Nasty Girls: Femme Fatale, The Crack Cocaine Diet, Honor Bar, Dear Penthouse Forum
Author: Laura Lippman
Date: 2018-09-04 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction
Description: Meet some of the most dangerous women master of psychological suspense Laura Lippman has ever created in works so dark that her husband observed that most of her short stories center on betrayals between men and women. These stories include a senior citizen porn star (“Femme Fatale”); two twenty-somethings deranged by calorie deprivation (“The Crack Cocaine Diet”); a petulant tourist deceived by love in Dublin (“Honor Bar”); and a mysterious Good Samaritan-hobbyist (“Dear Penthouse Forum” (A First Draft)). Available singly or as a collection.
Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Contents

Femme Fatale

The Crack Cocaine Diet

Honor Bar

Dear Penthouse Forum (A First Draft)

Announcement

An Excerpt from Sunburn

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

About the Author

Also by Laura Lippman

Copyright

About the Publisher

Femme Fatale

This is true: there comes a time in the life of a beautiful woman, or even an attractive one with an abundance of charm, when she realizes that she can no longer rely on her looks. If she is unusually, exceedingly self-aware, the realization is a timely one. But, more typically, it lags the physical reality by several years, like a thunderclap when a lightning storm is passing by. One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four one thousand . . . boom. One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four one thousand, five one thousand. Boom. The lightning is moving out, away, which is a good thing in nature, but not in the life of a beautiful woman.

That’s how it happened for Mona. A gorgeous woman at twenty, a stunning woman at thirty, a striking woman at forty, a handsome woman at fifty, she was pretty much done by sixty—but only if one knew what she had been, once upon a time, and at this point that knowledge belonged to Mona alone. A sixty-eight-year-old widow when she moved into LeisureWorld, she was thought shy and retiring by her neighbors in the Creekside Condos, Phase II. She was actually an incurious snob who had no interest in the people around her. People were overrated, in Mona’s opinion, unless they were men and they might be persuaded to marry you. This is not my life, she thought, walking the trails that wound through the pseudo-city in suburban Maryland. This is not what I anticipated.

Mona had expected . . . well, she hadn’t thought to expect. To the extent that she had been able to imagine her old age at all, she had thought her sunset years might be something along the lines of Eloise at the Plaza—a posh place in a city center, with twenty-four-hour room service and a concierge. Such things were available—but not to those with her resources, explained the earnest young accountant who reviewed the various funds left by Mona’s husband, her fourth, although Hal Wickham had believed himself to be her second.

“Mr. Wickham has left you with a conservative, diversified portfolio that will cover your costs at a comfortable level—but it’s not going to allow you to live in a hotel,” the accountant had said a little huffily, almost as if he were one of Hal’s children, who had taken the same tone when they realized how much of their father’s estate was to go to Mona. But she was his wife, after all, and not some fly-by-night spouse. They had been married fifteen years, her personal best.

“But there’s over two million, and the smaller units in that hotel are going for less than a million,” she said, crossing her legs at the knee and letting her skirt ride up, just a bit. Her legs were still quite shapely, but the accountant’s eyes slid away from them. A shy one. These bookish types killed her.

“If you cash out half of the investments, you earn half as much on the remaining principal, which isn’t enough to cover your living expenses, not with the maintenance fees involved. Don’t you see?”

“I’d be paying cash,” she said, leaning forward, so her breasts rested on her elbows. They were still quite impressive. Bras were one wardrobe item that had improved in Mona’s lifetime. Bras were amazing now, what they did with so little fabric.

“Yes, theoretically. But there would be taxes to pay on the capital gains of the stocks acquired in your name, and your costs would outpace your earnings. You’d have to dip into your principal, and at that rate, you’d be broke in”—he did a quick calculation on his computer—“seven years. You’re only sixty-eight now—”

“Sixty-one,” she lied reflexively.

“All the more reason to be careful,” he said. “You’re going to live a long, long time.”

But to Mona, now ensconced in Creekside Condos, Phase II, it seemed only that it would feel that way. She didn’t golf, so she had no use for the two courses at LeisureWorld. She had never learned to cook, preferring to dine out, but she loathed eating out alone and the delivery cuisine available in the area was not to her liking. She watched television, took long walks, and spent an hour a day doing vigorous isometric exercises that she had learned in the late sixties. This was before Jane Fonda and aerobics, when there wasn’t so much emphasis on sweating. The exercises were the closest thing that Mona had to a religion and they had been more rewarding than most religions, delivering exactly what they promised—and in this lifetime, too. Plus, all her husbands, even the ones she didn’t count, had benefited from the final set of repetitions, a series of pelvic thrusts done in concert with vigorous yogic breathing.

One late fall day, lying on her back, thrusting her pelvis in counterpoint to her in-and-out breaths, it occurred to Mona that her life would not be much different in the posh, downtown hotel condo she had so coveted. It’s not as if she would go to the theaters or museums; she had only pretended interest in those things because other people seemed to expect it. Museums bored her and theater baffled her—all those people talking so loudly, in such artificial sentences. Better restaurants wouldn’t make her like eating out alone, and room service was never as hot as it should be. Her surroundings would be a considerable improvement, with truly top-of-the-line fixtures, but all that would have meant is that she would be lying on a better-quality carpet right now. Mona was not meant to be alone and if she had known that Hal was going to die only fifteen years in, she might have chosen differently. Finding a husband at the age of sixty-eight, even when one claimed to be sixty-one, had to be harder than finding a job at that age. With Hal, Mona had consciously settled. She wondered if he knew that. She wondered if he had died just to spite her.

There was a Starbucks in LeisureWorld plaza and she sometimes ended her afternoon walks there, curious to see what the fuss was about. She found the chairs abominable—had anyone over fifty ever tried to rise from these low-slung traps?—but she liked what a younger person might call the vibe. (Mona didn’t actually know any young people and had been secretly glad that Hal’s children loathed her so, as it gave her an excuse to have nothing to do with them or the grandchildren.) She treated herself to sweet drinks, chocolate drinks, drinks with whipped cream. Mona had been on a perpetual diet since she was thirty-five, and while the discipline, along with her exercises, had kept her body hard, it had made her face harder still. The coffee drinks and pastries added weight, but no more than five or six pounds, and it was better than Botox, plumping and smoothing Mona’s cheeks. She sipped her drink, stared into space, and listened to the curious non-music on the sound system. It wasn’t odd to be alone in Starbucks, quite the opposite. When parties of two or three came in, full of conversation and private jokes, they were the ones who seemed out of place. The regulars all relaxed a little when those interlopers finally left.

“I hate to intrude, but I just had to say—ma’am? Ma’am?”

The man who stood next to her was young, no more than forty-five. At first glance, he appeared handsome, well put together. At second, the details betrayed him. There was a stain on his trench coat, flakes of dandruff on his shoulders and down the front of his black turtleneck sweater.

Still, he was a man and he was talking to her.

“Yes?”

“You’re . . . someone, aren’t you? I’m bad with names, but I don’t forget faces and you—well, you were a model, right? One of the new-wave ones in the sixties, when they started going for that coltish look.”

“No, you must think—”

“My apologies,” he said. “Because you were better known for the movies, those avant-garde ones you did before you chucked it all and married that guy, although you could have been as big as any of them. Julie Christie. She was your only serious competition.”

It took Mona a second to remember who Julie Christie was, her brain first detouring through memories of June Christie but then landing on an image of the actress. She couldn’t help being pleased, if he was confusing her with someone who was serious competition for Julie Christie. Whoever he thought she was must have been gorgeous. Mona felt herself preening, even as she tried to deny the compliment. He thought she was even younger than she pretended to be.

“I’m not—”

“But you are,” he said. “More beautiful than ever. Our culture is so confused about its . . . aesthetic values. I’m not talking about the veneration of age as wisdom, or the importance of experience, although those things are to the good. You are, objectively, more beautiful now than you were back then.”

“Perhaps I am,” she said lightly. “But I’m not whoever you think I was, so it’s hard to know.”

“Oh. Gosh. My apologies. I’m such an idiot—”

He sank into the purple velvet easy chair opposite her, twisting the brim of his hat nervously in his hands. She liked the hat, the fact of it. So few men bothered nowadays, and as a consequence, fewer men could pull them off. Mona was old enough, just, to remember when all serious men wore hats.

“I wish you could remember the name,” she said, teasing him, yet trying to put him at ease, too. “I’d like to know this stunner that you say I resemble.”

“It’s not important,” he said. “I feel so stupid. Fact is—I bet she doesn’t look as good today as you do.”

“Mona Wickham,” she said, extending her hand. He bowed over it. Didn’t kiss it, just bowed, a nice touch. Mona was vain of her hands, which were relatively unblemished. She kept her nails in good shape with weekly manicures and alternated her various engagement rings on the right hand. Today it was the square-cut diamond from her third marriage. Not large, but flawless.

“Bryon White,” he said. “With an O, like the poet, only the R comes first.”

“Nice to meet you,” she said. Two or three seconds passed, and Bryon didn’t release her hand and she didn’t take it back. He was studying her with intense, dark eyes. Nice eyes, Mona decided.

“The thing is, you could be a movie star.”

“So some said, when I was young.” Which was, she couldn’t help thinking, a good decade before the one in which this Bryon White thought she had been a model and an actress.

“No, I mean now. Today. I could see you as, as—Catherine, the Russian empress.”

Mona frowned. Wasn’t that the naughty one?

“Or, you know, Lauren Bacall. I think she’s gorgeous.”

“I didn’t like her in that movie with Streisand.”

“No, but with Altman—with Altman, she was magnificent.”

Mona wasn’t sure who Altman was. She remembered a store in New York, years ago, B. Altman’s. After her first marriage, she had changed into a two-piece going-away suit purchased there, a dress with matching jacket. She remembered it still, standing at the top of the staircase in that killingly lovely suit, in a houndstooth check of fuchsia and black, readying to throw the bouquet. She remembered thinking: I look good, but now I’m married, so what does it matter? Mona’s first marriage had lasted two years.

Bryon picked up on her confusion. “In Prêt à Porter.” This did not clear things up for Mona. “I’m sorry, it translates to—”

“I know the French,” she said, a bit sharply. “I used to go to the Paris collections, buy couture.” That was with her second husband, who was rich, rich, rich, until he wasn’t anymore. Until it turned out he never really was. Wallace just had a high tolerance for debt, higher than his creditors, as it turned out. Mona didn’t leave because he filed for bankruptcy, but it didn’t make the case for staying, either.

“It was a movie a few years back. The parts were better than the whole, if I can be so bold as to criticize a genius. The thing is, I’m a filmmaker myself.”

Mona hadn’t been to a movie in ten years. The new ones made her sleepy. She fell asleep, woke up when something blew up, fell back asleep again. “Have you—”

“Made anything you’ve heard of? No. I’m an indie, but, you know, you keep your vision that way. I’m on the festival circuit, do some direct-to-video stuff. Digital has changed the equation, you know?”

Mona nodded as if she did.

“Look, I don’t want to get all Schwab’s on you—”

Finally, a reference that Mona understood.

“—but I’m working on something right now and you would be so perfect. If you would consider reading for me, or perhaps, even, a screen test . . . there’s not much money in it, but who knows? If you photograph the way I think you will, it could mean a whole new career for you.”

He offered her his card, but she didn’t want to put her glasses on to read it, so she just studied it blindly, pretending to make sense of the brown squiggles on the creamy background. The paper was of good stock, heavy and textured.

“In fact, my soundstage isn’t far from here, so if you’re free right now—”

“I’m on foot,” she said. “I walked here from my apartment.”

“Oh, and you wouldn’t want to get in a car with a strange man. Of course.”

Mona hadn’t been thinking of Bryon as strange. In fact, she had assumed he was gay. What kind of man spoke so fervently of models and old-time movie stars? But now that he said it—no, she probably shouldn’t, part of her mind warned. But another part was shouting her down, telling her such opportunities come along just once. Maybe she looked better than she realized. Maybe Mona’s memory of her younger self had blinded her to how attractive she still was to someone meeting her for the first time.

“I’ll tell you what. I’ll call you a cab, give the driver the address. Tell him to wait, with the meter running, all on me.”

“Don’t be silly.” Mona clutched the arms of the so-called easy chair and willed herself to rise as gracefully as possible. Somehow she managed it. “Let’s go.”

She was not put off by the fact that Bryon’s soundstage was a large locker in one of those storage places. “A filmmaker at my level has to squeeze every nickel until it hollers,” he said, pulling the garage-type door behind them. She wasn’t sure how he had gotten power rigged up inside, but there was an array of professional-looking lights. The camera was a battery-powered camcorder, set up on a tripod. He even had a “set”—a three-piece 1930s-style bedroom set, with an old-fashioned vanity and bureau to match the ornately carved bed.

He asked Mona to sit on the padded stool in front of the vanity and address the camera directly, saying whatever came into her head.

“Um, testing one, two, three. Testing.”

“You look great. Talk some more. Tell me about yourself.”

“My name is Mona—” She stumbled for a second, forgetting the order of her surnames. After all, she had five.

“Where did you grow up, Mona?”

“Oh, here, there, and everywhere.” Mona had learned long ago to be stingy with the details. They dated one so.

“What were you like as a young woman?”

