Fancy Pants

Chapter 10

Skeet walked up next to Dallie, and the two men stood on the edge of the pool watching her. Finally Skeet made an observation. "She's not coming up real fast."

Dallie tucked one thumb into the pocket of his jeans. "Doesn't look like she can swim. I should've figured."

Skeet turned to him. "Did you hear the peculiar way she says 'bastard*? Like 'bah-stud.' I can't say it the way she does. Real peculiar."

"Yeah. That fancy accent of hers sure does manage to screw up good American cusswords."

The splashing in the pool gradually began to slow down. "You gonna jump in and save her any time in

the next century?" Skeet inquired.

"Suppose I'd better. Unless you'd consider doing it."

"Hell, no. I'm going to bed."

Skeet turned to walk out the gate, and Dallie sat down on the edge of a lounge chair to pull off his boots. He watched for a moment to see how much struggle she had left, and when he judged the time to be about right, he wandered over to the edge and dived in.

Francesca had just realized how much she didn't want to die. Despite the movie, her poverty, the loss

of all her possessions, she was too young. Her whole life stretched before her. But as the awful weight

of the water pressed down on her, she understood that it was happening. Her lungs bumed and her limbs no longer responded to any command. She was dying, and she hadn't even lived yet.

Suddenly something caught her around the chest and began dragging her upward, holding her close, not letting her go, pulling her to the surface, saving her! Her head burst through the water and her lungs grabbed the air. She sucked it in, coughing and choking, grabbing at the arms around her for fear they would let her go, sobbing and crying with the pure joy of still being alive.

Without quite being aware how it had happened, she found herself being pulled up on the deck, the last shreds of her greige silk blouse staying in the water. But even when she felt the solid concrete surface beneath her, she wouldn't let Dallie go.

When she could finally speak, her words came out in small choked gasps. "I'll never forgive you… I hate you…" She clung to his body, painted herself on his bare chest, threw her arms around his shoulders, held him as tight as she had ever held anything in her life. "I hate you," she choked out. "Don't let me go."

"You really did get shook up there, didn't you, Francie?"

But she was beyond replying. All she could do was hold on for dear life. She held on to him as he carried her back into the motel room, held on to him while he talked to the motel manager who was waiting for them, held on as he pulled her case from the rubble, fumbled through it, and carried her to another room.

He leaned over to lay her on the bed. "You can sleep here for the-"

"No!" The now-familiar wave of panic returned.

He tried to pry her arms from his neck. "Aw, come on, Francie, it's almost two in the morning. I want to get at least a few hours' sleep before I have to wake up."

"No, Dallie!" She was crying now, gazing straight into those Newman-blue eyes and crying her heart out. "Don't leave me. I know you'll drive away if I let you go. I'll wake up tomorrow and you'll be gone and I won't know what to do."

"I won't drive away until I talk to you," he said finally, pulling her arms free.

"Promise?"

He pulled off the sodden Bottega Veneta sandals, which had miraculously stayed on her feet, and pitched them to the floor, along with the dry T-shirt he'd brought with him, "Yeah, I promise."

Even though he'd given his word, he sounded reluctant, and she made a small inarticulate sound of protest as he went out the door. Didn't she promise all sorts of things and then promptly forget about them? How did she know he wouldn't do the same? "Dallie?"

But he was gone.

Somewhere she found the energy to pull off her wet jeans and underwear, letting them fall in a heap beside the bed before she slid under the covers. She pushed her wet head into the pillow, closed her eyes, and in the instant before she fell asleep, wondered whether she might not have been better off if Dallie had left her on the bottom of the swimming pool.

Her sleep was deep and hard, but she still jolted awake barely four hours later when the first trickle of light seeped through the heavy draperies. Throwing off the covers, she jumped unsteadily from the bed and stumbled naked toward the window, every muscle in her body aching. Only after she'd pushed back the drapery and looked outside at the dreary, rain-soaked day did her stomach steady. The Riviera was still there.

Her heartbeat resumed its normal rhythm, and she slowly made her way toward the mirror, instinctively doing what she had done every morning of her life for as long as she could remember, greeting her reflection to assure herself that the world had not changed during the night, that it still orbited in a predestined pattern around the sun of her own beauty.

