Necklace of Kisses Read online

  Spin the Bottle

  Weetzie heard laughter streaming out of Heaven’s suite. The front room was so crowded it was hard to see the décor, but Weetzie could make out pale blue wallpaper covered with chubby, winged baby angels; pink carpet; and pink-and-blue chairs with gold wings. Swinging cocktail lounge music was playing, barely audible over the laughing people. They all looked chic but somehow wacky at the same time. Maybe it was just because she had been thinking of Audrey Hepburn earlier, but Weetzie couldn’t help being reminded of the party scene in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

  Like any great hostess, Heaven appeared in an instant to guide Weetzie through the crush of bodies. She was wearing a short red-silk kimono and high-heeled sandals and drinking champagne out of a bottle.

  She handed Weetzie a bottle of Perrier. “I think I noticed you weren’t imbibing this evening?” Then she took her last sip of champagne and added, “When’s the last time you played spin the bottle?”

  “I was too scared to play in junior high,” Weetzie said.

  “Oh, honey, you’ve never played? We’d better do something about that.”

  Heaven clapped her hands, and immediately a group of people formed a large circle. They sat down and began chanting, “Heaven! Heaven!”

  Their lovely hostess took her empty champagne bottle and put it in the middle of the circle. Then she licked her lips and spun it. The bottle wobbled and finally stopped on a very good-looking man with dark, curly hair and lascivious lips. Weetzie realized it was Pan. Heaven smiled gleefully and opened her arms wide, but before he could get up, the bottle kept turning, as if of its own volition, and stopped on Weetzie. From across the circle, Pan winked at her.

  “Heaven,” he mouthed.

  Weetzie sat very still as Heaven turned to her.

  “I’ve never kissed anyone so much prettier than I am before,” Weetzie said. “Well, at least not until last night, I guess. There was a mermaid.”

  “You’re pretty cute yourself,” said Heaven.

  Weetzie closed her eyes and felt Heaven’s large, delicate hand take her own. She was still wearing Max’s ring. Heaven turned it softly on Weetzie’s finger.

  “He misses you,” she whispered into Weetzie’s ear. “He is doing things like sitting in the closet and sniffing your clothes.” She tsk-ed.

  Weetzie felt tears behind her eyelids but she didn’t open her eyes. Heaven went on, “Don’t go home yet, though. Your necklace isn’t finished.”

  Necklace? wondered Weetzie. Then she waited while Heaven leaned over and pressed her large, lovely lips to Weetzie’s smaller lips.

  Weetzie felt her body being lifted. She and Heaven, holding hands, rose into the air above the crowd of people and out the door of the suite into the redolent, balmy, crickety night. On their way up, palm fronds brushed roughly against their faces. The sleeves of Heaven’s red kimono filled with air. Weetzie’s satin trench billowed up around her, revealing her white-lace panties. Below, Weetzie saw the pink hotel as if it were an architect’s model. She saw the symmetry of the gardens, the careful placement of rose bushes, ponds, and arbors. She saw the outlying rooms and the main building, the bar, the tiled pool, the Japanese restaurant.

  They went on, through the night. Weetzie saw her city with its tiny, car-lined boulevards, its miniature palm trees, its jewel-box lights. She saw the club where she went to a punk gig with Dirk the first time, and the club where she danced in a go-go cage on her thirtieth birthday. The dome of the observatory where James Dean shot Rebel Without a Cause. The battered carousel at the top of the hill in Griffith Park. Her little store with its columns and French doors. She saw trash and homeless people and fountains and limousines. She saw the cottage that had been given to her and Dirk by his Grandma Fifi when she died and where Weetzie had spent over twenty years designing clothes, raising her children, sleeping in the same bed with Max. The lights were all out. Even the TV wasn’t on. Everything was so dark and quiet. Weetzie tried to turn her head to Heaven to ask if they could stop there and look in…

  She thought she heard Heaven’s voice. “Oh. I guess he’s not just sniffing in the closet now.”

  Weetzie opened her eyes and realized she had her hand in Heaven’s lap, right on top of Heaven’s sizeable erection. She moved it away, embarrassed.