“Well, I was the . . . bee’s knees.” An odd expression for her to use, one that pre-dated her own birth by quite a bit. She laughed at its irrelevance and Bryon laughed, too. She felt as if she had been drinking brandy Alexanders instead of venti mochas. Felt, in fact, the way she had that first afternoon with her second husband, when they left the bar at the Drake Hotel and checked into a room. She had been only thirty-five then, and she had let him keep the drapes open, proud of how her body looked in the bright daylight bouncing off Lake Michigan.

“I bet you were. I bet you were. And all the boys were crazy about you.”

“I did okay.”

“Oh, you did more than okay, didn’t you, Mona?”

She smiled. “That’s not for me to say.”

“What did you wear, Mona, when you were driving those boys crazy? None of those obvious outfits for you, right? You were one of those subtle ones, like Grace Kelly. Pretty dresses, custom fit.”

“Right.” She brightened. Clothing was one of the few things that interested her. “That’s what these girls today don’t get. I had a bathing suit, a one-piece, strapless. As modest as it could be. But it was beige, just a shade darker than my own skin, and when it got wet . . .” She laughed, the memory alive to her, the effect of that bathing suit on the young men around the pool at the country club in Atlanta.

“I wish you still had that bathing suit, Mona.”

“I’d still fit into it,” she said. It would have been true two months ago, before she discovered Starbucks.

“I bet you would. I bet you would.” Bryon’s voice seemed thicker, lower, slower.

“I never let myself go, the way some women do. They say it’s metabolism and menopause”—oh, she wished she could take that word back, one should never even allude to such unpleasant facts of life—“but it’s just a matter of discipline.”

“I sure wish I could see you in that suit, Mona.”

She laughed. She hadn’t had this much fun in ages. He was flirting with her, she was sure of it. Gay or not, he liked her.

“I wish I could see you in your birthday suit.”

“Bryon!” She was on a laughing jag now, out of control.

“Why can’t I, Mona? Why can’t I see you in your birthday suit?”

Suddenly, the only sound in the room was Bryon’s breath, ragged and harsh. It was hard to see anything clearly, with the lights shining in her eyes, but Mona could see that he was steadying the camera with just one hand.

“You want to see me naked?” she asked.

Bryon nodded.

“Just . . . see?”

“That’s how we start, usually. Slow like. Everyone has his or her own comfort zone.”

“And the video—is that for your eyes only?”

“I told you, I’m an independent filmmaker. Direct to video. A growing market.”

“People pay?”

Another shy nod. “It’s sort of a . . . niche within the industry.”

“Niche.”

“It’s my niche,” he said. “It’s what I like. I make other films about, um, things I don’t like so much. But I love watching truly seasoned women teach young men about life.”

“And you’d pay for this?”

“Of course.”

“How much?”

“Some. Enough.”

“Just to look? Just to see me, as I am?”

“A little for that. More for . . . more.”

“How much?” Mona repeated. She was keen to know her worth.

He came around from behind the camera, retrieved a laminated card from the drawer in the vanity table, then sat on the bed and patted the space next to him. Why laminated? Mona decided not to think about that. She moved to the bed and studied the card, not unlike the menu of services and prices at a spa. She could do that. And that. Not that, but definitely that and that. The fact was, she had done most of these things, quite happily.

“Let me make you a star, Mona.”

“Are you my leading man?”

“Our target demographic prefers to see younger men with the women. I just need to get some film of you to take to my partner so he’ll underwrite it. I have a very well-connected financial backer.”

“Who?”

“Oh, I’ll never say. He’s very discreet. Anyway, he likes to know that the actresses are . . . up to the challenges of their roles. Usually a striptease will do, a little, um, self-stimulation. But it’s always good to have extra footage. I make a lot of films, but these are the ones I like best. The ones I watch.”

“Well, then,” Mona said, unbuttoning her blouse. “Let’s get busy.”

FETISH, MONA SAID TO HERSELF as she shopped in the Giant. Fetish, she thought as she retrieved her mail from the communal boxes in the lobby. I am a fetish. This was the word that Bryon used to describe her “work,” which, two months after their first meeting, comprised four short films. She had recoiled at the word at first, feeling it marked her as a freak, something from a sideshow. “Niche” had been so much nicer. But Bryon assured her that the customers who bought her videos were profoundly affected by her performance. There was no irony, no belittling. She was not the butt of the joke, she was the object of their, um, affection.

“Different people like different things,” he said to her in Starbucks one afternoon. She was feeling a little odd, as she always did when a film was completed. It was so strange to spend an afternoon having sex and not be taken shopping afterward, just given a cashier’s check. “Our cultural definitions of sexuality are simply too narrow.”

“But your other films, the other tastes you serve”—Mona by now had familiarized herself with Bryon’s catalog, which included the usual whips and chains, but also a surprisingly successful series of films that featured obese women sitting on balloons—“they’re sick.”

“There you go, being judgmental,” Bryon said. “Children is wrong, I’ll give you that. Because children can’t consent. Everything else is fair game.”

“Animals can’t consent.”

“I don’t do animals, either. Adults and inanimate objects, that’s my credo.”

It was an odd conversation to be having in her Starbucks at the LeisureWorld Plaza, that much was sure. Mona looked around nervously, but no one was paying attention. The other customers probably thought Mona and Bryon were a mother and son, although she didn’t think she looked old enough to be Bryon’s mother.

“By the way”—Byron produced a small stack of envelopes—“we’ve gotten some letters for you.”

“Letters?”

“Fan mail. Your public.”

“I’m not sure I want to read them.”

“That’s up to you. Whatever you do—don’t make the mistake of responding to them, okay? The less they know about Sexy Sadie, the better. Keep the mystery.” He left her alone with her public.

Keep the mystery. Mona liked that phrase. It could be her credo, to borrow Bryon’s word. Then she began to think about the mysteries that Bryon was keeping. If she had already received—she stopped to count, touching the envelopes gingerly—eleven pieces of fan mail, then how many fans must she have? If eleven people wrote, then hundreds—no, thousands—must watch and enjoy what she did.

So why was she getting paid by the job, with no percentage, no profit-sharing? God willing, her health assured, she could really build on this new career. After all, they actually had to make her look older, dressing her in dowdy dresses, advising her to make her voice sound more quavery than it was. Bryon had the equipment, Bryon had the distribution—but only Mona had Mona. How replaceable was she?

“FORGET IT,” BRYON SAID when she broached the topic on the set a few weeks later. “I was up-front with you from the start. I pay you by the act. By the piece, if you will. No participation. You signed a contract, remember?”

Gone was the rapt deference from that first day at Starbucks. True, Mona had long ago figured out that it was an act, but she had thought there was a germ of authenticity in it, a genuine respect for her looks and presence. How long had Bryon been stalking her? she wondered now. Had he approached her because of her almost lavender eyes, or because she looked vulnerable and lonely? Easy, as they used to say.

“But I have fans,” she said. “People who like me, specifically. That ought to be worth a renegotiation.”

“You think so? Then sue me in Montgomery County courts. Your neighbors in LeisureWorld will probably love reading about that in the suburban edition of the Washington Post.”

“I’ll quit,” she said.

“Go ahead,” Bryon said. “You think you’re the only lonely old lady who needs a little attention? I’ll put the wig and the dress on some other old bag. My films, my company, my concept.”

“Some concept,” Mona said, trying not to let him see how much the words hurt. So she was just a lonely old lady to him, a mark. “I sit in a room, a young man rings my doorbell, I end up having sex with him. So far, it’s been a UPS man, a delivery boy for a florist, a delivery boy for the Chinese restaurant, and a young Mormon on a bicycle. What’s next, a Jehovah’s Witness peddling the Watchtower?”

“That’s not bad,” Bryon said, pausing to write a quick note to himself. “Look, this is the deal. I pay you by the act. You don’t want to do it, you don’t have to. I’m always scouting new talent. Maybe I’ll find an Alzheimer’s patient, who won’t be able to remember from one day to the next what she did, much less try to hold me up for a raise. You old bitches are a dime a dozen.”

It was the “old bitches” part that hurt.

WHEN MONA’S SECOND HUSBAND’S FORTUNE had proved to be largely smoke and mirrors, she had learned to be more careful about picking her subsequent husbands. That was in the pre-Internet days, when determining a person’s personal fortune was much more labor-intensive. She was pleased to find out from a helpful librarian how easy it was now to compile what was once known as a Dun and Bradstreet on someone, how to track down the silent partner in Bryon White’s LLC.

Within a day, she was having lunch with Bernard Weinman, a dignified gentleman about her own age. He hadn’t wanted to meet with her, but as Mona detailed sweetly what she knew about Bernie’s legitimate business interests—more information gleaned with the assistance of the nice young librarian—and his large contributions to a local synagogue, he decided they could meet after all. He chose a quiet French restaurant in Bethesda, and when he ordered white wine with lunch, Mona followed suit.

“I have a lot of investments,” he said. “I’m not hands-on.”

“Still, I can’t imagine you want someone indiscreet working for you.”

“Indiscreet?”

“How do you think I tracked you down? Bryon talks. A lot.”

Bernie Weinman bent over his onion soup, spilling a little on his tie. But it was a lovely tie, expensive and well made. For this lunch meeting, he wore a black suit and crisp white shirt with large gold cuff links.

“Bryon’s very good at . . . what he does. His mail-order business is so steady it’s almost like an annuity. I get a very good return on my money, and I’ve never heard of him invoking my name.”

“Well, he did. All I did was make some suggestions about how to”—Mona groped for the odd business terms she had heard on television—“how to grow your business, and he got very short with me, said you had no interest in doing things differently. And when I asked if I might speak to you, he got very angry, threatened to expose me. If he would blackmail me, a middle-class widow with no real money, imagine what he might do to you.”

“Bryon knows me well enough not to try that,” Bernie Weinman said. After a morning at the Olney branch of the Montgomery County Public Library, Mona knew him pretty well, too. She knew the rumors that had surrounded the early part of his career, the alleged but never proven ties to the numbers runner up in Baltimore. Bernie Weinman had built his fortune from corner liquor stores in Washington, D.C., which eventually became the basis for his chain of party-supply stores. But he had clearly never lost his taste for the recession-proof businesses that had given him his start—liquor, gambling, prostitution. All he had done was live long enough and give away enough money that people were willing to forget his past. Apparently, the going price of redemption in Montgomery County was five million dollars to the capital fund at one’s synagogue.

“Does Bryon know you so well that he wouldn’t risk keeping two sets of books?”

“What?”

“I know what I get paid. I know how cheaply the product is made and produced, and I know how many units are moved. He’s cheating you.”

“He wouldn’t.”

“He would—and brag about it, too. He said you were a stupid old man who was no longer on top of his game.”

“He said that?”

“He said much worse.”

“Tell me.”

“I c-c-can’t,” Mona whispered, looking shyly into her salade niçoise as if she had not made four adult films under the moniker “Sexy Sadie.”

“Paraphrase.”

“He said . . . he said there was no film in the world that could, um, incite you. That you were . . . starchless.”

“That little SOB.”

“He laughs at you, behind your back. He practically brags about how he’s ripping you off. I’ve put myself in harm’s way, just talking to you, but I couldn’t let this go on.”

“I’ll straighten him out—”

“No! Because he’ll know it was me and he’ll—he’s threatened me, Bernie.” This first use of his name was a calculated choice. “He says no one will miss me and I suppose he’s right.”

“You don’t have any children?”

“Just stepchildren, and I’m afraid they’re not very kind to me. It was hard for them, their father remarrying, even though he had been a widower for years.” Divorced for two years, and Mona had been the central reason, but the kids wouldn’t have liked her under any circumstances. “No, no one would miss me. Except my fans.”

She let the subject go then, directing the conversation to Bernie and his accomplishments, the legitimate ones. She asked questions whose answers she knew perfectly well, touched his arm when he decided they needed another bottle of wine, and, although she drank only one glass to his every two, declared herself unfit to drive home. She was going to take a taxi, but Bernie insisted on driving her, and accompanying her to the condo door, to make sure she was fine, and then into her bedroom, where he further assessed her fineness. He was okay, not at all starchless, somewhere between a sturdy baguette and a loaf of Wonder bread. She’d had worse. True, he felt odd, after the series of hard-bodied young men that Bryon had hired for her. But this, at least, did not fall under the category of fetish. He was seventy-three and she was sixty-eight-passing-for-sixty-one. This was normal. This was love.

Bryon White was never seen again. He simply disappeared, and there was no one who mourned him or even really noticed. And while Bernie Weinman was happily married, he had strong opinions about how his new mistress should spend her time. Mona took over the business but had to retire from performing, at least officially, although she sometimes auditioned the young men, just to be sure. Give Bryon credit, Mona thought, now that she had to scout the coffee shops and grocery stores, recruiting the new talent. It was harder than it looked and Bryon’s instincts had been unerring, especially when it came to Mona. She really was a wonderful actress.

