“Wait,” I said. I remembered something Odalie had shown me the last time we’d attended a speakeasy in this particular building. “There’s a better way out.” The Lieutenant Detective stopped and nodded. His grip on my arm loosened but did not relinquish altogether, and he allowed me to lead him in the direction of a tiny room in the back.
Once inside the back room, the Lieutenant Detective shot me a look of instant dismay. It was a small, claustrophobic room with shelves running along every wall, from floor to ceiling. The shelves were filled with unmarked bottles.
“Jesus, Rose, what is this? We don’t have time for this.”
“Hold on.” I walked to one wall of bottles and looked for the empty one Odalie had shown me. I lifted one and looked behind it: nothing. I lifted another.
“Rose—”
“Ah!” Behind the last bottle I lifted was the handle I’d been searching for. I reached in and pulled it, but it was stubborn. A small shiver of panic ran through me. I gave it a stronger yank and suddenly felt its release. The bottle-laden shelf swung open on a pair of heavy-duty hinges as though it weighed nothing. I turned to the Lieutenant Detective. Through the dark I made out his eyes, wide and saucerlike as he took in the fact of the new exit that had materialized before him.
“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.” He shook himself and shifted back into command. “C’mon, let’s go.” Taking my elbow again he made to enter the passageway.
“I’m not entirely sure where it goes.”
“Anywhere but here would do right now.”
I was wearing a dress from Odalie that ended in a short pleated sailor’s skirt with a gossamer overlay, and as the shelf of bottles swung shut behind us the gossamer floated up and got caught in the closing threshold. Too late, I tried to push back against the door. I heard the latch deploy with a heavy
thunk
.
“My skirt!” I said into the dark. The Lieutenant Detective produced a lighter from his jacket pocket, flicked it on over his head, and inspected the situation. Together we looked for a way to reopen the passageway door, but no opposing handle or latch could be perceived.
“All right. Hmm. Well.” He took a breath and glanced up from my skirt to look me in the eye. “I’m awfully sorry about this,” the Lieutenant Detective said, reaching into his back pocket.
“Sorry about what?”
Without answering, he produced a collapsible Opinel knife and flipped it open with one fluid snap of his wrist. At the sight of the blade, I involuntarily cringed and shrunk back.
“Take it easy.” The Lieutenant Detective reached down to my skirt, gathered the cloth where it was now tethered to the doorway, and with one fast, hard slice, cut the fabric. I intuited the knife was very sharp, for the gossamer came away as though it were simply a piece of paper being torn in two. I was free. The remainder of my skirt drifted down, the freshly cut patch an awkward tuft that barely covered my derriere. “A shame,” the Lieutenant Detective said, his mouth twisting into a strange variety of smile I had never before seen on his face. “It was a nice dress.”
“I don’t own it. It belongs to Odalie,” I blurted awkwardly.
“Ah. Well, shall we?”
We walked the remainder of the tunnel in silence, the flame from the Lieutenant Detective’s lighter guiding us along, casting the creepy elongated shapes of our own shadows on the tunnel walls as we progressed. At long last, we reached a wooden door. The Lieutenant Detective undid a series of bolts, locks that were only accessible from our side of the door, and suddenly we were met by a wet, humid blast of the hot summer night. We stepped out of the passageway and into a very nondescript alley. I realized I had no idea where I was.
“Clever,” the Lieutenant Detective commented, still inspecting the door we had just exited. “All the doors lock from the inside. You can leave but never enter. Perfect for getaways.”
“You sound admiring.”
“I am.”
“Did you organize the raid tonight?” I asked.
The Lieutenant Detective looked at me and held my gaze for several seconds. There was a full moon out and I could see the cold, clear blue of his eyes and the waxy-smooth skin of the scar on his forehead glistening in the silvery light.
