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i.
“So he’s cheatin’ with you?” Feefee asks, blinking against the dark-dipped mascara wand. Lestat told her, very clearly, not to do that. It's quiet as it gets backstage, the two of them alone, other than the regulars that float in and out, bitching at Lestat for taking up too much space on the long table that makes up the main vanity. As if she doesn’t own the vanity, and the stage, and the floors they walk on and the roof above their heads.
They should all be bitching about the stench of ranch and ketchup leaking out from the take out box Feefee’d brought in, balanced on top of an unopened box — a new pair of pleasers. Lestat’s stomach roils, everything to do with the rotten trash scent of so-called messy fries undercut by the alcohol-and-sugar odor of every cheap Amazon body spray a queen has brought to lather herself in. There’s no food allowed backstage anyway. Lestat allowed Feefee once and now she takes it as her due. A mouse with a cookie, whatever, all of Lestat’s children are adult homosexuals, who has the time to remember nursery rhymes or their morals.
Lestat drops the mascara in Feefee’s lap. It’s cheap, a neon yellow tube, easy enough to find amongst all the chains and straps and ripped polyester Feefee goes around calling pants. “His husband knows. We’ve met. If you sweat this off, I will not be around to reapply, Fiona Liqueur.”
She has to turn to grab the wig glue and a brush, so she doesn’t technically see Feefee’s eye roll, but a mother always knows.
“So they’re open.” Feefee presses. Lestat applies dark glue to Feefee’s lashes — dark, bigger than the ocher sets she herself wears — and waves the lash in lazy circles, the mouth shaped bruises on the back of her thighs light up when she shifts from foot to foot. Louis, wicked man with a wicked mind, listened intently this morning when she’d lectured him about the single bruise high enough on her tits that a costume might not cover it. He’d found other places to suck her blood high to the surface, pressing fingers deep into her and making sympathetic noises back at her unladylike grunts.
“The details of people’s marriages aren’t of any interest to me.”
Their courthouse wedding announcement was placed in the L’Observateur, pleasantly anachronistic already, even a decade ago. The announcement link is broken, but the single image attached to it still floats around the internet, easy enough to find on a Monday morning scroll in bed. Neither of them are exactly smiling in the photo, but little Claudia is. Her braces and the little crucifix around her neck are equally shiny in the picture, flattened by digital camera. Armand’s teenage portraiture is the next easiest thing to stumble upon—uninspired; limp—then articles where Louis lurks in between the lines; a sculpture sold for this many millions, another priceless painting that could, in fact, be priced. The thought of spending the better part of a decade with a single person exhausts Lestat, but it’s good for them. Louis will be gone in a few months, having taken his pleasure from Lestat and turned formless, misty ghost memories.
“Well,” Feefee says in that way she does, like she knows everything about Lestat, even though everyone who has ever known Lestat is dead or motorcycling around France, which is the nearest thing. She never closes her eye when Lestat puts her lashes on, stares up at Lestat instead. Lestat lets her look her fill, not particularly concerned if she finds whatever she's looking for. “As long as you’re being careful.”
"Ha ha," Lestat says.
ii.
Those awful sex shops back in New York used to smell this way. Some kind of incense, smoke, obviously, but sharp, too, almost acidic to Lestat’s nose. He supposes they had to be strong to cover the scent of fresh faux leather and edible underwear and those dildos that would melt inside of you after a few uses. He shudders to think about what kind of fluids and adjacent matter might need to be covered up in Madeleine’s apartment. Lestat does his best to keep a distance from this kind of women, with all their wet crevices and bleeding and tiny hands and asymmetrical bodies. Antoine is the occasional exception and he’d laughed at Lestat, the one time Lestat had mustered up enough courage and sense of fair play to reach down past the leather and metal grommets holding the harness together to prod at the wetness Antoine was hiding. Relief and disappointment were twinned pulses — he could have done anything Antoinette wanted, of course, some lingering professional pride still smarting at the thought of her laughter, how casually he’d shoved Lestat’s hands away.
Anyway.
