18   

This can’t be hell, the
plumbing works

From the taxi window, Charity goggled up at the splendor of Ultimate Rise. “Now, that is class!”

“As advertised.” Jake handed his card over the seat. “Anytime you need a cab.”

“I sure will, thanks. You’re nice when you don’t talk so weird.” When Jake came around to open her door, Charity noted the pallor of his face and neck. “You ought to get out more, Jake. Be with folks.”

“I’ve been there.”

“It’s kind of embarrassing. I can’t pay you. Not even a tip.”

“On the house. Your new condo, Miss Stovall. Corrupt yourself in good health.” Jake slid into the front seat, meshed gears and drove away.

A uniformed doorman spun the revolving doors at just the right speed to receive her smoothly. Across an opulent lobby large as a parking lot, a tailored, obsequious desk clerk held out her keys. “Your duplex, Miss Stovall. Elevators to your right. Welcome to Ultimate Rise.”

The elevator whispered open, wafting light, breezy music to her ears from an old Audrey Hepburn movie. A cool voice inquired: “Floor, please?”

“Uh. Floor.” Charity always flustered when singled out for a decision. “I don’t know. Do I press a button or something?”

The elevator voice had the sepulchral hush of an undertaker’s receptionist. “Floor, please?”

“I don’t know,” Charity implored the upholstered walls. “What do I do with an elevator that talks?”

“What do I do with a human who can’t?” The retort held a nuance of electronic bitchery. “I’m just a machine. Now, at least. I used to be a high-fashion model. Died of drugs, but I did have lovely cheekbones. Name, please?”

“Charity Mae Stovall. From Plattsville.”

“Finally. Penthouse duplex,” the elevator confirmed. “Going up.”

The music breezed and sparkled as the doors swept open on paradise. Charity gasped.

Definitely nothing like it even in Pittsburgh. A white apartment, everything perfect. The parquet foyer led down three steps to a sunken living room wall-to-walled in white carpet. Gleaming chrome-and-glass coffee table topped with oversized art books left at just the right angle. Cream the walls, ivory the grand piano, gossamer the powered silk drapes that slid noiselessly aside to reveal a spacious balcony and, beyond, a breathtaking panorama of fashionable Below Stairs.

“I’m rich.” She said it again as the truth sank home. “I’m RICH. Just like in the movies. WOWIE!”

Charity skipped from one vast room to another, wonder treading on wonder’s heel. Downstairs alone was big as two houses together. Living room, guest rooms, extra baths, kitchen, pantry, a whole freezer room, more rooms just for the hell of it.

“GOOOINNG UP!” Hiking the velvet skirt, Charity took the spiral designer stairs two at a time to the master bedroom with its emperor-sized water bed covered with an eiderdown and CMS-monogrammed silk sheets in powder blue. The master bath was done in pink.

Charity wallowed and rolled on the water bed like a contented puppy. The quilt hissed gorgeously as it slid against her skin. She paraded in front of the huge mirror and decided that gray velvet looked kind of tacky here, and then yipped with new delight to discover a full dressing room with three full racks of dreamy clothes, all in her size. Charity stepped out of the movie dress into nylon underwear and a soft linen caftan. Mirrored results were edifying. Feeling audacious, she wondered if she could get away without a bra — but no, that was for the liberated city women she disapproved of on principle.

“On second thought, why the hell not?”

Charity hiked up the caftan, popped the bra and let it drop on the carpet. She wasn’t a feminist, but the Devil had already liberated the hell out of her at the White Rose Motel, and this was her house, so she could be comfortable without feeling, you know, trashy or common. Besides, she wasn’t big enough to be all that floppy without a bra.

Descending the stairs, she felt exotic in caftan and bare feet. The cream leather sofa invited her; she melted into it before a four-foot television wall screen. The remote control was near her hand; one touch blossomed the screen to life, panning slowly across a snowy and familiar interior. Charity’s eyes widened.

“That’s this place. Mine, right here.”

