Speak Easy

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “You’re the boy with the eggs,” she says all dreamy and cool. It’s a voice she learned when she was young and learned good. A voice that doesn’t give up a damn thing. A voice that sounds bare and silly and sleepy though it’s the best armor she’s got. Zelda doesn’t let her real voice out to play anymore. It might tear her throat out. “You got any on ya?”

  “What are you doing in the bath?” He blurts, when he meant to say I came to find you because you are perfect. Frankie hasn’t got the smooth god gave a porcupine, but he meant to do better than that.

  “I’m writing a novel,” Zelda purrs. She adds in a giggle, a little dash of aren’t I just the maddest thing you ever met? You wouldn’t go thinking I’m serious, would you, darling? You wouldn’t do that to me.

  “That’s not how you write a novel.”

  “Show’s what you know, silly.”

  “Well, I do know, actually. I go for a typewriter, myself.”

  “Oh?” Zelda does this move in the tub, spinning around and turning over at the same time to come up over the lip of the thing and flash her eyes at Frankie, who has no defense against this sort of thing. Who does? The tub sparkles with green light. She sparkles, too. Zelda sparkles so good men think it’s love. “Do tell.”

  “Mostly detective stories just at the moment.” He rubs the back of his neck like some hick farmer confused over seed and before he can shut up he’s spilling it all. “Before I joined up, I pounded out a whole book. If the war was gonna get me, I figured I’d leave something behind. Something real. Something good. Trouble was, it wasn’t real or good. I’m still working on that part. The real and the good. But what I want, what I want, is to do something big. I’m gonna. I will. I’m gonna be famous. I can feel the books I might write just sitting under my ribs. Like another heart.”

  “Don’t we all, honey? That’s what I do professionally. Wait around for something big.”

  Frankie’s heart does a foxtrot on his liver. “I think you’re something big.”

  Zelda laughs her little-old-me laugh. “That’s mighty sweet of you to say. But I’m not yet. Don’t you just love Not-Yet? It’s like waiting to be born. I could be anybody yet. I could be a ballerina or a swimming champion. Or a pocketwatch. Or a Christmas pudding. Or a jackal.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “Completely, darling.” Zelda rests her chin on one dripping hand. “Jackals are really the cutest little things, did you know? It’s only that they scream so. They scream like death coming for you right quick. That’s why they’re in the Bible, acting the fool. I think I’d be a fine jackal, if I put my mind to it.”

  It was not going Frankie’s way. Talking to Zelda felt like talking to a radio. It talked back, but you couldn’t call it a conversation.

  “Don’t be cross,” she whispered, sliding into the water so only her eyes showed above the green stone tub. “I like to talk, is all. My Daddy always said a lady’s gotta sit still and hush her mouth except for please and thank you and you don’t say. But it’s not fair to do that to a girl. Talking is the most fun you can have. Clothes on, clothes off, it’s everything in the world. Don’t you think you oughta do the only thing you can manage that animals can’t just as often as possible? I suppose parrots can talk, too. But no one pays attention to a thing they say. And mostly, mostly, when I talk it’s like being a parrot. Men say oh, aren’t you clever and scratch me under my beak and give me treats. So I talk nonsense quite a little bit. Because it’s fun. And they don’t pay any attention anyhow. Only it’s not really nonsense. It wouldn’t be nonsense, if you knew me extra well.”

  I am here to tell you Frankie Key is a lost cause from here on out. If he ever had a hope of getting out of her alive, it circled the drain of that big green tub and slurped its way down to hell.

  “What’s your book about?” he said softly.

  Zelda Fair rolled back in the tub, water breaking over her tummy, rolling down her throat. She called him with one crooked finger and the boy in the silver meringue suit skedaddled over on the quick. She crooked her finger again. He bent down. The reek of gin snaked up his nose—she was swimming in the booze supply. Her pearly dress stuck like an oil slick to her breasts; the drying liquor on her shoulders made her skin prickle.

