Half an hour later, the three of us were sitting down at our small table; Miriam sat in the desk chair I rolled out of my room. As we ate, I asked our guest some questions—more out of a desire to keep the silence away from the dinner table than actual curiosity.
"Where are you from?"
It was Lorrie who answered. "Terry Town. It's in Louisiana."
"Bayou country, huh?"
"If that's what you folks call it," Miriam responded as she impaled a piece of omelet on her fork.
"What brings you up here?"
"A job."
Lorrie again: "She's a model; she's here working with an artist for a magazine."
"An artist, huh? Sounds neat. Anyone we might know?"
"Donna-Mellow," Miriam said quickly.
"Donna-Mellow," I repeated with a raised eyebrow.
"He's a transgender," she explained. "One of his gigs is making trips to New Orleans during Mardi Gras to take pictures of the drag queen contests. He makes collages and sells them to art vendors and magazines. NOMA has one of his pieces. He's very renowned though you've probably never heard of him."
She was right. I hadn't.
"So, what are you two working on now, if you don't mind me asking?"
She shrugged. "He hasn't told me yet."
"I'm sure it will be very interesting," Lorrie ventured.
"To the say the least," I replied before I finished off my glass of wine.
I offered to do the dishes so Lorrie could entertain our guest. I watched them disappear into her room as I squirted some liquid detergent on the frying pan. I spent the rest of the evening stretched out on the couch, reading Dos Passos. Every so often I would raise my eye from the page and look at the door—it never budged. Around midnight, I creased the top corner of the page I was on and decided to pack it in.
Miriam became a regular at the apartment. It wasn't a surprise to come home and find her on the couch reading or doing yoga on the floor. After a week, every time I opened the door I expected her presence just as much as I expected the presence of the couch or the kitchen; she had become a fixture at the Bungalow. Sometimes I would come home and they would be wrapped around one another on the couch or in the loveseat with their hands tucked away under skirts or shirts, and then when I walked in the room they'd quickly break away from one another and act as though nothing had happened, as though I cared how they were carrying on.
Sometimes I would refer to Miriam as "the third roommate" and Lorrie would laugh but Miriam herself would never find it amusing, often scowling at me or raising one of those Gaul like eyebrows. Even darker was her expression whenever I asked how her work with Donna-Mellow was going. Eventually I just stopped asking.
Admittedly, the situation was strange, but I brushed it off for a time simply because it was nice to see Lorrie smiling every day for a change. At least, that was my logic for tolerating Miriam until I began to realize just how much I missed spending time with my roommate.
"Hey, do you want to catch a movie this weekend," I would ask her when Miriam wasn't around.
"I can't," she would say. "Plans with Miri."
"Well, Miri can come along can't she?"
"No, I don't think so. It's been a hard week with Donna-Mellow—a dry spell. The collaboration is stressing the both of them out," she would reply.
And it was like this for a couple of months until one day when I was sitting at my desk at work. Too much jealousy leaked through the cracks and got the best of me, and I perhaps stuck my nose where it didn't belong. I picked up the phone, made some calls, and discovered everything I already knew I was going to find.
I waited until one afternoon when Lorrie decided to make a grocery store run and it was just Miriam and I alone in the living room. She was lying on the couch reading A Good Man is Hard to Find. I, on the other hand, was sitting in the loveseat. I placed the paperback I had been pretending to read on the arm my seat.
"Donna-Mellow, huh?" I started.
"What about him?" she asked from behind her book.
"That's a pretty lame name isn't it? Couldn't you have come up with something better?"
She closed the book and stared me down with those deadly gorgeous eyes. I kept on going.
"The New Orleans bit, I have to admit, was pretty nice. Did you come up with it?"
She leaned forward but her expression did not change, the expression of someone unsheathing a dagger to use it for some deadly purpose.
"I mean you must have seen Lorrie straight for what she was the moment you laid eyes on her, didn't you? You're a reader. You knew she would take your word for it because she's too damn nice for her own good. You knew it, didn't you? You knew she wouldn't call up the New Orleans Museum of Art and ask them for information about a Donna-Mellow piece only to hear the woman on the other end of the phone go 'who?' You're a reader, Miss McQuinn, but too bad for you I'm one as well."
