Revenge of the Cootie Girls (15 page)

“I don't remember! I was so … Two or three nights ago, I had this very erotic dream involving Matt Dillon on a dark field full of glowing white weather balloons. It is unnerving to meet someone you've recently had a sex dream about.”

“I doubt you said anything stupid.…”

“Robin, please don't do that.”

“Do what?”

“Whatever you're doing.”

“I'm not being sympathetic, I'm giving you my opinion. Jeez.”

“You … just assume I didn't say anything stupid.… I don't know. I appreciate your faith in me, but I feel like I'm not living up to it right now and …” she stuttered.

“Well, sorry for whatever. Jesus.”

“No, I'm sorry. It's all this shit. The Jess business, my thirtieth birthday is coming up, things have been going wrong for me lately, and I am having a hard time articulating how I feel.”

“It's okay.… Oh, I don't mean to be sympathetic when I say it's okay. I just mean, fugedaboudit.”

She smiled.

“Were you wearing that costume when you said something stupid to Matt Dillon?” I asked.

She laughed. “No. That would have been funny.”

I didn't hear the rest of what she said. I'd reached the bottom of the Godiva box, and found the other half of the dollar bill.

“de me tuer,” it said in French. To kill me.

I had to check it twice, put it together with the first part of the dollar to make sure the serial numbers matched. “Il essaie de me tuer.” There was no mistake. The message George had written on the dollar bill was, He is trying … to kill me. What was it, some kind of joke?

“This is really bizarre,” I said to Claire.

“You sure this is a PR stunt?”

“The charity checks out, right? But this seems tailor-made for me. And Kathy called from the charity's phone number.… It's weird—‘He is trying to kill me.'”

“Maybe that was his joke, once he realized you didn't really speak French. His way of confirming that.”

“A joke, like the one about me being an ironworks heiress. Yeah. ‘He's killing me.' Like the way people come up to Tamayo after a show and tell her, You kill me. But that the dollar says this, and Julie set this up as a charity murder mystery—”

“She probably doesn't know what it says, seeing as you've had the half that referred to killing and haven't seen her in all these years.”

“Yeah. It's probably just an amazing coincidence.” I have a tendency to leap to extreme conclusions. Same thing happened when I started seeing Mike. Mike has a dark, Irish side, and the blood of twenty-seven kamikaze pariah dogs on his soul, all mowed down on the unlit back roads of the Northwest Frontier of Pakistan, and because of it, I pushed him away. Then my super, Phil, gave me some good advice. Don't turn this into one of your plots, Robin, he said. Just listen, and he'll reveal himself.

“But after the shit you've been through because of murders, you'd think she'd do something else, a scavenger hunt or something, if she wanted to play a good-natured joke and pull your nostalgia strings,” Claire said.

“That wouldn't be Julie, to be good-natured and soft and squishy like that. She knew of my unhealthy interest in homicide, so she probably thought this would be a treat for me. I haven't seen her in a loooong time; maybe she isn't up on my unfortunate involvement in those two murder cases. Maybe she doesn't know that's all behind me now.”

“How strange this is happening on a Girls' Night Out.”

“Well, obviously, she didn't know about that,” I said. “She planned this around Halloween.”

“How did she know you'd be in town?”

“I don't know.”

Claire's reporter instincts were kicking in. She was interviewing me.

“How did she know you'd follow the clues?”

“She knows my curiosity. We did this as kids, sent each other all over the place to pick up clues.”

“What did you get at the end of the quest?”

“Candy,
Tiger Beat
magazines, that kind of thing when we were little. Jewelry, perfume, books, concert tickets when we were older. Or information sometimes. One time she sent me all the way to Duluth to a drugstore clerk to find the answer to the question: Who is Sis Fanning going to the Greaser Days Dance with? Sometimes it took me weeks to solve her puzzles, thanks to her false leads.”

Claire had a light in her eyes.

“Let's approach this from a reporter's standpoint, not an unobjective old-friend standpoint,” she said. “Kathy obviously did. She got to the charity office. That's got to be the last stop. Why don't we just go to the charity office, since Kathy called from there?”

“But I called there several times and no one was there. I got the answering machine, so I figured they went to wherever we were going to party later.”

