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Blanche DuBois has asked if she can meet me in Starbucks. At first I am reluctant; I fear the attention she will attract, and Starbucks is not a place in which a serious journalist likes to be seen. But her agent assures me that it’s Starbucks or nothing, as Miss DuBois is very partial to their skinny cappuccino. She is an hour late and I’m just about to call her agent to tell her that, skinny capp or no skinny capp, I have another assignment with a bigger star (I’ll think of someone), when I smell something in the room that definitely isn’t coffee. It’s an intensely sweet smell undercut by a sour note, like Coca-Cola with lots of lemon in it. I know it must be her.

I see her before she sees me. A flash of white-blonde hair is whipped up over the top of her head, like a just-cooked meringue. It swirls down over the high collar of her fitted white jacket. Her matching skirt is long, but it clings around her bottom and thighs in swooping curves. Her shoes, also white, taper to a fearsome-looking point.

I was expecting her to be frail, drooping even, after the death of her husband Shep Huntley (the movie mogul who pushed her to stardom) and the deep-sea dive her career has taken of late. But she looks a bit like one of those carvings of women on the brow of an old ship: stiffly saucy. There’s something surprisingly solid about her all-white body. I wonder about the strength of her support-underwear, and make a note to ask her about it later.

Standing at the counter, she smiles at the boy frothing her cappuccino, and I overhear her saying, ‘the more froth the better, honey!’ Occasionally she looks over her shoulder and neatly turns up the corners of her mouth at one of the people staring at her.

She’s carrying a red sequinned bag, into which she keeps dipping her hand. Each time she dips, she pulls out her (silent) mobile phone, puts it to her ear, shakes it, looks at it with a puzzled expression, and puts it back in the bag again.

She’s turned away from the counter when the boy calls after her.

‘Chocolate?’ He smiles, offering up the silver shaker.

She places one hand on her throat and hesitates. I watch as her face changes. It’s like she’s shaken out the creases and put the light on. Then she turns back to face the boy. ‘You make my mouth water!’ she says, rolling her eyes. I feel a contented murmur from the crowd around her. Still on form, then, I think.

The legend of Blanche DuBois is well-documented, not least by her own hand. In her first volume of memoirs, Sometimes there’s God, she tells the rather saccharine story of her idyllic childhood on a grand but crumbling Southern plantation. It was the second volume, Coming Suddenly into a Room, that topped the bestseller lists, however. In it, DuBois provides plenty of gory detail on what she calls her ‘mid-life fall’: the disastrous marriage to a homosexual poet who shot himself in front of her (she has since published a volume of his work – it was savaged by the critics but sold by the truckload); the rape at the ‘barbarian’ hands of her brother-in-law (the later trial and incarceration of Stanley Kowalski were featured in her made-for-TV movie, Deliberate Cruelty); her subsequent nervous breakdown and period in a mental hospital. The third volume, A Paper Lantern over the Light is really a hymn to Shep Huntley, the Hollywood producer she met at an AA meeting. Fifteen years ago, aged forty, she became his biggest star.

‘Miss DuBois’, I call, standing up. She stops and looks around the café, frowning slightly. Then she locates my waving hand. She touches her throat again, dips her head and smiles. I notice that her thick orange lipstick has slipped just slightly over the outline of her mouth.

‘Oh! You must be the lady from the newspaper! You’re younger than I expected!’ she says, moving forward and offering her long white fingers. ‘Much younger than I expected.’ As I take her hand her fingertips leave a little dampness on mine. She sits down quickly, and a droplet of her cappuccino lands on my oatmeal-coloured Prada trousers. She immediately jumps up again.

‘Here, dab it with this cloth!’ Her fingers are in the sequinned bag, and handkerchiefs begin to fly in my direction. ‘Keep dabbing it! Don’t stop! It’ll stain if you stop!’ She licks a lilac embroidered handkerchief and starts blotting my knee. ‘Your trousers – such an interesting colour – they’ll be ruined, irretrievably!’

As I smile and tell her it really doesn’t matter, I calculate the dry-cleaning bill in my head. The more she rubs, the deeper brown the stain becomes. Before she can unleash another gust of handkerchiefs, I ask her my first question. Is it true that Shep Huntley had a clause written into their marriage contract which stated the number of movies she was obliged to make every year? She stops blotting my knee and sits down.

‘You don’t waste time, lady reporter! I thought you’d at least ask me about my appearance first! A gentle enquiry about my shoes, or my hairstyle… But I forgot, this is the serious newspapers! No gossip allowed!’ Her lower lip cracks a bit as she smiles.

When I told my colleagues I was to interview Blanche DuBois, they laughed. There’s no point in having a list of questions, they said. Miss DuBois doesn’t like to answer questions. But I am determined not to be blanched, as one of them predicted I would be. I will not be flirted into oblivion. My dictaphone light is on. My notepad feels cool beneath my hand. I have my fountain pen. I have my list of questions.

We sit in silence. I ask her the question again. She takes a sip of her cappuccino, then dabs the corners of her mouth with the lilac embroidered handkerchief. I wait. She reaches down into her sequinned bag, takes out her mobile phone, looks at it, puts it back in the bag again. The dictaphone light glows red.

I try again. ‘Miss DuBois – can you tell me about your marriage papers? About the contract that Shep –’

She tosses a meringue-curl from her face and interrupts. ‘My shoes are from a darling little shop in Venice, Signor Bertoli, he makes them for me, I have such delicate feet, you see, shop-bought shoes just slip right off them. And my hairstyle… well, it is a problem, having such fine hair.’ She takes another sip of cappuccino. ‘But I can see you wouldn’t know about that! You have such a thick, strong head of hair yourself!’ She pats her own white confection.

