Femme Fatale and other stories

“Mona Wickham,” she said, extending her hand. He bowed over it. Didn’t kiss it, just bowed, a nice touch. Mona was vain of her hands, which were relatively unblemished. She kept her nails in good shape with weekly manicures and alternated her various engagement rings on the right hand. Today it was the square-cut diamond from her third marriage. Not large, but flawless.

“Bryon White,” he said. “With an O, like the poet, only the R comes first.”

“Nice to meet you,” she said. Two or three seconds passed, and Bryon didn’t release her hand and she didn’t take it back. He was studying her with intense, dark eyes. Nice eyes, Mona decided.

“The thing is, you could be a movie star.”

“So some said, when I was young.” Which was, she couldn’t help thinking, a good decade before the one in which this Bryon White thought she had been a model and an actress.

“No, I mean now. Today. I could see you as, as—Catherine, the Russian empress.”

Mona frowned. Wasn’t that the naughty one?

“Or, you know, Lauren Bacall. I think she’s gorgeous.”

“I didn’t like her in that movie with Streisand.”

“No, but with Altman—with Altman, she was magnificent.”

Mona wasn’t sure who Altman was. She remembered a store in New York, years ago, B. Altman’s. After her first marriage, she had changed into a two-piece going-away suit purchased there, a dress with matching jacket. She remembered it still, standing at the top of the staircase in that killingly lovely suit, in a houndstooth check of fuchsia and black, readying to throw the bouquet. She remembered thinking: I look good, but now I’m married, so what does it matter? Mona’s first marriage had lasted two years.

Bryon picked up on her confusion. “In Prêt à Porter.” This did not clear things up for Mona. “I’m sorry, it translates to—”

“I know the French,” she said, a bit sharply. “I used to go to the Paris collections, buy couture.” That was with her second husband, who was rich, rich, rich, until he wasn’t anymore. Until it turned out he never really was. Wallace just had a high tolerance for debt, higher than his creditors, as it turned out. Mona didn’t leave because he filed for bankruptcy, but it didn’t make the case for staying, either.

“It was a movie a few years back. The parts were better than the whole, if I can be so bold as to criticize a genius. The thing is, I’m a filmmaker myself.”

Mona hadn’t been to a movie in ten years. The new ones made her sleepy. She fell asleep, woke up when something blew up, fell back asleep again. “Have you—”

“Made anything you’ve heard of? No. I’m an indie, but, you know, you keep your vision that way. I’m on the festival circuit, do some direct-to-video stuff. Digital has changed the equation, you know?”

Mona nodded as if she did.

“Look, I don’t want to get all Schwab’s on you—”

Finally, a reference that Mona understood.

“—but I’m working on something right now and you would be so perfect. If you would consider reading for me, or perhaps, even, a screen test … there’s not much money in it, but who knows? If you photograph the way I think you will, it could mean a whole new career for you.”

He offered her his card, but she didn’t want to put her glasses on to read it, so she just studied it blindly, pretending to make sense of the brown squiggles on the creamy background. The paper was of good stock, heavy and textured.

“In fact, my soundstage isn’t far from here, so if you’re free right now—”

“I’m on foot,” she said. “I walked here from my apartment.”

“Oh, and you wouldn’t want to get in a car with a strange man. Of course.”

Mona hadn’t been thinking of Bryon as strange. In fact, she had assumed he was gay. What kind of man spoke so fervently of models and old-time movie stars? But now that he said it—no, she probably shouldn’t, part of her mind warned. But another part was shouting her down, telling her such opportunities come along just once. Maybe she looked better than she realized. Maybe Mona’s memory of her younger self had blinded her to how attractive she still was to someone meeting her for the first time.

“I’ll tell you what. I’ll call you a cab, give the driver the address. Tell him to wait, with the meter running, all on me.”

“Don’t be silly.” Mona clutched the arms of the so-called easy chair and willed herself to rise as gracefully as possible. Somehow she managed it. “Let’s go.”

She was not put off by the fact that Bryon’s soundstage was a large locker in one of those storage places. “A filmmaker at my level has to squeeze every nickel until it hollers,” he said, pulling the garage-type door behind them. She wasn’t sure how he had gotten power rigged up inside, but there was an array of professional-looking lights. The camera was a battery-powered camcorder, set up on a tripod. He even had a “set”—a three-piece 1930s-style bedroom set, with an old-fashioned vanity and bureau to match the ornately carved bed.

He asked Mona to sit on the padded stool in front of the vanity and address the camera directly, saying whatever came into her head.

“Um, testing one, two, three. Testing.”

“You look great. Talk some more. Tell me about yourself.”

“My name is Mona—” She stumbled for a second, forgetting the order of her surnames. After all, she had five.

“Where did you grow up, Mona?”

“Oh, here, there, and everywhere.” Mona had learned long ago to be stingy with the details. They dated one so.

“What were you like as a young woman?”

“Well, I was the … bee’s knees.” An odd expression for her to use, one that pre-dated her own birth by quite a bit. She laughed at its irrelevance and Bryon laughed, too. She felt as if she had been drinking brandy Alexanders instead of venti mochas. Felt, in fact, the way she had that first afternoon with her second husband, when they left the bar at the Drake Hotel and checked into a room. She had been only thirty-five then, and she had let him keep the drapes open, proud of how her body looked in the bright daylight bouncing off Lake Michigan.

“I bet you were. I bet you were. And all the boys were crazy about you.”

“I did okay.”

“Oh, you did more than okay, didn’t you, Mona?”

She smiled. “That’s not for me to say.”

“What did you wear, Mona, when you were driving those boys crazy? None of those obvious outfits for you, right? You were one of those subtle ones, like Grace Kelly. Pretty dresses, custom fit.”

“Right.” She brightened. Clothing was one of the few things that interested her. “That’s what these girls today don’t get. I had a bathing suit, a one-piece, strapless. As modest as it could be. But it was beige, just a shade darker than my own skin, and when it got wet …” She laughed, the memory alive to her, the effect of that bathing suit on the young men around the pool at the country club in Atlanta.

“I wish you still had that bathing suit, Mona.”

“I’d still fit into it,” she said. It would have been true two months ago, before she discovered Starbucks.

“I bet you would. I bet you would.” Bryon’s voice seemed thicker, lower, slower.

“I never let myself go, the way some women do. They say it’s metabolism and menopause”—oh, she wished she could take that word back, one should never even allude to such unpleasant facts of life—“but it’s just a matter of discipline.”

“I sure wish I could see you in that suit, Mona.”

She laughed. She hadn’t had this much fun in ages. He was flirting with her, she was sure of it. Gay or not, he liked her.

“I wish I could see you in your birthday suit.”

“Bryon!” She was on a laughing jag now, out of control.