Seduction of Moxie (11 page)

“Vi—” Peter began.

“Mull on that.” Her extended palm signaled that she was done listening to him. “And do make sure you take into account that, by your definition, I too am a degenerate and apparently therefore worthy of your scorn and derision. So go ahead, but I refuse to sit here for it.” She strode to the door and opened it. “I hope to see you bright and early Monday morning, Fitzy. Good night, gentlemen.”

The door shut softly, leaving the two men to ponder her disclosure.

As Violet walked rapidly back to her place, she was livid, completely incensed that someone she had been developing such a pleasant friendship with had said something so callous and intolerant. She wished she had shouted everything she had just said, but that wasn’t in her. When she was happy, she was lighthearted and calm. When she was angry, she was stoic and grave.

She did possess the passion to really scream at someone. Somewhere along the line, no doubt amongst the many altercations with her parents, she had learned that it was better to simply shut down emotionally and walk away. That was how she was able to deal with most things. To become enraged would give people power over her. To look them squarely in the eye, tell them “bullshit,” and then leave gave her the upper hand.

As she entered her bungalow, she saw a piece of mail had been slipped under the door. A closer look revealed it was from Moxie, and she was unable to suppress a smile. “Your timing’s getting a whole lot better, toots.”

She sat on the sofa, and Clitty jumped up to sit beside her. Slowly, she slid her finger under the envelope flap and prepared herself for whatever Moxie had decided to write.

Violet,

To say that I’ve thought about writing you a hundred times may be an understatement, so let’s agree that the number is somewhere between a hundred and five thousand. Every time I considered not replying to your last letter, I experienced an overwhelming sadness. And every time I considered replying, I wondered what I would say and exactly what it would mean.

The truth is that I want very much to correspond with you. I love getting your letters. I’ve never really received mail before so, yes, it has a certain novelty. But the stories of your comically tawdry exploits must unquestionably surpass what passes for a standard letter these days.

This may shock you, but most of us just muddle through our lives without a constant parade of anal artists, public fornicators, ass musicians, and pancake-eating corpses vying for our attention. I’m still not certain exactly what quality you possess that attracts these kinds of people, but it wouldn’t be truthful if I said that I didn’t find it fascinating, in a bizarre, carnival-sideshow sort of way.

I suppose I should try and catch you up on things here. Julian has started coming into the Luna a couple times a week. He’s almost always on the arm of a fella named Gary, who’s fairly easy on the eyes.

According to Julian, Wil is a hair’s breadth away from getting canned from
Secrets and Lies
. Apparently her drinking (and God only knows what else) is becoming increasingly detrimental to her performance. She drinks to steel her nerves, does poorly because she’s sozzled, and then gets even more nervous for the next night’s performance, so she has a little more. I don’t know if you’ve spoken with her since your arrival in California, but perhaps you could contact her and offer her some consolation or advice. It’s ironic that a woman who seemed so self-possessed when I met her can deep down be filled with such self-doubt.

I got my third set at the Luna, and I hear that I may have you to thank for that. I appreciate anything you may have told my boss to make him consider it. So far, things are going well. While I’m busy now, and the money’s better, I worry that I may be running myself ragged. Cotton, my agent, says he’s trying to get someone from the Kasbah to come out to see me perform in the hopes that I can transition from upscale juice joint to upscale supper club. It would be fantastic if that happened, if just for the shift in clientele—to work for people who weren’t
necessarily
criminals. After the supper club, who knows? Perhaps I could even put out a record.

For the first time I’m starting to feel like my life may not have limits. Things are really looking up for me, and somehow meeting you seems to be a part of that sensation—perhaps the catalyst.

I do think of you, quite a bit, and I recall our night on the town every day in some fashion or another. I’d be a fool to say that I completely understand my feelings for you, but I do know that somewhere mixed in with the trepidation, anxiety, and confusion is a good deal of appreciation, elation, and amusement.