“That’s right, Char.”

Even the voice was familiar, a nasal London yelp out of the speakers just as she remembered from Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. “This gowerjus condo in the carefully secluded and mowst expensive paht of Below Stairs is the hideaway of glamorous Char Stovall.”

She giggled. “You better believe it.”

“Char has been the constant companion of Roy Stride, rising young political leaduh.”

Gol-lee, where was Roy now? Well, she thought, he won’t be hard to find. If he’s no worse off than me, he sure ain’t hurting.

The screen blushed pink as the picture segued to the lush bathroom with its foaming Jacuzzi. “And it’s here,” the voice-over brayed enthusiastically, “that Char lives with her new love interest, Randy Colorad.”

“Hey. Who?”

“— her every wish fulfilled by her houseman, Simnel.”

Charity hugged her knees, wide-eyed. All too much, but fun. The camera cut to a beige kitchen where a mild, pudgy little man in livery busied himself twirling a bottle down into an ice bucket. “Wonder what heaven’s like.”

“Miss Stovall?”

Simnel hovered just behind her, holding a tray with champagne and several small but interesting plates of the stuff called “ordooves.” Charity flicked off the TV as he set the tray on the coffee table. “Mr. Colorad called earlier, mum. He should be here directly.”

There was a curious blob of something dark on one plate. “What’s this?”

“Caviar, mum.”

“Oh. Sure. Come to think of it, I ain’t had a bite since I got here. Dane said we don’t get hungry.”

“No, mum,” Simnel said pleasantly. “It’s one of the advantages. However, you may indulge if you care to. I also took the liberty of chilling an excellent year.” He poured the champagne into a tall, shallow glass. “Moet,’76. Shall I prepare the Jacuzzi?”

The champagne tingled delightfully in mouth and nose. So that’s what it tastes like. And Simnel looked like every butler she ever saw in old Fred Astaire movies. “Yes, indeedy. You may do that thing.” Charity flicked the television on again, unable to get enough of it. “Gol-lee.”

Simnel watched her with discreet amusement. “Jacob was right.”

Another gulp of Moet. “Say what?”

“This is your real religion.”

“I don’t want to go into that again.”

“Excuse me, mum. Merely by way of orientation. Your real religion is what you really want. I’ll ready your bath, mum.”

He sounded like a stuck-up Englishman or something. She ought to get rid of him and find a good nigger maid that knew how to keep her place.

The champagne made her tingle with well-being. She ordered Simnel to bring the ice bucket and caviar to the bathroom, then trailed upstairs to watch the Jacuzzi churn in readiness for her. Charity slithered out of the caftan and lowered herself bit by luxurious bit into the foaming bath.

“Oh, God, if I wasn’t already dead, I could DIE.”

The bathroom had its own thirty-inch screen with remote control. Charity swallowed more champagne to wash down the caviar — which she didn’t like all that much but it came with the place — and pressed the TV on switch.

There she was, herself, in salmon-pink lounge pajamas, sexy enough to ruin someone’s life, right there on TV.

“Oh, man, I look like red-hot Saturday night.”

She gulped more Moet and thrilled to her own image on the tube: half reclining on the white leather sofa, one knee drawn up, winsome with a blue teddy bear hugged to her breast.

“The trooly mahvelous thing about Char Stovall,” the narrator yelped, “is how she’s never forgotten her roots or the people that raised her.”

“But I’d sure love to,” Charity talked back. “Who the hell wants to remember Plattsville?”

She felt defiant, daring and just a little drunk.

“Here in this fabulous but secret five-million-dollah condo, Char Stovall works constantly to better the lot of the humble folk she comes from. A simple, poignant story, an American rags-to-riches tale of an orphan gel active in the little church in her hometown.”

Gorgeous color faded to grainy home-movie black and white with sepia hints of aging: Charity at ten with her adoptive parents, all waving at the camera and looking uncomfortable. Then a shot of Roy sitting with studied nonchalance on the hood of his car, rifle in hand. Woody playing with another local musician —

I really liked you, Woody Barnes, know that? You didn’t ask me to be anything but me and I could always sort of take my shoes off with you. One mistake, Woody. One. Am I still a nice girl?