The Crack Cocaine Diet

I had just broken up with Brandon and Molly had just broken up with Keith, so we needed new dresses to go to this party where we knew they were both going to be. But before we could buy the dresses, we needed to lose weight because we had to look fabulous, kiss-my-ass-fuck-you fabulous. Kiss-my-ass-fuck-you-and-your-dick-is-really-tiny fabulous. Because, after all, Brandon and Keith were going to be at this party, and if we couldn’t get new boyfriends in less than eight days, we could at least go down a dress size and look so good that Brandon and Keith and everybody else in the immediate vicinity would wonder how they ever let us go. I mean, yes, technically, they broke up with us, but we had been thinking about it, weighing the pros and cons. (Pro: they spent money on us. Con: they were childish. Pro: we had them. Con: tiny dicks, see above.) See, we were being methodical and they were just all impulsive, the way guys are. That would be another con—poor impulse control. Me, I never do anything without thinking it through very carefully. Anyway, I’m not sure what went down with Molly and Keith, but Brandon said if he wanted to be nagged all the time, he’d move back in with his mother, and I said, “Well, given that she still does your laundry and makes you food, it’s not as if you really moved out,” and that was that. No big loss.

Still, we had to look so great that other guys would be punching our exes in the arms and saying, “What, are you crazy?” Everything is about spin, even dating. It’s always better to be the dumper instead of the dumpee, and if you have to be the loser, then you need to find a way of being superior. And that was going to take about seven pounds for me, as many as ten for Molly, who doesn’t have my discipline and had been doing some serious breakup eating for the past three weeks. She went facedown in the Ding Dongs, danced with the Devil Dogs, became a Ho Ho ho. As for myself, I’m a salty girl, and I admit I had the Pringles Light can upended in my mouth for a couple of days.

So, anyway, Molly said Atkins, and I said not fast enough, and then I said a fast-fast, and Molly said she saw little lights in front of her eyes the last time she tried to go no food, and she said cabbage soup and I said it gives me gas, and then she said pills, and I said all the doctors we knew were too tight with their scrips, even her dentist boss since she stopped blowing him. And, finally, Molly had a good idea and said: “Cocaine!”

This merited consideration. Molly and I had never done more than a little recreational coke, always provided by boyfriends who were trying to impress us, but even my short-term experience indicated it would probably do the trick. The tiniest bit revved you up for hours and you raced around and around, and it wasn’t that you weren’t hungry, more like you had never even heard of food, it was just some quaint custom from the olden days, like square dancing. I mean, you could do it in theory, but why would you?

“Okay,” I said. “Only where do we get it?” After all, we’re girls, girly girls. I had been drinking and smoking pot since I was sixteen, but I certainly didn’t buy it. That’s what boyfriends were for. Pro: Brandon bought my drinks, and if you don’t have to lay out cash for alcohol, you can buy a lot more shoes.

Molly thought hard, and Molly thinking was like a fat guy running—there was a lot of visible effort.

“Well, like, the city.”

“But where in the city?”

“On, like, a corner.”

“Right, Molly. I watch HBO, too. But I mean, what corner? It’s not like they list them in that crap Weekender Guide in the paper—movies, music, clubs, where to buy drugs.”

So Molly asked a guy who asked a guy who talked to a guy, and it turned out there was a place just inside the city line, not too far from the interstate. Easy on, easy off, then easy off again. Get it? After a quick consultation on what to wear—jeans and T-shirts and sandals, although I changed into running shoes after I saw the condition of my pedicure—we were off. Very hush-hush because, as I explained to Molly, that was part of the adventure. I phoned my mom and said I was going for a run. Molly told her mom she was going into the city to shop for a dress, and we were off.

The friend of Molly’s friend’s friend had given us directions to what turned out to be an apartment complex, which was kind of disappointing. I mean, we were expecting rowhouses, slumping picturesquely next to each other, but this was just a dirtier, more run-down version of where we lived, little clusters of two-story townhouses built around a courtyard. We drove around and around and around, trying to seem very savvy and willing, and it looked like any apartment complex on a hot July afternoon. Finally, on our third turn around the complex, a guy ambled over to the car.

“What you want?”

“What you got?” I asked, which I thought was pretty good. I mean, I sounded casual but kind of hip, and if he turned out to be a cop, I hadn’t implicated myself. See, I was always thinking, unlike some people I could name.

“Got American Idol and Survivor. The first one will make you sing so pretty that Simon will be speechless. The second one will make you feel as if you’ve got immunity for life.”

“O-kay.” Molly reached over me with a fistful of bills, but the guy backed away from the car.

“Pay the guy up there. Then someone will bring you your package.”

“Shouldn’t you give us the, um, stuff first and then get paid?”

The guy gave Molly the kind of look that a schoolteacher gives you when you say something exceptionally stupid. We drove up to the next guy, gave him $40, then drove to a spot he pointed out to wait.

“It’s like McDonald’s!” Molly said. “Drive-through!”

“Shit, don’t say McDonald’s. I haven’t eaten all day. I would kill for a Big Mac.”

“Have you ever had the Big N’ Tasty? It totally rocks.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a cheeseburger, but with like a special sauce.”

“Like a Big Mac.”

“Only the sauce is different.”

“I liked the fries better when they made them in beef fat.”

A third boy—it’s okay to say “boy,” because he was, like, thirteen, so I’m not being racist or anything—handed us a package and we drove away. But Molly immediately pulled into a convenience store parking lot. It wasn’t a real convenience store, though, not a 7-Eleven or a Royal Farms.

“What are you doing?”

“Pre-diet binge,” Molly said. “If I’m not going to eat for the next week, I want to enjoy myself now.”

I had planned to be pure starting that morning, but it sounded like a good idea. I did a little math. An ounce of Pringles has, like, 120 calories, so I could eat an entire can and not gain even half a pound, and a half pound doesn’t even register on a scale, so it wouldn’t count. Molly bought a pound of Peanut M&M’s, and let me tell you, the girl was not overachieving. I’d seen her eat that much on many an occasion. Molly has big appetites. We had a picnic, right there in the parking lot, washing down our food with diet cream soda. Then Molly began to open our “package.”

“Not here!” I warned her, looking around.

“What if it’s no good? What if they cut it with, like, something, so it’s weak?”

Molly was beginning to piss me off a little, but maybe it was just all the salt, which was making my fingers swell and my head pound a little. “So how are you going to know if it’s any good?”

“You put it on your gums.” She opened up the package. It didn’t look quite right. It was more off-white than I remembered, not as finely cut. But Molly dove right in, licking her finger, sticking it in, and then spreading it around her gum line.

“Shit,” she said. “I don’t feel a thing.”

“Well, you don’t feel it right away.”

“No, they like totally robbed us. It’s bullshit. I’m going back.”

“Molly, I don’t think they do exchanges. It’s not like Nordstrom, where you can con them into taking the shoes back even after you wore them once. You stuck your wet finger in it.”

“We were ripped off. They think just because we’re white suburban girls they can sell us this weak-ass shit.” She was beginning to sound more and more like someone on HBO, although I’d have to say the effect was closer to Ali G than Sopranos. “I’m going to demand a refund.”

This was my first inkling that things might go a little wrong.

So Molly went storming back to the parking lot and finds our guy, and she began bitching and moaning, but he didn’t seem that upset. He seemed kind of, I don’t know, amused by her. He let her rant and rave, just nodding his head, and when she finally ran out of steam, he says:

“Honey, darling, you bought heroin. Not cocaine. That’s why you didn’t get a jolt. It’s not supposed to jolt you. It’s supposed to slow you down, not that it seems to be doing that, either.”

Molly had worked up so much outrage that she still saw herself as the wronged party. “Well how was I supposed to know that?”

“Because we sell cocaine by vial color. Red tops, blue tops, yellow tops. I just had you figured for heroin girls. You looked like you knew your way around, got tired of OxyContin, wanted the real thing.”

Molly preened a little, as if she had been complimented. It’s interesting about Molly. Objectively, I’m prettier, but she has always done better with guys. I think it’s because she has this kind of sexy vibe, by which I mean she manages to communicate that she’ll pretty much do anyone.

“Two pretty girls like you, just this once, I’ll make an exception. You go hand that package back to my man Gordy, and he’ll give you some nice blue tops.”

We did, and he did, but this time Molly made a big show of driving only a few feet away and inspecting our purchase, holding the blue-capped vial up to the light.

“It’s, like, rock candy.”

It did look like a piece of rock candy, which made me think of the divinity my grandmother used to make, which made me think of all the other treats from childhood that I couldn’t imagine eating now—Pixy Stix and Now and Laters and Mary Janes and Dots and Black Crows and Necco Wafers and those pastel buttons that came on sheets of wax paper. Chocolate never did it for me, but I loved sugary treats when I was young.

And now Molly was out of the car and on her feet, steaming toward our guy, who looked around, very nervous, as if this five-foot-five, size 10 dental hygienist—size 8 when she’s being good—could do some serious damage. And I wanted to say, “Dude, don’t worry! All she can do is scrape your gums until they bleed.” (I go to Molly’s dentist and Molly cleans my teeth and she is seriously rough. I think she gets a little kick out of it, truthfully.)

“What the fuck is this?” she yelled, getting all gangster on his ass—I think I’m saying that right—holding the vial up to the guy’s face, while he looked around nervously. Finally he grabbed her wrist and said: “Look, just shut up or you’re going to bring some serious trouble to bear. You smoke it, I’ll show you how, don’t you know anything? Trust me, you’ll like it.”

Molly motioned to me and I got out of the car, although a little reluctantly. It was, like, you know that scene in Star Wars where the little red eyes are watching from the caves and suddenly those weird sand people just up and attack? I’m not being racist, just saying we were outsiders and I definitely had a feeling all sorts of eyes were on us, taking note.

“We’ll go to my place,” the guy said, all super suave, like he was some international man of mystery inviting us to see his etchings.

“A shooting gallery?” Molly squealed, all excited. “Ohmigod!”

He seemed a little offended. “I don’t let dope fiends in my house.”

He led us to one of the townhouses and I don’t know what I expected, but it certainly wasn’t someplace with doilies and old overstuffed furniture and pictures of Jesus and some black guy on the wall. (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I figured out later, but I was really distracted at the time and thought it was the guy’s dad or something.) But the most surprising thing was this little old lady sitting in the middle of the sofa, hands folded in her lap. She had a short, all-white Afro and wore a pink T-shirt and flowery ski pants, which bagged on her stick-thin legs. Ski pants. I hadn’t seen them in, like, forever.

“Antone?” she said. “Did you come to fix my lunch?”

“In a minute, Grandma. I have guests.”

“Are they nice people, Antone?”

“Very nice people,” he said, winking at us, and it was only then that I realized the old lady was blind. You see, her eyes weren’t milky or odd in any way, they were brown and clear, as if she was staring right at us. You had to look closely to realize that she couldn’t really see, that the gaze, steady as it was, didn’t focus on anything.

Antone went to the kitchen, an alcove off the dining room, and fixed a tray with a sandwich, some potato chips, a glass of soda, and an array of medications. How could you not like a guy like that? So sweet, with broad shoulders and close-cropped hair like his granny’s, only dark. Then, very quietly, with another wink, he showed us how to smoke.

“Antone, are you smoking in here? You know I don’t approve of tobacco.”

“Just clove cigarettes, Grandma. Clove never hurt anybody.”

He helped each of us with the pipe, getting closer than was strictly necessary. He smelled like clove, like clove and ginger and cinnamon. Antone the spice cookie. I couldn’t help noticing that when he took the pipe from Molly’s mouth, he replaced it with his lips. I didn’t really want him to kiss me, but I’m so much prettier than Molly. Not to mention thinner. But then, I hear black guys like girls with big behinds, and Molly certainly qualified. You could put a can of beer on her ass and have her walk around the room and it wouldn’t fall off. Not being catty, just telling the literal truth. I did it once, at a party, when I was bored, and Molly swished around with a can of Bud Light on her ass, showing off, like she was proud to have so much baggage.

Weird, but I was hungrier than ever after smoking, which was so not the point. I mean, I wasn’t hungry in my stomach, I was hungry in my mouth. And what I wanted, more than anything in the world, were those potato chips on the blind lady’s tray. They were Utz salt ’n’ vinegar, I had seen Antone take them out of the green-and-yellow bag. I loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooove Utz salt ’n’ vinegar, but they don’t come in a light version, so I almost never let myself have any. So I snagged one, just one, quiet as a cat. But, like they say, you can’t eat just one. Okay, so they say that about Lay’s, but it’s even more true about Utz, in my personal opinion. I kept stealing them, one at a time.

“Antone? Are you taking food off my tray?”

I looked to Antone for backup, but Molly’s tongue was so far in his mouth that she might have been flossing him. When he finally managed to detach himself, he said: “Um, Grandma? I’m going to take a little lie-down.”

“What about your guests?”

“They’re going,” he said, walking over to the door with a heavy tread and closing it.

“It’s time for Judge Judy!” his granny said, which made me wonder, because how does a blind person know what time it is? Antone used the remote control to turn on the television. It was a black-and-white, total Smithsonian. After all, she was blind, so I guess it didn’t matter.

Next thing I know, I’m alone in the room with the blind woman, who’s fixated on Judge Judy as if she’s going to be tested on the outcome, and I’m eyeing her potato chips, while Antone and Molly start making the kind of noises that you make when you’re trying so hard not to make noise that you can’t help making noise.

“Antone?” the old lady called out. “Is the dishwasher running? Because I think a piece of cutlery might have gotten caught in the machinery.”

I was so knocked out that she knew the word “cutlery.” How cool is that?

But I couldn’t answer, of course. I wasn’t supposed to be there.

