Archive of Our Own

Smoke curls lazily in the cloudy dim light of the club, a wisp issued from the tip of a cigarette. Follow it down: the glowing ember burning a dusky red, the sweet, dark tobacco, the thin white paper. A cigarette holder, long, burnished gold, with the faint print of crimson lipstick at the end. Those lips, full and slick, holding secrets behind their knowing curve; that dimple at the left corner of her mouth. And those eyes, dark, unreadable, the whites and their red capillaries enhanced by the dark sweep of kohl along the rims of her lashes. She has many other fine qualities (her elegant nose, her jutting collarbones, the surprising dissonance of her laugh), but when men and women think of Lola, this is what they remember. Laughing red lips, hard dark eyes.

Lola.

. . .

Another day, another drink. Cognac neat, a mannish drink, but who cares (Lola certainly doesn't). The glass sweats in the heat of the mirrored bathroom, leaving a damp ring on the marble counter. Lola leans close to the mirror, paints mascara on her trembling lashes; a thousand of her reflections, bouncing from mirror to mirror, do the same. A prism of Lolas.

Lips next. She carefully outlines them in a vivid poppy red, just a little fuller than her natural look, exaggerating her cupid's bow. She's heard he likes it that way, so even though all her artful makeup will be gone by the end of the night, sweated and kissed and drank away, Lola will take the time to make it perfect.

"So this is where you ran away to, you sly thing." This from Carmen, Lola's best girl, her smoky voice raspy with amusement and drink, standing silhouetted in the doorway. "I've been looking for you."

"Have you?" Lola asks, glancing at Carmen in the mirror. She nibbles on her lip—just the inside, thank you, no lipstick on the teeth for this girl—and adds, her voice edged like a switchblade, "What about him?"

"Oh, him? He's been waiting for you," Carmen replies, leaning against the doorframe, wearing that wry smirk of hers. She raises her eyebrows, looking Lola over from her sleek blonde head to red-lacquered toes. "Look at you. I don't think he'll be disappointed."

Lola, with a smug little shiver of pride: "Come here and zip me up."

Carmen comes here, looking slick in her cigarette pants and half-buttoned tuxedo shirt. She's a bit of a bohemian, Carmen is, careless with her dress, letting her hair fall in chaotic frizzy curls and dangling cigarillos from the corner of her wine-stained mouth, and of course there are the rumors running rampant about certain predilections of hers—but Lola has dabbled in those things, too, as most girls at all-female boarding schools do, and besides, she's Lola's best friend, her only friend, so who the hell cares? Certainly not Lola.

Carmen zips her up obediently, smoothing out the red silk so it flows fluidly over Lola's curves. In the mirror, she is Lola's dark reflection, whisky and amber to contrast Lola's peaches and cream.

"There, you're all done." Carmen rests her chin on Lola's shoulders and looks at their twin reflections thoughtfully. "Your lipstick needs blotting."

"Yeah?" says Lola. "How about—" She presses a big kiss to Carmen's cheek, then another, wrapping her arms tight around her waist so her squealing, laughing best friend can't escape. "Blotted enough for you?"

"Jesus Christ, Lola! —Yeah, I think that'll do," laughs Carmen, and slings an arm around Lola's shoulders before digging around in her pocket. "Powder your nose before we go?"

"Oh hell, why not."

Carmen has the yayo and Lola has a few bills in her clutch, and they cut messy lines on the pristine marble counter and snort it under Andrew Jackson's disapproving gaze.

"Oh, that's nice," Lola says, sniffing hard and pinching her nose while Carmen tries desperately not to sneeze, like she always does. Her whole face has gone numb, and she's—yeah. Yeah. Lola shivers and exhales sharply. "That's really nice."

"Makes you feel good?" Carmen grins.

"Oh, yeah," Lola groans, and stretches. "Save some for him, yeah? Let's go party."

. . .

