Femme Fatale and other stories

that he said it—no, she probably shouldn’t, part of her mind warned. But another part was shouting her down, telling her such opportunities come along just once. Maybe she looked better than she realized. Maybe Mona’s memory of her younger self had blinded her to how attractive she still was to someone meeting her for the first time.
    “I’ll tell you what. I’ll call you a cab, give the driver the address. Tell him to wait, with the meter running, all on me.”
    “Don’t be silly.” Mona clutched the arms of the so-called easy chair and willed herself to rise as gracefully as possible. Somehow she managed it. “Let’s go.”
    She was not put off by the fact that Bryon’s soundstage was a large locker in one of those storage places. “A filmmaker at my level has to squeeze every nickel until it hollers,” he said, pulling the garage-type door behind them. She wasn’t sure how he had gotten power rigged up inside, but there was an array of professional-looking lights. The camera was a battery-powered camcorder, set up on a tripod. He even had a “set”—a three-piece 1930s-style bedroom set, with an old-fashioned vanity and bureau to match the ornately carved bed.
    He asked Mona to sit on the padded stool in front of the vanity and address the camera directly, saying whatever came into her head.
    “Um, testing one, two, three. Testing.”
    “You look great. Talk some more. Tell me about yourself.”
    “My name is Mona—” She stumbled for a second, forgetting the order of her surnames. After all, she had five.
    “Where did you grow up, Mona?”
    “Oh, here, there, and everywhere.” Mona had learned long ago to be stingy with the details. They dated one so.
    “What were you like as a young woman?”
    “Well, I was the … bee’s knees.” An odd expression for her to use, one that pre-dated her own birth by quite a bit. She laughed at its irrelevance and Bryon laughed, too. She felt as if she had been drinking brandy Alexanders instead of venti mochas. Felt, in fact, the way she had that first afternoon with her second husband, when they left the bar at the Drake Hotel and checked into a room. She had been only thirty-five then, and she had let him keep the drapes open, proud of how her body looked in the bright daylight bouncing off Lake Michigan.
    “I bet you were. I bet you were. And all the boys were crazy about you.”
    “I did okay.”
    “Oh, you did more than okay, didn’t you, Mona?”
    She smiled. “That’s not for me to say.”
    “What did you wear, Mona, when you were driving those boys crazy? None of those obvious outfits for you, right? You were one of those subtle ones, like Grace Kelly. Pretty dresses, custom fit.”
    “Right.” She brightened. Clothing was one of the few things that interested her. “That’s what these girls today don’t get. I had a bathing suit, a one-piece, strapless. As modest as it could be. But it was beige, just a shade darker than my own skin, and when it got wet …” She laughed, the memory alive to her, the effect of that bathing suit on the young men around the pool at the country club in Atlanta.
    “I wish you still had that bathing suit, Mona.”
    “I’d still fit into it,” she said. It would have been true two months ago, before she discovered Starbucks.
    “I bet you would. I bet you would.” Bryon’s voice seemed thicker, lower, slower.
    “I never let myself go, the way some women do. They say it’s metabolism and menopause”—oh, she wished she could take that word back, one should never even allude to such unpleasant facts of life—“but it’s just a matter of discipline.”
    “I sure wish I could see you in that suit, Mona.”
    She laughed. She hadn’t had this much fun in ages. He was flirting with her, she was sure of it. Gay or not, he liked her.
    “I wish I could see you in your
birthday
suit.”
    “Bryon!” She was on a laughing jag now, out of control.
    “Why can’t I, Mona? Why can’t I see you in your birthday suit?”
    Suddenly, the only sound in the room was Bryon’s breath, ragged and harsh. It was hard to see anything clearly, with the lights shining in her eyes, but Mona could see that he was steadying the camera with just one hand.
    “You want to see me naked?” she asked.
    Bryon nodded.
    “Just … see?”
    “That’s how we start, usually. Slow like. Everyone has his or her own comfort zone.”
    “And the video—is that for your eyes only?”
    “I told you, I’m an independent