Dallie shook his head. “Poor son of a bitch,” he muttered.
She tried to glare at him, but her eyes were too teary, so she stood and turned her back, struggling for control. “What I need, Dallie, is some way to endure the next few weeks until I can talk to Nicky. I thought you could help me, but last night you wouldn't talk to me, and you made me so angry, and now you've taken my money.” She spun on him, her voice catching on a sob. “Don't you see, Dallie? If you'd just been reasonable, none of this would have happened.”
“I'll be goddamned.” Dallie's boots hit the floor. “You're getting ready to blame all this on me, aren't you? Jesus, I hate people like you. No matter what happens, you manage to shift the blame to somebody else.”
She jumped up. “I don't have to listen to this! All I wanted was some help.”
“And a small bit of cash to go with it.”
“I can return every penny in a few weeks.”
“If Nicky takes you back.” He stretched out his legs again, crossing them at the ankles. “Francie, you don't seem to realize that I'm a stranger with no obligation to you. I don't do all that good a job of taking care of myself, and I'm sure as hell not going to take you on, even for a few weeks. To tell you the truth, I don't even like you.”
She looked at him, bewilderment imprinted on her face. “You don't like me?”
“I really don't, Francie.” His burst of anger had faded, and he spoke calmly and with such obvious conviction that she knew he was telling the truth. “Look, honey, you're a real traffic stopper with that face of yours, and even though you're a little on the puny side, you kiss great. I can't deny that I had a few wayward thoughts about what the two of us might have been able to accomplish underneath the covers, and if you had a different personality I could even see myself losing my head over you for a few weeks. But the thing of it is, you don't have a different personality, and the way you are is pretty much a composite of all the bad qualities of every man and woman I ever met, with none of the good qualities thrown in to even things out.”
She sank down on the end of the bed, hurt enveloping her. “I see,” she said quietly.
He stood and pulled out his wallet. “I don't have a lot of ready cash right now. I'll cover the rest of the motel bill with plastic and leave fifty dollars to hold you for a few days. If you get around to paying me back, send me a check in care of General Delivery, Wynette, Texas. If you don't get around to it, I'll know things didn't work out between you and Nicky, and hope greener pastures turn up soon.”
With that speech, he tossed the motel key on the desk and walked out the door.
She was finally alone. She stared down at a dark stain that looked like an outline of Capri on the motel carpet. Now. Now she'd hit bottom.
Skeet leaned out the passenger window as Dallie approached the Riviera. “You want me to drive?” he asked. “You can crawl in the back and try for a few hours’ sleep.”
Dallie opened the driver's door. “You drive too damned slow, and I don't feel like sleeping.”
“Suit yourself.” Skeet settled in and handed Dallie a Styrofoam coffee cup with the lid still snapped on. Then he gave him a slip of pink paper. “The cashier's phone number.”
Dallie crumpled the paper and pushed it into the ashtray, where it joined two others. He pulled on his cap. “You ever heard of Pygmalion, Skeet?”
“Is he the guy who played right tackle for Wynette High?”
Dallie used his front teeth to pull the lid off his coffee cup while he turned the key in the ignition. “No, that was Pygella, Jimmy Pygella. He moved to Corpus Christi a few years back and opened up a Midas muffler shop. Pygmalion's this play by George Bernard Shaw about a Cockney flower girl who gets made over into a real lady.” He flipped on the windshield wipers.
“Don't sound too interesting, Dallie. The play I liked was that Oh! Calcutta! we saw in St. Louis. Now that was real good.”
“I know you liked that play, Skeet. I liked it, too, but you see it's not generally regarded as a great piece of literature. It doesn't have a lot to say about the human condition, if you follow me. Pygmalion, on the other hand, says that people can change... that they can get better with a little direction.” He threw the car into reverse and backed out of the parking place. “It also says that the person directing that change doesn't get anything for his trouble but a load of grief.”
Francesca, her eyes wide and stricken, stood in the open door of the motel room clutching her case to her chest like a teddy bear and watched the Riviera pull out of the parking place. Dallie was really going to do it. He was going to drive away and leave her all by herself, even though he'd admitted he'd thought about going to bed with her. Until now, that had always been enough to hold any man to her side, but suddenly it wasn't. How could that be? What was happening to her world? Bewilderment underscored her fear. She felt like a child who'd learned her colors wrong and just found out that red was really yellow, blue was really green—only now that she knew what was wrong, she couldn't imagine what to do about it.
The Riviera swung around to the exit, waited for a break in the traffic, and then began to move out onto the wet road. The tips of her fingers had gone numb, and her legs felt weak, as if all the muscles had lost their strength. Drizzle dampened her T-shirt, a lock of hair fell forward over her cheek. “Dallie!” She started to run as fast as she could.
“The thing of it is,” Dallie said, looking up into his rearview mirror, “she doesn't think about anybody but herself.”
“Most self-centered woman I ever encountered in my life,” Skeet agreed.
“And she doesn't know how to do a damn thing except maybe put on makeup.”
“She sure as hell can't swim.”
“She doesn't have even one lick of common sense.”
“Not a lick.”
Dallie uttered a particularly offensive oath and slammed on the brakes.
Francesca reached the car, gasping for breath in small sobs. “Don't! Don't leave me alone!”
The strength of Dallie's anger took her by surprise. He vaulted out of the door, tore the case from her hands, and then backed her up against the side of the car so that the door handle jabbed into her hip.
“Now you listen to me, and you listen good!” he shouted. “I'm taking you under duress, and you stop that goddamn sniveling right now!”
She sobbed, blinking against the drizzle. “But I'm—”
“I said to stop it! I don't want to do this—I got a real bad feeling about it—so from this minute on, you'd better do exactly what I say. Everything I say. You don't ask me any questions; you don't make any comments. And if you give me one minute of that fancy horseshit of yours, you'll be out on your skinny ass.”
“All right,” she cried, her pride hanging in tatters, her voice strangling on her humiliation. “All right!”
He looked at her with a contempt he made no effort to disguise, then jerked open the back door. She turned to scramble inside, but just as she bent forward, he drew back his hand and cracked her hard across her bottom. “There's more where that came from,” he said, “and my hand's just itching for the next shot.”
Every mile of the ride to Lake Charles felt like a hundred. She turned her face to the window and tried to pretend she was invisible, but when occupants of other cars looked idly over at her as the Riviera sped past, she couldn't suppress the illogical feeling that they knew what had happened, that they could actually see how she had been reduced to begging for help, see that she had been struck for the first time in her life. I won't think about it, she told herself as they sped past flooded rice fields and swampland covered with slimy green algae. I'll think about it tomorrow, next week, any time but now when I might start crying again and he might stop the car and set me out on the highway. But she couldn't help thinking about it, and she bit a raw place on the inside of her already battered bottom lip to keep from making the smallest sound.
She saw a sign that said Lake Charles, and then they crossed a great cur
ved bridge. In the front seat, Skeet and Dallie talked on and off, neither of them paying any attention to her.
“The motel's right up there,” Skeet finally remarked to Dallie. “Remember when Holly Grace showed up here last year with that Chevy dealer from Tulsa?”
Dallie grunted something Francesca didn't quite catch as he pulled into the parking lot, which didn't look all that different from the one they'd left less than four hours earlier, and swung around toward the office. Francesca's stomach growled, and she realized she hadn't had anything to eat since the evening before when she'd grabbed a hamburger after pawning her suitcase. Nothing to eat... and no money to buy anything with. And then she wondered who Holly Grace might be, but she was too demoralized to feel more than a passing curiosity.
“Francie, I'd already pushed my credit card limit pretty close to the edge before I met you, and that little romp of yours just about finished the job. You're going to have to share a room with Skeet.”
“No!”
“No!”
Dallie sighed and flicked off the ignition. “All right, Skeet. You and I'll share a room until we get rid of Francie.”