“It’s—okay—Granny,” Antone grunted from the other room. “It’s—all—going—to—be—Jesus Christ—okay.”

The noises started up again. Granny was right. It did sound like a piece of cutlery caught in the dishwasher. But then it stopped—Antone’s breathing, the mattress springs, Molly’s little muffled grunts—they just stopped, and they didn’t stop naturally, if you know what I mean. I don’t mean to be cruel, but Molly’s a bit of a slut, and I’ve listened to her have sex more times than I could count, and I know how it ends, even when she’s faking it, even when she has to be quiet, and it just didn’t sound like the usual Molly finish at all. Antone yelped, but she was silent as the grave.

“Antone, what are you doing?” his granny asked. Antone didn’t answer. Several minutes went by, and then there was a hoarse whisper from the bedroom.

“Um, Kelley? Could you come here a minute?”

“What was that?” his granny asked.

I used the remote to turn up the volume on Judge Judy. “DO I LOOK STUPID TO YOU?” the judge was yelling. “REMEMBER THAT PRETTY FADES BUT STUPID IS FOREVER. I ASKED IF YOU HAD IT IN WRITING, I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ALL THIS FOLDEROL ABOUT ORAL AGREEMENTS.”

When I went into the bedroom, Molly was under Antone and I remember thinking—I was a little high, remember—that he made her look really thin, because he covered up her torso, and Molly does have good legs and decent arms. He had a handsome back, too, broad and muscled, and a great ass. Brandon had no ass (con), but he had nice legs (pro).

It took me a moment to notice that he had a pair of scissors stuck in the middle of his beautiful back.

“I told him no,” Molly whispered, although the volume on the television was so loud that the entire apartment was practically reverberating. “No means no.”

There was a lot of blood, I noticed. A lot.

“I didn’t hear you,” I said. “I mean, I didn’t hear you say any words.”

“I mouthed it. He told me to keep silent because his grandmother is here. Still, I mouthed it. ‘No.’ ‘No.’” She made this incredibly unattractive fish mouth to show me.

“Is he dead?”

“I mean, I was totally up for giving him a blow job, especially after he said he’d give me a little extra, but he was, like, uncircumcised. I just couldn’t, Kelley, I couldn’t. I’ve never been with a guy like that. I offered him a hand job instead, but he got totally peeved and tried to force me.”

The story wasn’t tracking. High as I was, I could see there were some holes. How did you get naked? I wanted to ask. Why didn’t you shout? If Grandma knew you were here, Antone wouldn’t have dared misbehave. He was clearly more scared of Granny than he was into Molly.

“This is the stash house,” Molly said. “Antone showed me.”

“What?”

“The drugs. They’re here. All of it. We could just help ourselves. I mean, he’s a rapist, Kelley. He’s a criminal. He sells drugs to people. Help me, Kelley. Get him off me.”

But when I rolled him off, I saw there was a condom. Molly saw it, too.

“We should, like, so get rid of that. It would only complicate things. When I saw he was going to rape me, I told him he should at least be courteous.”

I nodded, as if agreeing. I flushed the condom down the toilet, helped Molly clean the blood off her, and then used my purse to pack up what we could find, as she was carrying this little bitty Kate Spade knock-off that wasn’t much good for anything. We found some cash, too, about $2,000, and helped ourselves to that, on the rationale that it would be more suspicious if we didn’t. On the way out, I shook a few more potato chips on Granny’s plate.

“Antone?” she said. “Are you going out again?”

Molly grunted low, and that seemed to appease Granny. We walked out slowly, as if we had all the time in the world, but again I had that feeling of a thousand pairs of eyes upon us. We were in some serious trouble. There would have to be some sort of retribution for what we had done. What Molly had done. All I did was steal a few potato chips.

“Take the Quarry Road home instead of the interstate,” I told Molly.

“Why?” she asked. “It takes so much longer.”

“But we know it, know all the ins and outs. If someone follows us, we can give them the slip.”

About two miles from home, I told her I had to pee so bad that I couldn’t wait and asked her to stand watch for me, a practice of long standing with us. We were at that point, high above the old limestone quarry, where we had parked a thousand times as teenagers. A place where Molly had never said no, to my knowledge.

“Finished?” she asked when I emerged from behind the screen of trees.

“Almost,” I said, pushing her hard, sending her tumbling over the precipice. She wouldn’t be the first kid in our class to break her neck at the highest point on Quarry Road. My high school boyfriend did, in fact, right after we broke up. It was a horrible accident. I didn’t eat for weeks and got down to a size 4. Everyone felt bad for me, breaking up with Eddie only to have him commit suicide that way. There didn’t seem to be any reason to explain that Eddie was the one who wanted to break up. Unnecessary information.

I crossed the hillside to the highway, a distance of about a mile, then jogged the rest of the way. After all, as my mother would be the first to tell you, I went for a run that afternoon, while Molly was off shopping, according to her mom. I assumed the police would tie Antone’s dead body to Molly’s murder and figure it for a revenge killing, but I was giving the cops too much credit. Antone rated a paragraph in the morning paper. Molly, who turned out to be pregnant, although not even she knew it—probably didn’t even know who the father was, for sure—is still on the front page all these weeks later. (The fact that they didn’t find her for three days heightened the interest, I guess. I mean, she was just an overweight dental hygienist from the suburbs—and a bit of a slut, as I told you. But the media got all excited about it.) The general consensus seems to be that Keith did it, and I don’t see any reason to let him off the hook, not yet. He’s an asshole. Plus, almost no one in this state gets the death penalty.

Meanwhile, he’s telling people just how many men Molly had sex with in the past month, including Brandon, and police are still trying to figure out who had sex with her right before she died. (That’s why you’re supposed to get the condom on as early as possible, girls. Penises drip. Just FYI.) I pretended to be shocked, but I already knew about Brandon, having seen Molly’s car outside his apartment when I cruised his place at 2 A.M. a few nights after Brandon told me he wanted to see other people. My ex-boyfriend and my best friend, running around behind my back. Everyone feels so bad for me, but I’m being brave, although I eat so little that I’m down to a size 2. I just bought a Versace dress and Manolos for a date this weekend with my new boyfriend, Robert. I’ve never spent so much money on an outfit before, but then, I’ve never had $2,000 in cash to spend as I please.

Honor Bar

He took all his girlfriends to Ireland, as it turned out. “All” being defined as the four he had dated since Moira, the inevitably named Moira, with the dark hair and the blue eyes put in with a dirty finger. (This is how he insisted on describing her. She would never have used such a hackneyed phrase in general and certainly not for Moira, whose photographic likeness, of which Barry happened to have many, showed a dark-haired, pale-eyed girl with hunched shoulders and a sour expression.)

When he spoke of Moira, his voice took on a lilting quality, which he clearly thought was Irish, but which sounded to her like the kind of singsong voice used on television shows for very young children. She had dark HAIR and pale BLUE eyes put in with a DIRTY FINGER. Really, it was like listening to one of the Teletubbies wax nostalgic, if one could imagine Po (or Laa-Laa or Winky-Dink, or whatever the faggoty purple one was named) hunched over a pint of Guinness in a suitably picturesque Galway bar. Without making contact, Barry explained how he had conceived this trip to exorcise the ghost of Moira, only to find that it had brought her back in full force (again) and he was oh so sorry, but it was just not to be between them and he could not continue this charade for another day.

So, yes, the above—the triteness of his speech, its grating quality, his resemblance to a Guinness-besotted Teletubby—was what she told herself afterward, the forming scab over the hurt and humiliation of being dumped two weeks into a three-week tour of the Emerald Isle. (Guess who called it that.) After her first, instinctive outburst—“You asshole!”—she settled down and listened generously, without recriminations. It had not been love between them. He was rich and she was pretty, and she had assumed it would play out as most of her relationships did. Twelve to twenty months, two or three trips, several significant pieces of jewelry. He was pulling the plug prematurely, that was all, and Ireland barely counted as a vacation in her opinion. It had rained almost every day and the shopping was shit.

Still, she nodded and interjected at the proper moments, signaling the pretty waitress for another, then another, but always for him. She nursed her half pint well into the evening. At closing time, she slipped the waitress twenty euros, straight from his wallet, and the young woman obligingly helped to carry Barry through the streets to the Great Southern. His eyes gleamed a bit as she and the waitress heaved him on the bed, not that he was anywhere near in shape for the award he was imagining. (And how did his mind work, she wondered in passing, how did a man who had just dumped a woman two weeks into a three-week trip persuade himself that the dumpee would then decide to honor him with a going-away threesome? True, she had been a bit wild when they first met. That was how a girl got a man like Barry, with a few decadent acts that suggested endless possibilities. But once you had landed the man, you kept putting such things off, suggested that the blow job in the cab would follow the trip to Tiffany, not vice versa, and pretty soon he was reduced to begging for the most ordinary favors.)

No, they tucked Barry in properly and she tipped the waitress again, sending her into the night. Once the girl was gone, she searched his luggage and selected several T-shirts of which he was inordinately fond. These she ripped into strips, which she then used to bind his wrists and ankles to the four-poster bed. She debated with herself whether she needed to gag him—he might awaken and start to struggle—and decided it was essential. She disconnected the phone, turned the television on so it would provide a nice steady hum in the background, then helped herself to his passport, Visa card, and all the cash he had. Then, as Barry slept the rather noisy sleep of the dead-drunk, she raided the minibar—wine, water, cashews. She was neither hungry nor thirsty, but the so-called honor bar was the one thing that Barry was cheap about. “It’s the principle,” he said, but his indignation had a secondhand feel to it, something passed down by a parent. Or, perhaps, a girlfriend. Moira, she suspected. She opened a chocolate bar but rejected it. The chocolate wasn’t quite right here.

They were e-ticketed to Dublin, but that was a simple matter. She used the room connection to go online, and never mind the cost, rearranging both their travel plans. Barry was now booked home via Shannon, while she continued on to Dublin, where she had switched hotels, choosing the Merrion because it sounded expensive and she wanted Barry to pay. And pay and pay and pay. Call it severance. She wouldn’t have taken up with Barry if she hadn’t thought he was good for at least two years.

It had been Barry’s plan to send her home, to continue to Dublin without her, where he would succumb to a mounting frenzy of Moira-mourning. That’s what he had explained in the pub last night. And he still could, of course. But she thought there might be a kernel of shame somewhere inside the man, and once he dealt with the missing passport and the screwed-up airline reservations, he might have the good sense to continue home on the business-class ticket he had offered her. (“Yes, I brought you to Ireland only to break up with you, but I am sending you home business class.”) He was not unfair, not through and through. His primary objective was to be rid of her, as painlessly and guiltlessly as possible, and she had now made that possible. He wouldn’t call the police or press charges, or even think to put a stop on the credit card, which she was using only for the hotel and the flight back.

Really, she was very fair. Honorable, even.

“MR. GARDNER WILL BE JOINING ME LATER,” she told the clerk at the Merrion, pushing the card toward him, and it was accepted without question.

“And did you want breakfast included, Mrs. Gardner?”

“Yes.” She wanted everything included—breakfast and dinner and laundry and facials, if such a thing were available. She wanted to spend as much of Barry’s money as possible. She congratulated herself for her cleverness, using the American Express card, which had no limit. She could spend as much as she liked at the hotel, now that the number was on file.

It was time, as it turned out, that was harder to spend. For all Barry’s faults—a list that was now quite long in her mind—he was a serious and sincere traveler, the kind who made the most of wherever he landed. He was a tourist in the best sense of the word, a man determined to wring the most experience from travel. While in Galway, they had rented a car and tried to follow Yeats’s trail, figuratively and literally, driving south to see his castle and the swans at Coole, driving north to Mayo and his final resting place, in the shadow of Ben Bulben. She had surprised Barry with her bits of knowledge about the poet, bits usually gleaned seconds earlier from the guidebook, which she skimmed covertly while pretending to look for places to eat lunch. Skimming was a great skill, much underrated, especially for a girl who was not expected to be anything but decorative.

Of course, it had turned out that Yeats’s trail was also Moira’s. She had been a literature major in college and she had a penchant for the Irish and a talent, apparently, for making clever literary allusions at the most unlikely moments. On Barry and Moira’s infamous trip, which had included not just Ireland but London and Edinburgh, Moira had treated Barry to a great, racketing bit of sex after seeing an experimental production of Macbeth at the Festival, one set in a Texas middle school. And while the production came off with mixed results, it somehow inspired a most memorable night with Moira, or so Barry had confided, over all those pints in Galway. She had brought him to a great shuddering climax, left him spent and gasping for breath, then said without missing a beat: “Now go kill Duncan.” (When the story failed to elicit whatever tribute Barry thought its due—laughter, amazement at Moira’s ability to make Shakespearean allusions after sex—he had added: “I guess you had to be there.” “No thank you,” she had said.)

She did not envy Moira’s education. Education was highly overrated. A college dropout, she had supported herself very well throughout her twenties, moving from man to man, taking on the kinds of jobs that helped her to meet them—galleries, catering services, film production offices. Now she was thirty—well, possibly thirty-one, she had been lying about her age for so long, first up, then down, that she got a little confused. She was thirty or thirty-one, maybe even thirty-two, and while going to Dublin had seemed like an inspired bit of revenge against Barry, it was not the place to find her next position, strong euro be damned. Paris, London, Zurich, Rome, even Berlin—those were the kinds of places where a beautiful woman could meet the kind of man who would take her on for a while. Who was she going to meet in Dublin? Bono? But he was married and always prattling about poverty, a bad sign.

