Speak Easy

“The lady has it all! Well done! The House has a stock market crash in two years and a hotel stripped for copper during the war and split into slum-happy squats. That, combined with your nasty round of bronchitis and jolly heroin habit around age 50, unsuccessful novel, and a dead husband on 10 gives you a flush. Congrats, Miss P, you win the pot.”

Everyone recoils.

“Come on, kittens!” Al crows. “The cards are king! What’s Wall Street but fairy gold anyway? Don’t worry! I’ve had that shindig planned for a dog’s age. But Pearly’s got a 2 and a 9 of diamonds—that sets the clock. 1929! Isn’t this a good game? Poker is my best invention.”

Pearl smiles. She smiles like Christmas and Little Cass clings to her. She wraps her long fingers around the syringe like Lily Greer’s gun and puts it in her arm to keep it safe, jams it in before anyone can stop her. She’ll take it all if Big Cass gets his. That’s fine. Fine as a Yale crew team rowing in the sun.

The cards come out again. Whick, whick, whick.

Zelda looks at Frankie. He looks like her Daddy. He looks like a book she hasn’t thought up yet. He looks like a bear on a chain growling I love you. She’s so drunk she can’t think. Drunk on her own supply, on her insides turned outside and boiled into a glass. She takes off her green necklace. Al gave it to her. Gave it to her when she sold her first case of the good stuff. He kissed her when he did it. It was like kissing Neptune. The planet, not the sailorman. The whole planet, too. The storm on its equator and all the moons. Frankie pulls out his skeleton key, the magic stick that lets him into any room and good thing he’s a pretty honest fella or it might be a worry that he’s got one. Pearl tosses in her other earring. Small change. She’s done, she’s happy, she’s not fussed about anything else. Al pulls out his other cufflink.

“It’s not a cufflink,” he says. “It’s a name. A name that goes forever, a name schoolkids read about in a hundred years and say wow, that so-and-so was a hell of a writer. Maybe if I hope and pray and huff and puff I’ll be that good, huh? Who wants it?”

This time there’s betting. You better believe it. Pearl’s not so la-dee-da now. She gets her cards and puts in her tie, her stockings, finally her shirt. Ollie keeps her cool but only barely. She puts in her notebook, her blue pen, the name she uses in the big bad city so no one sees her straight. Frankie antes a safety pin, a cherry candy, and at last, as sullen as icemelt in March, his own notepad and pen. Ollie rolls her eyes.

“How original,” she quips.

Al’s happy to raise. A hip flask, a cigarette case (full), and last, a strand of his own hair.

“It’s not a flask. It’s a life in Paris. And these ain’t cigarettes, they’re a sanatorium upstate—a nice one, I promise! Hydrotherapy, electro-convulsive, thorazine, the whole smorgasbord. No expense spared. But this really is my hair. Honest Thomas. Just a hair. But this hair turns into a marriage when you take it upstairs. A long one. Long is all I can do. Can’t do happy, can’t do easy, can’t do pretty. But heaven and the dodo knows I can do long.”

Zelda only has two things left. Two things she’s willing to wager. She puts in her matchstick first. The blue head looks awful to her. She shivers. Al names his own bets, but they don’t name theirs. But Miss Z knows his games by now, at least a few, and she’s pretty sure her syringe and Pearl’s earrings and Ollie’s everything and Frankie’s ridiculous safety pin have other names, too. The matchstick is so red. Wasn’t it blue a second ago?

Without even meaning to, without even knowing why, she whispers: “It’s not a matchstick. It’s death by fire. Locked in a room and nobody coming for you.” Nobody says a thing. What can you say? Zelda’s sure she’s gonna win. She started all this. She didn’t shoot anybody. It’s hers.

But that’s not enough to stay in. So Zelda slips out of her black fur coat, a snail sliding out of a shell, bright and bare and just horribly, viciously vulnerable. You almost want to squash it just for daring to come out. Silly thing. What’s it thinking?

