Pursuit, p.7
Drag Queen (Robert Rodi Essentials), page 7
She looked a little put out. “They come looking for me, dear,” she said. “I turn down work.”
“But—your nails. They’re real, aren’t they?”
She held them up for display. “Sweet of you to notice! Yes, they are. But what’s that got to do with—” She stopped short, gasped, and looked at him with astonished delight. “Mitchell! You don’t really think I model these beauties as men’s hands!”
The abashed look on his face was all the answer she needed. She laughed all the way across the remainder of the bridge; settled into giggles in the Merchandise Mart elevator; and was wiping away the last bit of mirth from her eyes as she led Mitchell into the offices of the Jennifer Jerrold Talent Agency.
12
The receptionist announced them, and moments later they were approached by a fiftysomething woman with a long, braided ponytail, dressed all in black. She looked something like a cross between Bea Arthur and Zorro.
“Kitten, darling!” she exclaimed. “A delight, as ever! You look radiant. That wig—haven’t seen anything like it since the ‘39 World’s Fair.”
“You were not old enough to see the ‘39 World’s Fair,” Kitten said as she submitted to being kissed on the cheek.
“But I was,” the woman insisted. “Lost my virginity there, as a matter of fact!”
Even Kitten looked shocked. “But—you can’t have been more than a child!”
“Well, yes,” she said. “Didn’t say I lost it to a man, did I?” She turned to Mitchell and stage-whispered, “Goddamn saddle on that carousel!”
Mitchell went white as the most pristine ivory.
Kitten punched him lightly on the shoulder. “Mitch, don’t let Jennifer shock you, it only encourages her. Jennifer, this is my long-lost twin brother, Mitchell. Mitch, this is Jennifer Jerrold, Chicago’s premier talent agent.”
Jennifer extended a taloned hand to enclose one of Mitchell’s. As she shook it, she regarded him with one eyebrow raised. “Long-lost twin, eh? Well, there’s definitely a resemblance.”
“Oh, come on, Jen, we’re identical,” protested Kitten.
Mitchell gently extricated his hand from Jennifer’s grasp and said, “You—don’t seem very surprised about me.”
She rubbed his shoulder consolingly. “This one,” she said, nodding in Kitten’s direction, “has lost the capacity to surprise me. She could show up with six ex-husbands and I wouldn’t bat an eye.”
“Bet they would,” said Mitchell, and he was a little startled when both Kitten and Jennifer let out shrieks of appreciative laughter.
“Anyway,” said Jennifer a moment later, as she led them farther into her office, “come on in and make yourselves comfortable. I’ll go fetch that journalist gal; been waiting a good ten minutes.” She turned to a robust-looking woman at a nearby desk and said, “Natalie, the conference room free?”
“Yes, Jennifer.”
“What ‘journalist gal’?” Mitchell whispered to Kitten.
Jennifer turned and waved them through a door to their right. “Go ahead and wait in there. I’ll get Little Miss Atmosphere or whatever her name is.”
“What’s going on here?” Mitchell demanded as Kitten dragged him into a standard-issue, white-walled conference room with an oak table, a three-quarter-inch VCR, a monitor, a reel-to-reel tape deck, and a fairly impressive view of the river below. From here, it looked as though there was a body floating in it.
Kitten threw her purse on the table and shrugged her shoulders. “I forgot all about it. When I said I’d be coming in for my check, Jennifer asked if I’d take a few minutes to talk to a reporter as well. You don’t mind, do you?”
“Sit here for an interview?” Mitchell muttered darkly, not wanting anyone else in the office to hear him losing his temper. “This was supposed to be a private lunch, for God’s sake, not a talk show.”
“What can I say?” she replied, taking out her compact and checking her lipstick. “So sue me for wanting a little publicity. So have me put to death for trying to make a living.”
“You know very well that’s not the issue,” raged Mitchell. “And just who the hell is ‘Little Miss Atmosphere’?”
