Necklace of Kisses Read online

  The white-haired woman from the wedding came over and took Weetzie’s hand.

  “May I have this dance, my dear?”

  Weetzie said, “I’m not really dressed…”

  The woman ignored her and led her out onto the floor. The music took over and Weetzie whirled with her, forgetting everything. When the dance ended, the woman took Weetzie aside.

  “Did you find your animus?”

  “I saw him,” Weetzie said. “But he wasn’t what I thought he’d be.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t know. The perfect lover. He wasn’t interested in me at all.”

  “Is that the point?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your animus isn’t supposed to be interested in you. He’s supposed to be integrated into you. That way you won’t go chasing some idealized dream lover the rest of your days.”

  Weetzie looked around the dance floor. The gamine bride and the tall, beaky groom from the wedding breezed past her. Their faces were painted white and they wore small white skullcaps and matching white silk suits with huge buttons and collars. The bride had rosettes on her slippers. Weetzie thought she saw the couple levitate a few inches off the floor.

  “Ah, honeymoon,” the white-haired woman said. “Isn’t that the loveliest word?”

  Honey. Moon. Weetzie thought it was as good as “numinous.” She wished she had had one of her own. Maybe the stay at the pink hotel counted as a solo version.

  “Sweetheart, are you all right?” It was Heaven, dressed in a ruby red ball gown. She held Weetzie at arm’s length and surveyed her dirty clothes. “You look like you’ve been cleaning out the ashes. Where’s your ball gown, Cinderella?”

  Weetzie said, “I wasn’t planning on wearing this.”

  “I imagine not. You’d be better off in the nude. We could attach a centerpiece between your legs.” She gestured to the stargazer lilies on the tables.

  “I was going to wear…”

  Before she could finish, Weetzie saw a young woman parade past her on the arm of a white-haired man.

  “That!” Weetzie said. The woman was wearing Emilia and the raspberry pink sandals.

  Before she knew it, Weetzie was being dragged onto the dance floor. Sal pulled her close and hissed in her ear.

  “I had the strangest thing happen to me this morning. I woke all tied up in the biggest, strongest spiderweb I’ve ever seen. It took all day to get out of it.”

  Weetzie tried not to look away. His breath smelled of liquor and his eyes were bloodshot. She felt his fingers digging into her arm.

  “Your friend is wearing my Pucci,” Weetzie said. “And my shoes.”

  “Well, well,” said Sal. “Isn’t that funny. Tit for tat. Or, in this case, tat for tit. I guess we traded possessions. I can live without mine. Can you?”

  He dropped her arm as if he were tossing something into a trashcan and walked away. Weetzie steadied herself.

  “What was that about?” Heaven asked.

  “I think he stole some of my clothes,” she said softly. She put her hand on Heaven’s arm as she started after Sal. “But he’s right in a way. I guess we’re even.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Weetzie nodded and watched, wistfully, as Emilia left the ballroom.

  “Well, let me know if you change your mind!” Heaven kissed her and danced off.

  Weetzie heard her name. Dashell Hart and Tristan Sable were seated with Pan and a very young woman wearing a short, diaphanous, pleated column of a dress and a crown of gold leaves on her tousled dark hair. Weetzie went to greet them. They all got up and kissed her cheek, except for the woman, who only stared.

  “This is Phaedra,” Dashell said. “She plays a nymph on the show.”

  “Hi, Phaedra.”

  The dark-haired woman managed a small smile and put her hand on Pan’s bicep.

  That was quick, thought Weetzie, but after all, they were at the pink hotel. She hoped that Pan and Phaedra would be very happy laughing, crying, and coming together.

  The honeymooners, in their commedia del’arte costumes, floated by, pressed chest to chest a few inches off the ground. Pan got up and took Phaedra’s hand. Tristan Sable was led onto the floor by the white-haired woman. Heaven found Dashell Hart. Weetzie watched them. She felt a pain in her chest as if her heart were a glass disco ball that had been smashed into thousands of little pieces.

  The twelve princesses danced by.

  “Come join us!” they called. “Girls just want to have fun! Come dance with us! You never have to stop dancing!”

  Weetzie said, “Thanks, ladies, but I can’t. Then there would be thirteen of us.”

  They ignored her and two of them took her hands. Soon she was dancing by herself, in the midst of the twelve damask dresses, whirling like a dervish. Sweat poured off her body like tears. Her heart pounded in her chest; it had not broken after all.

  An hour later, Weetzie was still dancing. She spun so fast, the room was a carousel. Losing her balance, she went reeling.

