Fancy Pants (16 page)
"What are you doing?" he asked.
She didn't reply; she just leaned against him, soft and compliant as a
sleepy kitten. He smelled clean, like soap, and she inhaled the scent.
He wasn't going to kick her out. She wouldn't let him. If he kicked her
out, she wouldn't have anything or anyone left. She would vanish. Right
now Dallie Beaudine was all she had left in the world, and she would do
anything to keep him. Her hands crept up over his chest. She stood on
tiptoe and circled his neck with her arms, then slid her lips along the
line of his jaw and pressed her breasts into his chest. She could feel
him growing hard beneath the towel, and she felt a renewed sense of her
own power.
"Exactly what do you have in mind with all this?" he asked quietly. "A
little tag team wrestling under the sheets?"
"It's inevitable, isn't it?" She forced herself to sound offhand. "Not
that you haven't been a perfect gentleman about it, but we are sharing
the same room."
"I've got to tell you, Francie, that I don't think it's a good idea."
"Why not?" She let her eyelashes perform as best they could wearing
only dime-store mascara, and moved her hips clqser to his body, the
perfect coquette, a woman created only for the pleasure of men.
"It's pretty obvious, isn't it?" His hand slid up to encircle her waist
and his fingers gently kneaded her skin. "We don't like each other. Do
you want to have sex with a man who doesn't like
you, Francie? Who won't respect you in the morning? Because that's the
way it's going to end up if you keep on moving against me like that."
"I don't believe you anymore." Her old confidence returned in a
pleasant rush. "I think you like me more than you want to admit. I
think that's why you've been doing such a good job of avoiding me this
past week, why you won't look at me."
"This doesn't have anything to do with liking," Dallie said, his other
hand caressing her hip, his voice growing low and husky. "It has to do
with physical proximity."
His head dipped, and she could feel him getting ready to kiss her. She
slipped out of his arms and smiled seductively. "Just give me a few
minutes." Stepping away from him, she headed toward the bathroom.
As soon as she was inside, she leaned back against the door and took a
deep, shaky breath, trying to suppress her nervousness at what she was
committing herself to do. This was it. This was her chance to cement
Dallie to her, to make certain he didn't kick her out, to be sure he
kept feeding her and taking care of her. But it was more than that.
Having Dallie make love to her would let her feel like herself again,
even if she was no longer quite sure who that was.
She wished she had one of her Natori nightgowns with her. And
champagne, and a beautiful bedroom with a balcony that looked out over
the sea. She caught sight of herself in the mirror and moved closer.
She looked terrible. Her hair was too wild, her face too pale. She
needed clothes, she needed makeup. Dabbing toothpaste on her finger,
she swished it inside her mouth to freshen her breath. How could she
let Dallie see her in those dreadful dime-store underpants? With
trembling fingers, she tugged at the fastening of her jeans and
stripped them down over her legs. She let out a soft moan as she saw
the red marks on her skin near her navel where the waistband had
pinched her too tightly. She didn't want Dallie to see her with
creases. Rubbing at the marks with her fingers, she tried to make them
go away, but that only made her skin redder. She would turn out the
lights, she decided.
Quickly, she peeled off her T-shirt and bra and wrapped herself in a
towel. Her breath came quick and fast. As she pulled off
her cheap nylon underpants, she saw a small patch of downy hair near
her bikini line that she'd missed when she'd shaved her legs. Propping
her leg up on the toilet seat, she slid the blade of Dallie's razor
over the offensive spot. There, that was better. She tried to think
what else she could do to improve herself. She repaired her lipstick
and then blotted it with a square of toilet paper so it wouldn't smear
when they kissed. She bolstered her confidence by reminding herself
what a superb kisser she was.
Something inside her deflated like an old balloon, leaving her feeling
limp and shapeless. What if he didn't like her? What if she wasn't any
good, just like she hadn't been any good with Evan Varian or the
sculptor in Marrakech? What if— Her green eyes looked back at her from
the mirror as a dreadful thought occurred to her. What if she smelled
bad? She grabbed her atomizer of Femme from the back of the toilet,
opened her legs, and spritzed.
"Just what in the goddamn hell do you think you're doing?"
Spinning around, she saw Dallie standing inside the door, one hand on
his towel-covered hip. How long had he been standing there? What had he
seen? She straightened guiltily. "Nothing. I—I'm not doing anything."
He looked at the bottle of Femme hanging like a weight in her hand.
"Isn't there anything about you
that's real?"
"I—I don't know what you mean."