Just then, a tall woman strode into the conference room and announced, “I’m Skye Atcheson, OUTlandish Weekly. You must be the Doyenne of Despair!” She thrust her hand at Kitten, who shook it with equal vigor. Skye had very short, bleach-blond hair, and wore an astonishing orange outfit that looked like one of the spacesuits from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Kitten said, “This is my brother, my identical twin brother, Mitchell Sayer. It’s all right if he sits in, isn’t it?”
Mitchell felt a flurry of alarm as Little Miss Atmosphere gave him the once-over. “Of course,” she said. “Love it, actually. Adds a whole new angle to the story.” She settled into a chair, flipped open her notebook, and started digging through her pockets for a pen.
“Listen,” said Mitchell, “I don’t really want to be part of th—”
“Oh, good,” boomed the voice of Jennifer Jerrold; Mitchell turned and found her framed in the doorway. “You’ve all met, then? Everything’s all right?”
“Fine, Miz Jerrold,” said Skye Atcheson. “And listen, thanks for okaying this. Some agents, you know, might get nervous about their biggest-billing female hand model being revealed as a transvestite.”
Jennifer scoffed. “The only bad publicity is no publicity. You can write that she’s a Himalayan yak, for all I care. Just spell her name right. And mine.” And then she ducked out.
“Okay,” said Skye chirpily. “Ready to get started?”
Mitchell got up. “Listen, I really think I’d be better off waiting outsi—”
“Is that a body in the river?” blurted Kitten, interrupting him.
Skye leapt to her feet. “Where?”
They gathered at the window. “There, by that piling,” she said. “The one second-closest to Orleans Street.”
“Oh, my God. It is. It’s a body.”
“Look, there are people on the bridge who see it, too.” Kitten pointed to a cluster of pedestrians craning their necks over the place where the bloated remains of what appeared to be an elderly man bobbed peacefully in the murky green.
Suddenly Skye turned to Mitchell and said, “So, how does it felt to be the identical twin of a knockout drag queen?”
Mitchell was taken completely off guard; he would gladly have traded places with the corpse in the river. “Uh…fine,” he said.
She scribbled a note. “Ever tried drag yourself?”
He felt the room go quite out of focus for a moment.
“Mitchell and I are long-lost twins,” said Kitten, coming to his rescue. “We had very different upbringings. It’s a tragic story, really. The whole orphaned-as-infants thing, each adopted by a different family. We’ve only just reconnected.”
A Chicago Police boat appeared on the river and circled the body. The crowd on the bridge had gotten bigger.
Skye Atcheson jotted something else in her notebook, but made no move to leave the window. “That’s fascinating,” she said. “Tell me more.”
Kitten took out a cigarette and lit it, then leaned dramatically against the window jamb and let loose a stream of smoke. “Well, it’s a story filled with irony, Skye. Our parents were Dutch Reform missionaries, you see—Mitchell, hon, you’ll be a love and jump in if I get any of this wrong, won’t you?—and they actually met when they were on duty in central Africa. They were deeply religious people, but passion overcame them, and dear Mum got preggers in short order. But it was late in her pregnancy before they were discovered, because Mum had taken to wearing the traditional blanket-dress of the Kalahari tribe to disguise her condition. Got away with it for seven and half months till Dad let the cat out of the bag one night when he was in his cups; asked the chieftain of the tribe if he’d mind being a namesake to his son-to-be.”
“Your father wanted to give you an African name?” Skye asked, scribbling madly.
“Well, no,” Kitten replied, stubbing out the cigarette on the chrome window sill. “The chieftain’s name was Douglas. He was a convert, after all.”
“Ah,” said Skye, making a note of this.
Mitchell had heard just about enough. “I really can’t let this pass,” he said, “it’s a total fabrication, a complete—”
“Oh, that’s right,” Kitten said, snapping her fingers. “Dennis, not Douglas. Thank you, Mitchell, dove. Anyway, Mum and Dad were drummed out of the missionary corps and sent packing. And the stress of it must’ve got to Mum, because she went into labor right on the dock, and Mitchell and I finally made our debut onboard ship, a little over a mile off the Madagascar coast. Fortunately, the ship’s captain had married Mum and Dad twenty minutes earlier, saving us from the taint of bastardy.”
