up she was there in bed with me.” He swallowed.
“I was hungover and felt like shit. And she wouldn’t shut up. She kept going on and on about how happy she was, and what a great future we were going to have together, and what we were going to name our kids. It freaked me out.” He wiped sweat off his forehead.
“I told her I’d made a terrible mistake, that I didn’t love her, and she needed to leave. She threw a fit-she started screaming at me about how I’d used her, how she did everything for me, she gave and gave and all I did was take and take, and she was going to make me pay for it.” He winced at the memory. “She got so out of control Bobby and Tim had to come in and drag her out.” He hung his head.
“It was a shitty thing to do. I should have never slept with her. There’s no excuse for that. But she wasn’t right in the head. And then on Monday she went to the dean and accused me of rape.” He swallowed. “Her story didn’t stand up. Bobby and Tim told the dean about how she’d stalked me, and how she’d threatened to get even with me that morning. The dean caught her in several lies…contradictions… and she finally broke down and admitted I hadn’t done it.” He took a deep breath. “And I never saw her again. I didn’t rape her. Later that semester I asked the dean to expunge the disciplinary action from my record, and he did. I thought that was the end of it all.” He looked at Jillian, his jaw clenched. “And all this time you knew about it?”
“That doesn’t matter, dear. I was just trying to help-“
“By having Jay beat up Chanse? By having your mother locked up in rehab?” His hands were shaking. “And you never said a word about any of this to me. You never asked me about it-and you knew. Did you think I’d raped her, Jillian?”
“Of course not,” she said in a soothing tone. “I just knew it was out there, and if it ever got out, it could do damage to you. So I tried to keep it a secret. I was just trying to help-“
“So, Freddy, when you first started getting the e-mails, it never occurred to you that they might be about Karen Zorn?” I interrupted Jillian. They could fight out their personal problems after I left.
He shook his head. “It crossed my mind, but I thought, you know, that it couldn’t be. If Karen wanted to dredge all this up again, why wait until now? Why wait? She could have ruined me years ago with all of this-and really? It wouldn’t have been a big deal. Celebrities get accused of this kind of thing all the time, and I didn’t do anything wrong.” He swallowed again. “I didn’t really know what it was all about-and frankly, I wasn’t that concerned. I get those kinds of e-mails all the time and they’re usually just cranks. But Jillian was really worried…she was the one who insisted we get a private eye to check them out.”
“You were sure the e-mails referred to Karen Zorn?” I turned my attention back to Jillian.
She sat down on the sofa next to Freddy-who moved several inches away from her.
“And you didn’t tell me?” A muscle worked in Freddy’s cheek. He was drumming his fingers on his knees.
“I was trying to protect-“
“I DON’T NEED TO BE PROTECTED!” He screamed at her. His face was bright red. He stood up. “Chanse, go ahead and make this all public. I don’t care what it does to my career. I didn’t do anything wrong.” He shrugged. “If it kills my fucking career, I don’t care. I have more money now than I know what to do with. I don’t care. I don’t want any of this hanging over my head.” He walked over to me, and offered me his hand. “Thank you.”
I stood up and shook his hand. I glanced over at Jillian. She was trembling. All hell was going to break loose any minute.
“And just for the record,” Freddy added, “Jillian and I were together that afternoon. It wasn’t me you saw coming out of Glynis’s house.”
I nodded and headed for the door. I put my hand on the doorknob and looked at the wall beside it. It was a ‘wall of fame’-framed photographs and magazine covers. There was one picture that didn’t seem to belong-a headshot of a very young Freddy wearing a suit. He was smiling, but his mouth was closed. I stared at it.
I heard Mrs. Zorn saying,
I looked back at Freddy. I stared at his lips. “You used to wear braces.”
He nodded, a puzzled look on his face. “Until I was twenty-two.”
The line of his lips was different than it was in the picture.
I put my hand on the glass and covered the top half of his face.
I closed my eyes and remembered.
The person I saw had braces on-his lips had that odd full look braces give people.
Another memory flashed.
The kid in Cafe Envie-the one Rosemary said was a neighborhood kid, who’d looked slightly familiar, who did errands for her every once in a while, who danced at the Brass Rail.
Joey.
Chapter Thirteen
Since the levee failure, granted, I hadn’t gone out to the bars in the Quarter much-just on special occasions, like Halloween, Southern Decadence, Mardi Gras, New Year’s, and so on. But I always stuck to the Fruit Loop-the bars ringing the area of St. Ann and Bourbon. There are five bars there, the loop stretching from Rawhide to Good Friends to Bourbon Pub and Oz to Cafe Lafitte in Exile. We call it the Fruit Loop because they’re all so close together they’re easy to walk between. One bar bores you-you grab your drink and head to another one. Though there are about ten more gay bars spread throughout the French Quarter, I never really went to any of the others with a great degree of frequency back when I used to go out pretty regularly.
The Brass Rail was one of those bars further up in the Quarter, on Burgundy Street near Canal. I’d been there a few times, but not since the levee failure. It was a small place on a corner, dimly lit on the inside, and its main attraction was the boys dancing on the bar. And when I say
It was frequented by older men, who would perch on bar stools and give the dancers dollars in exchange for groping. I also suspected, that if the price was right, the boys would make their bodies available in private. They also sold lap dances, leading the patron to a darkened room with booths in the back of the bar. I always felt sorry for the young men, who often looked as if they were from small towns and working class backgrounds. It was different there from the other bars, where the dancers had thickly muscled bodies and seemed to be dancing out of choice. The boys at the Rail struck me as doing it because they didn’t have many other options. It might be all in my head, but I sensed a sadness to them, and I found myself wondering what they would be like in five years-where they would be, what they would be doing when they got too old for the Rail patrons.
It also made me sad to know that these boys could make more money working there than they could anywhere else.
The dancers usually started their show around nine on Friday nights, and the highlight of the evening was a dance contest judged by three people in the audience who were selected by the drag queen hostess of the evening. The winner got $100.
Even that seemed sad to me-given what they had to do to win. The more skin they showed, the higher the likelihood of getting that hundred dollar bill. So they would pull their underwear down and reveal their butts. They always danced in underwear, which made me feel like I’d stumbled into a high school slumber party.
At eight-thirty, I found a parking place, and walked up Burgundy Street. The Quarter was fairly empty. The Mardi Gras tourists were long gone and the vast majority of New Orleanians were honoring Lent. It was a two-week season of rest for the city until the NBA All-Star game would bring more hordes of tourists and their money into town like the plague. I hadn’t heard from Paige. I’d spent the rest of the day after getting home from the gym doing
