Speak Easy

by Catherynne M. Valente

  But in the Artemisia, you could always get a nip of the good stuff. Something real: absinthe, Pernod, Lillet, Cabernet, Rhum Louisiane, however many malts would please you, gin that had once actually met a juniper tree. Al kept it coming and nobody asked how and his only rule was: share. Be warm, be innocent, open your everything, speak easy. Share.

  Robin Hood already knew that song. Share it round, Prince John’s bag, King Richard’s ransom, a mason jar of slivovitz like the plums of heaven. And round it went, round a room of shimmy and shine and cigarette girls singing soulful past two a.m. and flamingo shit on the Moroccan rug. Boy, I’da thought they’d crap pink, wouldn’t you, Dougie? Guess not, Viv, guess not. Just the kind of scene Zelda lived to die for, just the kind of room she could smell winding up before the first cocktail cocked.

  And she was there—old Robin Hood would’ve turned in his tights if Miss Z had put on cold cream and curled up with Amazing Stories and a cup of warm milk. She sauntered on in just as the jugglers got going, her bob so perfect it could’ve cut her cheekbones, wearing one of Olive’s dresses, a spangled blue cupcake that showed her thighs all the way up to her soul. She kissed Robin Hood. She kissed Maid Marian. She kissed the lady blackmailer and the prophet’s son and the piano player and the ballerina and one of the flamingos and three different poor boys who’d never see their plays on stage.

  And by ten o’clock she was lying on the sideboard, sparkling knees drawn up to her chin, salmon tarts near her head and pineapple upside-down cake near her feet, sleeping hard as that sad sack who pricked a spindle when the world was young.

  2064

  So who runs it all? Who built this cuckoo clock world ticking away the nights on 72nd St?

  Oh, darling, this is the Copper King’s Palace, his favorite daughter—and the only one who still loves him even the littlest bit.

  Caspar Anson Slake, whose Daddy never met a mountain he couldn’t suck the copper off of or a soul he couldn’t find a way to hating. Couldn’t stand children, Papa Slake, his own least and last. I heard he left his cash to Caspar because everyone pissed him off so hard and so regular he only made a will once he figured the best way to sucker punch somebody or nine on the way out. Papa S twigged to his middle son’s ambitions of running off to Switzerland to make clocks in a cave on the Matterhorn or some hogwash, while the eldest and youngest wanted to be CEOs the way folks used to want to be emperors. Fine and dandy—Caspar got the whole sandwich, along with a postscript saying if he chucked it to his brothers the Church would clean up and they’d all be left asking after soup downtown.

  The outside of the Artemisia preens with copper. Polished like a penny in a loafer. Caspar sits in his penthouse like a roosting hen, clucking over the only clock he ever set to ticking. Named it for his baby sister who went red in the face and died at seven months old rather than say one word to that family.

  His wife sits up there, too, Pearl de Agosti y Candela, this tiny 22-year old spit of a Cuban-Catalan child, the most sculpted face in New York for about a year, give or take. She’s Justice at City Hall, St. Barbara at St. John’s, Spring in a seashell in Central Park. Rumor goes her uncle’s a duke in Spain—or was it a baron in Italy? Caspar had 45 years on his ticket and a hanker for the face he saw on the statue of Temperance outside his favorite scotch-and-cockery club. The only thing he really liked about his Daddy’s money was how nobody ever said no to him anymore. You know how this song goes. Man says marry and just like the worst magic trick in the world—bang! smash!—a girl’s wearing white even though it’s never been her color.

  Girl Pearl had about a thousand sisters, all living it up better than she knew how, fucking silent film actresses and boxing and piloting airplanes just to show girls could do it, too. Sucking the world out of an egg cup while Pearl stewed in her birdcage, missing her sculptors, hating her kid, whining, puking Little Cass, who never asked to have parents who only read about love in books. Pearl was only nice to Cass on Tuesdays, for an hour, between four and five when she gave him chocolate and read to him from a big old fairy book full of stories about bad mothers.

  Don’t you hate her already? I sure do.

