22
W
endy the tattoo artist was waiting for them.
“I recognize you,” she said to Mallory. “Moxie, right?”
“Yes,” Mallory said, and she could feel herself blushing. Alec laughed.
They sat on a black couch with Wendy, and she pulled out a sketch book.
“I made the changes you asked for after I e-mailed you the preliminary sketch. You wanted her hair to be longer, right? And the feather fan to be bigger?”
“Yeah,” he said, looking at the piece of paper she passed him. He smiled, then handed it to Mallory.
“It’s my girl!” she said with delight, looking at an image very similar to the one that had been painted on her arm that night that seemed so long ago. Except . . . “But she looks just like me,” she said.
“Yeah—it’s
my
girl,” Alec said. She looked more closely and smiled.
“You’re getting a tattoo of me on your arm?” she said.
“Yes. If it’s okay with you. I’d hate to get something permanent if you didn’t plan to be around for a while. It’s a big commitment, you know.”
She kissed him. “It is.”
“Alec e-mailed me a picture of you,” Wendy said. “I recognized you from the day you were here with Bette Noir. And Alec told me you’re a performer, too.”
“Yeah. I’ve taken a break the past few weeks but . . . I’m going to get back into it.”
“I really need to get to a show,” Wendy said, gesturing for them to follow her into the main part of the parlor. “I went to a late show one night at the Slit, but I was too drunk to remember anything about it.”
“That’s not real burlesque, anyway,” Mallory said. She was already thinking of the Slit as her competition—not as a performer at the Blue Angel, but as a club owner herself.
Of course, she and Alec had agreed they should do it. She would quit her job effective immediately, and Alec would finish his final article for
Gruff
and resign before announcing that he was going to be running a club to compete with Billy’s. Justin and Martha were thrilled.
“Where should we throw the launch party?” Justin had asked.
“Let’s find a space for the actual club first,” Alec had told him.
Wendy sat him in the chair at her station, and again Mallory marveled at the little tubes of color, the instruments, and the sketches all around the room.
Wendy snapped on her blue rubber gloves, then shaved the area of Alec’s arm where the tattoo would go. She pressed the stenciled image against the spot, peeling it away, leaving an outline of the girl. Alec checked the placement in the mirror.
“What do you think, Mal?”
“It looks amazing,” she said. “Are you really doing this?”
“Of course,” he said, winking at her.
He sat in the chair. Across the room, another tattoo artist, a thin guy with a ZZ Top beard, cranked up the Metallica.
“How long do you think this will take?” Mallory asked Wendy.
“Maybe two hours.”
She couldn’t imagine being in pain for two straight hours, but Alec seemed unfazed by this estimate.
Wendy touched the needle to his arm, starting one of the girl’s legs.
“I do the outline first, then the shading and colors,” she said. “What color do you want the corset?”
“Blue,” Alec and Mallory said in unison.
Mallory was surprised by the blood. Lots of it, beading through his skin like it would never stop. She hadn’t noticed it with Bette because she hadn’t stuck around long enough. But she was noticing it now.
“Is that normal?” she asked Wendy.
“Yes,” she said.
The Blue Angel girl was almost complete. Wendy was just adding details to the long plumes of feathers in her fan.
“Are you read to finish it off for me?” Wendy said to her suddenly.
“What?”
Alec squeezed her hand. “I asked Wendy if you could do the last mark of the tattoo.”
“You guys are crazy,” Mallory said with a nervous laugh.
“I really want you to do it—to know that you marked me outside as permanently as you marked me inside.”
“You are such a romantic!” she said. “But I don’t know if I can.”
“Here, I’ll show you the part that has to be filled in,” Wendy said. Mallory leaned down close to look over her shoulder. “Just this dot at the top of the plume. It’s a circle—you won’t mess it up.”
“Am I allowed to do this?”
“Not really,” Alec said.
“No,” said Wendy. “Rihanna’s tattoo artist lost his license for letting her tattoo him. Paparazzi snapped a photo of it. So don’t tell anyone. But your boyfriend told me your whole story, and you’re right—he is a romantic. You’d be surprised how many people come in here and get tattoos with barely any thought about it. It means nothing but getting some perceived hipster cred. And it’s not often I get to design something from scratch like this. So I’m excited about it, and I’m happy to let you be a part of the process.”
“Just think, Mal—how many times have you wanted to inflict pain on me? Now’s your chance.”
If Wendy was willing to let her do it, and Alec trusted her to take a needle to his arm, who was she to say no?
“Okay. What do I do?”
Wendy gave her blue gloves, and Mallory pulled them on. She felt as serious as if she was about to perform surgery. Wendy stood up to give Mallory the stool. She put the tool in her hand, and it was surprisingly heavy.
“Put your foot on this pedal—press it to start the needle.”
