The Notorious Pagan Jones

by Nina Berry

  “Excellent!” Thomas downed the last of his lemonade as the waiter brought them two more large glasses. “I’ll swing by around four o’clock, so that we can be sure to get there by five. I’ll see if my mother can allow Karin to stay up until we get back to the apartment. Perhaps we can be there by eight.”

  “We don’t have to stay long,” Pagan said. A tall, elfin figure weaved toward them through the crowd. “Oh, look, Bennie’s back.”

  “At least Jimmy Brennan’s not with him,” Thomas said.

  “Hello, hello, my spectacular stars!” Bennie said. “You two are the picture of youth and beauty out there on the dance floor.”

  “Thomas can cut a rug,” Pagan said. “He’s wearing me out, as you can tell from all the empty glasses of lemonade.”

  Bennie eyed her shrewdly through his thick glasses. He seemed pleased. “Would it be too much to ask you to have this dance with this old man?”

  “I’d be honored!” Pagan took his hand. The band was murmuring a hypnotic version of “Begin the Beguine,” and Bennie led her out for an easy stroll around the floor.

  “It’s good to see you out and having fun, as every young person should,” he said. “While keeping it wholesome.”

  He meant that she wasn’t drinking, of course. She could see how her being out at a dinner club might worry him, but she pretended he was talking about something else. “Oh, I think you can trust Thomas,” she said. “He’s always been the perfect gentleman.”

  Bennie gave a great cackle, throwing his head back as he shuffled her, with surprising lightness, back and around. “Yes, of course! With you he would be.”

  “What does that mean?” Pagan asked. Bennie was an odd old duck.

  “You have seen too much already in your young life, my dear. But there is even more for you to learn, I fear. Hey, that rhymes!” He spun her around, and she followed adeptly, laughing.

  The night was going far better than she’d hoped. She’d thought it would be more difficult to see so many people drinking, to watch glasses full of alcohol passing her on trays, ice clinking enticingly on every side. But dancing was even more fun when she was sober. Even Bennie seemed to have relaxed around her.

  As the song ended, Bennie put one arm expertly behind her back and dipped her with a quick, practiced move. She was giggling as he righted her, and he beamed back with fatherly pride and escorted her back toward her table.

  Jimmy Brennan materialized out of the milling throng. His pouched face was creased with some secret happiness, his tufted eyebrows lifted like devilish accent marks over his dark eyes. “Pagan, my darling, I have such a surprise for you,” he said, and gestured to someone else moving toward them through the press of bodies. “Look who I called to come join us for a drink!”

  He turned around and pulled from the press of people a good-looking young man of medium height, his thick brown hair combed back and gelled into place. He had sharp hazel eyes; a slightly crooked nose; and a wide, sweet, flexible mouth she knew all too well.

  Pagan’s fingertips went cold. She must have turned a strange color, because she was vaguely aware of Thomas taking her hand and saying, “Are you all right?”

  The young man stopped in his tracks when he saw her, face slackening with surprise, with loss, with longing. He swallowed hard. “Hello, Pigeon.”

  “Hello, Nicky,” Pagan said.

  In spite of the growing mass of diners, dancers, and gawkers pressing in from every side, regardless of Thomas looming helpfully by her side, Jimmy Brennan smirking on the fringe, and Bennie’s look of alarm, the world had narrowed down to the empty corridor of space between Pagan and Nicky.

  He’d lost some weight. His cheeks were more hollow than she remembered, his once-beefy shoulders leaner, his waist narrower in a tight black Oleg Cassini tuxedo. The thick brown hair, however much gel he used, still threatened to break loose over his forehead, dark eyebrows like commas over his heavy-lidded eyes, He had a strong, once-broken nose and a sensuously full lower lip she could well remember nibbling on. It was a friendly face, open, casual, and usually so at ease. Every inch of him was like coming home.

  Only he wasn’t hers to come home to. Not anymore.

  “How are you?” he asked, and looked over his shoulder nervously. “It’s good to see you.”

  A lie. And yet, she hadn’t imagined that look of desire in his eyes when he had first seen her.

