Siren Queen(60)

The entire place was veiled with something less tangible than smoke. I watched it all as if I was both in my body and floating above, the one connected to the other only by a tenuous string. I sat perfectly still because I did not know what would happen if that string snapped. I was quietly in love with each and every woman in the place, and when I turned to watch my companion, I saw an edge of gold all around her, a dull gleam that warmed me and allowed me to climb back into my body.

“What’s your name?” I asked her after making a study of her face for a half dozen years. There was a cragginess to her features, her strong nose and her sharp jaw. It would crash ships rather than launch them, but I never knew a woman who didn’t want to crash at least a few ships.

She glanced at me as if I were some animal that might be frightened off by eye contact.

“Tara Lubowski,” she said. “Pleased to meet you. What should I call you?”

I hesitated, and she laughed.

“That’s fine if you don’t want to,” she said. “Shall I name you?”

“You don’t have to call me anything at all,” I said, disliking the idea of names. I could tell somehow instinctively that Tara Lubowski was her own name. It grew from her like a tree from good soil, roots reaching deep and breaking through to something gleaming beneath.

She nodded easily, and I noticed for the first time a dark mole right above her upper lip. It was too dark and large to be called a beauty mark, but it gave her face an irregular kind of elegance that made me very much want to kiss her.

“I guess if there’s only one of you, you don’t need a name,” she said, so gravely I wasn’t sure if she was flirting at all.

“One of me? There’s another Chinese girl over by the bar.” There was. She had glanced at me with interest when I came in with Aguila before turning to whisper something in the ear of the adorably chubby Latino girl on her arm.

“I meant girls as beautiful as you,” she said even more seriously, inviting me to lean in or laugh and push her away. I did neither, and instead ran the tip of my finger along her long hands. She wasn’t beautiful, but there was a vitality to her, something living and breathing every moment of her life. I made a humming sound, and because she did not need me to think of how to answer, I didn’t.

Slowly, like a gravity I couldn’t deny, I ended up leaned against her, her arm closing around me. I realized that smoke clung to my hair and even my skin, acrid and unpleasant, but Tara didn’t push me away. As I watched the dancers from under her arm, I felt a little closer to it all, more in my body and present.

“The next time I come here, I’ll wear a dress, something nice,” I said suddenly.

We were breaking some kind of code, I could tell. Girls went with girls, but trousers went with skirts at the Pipeline. Aguila and her pinstriped lover and the other Chinese girl and her sweetheart in a plain and pretty floral dress were the rule. Tara and I were the only exceptions, and I could hear Lita calling me a kiki again.

“Wear whatever you like,” Tara said with a shrug. “It doesn’t bother me.”

She sounded as if she meant it, and I glanced at her curiously.

“But would you like it?”

She looked at me with one dark brow raised and a quirk to her thin lips. Tara would have been twenty-four or twenty-five then, and I could see she found me funny.

“I’ll like what you do,” she declared. “Wouldn’t say no to something bright on you, but I don’t think I’ll be saying no to you a lot.”

“Who writes your lines? You have a lot of them,” I said a little caustically, and she smiled.

“I can safely say I write them all.”

I talked in starts and stops like a faulty faucet. I hadn’t really talked to another woman since Greta left and Emmaline put me in a cab. Sometimes my apartment on Rexford Avenue felt like walls made of silence, which I liked more than I didn’t, but I was out of practice.

Tara didn’t seem to mind, not even when she walked me out to my car just a few minutes past two. Aguila had gone home with Alice, all forgiven, and I was on my own.

“I’m not going to ask to come home with you,” Tara said easily. “I don’t think you would like that.”

Maybe I would have, but I could already tell what a relief it would be to be alone.

“You’re good company,” I said, protesting by form, and she picked up my bandaged hand, bringing it to her lips in a courtly gesture that wasn’t as ridiculous as it sounds when I relate it now.

“I know I am, but I think right now, dear, you don’t want to be asked or have to answer. I come to the Pipeline all the time, though, and you know your way here now, don’t you?”

“I do,” I said. She nodded and headed towards the people she had come with, a band of girls who hooted and cheered for her as she walked away from me.

I guided Harry’s car back to the road, and as I drove into the city, I found myself glancing up at the stars in the sky, cold and white and alone in the inkling blue.





IV


Every morning, I got a runner from Whalen Mannheim that told me there was no shooting that day, but I went in anyway. It was the most idle I had been since I had come to Wolfe Studios, and I spent my time haunting the small café close to Lot 12, sipping the weak iced tea and nibbling on the stale toast. The idleness suited me in a way I found strangely distasteful. It was so easy to simply sit and listen, a newspaper in front of me and my tea melting to water beside me.