Page 31 of Good Days Bad Days
I finish my drink and watch as Martha sways to the rhythm of the band’s rendition of “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” while Tony shuffles from foot to foot. I glance around the room at the half-toasted businessmen in various levels of formal dress and the few tagalong women who came with husbands or lovers.
At our table, Mark looks bored but locked into a conversation with Hollinger and Quinton Florence from EBN. I’m sure he wishes he was on the dance floor or trying to flirt with one of the Bunnies. The room has a different vibe than I expected. The Bunnies are friendly and beautiful but nothing more than that.
A short blond Bunny in a pink satin corset catches my eye. She has her back to me, taking orders from a table in the far corner of the dim room. A man wearing a dark suit keeps taking advantage of his seated position, her Bunny tail right at eye level. He flicks it every time she looks away and then winks at the man to his side. She stays professional and cool, ignoring his behavior as she makes notes on a napkin. Then, when she turns away, the older man grabs her ass cheek with a rough squeeze, the flash of an expensive golden watch peeking out from under his shirtsleeve.
The Bunny doesn’t yelp like I expect her to, which is telling in and of itself. How often must she put up with this sort of violation? The rules must be strict on keeping quiet and not insulting the patrons. Though she doesn’t verbally protest, she does move away smoothly and swiftly, like it’s a step in a well-practiced choreography.
The two men elbow each other, and the older one reenacts the grab in midair as the woman walks away. She seems cool and collected, but maybe it’s a sign of her nerves that she drops her pen. She bends at the knees and dips to the ground, snagging it, then stands, smoothing the fabric at her abdomen and scanning the room to see if anyone noticed.
I should avert my gaze, look away so she doesn’t think I’m ogling her like the rest of the men, but I’m so far across the room and it’s dark, so it’s not likely she can see me. But then she tilts her head over her bareshoulder, revealing her face. She looks directly at me, as though I’m the only man in the entire room.
My heart stops.
I know that girl.
The lashes and blue eyeshadow are different, the ears and the black tights as well. But her eyes, those I can’t forget, literally cannot no matter how hard I’ve tried.
“Betty?” I whisper to myself, half rising from my seat, wondering if I’m seeing things. She rushes through a curtained exit, leaving me in a state of puzzlement.
“You owe me a dance,” Martha says, tugging at my bicep. Tony is back at the table with another drink in hand. Hollinger orders another round as the music slows.
“I’m not much of a dancer,” I say, looking past Martha toward the mystic partition where the girl who looks like Betty disappeared.
“I don’t really care,” she says, yanking on my arm.
“You gonna make her drag you?” Tony looks at me as though something’s wrong with me.
“No, no. I ... I would love to.” I offer Martha my arm as we make our way onto the dance floor. I try to keep my feet in time with the beat, enjoying the playful rhythm of the pianist.
Even the liberal strain of improvised jazz gives the musician no more than eighty-eight keys on the piano, twenty-four musical keys, three or four instruments playing together in an attempt to make something not only good but also worthwhile. In jazz there are rules and then freedom within those rules. But not so with the rest of life. Don’t murder, but go to war. Don’t lust, but don’t be a prude. Protect women, but also hunt them. Money isn’t everything, only it absolutely is.
Martha knows how to dance, and though as a man I should be the one leading, I follow her guiding movements. Even in her heels, her head reaches no higher than my chest, and my long, gangly arms awkwardly encircle her waist. She’s not shaped like the women whowork here, but she has a womanliness to her figure, pliable and enticing, especially when she leans in closer to whisper in my ear.
“That man has hands like an octopus. My lord.”
“Are you kidding me?” I whip around, my mind flooded with hot words heated not only by Tony’s brazen womanizing but also by what I saw happen to the girl I’m fairly sure is Betty.
“Shhh. It’s OK,” Martha says, regaining my attention, her lightly boozy breath caressing my neck. “Not sure what kind of business will get done here tonight. It’s all so ... distracting.” She gestures to the dolled-up women in the room. “They seem to forget I’m not one of these laughably desperate girls, shaking my ass for attention. But I’m not. I’m a producer, dammit.”
I think of Betty, that man’s hand, how she looked like a wild creature stuck in a trap rather than a woman in a costume. But Betty isn’t desperate, or at least she doesn’t seem to be when I watch her through the camera’s lens at work.
Martha can’t know about Betty. She already despises our daytime show, and to find out our host is a Playboy Bunny ... I’m not sure she’d recover from it. Does Hollinger know? Is that why we came here tonight?
I check the rear table again and see the outline of a Bunny. She’s not standing anywhere as close to the old man as before, a wise decision no doubt. But is it Betty?
“You OK?” Martha checks my line of focus. The Bunny turns her head, laughing at something one of the men at the table said.
It’s not her. It’s not Betty. Was the whole thing a trick of the shadows and scotch?
Then the velvet curtain to the kitchen sways for a moment before a redheaded Bunny explodes out from behind it. A form stands in the darkness, blond, wearing pink satin. Then, the figure is gone.
Martha glares in the redheaded Bunny’s direction, noticing my preoccupation with the back of the room.
“Ugh. Men.” She huffs and rolls her eyes, and as the song ends, she rushes back to her seat, where she gulps down a full glass of freshly poured champagne.
The rest of the night she has no interest in talking to me. The men at either side of us have swapped positions, and we both dive into the same conversations we had earlier.Where are you from? What show are you working on? Oh, the cooking one? That little blond girl—she’s great.
As the night rolls on and Martha starts to slouch beside me, the room blurs with each drink. And it becomes clear—and no one, not even Martha can deny it—that Betty is our star. She’s the reason WQRX is making a dime. She’s the pure, charming model of what a woman should be like.