In no way could I consider you a nuisance. There is a strange void that your letters somehow help to fill. They make me laugh and feel significant, so please keep writing them.

Tell me how the film is going and how your co-stars are. How has Clitty been enjoying it out there? (I mean the dog.) Have you been able to convince the powers that be to modify the ending? When might you be coming back to New York? Anytime soon?

Well, I’ll close this. I’m apparently finally running out of words.

Regards,

Genitalia Finkelstein

Violet sighed and leaned back on the sofa. “Clitty, I’m falling in love with this woman.” She reached over and scratched his back. “What the hell am I going to do?”

*

After Violet mailed her reply to Moxie, she and Clitty spent some quality time playing fetch amongst the jacaranda trees outside her bungalow.

In her peripheral vision, she saw Peter approaching her, and she sighed loudly, not wanting to reopen that particular can of worms.

“Vi?”

She turned to him, feeling a mixture of irritation and dread.

“Pardon me,” he said softly. His eyes nervously darted from her face to the ground and back again. “I need to get this off my chest. You owe me nothing, but I’d appreciate it if you’d let me apologize.”

She took the ball from Clitty and tossed it again, and the little dog took off after it. “Give it a try. I’m mildly curious.”

“Thank you. First, let me say that I have never felt quite so small as I did after you left last night. I’ve always considered myself to be both liberal and humane, and you showed me that I am neither. If I made you feel ashamed, I’m sorry.”

She squinted at him as Clitty dropped the ball at her feet. “I don’t feel ashamed, Peter. That seems to be the critical point you’re missing.” She threw the toy back out past the trees. “I don’t have anything to feel ashamed about.”

“Yes—”

“Shame should be reserved for occasions when you’ve hurt someone. I’m just living. I don’t have time to worry about what some homespun, folksy neighbors think about my choices. I mean, God only knows who’s sucking Pastor Stevenson’s cock when his wife is at the temperance meetings, and who’s spanking the schoolmarm with a steel-wire brush. What even remotely gives them the right to judge me?”

He cleared his throat nervously. “I have worded it poorly.”

“You have, yes.”

“What I meant was that I had no right to say such things, to belittle you in that way.”

“Agreed, though obviously it’s not just me who’s belittled. It’s everyone who gets lumped into a category for one thing or another and then treated like utter shit for it.”

“Understood. I am very sorry. I behaved terribly.”

“I mean, how would you feel if everyone judged you because of your dreadful mustache?”

“I love my mustache,” he said softly, beginning to stroke it gingerly with both hands.

“And as a consenting adult, you should be permitted to do so in the privacy of your own home, without anyone casting aspersions on you for it.”

He seemed to relax slightly at her humor. “You really think it’s dreadful?”

“It resembles the tightly packed bundles that Clitty pushes through his colon. But I only share that observation because you asked. I’m far too polite to simply volunteer something so tactless.”

“Clearly.” He paused. “Can I buy you a drink, Vi? Make it up to you?”

She smiled. “I believe you may, sir.”

*

Cotton took a long drag on his cigar. “Look, this is no easy feat, kid.”

Moxie looked at him closely, in the hopes of determining if he was lying. “But it’s just taking so long. I mean, how much coercion does it take to get a fella to go see a show? It’s not like you’re trying to talk him into castration.”

“Shh.” Cotton brought his flattened hand down slowly, signaling for her to lower her voice.

Moxie looked around the parlor of her apartment building where they sat. No one nearby seemed to be paying them any attention whatsoever. Was this one of Cotton’s many ploys to regain control of the conversation? “What?”

“Look, you act like I haven’t been on my dogs all day and night working to get you places. I got you that third set at the Luna, didn’t I?”

She studied him suspiciously. “Hmm, how’d you do that, anyway?”

“With my nose to the grindstone, that’s how. I campaigned for weeks on your behalf with the management there. They didn’t tell you?”

“Must have slipped their minds,” Moxie said in a monotone. The more Cotton talked, the more she wished he’d stop, and the less she tended to believe him.