“Blushes.” Lestat holds up the little black and white striped bag for Madeleine to grab. She does and then they are standing in the foyer of this small apartment, front door closed behind Lestat. Across from the door is a mirror, bracketed by a small pair of antlers, dyed neon green and strung with delicate, unlit fairy lights. The rug beneath their feet is brown cow-print, too small and flat to be luxe. The apartment is clean, but Lestat knows the smell of rotting wood, how little any of them can do against the sinuous curl of New Orlean’s wet fingers around everyone and everything. There are framed prints hung on the one wall Lestat can see of the hallway, a red background, a cartoon woman in a hijab, arms crossed and frowning. “The girls wanted to say thank you for your work over these last few months. And some of them have complained about you looking a bit sallow. It eases the mind, when the maker of our beautiful things is also beautiful.”
Madeleine snorts, keeps flipping through the things Lestat has brought, palettes and packets and bottles clattering together. It is mostly blushes, though he’d also plucked a few pencils of eyeliner, three or four fat pots of multi-use pigment in colors that wouldn’t clash with the bottle-dyed copper or the mousy red-brown that crept out along her hairline and shouted at Lestat when she knelt before him to fiddle with a hem or whatever it was she did.
“Thank you, this is sexist, but very sweet.” Madeleine says and then, in English, “I’ll swatch them. You can tell me which ones look best in the lights backstage. They're very orange. Come.”
She’s gone and so Lestat follows, curious enough about this apartment smelling of rot and smoke and flowers and covered over in pretend trophies of dead things that never lived. Impossible that Madeleine, an beloved oldest daughter from a family with enough money to send her across the ocean, has held a shotgun. Has steadied her breath to a whisper or closed and eye and pulled a trigger. She’s never heard a heavy body thump to the leaf-soft ground and felt satisfaction so fast and hot that she’s touched herself, for pleasure or to be certain that she’s still dry.
There are two taxidermied hares on the coffee table, both wearing small top hats. One holds a gently smoking incense over a platter. The other appears to be cuddling a package of American Spirits, the yellow box. Also, Claudia is sitting on the couch, half upside down, laptop resting on her stomach. Lestat vaguely recognizes the sweatshirt she’s wearing. Louis had worn it three Saturdays ago and nearly forgot to grab it from the foot of Lestat’s bed when he took his leave on Sunday morning.
“A sexist gift from a group of people parodying womanhood,” Claudia mumbles around the hoodie strings in her mouth. “Shocking.”
“You’re being a brat,” Madeleine says, clearly delighted by Claudia’s sour mood. She shoves herself between Claudia and the wobbly arm of the sofa, her shoulder dragging along the length of Claudia’s exposed leg. If this was only Claudia, the sweet young thing Madeleine simmered over months ago, recalling in damp detail the way she’d taken Madeleine’s fist the second time they’d fucked and pricking any girl that made so much as a gagging noise over the discussion of what real live pussies do— Well, that Claudia Lestat would leer at, perhaps sit too close to her other side, lob some half-hearted flirt about what kind of sleepover games she and Madeleine were getting into this gaumy evening.
But this is Claudia, the face that occasionally smiles up from Louis’ cycling phone backgrounds. Claudia, who made Louis a father, who Armand has apparently raised, who’d twisted her face up at Lestat’s offering of fish paste and sisterhood. Who sometimes calls Louis in the middle of the night, her voice piping out from the phone, frantic or laughing, Lestat is usually too sleepy to tell.
“Ah,” Madeleine says and wiggles out from her perch, dropping the makeup between the rabbits and gesturing for Lestat to sit at the short edge of the coffee table, in the tufted yellow armchair that’s drowned in a pale gray throw that looks to be handknitted, unevenly. Claudia doesn’t look at Lestat and the muted taps of her fingers against keys doesn’t pause. Louis never mentioned, but Lestat wonders if she plays something, anything. It’d be a shame, he’s heard of her clever fingers, though the context isn’t one he ought to bring up to her, or Louis. Another tidbit from Madeleine, in the days when Claudia was a concept that Lestat only heard of in passing.