  And then Frankie clued in. From where Zelda was pulling her gin-nymph routine, the acousticals of that pink washroom and the cracked door and the room outside wrestled all together into a weird pool of voices. From where Zelda was bathing, she could hear every word, even whispers, that the party coughed up.

  Zelda touched the fennel flower in his buttonhole. She didn’t kiss him, though, even though she liked kissing almost as much as talking. Her Mama once said not to kiss anybody you’d told a secret to. It wasn’t safe. “If you stick around long enough,” she whispered instead, “every night turns into a book. All you gotta do is stick it on a page.” A trumpet blurted out something rude in the world outside the pink washroom. “What’s yours about?”

  Frankie took on a shaky breath. “Things I can’t have.”

  “Mine, too.”

  1552

  Nobody lives in 1552. Vacancies do happen, even here.

  Oh, it won’t last. By the party at Robin Hood’s pad three flautists from the Philharmonic will have gone in on the place together, pinned up sheet music for wallpaper and liplinered their embouchures with Chanel No. Harlot in the round bathroom mirror. And back around Halloween the short stop for the Yankees called 1552 home and hearth. Poor fella lived in terror of being alone, but got so tongue-tied around the dames that all he could spit out was his own statistics. Miss Georgie knew the shortie plenty well. Every night he called down for Red Riding Hood, Jorinda, Vasilisa, even the odd Momotaro when he felt really out of sorts. It ain’t home when it’s just the one of me, he explained every time, and home was where he hung his dick.

  Folks’ve done worse to feel safe.

  But he got himself traded out to Cleveland and now 1552 has that embarrassed, hangdog look empty flats get, like you seen ’em naked and they don’t even know where they lost their clothes to so you’re both stuck with looking. This works out for Zelda and her Keychain Knight. Harold Kolburcher can slide that lock as easy as eating. I gotta see, he told Zelda. I gotta see what’s on the other side. Won’t be a tick.

  But there’s nothing on the other side. Nothing on the dining room wall where Zelda’s closet wall shimmies 1550 up against 1552, where the little sudden door in her closet should open up and say how-do to the ball-player’s supper-tray. Smooth, flat drywall, paisley wallpaper, the solid, happy sound of studs where Harold knocks on the wall like somebody in there’s gonna answer.

  Back over to Zelda Fair sitting cross-legged in her wardrobe, sallow deva floating on a sequin cloud, dresses, both hers and belonging to the O’s, thrown everywhere, in baskets, saladbowls, and bunched up on a footstool where she perches, staring at the door in the wall like she’s done every day she wasn’t fixing stoves since turkey and stuffing ruled the table. Mr. Puss-Boots roosted next to her, balled up tight, his big bill on her knee, half-asleep.

  The door’s different now. It’s gone purple, like it got bruised. There’s grapes and oak leaves and seedpods carved on it. The knob is a face with closed eyes.

  “It used to be plain white,” she whispers when Harold comes back to scratch his bald spot. She starts talking before he’s all the way in the room—he jogs to catch up with her talk. “When it got here it was plain white. Brass knob, just a door like every other door in the hotel. I thought: gee, I’m dense! All this time living here and I never noticed there’s a door in the closet! But I’m not dense, Mr. K. When we moved in there wasn’t anything here but a pelican. I’d’ve seen it. When I hung up my dresses. When Ollie hung up her trousers. When Opal stacked up her fabrics in here. We’d all have seen it. There was no door, and then there was a door. That’s what happened. And you’d think—wouldn’t you think?—when something like that happens it’s because it wants you to come in. It wants you
inside it. Otherwise why bother? Just kick around Door Park or whatever and mind your own business. But it’s locked up good. Doesn’t want me, I guess.” She reached out her fingers to stroke the door. “Come on, baby. I’m nice. I promise,” she whispered. “Everybody says I’m nice.” Mr. Puss-Boots chortled softly in his sleep. Zelda never thought pelicans could sound so much like plain old chickens.

  “Well, let me at it and we’ll see what an old thief can do,” Harold sighs.

