Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes (9 page)

I'm sure they thought I was nuts, but I didn't let that stop me as I elbowed my way through the crowd. Besides, I didn't want to stick around long enough for Elizabeth Hepburn to tell me she'd once slept with someone named Duncan.

I was going to finally see the man from the commercials up close and personal! I was going to finally see the man of my dreams in the flesh!

But when I got to the front of the crowd, I saw it wasn't
The
Yo-Yo Man at all. It was merely
A
Yo-Yo Man. And not even any kind of great Yo-Yo Man. It was Furthest Guy in the commercials, the guy who was always dropping his yo-yo in the background, while the real Yo-Yo Man,
The
Yo-Yo Man, showed his stuff.

But,
hey.
Up close and personal, Furthest Guy wasn't half-bad, at least not in the looks department. He was taller than I'd have expected—he always looked so tiny and insignificant in those commercials—and his hair was no longer so short, the curly chestnut strands poking out from the bottom of the Mets cap he wore backward. This near, I could finally see his eye color as he kept those warm brown eyes focused on the twin yo-yos he was twirling simultaneously. And his body…True, he had on those oversized long shorts, the ones that I hate with the waistbands that reveal the tops of guys' underwear, on top of which was a T-shirt advertising the casino we were in; I figured the casino probably made him wear the T-shirt. As for the obnoxious long shorts, I figured it was probably part of the cool yo-yo guy persona. I mean, why else would anyone our age—and he did look to be about the same age as me—wear those stupid long shorts if they didn't have to? As for the Mets hat, I was hoping that was for real. I may not have cared about sports, but my dad was a big Mets fan and it would please him greatly once I brought this Chris Westacott home.

What was I thinking? I shook my head to clear my thoughts. Clearly the champagne, coupled with seeing a real Yo-Yo Man, was going straight to my head.

I decided to stop fantasizing and instead just watched him perform. While technically not as proficient as The Yo-Yo Man, he was still pretty darn good; certainly the crowd thought so.

He was pretty darn good, at least, until he lost control of one of his twin yo-yos and the darn thing nailed me in the eye. Then, suddenly, he was Furthest Guy again.

“Shit!” He dropped his other yo-yo and rushed over, placed his hands gently on my shoulders. “Are you okay? Do you think you're going to lose it?”

I looked at Furthest Guy out of my one good eye. Despite that he'd just popped me one, he still looked really cute. Plus, he looked so concerned…

“Don't you think you've done quite enough?” It was The Voice again and now he was pushing Furthest Guy out of the way. “Here, let me look at that.”

Billy Charisma placed his fingers gently but firmly under my chin, tilting my head slightly upward. In his other hand, he'd produced a pristine white silk handkerchief, as though he'd expected all kinds of carnage.

“Oh,” he said, full stop, surprised. “It's not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. No doubt you'll have a shiner by morning, but the skin isn't cut at all and I don't even see any broken blood vessels. If only this
jerk
had been more careful…” He gestured at Furthest Guy.

“I'm sorry,” Furthest Guy said humbly. “I don't know what happened. I keep practicing and practicing this Double Whammy trick and it goes well enough whenever I do it at home. But every time I try to perform it in public—”

“Maybe you should only perform it at home alone then,” Billy Charisma said. There was a smile on his face, but his tone was all ice.

“Are you okay?” Hillary said, busting through the crowd.

“Don't Heimlich me!” I shouted.

“Huh?”

“I think it's time we all went home,” Stella said.

“Good night, Baby,” Billy Charisma said softly, kissing me gently above my injury.

I opened my mouth to thank him, but before I could even get the
th
out, Conchita and Rivera were hustling me toward the exit.

We were nearly out the door when one of the others thought to ask—I'm pretty sure it was Hillary, but I was pretty out of it at that point—how I'd done at the tables.

“Fair,” I said. “I've got a little over five hundred dollars in my pocket.”

“A little over…and you call that just
fair?
” Hillary said, encouragingly. I was sure it was her that time. “I think that's phenomenal!”

“You know,” said Elizabeth Hepburn, “back in my Louis B. Mayer days, there were whole
weeks
when I didn't make that kind of money. You hear some of these young actresses now complain they're only making fifteen million dollars a picture. Ha! I'd like to see them try to survive back when we had the studio system. Then let them talk to me about hardships.”

