Tuesday Tales: Urban Renewal

It's Tuesday again, time for Tuesday Tales.  Since I have a guest on the other blog, this week I'm posting my tale on my other blog.

Be sure to visit the main Tuesday Tales Blog and read all the other stories by talented authors!

www.tuesdaytales1.blogspot.com


Urban Renewal
A short story by Lee Ann Sontheimer Murphy

            Outside her hotel window, the Gateway Arch loomed tall and mysterious, like a strange artifact from another civilization.   Mercedes Montague lay in bed and when she could force her weary eyes open, stared at it, mesmerized by its proximity.   Her world class headache threatened to split her skull open, scattering odd bits of brain across the luxurious suite and if that failed to happen, she knew that her stomach, rolling and churning as much as the mighty Mississippi River a few blocks distant, would rebel and spew its contents over the fine carpets, leaving them stained.   It had happened before, in other hotels in different cities but no one complained, not as long as her people left large sums of money to cover clean up operations and to keep the pictures out of the tabloids.

            Her crimson Atelier Versace gown laid where she shed it; sheer fabric cut origami style discarded like a snake leaving off one skin for another.  Beside it, the silk panties she’d worn lay like yesterday’s trash.  Beneath the satin sheets, her naked skin ached as if she burned with fever but she knew she suffered from nothing more than overindulgence and fatigue.  Her mouth tasted foul, like last week’s leftovers after too many cigarettes and far more alcohol than anyone should imbibe.  Hung over and heartsick, Mercedes gazed at nothing and wondered how she ever reached this place, this foreign country of five star hotels and red carpets and paparazzi tracking her like autumn game.   All she ever wanted was financial security, to see her name on screen credits, and enough fame to wield power.   Her pretty smile opened more doors than she anticipated and her nubile body of two decades past unlocked even more.

            If she struggled, she could remember that young woman, a girl really, who left home on a Greyhound bus with a suitcase full of cheap, knock off clothing from The Paris and Einbender’s, thinking it was enough to conquer the world.   Her resume of high school starring roles and College Theater roles at the state college were be her calling card, her entry into the wider world of Hollywood and the silver screen.   On that bus trip, a three-day long hell, she dreamed of her footprints at the Chinese Theater and dining with the famous.    Instead, she arrived in Hollywood with ptomaine from a hamburger eaten at a bus station in Kansas, doubled over with stomach cramps and with just enough money to rent a terrible, filthy room a few blocks from Hollywood Boulevard.

            It had not been an auspicious start but after weeks of trailing up and down that famous street, mingling with the prostitutes and the tourists, she met a man who said he worked at a studio.   They ended up in bed and because he thought she was a virgin – which she was not – he felt, sorry enough afterward that he sent her over to Universal to get an extra role in a movie.   If she had not been the same size as Therese Simone, the star, it would have been a dead end, not a beginning.   She was, though, and that brought her into the limelight because when Ms. Simone overdosed on the heavy-duty barbiturates she adored, the movie would have scrapped if the director had not suggested that the producer allow her, little Marie Dillard, to screen test for the role.   The camera loved her, flattered her best features, and minimized her flaws.   At the age of nineteen, Marie got the part and when asked to change her name to something more glamorous than her birth name provided, she came up with Mercedes Montague, for her favorite car, a make she aspired to own, and for Romeo’s family.  That was for luck; her first stage triumph had been as Juliet in a high school production of the Shakespearean tragedy.

            Mercedes Montague went from living in a cockroach-filled room in seedy Hollywood to gracing the cover of Vogue and appearing on The Tonight Show.  That first, heady period was as intoxicating as wine, something she had never even tasted before leaving home.   In a matter of months, she transformed from a Missouri city girl from a blue-collar neighborhood that less kind people might call a ghetto into a world famous celebrity.    Somewhere along the way, she lost Marie and it took her years to figure out what Mercedes was.

            When she did, she did not like her but she thought it must be too late to change.

            Lying in the shadow of the Gateway Arch, she realized how very much she hated Mercedes.   She no longer could bear to look at her in mirrors, loathing that faux face created by cosmetics and fluff, when she knew her own did not look anything like the reflection.   The real Mercedes – Marie – favored her late grandmother as she aged but the version that the public saw looked more like a mannequin than it did Granny.