“You’re thinking really loudly,” Claudia mutters, as if she may not care if Lestat hears. “Like. You’re so fucking loud already, but I can basically hear it. Louis make it back from the UK alright? Armand pretends he hates it, but they go like three times a year. It’s gross, they always come back super lovey-dovey. So actually, you probably haven’t heard from him.”
She keeps not looking, and he has no answers for her. Madeleine's steps are heavy, loud despite the ugly rugs thrown across all available floor.
Madeleine places a glass of water in front of Lestat and sits on the edge of the couch closer to him. “Where should I start?”
The bag tips over, blush and bronzer spilling over lipstains, black and blue eyeliners roll across the table. Lestat had pulled at whatever seemed vaguely correct, from days old memories of what Madeleine looked like.
“All your features are generally darker, for someone so pale. The peach,” Lestat says, plucking it from the table. This one is a sheer formula, probably too sheer for how much it cost, but buildable in layers. And Madeleine is a woman in the daylight, they can always get away with less than Lestat can. “Your nipples, they’re brown? Perhaps the lavender.”
Claudia stops typing.
“Brownish,” Madeleine murmurs, grabbing a palette from the table. “Not very dark, though, sort’ve a pinky dusky, here, you can see.”
Madeleine touches the hem of her shirt and Claudia twists, feet thumping to the floor and then she’s up, out of the sitting room and down the hall, laptop left behind. They both turn to watch her leave.
“Oh dear.” The pot of blush flips along Lestat’s fingers.
“She’ll be fine,” Madeleine says, but quietly and in French. “I’ve told her, they’re just bodies! You want me no more than I want you. Though you are very beautiful, of course.”
“Of course.” Lestat nods. “She’s young.”
“Young,” Madeleine sighs. “Hot headed. Insistent.”
“A winning combination in a lover.”
“In a partner, yes.”
“Less desirable in a daughter, I would guess.”
Madeleine drops her head into her hands and laughs. “Not always. Not in my experience.”
Her smile, when she aims it at Lestat, is wicked, as if she’s not seen also Claudia in her braces and crosses and lacy little socks. Or perhaps she has. Why would she ask Lestat to be the arbiter of these things, child that he was, half-wild, unlaced and dancing away from wandering hands?
“Feefee is waiting for me,” Lestat says, standing. Feefee is at one of her other jobs, flipping hamburgers or delivering groceries or whatever boring things people without money do. Madeleine might know that. Lestat’s got some vague sense that there are friendships that happen at the bar without his attention or go ahead. It's a precursor to something dreadful, like these American unions he hears so much about, but that’s a concern for later, when Claudia isn’t thumping around behind Madeleine’s walls and also in his head.
If Madeleine knows any different, she doesn’t argue, letting him out with another thank you and a fleeting kiss, high on the apple of his cheek, where blush should go.
iii.
“There,” Louis grunts, brow furrowed horribly. His nipples are contracted tight, flushed dark from Lestat’s earlier biting and his hair is flattened on one side. He looks well fucked and he’s going to get a wrinkle right in the middle of his forehead and Lestat will know that he’s put it there, marked Louis permanently this way. “Right there, baby, don’t st—keep going. Fuckin’. Lestat, shit.” Lestat hauls Louis’ slipping leg higher on his shoulder, bracing against it and against the syrupy pull of his own orgasm. He’s a lady, too polite to come before Louis has, even though Louis came to him unfocused and has taken forever to get to the edge.
Which is to say that its a relief when Louis comes a moment later with a hard snap of his hips, four or five sinuous rolls, groaning shocky relief. He’s tight still, even after a long fuck, and flexing around Lestat’s cock, dragging him down into orgasm too, sooner than Lestat wanted, honestly. Those few seconds after Louis has come but isn’t quite ready to part have become Lestat’s favorite: Louis’ lazy reminder that Lestat had better get his quick, the sheen of sweat on Louis’ lightly furred chest and the high-throated whines Lestat fucks out of him.