He took a step farther into the bathroom. "Are you test-marketing new
uses for perfume, Francie? Is that what you're doing?" Resting the palm
of one hand against the wall, he leaned toward it. "You got your
designer blue jeans, your designer shoes, your designer luggage. Now
Miss Fancy Pants has got her
some designer pussy."
"Dallie!"
"You're the ultimate consumer, honey—the advertising man's dream. Are
you going to put little gold designer initials on it?"
"That's not funny." She slammed the bottle down on the back of the
toilet and clutched the towel tightly in her hand. Her skin felt hot
with embarrassment.
He shook his head with a world-weariness that she found insulting.
"Come on, Francie, get your clothes on. I said I wouldn't do
it, but I can't help myself. I'm taking you with me tonight."
"What accounts for this magnanimous change of heart?" she snapped.
He turned and walked out into the bedroom, so that his words drifted
back over his shoulder. "The truth of it is, darlin', I'm afraid if I
don't let you see a slice of the real world pretty soon, you're going
to do yourself some actual harm."
Choctaw, although it still wasn't the sort of place Francesca would
have chosen as the site for a coming-out ball. Located about ten miles
south of Lake Charles, it rested beside a two-lane highway in the
middle of nowhere. It had a screen door that banged every time someone
came through and a squeaky paddle-wheel fan with one bent blade. Behind
the table where they were sitting, an iridescent blue swordfish had
been nailed to the wall along with an assortment of calendars and an
advertisement for Evangeline Maid bread. The placemats were exactly as
Dallie had described them, although he had neglected to mention the
scalloped edges and the legend printed in red beneath the map of
Louisiana: "God's Country."
A pretty brown-eyed waitress in jeans and a tank top came to the table.
She inspected Francesca with a combination of curiosity and
ill-concealed envy, then turned to Dallie. "Hey, Dallie. I hear you're
only one stroke off the lead. Congratulations."
"Thanks, honey. The course has been real good to me this week."
"Where's Skeet?" she asked.
Francesca gazed innocently at the chrome and glass sugar dispenser in
the middle of the table.
"Something wasn't sitting right in his stomach, so he decided to stay
back at the motel." Dallie gave Francesca a stony look and then asked
her if she wanted something to eat.
A litany of wonderful foods flicked through her head— lobster consomme,
duckling pate with pistachios, glazed oysters—but she was a lot smarter
than she had been five days before. "What do you recommend?" she asked
him.
"The chili dog's good, but the crawfish are better."
What in God's name were crawfish? "Crawfish would be fine," she told
him, praying they wouldn't be deep-fried. "And could you recommend
something green to go along with it? I'm beginning to worry
about
scurvy."
"Do you like key lime pie?"
She looked at him. "That's a joke, isn't it?"
He grinned at her and then turned to the waitress. "Get Francie here a
big salad, will you, Mary Ann,
and a side dish of beefsteak tomatoes
all sliced up. I'll have the pan-fried catfish myself and some of
those
dill pickles like I had yesterday."
As soon as the waitress had moved away, two well-groomed men in slacks
and polo shirts came over to the table from the bar. It was quickly
evident from their conversation that they were touring golf pros
playing in the tournament with Dallie and that they had come over to
meet Francesca. They positioned themselves on either side of her and
before long were giving her lavish compliments and teaching her how to
extract the sweet meat from the boiled crawfish that soon arrived on a
heavy white platter. She laughed at all their stories, flattered them
outrageously, and, in general, had them both eating out of her hand
before either had finished his first beer. She felt wonderful.
Dallie, in the meantime, was occupied with a couple of female fans at
the next table, both of whom said they worked as secretaries at one of
Lake Charles's petrochemical plants. Francesca watched surreptitiously
as he talked to them, his chair tilted back on two legs, navy blue cap
tipped back on his blond head, beer bottle propped on his chest, and
that lazy grin spreading over his face when one of
them told him an
off-color joke. Before long, they had launched into a series of
nauseating double entendres about his "putter."
Even though she and Dallie were involved in separate conversations,
Francesca began to have the feeling that there was some connection
between them, that he was as conscious of her as she was of him. Or
maybe it was just wishful thinking. Her encounter with him at the motel
had left her shaken. When she curled into his arms, she had sent them
flying across some invisible barrier, and now it was too late to turn
back, even if she was absolutely certain she wanted to.
