Hob Broun - Odditorium

“On its way, Mr. Milbank.”

Julio wafted off to call the “cellar” on the intercom. There, two craftsmen were kept busy decanting California wine into bottles bearing counterfeit labels. The bottles were then rolled in a trough of wood ashes and finished off with mylar cobwebs sprayed from a device originally contrived by a producer of television commercials.

Slipping off her pumps, Dodie extended one stockinged foot under the table in search of Pierce. “You seem to have a lot of pull. How come we haven’t seen you around here before?”

“I was probably playing Scrabble in the back room.”

“Do you know Steve personally?” Working her way across Pierce’s instep, Dodie turned to fill in the newcomers. “Steve is the spirit behind the Canteen. He’s like an independent compass for environmental design.”

“Steve is a very beautiful and creative man.” Charmaine sighed dreamily. “When he made love to me it felt like I was being sculpted.”

“How about that.” Christo leaned back in his chair. “Well, I once fucked Johnny Carson all night.”

“And what do you think about that?” Dodie said challengingly.

“I think I have a nicer asshole,” Tildy snapped.

And then, before things could get really ugly, the champagne arrived.

Pierce filled their tulip glasses and proposed a toast to “Our visitor from Dixieland.” Tildy permitted him to kiss her hand.

“I’m a great student of accents,” Charmaine said. “I’ll bet you’re from Alabama.”

“Nope. I come from Louisiana.” Tildy brushed foam off her lip. “With a banjo on my knee.”

“I was in New Orleans once,” Charmaine offered. This one was for real, a memory all too vivid.

She’d flown down for the weekend with a bartender who was in on a lead-pipe scheme to doctor the ninth race trifecta at Evangeline Downs. Except this kid trainer was wired for sound, and when the payoff man whipped out his envelope, Pinkerton agents were all over him like a blanket. Charmaine spent most of Saturday night tied to the bed with extension cords and woke up in the hallway Sunday morning locked out of the room with nothing but a ripped T-shirt, a black eye and a pair of paper shower slippers. Rule #1: Don’t come on to the bartender.

The bandstand receded on worm-geared tracks, was replaced by a back-alley stage set complete with knothole fence, cardboard lamppost and suspended crescent moon. Half a dozen showgirls pranced out to a vamping piano. They wore pink tights with marabou tails appended and pointy ears on their pink berets. They had whiskers grease-penciled on their upper lips; in nasal thirds reminiscent of the Boswell Sisters, they sang,

“We’re fuzzy little alley cats

In a special kind of heat,

We’re all stoked up on catnip

And we love that boogie beat.

“Prowl girls, howl girls

And wag your silky tails …”

The piano rumbled and they rendered some rudimentary and not quite synchronized dance steps.

“Put me up there.” Dodie gestured awkwardly with her empty glass. “Put me up there and I’d show you some moves’d stiffen the neckties in this dump.”

“Dammit.” When Pierce’s fist hit the table, it rattled the lampshade. “What is it? You crib all your dialogue from comic books or what? Why don’t you just cool your jets for ten minutes and be ornamental.”

The pink kittens gurgled.

“Fish may be our favorite dish

But meat is also yummy …”

Tildy felt dizzy and hot. She unknotted her scarf and held it over her mouth. Christo asked if she was doing okay.

“I’m going to go wash my face,” she said.

All eyes at the table turned to watch her go.

“Nice bounce,” Pierce commented.

Charmaine, paralyzed with adoration, listened to her own sedated breathing and wished she were a boy.

Tildy sat in front of a large spotlighted mirror and examined the flanks of her nose for blackheads. Didn’t have the billboard looks of those two back at the table, but there was something solid there, something durable. Lucien used to tell her she’d make her way in the world because there was upright character showing in her face. Thanks, Dad. You should see me with makeup.

She gathered a ridge of skin between index fingers and squeezed until a translucent plug of sebum wormed up out of a blocked pore.

“No, never do that. It leaves pits.” Charmaine swayed in the doorway, twisting the orange scarf in her fingers. “I ought to know. My sophomore year in high school, I had the worst acne in my homeroom.”

“That’s all right,” Tildy said, dabbing saliva on the red spot. “My face needs a little distinction anyway.”

Charmaine moved up to the mirror and plucked at her fawn-colored bangs. “In this city your face is all you’ve got. I dote on mine. Lemon and egg white every morning … But it used to be horrible. I just hid out in my room for months, like I was a leper or something. Then this old Armenian lady who lived next door, one day she gave me some cuttings from a bush she had growing in her yard. Told me to strip the bark, boil it up with the leaves, then soak pieces of cheesecloth in it and tape them to my face before bed. The stains it made. I must have gone through fifteen pairs of pyjamas that summer. But by September my skin was like glass. Better than it is now.”

“And it’s beautiful now. Egg whites? Is that what you said?”

Charmaine turned her back to the mirror. The scarf was wound around her wrist and diagonally across her palm like an improvised bandage. “It was a transformation all right. Boys started to come after me and my new face. They told me I had a different look, older somehow. They’d touch my cheek like it was something from outer space that glowed. I fell in love with a few of them. I had a baby. A little girl. Tara didn’t cry, not ever. She just seemed above it all. Sometimes sitting by her crib watching that face, I’d want to cry. It was so soft and white, I almost expected it to come off on my fingers when I touched it. Like powder. She had a mobile hanging over her crib and one night it got twisted around her neck somehow and she stopped breathing. She just lay there with this necklace of toy lambs.”

Charmaine wobbled her feet and shrugged. There was regret in her voice, but no grief. It was like anything else: a plush apartment, a snazzy car — you had it for a while and then it was taken.

“That was how you found her? My God.”

Tildy meant only to touch her shoulder but it was too long a stretch; her hand came to rest on the upper slope of Charmaine’s heavy breast. They looked at each other for a moment and then Charmaine sank to her knees, one arm around the back of Tildy’s chair.

“Don’t be sad,” she said, lowering her head onto Tildy’s lap. “It doesn’t make any sense to be sad. You can’t keep hold of anything in this world. Not even your face.” Sitting up, pushing Tildy’s hair back. “You ought to show more of your cheekbones, you know.” Charmaine caught Tildy’s hands and held them against her breasts. Her eyes glistened. “They’re a little tender. I’m about to get my period.”

Uh-huh. This was where Tildy always seemed to be coming in.

“Next time,” she said, backing away. “Maybe next time.”

The stage was empty when Tildy returned. So was the bottle of champagne; so was Dodie’s chair. The partners were puffing casually on needle-thin reefers.

“We shook off our little hustler,” Pierce said. “You do the same with yours?”

“More or less.”

“Fluffheads,” Christo grumbled. “But at least they matched the decor.” All evening he had been able to think of little beyond his new business horizons. Pierce was free with promises; it was always a bull market with him. He was also someone who needed to be repeatedly pinned down. But Christo could not make his opening, could not find the words. An unfamiliar sensation. “So here we are, just the three of us.”