by Rona Jaffe
There was a party afterwards upstairs at Sardi’s while they waited for the reviews. Silky came in with Libra and Lizzie and Dick (Dick had an elegant-looking blonde in tow and maneuvered her into all his photographs, then spent most of the evening table-hopping and ignoring her).
Mad Daddy had come with Elaine. Gerry realized suddenly that if she’d needed a date for the opening, instead of hovering around backstage to be of moral support to Silky, she would not have known whom to ask. It was ridiculous; she was loved, cherished, and she had no one. But what no one else might have understood was that she didn’t feel alone. She knew Mad Daddy was with her. She wondered how many people sitting at those tables with the people they were married to, or the people they were being seen with because it was good for them, had other people somewhere else they were with in spirit right this minute.
There was a buffet with food, but Gerry didn’t feel like eating, so she wandered around saying hello to people she knew and then went to the bar and had the drink she felt she really deserved. It was hard to believe the show had finally opened. She would believe it when she saw the reviews. Elaine Fellin was sitting with Lizzie Libra, hoarding her own private bottle of champagne. Mad Daddy spent a polite amount of time with her and then came looking for Gerry.
“We look so great together,” he said. “Do you think anybody’s noticing how great we look together?”
“I notice it all the time,” she said. “Wow, I really missed you when I was away.”
“Me too. You don’t have to worry any more, do you?”
“No.”
“That’s good. I hated it. Hey, I have something for you.”
He took something out of his pocket, polished it off on his dinner jacket, looked around furtively and put it on Gerry’s middle finger. It was the new Mad Daddy Secret Code Ring, about to go on the market in a few days. She had always worn rings on her middle finger when she was a kid.
“That’s the original,” he said. “It’s worth a hundred thousand dollars, give or take ninety-eight cents. Now you’re officially my girl.”
“I’ll never take it off.”
“You can take it off when I give you the real one.”
“I thought that was the real one.”
“I mean a real ring, silly,” he said. “You know, a rock. I asked Elaine for a divorce today. I told her it was crazy going on the way we were, miserable all the time.”
“What did she say?”
“She said okay but I’d have to pay for it. She wants a lot but I don’t care; I figure I owe it to her. It’s my bail money.”
“You didn’t tell her about me, did you?”
“Of course not. And I have an appointment to see my attorney tomorrow, and I’m going to move to a hotel. I thought maybe next to the office—then you could run in and see me a lot, like you were going to the water cooler.”
“That would be wonderful! I’ll have Mr. Libra arrange it. He has pull at the hotel.”
“Will he get me a water cooler?”
“I’ll get you a water cooler.”
“And then when I’m free,” he said, “will you marry me?”
So this was the way it happened! The knight on the white charger, everything she’d dreamed of since she was a little girl, the proposal … Here he was … standing in the middle of a crowded opening-night party, whispering so no one would hear, standing discreetly away from her so his wife at a far-away table would not see them. And she loved him so much she couldn’t bear it. Well, if this was the way life turned out, then let it be this way. She felt dizzy with happiness and she knew she was blushing.
“Do you mean it?” she said.
“Of course I mean it. Will you?”
“You bet I will!”
“Oh, wow,” he said. The way he looked, stunned with happiness, she could believe this was the first time it had really happened to him. Maybe, no matter how often you’d been through it, there was a real first time for two people, a time that could never have been duplicated if they had not found each other.
The reviews came in then, and they were better than Gerry had expected: mixed—one critic even liked the show, the others said it was weak but fun, and everyone loved Silky. This morning Silky Morgan was a star. It was a wonderful engagement present. Gerry and Mad Daddy held hands under the newspaper.
“I’ll meet you later, okay?” he whispered.
“Okay.”
“I’ll call you at home in about an hour.”
“Okay.”