Three brawny rice farmers whom Dallie introduced as Louis, Pat, and
Stoney pulled up their chairs to join them. Stoney couldn't tear
himself away from Francesca and kept refilling her glass from a bottle
of bad Chablis that one of the golfers had bought her. She flirted with
him shamelessly, gazing into his eyes with an intensity that had
brought far more sophisticated men to their knees. He shifted in his
chair, tugging unconsciously at the collar of his plaid cotton shirt
while he tried to act as if beautiful women flirted with him every day.
Eventually the individual pockets of conversation disappeared and the
members of the group joined together and began telling funny stories.
Francesca laughed at all their anecdotes and drank another glass of
Chablis. A warm haze induced by alcohol and a general sense of
well-being enveloped her. She felt as if the golfers, the petrochemical
secretaries, and the rice farmers were the best friends she had ever
had. The men's admiration warmed her, the women's envy renewed her
sagging self-confidence, and Dallie's presence at her side energized
her. He made them laugh with a story about an unexpected encounter he'd
had with an alligator on a Florida golf course, and she suddenly wanted
to give something back to all of them, some small part of herself.
"I have an animal story," she said, beaming at her new friends. They
all looked at her expectantly.
"Oh, boy," Dallie murmured at her side.
She paid no attention. She folded one arm on the edge of the table and
gave them her dazzling wait-until-you-hear-this smile. "A friend of my
mother's opened this lovely new lodge near
Nairobi," she began. When she saw a vague blankness on several faces,
she amended, "Nairobi ... in Kenya. Africa. A group of us flew down to
spend a week or so there. It was a super place. A lovely long veranda
looked out on this beautiful swimming pool, and they served the best
rum punches you can imagine." She sketched out a pool and a platter of
rum punches with a graceful gesture of her hand.
"The second day there, some of us piled into one of the Land-Rovers
with our cameras and drove outside the city to take photographs. We'd
been gone for about an hour when the driver rounded a bend—not going
all that fast, actually —and this ridiculous wart hog leaped out in
front of us." She paused for effect. "Well, there was this awful thump
as the Land-Rover hit the poor creature and it dropped to the road. We
all jumped out, of course, and one of the men, a really odious French
cellist named Raoul"—she rolled her eyes so they would all understand
exactly the sort of person Raoul had been—"brought his camera with him
and took a photograph of that poor, ugly warthog lying in the road.
Then, I don't know what made her do it, but my mother said to Raoul,
'Wouldn't it be funny if we took a picture of the warthog wearing your
Gucci jacket!'" Francesca laughed at the memory. "Naturally, everyone
thought this was amusing, and since there was no blood on the warthog
to ruin the jacket, Raoul agreed. Anyway, he and two of the other men
put the jacket on the animal. It was dreadfully insensitive, of course,
but everyone laughed at the sight of this poor dead warthog in this
marvelous jacket."
She grew vaguely aware that the area around them had fallen completely
silent and that the slight blankness in the expressions of the people
around the table hadn't altered. Their lack of response made her more
determined to force them to love her story, to love her. Her voice grew
more animated, her hands more descriptive. "So there we were, standing
on the road looking down at this poor creature. Except—" She paused for
a moment, caught her bottom lip between her teeth to build the
suspense, and then went on, "Just as Raoul lifted his camera to take
the picture, the warthog leaped to his feet, shook himself, and ran off
into the trees."
She laughed triumphantly at the punch line, tilted her head to the
side, and waited for them to join her.
They smiled politely.
Her own laughter faded as she realized they had missed the point.
"Don't you see?" she exclaimed with
a touch of desperation. "Somewhere
in Kenya today there's this poor warthog running around a game
preserve, and he's wearing Gucci!"
Dallie's voice finally floated above the dead silence that had
irreparably fallen. "Yep, that sure is some story, Francie. What do you
say you and me dance?" Before she could protest, he'd grabbed her none
too gently by the arm and pulled her toward a small square of linoleum
in front of the jukebox. As he began to move to the music, he said
softly, "A general rule of living life with real people, Francie, is
not
to end any sentences with the word 'Gucci.'"
Her chest seemed to fill up with a terrible heaviness. She had wanted
to make them like her, and she'd only made a fool of herself. She had
told a story that they hadn't found funny, a story that she suddenly
saw through their eyes and realized she should never have told in the
first place.
Her composure had been held together by only the lightest thread and
now it broke. "Excuse me," she said, her voice sounding thick even to
her own ears. Before Dallie could try to stop her, she pushed her way
through the maze of tables and out the screen door. The fresh air
invaded her nostrils, its moist nighttime scent mingling with the smell
of diesel fuel, creosote, and fried food from the kitchen at the back.
