by Rona Jaffe
“No.”
“We’ll stop at the bookstore and you can buy it,” he said.
They went to the nearest bookstore and he found the book for her. Then they went to a greasy spoon where they had coffee, exchanged phone numbers, made an appointment for the following day to rehearse, and he borrowed a dollar from her, telling her he owed her eighty cents—deducting fifteen for her coffee and five cents for her share of the tip. She was relieved that he seemed to have no interest whatsoever in dating her.
That night she read the book and was appalled. The girl was a teen-aged black hooker. What kind of a part was that? Was that what he thought of her? And the words! She’d just gotten over saying all those words; she was darned if she was going to get started again saying them in public. If Mr. Libra knew he would kill her. Don had already marked several parts he thought would make good scenes for class. She didn’t like any of them. But what the heck, a scene was a scene. She had to start somewhere. She’d just cut out all the dirty words.
The next afternoon Don appeared at her hotel room with his own copy of the book. He was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and tight, faded corduroy pants, and he had an old Army jacket slung over one shoulder. She really hated his tattoo.
“Okay,” Silky said, resigned. “Let’s read. Is that what we do first?”
“No,” he said. “First we get to know each other a little.”
“Oh? All right. What do you want to know?”
“You’re not married, are you?”
“No. Are you?”
“Nope,” he said. “Is that Bourbon?”
“Yes.”
“Can I have some?”
“Oh, sure,” Silky said, bored with him and wishing he’d get on with the rehearsal. Maybe he was just nervous. She poured them both drinks. He sat on the bed.
“Hey, sit down,” he said. “Why are you so nervous?”
“I’m not nervous.”
“Then sit down, for Chrissakes.”
Silky sat in the chair.
“Why don’t we play some music to relax?” he said.
She turned on the radio. It was Hatcher Wilson’s song again—every time you turned on the radio, there it was. She was glad that Hatcher was making it.
“Do you want to dance?” he said.
“No.”
He drained his glass of Bourbon. “Hey, drink up.”
She took a few sips and looked at her watch. “I don’t have much time,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said. Then he jumped up, pulled her to him, and kissed her very hard on the mouth. She tried to pull away but he was very strong. She turned her head from side to side but he clamped his mouth on hers again so she bit him, at the same time stamping hard on his instep. He was wearing sneakers and it hurt. He yelped and let her go. “What’s the matter with you?” he said, furious.
“What’s the matter with you? I thought we were going to rehearse.”
“We are. But we have to know each other first. How do you expect to do a scene with me where we have a relationship if we don’t relax together first?”
“What is this, a rehearsal or a date?” Silky asked, mad now.
“What’s the difference? Don’t you like men?”
“I like men, not little boys. If you don’t want to work, get out, please.” She opened the door.
“Oh, come on.”
“Come on what?”
“Did you ever have a good orgasm?” he asked.
“Did you ever have a good punch in the mouth?”
“Oh, wow,” he said, laughing. “Wow.”
“Get out of here!”
“Oh, come on. I’m not going to force myself on you. If you don’t want to be friends, we can just work. I thought you’d be warm.”
Her eyes filled with tears. She wished she had a knife so she could kill him. She imagined stabbing him in the heart, seeing his arrogant, ugly-handsome face contort in surprise just before he fell down dead. He thought all black women were whores and nymphomaniacs, that was obvious. Oh, she would love to kill him.
“All the other actresses I work with like to ball,” he said, all hurt innocence. “That’s half the fun of rehearsing.”
She wiped her eyes. Maybe she was wrong, maybe he just thought all actresses were whores and nymphomaniacs. “I’m not an actress,” she said.
“I really wanted to get to know you,” he said. “Boy, you really know how to bring a guy down.”
Silky picked up the book. “Shall we start to read now?” she said.
He shrugged and picked up his copy of the book. “You have the first line,” he said. “We start here.”
