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And Frankie sees it all, the orgy of making.
Enzo kissing out his paintings with Ollie, kissing up her columns, Murray pouring out his sculptures, Nickel and Dime dancing till blueprints for buildings that ache to look at spool out under their feet. Iris Wiltsey Charlestoning movies her man Sammy won’t ever let her direct. And isn’t that Lily Greer vomiting up a new Vaudeville show? Why it is, it is! Look at the magician’s rabbit scrabbling up out of the toilet! And Frankie recognizes others, even if he doesn’t know their real names—Cinderella dancing with Rapunzel, Jorindel breaking plates with Prince Charming, Snow White passed out cold in the front hallway while the Snow Queen holds a compress to her head. Sonnets leak out of the cloth.
And Frankie sees something else, too. He sees Vollstead, though he doesn’t know that funny muscled bow-legged goblin has a name. He sees Vollstead using that rich man’s magic he himself used so well an hour ago. Following up behind, quiet as you please, the help, the janitor, the maid, picking up the dice-pages and the dance-flicks and the kiss-paintings, sweeping them up into ditches dug through the January ground, tidying everything away.
And in those ditches, the pages and the canvases and the film and the pigment and the icons and the statues liquify. Go black and bubble into syrup, into a foamy river flowing out and up and over, out and up and over into the great barrels in a thousand streams of a dark black-violet heady something that Frankie’s pretty sure would fetch more money than gold in the Artemisia right about now. Zelda’s hooch, bright and cold and full of dreams. He gapes like a kid, though he wants to play it cool. Zelda grins. She’s proud. So proud.
“Isn’t it something?” she breathes.
“You’ve been feeding us…junk? Upstairs. Letting us drink what you sweep up down here?”
Ollie’s voice cuts through the jiggly music-palace noise. She strides up in her long trousers and suit-coat and locks arms with Zelda like they’re old Greek soldiers and he’s from out of town. Oleander Coy looks him up and down like he’s nothing. Like she has to squint to see him at all. “Letting you? Haven’t you got eyes? It’s not junk, dummy, it’s art! And honey, everybody eats art and drinks stories. It’s the best drunk there is! If you can make something out of a potato so good that people would shoot you dead in the street for a glass, what can you make out of Enzo’s pictures and Olive’s dresses and my one-liners and Murray’s little stone gods? Vollstead showed us how. And Al. Hell, down here I don’t even have to use a white man’s name. I’m me and everyone knows it. Everyone sees me.”
Zelda lays her head on her friend’s shoulder. Some mean little part of Frankie wonders what a flat full of girls get up to in the off-hours, and Mr. Puss-Boots nips his hip in punishment. Frankie yelps. Zelda keeps talking.
“It’s…it’s so direct, you know? You look at a painting and it fills you up. You read a book and sometimes it’s so good you feel like you could live on it. And now we do live on it. Everyone does. It’s perfect. You should try it. You’re a writer. I remember!” Zelda Fair turns up her face and good lord but her lips look like glory and he stops thinking about the four of them crammed into Room 1550. “Come on. Kiss me. Let’s make a book!”
Well, Frankie is in no shape to turn that down. He kisses her hard, because he knows it might be his only chance. Their tongues meet in that oh-so-natural way, the way that says they might do all right if they got married. No teeth knocking. No nose-battling. And out of their mouths and their hands come not even pages but words, just words, moving type, slick and hard and hot, words like children’s toys, Christmas ornaments, crystalline creatures swelling up and flowing out of them, whispering, giggling, the words, the words that Frankie can never find, the words he reaches for and misses, and then falls back on a new detective, a new dead body, the same old yarn he’s always fraying. He stops kissing Zelda because some things are more important than kisses and the poor kid lurches after the black, dancing words, trying to hold onto them, trying to stop them getting away, trying to read them so he can remember, so he can remember when all this is over how good he can be, how simple and clean and orderly and beautiful. And not for a minute does he think that he only kissed those words into the world because Zelda put her mouth on his, that they’re hers, too. Not for a heartbeat.
The words don’t care. They leap toward the ditches, dive into the liquor, shiver into the brew and the barrels. Frankie sobs after them. He hates this place. This place where he isn’t seen right, where he was only allowed once everyone else had already gone. It’s not a Minnesota kind of place. His words are lost and he can never love a place that showed him what he could do and then took it away. Everyone here is out to lunch, bonkers, mad—Zelda is shooting a tommy gun at the sky and stories are falling back down into her hair. She’s catching them in a cut-glass pitcher, laughing, running to snatch another from the air, and sometimes she grabs their crystal words, too, their hard dark typeface animals Frankie and Zelda made together, skittering and tripping on the ice. They all fizz into rum in her pitcher, a deep green rum shining with wonderful light.
Frankie doesn’t care. He had it. He had it, there in his hands, the book he’s meant to write, all the books, the books deep down in the bottom of him, the pure sentences and chapters that get so damn junked up on the way out. And they’re gone, turned to muck so idiots can guzzle them down and puke them up and hallucinate on the fire escape and then forget it all in the morning. They’re a ruin, they are ruin, and he can never get them back. So Frankie does what a young man does when he’s lost something he thinks he’s got a right to, when he’s going to be seen, by god, when he’s stuck on the other side of the shop window while all the other kids roll around in the candy canes. Frankie Key snatches Zelda’s gun away. She yelps like he didn’t when the lady in the ballroom lost her shoe in his back pocket.
He grabs Pearl by the arm. She just laughs because who knows what a bastard grabbing you at a party will make here? A trumpet solo soars out of her elbow, golden notes and clefs bursting like sweet artillery, the melody loud and clear as rain.