“Amazing,” said Skye, although it wasn’t clear whether she meant Kitten’s story, or the crane the police boat was now positioning above the floating corpse.
“So, you see,” said Kitten, seated on the sill now and drawing up her legs, “Mitchell and I weren’t even American citizens until we were adopted. Which wasn’t long after we arrived in the States, because during the voyage both our parents died—Dad of cholera, Mum of scarlet fever.”
Skye shook her head at the sadness of this as she scribbled away. “Didn’t the ship have a doctor?”
“Yes, but he’d died of diphtheria the week before.”
Mitchell couldn’t believe this orange woman was actually buying Kitten’s story. He made a move to protest anew, but Kitten cut him off with, “Of course, we were too young to remember any of this, but I have it on the very best authority.”
“I’m sure you do,” said Skye, wrapping up a note and smiling.
The crane had hooked onto the corpse; the police were trying to haul it out of the water without much luck. Mitchell saw the boat actually tilt under the body’s weight.
“So then we two infants were sent to Chicago, where my father had a sister, Eugenie, our last living relative. But wouldn’t you know, by the time we got here, she was dead, too—killed by an insanely jealous female lover named Smitty. That’s how Mitchell and I ended up in an orphanage. From there, Mitchell was adopted by a very high-toned couple—a KLM Airlines executive and a former princess of Greece. He grew up surrounded by riches and lovely things. Waterford crystal. Henry Moore sculptures. German pool boys.”
“Now, wait jus—”
“I, on the other hand, was adopted by a stevedore named Slim and his wife, Polly, a woman devoted to soap operas and hypochondria. My mother had more phantom pregnancies than Doris Osmond had real ones. I grew up surrounded by despair, squalor, and defeat. I had to invent the beauty in my life, Skye; and to hold on to it, I had to become it.”
Skye nodded appreciatively as she jotted all this down. The police crane had managed to get the corpse out the water and was busy maneuvering it into the boat. The Orleans Street Bridge was now so burdened with onlookers that Mitchell thought it might buckle.
“So tell me, then,” Skye said as she took a pause from writing to crack her knuckles and survey the operations on the river, “what led you to become such an out drag queen? Because that’s what’s really going to interest our readers: that instead of staying safely cocooned in the ghetto, you’re actually out there making a success of yourself in the mainstream world, without compromising your identity one bit. There’s something quite heroic about that.”
Kitten put a hand on her breast. “Why, thank you—how sweet! I’m very flattered. Actually, there’s a story there, too.”
“I bet there is,” said Mitchell under his breath. The corpse was deposited aboard the police boat now, and the crowd on the bridge was dispersing; so he went to the far end of the conference table and sat down.
Kitten looked wistfully into the distance and said, “I was invited to perform at an AIDS benefit party, and afterwards, when I was backstage, I was visited by a very famous actress who became my benefactor.”
“And who might that be?” asked Skye, scribbling.
“Alas, it would embarrass her if I were to tell you; she likes her good works to be kept private. So I can’t even drop any hints, like, say, two Oscars, violet eyes, Montgomery Clift.”
“Ah,” said Skye knowingly.
“She complimented me on my act; then we got down to a little girl talk and became fast friends. And when she noticed my hands, she said they were the most beautiful she’d ever seen.” Here Kitten held up the appendages under discussion for Skye to admire. “She told me, ‘You could make a fortune with those babies.’ And then she paused and added, ‘In fact, I think you must.’ Then she helped me find my first few jobs; after which I met dear Jennifer, and the rest is history.”
Skye put down her pen and looked at Kitten with transparent admiration. “Wow,” she said in a low voice.
“Yes, wow is, I think, an applicable word.”
“So, you don’t run into any, you know, homophobia or anything?”
“Of course I run into homophobia. But I get the job done, Skye. In the end, people respect that.” She shrugged and shook her wig a little. “And of course Jennifer is always upfront with people who call and ask for me. So the real hate-mongers have a chance to pass.”
Skye nodded sagely, then picked up her pen and wrote this down. After which she smiled, sat back, and said, “Okay, I’m happy. Anything you’d care to add?”
