Butterflies in Heat (35 page)

He got up and reached for her hand. "Are you okay?"

She jerked it back quickly. "I'm all right, " she said, concealing her face from him. "I'm a Virgo, a cursed sign.
If
born under that sign, your brain never lets you alone, but haunts and tortures you night and day. I worry too much, care too deeply."

He felt powerless to help her in any way.

"Now you must leave me alone to meditate." She glided like some wraith into the throne chair. "I will sit here until darkness comes. Just be here to pick me up in my car, but only when darkness comes."

Later that night, Numie was sitting alone in the patio of Sacre-Coeur. Ralph and Leonora were getting ready for dinner.

The world was slipping into darkness around him, and he felt in danger of going with it. Someone switched on the lights in the patio, and the effect was like the headlights of the attorney's car that picked him up on the mosquito-infested keys.

Missing since this morning, Anne walked through the gate. She looked at him briefly, but comprehensively.

A strange shiver moved up Numie's spine. It seemed impossible that he had ever touched the flesh of this cold stranger, much less had her touch him.

"I knew I'd find you here," she said. The sound of her voice was a shock to him.
It
seemed totally detached from her body, lacking in any real feeling.

He studied the cool remoteness of her eyes. "About this morning ... " He really didn't know where he was going with the explanation.

She intervened in time to save him. "Here," she said harshly, thrusting some bills at him. "Thirty dollars. Isn't that the usual stud fee?"

He smiled bitterly to himself, accepting his punishment and having no desire to retaliate. "Stop it," he said softly.

She laughed a small laugh. "You performed very well. Ralph was right. You are good in your work."

Hurt and humiliated, he handed the money back to her.
"It
wasn't like that at all. And you know it." He wasn't remembering their love-making that night, but their time in the pool, the liquid movements of her body.

A flash of resentment crossed her face. "Take it, damn you. A male prostitute needs to get paid for his hard labor."

"Don't rub it in,' he protested.

"All these years," she said, "and I'm still naive about men." She gave him a long, level look. "I hope you and Ralph are going to be very happy together. He and I certainly weren't." She turned and walked quickly away.

"Come back .. ." he called, but his voice echoed in the darkness. She was gone. The stillness of the garden moved in on him. Once beautifully landscaped, it was now overgrown, like the emotions in this household. Behind her high wall, Leonora had hoped to buy solitude. Maybe, Numie wondered, all of them were tainted with Leonora's original purpose.

Leonora herself paused briefly in the garden, spying on Numie. She was surely mistaken, but she was receiving vibrations of having stumbled upon a lovers' quarrel. She had heard strange noises coming from Anne's room late at night, but had dismissed it as the wind. Was it possible for Anne to be in love with Numie? She'd have to caution the poor girl against male hustlers. She knew, but possibly Anne didn't, that male hustlers were too damaged to love ... ever.

After an appropriate interlude, Leonora's voice resounded across the patio. "Dear heart," she said to Numie, "it's going to be a very special dinner tonight. Just Ralph, you, and me. Somehow it didn't seem right to invite Anne. Amy Vanderbilt never wrote anything about the etiquette of the situation." Her hand was a pearly shadow moving through the night air. She held it up, suggesting the promise of the evening. Yet it could also hold a dagger. "Furthermore,' Leonora said, "you'll be delighted to know: we're having champagne."

Numie stood in front of Commodore Philip's bar. The doors were wide open. In back an old black man was mopping the floor. Flies buzzed around the sticky waxpaper hanging from the ceiling, waiting to capture them.

Dreading this moment, he'd returned to reclaim his possessions. At first he considered abandoning them completely, but he wanted that duffel bag back. It'd been with him through worse situations than this; and he had to have it. It was his traveling office, and he felt lost without it.

From the upstairs boudoir, Dinah was racing down the steps, clad only in a skimpy see-through robe. She made a sleepy face, eyeballed him, and let out a soulful sound: "Lookee who's here! Lola's so pissed at you, stud, she could rip your thing off. Has that black bitch been carrying on "bout you!"

"I've come for my things," he said.

Behind the bar, she said, "Let me scarf down some strong whiskey. Till I get some stuff swimming around in my gut, I can't think straight."

He swallowed hard. "Is Lola up?"

"Was just a minute ago—not only up, but bouncing around like some whore in heat ready to take on the whole navy."

"Where's the commodore?" The question came out like an angry curse.

"He's in the cottage out back. Went there groaning and bellyaching that we was gonna give him a stroke for sure." She jiggled the ice in her glass. "He didn't retire, though, till Ned and I earned our bread. No two cottonpickers ever worked harder for the man than we did last night." She smiled suggestively. "Heard you got all high class on "em and swished your tail right out of here."

Numie glanced back at the street, as two effeminate-looking older men with dyed hair paraded by. "It wasn't my scene."

"Mine either, but a gal's gotta live. That magic wand of the commodore has clean run out of tricks."

"Is it okay for me to go up?" Numie's voice resounded across the bar. "To get my things?"

"Sure," Dinah said, slurping the rest of her whiskey. "Lola ain't got no bodysnatcher up there waiting to sell you into white slavery."

Numie stood tall in his khakis an and desert boots, preparing himself for battle. Up the steps two at a time, he was pounding on the door to Lola's apartment.

Irked at the interruption, Lola yelled, "Come on in if your drawers are clean." She reckoned it was probably that annoying cousin, Castor Q. Combes, asking for another dollar.