  All her husband’s animals made her sneeze—Mr. Slake up there started the policy on pets in Artemisia apartments. First it was a Mongolian hunting eagle by the name of Ogedei, who naturally had to have his own bedroom. Honestly, woman, do you expect a bird like that to sleep in a coop on the roof like an idiot pigeon? Then she had to suffer a couple of red foxes relaxifying on the fainting couch, and later in Little Cass’s bed. Then came the peacock and the bobcat and the baby black bear—but once Gogol the jaguar moved in, Pearl threw a fit you could hear in Harlem. The great diaspora. You know what happened to that sweet little bear. He kept growling I love you I love you back at Pearl the whole way up to the roof and she wanted to give in but she just couldn’t do it. A trombonist took in the flamingos. A raggedy lion, already paid for but not yet landed, was quietly re-routed to Caspar’s buddy Wiley Hachett down on five, where he let girls practice taming him if they asked nicely. Caspar’s three seals ended up in the lobby fountain, splashing around and barking at the buttresses. But Pearl was stuck with Ogedei, and Gogol, and the foxes, who loved Little Cass like a chicken bone. The kidlet named them Boo and Roo. Caspar plumped for Hannibal and Hasdrubal, but his boy didn’t care and couldn’t say those damn words anyhow.

  Pearl’s writing a book. Slowly, carefully, in the corners when nobody can see her, in the wee hours when nobody’s bawling for her. It’s not a good book, but it sure is fun to read. Pearl doesn’t have the knack of changing what happens to her into something brighter, wilder, thicker. She doesn’t know the trick of cutting up what really happens and stitching it together with what didn’t or couldn’t or shouldn’t happen and rat-a-tatting a selvedge edge on time so that this thing that went down when she was in pigtails sits right up flush next to the hurt she found when she was twenty. She can only call things straight and flat, as they are, in the order they ordered, no piddling around. Her protagonist is Mrs. Paige Stokes who has a husband called Carlyle and a kid named Little Ly. Her book is a house with glass walls and her the only cat inside.

  Now, that sort of style is all right in moderation, but the trouble is, Pearl was a society lady now. The Copper Queen. And the Copper Queen can’t swear, no sir. She can’t spit or get drunk or wander around her own damn flat naked or laugh too loud. Her sculptors let her do all that and loved her better when she did. Good Lord, but who doesn’t love a Minerva half-cracked on bourbon, telling dirty jokes and laughing at her own farts? Christ, she missed farting! The man who made her Temperance used to let go like a stevedore, and she’d blast right along with him. Now she has to hold it in until she’s alone and can let her tinny little society stinkers out in a locked powder room, giggling like her rear could tell jokes. So she held it in all day, the swearing, the spitting, the drinking, the farting, until she could be alone with her book and it all came whistling, bubbling, splattering out.

  Mrs. Rockaway joined Pearl de Agosti y Candela y Slake for tea every second Wednesday. On this hot-trotting subject, Mrs. S writes: Mrs. Rockaway came round for tea at 3:15 in the afternoon. She asked to see Little Cass but he thinks she smells like dead squirrels and eagle’s ass, so he wouldn’t come out of his room. Finally, my boy shows some sense. Mrs. Rockaway said her son is starting Yale in the fall. Mrs. Rockaway says Steel is King and they get richer every time they take a shit. Mrs. Rockaway is fucking her son’s long-cocked friend from the rowing squad, but she thinks I don’t know. Mrs. Rockaway is a hell-bitch with a brain like old steak and her teeth are yellow. Truthfully, she’s only here to get her biweekly booze, but Mrs. Rockaway feels obligated to me socially because Caspar crossed piss-streams with her husband sometime before the dawn of man. Additionally, she is a fat bear-cunt of a whore who knows I have smashing cakes in the icebox and wants to annex them. Nothing goes with a hippo’s serving of Canadian gin like chocolate cake. And the Yale rowing squad. Lux et ver
itas, wouldn’t you say, Mrs. R?

  Mrs. Slake looks up from her typewriter (a spectacular custom-job blood-red Underwood with mother-of-pearl keys and a carriage release that used to be part of some swish pirate flintlock Caspar had lying around like it was no big thing. Pearl treats her Underwood like a car. After all, it’s the only thing that gets her anywhere).

  The jaguar watches her from the top of an armoire that holds Caspar’s collection of Bronze Age knives. His eyes shine in the evening like tumblers of rum.

  1415

  Zelda Fair juggles four or five marriage proposals at once in a good month. See her throw them in the air, clubs, torches, plates spinning up on sword-tips, soft-shoeing it through the only dance a girl gets. She don’t say no, she don’t say yes, she just keeps on spinning ’cause if she stops…well, the plates’ll be fine and the swords, too, they’ll just keep going round and round while she falls and breaks into a million bitty pieces.

  Sorry, chiclet. I did that dance, too, and it’s a pile of shit on the bill, a pile of shit when the curtain goes up, and a pile of shit when it goes down. Shit is the one thing in this world that’ll never leave your side.

