Speak Easy

“Oh. No, Mister, I haven’t seen her all night. I’m sure she’s here, though. Who’d miss this out? At one o’clock the Mauler’s gonna go a round with that fat man from the pictures. Don’t you run off! You’ll find her.”

“I think I saw her in the washroom,” grunts one of the other dice-jockeys, who just this morning bought the fastest race-horse in Australia and put him on a boat to California. “If you’re missing a girl, always look in the washroom, I always say. The dame’s choice locale for passing out, hopping up, getting hers, bawling like a dog or gossiping like a goddamn parakeet.”

Frankie trips over a bottle of Pernod, a tophat, a wolfhound, a stone-drunk textile heir, and a child star with blond curls like cinnamon buns on his way to the bedroom-sized washroom of Room 1709. He expects the door to be locked but it swings open, not even latched. It’s empty in there: pink tile with green chevrons, three oval mirrors with electric lights and gold frames to make your face a painting, hart’s-tongue ferns in bronze vases. Panther-skin to dry your footsies. And a grand tub, lizard-clawfoot, hacked out of a hunk of malachite hauled all the way back from the Congo by a fella who said he was coming to cure malaria. Amethyst taps shaped like rhino-heads, one grimacing for cold, the other panting for hot. That’s where he finds her, Zelda Fair, hiding out, lying in the bath in her oyster-shimmer dress, strings of black pearls floating in the water all around her, stockings shriveled round her toes, a flapper mermaid caught with her fins out.

“You’re the boy with the eggs,” she says all dreamy and cool. It’s a voice she learned when she was young and learned good. A voice that doesn’t give up a damn thing. A voice that sounds bare and silly and sleepy though it’s the best armor she’s got. Zelda doesn’t let her real voice out to play anymore. It might tear her throat out. “You got any on ya?”

“What are you doing in the bath?” He blurts, when he meant to say I came to find you because you are perfect. Frankie hasn’t got the smooth god gave a porcupine, but he meant to do better than that.

“I’m writing a novel,” Zelda purrs. She adds in a giggle, a little dash of aren’t I just the maddest thing you ever met? You wouldn’t go thinking I’m serious, would you, darling? You wouldn’t do that to me.

“That’s not how you write a novel.”

“Show’s what you know, silly.”

“Well, I do know, actually. I go for a typewriter, myself.”

“Oh?” Zelda does this move in the tub, spinning around and turning over at the same time to come up over the lip of the thing and flash her eyes at Frankie, who has no defense against this sort of thing. Who does? The tub sparkles with green light. She sparkles, too. Zelda sparkles so good men think it’s love. “Do tell.”

“Mostly detective stories just at the moment.” He rubs the back of his neck like some hick farmer confused over seed and before he can shut up he’s spilling it all. “Before I joined up, I pounded out a whole book. If the war was gonna get me, I figured I’d leave something behind. Something real. Something good. Trouble was, it wasn’t real or good. I’m still working on that part. The real and the good. But what I want, what I want, is to do something big. I’m gonna. I will. I’m gonna be famous. I can feel the books I might write just sitting under my ribs. Like another heart.”

“Don’t we all, honey? That’s what I do professionally. Wait around for something big.”

Frankie’s heart does a foxtrot on his liver. “I think you’re something big.”

Zelda laughs her little-old-me laugh. “That’s mighty sweet of you to say. But I’m not yet. Don’t you just love Not-Yet? It’s like waiting to be born. I could be anybody yet. I could be a ballerina or a swimming champion. Or a pocketwatch. Or a Christmas pudding. Or a jackal.”

“Are you drunk?”

“Completely, darling.” Zelda rests her chin on one dripping hand. “Jackals are really the cutest little things, did you know? It’s only that they scream so. They scream like death coming for you right quick. That’s why they’re in the Bible, acting the fool. I think I’d be a fine jackal, if I put my mind to it.”

It was not going Frankie’s way. Talking to Zelda felt like talking to a radio. It talked back, but you couldn’t call it a conversation.

“Don’t be cross,” she whispered, sliding into the water so only her eyes showed above the green stone tub. “I like to talk, is all. My Daddy always said a lady’s gotta sit still and hush her mouth except for please and thank you and you don’t say. But it’s not fair to do that to a girl. Talking is the most fun you can have. Clothes on, clothes off, it’s everything in the world. Don’t you think you oughta do the only thing you can manage that animals can’t just as often as possible? I suppose parrots can talk, too. But no one pays attention to a thing they say. And mostly, mostly, when I talk it’s like being a parrot. Men say oh, aren’t you clever and scratch me under my beak and give me treats. So I talk nonsense quite a little bit. Because it’s fun. And they don’t pay any attention anyhow. Only it’s not really nonsense. It wouldn’t be nonsense, if you knew me extra well.”

I am here to tell you Frankie Key is a lost cause from here on out. If he ever had a hope of getting out of her alive, it circled the drain of that big green tub and slurped its way down to hell.

“What’s your book about?” he said softly.

Zelda Fair rolled back in the tub, water breaking over her tummy, rolling down her throat. She called him with one crooked finger and the boy in the silver meringue suit skedaddled over on the quick. She crooked her finger again. He bent down. The reek of gin snaked up his nose—she was swimming in the booze supply. Her pearly dress stuck like an oil slick to her breasts; the drying liquor on her shoulders made her skin prickle.

And then Frankie clued in. From where Zelda was pulling her gin-nymph routine, the acousticals of that pink washroom and the cracked door and the room outside wrestled all together into a weird pool of voices. From where Zelda was bathing, she could hear every word, even whispers, that the party coughed up.

Zelda touched the fennel flower in his buttonhole. She didn’t kiss him, though, even though she liked kissing almost as much as talking. Her Mama once said not to kiss anybody you’d told a secret to. It wasn’t safe. “If you stick around long enough,” she whispered instead, “every night turns into a book. All you gotta do is stick it on a page.” A trumpet blurted out something rude in the world outside the pink washroom. “What’s yours about?”

Frankie took on a shaky breath. “Things I can’t have.”

“Mine, too.”

1552

Nobody lives in 1552. Vacancies do happen, even here.

Oh, it won’t last. By the party at Robin Hood’s pad three flautists from the Philharmonic will have gone in on the place together, pinned up sheet music for wallpaper and liplinered their embouchures with Chanel No. Harlot in the round bathroom mirror. And back around Halloween the short stop for the Yankees called 1552 home and hearth. Poor fella lived in terror of being alone, but got so tongue-tied around the dames that all he could spit out was his own statistics. Miss Georgie knew the shortie plenty well. Every night he called down for Red Riding Hood, Jorinda, Vasilisa, even the odd Momotaro when he felt really out of sorts. It ain’t home when it’s just the one of me, he explained every time, and home was where he hung his dick.

Folks’ve done worse to feel safe.

But he got himself traded out to Cleveland and now 1552 has that embarrassed, hangdog look empty flats get, like you seen ’em naked and they don’t even know where they lost their clothes to so you’re both stuck with looking. This works out for Zelda and her Keychain Knight. Harold Kolburcher can slide that lock as easy as eating. I gotta see, he told Zelda. I gotta see what’s on the other side. Won’t be a tick.