Siren Queen(65)

“Don’t go,” Tara said. “Please.”

“I’m too angry to speak with you,” I said honestly, and her lips quirked in a small smile.

“Want to dance instead?”

There was a hint of vulnerability in her dark brown eyes, longing and sadness that didn’t have words, even if she was a writer. She wrote all her own lines. Maybe someday she would write about this too, in some secret journal that she would hide or burn.

I had come in a lilac dress this time, sewn over with a shimmer of icy glass beads, turning heads as I walked in and stirring a murmur of recognition. People were starting to look our way, and I glared at her.

“Why would I want to do that?”

“Because you don’t want to talk, and you don’t want to leave. And because I think you want to.”

She was right. I did. By the bar, the elderly coin-operated phonograph hummed to life, and something sweet and soft started playing. I sighed, and allowed her to guide me out onto the dance floor.

Tara was light on her feet, but she led with a tentative touch, as if I were something she was afraid to rattle. At this point, after all my time with Mme Benoit, I could dance through hell on high heels, and I took the lead almost absently. She was tall enough that I didn’t bother trying to meet her eyes, but by the end of the dance, we were closer than we had been. She smelled a bit like whiskey, a bit like pomade and soap, and I knew she could smell my own perfume, something warm and floral floating over my skin and my hair.

“I’m sorry,” she said when the music ended, and I sighed.

“I’m not going to thank you for that,” I told her, and she smiled.

“All right. But I will try to do better.”

I nodded, and allowed her to bring me back to the booth. It was the same one that we had sat at a few weeks ago, giving us a sense of ownership over the space.

“You should tell me about yourself,” she said. “All I know about you is what Dottie Wendt says, and she thinks that you’re the daughter of a mandarin and a silk spinner, or maybe a spy and his secret French mistress.”

“You first,” I said, and she shrugged.

Her stories were like pebbles from the beach, small and smooth, easy to hold in my hand. Her parents were Jewish communists from Poland, fiery and occupied with their own lives, leaving their only child, Tara, to live and dream out her own way in a narrow and drafty house in Chicago.

“I wanted to be warmer, so I came west,” she said, smiling a little. “Being a writer is an inherently unlikely and rebellious thing. My parents approve, to some extent.”

And as to her first girlfriend, her time at the Pipeline, and the group apartment she shared with an anarchist and a pair of union agitators?

Tara shrugged.

“I like to think if they knew, they would approve. Jewish and communist, remember? They can appreciate the need for a certain kind of secrecy.”

She leveled a look at me, considering and somehow understanding.

“Tell me something you want to tell me. True would be nice, but I don’t think either of us are really in the business of truth.”

I paused, and she gave me all the room I wanted to think over her question, only breaking the silence to call for a cucumber water for me and some bourbon for her. I sipped at the cool drink and watched how her eyes were never still, flickering to the door, to the girls seated at the bar singly and in couples and corteges, to the rows of polished bottles behind the bar and the high-strung and supercilious gray cat that perched on one of the bar stools.

“Three years ago, after my sister and I tricked Jacko Dewalt, I stole her name.”

Tara looked at me curiously, and I told her the rest of it, how Oberlin Wolfe had struck off name after name and how my tongue had grown thick in my mouth, dry and stupid. I had never told this story to Greta or to Harry, but when I told it now, I wondered if it was the fact that it was a real name, used and loved, that drew Wolfe’s attention where none of the others had.

“I thought for sure that Luli Wei was your real name,” she mused. I shrugged.

“It’s real enough, even if it’s not mine.”

I had wondered if I would feel lighter after telling her, but instead I felt possessed of a strange and restless energy. I thought of my sister, who had moved up to San Francisco the year before. I got news of her once in a while through my mother, terse and vague things, whether because my mother didn’t understand them or because she thought I might disapprove. I wondered what would happen if I sneaked away to the house my sister shared with her artist roommates. Would she welcome me? Would she turn me away from the door? I would accept the latter, but the former made something in my chest flutter. Hope, I decided. It lingered, and even though I put it from my mind for the moment, I knew it would stay with me.

“Thank you for telling me that,” Tara said gravely, and for some reason, that made me blush.

“I don’t know why I did,” I confessed, and she smiled.

“Because you wanted to? Because you liked that I wanted you to?”

She was right, and I took a sip of my drink, hiding my face from her too-knowing glance.





VI


When Tara offered me her arm as we approached the fires that Friday night, I had a strange moment of déjà vu. She was as different from Greta as it was possible to get, and no matter what I might have idly fantasized about late at night in my bed, Greta had never given me that slow and lingering look, sliding like a drop of warm water down my body.