The Lonely Hearts Hotel(63)

“How do you know all that about Napoleon?”

“I have a book about him that you can borrow.”

Mimi was the only person Rose had ever met who liked to read as much as she did. Rose kept the things she read stuffed messily in her head like a walk-in closet. Mimi kept them all organized in her head like a scientist. She filed them away like a stack of cue cards. The facts were always there when Mimi needed them. She was a genius. She should have been a lecturer at the university. She should have been touring around in a black suit and tie, talking about French history. She was here without her clothes on, though.

? ? ?

MIMI WAS GETTING DRESSED in a maid’s outfit. She turned her back to Rose so that her friend could do up the little buttons at the back.

“What in the world do our clothes say about us when we put them on?” Rose said. “There’s no real dignity in any of these costumes. If I’m a maid, I do what the owner of the house tells me to do. If I’m a nurse, I do whatever the doctor tells me to do. What are we as women, other than barnacles that attach themselves to higher life forms in some pathetic attempt to clean up messes? Tidy up what men have left behind—make the world a lovelier, better place for men. I would like to play a part in which I don’t have a superior.”

The director told Rose that she should save her philosophical speculations until after work because they were causing the male actors to lose their erections.

Rose looked over at the male actor. He was wearing a long white wig and a black judge’s robe that went down to his feet. He was casually stroking his cock to get an erection so they could start the film again.

A man walked by with a mask of a donkey head and a tail attached to a belt around his waist. Rose looked down at his penis to see if she could recognize who it was by the organ. It seemed to be a rather ordinary penis.

“Have you watched any of the movies we’ve been making?” Rose asked. “In every one of them, the woman is hunted. She’s subdued, isn’t she?”

“Oh, you’re not supposed to look into them so hard, you know. They’re just there to let some lonely people get their jollies,” said Mimi.

“A girl’s desire is like a pretty butterfly. And a man’s desire is like a butterfly net. His desire captures and kills her. He turns her into an object to be pinned on a corkboard. I don’t think I’m interested in the tyranny of the couple. I’m more interested in what a person does when they’re forced to be by themselves.”

“You just want to sit on a chair naked and masturbate?”

They both laughed.

“Are you going to get into your costume soon?” Mimi asked.

Rose had said all that while being stark naked, not a stitch on her other than a string of fake pearls, a pair of black high heels and a little tuft of pubic hair.





33


    STILL LIFE OF MURDERS



McMahon had thought about Rose compulsively during the past year. He had stopped sleeping around. It was too emotionally risky. Before Rose, he had always felt completely in command when sleeping with a woman. Now he felt vulnerable, like the woman could take something from him. He felt as if he were begging them for something they could never give him. The emptiness and longing he felt after sex made him sick inside. He blamed Rose for this.

And he sometimes even felt strange when he masturbated. He always felt like weeping after he came and his fantasy dissipated. It wasn’t worth the orgasm. He sometimes wondered whether the sex had affected Rose similarly. After all, he had been her first. So he had to have registered in her consciousness in some fashion. He had to be emotionally important. If he knew she felt the same, he thought that perhaps he could go back to being a man.

? ? ?

MCMAHON KEPT EXPECTING ROSE TO return for money, but she never did. He thought maybe Rose had died. He had everyone in the police station paid off. The crime-scene photographer put together a portfolio of Jane Does in the city who had died suspicious deaths since Rose had run off on him.

Every time he looked at one of the photographs, for a split second he was sure it was Rose.

There was a woman with a tie around her mouth, put there no doubt so that she couldn’t voice her own disappointment at being murdered. There was a woman fastened to a kitchen chair. Her head hung forward, almost like she had fallen asleep that way. There was a girl with a pillowcase over her head. He thought for a moment that if he were just able to pull off the pillowcase, he would see Rose. But the body of the girl was quite plump. Too plump to be Rose. There was a girl lying on a bed with a bullet hole in her forehead. She seemed to be looking up at the hole. There was a girl in the park. Dark-colored autumn leaves had fallen on her. She had on boots and a hat but nothing else.

There was a girl who was found beside the fairground. She’d had a good time there, as she had a stick of cotton candy lying next to her, and a stuffed black panther with a red bow tie around its neck. It was something she had won, tossing balls into baskets and rings around the necks of bottles. She was wearing black tights. Those black tights reminded him so much of Rose. He liked when she would sit in her tights on the side of the bed with her legs dangling over the side. They reminded him of a little girl, but a little girl he could fuck.

He loved Rose so much, he needed her dead. It was a man’s right to kill the woman he loved. McMahon closed the portfolio and went to find Rose. The smoke ring from his cigar hung in the dark like an eclipsed moon.