Chapter 20
Priscilla
The drag bar is exactly as kitschy as I’d expect from somewhere that Dallas Winthrop would take up residency. The theme seems to be gay Americana. Lots of old-style art—familiar slogans done with a subversive twist. Gingham patterns everywhere the eye can see.
We’re here right on time for Dallas’s first show of the night. It’s been years since I’ve had the privilege of watching one of his performances, and the promise of that excitement is almost enough to lift my mood.
Except the show doesn’t start on schedule.
Dallas has always believed in holding the curtain for fifteen minutes.
It allows for late arrivals, but it also builds tension.
The art of expectation is Dallas’s favorite.
That means fifteen minutes of drawn-out silence between Marlowe and me.
Fifteen minutes of staring at all the art on the walls, pretending it’s more interesting than the woman across from me.
The lights inside the bar finally take pity on us, dimming to nearly dark as a disco ball lowers over the catwalk that splits the dining space. The bartender has a mic linked to the house speakers. When he picks it up, the whine of reverb forces us to cover our ears until it passes.
“You’re all in for a special treat this evening,” the bartender says. “Beamed down straight from the great galaxy beyond, we have the one and only Houston Wehava!”
The tinsel curtains at the back of the stage part, and out saunters Dallas’s drag alter ego.
Houston wears a platinum blond beehive wig with a model rocket poking out the top.
She has on a silver minidress and sparkly tights, very 1960s, with an old red analog telephone glued to her torso.
Her dark brown skin has been painted minty green, and there are dark green glitter tears trickling down her cheeks.
Her set starts with some Motown. The performance is big and flashy and fun, with lots of high kicks and fully committed lip-syncing. I had no idea Dallas was still so flexible.
Every number is met with more applause than the last, and by the time the lights are dimming for the final song, I’m smiling so much my cheeks hurt.
“It’s My Party” by Lesley Gore pipes in through the speakers, and Houston begins lip-syncing the lyrics into the phone receiver like she’s having a conversation with a friend.
On the surface, this performance is as brassy as the song’s instrumentation and as dramatic as its vocals. But beneath the expert theming, there’s an undercurrent of melancholy that matches the actual lyrics, inching closer to the surface the longer Houston performs.
When the chorus begins repeating, Houston falls to her knees as real tears begin to stream down atop her glitter ones. By the time the song ends, and Lesley Gore is done repeating her wailing lines about crying over and over, Houston is staring up at the ceiling, sobbing through a smile.
Dallas has lost someone. Of course he has. He will cry if he wants to, and most of the time, he doesn’t, because to cry is to expose his vulnerability to a world too cruel to receive it.
It all makes a strange, sad, perfect kind of sense.
In the years I’ve known him, he’s never had a partner.
Whenever I’ve poked at him about it during our calls and FaceTimes, he’s always told me his heart doesn’t have room.
I’ve understood that to be his identity.
But I see now it’s his grief, the same way I can see my own grief. We’ve both been hiding.
Who do you love? I wonder. Who has left you down here, an alien without a home, making pleading calls that provide no resolution?
A few minutes later, the curtains part again, and out walks Dallas. His skin is still green, and there are still those glittery mascara tears, but gone are the wig and the costume, replaced with an elegant satin robe and bonnet.
“Is that Marlowe Jenkins and Priscilla Covington-French I see?” he singsongs as he makes his way to us. “I thought I saw you two from the front, but I don’t wear my contacts during my performance. It hurts my eyes if the glitter gets in them. Lord, when was the last time I saw you both?”
“We came here from the Memory Machine,” Marlowe tells him.
He clutches his chest, playing the beat with humor. “Now, there’s a name I haven’t heard in years. The Memory Machine.”
“Where we’re from, you’re quite familiar with it,” Marlowe says.
He realizes we’re serious and fixes his face into a more appropriate expression. “I see. You didn’t come here to see your old teacher on a whim. You came here for answers.” He grabs a chair from another table and pulls it over to ours. “Let’s hear it. Tell me how you ended up in my world.”
