What's a Girl Gotta Do (26 page)

“Hey, Lisl,” he said, kissing the
anarchette’s cheek before sliding onto the stool next to me. He
ordered Wild Turkey. He looked great, very casual and masculine
(but not in a contrived, GQ way) in a khaki flight jacket and
jeans, a look I love for the way it sets off the line of a man’s
butt and legs. A man has to have the body to carry off a look like
that, though, and Eric did, with strong shoulders, a well-toned
butt, not too small and not too big, and nice long legs.

She told him about her taxes and said by
paying his voluntarily he was condoning all the wrongs of the U.S.
government.

“When the revolution comes, and they drag me
off as an establishment toady, I hope you’ll come to my defense,”
he said.

“When the revolution comes, nobody will drag
anybody off. Everyone will be free,” she said, and she said
good-bye and went to rejoin a table of her skank friends.

“She’s young and Utopian,” he said. “I’m
sorry I’m late. Greg had to leave right after the show, had a hot
date, and so I had to look after the show postmortem with the
crew.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “Who is Greg dating
these days?”

“I make it my business not to know what Greg
does and who he does it to,” Eric said.

I nodded. “Eric, do you think Griff might
have been investigating women who worked for Greg Browner?”

“Do you?”

“I think he was hired to get the goods on
Greg through us, women who worked for him,” I said.

“Robin, I don’t want to talk about blackmail
and murder tonight. You make me think you’re kissing up to me to
get information.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m not kissing up to you
for information. Do you think you’re after me because I’m … a
challenge of some kind? That conquest thing?”

“Are you just using me to get even with
Burke?”

We stared at each other and he said, “You
know, there have been these small, random events that … I can’t
explain this. On December thirty-first, I looked out my window and
saw a robin on my fire escape, at least a month early. At the
Marfeles, I heard the song ‘Rockin’ Robin’ on the elevator Musak.
Then I ran into you at the party, a Robin I’ve always been
extremely curious about. It seems like a … meaningful series of
coincidences, if you know what I mean.”

This was the perfect thing for him to say to
me as I have always had a fearful respect for coincidences and
omens. Was he sincere, or was I just being played by a master
Playboy, who seemed to know me too well?

“And when I looked in your eyes as we were
dancing, I thought, ‘Yeah, of course. Robin,’” he continued.

Oh, this is the final straw, the next most
perfect thing to say to me at this point. I hated that he could do
that.

“You wanna go back to my place?” he
asked.

“Yes,” I said, before he’d even finished the
question.

We walked to East Houston to get a cab,
stopping every few yards to soul kiss. How do I describe what it
did to me, kissing this guy on a dark street in a dangerous
neighborhood? We got a cab, and as soon as it squealed away from
the curb we started making out in the back seat. I felt like I was
seventeen and about to lose my virginity. When his hand came up
under my blouse, I thought I was going to die.

Chapter Fifteen

WHEN WE GOT INSIDE HIS apartment, he lifted
me up and carried me into his bedroom, almost gracefully, stopping
only once to hitch my weight up to a more comfortable holding
position. I got the feeling he’d done this before. It’s a corny
thing, a cliché, but it sure is romantic, and it sure takes care of
that awkward transition between rooms when you’re about to
fornicate with someone for the first time.

There were condoms by the side of the bed,
thoughtfully placed, noticeable but unobtrusive, so I didn’t have
to ask him any awkward questions. That issue settled, we tore each
other’s clothes off and were pagan and wicked, several times. Okay,
there were a couple of awkward moments, a couple of miscues, but
for the most part, the sex was great. After months of celibacy,
when my intimate encounters generally involved double-A batteries
and Henry Miller, it was refreshing to have good sex with a real
man.

After the second round, we ordered in
cheeseburgers, fries, and chocolate shakes. Between sweaty gropes,
we ate and talked. Eric told me his theory of dysfunctional
families, which he claimed improved the species by ensuring
migration so that different tribes met, mingled, and mixed genetic
material. Dysfunctional families were nature’s way to prevent
inbreeding, he said, because if everyone liked their family, they’d
never leave their valleys or islands and they’d just inbreed to
extinction – or idiocy. It made a certain sense.