She let out a strangled cry of despair.

If she'd had more sleep, she might have handled the shock better, but as it was, she could barely comprehend what she saw. Her beautiful hair hung in tangled mats around her face, a long scratch marred the graceful curve of her neck, bruises had popped out on her flesh, and her bottom lip-her perfect bottom lip-was puffed up like a pastry shell.

Panic-stricken, she rushed to her case and inventoried her remaining possessions: a travel-size bottle of Rene Garraud bath gel, toothpaste (no sign of a toothbrush), three lipsticks, her peach eye shadow, and the useless dispenser of birth control pills Cissy's maid had packed. Her handbag yielded up two shades

of blusher, her lizard-skin wallet, and an atomizer of Femme. Those, along with the faded navy T-shirt Dallie had thrown at her the night before and the small pile of soggy clothes on the floor, were her possessions… all she had left in the world.

The enormity of her losses was too devastating to comprehend, so she rushed to the shower where she did as much as she could with a brown bottle of motel shampoo. She then used the few cosmetics she had left to try to reconstruct the person she'd been. After pulling on her uncomfortably soggy jeans and struggling into her wet sandals, she spritzed Femme under her arms and then slid on Dallie's T-shirt. She looked down at the word written in white on her left breast and wondered what an AGGIES was. Another mystery, another unknown to make her feel like an intruder in a strange land. Why had she never felt like this in New York? Without shutting her eyes, she could see herself rushing along Fifth Avenue, dining at La Caravelle, walking through the lobby of the Pierre, and the more she thought about the world she'd left behind, the more disconnected she felt from the world she'd entered. A knock sounded, and she quickly combed her hair with her fingers, not quite daring to risk another peek in the mirror.

Dallie stood leaning against the door frame wearing a sky blue windbreaker beaded with rainwater and bleached-out jeans that had a frayed hole at the side of one knee. His hair was damp and curled up at the ends. Dishwater blond, she thought disparagingly, not true blond. And he needed a really good cut. He also needed a new wardrobe. His shoulders pulled at the seams of his jacket; his jeans would have disgraced a Calcutta beggar.

It was no use. No matter how clearly she saw his flaws, no matter how much she needed to reduce him to the ordinary in her own eyes, he was still the most impossibly gorgeous man she had ever seen.

He leaned one hand against the door frame and looked down at her. "Francie, ever since last night, I've been trying to make it obvious to you in as many ways as I could that I don't want to hear your story, but since you're hell-bent on telling it and since I'm getting pretty close to desperate to get rid of you, let's do it right now." With that, he walked into her room, slumped down in a straight-backed chair, and put his boots up on the edge of the desk. "You owe me someplace in the neighborhood of two hundred bucks."

"Two hundred-"

"You pretty well trashed that room last night." He leaned back in the chair until only the rear legs were on the floor. "A television, two lamps, a few craters in the Sheetrock, a five-by-four picture window. The total came to five hundred sixty dollars, and that was only because I promised the manager I'd play eighteen holes with him the next time I come through. There only seemed to be a little over three hundred in your wallet-not enough to take care of all that."

"My wallet?" She tore at the latches of her case. "You got into my wallet! How could you do something like that? That's my property. You should never have-" By the time she'd pulled her wallet from her purse, the palms of her hands were as clammy as her jeans. She opened it and gazed inside. When she could finally speak, her voice was barely a whisper, "It's empty. You've taken all my money."

"Bills like that have to be settled real quick unless you want to catch the attention of the local gendarmes."

She sagged down on the end of the bed, her sense of loss so overwhelming that her body seemed to have gone numb. She had hit bottom. Right at this moment. Right now. Everything was gone-cosmetics, clothes, the last of her money. She had nothing left. The disaster that had been picking up speed like a runaway train ever since Chloe's death had finally jumped the track.

Dallie tapped a motel pen on the top of the desk. "Francie, I couldn't help but notice that you didn't have any credit cards tucked away in that purse of yours… or any plane ticket either. Now, I want to hear you tell me real quick that you've got that ticket to London put away somewhere inside Mr. Vee-tawn, and that Mr. Vee-tawn is closed up in one of those twenty-five-cent lockers at the airport."