“All that means is that the answering machine was on. Your pal Julie wanted you to go through all this rigmarole, take you down memory lane, so she wasn't going to pick up on your voice.”

“You could be right. But that sounds too easy for something Julie plotted.…”

“We go to the source, cut out all the steps in between, and find your old friend and your intern. You've been out of the field too long, Robin. You gotta get out from under that administrative crap you do and get back on a story. Let's go.”

I hadn't seen a free cab all night, but Claire has this talent, among others—she can almost always get a cab.

“I think she's fucking with you, Robin,” Claire said of Julie as we rode uptown to the Flatiron District to pick up Tamayo.

“Claire, you have to know Julie,” I said. “A perverse sense of humor and love of a good girlish prank was something we shared. When I think of what she did to Mrs. Hobbins—or Old Hobnail, as we knew her—I still laugh, a little guiltily.”

“Old Hobnail?”

“The sewing teacher from hell, a Waffen-SS type with Queen Elizabeth's wardrobe, back in seventh and eighth grades, when sewing and cooking classes (home ec) were still mandatory for girls at my school.”

God, I hated sewing class. The machine scared me, with its razor-sharp needle going a hundred miles an hour. I was afraid I was going to accidentally stitch my thumb to a piece of stretch terry. But Julie was even worse at it than me. She was almost failing the course when we came to the Corduroy Unit of our sewing curriculum. A daunting material, corduroy, the Viet Cong of fashion fabric. It was to be her Dien Bien Phu.

After two weeks of fear, frustration, and tears, she finally turned in her corduroy project, only to have Mrs. Hobbins hold it up in class and ridicule it in front of our peers.

To be fair, her project was truly a disaster, a jumpsuit with twisted seams and one leg shorter than the other—as Hobbins pointed out, an outfit suitable only for a polio victim. But Julie hated Old Hobnail after that. The next class, before Hobnail got there, Julie discreetly poured water in the hollow of her wooden chair—just a little, so that she might not feel it through her bomb-grade corsetry, but enough that she'd look like she wet herself when she got up.

This is precisely what happened. When Hobnail turned to the blackboard and displayed her wet ass to the class, the loud laughter of the girls tipped her off that something was up. Strangely, though, she didn't accuse Julie. She accused me, and though I denied it, she kept me after class.

The next year, we were put in separate sewing classes, the theory being that separately we were inert substances, volatile only when mixed.

“Is this Julie worth all this trouble?” Claire asked.

“To me she is. Because of her, I moved to New York. And because of her, I became semipopular in high school, and redeemed my cooties somewhat.”

“I can't wait to meet her,” Claire said.

12

W
E HAD TO PICK UP
T
AMAYO
, so we went up to East 25th Street, just off Madison Square Park, site of the Rocking Chair Riots of 1901. When I first heard about those riots, I imagined a bunch of old people beating on cops with their rocking chairs. But actually the riots were started by a young guy who sat in a public rocking chair in Madison Square and refused to pay the nickel rental fee that the city charged.

The party was in a huge duplex with pillars holding up the ceiling and very little furniture. “Young, nasty hipsters,” as Claire put it, and Wannabeats jammed the place, most standing but others sitting on everything, hanging off the steel-mesh staircase in the back, lounging on top of amps. The crowd was young, twentyish, likely single. Most were moshing, kind of bobbing up and down, because there wasn't enough room to dance. You could hardly breathe, and when you did you took in a lungful of cigarette and pot smoke.

(As I looked for Tamayo, I caught a whiff of cigarettes and strawberry perfume, mingled, and I had a midlife moment. For a second there, I was transported back to a dark rec room, necking with a boy whose bubble gum had formed a thin sugar crust on his lips, and suddenly in my head I heard Cher singing “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves.”)

Two mummies holding hands passed by, and I remembered that I had to make a decision about Mike or Eric. If it was going to be Eric, I should call Mike and just tell him to can the weekend and I'd see him in two weeks, when I had to go to Vegas for an affiliates meeting. Or maybe I should be responsible, and not see either of them, stay in and do work instead, since I had reports due Monday, etc. It wasn't like I was doing some huge favor for Eric or Mike by seeing them. Eric was reeaallly good-looking, and funny too, a good guy, and he could scare up companionship pretty easily. Mike wasn't such a hound, and if we couldn't get together when he was in town, he'd hang out with his daughter Samantha.…

Oh, hell, I thought. I'll worry about it later.

