“Why did you take a job at Maylords, and then blow it, by playing with your skirt at the orientation sessions?”
“Oh! You’ve heard of me. I created a stir. That rascal Ainsworth acted as if I hadn’t raised an eyebrow. Just dumped on me after leading me on.”
“Leading you on how?”
“Giving me this pitch about what a ‘special’ environment Maylords is. How certain lifestyles are fine there. I think he got miffed when I wouldn’t let him into my Olgas on the first interview. I was dead meat after that. And I only lasted a few days more, which is probably eons more than that Ainsworth wuss would have lasted in any interesting sense of the word. A bunch of cowards, if you ask me. Pretend to be so with it, and such simps anyway.”
Temple considered all she didn’t know about the gay world, the lesbian world, the transvestite world, the transsexual world. It would fill Lake Mead.
Temple wondered again if Simon had been killed because he was gay. Not just because he was gay but because he didn’t fit into this particular gay world. He was basically invulnerable to the kind of pressure that seemed to rule Maylords. He had a protector, Danny. How awful if Simon’s very relationship with Danny had doomed him! The protector had been a liability.
And why hire a transvestite, and fire her? Him. Almost immediately. Temple didn’t believe Glory had quit. She had to have been ousted. Just a power play? Maybe it was all about power, which would explain the illogic. Control was a terrible thing to waste.
“Honey, you are lookin’ in need of something stronger than Kool-Aid. I have some very nice Pernod absinthe, lovely licorice taste and divine poison green color, like lime Kool-Aid crossed with Kickapoo Joy Juice.”
They were back to another world Temple knew little of: the snobbery of alcohol consumption combined with abstruse pop culture references she knew nothing about.
She shook her head. “No. But what about the straight men and women on the staff? There must be some.”
“Oh, a few. But they’re birds of passage. Once they’re sucked dry, they’re outta there.”
Temple was afraid to ask, but she did. “`Sucked dry’?”
“That’s the real game. People aren’t hired to do their jobs. They’re suckered in to get vamped.”
” ‘Get vamped’?” This was getting kinkier by the second.
“Drained, dearie. All those former sales staff and designers from the other, less upscale furniture palaces in town. What do they have that’s valuable?”
“They’re experienced professionals,” Temple said, merely to keep the dialogue going. She was beginning to get that qualifications were the last thing on the management minds at Maylords.
“Aren’t you the cutest thing! Especially when you recite that bullshit. You do see that’s the last reason Maylords would hire anyone.”
“I do?”
“It’s the designers’ contacts, dummy! Their mailing lists that they just so happily type into their Maylord iMacs, each one offered the color of his or her choice. What a classy operation! They’re so not used to the down-and-dirty retail world, and Maylords’s snob act has them fooled. So there they are typing their life’s blood into those treacherous little i-machines, professionally speaking, spilling decades of building a client list.”
“Which remains at Maylords when they’re let go after the first three months, as Ainsworth threatened would happen.”
“Those lists are sucked back out as soon as they’re entered,darlin’. Deliciously vicious, isn’t it? Not even a long, slow kissoff. Just empty ‘em out and shovel ‘em into the unemployment line.”
“I can’t believe all that evil energy would be expended on … selling furniture. I mean, Mozart had his murderous rival Solari and Snow White had her Evil Queen, but that was for really elevated purposes like art and … a beauty contest. But for furniture-?”
” ‘Who’s the most beautiful bitch of all?’ Life is a bitch, darlin’, and I’m doing my best to become one as fast as I can.”
“Speaking of which, where does Beth Blanchard fit in all this? She acts like she has some secret inner track.” “Have you ever heard of a fag hag?”
“I am from the midwest, but I wasn’t born in a cornfield. Whatever, I don’t see what’s in it for her.”
“She can be head bitch. And”-Glory sipped her Kool-Aid until her collagen-enhanced lips puckered-“like all of those delusional types, she was the devil in the heavenly chorus cherishing the notion of seducing a choirboy to the other side.” Temple considered. “Which choirboy?” But she already knew.
Who was the fairest of them all? Simon.
Glory shook her permanently curled poly-something locks. “Poor lad. Blind as a bat to that sort of predatory nuttiness.
Polite, charmingly aloof, living in his own world, not understanding the chaos he caused.”
Temple squirmed on the floral poppies upholstering the sofa. That could describe Matt too. Both men attractive and too decent to use it. Both unavailable. Perhaps maddeningly unavailable to some… . Women had been suffering from that kind of problem for millennia. It was mind-bending to see that some men did too. Was it really getting to be an equal-opportunity world, even down to victimization?
“Oh, my dear girl. Don’t get weepy on Glory. The world is mean and man uncouth, or why would I want to be what I want to be?”
“That’s Brecht!” Temple accused.
“What! I’m not Brecht. What is Brecht?”
“That ‘world is mean and man uncouth’ line.”
“I heard it in a trans revue, dear. It could be Rod McKuen, for all I know. Or Shakespeare. Speaking of dear old Willie, that
Blanchard babe is typecast for that play.”
Temple ran Glory’s wild free associations through her head. ” ‘Is this a dagger I see before me?”’
“Very good! You should try out for Attack of the Forty-Foot Woman or Invasion of the Booby Snatchers.”
“I don’t have the physical attributes for either role. You’re saying Beth Blanchard could have stabbed Simon?’
“Well, honey-dew, she did everything on earth a real she-male could do to seduce the poor bloke. And he turned her down, cold. I saw it myself. As they say, ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.’ I can’t wait until I get there myself. I’m ready for dispensing a little fury, you see what I mean?”
“I do,” Temple said, standing up. “I really must be going, but thanks for clueing me in. On so much. And you’re really not bitter about being fired by Maylords?”
” ‘Of all the gin joints in the world,’ it ran on pure venom. But it was a fun gig while it lasted. I shall always remember Paris. I wore my very best stainless-steel garters, specially purchased at a vintage shop to go with my pink Schiaperelli hose. One of my finer moments, despite the outcome. My dear, I adore your tangerine nail polish. It is s0000 Maylords this month. Perhaps you should seek permanent employment there, but do beware.”
Temple leaned forward to lap up this last scoop.
“Do not pull your hems above your panty line. Not that you have a panty line. That I can see from here. Perhaps if you gave me a head start-”
Mortified, Temple blushed, thanked Glory for her candor, and got the heck out of there.
In the stairwell, she paused to jerk at her panty line. Maybe she needed to buy a thong to prevent further embarrassment.
Sure.
Chapter 37
Dead Zone
Temple only had time after her intriguing interview with Glory Diaz to rush home and leave a fresh heap of Free-to-beFeline in the bowl for Louie to reject … when he came back from wherever he was to reject it, and he would.
And to rifle her closet for something funeral-worthy.
She began to panic when she realized that the newer fashions nowadays were as gauzy and floral as something Loretta Young might have worn in a ‘ 30s film, and she had scarfed up a bunch of them.
It was true that black was welcomed at weddings now, while color was appropriate at funerals. Yet she felt she needed to symbolize the desolation she felt on Danny’s behalf. He was theater people: symbols soothed him.