Speak Easy

  And Frankie walks through it all like somebody’s dad. Nobody meets his eye. Backs get turned one by one, bare and glittered and tuxed and tailed. Champagne conversation bubbles and foams and bubbles down to the floor and not one gulp of it goes hey buddy where’d you come from? Can I get you a canape? Sippa somethin’ nice? No girl dancing by her lonesome looks up with hope when Frankie’s shadow hits her shoes. No boy brushes up against him in that way that feels like a sweet, soft, uncertain question. He’s nothing. He’s no one. He’s invisible.

  Frankie’s a fella who likes his books, so he thinks of Perseus. He thinks of the cap of darkness that slick got on his way to look at an ugly dame. Thinks of Andromeda, tied up to a rock waiting for a whale to show her into his guts. He walks by a tap-dancing boy with suspenders chippered up with sapphires and white bows and a chin you coulda ordered from a catalogue. The boy taps on Frankie’s big toe and just keeps on going. Frankie yelps. The boy doesn’t even glance. Three girls who work together selling cigarettes and candy at the cinema down on 44th pass a silver compact between them, each taking their turn looking in the glass before passing it on like a joint, like a flask, like a sacred, all-seeing, all-judging eye. He tips his hat. They don’t blink. Maybe it’s Al’s magic, making him scarce. Maybe it’s the swimming cap he’s got stuffed in his pocket like a showgirl’s panties.

  Nah.

  It’s a simpler magic. An older magic. Older than Perseus? You bet. Older than Father Time’s greatest hits. Rich man’s magic, and here it is:

  Nobody minds the help.

  Frankie’s in his bellhop glad rags, brass buttons and bombazine twill and a pillbox cap of green, green darkness with a chinstrap so it stays on even if he should happen to need to go on hands and knees in the dumpster out back for some four-year-old princess’s favorite blue ribbon. Nobody wants to lock eyes with the guy who’s gonna have to clean up their good time while they sleep it off. Nobody’s looking to go home with the staff at midnight—that action only starts around three in the a.m., when other choices have split. I’ll tell you what, Perseus never had it so good. Mr. P was a god’s son, which is just another way of saying old money. Everywhere that cat went people gave him their best goat. He had the shiniest hair and the best teeth. But he needed magic to get ignored by the world. Magic knitted in hell by a chick with three faces and a mean backhand.

  Frankie can do that shit for free.

  He just slips on by. It shakes him up at first. Even a bellhop, when he’s a nice-looking white boy with a degree in one pocket and his mother’s love in the other, wants to be seen. Likes to be seen. Hell, doesn’t everyone? But Frankie’s always been seen. He’s used to it. He likes it. Likes how folks ask the time on the street because they know a chap like him has a watch. Likes how he gets to say who he wants for President in a bar and everyone nods agreement. Likes how his name sits on a magazine cover, his own honest-born name, even if it’s in tiny yellow print at the bottom corner under an ad for detergent. Even in his Artemisia get-up, when he goes to somebody’s door, he’s expected. They shake his hand, tip him for his trouble. Call him a nice young man. But now, when the party’s sprawled over the fake grass, wine glasses sunk in the golf-green, bubbly holes-in-one, when he should be glowing like a dock light, he’s a ghost.

  The writer in him, though, the writer in him likes it fine. He can listen like a mouse at a cat congress. It’s almost like manning the tubes. Coy never came to my show. Never wrote a word about it. We had to close inside a week. What can you do? Come on baby, the wife’s in Spain. I’ve got my money in rail, mostly, but I’m branching out into pharmaceuticals. Sounds grand, mister. Got anymore of that black-bottle stuff? Opium never got me so high…

  And just like that he’s bored. It’s not like the tubes, it’s just the same. There’s no such thing as a secret, really. The only secret is: I want something I don’t have. I’m dying for it. Losing sleep. Give it, Christ, give it here or I don’t know what I’ll do. And sometimes it’s something they shouldn’t have and sometimes it’s something they’ll never have and sometimes it’s peace of mind and sometimes it’s the end to all wars but mostly it’s just money or love. Money or love. Money that looks like love and love that looks like money. And since Frankie’s dying for those, too, he’s bored by them, by everyone else panting after them just like him.