She stumbled, still light-headed from the wine, and steadied herself by
leaning against the side of a pickup truck with mud-encrusted tires and
a gun rack on the back. The sounds of "Behind Closed Doors" drifted out
from the jukebox.
What was happening to her? She remembered how hard Nicky had laughed
when she'd told him the warthog story, how Cissy Kavendish had wiped
the tears from her eyes with Nigel MacAllister's handkerchief. A wave
of homesickness swept over her. She'd attempted to get through to Nicky
again today on the telephone, but no one had answered, not even the
houseboy. She tried to imagine Nicky sitting in
the Cajun Bar and Grill, and failed miserably. Then she tried to
imagine herself sitting at the foot of the Hepplewhite table in Nicky's
dining room wearing the Gwynwyck family emeralds, and succeeded
admirably. But when she imagined the other end of the table—the place
where Nicky should have been sitting—she saw Dallie Beaudine instead.
Dallie, with his faded blue jeans, too-tight T-shirts, and movie star
face, lording it over Nicky Gwynwyck's eighteenth-century dinner table.
The screen door banged, and Dallie came out. He walked to her side and
held out her purse. "Hey, Francie," he said quietly.
"Hey, Dallie." She took the purse and looked up at the night sky
spangled with floating stars.
"You did real fine in there."
She gave a soft, bitter laugh.
He inserted a toothpick in the corner of his mouth. "No, I mean it.
Once you realized you'd made a jackass of yourself, you behaved with a
little dignity for a change. No scenes on the dance floor, just a quiet
exit. Everybody was real impressed. They want you to come back in."
She deliberately mocked him. "Not hardly."
He chuckled just as the screen door banged and two men appeared. "Hey,
Dallie," they called out.
"Hey, K.C., Charlie."
The men climbed into a battered Jeep Cherokee and Dallie turned back to
her. "I think, Francie, that I don't not like you as much as I used to.
I mean, you're still pretty much a pain in the ass most of the time and
not, strictly speaking, my kind of woman, but you do have your moments.
You really went after that warthog story in there. I liked the way you
gave it everything you had, even after it was pretty obvious that you
were digging a real deep grave for yourself."
A clatter of dishes sounded from inside as the jukebox launched into
the final chorus of "Behind Closed Doors." She dug the heel of her
sandal into the hard-packed gravel. "I want to go home," she said
abruptly. "I despise it here. I want to go back to England where I
understand things. I want my clothes and my house and my Aston Martin.
I want to have money
again and friends who like me." She wanted her mother, too, but she
didn't say that.
"Feeling real sorry for yourself, aren't you?"
"Wouldn't you if you were in my position?"
"Hard to say. I guess I can't imagine being real happy living that kind
of sybaritic life."
She didn't precisely know what "sybaritic" meant, but she got the
general idea, and it irritated her that someone whose spoken grammar
could most charitably be described as substandard was using a word
she
didn't entirely understand.
He propped his elbow on the side of the pickup. "Tell me something,
Francie. Do you have anything remotely resembling a life plan stored
away in that head of yours?"
"I intend to marry Nicky, of course. I've already told you that." Why
did the prospect depress her so?
He pulled out the toothpick and tossed it away. "Aw, come off it,
Francie. You don't any more want to marry Nicky than you want to get
your hair mussed up."
She rounded on him. "I don't have much choice in the matter, do I,
since I don't have two shillings left to rub together! I have to marry
him." She saw him opening his mouth, getting ready to spew out another
one of his odious lower-class platitudes, and she cut him off. "Don't
say it, Dallie! Some people were brought into this world to earn money
and others were meant to spend it, and I'm one of the latter. To be
brutally honest, I wouldn't have the slightest idea how to support
myself. You've already heard what happened when I tried acting, and I'm
too short to make any money at fashion modeling. If it comes down to a
choice between working in a factory and marrying Nicky Gwynwyck, you
can bloody well be certain which one I'm going to choose."
He thought about that for a moment and then said, "If I can make two or
three birdies in the final round tomorrow, it looks like I'll pick up a
little spare change. You want me to buy you that plane ticket home?"
She looked at him standing so close to her, arms crossed over his
chest, only that fabulous mouth visible beneath the shadowing bill of
his cap. "You'd do that for me?"
"I told you, Francie. As long as I can buy gas and pick up the bar tab,
money doesn't mean anything to me. I don't even like money. To tell you
the truth, even though I consider myself a true American patriot, I'm
pretty much a Marxist."
