Prima Donna

by Megan Chance

  It was crowded with all of us. Usually there were only three in our “orchestra,” and with the piano, there wasn’t much room for more. Billy had left it a mess, as always, the lid over the keys up, the ivories sticky with spilled whiskey or beer, one key stuck fast until I hammered it loose. The girls hovered close around me, and one by one I took them through their songs.

  I was no kind of accompanist, but all I needed to play was the melody line, one single note after another, and that was easy enough. I’d been doing it regularly for two years now, as I could count on one hand the girls who’d come in already able to read music, girls who’d played instruments as children. Most were like the five huddled around me just now, and I’d got quicker at matching up the notes with the right keys, though I still paused and fumbled.

  They didn’t need to know the songs well; that would come with time. All they needed was to be able to follow a melody plausibly enough. I was done with the first four within an hour and a half, and one by one they’d left the loge until now I was alone with Charlotte. I’d left her for last. I would have said I’d done so unthinkingly, but when she seated herself on the piano bench beside me, I realized I’d done it purposefully, that I liked her, and that troubled me and made me short, so I banged out the melody of her song with impatient little strokes.

  She either didn’t notice or didn’t care. She frowned intensely at the music as if she could read it, and I had the impression she was trying somehow to hook the notes with the sounds of the keys, unlike the others, who had wanted nothing more than to learn the melodies and the words and leave. Charlotte was slow and thoughtful, but she knew the song before we’d gone through it twice.

  I said, “Very good. You’ve sung to music before?”

  “No. Not ever.”

  “Well, you’ve learned it better than the others in half the time.” I laid the sheets upon the folio of music on the piano’s top and rose. Charlotte stayed seated.

  “Is there something else?” I asked.

  She looked up at me. “Those things you say: that legato and pianissi—whatever it was—”

  “Pianissimo.”

  “What do they mean?”

  I was uncomfortable. Had I really used those words? When had they sneaked back into my mouth? How had I not noticed? “Smoothly. Softly.”

  “You a music teacher before you came here?”

  In the two years I’d been teaching girls the songs, not a one of them had ever asked me a question like that. Their uninterest had made me too comfortable, I realized suddenly. And now I found myself nonplussed and uneasy.

  “I’m a music teacher now, of a sort,” I said roughly. “You aren’t the only one who needs help, you know. None of the girls here read music but Annie.” I hurried to the stairs. “I’ve got things to do. You’d best get ready to work.”

  I WATCHED HER at the Palace that night, the way she dipped and smiled, the equanimity with which she took the men to the curtained boxes, her implacability when she returned, unmoved, unblemished, seemingly untouched. It was clear she was going to be a favorite. When she went onstage that night, she sang the song I’d chosen for her easily, forgetting only some of the lyrics, which was not at all unusual for a first time, and at the end of it the applause was almost as great as it was for Annie and Lil. My uneasiness with her questions had faded; I could no longer remember why they’d disturbed me. They were harmless enough—in fact, it seemed odder that no one had asked them before now.

  “Duncan says she stayed with you last night,” Johnny said as Charlotte came down from the stage. “Getting a little softhearted in your old age?”

  “She was trying to sleep on the back stoop,” I told him. “What else was I to do? Send her up to your room?”

  “How about sending her on her way?”

  “She’s the best of the five you hired. I didn’t want to lose her.”

  I felt Johnny scrutinizing me, though I didn’t look at him. He said, “Well, it seems being a Good Samaritan suits you, honey. You ain’t so riled up today.”

  “Not yet,” I told him. “You keep it up and you might force me to it.”

  He laughed, and then he poured himself a whiskey and went back into his office, and I wondered why I hadn’t told him that Charlotte would be staying with me for a while. I hadn’t told anyone. When Duncan asked if she’d found someplace, I’d told him yes and nothing more. I didn’t want to explain myself. The truth was that I wasn’t certain I could.

