Elliot Mabeuse (19 page)

She smiled and shook her head but I think my earnestness must have gotten to her, or she realized she'd hurt my feelings, or something, because she relented.

"Props," I repeated. "And at these prices, I want you to shock me with your lurid and whorish purchases, understand? And check it out—they have underwear too.

Behind you."

She looked at me and then looked behind her at a display of demi-bras—my friend had told me their underwear was especially good, their stockings too—and she surrendered. "Well, these bras aren't bad…"

Who was the poet who wanted to be a pair of his lover's panties?

I walked up to the counter and made a show of giving the cashier two fifties.

"Don't give these back to me no matter what. I'm an irresponsible madman and will only spend it all on books. Make sure she spends it all. I'll be right back. I have an urgent need for a grapefruit."

I thought Emma might be more motivated if she knew she could surprise me with her purchases, and I secretly liked the corny domesticity of the idea of the woman

surprising her mate, so I walked outside and stood in the parking lot and had a cigarette while she spent my money on sexual enhancements.

It was a gorgeous night and I was right where I wanted to be—both satisfied and aching for more, secure and feeling like I was on the edge of a dangerous precipice, almost feeling like I was loved. My failure to tell her how I felt in the Long Viet restaurant felt like it might yet have a chance to be redeemed in some shadowy doorway. I should tell her, and yet things were going so well. It would be so easy to ruin everything at this point.

Besides, she knew what was going on. We hadn't really made love yet. She knew I hadn't brought her all the way into the city just for a quick shower and a bowl of noodles. She'd seen the hoist and the locked room and now here I was buying her clothes at Dee's and she knew I had something planned. The main event was still to come. There was time.

I was worried about leaving her alone so I walked back in. The cashier nodded towards the changing booths in the back and I walked over, hearing her voice coming from one of the stalls, tight, low, urgent, talking on her cell phone.

"…Well see? That's why I didn't want to
tell
you! If you didn't
know
, then you wouldn't
have
to lie! You're the worst liar in the world, Angela, and David knows it too!

… (pause) … Well— Well— Well, just turn it
off!
Just don't answer it anymore! Angela—? Angela—?
Angela!
Would you listen to me—!?"

I turned and walked out, went outside, face burning, dizzy.

Supposedly no one knew where she was. Her roommates didn't know. Her fiancé didn't know. It was our secret affair, private, our own little game, something we shared.

If anyone got hurt it would be just us. And now here it was—the tone of her voice, tight, pinched, pleading,
manipulative
.

Strange how my face burned. Throbbed almost—the part of me I show the world—as if I'd been slapped.

I leaned against a car and watched her through the store window, through the mannequins as Emma came out of the dressing room, putting her phone away. She didn't look at me, she didn't feel me looking at her. She looked at the outfits she'd taken in with her. I tried to see her for who she was.

But was it really so weird, I asked myself? What had I heard? I'd heard her having words with Angela her roommate about David's calling her and that was really all. So Emma had lied to me when she told me her roommates didn't know about us.

Was that such a big deal? It kept me from pestering her at home. It kept me from dropping by or trying to make more of this thing than it was. Was that so unreasonable?

Still, the doubt remained. Her tone of voice on the phone wasn't the tone of voice I knew.

She'd stepped out of character and I hated that.

I wasn't sure who she was anymore. The idea that maybe I was playing a part in her game wouldn't leave me—that I was a minor character in the story she was writing featuring her and David—wouldn't leave me. The lights in Dee's suddenly seemed too

harsh and too flat at the same time, and Emma seemed to pick up some of that green cast to her skin as well.

We paid for her stuff and went back to my place.

"Should I model what I bought or do you just want to—?"

"No, let me see. Let's see it all."

We were back in the bedroom surrounded by the white and black bags from Dee's and I started going through them as if David might be inside. That was my obsession now, that Emma was having this affair with me just to make him jealous and goad him into adopting D/s as if it were nothing more than a lifestyle like yoga or vegetarianism—"Oh, come on, David! You know that Conner Devlin in Chicago did D/s with me and we had a great time! You should really try it!"—that she was making mental notes of what I was doing so she could report to him as if it was a technique he could learn off x note cards. I felt like my recipes were being stolen.

I started drinking. I was tense and angry and it started to hit me right away.

She'd bought nice things. Fairly conservative, handsome clothes—skirts of inexpensive fabrics that still hung with simplicity, tops of soft and elegant cut. Amidst all the flash and glitter and whorishness at Dee's, Emma had managed to find clothes that remembered a woman's beauty and made me ashamed of the particular kind of hot-pants lust I was looking for. That only irritated me more.

"That's it? That's as slutty as you could find?"

She looked at me. "I bought more. I was saving them for later."

I picked up a gray skirt. It was some synthetic I suppose, soft, like cashmere, not unusually tight or short. It wasn't what I'd been expecting. It wasn't what I'd been hoping for.

"Fine. Let's go then. Get dressed. One more place I want to take you and then we can come back and get down to business. I've got some stuff to get ready while you change."

"Do you want me to wear that skirt?"

"Sure, yeah, whatever. Wear the skirt. No, wait a minute. I got something else you can wear."

I went over to my dresser and opened the top drawer, I'd been saving this for later, but I was a little drunk now and it seemed to me this was as good a time as any.

I took a gift-wrapped box and gave it to her and I should have known—I should have seen the look in her eyes that said, "Don't do this to me. Please don't do this to me," and maybe I did. Maybe I saw that look and I gave it to her anyhow because I had the feeling at this point things were somehow already over and maybe I just wanted to hurt her. But I gave it to her and made her take it and stood there while she unwrapped it and tore the paper off and then opened the box.