She didn't reply; she just leaned against him, soft and compliant as a
sleepy kitten. He smelled clean, like soap, and she inhaled the scent.
He wasn't going to kick her out. She wouldn't let him. If he kicked her
out, she wouldn't have anything or anyone left. She would vanish. Right
now Dallie Beaudine was all she had left in the world, and she would do
anything to keep him. Her hands crept up over his chest. She stood on
tiptoe and circled his neck with her arms, then slid her lips along the
line of his jaw and pressed her breasts into his chest. She could feel
him growing hard beneath the towel, and she felt a renewed sense of her
own power.
"Exactly what do you have in mind with all this?" he asked quietly. "A
little tag team wrestling under the sheets?"
"It's inevitable, isn't it?" She forced herself to sound offhand. "Not
that you haven't been a perfect gentleman about it, but we are sharing
the same room."
"I've got to tell you, Francie, that I don't think it's a good idea."
"Why not?" She let her eyelashes perform as best they could wearing
only dime-store mascara, and moved her hips clqser to his body, the
perfect coquette, a woman created only for the pleasure of men.
"It's pretty obvious, isn't it?" His hand slid up to encircle her waist
and his fingers gently kneaded her skin. "We don't like each other. Do
you want to have sex with a man who doesn't like
you, Francie? Who won't respect you in the morning? Because that's the
way it's going to end up if you keep on moving against me like that."
"I don't believe you anymore." Her old confidence returned in a
pleasant rush. "I think you like me more than you want to admit. I
think that's why you've been doing such a good job of avoiding me this
past week, why you won't look at me."
"This doesn't have anything to do with liking," Dallie said, his other
hand caressing her hip, his voice growing low and husky. "It has to do
with physical proximity."
His head dipped, and she could feel him getting ready to kiss her. She
slipped out of his arms and smiled seductively. "Just give me a few
minutes." Stepping away from him, she headed toward the bathroom.
As soon as she was inside, she leaned back against the door and took a
deep, shaky breath, trying to suppress her nervousness at what she was
committing herself to do. This was it. This was her chance to cement
Dallie to her, to make certain he didn't kick her out, to be sure he
kept feeding her and taking care of her. But it was more than that.
Having Dallie make love to her would let her feel like herself again,
even if she was no longer quite sure who that was.
She wished she had one of her Natori nightgowns with her. And
champagne, and a beautiful bedroom with a balcony that looked out over
the sea. She caught sight of herself in the mirror and moved closer.
She looked terrible. Her hair was too wild, her face too pale. She
needed clothes, she needed makeup. Dabbing toothpaste on her finger,
she swished it inside her mouth to freshen her breath. How could she
let Dallie see her in those dreadful dime-store underpants? With
trembling fingers, she tugged at the fastening of her jeans and
stripped them down over her legs. She let out a soft moan as she saw
the red marks on her skin near her navel where the waistband had
pinched her too tightly. She didn't want Dallie to see her with
creases. Rubbing at the marks with her fingers, she tried to make them
go away, but that only made her skin redder. She would turn out the
lights, she decided.
Quickly, she peeled off her T-shirt and bra and wrapped herself in a
towel. Her breath came quick and fast. As she pulled off
her cheap nylon underpants, she saw a small patch of downy hair near
her bikini line that she'd missed when she'd shaved her legs. Propping
her leg up on the toilet seat, she slid the blade of Dallie's razor
over the offensive spot. There, that was better. She tried to think
what else she could do to improve herself. She repaired her lipstick
and then blotted it with a square of toilet paper so it wouldn't smear
when they kissed. She bolstered her confidence by reminding herself
what a superb kisser she was.
Something inside her deflated like an old balloon, leaving her feeling
limp and shapeless. What if he didn't like her? What if she wasn't any
good, just like she hadn't been any good with Evan Varian or the
sculptor in Marrakech? What if— Her green eyes looked back at her from
the mirror as a dreadful thought occurred to her. What if she smelled
bad? She grabbed her atomizer of Femme from the back of the toilet,
opened her legs, and spritzed.
"Just what in the goddamn hell do you think you're doing?"
Spinning around, she saw Dallie standing inside the door, one hand on
his towel-covered hip. How long had he been standing there? What had he
seen? She straightened guiltily. "Nothing. I—I'm not doing anything."
He looked at the bottle of Femme hanging like a weight in her hand.
"Isn't there anything about you
that's real?"
"I—I don't know what you mean."
