Tuesday Mooney Wore Black. Kate Racculia

her neck. “You have to laugh.”

      “Or drink,” said Dex. “You could drink.”

      “Oh, I do that too,” said Lila. “And I forget that I’m not supposed to talk about uncomfortable things, especially with strangers. You’d think I hadn’t lived in Cambridge my whole life.”

      “I am very glad to be sitting next to you,” said Dex. “What are you drinking?”

      “Vince – that’s my husband, you’ll meet him in just a moment – went to get—” She looked up and back and laughed again. “You’ll meet him right now!”

      A much older man approached the table, a glass in each hand – one with brown liquid and rocks, the other clear and sparkling with a bright wedge of lime – and Dex nearly choked. He was wearing a cape. A goddamned cape. A black cape like the kind British guys wore to the opera in old movies: secured, somehow, around his high tuxedo-collared neck, popped like a polo collar, fluttering halfway down his back. His skin was chalky and spotted, his hair was pure silver, his ears stuck out like wings, and under a nose you could only refer to as a schnoz was a peppery push broom of a mustache. His eyes were steady and warm. He looked like the kind of man who tied damsels to train tracks but only because that was his role in the melodrama, and he would never get away with it; he was there to give someone else a chance to be a hero.

      “I leave for one second,” he said, setting the sparkling drink before his wife, “and look who shows up. Suitors. Are we going to have to duel?” he asked Dex.

      Dex stuck out his hand and introduced himself again. “Hello,” he said. “And I hope you don’t think it’s inexcusably rude of me to ask if your name is really Vincent Price.”

      “Oh, it’s hardly rude, certainly not inexcusable,” he replied with half a smile. “And also true. Yes, my name is Vincent Pryce. Pryce with a Y, so you see, it’s completely different. I was named years before the other Vincent Price became a celebrity. Though my people weren’t moviegoing people, so they had no appreciation for the gift they’d given me.” He sat and jauntily brushed his cape back from one shoulder. “And it is a gift. I’ve always loved his movies. House of Wax. The Fly. The Tingler! The sound of his voice, that rumbly, educated purr. And his characters: men of science, men of wealth, men of passion – undone! By ambition, by madness! Who went headlong, laughing, to their dooms.”

      “And rapped for Michael Jackson,” said Dex.

      “Plus, he introduced me to E. A. Poe,” said Vince with reverence. “And for that, truly, truly I am grateful.”

      “Vince has one of the world’s largest amateur Edgar Allan Poe collections,” Lila said, as Pryce rolled his eyes at the word “amateur.” “First editions, letters, ephemera, assorted memorabilia. Movie stuff, posters, film prints of the Poe movies the other Vincent Price made with Hammer—”

      “Corman, my dear.” Pryce placed a hand, surprisingly large and steady, over his heart. “He made House of Usher in ’sixty, The Pit and the Pendulum in ’sixty-one, The Raven in ’sixty-three, The Masque of the Red Death in ’sixty-four” – Lila shot Dex a beautifully arched brow – “and all the others with Roger Corman, my dear. King of American independent cinema.” After he had composed himself, Pryce winked at Dex. “Master of cheap thrills.”

      “You should meet my friend Tuesday,” Dex said. “She lives for creepy stuff. And she’s right—” Dex waved across the ballroom. Tuesday, auction clipboard in hand, might have nodded in response. “She’s right there. If you bid and win, she’ll come over.”

      “I intend to,” said Vince. “What’s the point of bidding if you don’t intend to win?” He took a drink. “Dex. Dex Howard. I make it a point of putting a serious question to a man whenever I meet him. Would you permit me?”

      Dex, leaning forward with his elbows on the table, started. “Oh, me? You mean – of course.” He laughed. “Fire at will.”

      Vince cleared his throat.

      “Do you believe, Dex Howard,” Vince asked, “that you are real?”

      A beat of silence fell between them.

      Dex looked at Lila. Her expression was flat, with no hint as to how seriously he was supposed to take her husband.

      “Uh … yes?” Dex said.

      “Your hesitation speaks volumes.” Vince leaned into him. “How do you know you are real?”

      Dex cleared his throat. Swallowed. Decided on:

      “Because—?”

      He didn’t get a chance to say more before Vince charged ahead.

      “Precisely. Because. Simply because,” Vince said. “Because you have accepted the central, implicit thesis of existence – you exist as real because you know, as of yet, no other way of being. But that’s the rub, aye. There are so many ways of being, of being real, of living, right now. And the true prize, the jewel at the end of the journey, is the discovery of the self. The selves, whether they be wrought or revealed, recognized at long last.” Vince’s voice quieted. “Tell me, Dex Howard. Who are you? How were you made, and how much of your making was by your own hand?”

      Dex grinned at him. He could not help it. “I am a human,” Dex said. “I was made by Harry and Phyllis Howard in western Mass. in 1978, probably during a snowstorm. I made myself—” Dex swallowed. “Do you want a real answer?”

      Vince and Lila both nodded.

      Dex considered. There were many answers. All of them were more or less real. Had his making and unmaking taken place on his high school’s stage, when he was in the habit, yearly, of becoming fictional people? Or had his making been one great decisive action, when his father told him he could waste his own money on school and he agreed? Or—

      He remembered his armor.

      “On the day I went for an interview at a temp agency, I wore a suit, because a suit fit the part I was auditioning for,” he said. “And they looked at me like I had three well-groomed heads and immediately sent me to temp in finance. So I guess that’s when I made me, when I made this me that you see here before you.”

      “A fine distinction, this you.” Vince nodded gravely. “We are many. All of us.”

      “Yes,” said Lila under her breath. “I am aware I married a fortune cookie.”

      “In a cape,” said Dex. “Well done.”

      No one in Tuesday’s section of the ballroom was bidding. She’d expected as much – she was staked out way in the back, surrounded by corporate-sponsored tables filled with midlevel executives who had already made their own, more modest contributions to the night’s total. She pressed her clipboard to her stomach. She was still hungry. The illicit satay she’d snuck from Dex had only made her hungrier. She wasn’t allowed to hit the buffet until after the auction, technically, but if she didn’t get more to eat soon, she was at risk of passing out. Tuesday was a fainter. “Your blood has a long way to go,” her doctor had said after Tuesday passed out in tenth-grade band and hit her head on the xylophone, “to get from your heart all the way down to your feet and back up to that big brain of yours. Your blood cells have to be marathoners. Marathoners have to take care of themselves.”

      “So you’re saying I’m a giant with a big head.”

      “You know you’re a giant with a big head,” said her doctor. “Eat more salt.”

      The cream and gilt walls of the ballroom were broken up by enormous gold-draped windows. Tuesday nestled herself against one of the drapes, slipped out of her shoes, and closed her eyes. She always saw more with her eyes closed. Like the suit sitting at the table