Speak Easy

  And Frankie sees something else, too. He sees Vollstead, though he doesn’t know that funny muscled bow-legged goblin has a name. He sees Vollstead using that rich man’s magic he himself used so well an hour ago. Following up behind, quiet as you please, the help, the janitor, the maid, picking up the dice-pages and the dance-flicks and the kiss-paintings, sweeping them up into ditches dug through the January ground, tidying everything away.

  And in those ditches, the pages and the canvases and the film and the pigment and the icons and the statues liquify. Go black and bubble into syrup, into a foamy river flowing out and up and over, out and up and over into the great barrels in a thousand streams of a dark black-violet heady something that Frankie’s pretty sure would fetch more money than gold in the Artemisia right about now. Zelda’s hooch, bright and cold and full of dreams. He gapes like a kid, though he wants to play it cool. Zelda grins. She’s proud. So proud.

  “Isn’t it something?” she breathes.

  “You’ve been feeding us…junk? Upstairs. Letting us drink what you sweep up down here?”

  Ollie’s voice cuts through the jiggly music-palace noise. She strides up in her long trousers and suit-coat and locks arms with Zelda like they’re old Greek soldiers and he’s from out of town. Oleander Coy looks him up and down like he’s nothing. Like she has to squint to see him at all. “Letting you? Haven’t you got eyes? It’s not junk, dummy, it’s art! And honey, everybody eats art and drinks stories. It’s the best drunk there is! If you can make something out of a potato so good that people would shoot you dead in the street for a glass, what can you make out of Enzo’s pictures and Olive’s dresses and my one-liners and Murray’s little stone gods? Vollstead showed us how. And Al. Hell, down here I don’t even have to use a white man’s name. I’m me and everyone knows it. Everyone sees me.”

  Zelda lays her head on her friend’s shoulder. Some mean little part of Frankie wonders what a flat full of girls get up to in the off-hours, and Mr. Puss-Boots nips his hip in punishment. Frankie yelps. Zelda keeps talking.

  “It’s…it’s so direct, you know? You look at a painting and it fills you up. You read a book and sometimes it’s so good you feel like you could live on it. And now we do live on it. Everyone does. It’s perfect. You should try it. You’re a writer. I remember!” Zelda Fair turns up her face and good lord but her lips look like glory and he stops thinking about the four of them crammed into Room 1550. “Come on. Kiss me. Let’s make a book!”

  Well, Frankie is in no shape to turn that down. He kisses her hard, because he knows it might be his only chance. Their tongues meet in that oh-so-natural way, the way that says they might do all right if they got married. No teeth knocking. No nose-battling. And out of their mouths and their hands come not even pages but words, just words, moving type, slick and hard and hot, words like children’s toys, Christmas ornaments, crystalline creatures swelling up and flowing out of them, whispering, giggling, the words, the words that Frankie can never find, the words he reaches for and misses, and then falls back on a new detective, a new dead body, the same old yarn he’s always fraying. He stops kissing Zelda because some things are more important than kisses and the poor kid lurches after the black, dancing words, trying to hold onto them, trying to stop them getting away, trying to read them so he can remember, so he can remember when all this is over how good he can be, how simple and clean and orderly and beautiful. And not for a minute does he think that he only kissed those words into the world because Zelda put her mouth on his, that they’re hers, too. Not for a heartbeat.

  The words don’t care. They leap toward the ditches, dive into the liquor, shiver into the brew and the barrels. Frankie sobs after them. He hates this place. This place where he isn’t seen right, where he was only allowed once everyone else had already gone. It’s not a Minnesota kind of place. His words are lost and he can never love a place that showed him what he could do and then took it away. Everyone here is out to lunch, bonkers, mad—Zelda is shooting a tommy gun at the sky and stories are falling back down into her hair. She’s catching them in a cut-glass pitcher, laughing, running to snatch another from the air, and sometimes she grabs their crystal words, too, their hard dark typeface animals Frankie and Zelda made together, skittering and tripping on the ice. They all fizz into rum in her pitcher, a deep green rum shining with wonderful light.

  Frankie doesn’t care. He had it. He had it, there in his hands, the book he’s meant to write, all the books, the books deep down in the bottom of him, the pure sentences and chapters that get so damn junked up on the way out. And they’re gone, turned to muck so idiots can guzzle them down and puke them up and hallucinate on the fire escape and then forget it all in the morning. They’re a ruin, they are ruin, and he can never get them back. So Frankie does what a young man does when he’s lost something he thinks he’s got a right to, when he’s going to be seen, by god, when he’s stuck on the other side of the shop window while all the other kids roll around in the candy canes. Frankie Key snatches Zelda’s gun away. She yelps like he didn’t when the lady in the ballroom lost her shoe in his back pocket.

