“That’s all right,” Tildy said, dabbing saliva on the red spot. “My face needs a little distinction anyway.”
Charmaine moved up to the mirror and plucked at her fawn-colored bangs. “In this city your face is all you’ve got. I dote on mine. Lemon and egg white every morning … But it used to be horrible. I just hid out in my room for months, like I was a leper or something. Then this old Armenian lady who lived next door, one day she gave me some cuttings from a bush she had growing in her yard. Told me to strip the bark, boil it up with the leaves, then soak pieces of cheesecloth in it and tape them to my face before bed. The stains it made. I must have gone through fifteen pairs of pyjamas that summer. But by September my skin was like glass. Better than it is now.”
“And it’s beautiful now. Egg whites? Is that what you said?”
Charmaine turned her back to the mirror. The scarf was wound around her wrist and diagonally across her palm like an improvised bandage. “It was a transformation all right. Boys started to come after me and my new face. They told me I had a different look, older somehow. They’d touch my cheek like it was something from outer space that glowed. I fell in love with a few of them. I had a baby. A little girl. Tara didn’t cry, not ever. She just seemed above it all. Sometimes sitting by her crib watching that face, I’d want to cry. It was so soft and white, I almost expected it to come off on my fingers when I touched it. Like powder. She had a mobile hanging over her crib and one night it got twisted around her neck somehow and she stopped breathing. She just lay there with this necklace of toy lambs.”
Charmaine wobbled her feet and shrugged. There was regret in her voice, but no grief. It was like anything else: a plush apartment, a snazzy car — you had it for a while and then it was taken.
“That was how you found her? My God.”
Tildy meant only to touch her shoulder but it was too long a stretch; her hand came to rest on the upper slope of Charmaine’s heavy breast. They looked at each other for a moment and then Charmaine sank to her knees, one arm around the back of Tildy’s chair.
“Don’t be sad,” she said, lowering her head onto Tildy’s lap. “It doesn’t make any sense to be sad. You can’t keep hold of anything in this world. Not even your face.” Sitting up, pushing Tildy’s hair back. “You ought to show more of your cheekbones, you know.” Charmaine caught Tildy’s hands and held them against her breasts. Her eyes glistened. “They’re a little tender. I’m about to get my period.”
Uh-huh. This was where Tildy always seemed to be coming in.
“Next time,” she said, backing away. “Maybe next time.”
The stage was empty when Tildy returned. So was the bottle of champagne; so was Dodie’s chair. The partners were puffing casually on needle-thin reefers.
“We shook off our little hustler,” Pierce said. “You do the same with yours?”
“More or less.”
“Fluffheads,” Christo grumbled. “But at least they matched the decor.” All evening he had been able to think of little beyond his new business horizons. Pierce was free with promises; it was always a bull market with him. He was also someone who needed to be repeatedly pinned down. But Christo could not make his opening, could not find the words. An unfamiliar sensation. “So here we are, just the three of us.”
“Just the three of us,” Pierce repeated. “We should get cozy.” He motioned for them to bring their chairs in closer. “We should just be loose.”
Tildy avoided his eyes, focusing instead on the white satin handkerchief spouting like a fountain out of his blazer pocket. She found him, thus far, completely uninteresting.
“So what happened with the entertainment? I like to watch dancers. Used to be one myself.”
“Really.” Pierce tipped his shoulders forward and she felt his smoky breath on her face. “I might have guessed as much from that physique of yours. Very supple. Like an otter with curves. What was your specialty? Tap? Flamenco? Ballet?”
“Nothing so special. My boogaloo was popular.”
Stagelights flashed on and the band members hurried out. They began furiously tuning their instruments.
“Let’s have some of those doughnuts.”
“Let’s order a drink.”
“Let’s get out of here.”
Pierce negotiated his Packard roadster through a flying wedge of taxis.
“Is this yours or did you rent it for the evening?”
Pierce smirked and flicked Tildy under the chin. “This car has been in my family for years.”
“Didn’t I tell you, kid?” Christo said, pouting in the back seat like a birthday boy who’d gotten nothing but savings bonds. “This guy’s a real ruling-class worm. If he hadn’t got so wrapped up in the dope business, he’d probably be working for the State Department.”
“And doing a superb job. I had three years of Russian, you know.”
It finally occurred to Tildy to ask where they were going.
“My place,” Pierce answered, and his voice went all rich and silky. Like Bela Lugosi.
A cone of balsam incense smoldered in an ashtray on the desk. Fibrous blue smoke moved through a shaft of lamplight in the slowly shifting patterns of dawn at sea. Pierce bent over a mound of white powder glittering on a mirror.
Only weeks ago, on the eastern slopes of the Peruvian Andes several thousand feet below the altiplano, leaves from the shrub Erythroxylum coca had been harvested. Two Indians wearing cotton sport shirts under their ponchos, murmuring to one another in Quechuan, had dumped the leaves into an old oil drum containing a solution of potash, kerosene and water, and left them to soak. After several days the precious alkaloids had been leeched out in the form of a brown paste left behind when the leaves and their marinade were discarded. A former classmate of Pierce’s (at St. Eustatius Prep of Sharon, Connecticut—“It is the Spirit that quickeneth”) serving with a Peace Corps agronomic project near Tingo Maria came in a jeep and collected the paste. Packing it in two Zip-lock bags, wrapping it in a thin sheet of lead to circumvent possible fluoroscoping by the Post Office, he dispatched it to Pierce’s mail drop, a one-room apartment on Staten Island that contained one mattress, one chair and a clock radio. Back at the duplex, in a makeshift lab installed by Looie, Pierce, using a simple method involving treatment with hydrochloric acid, manufactured three remarkably clean ounces of what had been until 1903, in name only now, a key ingredient in the world’s favorite soft drink.
Pierce inserted a piece of drinking straw into first one nostril and then the other, snorting one line into each. “We have lift off. Passing through the stratosphere … ionosphere … Past gravity pull, beyond the orbit track and into deep space.” With a moistened fingertip he gathered adherent crumbs from knife blade and mirror edge, massaged them into his gums.
Christo leaped forward to fill his own nose barrels. “That’s a serious freeze,” he said, backfiring his sinuses. “Off a few pounds of this I could go fishing in the Bahamas for four or five years.”
“Right. So what’re you going to do, a little Rumpelstiltskin magic? Sit down in the basement all night spinning straw into high quality blow? This business is like any other — office machines, aluminum siding — you got to push and push and push. There are no shortcuts, jazzbo. Anybody starts to tell you about one, get a firm grip on your wallet.”
“Right, coach.” Christo served himself another couple of lines.
“I’ll pass,” Tildy said when Pierce beckoned to her, his face wreathed in bright hokum like a schoolyard perv trying to lure her into his car with a bag of jawbreakers.