Almost Famous Women (6 page)

When she wasn't speaking, Marlene let her cigarette dangle out of one side of her mouth, or held it with her hand at her forehead, resting on her wrist as if she was tired of the world. She smoked Lucky Strikes, Joe said, because the company sent them to her by the cartonful for free.

“How does she do it?” Georgie whispered to Joe, hoping for a laugh. “How does her cigarette never go out?”

Joe ignored her, leaning instead to Marlene. “Tell me about your next film,” she said, drumming her fingers on the white tablecloth.

“We'll start filming in the Soviet Occupation Zone,” Marlene said, exhaling.

“No Western?”

“Soon. You like girls with guns, don't you, Joe?”

“And your part?” Joe asked.

“A cabaret girl,” Marlene said. “But the cold-hearted kind. My character is a Nazi collaborator.”

Joe raised her eyebrows.

“Despicable,” Marlene said in her husky voice, “isn't it? Compelling, though, I promise.”

“You always are,” Joe said.

Georgie sighed and stabbed a piece of pineapple with her fork. The rum came to Marlene and she turned the bottle up with one manicured hand. She even knew how to drink beautifully, Georgie thought.

Joe moved her fingers to Georgie's thigh and squeezed. It was almost a fatherly gesture, Georgie felt. A we-will-talk-about-this-later gesture. When the last sip of rum came to Georgie, she finished it off, coughing a little as the liquor burned her throat.

“More rum?” Joe asked the table, glancing at the empty decanter.

“Champagne if you have it,” Marlene said.

“Of course,” Joe said. She pushed her chair back and went to discuss the order with a servant in the kitchen.

Georgie shifted uncomfortably in her chair, anxious at the thought of being left alone with Marlene. Next to her she could see Miguel stroking the senator's hand underneath the table while the senator carried on a conversation about the war with the financiers.

“And you,” Marlene said to Georgie. “Do you plan on returning to Florida soon? Pick up where you left off with that mermaid act?”

Georgie felt herself blushing even though she willed her body not to betray her.

“It's no picture show,” Georgie said, smiling sweetly. “But I suppose I'll go back one of these days.”

“I suppose you will,” Marlene said, staring hard at her for a minute. Then she flicked the ashes from her cigarette onto the side of her saucer and stood up, her plate of food untouched. Georgie watched her walk across the room. Marlene had a confident walk, her hips thrust forward and her shoulders held back as if she knew everyone was watching, and from what Georgie could tell, scanning the table, they were.

Marlene slipped into the kitchen. Georgie imagined her arms around Joe, a bottle of champagne on the counter. Bedroom eyes.

Georgie took what was left in Joe's wineglass and decided to get drunk, very drunk. The stem of the glass felt like something she could break, and the chardonnay tasted like vinegar in her mouth.

When Joe and Marlene didn't return after a half hour, Georgie excused herself, embarrassed. She climbed the long staircase to her room, took off her dress, and stood on the balcony, the hot air on her skin, watching the dark ocean meet the night sky, listening to the water crash gently onto the island.

Some days it scared her to be on the small island. When storms blew in you could watch them approaching for miles, and when they came down it felt as if the ocean could wash right over Whale Cay.

I could always leave, Georgie thought. I could always go back home when I've had enough, and maybe I've had enough.

She sat down at Joe's desk, an antique secretary still full of pencils and rubber bands Joe had collected as a child, and began to write a letter home. Then she realized she had nothing to say.

She pictured her house, a small, white-sided square her father had built with the help of his brothers within walking distance of the natural springs. Alligators often sunned themselves on the lawn or found the shade of her mother's forsythia. Down the road there were boys running glass-bottom boats in the springs and girls with frosted hair and bronzed legs just waiting to be discovered or, if that didn't work, married.

And could she go back to it now? Georgie wondered. The bucktoothed boys pressing their faces up against the aquarium glass to get a better look at her legs and breasts? The harsh plastic of the fake mermaid tail? Her mother's biscuits and her father's old car and egg salad on Sundays?

She knew she couldn't stay at Whale Cay forever. But she sure as hell didn't want to go home.

In the early hours of morning, just as the sun was casting an orange wedge of light across the water, Joe climbed into bed, reeking of alcohol and cigarette smoke. She put her arms around Georgie and whispered, “I'm sorry.”

Georgie didn't answer, and although she hadn't planned on responding, began to cry, with Joe's rough arms across her heaving chest. They fell asleep.

She dreamed of Sarasota.

There was the cinder-block changing room that smelled of bleach and brine. On the door hung a gold star, as if to suggest that the showgirls could claim such status. A bucket of lipsticks sat on the counter, soon to be whisked away to the refrigerator to keep them from melting.

