Alligator - Lisa Moore [66]
And now you work with rats, she said.
Just the spines.
A lucrative business, I guess? Madeleine said. She can’t believe he has brought up paying for a dinner a thousand years ago.
I’ve done well by rats.
The driver lets Madeleine out and a doorman in gold braid and a black jacket, awful in this heat, takes her luggage while she struggles with her purse.
It meant she was alive, Madeleine thought, as she stepped into the air-conditioned lobby: to always want more; never settling. It was what drove her. She saw herself on a London street, clutching a map. Some street corner long forgotten, she’d had a date with an old friend and couldn’t find the pub; the wind had taken her hat. Just look at how full her life had been; how many lovers, full to bursting. She drags her luggage down the hall to the elevator and talks on the phone.
Isobel, she says, I think you’ll be impressed.
There was a crowd waiting to be seated but the waiter had a table for them in the back. He brought them past the deli counter with homemade pastas, sausages, and cured meats and the feeling Madeleine got was that the family was all in the kitchen and they were overweight and had made a religion of the preparation of food. There were white truffles in small jars under lock and key. The ceiling was stucco with bits of mirror and the tablecloths were checked and the balsamic vinegar and olive oil were poured into a saucer that must have a matching teacup in the back.
They talked the way they always talked, in unison, without listening to each other, their mouths full of pasta. They were campy and loud and full of themselves. They laughed while they were drinking and got wine up their noses and had to snort.
I want bleak, Madeleine said. What year are we talking? 1834. You want turnip soup and fish flakes and scurvy. I want pouting orphans with sunken eyes and scabby knees. And you see me? I see you, yes. I’m the lead? It’s a big part. I don’t know. You don’t know? I’ve been offered something. What have you been offered? I’m this close, according to the grapevine. How close? A soap opera, I’ve been called back three times. You’re kidding. It’s a permanent job, Madeleine. You don’t need a soap opera. I need something. Read the script, that’s all I’m asking. I’ll read the script. Read the goddamn script.
FRANK
HE STOOD IN the rain under the umbrella but the rain came in sideways. The rain shuddered and was enraged and held its breath and slapped itself down in ropes, but people were still buying hot dogs.
Frank wasn’t going home if people were buying hot dogs.
A man drove up in the 97.5 K-Rock Hummer; it had an amber light on the roof that swivelled and the vehicle was pumping muffled music. It looked like people were squashed in, sitting on each other’s laps, a shoulder against the roof.
The driver left it running and the exhaust lifted in ragged clouds that turned amber and there was a red shoulder smeared against the passenger window in the back seat. The guy had his raincoat up over his head and he ordered five hot dogs.
Frank could hardly see through the sheets of rain on the steamy windows, but the Hummer seemed full of girls.
He thought he saw a leg. One of the girls was pulling on a pair of pantyhose in the back seat; he watched this through the eye-stinging coils of blowing smoke and the rain spilling off the umbrella.
The rain glazed the pavement and shivers ran through the water as it rushed down the street, wind-driven, and the hot dogs hissed and what he really wanted was to see how those girls fit in the back and smell their perfume and shampoo and why was she putting on pantyhose and what party were they going to and why did he have to be always standing in the rain.
He could not go home yet because he had not sold enough hot dogs to pack up and go home.
Frank got the five hot dogs ready and the man took them two at a time under his coat and passed them through the window to the women inside. Then he came back for his own and he only wanted ketchup.
The next day Frank heard Carol out on the fire escape pulling