So this was acting class. Crazy junkies flipping out, creepy studs with no bread using “rehearsals” as an excuse for sex, kids playing hippie, talking about things they knew nothing about, a poor old man with a stutter trying to make every girl in the room fall in love with him so he could make it up to himself for never becoming the star he’d always wanted to be. Some of the kids were working in shows, so they couldn’t all be fakes and failures. But what about all the others? What was all that crying, all that open discussing of their life problems, that self-indulgence? Were they all so lonely that this was the only place they could come to feel loved? Mr. Libra thought a nuthouse like that acting class was going to teach her how to stand up on a Broadway stage and carry a show, but when had he ever been to the Simon Budapest School of Theater Work? The school of confusion and monkey business was more like it. She had never felt more insecure and depressed in her life. She wished she could talk to Dick, ask his advice, ask him what was really going on in that class, could she ever understand it, could she ever learn to act? She needed Dick so badly, and he was gone. But she’d have him in the fall if she got the show. That, at least, would save her life. Meanwhile she would just work and try as hard as she could to do what was expected of her, if she could ever figure out what that was.
She and Don did the scene in class and Simon Budapest told her she was not bad. He asked her what she had used for the emotions and she said she was remembering things from her old neighborhood. But the truth was more that she was using her contempt for Don, the way he made her feel, because that fit in very well with the mood of the scene and it seemed natural. But she couldn’t say that about Don in front of the class, even though he was a jerk.
After class Simon Budapest took her aside. “If you have contempt for that boy, you should use it in the scene,” he said.
“I do, and I did,” Silky said.
“I thought so. Use it more. Let it all come out. I want you to do the scene again.” And then he was gone, no good-bye.
So that was what it was all about! Real feelings, just like life! Wasn’t it? It was coming a little clearer now. She felt better. Simon Budapest seemed to understand her, even like her a little. He could have said all that in front of Don and the class, but he had spared her feelings and Don’s. He wasn’t such a crazy old man after all. Don ran after her in the hall.
“What did he say? What did he say?”
“He said we should do the scene again.”
“Well, he could have said that in class. You’re lucky he spoke to you. He must think you’re good.”
“Do you really think so?”
“Yeah. He doesn’t say you’re good at first, but if he talks to you alone it’s a sign he’s really interested in your work.” Don looked at her with new respect.
My work, she thought. Singing was her work. But now acting was her work, too. She remembered the first night she’d gone out with Dick, when he’d told her she should take acting lessons. Oh, Dick was always so right about everything! She missed him so much it was like a constant ache in her heart. People could have an ache in their hearts, because she had one. It wasn’t just stuff they wrote about in songs. She was just going to have to work as hard as she could and learn as much as she could so that when she and Dick finally met again he would be proud of her. She wanted him to be proud of her. It meant more than even being
a hit in a show. The show seemed such a dream she couldn’t believe it was going to happen. But Mr. Libra said she was going to have to read for the part in a few weeks, so she’d have to get used to the idea that it was not a dream. Still, maybe it was better not to realize it was real, because if she ever realized fully that it was going to happen she would be so frightened that she wouldn’t be able to read for the part at all, acting lessons or no acting lessons.
Why is it, Silky thought, that now when everything I ever wanted in my life is coming true I can’t believe it, and I’d give it all up in a minute if I could only have Dick back again? But she was not really sure the last part of that was true. She wanted to be a success. Not just because she had nothing else, either. She wanted to be a success because … because … why? She didn’t know. But she did remember the alternative, and if she could think of no other reason for wanting to be a famous star, thinking of the alternative was enough.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Vincent-Slash-Bonnie! What was Gerry to do with her/him? When Libra first passed the edict that the kid was to live with her, making her sort of a foster matron, Gerry was appalled. He/she was a beautiful kid, with a cuddly sexual quality that was quite unnerving. She felt rather dikey in the presence of Bonnie, feeling that odd attraction, even though she knew quite well that Bonnie was really Vincent, so it was all right. And Bonnie/Vincent, or Vincent/Bonnie, played his/her sexuality up for all it was worth. Gerry couldn’t figure out how much of this was unconscious. Evidently the kid was at a loss for anything to talk to her about, and they both watched each other like wary animals at first. Vincent/Bonnie was waiting to see if Gerry was going to laugh at him/her, consider him a freak. And Gerry was suspicious of this silent, watchful kid who locked the bathroom door when he/she went in to dress or put on make-up, used her things and then denied he’d used them, who watched her every move as she watched his. She wondered if the kid was a kleptomaniac. How could you tell? You could hardly get a word out of him. She knew Vincent/Bonnie resented having to stay with her far more than she resented having the kid dumped on her.