We launch into the tale we’ve told so many times now that we’ve developed a rhythm even through our awkwardness. If there is one thing Marlowe and I have always been able to pull off, it’s rising above our personal circumstances to do the script justice.
This Dallas sits on a turned-around chair, clutching the back tightly as he hangs on our every word.
“Who did you make it for?” I ask once we’ve gotten him all caught up, incapable of being anything other than direct. We’ve gone too long wondering.
“His name was Teddy,” he says. He’s the first Dallas to tell us outright, and he does it with no riddles or pageantry.
It’s so direct that I repeat, “Teddy,” testing out the feel of his name as I try to think of what to ask next.
“He’s who I sing to every time I do the last number you just saw,” this Dallas says, requiring no follow-up questions to keep the information coming.
“I wonder about him every day, wishing I could reach him. But I told myself a long time ago that I couldn’t do anything else other than wonder.
I thought it would be the kind of thing I’d lose myself in, that Memory Machine.
I know how I can get. Obsessive to a toxic degree. I’m sure that’s not news to you two.”
He’s much less guarded than our previous Dallases—no prideful shutting down or careful avoidance. Maybe because this is the only Dallas we’ve met who hasn’t kept working on the Memory Machine in the first place.
“Teddy and I met in undergrad,” this Dallas continues. “He was so damn smart. He’s the only reason I finished my physics degree in the first place. I’d have been lost without him.”
There’s a fresh gloss of tears in his eyes, and he looks up at the ceiling to stop them from falling.
“Between the two of us, he was the inventor.” He swallows hard in a bid to regain his composure.
“The idea for the Memory Machine was his. We would stay up late and talk about how we wished we could go back to the first night we met. How we wanted to live it over and over again, as many ways as possible.” He smiles.
“Okay, that part of the machine might have been me. You know what a sap I can be.”
I want to give him the levity he’s searching for, but I don’t have it in me.
His words burn with too much raw hurt, the ache of something long gone.
It’s not the same ache as my own. If anything, they’re like relatives of each other, alternate realities with the same base element—it hurts to be alone.
To not have someone around to love you fully.
“When I admitted to him that I actually wanted to be a performer, and all the science stuff was just me trying to make my family proud, he insisted we move to New York together,” this Dallas continues.
“We wanted the liveliness of the city at night. We both loved it, until it reached a point where we couldn’t make ends meet anymore.
I don’t know if you’ve heard, but art doesn’t like to pay the damn bills. ”
“Say it isn’t so,” Marlowe quips.
“Even Teddy’s engineering job wasn’t enough,” Dallas continues.
“Once I completed my master’s degree, and I’d been auditioning in New York for a bit to no success, we decided we would go back to his hometown to save up for a while.
He was from a little place in Iowa called Garden Meadows.
I thought that was the cutest damn town name I’d ever heard. ”
I knew our Dallas had grown up in the South, but he always said Garden Meadows found him so long ago that he considered himself an honorary lifelong citizen.
It must have been my own youthful ignorance that let me accept this without ever wondering how he ended up in the middle of Iowa, or why he stuck around.
“It was never supposed to be for very long,” he continues.
“We said two years. That would be long enough to get a decent savings under our belts. I got a job at the high school and took over the failing theater department. They had that beautiful stage, and yet nobody at that school gave a damn about the program before me. Teddy worked for his family. It was all fine. We knew it wouldn’t be forever.
Then one night, we were lying in bed, only a year into the whole setup, and Teddy rolled over and said, ‘Let’s just leave.
We’re not happy here. I want us to have our old life back.
’ So I wrote a letter of resignation on a scrap of notebook paper, and I drove up to WRHS the very next day to drop it off.
It was a Saturday. Labor Day weekend. No one was at the school. I—”
Dallas takes a long inhale, attempting to continue, but whatever memory he’s conjuring has tripped him up, and his long-suppressed tears start falling. “These damn contacts,” he says, scooping up tears with his mint-green fingers. “Excuse me for a second.” He hurries back through the curtains.
I look to Marlowe, who is crying right along with him. My own tears have been dripping steadily onto my half-eaten plate of mozzarella sticks.
“Did you know about Teddy?” she asks.
“No,” I say.
“How did we not know?”