But this is good too, Lestat comes and collapses onto Louis, who pushes him off with a sigh and a laugh and disappears into the bathroom to clean up, quick enough that Lestat is still awake and increasingly sticky when he crawls back into the bed. The washcloth is the hot side of warm and Louis is sweet, if utilitarian, in wiping Lestat down. The air conditioning hums. Lestat’s damp skin prickles and the washcloth hits the floor, somewhere in the direction of the bathroom doorway. Louis’ sigh is satisfied and Lestat has to look over, has to be certain that he is real, and here and nowhere else for the night.
Louis has fixed his hair, curls evenly fluffed all around, and he’s staring back at Lestat, face resting on his hand, body twisted so that their legs are touching. Before Louis, the only lover Lestat had here in ages was Antoinette and that was out of laziness and the satisfied thrill of having someone come calling. And no one has come calling in months, not since the overeager Thai place and the hot weight of Louis’ unfinished in his mouth. He’s managed a couple flings, tugging down tipsy gogo boys’ little latex shorts in the alley behind the bar. Squeezing a handful of whatever is close in the dark of somebody’s after-party, a few keys deep. But nothing real. Not that this is real either.
It’s good, actually, that their fucking is like something out of a dirty storybook. Lestat focuses on that, not the throbbing certainty that Louis is a problem that Lestat will add to the collection of pretty birds around his neck the moment Louis walks away and never comes back. The months stretch between them, the fly-paper collection of memories too. Had it only been a handful of weeks since the first time he met Claudia? A handful more since Louis rubbed gauzy blue fabric between his fingers and taken Lestat as herself as easily as he took Lestat as himself?
“What’s got you thinking so hard?” Louis asks.
Lestat snorts. “You are very similar to your daughter, do you know this?”
The furrow is back, confusion now, and Lestat reaches to smooth it out, and then to follow the gentle curve of Louis’ nose down to his mouth. Louis’ features aren’t fine, but they’re soft, softer than girls Lestat’s let on stage with a half pump of concealer and a dream. The impulse, when it comes, feels so much like hunger Lestat grabs his phone. How long was it, since the handfuls of pistachios split between the two of them, Louis sat on the counter and Lestat between his legs? Not even an hour. Hands back to Louis’ face, swiping along eye socket, the manicured tail end of an eyebrow and up the temple, along the rough-prickled fade and into his hair properly.
“Stay here,” Lestat murmurs, just to watch Louis roll his eyes and continue laying down. The colors won’t be quite right. Everything here is for Lestat alone, none of the lesser products he brings and loans out to girls who come up short — a favor always paired with a reminder, quality products cost money, of course, but look how smooth the skin, how bright the pigment.
Lestat doesn’t bother with a robe, walks naked to the drag room and grabs things from the vanity. The Saint Laurent in Pink Domination. None of the skin products will work but one of the Bobbi Brown pencils, smudged quick before it set around the eyes, and the darker of the Baby Cheeks palette — a stupid name, but even Lestat struggled to find fault with the results. A mascara, any mascara truly, Louis’ eyes were already a sight to behold and Lestat wasn’t sure what would spill from his mouth if they became sharper, or any more knowing.
Louis is staring at the ceiling, cigarette between his fingers, idly tapping his wedding ring against the bedroom ashtray — vintage, glass cut into sharp art deco edges and lined in flaking gold paint — until Lestat climbs back into bed, dropping his bounty against Louis’ side.
“What—” Louis says, but Lestat is moving the ashtray to his other side and straddling him, their skin sliding together in a pleasant enough recreation of the moments ago coupling.
“It’d be a shame not to,” Lestat murmurs, adjusting to sit mostly on Louis’ stomach, knees pressing up into his armpits. He takes the cigarette, steals a drag and drops it, still smoking, in the ashtray. “You’re beautiful, of course you know that, cher.”
Louis huffs, the way he has so far, every time Lestat has repeated his own little turns of affection and doesn’t argue anymore. Had he known, Lestat wonders. Had he accepted this as an inevitability, as expected as playing dress up with Claudia? Kiss kiss slap, or whatever attempts at play Armand foisted upon him?