So, alone in Dublin, she wasn’t sure what to do, and when she contemplated what Barry might have done, she realized it was what Moira might have done, and she wanted no part of that. Still, somehow—the post office done, Kilcommon done, the museums done—she found herself in a most unimpressive townhouse, studying a chart that claimed to explain how parts of Ulysses related to the various organs of the human body.

“Silly, isn’t it?” asked a voice behind her, startling her, not only because she had thought herself alone in the room, but also because the voice expressed her own thoughts so succinctly. It was an Irish voice, but it was a sincere voice, too, the beautiful vowels without all the bullshit blarney, which had begun to tire her. She could barely stand to hail a cab anymore because the drivers exhausted her so, with their outsize personalities and long stories and persistent questions. She couldn’t bear to be alone, but she couldn’t bear all the conversation, all the yap-yap-yap-yap-yap that seemed to go with being Irish.

“It’s a bit much,” she agreed.

“I don’t think any writer, even Joyce, thinks things out so thoroughly before the fact. If you ask me, we just project all this symbolism and meaning onto books to make ourselves feel smarter.”

“I feel smarter,” she said, “just talking to you.” It was the kind of line in which she specialized, the kind of line that had catapulted her from one safe haven to the next, like Tarzan swinging on a vine.

“Rory Malone,” he added, offering his hand, offering the next vine. His hair was raven black, his eyes pale blue, his lashes thick and dark. Oh, it had been so long since she had been with anyone good looking. Perhaps Ireland was a magical place after all.

“Bliss,” she said, steeling herself for the inane things that her given name inspired. Even Barry, not exactly quick on the mark, had a joke at the ready when she provided her name. But Rory Malone simply shook her hand, saying nothing. A quiet man, she thought to herself. Thank God.

“HOW LONG ARE YOU HERE FOR?”

They had just had sex for the first time, a most satisfactory first time, which is to say it was prolonged, with Rory extremely attentive to her needs. It had been a long time since a man had seemed so keen on her pleasure. Oh, other men had tried, especially in the beginning, when she was a prize to be won, but their best-intentioned efforts usually fell a little short of the mark and she had grown so used to faking it that the real thing almost caught her off guard.

“How long are you staying here?” he persisted. “In Dublin, I mean.”

“It’s . . . open-ended.” She could leave in a day, she could leave in a week. It all depended on when Barry would cut off her credit. How much guilt did he feel? How much guilt should he feel? She was beginning to see that she might have gone a little over the edge where Barry was concerned. He had brought her to Ireland and discovered he didn’t love her. Was that so bad? If it weren’t for Barry, she never would have met Rory, and she was glad she had met Rory.

“Open-ended?” he said. “What do you do, that you have such flexibility?”

“I don’t really have to worry about work,” she said.

“I don’t worry about it, either,” he said, rolling to the side and fishing a cigarette from the pocket of his jeans.

That was a good sign—a man who didn’t have to worry about work, a man who was free to roam the city during the day. “Let’s not trade histories,” she said. “It’s tiresome.”

“Good enough. So what do we talk about?”

“Let’s not talk so much, either.”

He put out his cigarette and they started again. It was even better the second time, better still the third. She was sore by morning, good sore, that lovely burning feeling on the inside. It would probably lead to a not-so-lovely burning feeling in a week or two and she ordered some cranberry juice at breakfast that morning, hoping it could stave off the mild infection that a bout of sex brought with it.

“So Mr. Gardner has finally joined you,” the waiter said, used to seeing her alone at breakfast.

“Yes,” she said.

“I’ll have a soft-boiled egg,” Rory said. “And some salmon. And some of the pancakes?”

“Slow down,” she said, laughing. “You don’t have to try everything at one sitting.”

“I have to keep my strength up,” he said, “if I’m going to keep my lady happy.”

She blushed and, in blushing, realized she could not remember the last time she had felt this way.

“SHOW ME THE REAL DUBLIN,” she said to Rory later that afternoon, feeling bold. They had just had sex for the sixth time, and if anything, he seemed to be even more intent on her needs.

“This is real,” he said. “The hotel is real. I’m real. How much more Dublin do you need?”

“I’m worried there’s something I’m missing.”

“Don’t worry. You’re not.”

“Something authentic, I mean. Something the tourists never see.”

He rubbed his chin. “Like a pub?”

“That’s a start.”

So he took her to a pub, but she couldn’t see how it was different from any other pub she had visited on her own. And Rory didn’t seem to know anyone, although he tried to smoke and professed great surprise at the new antismoking laws. “I smoke here all the time,” he bellowed in more or less mock outrage, and she laughed, but no one else did. From the pub, they went to a rather sullen restaurant, and when the check arrived, he was a bit slow to pick it up.

“I don’t have a credit card on me,” he said at last—sheepishly, winningly—and she let Barry pay.

Back in bed, things were still fine. So they stayed there more and more, although the weather was perversely beautiful, so beautiful that the various hotel staffers who visited the room kept commenting on it.

“You’ve been cheated,” said the room service waiter. “Ask for your money back. It’s supposed to rain every day, not pour down sunlight like this. It’s unnatural, that’s what it is.”

“And is there no place you’d like to go, then?” the chambermaid asked when they refused her services for the third day running, maintaining they didn’t need a change of sheets or towels.

Then the calls began, gentle but firm, running up the chain of command until they were all but ordered out of the room, so the staff could have a chance to freshen it. They went, blinking in the bright light, sniffing suspiciously at the air, so fresh and light after the recirculated air of their room, which was now a bit thick with smoke. After a few blocks, they went into a department store, where he fingered the sleeves of soccer jerseys. Football, she corrected herself. Football jerseys.

“Where do you live?” she asked Rory, but only because it seemed that someone should be saying something.

“I have a room.”

“A bed-sit?” She had heard the phrase somewhere, perhaps in a British novel, and was proud of being able to use it. Although, come to think of it, Ireland and Great Britain were not the same, so the slang might not apply.

“What?”

“Never mind.” She must have used it wrong.

“I like this one.” He indicated a red-and-white top. She had the distinct impression that he expected her to buy it for him. Did he think she was rich? That was understandable, given the hotel room, her easy way with room service, not to mention the minibar over the past few days. All on Barry, but Rory didn’t know that.

Still, it seemed a bit cheesy to hint like this, although she had played a similar game with Barry in various stores and her only regret was that she hadn’t taken him for more, especially when it came to jewelry. Trips and meals were ephemeral and only true high-fashion clothing—the classics, authentic couture—increased in value. She was thirty-one. (Or thirty, possibly thirty-two.) She had only a few years left in which to reap the benefits of her youth and her looks. Of course, she might marry well, but she was beginning to sense she might not. She did not inspire matrimony, not that she had been trying. Then again, it was when you didn’t care that men wanted to marry you. What would happen as thirty-five closed in? Would she regret not accepting the proposals made, usually when she was in a world-class sulk? Marriage to a man like Barry had once seemed a life sentence. But what would she do instead? She really hadn’t thought this out as much as she should.

“Let’s go back to the room,” she said abruptly. “They must have cleaned it by now.”

They hadn’t, not quite, so they sat in the bar, drinking and waiting. It was early to drink, she realized, but only by American standards. In Rory’s company, she had been drinking at every meal except breakfast and she wasn’t sure she had been completely sober for days.

Back in the room, Rory headed for the television set, clicking around with the remote control, then throwing it down in disgust. “I can’t get any scores,” he said.

“But they have a crawl—”

“Not the ones I want, I mean.” He looked around the room, restless and bored, and seemed to settle on her only when he had rejected everything else—the minibar, the copy of that morning’s Irish Times, a glossy magazine. Even then, his concentration seemed to fade midway through and he patted her flank. She pretended not to understand, so he patted her again, less gently, and she rolled over. Rory was silent during sex, almost grimly so, but once her back was to him, he began to grunt and mutter in a wholly new way and when he finished, he breathed a name into the nape of her neck.

Trouble was, it wasn’t hers. She wasn’t sure whose it was, but she recognized the distinct lack of her syllables—no “Bluh” to begin, no gentle hiss at the end.

“What?” she asked. It was one thing to be a stand-in for Barry, when he was footing the bills, to play the ghost of Moira. But she would be damned before she would allow a freeloader such as Rory the same privilege.

“What?” he echoed, clearly having no idea what she meant.

“Whose name are you saying?”

“Why, Millie. Like in the novel Ulysses. I was pretending you were Millie and I was Bloom.”

“It’s Molly, you idiot. Even I know that.”

“Molly. That’s what I said. A bit of playacting. No harm in that.”

“Bullshit. I’m not even convinced that it was a woman’s name you were saying.”

“Fuck you. I don’t do guys.”

His accent had changed—flattened, broadened. He now sounded as American as she did.

“Where are you from?”

He didn’t answer.

“Do you live in Dublin?”

“Of course I do. You met me here, didn’t you?”

“Where do you live? What do you do?”

“Why, here. And this.” He tried to shove a hand beneath her, but she felt sore and unsettled, and she pushed him away.

“Look,” he said. “I’ve made you happy, haven’t I? Okay, so I’m not Irish-Irish. But my, like, ancestors were. And we’ve had fun, haven’t we? I’ve treated you well. I’ve earned my keep.”

Bliss glanced in the mirror opposite the bed. She thought she knew what men saw when they looked at her. She had to know; it was her business, more or less. She had always paid careful attention to every aspect of her appearance—her skin, her hair, her body, her clothes. It was her only capital and she had lived off the interest, careful never to deplete the principle. She exercised, ate right, avoided drugs, and, until recently, drank only sparingly—enough to be fun, but not enough to wreck her complexion. She was someone worth having, a woman who could captivate desirable men—economically desirable men, that is—while passing hot hors d’oeuvres or answering a phone behind the desk at an art gallery.

But this was not the woman Rory had seen, she was realizing. Rory had not seen a woman at all. He had seen clothes. He had seen her shoes, high-heeled Christian Lacroixs that were hell on the cobblestones. And her bag, a Marc Jacobs slung casually over the shoulder of a woman who could afford to be casual about an $800 bag because she had far more expensive ones back home. Only “home” was Barry’s apartment, she realized, and lord knows what he had done with her things. Perhaps that was why he hadn’t yet alerted the credit card company, because he was back in New York, destroying all her things. He would be pissed about the T-shirts, she realized somewhat belatedly. They were authentic vintage ones, not like the fakes everyone else was wearing now, purchased at Fred Segal last January.

And then she had brought Rory back to this room, this place of unlimited room service and the sumptuous breakfasts and the “Have-whatever-you-like-from-the-minibar” proviso. She had even let him have the cashews.

“You think I’m rich,” she said.

“I thought you looked like someone who could use some company,” Rory said, stretching and then rising from the bed.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-four.”

He was she, she was Barry. How had this happened? She was much too young to be an older woman and nowhere near rich enough.

“What do you do?”

“Like I said, I don’t worry about work too much.” He gave her his lovely grin, although she was not quite as charmed by it.

“Was I . . . work?”

“Well, as my dad said, do what you love and you’ll love what you do.”

“But you’d prefer to do men, wouldn’t you. Men for fun, women for money.”

“I told you I’m no cocksucker,” he said, and landed a quick, smart backhand on her cheek. The slap was professional, expert, the slap of a man who had ended more than one argument this way. Bliss, who had never been struck in her life—except on the ass, with a hairbrush, by an early boyfriend who found that exceptionally entertaining—rubbed her cheek, stunned. She was even more stunned to watch Rory proceed to the minibar and crouch on all fours before it, inspecting its restocked shelves.

“Crap wine,” he said. “And I am sick to hell of Guinness and Jameson.”

The first crack of the door against his head was too soft; all it did was make him bellow. But it was hard enough to disorient him, giving Bliss the only advantage she needed. She straddled his back and slammed the door repeatedly on his head and his neck. Decapitation occurred to her as a vague goal and she barely noticed his hands reaching back, scratching and flailing, attempting to dislodge her. She settled for motionlessness and silence, slamming the door on his head until he was still.

But still was not good enough. She wrestled a corkscrew from its resting place—fifteen euros—and went to work. Impossible. Just as she was about to despair, she spied a happy gleam beneath the bedspread, a steak knife that had fallen to the floor and somehow gone undetected. She finished her work, even as the hotel was coming to life around her—the telephone ringing, footsteps pounding down the corridors. She should probably put on her robe. She was rather . . . speckled.

“HOW OLD ARE YOU, THEN?” the police officer—they called them gardai here—asked Bliss.

“How old do I look?”

“You look about twenty-five, but the records require more specific data.” He was still being kind and solicitous, although Bliss sensed that the fading mark on her cheek had not done much to reconcile the investigators to the scene they had discovered. They were gallant and professed horror that she had been hit and insulted. But their real horror, she knew, was for Rory.

“Really? Twenty-five? You’re not just saying that?”

“I’d be surprised if you could buy a drink legally in most places.”

Satisfied, she gave her real age, although it took a moment of calculation to get it right. Was she thirty, thirty-one? Thirty, she decided. Thirty.