Oleander Coy opens up her arm and bleeds onto the table. All in. Frankie’s cherry candy, Pearl’s baby boy. Zelda starts crying. She only has the one thing left. She doesn’t want to put it in the pot. It’s hers. She loves it. She can’t get it back if she loses it. And suddenly that win-feel goes up like gas. Zelda knows, somehow, that it’s all over now, all over down here, with Vollstead dead. Something’s unhappy in Canada and Al’s gonna pack up shop. This is the end of the party. It’s truth o’clock. But she doesn’t want to go home. She doesn’t want to go back. Going back is the worst thing she can think of. Being who she was. Marrying Billy or Josie or…God, she can’t even remember the other one’s name. She’s still young enough to think she’s just driving down one long road forward and up, never looping back. It’s mine, it’s mine, she cries, but it’s this or lose, and losing a game with Al is like losing one with gravity.

Zelda Fair puts a bottle on the table. It’s square, like Bombay Sapphire. Hell, maybe it was a Bombay Sapphire bottle in another life. The label’s all rubbed off now. It’s full of green, the green of her last shots, her last pages—and some of her l

ast kisses, too, but mostly the divine fire-paper bullets of the gun Vollstead gave her, the green rum of her heart, her best heart, her heart beaten out into a long, lovely tale where a girl comes out on top and the beats come so hot and hard and sweet they’ll knock you dead and you’ll beg for a sequel.

All in. She’s got nothing left.

Pearl’s out right quick. Nothing but rubbish and she doesn’t care. Little Cass chews on her Jack and Al doesn’t say it but that Jack is a suicide at thirty-five. Poor lamb. Ollie puts down eights over twos. She’s shaking, her pretty ink-stained mouth trembling. Still bleeding. Zelda puts pressure on the wound with one hand and lays her cards out with the other. Not as good as her three queens. Just a pair of sevens.

But Frankie? Frankie has a full house.

Al doesn’t even show his cards. Just counts out the boy’s winnings.

“Good show, you little milquetoast fuckhearted sludge,” he chuckles. He’d never admit it, but he played fair. Just let them roll. That’s what you get when sit down with fairies. The House doesn’t ever hurt. Fair odds are as good as damnation. “The House has cirrhosis of the liver and a healthy baby daughter, to which you add fourteen novels, a decade spent as the toast of the town, and an early, penniless death! It’s all yours, son. The nights in Paris, the long marriage, the asylum with the beautiful gardens, just the right size for a wife who’s no fun anymore, the forever-name, the liver, the out-of-print back catalogue, the ding-dong-dead, the lot! I’ve played some sharks in my time, but you’ve bested me. Not many can put that on their resume. Aren’t you proud? Couldn’t you just crow? Couldn’t you just howl?”

Al’s face goes dark and small.

“Now get the fuck out of my house.”

Rooftop

Zelda doesn’t want to go. She wants the brandy-sun of Canada and Al’s Neptune kisses and her gun. She wants Ollie and Mr. Puss-Boots. What did she do wrong? She loved Vollstead. Why should she have to go? She doesn’t even remember the name of the hotel. When it’s above ground, it has a different name. Right? She thinks so. She’s sure of it.

Between you and me, I think Al would’ve let her stay. If she begged. He likes monkeys begging. Never gets tired of that song. Ollie stayed. A few others. Ask Persephone. All you gotta do is open up a tab at the bar. Who wants to go back to being unseen and unseeable? Besides, hell has the best theater.

But Zelda didn’t even ask. Why?

Because Frankie has her stash.

There was a moment there when people just keeled over faint for what Zelda had. Not her face, not her hand, not to get between her legs. But for her Goodies. For her Good. And she won’t ever be able to live without that now. Without rum and love and Good. Frankie’s got the last of it. He thinks he’s smuggled it without her seeing. He can feel it warming him up already. Zelda followed him up that long staircase, through the door in her own room—seems like forever ago she tried to have Harold bust it open. As if you could break into a place that always wanted you. She follows him and he’s better than Orpheus I guess. He never once looks back to see if she’s there.