  I went about the Palace that night soothing aggravated poker players and moving from table to table, and tonight it was easier than it had been for months; tonight I had no trouble laughing and smiling and flirting. The work I’d done to control Jenny had been effective. She had seemingly lost as much interest in her favorite customer as he had gained in me. It was second nature to keep him in the line that formed forever in my wake. After a month or two, he’d grow weary of it and disappear, and I would not think of him again, just as I’d forgotten so many others.

  I hardly spoke to Charlotte at all; it was almost as if we didn’t know each other, as if we moved in different orbits, and when the place died down and we went about closing up, it felt both strange and reassuring to know she would be coming back to the boardinghouse with me, that I wouldn’t be alone.

  When I called her over as Duncan readied to walk me home, he gave me a questioning look. I said, “Charlotte’s staying at Mrs. McGraw’s now too.”

  I waited for him to ask if she was still staying with me, but he didn’t. Duncan had never been the curious type; he simply took everything in and accepted it. There had been times when I admired that, when I thought how nice it would be if nothing mattered. But I was not made the same way. The only numb thing about me was the scar on my face, and even that sometimes hurt, as if the memory of how it had been made had never quite left it.

  We went to the boardinghouse in silence. Duncan said good night at the door. Charlotte yawned as she went up the stairs and was still yawning when we entered my room. I went to light the candle, which sent our shadows flickering about the walls, making it somehow seem smaller and more intimate than even it was.

  “It was a long night,” she confessed as she undressed. “I don’t care for the singing.”

  “It didn’t show.”

  She let me unbutton her and then shrugged out of the satin, leaving it crumpled on the floor. “I’d give my soul to bathe.”

  “Saturdays only,” I said. “And it’ll cost you fifty cents.”

  “Well, I’m saving so much on the room I guess I’ll pay it.” She laughed and plaited her hair, and then she went to the basin and washed with quick efficiency—her face and beneath her arms, raising her chemise to wash between her legs. Then she rinsed her mouth, spitting into the chamber pot she dragged from beneath the bed. “But this is a sight better than where I was living before, I can tell you that.”

  “In Portland?”

  “Yeah.”

  I waited for her to volunteer something more, but she didn’t, and I slipped off my own dress and went to the bureau, where I’d put away the packages I’d bought at the druggist’s yesterday. How intimate we were, washing in front of each other, undressing, and yet we were strangers, and I felt it in what she didn’t say, in what I didn’t volunteer.

  She asked, “You been in Seattle long?”

  “A few years,” I said. I took out the henna and laid it on top of the dresser.

  “You been with Johnny all that time?”

  “Yes.”

  She went to the bed and lifted the blankets, slipping between them. “The two of you are partners.”

  I nodded. I unknotted the twine on the packages, pulling it loose, then unfolding the paper on the first one to reveal the green powder within.

  “I saw him with Sally,” she said.

  “She’s his new favorite.”

  “But he watches you.”

  “Johnny and I have a history,” I said. “But that part of it’s over. Mostly, anyway.�
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  “Annie says he’s in love with you.”

  “Annie says a lot of stupid things.”

  Charlotte laughed sleepily. “Yeah, she does, but that seems true enough to me.” She moved a little, the mattress creaked and shifted. “You coming to bed?”

  “In a while. There’s something I need to do yet.”

  “All right.” She turned over, a shuffling of blankets, her soft sigh.

  I went to the window and lifted it just enough to pour out the water she’d washed with, hearing it splash into the mud below, and then I poured the henna powder into the basin and mixed it with water until it was a grassy, muddy paste. I glanced over my shoulder. Charlotte was quiet, her eyes closed. I took the basin over to the dresser so I would disturb her less, and then I began to scoop the paste into my hair. It was cold and unpleasant, but I worked diligently, massaging it into my scalp, along my temples, into the hair at my nape. I didn’t need a mirror; I had done this the same way so many times I could do it by feel alone.

