Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes Read online

  Ouch!

  Then The Voice busted, too.

  And we kept on busting until I was down to just over five hundred dollars.

  Even though this was in no way going to get me the Ghost I wanted, and fighting the compulsion to stay right where I was every second, I pushed away from the table.

  “Oh, no!” The Voice said, placing a restraining hand on my arm.

  My, his hand was beautiful, like a world-class pianist’s. And I’d bet my last five-dollar chip those nails weren’t acrylics.

  “You can’t leave now!” The Voice said.

  Oh, how I would have liked to stay, if only just to please him. But I had to go. I was following my dad’s rules. “When you start to lose, walk away,” he’d told me, making the point that in some games quitters actually stood a better chance of prospering, at which point I’d pointed out that wasn’t it cheaters that didn’t prosper anyway? Whatever. Sure, if I stayed, I might win some back, maybe I’d win more than some. But the cards had turned cold on me and if I stayed, I could lose everything. Then where would I be? Besides, I was still ahead by over four hundred dollars from when I started. Washing windows, it took me a few days to earn four hundred dollars.

  “Sorry.” With reluctance, I peeled his fingers off. He had some grip! “I really do have to stop now.”

  “How about just one more—?”

  But the dealer from hell cut him off.

  “Bet?” she commanded me, pointing one talon at the table in front of me.

  “No, thanks.” I forced myself to be firm. “No.”

  “Bet?” she commanded The Voice, shifting her finger to him.

  The Voice smiled ruefully before pocketing his chips. Even though his losses had been more spectacular than mine, his wins had been that much more so, and I figured he had at least a thousand dollars in his pocket.

  “Sorry,” The Voice said to the dealer. “But if the lady goes, I go. After all, I can’t keep winning without my talisman.” Then he tossed one of his twenty-five-dollar green chips on the table as a tip for the dealer. “Perhaps another time.”

  Hey, it was impressive he was such a great tipper, and I liked to tip well, too, but I could have used that chip right then.

  Oh, well. It was time for me to go.

  I was a few tables away, when I felt that firm hand on my arm again.

  “Hey,” said The Voice, “what’s the big hurry?”

  “I don’t know…I just thought…” Then I blurted out, “What’s your name?” I couldn’t help it. I needed to find something to call him in my mind other than The Voice.

  He smiled. “Billy Charisma,” he said.

  “Of course. Why didn’t I think of that?”

  “And yours?”

  “Delilah Sampson.”

  “Ah.” He smiled again. “Your name is both strong and weak. If I stick with you long enough, will I lose all my hair?”

  I’d actually heard that one before, or at least something similar.

  I shrugged. “Maybe just all your chips.”

  “Well, that would certainly be devastating. Although, thanks to you, I had a very good night. Before you came along, the night looked to be a lousy day at the office. But after you showed up?” He twinkled his fingers in the air. “It turned magical.”

  I wasn’t used to a man, let alone such a gorgeous man, paying such attention to me. And I knew I should have encouraged him, since who knew when, if ever, Fortune might shine so again? But I’d come there as a woman with a mission and a sort-of posse, and a woman with a mission and a sort-of posse I was still.

  “That’s great,” I told him, feeling like Cinderella as the clock strikes midnight, “but I really need to go. I’m with some friends and I need to go find—”

  But he’d already flagged down a cocktail waitress, ordered two glasses of champagne.

  “Surely your friends can wait a few more minutes,” he said. “We need to celebrate our success. Always have to celebrate the small successes. Pity we have to pay for the celebration, though,” he said, handing enough chips to the waitress to cover the tab. “If we’d ordered them while still at the table, we’d have been comped. Eh, cheers!”

  I drank.

  A part of me knew it was time to find the party I’d come with, and yet I felt very much as though I’d been deer-in-the-headlightsed, like Billy Charisma was too bright a thing and I too dull to even speak.

  “So, tell me, Delilah Sampson,” he said, taking a sip from his own champagne, “do you have any nicknames?”

  “Nicknames?” I was getting duller by the minute.

  “Yes. It’s just that the name Delilah brings up too many bad associations for me. You know, bad nights in Vegas, Tom Jones and all of that.”