She hugged her chest and stared at the wall. "I don't know what to do," she choked out.

"You're a big girl, and you'd better come up with something real fast."

"I need help." She turned to him, pleading for understanding. "I can't handle this by myself."

The front legs of his chair banged to the floor. "Oh, no you don't! This is your problem, lady, and you're not going to push it off on me." His voice sounded hard and rough, not like the laughing Dallie who'd picked her up at the side of the road, or the knight in shining armor who'd saved her from certain death

at the Blue Choctaw.

"If you didn't want to help me," she cried out, "you shouldn't have offered me that ride. You should have left me, like everyone else."

"Maybe you better start thinking about why everybody wants to get rid of you so bad."

"It's not my fault, don't you see? It's circumstances." She began to tell him all of it, beginning with Chloe's death, stumbling over her words in her haste to get them out before he walked away. She told him how she'd sold everything to pay for her ticket home only to realize that even if she did have a ticket, she couldn't possibly go back to London without money, without clothes, with the news of her humiliation in that terrible movie on everyone's lips so that they were all laughing at her. She realized right then that she had to stay where she was, where no one knew her, until Nicky got back from his sordid fling with the blond mathematician and she had a chance to talk to him over the telephone. That's why she'd set out to find Dallie at the Blue Choctaw. "Don't you see? I can't go back to London until I know Nicky will be right there at the airport waiting for me."

"I thought you told me he was your fiance?"

"He is."

"Then why is he having a fling with a blond mathematician?"

"He's sulking."

"Jesus, Francie-"

She rushed over to kneel down beside his chair and looked up at him with her heart-stopping eyes. "It's not my fault, Dallie. Really. The last time I saw him, we had this awful quarrel just because I turned down his marriage proposal." A great stillness came over Dallie's face and she realized he had misinterpreted what she'd said. "No, it's not what you're thinking! He'll marry me! We've quarreled hundreds of times and he always proposes again. It's just a matter of getting hold of him on the telephone and telling him I forgive him."

Dallie shook his head. "Poor son of a bitch," he muttered.

She tried to glare at him, but her eyes were too teary, so she stood and turned her back, struggling for control. "What I need, Dallie, is some way to endure the next few weeks until I can talk to Nicky. I thought you could help me, but last night you wouldn't talk to me, and you made me so angry, and now you've taken my money." She spun on him, her voice catching on a sob. "Don't you see, Dallie? If you'd just been reasonable, none of this would have happened."

"I'll be goddamned." Dallie's boots hit the floor. "You're getting ready to blame all this on me, aren't you? Jesus, I hate people like you. No matter what happens, you manage to shift the blame to somebody else."

She jumped up. "I don't have to listen to this! All I wanted was some help."

"And a small bit of cash to go with it."

"I can return every penny in a few weeks."

"If Nicky takes you back." He stretched out his legs again, crossing them at the ankles. "Francie, you don't seem to realize that I'm a stranger with no obligation to you. I don't do all that good a job of taking care of myself, and I'm sure as hell not going to take you on, even for a few weeks. To tell you the truth, I don't even like you."

She looked at him, bewilderment imprinted on her face. "You don't like me?"

"I really don't, Francie." His burst of anger had faded, and he spoke calmly and with such obvious conviction that she knew he was telling the truth. "Look, honey, you're a real traffic stopper with that face of yours, and even though you're a little on the puny side, you kiss great. I can't deny that I had a few wayward thoughts about what the two of us might have been able to accomplish underneath the covers, and if you had a different personality I could even see myself losing my head over you for a few weeks. But the thing of it is, you don't have a different personality, and the way you are is pretty much a composite of all the bad qualities of every man and woman I ever met, with none of the good qualities thrown in to even things out."

She sank down on the end of the bed, hurt enveloping her. "I see," she said quietly.

He stood and pulled out his wallet. "I don't have a lot of ready cash right now. I'll cover the rest of the motel bill with plastic and leave fifty dollars to hold you for a few days. If you get around to paying me back, send me a check in care of General Delivery, Wynette, Texas. If you don't get around to it, I'll know things didn't work out between you and Nicky, and hope greener pastures turn up soon."

With that speech, he tossed the motel key on the desk and walked out the door.

