TIGHTLACE: the Last Words of a Murderess

Part 1, continued from below...

Manhattan 1926

I wore a blue Butterick dress, pearls and my fox fur wrap. It took that little extra something to perk me up. But by the time I’d dropped Laney and caught the Ferry and walked around Manhattan getting lost in my usual way, I was sticky and stale as Sunday picnic mayonnaise.

I spun through the revolving door at Henry’s and the hot air hit me like a clammy palm. Usually I love a Smörgåsbord and at Henry's there's a cheerful atmosphere with the egg-yolk walls and little square tables, each set with a silk carnation. What's more, you get served by waitresses instead of having to crowd into a buffet with the hoi polloi.

But that day, New York had got greedy and the place was packed. The prim little hostess – whose name I can never remember - minced over.

“Do you have a reservation?”

“I’m meeting Mrs. Kaufman here.”

“Mrs. Who?” said the brown mouse. She scurried to her station to run her finger down a list.

“Excuse me,” I said, “I come here practically every week. I’m astounded you don’t recall…”

“I can’t find that name at all. We’re awfully busy today.”

I was starting to feel fuzzy, a sure sign I was going to have one of my turns. I craned my neck, peering between tables. It was hard to see past the fat rear-ends of waitresses leaning over, giving the gents an eyeful for a bigger tip. My eyes were full of dots and colours by the time I spotted Karen. She was sitting at a corner table as at the far end of the buffet, painting on lipstick in an angry ox-blood square.

“That’s her!” I pointed, “That’s Mrs. Kaufman.”

I tried to sound haughty like those Manhattan ladies, but the words came out crackly and desperate.

“Oh. Mrs Kaufman,” said the brown mouse, enunciating. She snatched my wrap from me before I even had it off my arms.

“Watch it, Sister. That’s real fox fur.”

“I’ll be so careful,” she said.

I showed myself to my table, squeezing in between the straining rumps swaddled in their smudgy white pinafores. I could see what courses the girls’d served already from the colour of the hand-marks on their asses. By the time I’d crossed the room, I’d counted dill sauce, beetroot salad, potato casserole and stewed brown cabbage.

Before I even sat down, Karen seemed to sense my state of mind.

“Oh Honey, I’ll order aquavit,” she said, “Excuse me, waitress! You know, they’re darn deaf here, Tommy, I think I’ll have to get my blouse undone before anyone'll take notice.”

Tommy – that’s Karen and everyone else’s nickname for me. Gay Tommy, because I’m always the life of the party, the living spirit of the Jazz Age. I slumped down in the chair across from her.

“Where are we going shopping?”

“You don’t look like you could hold a fork, let alone fight your corner in the Macy’s sales. Besides, I’ve got something else in mind to pick us up.”

“What? Like a forklift truck?” I said.

“See, there’s the Tommy I like having lunch with.”

The waitress brought us a bottle of aquavit and two tiny glasses, cute as baby shoes. She took our order and I poured us shots and we toasted skål and downed them. It was only sugar-water, of course. But as soon as the waitress was out of sight, Karen slipped a flask out of her purse. I knew she kept it filled up with bootleg gin she scooped out of Maisie Olsen’s bathtub every Saturday. I often spotted her in Church, taking a covert belt during a boring sermon. On this occasion, she decided to be Christian and share.

“Fuck. You could clean the John with this, Karen!”

“There’s some hope for your potty-mouth, then.”

“Sorry. It’s as if this other voice pops out of me sometimes…damn demon in me, making me cuss. Then Albert’s slamming the door and Laney’s crying…”

“Hun, you’re a foul-mouthed so-and-so and a drunk and a terrible mother, just like me. We should’ve been gaiety girls or fan-dancers but instead we’re stuck elbow-deep in dirty laundry.”

“I know! I’m there hanging Albert’s pants and socks on the line and I hear music coming from a few blocks away. Teenagers. I just want to drop the wet clothes on the grass and kick my shoes off...”

“But you’re not young any more, Ruth. You’re over the hill. Anyway, you have your fun. Out of school too. Except recently. You’ve been hiding out. It's what I'm seeking to rectify.”

She was referring to a man I’d been seeing for a while behind Albert’s back. It made me uncomfortable that she was so free with the information. I belted another shot.

“Yes, it’s been a while. Albert keeps me so busy, you know, doing the man’s jobs too. Fixing the sink. Pulling the dead leaves off the roof. He says he’s too tired from his busy life working at the magazine.”

“Ohhh....yes, Bobby gets just knocked out sitting in his office all day, with that twelve-year-old brunette waiting on him hand and foot. But if he doesn’t fix the guttering soon, I’ll strangle him and then he'll know what's what...”

“Snap! If Albert doesn’t put a fresh lick of paint in the parlor, I’ll shoot him through both temples...”

“...or I might poison Bobby’s steak. It would only be fitting since he picks his teeth at the table. If he says I'm off it, he knows who to blame.”

I laughed. But it made me sad, because it was true.

“Seriously, though,” I said, “sometimes I get so darn mad. I do just feel like smothering Albert in his sleep. It would mean we use our bed for something…”

Yes, I came out with it and I regret that every day. You see, Karen was one of the main character witnesses at my trial. The irony is - I didn’t even mean it at the time. It’s just that I could feel her wringing the misery out of me like blood from a towel and I had to spill. All that pain that had been bottled up inside me finally had a chance to be poured into her big, generous, brandy-glass of a soul.

I knew she would serve it with a smile to the next girl she took out to lunch. I didn’t care. It felt good.