  I tried to think. I’d never been much of a nickname person, not the kind of cool person to have a really cool nickname like Legs or Bright Eyes or Pepper. “The girls I work with call me chica sometimes.”

  He thought about it for a moment. “Nope,” he decided. “It shouldn’t be anything I need to pronounce with a Spanish accent.”

  “Well, my dad always calls me Baby.”

  What can I say in my defense? I certainly wasn’t about to tell him Hillary sometimes called me Shit For Brains.

  “Baby?” He tried the name out, studied the high ceiling beyond the smoke clouds, nodded. “I like Baby. I think then that from now on I’ll call you—”

  “There you are, chica!” It was Rivera. She spoke to me as though this gorgeous guy I was standing next to wasn’t even there; which I guess, to her, he wasn’t. “Boss ate some kind of bad clam when she was eating with Hillary. Either that or she choked on the prime rib and Hillary had to do the Heimlich. I forget which. Anyway, it’s time to go.”

  “Are you sure Stella doesn’t suffer from emphysema?” I asked, concerned.

  “Huh?” Rivera said.

  I explained how just recently I’d seen the author John Irving getting interviewed by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. Irving had related an anecdote about being out to dinner with his mentor Kurt Vonnegut when Vonnegut had started choking. Irving, unwilling to let his mentor die while dining with him—talk about someone thinking everything that happened around them was about me, me, me (or them, them, them)—he immediately started performing the Heimlich. But Irving is a short man, Vonnegut a tall one, and Irving’s first efforts…well, let’s just say he did not apply the pressure to Vonnegut’s stomach. So then Irving, a man with a lot of wrestling in his past, somehow got Vonnegut down on the floor on all fours, whereupon he proceeded to continue to Heimlich him. At one point, Vonnegut managed to gasp, “John, I wasn’t choking on anything. I have emphysema.” As punch lines go, it was a doozy.

  Rivera gave me a strange look. “Chica, I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about, but we gotta go.”

  And with that, barely giving me a second to throw a goodbye wave over my shoulder to Billy Charisma, she tugged me away.

  Back out in the entryway, the rest of our group was waiting for us. But they certainly weren’t bored. They were standing on the edges of a huge crowd whose attention was focused on someone in the center.

  In the middle of the room, replacing the Balloon Lady from earlier, was The Yo-Yo Man.

  Oh my God! It was The Yo-Yo Man!

  At least that’s what the sandwich-board sign on the easel said: Chris Westacott, The Yo-Yo Man.

  “Oh my God!” I shrieked at my gal pals. “It’s The Yo-Yo Man!”

  I’m sure they thought I was nuts, but I didn’t let that stop me as I elbowed my way through the crowd. Besides, I didn’t want to stick around long enough for Elizabeth Hepburn to tell me she’d once slept with someone named Duncan.

  I was going to finally see the man from the commercials up close and personal! I was going to finally see the man of my dreams in the flesh!

  But when I got to the front of the crowd, I saw it wasn’t The Yo-Yo Man at all. It was merely A Yo-Yo Man. And not even any kind of great Yo-Yo Man. It was
Furthest Guy in the commercials, the guy who was always dropping his yo-yo in the background, while the real Yo-Yo Man, The Yo-Yo Man, showed his stuff.

  But, hey. Up close and personal, Furthest Guy wasn’t half-bad, at least not in the looks department. He was taller than I’d have expected—he always looked so tiny and insignificant in those commercials—and his hair was no longer so short, the curly chestnut strands poking out from the bottom of the Mets cap he wore backward. This near, I could finally see his eye color as he kept those warm brown eyes focused on the twin yo-yos he was twirling simultaneously. And his body…True, he had on those oversized long shorts, the ones that I hate with the waistbands that reveal the tops of guys’ underwear, on top of which was a T-shirt advertising the casino we were in; I figured the casino probably made him wear the T-shirt. As for the obnoxious long shorts, I figured it was probably part of the cool yo-yo guy persona. I mean, why else would anyone our age—and he did look to be about the same age as me—wear those stupid long shorts if they didn’t have to? As for the Mets hat, I was hoping that was for real. I may not have cared about sports, but my dad was a big Mets fan and it would please him greatly once I brought this Chris Westacott home.

