Chapter Thirty-Two #3
Mazelle bristled. Before Hattie died, she had been forced to go to court to fight for the right to live in her white-only Sugar Hill neighborhood.
And more recently, the Supreme Court had ruled against school segregation in Brown v.
Board of Education, and the pressure was turning up to end Jim Crow in the South.
Was Lorenzo comparing the dignity and safety of her resort to the terrible treatment of her people?
Sam had been forced to sleep on a dressing room floor when he couldn’t find a Negro boardinghouse on tour, and she remembered her family’s horror stories from the road.
“That’s not how it works,” she said icily. “Everyone’s allowed here.”
“Sorry—bad idea of a joke.”
Now that Lorenzo was closer to her, Mazelle was sure of it: He was nervous. He couldn’t keep his hands off her in public, but in private he was like a first date with a virgin. But that was all the better—she didn’t need to have a drink and chitchat with him. Or put up with his hands.
“Let me take you outside and show you my ski trail,” she said, back on script.
“A ski trail. Incredible. I can’t wait to see it… but first… sit down for a sec. There’s something I need to say to you.” His sober eyes were intent on hers.
Mazelle sat on her sofa close to where he stood, but Lorenzo moved away from the sofa to sit in the matching chair across from her, creating a deliberate gulf between them.
“So… bear with me on this… and I hate to spring it on you”—What the hell is happening?—“but after my accident, I got in this program called the Twelve Steps.”
NO, Mazelle’s mind screamed. YOU DO NOT GET TO COME HERE AND UNBURDEN YOURSELF TO ME. TRY TO FUCK ME LIKE YOU DID IN YOUR OFFICE.
Outside, the wind chimes tinkled madly. Scout wanted her to know he was ready.
“Yeah, I see it in your face…” he went on.
“Where could I even start? You know Sharpe won’t even speak to me anymore?
After that last Lazy Mazy movie, suddenly he stops returning my calls.
But hey, I don’t blame him. I put that guy through a hell of a lot.
Had him cleaning up messes I had no business asking him to.
I was a real piece of work. I don’t have to tell you. ”
The chimes outside jangled again, in a frenzy.
“You gonna get that?’ Lorenzo said. “Is that a delivery?”
“It’s the wind,” Mazelle said.
Lorenzo nodded, although the chiming didn’t sound the least bit natural. His jaw flexed hard as he returned to his speech, which he clearly had prepared. “I don’t feel clean about you, Mazelle. I… did things I shouldn’t have done… and I just want you to know how sorry I am.”
Mazelle tried to keep her armor intact, but inside she was rejoicing in those words. Once upon a time, she had imagined a scene just like this. Craved it. But that person was dead.
“Ten years later,” she said flatly.
“Like I said, on the booze I was an asshole. I leaned on booze so running that studio wouldn’t give me a heart attack. All the money involved. Debts. The Depression. The goddamn war. One thing after another. I talked big talk, but I was scared shitless every day.”
“You owed money to the mob,” Mazelle said, confirming it for herself.
Lorenzo didn’t look surprised. “Guess everyone in town knows that by now. Live and learn, as they say. I tried to break away, they said, ‘Not so fast.’ I don’t care about any of the rest of it, but those Li’l Gumshoes reels…
” He blinked, his eyes turning misty. “… those really meant something to me. Sharpe never got over it either. I feel like those were my best days.”
Mazelle understood more than she wanted to.
“I should have let Chaplin take you to United Artists, at least a loan,” he said, nearly whispering. “Chaplin would’ve done better with you. Mentored you. Just look at what he did with The Great Dictator back in ’forty. He was doing that… and I had you doing—”
“Shut up, Lorenzo,” Mazelle said.
“I know Lazy Mazy wasn’t what you wanted. I know it hurt your career.”
Mazelle sprang to her feet, and Lorenzo didn’t flinch away before she slapped him. Hard. Her palm print was bright red against his cheek. He sat calmly, his fingers clasped. It was like he had turned into a monk.
“I had that coming,” he said.
“I liked you better when you were trying to fuck me,” she told him.
“At least you weren’t asking me to… What?
To absolve you? Well, you are not absolved.
It didn’t hurt my career—it fucking killed my career!
” Her raised voice trembled the glass beads from the chandelier above her.
“ ‘You’ll always be Lazy Mazy,’ ” she quoted.
“Remember? Well, you were right about that.”
Lorenzo brushed imaginary hair from his forehead. He looked shaken.
“I know you lied about Reaper,” she said. “You never had the rights.”
Lorenzo stood up too. “That’s not true—I had the rights for a year.”