He squeezed her hand and went back to his table. Elaine was screaming at some woman, standing up with her hands on the edge of the table for support. Poor Elaine. Poor Mad Daddy … no, not any more. Poor everybody who was alone or trapped with someone they didn’t love or respect. Silky was surrounded by well-wishers. She looked happy but tired. As usual, Libra hadn’t spent a moment with Lizzie all evening. All the lonely people … as the song went.
Gerry wished she could talk to Libra alone so she could tell him the news and share her happiness with him. He was her family. And she wanted to tell Bonnie, who was her family too. She couldn’t possibly call her parents back home and tell them; they’d be stone cold furious. But they didn’t really seem like her family any more—as she’d told Libra long ago, her parents were just two people who would come to her wedding. She looked around the room. This was her world now, people she was familiar with and worked with, some she liked and some she didn’t, some she only recognized by sight, some she knew down to the bottom of their hearts. She could pick and choose in this world, and she had chosen. This time, she knew, she had chosen right.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
That september the Gilda Look swept the country. Elaine Fellin wore it and looked very good in it. Lizzie Libra wore it, hated it, and looked dumpy and twice as old as she’d looked the year before. Little Penny Potter started all the Beautiful People wearing it; she hadn’t even been born when it came around the first time and she thought it was great camp. Gerry Thompson refused to wear it at all. But everyone else was wearing it, and the framed oil painting of Sylvia Polydor above Sam Leo Libra’s fireplace looked as if it had just been painted and hung there on purpose. Sylvia Polydor was queen of the shoulder pads—she had never stopped wearing the Gilda Look.
Bonnie Parker was hired to wear the Gilda Look for the editorial pages of Vogue, along with her old friend Fred, a happy reunion for them both. Bonnie was now a much bigger model than Fred, but Fred was not jealous because she knew she was quitting soon to get pregnant. Besides, Bonnie did not come out too well in those pictures—for some reason the Gilda Look, with its auburn wig and huge shoulders made her look oddly like (as one Vogue editor laughingly remarked) a drag queen. They used only one picture of Bonnie in that layout instead of the six full pages they had planned, and afterwards they kept her in more conservative clothes. Bonnie cried for days when they yanked her pictures, but she was soon cheered by the news that Sam Leo Libra had arranged a screen test for her, and she would soon be flying to Hollywood. She’d always wanted to go to Hollywood and meet stars, and she counted the days.
Bonnie/Vincent was now nearly twenty years old. Lately, he had been moody and depressed, his moods going up and down more rapidly than he could control them. He was not crying merely for the pictures of himself as Bonnie that had not been used. He was crying because he had begun to notice some disturbing physical changes in himself.
For one thing, he now had to shave his moustache every other day. Shaving gave him bumps and irritated his tender skin, but he was working so often that he did not have time to go into seclusion and grow his moustache long enough to have it waxed. It was hard to cover the bumps with make-up, and he was actually afraid someone would notice it and his photos would have to be air-brushed. He knew there were other models with facial hair, but they were all real girls and they did not have to worry. Their pictures were automatically retouched and their hairy identity was a secret of the trade. He couldn’t afford to take chances. He w
orried about it all the time.
The other thing that frightened him was that he had grown two inches in the past two months since he had begun modeling. He knew that Verushka was over six feet tall, but he had no idea how tall he was going to grow. He was now five feet eleven. At first he had not known that he was growing; he had simply noticed that his legs, always a problem, looked skinnier than ever. He always wore two pairs of tights to make them softer looking and less like a boy’s sticks, but he wished desperately that the photographers would take him out of mini-skirts and put him into floor-length gowns and trouser suits before anyone else noticed. Then he realized that his legs were getting skinnier because he was growing and not gaining any weight; he was skinnier all over. Every night he pulled at his semblance of breasts, trying to make them grow, and he wondered if he should start taking hormones—perhaps birth-control pills. Sweets made him break out, so he began eating a loaf of bread a day in addition to his regular food, trying to gain weight.
One of the boys he dated was a married medical student whose wife was putting him through med school. This boy told him that he was probably a case of delayed maturity, that some boys didn’t grow up until they were twenty-three or -four.