  What was I thinking? I shook my head to clear my thoughts. Clearly the champagne, coupled with seeing a real Yo-Yo Man, was going straight to my head.

  I decided to stop fantasizing and instead just watched him perform. While technically not as proficient as The Yo-Yo Man, he was still pretty darn good; certainly the crowd thought so.

  He was pretty darn good, at least, until he lost control of one of his twin yo-yos and the darn thing nailed me in the eye. Then, suddenly, he was Furthest Guy again.

  “Shit!” He dropped his other yo-yo and rushed over, placed his hands gently on my shoulders. “Are you okay? Do you think you’re going to lose it?”

  I looked at Furthest Guy out of my one good eye. Despite that he’d just popped me one, he still looked really cute. Plus, he looked so concerned…

  “Don’t you think you’ve done quite enough?” It was The Voice again and now he was pushing Furthest Guy out of the way. “Here, let me look at that.”

  Billy Charisma placed his fingers gently but firmly under my chin, tilting my head slightly upward. In his other hand, he’d produced a pristine white silk handkerchief, as though he’d expected all kinds of carnage.

  “Oh,” he said, full stop, surprised. “It’s not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. No doubt you’ll have a shiner by morning, but the skin isn’t cut at all and I don’t even see any broken blood vessels. If only this jerk had been more careful…” He gestured at Furthest Guy.

  “I’m sorry,” Furthest Guy said humbly. “I don’t know what happened. I keep practicing and practicing this Double Whammy trick and it goes well enough whenever I do it at home. But every time I try to perform it in public—”

  “Maybe you should only perform it at home alone then,” Billy Charisma said. There was a smile on his face, but his tone was all ice.

  “Are you okay?” Hillary said, busting through the crowd.

  “Don’t Heimlich me!” I shouted.

  “Huh?”

  “I think it’s time we all went home,” Stella said.

  “Good night, Baby,” Billy Charisma said softly, kissing me gently above my injury.

  I opened my mouth to thank him, but before I could even get the th out, Conchita and Rivera were hustling me toward the exit.

  We were nearly out the door when one of the others thought to ask—I’m pretty sure it was Hillary, but I was pretty out of it at that point—how I’d done at the tables.

  “Fair,” I said. “I’ve got a little over five hundred dollars in my pocket.”

  “A little over…and you call that just fair?” Hillary said, encouragingly. I was sure it was her that time. “I think that’s phenomenal!”

  “You know,” said Elizabeth Hepburn, “back in my Louis B. Mayer days, there were whole weeks when I didn’t make that kind of money. You hear some of these young actresses now complain they’re only making fifteen million dollars a picture. Ha! I’d like to see them try to survive back when we had the studio system. Then let them talk to me about hardships.”

  “But it’s not enough,” I answered Hillary. “It’s not even half of what I need for the Ghost.”

  “Oh.” Hillary’s face fell on my account. Then she brightened. “I know—you just need a good, solid plan.”

  “You’re right,” I said, suddenly brightening, as well. “I do need a plan. And I’ve got one.”

  “You do? Already?”

  “Yes. Next Saturday, I’m taking the bus to Atlantic City. I’ll use what I won tonight as my stake. Just think about it. Tonight, I managed to walk out with five times what I walked in with. If I can do the same next week, I’ll be able to buy Ghosts for both of us!”

  “Are you sure you don’t have a head injury?” Stella asked. “Because I’m doing the math here and, frankly, I think you’re nuts. You really think you can take five hundred dollars to New Jersey—New Jersey!—and come back out with twenty-five hundred?”

  But I never got to reply to her skepticism, for as we approached Conchita’s white limo, I heard footsteps that I’d vaguely registered behind us before, as those footsteps sped up, passing us on the left.

  “Hey!” Rivera said. “Isn’t that the same guy who you were talking to back in the casino? Isn’t that the same guy who saved you from that stupid jerk with the flying yo-yo?”

  I saw the back of that black tux walking away from me, a wisp of smoke trailing up over his head. I’d have bet all the money in my pockets it was Billy Charisma.

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s Billy Charisma.”