  Lucky Zelda’s Daddy was a judge. A regular Rhadamanthus of the great American Delta. And her mother was Minerva Fair, who wanted to be an actress but the world said nope, be a lady instead, and she said no thank you please, and there ain’t nothing like a goddess disappointed to teach a girl how to wait and how to choose.

  Let’s look at the boys wrapped up under Miss Z’s Christmas tree this year! Bows and bangles and spangles and ribbons—Santa himself got blinded by the gleam! In 1415, there’s Thomas Germain, who never met an oil rig that didn’t wanna curl up at his feet like an Airedale. Tommy Dear makes promises like little boys make mudpies. The stage, the screen, the page, the cradle. All she has to do is cough and an ermine cape appears. If she catches a cold, she catches sapphires. Rich men are magicians, and that’s the very end. They think everyone else is a magician, too, which is why Thomas turns Zelda’s laugh into a pre-nup and her any-old-Tuesday Charleston into a baby already born and snoozing.

  In Room 1940, Josiah Shadduck pines like a Canadian forest. His grandaddy knew the Yukon in a Biblical way and every kitten in the Shadduck basket gets a little gold nugget put under their tongue at their Christening so they won’t forget the taste of money. Josie looks like a gold mine: big and rosy and stubborn and just as much filth as the good stuff. He thinks Zelda is the water who’ll run through him and leave him clean. She never wears his gold necklaces, not even the tiara with a pink diamond shaped like a wildflower stuck in it. She keeps his loot in a box under her bed. A girl who knows every other day’s a rainy one stocks up on slickers.

  In 988, William Hessen-Hyde bides his time. He’s almost a Duke and when his uncle kicks it he’ll be all of one. Girls like Dukes, he’s been assured by the whole wide world. All he has to do is sit still and be a Duke and Zelda will weigh Duchessing heavier than any little glass another beau can toss her way. Billy hedges his bets, though. He’s gonna have to high-tail it back to Germany to get in on that Duke game, and he knows he’s gotta sweeten the pot for a New York girl. Gave our Zelda a ruby brooch: a rooster snacking on the crest of his house. And he’s promised her a forest all her own, with a damn good lake inside. She can’t wear it socially, but it can wear her. Just as soon as death makes an honest man of him. He’s made himself a little vow—not a drop of booze until he can put her name on those trees.

  “I wish I had half your boys,” Olive Bay says while she stretches her hamstrings on the sideboard in Room 1550.

  Zelda and Oleander and Opal play poker. They deal in their pelican Mr. Puss-Boots, who interferes with the cards but can’t get the hang of betting. Zelda lays down a Jack for the house.

  “You don’t,” she says.

  “I could stand being a Duchess,” Opal opines. “All the silk I could stitch. And cakes for tea every damn day of the week.”

  Zelda lays down a three of hearts. “Tommy said he’d make me a star.”

  “Isn’t that what you want?” asks Olive Bay, bluffing for everything.

  “I said: what if I’m not any good? And he said: who cares?”

  “That bastard,” Ollie says, and she’s not making fun. They all know. Who cares is them, all of them. They care so much.

  “I’m gonna be good at something besides marrying, darlings. Besides, I don’t want them. I don’t even wanna screw them, how am I gonna marry them?”

  Mr. Puss-Boots puts his feathered head on her knee. He hasn’t got anything to offer. But he’d bring her fish and guard her eggs if she gave him half a chance.

  Then there’s Frankie Key, of course. Down on two. But Zelda doesn’t know about him yet.

  212

  Second floor: staff digs. Six to a suite unless you’re management, but a suite’s a suite. Nobody does much but sleep down on two anyhow. You don’t get to kick up your feet with a pipe and a British novel round these parts. Bellhops hit duty like a punching bag at 3 a.m. Concierges swap out like the royal guard at noon and midnight, front desk girls in lipstick and victory rolls run nine-hour shifts of flash-teeth-when-you-smiles and and-your-key-sirs. Kitchens never do close, and cleaning never does stop. Uniforms so green you’d swear they were grown in a Swiss meadow hang like six smart ghosts in each parlor, brass buttons polished, caps jaunty even without a head to hold them up or a hand to tip them.

