reluctantly took his hand and forced a smile. “Belle Bacall.”
David rolled his eyes.
“You look a little bit like Demi Moore,” said Barry.
David rolled his eyes again and decided to end the charade. “You remember Andrew Westlake, don’t you?”
Now it was Barry’s turn to squint. He dropped my hand when he realized it was me. “Hello, Andrew.”
“Barry,” I acknowledged, equally cold.
David chose to punish me for what he felt was my heart’s poor choice in men by talking interminably with the evil Barry Blackburn. After a few minutes of their conversation, I moved a few steps away. After five more minutes, I moved several feet away. And some time around the fifteenth minute, I moved to the other side of the club.
I was leaning on the bar, minding my own business, when I heard a voice say, “Well, hello there.”
When I turned, I saw it was Paul Musso, the balding trollish cop wannabe with the occasionally unconcealed nightstick.
“Go away,” I told him with irritation, making a point of not looking at him…especially below the waist.
“I’d really like to take you home,” he said. “It would really be hot. I’d fuck you so hard you’d be begging for more—”
That was all I heard.
It was time to leave, and not with Paul Musso. And, for that matter, not with that meddlesome, Barry Blackburn–schmoozing David Carlyle, either. I left a full drink behind on the bar and headed for the exit.
Halloween might have been a great night to open a nightclub, but as I walked out the exit and onto West Street, I realized it was a very bad night to find a cab. Earlier that night, the annual Halloween Parade had flooded Greenwich Village with tens of thousands of revelers. At this hour, any cab driver who had the slightest interest in picking up fares would be several long blocks east, hovering around Sheridan Square, rather than cruising the rundown outskirts of the Village.
So I started walking. I was half a block away when I realized someone was following me.
Ordinarily, that wouldn’t faze me. Up to that point, I’d lived in Manhattan for the better part of two decades without incident. But tonight wasn’t an ordinary night. Tonight, I was wearing a skirt and a wig and stockings and heels. Tonight, I was Belle Bacall, walking unescorted through a neighborhood that had a tendency to be a bit rough. Tonight, I was a potential rape victim…at least until my panties were torn off, at which point I would become a potential rape and bashing and castration and murder victim.
So, I tried to remember what every woman in every woman-in-jeopardy movie had done when she heard footsteps approaching. I started to walk faster.
Behind me, I heard the other set of footsteps quicken their pace.
I was about to break into a sprint when I heard a voice call out, “Belle!”
That stopped me. I turned.
It was Frank. With an ear-to-ear smile. “I’m sorry,” he said, jogging up to me. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I was just leaving and saw you leave, so I thought…” He trailed off and glanced shyly at the sidewalk.
“You’ll never know how glad I am it’s you,” I said breathlessly, slipping instinctively into Belle’s voice.
That dazzling smile widened at what he perceived as a compliment, and since I meant it in part as a compliment, I decided not to add that I was also glad it was him because he wasn’t a rapist/basher/castrator/murderer. Unless one listened to David Carlyle.
“Wanna go get something to eat?” he asked. “There’s this diner a few blocks from here—”
A diner—a brightly lit, very public diner—was probably the last place I should have gone with Frank. It was one thing to do drag in a dark club with strobe lights, alcohol, and hundreds of other distractions; it was quite another to sit in an overlit booth with stubble trying to poke through minimal makeup.
But there we were, Belle Bacall and Frank DiBenedetto, sipping coffee and talking in Frank’s favorite diner. I took some consolation from the fact that there was some drag there far worse than mine, and even more consolation from the belief that actual women wore some of it.
Frank and I didn’t talk about anything too deep or important. We just skipped along the surface of small talk. It was over in half an hour.
“I gotta get home.” He waved for the check. “I’m exhausted. Getting Benedick’s ready for the opening was a lot harder than I thought it would be.”
“How come you didn’t join the party?”
He shook his head. “Not really my crowd.”
“Mine, either,” I confessed.
He paid and we walked outside. “I’ll hail you a cab. Where are you going?”
“Upper West Side.”
“No kidding? Me, too. We can share.”
Traffic was light, so the cab sliced through Manhattan. We were closing in on Frank’s apartment on West Seventy-second Street near Central Park when he gave me a boyish smile. “Can I have your home phone number?”
“Sure,” I said with a laugh, and I scrawled it out on a slip of paper. “Promise to call?”
“Promise.” He pocketed the phone number. The cab slowed as we approached his building, and he added, “And when I call you, you can tell me what your real name is.”
“Don’t I look like a Belle Bacall?”
“Nobody looks like a Belle Bacall.” He handed the cabbie a handful of crumpled bills, then leaned over and gave me a kiss on the lips, which wasn’t as passionate as it was forceful.
“Good night,” he whispered.
“It’ll be a much better night when I get out of this wig and dress,” I replied, and the voice of Andrew Westlake slipped out.
He smiled, closed the door, and, as the cab started its sixteen-block trip to my apartment, did a double take.
And that’s when it hit me. Despite the fact that he had no reason whatsoever to think that I was a woman, he did.
Frank didn’t call the next day.
Neither did David.
But Denise came over.
“You did what?” she asked, stunned, sitting amid the scattered and discarded sections of the Sunday Times that littered my apartment.
I was embarrassed, but reasoned that confession was good for the soul, so I said it again. “I accidentally tried to pick up a straight man.”
She folded her arms and kicked at the Real Estate section for a few seconds. “Aren’t there enough gay men out there for you? Why do you have to try to ruin things for the rest of us? Some of us want straight men to stay straight. Some of us need straight men to stay straight. And I’m not even talking about propagating the species, Drew. Gay men aren’t the only people who like to have sex, you know!”
“Sorry.” I flopped down next to her on the couch. “If it’s any consolation, I don’t think my efforts to convert him were successful. And anyway, how was I supposed to know he was straight? He owns a gay nightclub, after all.” I had a thought. “Maybe I could introduce the two of you.”
“Oh, that would work.” Her voice dripped with sarcasm. “Hi, I’m Denise Hanrahan and I’m a friend of Betty Bacall!”
“Belle,” I corrected her.
“Like it matters. I really don’t feel like meeting any guys who are trying to find out whether or not I have a penis before they’ll talk to me. Face it, Drew, you’ve traumatized one of the few remaining