“But it's not enough,” I answered Hillary. “It's not even half of what I need for the Ghost.”

“Oh.” Hillary's face fell on my account. Then she brightened. “I know—you just need a good, solid plan.”

“You're right,” I said, suddenly brightening, as well. “I do need a plan. And I've got one.”

“You do? Already?”

“Yes. Next Saturday, I'm taking the bus to Atlantic City. I'll use what I won tonight as my stake. Just think about it. Tonight, I managed to walk out with five times what I walked in with. If I can do the same next week, I'll be able to buy Ghosts for both of us!”

“Are you sure you don't have a head injury?” Stella asked. “Because I'm doing the math here and, frankly, I think you're nuts. You really think you can take five hundred dollars to New Jersey—
New Jersey!
—and come back out with twenty-five hundred?”

But I never got to reply to her skepticism, for as we approached Conchita's white limo, I heard footsteps that I'd vaguely registered behind us before, as those footsteps sped up, passing us on the left.

“Hey!” Rivera said. “Isn't that the same guy who you were talking to back in the casino? Isn't that the same guy who saved you from that stupid jerk with the flying yo-yo?”

I saw the back of that black tux walking away from me, a wisp of smoke trailing up over his head. I'd have bet all the money in my pockets it was Billy Charisma.

“Yes,” I said. “That's Billy Charisma.”

“Huh.” Rivera put one hand on her hip, thrust that hip out. “I don't think so,
chica.
”

“No, really, he is, and—”

“I don't like that guy,
chica,
” she said. “I don't trust him.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because she's jealous of anyone who's prettier than she is…like me,” Conchita said. “C'mon, ladies.”

Rivera's words made me feel uneasy. Why would she say something like that about Billy Charisma? She didn't even
know
Billy Charisma. And besides, no matter how uneasy her words made me, feeling the light of his attention all night had made me feel
good.
It was the first time any guy had paid that quality attention to me in I didn't want to think about how long, and I pushed away the negative feelings: the ones I'd felt when Billy had cowed Furthest Guy—after all, Furthest Guy didn't
mean
to yo-yo me—or the mixed feelings I'd had, feelings of being cared for and condescended to all at the same time, when he called me Baby.

As Conchita drove into the night, I heard the soft snores of Hillary and Stella and Rivera. Elizabeth Hepburn, still wired like a kid allowed to stay up too late on New Year's Eve but losing energy fast, rested her head on my shoulder, reliving the night.

“I'm glad you had a good time,” I said when she paused for breath, meaning it.

“Oh, God, yes,” she said. “I had a blast! And seeing that yo-yo guy at the end? It reminded me of the time me and Duncan…”

See? I knew it would come to that.

“Elizabeth?” I said, gently cutting off her reminiscences.

“Hmm?”

Even though Conchita couldn't hear me because she was too busy driving up front, and the others were asleep, I whispered as I spoke. “I was wondering,” I said, trying to tread delicately, “all these men you say you've been with in the past…some of them have been dead a really long time and some of them I'm pretty sure were, well, gay. So did you really…?” My voice trailed off. I couldn't bring myself to accuse her outright of lying.

“You caught me,” she said ruefully.

Now I was sorry I'd even brought it up. The last thing I ever wanted to do was hurt her. “No, I—”

“It's all right,” she said. “But I did sleep with at least half of them…and I'm not saying which.”

“No, of course not. I just wanted to know why—”

“Why I exaggerate so much? Why I claim to have twice as many notches on my belt than I really do?”

In the relative darkness of the limo, I nodded.

She sighed. “Everyone wants to be cool, Delilah. Don't you know that by now?” She sighed. “Even old ladies.” I felt her frail shoulders shrug against my side. “I guess I just always figured that if people thought I lived this exciting life, they'd think I was still cool and want to talk to me. When you're young in Hollywood, everyone wants a piece of you. But once you get old? All they do is trot you out once a year, so everyone can stare and say, ‘You're still here? We all thought you were dead.'”

“You are so still cool,” I said, putting my arm around those frail shoulders, smoothing her hair with my hand. “You have led an exciting life. Why, you're
the
one and only Elizabeth Hepburn!”

“I am that,” she said. “And,” she added, with a twinkle in her voice, “I've slept with at least half the men I've said I had.”

“That, too,” I agreed.

“You won't tell anyone,” she said, “will you? That I exaggerate my CV a bit?”