“Honey, you don’t have time for everything I’d care to add!”
Skye laughed, then stuck her pen behind her ear and popped the cap off her Nikon. “Okay if I get a shot of you to go along with article?”
“One doesn’t undertake this way of life if one is at all shy of photography. Quite the opposite, in fact. Just give me a sec.” She snatched her compact from her purse, flicked it open, and gave herself the once-over in its tiny mirror.
Skye was on her feet now, looking through her camera lens at Kitten. “Actually,” she said, “if I could ask you to move away from away from the window—get the light on you instead of behind you—that’d be great.”
“You’re the artiste,” said Kitten with a wink. She slipped off the window sill, scooted around the conference room table, and posed against the wall about a foot from where Mitchell was seated.
Skye fiddled with her f-stop for a moment. “Okay, ready when you are.”
Kitten got a positively wicked glint in her eyes. “Just one more sec,” she said; then, without warning, she leapt into Mitchell’s lap. He spat out a lungful of air, and hadn’t quite recovered his breath when Kitten flung her arms and legs into the air and cried, “Shoot!”
Skye shot.
13
In the elevator, Kitten stuffed her check from Jennifer Jerrold into her purse, while Mitchell called her cheap, petty, mean-spirited, and pathetic.
As they crossed the Merchandise Mart lobby, he called her a grandstander, a menace, a liar, and a fake.
While Kitten hailed a cab at the east entrance of the mart, he called her childish, vain, dangerous, and pathetic.
“You already said pathetic, dear,” she noted, just as a taxi pulled up to admit them.
“It bears repeating,” he said, opening the door for her. “Doesn’t it bother you, to flat-out lie like that? To just spew forth blatant garbage?”
“Not at all,” she cooed as she slid in and fastened her seatbelt. “It feels wonderfully theatrical, Mitchell. Nothing’s quite so dull as the truth. Aside from which, Skye wasn’t even interested in the truth. She wanted a story. I gave her one. She probably didn’t believe a word I said, but that wasn’t the point, and she knew it.”
“You’re crazy,” he declared as he settled in next to her and slammed the door. “A lie is a lie.”
She cocked her head at him. “Now, go on and tell me you never make things up.”
“Never. When I came out thirteen years ago, I swore I’d always tell the truth, from then on. No exceptions. No matter what.”
They glared at each other for a few pounding heartbeats; then Mitchell, realizing the cab wasn’t moving, turned and snapped, “Drive on, please.”
“Sure, sure,” said the laconic, yellow-bearded cabbie from beneath a baseball cap bearing the Cocoa Puffs logo. “You got any place special in mind?”
“Damn it,” muttered Mitchell. “Is your meter running?” Seeing that it was, he turned to Kitten. “I just don’t know where to take you. I can’t be seen with you, that’s plain. Listen, why don’t we just postpone this, do it another d—”
“Excuse me!” cried someone through the open window. “Are you getting out?”
Mitchell whirled, an angry retort ready on his lips, then found himself face to face with a handsome, russet-haired man in a business suit—a man, moreover, who had under his right eye a large birthmark almost exactly the shape of Oklahoma.
“Hey,” Mitchell said, the birthmark jogging his memory. “You’re—aren’t you—”
“Mitch?” the man blurted. “Mitchell Sayer?”
Recollection washed over him. “Zack Crespin? It can’t be Zack Crespin!”
“Hell if it ain’t, brother Mu!” Zack Crespin stuck his hand through the window and gave Mitchell’s a good shake. “How you been doin’?”
“Great—great! You?”
“Fantastic!” An awkward pause ensued, during which Zack retrieved his arm through the window. Then Zack said, “You comin’ or goin’, buddy?”
“Oh—actually, we’re going. Just sitting here while deciding where to—”
“Then, would you mind sharing a cab with an old frat brother?” Zack said, opening the door. “I’m in a helluva hurry. And I’ll pay the full fare.”
“Course not,” said Mitchell, scooting over to make way for him. Then, bumping up against Kitten, he recalled her presence and said, “Though, actually—I mean, I’m not sure we can afford the time ourselves.”