Glimmering with gold and rich leather, the club throbs with the pulse of the city. The slow bass beat of the music twines with the singer's mellifluous voice, carried on the fumes of smoke and perfume, and the rich and influential swim through the sea of sound and scent and blurred light all around them. Yet Lola has eyes for one man only: the richest, the most influential, the man in the black suit in the biggest booth at the back, gold rings looped around his fingers. This isn't the first time she's met him; brash, crass seventeen-year-old Lola, fresh from reformatory school in Santa Monica and wild with her newfound freedom, ran into him at a party in the Hamptons a few years back. He'd bought her a drink and kissed her knuckles (his eyes gleaming, those same rings glittering, Lola's heart stuttering), and forgotten her name ten minutes later. This time, she'll have him wrapped around her pinky finger before the night is over.

Gorgeous, gracious Carmen is already with his entourage, cigarillo in her mouth, leaning down to a flickering flame held by an older man with his eyes down her shirt. She catches Lola's eye and winks. The old man follows her gaze to Lola; the rest of them look where he's looking; and finally, her man in the black suit turns to face her. Lola slips the little packet of blow from her clutch and tosses it in front of him with an elegant twist of her wrist. She leans over the table, a sexy little slouch, her lips in a garnet curve, that unforgettable, astonishing Lola smile.

"I hear you like bad girls," she says. His eyes flick over her clinging dress, the artful curls in her hair, her flawless décolletage, those sharp collarbones and the tantalizing shape of her breasts under silk. His smile is slow and heated.

"I might," he allows, and leans back, slinging an arm over the back of the booth. "You a bad girl, sweetheart?"

Slinking over the laps of the others in the booth without a care for propriety, Lola curls up at his side, tracing one slim finger along his tie with coke-fueled fearlessness.

"Baby," she breathes in his ear, "you have no idea."

. . .

Together, he and Lola tour the country. In August, Chicago; two weeks later, Miami. Then, after a brief stopover in D.C. ("On business," her old man tells her, "bad, bad business," and Lola doesn't ask for details), on to Memphis, to New Orleans. Roaming the streets of those those hot, humid, hallucinatory cities of the south leave Lola restless and haunted, calmed only by booze and telephoning Carmen in the dead hours of the night.

Christmas they spend in Coney Island, Lola dancing on the boardwalk in her mink-lined coat, the carousels and whirligigs shining like madcap stars. For New Year's, Las Vegas, dope and casinos and a brief stint in a jail cell, Carmen calling with good wishes from her new lover's Hollywood mansion. Then back to the West Coast, Houston, Phoenix, good old L.A., and during all this, her man, that bad man, proclaiming her his queen, his one and only, anointing his goddess with Pétrus, gold, and diamonds. Oh, she loves him; she loves him, and who would have expected Lola, tough Lola with her tarnished past, to love this honestly, this purely?

"You're obsessed," observes Carmen, her voice tinny through the telephone. Lola, lounging in the swimming pool at Château Marmont with just her head and shoulders above the turquoise water, lets her speak, absently winding the cord around her finger. "Delusional. A complete maniac. I hope you know."

"Of course, darling," Lola says, kicking her legs and watching windowpanes of sunlight through water dance along the pool's floor. Across the pool, by the bar, her man sits in deep conference with another man in the same uniform of black suit and gold rings. Much less handsome than hers, of course. They're arguing. Bad, bad, business. "I'm in love."

. . .

From there, Lola has nowhere to go but down.

. . .

Picture this: a ritzy Los Angeles hotel room, the sort with lush carpet, fine brocaded chairs, heavy, dark walls adorned with authentic, expensive art. Mahogany tables and headboard, this latter lovingly hand-carved with scenes from Greek mythology (nymphs dancing to Pan's flute, Persephone, nubile and trembling, placing one delicate foot on her path to Hades). Rain on the roof, a dull patter muffled by the thick layers of brick and insulation between the room and the outside elements; not quite a storm, but the sky's rage is growing. And on the floor, upon that fine Persian rug, a corpse.