  “I’m great,” Pagan said automatically. “How—”

  A tall blonde woman in a powder-blue Empire-waist gown squeezed past Jimmy Brennan and took Nicky’s arm, glancing around with a smile until her eyes, pale blue like the dress, stopped on Pagan. Her happy expression suspended, like an unanswered question, over the halted conversation.

  “My wife, Donna Raven,” Nicky said into the silence. “Donna, you know Bennie Wexler, of course. And this is Pagan Jones. I’m sorry, I don’t know this gentleman.” He nodded toward Thomas.

  “Thomas Kruger,” Pagan blurted out, slipping her arm into the crook of Thomas’s elbow for support. So this was Donna. She was more lushly fleshed out than Pagan, with opulent cleavage, a heart-shaped face and plump lips shining in their glossy red paint.

  “I apologize for not introducing him sooner,” Pagan continued, forcing herself to smile and skating her gaze over Nicky’s face, over the pair of them, over the drink in Nicky’s hand, over the shiny diamond and narrow gold band on Donna’s ring finger. “Thomas is my costar in Bennie’s movie, and quite a celebrity here in Europe.”

  “Glad to meet you,” Thomas said, holding out his hand.

  After a brief hesitation, Nicky shook it, eyes darting back and forth between Thomas and Pagan. Bennie also greeted him, and to break the tension, turned to Donna, taking her gloved hand in his.

  “Donna, my dear. We weren’t expecting you, but how nice,” Bennie said, casting a brief glare at Jimmy. “You’re glowing.”

  “We flew in from Paris yesterday,” Donna said. Her voice was higher than Pagan’s, more girlish, but sweet. “Never thought we’d run into people we know.” She managed a smile that wasn’t sour, but Pagan could see she wasn’t thrilled to be standing in front of her husband’s ex. That made two of them. “On Monday we head off to Venice, then Rome.”

  “Gotta pay homage to the family homeland,” Nicky said. “Might visit my cousins in Naples.”

  An awkward pause developed. Pagan reached deep, trying to find something to say that would be completely innocuous, something to show that she didn’t give a fig about how happy they were, how married they were…

  “So you must be the lucky girl who got my role in Bennie’s movie,” Donna said, turning her fixed smile on Pagan. “I hope you’re having fun.”

  It took a moment for the sense of her words to sink in.

  Jerry Allenberg had said the actress up for the role of Violet in Neither Here Nor There had to be replaced because she got pregnant. Pagan’s eyes lowered to Donna’s gown, belted with a sequined band under her bust, skating over the slightest swell of her stomach to the floor.

  Pagan swayed. The girl was pregnant. By Nicky.

  Thomas steadied her, his head dipping low to look at her face with concern. But she wasn’t going to faint or make excuses now. She was going to show them that she was doing great, better than ever. That she was happy for them even, that she didn’t give a damn.

  “I am very lucky,” she said, her voice lilting in a good approximation of happiness. “And may I offer you both—” she couldn’t help meeting Nicky’s anxious gaze; the knuckles holding his glass were white “—my hearty congratulations.”

  Nicky dipped his head in acknowledgment as Donna leaned into him possessively. “We have so much to be grateful for,” she said.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the band leader’s voice broke through the awkwardness in English with a clipped
German accent. “We have a genuine recording star visiting us here tonight. Please give a warm round of applause for Nicky Raven!”

  The spotlight swiveled from the band leader to pick Nicky out of the throng, glinting off Donna’s blue sequins. Nicky, caught off guard, jerked his eyes off Pagan and plastered a big smile on his face as the audience clapped.

  “I know it’s a bit much to ask a man on his honeymoon to work, but, Nicky—is there any chance you’ll grace us with a song?”

  The ovation escalated to cheering, and people seated at tables stood up, nodding and smiling. Nicky shook his head, putting up a hand in protest to the band leader, as if to say, don’t let me interrupt.

  The volume of the clapping increased. Men whistled. Nicky ducked his head modestly. Pagan had watched him in concert from backstage, heard the girls swooning, but she’d never seen an adult crowd so enthusiastic about him. He must have become even more popular since she’d gone to reform school.