  It’s hard going with a pelican staring over your shoulder. It should have been an easy crack. These old skeleton locks, you just look at them sidewise and they cry uncle. But it won’t let go. The tumblers won’t tumble and the pins won’t pin. Sticking his pick in there is like throwing a pencil into a forest. He rubs his neck, sweating fierce.

  “Okay, Miss Z, I can bust it off its hinges or I can hack out the lock with a saw. I hate to do it that way. It’s brutish and it shows no style. But that’s what I got.”

  “No!” cried Zelda Fair, who can’t bear the thought of the door getting hurt on her fault.

  “Right. Then I can take a mold and cut a new key for it, and that’ll cost you high. But it can’t go anywhere, honey. There’s nothing on the other end. At best you’d get a little more space for your stockings out of it. I say eat your steaks and pet your bird and go about your life. Like you said. Funny things happen in the world. Probably you were too busy with your hatboxes to notice a little thing like this. Don’t you worry about paying me—I didn’t do nothing, and nothing deserves no pay. Just you take it easy. Ease up on the drink, maybe.”

  Exeunt Harold.

  Mr. Puss-Boots watches Zelda Fair in her dressing gown, frying her T-bones in an iron skillet. The fat pops; a drop burns the inside of her wrist. The pelican shakes his pouch, which is how his sort says worry. Mr. Puss-Boots loves his girls. They’re a damn sight better than the antiques hawker who’d bought him from the Bronx Zoo and pretty much just thought of him as another Chesterfield chair, then fucked off to Mexico and left him with no fish and a dry bathtub. His girls never let the bathtub stand empty. He can paddle about as much as he wanted. And they had herrings all the time.

  Zelda tosses him a chunk of beef, which isn’t as good as a herring, but what is? She sits in the window while the stars come out, eating her bloody meat, sipping at the silver flask, which turns out to be ginger ale—not the vicious bitter death-causing kind, but ginger ale like it was before ol’ Mr. Vollstead ruined everything. Soft and bubbly and sweet and beerily heavy in the blood.

  Puss-Boots shuffles his webbed feet. He is a guilty bird. He knows how to get into that door. The key showed its face before the door did. Popped up on the lip of the sink like an old toothbrush. Puss-Boots couldn’t help it. It was so shiny. It was so gold and bright. It looked like a herring. It didn’t taste like a herring, though. It tasted like a sea with no other pelicans anywhere. He’d kept it at the bottom of his pouch. Didn’t want to swallow that night, no sir. Didn’t want to give it to Zelda, either. But now she wanted it so bad and he had it and a bird heart can only hold out so long. He wished the O’s would come home. They’d drag her out to a party and when Zelda danced she was happier than a basket of eggs.

  Mr. Puss-Boots shakes his beak and in another half-second he’d have burped up his secret. But Zelda hops up from the window and makes a beeline for the closet. She has a T-bone in her hand, still stringy with meat and stuffed with marrow. She sits down on the gowns again, holding the bone in her hand like a pistol. It must be the ginger ale moving her hand for her. A girl’s hand wouldn’t do such a crazy thing.

  She sticks the bone in the lock.

  And turns it.

  And it turns.

  The little door in the closet opens inward, all smug and satisfied. Zelda looks down, down down. Down stairs turning circles into the dark.

  And then she’s gone.

  Zelda leaves the door open behind her. When you’re that excited, you can’t keep silly things like who might follow you on the brain. Mr. Puss-Boots sighs. He bites the door knob and pulls it shut behind him. Humans never clean up after themselves. The pelican takes a deep breath, puffs his feathers like a dandy on a date, opens his wings, and sails out into the great big hulking black space beyond the wall of Room 1552. His wings stretch wide as a diving champion, as wide as he can go, flapping all the way out for the first time since he came to Manhattan. Hot damn it feels good.

  It’s a long way down.

  Housekeeping

  Come on, duckies. You’ve been waiting all this time. I know. I know you. I said there was a basement right there in the beginning and you been waiting for me to get there, drumming your fingers and peeking over the pages for a little peek at something dark. Trying to see round the curtain at my little peep show before I’m ready to show you my big secret Hades-approved hell-titties. Well, hop to it. Put in your dime. Shut the door behind you.