He took a step farther into the bathroom. "Are you test-marketing new
uses for perfume, Francie? Is that what you're doing?" Resting the palm
of one hand against the wall, he leaned toward it. "You got your
designer blue jeans, your designer shoes, your designer luggage. Now
Miss Fancy Pants has got her
some designer pussy."
"Dallie!"
"You're the ultimate consumer, honey—the advertising man's dream. Are
you going to put little gold designer initials on it?"
"That's not funny." She slammed the bottle down on the back of the
toilet and clutched the towel tightly in her hand. Her skin felt hot
with embarrassment.
He shook his head with a world-weariness that she found insulting.
"Come on, Francie, get your clothes on. I said I wouldn't do
it, but I can't help myself. I'm taking you with me tonight."
"What accounts for this magnanimous change of heart?" she snapped.
He turned and walked out into the bedroom, so that his words drifted
back over his shoulder. "The truth of it is, darlin', I'm afraid if I
don't let you see a slice of the real world pretty soon, you're going
to do yourself some actual harm."
Chapter
12
The Cajun Bar and Grill was a decided improvement over the Blue12
Choctaw, although it still wasn't the sort of place Francesca would
have chosen as the site for a coming-out ball. Located about ten miles
south of Lake Charles, it rested beside a two-lane highway in the
middle of nowhere. It had a screen door that banged every time someone
came through and a squeaky paddle-wheel fan with one bent blade. Behind
the table where they were sitting, an iridescent blue swordfish had
been nailed to the wall along with an assortment of calendars and an
advertisement for Evangeline Maid bread. The placemats were exactly as
Dallie had described them, although he had neglected to mention the
scalloped edges and the legend printed in red beneath the map of
Louisiana: "God's Country."
A pretty brown-eyed waitress in jeans and a tank top came to the table.
She inspected Francesca with a combination of curiosity and
ill-concealed envy, then turned to Dallie. "Hey, Dallie. I hear you're
only one stroke off the lead. Congratulations."
"Thanks, honey. The course has been real good to me this week."
"Where's Skeet?" she asked.
Francesca gazed innocently at the chrome and glass sugar dispenser in
the middle of the table.
"Something wasn't sitting right in his stomach, so he decided to stay
back at the motel." Dallie gave Francesca a stony look and then asked
her if she wanted something to eat.
A litany of wonderful foods flicked through her head— lobster consomme,
duckling pate with pistachios, glazed oysters—but she was a lot smarter
than she had been five days before. "What do you recommend?" she asked
him.
"The chili dog's good, but the crawfish are better."
What in God's name were crawfish? "Crawfish would be fine," she told
him, praying they wouldn't be deep-fried. "And could you recommend
something green to go along with it? I'm beginning to worry
about
scurvy."
"Do you like key lime pie?"
She looked at him. "That's a joke, isn't it?"
He grinned at her and then turned to the waitress. "Get Francie here a
big salad, will you, Mary Ann,
and a side dish of beefsteak tomatoes
all sliced up. I'll have the pan-fried catfish myself and some of
those
dill pickles like I had yesterday."
As soon as the waitress had moved away, two well-groomed men in slacks
and polo shirts came over to the table from the bar. It was quickly
evident from their conversation that they were touring golf pros
playing in the tournament with Dallie and that they had come over to
meet Francesca. They positioned themselves on either side of her and
before long were giving her lavish compliments and teaching her how to
extract the sweet meat from the boiled crawfish that soon arrived on a
heavy white platter. She laughed at all their stories, flattered them
outrageously, and, in general, had them both eating out of her hand
before either had finished his first beer. She felt wonderful.
Dallie, in the meantime, was occupied with a couple of female fans at
the next table, both of whom said they worked as secretaries at one of
Lake Charles's petrochemical plants. Francesca watched surreptitiously
as he talked to them, his chair tilted back on two legs, navy blue cap
tipped back on his blond head, beer bottle propped on his chest, and
that lazy grin spreading over his face when one of
them told him an
off-color joke. Before long, they had launched into a series of
nauseating double entendres about his "putter."
Even though she and Dallie were involved in separate conversations,
Francesca began to have the feeling that there was some connection
between them, that he was as conscious of her as she was of him. Or
maybe it was just wishful thinking. Her encounter with him at the motel
had left her shaken. When she curled into his arms, she had sent them
flying across some invisible barrier, and now it was too late to turn
back, even if she was absolutely certain she wanted to.