  “How about this?” the band leader said, swinging his baton in a gentle rhythm. “We’ll start to play “The Fairest Stars,” and see what happens…”

  As the violin and cello sang out the first phrases of a song Pagan didn’t recognize, cheers swelled so loudly they briefly blotted out the music. People all around Nicky were waving him up toward the stage, patting him on the back, shouting encouragement. Nicky bent his head, saying something low to Donna, who smiled permission. So he gave her back her arm, bowing, and half ran up to the bandstand steps, slowing as the female vocalist curtsied and handed him the microphone.

  “Thanks, everybody,” Nicky said in his smooth, performer’s voice. “It’s an honor to be here, in this beautiful city, with all of you.”

  Applause rose around her as Pagan, unsteady, moved to get out, to leave, but her knees were weak, and Thomas misinterpreted her movements and pulled out her chair. She sank into it, and clutched her glass, still half-full of lemonade, like a ward against evil.

  Jimmy Brennan was leading Donna back to her table with care. As she walked, her dress flowed against her body, and Pagan couldn’t help staring again at the convex curve of her belly. The girl was pregnant. She was having Nicky’s baby.

  An unworthy thought came to her. Was that why Nicky had married her? What if they’d had to get married because of the pregnancy?

  The music swelled, then dipped in volume to allow the singer to step in. “I am too bold,” Nicky sang, his round baritone cozy but grand, confident yet intimate. “’Tis not to me she speaks.”

  Pagan hadn’t heard the song before, but she knew the lyrics instantly. On their first date alone together at the Brown Derby, Nicky had quoted Romeo’s speech to Pagan while he stood under Juliet’s balcony. She’d told him it sounded like a song. He’d started singing it to her then and there, improvising, and here he was, sixteen months later, with a swinging hit. It was typical Nicky, an almost-radical interpretation of something classical that instantly became a classic itself.

  It had once been their intimate little secret. Now it belonged to the world.

  It all came swooping back to Pagan, the powdery smell of Nicky’s pomade mixing with his own musky scent, the opulent zest of his voice, the tiny rhythmic movements of his hands and his shoulders as he sang. After the first concert she’d attended with him, he’d come offstage, stooped, and wrapped his arms around her thighs to pick her up off the ground. Her head had been higher than his, forearms resting on his shoulders, and he’d buried his face between her breasts, breath warm on her skin.

  It had shocked and thrilled her; they’d only kissed once before that, but Nicky wasn’t one to wait for proprieties, to follow the usual steps. Nicky lived for now, now, now, damn it. It had been exhilarating. That was why he’d run up onstage now, during his honeymoon. He really believed that tomorrow he might not be alive to do it.

  The song ramped up to a crescendo, and Nicky’s voice soared over the rapt men and women in their summer finery, cigarettes smoldering forgotten between their fingers, hands entwined under the table.

  Pagan applauded briefly with everyone else and took a long drink of her lemonade. Thomas’s green eyes were dark with concern. “I’m all right,” she said. “It was a bit of a shock.” She laughed at her own understatement. “But I’m okay.”

  Thomas put his hand over hers. “Would you like me to take you somewhere else? I know a wonderful little club where no one famous ever goes.”

  Thank God for Thomas. Devin Black, wherever the hell he was, not looking out for her, could whistle up a rope wondering where she’d gone.

  “You know what?” she said. “That would be great.” She put her glass down. “Just let me powder my nose, and we’ll go.”

  He smiled. “I’ll be here.”

  The band was starting up another song, something in 4/4 time with a slow shuffle beat. Pagan turned her back to the bandstand, grabbed her purse, and began to wind her way toward the vestibule near the elevator, where the restrooms were located.

  “This is a new hit song from a wonderful singer named Patsy Cline, back in my home country,” Nicky said into the microphone. “It’s called ‘I Fall to Pieces.’”