“No,” he said finally. He shrugged. “I don’t disapprove of places like . . . like this.” I didn’t answer, and he continued, abruptly stumbling forward in a jittery voice. “Actually, I have a theory.” His eyebrows shot up in a nervous gesture, as though he were about to commit high treason and was somewhat exhilarated at his own boldness. “See, my theory is society needs places like these. Places to let the steam off, you know? Prohibition isn’t practical. It simply turns more citizens into criminals.” A long silence followed, and the shoulders that had been hunched with excitement as he’d chattered now sagged. I believe he knew what my next question was going to be before I asked it.
“Then why—”
“Why did I agree to come along on the raid tonight?”
I nodded.
He shrugged and looked distantly toward the end of the alley. “I dunno.” He returned his gaze to me and hesitated, as if weighing what he was about to say next. Then he gave a guilty grin and waved one hand in the direction of my snipped skirt. “I suppose you never know when you might come to the aid of a damsel in distress.”
It was a line. But I had no idea why the Lieutenant Detective would try a line on me and found myself a little shocked. More shocking still was how, once he’d said it, the Lieutenant Detective looked down at the pavement and shuffled his feet awkwardly. I couldn’t believe he might be in earnest. The ladylike reaction would be to feel sympathy for his awkward overtures, no matter how gauche they might be, but I didn’t. Perhaps it is telling that my natural reaction to the Lieutenant Detective’s confession was that of a cat reacting to the discovery of a wounded field mouse.
“Of course. I forgot to thank you for making a shambles of my dress.” It came out of my mouth with even more of a sarcastic bite than I’d intended. But instead of apologizing, I found myself rubbing it in further with a bitter, mocking little curtsy.
“
Odalie’s
dress,” he corrected me with an equally belligerent air. I glared at him midcurtsy, and he glared back. Our eyes locked once again, but this time by a sudden feral flash of white-hot anger. We remained like that for several minutes, as though the silvery light of the moon had petrified us and transformed us into two stone statues caught midsnarl. But curiously, the clenched musculature of our two faces suddenly, and in simultaneous synchronicity, began to loosen and slide into a pair of mirrored grins. I was surprised to hear my own voice laughing along with the Lieutenant Detective’s.
When our laughter had subsided, I was very aware that the Lieutenant Detective had inched a few steps closer. On instinct, I leaned away. “I ought to be getting back to our apartment. You know, to deliver the bad news to Odalie about her dress.” I was suddenly very eager to make my farewells and get away, not only because the increasing proximity of the Lieutenant Detective made me uncomfortable, but because I was nervous he might attempt to see me home. By then everyone at the precinct was aware of the fact Odalie and I had become room-mates, but I had been careful to keep the location and luxury of the apartment a secret. I didn’t want to slip up and botch things simply because the silly young detective before me fancied himself a gentleman.
“I thought you said she’d already found a suitable . . . ahem,
diversion
for the evening.”
“She’s likely at home already,” I lied in a haughty voice. The Lieutenant Detective ceded two steps of the borderland between us. “She’s probably wondering where I am.”
“Then we ought to get you home.” He began pacing in the direction of the alley entrance and gave a heavy sigh. I knew I couldn’t let him see Odalie’s apartment, but when he put down my protests with a surprisingly concise, forceful air, I realized he was going to escort me either way, and I elected to save my protests for another time. And when we heard the long, plaintive
WAHHHH
of police sirens moving in the direction of the speakeasy’s innocuous entrance, I was secretly glad for the respectable company.
U
pon turning the key in the lock, I was shocked to find Odalie actually home. I hadn’t really expected her to be. She was swathed in a bathrobe made out of several layers of sheer, sapphire-blue material, and her lanky, catlike body was stretched out at length on the emerald-and-white striped upholstery of the divan. The heat of the day still lingered in the room and Odalie had thrown open the windows to let in the night air. The gauzy white curtains hanging in the window sashes somehow enhanced the overall feline impression of the scene by lifting on the breeze and giving an intermittent, syncopated flick—very much in the tempo of an annoyed housecat idling her tail. In contrast to the inky night sky that loomed in the windowpanes behind her, Odalie looked very vivid and bright where she reclined on the divan in a study of jewel tones.