Georgie pulled on her mermaid tail and slipped into the tank, letting herself fall through the brackish water, down, down to the performance arena. She smiled through the green, salty water and pretended to take a sip of Coca-Cola as customers pressed their noses to the glass walls of the tank. She flipped her rubber fish tail and sucked air from a plastic hose as elegantly as she could, filling her lungs with oxygen until they hurt. A few minnows flitted by, glinting in the hot Florida sun that hung over the water, warming the show tank like a pot of soup.

Letting the hose drift for just a moment, Georgie executed a series of graceful flips, arching her taut swimmer's body until it made a circle. She could see the audience clapping and decided
she had enough air to flip again. Breathing through the tricks was hard, but a few months into the season, muscle memory took over.

Next Georgie pretended to brush her long blond hair underwater while one of Sarasota's many church groups looked on, licking cones of vanilla ice cream, pointing at her.

How does she use the bathroom? Can she walk in that thing? Hey, sunshine, can I get your number?

The next afternoon, as the sun crested in the cloudless sky, Marlene, Georgie, and Joe had lunch on Femme Beach. Marlene wore an enormous hat and sunglasses and reclined, topless, in a chair. She pushed aside her plate of blackened fish. Joe, after eating her share and some of Marlene's, kicked off her shoes and joined Georgie in the water, dampening her khaki shorts. Neither of them spoke for a moment.

“Marlene needs a place where she can be herself,” Joe said eventually. “She needs one person she can count on, and I'm that person.”

“Oh,” Georgie said, placing a palm on top of the calm water. “Is it hard being a movie star?”

Joe sighed. “She's been out pushing war bonds, and she's exhausted. She's more delicate than she looks. She drinks too much.”

“You're worried?”

“Sometimes she's not allowed to eat. It's hard on her nerves.”

“Is this why the other girls left?” Georgie asked, looking out onto the long stretch of water. “You could have mentioned her, you know. You could have told me.”

“Try to be open-minded, darling.”

“I'll try,” Georgie said, diving into the water, swimming out as far as she ever had, leaving Joe standing knee-deep behind her. Maybe Joe would worry, she thought, but when she looked back, Joe was in a chair, one hand on Marlene's arm, and their heads were tipped toward each other, oblivious to anything else.

What exhausted Georgie about Joe's guests was that they were all-important. And important people made you feel not normal, but unimportant.

That night the other guests went on a dinner cruise on the
Mise-en-scène
, while Joe entertained Marlene, Georgie, and Phillip. They were seated at a small table on one of the mansion's many balconies, candles and torches flickering, bugs biting the backs of their necks, wineglasses filled and refilled.

“How do you like Whale Cay?” Phillip asked Marlene.

“I prefer the drag balls in Berlin,” she said, in a voice that belied her boredom. “But you know I've been coming here longer than you've been around?”

Marlene leaned over her bowl of steamed mussels, inspecting the plate. She pushed them around in the broth with her fork. “Tell me how you got to the island?” she asked Phillip, who, to Georgie, always seemed to be sweating and had a knack for showing up when Joe had her best liquor out.

“After Yale Divinity School—”

“He sailed up drunk in a dugout canoe. I threatened to kill him,” Joe interrupted. “Then I built him his own church,” she said proudly, pointing to a small stone temple perched on a cliff, just
visible through the brush. It had two rustic windows with pointed arches, almost Gothic, as if it belonged to another century.

“He sleeps in there,” Joe said.

“I talk to God,” Phillip said, indignant, spectacles sliding down his nose. He slurped his wine.

“Is that what you call it?” Joe said, rolling her eyes.

“What do you have to say about all this?” Marlene asked Georgie.

“About what?”

“God.”

“Why would you ask me?” Georgie felt her face get hot.

“Why not?”

Georgie remembered the way sitting in church made her feel pretty, her mother's hand over hers. She could recall the smell of her mother, the same two dresses she wore to church, her thrifty beauty and dime-store lipstick and rough hands and slow speech and way of life that women like Joe and Marlene didn't know. Despite Phillip, the church at Whale Cay still had holiness, she thought. Just last week Hannah had sung “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” after Phillip's sermon, and it had brought tears to Georgie's eyes, and taken her to a place beyond where she used to go in her hometown church, something past God as she understood Him, something attainable only when living away from everyone and everything she had ever known. Even if He wasn't a certain thing, He could be a feeling, and maybe she'd felt Him here. That day she'd realized she was happier on Whale Cay than she'd ever been anywhere else. She'd been waiting all her life for something big to happen, and maybe Joe was it.

“I suppose I don't know anything about God,” she said. “Nothing I can put into words.”

“You aren't old enough to know much yet, are you? You
haven't been pushed to your limits. And you, Joe?” Marlene asked. “What do you know?”

Joe was quiet. She shook her head, coughed.

“I guess I had what you'd call a crisis of faith,” she said. “When I drove an ambulance during the First War. I saw things there I didn't know were possible. I saw—”

Marlene cupped her hand over Joe's. “Exactly,” she said. “Those of us who have witnessed the war firsthand—how can you feel another way? We've seen the godless landscape.”