“Look, I’ve got Brown’s word that he’ll be by the Luna to see one of your sets next Saturday. He’s going to be out of town this coming weekend. That’s the only reason this is taking so long.”

“Okay, Cotton. I’ll be ready for him.” She was starting to wonder if getting the manager of the Kasbah to come by and see her perform would ever happen, and she was quickly tiring of this conversation with her self-congratulatory agent. Cotton represented a number of people now, and he had more clients to consider than just her. But lately, even though he seemed to be putting less effort into her career, he still managed to take credit for anything good that came her way.

“Make sure you wear a fancy dress that knocks him on his ass.”

“How fancy?”

“As high class as you can stand, sister. You’ve got to really get all dolled up, you know? You need to
look
upscale if you want an upscale gig.”

Now she was officially irritated. “I don’t look upscale?”

“You look like a singer in a gin joint. You need to seem like you just dropped in from a swanky dinner party at a Manhattan penthouse, like you shit diamonds.”

“And will you be fronting me the jack for said diamond-shitting dress?”

He looked put out. “What, you can’t borrow one from someone? There must be fifty dames living here with you.”

She sighed. “Sure, Ebenezer. I’ll just ask the countess on the third floor if I can borrow her tiara while I’m at it.”

Mrs. Bennington approached her, making a disgustingly vile sound as she snorted something from her sinuses into her mouth. Moxie tried to ignore it.

“You got another letter,” she rasped, tossing the envelope into Moxie’s lap where she sat on the divan.

“Thanks,” she murmured, though the woman had already turned to leave.

Cotton’s brow furrowed. “Who is that from?”

She smiled as she regarding the writing on the outside. “A friend of mine out West.”

“Since when do you have friends out West?”

“Why do you want to know? So you can figure out what I can borrow from her? Want me to see if she has some upscale shoes?”

He rolled his eyes. “You know, I don’t get any kind of gratitude from you. If it wasn’t for me, you’d be mopping up urine in a clip joint in the middle of nowhere.” He expelled cigar smoke dramatically.

Moxie was no longer interested in this conversation. She had a letter to read, after all. She decided to just skip to the end of this all-too-familiar conversation in order to speed things along. “Yes, Cotton. You are wonderful yet I mistreat you. I am a selfish bitch, and you ejaculate rainbows. I get it.”

He stared at her. “Ejaculate rainbows?”

“Or something like that, yes. I’ll find something to wear before next Saturday.” She stood and kissed him on the cheek. “Thanks for stopping by.” She scurried up the staircase, leaving him alone in the parlor looking completely bewildered.

Once she was contained within the relative safety of her apartment, she opened the letter.

Miss Genitalia (Genny) Finkelstein,

I received your letter tonight and I was touched and delighted by both the gesture, as well as the sentiment within. I’ve been holding my breath since I mailed that last letter to you, wondering if I would hear back. And while things have obviously progressed here—the shooting is more than half completed now—with regard to you, time has stood still for me.

So let me catch you up on the last couple of weeks here in Hollywood. The accommodations that the studio arranged for me are a perfect match—private bungalows nestled amidst nature and lunatics, which happen to be two of my favorite things to sit and observe.

The front desk is diligently manned by Captain Napkin, as I call him, and I’m sure that over the phone, without any visual cues, he may come off as only slightly deranged. Good for him that he doesn’t allow his dementia to interfere with his conscientiousness. He is a very hard worker; it’s just that sometimes his “work” includes wearing menstrual accoutrement on his head or periodically liberating pieces of garbage from the residents’ trash, burying them in shallow graves, and performing tiny funerals. I caught him saying a few words over an empty anchovy tin and some coffee grounds the other day.

Incidentally, I don’t know what you mean when you say that I attract odd and eccentric people. Perhaps you can provide an example?

Other residents here have shown themselves to be both kind and unkind to varying degrees, which makes them very much like New Yorkers, but with a healthier glow about them.