She was reading a magazine and eating chocolate-covered cherry cordials from a silken confectioner’s box. Odalie had a peculiar way of eating sweets. It differed vastly from Helen’s method. Helen ate her penny candies with a guilty, surreptitious air that put you in mind of a paranoid squirrel desperate to secure a nut before some bird or larger animal came along and forced it to share. In an opposite manner, Odalie ate her chocolates languidly, haphazardly. Sometimes she ate with an indifferent, distracted demeanor, holding whatever treat was in her hand with a slack wrist, a thing already forgotten as she squinted more closely at the latest hats from Paris. Other times she put her whole body into it. She was not afraid to
mmm
and
ohh
when she judged something particularly tasty. With Helen, the candy itself seemed like the valuable thing, whereas on the other hand with Odalie, the valuable thing seemed like her
reaction
to the candy. Perhaps these differences are emblematic of yet another class difference to which I was uninitiated. After all, Helen was stingy with her candies because they were in limited supply. Odalie, however, could afford to be generous and perhaps even a little wasteful. Over the months we lived together, I’d retrieved numerous half-eaten boxes of chocolates from under Odalie’s bed, only to cluck my tongue and deposit them in the waste bin because they had grown a furry whitish-green mantle of mold due to exposure and neglect.
“Oh!” she said when she looked up and saw us. I could tell she was very surprised to discover a man standing in her foyer. She was especially startled that it was the Lieutenant Detective, but I think she would have been at least a little surprised by any man at all. I had never brought a gentleman to the apartment before, and I was still smarting from the sting of humiliation brought on by the countless smirks and raised eyebrows of the hotel staff who witnessed our entry as we’d made our way through the lobby and into the elevator. Despite my repeated protests, the Lieutenant Detective had insisted on seeing me all the way to the front door. Now he stood loitering in the foyer, staring into the sitting room with his mouth slightly agape. I believe he was a little stunned by the trip upstairs and was still deciding what to make of the plush lobby, the golden elevators, and the fashionably decorated apartment in which he currently found himself. Odalie shot me a look of reproach; I understood by allowing the Lieutenant Detective to escort me home I had violated my oath to keep her living situation a secret. She was clearly not at all pleased with this development. But just as soon as her features stiffened with anger, she regained herself and they melted back into a repose of welcoming ease. She rose lithely to greet us.
“Goodness. Well, Lieutenant Detective, you’d better come in and make yourself at home.”
“I was only seeing to it Rose got home safely.”
“Nonsense. You’re here now. Stay a bit.” The Lieutenant Detective staggered forward in a daze as Odalie hooked her arm through his and sat him on the divan where she’d been lounging just seconds before. He seemed acutely aware of this latter fact and scooted politely so he was perched on the outermost edge of the upholstered seat. She gave him an assessing look, her mouth involuntarily wriggling in a way I understood meant she was deciding how to regain control of the situation. I knew she would be unsettled until she had extracted a tacit guarantee that the Lieutenant Detective wouldn’t give away her secret, and to do so first she needed to size him up. “I could offer you something to drink,” she said. He looked at her. “Something to calm your nerves,” she said. It was clear she did not mean coffee or tea, and he seemed to understand his acceptance of a cocktail would in fact calm his hostess’s nerves.
“Sure.”