Three brawny rice farmers whom Dallie introduced as Louis, Pat, and
Stoney pulled up their chairs to join them. Stoney couldn't tear
himself away from Francesca and kept refilling her glass from a bottle
of bad Chablis that one of the golfers had bought her. She flirted with
him shamelessly, gazing into his eyes with an intensity that had
brought far more sophisticated men to their knees. He shifted in his
chair, tugging unconsciously at the collar of his plaid cotton shirt
while he tried to act as if beautiful women flirted with him every day.
Eventually the individual pockets of conversation disappeared and the
members of the group joined together and began telling funny stories.
Francesca laughed at all their anecdotes and drank another glass of
Chablis. A warm haze induced by alcohol and a general sense of
well-being enveloped her. She felt as if the golfers, the petrochemical
secretaries, and the rice farmers were the best friends she had ever
had. The men's admiration warmed her, the women's envy renewed her
sagging self-confidence, and Dallie's presence at her side energized
her. He made them laugh with a story about an unexpected encounter he'd
had with an alligator on a Florida golf course, and she suddenly wanted
to give something back to all of them, some small part of herself.
"I have an animal story," she said, beaming at her new friends. They
all looked at her expectantly.
"Oh, boy," Dallie murmured at her side.
She paid no attention. She folded one arm on the edge of the table and
gave them her dazzling wait-until-you-hear-this smile. "A friend of my
mother's opened this lovely new lodge near
Nairobi," she began. When she saw a vague blankness on several faces,
she amended, "Nairobi ... in Kenya. Africa. A group of us flew down to
spend a week or so there. It was a super place. A lovely long veranda
looked out on this beautiful swimming pool, and they served the best
rum punches you can imagine." She sketched out a pool and a platter of
rum punches with a graceful gesture of her hand.
"The second day there, some of us piled into one of the Land-Rovers
with our cameras and drove outside the city to take photographs. We'd
been gone for about an hour when the driver rounded a bend—not going
all that fast, actually —and this ridiculous wart hog leaped out in
front of us." She paused for effect. "Well, there was this awful thump
as the Land-Rover hit the poor creature and it dropped to the road. We
all jumped out, of course, and one of the men, a really odious French
cellist named Raoul"—she rolled her eyes so they would all understand
exactly the sort of person Raoul had been—"brought his camera with him
and took a photograph of that poor, ugly warthog lying in the road.
Then, I don't know what made her do it, but my mother said to Raoul,
'Wouldn't it be funny if we took a picture of the warthog wearing your
Gucci jacket!'" Francesca laughed at the memory. "Naturally, everyone
thought this was amusing, and since there was no blood on the warthog
to ruin the jacket, Raoul agreed. Anyway, he and two of the other men
put the jacket on the animal. It was dreadfully insensitive, of course,
but everyone laughed at the sight of this poor dead warthog in this
marvelous jacket."
She grew vaguely aware that the area around them had fallen completely
silent and that the slight blankness in the expressions of the people
around the table hadn't altered. Their lack of response made her more
determined to force them to love her story, to love her. Her voice grew
more animated, her hands more descriptive. "So there we were, standing
on the road looking down at this poor creature. Except—" She paused for
a moment, caught her bottom lip between her teeth to build the
suspense, and then went on, "Just as Raoul lifted his camera to take
the picture, the warthog leaped to his feet, shook himself, and ran off
into the trees."
She laughed triumphantly at the punch line, tilted her head to the
side, and waited for them to join her.
They smiled politely.
Her own laughter faded as she realized they had missed the point.
"Don't you see?" she exclaimed with
a touch of desperation. "Somewhere
in Kenya today there's this poor warthog running around a game
preserve, and he's wearing Gucci!"
Dallie's voice finally floated above the dead silence that had
irreparably fallen. "Yep, that sure is some story, Francie. What do you
say you and me dance?" Before she could protest, he'd grabbed her none
too gently by the arm and pulled her toward a small square of linoleum
in front of the jukebox. As he began to move to the music, he said
softly, "A general rule of living life with real people, Francie, is
not
to end any sentences with the word 'Gucci.'"
Her chest seemed to fill up with a terrible heaviness. She had wanted
to make them like her, and she'd only made a fool of herself. She had
told a story that they hadn't found funny, a story that she suddenly
saw through their eyes and realized she should never have told in the
first place.
Her composure had been held together by only the lightest thread and
now it broke. "Excuse me," she said, her voice sounding thick even to
her own ears. Before Dallie could try to stop her, she pushed her way
through the maze of tables and out the screen door. The fresh air
invaded her nostrils, its moist nighttime scent mingling with the smell
of diesel fuel, creosote, and fried food from the kitchen at the back.