“You mean I’m going to turn into a man?”
“I hope not,” his lover said.
“But you said …?”
“Well, you’re growing, and you said you shave now. You didn’t shave before.”
“I’m not going to get big, butch shoulders, am I?” Vincent asked in horror.
“You’ve got a pretty good pair of shoulders already, for a girl.”
Later that night Vincent spent the better part of an hour in front of a full-length mirror. He certainly did have a big pair of shoulders for a girl—no wonder the Gilda Look had looked so horrible on him! Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph …! He started to cry and watched his Adam’s apple working convulsively in the relentless mirror. What kind of a man would he turn out to be? He would be a freak then, for sure. He’d never look like a truck driver; he’d just look like another of the thousands of little nippy queens running around the streets. His career would be over. He would never be a movie star. He would kill himself.
He began almost living on Ups to keep away the depression, and the Ups killed his appetite so he found it torture to eat enough to keep his weight. He was as nervous as a cat. He kept wondering when Gerry was going to notice. She’d have to notice soon—he was living right under her nose. But Gerry was so happy and absorbed with Mad Daddy these days that she hardly noticed Vincent at all, except to give him cheerful hugs and kisses whenever she saw him. Maybe love was blind to everyone, not just to the love object. Vincent prayed so.
But one day Gerry noticed. She had just finished hugging Vincent and she drew back. “Bonnie … you’ve grown!”
“No I haven’t.”
“You certainly have. You’re a head taller than I am.”
“I always was.”
“The top of my head used to fit just under your chin. Now you’re way up there like Alice in Wonderland. Have you measured yourself lately?”
“No.”
“Then how come you let down all your pants? And your wrists are hanging out of your sleeves. Bonnie, for God’s sake, you can tell me. Are you growing?”
Vincent burst into tears and ran and locked himself in the bathroom.
When Gerry finally persuaded him to come out he confessed all of it to her, even the shaving. “And I’m so scared I’m going to turn into a big man,” he sobbed.
“Well, not overnight you’re not,” Gerry said. As always, she was calm, already thinking of a solution. “Maybe you should start smoking and drinking lots of coffee, or is that just an old wives’ tale? I don’t know, they used to threaten me that I wouldn’t grow if I smoked and drank coffee … no, maybe that’s when you’re only ten years old. How tall are your parents?”
“Shorter than me.”
“Oh dear, the new young generation is so damn healthy. I’ll get some wax for your moustache and we’ll rip it right out by the roots.” Vincent winced. “Never mind, it’ll be worth it. You’ll take a week off and tell them you have the flu, and you’ll sit in the apartment and grow your moustache for me. We’ll do it right before your screen test. And we have to get you some new clothes. Thank God you don’t have hair on your chest. Some men never get that. The shoulders, though, are going to be a problem. You’re growing a nice little pair of those.”
“What’s nice about them?”
“I’ll get one of those beauty books and see how a girl with big shoulders and skinny legs should dress. They always tell you how to minimize your flaws. I think maybe you should start wearing little falsies, Bonnie. Then you’ll just look like a big, zaftig girl. Try one of my bras with two make-up sponges in the cups. I think that’ll be more natural.”
When Mad Daddy came to pick Gerry up she had Vincent in the bra with the sponges and a poor-boy sweater and skirt. They’d told Mad Daddy about Vincent, finally, and he never really could get used to it; he always looked as if he were going to burst out laughing. Vincent would have hated him for it, but Mad Daddy was so sexy and likable that he really couldn’t get mad—it was like getting mad at a seven-year-old kid … a kid Vincent would really have loved to ball; too bad he was straight.
“You look very sexy,” Mad Daddy remarked pleasantly. How could anyone say that and sound so uninterested?
“Do you notice anything different?” Gerry asked.
Mad Daddy shrugged. “He’s growing a bust?”
“He’s growing, period,” Gerry said. “Can you tell?”
“Elaine did that after I married her,” Mad Daddy said. “She grew and grew. I had to get her a whole new wardrobe.”