As Odalie got up to mix the drinks, the Lieutenant Detective’s eyes followed her, and I took the opportunity to sneak down the hall and into her bedroom to change my clothes. If Odalie had taken note of the brutally shredded hemline of the dress I’d borrowed, either she did not care or did not care to comment. I knew it was not likely she would say anything to reproach me. Nonetheless I felt guilty, having ruined something I knew I could not afford to replace. From the other room the spurt of the seltzer bottle sounded in several staccato blasts. In the months after I’d moved in, Odalie and I had taken to sharing one big closet and I stood before it now, studying its contents. As I rooted about for something to wear I heard Odalie bring a tray of drinks to the coffee table, the ice tinkling as she crossed the room. The sharp fragrance of fresh lime drifted from the sitting room into the bedroom, and I guessed she’d elected to make gin rickeys. Odalie, never one to drink the concoctions of ethanol and juniper syrup sold in the speakeasies—commonly referred to as bathtub gin—had very likely used the last of the bottle of real English gin we kept in the kitchenette bar (it was destined to mysteriously replace itself the very next day). Curiously, my mouth watered in anticipation, a phenomenon I’d never experienced before, being something of an amateur drinker myself.
I stared at the wall of hanging clothes and tried to hurry up. If the Lieutenant Detective had diplomatically gone home like proper decorum dictated, the decision would have been simple and I would’ve put on my nightgown, ready to be comfortable for the evening. But I ruled this out immediately. My regular nightgown was not an improper garment, per se. In fact it possessed certain features reminiscent of the sexless nightshirts we were made to wear in the orphanage: bleached white linen of a coarse and scratchy variety, a high starched neck, and long sleeves with string-pulls that cinched at the wrists. But I knew I’d rather die than have the Lieutenant Detective see me in any nightgown, let alone that particular one. I searched about for something more suitable.
“That’s a very nice pair of bracelets,” I overheard the Lieutenant Detective remark to Odalie. Immediately I knew the ones he meant. She hadn’t been wearing them earlier, but I had spotted them twinkling on her wrists when we walked in the door. The baubles in question were a pair of diamond bracelets, the like of which I’d never seen in my admittedly provincial life. They were far out of the range of anything I ever glimpsed in Mrs. Lebrun’s jewelry box as she taught me how to properly clean precious stones and their settings. I will probably never see anything to rival Odalie’s bracelets ever again. Most curious to me at the time was the fact I’d never seen Odalie wear them out. Instead, she had a queer habit of putting them on when she stayed in, wearing them around the apartment the way another sort of woman might wear a housecoat.
“Are they real?” he asked. I heard Odalie laugh, the musical peals of her voice striking a perfectly ambiguous note, implying
yes, of course
and
no, don’t be silly
all at the same time. I had wondered about the answer to this question myself, but had never been so bold as to ask. Finally, I found something of my own buried deep in the closet. I threw on a very plain blue cotton dress and made my way back to the sitting room, but hovered in the doorway, just out of sight, peering in on them from a vantage point where they were not likely to notice me.
“Do you know,” she leaned in excitedly, “they were a gift; I’ve never asked whether or not they’re real.” She laughed again. I noticed she had pronounced the word
gift
sharply, like it had a bitter bite to it. The Lieutenant Detective also did not fail to notice this.
“That so? A gift?”
“Yes. Well. An
engagement present,
to be more precise.”
“Oh, forgive me. I was under the impression you were . . .” He reached around for the most inoffensive word and found none. “. . . a bachelorette,” he finally concluded, feminizing the more familiar (and notably less offensive) masculine term. Odalie smiled, pleased and Sphinx-like.
“I am.”
“Oh, I beg your pardon. Again.”
Odalie did not reply to this last comment and instead stretched her wrists out in front of the Lieutenant Detective’s eyes. “But they really are something, aren’t they.” It was not a question. She rolled her wrists slowly to the left and then to the right, allowing the diamonds to shoot off the full color spectrum of their tiny prismatic flares. He gazed at them with appreciation.
“I’ve never seen a woman wear bracelets on both wrists, matching like that.”
The bitter bite came back into the shape of her mouth as she smiled at the Lieutenant Detective’s impressed countenance and gave a brittle laugh. “Yes. They look a little like . . . like
handcuffs,
don’t they?” She crossed her wrists together and posed. The Lieutenant Detective started at this grim comparison and glanced at Odalie in surprise. She leaned closer to him. “In fact, I’ll let you in on a secret: That’s what engagement presents always are, in one way or another.” She cocked her head playfully, but there was something dark, too, in her demeanor. I felt the prickle of something proprietary awaken in me, but I wasn’t entirely certain to which party this feeling was directed.
