Speak Easy Read online

  And that thing up there? That thing that could be a castle or a villa or a ruin or a chalet or a rack of old dinosaur bones? It’s gotta be the distillery. There’s barrels like mountains all around it, closing it in, keeping it safe and snug. The taps stick out like proud boys’ pricks, bigger than the statues in Union Square, diamond and baleen, gargoyle-spigots tangled up with leaves and berries in their hair. The distillery is a palace without walls. A skeleton of a place. Up rise the arches and struts and buttresses and pillars and load-bearing studs. Up spiral staircases and doorframes to rooms with floors like trellises, floors full of holes and air. Windows float. Doors hinge to nothing. But it’s not empty, oh no. There’s people milling and swilling everywhere, wearing their Friday best, spangles in every color liquor comes in, black rum and white gin and green abinsthe and pink Hungarian palinka and brown brandy and ginger beer gold. Girls laugh. Their hair giggles down their backs.

  Zelda Fair laughs, too. It’s parties all the way down.

  Only it’s not. It’s not. Parties are where you go to do nothing as hard as you can. She’s past the grand front door now, all frosted glass and brass funny-business, and yes, a man takes her coat, a man with a blue tongue like a lizard, but other than that, reasonably butler-like. And yes, under her coat she’s suddenly dressed for a to-do. Her swimming costume has put on airs and swings with glitter-fringe and beads like shotgun pellets. Yes, the sounds bounce and sway just right, yes there is music, yes a smile is a uniform and laughter is a medal of valor—but Zelda’s never met a party like this.

  Everyone’s so awfully busy. A girl dances on a table—and oh! Gee! Zelda knows her! That’s Iris Wiltsey, she’s Sam Griffith’s mistress, the big swinging studio head who comes out from California every month to refresh himself and then straight back to the backlots. Iris is going great guns, moving, her heels striking hard sparks on the slab of table under her. Her red hair flings sweat everywhere. All well and good—but where her feet fall film flickers out, black, shiny ribbons of the stuff, one frame per step, ticking, spooling, piling up around like briars. A man with no shirt on and a chest to write home about pours drinks for his friends at a bar hollowed out of a topaz—why, isn’t that Murray Keen, the bellhop with the sweet New England vowels, the one who rooms with Frankie? It is! And when he pours his anise out, it glugs down onto the bar and turns into statues of onyx and marble and bronze, maidens twisted like little Daphnes half-way to turning into sewing machines or clocks or biplanes. Men with triceps to die for crumbling into fennel-flowers, plough-shares, open books.

  And there, there’s Enzo tucked into a corner with Ollie, Ollie who’d had some boy for weeks and never told, never even squeaked, kissing and grabbing and clinging like they were each a cliff for the other to fall off of. And every time they take a breath, a little slip of a thing escapes their lips, a little gargoyle or medusa or fiery avenging angel or dog-faced carnival boy. Those little thin pictures, well, they drift up like cigarette ash, sticking to whatever they found, turning the bones of the place into confetti colors. And every time he touches her breast or she grabs at his never-you-mind, typewritten columns spiral out, vicious and insightful and clever as death and always utterly right, right for the ages.

  Everybody’s got something to do but Zelda. Everyone’s got the Goods.

  “I’m sleeping,” she says, and she really believes it just then.

  “Nuh-uh,” says a little grumble of a voice. She looks down and it’s Vollstead standing next to her with a green cigar. “Al is the upside-down man. Back home, you work all day and night to learn how to paint, learn linseed and cadmium and badger-hair and perspective, which is just math in art-school drag, you know? And maybe you still can’t do anything worth phoning the Met over. But hey, getting a boy to fuck you is just the easiest thing since Sunday naps. Up top, getting drunk at a party is what you do when you’re all out of art. But in…Canada? Are we calling it Canada now? Ok! Al’s the King of Canada and he says: fuck that for a lark! The world feels like being a bastard-and-a-half this decade, let’s play nine-pins on its grave. Down here it’s all the same! Kiss a boy and books come out! Ralph up Parthenons into the upstairs toilet! Dance poems, shit showtunes! Art is easy! Pick up genius at the corner shop! Sell your soul and half your shoes for a glass of gin!” He looks up at Zelda Fair and his poor goblin face goes all twisted up and desperate. “It’s all fucked anyway, you see? The end of the world already happened. It’s happening all the time. It’s gonna happen again. And again after that. Just when you think it’s done falling on its face, the world picks itself up and throws itself off a roof. Boom. Pavement. The world’s ending forever and ever and we’re not even allowed to toast at her funeral. So we gotta do something else or she won’t know we ever loved her.”