“Probably for peanuts,” she said. “But you knew you’d never make it. You always knew you wanted me to be Lazy Mazy. That was the one you knew you could sell. You weren’t ready to fight for me, you just pretended you were. Tell me I’m a liar.”
Their faces were a foot apart, and his eyes dimmed while she watched.
“Mazelle… I am so, so—”
“Don’t,” she said. “If you say ‘sorry’ again, I’ll knock your teeth out.”
Lorenzo’s eyes flitted toward her bar counter, but he looked quickly away from her array of a dozen bottles. He was fighting temptation.
“Why are you here?” she asked.
“The truth?” He shrugged, his eyes appraising her again. “I wanted to make love to you, Mazelle. I still do. But I had to clear the air first.”
“Did you tell anyone you were coming here?”
He paused. Her officious tenor confused him. Finally, he said, “I’m at a conference for the weekend in Vegas. That’s my story.” He sounded guarded. “Why’d you invite me here?”
“The truth?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“To kill you.”
He cocked his head. His face paled around her glowing handprint. “That’s not funny.”
“Am I laughing?”
Lorenzo had heard enough. Had seen enough in her eyes. He took a step away from her. “Maybe… this was a mistake.”
“I’m really hoping you’ll let me show you my ski trail,” she said. She produced a smile, but from Lorenzo’s face it wasn’t the pleasant smile she was trying for.
“Why—so you can push me off?”
“I won’t lay a hand on you,” she said. “Promise.”
Lorenzo studied her, trying to read her intentions. He didn’t like what he saw.
“Sweetheart, I think I need to go get your driver… Unless you want me to call a cab.”
“I don’t have a phone here,” she said. “Not anymore.”
Lorenzo’s fear excited something in Mazelle she had never experienced, except that one day on Li’l Gumshoes when she defied the Sharpes and performed her ladder stunt, watching their terror that she would fall.
Now her flurrying heart and curling toes had nothing to do with nerves.
His fear was a sweet syrup on her tongue.
Lorenzo took more uncertain steps away. He noted that she wasn’t carrying a weapon in her robe, but he also didn’t want to stick too close. He went to the hooks by the front door and slipped his hat on. Next, deliberately not rushing, he put on his coat.
“Maybe you’re right,” he said. “These apologies… they don’t do anything for you. I’m sorry I wasted your time. Maybe this program’s just a crutch…”
“Is fucking around on your wife one of the Twelve Steps?”
The old Lorenzo flashed in his eyes, the Lorenzo who had looked like he might hit her in the limousine on the way to the Ambassador Hotel.
But he was also figuring out that her invitation had never been a seduction.
That only left her given reason. That’s right.
Be scared. Mazelle’s smile spread more widely across her lips, showing her teeth.
The chimes outside jangled again.
“It’s a real shame, what’s going to happen to that coat,” she said.
Lorenzo’s last look was a thousand pleas. Please—whatever you’re doing—stop it. Then he opened the living room door. As cold air seeped into the house, skating across Mazelle’s cheeks, her smile died. She felt exhausted, suddenly. And sad.
“Jerry, wait,” she said. He was so surprised by the urgency in her voice, the tenderness of hearing his first name, that he turned to look at her over his shoulder.
“Don’t go out there.” Her voice didn’t sound like her own—she sounded like she was seven again, her buried little girl finally fighting through her ruination.
Lorenzo pinned his lips ruefully, probably restraining the final apology that was spilling from his eyes.
Then he left and closed the door. Mazelle’s inner seven-year-old might have wanted to go after him, but the adult she had grown into only made it as far as the window to watch his gorgeous suede coat moving down the porch steps.
Giovanni Mateo Lorenzo, known by friends and enemies alike as “Jerry” since he left New York’s Little Italy at fifteen to be an actor (or so he thought), stood in the sharp cold of the Mount Shasta lodge’s courtyard and tried to calm his thoughts with slow breaths.
His bare hand clung to the back of a whitewashed wooden beach chair near the frozen duck pond, partially holding him upright.
This tightness usually only seized his chest during budget meetings, overtime shoots, or reading box office reports, and his doctor had warned him to avoid stress if he didn’t want to inherit the massive heart attack that had killed his father when he was only a few years older than Jerry’s fifty-nine.
He’d known his visit with Mazelle could go south after he said what he needed to say, but the meeting had gone worse than he imagined.
Not only hadn’t Mazelle been willing to forgive him, but now the routine of “making amends” felt like a pile of horseshit he had dumped on her, wrenching open wounds.
He wondered if he’d just been spreading a plague all over town with his letters and phone calls to people he had wronged, like digging up dead bodies for display.