I decide to play her game for a while, and make an innocent enquiry about her skin-care routine – how does she stay looking so young? The rumour is she’s had at least five face lifts in the last fifteen years, but I don’t mention that.

She runs her hands up her neck and over her cheeks. Each finger has a ring on it, and as she moves her hands chips of light seem to spark around the room. ‘My face is entirely my own. I mean that most sincerely. It’s just been – stretched – the tiniest little bit!’ She laughs and leans towards me. ‘Of course, clothes are my weakness.’

Ah, the weaknesses. I have a list of questions about them. She is, I say, known for her weaknesses. Clothes, men, liquor.

I am surprised that she doesn’t flinch. Instead she leans over and grabs my (still slightly damp) knee. ‘If a girl has to have weaknesses, she may as well go for the big ones! Don’t you have any little weakness, honey?’

I am about to ignore her question and ask her if she still indulges her weaknesses when she looks round to the boy behind the bar and calls. ‘Honey lamb! Fetch me another skinny capp, would you?’ She holds out her cup and watches him approach. He has a glow about him; his thick black hair and very straight nose shine beneath the soft Starbucks lights. As he takes the cup from her she grips his coffee-stained shirt-cuff.

‘Could you give me a light?’

‘I’m sorry. It’s no smoking in here.’

She looks at him for a moment. Then she gives a slow sweep of her eyelashes. ‘Well, I think you’ll find your boss won’t mind terribly if you – massage the rules, just a little, just for me.’ The boy doesn’t move. His cuff is still in her grip, and the light from her rings jumps up his sleeve.

‘I’ll bet you love Café Mocha. It’s your favourite, isn’t it?’ she asks him, flipping a curl away from her neck.

‘I – well, I –’

I twist round to face the boy. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘Miss DuBois, weren’t we doing an interview?’

‘Hang on just a second, lady reporter!’ She pulls the boy closer to her. ‘I’ll tell you what. You run and fetch me a light, and I’ll buy you as much mocha as you like.’ With one finger she traces a circle on his cuff. ‘As much as you like, whenever you like. How does that sound?’

The boy hesitates. ‘I don’t know –’

‘Miss DuBois –’

‘Just a second, lady reporter. Young man, wouldn’t you love it if I broke the rules – just the tiniest little bit – just this one time?’

The boy lets himself smile a big smile. She lets go of his cuff and he backs away, taking her cup with him.

A sudden burst of piercing Polka music rises up from somewhere beneath her legs. She laughs and swings her sequinned bag onto her lap. ‘Would you excuse me for just one second?’

I start to say no, I will not excuse her, she’s already spent most of this interview talking to someone else and I have another assignment and she’s ruined my Prada trousers and my dictaphone has nothing on it and I consumed three lattes just waiting for her (and I usually drink only herbal tea) and she’s apparently going to smoke right here in Starbucks. But she’s already laughing and uh-huhhing into her mobile.

While she’s on the phone, the boy comes back with the light. Without ending her call, she smiles up at him, pops an all-white cigarette between her lips and raises her chin to his hand. He smiles as he angles the flame towards her. In the light of the match, her orange lips look smooth and soft. She inhales deeply and lets out a particularly long uh-huh as the boy walks away.

It’s a full five minutes before she drops the phone into her handbag.

‘I just had to take that call. I never hang up on an admirer! Unless he’s behaved unforgivably.’

‘You’re smoking in Starbucks.’

‘Honey, don’t look so shocked! I do it all the time. It’s just a question of deceiving people just enough… you have to convince them that they want you to do it. Now what was it you were asking me?’

I tap my fountain pen on my notepad. The only question I can remember is the one about her support underwear. She sighs and waves her cigarette in front of my face.

‘What sort of a question is that, honey? Support underwear? I don’t even know what that is, blessed child!’

I look down at my typed page of questions. Smoke from her cigarette is making my contact lenses dry, and I feel them drag over my eyes as I try to focus on the page. I see the word pleasure and pick that.

‘Um, what would you say has been your greatest pleasure in your life?’

I tap my pen and shift in my seat. I am ready to write the word clothes or acting.

‘Epic fornications.’

I drop my pen into her cappuccino cup. She looks straight at me. For the first time I notice that her eyes are a very clear, very light blue.

‘That is one hundred per cent the truth, honey.’ She pulls her jacket tight around her chest. Her collarbone juts out as she leans over me. ‘Do you want me to spell fornications for you?’ She picks my pen out of her cup, shakes it once, and offers me the coffee-soaked nib. ‘You have your pen all ready here but I don’t think that you’ve written a thing throughout this entire interview! So much for the serious newspapers!’
The red light on my dictaphone has gone out.

‘That’s why I married Shep Huntley,’ she continues. ‘Not because of some bunch of papers… but because I knew he would let me… stray from him, whenever I needed to. And that’s why I became an actress. All those leading men! All those coloured lights! Young, young actors, just trembling to get their minute of screen time.’

A bit of blood appears on her cracked bottom lip as she stretches a smile across her face. She picks up her cappuccino cup and stares into the bottom.

‘Oh my, it’s all gone. And so quickly!’ She dips into her sequinned bag.

‘Miss DuBois, not the mobile again, please –’ I begin, but she brings out an ivory compact. With one smooth action, she twists up a lipstick and slicks it over the blood. As she presses her lips together the skin around them goes light and taut.

‘There. A little deception goes a long way.’

She blows out a long white stream of smoke in my direction. 

BETHAN ROBERTS has an MA in Creative Writing at University College Chichester, where she also teaches part-time. She has been published once previously (in Mslexia Issue 16), and won joint first prize in the English and Media Centre Short Story Competition 2003 judged by Michèle Roberts.

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