Fantasy Fest

The beads came in boxes of a hundred, and the boxes had taken over the dining room earlier that week and showed no sign of leaving.

Dennis held a medallion up to the light. It was round as an Olympic medal and near as wide — three inches and better of deep purple plastic with a coin's confidence, and nothing on it printed: the whole design was molded in relief, raised out of the same purple, lighter only where the light caught its edges, the way a coin's face reads lighter than its field. The words ran around the top, following the curve, in raised letters a thumb could read. Under them reclined the girl — nude, propped on her elbows the way girls recline on truck mudflaps and calendars, one knee up, hair down her back, saying nothing and advertising everything — and under her, small and perfect, a sunset: a low sun on water between two palm trees, with birds. One side said SHOOTYOURWIFENUDE.COM. The other side, when he flipped it over his knuckle the way he did everything he was proud of, said BEGINNERMODEL.COM — the same girl keeping watch over both addresses, and the same sunset under both.

"Read it at festival distance," he said. "Across a bar. Across a street. Somebody reads that once, they remember it, and that night at the hotel they type it in."

"You're not selling beads, baby," Mandy said. "You're selling typing."

"I am selling typing. Three thousand hotel rooms' worth of typing."

Dennis had a vision dancing in his head: thousands of beads promoting his website at Key West's biggest adult event, attracting millions of visitors to his photography forums — the beads on men and women, photographs of them distributed widely, Fantasy Fest the perfect launch for his newest website.

Fantasy Fest was Key West's answer to Mardi Gras, ten days at the end of October, and it had been running since Mandy was a little girl — tens of thousands of adults descending on one small island in costumes that ranged from pirate kings to a coat of paint and a confident smile. Parades down Duval. A toga party in the street. And at the island's end, the Fantasy Zone, where the city had written down the rule that paint counted as clothing and left everything else to be understood. Mardi Gras had beads and families on the neutral ground. Fantasy Fest had beads too — but after dark it belonged to the grown-ups, and that was rather the point of it.

Three thousand medallions, every one of them the same deep struck purple, because a brand is a thing a stranger can recognize across a street. The color lived in the beads: strands in red and purple and green like bottled glass, and a pink that had no business being as pretty as it was, all of it intermixed in every box, so any handful a man pulled out came up carnival. Four boxes sat open on the dining table — pulled at random out of the thirty, Dennis's inspection, a man launching three thousand of anything checks that the last one matches the first — each box holding its one fat bag of a hundred strands, the bags laid out among the boxes like ballast. They were supposed to be sorting. They were supposed to be counting — Woody had put the fear of God into Dennis about the numbers, about weight and balance and what a borrowed airplane flown by the book would forgive and what it would not — and instead they were doing what they always did with a new idea, which was playing with it at the kitchen table while the coffee went cold.

The Jeep announced itself on the gravel drive before it announced itself anywhere else.

Jess came up the mountain that Sunday out of Chattanooga in the valley below, horn giving two cheerful taps at the curve like the house might not have heard the tires. Dolly was dark with road dust to the windows, and Jess climbed down out of her barefoot — she drove barefoot whenever the weather allowed it, and October in Tennessee still allowed it — in the green scrubs she'd worked the morning in, her work bag slung over one shoulder and a gas-station coffee the size of a paint can in her hand. Her hair was still pinned up from the shift and she was already pulling at the pins as she crossed the yard.

She set the coffee on the counter. She set the bag on the floor. "Six hours in the trauma bay and one of them was a chainsaw," she said. "I smell like a hospital. I'm taking your shower, and if either of you makes me put clothes on before Wednesday I am going home to my horses. Where are these famous beads." And she was gone down the hall, peeling the scrub top over her head as she went, the bathroom door not quite closing behind her.

She came back down the hall the way weather comes back after rain — naked, damp, her hair down and dark with water, red curls springing back to their own plans as it dried. That was Jess, entire: the nurse and the farm wife and the woman Billy Schmitt had married at nineteen with his eyes wide open, her wedding ring catching the light, her smile without a frightened bone in it, smelling of Mandy's soap and clean skin. Billy had their daughter June and the farm for the day and his blessing on the whole enterprise, because Billy had been inside this world longer than any of them and trusted his wife the way other men trusted gravity.

