuck you, Frannie. Listen, remember Pauline Ostrova?"
"Sure, you pulled her out of the river. The day we all grew up."
"You remember everything about that day?"
"Damn right I do, Sam! How many people get murdered in this burg?"
"Two, as long as I've been on the force. That's seventeen years. Both marital things. Very pathetic and uninteresting."
"Who did it? Who killed Pauline?"
"Who do they say did it, or who did it?" He lit a cigarette and closed his lighter with a hard snap.
Cass and I looked at each other and waited for him to continue. He didn't.
Smiling, he wiggled his eyebrows. "I should have been an actor. How's that for dramatic tension? I think they should cast Andy Garcia as me in the movie.
"The best part of being chief of police is I get to look in all the old files and see what really went on here when we were kids. There's still a file on you, Sam. Now that you're famous, you think I could get some money telling the world you were once half a juvenile delinquent?"
"Frannie, what about Pauline?"
"The case was open-and-shut. She had a boyfriend from college named Edward Durant. They arrested him, he confessed, they cut a deal with the prosecutor and sent him up to Sing Sing for life. He's dead."
Cass gasped.
Frannie ran a hand through his hair. "This is ugly stuff, Cassandra. You sure you want to hear it?"
She licked her lips, nodded slowly, then quickly.
"As soon as he got up there, the bad boys started using him for a fu – uh, love doll until he couldn't take it anymore and hanged himself in his cell."
"Jesus! How old was he?"
"Twenty-one. Nice-looking boy. Highest honors at Swarthmore. But he didn't do it."
"Who did?" I realized I was breathing too quickly.
"I'm not positive, but I've got my suspicions. You didn't know Pauline did you? She was from another dimension. Why do you want to know about her now?"
"Because I want to write a book about what really happened to her."
Frannie took a long drag on the cigarette and put his hand behind his head. "Interesting idea." He looked at the ceiling. "Come on, I want to show you a couple of things." He stood up and gestured for us to follow.
Kissing the Beehive Page 5