  “You look too young to have gray hair,” Charlotte said.

  I started. I’d thought she was asleep. “It starts early in my family.”

  She sat up, ghostly white in the near darkness, the candle flame playing over her skin, glinting in her hair. She was out of bed in a moment, coming over to me before I realized what she was about. “Let me help,” she said, and then, before I could protest, she was dipping her fingers into the paste and her hands were in my hair.

  “Don’t,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”

  Her voice was very soft. “Let me do this.”

  And so I let her. Charlotte’s fingers were strong and steady; they felt good against my scalp, working through my hair. I could not remember the last time someone had touched me this way, without meaning to have something in return.

  When she was finished, she asked, “How long does it stay on?”

  “Half an hour,” I told her, and then, when I saw her yawn again, “Go on back to bed. I can finish it. There’s no need for you to stay up.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t need much sleep. A couple of hours.” She sat on the bed. “Whoring’ll train you to that.”

  “How’d you come to it?”

  Bluntly, without preamble or hesitation, she said, “I ran away from my husband and trusted a man I shouldn’t have. How’d you come to the Palace?”

  Her question was so direct it took me by surprise, and then I cursed myself for asking her anything, for the quid pro quo it accorded her. I shrugged, trying to make it seem casual, a simple answer to a simple question, when nothing was that simple at all. The memory surged back; with effort I pushed it away. “I was looking for a job. Johnny gave me one.”

  “As his partner?”

  “No. I scrubbed floors and shared his bed,” I said, and my words held a bitterness I hadn’t expected and didn’t want her to hear. “The partnership came later.”

  “You must’ve been some fuck.” When I glanced sharply at her, she smiled knowingly and said, “Well, ain’t you? No man makes a partner of a woman unless she’s got her hands around his balls. Else why not just put you to work on the stage?”

  I felt a flicker of anger—too much, too quick, and with effort I suppressed it. This was no longer my old life, and Charlotte was only partly wrong. “It was just a saloon then. To make it a boxhouse was my idea.”

  “How’d you come up with that?”

  “Johnny means to make the Palace a theater. This way is close enough that he forgets what he really wants.”

  Charlotte frowned. “Why d’you want him to forget it? A theater sounds pretty good.”

  I faltered. A careless answer on my part, a too perceptive question on hers. I searched for a plausible lie. “Because Johnny isn’t thinking. Look around you. You think a real theater could make money here? With phrenologists a quarter a ticket? Or temperance and woman suffrage lectures? No acting troupe’s been to Seattle in more than a year. They don’t even come to Squire’s.”

  She snorted. “Squire’s. Is it really an opera house?”

  “That’s what the sign says.”

  “Why the hell did they build it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, trying not to remember how it had drawn me those first days, how I’d gone out of my way to walk by it, how I’d hoped each time to see a placard for an opera in its close-set windows, how I’d been both disappointed and relieved when there was nothing. Once I’d stood so long outside the dry goods store leasing its bottom floor that the clerk came out to ask me what I wanted.

  “I guess a city’s always trying to be finer than it is,” Charlotte said. “So you were the smart one. And Johnny listened to you. That ain’t like a man.”

  “He’s not a fool. Don’t ever make the mistake of thinking he is.”

  “Believe me, I don’t.”

  “In any case, it worked. We make money, and Johnny gets to pretend he’s an impresario, for what it’s worth.”

  “You regret it?”

  “What makes you ask that?”

  “You sounded angry.”

  Henna dripped at my temple and I wiped it away impatiently. “Did I? Pardon me. What the hell do I have to be angry about? I run whores for a living. Isn’t that every girl’s dream?”

  “Some girls.”

  “Well, it wasn’t mine.”

  “No? What was yours then?”

  I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. “I don’t know. Something different.”

  “At least you ain’t spreading your legs for two dollars.”

