Breakfast in Stilettos (12 page)

I tossed my bag in the back of the Jeep and hurried to my lunch appointment with Pixie. I wasn’t really all that hungry, but interviews invariably happen over food. Thus my refrigerator is often the recipient of lunch leftovers destined to become science projects.

Pixie and I had agreed to meet at the Cyclops Cafe, a strange little eatery in Belltown. As I drove downtown I was all too aware that I was only a couple of blocks from Frank and our unfinished conversation. I wasn’t regretting our decision to meet up at the club tonight, but I was nervous. So I did my best to put it out of my mind, turning my attention, instead, to the never-ending search for downtown parking. Amazingly
,
I found a space only a block a
way.
I double
-
checked
that I had my notebook and iPhone—so I could record anything really juicy—and headed for the restaurant.

The Cyclops had once been called the Mars Café, a restaurant that had always struck me as a way station for aliens—and not the illegal type. I loved to sit there and imagine
from
which planet or
star
system
each
patron
might have come
. Finally I had a use for the college
astronomy
courses I took
during those
two quarters when
I believed myself destined to
become
an
astronomer
.
That is, until
I realized I’d watched just a few too many episodes of
Star Trek
and
that
I didn’t really like staying up late.

The Cyclops hadn’t changed much. The new owners had
done little more than convert
the great Mars orb that fronted the restaurant into a giant eye
, iris and all
. As I walked up to the door, it glared at me from overhead, as if judging my
hipness
quotient
.

Pixie had
described herself as
fortyish with long gray hair and a white widow’s peak streak on one side. That seemed distinctive enough. A quick glance around
revealed
no such person. I made my
way
to an open
booth surrounded with padded red vinyl
and took a seat with a good view of the door as well as the other diners, intending to partake in a short stint of people watching.

The table beside me was occupied by a couple of older women, maybe in their early seventies. They looked like sisters, each thin and overly angular, with short cropped gray hair and
ice splinter
blue eyes. They were focused on the Seattle tourist map laid out on the table in front of them.

Leaning toward them, I caught snatches of their conversation, which was going on in a syrupy southern drawl.

“I don’t wanna see no silly flying fish or vegetables, Marabell. Nor a statue of a pig, fo’ heavensake. I didna fly all this way to see pigs.”

Marabell responded with a forced exhale. “Well, we
hafta
see something. The boat
does
’
na
leave until tomorrow, and I
am not
sitting here
’
til then
.”

The first sister cast a sharp glance over at me, clearly aware that I was listening. “Maybe this young lady
would be so kind as to
make a suggestion. Where
do
you go if’n y’all want to see something to amaze a couple of, well, ovahly-seasoned travelers.”

“Willa! Don’t you go a-bothering people,” said Marabell, smiling at me encouragingly.

“Oh, I don’t mind.” And I didn’t. Though I wasn’t sure exactly what to recommend. “What sort of things do you like to do?”

Marabell leaned toward me. “Excitin’ things.”

Willa nodded. “We’re about to be
cooped
up with a boat full of old folks for two
whole
weeks and I want some
action
before I go.”

Action
.
OK
.
I wondered what passed for action at age seventy, but, from the intensity of their expressions, I got the sense that these two ladies were no dullards. I glanced at the map on the table. I
t
was unlikely that anything
that
interesting would show up on a tourist map, so I told them to hold on a moment while I grabbed a copy of
The
Zealot
.

I made sure to avoid Frank’s article on Mistress Maven as I searched for “The
Zealot
Suggests” section and opened the paper for them. This section normally carried a nice sampling of Seattle’s Strange and Unusual events. I noticed that El Vez, the local Latino Elvis impersonator, was playing, as were The Bobs, a great
a
cappella
group who sang songs such as “
There’s
A
Nose Ring In My Soup
”
and
“
Hey Coach, Don’t Call Me A Queer
.”

“You might scan through this and see what inspires you. If anything that might classified as excitement exists in Seattle, you’ll find it here.” Which wasn’t strictly true, but it was close enough for these ladies.

The two women glanced eagerly down at the paper and then back at me. Willa laid a hand on my arm. “Thank you so much, dear. We shall endeavah to keep owaselves out of too much mischief.”

Marabell laughed in that slightly barmy way of someone who really knew how to get into trouble.

