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BUT ALTHOUGH he was paying for her whole life, McMahon still wasn’t sure whether he truly possessed her. To make certain that he did, he tried to make Rose miserable. This was the only real proof that a woman belonged to you. Anybody could make a girl happy. It was only when a girl was in love with a man that he could ruin her self-esteem. He knew he would have to get around to that. He only had her for now.
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ROSE WAS DRESSED to the nines that weekend. She was feeling optimistic waiting for McMahon’s response. They shuffled into the Roxy together, sitting down around the enormous round center table with McMahon’s associates and their girlfriends. In the middle of the dinner, McMahon got everyone’s attention.
“Here’s a question for you all. Rose wants to replace Antoine. What do you think of my girlfriend coming in as a business partner with me?”
Rodney Chesterwick, who owned the Toscadero Casino, looked up from his glass of whiskey, shook his head and stated, “Women ought to be at home. Otherwise, who prepares the food?”
“Can we just change the subject?” asked Harry Manuedo, who owned the Ravishing Hotel. “What movie are we going to see?”
They didn’t want to get involved in a domestic dispute. If they did, they would go home to their wives. They thought Rose was crazy. Didn’t she have any idea how good she had it, considering it was the Depression? She had a big plate of turkey in front of her. She had a little mountain of cranberries in front of her. They would turn her lips red and warm up her belly.
Rose realized that these men would never help her. She also knew that McMahon had made it clear to them that they were to treat her like an inferior. She was so humiliated, she couldn’t speak. She didn’t know how to talk back to a group of men like this. And she knew that if she tried to say even a single word, she would burst out crying, and that would somehow prove every point they had just made. So she sat there quietly through the evening. Everyone else went back to talking. All the molls went back to being delightful and screaming out loud in laughter.
McMahon wasn’t satisfied that he had hurt Rose. Once he had gotten a sniff of her pain, he had to have more of it. He wanted to hurt her more. He was all of a sudden enraged that he had ever been under her spell; now that the tables had suddenly turned, he was on her the minute they got back to the hotel.
“You think you’re good in bed, but you really aren’t. You’re ridiculous. Other women are more passionate. They smell better. They buy themselves perfumes and bathe in them.
“Instead of asking people about what the seating capacity in their restaurants is, why don’t you ask the women some of the things you need to know? Like how they all smell so good? Do you want to know how to identify a proper lady? You lift up her arm, you stick your face in her armpit and inhale and it still smells good. You know, most girls make an effort to please a man.”
Rose sat on the bed. There was no point in defending herself against these accusations. She wouldn’t dignify them. If you were stupid enough to listen to them, then you deserved them.
“It’s bad enough that you flirt with other men, but it’s the type of men you flirt with. It makes me really question myself. Like, if you’re at all attracted to me, does that mean I’m a lowlife creep too? How stupid was I? I mean, it’s one thing to fuck the help, but you don’t go and set them up in their own apartment and parade them around town.”
It made her feel like a rabbit caught in headlights. It made her feel as if a curse had been placed on her and now she was a little statue.
“Why don’t you please tell me who you would be, if it weren’t for me? I want you to explain it to me. You would be scrubbing floors, if you were lucky. You would be trying to seduce some other boss, who would have the good sense to ignore you.”
“I don’t know where I’d be?” she asked sarcastically.
“Why don’t you gain some weight? You look like you’re starving to death. I can see your rib cage poking out. No man wants to see something like that. Ask any man, he’ll tell you that he likes a woman with flesh he can grab on to. He likes a big ass he can stuff his face into. That’s it. That’s the main value that a woman affords to a man. I should be a happy man. I’m rich. Everyone knows who I am. I’m a respectable member of the community.”
“Are you?”