“Never,” I vowed.

“Thank you, dear.” She yawned. “And thank you for everything else.”

“What? I haven't done anything.”

“Are you kidding me? The trip to Manhattan, tonight at Foxwoods—thanks to you, I've had the time of my life, and at a time when I thought I was all finished having the time of my life.”

A few minutes later, she was snoring softly with the others and I was back to confronting the paradox that was my feelings about Billy Charisma. Was he good whack or bad whack?

Oh, well. I sighed as I fell asleep in the back of the limo, none of it mattered anyway since I was sure I'd never see either of them again, neither Billy Charisma
nor
Furthest Guy.

But I did see them both. Oh, did I ever. Just as soon as my eyes closed completely and REM kicked in—not the rock band; I'm talking about the sleep thing here—I dreamt of both of them together. I don't mean they were together, which would be really strange, but rather, they were both there and they were each taking turns dancing with me. Billy Charisma was a great dancer, as you'd expect, but the big surprise was Furthest Guy: with a girl in his arms—me—he was just as good a dancer.

Maybe even better.

“W
hat's this?”

We were sitting out on our balcony the following day, enjoying the late-summer sun while drinking some recuperative Bloody Marys, and I'd just handed Hillary three hundred dollars in cash.

“Are you sure you can stand to drink something other than Diet Pepsi Lime or Jake's Fault Shiraz?” Hillary had said when I'd suggested the Bloody Marys. Then she'd put her hand to my forehead. “You don't feel feverish,” she'd said.

“Cut it out,” I'd said, brushing her hand away. And, hey, hadn't I just drunk champagne the night before? “I've been doing so many things lately that I wouldn't normally do, what's one more?”

In truth, all of the “doing so many things lately that I wouldn't normally do” was making me feel edgy in the extreme, like I'd gone ice skating on a lake that was about to melt through. But if doing things like going to Foxwoods the night before and the prospective trip to Atlantic City was to become a part of my new reality, I was going to have to break from my old “I only eat the same foods at each meal” mode. Either that, or become the crazy lady on the bus carrying her own purple lunch bag with her to the casinos.

“It's for you,” I said now, referring to the three hundred dollars.

“I don't get it,” Hillary said.

She might not get it, but I certainly did. For years now, she'd been a great friend to me. Not only was she undyingly supportive—wasn't that her the night before telling me I'd done great and encouraging me to do even better in the future?—but she was also the codependent who was always letting me be just as weird as I needed to be…except for when she was making fun of me for it, that is. Despite the latter, Hillary deserved some kind of reward for being the greatest friend I'd ever had and I was determined to give it to her.

“At first, I thought maybe you could get the Pippa with it. It's a metallic flat thong that retails for three hundred and thirty dollars—I found that out when I looked online last night.”

“Wait a second,” she said. “You were in my room after we got home last night, surfing on my computer,
while I was sleeping?
”

“Yes, and it's getting kind of messy in there. I think you should clean—”

“You were in my room—”

“Hey,” I said, “what can I say? I couldn't sleep. So I started planning for my Choo shoes future. But then I started thinking about you.”

“And you thought I should have the Pippas?”

“Well, yes, until I realized they were a little more than I can budget right now, so I think you should get the Momo Flats.”

“Why does that name sound familiar?”

“Because Elizabeth Hepburn flirted with them briefly when we went to New York, before rejecting them for the Fayres as being the shoe that will finally knock out Bacall at the Oscars. You remember the Momos, don't you? They were a metallic laser-cut shoe. The label underneath said they were available in blood-orange, bronze, charcoal, chocolate, gold, purple and silver.”

“How do you remember all that detail?”

“I looked under all the shoes and committed the information to memory. It was important to me, like knowing that ‘I am almost out at heels' comes from
The Merry Wives of Windsor,
not the Jimmy Choo catalog. But that's neither here nor there, because here's the best part.”

“I can't wait.”

“I really don't think those colors I listed for the Momo Flats would be the most exciting for you, but the display model was in that blue-green color we all liked the best. I think you should get those with the money. They're only two hundred and ninety-five dollars. I
want
you to get those with the money.”

“You're paying for it all?”

“Well, no. I can't pay the taxes. You'll need to pay the taxes yourself.”

“But this is supposed to be part of your stake money for Atlantic City.” She tried to hand the money back to me. “I can't take this!”