  He grabs Pearl by the arm. She just laughs because who knows what a bastard grabbing you at a party will make here? A trumpet solo soars out of her elbow, golden notes and clefs bursting like sweet artillery, the melody loud and clear as rain.

  “You’re coming home,” Frankie snarls. “You’re coming with me. Your husband sent me. Put your clothes on.”

  “Fuck you,” Pearl giggles, and Little Cass pipes up, repeating his mother. “Fuckoo!”

  “Hey now,” gruffs a voice, which is Vollstead’s voice. Frankie looks him dead in the eye. “Stop that monkey shit. We can settle this like men, yeah?” Frankie stares. Takes in V’s machine-gun legs, his ripply blue chest, his warty odd face and his long ears, his earrings, his gold eyes, his huge hands, and our boy up and decides Vollstead isn’t real, he just isn’t. He’s like the space between the restaurants in the lobby, the paisley green-and-gold place where you whisper about gruyere and boysenberries but it isn’t really anything at all, just a whispering place like St. Paul’s in London. This ugly lump is just one of Al’s tricks. Al loves tricks. They’re his favorites. And Frankie’s going to take Pearl home and get paid enough to buy his own place to sit and think and try to remember those pristine words he lost. No abracadabra is going to get in the way of that, no sir. No bunny is gonna show him up. Not this bunny, anyway, this fairybook monster with breath like sweet almonds and the death of hope.

  So Frankie shoots him.

  B4

  Parties get quiet toward the end. Only a few folks left, keeping the lights on, keeping the music going, rooting through the bottles for the one that’s not empty. Gets quiet. Just before the sun starts straightening the tables and filling the glasses. Gets close and secret and gentle. Truth o’clock. That’s where we are now.

  Al doesn’t care about punishment in the traditional sense. Eye for an eye and all that. Al can have an eye whenever he wants. An eye’s nothing to him. He’d rather have an eyelash for an eye. Or the USS Maine for an eye. He has no sense of proportion, does Al. But he has a mean sense of humor. Vollstead was his baby. A wedding ring he traded back and forth with his great big Titanic-Titania dinosaur-wife. Zelda’s his baby, too. And Pearl. And Ollie. And Enzo. They’re all his babies. He could kill Frankie and nobody would even get upset over it. Fair play, old man. A dozen more where he came from. But it’s not even that much fun to kill humans. Al got bored with that centuries ago. He needs his fun. No cat likes to be fed dazed mice. You gotta play with them a little first, or the meat gets tough.

  So here they sit, in the close quiet dark of the grand party. Around a table: Al, Frankie, Zelda, Ollie, Pearl with Little Cass in her lap. The table’s the same green as the Golfballroom in the Artemisia, soft and fake and nice. Al deals cards like an old pro because that’s just what he is. A plain red Bicycle deck, nothing fancy, nothing hidden, fifty-two cards fair and square, I wouldn’t try
to cheat you, no sir. Check ’em if you like. Four aces, nothing up the sleeve.

  Zelda’s fur coat hangs open just enough for everyone to see she hasn’t got a stitch on underneath except a little emerald pendant on a gold chain. Green as a dock light between her breasts. Mr. Puss-Boots sleeps under her feet, his long white wings swallowing up her toes. Mr. Puss-Boots dreams a story like this, a story where a prince goes creeping down into the underworld after twelve dancing princesses because some king decided the girls were having too much fun and wanted to rub their faces in how hard he owns them. Only when Mr. Puss-Boots dreams it, the prince is half-pelican, and he loves the princesses like the sea. He just glides on down after them, into the dark, following their starry-light dresses, and when he finds them they laugh and shout and speak Pelican and hold him in their arms all together and the bird-prince just never goes back home to that nasty old daddy with the tinfoil hat. Mr. Puss-Boots stays with his girls forever and the dancing princesses never slow down. It’s a nice dream. He’s dreamed it every night since his first sleep in Canada.

  Pearl strokes her kid’s hair. Ollie smokes and plays footsie with Al. Frankie glares at the lump that used to be Vollstead. The bloody, unreal lump. Even without him, pages and paint trickle into the river flowing up to the barrels. His pages. His perfect ink.

