her.' You know her. I took a few steps away from him across the flags. I lit another cigarette. Private gesture that, lowering your head, cupping your hands around the flame. Just for a second blow them all way. Richard had come out and he appeared beside me, glancing back at her furtively as he spoke under his breath. 'You're doing exactly the right thing,' he said. 'Back off, asshole,' I said. 'You love this woman?' he asked, deep-set eyes narrowing, voice like ice. 'You want to ruin everything for her? She won't come back to The Club unless you're waiting for her there.' 'Play this one out with us, Elliott,' Scott said, 'for her sake.' 'You guys have got everything figured, haven't you?' I turned around and looked back at her. She had risen and come towards the french door, her ankles unsteady in the perilous shoes. She had her arms folded, and she looked shattered, absolutely broken to bits.
I stamped out the cigarette on the stones, and pointed my finger at her. 'In a couple of days,' I said. She nodded. 'I won't break my word,' she said. I wanted to tell her coldly and calmly that I didn't care whether or not she ever came back. I wanted to call her every bad name for a woman I knew, every snarling bad name in every language that I had ever heard. But she wasn't all those names to me. She was Lisa. And the one lie she had told, she had admitted to that first morning at the Court of Two Sisters. And there had never been any lies from her after that, or any promises, or any commitments of any kind. Yet I had the feeling of something so vital and so precious being destroyed, something so extraordinary and so crucial, that I couldn't even look into her face anymore. It was like some door had opened, and the horror that had always been behind the door, the awful thing I'd feared all my life was finally standing there.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
29 -- Lisa
Visit to Church
All we are asking is that you explain it to us, that you let us try to understand. How could you do it? It was a dump, a hole, joint, any name you can think of for a seedy tourist trap built like an alleyway with a bench down one wall for the customers, and the stage a garishly lighted strip behind the bar opposite. And a man who looked exactly like a giant of a woman was dancing, if you could call it that, or more truly shuffling back and forth in satin mules, the light flickering on her white satin gown, her heavily made-up cheeks, the spun glass of her white wig, her vapid unfocused eyes. She/he was watching herself in the mirror, dancing with herself, mouthing the words to herself of the recorded song as it crackled through the speakers, a dreary leakage of rhythmic sound, the silver boa shivering over her smooth and powerful arms, her whole appearance strangely, undeniably sensuous as it was manufactured, beautiful as it was ghastly. To me anyway. You are all angels. You have transcended everything into the pure theatre of yourselves. I am worshipping.
I mean, you are the mentor, the guardian angel of this whole system, and you tell me not to ask you any questions! I sat motionless against the wall, watching her, the heavy, almost lumbering steps of her big feet, dime-store pink of her waxed mouth, dull, straight-ahead stare beneath fringe of false lashes. Reek of urine from the little bathroom just beyond the filthy red velvet curtain. Stench of dirty carpet, damp, mildewed on the narrow floor. Faint sweet stink of pancake, makeup, dirty costume. Like the giant marble angels in church who hold out the shells full of holy water for us to dip our fingers. Larger and smoother than life, undeniably perfect creatures. It had been hours that I'd been sitting here. How could you do it to him, to him, I mean whatever the reason? Play games with him like this? What do you think this guy is that you can manipulate him, use him like this? You are the one who taught us to never, never underestimate the psychological dynamite we are dealing with. Two hundred-dollar bills to keep the place open.
Ten, eleven, twelve rip-off seven-ounce nightclub bottles of beer. Bourbon Street almost empty outside, and only one other person in the club, I mean