  The noise is getting so Zelda can hardly think. Some gramophone somewhere is trilling out a song about how rich daddies never did a girl right since God told Eve she had to clear out her stuff. Vollstead makes a wretched clack-crunch sound and pulls off one of his own legs, hands the tommy gun of his thigh up to her.

  “You know what they call one of these in Chicago?”

  “I never been to Chicago.”

  “Al loves that town to death. Me too. Had some of my best days out there. I made that town. Brought her up good.” He fingers the barrel of the gun. Zelda thinks he should probably fall over, having only one peg-leg left, but he doesn’t. “Anyway, out there they call this baby a typewriter. Get it? Plink-plink-rat-a-tat-smash-punch-carriage-return-bang. Yeah?”

  Zelda Fair takes the tommy gun. It’s lighter than she thought a gun would be. Feels like a gun should always be heavy like the sun. It’s gotta hold all that death. I’m just sleeping, she thinks, and she believes it. When you’re sleeping you know how things oughta go, how they fit together. Or maybe you always know but you can’t get the rhythm right, and when you’re asleep you just go with the beat and the beat don’t fail you. So Zelda points the gun at her heart. It’s tough. A tommy gun likes to play with others. She has to stick it in the ground and sort of fall over it. But she does. She pulls the trigger with her thumb. That Chicago typewriter rat-a-tat-smash-punches right into her chest.

  Pages burst out of the gun, page after page after page, covered with paragraphs, with whole chapters so perfect you could live on them for the rest of your given days. They feel like alive things pushing against her breast, like little animals biting and growling and suckling and baying for meat.

  2068

  All right, here’s the skinny: it’s February and Caspar Slake is fucking Lily Greer in the room next door. There’s only four rooms that matter on the 20th floor: the Slake suites, which tumble out like a very nicely upholstered octopus through Rooms 2056-2064, the Valhalla, for visiting how-dos, the Carolingian, for Al’s needs when he’s up top, and 2068. A few richies take the others when they want to show off, but all the real action’s further south on the elevator line, so why put yourself above the fray? Get down where it’s at, young man.

  So Caspar keeps 2068 nice and plush for his own little frays, his strays, his special ways and means. It’s been Lily for three whole months now, and if you’re not impressed, you should be. Most don’t last three weeks. Lily doesn’t live there. Discretion, darling! But it sure is a fine place to spend the night. Done up like a forest in a French fairy tale, all tapestries and canopies and green glasses full of honey-wine. Not Lily’s style, if you asked her about it. Looking up at the scene of a stag getting skewered on the ceiling while a man who could buy the dinky state she was born in bounces up and down on top of her is what a girl might call unsettling. But that’s the scene as we come in.

  Now, you might think a fella like Caspar is the pits in bed, but he’s not half bad. Lily’s had worse by a mile. It’s been swell, eating fish eggs and angel food cake and peaches from Argentina while lying around naked as a painting. Sometimes he likes her to wear her show costume—she does a regular act down at the Arden Theater as Lily-or-Lyle, the Comic with a Secre
t! Straps down her tits, slicks her hair, pastes on a mustache with rubber glue, and tells the vaudeville crowds what it’s all about. It is currently all about the stupid little blister in her heart where Caspar has rubbed her raw and she hates herself for it but she’s started to love him a bit. Lily does not subscribe to love’s periodicals. She has a whole set about that at the Arden. How a fella in love isn’t a fella at all. Johnny isn’t Johnny anymore, he’s been replaced by Love, who is not a baby in a diaper but a fat drunk moron who never graduated third grade. Love is nothing but a freak walking around in somebody else’s clothes. It’s a good bit. Gets them on Lily/Lyle’s side. But the point is, you don’t love the rich man you’re screwing. That’s not how the show goes. It’s not a good move. Rich men are for fun. That’s all they want from you and all you’ll get from them, so just sit in it and soak for awhile.

