“Can’t say,” Chaz says. “But it does look like she spent it all.” He shrugs, stirs his coffee. It happens. People take out a loan for one thing, then spend it on other stuff.
Suddenly I can’t breathe. I need a cigarette. A shot of something. Anything. Chaz keeps stirring his coffee with a little spoon. He’s loving this, I can feel it. My helplessness. My sudden breathlessness, my flushed face, all of it is giving him a hard-on.
“I’d advise you to sell the condo. Use the equity to pay off the loans. You might barely break even if you do that.”
“I might break even?” I shout this. Everyone’s looking at us now. The waiters, the rich couple at the next table roused from their passion fruit and champagne brunch. I think of my studio apartment in Montreal. Barely decorated but for the skin products lining the walls of my single room. Closet bursting with dresses from work that I never wear. Every day the same black shift. Yet I was content in this little life, I was. In the back of my mind, did I think Mother would somehow save me?
“Well, there’s the Jaguar,” Chaz offers. “You could sell it, although it’s unlikely to be worth much since she dinged it up a bit.”
“Dinged it up?”
“Just in a few places. A few little fender kisses here and there. Some scratches.” He grins as if recalling some past intimacy. “You know your mother.”
Do I? I think of Mother behind the wheel in her dark glasses. Staring at me through the windshield, neither grinning nor frowning because she didn’t want to disrupt the planes of her face.
“Fixing it is going to cost a pretty penny, of course. Vintage Jaguars don’t grow on trees.” He looks at me sadly. “But you might get a buyer as is. Men do love their toys. Especially fixer-uppers.”
I think of her entourage of rich, smiling ghouls.
“As for the condo, I can put you in touch with a real estate agent,” Chaz is saying. “But you’ll want to fix the place up a bit too so you can sell it. It seemed a bit… run-down… last time I visited.” He laughs a little. I picture Chaz visiting Mother. Rolling up in his Rolls. Rocking on his elevated heels at her front door. Mother answering with a cigarette between her fingers. Donning a black silk shift or maybe one of her white suits. That pendant of a warped red heart shimmering darkly on her chest. Smilingly entreating, Entrée, entrée.
She’d never let him fuck her, would she?
“Anyway”—he signals to the waiter—“a lot to think about.” He looks at his watch and smiles. He’s so sorry he doesn’t have better news. I hear the rich couple toast each other with a clink of their flutes. Their easy laughter. What am I doing here in this place I can’t afford? In my borrowed sack dress? From our little shop, Sylvia said when she handed it to me. I’ll always think of it as ours, Belle. Then I remember. The shop.
“Wait! What about her dress shop, Belle of the Ball?” Named after my daughter, Mother would say, gripping the back of my neck. That shop was her consolation prize after her acting career failed spectacularly. Got one of her many gentleman friends to foot the bill. I’ll consider it an investment, I imagine he said, winking. Probably dead now.
“I could sell her share of the dress shop, right?”
Chaz looks at me. “She already sold it, Belle.”
Inside me, something shatters like glass. “Sold it?”
“A couple of months ago. To her partner. Sylvia Holmes?”
I drop my coffee cup. It makes a crashing sound like the world ending. We watch the spilled coffee gush to the ends of the table and drip, drip to the floor.
“You know the name, of course,” Chaz says quietly.
“I know the name.”
Another respectful silence. Or maybe he just doesn’t know what else to say. Doesn’t want to call attention to how little I know about Mother’s life. Maybe out of sensitivity or maybe because he doesn’t want another scene. The check comes. “All on me,” he says magnanimously, though all I had was the coffee. And then I remember that Mother owes him money too.
“Your mother,” he says wistfully. I watch the rings gleam on his hairy fingers as he signs the bill. “Bit of a mystery, wasn’t she?”
4
Belle of the Ball is in the heart of the village. Mother made sure you couldn’t miss it. How it gleamed there redly on the street full of shops, flanked by palm trees. Display window full of diabolically beautiful women. The sign featured a girl in a ball gown reclined in the crescent of a silver moon, swinging from an iron hook over the door. The shops nearby couldn’t really hold a candle to it. You’d walk right past their windows full of Turkish rugs and Chihuly glass, ignoring the salesmen lurking in the doorways.
Hello, they’d whisper, grinning desperately in the shadows.
Welcome, said the bolder ones, bowing their heads.
Mother never did that. She never lurked in her own doorway, grinning. The mannequins in the window did all the luring for her. The way they’d stare at you, through you, from behind the glass. Pointy white faces. Red lips curved in slight smiles. That strange color of eye—topaz—that glittered. All of them had Mother’s dark red hair. She’d put them in whimsical, sometimes sinister configurations. To catch the eye. Have a little fun. One day they might be waltzing. Another day they might be throttling one another. Or sitting for afternoon tea. They wore fanciful dresses, vintage-looking and shimmery as dreams. They oozed a formidable glamor. You’d become afraid, looking at the mannequins in their finery, even as desire filled you like darkness. Bitches, you’d think. Yet you’d want to buy whatever they were wearing. You’d go in and hand Mother all your money, the little shop bell jangling softly when you finally figured out the scissor-shaped door handle and pushed open the door. She had that handle installed just to make it that much harder for people to come in. But inside, oh inside, the air would be bright and sweet with her violets and smoke. Music played, too, something French or classical usually. Beautiful but intimidating. You’d be intimidated. You’d wonder if you made a mistake, coming through the scissor door. But you’d gather yourself. Remember the dress you saw, the dream of yourself it gave you. I want that, you’d say, pointing at the mannequin’s swanlike back clad in whatever dress. And Mother would size you up with her shop woman’s eyes. She was like a living mannequin behind the counter, oozing her own glamour. Looking so bored by you. Everything from her half-buttoned silk shirt to her loose curls to her lips red like a perfect stain said, I only give the very slightest of fucks. And maybe she’d oblige you or maybe she wouldn’t. Sorry, she might say, though she never once looked sorry. Last one, even if it wasn’t. Even if there were a row of these very dresses hanging right behind her. Shrug of her silk shoulders. Can’t be helped. A question of destiny.
I used to feel so much envy for the window mannequins. I’d imagine that they were Mother’s true children, that they tortured me like Cinderella’s evil sisters. Their whiteness glowed beneath the moon of my dreams. In these dreams, Mother also loved them more.
* * *