Bracing himself, Numie walked in.

In her red silk panties, Lola was on the bed with Ned. He wore nothing. Blinking her eyes, not sure she was seeing right, she sat up. Anger flooded her system. "Lily-White, the prick-peddling bastard has returned to the scene of the crime."

Numie stood there stunned. The only thing he could think of for a moment was that the room smelled of Campbell's chicken noodle soup. "I've come for my duffel bag and my clothes," he managed to say, avoiding looking directly at the bed again.

Ned said nothing, just stared at Numie with a mocking grin.

Before Lola spoke, her mouth began to shape itself for cannibalistic devouring, like that of a hungry lioness. "The wardrobe I bought for you, you mean." She kept trying to read Numie's thoughts. He felt she was trash, that was for sure. She was torn between two conflicting emotions: That of trying to act like a lady and that of creating the impression she was the type of gal men wanted to rape.

"What wardrobe?" Numie asked, now confronting her eye to eye. "A pair of pants and sweater paid for with the commodore's money. You're welcome to keep them." Lola disgusted him. She was nothing but a bragging, jiving, exaggerating bitch!

"Just a minute," Lola said, propping her elbows on her hips and jiggling her breasts a little to enhance her sexual allure. "What makes you think you can barge in on a lady when she's entertaining a gentleman? A
real
man, I might add. Look at that thing. Isn't that the biggest salami you ever laid eyes on?" Leaning over, she said to Ned: "Numie whipped it out for my commodore last night.
It
was soooo tweensy-weensy we couldn't even see the thing. My commodore asked me to go get his bifocals!"

Numie burned at the fact that it was said in front of Ned. "Aren't you talking about your own endowments?" Numie asked.

"Honey," Lola said sarcastically, "of all the things I've pretended in life,
hung
ain't one of "em."

The very presence of Lola seemed to be clouding his brain, like darkness moving in fast on a winter's afternoon. "I'm here just to get my things, that's all!"

Whiskey glass in hand, Dinah was back in the room. She flipped on a television set, turning up the sound. "Look at all these goddam white mothers, advertising all these grand things just to tempt us. They know we can't afford them. Some of us are lucky to even have TV. That's the way they have of torturing us."

"I'll get your things when I'm good and ready," Lola said irritably. "Don't want you messing up my gowns." She settled back on the bed, determined to prolong Numie's farewell as long as possible. She wasn't going to be dictated to by any white trick in her own apartment. The commodore had dumped on her all the white man's crap she planned to take in this lifetime. It was feeling mighty good to toss a little of that shit back. "God only knows what you white trash would steal
if
I wasn't looking. First, I've got some unfinished business to attend to." She turned over in bed, pulled down her red silk panties, then ordered Ned: "Ride the range, cowboy." Panting, Lola hawkeyed Numie with hatred in her dry eyes.

He looked away. His eyes darted around the room, as if seeking some door of escape from this mad moment.

Chewing gum and drinking liquor at the same time, Dinah called over to the bed, "He in there dirty and deep, Lola?"

"
If
he was in any more, child," she yelled back, "he's be coming out like an oil derrick in China."

"He can cum a ton," Dinah said, her eyes transfixed on the kiddies' cartoons on the tube.

"Baby," Ned was huffing in Lola's ear, "I'm filling you up so much this time you gonna be water-logged."

The sound of their engines grew louder and louder in Numie's ears. Then something clicked, and he tuned them out completely, a trick he learned to do when he used to sleep in all-night movies and people were having sex all around him. Going into Lola's closet, he was rounding up his possessior's. He tossed his newly bought white slacks and sweater on the floor. Under a red sequin gown, he found his precious duffel bag. As he was leaving, Lola and Ned were in the throes of orgasm. Lola was moving hard now. She wanted Numie's memory of her to be this spectacular finish. After his temper cooled down, pure jealousy and lust would drive him back to her.

Outside the door, Numie didn't know whether to celebrate or prepare for a fast getaway.

In the bar downstairs, he paused briefly, as if he'd forgotten something. Suddenly, the cat belonging to Castor
Q.
Combes appeared from under a table. She was dragging a dead wharf rat, huge in size. Numie cringed at the sight of it.

Bounding down the steps two at a time, Ned landed on the wood floor, still zipping up his sailor pants. "Don't get pissed at Lola, man," he said. "Us spades are just better in the
sack—every
queen knows that. When I'm sailing into a chick—or in Lola's case, whatever—I'm on home turf."

"You're welcome to her," Numie said sarcastically. "The commodore, too." Turning to go, he was in no mood for Ned's gloating look.

"Now don't you go heaping no big favors on old Ned. Sweetheart,
yo
u
can have the commodore." He opened a beer.

Suddenly, the thought of Anne flashed through Numie's brain.

Ned said, casually, sipping his beer, "Only thing I like "bout him is his bread."

Numie smiled uncertainly. He was sure that Ned was somebody's sexual fantasy. But not his! "I've got to go."

"Shit, man, I've come all the way down here to express my sympathy for you." He anchored, feet and all, on the top of the bar. "To shower some hot attention on you. In some ways, you're a nigger like me—forced to peddle your meat in whitey's country."

Numie paused, taut with anticipation. A sense of unreality moved over him. Ned was obviously here for a purpose. And it wasn't sympathy.

"You've been outclassed, man," Ned said. "The commodore told me so last night. Black meat is in."