Authors: Rona Jaffe
“That was a perfect evening,” Mad Daddy said. “Didn’t you think so?”
“Yes.”
He looked at his watch. “Let’s go walk in the zoo.”
“The zoo?”
“Yeah. There won’t be anybody there yet. We can see everything.”
“You’re not allowed in at five in the morning, are you?”
“Of course not. That’s the fun of it. Come on.” He jumped to his feet and pulled her up.
She was so tired she was getting numb, but still she didn’t want to tell him to go away so she could sleep. She went with him to the street where he found a cab and directed it to an all-night cafeteria, where he bought containers of coffee and huge pieces of artificial-looking Danish pastry wrapped in cellophane. Then the cab took them to the Fifth Avenue entrance to the zoo. The city looked very clean and fresh in the dawn. There was no one in the street and you could look for blocks in either direction and not see any traffic. Early morning sunlight sparkled on windowpanes of the big buildings, and a light breeze stirred the leaves of the trees in the park. There was no one to tell them they could not enter the zoo, just a sign which they ignored, so they went in.
A few animals were awake, looking at them curiously. They strolled from cage to cage, sipping their coffee, eating their Danish pastry, which tasted as artificial as it looked, but wonderful.
“Get up, lion!” Mad Daddy yelled at the lion’s cage. “Robert F. O’Brien is coming! Don’t let him catch you asleep on the job.” The lion yawned at them. “Rehearsing already,” he said.
A man in a uniform came out of one of the animal houses and looked at them suspiciously. Mad Daddy nodded and smiled at him. “Good morning,” he said pleasantly.
The man’s face defrosted slightly.
“You keep a very clean zoo,” Mad Daddy said. “We just got married this morning. This is our honeymoon.”
The man shrugged. “Congratulations.”
“You see, we met in the zoo. So we wanted to come back for sentimental reasons.”
“That’s nice,” the man said without much enthusiasm.
“Isn’t it?” Mad Daddy said happily. He steered Gerry away toward the bears’ cage. “See, Seymour,” he told her. “He didn’t even notice you were a man.”
“You’re a nut.”
“So are you. Running around like that, in a dress.”
She giggled, and then she remembered Bonnie, and Dick, and she stopped giggling. She wondered if Dick would have liked Bonnie if he had thought she was a girl. No … Bonnie wasn’t really Dick’s type … he’d run through all the models of note. Dick had really liked Bonnie because Bonnie
was
a boy. Dick seemed far away now, like a stranger she’d once known. She could look at him objectively and it didn’t hurt any more. She wondered if Dick would ever have the courage to go out with Bonnie alone, and she knew at the same time that if he did, neither Bonnie nor Dick would ever tell her, and that
it didn’t matter
. Dick could do anything he wanted to now; if he didn’t want
her
it didn’t matter who he wanted.
“You look sad,” Mad Daddy said.
“No … just sleepy.”
He started walking back toward her apartment building. She wondered if he meant to come up … she wondered if Bonnie would be there … she wondered if Mad Daddy would like Bonnie … She knew she had to go to sleep now because she was so tired she was getting paranoid and sorry for herself.
When they got to her building he went upstairs with her. He didn’t look as if he was expecting to go to bed with her; he just looked like he didn’t want to go home. She knew he was alone in his apartment and she wondered if he was afraid to be alone, or if he found it a relief. There were a lot of things she was curious to find out about him, but there would be time …
Bonnie was in the kitchen, wearing Gerry’s bathrobe and making scrambled eggs.
“Out all night, you big tart,” Bonnie said cheerfully.
“Same to you. Where were you?”
“Oh, I had a date with some guy I
wrecked
,” Bonnie said, and gave Gerry a big smile of triumph.
“Anyone I know?”
“No. You wouldn’t want to know him either.”
“This is Mad Daddy,” Gerry said. “Bonnie Parker.”
“Hello, Bonnie,” Mad Daddy said. He smiled politely and looked at Bonnie with no interest at all. Gerry felt her heart soar.
“Do you want some eggs?” Bonnie asked. She pouted and simpered at Mad Daddy; she couldn’t help it, really, it was as instinctive with her as breathing. When she didn’t flirt with a stranger she ran away and hid. It depended on how secure she was feeling at the moment. Since she was usually afraid of strangers it was evident she was feeling very secure right now. She really must have wrecked that guy, whoever he was.