  “No problem, baby,” Heaven whispered. “That was a great trip. Do you do that all the time?”

  Weetzie felt something in her mouth, making it hard for her to answer. She spit out a red stone.

  “It’s Grandma Ruby’s!” Heaven said. “For your necklace.”

  The Darkness Inside

  As Max got onto his motorcycle, he felt a hand on his bicep. He pulled away. Vixanne Wigg was standing in the harsh parking-lot light, staring at him with her tilted, purple crazy-looking eyes. Somewhere in the darkness beyond the parking lot, Max heard glass breaking and a man yelling.

  “I told you to leave me alone,” he said, but this time his voice sounded weaker.

  “Just come home with me,” she said. “We can just talk. I bet you have a lot on your mind.”

  Max turned his face away from her. He could feel her breath on his neck. It smelled like apple liqueur, sweet and harsh at the same time, intoxicating.

  “Besides, we need to talk about our daughter. I haven’t seen her in years. I want to know how she’s doing.”

  Max turned the key and revved the engine of his bike.

  “I promise,” Vixanne said. “I won’t even try to touch you. Think of all the problems that caused before!”

  He drove away, leaving her on the sidewalk. The stars were like broken glass; he wondered if that was the sound he had heard, some kind of cosmic smashing. The air stank of gasoline and garbage. A mummy, bandaged in rags, was pushing a shopping cart, talking to the night. A siren screamed: “She’s gone! She’s gone!”

  He found himself driving to Vixanne’s house in the hills without even thinking. It was as if something was propelling him. When he slept with her before, and tried to explain that she had put some kind of witchy spell on him, Weetzie hadn’t bought it. Not that she didn’t believe in magic—that was the main thing she believed in. She just didn’t think that Vixanne needed a spell. It was only Max, being weak, being hurt. Maybe she was right. Maybe he was just being weak and hurt again. But still, he couldn’t stop himself.

  He rode up the circular driveway and parked the bike. She was waiting for him at the door, her long body silhouetted darkly against the light of the front room. She led him inside.

  Her paintings were everywhere. Witch Baby had told him about them. They rarely talked about Vixanne, but once, after Witch Baby had run away for a while, she told him what she had seen. They were all portraits of Vixanne Wigg, done in rich, glossy paints, full of fury and lush beauty. He was relieved to see them. They made her seem like a person with a heart—barbed and bleeding with thorns—instead of a hollow sorceress.

  Vixanne handed Max a glass filled with greenish liquid, which he didn’t touch. But he did sit down. It was more like collapsing.

  “How is the witch baby?”

  “She’s not a baby. You’d know that if you ever spent time with her.”

  “You wouldn’t want that, now would you? Her mother wouldn’t want that.”

  In spite of the sarcasm, he thought he heard something almost melancholy in her voice and noticed that she was looking over at a painting he hadn’t noticed before—a young woman with a tangle of black hair and eyes like large purple flowers.

  “She’s growing up,” he said. “Lily. She’s at Berkeley and she’s studying really hard but I think she’s depressed. She still does this thing where she collects newspaper clippings of the worst shit she can find and papers the walls with them.”

  “Like you.”

  He put his head in his hands and pressed his thumbs over his eyeballs until there was a kaleidoscope of dark, broken color.

  “Tell me what you see,” she said.

  “They say that kids thought, eve
ry time they showed it on TV, they thought it was happening again. So they had to stop showing it. But I can’t turn it off.”

  She nodded, tapping her fingernail on the glass he didn’t want.

  “What else?”

  “There was this documentary. They showed firefighters responding. And this one said how he was filming it but he had to turn the camera away, because there were people on fire, running. He said, ‘No one should have to look at something like that.’ “

  “But you see it anyway,” Vixanne said.

  “I used to see movies everywhere. I started making movies in my head, because that was the only way I could deal with what was really going on. It always worked before.”

  She went over to the fireplace and stirred the dead coals. Dry ash rose up, charred remains.

