Siren Queen(30)
Emmaline shrugged, but I could see she was filing that information away.
“Mr. Abelard might just be a different kind of monster,” she said, her voice calm enough to hide a great deal of trouble underneath.
“He tears himself open, and oh, it looks like it hurts. His skin was smaller than I thought it would be but it thumped when it hit the ground. The carpet was dark, or else I might have seen how bad it was and fainted.”
“But you didn’t,” Emmaline said softly, and Jillian fairly glowed.
“So he’s wearing something cheaper underneath, and his hair’s slicked down like something newborn, and he says to me again, ‘Pretty girl, take off your shirt,’ and I do, and there’s Chloe’s pink seersucker blouse. I say the words to him again, and he has to pick up the knife again.
“This keeps going, and we hit my camisole. My heart’s thudding so fast, because what if I got it wrong, or what if that woman tricked me, you know? I came this far, and maybe I should have sneaked another shirt on … Well, I take off Amanda’s silk embroidered shirt, the blue one, and underneath, I’m down to my slip and my skirt. I say it one more time, ‘Mr. Abelard, take off your skin,’ and he cries! He starts blubbering and asking me not to do it.”
She paused.
“If I had had an extra shirt on, I might have taken it back,” Jillian said meditatively. “I’m not … I’m not like them. If I had my shirt on and not just my slip…”
She shrugged.
“I didn’t. I insisted, and then he’s down to his skin and I can see it all. I can see how he used to kiss up to the bigger boys in school so they didn’t bully him, and how much fun it was to bully the littler boys. I could see how he put his mom in a home so he never has to think about her again, and a boy he stranded out on the prairie in the middle of winter. I saw all of it, and above all, I saw how little he was.
“With all the skin off of him, he was just this blubbering weedy sloppy mess, but the woman on the rocks told me that if I stopped there, he would just regrow his skins. In six months, a year, two years, he would be big Mr. Abelard again, in the nice suit and with the chair that can bind down elephants.”
“So what did you do?” I asked, my tone hushed. I had almost forgotten what a little lapdog she looked to me. These were the lessons I had been craving while I learned how to walk in high heels and how to speak so that I sounded like I had never worked for a living. This was how to survive in the Friday fires and the ashes they left behind.
“I did just as the lady said. I picked him up from the floor and threw him on the desk. He has these trees in pots all over the office, and I pulled my knife from my purse. I cut a few good switches, and I start beating the hell out of him. I beat him so hard that I think my arm is going to fall off. Even when he’s howling fit to bust my eardrums, no one comes in.”
“They’re used to yelling from the office,” offers someone else, and the circle nods sagely.
“Well, I wear out the switches, I just want to crawl away and sleep forever, but I’m still not done. I’m so tired, but I drag him to the rock fountain. I throw him in and I wash him. I didn’t have a board, so I have to beat him against the rocks until all the nastiness is gone. It took a while.”
Jillian paused, and tilted her head so that Emmaline could tousle her hair gently. She luxuriated in the attention before she continued, but I couldn’t fault her this time, caught up in her story.
“I wrung him out and threw him over the ledge of the fountain to dry. After that, I don’t know, I guess I slept? I went to the couch at the back of the office, and I curled up there. It was nice. Comfortable. When I woke up, he was Mr. Abelard again, but not the one I had met.
“He was shrugging into a stiff, shiny new jacket, and though he’s still big, there was something different in his eyes. Maybe this was who he used to be, or maybe I chased him out, and something else came to live inside him instead.”
She shrugged, supremely unconcerned.
“‘So you must be Miss Waldorf,’ he says with this big smile. ‘I’m Ronald Abelard, and I’m so pleased to meet you.’ Well, I sit down in that chair that he don’t even know how to flip anymore, and we talk and talk for almost three hours. I have a three-picture deal now, and that’s three pictures before Midsummer, mind you. I’ve got a new place all to myself over in Brentwood, and he says that I might have an even better contract waiting for me after this, and I got it all while keeping my slip on.”
She finished triumphantly, and the circle burst into applause, myself included. Ronald Abelard made Jillian Waldorf’s career, and though her star is quite small, it is very bright. The man himself drifted away on some easterly wind, and the nastiness he left behind crumbled to ash on some back studio lot.
“I wonder what would have happened if you had sat behind his desk,” I said without thinking, and Jillian’s sharp eyes turned to me.
“Is that what you would have done?” she asked, a hint of contempt in her voice. “Skinny as you are, I bet you couldn’t have dragged him to the fountain or slammed him down to get all that awful off.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell her that of course I could have. I had been dragging heavy silk dresses and pure wool suits through the wash since I was a child. Then I shrugged because that kind of truth mattered very little here, at least to me.