  Pagan kept going as Nicky launched his baritone into a torchy country song she hadn’t heard. Around her, people were standing to see Nicky better, swaying to the beat. A few couples were dancing in small circles right next to their tables, arms draped dreamily around each other’s necks. That was the kind of impact Nicky’s singing always had, a hypnotic excuse to act like you were the only two people in the universe.

  Pagan neared the maître d’s podium as the lyrics began to sink in. The singer’s lover didn’t want them to be together, yet the singer didn’t understand it. He still fell to pieces every time he saw her.

  Pagan stopped walking. As Nicky sang about how he couldn’t act as if they’d never kissed, she turned slowly around, heart beating hard against her ribs. It couldn’t be a coincidence he’d chosen to sing this song here and now.

  Across the rooftop under the cloudy skies, over the heads of all the other listeners, Pagan’s eyes met Nicky’s. He was staring right at her. His wife in her pregnant powder blue was at a table off to his right. But Nicky’s gaze was fixed on Pagan as he sang about how when he went out with someone new, he’d still fall to pieces when she walked by.

  Pagan was pinned in place. The love that Nicky had always had for her was blazing out of him.

  And she… She loved him still. She always would.

  The song came to its sad conclusion, and the room erupted in applause again. “Thank you,” Nicky said, handing the microphone off to the female vocalist and bowing once more to the audience.

  Pagan put her head down and made it down the stairs and into the ladies’ room. There weren’t many women in there, thanks to Nicky’s serenade, and she quickly checked her makeup in the plush front lounge area after washing her hands, refreshing the lipstick and repowdering her nose. Her hair had gotten a little wild, but the way it curled around her forehead wasn’t awful, so she let it stay. Who gave a hoot how her hair looked? Nicky still loved her.

  It felt so good to know it was true. She wasn’t just telling herself lies to feel better. But what did it mean? Maybe she should stay after all. Except—oh, God, Nicky was married. What was wrong with her?

  She emerged from the ladies’ room, not sure what to do, when someone lurking near the cloakroom put a hand on her arm and pulled her against him and into the dark forest of hangers, wool, and fur.

  Instinctively, she twisted her arm against the grip and tore herself free, inhaling deeply, getting ready to scream.

  “Pigeon, it’s me!” It was Nicky’s voice. In the indirect light she picked out his familiar silhouette. He took a step back, his hands up. “I’m sorry. I forgot…”

  He looked down guiltily and didn’t finish his sentence.

  She
exhaled carefully, trying to leash all the emotion rising inside her. What came out was anger.

  “You forgot—what? That I’m no longer the carefree girl from last year? I was convicted of manslaughter, Nicky. I spent the past nine months in a reform school for girls, so don’t jump at me in dark corners or I might gut you with my shiv.”

  “Yeah, no,” he said, dropping his hands dejectedly. “I just see you and it’s like I’ve gone back in time to last year and all I can think about is when can I take you out again.”

  “Take me out again?” She stood up on her toes in disbelief. “All I can think about is how my entire family is dead and my boyfriend never returned my calls.”

  “I’m so sorry, Pidge.” Nicky had both hands in his pants pockets, shoulders stooped. She could see the pain in his posture. “That’s really why I’m here. To tell you how sorry I am. I failed you. I know. But if I’d known you were going to get sober, get your life back like this, I never would have ended it at all. I would’ve waited for you.”

  “If you had known…” She broke off, helpless. He must be muddled from seeing her. He couldn’t be that blind. “You never even gave me a chance!”

  “I know.” He nodded. “I should have. But the truth is—I can’t stop thinking about you.”

  Pagan stared at him. She wanted to throw her arms around his neck and kiss him. She wanted to sock him in the jaw. “I never stopped loving you, Nicky.”

  Nicky lurched forward, hands reaching, but she stepped back, fending him off.

  “I never stopped dreaming I’d see you in court or that you’d come by on visitors day in the reform school—­something, anything! But you ran away from me the second my life went bad. You couldn’t even be bothered to say goodbye. My father and sister are dead, Nick, and you didn’t even send me a stupid sympathy card.” Her eyes filled, but she would not cry, damn it. “That’s not love!”