  “That thing that happened. It wasn’t only about what happened to all those people. It was your darkness. You need to remember,” Vixanne Wigg said before Max left her again.

  Lunch

  Ping Chong Jah-Love met Weetzie at the front desk the next day. Her hair, which was short and black as jet, had been tipped with fuchsia and lavender since the last time Weetzie had seen her. She was wearing oversized purple sunglasses, a white minidress, and white-wood platform sandals. When Weetzie saw Ping, she started to cry.

  “Girlfriend!” Ping said. “What is the matter? You’ll spoil your mascara.”

  They always joked about spoiling their eye makeup, even when they didn’t have any on. Weetzie didn’t laugh this time, though.

  “Come on,” Ping said, “let’s go to the pool.”

  They sat under a green umbrella and ordered gazpacho, green salads, and mineral water with lime. Weetzie said, “I’ve been in this dream. But when I saw you, I realized that nothing has changed out there.”

  “I changed my hair color,” Ping said.

  “It’s lovely,” said Weetzie.

  “And yours—perfect as always,” Ping said. Then she touched Weetzie’s hand. “Maybe this—you being here—will change him.”

  “It’s been so extraordinary,” said Weetzie. “And I never use that word! Like a magical-realist book or a Fellini movie. I haven’t felt this way in about ten years.”

  “Well, that’s good, honey. Just enjoy it.”

  “But what about when I come home? I don’t know if I can ever come home.”

  “I’ll have to sell a lot of Chanel to keep you here, babe. Speaking of Chanel,” she added, “I brought you something.”

  She handed Weetzie a shiny, see-through pink-and-silver shopping bag from the store. Inside was Coco.

  “I thought you might want her. I snuck in when he wasn’t home.”

  Weetzie thought she would cry again. Now that she had the suit, she felt as if she had really left.

  “Did I do the wrong thing?”

  “No, Ping. Thank you.”

  “This doesn’t mean I don’t think you’ll be back.”

  “I know.”

  “Weetzie, I remember how much you wanted him.”

  Ping and Valentine Jah-Love had been there from the beginning, when Weetzie dreamed of finding her secret agent lover man. They watched her putting on her torn, delicate dresses and stomping boots, and they told her she looked beautiful. They listened to her stories about stumbling drunkenly through nightclubs, letting boys put handcuffs on her, and they told her they were worried. They heard her laugh about her bad luck when inside she felt there was a fountain of tears trying to gush up. They tried not to act too in love in front of her, even though they could never keep their hands off of each other for very long. Then Max came, and they breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn’t until just weeks ago that Weetzie told Ping about the death of kisses.

  A huge blue butterfly, the size of a hand, flew onto the table. Weetzie and Ping gasped. They had grown up with small orange, white, and even black California butterflies, but never one this color or size.

  “I knew this hotel was magical!”

  “Either that or it’s a bad sign of global warming,” said Ping.

  Weetzie stared at the butterfly, hard, and thought, If it lands on any part of my body, it means Max and I will stay together.

  The blue butterfly rose up, circled delicately, hesitated above Weetzie’s left hand, and then flitted away into the day. Weetzie sighed.

  “He wants you, too, you know. He’s just afraid.” Ping checked her oversized white wristwatch, then leaned over and kissed Weetzie’s cheek. “I’m sorry, honey, I have to get back to the shop. Will you be okay?”

  Weetzie nodded, still seeking the blue wings, but the butterfly—lucky sign or dark omen—was long gone.

  Monsters

  After Ping left, Weetzie decided to cheer herself up with a manicure and pedicure. It was, after all, as Heaven had pointed out, all about the details. If her toes and fingers were shiny and cuticle-free, she always felt a bit brighter and lighter, even when her heart had darkened and sunken heavily into her chest.

  The salon was almost empty, except for two women in white lab coats, the red-haired woman from the pool, and her son. He was holding a bottle of silver polish, which he had grabbed from the manicurist, and running in circles around a giant golden Buddha with offerings of silk lotus blossoms and glass mangoes at its feet. The boy’s mother, who had one silver-tipped foot, was begging him to bring the bottle back. She was upset, Weetzie could tell, but also amused, trying not to let herself laugh and ruin the effect.

