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But there’s nothing on the other side. Nothing on the dining room wall where Zelda’s closet wall shimmies 1550 up against 1552, where the little sudden door in her closet should open up and say how-do to the ball-player’s supper-tray. Smooth, flat drywall, paisley wallpaper, the solid, happy sound of studs where Harold knocks on the wall like somebody in there’s gonna answer.
Back over to Zelda Fair sitting cross-legged in her wardrobe, sallow deva floating on a sequin cloud, dresses, both hers and belonging to the O’s, thrown everywhere, in baskets, saladbowls, and bunched up on a footstool where she perches, staring at the door in the wall like she’s done every day she wasn’t fixing stoves since turkey and stuffing ruled the table. Mr. Puss-Boots roosted next to her, balled up tight, his big bill on her knee, half-asleep.
The door’s different now. It’s gone purple, like it got bruised. There’s grapes and oak leaves and seedpods carved on it. The knob is a face with closed eyes.
“It used to be plain white,” she whispers when Harold comes back to scratch his bald spot. She starts talking before he’s all the way in the room—he jogs to catch up with her talk. “When it got here it was plain white. Brass knob, just a door like every other door in the hotel. I thought: gee, I’m dense! All this time living here and I never noticed there’s a door in the closet! But I’m not dense, Mr. K. When we moved in there wasn’t anything here but a pelican. I’d’ve seen it. When I hung up my dresses. When Ollie hung up her trousers. When Opal stacked up her fabrics in here. We’d all have seen it. There was no door, and then there was a door. That’s what happened. And you’d think—wouldn’t you think?—when something like that happens it’s because it wants you to come in. It wants you
inside it. Otherwise why bother? Just kick around Door Park or whatever and mind your own business. But it’s locked up good. Doesn’t want me, I guess.” She reached out her fingers to stroke the door. “Come on, baby. I’m nice. I promise,” she whispered. “Everybody says I’m nice.” Mr. Puss-Boots chortled softly in his sleep. Zelda never thought pelicans could sound so much like plain old chickens.
“Well, let me at it and we’ll see what an old thief can do,” Harold sighs.
It’s hard going with a pelican staring over your shoulder. It should have been an easy crack. These old skeleton locks, you just look at them sidewise and they cry uncle. But it won’t let go. The tumblers won’t tumble and the pins won’t pin. Sticking his pick in there is like throwing a pencil into a forest. He rubs his neck, sweating fierce.
“Okay, Miss Z, I can bust it off its hinges or I can hack out the lock with a saw. I hate to do it that way. It’s brutish and it shows no style. But that’s what I got.”
“No!” cried Zelda Fair, who can’t bear the thought of the door getting hurt on her fault.
“Right. Then I can take a mold and cut a new key for it, and that’ll cost you high. But it can’t go anywhere, honey. There’s nothing on the other end. At best you’d get a little more space for your stockings out of it. I say eat your steaks and pet your bird and go about your life. Like you said. Funny things happen in the world. Probably you were too busy with your hatboxes to notice a little thing like this. Don’t you worry about paying me—I didn’t do nothing, and nothing deserves no pay. Just you take it easy. Ease up on the drink, maybe.”
Exeunt Harold.
Mr. Puss-Boots watches Zelda Fair in her dressing gown, frying her T-bones in an iron skillet. The fat pops; a drop burns the inside of her wrist. The pelican shakes his pouch, which is how his sort says worry. Mr. Puss-Boots loves his girls. They’re a damn sight better than the antiques hawker who’d bought him from the Bronx Zoo and pretty much just thought of him as another Chesterfield chair, then fucked off to Mexico and left him with no fish and a dry bathtub. His girls never let the bathtub stand empty. He can paddle about as much as he wanted. And they had herrings all the time.
Zelda tosses him a chunk of beef, which isn’t as good as a herring, but what is? She sits in the window while the stars come out, eating her bloody meat, sipping at the silver flask, which turns out to be ginger ale—not the vicious bitter death-causing kind, but ginger ale like it was before ol’ Mr. Vollstead ruined everything. Soft and bubbly and sweet and beerily heavy in the blood.