“Oh, my God,” Mallory said. She looked at Alec. He winked at her. She pressed the pedal toward the floor, and it started a whirring sound. Slowly, she lowered the needle to the spot on the design that needed the final mark. She was afraid to press too hard and hurt him, and ink sprayed off the surface making it hard for her to tell if she was making contact with his skin or not. She released the petal and pulled the needle back and looked at her handiwork. Sure enough, there was a small dot. With a deep breath, she restarted the tool and pressed it to Alec’s arm again, this time making a conscious effort to move the needle in a circular motion. After a few seconds, she pulled back again. Wendy wiped the area of the mark, and, there was a small blue circle completing the design of the feather.
“Is it done?” she asked, as amazed as if she had just witnessed a birth.
“It’s done,” Wendy said.
“Thanks,” Mallory said. “That was something I’ll never forget.”
“Damn right,” Alec said. “You’ll be looking at it for the rest of your life.”
“Oh, you think?” she said to him.
“I can only hope.”
She leaned over and kissed him.
23
M
allory stretched her leg up on the barre, bending into a deep plié. She wore a pair of black Hard Tail workout pants, a black tank top, and her pink ballet slippers. Black leg warmers stretched from her ankles to mid-thigh. She remembered how her childhood ballet academy had required them to wear black leotards, pink tights, and pink ballet slippers. No deviation from that, and hair always pulled into a low ponytail.
She wondered what her old instructor would think of her now—rolling the dice and gambling everything on making her way as a performer. It wasn’t ballet, or even jazz, but burlesque performance
was
dancing—her former practice space partner, Nadia, had assured her of that. Now Nadia had a spot with the Pennsylvania Ballet, and Mallory was on her way to running the club she herself would perform in. If they ever found a location for the club—or thought of a name.
They’d tossed around plenty of ideas and rejected them all. For a while, the front-runner was “Moxie,” but Mallory told them it would turn off some of the more ambitious girls who would want to imagine they could become headliners or the top girl there, an impossible goal when the club was named after another performer. They had thought about calling it Ivy’s, in homage to the university where Alec and Mallory had met; they considered the Pike, after Martha’s sensational Kegel aid. They considered random names like the Revue, Gloss, and Stilettos. But they still hadn’t found something worthy of the club they envisioned.
She cued up the old CD player at the ballet studio, and the opening of Marilyn Manson’s “Heart-Shaped Glasses” filled the room. The night she had abruptly walked out of the Blue Angel before the start of a show three months ago was the night she had planned to perform to the song. In the days that followed, she thought she might never again be in front of an audience, and that meant the “Heart-Shaped Glasses” choreography, probably her best routine aside from the one Bette had taught her the first night she ever performed, would never be seen by anyone. It was a waste, but at the time, she’d felt it was what she had to do.
She still wasn’t sure when she would get to unveil “Heart-Shaped Glasses”; once the Blue Angel closed for remodeling by its new owners, she had no place to perform. A few of the girls were picking up gigs at other clubs, but she knew that when she performed, it would be on the stage that she would help design, in a show she would conceptualize and direct—Martha and Justin had made it clear they wanted her and Alec to be as involved with the creative direction of the club as possible. The thought was thrilling.
She sat in the center of the room as the song kicked in, languidly unfolding her body, seducing the “audience” with her slow, purposeful movements. She rolled onto her side, experimenting with changing her position on the “bed” to start out half propped up instead of on her back, when a rap on the rehearsal room window interrupted her. Alec waved. She jumped up off of the floor and let him in. He kissed her perspiring forehead.
“Hey,” she said. “I still have twenty minutes left.”
“I couldn’t wait to pick you up; I have to show you something.”
“Okay, show me.”
“You have to come somewhere with me.”
“Alec! I have to practice. I can’t let myself get rusty. Bette said when she took four months off it was really hard to feel confident on stage afterward.”
“I wouldn’t interrupt you if it wasn’t important,” he said. She tried to read from his expression if he was being serious or was just messing around with her, but she couldn’t tell. His eyes looked bright and excited and playful, but there was something focused and determined in the set of his jaw.
“Okay, okay. I’ll meet you out front in five minutes. Just let me change.”
“Don’t change. Just put your coat on over that.”
“I’ll be quick.”
“No—I’m serious. Don’t change.”
“Fine. I’ll meet you out front.”
She was learning not to waste time debating Alec when he was determined. Maybe that was the way relationships survive—constantly learning how to coexist with someone. Picking your battles. Only putting your foot down when it was a deal breaker. Fortunately, she hadn’t been confronted with any of those lately. She was starting to feel confident she wouldn’t ever again.
Alec told the cab to let them off on the corner of Elizabeth Street and Houston. He took Mallory by the hand and led her to the center of the block. She wondered if he was taking her shopping for an early Valentine’s Day present. Two of her favorite stores were on Elizabeth, the jewelry store Me & Ro and the Tory Burch boutique. Even though Tory Burch clothes tended to be a bit on the conservative side, Mallory had a soft spot for the designer because she had grown up in the same town as Mallory. Alec was amused that Main Line Philadelphia was the birthplace of Princess Grace Kelly, designer Tory Burch, and burlesque dancer Moxie.
“And one day you’ll be more famous than the other two,” Alec had said.
