“He’d promised he’d stay over tonight.” She looked up at Dara, her eyes bewildered like a child’s. “Why is he doing this to me?”
Dara shook her head. Everything he said was a con.
“I’ve done everything he asked me to. Such filthy things,” she said, voice rising, “I’ve done it all and liked it.”
Dara paused a moment, pictures flashing in her head. Marie’s degradation. Hairy and ugly and splotchy, his great tufted back, his made-to-order teeth, the marks his socks left on his ankles. Battering away at her, splitting her open, slapping her softness, fist wrapped in her hair.
“That was your mistake,” Dara said. “You have to hold something back. Now you’re no longer his conquest. Now you’re just his whore.”
But Marie wasn’t listening.
* * *
*
The next morning, Dara approached the back office, following the sound of Marie’s lilting titter.
She saw the look on Charlie’s face first.
She heard him say, “Marie, what did you do? What did you do?”
And Dara thought she might walk into the back office to find Marie with a black eye like out of a cartoon, a pink slab of steak pitched over it.
“I don’t know, Charlie,” Marie was saying, her voice softly shrugging. “I just did it. I just did it.”
That was when Dara saw it. Marie’s hair. Caught up in a ponytail and stripped from sandy blond to near whiteness.
The whole office smelled sweet and chemical.
“You look ridiculous,” Dara said.
“Only to you,” Marie replied coolly. Then touching her hair a little nervously, patting it.
Seated at the desk, Charlie didn’t say anything, just kept staring.
Well, it was impossible not to. She looked like an old-time pinup who should be lounging in silver lingerie, in bright lamé. A gangster’s moll. Or maybe a hooker, high-end. The kind their dad, when he had a load on, talked about seeing in the port cities when he was in the Merchant Marines. Always a few with a fancy doll look you’d pay extra for just to come in their faces.
“Derek likes it,” she said, touching the nape of her neck, slipping the elastic free. “I like it.” Leaning down, whispering hotly in Dara’s ear, “He liked it so much he fucked me all night.”
Dara coughed loudly, feeling sick. That wasn’t a word Marie used, or didn’t use without stumbling over it, like she had the other night.
“Well,” Charlie said. “That’s that.” And reaching for his back pills, shaking the container, pills tumbling across the desk felt.
Something was hovering near the front of Dara’s head, but she couldn’t name it.
Suddenly: A phrase floated forward in her brain.
Hot Buttered Blonde.
She couldn’t get it out of her head, every time she saw Marie that day, her head like the fizzy top of a dandelion, a daffodil’s crimped corona.
It was many hours later that it came to her. That time last year, Mrs. Bloom submitting to the hairdresser, to the tantalizing name: Hot Buttered Blonde.
A coincidence, surely.
Mrs. Bloom, the year before, a brazen blonde. Her shame over it.
Marie, of course, had no shame.
* * *
*
He tells me things, Dara. He tells me what I do to him.
He says when he leaves here, he smells of it. All the heat and cunning.
The smell of the studio, which is the smell of me. Musk, baby powder, sweat.
He says he can smell it on his shirt cuffs, in the creases of his shoes. All the bodies so close, daring eyes and straining limbs. The salty brine of hunger and pain. Bodies, he never knew they could be so complicated, so tortured. He never knew how much girls like to torture themselves.
It was impossible. That man, with his two phones and his big voice and his swagger. A cliché of what women supposedly liked, secretly, under the skin.
This man—he was a nothing. There was no center to him. No feeling. And he didn’t care about Marie and would toss her aside soon enough or already had because a man like that—
He says he thinks about me when he’s driving home on the highway. When he’s pumping gas or rolling a cart down the grocery store aisle, the pink stacks of meat.
He thinks about having me again. Spreading me open. Pinning me like a butterfly.
His glove compartment—did you know, Dara—he keeps one of my leotards in there. He pulled it off my bedroom floor, pressed his face against its soft, wet crotch. Stuffed it in his pocket when I wasn’t looking. At stoplights, when he’s stuck in traffic, when the light goes red, he pops it open, puts his hand in there, thinks of me.