She was finally alone. She stared down at a dark stain that looked like an outline of Capri on the motel carpet. Now. Now she'd hit bottom.

Skeet leaned out the passenger window as Dallie approached the Riviera. "You want me to drive?" he asked. "You can crawl in the back and try for a few hours' sleep."

Dallie opened the driver's door. "You drive too damned slow, and I don't feel like sleeping."

"Suit yourself." Skeet settled in and handed Dallie a Styrofoam coffee cup with the lid still snapped on. Then he gave him a slip of pink paper. "The cashier's phone number."

Dallie crumpled the paper and pushed it into the ashtray, where it joined two others. He pulled on his

cap. "You ever heard of Pygmalion, Skeet?"

"Is he the guy who played right tackle for Wynette High?"

Dallie used his front teeth to pull the lid off his coffee cup while he turned the key in the ignition. "No, that was Pygella, Jimmy Pygella. He moved to Corpus Christi a few years back and opened up a Midas muffler shop. Pygmalion's this play by George Bernard Shaw about a Cockney flower girl who gets

made over into a real lady." He flipped on the windshield wipers.

"Don't sound too interesting, Dallie. The play I liked was that Oh! Calcutta! we saw in St. Louis. Now that was real good."

"I know you liked that play, Skeet. I liked it, too, but you see it's not generally regarded as a great piece of literature. It doesn't have a lot to say about the human condition, if you follow me. Pygmalion, on the other hand, says that people can change… that they can get better with a little direction." He threw the car into reverse and backed out of the parking place. "It also says that the person directing that change doesn't get anything for his trouble but a load of grief."

Francesca, her eyes wide and stricken, stood in the open door of the motel room clutching her case to her chest like a teddy bear and watched the Riviera pull out of the parking place. Dallie was really going to do it. He was going to drive away and leave her all by herself, even though he'd admitted he'd thought about going to bed with her. Until now, that had always been enough to hold any man to her side, but suddenly it wasn't. How could that be? What was happening to her world? Bewilderment underscored her fear. She felt like a child who'd learned her colors wrong and just found out that red was really yellow, blue was really green-only now that she knew what was wrong, she couldn't imagine what to do about it.

The Riviera swung around to the exit, waited for a break in the traffic, and then began to move out onto the wet road. The tips of her fingers had gone numb, and her legs felt weak, as if all the muscles had lost their strength. Drizzle dampened her T-shirt, a lock of hair fell forward over her cheek. "Dallie!" She started to run as fast as she could.

"The thing of it is," Dallie said, looking up into his rearview mirror, "she doesn't think about anybody but herself."

"Most self-centered woman I ever encountered in my life," Skeet agreed.

"And she doesn't know how to do a damn thing except maybe put on makeup."

"She sure as hell can't swim."

"She doesn't have even one lick of common sense."

"Not a lick."

Dallie uttered a particularly offensive oath and slammed on the brakes.

Francesca reached the car, gasping for breath in small sobs. "Don't! Don't leave me alone!"

The strength of Dallie's anger took her by surprise. He vaulted out of the door, tore the case from her hands, and then backed her up against the side of the car so that the door handle jabbed into her hip.

"Now you listen to me, and you listen good!" he shouted. "I'm taking you under duress, and you stop

that goddamn sniveling right now!"

She sobbed, blinking against the drizzle. "But I'm-"

"I said to stop it! I don't want to do this-I got a real bad feeling about it-so from this minute on, you'd better do exactly what I say. Everything I say. You don't ask me any questions; you don't make any comments. And if you give me one minute of that fancy horseshit of yours, you'll be out on your skinny ass."

"All right," she cried, her pride hanging in tatters, her voice strangling on her humiliation. "All right!"

He looked at her with a contempt he made no effort to disguise, then jerked open the back door. She turned to scramble inside, but just as she bent forward, he drew back his hand and cracked her hard across her bottom. "There's more where that came from," he said, "and my hand's just itching for the next shot."