“I don’t need to be famous,” Mallory had said.
“Oh no? What do you need to be?”
“Loved,” she had replied.
Now he stopped her four storefronts before Tory Burch. It looked to be a former restaurant. She could have sworn she’d been there before, but she couldn’t remember exactly what used to occupy that space.
Alec pulled a key from his wallet and began opening the door.
“What is this?” she said.
“It’s your club.”
“No way.”
“Yeah. Justin and I found it a few weeks ago.”
Mallory’s heart started to beat faster. It was a perfect location—not too out of the way, but not as overrun and crazy at night as the Meatpacking District or the Village. And they had all talked about creating a more intimate venue than the Blue Angel, and certainly more intimate than the circus-like atmosphere of the Slit. From what she could tell from the outside, this space was exactly what she had in mind.
“Why didn’t you tell me you found something?” she said, following him into the darkness. He locked the door behind them and flipped a wall switch so the room was lit by a few bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling. The walls had been stripped down, and there were construction directions and markings all over them. Exposed wires ran along the wall and some from the ceiling. An empty bar lined the right side of the space, covered with a few discarded jackets and equipment left by construction workers. The room widened toward the back, with slightly higher ceilings and a corridor that she assumed led to the former restaurant’s kitchen.
“The layout could work like this: tables here, a few rows of non-table seating along the sides and back. Keep the bar where it is. And this space back here”—he led her by the hand to where the room widened—“will be the stage. Behind this spot is a kitchen, but we’re going to take it out and build a really good dressing room.”
Mallory hugged him. “It’s perfect! Oh, my God, I’m so excited. I can’t believe this is really happening.”
Alec picked up what appeared to be a large poster board propped against the back wall. He turned it around to show her, and she saw that it was painted with a large replicated image of the dancer that Alec had tattooed on his arm—the Mallory burlesque angel. Next to it, in bold script, were the words
The Painted Lady.
“What is that?” she said, looking at his smile.
“I’m thinking it’s the name of the club. What do you think?”
“It’s perfect. It’s just all . . . perfect. I’m at a loss. You’re the writer—how do I express how amazing this is? I don’t know where to start.”
“Maybe we should christen the stage,” he said.
She looked at the floor. “You want to have sex in here?”
“I was thinking maybe the next best thing. Want to do a little inaugural performance?”
She smiled. Now she knew why he hadn’t wanted her to change out of her workout clothes. “There’s one problem: I need music.”
He walked over to the bar and picked up an iDock that was still plugged into an outlet. “Luckily for us, the construction workers feel the same way.” He set his iPhone between the speakers. “What do you want to hear?”
“You really think I’m going to do this?”
He walked over to the sign and held it up. “You are my muse, baby. Gotta keep the inspiration flowing.”
She smiled. “Fine. You win. As usual! Do you have Marilyn Manson on there?”
“Of course.”
“Play “Heart-Shaped Glasses.’ ”
She took her coat and his coat and spread them out on the floor to make a “bed.” Without props, tassels, and schoolgirl clothes, the routine wouldn’t work. But she knew that piece had to be her inaugural dance. It hadn’t made it to the Blue Angel stage for a reason—it was meant for this space, hers and Alec’s.
She pulled two hairclips from her bag and put them on the floor next to the bed. Quickly, before she could change her mind, she shed her clothes, leaving on only her black lace thong from the Gap. Not the most inspired undergarment, but she hadn’t planned to be on display when she woke up that morning. Of course, living with Alec, she should know to always be at the ready. And she loved it that way.
She stretched out on the coats, rearranging them so a zipper didn’t dig into her bare back. When she felt comfortable enough to begin, she told him to start the music.
The song filled the room, its rhythmic opening slightly tinny in the wide open space, and Alec sat on the floor in front of her. The opening built to a swell, and then the lyrics kicked in. At the first sound of Manson’s low, growling voice, she extended her body out, raising her arms in an exaggerated morning stretch. She turned away from the “audience,” giving a view of her ass. In the actual show, she planned to use stuffed animals to tease the crowd with only a partial view. She would make sure the color scheme was mostly pink with a few accents of red, and when she was fully dressed at the end, her final accessory would be an oversized pair of red, heart-shaped glasses.
With practiced slowness, she sat up in bed, giving a final stretch. She shimmied her breasts, wondering if she should cover her nipples with tassels during the performance or maybe just heart-shaped pasties. As she considered the finer points of how the performance should debut when The Painted Lady was open for business, Alec jumped up from his perch at the edge of the “stage” and practically tackled her on the coats.
“What are you doing?” She laughed.
“I heard this was an audience-participation show.”
“No! Go back to your seat. I’m just getting started.”
“You’re getting me started, I can tell you that. And I’ve changed my mind.”
He pulled her against him, his hand running down her back, cupping her ass.
“About what?”
“Your original idea about how to christen the stage was much better. I defer to your wisdom.”
He kissed her, and she threw her arms around him, knowing that as long as they were together, the whole world was their stage.