Beauty Queen

century of loving hand-rubbed waxing on a fine old piece of furniture.
    "Well, I think you'd better tell me," said Marion.
    He reached over to the bedside table, pulled a little cigar from a pack, and lit it with his scratched gold lighter. His bent shoulders, his silky blond hair falling forward and the light playing over his chest and hands, made him look curiously young, curiously vulnerable. Bill ached with a tenderness that was not possible to express.
    "Nothing to do with you," he said.
    "Not true," said Marion crisply. "Anything that spoils our time together is something to do with me."
    Bill heaved a slow sigh.
    "Today I gave Jeannie a check for ten thousand dollars for her campaign fund."
    Head still bent, Marion drew on the cigar, then blew out the smoke slowly, almost wearily. In the light of the bedside lamp, the pale blue smoke curled up past his hair. He shook his head as if in disbelief.
    "I haven't a thing to say," he said. "She's your daughter. I can't criticize."
    "Now that I've done it, of course, I feel like an ass," said
    Bill.
    He sat up on the edge of the bed, and reached to the wing chair for his shorts.
    "Of course you're an ass," said Marion. "She's your daughter, and I can't criticize, but you're an ass anyway. You're gay, and she is going to the governor's mansion over the bodies of gays, and you are giving her money for her campaign fund."
    Bill stood up and pulled on his shorts. Suddenly he felt old, ridiculous, out of shape. He felt that he should run a mile a day on an indoor track somewhere, during his lunch hour, and lose twenty pounds.
    "I'm sorry you've lost respect for me," he said.
    "I haven't lost respect for you," said Marion. "I've just said a truth."
    "True," said Bill.
    "And you're going to her dinner."
    "Marion ..." He turned to his lover in anguish. "... I'm her father. I have to be there."
    "How much a plate?"
    "Two hundred and fifty."
    "So actually," said Marion, "you're giving her ten thousand and two hundred and fifty."
    Bill felt himself growing angry—an anger that he knew he had no right to feel, and whose causes he was unsure of. He pulled on his trousers, pushing his shirttails down into them.
    "You don't have to give her anything," said Marion. "Why couldn't you just stick with your original story? That you'd plowed everything into the South Street thing? That you couldn't spare a dime?"
    "Because she and Al would know it was a lie, that's why," Bill shouted. "I always gave her money to run with.
    Now it's the big one, now it's Albany, and all of a sudden I don't have a cent to give her? She'd know it's a lie. She'd wonder what I have to hide."
    "Years of us," said Marion, an icy look in his eyes. At that moment he looked as savage and ruthless as the beautiful killer Englishman in The Day of the Jackal.
    "I can always stop payment on the check," said Bill.
    The moment he said it, he realized how stupid it sounded.
    "And stop payment on us, too," said Marion.
    Seizing his jacket off the chair, Bill turned on him. "What makes you think it's so simple, all of a sudden?"
    And then he left, striding out of the apartment, into the elevator, into the street. With every step his feet were screaming that they wanted to turn around and go back to Marion's door.
    Jeannie was dressing carefully. She hoped that the Lord Jesus Christ looked kindly on a woman's dressing carefully for an occasion where her way of looking was important.
    A few years ago, she would have sent to the bank for her jewels, and she would have pulled some stunning creation out of the closet. But tonight her jewels were still in the bank—and she had sent all her flashy, immodest clothes to be resold.
    She had spent the afternoon at the beauty salon, having her hair and nails done. Now she slipped on a dove-gray chiffon gown with a high cowled neck and long cuffed sleeves, and a lot of little round buttons up the front. It was very modest and old-fashioned looking. Her father kept telling her that she ought to gain a few pounds, but really, she was glad she looked so slender—like a leader with charisma, emerging from a long hunger strike.
    She reached to the gold-plated art nouveau jewelry box that had always been her mother's, and opened it. Nestling in the blue silk lining was her mother's three-strand pearl choker. Her father had bought it for Cora for their tenth wedding anniversary, and it was the only piece of jewelry that her mother had ever liked and worn. The pearls were real, not cultured.