But as spring went into summer and then the hot summer went on and on, Gerry began to see heartening changes in Bonnie. (She was finally thinking of him/her as Bonnie now, because when the kid had first come to stay she’d asked him what he wanted to be called, and he’d said: “Bonnie, because if you think of me as Vincent and I get a phone call you might forget and say, ‘Vincent, it’s for you.’”) The first time Bonnie really talked to her was the night Bonnie had taken a pill, one of the little cache of Ups Bonnie got from the queens in the gay bars and which she hid somewhere in the apartment. Bonnie was on her way out to romp in the bars, and Gerry made coffee and they sat in the living room and Bonnie talked and talked, about her Me, her childhood, her first love who had gone away.
“I talk a lot on pills, don’t I?” Bonnie said.
“I’m glad to hear you talk at last.”
“I used to be shy. I felt stupid. I’ve learned a lot, haven’t I? I’m not so dumb now, not so loud.”
“You were never loud.”
“Well, I felt loud,” Bonnie said. “I thought you hated me.”
“I thought you hated me.”
“You used to stare at me.”
“Only because you’re so pretty. You used to stare at me, too.”
“Well, I never had a sister or anything. Do you like me now?”
“I always liked you. I just didn’t think you liked me. But I like you more now that I know you don’t hate me. Do you like me now?”
“Yes,” Bonnie said. She lowered her eyes. “Very much.”
Gerry felt a rush of affection for Bonnie. It really wasn’t necessary to treat her as either a girl or a boy; she could just treat her like a very young person. Bonnie had teen-agey interests: clothes, make-up, hairdos, romantic records. And she wasn’t nearly as dumb as she looked. (It was a stereotype to think someone as confectionary as Bonnie was stupid, but it was also a stereotype to think that any astute remark that came out of her mouth was a gem just because it was a surprise.) Gerry had learned to accept Bonnie on her own terms and she realized that Bonnie was quite intelligent and extremely shrewd, with a perception that saw right through the defenses people put up, if only because Bonnie was from such a different world that these defenses were never something she had become conditioned to accept the way everyone else did.
“I want to learn as much as I can,” Bonnie said. “I’m learning a lot with you.”
And she was. Gerry was her image for what real girls did. When Bonnie had first arrived she was extremely sloppy, leaving makeup anywhere in the apartment, losing the tops of all her bottles and jars, leaving her false eyelashes dropped on the bookcase or under the cushion of a chair, wherever she had taken them off. She threw her dresses on the floor as if they were costumes that had nothing to do with her. Now she was becoming systematic, everything put in its proper place, even keeping a little notebook for her business appointments and the telephone numbers of new friends. “You’re neat because you’re a girl,” Bonnie said. So Bonnie became neat. Gerry didn’t tell her how messy most girls were.
Right from the start Bonnie was working all the time. She had bookings every day and by summer her pictures began to appear in the newspapers and soon they would be in the magazines. Magazines worked three months in advance. Libra didn’t let her do fashion shows. She was hailed as “the face of the year,” “a sexier Twiggy,” “the new androgynous sex goddess,” “the essence of unselfconscious femininity,” “Marilyn Monroe reincarnated.” Nobody seemed quite sure how to describe her; they only knew that they loved her.
There were crises too. One day a photographer called up, furious, to say that Bonnie had walked off with one of the originals in a collection they had photographed: a fifteen-hundred-dollar pants suit. Bonnie denied it innocently. Gerry denied it heatedly. Then later Gerry found the pants suit crumpled up in a far corner of her closet, on the floor, behind a can of moth crystals she’d been looking for. She confronted Bonnie with it.
“Well, I thought they were supposed to give models all the clothes they were photographed in,” Bonnie said.
“Give!” Gerry said. “Give, not let you take! That’s stealing. They need that pants suit to make copies of.”
“He gave it to me,” Bonnie said.