Mandy felt her whole afternoon rearrange itself into its proper shape. Packing could wait an hour.

"In the dining room please," Dennis said, and got up for the camera without being asked, the way a man does when the light and the company arrive at the same time. "We're shooting the front door of the site. Both of you, until you say stop. It opens its doors at the festival, and the first thing a man is going to see when he walks in is two beautiful wives."

"Front door," Jess said, following naked as daylight, pausing to kick her scrubs the rest of the way through the bathroom door with the air of a woman filing paperwork. "Is that what we're calling it?"

Mandy was still dressed — she'd been sorting beads in clothes like a person with a Sunday list — and Jess took one look at that situation and corrected it the way she corrected everything, personally and at once. "No, ma'am. Absolutely not. The photographer said two beautiful wives and one of them's still in a shirt." Dennis already had the camera up. He hadn't said a word about it; he didn't need to. The undressing was his favorite part of any shoot there had ever been — not the arrival, the road there — and both women knew better than to hurry him.

Jess took the hem of the shirt in both hands. "Arms." Mandy laughed and put her arms up in surrender, and Jess drew the shirt up and off in one pull and tossed it in the direction of the dining chair, where it landed half on a box of medallions. Click. The skirt was slower, because Jess made it slower on purpose — came around front, took hold of the waistband with both hands and worked it down over her friend's hips in stages, an inch and a conversation at a time, editorial comment supplied from the doorway. "Stand still, catalog. You're wiggling like it's your first communion." Mandy stepped out of the skirt pooled at her ankles and kicked it, with great dignity, toward the shirt. Click.

Then it was the bra, and Jess went behind her, where the clasp was, and put her hands there and did not open it. She rested her chin on Mandy's shoulder instead and looked at the camera over it, and Mandy felt her own breath go interesting in her chest, because the almost was Dennis's sacrament and Jess was serving it to him on a plate — one strap eased down an arm, then the other, the cups still held by nothing but attention. "Jess," Mandy said, "if you're going to leave me standing here in the equipment, I'm going to start charging rent." "Hush," Jess said. "He's composing." And when the clasp finally went, she drew the whole thing away slow enough to be a sentence with punctuation, and the last of it, the underwear, Jess took down with the same ceremony, Mandy stepping out of them into the afternoon — and then she stood in her own dining room in nothing but her skin, with her best friend's hands settling at her waist like they'd arrived somewhere, and felt the last of the list go out of the day — the nurse had clocked out, the banker had clocked out, and what was left was hers.

◆ ◆ ◆

They started dressed in nothing but the beads, which was Dennis's whole marketing department in one decision: a few strands each, worn like jewelry, the medallions riding where every eye was going anyway. Jess got the red and the purple. Mandy got the bottled green and the pink that had no business being as pretty as it was. The tall windows gave them the light, the rug gave them the floor, and Dennis gave them almost nothing, which was his gift as a director — a word, a hand in the air, stay there — because he had learned long ago that the two of them did not need choreography. They needed an audience of one and permission, and the camera supplied both.

Jess stood in the window light with a single strand at her throat and held the medallion out toward the lens between two fingers, and Jessica Vale — the name she modeled under, the name on the forum — came up in her face the way it always did: still warm, still Jess, but focused now, working-woman focused, a professional in front of the glass. She let the medallion drop. It landed between her breasts and hung there, swinging a little, the lettering catching the light, and she looked down at it and then up at the camera with the expression of a woman presenting evidence. The shutter took her.

Then Mandy was in the frame with her, and the shoot became the thing it actually was.

