I started laughing, even though I’d been there myself. She was one of those flamboyant old doyennes one didn’t expect to meet outside of a movie theater and the idea of her walking down an aisle in a wedding dress while a terrified homosexual husband waited for her—three times—was priceless.
“The first time,” she told me, throwing her head back against the pillows, “why, I was just a girl. Seventeen years old. But such a beautiful girl, Cyril! If you saw pictures of me then, I promise you’d fall over in a faint. People said I was the most beautiful girl in New York. My father, who was in concrete, wanted an alliance with the O’Malley family—the steel O’Malleys, that is, not the textile O’Malleys—and so he basically sold me like a piece of chattel to a friend of his who had an idiot son going begging. Lance O’Malley III was his name. Seventeen years old, just like me. Irish blood in him, just like you. The poor child could barely read and had feathers in his head where his brain should have been. But he was a looker, I’ll give him that. All the girls were crazy for him as long as he didn’t open his mouth. Most of his conversation revolved around whether there might be aliens living in outer space. They don’t need to live there, I told him. There’s enough of them already here on earth, but he was too dim to understand what I meant. On the wedding night, after the reception, I took him to bed and I don’t mind admitting I was quite looking forward to what was going to happen next, but the poor boy started to cry when I took my panties off. I didn’t know what I’d done wrong and so I started crying too. And so there we sat, the pair of us, all night long, weeping into our pillows. The next morning, I waited until he was fast asleep and I carefully pulled his drawers down and climbed on top of him, but he woke up and got such a fright that he punched me in the face and I fell off the bed. Of course, Lance was distraught—he hadn’t a violent bone in his body—and when we came down to breakfast both our families tried to ignore the fact that I had a black eye. They must have thought we’d been up to wild games in the night! No such luck. Anyway, Lance and I stayed married for a year and he never touched me once during all that time and then one day I confided in my father that the marriage had never been consummated because, the truth is, I was close to killing myself with anxiety and that was the end of that. The whole thing was annulled and I never saw Lance O’Malley III again. The last I heard, he’d become a merchant sailor. That may or may not be true, however, so don’t spread it around.”
“But he didn’t put you off marriage?” I asked.
“Well of course not! That’s what people did in those days. If one husband didn’t work out, then you took another. It didn’t matter whose. You just kept going till you found a match. I’m sure there’s a card game that works along those lines if I could only remember what it’s called, but this damn disease is playing fast and loose with my memory. Now, my second marriage was by far my happiest. Henry liked boys as well as girls and he told me all about this before we went down the aisle and so we made an agreement that he could have a little fun on the side if I could too. We even shared a young man from time to time. Oh, don’t look so shocked, Cyril. It was the 1930s, people were a lot more evolved then than they are today. Henry and I might have rubbed along pretty well together forever, but the problem was that he was quite mad and threw himself off the Chrysler Building on his thirtieth birthday because he thought the best was all behind him. His hair had started to thin, poor dear, and he couldn’t stand the idea of what other indignities middle age might throw at him. Such drama! I could have lived without it. Although when I look in the mirror now, I wonder whether he might have had the right idea.”
“And the third time?” I asked.
She turned her head slowly to look out the window and her body suddenly began to pulsate with a spasm of pain. When she looked back at me, her expression had darkened and I could see that she wasn’t entirely sure who I was.
“Eleanor,” I said. “Are you all right?”
“Who are you?” she asked.
“It’s me, Cyril,” I said.
“I don’t know you,” she replied, waving me away. “Where’s George?”
“There’s no George here,” I told her.
“Get George!” she screamed, and then began to cause such a commotion that one of the nurses had to come in to settle her. Finally, she calmed down and I was considering whether I should leave for the day but she turned back to me with a cheerful smile as if nothing untoward had happened.
“The third time was no good either,” she continued. “It lasted only a few months. I married a famous Hollywood actor in secret on a beach in Mustique. I was rather besotted with him, to be honest, but I think that was because I was so accustomed to seeing him up there on the silver screen. He was pretty good in the sack, but he got bored with me after a few days and went back to his boys. The studio wanted to keep me on salary, but I had too much self-respect for that and we ended up getting divorced too. It never even came out that we’d been married.”
“Who was it?” I asked. “Someone famous?”
“Someone very famous,” she said, beckoning me forward. “Come here and I’ll whisper his name to you.”
I leaned forward, but perhaps I moved too slow for she quickly pushed me away.
“Oh, you’re just like everyone else, aren’t you?” she snapped. “You say you’ve come to help but you’re just as frightened of me as the rest of them. What a shame! Oh, you’ve let me down terribly!”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to—”
I leaned forward again but she lifted her scarred hands and held them in front of her face. “Just go,” she said. “Just go. Just go. Leave me to suffer alone.”
I stood up to leave, certain that when I returned a few days later she would have forgotten the incident entirely, and made my way back toward the reception area, where Shaniqua eyed me suspiciously and moved her purse into the top drawer, locking it carefully. I phoned up to Bastiaan’s office to see whether he was able to leave early for the day and he told me that he’d be another hour yet, but could I wait for him?
“Of course,” I said. “I’ll see you at reception.”
Hanging up, I did my best to make small talk with Shaniqua, but she was having none of it.
“Isn’t there anything useful you can do?” she asked. “Other than sitting around here bothering me?”
“I’m waiting for Dr. Van den Bergh,” I said. “I have time to kill. Tell me about yourself, Shaniqua. Where are you from?”
“What the hell do you care where I’m from?”
“I’m just making conversation, that’s all. Why do you always wear yellow?”
“Does it offend you in some way?”
“No, not at all. As a matter of fact, I happen to be wearing yellow boxer shorts today.”
“I didn’t care to know that.”
“Shaniqua,” I said, sounding out the syllables on my tongue. “It’s an unusual name.”
“Says Cyril.”
“Point taken. Is there anything around here to eat?”
She spun around in the chair and gave me her death-stare. “Ever been thrown out of a hospital by security?” she asked.
“No.”
“Wanna keep it that way?”