I moved back to my table just as a woman who fit Pixie’s description walked in and started looking around. A glare was coming through the windows and obscuring the view, so I stood and motioned her over. Seeing me, she smiled and navigated through the tables, sliding with some grace onto the cushy booth seat across from me. She was short and pencil thin—a tiny flea speck of a woman. However, she radiated a strength I rarely saw in anyone. That quality was certainly not what I expected from a self-proclaimed submissive.
Like I would know.

I must have looked stunned, for as she smiled and held out her hand, she said, “Not what you were expecting?” Her long gray hair was half hidden under a Bogart style black fedora. She wore no makeup except for a touch of dark burgundy lip color. She was very attractive in that middle-aged wise woman sort of way, where everything had gone to gray and white, but the result was as richly striking as platinum and diamonds.

“Well, honestly, no. But it sounds as though I’m not the first to think so.” I knew I was staring. I shook her offered hand. Her grip was firm but without any overhand or underhand contortions—polite, straightforward and confident. “I appreciate your meeting with me.”

Laughing, she tugged off her coat and settled in. “I’m not so unusual. I just think the stereotypes are
very
prevalent.” And, in fact, she was wearing a black leather collar with a silver chain that snaked down her blouse. She tugged on it, rolling her eyes as she let out easy chuckle. “It gets old, seeing the way people, even within the community, respond to BDSM. But we all suffer from stereotyping of some sort or another. I’m sure you get tired of the ‘all journalists are hacks’ kind of comments.”

My face must have registered my annoyance, because she reached for my hand. “Oh, no. Don’t think I believe that. It was just something that Frank said. He was always going on about the lack of journalistic respect in the world today.”

Belatedly I realized that of course she knew Frank. He hadn’t picked her contact information out of the air. But it hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that she might
know
His Royal Suckiness, in a Biblical way. A niggling discomfort descended into the pit of my stomach, which I fended off with a flurry of journalistic hackification. “So. How long have you known Frank?” I tried to avoid the emphasis.

“Oh, I met him at
the Salon
a few months ago. I was taking pictures—I’m a photographer. Anyway, he was doing this scene with Lil …” She suddenly stopped and looked at me. “I’m assuming that Frank talks to you about this. Right? I’d hate to out him. I just assumed that, since you had my contact information that you would know about everything.”

I suddenly felt a woozy surge of light-headedness, as though all the oxygen in my small lunar module of a brain had suddenly vented into space. And what, in the Good Lord’s Holy Name, was
everything
?

Just then a waiter with short black hair and long electric blue bangs ambled over at our table and took our drink orders. Pixie was sticking to water and I felt obliged to do the same. Skinny people who drink water always inspire me to drink water. Overweight people who drink water depress me into guzzling super-sized Cokes. I mean, if the water thing isn’t working, why deny yourself?

I scanned the menu, avidly avoiding the unavoidable confrontation with the official, all-encompassing and collectively unknown black hole called “everything” to which Pixie was clearly privy. The Strange and Unusual had arrived, uninvited, on my doorstep.

Pixie allowed a few moments of weighty silence before venturing to speak again. I imagined that, with her photographic eye, she was mentally snapping a series of photos called Freaked Out Ex-lover, Part I. “Hmmm. I take it from your expression that Frank hasn’t really talked to you about, oh, anything.” She looked as if she had just stepped in dog poo, which, of course, she had.

I didn’t want her to feel bad. She wouldn’t be the first person to get the shit because of Frank. “Well, that would be a ‘no.’ But apparently there are parts of Frank’s life that I have yet to discover. At least not directly. I did read his recent article in
The
Zealot
. That was my first hint. Then, when I asked about it, he gave me this list of people and websites for the article I’m writing on
the Salon
. We haven’t gotten to the place where he tells me
how
he knows all this. And, since we have broken up, I didn’t feel it was really appropriate to ask.”

“Well, that ass-hat.” She put down her menu. “Didn’t you two date for, like, two years?”

I nodded, surprised she knew so much. “But there was lots of on and off, and we never lived together. So I suppose it was easy to let topics like that slip through the cracks.”

“That’s a pretty big something to be missed.”

“He’s not like a serial killer, right?” How big of a something could it be?

“No. No. Nothing like that. But still …” She let the thought drift.

I shrugged, not knowing what else to say. “To be honest, I don’t think we have ever been good at communicating. He never felt like he could talk to me about it. It makes sense. I was never completely honest with him either.”

But she clearly disagreed, smacking the table a little too enthusiastically and causing the Easter Island head-shaped lamp on the table to jump. “Are you kidding? That’s not something you keep from your significant other. The world is so clearly fucked up that we can’t talk about sex.”