  Miss Zelda Fair, she walks through walls. She walks forever. Forever walks her. Don’t seem sensible there should be so much Artemisia in the Artemisia. Her eyes get used to the dark, big as spinning plates. There’s blue at the bottom. Blue like water. Blue like an eye.

  She thinks on a time when she was just a tiny thing and she found a little cave on the back forty that hadn’t been a cave before on account of ferns and mud and mushrooms, but rain washed all that away and left a perfectly marvelous hiding place. Zelda knew it was hers right off. Like a puppy in a shop window. She’d be the Bat-Queen of Slimy Rock and lord it over the Land of the Creepy-Crawlies (which she’d quit being afraid of as soon as possible). She’d dance her ballets in there and be every donna that ever prima’d and the worms would be wowed. They’d applaud all wet and quiet. But Mama Minerva ruined it. Came looking and found little Zelda dressed flash in muck with beetles in her hair. Never again, for goodness sake! Minnie would have it filled in with concrete by supper and Zelda wouldn’t have any buttered rolls to boot. Why, Mama?

  Because ladies don’t crawl into holes, my heavens!

  Ladies didn’t swim naked either, or smoke or run with boys or cross their legs or curse or eat too much or get blotto because they’re bored and only feel half-alive about every other month. Being a lady’s just the worst thing since the first thing. Zelda would stay a girl if that was the shape of things, and a girl till she died.

  A man’s waiting at the bottom of the stairs. Zelda’s never met Al before, she don’t know him from a cricket. Never been in the basement—too busy upstairs by half. He’s all over blue. Blueberry-cream suit with a blue mushroom in his buttonhole, blue light coming out of the pool behind him like the whole sky. His scars look like they could almost spell something, if you could just squint right. Over his shoulder voices whizz and whirr, splashing giggles, the kind of sighing that means somebody’s about to get what they want. Thursday is delivery day down here in the underworld and lookie—a surprise package for Al, all wrapped up nice like he likes them.

  “Give it over,” he says, but he says it with a smile, like he’s giving her something.

  “What?”

  “The nightgown, for starters.”

  “But then I’ll be naked.”

  “You’re already naked, doll.”

  That doesn’t really make any sense, but Zelda strips off her pistachio-green satin sleeping number. Al takes it over his arm.

  “Underthings, too, sweetheart.”

  “But—”

  “Price of admission, cupcake! You want in or not?”

  “Into what?”

  Al grins. It splits his face like another scar. He gestures at her brassiere. Okay, then. Men do always want your underneath, don’t they? It’s not so odd. Zelda Fair strips down to her belly button. She doesn’t even try to cover up with her arms like that stupid Botticelli girl who thought her hair could save her.

  “Slippers,” he says.

  Fine.

  “The ribbon in your hair and stop stalling.”

  Whatever you say, Papa.

&
nbsp; Al hands it all off to some tall corpse of a fella Zelda could swear is Mr. Bayeux, the Head Concierge, but she doesn’t want to think too long on that.

  “Take the third cabana on the left, kitten. I’ll be waiting in the shallow end.”

  Now, probably she shoulda argued, but that man in the blueberry suit didn’t even look surprised to see her walk out of the wall, and once you’ve crawled through a magic door it pays to go with the flow, don’t you know? In for a penny and all that jazz.

  Red cabana #3 has got a bathing costume for her. Black. Silver stars. A swimming cap with licks of painted blue flames dancing up all over it. When Zelda gets her kit on, she sees underneath it a little china plate from the Green Tabernacle, their own pattern, frogs and treasure boxes dancing round the rim. It’s a choice. She knows it right away. Pick one and come on in, the water’s fine.

  Six red pills. A syringe like a spindle full of woolly moon juice. A matchstick with a thick blue head carved all over with little dancing wooden bodies almost too small to make out their perfect tiny dancing shoes.

  Zelda looks at the dish. She thinks about Minerva. About the cave all filled in like a damn pothole.