“How long you been wantin’ to do this?”
Never. Women, in Lestat’s experience, can be trusted to metamorphose, to wield transformation kindly, adorning themselves in color and flash. Men aren’t that dimensional — they want one thing, whether it’s sex or the music, the boy, the power.
It’s a bad angle and Lestat didn’t grab a single brush. Berry color blush applied to the pads of his middle and ring fingers and swept across Louis’s cheeks, buffed out from a garish slash into a sweet deep flush.
“Close your eyes,” Lestat murmurs, “Has anyone put you in eyeliner?”
Louis makes rueful noise and Lestat works, rich black pulls across the lash line and Louis shivering but not flinching away. Lestat’s hands tremor a little, wrist aching.
“Probably, the year I danced at that club.” He says it like he’s passing Lestat the kind of secret that belongs in a folded note. “Right before Claudia. Don’t remember much. It was a long time ago and I was—”
“You made plenty of tips.” Not a stretch to imagine, Louis but younger, barely hair on his chest. Hip bones framed in a jock, a tight white singlet, thin enough to watch him breathe. Not Lestat’s type, exactly, but beauty is beauty and Louis' would have been transportive. The kind of face men start wars for, or go to the ATM for a couple twenties.
“Yeah.” Louis does flinch this time. Lestat’s braced and ready for it. Most people don’t like their eyes being touched. Gabrielle had told him that once, laughing a little. She’d make him close his eyes and touched along his forehead, his nose, his eyes, his mouth, his collarbone. The game was how long he could go without flinching. How many places she could touch. She was a different person in the nighttime, not warmer, but more tangible. Someone he could touch back.
Louis opens his eyes and the mistake reveals itself to Lestat. Her features are well-wrought, but not soft. Louis blinks. Lestat could cry. He picks up the lipstick instead. It’s wrong, pink ashen against Louis’ skin. Lestat only paints the middle of Louis’ lips, the place for kissing, rendering him Marie Antoinette circa 2015.
He’s beautiful uncontoured and barely painted at all. Perhaps the men were withdrawing fifties, hoping to draw Louis down from whatever wobbly pedestal the club had provided, nightdreaming of him tumbling into their open arms.
Lestat was a beautiful boy, too, once: his skin tight and smooth, his eyes bright. He didn’t shudder or shiver when Magnus touched him, either. Not when Nicki did, or Antoinette, or the alleyway gogo boys, or the drunken bachelorette bitches that just wanted to feel the tuck. Not the chasers or the queens who want to be mothered, or fathered, or fucked.
But the stage, oh, the stage. Up there, she was untouchable. Face carved and set in creams and powders, a perfect portrait. And here, at home, alone, in front of her vanity. She could always find herself in the mirror, the silver pool to drown herself in. How good for Louis, to find himself lovely with a few swipes of color and the yielding softness of good bones.
Lestat brings a hand to his throat and swallows, presses against the bobbing hardness there. There is something wrong, a ticking in his body, a fundamental pathology that wheezes and weeps and won’t die and Louis is still beautiful between his legs and he cannot know. No one can know, except the ones who know where to look. And they are all dead, or Gabrielle, who is spiteful enough to die any time.
“Did you do me wrong?” Louis asks, laughing from another world, batting eyelashes that didn’t need the help. “Take a picture, let me see.”
Lestat will. But a stolen kiss is more important. Lestat whispering against Louis’ skin the truth as if a lie, that he is too beautiful, that Lestat will hide him away, that no one can know the treasure Lestat has uncovered here.
+.
Candy steps as far back as she can in the small back room. She's appraising, careful eyes tracing the curve of Lestat’s constructed hips. Neither of them are so sure the hobble skirt is right, but it matters less than the pads themselves. Lestat’s waist is small, his shoulders broad. Nothing, not even the tits, will look right if the hips don’t.
Honestly. Building a body out of couch foam? There were fruity drinks on islands he could be sipping on right now, spending that old bastard’s money down to the last penny. That’s what he’d wanted, wasn’t it? To leave Lestat in the kind of luxury he’d offered in life, a carrot on a string. Be a good boy, bend over and earn your millions.