  “The game is Cretaceous Hold ’Em. Everything’s wild. Play or I bury you here.” Al doesn’t fuck around. But his voice is so soft and loving, like a grandpa after a good pipe. Only grandpa might eat you as soon as tuck you in bed.

  The cards fan out but nobody wants to bet. No chips anyhow. Zelda looks at her cards. Three queens. She touches their faces. Olive’s face and Ollie’s face and Opal’s face. Spades, Hearts, Clubs. Red Bicycle my ass, she thinks. She puts her hand into her coat. Her comforting coat. All she wants is to shoot up another chapter, is to dance some wry, wise prose into the bathroom floor. It is so good here, she thinks. It is hers. There is no space between wanting and having, between thinking and making real. That’s the best any place can offer. She does have something to bet, she thinks, though she was saving it. What if she needed it? Well, she guesses she needs it now. Zelda Fair puts her syringe in the middle of the table. Al looks approvingly at her.

  “My girl,” he says.

  Pearl takes off her ruby earrings and throws them in. Little Cass tries to add his lollipop but his mama won’t let him waste his treasure. Ollie puts in her smokes. Frankie? Frankie has fuck all, to tell the truth. He throws in his billfold, which is hardly enough to call, let alone stay in the game. Honestly, Frankie. Get with it. Al pulls off his cufflink. He says:

  “It’s not a cufflink. It’s Lily Greer. She’s gonna shoot somebody cold in the 10th floor hallway in about six months. Who’s it gonna be?”

  Pearl’s face pinches. She knows what she’s got. She calls. As she lays down her cards, Al names them:

  “The lady has it all! Well done! The House has a stock market crash in two years and a hotel stripped for copper during the war and split into slum-happy squats. That, combined with your nasty round of bronchitis and jolly heroin habit around age 50, unsuccessful novel, and a dead husband on 10 gives you a flush. Congrats, Miss P, you win the pot.”

  Everyone recoils.

  “Come on, kittens!” Al crows. “The cards are king! What’s Wall Street but fairy gold anyway? Don’t worry! I’ve had that shindig planned for a dog’s age. But Pearly’s got a 2 and a 9 of diamonds—that sets the clock. 1929! Isn’t this a good game? Poker is my best invention.”

  Pearl smiles. She smiles like Christmas and Little Cass clings to her. She wraps her long fingers around the syringe like Lily Greer’s gun and puts it in her arm to keep it safe, jams it in before anyone can stop her. She’ll take it all if Big Cass gets his. That’s fine. Fine as a Yale crew team rowing in the sun.

  The cards come out again. Whick, whick, whick.

  Zelda looks at Frankie. He looks like her Daddy. He looks like a book she hasn’t thought up yet. He looks like a bear on a chain growling I love you. She’s so drunk she can’t think. Drunk on her own supply, on her insides turned outside and boiled into a glass. She takes off her green necklace. Al gave it to her. Gave it to her when she sold her first case of the good stuff. He kissed her when he did it. It was like kissing Neptune. The planet, not the sailorman. The whole planet, too. The storm on its equator and all the moons. Frankie pulls out his skeleton key, the magic stick that lets him into any room and good thing he’s a pretty honest fella or it might be a worry that he’s got one. Pearl tosses in her other earring. Small change. She’s done, she’s happy, she’s not fussed about anything else. Al pulls out his other cufflink.

  “It’s not a cufflink,” he says. “It’s a name. A name that goes forever, a name schoolkids read about in a hundred years and say wow, that so-and-so was a hell of a writer. Maybe if I hope and pray and huff and puff I’ll be that good, huh? Who wants it?”

  This time there’s betting. You better believe it. Pearl’s not so la-dee-da now. She gets her cards and puts in her tie, her stockings, finally her shirt. Ollie keeps her cool but only barely. She puts in her notebook, her blue pen, the name she uses in the big bad city so no one sees her straight. Frankie antes a safety pin, a cherry candy, and at last, as sullen as icemelt in March, his own notepad and pen. Ollie rolls her eyes.

  “How original,” she quips.

  Al’s happy to raise. A hip flask, a cigarette case (full), and last, a strand of his own hair.