  He tries talking.

  Al sent me: to an elderly golfer with plaid pants and pound coins in his loafers. Have you seen Al tonight: to a dowager wearing three ivory black-backed cameos. Can you get into the basement from here: to the piano-player with marigolds braided in his black beard, who brought his music downtown even though it’s the only precious thing he’s got and these dumb white drunks just eat it without tasting.

  Nobody answers. They look past him. They don’t see. They shift a glass from one hand to another, tap a ball like a bank safe and send it to its final resting place, shift the song into G Major and sing out: send this orphan boy home, home, home before he ain’t got nothing left but his bones, bones, bones. Frankie can’t figure it out. Al’s always been there with a pun and a paycheck whenever they’ve met. What’s he done wrong?

  Okay, he tells himself, you’re a gumshoe. You’re Frankie K. Frankie the Ghost. Strong and silent. On the case. What are your assets? He pats his chest, his front pockets, his back pockets, the atheist’s genuflection. Billfold, skeleton key, notepad, pen. Safety pin. Hard cherry candy.

  Swimming cap.

  Frankie the Ghost yanks off his pillbox bellhop crown and stretches the black shiny latex over his hair, ripping out strands of his straw-colored mop-top. Silver stars pop into place over his ears. He fits the rubber chinstrap nice and tight.

  And falls to the ground. To the fake grass. To the green.

  Agony arcs through his skull, electric firework horror ticker tape flick-film. His eyes bulge, muscles lock up, spine turns to a pillar of sizzling salt. An heiress steps over him, losing her slingback as she goes, sticking its cream leather heel in his back pocket. She scuttles for the bar rather than go back for it and have to make little puppy noises like she cares. Frankie tries to get his hands up under the cap to get it off, get it off, but his elbows are frozen in pain like a stuck bomb, halfway blown. He’s making a scene, now. His invisibility won’t hold much longer. Poor lamb.

  The cat in the plaid pants comes up behind him. Trying to play through, just like the rest of us. He winds back his putter like St. So-and-So’s lance and knocks Frankie in the rear. It’s not a tough shot. The old codger will make par in the ballroom, that’s for sure. And even though he doesn’t want to, doesn’t even seem like that knock should do a damn thing, Frankie rolls. He rolls toward the golf hole with a proud 18 flag and a broken champagne flute sticking out of it. It’s black in there, blacker than it should be, and bigger than it should be, and he’s teetering toward it, electric night still rutting his brain into obliteration, and it opens like a sinkhole, like quicksand, like the doors to the Artemisia, like money and love and Zelda in the bathtub, it opens like a book waiting to be written, and Frankie the Ghost is falling under grass.

  B2

  “Whatcha got that on for?”

  It’s a voice he knows. A silly, laughing voice. A voice out of a schoolyard, teasing, coaxing, the kind of voice that invites you back behind the gymnasium for one glorious cigarette, shared like communion, transubstantiated into the holiest of nicotine-spirits by her hand.

  It’s Zelda.

  The first face you see in the underworld is always the one you want most. It’s like that first hit of morphine—free of charge, baby. Just a taste.

  “You can see me,” Frankie gasps.

  “’Course I can, silly. I got 20/a million peepers these days. And I see you got something that’s mine,” Zelda says, and pulls the swimming cap off him, the chinstrap dangling free in her hand like a black noose. “You can’t have it.”

  Frankie’s jaw unlocks. His brain starts to soften back into the good goo of grey and pink and thin
king. His bones quit doing their poison puppet act. He gets on with breathing and every time he manages it it’s less like choking on sour fire. He looks up and she’s there, bending over him, fastening the cap on her own head. She just looks at him, not even really smiling, but almost halfway to the county where smiling lives. Rubs her arms in the chill. Everything smells like pine and ice and starlight. Did you know starlight has a smell? Well, at least it does in Canada. Smells like vodka and lime and a splash of bitters, hand to God.

  “Doesn’t that hurt?” Frankie coughs. His spit freezes when it hits the ground.

