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I didn’t hear from Betsy for a few days. I supposed she was working and helping her daughter acclimate to life on the surface of the sun. I did get texts from Marisa, and while they weren’t quite innocuous, neither were they incendiary. She wanted to know if I thought she should get a second piercing along the side of her ears (I said to ask her mother) and whether I could procure tickets for Betsy and her to a new Cirque du Soleil show that kids at her school said was “super hot.” (I said I could, but the request for tickets had to come from her mother, given the reality that the show was indeed awash in nubile young bodies in provocative contortions.) She asked if I ever went to England to research my own cabaret, which was a clever inquiry. I had, but it had been years earlier. She was curious whether people “ever give you shit” because Diana was an inch shy of six feet tall and I am, by comparison, “a freaking midget.” (Her words.) I told her not to use the term midget and boasted that I was, like Betsy, five feet, four inches tall—a perfectly good height for a woman, thank you very much—and I wore a lot of heels. Also, I added, most people had no idea that Diana was statuesque. Then she asked if I knew that the princess had once gone to Russia. I did and texted back:
Yes. And not wanting to encourage non sequiturs, I have to ask: what in the world made you google Diana’s two days in Moscow?
All of this Russia talk—including the fact that Frankie had once worked there and the closest thing I had to a suitor was a Russian American who went by Gene but I still enjoyed calling Yevgeny—had me nervous. But my niece’s response reassured me. At least a bit.
I didn’t google it. Russia came up when I was looking at all the countries she’d visited and it wasn’t in your show. I’ve never even been to Canada and I’ve only been to three states. And that counts Vermont.
When I read that text, it made me rather sad.
* * *
I told Nigel about Cleo Dionne’s death. His first reaction was that she had the perfect name for a Vegas performer, and if anyone was going to drown in a bathtub, it was going to be a woman with that moniker.
“So, you don’t suspect foul play?” I asked him.
“Oh, of course I do. She died in a bathtub on Grand Cayman, for God’s sake. That’s fishy.”
“Was that a joke?”
“Because she drowned? No. Just a coincidence that I chose that word. Who found her?”
“Housekeeping.”
“Well, that must have been a treat. Was Frankie Limback with her? I don’t mean in the hotel room. Or the bathtub. But was he on the island when she died?”
“That’s a great question. Is there a way to find out without asking him?”
“Know any good spies?” he asked in response, kidding.
“No, I don’t,” I told him. “But I do have a friend who seems quite resourceful.” I was thinking, of course, of Yevgeny.
* * *
The queen died that Thursday.
I knew I would have to rewrite parts of the show, because the world was becoming one soggy box of tissues over her demise. I understood that. I was as stunned as everyone.
As anyone.
But the part of me that was Diana was miffed.
The world had been furious with the queen in the days immediately following Diana’s death in 1997. People felt she was callous—and especially cruel to her grandsons, expecting them as boys to have stiff upper lips as their mother, estranged from the royal family, was lowered into the ground. Oh, eventually the queen bowed her head—and it was a deep and resonant bow, not a bow that she phoned in—as Diana’s funeral cortege passed, but it took her a painful few days to reach the realization that she had to transcend protocol and be…human.
You will suppose I watched every bit of the coverage that flooded the news cycle.
I watched some.
But those days? A little went a long way. And I had other things on my mind.
* * *
Yevgeny was arriving on Saturday and planned to go hiking on Sunday, the first of my two days off every week, and then join me at the pool. (The show was dark on Sundays and Mondays.) Saturday, I knew, we’d have a rather scrummy reunion, and I was relieved he hadn’t suggested I join him on the hike. Yes, I know that Diana first earned her keep in the eyes of the royal family by donning a pair of well-worn brogues and showing what an agreeable outdoorswoman she could be at Balmoral, but I prefer to exert myself in the hallowed—and air-conditioned—halls of a gym. I was impressed by how well he had already picked up on the things I liked to do, and the things I did not.
How much Yevgeny would know about Frankie Limback was an interesting question in my mind. If he was who he said he was, he might know nothing. If he was, despite what I told Nigel, some sort of spy, he might know something and feign ignorance. Or he might kill me for asking.
No, I was confident he wouldn’t do that.
Mostly, anyway.