They posed the way they played, and they played the way they posed, and after the first few minutes the seam between the two was nobody's business but the camera's. Jess settling the strands over Mandy's shoulders with both hands, palms smoothing down over her collarbones and between her breasts — a costumer's hands that kept forgetting to leave. Mandy turning her face into Jess's hair and breathing clean soap and warm skin while Jess's mouth found the side of her neck, a kiss that was supposed to be a pose and outlasted the shutter by a long, honest margin. Jess's thumbs finding her nipples through the strands and staying there, unhurried, while Mandy's breath went out of her in a way that had nothing to do with holding a position.

They loved this, the two of them; they had loved it since the Sterling shoot that summer, the game of it, the permission of the camera turning their hands honest.

"All right," Dennis said, in the voice he used for the real work, gentle and exact. "Mask now, baby. Give me the ones the world can have."

The mask lived in its hatbox on the sideboard, and Mandy took it down and put Susie on standing in the window light — gold and green over the top half of her face, the feathers sweeping back, everything below the mask bare and hers to give. Something in her shoulders changed when the mask went on; Dennis had watched it happen all summer and photographed it every time like it might stop. Then it was Jessica Vale and Susie in the frame together, the two women with secret identities, strands at their throats and medallions presented to the lens like evidence at a trial neither intended to lose — those frames could go anywhere on earth, and would. The ones from after, when the mask came off and it was only Mandy in her husband's dining room with her best friend's hands on her, belonged to the camera and the four of them, Billy included, and no one else.

"Ours now," Dennis said, and Mandy took the mask off and laid it on the hatbox, and the room changed its temperature back.

"Chin up," Dennis said, from somewhere far away behind the camera. "Baby. Eyes on me."

She gave him her eyes. It was the hardest direction he had ever given her. Jess had Mandy's breast free of the beads now — had it in her hand, and then her mouth, and the sound Mandy made was not a sound she had planned, and the shutter went and went.

Somewhere in it the shoot stopped being a shoot for Mandy, and she could feel the exact slope of it, the way you feel a swing go over the top: the posing had been a game with rules — hold, turn, present — and then Jess's mouth was a fact instead of a picture, and Dennis's directions, which had been arriving like small safe islands, stopped arriving, and the quiet from behind the camera told her he knew it too, that he had seen the seam go and stepped back from it on purpose. What was left was the light, and the rug, and her best friend's hair spilling everywhere, and being wanted in her own dining room by the two people whose wanting had rearranged her whole life — and none of it was for the website anymore, whatever the camera thought.

Dennis set the camera down somewhere in there. He did it quietly, the way a man lays down a tool he has finished with, and neither of them noticed for a while, because there was no longer anything to direct. The strands came off gradually, then all at once. Mandy went to her knees among the spilled strands with her whole body lit up all at once and pulled Jess down with her by two fistfuls of red hair, and Jess went where she was pulled, joyful and unembarrassed, and put her mouth where her mouth had been wanting to be since the dining room — between Mandy's thighs, a medallion strand still caught around one wrist like a bracelet she had forgotten to take off.

Mandy came with her hands in that hair and her husband's name and her best friend's name both in her mouth, not loud, the house too full of daylight for loud — thorough, instead, the way a chord resolves. When she could see again the ceiling had come back. Jess was sitting back on her heels with her mouth wet and her expression extremely pleased with the state of the world, wiping her chin with the back of the beaded wrist like royalty. Dennis was in the doorway with his arms folded, and Jess looked up at him over her shoulder.

"Dennis Jones," she said. "You have been patient all afternoon, and it is the least attractive thing about you. Get down here."

He looked at Mandy. She was lying in the wreckage of the strands with her hair everywhere, and she held one hand out to him, palm up.

"Husband," she said. "Come here. You've earned the rest of the afternoon off."

He came down to the rug and kissed her — long and unhurried, his hand in her hair — and when he let her go she was smiling with her eyes still closed.

"Bedroom," Jess said, getting to her feet among the spilled strands. "This floor has done its duty, and my knees have filed a formal complaint about your rug. Dennis, carry your wife." She fished the fallen strand out of the rug while he got his arms under Mandy, and laid it across her friend's stomach as he lifted her. "Hold still, catalog. You're the whole warehouse. That one goes where you go."