In the doorway, Lola stands frozen, a lovely statue with her face a rictus of agony and horror. She doesn't scream—her voice is trapped behind her clenched teeth, caught in her choking throat—she doesn't faint—she simply refuses to believe. Until she takes a step forward and sees his face, or what remains of it, for a quarter of his skull is gone, leaving a pulpy mess in its wake. The temple she used to kiss, threaded with silver, his square, stubbled jaw, his eye with its laughing creases, sprayed across the floor in an explosion of blood and grey matter. Another step, and she treads on something—squishy—and suddenly her merciful haze of disbelief is ripped away as though by a vicious wind.

Her scream is piercing, utterly despondent, torn out of her throat bloodily and painfully, and she collapses, knees cracking against the floor, blood soaking into her white dress. She screams and screams—Kill me! Just fucking kill me, oh god, I'll die if you don't—animalistic, pounding the ground with her open palm, leaving handprints that will remain there, indelible, haunting the room with Lola's heartbreak. Only the police can peel her away, more roughly than they would have, were she the sweet virgin her dress proclaims her to be rather than the hard-edged gangster's moll they see. Still, there is some measure of gentleness in the way they handle her. Exiled to the hallway, Lola sinks to the floor and wraps her arms around her knees, trembling uncontrollably.

"Love you," she whimpers, "love you so much," and her eyes cloud with tears. They spill down her splotchy cheeks, her dripping nose; but even in this, the throes of despair, she is beautiful, and a junior detective takes pity on her.

"What do you need, honey?" he asks, crouching before her, earnest deer eyes peering at her as if he isn't aware of the frailty of his own treacherous body, capable of being destroyed by a single gunshot to the head. "What can I get you?"

"Carmen," Lola mumbles dully, then, with a hot sob in her throat, "I want my Carmen!"

Faced with the frightening prospect of a woman driven to such violent anguish, the junior detective hunts down her number and gets Lola's Carmen.

. . .

"I'll make them rue the day they killed him," Lola tells Carmen, a familiar litany, her head pillowed in her best girl's lap. She touches her cigarette to her lips and takes a drag, watching the tip burn; she knows this makes her cross-eyed, but who cares? Not Lola, not Carmen. Plucking it from her hand, Carmen steals her own dose of nicotine, carding the fingers of her free hand through Lola's curls, and taps the ashes beside the glass on the nightstand. "I'm going to destroy them."

They're curled on their single bed in a shabby motel along Route 66, haphazardly draped in sheets that smell of sex and their mingled perfumes. This coming together, Lola supposes, was inevitable, an affair waiting patiently for the two of them to be alone in the same place at the same time. If her one true love had been tequila shots and a snootful of white powder, Carmen is mellowed whisky and soothing cigarettes. No betrayal of his memory here, not to Lola's eyes; this is natural, as easy as breathing. He'd liked Carmen, anyway.

"Yeah, you are," Carmen murmurs, and ducks her head to press a kiss against Lola's mouth. Firm, tacky with the last remnants of smeared lipstick, tasting of Lola and Carmen's own, unique flavor. "Tell me again, baby."

Lola bares her teeth, an unconscious, shocking snarl. Oh, those criminals who killed her old man, they have no idea what sort of beast they've unleashed. Lola's learned a thing or two about bad, bad business in the past few years. "I'm gonna fucking destroy them, Carmen."

"That's what I like to hear," Carmen says, and leans back against the cracked whitewashed wall. Lola stretches sinuously and gropes around for the glass on the nightstand; helpfully, Carmen picks it up.

"Open wide," she says, and Lola smiles at her, parts her lips—Carmen tilts the glass and carefully pours the dregs of the booze into Lola's waiting mouth.

"Sweet," Lola whispers, and tugs Carmen down to give her a taste.

Tonight they'll spend like this, in relative peace, in a tangle of limbs and moans and slow-burning desire, but tomorrow they'll leave this slumped, stained room and pile in Carmen's vintage roadster, heading east; tomorrow, amid clanging casinos and searing colors and the sticky, clinging musk of sin, Lola's revenge will begin.

Viva Las Vegas.