Dear Penthouse Forum (A First Draft)

You won’t believe this, but this really did happen to me just last fall, and all because I was five minutes late, which seemed like a tragedy at the time. “It’s only five minutes,” that’s what I kept telling the woman behind the counter, who couldn’t be bothered to raise her gaze from her computer screen and make eye contact with me. Which is too bad, because I don’t need much to be charming, but I need something to work with. Why did they make so many keystrokes, anyway, these ticket clerks? What’s in the computer that makes them frown so? I had the printout for my e-ticket, and I kept shoving it across the counter, and she kept pushing it back to me with the tip of a pen, the way I used to do with my roommate Bruce’s dirty underwear, when we were in college. I’d rounded it up with a hockey stick and stashed it in the corner, just to make a pathway through our dorm room. Bruce was a goddamn slob.

“I’m sorry,” she said, stabbing that one key over and over. “There’s just nothing I can do for you tonight.”

“But I had a reservation. Andrew Sickert. Don’t you have it?”

“Yes,” she said, hissing the s in a wet, whistling way, like a middle-school girl with new braces. God, how did older men do it? I just can’t see it, especially if it really is harder to get it up as you get older, not that I can see that either. But if it does get more difficult, wouldn’t you need a better visual?

“I bought that ticket three weeks ago.” Actually, it was two, but I was seeking any advantage, desperate to get on that plane.

“It says on your printout that it’s not guaranteed if you’re not at the gate thirty minutes ahead of departure.” Her voice was oh-so-bored, the tone of a person who’s just loving your pain. “We had an overbooked flight earlier in the evening and a dozen people were on the standby list. When you didn’t check in by nine twenty-five, we gave your seat away.”

“But it’s only nine forty now, and I don’t have luggage. I could make it, if the security line isn’t too long. Even if it’s the last gate, I’d make it. I just have to get on that flight. I have . . . I have . . .” I could almost feel my imagination trying to stretch itself, jumping around inside my head, looking for something this woman would find worthy. “I have a wedding.”

“You’re getting married?”

“No!” She frowned at the reflexive shrillness in my voice. “I mean, no, of course not. If it were my wedding, I’d be there, like, a week ago. It’s my, uh, brother’s. I’m the best man.”

The “uh” was unfortunate. “Is the wedding in Providence?”

“Boston, but it’s easier to fly into Providence than Logan.”

“And it’s tomorrow, Friday?”

Shit, no one got married on Friday night. Even I knew that. “No, but there’s the rehearsal dinner, and, you know, all that stuff.”

More clicks. “I can get you on the seven A.M. flight if you promise to check in ninety minutes ahead of time. You’ll be in Providence by eight thirty. I have to think that’s plenty of time. For the rehearsal and stuff. By the way, that flight is thirty-five dollars more.”

“Okay,” I said, pulling out a Visa card that was dangerously close to being maxed out, but I was reluctant to give up my cash, which I would need in abundance Friday night. “I guess that’s enough time.”

And now I had nothing but time to spend in the dullest airport, Baltimore-Washington International, in the dullest suburb, Linthicum, on the whole eastern seaboard. Going home was not an option. Light Rail had stopped running, and I couldn’t afford the $30 cab fare back to North Baltimore. Besides, I had to be in line at 5:30 A.M. to guarantee my seat, and that meant getting up at 4:00. If I stayed here, at least I couldn’t miss my flight.

I wandered through the ticketing area, but it was dead, the counters all on the verge of closing down. I nursed a beer, but last call was 11:00 P.M., and I couldn’t get to the stores and restaurants on the other side of the metal detectors because I didn’t have a boarding pass. I stood by the stairs for a while, watching the people emerge from the terminals, their faces exhausted but happy because their journeys were over. It was almost as if there were two airports—“Departures,” this ghost town where I was trapped, and “Arrivals,” with people streaming out of the gates and onto the escalators, fighting for their baggage and then throwing themselves into the gridlocked lanes on the lower level, heading home, heading out. I should be doing the same thing myself, four-hundred-some miles away. My plane would be touching down by now, the guys would be looking for me, ready to go. I tried to call them, but my cell was dead. That was the kind of night I was having.

I stretched out on one of the padded benches opposite my ticket counter and essayed a little catnap, but some old guy was pushing a vacuum cleaner right next to my head, which seemed a little hostile. Still, I closed my eyes and tried not to think of what I was missing in Boston. The guys would probably be at a bar by now, kicking back some beers. At least I’d make it to the major festivities the next night. It hadn’t been a complete lie, the wedding thing. I was going to a friend’s bachelor party, even though I wasn’t invited to the wedding proper, but that’s just because there’s bad blood between the bride and me. She tells Bruce I’m a moron, but the truth is we had a little thing, when they were sorta broken up junior year, and she’s terrified I’m going to tell him. And, also, I think, because she liked it, enjoyed ol’ Andy, who brought a lot more to the enterprise than Bruce ever could. I’m not slagging my friend, but I lived with the guy for four years. I know the hand he was dealt, physiologically.

Behind my closed eyes, I thought about that week two years ago, how she had come to my room when she knew Bruce was at work, and locked the door behind her, and, without any preamble, just got down on her knees, and—

“Are you stranded?”

I sat up with a start, feeling as if I had been caught at something, but luckily I wasn’t too disarranged down there. There was a woman standing over me, older, somewhere between thirty and forty, in one of those no-nonsense suits and smoothed-back hairdos, toting a small rolling suitcase. From my low vantage point, I couldn’t help noticing she had nice legs, at least from ankle to knee. But the overall effect was prim, preternaturally old-ladyish.

“Yeah. They overbooked my flight, and I can’t get another one until morning, but home’s too far.”

“No one should have to sleep on a bench. A single night could throw your back out of alignment for life. Do you need money? You probably could get a room in one of the airport motels for as little as fifty dollars. The Sleep Inn is cheap.”

She fished a wallet out of her bag, and while I’m not strong on these kinds of details, it looked like an expensive purse to me, and the billfold was thick with cash. Most of the time, I don’t angst over money—I’m just twenty-three, getting started in the world, I’ll make my bundle soon enough—but it was hard, looking at all those bills and thinking about the gap between us. Why shouldn’t I take fifty dollars? She clearly wouldn’t feel it.

But for some reason I couldn’t. “Naw. Because I’d never repay you. I mean, I could, I’ve got a job. But I know myself. I’ll lose your address or something, never get it back to you.”

She smiled, which transformed her features. Definitely between thirty and forty, but closer to the thirty end now that I studied her. Her eyes were gray, her mouth big and curvy, fuller on top than on the bottom, so her teeth poked out just a little. I go for that overbite thing. And the suit was a kind of camouflage, I realized, in a good way. Most women dress to hide their flaws, but a few use clothes to cover up their virtues. She was trying to hide her best qualities, but I could see the swells beneath her outfit—both on top and in the back, where her ass rose up almost in defiance of the tailored jacket and straight skirt. You can’t keep a good ass down.

“Don’t be so gallant,” she said. “I’m not offering a loan. I’m doing a good deed. I like to do good deeds.”

“It just doesn’t seem right.” I don’t know why I was so firm on this, but I think it was because she was basically sweet. I couldn’t help thinking we’d meet again, and I wouldn’t want to be remembered as the guy who took fifty dollars from her.

“Well . . .” That smile again, bigger this time. “We have a stand-off.”

“Guess so. But you better get down to that taxi stand if you want to get home tonight. The line’s twenty deep.” We glanced out the windows, down to the level below, which was just chaos. Up here, however, it was quiet and private, the man with the vacuum cleaner having finally moved on, the counters all closed.

“I’m lucky. I have my own car.”

“I think the lucky person is the man who’s waiting at home for you.”

“Oh.” She was flustered, which just made her sexier. “There’s no one—I mean—well, I’m single.”

“That’s hard to believe.” The automatic bullshit thing to say, yet I was sincere. How could someone like that ticket-clerk crone have a ring on her finger, while this woman was running around loose?

“It’s a chicken-or-egg problem.”

“Huh?”

“Am I single because I’m a workaholic, or am I a workaholic because I’m single?”

“Oh, that’s easy. It’s the first one. No contest.”

Her faced seemed to light up and I swear I saw her eyes go filmy, as if she were about to cry. “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”

“You need to hang out with better people, then.”

“Look—” She put her hand on mine, and it was cool and soft, the kind of hand that gets slathered in cream on a regular basis, the hand of a woman who’s taking care of every part of herself. I knew she’d be waxed to a fine finish beneath that conservative little suit, with painted toenails and nothing but good smells. “I have a two-bedroom apartment on the south side of the city, just a few blocks from the big hotels. You can spend the night in my guest room, catch the first airport shuttle from the Hyatt at five. It’s only fifteen dollars, and you’ll get where you’re going rested and unkinked.”

Funny, but I felt protective of her. It was almost as if I were two people—a guy who wanted to keep her from a guy like me, and the guy who wanted to get inside her apartment and rip that suit off, see what she was keeping from the rest of the world.

“I couldn’t do that. That’s an even bigger favor than giving me fifty dollars for a hotel room.”

“I don’t know. It seems to me there are ways you could pay me back, if you put your mind to it.”

She didn’t smile, or arch an eyebrow, or do a single thing with her face to acknowledge what she had just offered. She simply turned and began pulling her bag toward the sliding glass doors. But I was never more certain in my life that a woman wanted me. I got up, grabbed my own suitcase, and followed her, our wheels thrumming in unison. She led me to a black BMW in the short-term lot. Neither one of us said a word, we could barely look at each other, but I had her skirt halfway up her thigh even as she handed the parking lot attendant two bucks. He never even bothered to look down, just handed her the change, bored with his life. It’s amazing what people don’t see, but after all, people didn’t see her, this amazing woman. Because she was small and modest, she passed through the world without acknowledgment. I was glad I hadn’t made the mistake of not seeing what was there.

Her apartment was only twenty minutes away, and if it had been twenty-five, I think I would have made her pull over to the side of the road or risked bursting. I had her skirt above her waist now, yet she kept control of the car and leveled her eyes straight ahead, which just made me wilder for her. Once she parked, she didn’t bother to pop the trunk, and by that time I wasn’t too worried about my suitcase. I wasn’t going to need any clothes until the morning. She ran up the stairs and I followed.

The apartment building was a little shabby, and in an iffier neighborhood than I expected, but those warehouse lofts usually are in odd parts of town. She pulled me into the dark living room and locked the door behind me, throwing on the deadbolt as if I might change my mind, but there was no risk of that. I didn’t have the time or the inclination to take in my surroundings, although I did notice that the room was sparsely furnished—nothing more than a sofa, a desk with an open laptop, and this huge credenza of jars with gleaming gold tops, which looked sort of like those big things of peppers you see at some delis, although not quite the same. I couldn’t help thinking it was a project of hers, that maybe they were vases distorted by the moonlight.

“You an artist?” I asked as she backed away and began pulling her clothes off, revealing a body that was even better than I had hoped.

“I’m in business.”

“I mean, as a hobby?” I inclined my head toward the credenza, as I was trying to get my trousers off without tripping.

“I’m a pickler.”

“What?” Not that I really cared about the answer, as I had my hands on her now. She let me kiss and touch what I could reach, then sank to her knees, as if all she cared about was pleasing me. Well, she had said she was into good deeds, and I had done pretty well by her in the car.

“A pickler,” she said, her breath warm and moist. “I put up fruits and vegetables and other things as well, so I can enjoy them all winter long.” And then she stopped talking because she had—

MAUREEN STOPS, FROWNING at what she has written. Has she mastered the genre? This is her sixth letter, and while the pickups are getting easier, the prose is becoming harder. Part of the problem is that the men bring so little variation to their end of the bargain, forcing her to be ever more inventive about their lives and their missions. Even when they do tell her little pieces of their backstories, like this one, Andy, it’s so boring, so banal. Late to the airport, a missed connection, not enough money to do anything but sleep on a bench, blah, blah, blah. Ah, but she doesn’t have the luxury of picking them for material. She has to find the raw stuff and mold it to her needs.

So far, the editors of Penthouse haven’t printed any of her letters—too much buildup, she supposes, which is like too much foreplay as far as she’s concerned. Ah, but that’s the difference between men and women, the unbridgeable gap. One wants seduction, the other wants action. It’s why her scripts never sell, either. Too much buildup, too much narrative. And, frankly, she knows her sex scenes suck. Part of the problem is that in real life Maureen almost never completes the act she’s trying to describe in her fiction; she’s too eager to get to her favorite part. So, yes, she has her own foreplay issues.

No, there are definitely voice problems in this piece. Would a young man remember that whistling sound that braces make, or is she simply giving too much away about her own awkward years? Would a twenty-three-year-old man recognize an expensive purse? Or use the word “preternaturally”? Also, she probably should be careful about being too factual. The $2 parking fee—a more astute person, someone who didn’t have his hand up a woman’s skirt, fumbling around as if he’s looking for spare change beneath a sofa cushion, might wonder why someone returning from a business trip paid for only an hour of parking. She should recast her apartment as well, make it more glamorous, the same way she upgraded her Nissan Sentra to a gleaming black BMW. Speaking of which, she needs to get the car to Wax Works, just in case, and change Andy’s name in the subsequent drafts. She doesn’t worry that homicide detectives read Penthouse Forum for clues to open cases, but they almost certainly read it. Meanwhile, his suitcase is gone, tossed in a Dumpster behind the Sleep Inn near the airport, and Andy’s long gone, too.