            I am nothing, she thought, lying there sick and loathe to move.  There is no me left.  She had no control over her life, where she went, or what she did.   Her agent, her personal assistant, and her companion, all told her when, where, and how.   Most of the time they told her what to wear and her companion, a bland, non-politically offensive name for what was once a ladies maid, picked her clothing.   Suse did her hair, her nails, and her make-up.    Even what shade lipstick brightened her mouth was someone else’s pick.

            If the Gateway Arch, quintessential symbol of the St. Louis skyline, had not loomed outside the hotel window, Mercedes would have been uncertain where she awakened.  Waking in an unknown city happened more often than she cared to admit and most major cities looked shockingly the same, skyscrapers, a major league stadium, maybe a river, an old district, a train station from the glorious past, and new office buildings.   Throw in a dozen or so shopping malls, freeways, and voila – an American urban scene of the early 21^st century.   Hotels were interchangeable, too.

             A luxury suite or even a penthouse in five star hotels had enough similarities that she could seldom distinguish one from another.   Such an honest opinion would make interior designers on three continents weep with shame but she cared little if the drapes were peach, puce, or chartreuse or if the table lamps were Empire or Grecian.   Even the food that she ate, no matter what top rated chef prepared it, had sameness.  No matter how she lusted after fiery tamales from a street vendor’s cart or fried chicken the way her grandmother used to cook it, she had haute cuisine, steaks, broiled lobster, mahi-mahi, and dishes that were more art than food.  Sometimes she wanted to shout until someone brought her a big old cheeseburger, run through the garden, and dripping grease back onto the plate with a side of crisp fries or onion rings.  When she longed for old-fashioned homemade beef and vegetable soup, she ate vichyssoise and tried not to gag as she spooned down the cold, thick mass.

            I want to go home.  That thought struck her hard, like a rock thrown with force through a window and shattered what self-composure that remained.  If she could, if she but possessed the magic ruby slippers, she would rise and tap her heels together thrice so that she, like Dorothy Gale, could return to her home, back to her origins.   If she could begin again, armed with the knowledge she now possessed, she might make a better life of it.  However, she was almost forty, not nineteen and the girl brimming with hopes who left to make her way was no more, leaving the shell of a woman that the fans knew better than she did herself.

            If Marie wanted to live, then Mercedes had to die.

            Marie gasped aloud and sat up in bed, heedless of her pounding head and aching stomach.   She didn’t need ruby slippers or magic, just the gutsy courage that took her out of the neighborhood twenty years earlier and some determination.   The answer to her unasked question, the solution for her yearnings was simple and so obvious she could not understand why it had not occurred to her before; she would go home.

            Like anyone blue collar raised, she understood having a rat hole, a place to dive in times of trouble or as a last resort.   She owned the house where her grandmother raised her and her brother, Stan.   Each month, a separate accountant paid the utilities so that everything was always on and the house ready for her arrival.   In the last dozen years, she had been there just twice, for brief respites when her fan base thought she was in Monaco or Jakarta.   That house was her one secret, the place that few of her own staff knew about and she was just a few hours away.    If she pulled herself out of bed, she could be there by suppertime and she could stay until she knew if Marie remained deep within or if she had to create someone new that she could live with for the rest of her life.

            The first step was to crawl out of bed and plunge her aching body with all its hurts under a hot shower, washing away last night’s cosmetics and easing some of her pain.   Marie scrubbed her skin with furious intent as if she could wash away all the bad, leach it out of her skin and purge it from her soul.   Afterward, she combed out her long hair and dried it with the hotel hair dryer, combing it out and then, for the first time since her teens, braided it.   That was practical, maybe not so pretty but she did not care this morning.  

            Her many suitcases yielded little casual wear and nothing without designer labels so she rejected it all.   None of it was suitable for where she was heading.  The single pair of blue jeans in her luggage were Levi Capitol E jeans, inappropriate and out of place anywhere in Missouri.   Marie tossed out the contents of all her suitcases and garment bags, pilfering through it to find something she could wear.  She discarded the Gucci silver fox cape, the Prada shoes, the Versace turtleneck sweater with one sleeve, the Valentino alpaca tunic sweater, the cashmere blouses, the silk dresses and shirts, the Chanel, the Dior, and the Hermes silk scarves.  