I held my breath as Odalie reduced the inches of empty space between them. “Doll a thing up all you want, but you still can’t change what it is.
A rose by another other name . . .
” she said coquettishly. Hearing the homonym of my name stung my ears somewhat. “Do you think any of the suspects down at the precinct would be envious if they knew my handcuffs are fancier than theirs?” Odalie was grinning wolfishly now, her rouged lips stretched wide over the white of her teeth, her body almost touching the Lieutenant Detective. Suddenly the urge to enter the room overcame me. I coughed.
Their attention snapped in my direction, a couple of woodland creatures frozen instantly upon realizing they are not alone in the forest. The Lieutenant Detective’s face colored up to his ears, and he rose reactively from the divan.
“Oh! Yes. Well. I should be going. I’m quite glad to have seen you home safely, Miss Baker.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant Detective. For all your . . .” I searched for the right word, lamely shrugged, and finally murmured,
“. . . assistance.”
I hadn’t meant it sarcastically, but I could tell that was how he took it. He straightened his spine in an aggrieved manner that simultaneously suggested he felt truly sorry for the events of the night—for having been caught making eyes at Odalie, for having ruined the dress, perhaps even for the raid itself. He reached for his hat.
“Oh, but
Frank,
stay awhile. You haven’t finished your drink,” Odalie complained, gesturing to the glass still half full with gin rickey. She reached a hand up to tug playfully at his jacket sleeve. There was a familiar ease about the way Odalie pronounced the Lieutenant Detective’s given name; it was as though she had said it that way many times over already. As I took in the image of the two of them there in the sitting room, it occurred to me the Lieutenant Detective did not look so overwhelmed and disconcerted by his surroundings as I had originally thought. For the first time a certain suspicion began to form itself in my head.
“No, no. It’s late, and I’ve already had more than my fill tonight, no need to tank up before going home.” Still standing where he had abruptly leapt to his feet from the divan, he made a halfhearted attempt to smooth his rumpled suit. Despite his best efforts, the suit still hung on him in its signature slouchy manner. I suppose I had always known there was something of the handsome rogue about the Lieutenant Detective, but just at that moment, as he looked up at me with the scar on his forehead furrowed in the lamplight and a crooked grin forming on his lips, I began to see why he was so often fussed over when he found himself in the company of ladies.
“Besides,” he added, “it’s been quite an eventful evening.” At this, Odalie looked at him askance. “I’ll let Rose—beg pardon, I mean Miss Baker—recount the particulars.”
Odalie saw him to the door. “The other way . . . to your right,” I heard her call softly as he went the wrong direction to find his way back to the elevator. The suspicion that had hatched itself in my brain only minutes earlier subsided a bit. I don’t believe his disorientation was the product of too much drink. It was his first visit to the hotel, as far as I knew, and people often found themselves overwhelmed upon their premier visit to Odalie’s apartment.
Odalie came back into the sitting room, and from the shift in her manner it was immediately clear she was expecting a thorough debriefing on the subject of my recent interaction with the Lieutenant Detective. “It was very
nice
of him to see you home like that,” she said. She threw her body over the divan like a wet blanket. There was something perpetually fluid about her movements, even in spite of the fact she was mostly long lines and hard angles. For months now I’d been trying to understand this paradox, and I knew I was not the first to try to puzzle it out.
“And don’t worry,” she continued once I had failed to reply. “I won’t get too cozy with him.” I knew right away this was a lie. She leaned forward from the divan and reached to pat the back of my hand where it rested on my knee. “I can tell you wouldn’t want me to.” There was an excitement in her voice the way she said it, and I realized the Lieutenant Detective had very recently gained an element of true appeal in Odalie’s eyes. But it didn’t matter to me just then, as there was another matter of great importance at hand.