It was a collar. A silk-lined, leather collar, cushioned with velvet, set with mother-of-pearl studs and tourmaline cabochons and three stainless steel rings. It had a stainless steel buckle and a lock and key and four silver bells hanging free. They chimed so I'd always know where she was by the sound. I'd had it custom made and it had cost me four hundred and sixty-five dollars.

Her face went pale. She lifted it out of the box and said, "Oh Conner. I can't wear this. You know I can't."

"It's not a fucking ring, Emma. Okay? It's a collar. It's a fucking collar! It's just a piece of jewelry. It doesn't mean anything more than what you want it to mean."

I took it from her hands, shoved it in the box and threw the box in the drawer.

* * * *

The Blue Moon is the oldest bar in continuous existence in the city of Chicago.

What that means is they've been drinking there since . Al Capone drank there, actually owned it for a while. The booth he sat at is still there. The basement room he and his flunkies gambled at is still downstairs but stripped now and used for storage only—but there's still a tunnel that runs beneath Broadway and comes up on the other side of the street a block away, for use in case of police raids, of which there were none, because Capone owned the police.

The Blue Moon is the quintessential private eye bar, forever stuck in the era of hard booze and fast women, garish green lights and red juke boxes, men in fedoras and women in low-cut dresses. The people who go there know it and they dress the part, so going there is half night-out, half costume party. It's always kind of surreal.

Harvey the bouncer met us outside and we squeezed in through the crowd at the door, making our way down the long bar towards the bandstand in the back where the booths were already occupied. The place was dark and crowded as usual, but there was always some space you could slide into. It was noisy without being loud, bubbling and alive, crowded without being crushing.

It was a perfect bar, exciting and relaxing at the same time, a sense of anticipation always in the air. You walked in and looked around and there were people looking for you. The dim booths, shadowy corners, colored spotlights reflecting in polished brass instruments, rows of bottles standing against cloudy mirrors. It was here that they'd started the poetry slams in the early 's, opening up the mikes to any poets who wanted to read, and suddenly the word went out and people started crowding in to hear this new, spoken music and things took off. That's how I found this neighborhood and found this life, and that's why I'd brought Emma down here to this place I'd told her so much about, to meet my other mistress.

But now that we were here, I was feeling strange and confused, still upset about that phone call and the collar and so many things. And it was early yet, not even midnight.

We found a place at the far edge of the bar, almost next to the bandstand, under a bust of Plato. The band was a big band called Retro Metro– eighteen pieces, three singers in 's outfits with camellias in their hair, great brass, all professionals. They suck up a room and spit it out, and for someone like Emma, who'd never heard live big band, they were a revelation, like discovering music for the first time.

There was one stool at the end of the bar, right next to the band stand, and I slid Emma onto it as the band was playing "Night in Tunisia," and her eyes just went wide.

We were so close you could almost feel the blast from the trumpets and hear the keys on the saxophones slapping, the musicians laughing and kidding each other and ordering drinks from the bar. The air smelled of beer and sweat and gardenia and people were dancing in a way you don't see anymore—jitterbugging, foxtrot, twostep,

really good dancers, dancing out of sheer joy. But I was irritated and confused and ordered a double whiskey for myself while Emma had a rum and coke.

I'd made it a point not to really look at her when we left my place, but now I did, when I took off her sweatshirt and threw it on a stool, not caring whether anyone took it or not.

She was wearing the gray skirt, which hung on her without pleat or wrinkle, an exquisite, mistlike curve showing where space stopped and Emma began. Above the skirt she wore a white top with a square neck and long, tight sleeves that was gathered between the tits in a way that was both innocent and suggestive. It was made of some material that looked very tactile—the urge to touch it was almost overwhelming, and I guess that was the point.

Her entire person was made for holding, I realized—her shape, her scent, the colors she'd chosen, the way she moved, the textures of her clothes. In the mood I was in, it was maddening, not just that she was made for holding, but that she had designed herself to appeal this way to me. Why did she do this to me if she didn't want me to hold her? I was trapped now and confused, angry and humiliated about the collar.

The band rushed up to a close, hit the note and held it. The dancers stopped, fell away in happy applause, whistles.

I noticed the clock. Midnight. I turned to her. "Aren't you expecting a call?"

"Who?"

"David. He should have called you by now."

Emma looked at me cautiously. "Sometimes he doesn't call."

I nodded wisely, as if in sympathy. "Good thing he didn't call tonight with us being in a bar and everything, huh?"

The Band started playing and Emma put her drink down. "Conner, what's wrong?

Why are you so angry? What have I done?"

"Who says I'm angry? It's just a lucky coincidence he doesn't call tonight while you're out with your other boyfriend."

I looked at her. It was terrible. I was hurting her and it was like I was cutting my own stomach open but I couldn't stop.

"He doesn't know you're out with me, does he, Emma? No one knows you're out with me, right? That's what you told me, and you wouldn't lie to me."

I saw the fear in her eyes then. She knew I'd found out. She spun so she was facing the room, sideways to me. She was so incredibly beautiful. Even with what she was doing to me she was beautiful.

"No," she said. "No one knows about us."

I took a sip of my drink as the band started up the next number. I leaned against the bar so I was a little behind her. I put my drink down and leaned over her, slid my arm over her chest and caressed her breast.

"You're a terrible liar," I whispered in her ear. "You must even be a worse liar than Angela."