Every so often one of the grad students I cajole introduces me to something that stuffy academia would never let me see, bringing a new color into my life. (At some point I will dig out a few old essays on why comics are a mythology for modern America.) Some of the more, for the want of an oxymoron, popularly obscure. Like Sin City, which was made into a movie several years ago. The idea of black and white and a splash of color interested me, and although the books were unreconstructed nonsense, the mechanism appealed.
Then I thought of all those 50s film noirs I love, and the pulp novels they grew up from. Where was the feminist side of these? So I have always toyed with writing a series of short stories (in the noir/Sin City format, some thread running through them all) from the viewpoint of the femme fatale. There are ideas jotted down, and here is an opening from one.
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These offices are all the same. Cheap carpet. Unemptied ashtrays. Cliche upon male cliche. The male domain is an alien one. To keep with the sham, we degrade ourselves before we come. The deep, deep red lipstick, the deep, deep red dress. And deep, deep attitude. It is what is expected. The ceiling fan chokes on the smoke, I add to it by inhaling from the cigarette in my hand, exhaling with my head titled upwards. I stare at the blades, counting the rotation. The light flickers, the blades slow down. I can hear the air drag and slow the progress, increasing the pressure in the room. The setting sun intrudes through the drawn blinds, reflecting off every smoke particle in the air. I can see each beam reach its grubby fingers towards me.
“Dame’s are always trouble” breaks the spell, reminds me of where I am, what I am dealing with and what I have to pretend to be. “But can you help?” I drawl. The voice is all part of the act. Throaty, vunerable. Play to what he wants, so I can use his entry to a world that is beyond me. “Sure” is all I get back. He stands, shuffling back from his untidy desk, piled with what are probably unsolved cases. Husbands cheating on wives, husbands abandoning wives, husbands murdering wives. And here is another man to take their dollars, exchange these dollars for hope. Why should I be any different from the others? I may be a little taller, maybe a little smarter, but I know where the power lies here. “When can you start?” keeping the exchange functional.
The dress was a bad idea. There is a trickle of sweat inching down my back. The shoes were a bad idea. Second floor office with no lift and pointed heels. This was all a bad idea.
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That one never quite worked, but there are least four other attempts at the same story. The others will see the light soon. The plan for this journal of ideas and odds and ends is a poem, some prose, then something personal.
And there is something great about being in fishnets and red. Red dress, red lipstick. Every girl should try it at least once.
Dawn