  Sometimes you fall, spinning through space, grasping for the things that keep you here. Sometimes you catch them. Sometimes you don’t.

  Sometimes they catch you.

  Weetzie careened into a man in a tuxedo standing at the entrance to the ballroom.

  It was Max.

  When their bodies touched, the lights in the ballroom flickered for a moment. There was a slight shifting of earth beneath the pink hotel. The chandeliers tinkled. Balloons burst, sprinkling confetti over the dancers. Champagne corks popped. A swarm of blue butterflies flew through the open windows.

  Weetzie felt something cold and wet pressing against her leg. It was the white dog’s nose. He stood there, watching her, swaying his head from side to side. Then he turned and high-stepped out the door.

  Max and Weetzie followed him down the staircase, through the lobby, into the garden.

  .

  The Necklace of Kisses

  The moon was completely full, white and papery like a lantern. It was so bright that the birds sang, believing morning had come. Weetzie and Max followed the white dog across a little bridge over a stream and into a grotto of moss and vines. The air smelled of American Beauties, Marilyns, and Sugar Plum Fairy roses. Max handed Weetzie a large silver box swathed in sheer pink tulle. She unwrapped it and took out the pink gloves, the gold shoes, and the dress.

  “Princess Grace!” she said.

  Max smiled. Weetzie looked into his tired, green eyes. She used her toe to push off one orange sneaker, and then the other. She wriggled out of her tank top, unfastened her orange pants, and let them fall off her hips to the ground. She wedged her rather sweaty, swollen feet into the golden shoes. She slid the long pink satin gloves up to her elbows, smoothed them out, and buttoned the pearl buttons.

  Then she reached behind herself and unhooked her orange bra. She slowly slid off her orange panties. Max had seen her naked before so many times. There in the moonlight, in the garden of the pink hotel, it felt like the first.

  Weetzie stepped into the huge tulle skirt covered with roses, careful not to catch it on the spikes of her heels. She leaned forward and shimmied her breasts into the cups of the dress, the way she had seen her mother do when she was young. Arms akimbo, she tried to find the zipper but couldn’t. Max put his hands on her waist and gently, firmly, turned her around. He lightly grazed her skin with the zipper before it slid up smoothly. She shivered from the slight pain as she turned back to face him again.

  Max put both his hands on Weetzie’s throat, touching the necklace of kisses. His fingers were warm and dry, trembling slightly. Weetzie helped Max take off his tuxedo jacket and bow tie and unbuttoned the collar of his white shirt. She could see the pulse in his neck. She reached up to her own and undid the tiny catch with her thumbnail. Then Weetzie Bat fastened the necklace of kisses around her secret agent lover man’s throat.

  Waking from his two-year-long September, he pressed his lips to hers. />
  This is what happened:

  Daisy Montgomery, who would never have her wedding night in the pink hotel, lifted out of the mist above the reflecting pool and flew off into the night sky.

  The sleeping goddess statues that the madam’s son had hidden in the garden opened their eyes.

  Keiko Yamaguchi, the former owner of the pink hotel, who was now working secretly as a waitress in the Japanese restaurant, woke suddenly in her room, stumbled to the mirror, and saw that the hormones she had been taking for months, to no effect, had started to work.

  Isis Kenna Clay, the hotel receptionist, woke suddenly in her courtyard bungalow in West Hollywood, yawned, rubbed her face with her palms, stumbled to the bathroom, looked in the mirror, and found that her skin was no longer blue, but its original shade—a deep, rich ebony.

  In the ballroom, Dashell Hart turned to the young actor Pan and offered him a role in the soap opera Eden Place.

  Tristan Sable peered into the pocket of his tuxedo, where he discovered his long-lost friend Stem hiding.

  The twin masseurs’ father, Bear, a burly Swiss man with a long, white beard, entered the ballroom. The white-haired woman, recognizing her future husband, smiled to herself and went to ask him for a dance.

  After a day and night of traveling, the artist walked into the white, wood-frame house in Upstate New York. He could hear the brook that ran through the backyard and see the shadow of the willow tree on the wall.

  Then Zane Starling went upstairs to the large bed, where his wife was sleeping on fresh white linens with his two youngest children. She opened her eyes when she felt his breath on her face. The look she gave him was one he had seen six times before, so he did not need her to use words to tell him—she was pregnant again.

  Somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, a mermaid with the legs of a woman swam in a school of dolphins to a cave covered with barnacles. The dolphins whistled good-bye and surged off. The mermaid went into the cave and found her mother sleeping there in a pile of the pearls she had wept.

