Read Online Mystery Girl: A Novel by David Gordon - Free Book Online

could slink off, she snapped back to my harsher reality.
    “I see you’re looking at Azure Galaxy.”
    “Um, who?” I had no idea what she meant. A fellow drag queen?
    She snatched a bottle off the counter. “I love that one too. Let me show you.”
    Too afraid to move, I stood like a statue while she drew on my face. “The sky tones bring out your eyes. And the glitter stands up to your strong features. There.” She squinted at me doubtfully and held up a mirror. “Perfect. Take a look?”
    I looked. A very frightened, very ugly, old prostitute looked back. Then I spotted Ramona, swinging over again with her dainties. “Sorry,” I blurted. “I’m late. Got to go.”
    “Come again,” the girl called after me. “You look really pretty!”
    I jogged to my car, head down, and drew only a few stares and one honk from a passing trucker. I removed the wig and tried to find some kind of wipe or napkin. Of course there was none. Why would there be? This was my car. I tried to rub the blue glitter off my eyelids with spit but only smeared it. Now the whole area around my eyes sparkled. I looked like a raccoon on ecstasy. Then I saw the Mercedes heading south.
    This time it was a pleasant surprise. My lady turned onto Beverly Boulevard and led me to the New Beverly Cinema, a rerun housewhere I’d spent untold hours. Back on home turf, I parked leisurely and watched the mystery woman saunter up to the theater. I put my broken sunglasses back on to hide the glitter and followed. She went in, tossing a shopping bag with the Trashy logo into the garbage. Why would she dump her new items? the detective in me wondered. That place wasn’t cheap, added the husband. I waited a beat then bought a ticket, hoping the teenaged clerk wasn’t watching as I snuck her Trashy trash from the garbage on my way in.

15
    THE DARK THEATER WAS nearly empty, with featureless silhouettes scattered among the rows. I spotted a shapely shadow taking a seat in front and slid into my preferred spot, the center of the middle row. I hadn’t noticed the name of the film when I came in but I recognized it quickly: They Live by Night (1948), Nicholas Ray’s first film, the original doomed-lovers-on-the-run movie. Its story has been repeated so often, and is so stripped down to the core here, that the film came back to me, filtered by cinematic memory, as collage, a poem of images and gestures: depression-era gas station attendants who wore suits, long black cars jittering down narrow roads on skinny tires, Cathy O’Donnell’s sad eyes and pixie face and her body in those sweaters and skirts, Farley Granger’s creased hair and nervous hands molding emptiness.
    Why do these old black-and-white movies feel so good to me? So rich, so creamy, so dreamy? It can’t be nostalgia. Color was in full command before I was born. I first saw these movies on late-night TV or video, and began only later to seek true prints. But somehow this realm of silver stars and gray shadows, black nights and slivered moons, seems closer to movie heaven, preserved in that house of secular worship where we few still go to sit silently in the dark.
    By the dim light of a bright scene, I checked Ramona’s bag. The contents were fabric of some sort, but not the little nothings I expected and for a moment, drunk on the movie, I imagined a bloody scarf or something noir. I held the items up to catch the screen light and saw a bra in one hand, panties in the other. Both seemed quite nice, plain cotton and of reasonable sizes (big enough and small enough respectively) but nothing scandalous. Nothing Trashy. As I pondered this, the lights came up. The movie had ended. One fellow turned around in his seat, staring at me blankly and sucking soda through his straw. Scowling, I stuffed the underthings back into the bag and stood, remembering too late that my glasses were off and I looked like Ziggy Stardust’s older sister. And then I realized: the curvaceous form in the front row I