Free Tell-All by Chuck Palahniuk Page B

Kathie’s rolled back the cuffs of her shirt, a man’s white dress shirt, the breast pocket embroidered with
O.D.
, the monogram for her fourth “was-band,” Oliver “Red” Drake, Esq. , all of the shirt spotted with pink paint. A bandanna tied to cover her hair, and pink paint smudged on the peak of one movie-star cheekbone.
    The town house stinks of lacquer, choking and acrid as a gigantic manicure compared to the smell of talcum powder and sunlight on the doorstep.
    Miss Kathie’s feet descend the last steps, trailed by drops of pink. Her blue denim dungarees, rolled halfway up to her knees, reveal white bobby socks sagging into scuffed penny loafers. She faces the nurse, her violet eyes twitching between the gurgling, pink orphan and the paintbrush in her own hand. “Here,” she says, “would you mind …?” And my Miss Kathie thrusts the brush, slopping with pink paint, into the nurse’s face.
    The two women lean together, close, as if they were kissing each other’s cheeks, trading the swaddled bundle for the brush. The white uniform of the nurse, spotted withpink from touching Miss Kathie. The nurse left holding the gummy pink brush.
    Her arms folded to hold the foundling, Miss Kathie steps back and turns to face the full-length mirror in the foyer. Her reflection that of Susan Hayward or Jennifer Jones in
Saint Joan
or
The Song of Bernadette
, a beaming Madonna and child as painted by Caravaggio or Rubens . With one hand, my Miss Kathie reaches to the nape of her own neck, looping a finger through the knot of the bandanna and pulling it free from her head. As the bandanna falls to the foyer floor, Miss Kathie shakes her hair, twisting her head from side to side until her auburn hair spreads, soft and wide as a veil, framing her shoulders, the white shirt stretched over her breasts, framing the tiny newborn.
    “Such a pièce de résistance,” Miss Kathie says, rubbing noses with the little orphan. She says, “That’s the Italian word for …
gemütlichkeit.”
    Miss Kathie’s violet eyes spread, wide-open, bug-eyed as Ruby Keeler playing a virgin opposite Dick Powell under the direction of Busby Berkeley . Her long movie-star hands, her cheeks marred only by the pastel stigmata of pink paint. Her eyes clutching at the image in the foyer mirror, Miss Kathie turns three-quarters to the left, then the right, each time closing her eyelids halfway and nodding her head in a bow. She bows once more, facing the mirror full-on, her smile stretching her face free of wrinkles, her eyes glowing with tears. This, the exact same performance Miss Kathie gave last month when she accepted the lifetime tribute award from the Denver Independent Film Circle . These identical gestures and expressions.
    A beat later, she unloads the infant, returning the bundleto the nurse, Miss Kathie shaking her head, wrinkling her movie-star nose and saying, “Let me think about it.…”
    As the nun mounts the porch steps, Miss Kathie thrusts two fingers into her own dungarees pocket and fishes out a card of white paper.… She holds the sample shade of Honeyed Sunset to the cherub’s pink cheek, studying the card and the infant together. Shaking her head with a flat smile, she says, “Clashes.” Sighing, Miss Kathie says, “We’ve already painted the trim. Three coats.” She shrugs her movie-star shoulders and tells the nun, “You understand.…”
    The next newborn, Miss Kathie leans close to its drowsing face and sniffs. Using an atomizer, she spritzes the tender lips and skin with L’air du Temps and the tiny innocent begins to squall. Recoiling, Miss Kathie shakes her head, No.
    Another gurgling newborn, Miss Kathie leans too close and the dangling hot ash drops off the tip of her cigarette, resulting in a flurry of tiny screams and flailing. The smell of urine and scorched cotton. As if a pressing iron had been left too long on a pillowcase soaked in ammonia.
    Another foundling arrives barely a shade too pale for the new