“You’re coming home,” Frankie snarls. “You’re coming with me. Your husband sent me. Put your clothes on.”
“Fuck you,” Pearl giggles, and Little Cass pipes up, repeating his mother. “Fuckoo!”
“Hey now,” gruffs a voice, which is Vollstead’s voice. Frankie looks him dead in the eye. “Stop that monkey shit. We can settle this like men, yeah?” Frankie stares. Takes in V’s machine-gun legs, his ripply blue chest, his warty odd face and his long ears, his earrings, his gold eyes, his huge hands, and our boy up and decides Vollstead isn’t real, he just isn’t. He’s like the space between the restaurants in the lobby, the paisley green-and-gold place where you whisper about gruyere and boysenberries but it isn’t really anything at all, just a whispering place like St. Paul’s in London. This ugly lump is just one of Al’s tricks. Al loves tricks. They’re his favorites. And Frankie’s going to take Pearl home and get paid enough to buy his own place to sit and think and try to remember those pristine words he lost. No abracadabra is going to get in the way of that, no sir. No bunny is gonna show him up. Not this bunny, anyway, this fairybook monster with breath like sweet almonds and the death of hope.
So Frankie shoots him.
B4
Parties get quiet toward the end. Only a few folks left, keeping the lights on, keeping the music going, rooting through the bottles for the one that’s not empty. Gets quiet. Just before the sun starts straightening the tables and filling the glasses. Gets close and secret and gentle. Truth o’clock. That’s where we are now.
Al doesn’t care about punishment in the traditional sense. Eye for an eye and all that. Al can have an eye whenever he wants. An eye’s nothing to him. He’d rather have an eyelash for an eye. Or the USS Maine for an eye. He has no sense of proportion, does Al. But he has a mean sense of humor. Vollstead was his baby. A wedding ring he traded back and forth with his great big Titanic-Titania dinosaur-wife. Zelda’s his baby, too. And Pearl. And Ollie. And Enzo. They’re all his babies. He could kill Frankie and nobody would even get upset over it. Fair play, old man. A dozen more where he came from. But it’s not even that much fun to kill humans. Al got bored with that centuries ago. He needs his fun. No cat likes to be fed dazed mice. You gotta play with them a little first, or the meat gets tough.
So here they sit, in the close quiet dark of the grand party. Around a table: Al, Frankie, Zelda, Ollie, Pearl with Little Cass in her lap. The table’s the same green as the Golfballroom in the Artemisia, soft and fake and nice. Al deals cards like an old pro because that’s just what he is. A plain red Bicycle deck, nothing fancy, nothing hidden, fifty-two cards fair and square, I wouldn’t try
to cheat you, no sir. Check ’em if you like. Four aces, nothing up the sleeve.
Zelda’s fur coat hangs open just enough for everyone to see she hasn’t got a stitch on underneath except a little emerald pendant on a gold chain. Green as a dock light between her breasts. Mr. Puss-Boots sleeps under her feet, his long white wings swallowing up her toes. Mr. Puss-Boots dreams a story like this, a story where a prince goes creeping down into the underworld after twelve dancing princesses because some king decided the girls were having too much fun and wanted to rub their faces in how hard he owns them. Only when Mr. Puss-Boots dreams it, the prince is half-pelican, and he loves the princesses like the sea. He just glides on down after them, into the dark, following their starry-light dresses, and when he finds them they laugh and shout and speak Pelican and hold him in their arms all together and the bird-prince just never goes back home to that nasty old daddy with the tinfoil hat. Mr. Puss-Boots stays with his girls forever and the dancing princesses never slow down. It’s a nice dream. He’s dreamed it every night since his first sleep in Canada.
Pearl strokes her kid’s hair. Ollie smokes and plays footsie with Al. Frankie glares at the lump that used to be Vollstead. The bloody, unreal lump. Even without him, pages and paint trickle into the river flowing up to the barrels. His pages. His perfect ink.
“The game is Cretaceous Hold ’Em. Everything’s wild. Play or I bury you here.” Al doesn’t fuck around. But his voice is so soft and loving, like a grandpa after a good pipe. Only grandpa might eat you as soon as tuck you in bed.
The cards fan out but nobody wants to bet. No chips anyhow. Zelda looks at her cards. Three queens. She touches their faces. Olive’s face and Ollie’s face and Opal’s face. Spades, Hearts, Clubs. Red Bicycle my ass, she thinks. She puts her hand into her coat. Her comforting coat. All she wants is to shoot up another chapter, is to dance some wry, wise prose into the bathroom floor. It is so good here, she thinks. It is hers. There is no space between wanting and having, between thinking and making real. That’s the best any place can offer. She does have something to bet, she thinks, though she was saving it. What if she needed it? Well, she guesses she needs it now. Zelda Fair puts her syringe in the middle of the table. Al looks approvingly at her.
“My girl,” he says.
Pearl takes off her ruby earrings and throws them in. Little Cass tries to add his lollipop but his mama won’t let him waste his treasure. Ollie puts in her smokes. Frankie? Frankie has fuck all, to tell the truth. He throws in his billfold, which is hardly enough to call, let alone stay in the game. Honestly, Frankie. Get with it. Al pulls off his cufflink. He says:
“It’s not a cufflink. It’s Lily Greer. She’s gonna shoot somebody cold in the 10th floor hallway in about six months. Who’s it gonna be?”
Pearl’s face pinches. She knows what she’s got. She calls. As she lays down her cards, Al names them:
