“I've got to tell you, Francie, that I don't think it's a good idea.”
“Why not?” She let her eyelashes perform as best they could wearing only dime-store mascara, and moved her hips closer to his body, the perfect coquette, a woman created only for the pleasure of men.
“It's pretty obvious, isn't it?” His hand slid up to encircle her waist and his fingers gently kneaded her skin. “We don't like each other. Do you want to have sex with a man who doesn't like you, Francie? Who won't respect you in the morning? Because that's the way it's going to end up if you keep on moving against me like that.”
“I don't believe you anymore.” Her old confidence returned in a pleasant rush. “I think you like me more than you want to admit. I think that's why you've been doing such a good job of avoiding me this past week, why you won't look at me.”
“This doesn't have anything to do with liking,” Dallie said, his other hand caressing her hip, his voice growing low and husky. “It has to do with physical proximity.”
His head dipped, and she could feel him getting ready to kiss her. She slipped out of his arms and smiled seductively. “Just give me a few minutes.” Stepping away from him, she headed toward the bathroom.
As soon as she was inside, she leaned back against the door and took a deep, shaky breath, trying to suppress her nervousness at what she was committing herself to do. This was it. This was her chance to cement Dallie to her, to make certain he didn't kick her out, to be sure he kept feeding her and taking care of her. But it was more than that. Having Dallie make love to her would let her feel like herself again, even if she was no longer quite sure who that was.
She wished she had one of her Natori nightgowns with her. And champagne, and a beautiful bedroom with a balcony that looked out over the sea. She caught sight of herself in the mirror and moved closer. She looked terrible. Her hair was too wild, her face too pale. She needed clothes, she needed makeup. Dabbing toothpaste on her finger, she swished it inside her mouth to freshen her breath. How could she let Dallie see her in those dreadful dime-store underpants? With trembling fingers, she tugged at the fastening of her jeans and stripped them down over her legs. She let out a soft moan as she saw the red marks on her skin near her navel where the waistband had pinched her too tightly. She didn't want Dallie to see her with creases. Rubbing at the marks with her fingers, she tried to make them go away, but that only made her skin redder. She would turn out the lights, she decided.
Quickly, she peeled off her T-shirt and bra and wrapped herself in a towel. Her breath came quick and fast. As she pulled off her cheap nylon underpants, she saw a small patch of downy hair near her bikini line that she'd missed when she'd shaved her legs. Propping her leg up on the toilet seat, she slid the blade of Dallie's razor over the offensive spot. There, that was better. She tried to think what else she could do to improve herself. She repaired her lipstick and then blotted it with a square of toilet paper so it wouldn't smear when they kissed. She bolstered her confidence by reminding herself what a superb kisser she was.
Something inside her deflated like an old balloon, leaving her feeling limp and shapeless. What if he didn't like her? What if she wasn't any good, just like she hadn't been any good with Evan Varian or the sculptor in Marrakech? What if— Her green eyes looked back at her from the mirror as a dreadful thought occurred to her. What if she smelled bad? She grabbed her atomizer of Femme from the back of the toilet, opened her legs, and spritzed.
“Just what in the goddamn hell do you think you're doing?”
Spinning around, she saw Dallie standing inside the door, one hand on his towel-covered hip. How long had he been standing there? What had he seen? She straightened guiltily. “Nothing. I—I'm not doing anything.”
He looked at the bottle of Femme hanging like a weight in her hand. “Isn't there anything about you that's real?”
“I—I don't know what you mean.”
He took a step farther into the bathroom. “Are you test-marketing new uses for perfume, Francie? Is that what you're doing?” Resting the palm of one hand against the wall, he leaned toward it. “You got your designer blue jeans, your designer shoes, your designer luggage. Now Miss Fancy Pants has got her some designer pussy.”
“Dallie!”
“You're the ultimate consumer, honey—the advertising man's dream. Are you going to put little gold designer initials on it?”
“That's not funny.” She slammed the bottle down on the back of the toilet and clutched the towel tightly in her hand. Her skin felt hot with embarrassment.
He shook his head with a world-weariness that she found insulting. “Come on, Francie, get your clothes on. I said I wouldn't do it, but I can't help myself. I'm taking you with me tonight.”
“What accounts for this magnanimous change of heart?” she snapped.
He turned and walked out into the bedroom, so that his words drifted back over his shoulder. “The truth of it is, darlin', I'm afraid if I don't let you see a slice of the real world pretty soon, you're going to do yourself some actual harm.”
Chapter
12
The Cajun Bar and Grill was a decided improvement over the Blue Choctaw, although it still wasn't the sort of place Francesca would have chosen as the site for a coming-out ball. Located about ten miles south of Lake Charles, it rested beside a two-lane highway in the middle of nowhere. It had a screen door that banged every time someone came through and a squeaky paddle-wheel fan with one bent blade. Behind the table where they were sitting, an iridescent blue swordfish had been nailed to the wall along with an assortment of calendars and an advertisement for Evangeline Maid bread. The placemats were exactly as Dallie had described them, although he had neglected to mention the scalloped edges and the legend printed in red beneath the map of Louisiana: “God's Country.”
A pretty brown-eyed waitress in jeans and a tank top came to the table. She inspected Francesca with a combination of curiosity and ill-concealed envy, then turned to Dallie. “Hey, Dallie. I hear you're only one stroke off the lead. Congratulations.”
“Thanks, honey. The course has been real good to me this week.”
“Where's Skeet?” she asked.
Francesca gazed innocently at the chrome and glass sugar dispenser in the middle of the table.
“Something wasn't sitting right in his stomach, so he decided to stay back at the motel.” Dallie gave Francesca a stony look and then asked her if she wanted something to eat.
A litany of wonderful foods flicked through her head— lobster consommé, duckling paté with pistachios, glazed oysters—but she was a lot smarter than she had been five days before. “What do you recommend?” she asked him.
“The chili dog's good, but the crawfish are better.”
What in God's name were crawfish? “Crawfish would be fine,” she told him, praying they wouldn't be deep-fried. “And could you recommend something green to go along with it? I'm beginning to worry about scurvy.”
“Do you like key lime pie?”
She looked at him. “That's a joke, isn't it?”
He grinned at her and then turned to the waitress. “Get Francie here a big salad, will you, Mary Ann, and a side dish of beefsteak tomatoes all sliced up. I'll have the pan-fried catfish myself and some of those dill pickles like I had yesterday.”
As soon as the waitress had moved away, two well-groomed men in slacks and polo shirts came over to the table from the bar. It was quickly evident from their conversation that they were touring golf pros playing in the tournament with Dallie and that they had come over to meet Francesca. They positioned themselves on either side of her and before long were giving her lavish compliments and teaching her how to extract the sweet meat from the boiled crawfish that soon arrived on a heavy white platter. She laughed at all their stories, flattered them outrageously, and, in general, had them both eating out of her hand before either had finished his first beer. She felt wonderful.
Dallie, in the meantime, was occupied with a couple
of female fans at the next table, both of whom said they worked as secretaries at one of Lake Charles's petrochemical plants. Francesca watched surreptitiously as he talked to them, his chair tilted back on two legs, navy blue cap tipped back on his blond head, beer bottle propped on his chest, and that lazy grin spreading over his face when one of them told him an off-color joke. Before long, they had launched into a series of nauseating double entendres about his “putter.”
Even though she and Dallie were involved in separate conversations, Francesca began to have the feeling that there was some connection between them, that he was as conscious of her as she was of him. Or maybe it was just wishful thinking. Her encounter with him at the motel had left her shaken. When she curled into his arms, she had sent them flying across some invisible barrier, and now it was too late to turn back, even if she was absolutely certain she wanted to.
Three brawny rice farmers whom Dallie introduced as Louis, Pat, and Stoney pulled up their chairs to join them. Stoney couldn't tear himself away from Francesca and kept refilling her glass from a bottle of bad Chablis that one of the golfers had bought her. She flirted with him shamelessly, gazing into his eyes with an intensity that had brought far more sophisticated men to their knees. He shifted in his chair, tugging unconsciously at the collar of his plaid cotton shirt while he tried to act as if beautiful women flirted with him every day.
Eventually the individual pockets of conversation disappeared and the members of the group joined together and began telling funny stories. Francesca laughed at all their anecdotes and drank another glass of Chablis. A warm haze induced by alcohol and a general sense of well-being enveloped her. She felt as if the golfers, the petrochemical secretaries, and the rice farmers were the best friends she had ever had. The men's admiration warmed her, the women's envy renewed her sagging self-confidence, and Dallie's presence at her side energized her. He made them laugh with a story about an unexpected encounter he'd had with an alligator on a Florida golf course, and she suddenly wanted to give something back to all of them, some small part of herself.
“I have an animal story,” she said, beaming at her new friends. They all looked at her expectantly.
“Oh, boy,” Dallie murmured at her side.
She paid no attention. She folded one arm on the edge of the table and gave them her dazzling wait-until-you-hear-this smile. “A friend of my mother's opened this lovely new lodge near Nairobi,” she began. When she saw a vague blahkness on several faces, she amended, “Nairobi... in Kenya. Africa. A group of us flew down to spend a week or so there. It was a super place. A lovely long veranda looked out on this beautiful swimming pool, and they served the best rum punches you can imagine.” She sketched out a pool and a platter of rum punches with a graceful gesture of her hand.
“The second day there, some of us piled into one of the Land-Rovers with our cameras and drove outside the city to take photographs. We'd been gone for about an hour when the driver rounded a bend—not going all that fast, actually —and this ridiculous warthog leaped out in front of us.” She paused for effect. “Well, there was this awful thump as the Land-Rover hit the poor creature and it dropped to the road. We all jumped out, of course, and one of the men, a really odious French cellist named Raoul”—she rolled her eyes so they would all understand exactly the sort of person Raoul had been—“brought his camera with him and took a photograph of that poor, ugly warthog lying in the road. Then, I don't know what made her do it, but my mother said to Raoul, ‘Wouldn't it be funny if we took a picture of the warthog wearing your Gucci jacket!’” Francesca laughed at the memory. “Naturally, everyone thought this was amusing, and since there was no blood on the warthog to ruin the jacket, Raoul agreed. Anyway, he and two of the other men put the jacket on the animal. It was dreadfully insensitive, of course, but everyone laughed at the sight of this poor dead warthog in this marvelous jacket.”
She grew vaguely aware that the area around them had fallen completely silent and that the slight blankness in the expressions of the people around the table hadn't altered. Their lack of response made her more determined to force them to love her story, to love her. Her voice grew more animated, her hands more descriptive. “So there we were, standing on the road looking down at this poor creature. Except—” She paused for a moment, caught her bottom lip between her teeth to build the suspense, and then went on, “Just as Raoul lifted his camera to take the picture, the warthog leaped to his feet, shook himself, and ran off into the trees.” She laughed triumphantly at the punch line, tilted her head to the side, and waited for them to join her.
They smiled politely.
Her own laughter faded as she realized they had missed the point. “Don't you see?” she exclaimed with a touch of desperation. “Somewhere in Kenya today there's this poor warthog running around a game preserve, and he's wearing Gucci!”
Dallie's voice finally floated above the dead silence that had irreparably fallen. “Yep, that sure is some story, Francie. What do you say you and me dance?” Before she could protest, he'd grabbed her none too gently by the arm and pulled her toward a small square of linoleum in front of the jukebox. As he began to move to the music, he said softly, “A general rule of living life with real people, Francie, is not to end any sentences with the word ‘Gucci.’”
Her chest seemed to fill up with a terrible heaviness. She had wanted to make them like her, and she'd only made a fool of herself. She had told a story that they hadn't found funny, a story that she suddenly saw through their eyes and realized she should never have told in the first place.