“Not hardly.” Skeet threw open the door of the Riviera. “I haven't shared a room with you since you turned pro, and I'm not gonna start now. You stay up half the night and then make enough noise in the morning to wake the dead.” He climbed out of the car and headed toward the office, calling back over his shoulder, “Since you're the one who's so all-fired anxious to bring Miss Fran-chess-ka along, you can damn well sleep with her yourself.”
Dallie swore the entire time he was unloading his suitcase and carrying it inside. Francesca sat on the edge of one of the room's two double beds, her back straight, her feet side by side, knees pressed together, like a little girl on her best behavior at a grown-up party. From the next room she heard the sound of a television announcer reporting on an anti-nuclear group protesting at a missile site; then someone flipped the channel to a ball game and “The Star-Spangled Banner” rang out. Bitterness welled up inside her as the music brought back the memory of the round button she had spotted on the taxi driver's shirt: AMERICA, LAND OF OPPORTUNITY. What kind of opportunity? The opportunity to pay for food and shelter with her body in some sordid motel room? Nothing came entirely free, did it? And her body was all she had left. By coming into this room with Dallie, hadn't she implicitly promised to give him something in return?
“Will you stop looking like that!” Dallie threw his suitcase on the bed. “Believe me, Miss Fancy Pants, I don't have any designs on your body. You stay on your side of the room, as far out of my sight as possible, and we'll do just fine. But first I want my fifty bucks back.”
She had to salvage some morsel of her self-respect when she handed him back his money, so she tossed her head, flicking her hair back over her shoulders as if she hadn't a care in the world. “I gather you're some sort of golfer,” she remarked offhandedly, trying to show him that his surliness didn't affect her. “Would that be a vocation or an avocation?”
“More like an addiction, I guess.” He grabbed a pair of slacks from his suitcase and then reached for the zipper on his jeans.
She spun around, quickly turning her back to him. “I—I think I'll stretch my legs a bit, take a turn around the parking lot.”
“You do that.”
She circled the parking lot twice, reading bumper stickers, studying newspaper headlines through the glass doors of the dispensers, gazing sightlessly at the front-page photograph of a curly-haired man screaming at someone. Dallie didn't seem to expect her to go to bed with him. What a relief that was. She stared at the neon vacancy sign, and the longer she stared, the more she wondered why he didn't desire her. What was wrong? The question nagged like an itch. She might have lost her clothes, her money, all of her possessions, but she still had her beauty, didn't she? She still had her allure. Or had she somehow lost that, too, right along with her’ luggage and her makeup?
Ridiculous. She was exhausted, that was all, and she couldn't think straight. As soon as Dallie left for the golf course, she would go to bed and sleep until she felt like herself again. A few remnant sparks of optimism flickered inside her. She was merely tired. A decent night's sleep and everything would be fine.
Chapter
11
Naomi Jaffe Tanaka slammed the palm of her hand down on the heavy glass top of her desk. “No!” she exclaimed into the telephone, her intense brown eyes snapping with displeasure. “She isn't even close to what we have in mind for the Sassy Girl. If you can't do better than her, I'll find a model agency that can.”
The voice on the other end of the line grew sarcastic. “Do you want some phone numbers, Naomi? I'm sure the people at Wilhelmina will do a wonderful job for you.”
The people at Wilhelmina refused to send Naomi anyone else, but she had no intention of sharing that particular piece of news with the woman on the phone. She pushed blunt, impatient fingers through her dark hair, which had been cut as short and sleek as a boy's by a famous New York hairdresser intent on redefining the word “chic.” “Just keep looking.” She shoved the most recent issue of Advertising Age away from the edge of her desk. “And next time try to find someone with some personality in her face.”
As she put down the receiver, fire sirens screamed up Third Avenue, eight floors below her corner office at Blakemore, Stern, and Rodenbaugh, but Naomi paid no attention. She had lived with the noises of New York City all her life and hadn't consciously heard a siren since last winter when the two gay members of the New York City Ballet who lived in the apartment above her had lit their fondue pot too near a pair of Scalamandré chintz curtains. Naomi's husband at the time, a brilliant Japanese biochemist named Tony Tanaka, had illogically blamed her for the incident and refused to talk to her for the rest of the weekend. She divorced him soon after—not just because of his reaction to the fire, but because living with a man who wouldn't share even the most elementary of his feelings had grown too painful for a wealthy Jewish girl from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, who in the never-to-be-forgotten spring of 1968 had helped take over the dean's office at Columbia and hold it for the People.