“See?” Gerry said. “Girls grow too.”
“How old was she then?” Vincent asked.
“Sixteen.”
“Well, I’m nearly twenty. Ain’t that a mess?”
“Isn’t,” Gerry corrected automatically. “Isn’t that a mess.”
“You look kind of like Elaine from the back,” Mad Daddy told him.
“That’s not all bad,” Vincent said.
“That’s a good idea,” Gerry said, thinking. “You should let your hair grow. Then people would notice your hair and face more. Twiggy is out anyway. Elaine has big shoulders, but with all that hair spilling around them, nobody notices.”
“By the time my shoulders finish growing my hair will cover them, right?”
“Right.”
“If they ever finish growing,” Vincent said morosely.
“Can’t we go eat now?” Mad Daddy asked.
When Gerry and Daddy left, Vincent experimented with his collection of blond falls. He wondered how long it took to make a movie. Wouldn’t it be a mess if he made one movie and became a big star and then nobody ever hired him again because he’d turned into a wrestler? Gerry’s bra was too tight around the back and it hurt. He took it off. He’d go out tomorrow and buy a Jezzie—that’d push up what he had. He pushed his breast skin up with his fingers. They did look like tits, they did. He was scared to take hormones, even though a lot of the queens he used to hang around with took them. He didn’t want to be a freak. Those things the queens got weren’t tits, they were just membranes. Tumors, cancers. He didn’t want two tumors growing out of him.
He washed his tear-stained face and painted carefully, putting on six pairs of upper eyelashes and a pair of lowers. He painted in a beauty spot beside his mouth and one of them on the opposite cheek. He pinned on two of the falls and two little side curls. Then he put on the bra again, even though it hurt, and put in the two make-up sponges. It certainly looked real. He put on his favorite pants suit and noticed with pleasure how much better it looked with a little shape up top. Oh, Bonnie, you are flawless! You are a flawless beauty!
He had no place to go, so he’d go to a gay bar and wreck them. He hadn’t been to one for a couple of weeks, and he didn’t want to be forgotten. Everyone woul
d rush over to him when he came in, as they always did, and make a big fuss over him because now he was their star. He’d never looked better, no matter what anyone said. He pouted at himself in the mirror and blew his image a kiss. Oh, what a flawless beauty! Look at that nose, look at those huge violet eyes! He ran his hands down his body and over the cups of the bra. Didn’t those sponges feel real! Just like a girl’s tits—not that he’d ever felt any except Gerry’s on the sly. He tossed his head and the hair of the falls swayed and rippled over his shoulders. God, he was beautiful! It turned him on, seeing himself so lovely in the mirror, even though he knew it had taken him two hours to achieve this masterpiece. He was really getting hot. Look at those sensual lips! His cock began to hurt where he’d gaffed, and he realized he was getting a hard on. Now he’d have to pull it before he went out.
Vincent jerked off in front of the mirror, staring passionately at Bonnie’s exquisite face. Another man never made him as hot as just looking at himself and knowing he was lovely. The only other thing that really made him hot was being the center of attention and knowing everyone thought he was beautiful and wanted him. He was so lucky he had been born beautiful! Just before he came, he kissed Bonnie’s voluptuous mouth in the mirror.
Then he washed and dried himself neatly and tucked the love-hate object back out of trouble. He’d never go have it cut off like some of those crazy queens did. Just yesterday he’d heard on the grapevine that one of the queens who was saving up for the sex change had committed suicide. That came as no surprise. Whatever happened, even if he (God forbid) turned into a big man, he was fond of what he had. It was his identity, his toy, his solace. See, what if he’d had it cut off last year, when he was just entering his heyday as Bonnie, and then he started growing these shoulders and that moustache. He’d really be in trouble then! If I have to be a man, Vincent thought, I’ll be a real man. But taking a last look at Bonnie Parker in the mirror before he went out of the apartment, the possibility that he might turn into an unmistakable man seemed very far away indeed.