Tuesday Mooney Wore Black

Dex shrugged.

“You should try the shrimp,” Tuesday said. “Did you see them? They’re grotesque. They’re the biggest shrimp I’ve ever seen.”

“That’s an oxymoron.” Dex drained his glass.

“Though I overheard people complaining that they didn’t have much flavor.” Tuesday walked with him out of the ballroom and back toward the bar and the food. “They’re too big.”

“Metaphor alert.” Dex nabbed a small plate from the end of the buffet. “Those are the biggest shrimps I’ve ever seen. They’re obscene.”

“The chicken satay thingies are always good,” she said. “And the dessert course here is usually phenomenal. Save room for the cake pops.”

“Cake Pops and Bourbon.”

“Title of your autobiography?”

“My darkly confessional, poorly received sophomore album.”

That got a twitch of a grin. Dex loved it. He knew that people looked at Tuesday and saw, in order, her height, her shoulders, her pale darkness. They heard her clumping around corners, occasionally tripping over her own feet; they saw her all-black wardrobe, her shelf of bangs, and her un-made-up face, and in their heads they thought, Grown-ass Wednesday Addams, one day of the week earlier. Dex actually knew this; their former coworkers, before Dex fully defected to Team Tuesday, once asked him what the deal was with that bizarro know-it-all tall girl. The guys thought she was hiding a great body – I mean, no wonder she was so clumsy; she was topheavy – under black sackcloth. The girls thought her face only needed a little, like, lipstick, or eyeliner, or something. If they even bothered, they imagined that she spent all her free time watching horror movies (true), listening to The Cure (occasionally true), and writing goth fan fiction (not true, but not outside the realm of possibility).

The truth was this: Dex genuinely believed Tuesday didn’t give a shit what people thought when they looked at her. But the truth was also: he spent a fair amount of his free time with her – when he wasn’t with a future ex-boyfriend – and he didn’t really know what the deal was with her either. He knew how she was. He knew she cared about him, though he also knew he cared more about her. She kept him outside. After all these years, after all this time, he knew her without really knowing her at all.

He didn’t know, for example, where she came from other than geographically. He had never met her parents, or learned anything about them other than factual details: they owned a souvenir shop in Salem. She had a brother, he thought. He knew what she loved, aesthetically – the weird and macabre – but he didn’t know what she feared. Or wanted. Or worried about. He didn’t know where she was most tender, or why, and anytime he poked in the general direction of where her underbelly might be, she solidified, invulnerable as granite. There was something Tennessee Williams tragic about her intimacy issues that, if he was being honest with his most melodramatic self, increased her appeal. Since she wouldn’t take him into her confidence, he could only romanticize her. He could only imagine how she’d managed to get her great heart squashed.

Not that anyone would ever be able to tell. A squashed heart still beat, and Tuesday categorically Had Her Shit Together. She was quick. She was bright. But Dex knew a thing or two about armor – this suit and tie he was wearing right now was a shell over his own tenderest parts – and he knew every suit of armor has a weak spot that can only be found by systematic poking. Every time Dex succeeded in making Tuesday smile, it was like seeing a rainbow over a haunted house.

He took his heaped plate of satay and shrimp back into the ballroom, and only then noticed Tuesday was plateless. He nodded toward the food. She picked up a skewer. Then another skewer. She had nothing if not an appetite. They chewed, Tuesday surreptitiously, and loitered by the rear wall. Tuesday’s next responsibility was helping with the auction as a runner. If anyone sitting in her quadrant of the room won an item, she had to dash out and collect their pertinents: name, address, credit card number. The auction itself, she explained, would be pretty exciting – the auctioneer was a professional, brought in for the night; the cause was good; the crowd was well heeled, well sponsored, and well lubricated.

“We have VIP meet-and-greet tickets for the New Kids on the Block reunion concert,” she said. “My money’s on that for bidding war of the night.”

“Really?” said Dex. He took in the room, ivory-draped tables and rows of maroon seats filling. “Big NKOTB fans here in the land of ancient corporate white dudes?”

“You’d be surprised. Hometown pride. Plus, there are a lot of parents bidding for their kids.” She pulled the last bite of satay off her skewer with her teeth. “You should take a seat. I have to grab my clipboard.”