She took larger gulps of champagne, guzzling it like her usual diet cola. Combined with the hot Jacuzzi, the effect relaxed her, made her quickly drunk and not a little maudlin. She wept incoherently over Woody, Roy, herself and the pathetic sight of ten-year-old Charity in a greasy potato-sack shift.

Then realized: “I never wore anything like that.”

“Yes, yew did, Char,” the narrator prompted. “It goes with the American Dream.”

Cut back to silken Char on her divan, cuddling her teddy bear, a close-up that caught all the honesty and wistfulness of her thoroughly American face. “Until I was ten,” the screen Char spoke to someone off camera, “I never had any clothes that weren’t hand-me-downs. So now I want to write my story as an inspiration for other people and to show that the American Dream is real. Somehow, any way I can, dead or not, I want to go back and help my people.”

“You kiss my ass,” Charity blurted, dropping her glass in the bath. “I ain’t never going back there, never! Damn dead town where there wasn’t anything to do but work and pray and pay and get kids.”

“Char is a deeply religious gel,” the voice-over nasaled. “She led the prowtest against the Planned Parenthood clinic ten miles from Plattsville.”

“Sure I did.” Charity found her glass, rinsed and refilled it. “And I wish I didn’t. My best friend got pregnant first time with a boy. What kind of lies you telling?”

“Why, Char,” the narrative voice protested, “the truths you’ve I always lived by.”

“That ain’t the way it was, no way.”

Not even close to truth. Bea got pregnant and scared, and the first thing her father did was beat hell out of her because Bea’s mother made him. Liars! Charity raged. You goddamn phonies, you weren’t thinking of Bea, just how it would look with the neighbors. So Bea married Roland, and when I saw her after, it was like more than the baby got taken out of her. She shouldn’tve had that baby, but there wasn’t any more clinic even if she could’ve gone. After all that protest and screaming we did, Roy and the Paladins bombed it in the name of White American motherhood or something. I think Roy did it to impress me.

“Char Stovall, this is your faith. Brought to you by Slick Shave, the blade that starts your day —”

“And can damn well end it any ol’ time you get sick of the stupid game.” Charity switched off the set in disgust and reached for the white Princess phone.

“Simnel, that you? Listen, how do I get outside? I want to call a friend.”

“Sorry, mum. The entire phone system is out for the whole building. We have intercom but nothing outside.”

“Oh, fine.”

“And Mr. Colorad just arrived. He’ll be up in a minute.”

Was up already, smiling at her from the bathroom door. “Hi-i, gorgeous.”

Charity gazed with bleary appreciation at the muscular young man who stood before her stripping down to a pair of immaculate white briefs. “Hi,” she breathed. “I bet your underwear don’t even get dirty.”

“Not the kind I wear.” Randy Colorad winked from the mirror, lathering himself.

“Y’know, Jake’s right,” Charity mumbled, sinking to her chin in the whirlpool. “’S my religion. I want. Wanted all my life. That’s a main occupation back home. Right, right, right. First offender: think I’d get off with probation, but no-o-o. To hell with you, Stovall! And there’s Dane with all that fog and poetry and then Jake who jus’ sits around feeling sorry for hisself. What the hell’s he got to be sorry about?” She smiled foggily at Randy, her mood shifting softly. Talk about ruining somebody’s life; he looked like he might enjoy it. “You’re a real hunk, y’know that?”

“It’s easy with my Slick Shave.” Randy flashed thirty-two blinding teeth at her. “I’m smooth all the time.”

“C’mon in here and prove it. What the hell, I’m just what the man said. A simple down-home girl living the American Dream.”

“Love to.” Randy slipped out of his briefs and into the whirlpool. Charity snuggled up to him.

“Already been damned,” she murmured woozily, “and I got change coming.”