  “Huh.” Rivera put one hand on her hip, thrust that hip out. “I don’t think so, chica.”

  “No, really, he is, and—”

  “I don’t like that guy, chica,” she said. “I don’t trust him.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because she’s jealous of anyone who’s prettier than she is…like me,” Conchita said. “C’mon, ladies.”

  Rivera’s words made me feel uneasy. Why would she say something like that about Billy Charisma? She didn’t even know Billy Charisma. And besides, no matter how uneasy her words made me, feeling the light of his attention all night had made me feel good. It was the first time any guy had paid that quality attention to me in I didn’t want to think about how long, and I pushed away the negative feelings: the ones I’d felt when Billy had cowed Furthest Guy—after all, Furthest Guy didn’t mean to yo-yo me—or the mixed feelings I’d had, feelings of being cared for and condescended to all at the same time, when he called me Baby.

  As Conchita drove into the night, I heard the soft snores of Hillary and Stella and Rivera. Elizabeth Hepburn, still wired like a kid allowed to stay up too late on New Year’s Eve but losing energy fast, rested her head on my shoulder, reliving the night.

  “I’m glad you had a good time,” I said when she paused for breath, meaning it.

  “Oh, God, yes,” she said. “I had a blast! And seeing that yo-yo guy at the end? It reminded me of the time me and Duncan…”

  See? I knew it would come to that.

  “Elizabeth?” I said, gently cutting off her reminiscences.

  “Hmm?”

  Even though Conchita couldn’t hear me because she was too busy driving up front, and the others were asleep, I whispered as I spoke. “I was wondering,” I said, trying to tread delicately, “all these men you say you’ve been with in the past…some of them have been dead a really long time and some of them I’m pretty sure were, well, gay. So did you really…?” My voice trailed off. I couldn’t bring myself to accuse her outright of lying.

  “You caught me,” she said ruefully.

  Now I was sorry I’d even brought it up. The last thing I ever wanted to do was hurt her. “No, I—”

  “It’s all right,” she said. “But I did sleep with at least half of them�
��and I’m not saying which.”

  “No, of course not. I just wanted to know why—”

  “Why I exaggerate so much? Why I claim to have twice as many notches on my belt than I really do?”

  In the relative darkness of the limo, I nodded.

  She sighed. “Everyone wants to be cool, Delilah. Don’t you know that by now?” She sighed. “Even old ladies.” I felt her frail shoulders shrug against my side. “I guess I just always figured that if people thought I lived this exciting life, they’d think I was still cool and want to talk to me. When you’re young in Hollywood, everyone wants a piece of you. But once you get old? All they do is trot you out once a year, so everyone can stare and say, ‘You’re still here? We all thought you were dead.’”

  “You are so still cool,” I said, putting my arm around those frail shoulders, smoothing her hair with my hand. “You have led an exciting life. Why, you’re the one and only Elizabeth Hepburn!”

  “I am that,” she said. “And,” she added, with a twinkle in her voice, “I’ve slept with at least half the men I’ve said I had.”

  “That, too,” I agreed.

  “You won’t tell anyone,” she said, “will you? That I exaggerate my CV a bit?”

  “Never,” I vowed.

  “Thank you, dear.” She yawned. “And thank you for everything else.”

  “What? I haven’t done anything.”

  “Are you kidding me? The trip to Manhattan, tonight at Foxwoods—thanks to you, I’ve had the time of my life, and at a time when I thought I was all finished having the time of my life.”

  A few minutes later, she was snoring softly with the others and I was back to confronting the paradox that was my feelings about Billy Charisma. Was he good whack or bad whack?

  Oh, well. I sighed as I fell asleep in the back of the limo, none of it mattered anyway since I was sure I’d never see either of them again, neither Billy Charisma nor Furthest Guy.

  But I did see them both. Oh, did I ever. Just as soon as my eyes closed completely and REM kicked in—not the rock band; I’m talking about the sleep thing here—I dreamt of both of them together. I don’t mean they were together, which would be really strange, but rather, they were both there and they were each taking turns dancing with me. Billy Charisma was a great dancer, as you’d expect, but the big surprise was Furthest Guy: with a girl in his arms—me—he was just as good a dancer.