“Want me to drive up the bid on the New Kids?”

“You can bid on anything you want.” She raised her brows. “So long as you pay for it.”

After Tuesday was gone, Dex, alone again, and embracing the reality that no one was going to hit on him tonight – this crowd was too old, too straight, too married, too professional – scanned for someone fun to sit beside, someone who might feel as out of place as he did.

“Is this seat taken?” he asked, placing one hand lightly on the back of a chair at the front of the room.

The woman sitting beside it looked up and smiled. No one else was sitting at the table but her. Dex would have guessed she was in her late thirties or early forties. Her skin was dark, her black hair fringed and pulled back; she was gloriously round, and rocking the holy hell out of a one-sleeved teal dress. On her ring finger was a yellow diamond big enough to put out a man’s eye.

“Not at all,” she said. “Have a seat! My husband bought this table as a sponsorship, but then we didn’t invite anyone, so it’s sort of a table for lost souls.”

“Absolutely perfect,” Dex said, and sat down. “Dex Howard.” He offered his hand. “Professional lost soul.”

“Lila Korrapati Pryce,” she said, shaking it. “English teacher – former English teacher. Professional wife.”

“You looked very lonely over here,” Dex said. “A lonely little island.”

“Crap,” she said. “Lonely? Really? I was aiming for glamorously aloof, keeping my distance from the hoi polloi. International star, maybe. Bollywood queen.”

“Ambassador’s wife.”

“Ambassador,” she said.

“Heir to a diamond mine.” He pointed at her ring. “Owner of a cursed jewel.”

Lila laughed. She had a magnificent laugh. It was warm and hearty, like a drunk but high-functioning sailor’s. “Professional mysterious woman,” she said, “and the only brown person in this corner of the ballroom.”

“Well, I did notice that,” said Dex. “Kind of hard not to.”

“You’d be surprised what people don’t notice,” said Lila. “I don’t mind, honestly. I mean, I mind it in the larger socioeconomic sense, but in the personal sense, I like being a little on the outside. Keeps me sharp.” She cracked her neck. “You have to laugh.”

“Or drink,” said Dex. “You could drink.”

“Oh, I do that too,” said Lila. “And I forget that I’m not supposed to talk about uncomfortable things, especially with strangers. You’d think I hadn’t lived in Cambridge my whole life.”

“I am very glad to be sitting next to you,” said Dex. “What are you drinking?”

“Vince – that’s my husband, you’ll meet him in just a moment – went to get—” She looked up and back and laughed again. “You’ll meet him right now!”

A much older man approached the table, a glass in each hand – one with brown liquid and rocks, the other clear and sparkling with a bright wedge of lime – and Dex nearly choked. He was wearing a cape. A goddamned cape. A black cape like the kind British guys wore to the opera in old movies: secured, somehow, around his high tuxedo-collared neck, popped like a polo collar, fluttering halfway down his back. His skin was chalky and spotted, his hair was pure silver, his ears stuck out like wings, and under a nose you could only refer to as a schnoz was a peppery push broom of a mustache. His eyes were steady and warm. He looked like the kind of man who tied damsels to train tracks but only because that was his role in the melodrama, and he would never get away with it; he was there to give someone else a chance to be a hero.

“I leave for one second,” he said, setting the sparkling drink before his wife, “and look who shows up. Suitors. Are we going to have to duel?” he asked Dex.

Dex stuck out his hand and introduced himself again. “Hello,” he said. “And I hope you don’t think it’s inexcusably rude of me to ask if your name is really Vincent Price.”

“Oh, it’s hardly rude, certainly not inexcusable,” he replied with half a smile. “And also true. Yes, my name is Vincent Pryce. Pryce with a Y, so you see, it’s completely different. I was named years before the other Vincent Price became a celebrity. Though my people weren’t moviegoing people, so they had no appreciation for the gift they’d given me.” He sat and jauntily brushed his cape back from one shoulder. “And it is a gift. I’ve always loved his movies. House of Wax. The Fly. The Tingler! The sound of his voice, that rumbly, educated purr. And his characters: men of science, men of wealth, men of passion – undone! By ambition, by madness! Who went headlong, laughing, to their dooms.”

“And rapped for Michael Jackson,” said Dex.