“Then how come he called up so furious, looking for it?”
Bonnie shrugged and pouted.
“You’ll have to give it back.”
“I didn’t take it.”
“If you didn’t take it, how did it get here? It walked here?”
Gerry didn’t know what to do. She was afraid for Bonnie’s career, for one incident like this could ruin her as a model forever because no one would ever trust her. She couldn’t go to all Bonnie’s bookings as a watchdog. But Bonnie had to learn that even though she was living a fantasy life she still lived in the real world where people had real values like not stealing. She finally decided to give the pants suit to Libra and let him take care of it, and for herself, she simply stopped speaking to Bonnie for two weeks.
What Libra did with the pants suit was a mystery. The only thing Gerry knew was that the photographer spread it around the industry that Bonnie was a lousy model, too stiff, and that he would never use her again—and no one else paid much attention because Bonnie was an excellent model and most of them assumed the photographer had simply tried to go to bed with Bonnie and had been rudely rejected. As for Libra, he deducted the fifteen hundred dollars, in installments, from Bonnie’s allowance, keeping her virtually trapped in Gerry’s apartment with no money except carfare to get to bookings, and Gerry keeping a stony silence.
Bonnie stayed at home, watching television when Gerry turned it on, eating when food was given to her, fasting and sleeping when no food or entertainment was proffered. At the end of two weeks Gerry came home one night from the office to find Bonnie sitting on the floor, wearing boy’s jeans and a torn boy’s shirt, h
er hair combed back like a boy, no make-up on her face, and sobbing.
“I can’t stand it any more,” Bonnie said. “Please talk to me.” With her eyes and nose swollen from what must have been hours of crying and her hair skinned back like that, she looked more like Vincent than Bonnie. Gerry felt a rush of pity and tenderness.
“You have to learn to respect other people’s property,” she said.
“I will.”
“Maybe you don’t respect a lot of the people you work with, but while you’re working with them, you have to respect their rules.”
“I do respect them,” Bonnie said. “The people, I mean.”
“I’m not saying you have to respect all of them. You’re entitled to your opinion. But just don’t play them for fools, because they’re not.”
“I know it.”
“Okay. What do you want for dinner?”
Bonnie rushed over to her and hugged her. Gerry felt terrible. She didn’t want to have to be a mother to this kid, or a watchdog or a warden. She hated the idea of any adult having so much power over another adult. But she couldn’t let Bonnie get into trouble, either. The world saw only the good Bonnie, the lovely face, the graceful, lovable nymphet. They were not even interested in seeing Bonnie as a whole human being. She had to see both faces of Bonnie—you had to do that with someone you cared about. And she had to protect her. Not just because Libra told her to—it was different now. She had grown used to Bonnie and more than a little attached to her. She was impressed with the way Bonnie seemed to have solved her emotional problems by herself, without ever complaining of feeling sorry for herself, and even seemed to be having a better time in life than most of the normal girls and young men she knew. Bonnie had a lot of strength. Gerry respected her.
After that the relationship changed. Gerry began encouraging Bonnie to go out with her, to shop for groceries or clothes, to the movies, for dinner on hot nights when she was too lazy to cook. And Bonnie seemed to enjoy it. She didn’t go to the gay bars so much any more. She had more dates. The boys came to the apartment to pick her up, and they always seemed like nice, clean-cut, straight boys. They obviously liked and respected Bonnie. Gerry couldn’t see hanging around on Bonnie’s dates even though Libra wanted her to, so she stayed home on the nights she wasn’t seeing Dick. Sometimes now Bonnie insisted Gerry go out with her on a double date, getting the date for Gerry, so Gerry went. It was pleasant, and she did not feel uncomfortable after the first time. Her date was always straight, at least to the best of her knowledge—probably bisexual she told herself, but how did you ever know who was and who wasn’t, anyway? On dates Bonnie was quiet, sitting there looking beautiful and knowing she was beautiful, occasionally saying something unexpectedly witty that made everyone laugh a great deal, partly because her delivery was so well timed. Gerry thought that Bonnie was a natural comedienne and could probably make her debut in a comedy part when Libra found the right film for her.