Well—she looks up at the row of gleaming jars, which she needs to lock away again behind the credenza’s cupboards, but they’re so pretty in the moonlight, almost like homemade lava lamps. Well, she reminds herself. Most of Andy is long gone.

Announcement

Continue reading for an excerpt of Laura Lippman’s new novel, Sunburn, that everyone is raving about.

“Laura Lippman continues to push the envelope of modern crime-writing. Sunburn, her take on noir, may be her nerviest novel yet.”

—Harlan Coben

"A masterful mix from a total pro.”

—People

“Cool and twisty.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“Sunburn is a dark, gleaming noir gem. Read it.”

—Gillian Flynn

“Sunburn delivers one of the year’s most intriguing mysteries.”

—Associated Press

“Spellbinding [. . .] this corkscrew of a book, with its psychological insights and sensual charisma, proves once again that Laura Lippman, as a writer, is sui generis.”

—The Wall Street Journal

An Excerpt from Sunburn

1

JUNE 11, 1995

BELLEVILLE, DELAWARE

It’s the sunburned shoulders that get him. Pink, peeling. The burn is two days old, he gauges. Earned on Friday, painful to the touch yesterday, today an itchy soreness that’s hard not to keep fingering, probing, as she’s doing right now in an absentminded way. The skin has started sloughing off, soon those narrow shoulders won’t be so tender. Why would a redhead well into her thirties make such a rookie mistake?

And why is she here, sitting on a barstool, forty-five miles inland, in a town where strangers seldom stop on a Sunday evening? Belleville is the kind of place where people are supposed to pass through and soon they won’t even do that. They’re building a big bypass so the beach traffic won’t have to slow for the speed trap on the old Main Street. He saw the construction vehicles, idle on Sunday, on his way in. Places like this bar-slash-restaurant, the High-Ho, are probably going to lose what little business they have.

High-Ho. A misprint? Was it supposed to be Heigh-Ho? And if so, was it for the seven dwarfs, heading home from the mines at day’s end, or for the Lone Ranger, riding off into the sunset? Neither one makes much sense for this place.

Nothing about this makes sense.

Her shoulders are thin, pointy, hunched up so close to her ears that they make him think of wings. The front of her pink-and-yellow sundress is quite a contrast, full and round. She carries herself as if she doesn’t want to attract any male attention, at least not tonight. On the front, he can’t help noticing as he slides on a barstool, she’s not so pink. The little strip of skin showing above the relatively high-necked dress has only the faintest hint of color. Ditto, her cheeks. It is early June, with a breeze that makes it easy to forget how strong the sun is already. Clearly a modest type, she wears a one-piece, so there’s probably a deep U of red to go with those shoulders. Yesterday, fingerprints pressed there would have left white marks.

He wonders if she’s meeting someone here, someone who will rub cream into the places she can’t reach. He would be surprised if she is. More surprised if she’s up for leaving with a stranger, not shocked by either scenario. Sure, she gives off a prim vibe, but those are the ones you have to watch out for.

One thing’s for sure: she’s up to something. His instincts for this stuff can’t be denied.

He doesn’t go in hard. He’s not that way. Doesn’t have to be, if that doesn’t sound too vain. It’s just a fact: he’s a Ken doll kind of guy, if Ken had a great year-round tan. Tall and muscular with even features, pale eyes, dark hair. Women always assume that Ken wants a Barbie, but he prefers his women thin and a little skittish. In his downtime, he likes to hunt deer. Bow and arrow. He goes to the woods of western Maryland, where he can spend an entire day sitting in a tree, waiting, and he loves it. Tom Petty was wrong about that. The waiting’s not the hardest part. Waiting can be beautiful, lush, full of possibility. When he was a kid, growing up in the Bay Area, his ahead-of-the-curve beat parents put him in this study at Stanford where he was asked to sit in a room with a marshmallow for fifteen minutes. He would get two if he didn’t eat the one while he waited. He had asked, How long do I have to sit here for three? They laughed.

He didn’t learn until he was in his twenties that he was part of some study that was trying to determine if there’s a correlation between success and a kid’s ability to manage the desire for instant gratification. He still thinks it was unfair that the experiment wasn’t organized in a way that allowed a kid to get three marshmallows for sitting twice as long as anyone else.

He has left two stools between them, not wanting to crowd her, but he makes sure she hears when he orders a glass of wine. That catches her attention, asking for wine instead of beer in a place like this. That was the idea, catching her attention. She doesn’t speak, but glances sideways when he asks the blonde behind the bar what kind of wine they serve. He doesn’t break balls over the selection, which is red and white. Literally: “We have red and we have white.” He doesn’t bat an eyelash when they serve him the red cold. Not a sommelier-ordained-sixty-degree cold, but straight-from-the-fridge cold. He takes a sip, summons the barmaid back, and says, oh so politely, “You know what? I’m happy to pay for this, but it’s not to my taste. May I have a beer?” He glances at the taps. “Goose Island?”

Another quick sideways flick of her eyes, then back to her own drink—amber, rocks. Wherever she’s going tonight, it’s not far from here. He looks into his own drink and says out loud, as if to himself: “What kind of an asshole orders red wine in a tavern in Belleville, Delaware?”

“I don’t know,” she says, not looking at him. “What kind of an asshole are you?”

“Garden variety.” Or so his exes—one wife for a span of five years, maybe seven, eight girlfriends, which strikes him as a respectable number for a thirty-eight-year-old man—always told him. “You from around here?”

“Define from.” She’s not playing, she’s retreating.

“Do you live here?”

“I do now.”

“That sunburn—I just assumed you were someone who got a day or two of beach, was headed back to Baltimore or D.C.”

“No. I’m living here.”

He sees a flicker of surprise on the barmaid’s face.

“As of when?”

“Now.”

A joke, he thinks. A person doesn’t just stop for a drink in a strange town and decide to live there. Not this town. It’s not like she’s rolled into Tuscany or Oaxaca, two places he knows well and can imagine a person saying, Yes, here, this is where I’m going to plant myself. She’s in Belleville, Delaware, with its saggy, sad Main Street, a town of not even two thousand people surrounded by cornfields and chicken farms. Does she have connections here? The barmaid sure doesn’t treat her like a local, even a potential one. To the barmaid, blond and busty with a carefully nurtured tan, the redhead is furniture. The barmaid is interested in him, however, trying to figure out whether he’s passing through tonight or hanging around.

Which has not yet been determined.

“Let me know if you want someone to give you the skinny on this place,” the barmaid says to him with a wink. “It would take all of five minutes.”

Barmaids and waitresses who flirt this overtly make him a little nervous. Bringing a man food or beer is intimate enough.

He lets both women alone, drinks his beer, watches the inevitable Orioles games on the inevitable TV with the inevitable shimmy in its reception. The team is good again, or, at least, better. As the redhead’s third drink reaches its last quarter inch, he settles up, leaves without saying good-bye to anyone, goes to his truck in the gravel parking lot, and sits in the dark. Not hiding because there’s no better way to be found than to try to hide.

Ten minutes later, the redhead comes out. She crosses the highway, heads to the old-fashioned motel on the other side, the kind they call a motor court. This one is named Valley View, although there’s no valley and no view. The High-Ho, the Valley View, Main Street—it’s like this whole town was put together from some other town’s leftovers.

He waits fifteen minutes, then enters the little office at the end, and inquires if there’s a room, despite the big red VACANCY sign filling the window.

“How many nights?” the clerk, a pencil-necked guy in his thirties, asks.

“Open-ended. I can give you a credit card, if you like.”

“Funny. You’re the second person today to ask for an open-ended stay.”

He doesn’t have to ask who the first one was. He makes a note to himself that the chatty clerk will be chatty about him, too.

“You need my credit card?”

“Cash is fine, too. If you commit to a week, we can give you the room for two hundred fifty. We don’t get many people Monday through Friday. But, you know, there’s no kitchenette, no refrigerator. You gotta eat your meals out or bring stuff in that won’t spoil.” He adds, “If the maid sees stuff sitting out, she’ll tell me. I don’t want ants or roaches.”

“Can I keep a cooler in the room?”

“As long as it doesn’t leak.”

He hands the credit card over.

“I can give you a better rate if you pay cash,” the guy says, clearing his throat. “Two hundred twenty dollars.”

Guy’s got some sort of scam going, must be skimming the cash payments, but what does he care? He can last a long time in a place that’s $220 a week, even if there’s no refrigerator or stove.

He wonders how long she can last.

2

She steps out of room 5 into a bright, hot morning, unseasonably hot, just as the weekend at the beach had been, but at least there the breeze from the ocean took the edge off. People said how lucky it was, getting such a hot day in early June, when the water is too cold for anyone but the kids. School not even out yet, lines at the most popular restaurants were manageable. Lucky, people kept saying, as if to convince themselves. Lucky. So lucky.

Is there anything sadder than losers telling themselves that they’re fortunate? She used to be that way, but not anymore. She calls things the way they are, starting with herself.

When Gregg had started talking about a week at the beach, she had assumed a rental house in Rehoboth or Dewey. Maybe not on the beach proper, but at least on the east side of the highway.

Well, they had been close to the beach. But it was Fenwick, on the bayside, and it was a two-story cinder block with four small apartments that were basically studios. One big rectangular room for them and Jani, a galley kitchen, a bathroom with only a shower, no tub. And ants. Wavy black lines of ants everywhere.

“It’s what was available, last minute,” Gregg said. She amended in her head. It’s what was available, last minute, if you’re cheap. There had to be a better place to stay along the Delaware shore, even last minute.

Jani couldn’t sleep unless the room was in complete blackout. So they kept her up late, to nine or ten, because the alternative was to go to bed together at eight, and lie there in the dark without touching. The first night, about 2 A.M., Gregg made a move. Maybe a year or two ago, it would have been sexy, trying to go at it silently in the dark. But it had been a long time since she found anything about Gregg sexy.

“No, no, no, she’ll wake up.”

“We could give her a little Benadryl.”

That had given her pause, made her wonder if she should change her plans, but no, she had to go ahead. The next day, she did ask him if he would really do that, give Jani a Benadryl. He insisted he was joking. She decided to believe him. If she didn’t believe him, she would have to stay. And there was no way she could stay.

That was Saturday. She put a gauzy white shirt over her bathing suit, but even that irritated her shoulders. She huddled under the umbrella, shivering as if cold. A bad sunburn can do that, give you chills. Gregg played in the surf with Jani. He was good with her. She wasn’t just telling herself that. He was good, good enough, as good as she needed him to be.

They went to the boardwalk, the smaller one up at Rehoboth, which was better for little kids like Jani than the one in Ocean City. Gregg tried to win Jani the biggest stuffed panda he could, but he never got above the second-tier prize. Do the math, she wanted to tell him. For the $20 he was spending, shooting water guns at little targets, tossing rings, he could buy Jani something much better.

On Sunday, she watched them build a sand castle. About 11 A.M., she said she had had too much sun, she was going back to the house. House, huh. Place. The highway was busy, it seemed to take forever to get across. She changed into her sundress, packed a bag, the duffel, which had wheels, and wrote a note to go with the one she had brought with her. She worried what would happen if she didn’t leave a note. The notes were more for Jani than Gregg, anyway.

She bounced the duffel down the steps and onto the shoulder of the highway, followed it almost a quarter mile to the state line, where she planned to take the local bus to the Greyhound station in Ocean City. She would then head to Baltimore, although she couldn’t stay long. She was too easy to find there, she would fall back into certain routines.

An older man in a Cadillac offered her a ride to D.C., and she figured why not. Then he got pervy, his sad old fingers sneaking toward her knees like some arthritic spider, and she said, “Put me out here.” It was Belleville. ONE OF THE TEN BEST SMALL TOWNS IN AMERICA, according to a shiny, newish sign.

Now, seeing Belleville in the bright morning light, she wonders what the other nine are.

She doesn’t have much of a head start. Gregg would have seen the note at noon or so, when they came back for lunch. He was probably more upset that she hadn’t made them any sandwiches or set the table. He didn’t love her and she didn’t love him. He had one foot out the door. He’d leave her, get an apartment. He’d never pay child support, not without endless nagging. She might even have to get a job. So why not go ahead and get a job, but let him have Jani, see what it’s like to be a full-time parent? He wasn’t going to trap her.

When you’ve been in jail even a short time, you don’t like feeling confined.

What next? She’s thought a lot of things out, but she hasn’t thought everything out. She has to earn some money, enough to head west by fall. She had assumed she’d do that in D.C., but maybe it’s easier to do it here.

Certainly, she’ll be harder to find.

She walks into the town proper, down the main street. Which is called Main Street. There is a deli, a grocery store called Langley’s, a Purple Heart thrift store, a florist. But a lot of the shops are empty, long vacant by the looks of them.

She doubles back to the motel, the bar she had chosen last night when she made her ride pull over. The High-Ho. Certainly it should be Heigh-Ho?

The guy in the bar last night was awfully good-looking, kind of her type, not that she was interested. Still, she was surprised, even a little insulted, that he gave up so easy.