It was too noisy to have a conversation here; music from early-1960s spy shows was blasting away. The idea seemed to be to just bump randomly into other bodies all night until you bumped into one you liked and then leave with it. When I was younger, I loved scenes like this, but unless you're energetic and in full mating mode, what's the point of standing around in a noisy, smoky room for even five minutes?

It took more than five minutes to track down Tamayo, who was out on the fire escape talking about her UFO movie to a comic-book illustrator, not in costume, and a guy dressed like a Klingon.

“But if the two black holes are connected by a tunnel, or what is known as a wormhole, and the mouths of the black holes meet, as they would eventually, then the people on this planet would travel back to their own pasts,” the Klingon said. “Maybe to their own futures.”

“And how would that affect their weight?” Tamayo asked. “Would it fluctuate wildly?”

“I'm not sure they would weigh more in the first place. I don't know. I'm confused,” the Klingon said.

I admired how Tamayo could get a man trying to hit on her into a conversation about quantum physics.

“Know how Klingons flirt?” Tamayo asked, when we finally dragged her out. “The Klingon word for ‘love' is
bang
, and the word for ‘yes' is
HISlaH. Bang? HISlaH
. That's an entire romantic interaction.”

“Did that Klingon use that on you?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“That explains why there are so few Klingons in the world,” I said.

“Where are we going?” Tamayo asked.

“Park and 62nd, to find Kathy and Julie. There have been a few wrinkles since I lost you in the parade.”

Claire filled Tamayo in on the key things, and also mentioned Solange's new book.

“So what do you care what Solange says? Remember what you told me when I started doing stand-up full-time? If you're going to swim with the sharks, don't wear a raw-beef bathing suit. Good advice.”

Claire said, “It's not what she thinks, it is what other people will …”

“The swells will know she's full of shit. There isn't anything you can do about the squares except win them over through your work. Otherwise ignore them. Did Robin tell you how I offended Solange with an armpit fart at one of those Womedia things?”

“No, I didn't,” I said. “Why don't you tell her?”

Tamayo had the world broken down into swells and squares. Swells, presumably, include those people who laugh at quality fart jokes. Solange was not in this number, as we discovered at a Womedia fund-raiser organized by Solange and featuring a dance piece choreographed by a guy Solange wanted to boink. I took Tamayo so I could introduce her to some of my sweller Womedia sisters who might be able to help her career. Solange did not appreciate Tamayo's making fart noises, or, as Solange put it, “vulgar noises,” with her armpit during “sensitive parts of the performance.”

That sounds crude, I know, fart noises, but it was Tamayo's timing that made that work. See, the female dancer had her back to the male lead, and he was holding on to her, slowly sliding down her back to his knees, and when his face got to her butt, Tamayo did the fart thing. Childish, yes. Nobody but those people immediately around us heard the fart, but Solange heard it—and was not amused. Stifling hysterics, we had to leave.

Perhaps we shouldn't have had those preshow Rob Roys at Hojo's.

Not that we're completely uncultured boors—not all the time. But it was a shitty dance piece, called
X/Y
, tedious and pretentious, a couple in spandex essentially doing what we used to call dry-humping back at Hummer High School in Ferrous, Minnesota. I hasten to add that the
New York Times
dance critic also panned the piece, although she expressed herself somewhat more eloquently than Tamayo. In any event, some of my more serious Womedia sisters felt the armpit fart was inappropriate, and I could see their point of view too, you know.

Tamayo's retelling of this had Claire laughing her ass off, and Claire was suddenly fine again. They talked about people I didn't even know, nights they'd gone out together to interesting-sounding places, like Mugsy's Chow Chow and the Bubble Lounge, and exchanged information about all the new trendy places. They poked fun at each other and did that home-girl, hands-on-hips, side-to-side head-bob thing, which Tamayo, mimic extraordinaire, had taught to Claire. The circle of their intimacy drew a little tighter, and seemed to have a little less room for me.