  Frankie Key is an egg-hop by day and a pneumatic boy by night. He shares 212 with a pair of twins out of Texas everyone calls Nickel and Dime, a Vermont college boy name of Murray Keen, a preacher’s son born under the sorry name of Hallelujah Barnes, though he’s shortened that up to Hal now, and Enzo Bacchi, a painter from some nothing town in the Swiss Alps who covers every hidden surface of the room with miniature cosmic ragtime parades, goblins and gargoyles and gamines and gallants dancing under the lip of every windowsill, the ledge of every counter-top, the under-slats of all six beds, the back of the medicine cabinet, even the inside of the broken faucet in the kitchen, wherever the boss-men won’t see it when they come on inspection. Room 212 has a secret Hieronymus shindig shaking down all over itself, and sometimes her boys lie flat on the parlor floor, six heads spread in a star, looking up at the underside of Enzo’s heart.

  All those sweet boys used to work as caddies on some rich man’s great huge lawn, so that’s what most everyone called them. Those Caddies, ain’t they swell?

  Now, Frankie, he was born in Minnesota but mostly got to walking and talking in Buffalo, that upstate snow-show with barely a canal and a train-line to rub together. Some eighth of a cousin of his wrote a song you probably know. Daddy was a pharmaceutical man, selling Well-Being door to door. Mama was a greengrocer’s daughter with moles on her middle knuckles, all ten of them, like little pinpricks for marionette strings. Sent their boy to Catholic school to learn what boys learn there, which is mostly how not to be a Catholic ever again. Missed the war by a hair—Armistice did her cannonball splash while Frankie was learning how to march and salute and un-rifle, then re-rifle, then un-rifle a rifle in some swamp in Alabama. The war he didn’t fight sticks on him like shit on a shoe. He can still smell it, even though nobody else can, even though his sole is clean.

  Frankie, he loved his green-hand Mama like the rest of us loved Kentucky rye, and that’s the truth. Every Friday he put a little lavender envelope into the gloved hand of Mr. Raspail F. Bayeux, head Concierge, stamped for Buffalo with love. She did love purple, Mrs. Key. These days you and I and anybody would pay all our little pennies for one of those envelopes, for his sharp, bright, sly paragraphs of mother-love and city-woes. But Buffalo takes no prisoners.

  So let’s all be Frankie for a spell. Up we go at the crack of better-dead-than-out-of-bed, two hours sleep if it was a minute, one leg into our billiard-green trousers, then the other. Shirt, coat, hat-strap tight under our chin, gloves, shoes slicker than glass. Into the lift, screen shut tight, and up, up, up through all the s
leeping continents of the world inside the Artemisia, the only world that counts. Up, darling, always up. The soul of Frankie Key points up and its the only direction that seems friendly. Down’ll getcha if you get sleepy and happy with what you got. So up we go. Up past the Green Tabernacle restaurant on four where the day’s first bread is busy rising and the coffee-troughs are already brimming. Up past that mess on seven with the dueling pharmacists who have to give serious think-space every day to whether or not to shoot each other in the hall. Up past the torch-singer on ten crying through her scales. Up past the sixteenth floor, where the weird wizardry of room assignments had either fallen asleep on the job or shown up early for work, depending on your attitude. This is where the front desk dumped all the bookbinders, librarians, novelists (but not short story writers, columnists, or playwrights), editors, illustrators, and two genuine muses on tap for the convenience of all, Lily Greer, the great Vaudeville boy-dresser and scissor-swallower, and Dandelion Bruno, pretty Dandy Brute who killed a fella in St. Louis ’cause he stole a rose out of the boy’s lapel. On sixteen all the doors stand open and every parlor is choking on books. You can walk right in and borrow anything you like, sit in a nice chair and peruse yourself a fine leather volume. If you have the time. Which we do not. Up past the penthouses on twenty and onto the roof, the green dewy roof all full of chickens and goats and morning.

  Frankie likes it up here. You can see the whole city, lights still out, quiet as a church. He named the chickens after ancient queens—it’s the sort of thing Frankie likes to imagine telling folk he did when he was young, so he does it. Boudicea, Theodora, Elizabeth, Mathilda, Antoinette—but they’re all white Delawares so he can’t tell them apart anyway. Come on, Messalina, he calls the hundreds of them all together, time to send your heirs to the slaughter. And he fills up his baskets with warm brown eggs while they purr and mew and chuckle, more like kittens than the great old dinosaur-cousins they are. Enzo’ll be up to milk the goats later, and Nickel and Dime to hack of hunks of honeycomb from the hives while they sing old cowboy songs to Rutherford, who thinks, privately, that those boys can’t sing for shit. And egg-boys, more egg-boys, a dozen and more, to bring down breakfast to the little nations of the Artemisia, free of charge, golden and rich as the sun on a day nobody’s fucked up yet.