“Plus, he introduced me to E. A. Poe,” said Vince with reverence. “And for that, truly, truly I am grateful.”

“Vince has one of the world’s largest amateur Edgar Allan Poe collections,” Lila said, as Pryce rolled his eyes at the word “amateur.” “First editions, letters, ephemera, assorted memorabilia. Movie stuff, posters, film prints of the Poe movies the other Vincent Price made with Hammer—”

“Corman, my dear.” Pryce placed a hand, surprisingly large and steady, over his heart. “He made House of Usher in ’sixty, The Pit and the Pendulum in ’sixty-one, The Raven in ’sixty-three, The Masque of the Red Death in ’sixty-four” – Lila shot Dex a beautifully arched brow – “and all the others with Roger Corman, my dear. King of American independent cinema.” After he had composed himself, Pryce winked at Dex. “Master of cheap thrills.”

“You should meet my friend Tuesday,” Dex said. “She lives for creepy stuff. And she’s right—” Dex waved across the ballroom. Tuesday, auction clipboard in hand, might have nodded in response. “She’s right there. If you bid and win, she’ll come over.”

“I intend to,” said Vince. “What’s the point of bidding if you don’t intend to win?” He took a drink. “Dex. Dex Howard. I make it a point of putting a serious question to a man whenever I meet him. Would you permit me?”

Dex, leaning forward with his elbows on the table, started. “Oh, me? You mean – of course.” He laughed. “Fire at will.”

Vince cleared his throat.

“Do you believe, Dex Howard,” Vince asked, “that you are real?”

A beat of silence fell between them.

Dex looked at Lila. Her expression was flat, with no hint as to how seriously he was supposed to take her husband.

“Uh … yes?” Dex said.

“Your hesitation speaks volumes.” Vince leaned into him. “How do you know you are real?”

Dex cleared his throat. Swallowed. Decided on:

“Because—?”

He didn’t get a chance to say more before Vince charged ahead.

“Precisely. Because. Simply because,” Vince said. “Because you have accepted the central, implicit thesis of existence – you exist as real because you know, as of yet, no other way of being. But that’s the rub, aye. There are so many ways of being, of being real, of living, right now. And the true prize, the jewel at the end of the journey, is the discovery of the self. The selves, whether they be wrought or revealed, recognized at long last.” Vince’s voice quieted. “Tell me, Dex Howard. Who are you? How were you made, and how much of your making was by your own hand?”

Dex grinned at him. He could not help it. “I am a human,” Dex said. “I was made by Harry and Phyllis Howard in western Mass. in 1978, probably during a snowstorm. I made myself—” Dex swallowed. “Do you want a real answer?”

Vince and Lila both nodded.

Dex considered. There were many answers. All of them were more or less real. Had his making and unmaking taken place on his high school’s stage, when he was in the habit, yearly, of becoming fictional people? Or had his making been one great decisive action, when his father told him he could waste his own money on school and he agreed? Or—

He remembered his armor.

“On the day I went for an interview at a temp agency, I wore a suit, because a suit fit the part I was auditioning for,” he said. “And they looked at me like I had three well-groomed heads and immediately sent me to temp in finance. So I guess that’s when I made me, when I made this me that you see here before you.”

“A fine distinction, this you.” Vince nodded gravely. “We are many. All of us.”

“Yes,” said Lila under her breath. “I am aware I married a fortune cookie.”

“In a cape,” said Dex. “Well done.”

No one in Tuesday’s section of the ballroom was bidding. She’d expected as much – she was staked out way in the back, surrounded by corporate-sponsored tables filled with midlevel executives who had already made their own, more modest contributions to the night’s total. She pressed her clipboard to her stomach. She was still hungry. The illicit satay she’d snuck from Dex had only made her hungrier. She wasn’t allowed to hit the buffet until after the auction, technically, but if she didn’t get more to eat soon, she was at risk of passing out. Tuesday was a fainter. “Your blood has a long way to go,” her doctor had said after Tuesday passed out in tenth-grade band and hit her head on the xylophone, “to get from your heart all the way down to your feet and back up to that big brain of yours. Your blood cells have to be marathoners. Marathoners have to take care of themselves.”

“So you’re saying I’m a giant with a big head.”

“You know you’re a giant with a big head,” said her doctor. “Eat more salt.”