Jess shut the bedroom door with her heel, out of long habit, though there was nobody in the house to shut it against. Dennis set Mandy down on the bed and the two women undressed him where he stood — Jess at his buttons, quick and businesslike, Mandy's hands coming in under hers at his belt — and he stood between them with his hands in their hair by turns and let himself be handled.

Jess put a hand flat on his chest and walked him backward to the bed. "Sit," she said. "You've been on your feet being talented all day."

He sat on the edge of it, and Jess put both hands on his chest and pushed him the rest of the way, back onto the bed, flat, like she was parking him. "Stay," she said.

"You got out of the creek early, Dennis," she said, climbing over him the wrong way around, settling herself over his face with her knees by his ears and her hair falling down over his chest. "A girl remembers a thing like that. Watch your teeth."

Then she bent and took him into her mouth, and his hands came up and took hold of her hips and pulled her down onto his tongue, and the sound Jess made went into him muffled and unladylike. Mandy got up on her knees beside them and gathered all that falling red hair into one hand and held it back out of her friend's face so she could work, and her other hand went where it was needed — closed around the base of his cock, holding him steady for Jess's mouth, feeling every pass of it under her fingers: Jess's lips, Jess's tongue, the wet heat of her, unhurried and greedy turn and turn about.

Jess's rhythm on him broke apart every time his tongue found the right place in her. She would stop entirely and press down against his mouth and moan into him, shaking, and Mandy held him still and held her hair and laughed, low and fond.

"Give her a second, husband," she said. "She's having a religious experience down there."

"Don't you dare stop," Jess said, to the man underneath her, and went back to him twice as hungry for having been interrupted, and Dennis — who had been given two jobs and was doing the loud one very well — made a sound against her that vibrated through both women.

He lifted his mouth off her long enough to say it, hoarse. "Jess. I'm close. I'm — Jess."

"Then finish," she said, and took him deeper and stayed, and his mouth went back to her and his hands pulled her down hard, and Mandy rode it all with her hands — one in the red hair, holding her steady, one around him, feeling Jess take all of it, feeling him go taut and give it up into her mouth while Jess was still swallowing — and then Jess came apart against his face with a cry she didn't muffle at all, and Mandy held her through it, held her hair and kept her voice low and steady in her ear. "There you go. There you go, baby. I've got you."

Jess lifted off him and turned around and collapsed beside him on the bed, boneless, and rested her forehead against his shoulder, catching her breath, grinning like a woman who'd just been paid in full.

"You've owed me that since the creek, Dennis," she said.

"Ask me if I'd pay it again," he said, when he could talk.

"I'm asking nothing. I'm observing a debt discharged." She turned her head and kissed Mandy — deep, tasting of him, unhurried — and Mandy kissed her back with both hands in that red hair.

They fell back on the bed in a tangle, all three, and nobody got up for a while. That was the rule nobody had ever had to say: the afternoon didn't resume until it resumed on its own. Mandy lay with her head on her husband's shoulder and Jess stretched out on her other side with the strand still around her wrist, and the house was quiet around them.

"There are three thousand medallions having a convention in your dining room," Jess said at last, to the ceiling, "they're in the rug and on the chairs, and the actual packing hasn't even started."

"Those frames from this afternoon are the site," Dennis said. "Front page, before there's a front page. The packing can have what's left of us."

"It'll have to," Mandy said, into his shoulder. "What's left of us isn't much."

Jess sat up and shook the strand off her wrist onto the bedside table. "All right," she said. "Wings. Before I get comfortable and somebody has to carry me downstairs too."

◆ ◆ ◆

Sunday afternoon, the wings came out of the case they lived in — a case the size of a cello's — like something being born.

Mandy had bought them in a fever the winter before, from a costumer in New Orleans who made them for parade krewes, and they were real feathers — white shading to gold at the tips, layered over a frame light as balsa, taller than she was when they stood open. On their own they were a craft object. On her back, with the harness settled and the straps coming under her arms, they were a transformation with a wingspan: she turned in the bedroom doorway and nearly took the lamp, and Jess, who had come in behind her with the mask in both hands like an offering, said, "Oh, the street is not ready."