I lay there, naked, freshly loved, fed,
feeling like maybe, just this once, Fortune had smiled on me, that
maybe there was such a thing as Mr. Right and one didn’t have to
settle for Mr. Close Enough. I could let myself fall in love with
you, I thought, as he told me his theory about the future of
television, which was that we’d be washed up in a few years because
virtual reality was the next thing, the wave. People would live
their own sitcoms, instead of just watching them. It’d be like
putting yourself in the box instead of sitting outside it because
you’d be able to interact with other characters in a 3-D
holographic environment with sensory stimuli so you could touch,
taste, and feel the imaginary world. Television would become quaint
and we’d end up like McGravy, telling stories of the good old days
when television was king, when kids had to use their imagination to
enjoy a show in two dimensions.

I smiled and rolled onto my stomach to read
the titles of the books on the shelf built into his headboard, a
couple of sports bios and several yearbooks. Over his protests, I
made him show me his yearbook pictures. Even back in high school he
was good-looking, although awfully clean-cut. In senior year Eric
Slansky, student council president, lettered in golf and was a
Junior Achiever.

“Prediction: Ambitious Eric goes all the way
to the White House, if wine, women, and rock and roll don’t get him
first,” read the editorial note below his picture.

“Golf?” I said. “If I looked at this picture
without knowing you, I would have guessed you’d grow up to be the
CEO of Omnipotent Industries or something. What were your favorite
subjects?”

“Math and history. I was a nerd back
then.”

“What happened? Wine? Women? Rock and
roll?”

“Life,” he said with mock gusto. “What were
you like in high school?”

“Well, I was on the school paper, the Super
Snooper, and I was a cheerleader for a year and a half,” I
admitted. “Not a very happy one. I was kind of the squad black
sheep. I quit in junior year.”

“Why?”

“I read The Female Eunuch,” I said. It was a
lie. Actually, my cheerleading career was brought to a sliding halt
before a stadium full of my high school peers by a mud slick and an
overly ambitious kick. I’d set myself up as the best and then
humiliated myself. I was beginning to sense a motif.

“Do a cheer for me,” he said.

“Make me,” I challenged and we had sex again
in a completely different position.

Afterwards, he insisted on going out to get
my favorite flavor of ice cream. This is too good to be true, I
thought, as I luxuriated, naked, between his blue cotton sheets. A
guy who fucks like that and then goes out on a winter night to get
you ice cream afterwards. Yep, if the devil wanted my soul, this is
the guy he’d send to fetch it.

Eric was gone a long time. I got bored and
turned on the news. A woman reporter was live on the scene of a
Queens grave robbing, which led the show, and she tossed to another
live story, this one with ace reporter Burke Avery outside Spencer
Roo’s office building.

“Thanks, Carmela. Buster Corbus has not one,
but three alibis for the Marfeles murder,” Burke said. Three
alibis, and every one of them a winner – a woman in “the adult
entertainment field,” dressed in black lingerie and blue jeans, a
timid deli clerk, and a parish priest. Buster Corbus and Spencer
Roo were taking no chances. The woman and the deli clerk might not
have been credible witnesses, but it was going to be hard to shake
the testimony of a man of the cloth, even in this day and age, when
we know ministers are flawed men like other flawed men.

Normally, three such witnesses in a Spencer
Roo case wouldn’t be enough to convince me, but the minister really
did look saint like, and the response from the D.A.’s office was
somewhat subdued, like they weren’t completely sure of their case.
I was hyperaware suddenly that the killer was probably still at
large.

To quiet the hum of fear inside me, I made
myself a drink and then wandered naked around Eric’s apartment,
looking for clues to his real self. He had very old-fashioned
masculine décor, a lot of deep blues and blue tartans, wooden decoy
ducks and Remington prints. In a corner, a bicycle wheel was
propped up next to a tennis racket missing a string. There were
balled up socks scattered about and enough general disorder to make
me feel comfortable.

On the coffee table by the sofa, a P.G.
Wodehouse book (The Inimitable Jeeves) was open, text down. I just
love a man who reads, especially a man who reads P.G. The sofa
still held the impression of his body, and I sat down there and
imagined him stretched out, reading Wodehouse. It was a very
pleasant image.