  Somewhere in a graveyard in New Orleans, three strange-looking people with red hair and an empty baby carriage were struck with amnesia. They stopped in their tracks and stared at each other, wondering why the hell they had come here in the first place.

  Esmeralda Escobar woke suddenly in her apartment near downtown Los Angeles and grabbed her sleeping husband’s shoulders. “Mira!” she said. He opened his eyes and rubbed them three times to make sure he was not dreaming when he saw the girl he had married, grown older now, sitting beside him, her horse’s mane of black hair loose around her shoulders.

  Dirk McDonald and Duck Drake had the same dream: Weetzie had come home. She was standing on the doorstep, naked and laughing. They rolled over in bed, found each other, and made love in their canyon house of cherry wood and stained-glass windows.

  Ping Chong Jah-Love felt something fluttering against her face. She woke to see two huge, fluorescent-blue butterflies in her bedroom. The pair circled for a while and then landed on sleeping Valentine Jah-Love’s big, bare shoulder, where they began to mate delicately. Ping did not take this as a sign of global warming, or any other planetary distress, but as a sure message that Weetzie and Max had found each other again.

  In Santa Barbara, Cherokee Bat woke suddenly, sat at the sewing machine in the shape of a sphinx, and began to work. She was making a sleeveless cream-silk sheath over slim, sheer cream-chiffon pants and a cream raw-silk three-quarter-length coat with a pale blue lining covered with silver stars. In the lining, she would put tiny notes, little charms to honor and protect the enchantress, her mother.

  In a café on Telegraph Avenue, Witch Baby sat across the table from her beloved Angel Juan and said, “What were you looking for?”

  “You,” he answered.

  “But you didn’t know it?”

  “Not until now.”

  She nodded. She said, “Now I need to find what I am looking for.”

  Hilda Doolittle sat at her desk in her one-room Echo Park apartment, looking out over Sunset Boulevard through a window hung with skeleton lights. She was writing a poem called “The Goddess in You.” On the wall, she saw the unmistakable shadow of a woman, though there was no one there but herself.

  A young starlet left the hotel room of the producer with whom she had spent the evening and who was now asleep on the couch. She was carrying a white case covered with roses. She drove away from the pink hotel, never to return. As she merged onto the freeway, her car trunk popped open, the latch on the white case undid itself, and a pink-and-green silk dress flew off into the night sky.

  While everyone in the ballroom kissed each other, Heaven stepped onto the balcony. As soon as the moonlight touched Heaven, Haven emerged.

  “We need to send her some CDs,” said Haven. “She’s still talking about ‘Seasons in the Sun.’”

  Heaven rolled her eyes. They took each other’s hands and looked out over the grounds of the pink hotel.

  “What a strange and beautiful night,” Heaven sighed.

  All of the little atrium shops were dark. Except for one.

  In her Beautiful World, Lacey was weaving a tapestry, telling a story out of her body. It was about people on fire. It was about people in love. It was about people falling from burning buildings. It was about people discovering they could fly.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank my family, my longtime editor and beloved friend Joanna Cotler, and my current editor, Alison Callahan, for helping this book come into existence. And thanks to Charlotte Zolotow for starting it all.

  About the Author

  Francesca Lia Block is the author of the Los Angeles Times bestsellers Guarding the Moon, The Rose and the Beast, Violet & Claire, and Dangerous Angels: The Weetzie Bat Books, as well as I Was a Teenage Fairy, Girl Goddess #9, The Hanged Man, Echo, and Nymph. Her work has been translated into seven languages. She lives in Los Angeles.

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  Also by Francesca Lia Block

  Weetzie Bat

  Goat Girls

  Beautiful Boys

  Primavera

  Ecstasia

  Wasteland

  Echo

  Violet & Claire

  I Was a Teenage Fairy

  Dangerous Angels: The Weetzie Bat Books

  The Hanged Man

  The Rose and the Beast: Fairy Tales Retold

  Girl Goddess #9: Nine Stories

  Nymph

  Guarding the Moon: A Mother’s First Year

  Credits

  Jacket illustration © C. Sagel/Zefa

  Author photograph © 2005 by Jamie Rector

  Copyright

  NECKLACE OF KISSES. Copyright © 2005 by Francesca Lia Block. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  ePub edition July 2005 ISBN 9780061750175

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Block, Francesca Lia.

  Necklace of kisses: a novel / Francesca Lia Block.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-06-077751-6

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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