We Are Pirates: A Novel (16 page)

“
And
, I was thinking,” Amber said. “I probably won’t do it, but I should get a tattoo.”

“Shouldn’t we both?” Gwen said. “But I probably wouldn’t either.”

“On my leg,” Amber continued, “in the same shape as your burn. You know, like sisters.”

“Mates.”

“Mates,” Amber agreed. Naomi would have made some big lesbian deal of it. “And an ivory dress with a long train.”

They laughed. This was a slap at Amber’s stepsister, a blonde with flat teeth grinning on the refrigerator in Amber’s kitchen. She sold real estate, which was so stupid, in Denver, and was getting married and had sent Amber a frilly book with ribbons on the edges and a tiny lock with a key on a chain to wear around your neck. Or, you could tear the lock off the cardboard of the cover and open it that way. Inside Amber was supposed to write down her dreams for her own wedding, so she could look at it when she found the guy and pick the right flowers. There were some girls who did this, planned their weddings. The other girls planned their funerals, and Gwen and Amber had already talked one night, late late, about burial at sea. The death part was in the books, too. “The captain,” read a caption under a ghastly etching, “hanged in chains. Like a ruin he looks.” That was where it ended, they knew. You went off the map and they found you anyway, go figure. Or you ended it yourself. “The mates toss themselves off the ramparts into the raging sea rather than face certain brutal justice.” Either way, it was finished deep down in, you couldn’t help giggling, Davy Jones’s locker.

“I’m doing it tonight,” Amber said quietly.

“What? Where?”

“Not the tattoo,” she said. “The note.”

Gwen looked at her desk, where an envelope gaped open, as if it had been ransacked by her mother. “G” was scrawled on the outside of it, just “G,” which at a different point in her life Gwen had found endearing. Now it just looked like Naomi had been too lazy to write out Gwen’s whole name.

“How long will it take?” Gwen asked. Gwen had already seen Amber’s handiwork. It was perfect. It fooled everybody.

“Not long. An album, probably.”

“Tortuga?”

“Can you believe that, where he’s from? And the parrot?”

“I know.”

“This is really happening.”

“Verily.”

“I’m nervous about it, though.”

“Yeah.”

“Goodnight, Gwen.”

“Goodnight, wench.”

Gwen hung up on Amber’s laugh and glared back at the envelope in the fading light. Among the many things she remembered was the phone number of the girl she used to call when she was
naive.
She stretched out her starboard leg, the burn like a badge of honor—
mates
—and turned the other knob on the radio, to find a station. Something she’d never listen to, loud and scraggly. Then she blocked her number and punched in her call.

“Hello?”

Gwen used a new voice. “I’m going to fuck you up,” she said.

“Who is this?” came the instant answer, shrill and scared like a little girl. “Who are you?”

“You fucking bitch cunt,” Gwen snarled. “I’m going to fuck you up, Naomi.”

It was dead in the earpiece. Naomi would never guess who it was. When she was an adult, this voice would come to her sometimes, her silver pen tapping on the documents she was supposed to work on, but she’d never figure it out. She had made so many people hate her, the suspects were endless.

Gwen let the phone drop to the carpet. She wondered—she was sure there must be—if there was a bottle of rum in the house. This was really happening. This was going to start; it was starting already. Look at her swearing like a sailor.

This year’s hotel looked shabby. Phil Needle got out of the car like he was bad on stilts, one leg sore and jerky from the gas pedal. He still had no title, and it was getting late. Or it was late already. But he was here, he had to remind himself. In front of the hotel, too large for the space, was a fountain tinkling water into its own pool. He was not like one of those drops, creating a tiny circle gone and unmissed.

“Make yourself useful,” he said to Alma Levine, who was blinking at the fountain. “Please,” he added. “Go in and see about our rooms.”

“Right,” Levine said and slouched through the doors, which slid open as she stepped near them. Phil Needle retrieved his little suitcase and stepped out of the way of a van marked COURTESY. The doors opened for him, too.

The lobby was empty but full of laughter somehow, broadcast from around the corner. The bar, surely, full of the conference. Soon he would go, batten down the hatches with a drink, with luck run into Leonard Steed. Or call him. Have Levine call him. Something. He strode hopefully purposefully across the lobby, past a painting of squares and foil with a plaque saying it had been donated by the artist. Thanks a lot, pal. Levine was talking to a man behind a desk, and behind the man was a ficus, a sort of plant, at this point in history, that needed hardly any care at all.

Levine had her frown on. “There’s a problem, Phil.”

No, Phil Needle was not surprised.

“What?”

“No room at the inn.”

Phil Needle decided to check with the man directly. “Are you,” look at the name tag, “Florio, going to honor our reservation?”

“I didn’t,” Levine said, “make a reservation, actually.”

Phil Needle blinked. Fuck that ficus.

“You didn’t actually tell me you needed a reservation,” Levine said. She looked not even apologetic about not being apologetic. “Just for the plane.”

“Winter Air,” Phil Needle said coldly, but no, he should be staying mad about the hotel.

The man was typing into his computer and then changed his mind and looked at a clipboard. Nobody spoke. Then he slowly, slowly put the clipboard on the counter and pointed to something with his pen. It was a mess of squares and ink, with numbers crossed out and circled, and then, suddenly, below it, an empty oasis of blanks for his name and address. “A suite,” the guy said.

“What?”

“I have a suite,” he said. “Two bedrooms with a shitty view. Separate baths, but you’ll have to share a sitting room.”

He quoted a large, laughable price, without laughing, and on the clipboard Phil Needle saw that Florio was the name of the hotel.
City
view, he must have said, and the rest was like the setup of a dirty joke. Wasn’t it? He handed over his credit card thinking of it, the shared part of the shared room. “Is it okay with you?” he thought to ask Levine.