When I went back to bed, I picked up his
college yearbook, from his junior year, trying to find the missing
link between the upright nerd of high school and the loose,
confident supervising producer. Between high school and college,
his physical image changed dramatically. The yearbook called him
“Tri Kap’s Prez and Partymeister.” He was kind of shaggy looking,
smiling widely, and he appeared to be stoned. I turned to the
section on frats, hoping to see more pictures of him.

There was only one, and at first I didn’t
recognize him. He and three of his “brothers” were in drag for a
campy, all-male production of Clare Boothe Luce’s The Women done
for charity. Eric made, well, not a pretty woman, but a handsome
one certainly. It was that blond wig that bothered me.

A blond wig. Like a blond transvestite, I
thought. Sure, Mrs. Ramirez was always imagining transvestites and
call girls coming to my apartment, but maybe she wasn’t far off the
mark that last time. Holy shit! Holy Mr. Wrong! I thought as I
quickly dressed and got the hell out of there. What a sucker!

It all made sense now. Griff would have
investigated Eric too, because he worked for Browner and presumably
had a lot of dirt on his boss. Well, this answered another question
I had: why Eric was so ardently pursuing me. It was plain: He was
dating me to find out what I knew, to mislead me. God, maybe to
kill me. Of course, I had no proof beyond an old photo in a college
yearbook but I had something else – a strong hunch.

All that talk of Eric’s about family. “What a
crock,” I said aloud. After Burke, he probably thought that was the
right button to push with me, the solid family-man button. Thank
God I wanted Ben & Jerry’s light Reverse Chocolate Chunk, I
thought, my favorite flavor, but not an easy one to find. It gave
me time to escape.

I ran out to the street and got a cab and I
didn’t relax until I was back in my apartment, my heavy furniture
pushed in front of all the doors and windows. That night, I slept
very badly at first. Every time a car drove down my dark street,
the shadows on my wall changed and grew more sinister, until I had
to turn my bedside lamp on. The pipes clanked, the iron fire escape
outside my bedroom window creaked, and I was sure I heard a woman
screaming in the dark distance.

I rolled over and tried to reassure myself,
but then, from the living room, I heard a small but very alarming
noise: Louise Bryant hissing softly at something. Slowly and
quietly, I picked up my special umbrella and my bottle of cayenne
cologne. My umbrella was the telescopic kind that shoots out and
opens up with the touch of a button. Strategically aimed, it could
disable an attacker quite nicely while at the same time providing a
kind of shield. I kept it by the side of my bed.

Holding my umbrella carefully, I crept
towards the bedroom doorway, expecting a psychopathic killer to
jump in front of me at any moment. Then, my heart pounding and
every nerve in my body on red alert, I inched to the very edge of
the wall and heard Louise Bryant his again. At that, I stopped. In
my wide-eyed rigor mortis I could not move my feet. But something
inside me took over – my bad temper, I guess.

With a quick motion I reached around the
corner and flicked on the overhead light, hurling myself into the
living room. “Ha!” I shouted, brandishing my weapons, umbrella in
one hand, perfume in the other. Go ahead. Make my day. But there
was nobody there. Just my cat holding a cockroach firmly under a
front paw and looking up at me, contempt mixed with embarrassment
in her cold amber eyes.

I felt foolish but nevertheless made myself
useful, spearing the cockroach with my umbrella and depositing it
in the toilet. By now I was wide awake and pumped up on adrenaline,
so I took a sleeping pill, watered my poison ivy, and took down my
scrapbooks and started pasting Griff stories into them with Elmer’s
glue while I waited for the pill to take effect.

I guess it sounds pretty weird, but ever
since I was a kid, I’ve kept scrapbooks of murders. I opened one to
an old story about Nannie Doss, the Giggling Grandma, who killed
four of her five husbands. Why? She told police she was looking for
the perfect husband, presumably by process of elimination, Four
down, a billion to go. In all, I had twenty-four scrapbooks, each
with headings like “Mass Murders,” “Random Murders,” “Family
Murders.” Some of these had several volumes, and some, like the one
I called “Straw that Broke the Camel’s Back,” consisted of just one
scrapbook. The most famous example of the last would be the Papin
sisters, lesbian lovers and housemaids who in the 1930s killed
their employer and her daughter in a bloody rage of mutilation
after a short-circuiting iron blew a fuse one too many times. Jean
Genet immortalized them in The Maids.