“I’d better go home,” Mad Daddy said. “I have to write some shows tomorrow. I always leave it till the last minute. I keep trying to stay ahead, but I never can. Nice meeting you.”
Gerry walked him to the door. He put his arms around her.
“Hey,” he whispered in her ear, “that roommate of yours—is she a dike?”
“Of course not!”
“Well, she looks like a dike. When I first looked at her, the first second, I thought she was a guy.”
“Don’t say that!” Gerry whispered, horrified.
“Boy,” he said, “Models … feh! You’re beautiful. I love you. Good night.”
“Good night.” Then he kissed her. She had known all along he would be a champion kisser. It went with the whole kid thing of him, and she knew he would be a champion necker, too. She wondered about the rest of it. They stood there in the doorway, kissing, while the opened door closed softly again. “I better go,” he said. “I’ll call you tomorrow. Today, I mean. Go to sleep.”
And he was gone. Gerry stood there, touching her lips. She could still feel him. She knew now that it was inevitable; they were going to have a romance. She wondered what it would do to their friendship. He was so perceptive it was scary. If he’d spent five more minutes with Bonnie he would have
known
she was Vincent. Like a child … a dress and make-up couldn’t fool him, because actors and clowns wore costumes and make-up, too. What an incredible man Mad Daddy was! A child and a man … a precious person.
She walked slowly back to the kitchen, looking at Bonnie. Had Bonnie changed? They’d been so close, maybe she had changed and Gerry hadn’t noticed. No, Bonnie looked the same. Thank God! Gerry remembered her mother saying you should never eat capon because it had male hormones in it. Well, from now on she wouldn’t even let Bonnie eat chicken. She smiled appreciatively at Bonnie, lovely even after a long, hard night, and went into the bedroom, stopping only to peel off her false eyelashes before she fell into bed and was asleep.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Lizzte Libra lay in the Las Vegas sun, her body oiled, her eyes closed, listening to the mournful drone of Elaine Fellin’s voice. If it had been anyone else she would have been whining, but Elaine’s dead voice was incapable of a whine. Her rotten kid was off playing by the pool with some other kids she’d found, sending off shrill yips of pleasure. Eyes still closed, Lizzie adjusted the top of her suit to avoid a strap mark. This was the first year she’d bought a one-piece suit, and it depressed her beyond measure. (“I do think bikinis are better for the
young girls
, don’t you, madam?” the snotty salesgirl had said. “This power net will hold in the little bulge around the tum-tum.”) Wouldn’t the bitch faint if she knew the names of some of the famous stars who had enjoyed themselves very much indeed atop that little bulge on the tum-tum!
Her
boyfriend probably worked in a drugstore.
“I never should have married him in the first place,” Elaine went on. “If I had it to do all over, I never would. What did I know? I was sixteen years old. Daddy was the first and only man I’d ever slept with. I thought I had to marry him just because I’d been to bed with him—I thought otherwise it was dirty. He never talks to me. He never wants to take me anywhere. Oh, he loves to go out with those stiffs from the station he does business with, but he won’t take me. All he ever wants to do at night is watch television. He’ll watch anything. He makes me give him his dinner in front of the set. He sits there till his eyes are ready to drop out. He doesn’t know if I’m giving him meat loaf or dog food. He watches vampire movies. Vampire movies! When I try to talk he goes:
Shhh
. Son of a bitch!”
Across the tiled walk from the swimming pool was the King Cactus Bar, where Lizzie could hear soft music from the jukebox. It was all done up very wagon wheels and horse bits. The afternoon bartender looked exactly like Paul Newman. It was uncanny. Lizzie had made several trips to the bar simply because the young man with the blond hair and stop-traffic blue eyes looked so much like Paul Newman it made her almost horny. What a shame he was only a bartender! This place was dead.
“At night when I can’t sleep I just wander around the apartment and cry,” Elaine said. “I used to take only one Seconal; now I take three. He doesn’t even know I’m awake—he’s snoring away, the pig. Once in a while he notices I exist and then he grabs me just as if I’m some tart. He thinks he can ignore me all the time and then expect me to go to bed with him. The trouble is, he still makes me so hot. I hate him, and I’d divorce him in a minute, but the damned bastard makes me so hot.”
