His hair was dark, with just a touch of gray at the temples. He hoped it would stay like that, but knew it wouldn’t. A touch of gray was all right, it was even an asset, but he didn’t feel ready for a full head of gray hair. Maybe he’d dye it, if it came to that. But in any event he’d preserve the gray at the temples, because he liked the effect.
On the jukebox, an Anne Murray record ended and a K. D. Lang record followed in turn. A waitress came to their booth, took their drink order. She was neither tall nor short, a little thick in the waist but not objectionably so. She came back with two glasses of Chardonnay, and Brady watched her walk off.
“I wouldn’t mind,” he told the woman.
“Hands off the help.”
“Oh, I know. It was an observation, not a suggestion.”
“Anyway, she’s Girls Only. It sticks out all over her.”
“Not the only thing that sticks out.”
“She wouldn’t like it,” the woman said, “and you’d try to make her like it, but it wouldn’t work.”
“So? It could still be interesting. But it’s idle speculation, because, as you so kindly pointed out, it’s a case of hands off the help.”
“Exactly.”
“All the same,” he said, “I wouldn’t mind.”
She was sitting alone at the bar. She had ordered an Orange Blossom, straight up, without being all that certain what it was, but she’d heard the name and liked the sound of it. And wasn’t it something a sweet young thing named Missy would order? This one showed up in a stemmed glass, like a Martini, and it was orange, which figured, and garnished with an orange slice. She took a small sip and identified two of the ingredients, gin and orange juice, but there was an undertone of something else, some cordial, that she couldn’t place. Triple Sec? Cointreau?
She kept her eyes facing forward but surveyed as much of the room as she could out of the corners of her eyes. She felt someone looking at her, actually felt the gaze, and she turned her head just enough to catch an oblique glimpse of them. A man and a woman, and she was a beauty while he was movie-star handsome. And they were looking at her, and wasn’t that interesting?
But someone else was looking at her, and not from a distance. And walking toward her, no, not simply walking, striding toward her, with an aura of butch self-confidence overlaid upon a core of nervous anxiety.
“What’s that you’re drinking?”
“An Orange Blossom.”
“Good?”
“It’s all right.”
“Well, drink up and I’ll buy you another.”
A deep voice, probably deeper than the one God had given her. She’d read about a film star — a gay man, actually, although he kept it a secret until AIDS got him. He’d started out with a high-pitched voice, and did something about it; every day he went to a local subway stop, and when the express train roared by he screamed at the top of his lungs. After a few months his voice dropped a full octave, and he went to Hollywood and started playing romantic leads.
Did this one know the subway trick? Or was she just forcing her voice into its lower register?
Then again, what did she care? It was nice to be admired, but she wasn’t interested. If she was going to try being with a woman, what did she want with one who was trying to be a man?
The woman set down her glass of Chardonnay. “Hell,” she said.
“Oh?”
“That one would be ideal,” she said, “but that swaggering bulldyke got there first.”
“Have a look to their right, why don’t you.”
“How did I miss her? But isn’t that—”
“Susan.”
“No, but that’s close. Suzanne.”
“Suzanne it is. We called her Suze, as I recall.”
Which rhymes with cooze, she thought.
“Which rhymes with cooze,” he said, predictably enough. “She was delicious. And she really didn’t want to play, not at first.”
“She wanted to play with me. She didn’t get unhappy until you joined the party.”
“And then she got very unhappy.”
“Yes. Fear and anger in equal parts. I have to say it added a little something.”
“But she got over it. In fact by the time we were done with her I was afraid she was going to propose marriage.”
“She did show some enthusiasm, didn’t she?”
Her own name was Angelica, or at least that was the latest variation on the theme. Her parents had named her Angela, which early on got shortened to Ange and Angie. And then she resumed being Angela again, until for a while she morphed into Angelique, but that never felt entirely natural. She’d barely considered Angelica, until one night that was her response when someone asked her name, and she’d been Angelica ever since.
She was beautiful, and she knew it, but there was a portion of her psyche that would never entirely believe it. You could be better, it had said, always and forever, and it had led her to lighten her hair the slightest bit and warm its tone to a rich honey blonde. You could be better, it told her, through four minor plastic surgeries, smoothing the imperceptible bump on the bridge of her nose, lifting her full breasts a few degrees, erasing a crease here and a wrinkle there. “Gilding the lily,” her São Paulo surgeon said on her most recent visit, but she knew what she wanted, and he did the work.
“Suze the Cooze,” Brady said. “What an eager little thing she turned out to be, and inventive in the bargain. I’ll tell you, I wouldn’t mind a return engagement. And I don’t think it would be all that hard to persuade her.”
“No.”
“No? You certainly had a good time, at least the way I remember it.”
“Another time,” she said. “Tonight I want someone new.”
“You want the conquest.”
“I do,” she said. “I want the yielding, the submission. And then I want the fear, the shock and awe, when she discovers she’s getting more than she thought. And then that delicious moment when she yields all over again.”
“To me, you mean.”
“Yes.”
“I love that part,” he admitted. “And if she doesn’t yield, well, in certain ways that can be even nicer.”
“It’s delicious either way,” she said. “That’s what I want.”
“Well, I want what you want, my dear. And she’d be perfect, so it’s a shame your little dark-haired friend is taken.”
“But I don’t think she is,” she said. “Watch.”
“Thank you,” she said. “But no.”
“Hey, I just got here, you know? My name’s Bobbie.”
No response.
“You’re not gonna tell me your name?”