  “What doesn’t? But some kinds of hurt almost feel good, you know? Familiar. Like an ugly couch in your parents house with the springs all bare where your daddy slapped you once for coming home late and now when you sleep on it it’s like one of those Indian fellas napping on nails but it makes you feel like you come from somewhere. Hurts like home. I always wear this when I’m down here. How’d you get it?”

  “I found it.”

  And Zelda shrugs like it doesn’t matter. She looks up and off over a rise full of frozen real grass, not perfect silk golf grass, grass with big beardy crusts of cold all over. They’re on a lakeshore, Frankie realizes. A lakeshore in winter and even the sand is half ice. Zelda’s wearing fur, a black fur coat like a senator’s mistress only it’s hers, it’s so clearly hers, she’s so at home in it she looks naked even though he can only see the pale punctuation of her face at the top of the ruff. She doesn’t look like he remembers her, like the dog-eared faded bathtub memory he keeps under his heart. Frankie has a mad thought—she looks like architecture. Like some permanent, chiseled thing so deliberate and designed and lovingly hacked out of stone that tourists come to look at it and wish they lived somewhere they could look out of their kitchen window and see just one corner of it every day. She looks like one of Al’s people. Oh, not like Frankie. Not like Al’s errand boys and good time girls. One of his people. One of the odd ducks off in the shadows in long coats and long dresses and eyes that don’t shine in the dark, one of the ones always writing or counting or checking the time while Al does his softshoe workin’-for-me’s-like-working-for-springtime come hither pitch.

  “Zelda, where have you been? What are you doing down here?”

  Her eyes slip back toward his.

  “Working,” she says, and her voice is so full of thrill at that word Frankie is sure she said something else for a minute. Winning, maybe, or wanting. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

  She hauls him up the winter dunes. He turns up the collar on his bellhop uniform. The sky overhead is so clotted with stars, like they’re all in a hurry to get somewhere. To get here. Zelda walks like this is her own backyard, and pretty soon she’s gonna show him a rope swing she was too afraid to try till she was thirteen.

  “Have you ever been to Canada before?” Zelda says instead. She’s different—less interested in him. Frankie hates it.

  “No ma’am,” he starts to say before he understands that she don’t mean any place whose capital is Ottawa. But the answer is still no. “I just work for Al, up top. Keeping…keeping books.” He finds he doesn’t really want to say anything about the tubes. She might think it was wrong, that he’d seen things he shouldn’t, which of course he has. “I asked once. If I could see the basement. Always heard the parties there were like something out of the Bible. The good parts of the Bible, before God gets mad and raids the place. But he said it wasn’t for me. Not for a nice Minnesota boy with milk for blood. I insisted and he said…” Frankie winces. He remembers every word. “He said I’d just blab it all to everyone because that’s what good schoolboys who grow up writers do, and maybe when I was forty and had drunk down a dozen movies and saw despair in my own buttonholes, then I could be trusted.” Zelda doesn’t laugh at him. That’s something. “Do you like it here?” he ventures, pressing his luck.

  “It’s the best place in the world,” she says, and she means it, he thinks, more than he’s ever heard anyone mean a thing. He’s jealous of this place all the sudden, she means it so hard. “So how come you’re here now, if he blew you off?”

  “I’m…I’m looking for someone.”

  The schoolyard cigarette voice clicks back on like a light. “For me? That’s awfully sweet.”

  “No,” he says, and feels sick because of course it’s her, who else but her? “For Pearl Slake. Y Candywhatever. I’m supposed to bring her home. Have you seen her?”

  “Well, sure.”

  “Is she well?”

  “So well you could throw pennies in her. But I don’t think she’ll want to go home. I wouldn’t mention it, if I were you. She throws things when she’s mad.”

  A grand set of mountains brushes up against the stars far ahead. Frankie can see a house—but you couldn’t all it a house. It’s huge, bigger than a castle, bigger than he imagines Versailles could ever hope to grow up to be. It has no walls. It’s bones against the dark. Glowing, glittering bones, ringed in by barrels like Greek temples. He tugs Zelda’s furry arm back. Before they get there, he has to ask. He has to know.