Naomi tugged on the black and silver caviar beads she was wearing with a gray flannel suit and silk blouse, clothes she would have scorned in those fiery, close-fisted days of Huey and Rennie and Abbie when her passions had focused on anarchy instead of market share. For the last few weeks, as the news reports about her brother Gerry's latest anti-nuclear escapade had surfaced, stray memories of that time kept flickering into her mind like old photographs, and she found herself experiencing a vague nostalgia for the girl she had been, the little sister who had tried so hard to earn her big brother's respect that she had endured sit-ins, love-ins, lie-ins, and one thirty-day jail sentence.
While her twenty-four-year-old big brother had been shouting revolution from the steps of Berkeley's Sproal Hall, Naomi had begun her freshman year at Columbia three thousand miles away. She had been her parents’ pride and joy—pretty, popular, a good student—their consolation prize for having produced “the other one,” the son whose antics had disgraced them and whose name was never to be mentioned. At first Naomi had buried herself in her studies, staying far away from Columbia's radical students. But then Gerry had arrived on campus and he had hypnotized her, right along with the rest of the student body.
She had always adored her brother, but never more so than on that winter day when she had watched him standing like a young blue-jeaned warrior at the top of the library steps trying to change the world with his impassioned tongue. She had studied those strong Semitic features surrounded by a great halo of curly black hair and couldn't believe the two of them had come from the same womb. Gerry had full lips and a bold nose unredeemed by the plastic surgeon who had reshaped hers. Everything about him was larger than life, while she felt merely ordinary. Lifting his strong arms over his head, he had pumped his fists in the air and tossed his head back, his teeth flashing like white
stars against his olive skin. She had never seen anything more wondrous in her life than her big brother exhorting the masses to rebellion that day at Columbia.
Before the year was over, she had become part of Columbia's militant student group, an act that had finally won her brother's approval but had resulted in a painful estrangement from her parents. Disillusionment had settled in slowly over the next few years as she fell victim to the Movement's rampant male chauvinism, its disorganization, and its paranoia. By her junior year she had severed her contacts with its leaders, and Gerry had never forgiven her. They had seen each other only once in the past two years, and they had argued the entire time. Now she spent her days praying he wouldn't do something so irredeemably awful that everyone at the agency would find out he was her brother. Somehow she couldn't imagine a firm as conservative as BS&R appointing the sister of a nationally renowned radical as its first female vice-president.
She pulled her thoughts away from her past life and looked down at her present one—the layout spread on her desktop. As always, she felt the rush of satisfaction that told her she had done a good job. Her experienced eye approved the Sassy bottle design, a frosted glass teardrop topped by a wave-shaped navy blue stopper. The perfume flagon would be elegantly packaged in a shiny navy box imprinted with the hot pink letters of the slogan she had created—“SASSY! For Free Spirits Only.” The exclamation point after the product name had been her idea, and one that particularly pleased her. Still, despite the success of both the packaging and the slogan, the spirit of the campaign was missing because Naomi hadn't been able to perform one simple task: she hadn't been able to find the Sassy Girl.
Her intercom buzzed, and her secretary reminded her that she had a meeting with Harry R. Rodenbaugh, senior vice-president and board member of BS&R. Mr. Rodenbaugh had specifically requested that she bring along the new Sassy layout. Naomi groaned to herself. As one of BS&R's two creative directors, she'd been handling perfume and cosmetic accounts for years, and she'd never had so much trouble. Why did the Sassy account have to be the account that Harry Rodenbaugh had made his pet project? Harry, who desperately wanted one last Clio to his credit before he retired, insisted on a fresh face to represent the new product, a model who was spectacular but not recognizable to fashion magazine readers.