  But now she’s got a blister on her heart. Like syphilis. She’ll have to go see somebody about getting rid of it.

  So they fuck on that big green Aquitaine of a bed and it’s so good she could eat it for days. She does her Lyle voice for him and he gobbles it up like blackberry pie.

  Caspar’s just about done fucking her, but she doesn’t know it yet. Caspar Slake has a three-month limit at the bar. Any longer and you start thinking about a person different. You start thinking of them like they’re yours. You start making plans. He didn’t make the rule. It just is. People are clocks who think they wind themselves. Caspar’s heard of men who belly about, hollering about how many girls they can stick it in without caring what color eyes they got. But he knows better. Nobody does that. Nobody can. The minute you want somebody more than once, time starts ticking down and all you can do is bug out before the color of their eyes gets to be the only thing in the world that matters at all.

  Besides, Pearl always figures out who he’s got going by the three-month mark. She’s the Hercule Poirot of adultery, that one. Gets out her magnifying glass and peers down the Artemisia, top to bottom. Sometimes Caspar thinks she likes it. It’s the flip side of seduction. He chases women, Pearl chases him. He thinks of the pair of them and he thinks of the old German cuckoo clock where Jesus chases Death round and round like a coupla old racetrack dogs. She’s nearly got Lily in her sights. So that’s about that. Maybe he’ll see about that girl everyone’s talking about on the fifteenth floor, with the giant Gishy eyes and her voice that somehow knows how to blush. Just the voice, none of the rest of her. Caspar likes that. He liked it the first time he met her, when she handed him a bottle still sealed up with blue wax. No label. Liquor colored like squid ink, with little white petals floating at the bottom. Tried to sell it to him for ten bucks. Ten! Her teeth were crooked inside her smile. Been forever since anybody tried to sell Caspar anything as cheap as ten bucks. Been forever since anybody charged him cash money for drink. She didn’t have the first foggy notion of who he was. So he paid her. He kissed her. She let him, maybe even kissed him back, though when he got his arm around her waist and crushed her up to him a little, she laughed like he’d made the best joke since the first man walked into the first bar. Said her name was Zelda and there was more where that came from and hopped away. Yeah, he might have to ask after that one. She had ankles that looked like they’d shatter if you pinched them. Or maybe he’d just call down to Georgie and have her send up a Rapunzel or two.

  Here’s a pair of things Caspar doesn’t know yet. Just to get a good punch in for Lily. Right about the time he’s doing his best thing in her and turning red and thinking of Zelda’s crooked teeth and shutting his eyes and crying out all desperate and sincere like humans love to do, just about that time, when he’s decided to take Lily’s pretty silver 2068 key back this very night, Caspar Slake is fixing his death in place, just as neat as a nail for a picture that ain’t been bought yet.

  And Pearl de Acosti y Candela y Slake?

  Oh, she’s gone.

  1633

  It’s not just Pearl, oh no. The Artemisia’s got a hole in her pocket. She’s lost a whole batch of things down there. Lint, quarters, cigarettes, buttons, hairpins, Pearl Slake, Oleander Coy, Murray Keen, Olive Bay, Enzo Bacchi, Dandy Brute, Iris Wiltsey, Ogedei the Mongolian eagle, car keys, breath mints, Lily Greer, lipstick, a pair of Texas twins name of Nickel and Dime. A pelican.

  Zelda Fair.

