minuscule portions, wouldn’t the smart move be to serve everything on minuscule plates, so that the food looked bigger by comparison? Whatever. Rich people were idiots. Give me a colossal BrainWash breakfast burrito any day of the week.
“I’ll order,” Zelda said. “I’ve got a pretty convincing fake driver’s license. Plus, I’m the only one of us who can talk.”
I sat down in one of the armchairs and watched her approach the bartender. She made a joke, and he laughed, and then he was mixing up two drinks for her. She never even had to get out the fake.
“Cheers,” she said, returning with two glasses of scotch. We clinked and drank. It burned all the way from tongue to stomach, but I still nodded when Zelda let out an ahh of satisfaction and said, “That’s smooth.”
She crossed her legs and leaned back into the chair, swirling her drink like some kind of Bond villain. “So tell me, Parker Santé, what were you really doing here yesterday? Besides taking a long weekend, I mean.”
I opened up my journal. I like hotels.
“Why?”
I don’t know. They aren’t part of real life, because nobody’s here to stay. Also, nice hotels are always a safe place to steal, because everybody’s rich.
Zelda laughed. “I’d almost forgotten about that! You took all my money!”
I brought it back.
“Eventually.” Over the top of her giant glass, she scoped out the room. “Take something right now,” she said.
I raised an eyebrow.
“Go ahead. I want to see you in action.”
It was the work of thirty seconds. There was a coatrack just inside the entrance of the bar. I took a gray cashmere scarf and wrapped it theatrically around my neck, over the scarf Zelda had bought me back at the Legion of Honor. Then I reached into the pockets of a couple of coats until I came up with an antique silver lighter. I returned to my seat and presented it to Zelda.
“Bravo!” she said, applauding. We toasted again and drank off the rest of our scotch.
“I’ll get us a refresher,” Zelda said. “And I guess I won’t be needing this.” She threw her fake license onto my lap. Her age was listed as a just barely plausible twenty-two. Under hair color, it said silver.
It’s funny, I wrote, after she returned with round two. The thing that’s fake about this ID is the exact opposite of what’s fake about most fake IDs. You’re pretending to be younger than you really are.
She took the license back and looked at it. “I suppose that’s true. But you want to hear a secret, Parker? No one ever really stops feeling young. We may get a job and a husband and a house, but the whole adulthood thing is just a charade. We’re all pretending to have grown up. You know what the cruelest object ever invented is?” I shook my head. “The mirror. It breaks the illusion.”
Not for you, though.
“What do you mean?”
You see the same thing every time, don’t you?
I’ll admit this question was a kind of challenge. My faithometer had been creeping up all day, but it was still shy of the critical 50 percent mark.
“Oh, that’s just as bad, really, only in a different way. People don’t like getting older, but they do like changing. Staying the same is a kind of death.”
My mom told me once that she wouldn’t be a kid again for a million bucks. She said things hurt more when you don’t have any perspective on pain.
“That’s true.”
But doesn’t everyone want to be young and hot forever?
“They only think they want it, Parker. But nobody really wants anything forever. Just for longer than they get it.”
I want you forever.
She smiled, then leaned over and kissed me gently with her whiskey-sweet mouth. “No, you don’t,” she said. “But you want me tonight, don’t you?”
I nodded.
“So finish your drink, darling, and let’s go upstairs.”
I did. Fire all the way down.
THE TRAGEDY OF THE MINIBAR
WE TOOK THE ELEVATOR UP to the top floor.
“Once upon a time,” Zelda said, “this place had big beautiful keys made of bronze. And now?” She held up the white plastic keycard and flicked it. “And so the whirligig of time brings in its revenges.”
The electronic lock beeped, and we entered the suite.
Jesus H. Christ. This wasn’t a hotel room. It was an apartment.
The decor looked like what your grandma would buy if someone gave her a million dollars and no rules. Every available square inch of flat surface had some pricey-looking tchotchke on it. In the