Puss-Boots shuffles his webbed feet. He is a guilty bird. He knows how to get into that door. The key showed its face before the door did. Popped up on the lip of the sink like an old toothbrush. Puss-Boots couldn’t help it. It was so shiny. It was so gold and bright. It looked like a herring. It didn’t taste like a herring, though. It tasted like a sea with no other pelicans anywhere. He’d kept it at the bottom of his pouch. Didn’t want to swallow that night, no sir. Didn’t want to give it to Zelda, either. But now she wanted it so bad and he had it and a bird heart can only hold out so long. He wished the O’s would come home. They’d drag her out to a party and when Zelda danced she was happier than a basket of eggs.
Mr. Puss-Boots shakes his beak and in another half-second he’d have burped up his secret. But Zelda hops up from the window and makes a beeline for the closet. She has a T-bone in her hand, still stringy with meat and stuffed with marrow. She sits down on the gowns again, holding the bone in her hand like a pistol. It must be the ginger ale moving her hand for her. A girl’s hand wouldn’t do such a crazy thing.
She sticks the bone in the lock.
And turns it.
And it turns.
The little door in the closet opens inward, all smug and satisfied. Zelda looks down, down down. Down stairs turning circles into the dark.
And then she’s gone.
Zelda leaves the door open behind her. When you’re that excited, you can’t keep silly things like who might follow you on the brain. Mr. Puss-Boots sighs. He bites the door knob and pulls it shut behind him. Humans never clean up after themselves. The pelican takes a deep breath, puffs his feathers like a dandy on a date, opens his wings, and sails out into the great big hulking black space beyond the wall of Room 1552. His wings stretch wide as a diving champion, as wide as he can go, flapping all the way out for the first time since he came to Manhattan. Hot damn it feels good.
It’s a long way down.
Housekeeping
Come on, duckies. You’ve been waiting all this time. I know. I know you. I said there was a basement right there in the beginning and you been waiting for me to get there, drumming your fingers and peeking over the pages for a little peek at something dark. Trying to see round the curtain at my little peep show before I’m ready to show you my big secret Hades-approved hell-titties. Well, hop to it. Put in your dime. Shut the door behind you.
Miss Zelda Fair, she walks through walls. She walks forever. Forever walks her. Don’t seem sensible there should be so much Artemisia in the Artemisia. Her eyes get used to the dark, big as spinning plates. There’s blue at the bottom. Blue like water. Blue like an eye.
She thinks on a time when she was just a tiny thing and she found a little cave on the back forty that hadn’t been a cave before on account of ferns and mud and mushrooms, but rain washed all that away and left a perfectly marvelous hiding place. Zelda knew it was hers right off. Like a puppy in a shop window. She’d be the Bat-Queen of Slimy Rock and lord it over the Land of the Creepy-Crawlies (which she’d quit being afraid of as soon as possible). She’d dance her ballets in there and be every donna that ever prima’d and the worms would be wowed. They’d applaud all wet and quiet. But Mama Minerva ruined it. Came looking and found little Zelda dressed flash in muck with beetles in her hair. Never again, for goodness sake! Minnie would have it filled in with concrete by supper and Zelda wouldn’t have any buttered rolls to boot. Why, Mama?
Because ladies don’t crawl into holes, my heavens!
Ladies didn’t swim naked either, or smoke or run with boys or cross their legs or curse or eat too much or get blotto because they’re bored and only feel half-alive about every other month. Being a lady’s just the worst thing since the first thing. Zelda would stay a girl if that was the shape of things, and a girl till she died.
A man’s waiting at the bottom of the stairs. Zelda’s never met Al before, she don’t know him from a cricket. Never been in the basement—too busy upstairs by half. He’s all over blue. Blueberry-cream suit with a blue mushroom in his buttonhole, blue light coming out of the pool behind him like the whole sky. His scars look like they could almost spell something, if you could just squint right. Over his shoulder voices whizz and whirr, splashing giggles, the kind of sighing that means somebody’s about to get what they want. Thursday is delivery day down here in the underworld and lookie—a surprise package for Al, all wrapped up nice like he likes them.
“Give it over,” he says, but he says it with a smile, like he’s giving her something.