The violent look in her eyes faded and the features of her face softened. She grinned as she rose from the couch.
"So, what now?" she asked. "You gonna tell her…tell her that I'm a lying, selfish bitch so she'll boot me out and I'll be out of the picture while she'll be miserable and lonely? Do you hate me that much, Mikhail?"
I didn't say anything. She walked over to me and patted my head like I was a pet before lowering her face to my level.
"What do you want? Do you want to fuck me? If that's what'll keep you quiet we should probably get started before she gets back," Miriam said, grabbing my hand and slapping it against her firm right thigh. A loud pop sound echoed through the living room. I pulled my hand back.
She sat down on the floor and looked up at me—the grin had returned to a scowl.
"Well, what the hell do you want then?"
"Treat her right," I said simply.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Be good to her."
She tossed her red hair and scoffed. "What do you care? It's not like you love her or anything. Aren't you a fag or something?"
"What does that have to do with anything?"
"It's everything," she said like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
"Treat her right," I repeated. "And share her for chrissake. Don't hog her all to yourself."
"Done," she said staring at me in that same cold hard way one last time before returning to the couch and opening up her book once more.
Things got better for a short time. Lorrie and I began to frequent movie theaters, bars, and parties just like it had been before Lady Lazarus had showed up. Miriam would only come along if we were going to the independent theater: she said that a movie was only good if it was a film and a film was only a film if most of the theaters in the United States refused to show it. Lorrie would nod her head as though she agreed wholeheartedly. I shrugged my shoulders.
The three of us never really clicked. If Miriam was in the room, Lorrie would give her all her attention, and I would just sit there thumbing through another paperback or making ambitious scribbles in my little notebook—character sketches and plot outlines for various novels, television shows, and movies that would never amount to anything. The dynamic worked for a little while, for a couple of months until the day I came home and found Lorrie with her face down on the kitchen table, sobbing quietly.
"She's fucking around!" she cried as I handed her a paper towel to dry her eyes.
"Well, dump her ass."
Her movement was quick. I had been slapped even before I realized she was lifting her hand. Her furrowed brow and angry eyes froze the hot fury in my blood. For a moment I was frightened that she was going to strike me again, but then her lip quivered. She started bawling again and I felt guilty, as though it had been I who had slapped her.
She went on for a bit about a "manwhore" named Diego who had had his hands around Miri's ass as he stuck his tongue inside her mouth, and about an anorexic woman with a tattoo of a panther that took up the entirety of her back who had rubbed her hands over Miriam's clothed breats, and so on and so forth until she had spouted off an epic catalogue of infidelities that would have made Ovid blush. "I'm sorry, Mikhail" she whimpered. "I'm sorry I'm such a wimp."
I patted her back and gave her the whole spiel about standing up for yourself, and then I told her how she was a wonderful person and didn't deserve to deal with anyone's shit. She just sat there, wiping her eyes with a napkin, and nodding gently from time to time to give the impression that she was paying attention. I almost told her about Donna-Mellow, but decided against it—it would have just been the final tap that sent the already dilapidated, swinging structure crumbling to the ground.
"Promise me you won't talk to Miriam about this," she requested after our heart to heart.
I nodded my head and broke that promise the next night.
"I said 'treat her right' you dumb cunt," I told her in the parking lot of the apartment complex. "Part of that means don't sleep around."
She lit up a cigarette and stared me down.
"I'll fuck whoever I want to fuck," she said, blowing a puff of smoke toward me.
I wanted to take that damn cigarette and put it out in her eye.
"Not while you're involved with her. She's fragile, got it? Do you know that means? It means she breaks easy."
She glowered. "I know what 'fragile' means."
"I don't think you do in this case, Miriam. That girl has been broken before hundreds of times, broken by herself, broken by other people, broken by expectations, and every time she's gotten back up—she's repaired herself. But this time is different. She looks at you, and her eyes become glassy and fill up with childish things like boundless love. If you break her, it's done. She's done."