            In the end, colorful clothing littered the carpet like an autumn forest floor covered in leaves.  All she kept, stuffed into a single carry-on bag, were one Oscar De La Renta satin antique lace long nightgown because no one would see what she wore to bed, a Gucchi Jersey sheath dress; a classic little black dress just in case she wanted to go formal, and one silk scarf.  

            She had nothing to wear back to the old neighborhood, she thought.   Nothing in the hotel boutique would be any less pretentious or expensive.  If she asked, the bell desk would send out to any shop she wanted for clothing but it would be the same story.   Racking her fuzzy brain, she remembered seeing hotel domestics in uniforms and Marie wondered if they wore them to work or if they changed.  

            With the imperious air that Mercedes had trademarked, she phoned down to the concierge and asked that someone come up to, her suite to clean up what she called “a slight mess.”   

            “I must have someone immediately,” she drawled in her movie-star tones, the ones she had long cultivated and now loathed.

            “Yes, Miss Montague.  We will send someone up immediately.”

            With the air of a grand duchess, she thanked them and congratulated herself from asking them to send someone who wore her size.    Two minutes later, someone tapped at the door and she opened it to find two domestic staff members, wide-eyed with excitement.

            “Come on in,” she said, in her own voice.  “What size are you?”

            They told her and she whooped aloud because their clothing would fit.

            “Girls, this is your lucky day if you have everyday clothes you wore to work.  Please tell me that you changed into those awful uniforms here.”

            “We did.” The young woman who answered her wore a nametag that read Luz.  “We have a locker room downstairs.”

            “Good.” Marie waved an arm at the scattered clothing. “If you can bring me some jeans and a t-shirt or two, you can have anything you want from my wardrobe.”

            Luz’s eyes widened and her companion, Stefani’s did too.

            Thirty minutes later, after a large dose of aspirin and a cold Coca-Cola, Marie dressed in faded blue jeans and a Twilight t-shirt that featured both Edward and Bella’s faces.   Her carry-on bag bulged with another pair of jeans and a button down cotton blouse, her lingerie, and a few toiletries.    Converse athletic shoes fit her feet and if the socks came from Rodeo Drive, no one would notice.   The two young women, arms laden with multiple designer garments, departed with speed and she sat down, feeling both familiar and yet odd in the casual clothing.  

            Her emergency stash of money, another hold out from her poverty days, lurked in an invisible pocket in her cosmetics bag and she removed it, counting the crisp bills.   She had ten thousand dollars in one hundred dollar bills, more than enough to make it across the state and live for a while, at home.   Now that she possessed the wardrobe for the part, Marie needed transportation.

            She considered riding the Greyhound bus but she didn’t like the idea.   That option would strand her at the bus station blocks from the house.   With her carryon bag over one arm, her money stashed inside except for a few hundred bucks, and a pair of sunglasses, Marie marched out of the suite and descended.   In the lobby, she attracted no attention.  No one recognized her and not a single person approached for an autograph.   She heard no gushing about her movies and she emerged into the bright sunlight of a St. Louis morning, thick with smog and city stench, free.

            What she needed now were wheels and cheap ones so she caught a city bus out to a busy thoroughfare on the edge of a neighborhood going sour.   With the page ripped from the yellow pages, she found Buy Cheap, Get Cheap Used Cars, a very small operation tucked behind a old house.   In her current outfit, talking like Marie Dillard and not Mercedes Montague, she haggled a deal and drove away in a well-worn 1981 Buick Skylark.  The seats showed wear, the windshield had a small crack in one corner and the body was rough but the engine ran fine and the tires were good.   If it could get her across I-70 today, it was worth the couple of thousand dollars cash she plunked down to the dealer.   He signed the title and tossed her the keys.

            She seldom drove any longer and when she did, it was on Highway 101 or up in the mountains.  Within minutes of pulling out and navigating her way across The Lou, Marie knew terror for the first time in years.  In her controlled world, she had nothing to be afraid of but the fast traffic and the cars jumping lanes frightened her.   Her grip on the wheel was so tight that her knuckles went white and when she could, she pulled into a McDonald’s parking lot for a moment of respite.

            From here, all she had to do was drive across the state home so she could detox, think, and undergo such much needed urban renewal.