  For once, folk notice when Zelda runs off. This is because Zelda, of late, has had the good stuff. Her black booze got you so drunk you thought your name was William. And if your name was William, you’d swear it was Nebuchadnezzar, King of the Buffalo. Zelda’s shit is the best shit this side of Shit-City. I heard a girlie got ahold of a whole bottle to herself—and how she pulled that off I couldn’t tell you. Miss Z started out at ten smackers, but inside a week she was up to fifty per, and yesterday I couldn’t get one for seventy-five. Anyway, this little bitsy thing, circus girl, top of the trapeze pyramid or something, couldn’t weigh more than my little finger, got a whole bottle of Zelda’s medicine and hogged it all. Drank and drank. Told everybody she was gonna find the perfect mixer for this growler whiskey right here. Drank it with tonic, drank it with orange juice, apple juice, grapefruit, tomato, drank it with ginger ale, drank it with Coke, drank it with bitters and champagne, drank it with lemonade. By the end she was drinking it with tears and calling poor Mad Mauler Morrison the Lord of the Moon. She dubbed that nice boy who writes obituaries for the Times Ganymede, Jupiter’s Slave, and insisted that she was the new Christ, Star of the West, anointed with gin, and she came to bring not the sword but the juniper branch, and where there was one blue bottle of Bombay Sapphire and one fried potato she would make a wedding feast of five thousand Queen Victorias and five thousand chips with vinegar and then she didn’t wake up for a week. When she did wake up, she went into mourning for her husband, Stone Boy, who was eaten by a lion. Wore black. Whipped her back raw with her circus buddy’s crack-whip. Cried like the world went and broke. Thing is, she’d never been married in her life. Barely a kid herself.

  Zelda’s shit is the only shit.

  She sells it out of thigh-holsters like a gunslinger. Ask her for liquor and she opens her legs, pulls out heaven, and charges you way too much for the privilege but you don’t even mind. She’d show up to a party, giggle and dance and tell the one about the guy on 42nd St with the hippo in his handbag, sell out her stock, and pass out asleep under the dining table. After 10 pm, every party played Find Zelda. So when suddenly there’s no holsters and no black bottles of white petals and no new Christs vomiting in the bathroom, everybody notices.

  Josie Shadduck loses his damn mind. Puts reward sheets up in the elevators like he’s living in the Old West. Threatens anybody he thinks so much as smells like her. Starts carrying around a flickie-knife so he can keep to a tight schedule of screaming and brandishing. The things he accuses those boys of you never heard in all your days! Fuck-and-kill combos not even that Ripper fella in London could dream up. What did you do to my wife? Tell me! And God in his heavenly hammock help you if you point out that Josie wasn’t even the least littlest bit married to her. Which is where he crosses Tommy Germain, who wanders around the halls like a Gothic gentleman, wailing and weeping about his wife, which Zelda was also not, and it’s a little known fact I don’t mind sharing that eventually Josiah Shadduck III stabbed Thomas Wyclyffe Germain outside Room 1633 for sniffling over how much he missed his dear, beloved, precious wifey-poo.

  Oh, calm down. Josie got him in the love-handle. Germain dropped like a cartoon anvil but it wasn’t much of anything but funny. The joke comes out best when you consider those two made a bouncing baby electricity company together about ten years later, and they’re probably the fellas keeping the light on while you read right this very instant.

  William Hessen-Hyde hoards. Hoards all the bottles he could get off of anyone. Buys, steals, grabs, swaps. Even a half-drunk bottle. Even a snifter with a little left at the bottom. Hoards it all up in his room till he’s surrounded by glasses full of black booze like church
candles. He doesn’t call Zelda his wife. He doesn’t promise a million bucks to the guy who brings her home. He just sits seething in the middle of all that bum-rum, snorting through his nose like a boar. And then he starts drinking.

  So Zelda’s skedaddled. Sure. Okay.

  But when Pearl pops off, all hell breaks loose.

  288

  See Frantic Frankie do the Lost Girl Rag!

  He doesn’t hear the news till everyone else already knows. See, Frankie doesn’t get invited to the good parties. He’s never even tasted that hellcat hooch Murray’s always on about. Murray comes home at end of shift wearing his rowing crew New England ivy-up-his-ass looks. Looks like that irritate Frankie. They don’t mean anything. They’re as good as a $50 tie and they come for free. Anyhow, Murray comes home with a little nip in his pocket one night, a nip of something new. He’s barely nabbed more than a damn test tube of the stuff, but he doesn’t share. Murray sits in the window nook and slurps down his loot and after awhile he starts talking to the fire escape. Tells it all his secrets. Calls it Mathilda. Tells it he loves it, his rust iron golem princess, and when he’s saved up enough he’ll take Mattie away from this awful place. When he’s made a man of himself. They’ll go out west together. Maybe Iowa. Have babies with rungs so strong you could hang all your faith on them and they’d never bend. If she’ll just let him have his way this once. Frankie stops feeling quite so hung up on Murray’s $50 pinstriped face.