  “Zelda, Zelda, wait. Wait.” She looks at him with a perfectly open, sunny face, the swimming cap that hurt him so covering her ears snug and cozy. “Do you like me?” he whispers. “I thought, that night in the tub, I thought you liked me. And when I bring the eggs round in the morning. I had the feeling that you liked me then, too. But I could be wrong, you can always be wrong, so before we get wherever we’re going, can’t you just tell me? Because I like you like fire.”

  She laughs a little. Puts her hand to her windblown bob. Before she can say anything, a great white shape comes careening down the frozen meadow, down the mountains and the barrels and the house on the horizon. It lands next to her—a pelican with wings as wide as a giant’s arms. It takes Zelda’s fingers gently, so, so gently, in its beak. Standing between his girl and a boy who just needs to be seen so bad he’d turn on all the lights in hell.

  “Mr. Puss-Boots!” she cries in delight. Mr. Puss-Boots does a little shuffling dance with his webbed feet. “Well, Frankie, I’ll tell you,” Zelda says cheerfully. “I do like you. I like you plenty. But I like a lot of things that are no good for me. Liking something doesn’t mean much, if you ask me. It’s not what matters. What matters is if you let the liking have its say. and I don’t. If I can help it.”

  B3

  Pearl de Agosti y Candela y Slake isn’t hard to find. She’s standing outside the great skeleton house. She’s got a man’s nightshirt on and stockings with holes in them. Somebody else’s tie, a gold and green chevroned number, hangs around her neck and just at this moment it looks like a king’s mantle draped over her shoulders. Her hair’s all loose, her lipstick and eyeliner gone a-roving. She’s got a cigar in one hand and a jar full of gin in the other, and she’s laughing, laughing like for once that damned chicken crossed the road for something really good. Frankie only ever saw her once before. She was all slicked back, not just her hair but her heart, her clothes and her way of talking, her hand on her son’s head, the way her eyes narrowed when she watched her husband cutting the ribbon for the new golfballroom. That was over now. Little Cass jumps and giggles beside her, with buttercups in his hair, and every once in awhile the little boy sings: my mummy she has blue, blue eyes! She’ll forget with a wink of the left, she’ll forget-you-not with a wink of the right, and if you bring me sweets she’ll spend the night! in his small trembling voice. Pearl sweeps him up in her arms and covers him with kisses and calls him her prince and presses her cheek to his and Frankie doesn’t know but I’ll spill—it’s the biggest love that boy will ever know, down there in Canada, in the dark. Funniest thing about love, how it shakes loose when no one’s looking. How the dark helps it along. Maybe that’s why we dug caves so much, way back when. Caspar gone for a moment and Little Cass turns into Little P, all her own, and isn’t he clever, isn’t he grand? He looks like himself down here, not like that pile of shit with the wedding ring on. And she just lets go
into her love. Turns out she’s got a bucketful. She always thought she’d gone dry.

  Pearl puts her kidlet down and throws dice against the foot of the buttress. A ring of men cheer. She cheers. Her cheers sound like screaming. The dice explode against the wall into pages, pages and pages, landing on the snow like ash, covered in type, covered in good paragraphs, cutting, incisive, perfect paragraphs like her old Underwood could never bash out. She falls on them, holding them in clumps and sheafs to her heart, stuffing them in her shirt till they stick out like tits. But in a minute she’s up again, into the throng of the house without walls, into the heat of the place, the sound, the fury, the utter din of it.

  And Frankie sees it all, the orgy of making.

  Enzo kissing out his paintings with Ollie, kissing up her columns, Murray pouring out his sculptures, Nickel and Dime dancing till blueprints for buildings that ache to look at spool out under their feet. Iris Wiltsey Charlestoning movies her man Sammy won’t ever let her direct. And isn’t that Lily Greer vomiting up a new Vaudeville show? Why it is, it is! Look at the magician’s rabbit scrabbling up out of the toilet! And Frankie recognizes others, even if he doesn’t know their real names—Cinderella dancing with Rapunzel, Jorindel breaking plates with Prince Charming, Snow White passed out cold in the front hallway while the Snow Queen holds a compress to her head. Sonnets leak out of the cloth.