Lizzie opened her eyes and sipped the dregs of her piña colada. It was time to see Paul Newman and get another. Elaine was half smashed, as usual. She was really a gloriously pretty animal, with her tawny hair down around her shoulders and that Miss America body. Elaine could still wear a bikini. Lizzie sighed and tried to hold in her stomach. Elaine didn’t have midriff bulge; Elaine had a double ridge of muscle from her solar plexus down to her impeccable navel. Elaine’s tits didn’t sag when she didn’t wear a bra. Elaine didn’t have to get that job with the wire under the cups. Lizzie sighed again and thought she would have to get to Kounovsky’s more often. What the hell—Garbo was old and she looked great. What was wrong with
her?
She was only forty-two years old; that wasn’t an old bag. She felt depressed.
“He completely ignores his own child,” Elaine said. “He’s doing that damn show every night, playing Daddy Two-Shoes, and he doesn’t care about his own kid. Sometimes I think he’s even forgotten her name. He says she’s spoiled. I tell him, well,
you
never do anything about bringing her up, so if she’s spoiled it’s your fault. He says it’s my fault because a girl needs her mother as an example. I tell him, a fine example she’s got for a father. She thinks her father is that nice guy she watches on television. She doesn’t even
know
that grouch who lives with us.”
When they’d first gotten to Vegas, two weeks ago, Lizzie had looked in the paper to see who was playing at each of the hotels. Arnie Gurney, of course, and they’d had to spend several boring evenings with him and that drab he was married to. There was absolutely no one for Lizzie. She’d balled each and every one of the stars years ago, with the exception of Sinatra, and he wouldn’t have anything to do with her. There wasn’t even an interesting celebrity to talk to anywhere in this crass hotel. There was only the gambling, and as usual she’d done very well, winning more than she’d lost. She and Elaine had decided to stay on for another week or ten days. The trip wasn’t costing them anything, and New York in the summer was even worse than here. Elaine sat and complained all the time, but she couldn’t decide whether or not to establish residence and divorce Mad Daddy once and for all; she preferred to complain. By midnight every night, Elaine was dead drunk. Elaine attracted a lot of men, but she wouldn’t have anything to do with them. It made her feel like more of a martyr to be a faithful wife, and it gave her something else to complain about. Lizzie hadn’t had anything either, but she didn’t care to drink herself to sleep the way Elaine did. What a shame that Paul Newman look-alike was only a bartender! A middle-aged married woman on vacation away from her husband, having a fling with the hotel bartender, was just too trite. She couldn’t lower herself to be trite, no matter what else she did. Why couldn’t he really be Paul Newman? He even had that same sexy voice.
“I don’t know why I’m still faithful to him,” Elaine said. “I know it would serve him right if I wasn’t. But I just can’t put myself on the level of those whores we know. They’re all whores. Oh, not you, Lizzie—you’re just a nut.”
“This nut is getting another drink,” Lizzie said. She looked into her compact, fixed her hair, put on a little more lipstick, and got up.
“Bring me a double vodka on the rocks,” Elaine said, handing her the empty glass. “Hundred proof—not the eighty.”
God, the tiles were hot! It must be a hundred degrees out. Lizzie hobbled back for her thong sandals and slipped them on. Except for the kids playing, the pool area was deserted. Everyone was either gambling or sleeping it off. Nobody ever came here to work on their tan or swim. She didn’t even know who those two kids Elaine’s rotten kid was playing with belonged to. An arm opened the screen door of the cabana apartment to let them in and out. Maybe she should stay indoors, too. Sun aged the skin.
Feeling ancient, Lizzie entered the dim, air-conditioned bar. The bartender saw her and gave her a big, sexy Paul Newman smile. She held in her stomach. Goddam power net anyway; she should have gotten something with a little overblouse.
“How ya doin’, Mrs. Libra?” the boy said. He winked.
“Pretty good, Jared.” The bar was nearly empty; just two tables with drinkers at them, and a middle-aged bleached blonde with a lot of clanky charm bracelets, playing the one-armed bandit in the corner. Clank, clank went the charm bracelets. Clunk went the steel arm. Clank, clank. Dimes tinkled into the steel well, maybe five or six dimes in all. The woman, whose bracelets by weight alone must have cost five hundred dollars, whooped with joy. Lizzie hoisted herself up to the tall bar stool, wondering if she looked as old and grotesque as that woman.
“You’re certainly looking great today, Mrs. L.,” the bartender said. “You looked like a little kid standing there in the doorway.”
Lizzie smiled. “Yes?”
“Man, your husband is crazy to let you come here alone. Some millionaire is going to carry you off on his yacht.” Deftly, he began mixing her another piña colada. “This one is on the house.” He winked again.