She shrugged, her shirt moving a little bit. “Yes,” she said. “I guess it was my fault.”

Phil Needle thought that was a good guess.

“Do you need validation?”

“Yes,” Phil Needle said. “I have a car outside.”

“You can give the key to—”

But Phil Needle, the American outlaw, just put his keys down on the counter, at the price he was paying. “You can give it to them,” he said to the man, and began to walk away. Levine, unintentionally or perhaps humbled, wheeled his suitcase behind him. He thought that Alma Levine would say something about his getting them a room, as they elevatored up to the twentieth floor. It wouldn’t have to be “Oh, Phil Needle, you’re so wonderful,” but surely
something.
But Levine didn’t say a word until Phil Needle had the door to the room unlocked, and then she said, “Phew,” and quickly traipsed ahead of him into the room.

Here they were. In the sitting part, two couches sat, and the curtains were open at the big window. Outside it was dark, with lights here and there tilted at warehouses. Phil Needle had been right the first time: it was a shitty view, particularly with his large, disappointed face reflected in the middle of it. It looked funny-looking. The ends of Levine’s legs were visible, kicking off their shoes on a bed in a doorway, her feet arching on the ugly bedspread, and then scratching at each other.

“Would it be okay to order food up?” she called to him.

“Sure,” he said.

“I’m going to take a shower,” she said, but she did not rise and close the door.

Phil Needle took his own suitcase to his own separate room and lay it down on an identical bedspread, right where Levine’s legs were now. He unzipped and looked at everything his wife had put in his baggage. She had put in an extra shirt, as she had promised, one of those shirts that makes you remember the time you were in a gift shop of a fancy hotel buying it from a girl in a cowboy hat while your wife and daughter napped upstairs. That journey was another adventure, not the journey he was on now. The view looked worse from his room. Tomorrow he hoped he would be flush with victory, or maybe even tonight when he went downstairs, ran into Steed and sealed the deal. He thought umpteenthly of the document in Personal:
I ask what you want to do. You unzip your pants.
And of course her legs on the dashboard of his car, while she talked about desire and excitement, and now on the bed, identical to the one he was sitting on.

“Levine?” he called.

“Yeah” came faintly.

“What if I told you there was no conference?” he asked.

There was a pause, with the hum of something, maybe faint traffic outside, or something in the room adjusting the temperature. Then he heard the
pad, pad, pad, pad
of feet, unmistakably bare, and then Levine’s head appeared in the doorway. He could not see the rest of her. Was she in a towel?

“What?” she said.

“I thought you were going to take a shower,” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

Yes.

“I’m just going to wash my face,” Phil Needle said, “and get a drink downstairs with the people from the conference.”

She watched him but did not step further into the room. She was waiting for something. She wanted something.

“I want you,” he said, “to wait upstairs.”

“Okay,” she said. “Can I still order food?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ll be up later.”

“Did you need me for something?” she asked. “Otherwise I’ll probably be in bed before long. It’s late.”

He was her boss. There was nobody else the document could have been about. If he’d had a drink already, he told himself, he’d have the resolution to unzip his pants, right there on the bed. Then she would walk into the room, if that was what she was waiting for. But he hadn’t had a drink, and he was not quite so foolhardy to think he couldn’t be wrong. So he took his hand and waved at Alma Levine, just a little wave. She smiled and waved back, and then there was the
pad, pad, pad, pad
of her retreat. He let himself lean back on the bed and stare at the ceiling with the blinking smoke detector ready to scream if the building caught fire, or if it just malfunctioned. He tried again to think of a title, but it was just Levine’s legs on the bed, all the way down the elevator.

It was not a piano bar, but the bar had a piano in it, shiny on a small round stage with a plaque where the man playing it should have been. The plaque advised guests of the Florio that they had an opportunity to win a piano actually used in the movie
Mississippi Marvel
, the word “actually” more or less admitting that the entire statement was a lie.
Mississippi Marvel
was the biography of another American bluesman, of higher stature than Belly Jefferson, because the Mississippi Marvel had a movie made of his life. The Belly Jefferson people hated him. Phil Needle caught his own nervous reflection in the side of the piano, and checked in with his doubts and fears. They were doing fine, thanks.
American
something. The face of Leonard Steed appeared next to him. Phil Needle did not shriek.

“You’re here,” Steed said.

“Of course I’m here,” Phil Needle said. Leonard Steed had told him to come. And so what if maybe he had, a little shriek.

“I told you to come and you came. I like that. I’ve been looking. We’re all at the bar thinking you were going to come in. Everyone you need to meet.”

“Yes, the bar.”

Leonard Steed put one hand on Phil Needle, somewhere between paternal and bouncer. “We’re in the
other
bar,” he said. “Come on.”

Phil Needle followed Leonard Steed down another turn and past a podium where the man grinned at Steed, who said gently, “Thanks for your help, Jeffrey,” as they walked through an empty restaurant. The walls were red, with light fixtures here and there pretending to be candles. At the back was an enormous table, black and high, and everyone was sitting at it. They were all there, and they were all the same type, and Phil Needle’s distance from that type was off the map. But everyone smiled.

“Ten bells and all’s well,” Leonard Steed said. “Everyone, this is Phil Needle.”

“
The
Phil Needle?” asked one of them.

“No,” Phil Needle said, because it couldn’t be so.

“Of course!” Leonard Steed said. “Phil Needle of Phil Needle Productions. From San Francisco he comes to you, having fled New York City to reinvent himself. Tall, handsome, married, Jewish, hobbies include kicking your ass at the big presentation tomorrow.”