  “It’s not a flask. It’s a life in Paris. And these ain’t cigarettes, they’re a sanatorium upstate—a nice one, I promise! Hydrotherapy, electro-convulsive, thorazine, the whole smorgasbord. No expense spared. But this really is my hair. Honest Thomas. Just a hair. But this hair turns into a marriage when you take it upstairs. A long one. Long is all I can do. Can’t do happy, can’t do easy, can’t do pretty. But heaven and the dodo knows I can do long.”

  Zelda only has two things left. Two things she’s willing to wager. She puts in her matchstick first. The blue head looks awful to her. She shivers. Al names his own bets, but they don’t name theirs. But Miss Z knows his games by now, at least a few, and she’s pretty sure her syringe and Pearl’s earrings and Ollie’s everything and Frankie’s ridiculous safety pin have other names, too. The matchstick is so red. Wasn’t it blue a second ago?

  Without even meaning to, without even knowing why, she whispers: “It’s not a matchstick. It’s death by fire. Locked in a room and nobody coming for you.” Nobody says a thing. What can you say? Zelda’s sure she’s gonna win. She started all this. She didn’t shoot anybody. It’s hers.

  But that’s not enough to stay in. So Zelda slips out of her black fur coat, a snail sliding out of a shell, bright and bare and just horribly, viciously vulnerable. You almost want to squash it just for daring to come out. Silly thing. What’s it thinking?

  Oleander Coy opens up her arm and bleeds onto the table. All in. Frankie’s cherry candy, Pearl’s baby boy. Zelda starts crying. She only has the one thing left. She doesn’t want to put it in the pot. It’s hers. She loves it. She can’t get it back if she loses it. And suddenly that win-feel goes up like gas. Zelda knows, somehow, that it’s all over now, all over down here, with Vollstead dead. Something’s unhappy in Canada and Al’s gonna pack up shop. This is the end of the party. It’s truth o’clock. But she doesn’t want to go home. She doesn’t want to go back. Going back is the worst thing she can think of. Being who she was. Marrying Billy or Josie or…God, she can’t even remember the other one’s name. She’s still young enough to think she’s just driving down one long road forward and up, never looping back. It’s mine, it’s mine, she cries, but it’s this or lose, and losing a game with Al is like losing one with gravity.

  Zelda Fair puts a bottle on the table. It’s square, like Bombay Sapphire. Hell, maybe it was a Bombay Sapphire bottle in another life. The label’s all rubbed off now. It’s full of green, the green of her last shots, her last pages—and some of her l
ast kisses, too, but mostly the divine fire-paper bullets of the gun Vollstead gave her, the green rum of her heart, her best heart, her heart beaten out into a long, lovely tale where a girl comes out on top and the beats come so hot and hard and sweet they’ll knock you dead and you’ll beg for a sequel.

  All in. She’s got nothing left.

  Pearl’s out right quick. Nothing but rubbish and she doesn’t care. Little Cass chews on her Jack and Al doesn’t say it but that Jack is a suicide at thirty-five. Poor lamb. Ollie puts down eights over twos. She’s shaking, her pretty ink-stained mouth trembling. Still bleeding. Zelda puts pressure on the wound with one hand and lays her cards out with the other. Not as good as her three queens. Just a pair of sevens.

  But Frankie? Frankie has a full house.

  Al doesn’t even show his cards. Just counts out the boy’s winnings.

  “Good show, you little milquetoast fuckhearted sludge,” he chuckles. He’d never admit it, but he played fair. Just let them roll. That’s what you get when sit down with fairies. The House doesn’t ever hurt. Fair odds are as good as damnation. “The House has cirrhosis of the liver and a healthy baby daughter, to which you add fourteen novels, a decade spent as the toast of the town, and an early, penniless death! It’s all yours, son. The nights in Paris, the long marriage, the asylum with the beautiful gardens, just the right size for a wife who’s no fun anymore, the forever-name, the liver, the out-of-print back catalogue, the ding-dong-dead, the lot! I’ve played some sharks in my time, but you’ve bested me. Not many can put that on their resume. Aren’t you proud? Couldn’t you just crow? Couldn’t you just howl?”

  Al’s face goes dark and small.

  “Now get the fuck out of my house.”

  Rooftop

  Zelda doesn’t want to go. She wants the brandy-sun of Canada and Al’s Neptune kisses and her gun. She wants Ollie and Mr. Puss-Boots. What did she do wrong? She loved Vollstead. Why should she have to go? She doesn’t even remember the name of the hotel. When it’s above ground, it has a different name. Right? She thinks so. She’s sure of it.