Every mile of the ride to Lake Charles felt like a hundred. She turned her face to the window and tried to pretend she was invisible, but when occupants of other cars looked idly over at her as the Riviera sped past, she couldn't suppress the illogical feeling that they knew what had happened, that they could actually see how she had been reduced to begging for help, see that she had been struck for the first time in her life. I won't think about it, she told herself as they sped past flooded rice fields and swampland covered with slimy green algae. I'll think about it tomorrow, next week, any time but now when I might start crying again and he might stop the car and set me out on the highway. But she couldn't help thinking about it, and she bit a raw place on the inside of her already battered bottom lip to keep from making the smallest sound.

She saw a sign that said Lake Charles, and then they crossed a great curved bridge. In the front seat, Skeet and Dallie talked on and off, neither of them paying any attention to her.

"The motel's right up there," Skeet finally remarked to Dallie. "Remember when Holly Grace showed up here last year with that Chevy dealer from Tulsa?"

Dallie grunted something Francesca didn't quite catch as he pulled into the parking lot, which didn't look all that different from the one they'd left less than four hours earlier, and swung around toward the office. Francesca's stomach growled, and she realized she hadn't had anything to eat since the evening before when she'd grabbed a hamburger after pawning her suitcase. Nothing to eat… and no money to buy anything with. And then she wondered who Holly Grace might be, but she was too demoralized to feel more than a passing curiosity.

"Francie, I'd already pushed my credit card limit pretty close to the edge before I met you, and that little romp of yours just about finished the job. You're going to have to share a room with Skeet."

'Wo.'"

"No!"

Dallie sighed and flicked off the ignition. "All right, Skeet. You and I'll share a room until we get rid of Francie."

"Not hardly." Skeet threw open the door of the Riviera. "I haven't shared a room with you since you turned pro, and I'm not gonna start now. You stay up half the night and then make enough noise in the morning to wake the dead." He climbed out of the car and headed toward the office, calling back over his shoulder, "Since you're the one who's so all-fired anxious to bring Miss Fran-chess-ka along, you can damn weil sleep with her yourself."

Dallie swore the entire time he was unloading his suitcase and carrying it inside. Francesca sat on the edge of one of the room's two double beds, her back straight, her feet side by side, knees pressed together,

like a little girl on her best behavior at a grown-up party. From the next room she heard the sound of a television announcer reporting on an anti-nuclear group protesting at a missile site; then someone flipped the channel to a ball game and "The Star-Spangled Banner" rang out. Bitterness welled up inside her as the music brought back the memory of the round button she had spotted on the taxi driver's shirt: AMERICA, LAND OF OPPORTUNITY. What kind of opportunity? The opportunity to pay for food and shelter with her body in some sordid motel room? Nothing came entirely free, did it? And her body was all she had left. By coming into this room with Dallie, hadn't she implicitly promised to give him something in return?

"Will you stop looking like that!" Dallie threw his suitcase on the bed. "Believe me, Miss Fancy Pants, I don't have any designs on your body. You stay on your side of the room, as far out of my sight as possible, and we'll do just fine. But first I want my fifty bucks back."

She had to salvage some morsel of her self-respect when she handed him back his money, so she tossed her head, flicking her hair back over her shoulders as if she hadn't a care in the world. "I gather you're some sort of golfer," she remarked offhandedly, trying to show him that his surliness didn't affect her. "Would that be a vocation or an avocation?"

"More like an addiction, I guess." He grabbed a pair of slacks from his suitcase and then reached for the zipper on his jeans.

She spun around, quickly turning her back to him. "I-I think I'll stretch my legs a bit, take a turn around the parking lot."

"You do that."

She circled the parking lot twice, reading bumper stickers, studying newspaper headlines through the glass doors of the dispensers, gazing sightlessly at the front-page photograph of a curly-haired man screaming

at someone. Dallie didn't seem to expect her to go to bed with him. What a relief that was. She stared at

the neon vacancy sign, and the longer she stared, the more she wondered why he didn't desire her. What

was wrong? The question nagged like an itch. She might have lost her clothes, her money, all of her possessions, but she still had her beauty, didn't she? She still had her allure. Or had she somehow lost that, too, right along with her luggage and her makeup?

Ridiculous. She was exhausted, that was all, and she couldn't think straight. As soon as Dallie left for the golf course, she would go to bed and sleep until she felt like herself again. A few remnant sparks of optimism flickered inside her. She was merely tired. A decent night's sleep and everything would be fine.