I shoved the money back at her. “But you
have
to take it!” I said.

“But I'll feel lousy if you don't achieve your dream on account of me!”

“But I'll feel lousier if you don't let me do this for you!”

“But why, why,
why,
Delilah, is this so important to you?”

I cupped my hand behind my ear. “Did someone let Tom Jones in?” I asked.

“What?”
She was exasperated.

“Never mind.” I brushed it off. There was no point in letting her in on just how much weirder I was getting, meaning that ever since we'd set foot into the casino the night before, I'd been hearing an undernote of Tom Jones singing all the time. Really. She'd been psychoanalyzing me for years for free. I certainly didn't want her to start medicating me.

Instead, I speechified for a bit.

“Ever since our first day at college, you've taken care of me. You cheered for me the two times I actually got boyfriends, even though their nicknames were The Weasel and The Rat, respectively, and mourned with me the two times I lost them. You cheered for me when I aced my Shakespeare class, held my hair whenever I vomited after too many Singapore Slings, cried with me and helped me carry my things to the car after I flunked out. Then, as soon as you graduated yourself, you found us an apartment I could actually afford half the rent on—I know if you were just looking for yourself, you could have gone higher, lived somewhere grander than South Park—so that I could finally move out of my dad's place. And since then, you've been just as supportive as ever.”

“But I tease you,” she interrupted, “sometimes mercilessly.”

“But I deserve it,” I countered. “If it weren't for you, I'd never stop and think about the bigger picture or the fact that at age twenty-eight all I've got to show for myself is the Golden Squeegee Award.”

“But you worked so hard for that.”

“See?” I pointed the celery stalk from my Bloody Mary at her accusingly. “You're doing it again.”

“Ohh, don't be so pointing-things-outish. In a minute, I'll be giving you a hard time again.”

“True,” I conceded. “But I need someone to give me a hard time. My dad never does it, my mom didn't live long enough to do it now.”

We bowed our heads for a moment of silence over the dregs of our Bloody Marys in honor of Lila Sampson, may she rest in peace.

“You do everything for me,” I said, breaking the moment first, “but I never get to do anything for you, Hillary. Let me do this one thing.”

“But if I wanted the shoes that desperately, I could afford them myself.”

“But you already said you wouldn't buy them until I could afford mine. Besides, if you bought them for yourself, then I'd be denied the chance to do something for you for once. Don't deny me that.”

“Ohh…all
right.
You can buy me the damn shoes.”

“Yea!”

What an odd exchange: you'd think I'd talked her into doing something distasteful; you'd think I'd just won something other than the right to spend most of my stake on someone else.

But Hillary, at least, hadn't forgotten about the need for that stake.

“Those shoes really are going to look great on me,” she said, “but what about your stake for Atlantic City?”

“Oh—” I pooh-poohed her concerns “—it'll be fine. Don't forget, at Foxwoods I started out with one hundred dollars and came away with five times that much. I'll be going to Atlantic City with twice that stake, so I'll probably turn that two hundred dollars into a thousand before I get home. I still won't be able to afford the Ghost, but I'll be damn close. I'll just make up the rest some other way.”

“Gee, your math skills are great, Rumpelstiltskin, but don't you think you're getting a bit ahead of yourself here?”

Apparently, we were back to giving me a hard time again.

“Hmm?” I prompted, not sure I wanted to know.

“I just mean, what makes you think you can keep spinning straw into gold? What makes you so sure you'll go on winning, that you'll never lose?”

“Well, for one thing,” I said, feeling huffy, “since I'm taking money and turning it into bigger money, your straw-into-gold analogy sucks because what I'm doing is something more akin to turning a little bit of gold into a lot of gold. And for another thing—”

“Stop.” She stopped my madly waving celery stalk with her hand. “I just wanted you to entertain the notion that there's no sure thing about what you're doing. If gambling always equaled winning, everyone would do it. I just wanted you to be aware that you could conceivably lose, that there are always consequences.”

“Of course,” I said, calm once more, leaving my celery stalk at peace. “I understand that.”

But, secretly, inside I was thinking:
No way was I going to lose, not ever. I was Black Jack Sampson's daughter and sole heir, wasn't I?

True, Black Jack Sampson had lost as many fortunes as he'd won, but it was going to be different for me.

I was
not
going to lose.