She stumbled, still light-headed from the wine, and steadied herself by
leaning against the side of a pickup truck with mud-encrusted tires and
a gun rack on the back. The sounds of "Behind Closed Doors" drifted out
from the jukebox.
What was happening to her? She remembered how hard Nicky had laughed
when she'd told him the warthog story, how Cissy Kavendish had wiped
the tears from her eyes with Nigel MacAllister's handkerchief. A wave
of homesickness swept over her. She'd attempted to get through to Nicky
again today on the telephone, but no one had answered, not even the
houseboy. She tried to imagine Nicky sitting in
the Cajun Bar and Grill, and failed miserably. Then she tried to
imagine herself sitting at the foot of the Hepplewhite table in Nicky's
dining room wearing the Gwynwyck family emeralds, and succeeded
admirably. But when she imagined the other end of the table—the place
where Nicky should have been sitting—she saw Dallie Beaudine instead.
Dallie, with his faded blue jeans, too-tight T-shirts, and movie star
face, lording it over Nicky Gwynwyck's eighteenth-century dinner table.
The screen door banged, and Dallie came out. He walked to her side and
held out her purse. "Hey, Francie," he said quietly.
"Hey, Dallie." She took the purse and looked up at the night sky
spangled with floating stars.
"You did real fine in there."
She gave a soft, bitter laugh.
He inserted a toothpick in the corner of his mouth. "No, I mean it.
Once you realized you'd made a jackass of yourself, you behaved with a
little dignity for a change. No scenes on the dance floor, just a quiet
exit. Everybody was real impressed. They want you to come back in."
She deliberately mocked him. "Not hardly."
He chuckled just as the screen door banged and two men appeared. "Hey,
Dallie," they called out.
"Hey, K.C., Charlie."
The men climbed into a battered Jeep Cherokee and Dallie turned back to
her. "I think, Francie, that I don't not like you as much as I used to.
I mean, you're still pretty much a pain in the ass most of the time and
not, strictly speaking, my kind of woman, but you do have your moments.
You really went after that warthog story in there. I liked the way you
gave it everything you had, even after it was pretty obvious that you
were digging a real deep grave for yourself."
A clatter of dishes sounded from inside as the jukebox launched into
the final chorus of "Behind Closed Doors." She dug the heel of her
sandal into the hard-packed gravel. "I want to go home," she said
abruptly. "I despise it here. I want to go back to England where I
understand things. I want my clothes and my house and my Aston Martin.
I want to have money
again and friends who like me." She wanted her mother, too, but she
didn't say that.
"Feeling real sorry for yourself, aren't you?"
"Wouldn't you if you were in my position?"
"Hard to say. I guess I can't imagine being real happy living that kind
of sybaritic life."
She didn't precisely know what "sybaritic" meant, but she got the
general idea, and it irritated her that someone whose spoken grammar
could most charitably be described as substandard was using a word
she
didn't entirely understand.
He propped his elbow on the side of the pickup. "Tell me something,
Francie. Do you have anything remotely resembling a life plan stored
away in that head of yours?"
"I intend to marry Nicky, of course. I've already told you that." Why
did the prospect depress her so?
He pulled out the toothpick and tossed it away. "Aw, come off it,
Francie. You don't any more want to marry Nicky than you want to get
your hair mussed up."
She rounded on him. "I don't have much choice in the matter, do I,
since I don't have two shillings left to rub together! I have to marry
him." She saw him opening his mouth, getting ready to spew out another
one of his odious lower-class platitudes, and she cut him off. "Don't
say it, Dallie! Some people were brought into this world to earn money
and others were meant to spend it, and I'm one of the latter. To be
brutally honest, I wouldn't have the slightest idea how to support
myself. You've already heard what happened when I tried acting, and I'm
too short to make any money at fashion modeling. If it comes down to a
choice between working in a factory and marrying Nicky Gwynwyck, you
can bloody well be certain which one I'm going to choose."
He thought about that for a moment and then said, "If I can make two or
three birdies in the final round tomorrow, it looks like I'll pick up a
little spare change. You want me to buy you that plane ticket home?"
She looked at him standing so close to her, arms crossed over his
chest, only that fabulous mouth visible beneath the shadowing bill of
his cap. "You'd do that for me?"
"I told you, Francie. As long as I can buy gas and pick up the bar tab,
money doesn't mean anything to me. I don't even like money. To tell you
the truth, even though I consider myself a true American patriot, I'm
pretty much a Marxist."
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