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Wedgwood locket he’d given to her, a simple bauble, a dumb surprise, more precious than a ship of gold.
    It was, then, like the paintings, a dreamscape, those eight months. She knew it to the date, never forgot it. December 20 to August 13. The bliss-time of her life. Years later she would look back at that whirling, staggering time. The nights of laughter,running through thunderstorms half-drunk, him on her, next to her, in her, in the alley, laughing, crazy, they were crazy, mad with lust or love or what was it, a longing when the other wasn’t there worse than a junkie. She pined for him, a bottomless thirst.
    A weekend up at Cape Cod. Seared in her memory. July 3, 1949. The happiest day of her life. Floating around in the water, she on top of him, only three feet of water and floating on his back, pretending to be . . . what? Laughing and splashing—the whole thing—ridiculous! Back then, in her white-and-blue polka-dot bikini, the most stunning girl on the beach, in Cape Cod, on the Eastern shore for God’s sake. And he’s proud, just fucking proud to be with her.
    Edward.
    Tall and too thin and from a good family. Edward from Boston who’d seen it all. Edward who was mad about his stop-traffic girl from Odessa. His half-yokel, half—movie star he couldn’t stop thinking about, fucking too much, aching for. Oh Lord, let me just spend the rest of my days fucking this girl I love more than I love myself. Which is not much, now that I think about it.
    He blindsided her.
    When he broke it off. He took his hand and reached into her chest and pulled out everything a girl from Odessa, Texas, can hold.
    Why did he do it? How could he have done it? Was it his family? Was it him? Was it someone else? Was it simply being too much in love? Or was he not . . . actually, too much in love? Was he not in love at all? Was she just a fucking fool?
    These were the questions that ran through her head, maddening, over and over and over again, kicking her arm out to thenearest glass, throwing her feet out, one in front of the other, to the nearest bar. You see, I’m pretty. You see, I can still stop a room.
    And she could, whether at the Downbeat Club or the Onyx or the Three Deuces. She was not less, no, no even more fetching now. There was a sort of melancholy you wanted to shake out of her. A name you wanted to kiss off her lips. And she would go, every night, just as she’d gone before. She didn’t give herself one night to mourn he-who-she-would-not-speak-of. Not one night. Dress. Check. Heels. Check. Stockings. Check. Lipstick. Check. Like an army routine. This list, this habit. This was the only thing holding her up. If she hadn’t had the checklist, and the bar, and the eight million suitors . . . she would not have made it through.
    Still, at the end of the night, alone, having flirted and smiled or even kissed, she would stare in the mirror, those sweetheart lips frozen, that alabaster arm shaking shaking shaking, and watch as that mascara came down in little pieces, droplets, streams. And she would stay frozen, watching her real self, her alone self, what she’d become. After Edward.
    And what she’d become was becoming something different, fast. The admirers were still there, yes. Thank God. But inside, the flasks, the shaking. Hidden bottles under the cupboard. Night panics. Her thoughts racing. How easy it would be to break this bottle and take that sharp edge and put it in my neck, my wrists, my gut.
    Oh fuck! Fuck this body, fuck this heart. Why?! Why did he do it?
    And so, as the nights were getting longer and slurrier and more careless, dangerous, slapdash nights with seedier mornings,it wasn’t a difficult decision to make when Lt. Colonel Charles Krause came waltzing through the door of Clark Monroe’s Uptown House, went up to the drop-dead girl at the bar, a girl with pitch-black hair and ghost skin, and said, “I’m going to marry you and take