Before I knew it, the flask was empty. The waitress stood over us with heaping plates of gravlax and pickled herring, potatoes, eels and hardboiled eggs, dill sauce, mustard and mayonnaise, two shots of steaming fake-soda-snaps to chase the aquavit. It was so good, so familiar. Though I couldn’t eat it without thinking of my poor Ma begging for köttbullar and prinskorv when she got sick, my Pa telling her Vi er i Amerika nå. For Kristi skyld, woman! Speak English!

When I left home at seventeen, I swore I would never have a marriage like my parents’. So traditional. So boring. The original immigrants - Ma crocheting shawls and crooning Arve Moen Bergset to herself. Pa, the melancholy Norwegian, ignoring her, whittling ships out of scrap alder and dreaming about his life as a sailor. Så skjønn, så ledig at sea, until she dry-docked him.

In one sense I honored my oath. My marriage was something else - for all their quiet unhappiness, my Pa never tortured my Ma to get his kicks and my Ma never wrung Pa's neck.

“You’ve got dill-sauce down your chin. You look like a pig,” said my companion.

“Well, you have pickle between your front teeth."

“That’s not the point. There’s someone coming over. Here, have my compact. And put some lipstick on, for God’s sake! I don't want you to show me up.”

Karen thrust her little gold clamshell into my hand. While I dabbed my greasy mouth with my napkin, she twisted a Chanel tube.

“The New York Times says it makes your mouth look like an engorged you know,” said Karen.

“How lovely,” I said.“Isn’t it rude to put your you know on in public?"

“No, Silly! It’s all the rage. Go on. I don't want him to think I keep plain company.”

I felt like the whole room was watching me as I slid the little red penis over my mouth, trying drunkenly to colour inside the lines. I squeezed my lips together and pouted into the mirror. A dark shape hovered behind my head, stealing my light. Someone bumped against my chair and jogged my hand. The lipstick hit my neck.

“Hey!” I said, spinning round, “I’m trying to freshen up here!”

A wiry man wearing a well-cut suit stood behind me. He pushed his specs up his snub-nose and smiled lopsidedly. This was who she was trying so hard to impress?

“You seem plenty fresh to me,” he said and looked me up and down like I was the new Packard in the dealership.

“Tommy –Judd. Judd – Tommy,” said Karen. She batted her eyelids. “Judd, be a champ and ask the waitress to fetch us another chair?”

“As long as I can sit between you two beauties,” said Judd, thumbing the groove in his angular jaw.

“Well now, it is a square table,” said Karen.

She had her head cocked to one side and was curling a damp strand of sandy-coloured hair around her finger. I thought she was about to start chewing it. As soon as Judd went to chat up the waitress, she grabbed my wrist.

“Gimme my lipstick back, you klutz!”

“Ow, you’re pinching me!”

“God, you’re blotto! Wipe your throat!”

“What's wrong with my throat?”

I stared into the mirror. It looked like someone had cut me with a straight razor, the way the lipstick was smeared across it.

“I’ll have that back before you smash it,” said Karen, snatching her compact and shutting it with a snap.

I hunched down and scrubbed my neck on my napkin. For a minute I thought I would puke, but I swallowed the bile back. When I looked up, Judd was sitting right next to me with his chin in his hands. I noticed the rectangle of pale skin on his ring finger.

“You’ve still got a bit of red stuff just under your chin,” he said.

“I can’t see because she’s taken her mirror back."

He smiled and nodded and took a folded handkerchief from his pocket that looked like it had been pressed by some good little homebody. It had initials embroidered on the corner in green thread. JG.

It will sound funny, but those simple letters stirred a wasps’ nest up in me, somewhere under my Butterick dress. Beneath the bandeau bra and the boobs and the ribcage, there was a mob of angry insects stinging each other without mercy.

See, my husband and I had a photo album on our shelf with the very same initials on the cover. And hanging from the wall of our family room was a large, misty-eyed portrait of their owner: the lovely Miss Jessie Guischard, who had been Albert’s fiancée until her untimely demise from pneumonia. Can you guess who held her hand when she finally slipped away?

Sometimes, when his colleagues used to come to dinner and he forgot I was there, he’d start harping on her name. How she understood art and books and yachts and could talk to him for hours. How she was the best woman he ever knew. The last time I waited until he was at work and snuck and unhooked that portrait, we didn’t speak for a month. I was so beat-down I went to stay with my folks. When I stepped back in the door all ready to forgive him, the first thing I clapped eyes on was JG.

I wasn’t getting muddled, though. Clearly this man had his own set of initials, JG. And I was guessing that his wife had sewn them on his handkerchief so that he didn't mix it up with his tennis partner's.

Like the meatloaf crumbs, the initials appeared to me to be an omen. When Judd moistened the handkerchief with his tongue and began dabbing at my neck, I didn’t smack his hand away.

“You have a beautiful throat,” he said.

“Really?”

“It’s like a cat’s. I can feel it purring under my hand.”

“Well, you sure know how to stroke a cat,” I said.

My eyes were half shut. Through my lashes, I saw a chair pushed back and a napkin hurled spitefully on the table. My last glimpse of Karen was her bony ass running away from the scene of defeat. Judd was still dabbing my throat, drawing the job out. Meanwhile, something had unwound in me - the rattler had been charmed. The wasps had been smoked to sleep by the caresses of a greenhorn. And I had the whole weekend to myself while Albert yachted and Laney played at Anne’s.

“Are you good for the cheque?" I drawled.

"Sure am, ma'am. I'm loaded at the minute. I just got paid."

"And what d’you do for a living, Judd, apart from freshening up ladies' necks?”

“I sell intimate garments,” he said, “intimate garments for ladies.”

To be continued…