Megan Abbott - Bury Me Deep

So it was a long hour after that, radio playing, rasping out “Far away near Havana shores there lives a girl, whom I call dancing Cuban Pearl,” and Marion darning, like her crook-handed mother, stockings fuzzed with wear. She might have gone to the girls’ place on Hussel Street. Louise always said it was an open invitation and that Saturdays were always a scream, they made sure of it.

But then there it was, like an air horn blast. Eight o’clock, or three minutes past, the sharp knock and frog-jawed Mrs. Gower, robe pulled across low-slung chest, saying, “A Mr. Lanigan should want you on the telephone, Mrs. Seeley. Told him I shan’t expect you to take calls this late but he said mightn’t I try. Couldn’t barely hear him. Sounds like he’s telephoning from a train station, or a rodeo.”

Marion’s breath fast, her hand nearly damp on the mouthpiece, fingers pressed on the thrumming ringer box. “Mr. Lanigan?”

Was that his voice amid the crunching sounds of the festivities, glasses tinkling, dishes clapping against each other, chairs skidding, a trombone drawling, but most of all waves of laughter, men and women laughing together?

“Mrs. Seeley… I know you had declined me, but I do believe you have the wrong impression… should come… respectable celebration in honor of a fine civic leader and Mr. Solway himself would so appreciate your presence… might you consider attending?… You might take a trolley car down and I would meet you and escort you…”

THE TWO YOUNG MEN next to her on the trolley, both wheezing corn liquor, kept rustling her, each time apologizing, hat doffing, but still so caught up in their drunken stories that they’d inevitably fall to it again, one of them even jabbing her straight in the bosom.

Don’t I deserve it, Marion thought. Her knees shaking, her heart vibrating like a tug spring, she cursed herself for not hesitating fifteen seconds before putting on her one fine dress, daffodil colored and ironed to shininess, borrowing trolley fare from no less than bristle-lipped Mrs. Gower (“It was my brother, Mrs. Gower. He needs me to wire him train fare home to see our dear mother.”). And now, heading alone to a downtown hotel to see a man she had no business seeing. No business seeing at all except the business of ruin. She felt her stomach flip three times, and could barely wait to get there.

No one was waiting for her at the trolley stop. She could see the El Royale from where she stood and then she was walking there. She wondered, as she kept her eyes on the hotel, which sprawled a full city block and had a front canopy of gold, if this awfulness in her was new, a spell cast, or something inside her that he had stoked or merely touched and watched enfold in her.

But then, walking alone into the cavernous Thunderbird Dining Room, a sea of dark suits and mustaches, cigar smoke and preening, she felt everything inside her held so tight for a week or more release itself. She saw only a handful of women, their dresses like glowing paint streaks—poppy, turquoise, parrot green. They were young like her, but their dresses dipped low, showing shiny flesh, and their eyes were fringed with dark lashes and their cheeks were like berries bursting, crinkly hair marcelled, and it was all very, very wrong that she should be here, and one man, a stout patrician type with a bulging pocket-watched vest, he had his hands clambering down a girl’s lightly clad, shimmery gold back nearly toward her behind and then, definitely, there. The music hammered at her and the floors felt sodden with champagne and maybe it wasn’t so different from Louise and Ginny’s and yet it was. It was. It was because that was their party and this was not. This was not. It was something else and it felt a little bit like these girls had, stiff-faced and cold-eyed, punched a clock.

Then, from the corner of her eye, something: a swath of dress the color of crème de menthe and it was a dress she knew, as Mrs. Loomis had worn it on New Year’s Eve, and it fit so snug across her swelling chest that the trim kept tearing. But it didn’t look like Mrs. Loomis, not the way the dress was hanging, swinging.

Her eye followed the dress, followed its peacock spread, trailed it as it spanned and tucked and then settled behind the large gray shoulder of a man she recognized as one of the doctors at the clinic, Dr. Jellbye, Dr. Jellieck, Dr. Jellineck…and then he turned and behind him Marion could see that bristle of deep red hair and then Louise’s kohl-rimmed eyes, jittery with pleasure.

“It’s my prairie canary,” came a voice slipping rough in her ear, startling Marion, making her flinch. But it was only Mr. Gergen, the Westclox salesman, and he took Marion’s arm in his sausage fingers and plucked her from the crush and as he did said, “Joe Irish is looking for you, bunny rabbit.” And she felt overwrought and angry and she said, “I don’t know who you mean. And you may tell him I have gone.”

But Marion’s voice seemed to get swallowed up by Mr. Gergen and his big double-breasted suit jacket and then, like a game of Pass the Parcel, she was fast in the arms of Gent Joe himself, tuxedo black as India ink, and she looked up at his eyes, his eyes smiling, his face doing smiling things as if there were never any such thing as shame in this world, and she caught his eyes and she said, in a voice that surprised her, “Mr. Lanigan, you will remove me from this place,” a strong, spiky voice like Louise telling a noisy patient, “I suppose you know you’re disturbing the entire ward, Mr. Milksop.”

He did as she said. He removed her with great speed.

Then they were in front of the hotel and the cold pinpricking her and he putting his tuxedo jacket around her.

“These are not the kinds of places I can…”

He pulled his jacket tighter around her and said, mournfully like those Irish can do, “I shouldn’t have asked you to come. But I saw no other way. You had closed the door on me. But I was wrong. Of course I was wrong. I should have realized this was no place for you. That’s a lie, Mrs. Seeley. I knew this was no place for you. And yet.”

He said he’d take her home in his motorcar and she didn’t like it but could think of no other way. The trolleys ran an hour apart this time of night.

In his car, she sat far against the door, feeling suddenly like he’d seen her without her clothing. She felt like, in coming, she’d shown him everything. She knew she had. And now she must retreat.

The sedan was filled with him, he was so large a presence, so tall and with that hair thick like a layer cake, and the way he talked, which was big, like the best salesman, filled with tricks of tone and turns of phrase—there was this way he had of always reminding you how important and marvelous what was happening to you just then was.

“And that El Royale Hotel, I’ve invested a substantial amount in it, it will be colossal. Did you know, they put circulating ice water in every room and automatic cooled air that changes every three minutes? I timed it. But listen to me sitting here talking nonsense about circulating water and I get these moments with you and it’s a thing of glory, just like this, this is all I wanted, Mrs. Seeley, and I just didn’t know how else to make it happen.”

He drove three miles past Mrs. Gower’s house, would not stop pressing until she turned and let a snarl loose like none she knew was in her.

“What kind of husband,” she said, “with an invalid wife at home no less, spends his evenings like this, Mr. Lanigan?”

“What kind of husband is your Dr. Seeley,” he replied, rough as a razor strap, “leaving his wife behind and packing off to savage Mexico?”

And that was a terrible thing for a man to say, for anyone to say, what did he know of her husband’s sorrows and burdens, and Marion felt it like a hot iron to her chest and she hated Joe Lanigan, she did.