  My laugh was short and hard. I regretted it almost the next moment, because when I looked at her, she was staring at me as if I’d just given her some clue to a mystery she was trying to figure out. Nervously, I said, “So what about you, Charlotte? You mean to marry your way out like some of the other girls?”

  She snorted. “No.”

  “You can’t expect to work at the Palace forever?”

  Her mouth cracked in a smile. “Don’t worry, Marguerite, you won’t have to worry about a sixty-year-old whore.”

  “That wasn’t what I meant.”

  “I don’t think about the future. One day at a time is hard enough.”

  That was something I understood.

  When it was time, she rinsed the henna from my hair and applied the black, and once the paste was in my hair and the air was filled with its mashed-pea smell, she rinsed her hands. But they were covered with the blue-gray stains I knew would not fade for days, working up the discoloring of her scar like a shadow growing with the passing of the hours. She went back to the bed to wait, curling up on the mattress, and within a few minutes she was asleep. I watched her there, breathing slowly and evenly, her arm crooked beneath her face, and thought about the things she’d said, the things I’d told her that I hadn’t meant to say, and I wondered about her, who she was, what she thought of me. It was the first time in three years—or even before that, really—that I’d felt such curiosity about someone. I’d never asked a single question about Duncan’s past, and what I knew of Johnny’s was because he’d told me, not because I’d cared enough to know. The other girls in the Palace … well, they were just whores I was meant to manage; I could hardly be bothered to remember their names.

  It had been a long time since I’d revealed something about myself to another person, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the essence of her, or the way it clung to me. I didn’t like the way her breathing eased my loneliness.

  But neither did I want to dispel it.

  When the half hour was up, I rinsed the black henna from my hair and toweled it dry and then I quietly lifted the sill to pour the water out. She shifted and murmured in her sleep, and I went still until she settled again, looking out at the sky, growing paler now with the faint light of dawn.

  I put up my hair and then gently crawled into bed. She turned and eased close, in her sleep searching for warmth, pressing her chemise-covered legs against mine.

  MY DREAMS
WERE tossed and vibrant, a closed gate, beyond its cast-iron rails a city I knew very well. I was shivering and cold, waiting, and I didn’t want to be there; I was afraid. At first I was alone, and then my brother stood beside me, whispering: “It would be best if you ran, you know.” And I meant to. I meant to run. But my feet were stuck fast, and then the gates began to open, and he was gone, and it was too late. Far too late—

  I woke with a gasp, clawing at the bedcovers in fear. It was a moment before I realized Charlotte was beside me, opening her eyes sleepily at my movement, frowning.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “A bad dream,” I said. I crawled over her, suddenly desperate to get out of bed. The light that shifted through the crack in the curtains was bright, and with unsteady hands I opened them. There was a good wind blowing through the treetops on the hills above the tideflats, breaking up the overcast so that the peak of Mount Rainier sat like an illusion in the sky, its foot still shrouded in clouds so it looked as if it were floating, rather like Wagner’s Valhalla.

  I remembered the first time I’d seen it—not until weeks after my arrival here, when one day the perpetual gray had lifted and the Mountain had appeared so suddenly and huge that I was convinced I was seeing things. There it was, giant and snow covered, looming above the black treed hills to overlook Seattle, so large that it seemed the town was nestled in its hollows, as if one could walk through the forest and come upon its slopes after a short trek, though Duncan told me it was sixty miles away. The blue-gray of glaciers and shadowed crannies sculpted it; the sunset colored it blue and gold and pink. They called it Rainier in Seattle, though Duncan told me the Indians had another name for it—Tahoma—and that to them it was a god.

  The next day the rain came again, and it was gone, but now I knew it was there, veiled by clouds. I’d begun to think of the Mountain as a benevolent watcher, a good omen, though today even that could not soothe me. The dream had brought the edges back again. I was uneasy, uncomfortable in my skin, feeling the constant need to move about, as if I were running from that gate in my waking life too.