A string of smoke rose from the burnt end of the cigarette as she gave me a Cheshire smile. "That's pretty good, Mikhail."
She dropped what was left of the cigarette and crushed it under her shoe. She looked up at me and for the first time it was an expression with something other than malice or bemusement; she was looking at me sadly.
"You know you can't save her, right? I can't save her; she can't save herself; no one can save anyone. It's just that kind of world."
Miriam turned and walked across the parking lot to the section where we lived. I watched her ascend the steps to the Bungalow while I took my time finishing my cigarette.
Things only got worse during the next week. Lorrie tried to hide the sadness from me but I saw it in the rings under her eyes and in the weight that she shed. It was at the end of summer when I pulled myself out of the presence of my notebooks and confronted her.
"Eat something," I told her.
"No," she said. "I'm fat."
"To an Ethiopian maybe."
"Then why am I not good enough anymore?" she asked weakly. "Why am I not good enough for…."
I sat down beside her. "You're better than her, Lorrie. The two of you aren't even in the same league; you're worth a million Miriam McQuinns."
"No, no, I'm not," she said, burying her head into the armrest of the couch. "She's so much smarter than me, and prettier, and just…I don't know…just special."
"It's a show, Lorrie. She's all show."
"No, no, she isn't."
I sighed and told her everything. I watched as the glass over her eyes shattered and the shrine for Miriam McQuinn she had been building inside her over the past seven months collapsed. She never even protested, never sneered at me or called me a liar. She knew the entire time, just needed someone else to say it, to break the illusion. But with that illusion something else gave away.
"Lor?"
"I'm okay."
"No, you're not."
"No, really," she said, standing up, "I'm fine."
I knew better than to say anything, so I just watched as she wandered into her room and shut the door. I sat there, listening to her sobs from beyond the door, for a while debating with myself whether or not I should go inside to comfort her. In the end, I just got up and poured myself a glass of cheap bourbon, sat down, and went back to debating. The door opened after I had taken two sips, and out stepped Lorrie with a familiar looking, raggedy orange suitcase. Her eyes were red and so were her cheeks. She looked over at me.
"Can you put this outside in front of the door." she requested gently.
I nodded.
"Thanks, Mikhail."
The door closed. I dragged the suitcase into the hallway and the outside of the complex. At some point in the last hour or so it had begun to storm without me being aware so I stood beneath the entrance's overhang. The overhang had holes in it which meant that a good deal of rain was still falling on my shoulders. I lit up a cigarette anyway.
A rusty yellow Honda pulled up next to the door and out stepped Miriam from the passenger side; she blew the driver a kiss and thanked him. Spotting me in mid-turn, she smiled. I could smell the booze when she opened her mouth:
"Didn't anyone ever tell you standing in the rain is bad for your heal—," she stopped when she saw her briefcase and then, like a disappointed child who has just learned that playtime is over, she shrugged her shoulders slowly.
"That my suitcase?"
"Yep." I tapped the end of my cigarette and sent some ash drifting down onto the half-dry, half-wet pavement.
"You told her then?"
"Yep."
She sighed. "I guess I can't blame you. Does that mean what I think it means?" She asked, her eyes mounting and aligning themselves with the windows of my apartment.
"Yes, it does," I said.
"I see."
We continued to stand there and get pelted by the rain falling through the rips in the overhang, with no words passing between us until she stepped forward and took a hold of the suitcase.
"I can call a cab or give you a ride somewhere," I said suddenly as she stepped into the rain.
She turned and looked at me with surprise; I think I might have been surprised with myself for the outburst of pity as well. Miriam McQuinn was among the last of her kind, a monument to those sultry women of the old age, the starlets and femme fatales, the ones who survived on their glamour alone. The modern world would not take kindly to her, but she could do nothing about it—she knew no other way to live.
She gave me a knowing smile. "No, that won't be necessary."
"Miriam, it's raining!"
"It's always raining somewhere, isn't it?" She said it as though it was profoundest thing in the world, but its meaning was lost on me.
She lugged her suitcase through the parking lot and out of the gate while I just stood there and watched. It was still raining when I flicked the remains of my cigarette into the downpour, and walked back to the Bungalow.