The cream and gilt walls of the ballroom were broken up by enormous gold-draped windows. Tuesday nestled herself against one of the drapes, slipped out of her shoes, and closed her eyes. She always saw more with her eyes closed. Like the suit sitting at the table four feet to her right; he was angry about something. She could hear the fabric of his suit jacket sliding, pulling as he hunched his arms. He set his glass down hard. His voice – he was talking about nothing, really; work stuff – Dopplered in and out, which meant he was moving his head as he spoke, side to side, trying to catch an ear. He couldn’t sit still. The other people at the table weren’t listening to him. He was angry because to them, he was invisible. I see you, thought Tuesday, and opened her eyes.

Nathaniel Arches was standing in front of her.

He looked down at her bare feet, gripping the crimson carpet.

“That the secret to surviving this thing?” he asked. “Making fists with your toes?”

“Better than a shower and a hot cup of coffee,” she replied, and balled up her feet.

A wave of noise crashed from the other side of the ballroom. Two bidders were going head-to-head for the New Kids tickets. The auctioneer pattered, Do I hear seventy-five hundred, seventy-five hundred – do I hear EIGHT, eight thousand, eight thousand for the meet-and-greet of a lifetime, the New Kids in their home city, in the great city of Boston – do I hear – I hear EIGHT—

“You should try it,” she said.

“Take off my shoes? But then I won’t be able to make a quick getaway.”

“You’re telling me the Batmobile doesn’t have an extra pair of shoes in the trunk?”

“It doesn’t have a trunk,” he said. “Or cup holders.” He looked down at the tumbler in his hand, half full, brown and neat. “I’ve been meaning to do something about the cup holder situation.”

“But not the trunk.”

“It’s not like I take it to Costco.”

Tuesday laughed. She’d been trying not to, and it came out like a snort.

—do I hear eighty-five – EIGHTY-FIVE, do I hear nine? Nine thousand? To hang tough with the Kids?—

“You’re fun,” he said.

“And you’re very pretty,” she said back, and that made him laugh.

“Fun and a fundraiser.” He leaned against the wall beside her. “How’s that working out for you?”

“I’m not a fundraiser,” she said. “I’m a researcher.”

“What do you research?”

“Prospects. I’m a prospect researcher.”

“Ah, so you research people like me.” He tapped his HELLO MY NAME IS sticker.

“I’ve researched you,” she said. “Actually, you.”

He brightened. “And what can you tell me?” he said. “About myself, I mean.”

—TEN! I have ten from this gentleman here in the red tie. Yes – oh I can tell, I can tell you’re a fan! But I have to ask, it’s my job: do I hear ten thousand five hundred?—

“That you don’t already know?” Tuesday said.

“Impress me.”

She opened her mental file on Nathaniel Arches. Looked over his tweets. His investments. His vague pronouncements. The rumors. This was her favorite part of the job, a holdover from being the kid whose hand always shot up first with the answer. She loved to prove how much she knew.

She was about to say You don’t know you’re rich – because he clearly didn’t; if her research had a common theme, it was incurious hunger, a dumb desire for more, as though he had no idea he’d already been born with more than most humans will see in six lifetimes—

But Nathaniel Arches turned and opened his eyes at her, wide. She had never seen his eyes before. In all those press photos, his eyes were slitted, protected, too cool. Now they were open, dark, steady. He was looking at her like he was capable of curiosity. Like he was searching for something.

Or someone.

She slid this information, full value yet to be determined, up her sleeve like an ace.

“You don’t know you’re rich,” she said.

“You think I’m rich?”

“You’re a few notches above rich,” she said, turning to stare straight ahead.

“What’s a higher notch than rich?”

“Stupid rich,” she said. “Then filthy rich. It gets fuzzy once you’re over a billion.”

—do I hear eleven! ELEVEN! – Hey – hey, man, you’ve got some competition for biggest New Kid fan over here. You’ve got some competition!—

“What does a billion even mean?” Nathaniel said.

He grinned at her with all his teeth and raised his hand high.

“Fifty thousand!” he shouted.

Every face swung around and pushed them against the wall.

The auctioneer was a cheerfully sweaty guy named Tim. He had gray hair and a red nose and Tuesday had seen him call auctions before, but she had never seen him look like he did now: surprised.