A car seems to come out of nowhere and she jumps, skittish. But it’s too early for anyone to be looking for her and, anyway, it isn’t against the law, leaving your family at the beach. She’s surprised more women don’t do it. She got the idea from a book she read two months ago. Well, she didn’t actually read it and she had been planning her own escape for a while. But everybody was talking about it, like it was a fantasy. If only you knew, she wanted to tell her neighbors along Kentucky Avenue. If only you knew what it means to walk away from something, what it takes.

Money. She has some. She needs more.

The guy last night—he liked her, she was sure. But she doesn’t want to make that mistake anymore. She has enough money to go two, three weeks. Summer is coming, there are probably some seasonal jobs still open. She wonders when Gregg will check the accounts, see how much money she moved out of their joint savings in that final week before their “vacation.” Half, which is what she was entitled to.

The money will make him even madder than the fact that she left. At least Jani is a pretty easy kid, she wants to tell him. Imagine it otherwise. He can’t. Gregg can’t imagine anything. Life unspools as Gregg expects. Even the surprises—Jani, their marriage—don’t surprise him. She used to be that kind of person. But she’s not going to be, not anymore.

Back at the motel, she sees the guy from the bar leaning against the doorjamb of room 3. Could be a coincidence. Everyone has a life, everyone has something going on. Don’t make the mistake of thinking everything is all about you, all the time.

“Hi,” he says. He’s the kind of guy who can get away with just that one word. Hi. He’s good-looking in a bland way, and he probably thinks that’s enough. Probably has been enough with most women. She wiggles her fingers in a kind of greeting, but keeps her hand by her side, like he’s not worth the effort of bending an elbow.

He says, “How long you staying over?”

“Who wants to know?”

“Every man in town, I’m guessing.”

So predictable. And not even true. She has a version of herself that catches men’s eyes, but she’s turned that off for now, maybe forever. The only thing it ever got her was trouble.

“I’m Adam Bosk,” he says. “Like the pear, only with a ‘k’ instead of a ‘c.’”

“I’m the Pink Lady,” she says. “Like the apple.”

“Think we can still be friends, me a pear, you an apple?”

“I thought it was apples and oranges that can’t be compared.”

She walks past him and into her room.

She doesn’t come out again until the sun goes down, which means it’s almost 8:30 before she emerges. Maybe some people would go crazy, sitting in a motel room, nothing to eat but a pack of peanut butter and cheese crackers she found in her purse. Mom food. Gregg is going to have to learn tricks like that now. Jani’s an easy kid until she gets hungry, then all bets are off. She enjoys the silence, the novelty of no one needing her, no voices calling, nothing to be cleaned or cooked or washed. She doesn’t even put the television on, just lies back on the bed, steeping herself in silence.

When she crosses the street, the sun huge and red as it sinks over the cornfields, she has a hunch he’ll be there, Mr. Pear. He is. She makes sure there’s a stool between them.

“What are you having?” he asks.

“How much money do you have?”

He laughs. They always think she’s joking. Gregg did, that’s for sure. She wishes she could say, Pay attention. I haven’t even told you my name yet, but I’m telling you who I am, what I care about.

As if privy to her thoughts, he asks, “What’s your name, Pink Lady? Not that you’ll be pink for long. There’s a nice shade of brown under that burn. I didn’t know redheads could tan like that.”

What is her name? Which one should she use?

“Polly Costello,” she says.

3

Jani wakes up crying for her mother. She’s only three years old. She can’t understand what’s happening. Gregg barely understands. She asks Gregg to read the note again, as if it might change since he read it last night and yesterday at lunch and yesterday morning and the night before that. The note does change. He adds a little to it with each reading. An additional, “I love you, Jani.” Then, the next time: “I love you more than anything, Jani.” Later, he thinks it might be a good idea to include: “Be good to Daddy. This is going to be even harder on him.”

Pauline’s been gone only two days, and the note is already creased and worn. Jani holds it against her face, pressed between her cheek and her stuffed cat, when she goes to sleep. She goes to sleep crying, she wakes up crying. In between, she has nightmares that make her cry and mutter and moan, yet don’t wake her. They wake Gregg, though.

What kind of woman walks out on her family? Gregg knows. The kind of woman he picked up in a bar four years ago precisely because she had that kind of wildcat energy. Pauline was supposed to be a good time, nothing more. She scratched, she bit, she was up for anything, anywhere, anytime.

Then, in the middle of their summer fling, she peed on a stick and a plus sign formed in the circle, but it might as well have been a cross and he was up on it. Because it turned out she was a good girl all along. Good enough that she wouldn’t think of having an abortion. Did not see that one coming. Plus, she was thirty-one and she figured this might be her last chance to have a kid. Maybe it was a sign? A destiny thing?

They got married fast. It wasn’t so bad at first. So much was happening. She said she didn’t want a wedding because she had no people, it would just make her sad, her side of the church empty, so they got married at the courthouse and used the money that would have gone to a wedding to honeymoon in Jamaica, one of those resorts where everything was included. It was cheap because it was the last week of October, the tail end of hurricane season.

They had to find a house big enough for what was going to be the three of them and they lucked out on a bargain up near Herring Run Park, a snug little brick place, very respectable, all the old woodwork and leaded windows still intact. Jani arrived. A first for both of them, but Pauline was calm while he was a mess. Now that he thinks about it, maybe that was the first sign that she wasn’t right. Should any woman be that calm, taking care of her first baby? At the time, he thought it meant she was a natural mom, but maybe this was proof that she was the opposite. She is detached, removed, a caretaker, not a parent.

The sex slowed after Jani was born and it was still good enough that it made him angry that they didn’t have more of it. She said that if he wanted more attention from her, he needed to help around the house. He wasn’t raised to be that way. Gregg had grown up without a father, and his mother had worked overtime, in and out of the house, to make sure he knew what was his due as a man. Pauline didn’t even have a job. Why was she so tired?

By the time Jani turned two, Pauline was still tired and the newness had worn off everything—marriage, house, baby, her. There was nothing left to distract them from the fact that they just didn’t like each other that much. Yet the sex was still good. Looking back, he thinks she treated the sex like that was her job, a job she enjoyed. Listening to his friends at work, he felt smug at first because it wasn’t that way with them. But now he knew, that was another sign that she was unnatural. Once a woman became a mother, she wasn’t supposed to be like that. Pauline was a dirty, dirty girl. She wasn’t cut out to be a mother, a wife. How had he missed it?

Then, Pauline had—it was hard to admit, even to himself—Pauline had started hitting him. During. It had started with him spanking her a little, not hard, just for fun, a way to spice things up. She had howled all out of proportion to the pain, tried to scratch him with her nails.

But when she calmed down, she asked if he wanted to see what it felt like. He didn’t, but he didn’t want to look as if he wasn’t as bold as she was. She slapped his cheek. It hurt, but he didn’t want to say how much because he couldn’t let her be tougher than he was. Of course, he had reined himself in, didn’t use his full strength because that would be wrong, whereas she wasn’t holding anything back. It stung. It was painful. It was exciting.

Then, somehow, about two months ago, the acrid fights of their day-to-day life spilled over into the sex and even sex wasn’t fun anymore. He had a coworker, Mandy, who went to lunch with him, listened and sympathized. He started staying out late, claiming he was working overtime. They were doing a lot of refi’s at work, so it was credible. Then he went home to Pauline, overflowing with this mysterious anger.

He started dropping by the bar where he met Pauline and, yes, sometimes, he took another girl out to the parking lot. The sex was never quite as good as what he had with Pauline, in their early days, but it was better than what he had now, which was pretty much nothing.

He had proposed this beach vacation as one last family get-together, to see if they could find their way back. He spun the one-room studio rental as a part of the plan—real togetherness, one big happy. But, in the back of his mind, he was already thinking about moving out. His mom would take him in, he could always count on his mom.

Now she’s moved out, leaving him with the kid. There had been a separate note just to him, one that he had hidden from Jani. This note was cool and businesslike. A typed note at that, which means she had written it before they ever got here. Probably pecked it out at the library, where they had word processors.

I will let you know of my plans as soon as possible. I know you want a divorce, so let’s make it quick and painless. For now, it’s best if Jani remains with you, in the house and routine she knows. I will call after I’m settled.

And now it’s Tuesday, their last day of “vacation.” He has trudged through the past forty-eight hours as if the end of this getaway was some sort of finish line. He cannot believe how hard it is to care for a child 24/7, although he told himself that’s because they’re not at their house, with all their stuff. Now, packing up to return home, he sees that life is just going to keep going, that he will have even more problems once he gets home. What will he do for child care? He loves Jani, but, Christ, he cannot be a single dad.

There’s a $125 penalty if you stay one minute past 11 A.M. on the last day of your rental, even on a Tuesday. Jani wanted one more morning at the beach, but Gregg can’t get them packed up and have the place clean enough to get his deposit back if they do that. Jani whines every second of the morning and shows a real talent for creating a mess wherever he has just cleaned—stepping in dust piles, leaving sticky prints on appliances, tables, walls. They get away with only minutes to spare, 10:57 on the dashboard clock.

When he turns to check his sights as he backs the car out of the driveway, he sees Jani in her car seat, clutching that damn note to her cheek. Those dark curls, olive skin, light eyes—she looks nothing like her mother. If he hadn’t been at the hospital when Jani was born, if he hadn’t been there for the pregnancy, he’d wonder if a woman could somehow fake having a kid. Jani has looked exactly like him since Day One. “That’s evolution at work,” Pauline told him. “If babies didn’t look like their fathers, they’d reject them. She’ll look more like both of us as time goes on.” Well, it’s three years later and the little girl in the car seat still looks like a female version of him. Put their childhood photos next to each other and you’d think they were fraternal twins. There’s not a trace of her mother in her face.

Pauline’s not going to dump this kid on him. He’ll find her, make her do right. He’s the one who’s supposed to be moving out, moving on.

“Whore,” he mutters.

“What, Daddy?”

“Nothing.”

Two miles up the highway, he takes the left turn onto State Highway 26 too fast and the boogie board he roped to the roof goes sliding off. Horns honk around him, as if he planned this fiasco. He’d leave the board on the roadside if he could, but that would make him no better than her. He pulls over and puts everything to rights, then fights for his way back into the westbound traffic, surprisingly thick for a Tuesday in June. Oh God, there’s a funeral, apparently for the most popular guy in Bethany Beach, the line of cars twenty, thirty deep. He adds this mishap to the growing list of everything that’s her fault. She has ruined his life. Or tried to. He’ll find her, make her fulfill her obligations, make her pay.

He remembers the first slap, after he gave her permission, so hard it almost brought tears to his eyes. It was as if she had been waiting to hit him for a very long time.

About the Author

Since LAURA LIPPMAN’s debut, she has won multiple awards and critical acclaim for provocative, timely crime novels set in her beloved hometown of Baltimore. Laura has been nominated for more than fifty awards for crime fiction and won almost twenty, including the Edgar. Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Now a perennial New York Times bestselling author, she lives in Baltimore and New Orleans with her family.

Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

Also by Laura Lippman

Sunburn

Wilde Lake

Hush Hush

After I’m Gone

And When She Was Good

The Most Dangerous Thing

I’d Know You Anywhere

Life Sentences

Hardly Knew Her

Another Thing to Fall

What the Dead Know

No Good Deeds

To the Power of Three

By a Spider’s Thread

Every Secret Thing

The Last Place

In a Strange City

The Sugar House

In Big Trouble

Butchers Hill

Charm City

Baltimore Blues

Copyright

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Femme Fatale first published in Geezer Noir; copyright © 2006 by Laura Lippman.

The Crack Cocaine Diet first published in The Cocaine Chronicles; copyright © 2005 by Laura Lippman.

Honor Bar first published in Dublin Noir; copyright © 2006 by Laura Lippman.

Dear Penthouse Forum (A First Draft) first published in Dangerous Women; copyright © 2005 by Laura Lippman.

Excerpt from Sunburn copyright © 2018 by Laura Lippman.

NASTY GIRLS. Copyright © 2018 by Laura Lippman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers. For information, address HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007.

Digital Edition SEPTEMBER 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-286859-6

Cover photograph © Nattika/Shutterstock

William Morrow Impulse is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.

William Morrow and HarperCollins are registered trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers in the United States of America and other countries.

About the Publisher

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Contents

1. Cover
2. Title Page
3. Contents
4. Femme Fatale
5. The Crack Cocaine Diet
6. Honor Bar
7. Dear Penthouse Forum (A First Draft)
8. Announcement

9. An Excerpt from Sunburn

1. Chapter 1
2. Chapter 2
3. Chapter 3

10. About the Author
11. Also by Laura Lippman
12. Copyright
13. About the Publisher

Guide

1. Cover
2. Contents
3. Chapter 1

1. ii
2. iii
3. iv
4. 3
5. 4
6. 5
7. 6
8. 7
9. 8
10. 9
11. 10
12. 11
13. 12
14. 13
15. 14
16. 15
17. 16
18. 27
19. 28
20. 29
21. 30
22. 31
23. 32
24. 33
25. 34
26. 66
27. 67
28. 68
29. 69
30. 70
31. 71
32. 72
33. 73
34. 74
35. 75
36. 76
37. 77
38. 78
39. 79
40. 80
41. 81
42. 82
43. 83
44. 131
45. 132
46. 133
47. 134
48. 135
49. 136
50. 137
51. 138
52. 139
53. 140
54. 141
55. 142
56. 143
57. 144
58. 145
59. 293