“It’ll do,” Candy says slowly, convincing no one, including herself. She’s halfway out of drag, platinum wig traded for a platinum pony tail. Blue green veins and wrinkles on the back of her hands washed clean of concealer, but her full face is unmoved. She’s a magician, mug intact after two numbers in the horrifically organic humidity of a basement bar in New Orleans. Lestat knows she’s going somewhere after this. It’s not hard to guess she’s dating. He has offered to pay her more, give her a regular night. He’s got enough that it doesn’t matter what her number might be.
She’ll smile every time, tell him nobody wants to see some old lady swipe her tits across the stage for ones, kid. Candy’s been a star long enough that she’s burning on her own fuel now, never one for saving, always on the move. To see your own grave on a living woman’s face, Lestat muses.
He’s tucked. Aware of the tuck. The blood going funny. She made him take off his top, the tits, all of it, so she could look properly. If she’s noticed that his nipples are hard, she doesn’t care. A shame, everyone should get a good, long look at the ring through his left nipple, the only parting gift from New York he’d kept. The chlamydia cleared up quickly, once he’d found a doctor that wouldn’t ask, in that lowing, disappointed tone they get, why he wasn’t having safe sex.
Just as well.
She’s touching him again. Or, well, she’s touching the pads. Adjusting the skirt, squeezing and shifting the foam. Three pairs of tights, the stretched emerald bandages that form the skirt, and the tucking briefs between them. Impossible, that he could feel her plastic nails curling against him. She sweeps a hand along the curve of him, the body, and doesn’t look up at his breath tripping over itself. She smells like the cheap pinot noir Lestat hasn’t had the bar switch over from yet and her awful gum, artificial sugar burning through tobacco. Perfume too, lilies dusted in baby powder.
“Kid. Baby.” She says it as a complete sentence. Lestat can’t stop wondering what her lips feel like, tastefully enlarged like they are. He’s owned the place for nearly a year now; he’s starting to recognize the signs of the queens that take off their drag, but not their womanhood. In truth, he didn’t realize Candy was one of them at first. He’d only ever seen women like that in the documentaries he’d watched on the couch while Magnus slept, before New York. And there, they were mostly gangly, awkward with late onset puberty and cheap, terrible skirts, all of them foals stumbling on wobbling feet. Only a rare few were certain in their own beauty, daring and unshaken in their glamour. And even then, they wore so much black.
They’d been suspicious of Lestat, even the ones who allowed him into their circles of conversation. They seemed to always be laughing at him, loving and familiar, unintelligible from strangers.
The whine is a dewdrop on a new leaf. Precarious, precious, inevitable. Her knuckles brush over one of the skirt’s golden buckles, and higher, disturbing the light down of pale hair on his belly. His stomach trembles, impossible for her to ignore.
“You can’t be looking at me like that.” Deep breaths through her nose. This close, her eyes are blue. A little greener than his, but close. Marty, the ancient bitch Lestat bought the club from and still allows to sit and drink wine all night, said they were “next to kin, standing up there, all blonde and prissy.”
“Where else would you have me look?” He sounds like a john, finds himself bitterly jealous of whoever she’s keeping waiting while she touches him and steps softly on his heart. “Ma sucre, tell me. Please.”
Was there an old man walking the halls of her dreams too? Did she have the secret knowledge, the trick to sleep soundly at night? He would plead for it on his knees for her. He would have her fingers in his mouth, her disappointed mouth turned down.
She huffs a laugh and stops touching him. “You’re so sweet. Smart-mouthed, but sweet as sugar. What is an old lady like me supposed to do with you?”
She gives him a illegible look and he closes his mouth, answer dead on his tongue. Anything, he would beg, mad with it. A new boy every night in New York, any man he wanted in this godforsaken swamp. And Candy, moving away again, toward the door, shaking her head, ponytail high and bright and shining. Lestat stands in the backroom, halfway through transformation, and listens to the click of her heels as she walks away,