"Hold still." Jess set the mask on her. It was a Mardi Gras mask, gold and green, molded to the top half of her face, feathers of its own sweeping back — and under it Mandy's mouth was bare, and her eyes were somebody else's eyes entirely. She looked at the mirror and felt the old, settling calm of it: not hiding, exactly. Arriving as someone the world hadn't been introduced to. Susie — that was the name the world got, the name on the forum and the photographs, so that Amanda Kline could keep everything else. Dennis could photograph Susie all day and all night, and the woman in the mirror would keep Mandy's secrets for her.

Jess's hands were at the harness again, checking the buckle under her arm — and then not only checking it, fingertips traveling the strap's whole road across her ribs and down, slow, while Mandy stood very still in the feathers and let her. "Breathe in it," Jess said, closer than the work required, her mouth nearly at Mandy's ear. "If you can't breathe in it, you'll faint on Duval Street in front of a brass band and I'll have to read about it in the papers."

"I'm breathing fine," Mandy said, and was, mostly — it was not the harness doing it. She turned, slow, and the feathers took the window light and threw it around the room. "How do I look?"

"Like an angel," Jess said, "with excellent posture," and Dennis, in the doorway with the camera already up, said nothing at all for a moment, which from Dennis was a paragraph.

◆ ◆ ◆

Dennis weighed one bead box on the bathroom scale, doing Woody's homework under Woody's law: the limits had come by phone, with the fear of God attached, and the rest was a pencil, the back of a fuel receipt, and arithmetic in his head with his lips barely moving. "Beads, one ninety-five — the flying half. Those medallions are not jewelry, they're ballast. The other half is riding a truck to the hotel like civilized cargo. Wings, eleven pounds in a case built for a hundred. Camera gear, forty. Luggage—" he looked at the suitcases lined up in the hall, and then at his wife, "—for a woman whose entire wardrobe for the festival is paint, you have packed like a duchess."

"There are dinners," Mandy said. "There are events. A woman does not live by paint alone, Dennis."

"It all flies," Dennis said, writing it down, "if the airplane's feeling forgiving, which Woody swears it will be because he's asking it nicely. Seven in the morning, Wednesday, at the field — his words. He says the weather over the Gulf is going to be a gentleman about it. He's checked."

Then Jess took charge of the wings, and the comedy went out of the afternoon for a while, because Jess repacking the case was a nurse closing up after surgery: tissue between the feather layers, the harness coiled and nested where it could not rub, a folded beach towel — Mandy's, surrendered without a fight — laid over the tallest feathers like a blanket over a sleeper. "These come home in this," she said, "in this order, in these layers. Not stuffed in a duffel in the dark at the end of the week because everybody's tired and sunburned and somebody's husband says good enough. Whoever packs them in Key West packs them like this, or I will know, and I will drive to your house, and I will be disappointed in a way you can hear from the driveway."

"Yes, ma'am," Dennis said, and meant it.

Loading the 4Runner took the rest of the light. The bead boxes went in first, low and forward, Dennis grunting them up into the back of the grey 4Runner with a care for his spine that Jess observed with the air of a woman filing information for later. The wings case rode on top of everything like a coffin at a parade, strapped down with bungees, and the suitcases filled the corners the way grout fills tile. Jess worked the gaps with small things — the mask in its hatbox, the camera batteries, a cooler bag nobody remembered packing and everybody refused to unpack.

When the hatch came down and latched, the three of them stood in the driveway in the blue hour, looking at a truck full of a week none of them had had yet.

"Wednesday," Jess said, "I will be at the farm with my daughter and my husband and a clear conscience, and you three will be committing aviation. Text me from the air." She hugged Mandy through the open driver's window of the Jeep, already half gone, already laughing. "Don't do anything I wouldn't do."

"That's not a fence, Jess. That's an open field."

"I know," Jess said. "Have a wonderful time in it."