  Weetzie watched this for a while and finally said, “Can anybody here help me?”

  The woman looked at her, but Weetzie kept her eyes on the running boy. “I have a monster chasing me,” Weetzie said.

  The boy stopped. He actually seemed more concerned than Weetzie would have thought; she hoped she hadn’t frightened him.

  “I heard that silver nail polish keeps monsters away.”

  The boy looked at the bottle in his hand. He looked at his mother and his features seemed to get even smaller in his tiny face. Then he handed the manicurist the bottle, hopped up onto his mother’s lap, and glared suspiciously at Weetzie with his bright, tilted, silvery little eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to scare anybody.”

  The woman was wearing a pale blue silk kimono with cherry blossoms and gold branches that matched the walls of the salon. She graciously waved her wet silver fingers in the air. Her voice was silvery, too, and mysteriously accented. “I think he’s all right. Are you all right then, Bean?”

  “Monsters?” he said.

  “There aren’t really any monsters. The lady was playing a game.”

  He seemed satisfied with this and started to stroke his mother’s hair. She mouthed a thank-you to Weetzie, who was taking off her sandals and rolling up her white jeans. She plunged her feet into the basin of warm suds and sighed. How she loved a pedicure. It was, she truly believed, one of life’s great small pleasures. While one of the beauticians scrubbed, rubbed, trimmed, and polished Weetzie’s toes, she glanced over at the woman and her son. They both had skin so white you could see the veins beating under it. It looked even paler, somehow, against their scarlet hair. Weetzie noticed that the boy’s ears formed long, downy points at the top.

  Weetzie closed her eyelids as the beautician massaged orange-blossom scented lotion into her legs and feet. When she opened her eyes again, the red-haired woman and her son had disappeared. Weetzie had the eerie feeling that, perhaps, they had never really been there.

  “That other lady,” she asked the beautician. “Where do you think she was from?”

  “We’re from Vietnam,” the woman replied.

  Weetzie wondered if this answer confirmed her suspicions about the redheaded hallucination.

  “And what brought you to the pink hotel?” she asked, to be polite.

  The woman had very broad, high cheekbones, full, beautiful lips, and large teeth.

  “Our father died in the war. He was cleaning a pool the last week before the war ended and a bomb
went off. Our mother had six children to take care of and no money. One day it got so bad, we’re all so hungry, we had to eat a tree. I remember my brother got so sick. That was when my mother decided to find a way to get us to this country.”

  “How did she do it?” Weetzie asked.

  “The tree told her. It told her that my sister wasn’t our father’s daughter.”

  Weetzie was still trying to understand this, when the other woman said, “I had to take a blood test.” Weetzie noticed that she had the same mouth as her sister, though she was much taller and larger-boned. “I found out I have American blood.”

  “We hated the American man that hurt our mother,” the first woman said. “But he made it possible for us to come here.”

  Her sister scrutinized Weetzie’s face. “Why are you here?” she asked.

  “I needed time away from my boyfriend,” Weetzie said, feeling embarrassed at how trivial it sounded after the women’s story.

  “You need to show him your fingernails! He’ll like how pretty you look now! Do you want a bikini wax, too?”

  Weetzie started to repeat that she was the one who needed time away, but decided against it.

  “How much is this?” she asked when her nails were pale, glossy pink, and adorned with rhinestone flowers.

  “Eighty,” the woman said softly.

  Weetzie was used to paying sixteen dollars at one of the local nail salons—Fairy, Cute, Star, or Happy. Now she understood the Happy name.

  “She paid for you,” the sister said.

  “Who?”

  “That lady that was here.”

  Weetzie thought, Well, I know she’s real, then. And what a nice surprise!

  “You helped her.”

  Weetzie shrugged. She realized she hadn’t really helped anyone very much since she had been here. She certainly had been helping herself, but that didn’t seem to count. Especially after what the beauticians had just told her. She gave them tips the size of two Happy manicure/pedicures, eased her feet carefully into her orange slides, and left.