Her composure had been held together by only the lightest thread and now it broke. “Excuse me,” she said, her voice sounding thick even to her own ears. Before Dallie could try to stop her, she pushed her way through the maze of tables and out the screen door. The fresh air invaded her nostrils, its moist nighttime scent mingling with the smell of diesel fuel, creosote, and fried food from the kitchen at the back. She stumbled, still light-headed from the wine, and steadied herself by leaning against the side of a pickup truck with mud-encrusted tires and a gun rack on the back. The sounds of “Behind Closed Doors” drifted out from the jukebox.
What was happening to her? She remembered how hard Nicky had laughed when she'd told him the warthog story, how Cissy Kavendish had wiped the tears from her eyes with Nigel MacAllister's handkerchief. A wave of homesickness swept over her. She'd attempted to get through to Nicky again today on the telephone, but no one had answered, not even the houseboy. She tried to imagine Nicky sitting in the Cajun Bar and Grill, and failed miserably. Then she tried to imagine herself sitting at the foot of the Hepplewhite table in Nicky's dining room wearing the Gwynwyck family emeralds, and succeeded admirably. But when she imagined the other end of the table—the place where Nicky should have been sitting—she saw Dallie Beaudine instead. Dallie, with his faded blue jeans, too-tight T-shirts, and movie star face, lording it over Nicky Gwynwyck's eighteenth-century dinner table.
The screen door banged, and Dallie came out. He walked to her side and held out her purse. “Hey, Francie,” he said quietly.
“Hey, Dallie.” She took the purse and looked up at the night sky spangled with floating stars.
“You did real fine in there.”
She gave a soft, bitter laugh.
He inserted a toothpick in the corner of his mouth. “No, I mean it. Once you realized you'd made a jackass of yourself, you behaved with a little dignity for a change. No scenes on the dance floor, just a quiet exit. Everybody was real impressed. They want you to come back in.”
She deliberately mocked him. “Not hardly.”
He chuckled just as the screen door banged and two men appeared. “Hey, Dallie,” they called out.
“Hey, K.C., Charlie.”
The men climbed into a battered Jeep Cherokee and Dallie turned back to her. “I think, Francie, that I don't not like you as much as I used to. I mean, you're still pretty much a pain in the ass most of the time and not, strictly speaking
, my kind of woman, but you do have your moments. You really went after that warthog story in there. I liked the way you gave it everything you had, even after it was pretty obvious that you were digging a real deep grave for yourself.”
A clatter of dishes sounded from inside as the jukebox launched into the final chorus of “Behind Closed Doors.” She dug the heel of her sandal into the hard-packed gravel. “I want to go home,” she said abruptly. “I despise it here. I want to go back to England where I understand things. I want my clothes and my house and my Aston Martin. I want to have money again and friends who like me.” She wanted her mother, too, but she didn't say that.
“Feeling real sorry for yourself, aren't you?”
“Wouldn't you if you were in my position?”
“Hard to say. I guess I can't imagine being real happy living that kind of sybaritic life.”
She didn't precisely know what “sybaritic” meant, but she got the general idea, and it irritated her that someone whose spoken grammar could most charitably be described as substandard was using a word she didn't entirely understand.
He propped his elbow on the side of the pickup. “Tell me something, Francie. Do you have anything remotely resembling a life plan stored away in that head of yours?”
“I intend to marry Nicky, of course. I've already told you that.” Why did the prospect depress her so?
He pulled out the toothpick and tossed it away. “Aw, come off it, Francie. You don't any more want to marry Nicky than you want to get your hair mussed up.”
She rounded on him. “I don't have much choice in the matter, do I, since I don't have two shillings left to rub together! I have to marry him.” She saw him opening his mouth, getting ready to spew out another one of his odious lower-class platitudes, and she cut him off. “Don't say it, Dallie! Some people were brought into this world to earn money and others were meant to spend it, and I'm one of the latter. To be brutally honest, I wouldn't have the slightest idea how to support myself. You've already heard what happened when I tried acting, and I'm too short to make any money at fashion modeling. If it comes down to a choice between working in a factory and marrying Nicky Gwynwyck, you can bloody well be certain which one I'm going to choose.”