The room held its breath.

“Well!” Tim shouted into his microphone, and the room let go – it exhaled, it hooted, it whistled and shouted. “Sir! Sir! Out of the back corner and into our hearts! You don’t mess around! Do I hear fifty thousand five hundred?” Tim laughed. He turned back to the first competing bidders. “Guys? What do you think?”

Tuesday smiled – cheerfully, professionally – at the room. She saw Dex up front, kneeling on his chair and cackling, open-mouthed.

“You’re nuts,” she said to Nathaniel around her teeth.

“Takes one to know.” Nathaniel smiled back.

“Fifty thousand going once!” said Tim.

“Do you even like the New Kids?” she asked.

“Not really. Do you?”

“Fifty thousand going twice!”

“Not – particularly—”

It happened then: the beginning of everything that would come after.

A dark figure on the edge of Tuesday’s vision stood up at the front of the room not far from where Dex was sitting – in fact, exactly where Dex was sitting, at Dex’s table.

“Sir!” Tim the auctioneer cried. He turned away from Archie and flung his arm toward the figure like he was hurling a Frisbee. The room roared. “I hear fifty thousand five hundred!”

The figure was a tall man with silver hair, wearing a cape – a cape? – a cape! Tuesday peered across the ballroom. The man turned.

“Do I hear fifty-one thousand?”

The man wobbled.

Crowds feel things before they know things. This crowd of investors and developers and venture capitalists, of vice presidents and senior vice presidents, of fundraisers and gift processors and admins and researchers, mostly white, mostly men, mostly straight, rich and not rich and not much in between, but humans, all of them humans, felt it. Felt something. It stilled on nothing more than premonition. It waited for the man in the cape to turn around and face it. It held its tongue.

The man in the cape wobbled again. He blinked. He didn’t act as though he knew where he was. His arms were raised, tense and defensive. A woman in a striking teal gown began to rise beside him, to pull him back to her, to help him. But it was too late.

He screamed. He threw his head back like hell was raining down from the ceiling and covered his head with his arms and screamed and screamed in the otherwise silent ballroom of the Four Seasons Hotel.

His final scream died in an echo. The old man in the cape straightened. He held his hands out, fingers splayed like a magician.

“Gotcha,” he said.

Still nobody moved. Nobody knew what was happening.

The old man’s eyes opened as large as his lids would allow and glittered in shock, as if he’d recognized a friend long lost across the chasm of time.

Then he took two steps and fell down dead.

2

THE OBITUARY

Two days later, Tuesday’s desk phone rang.

The only reason anyone called instead of emailing was because they wanted something they knew they had no business asking for.

She looked at the gray caller-ID square. KURTZ, TRICIA blinked back at her in blocky blue digit-letters. Trish worked on the events team. If Tuesday was remembering correctly, the Auction for Hope – or the Auction to Abandon All Hope, as Dex was calling it – was her baby. She was the organizer, the decider. She was the person who’d had to explain to June, head VP of the development office, that yes, a donor to the hospital, a billionaire and all-around beloved kooky Bostonian, had died, gone tits-up smack in the middle of a BGH fundraising event. And no, there was nothing anyone could have done.

People tried. Dex had tried, and was genuinely upset about the whole thing, which is why Tuesday let him get away with making morbid jokes at the event’s expense. Pryce’s wife – the woman in teal – had tried. They both whaled on his chest. She puffed air into his lungs. Nothing worked. Vincent A. Pryce was toast, and the next morning the Herald upheld its long tradition as the city’s classiest rag with the headline PRYCE BIDS FAREWELL.

Tuesday picked up the phone.

“Hey Trish,” she said. “Are you drunk-dialing me at two in the afternoon? Because I wouldn’t blame you if you were.”

“Ha ha ha,” said Trish. Tuesday hadn’t worked with her often, but enough to know Trish was sarcastic as hell. Everyone on the events team was. It seemed a necessary disposition for a job that was five percent emailing, five percent decision-making, ten percent constant overtime, and eighty percent shitstorm crisis management. Tuesday had nothing but respect for the events team. “I wish I were. You have no idea how badly I wish I were,” said Trish.

“What’s up?” Tuesday spun her chair away from her computer and propped her bare feet on a pile of binders.