by Paula Guran
Our members retreat to the private dining room, the one with the etched glass working class figures on the walls. There, they cower beneath the table, but the waitstaff hangs onto the velvet curtains and watches as the Chrysler walks to Thirty-fourth Street, clicking and jingling all the way.
“We shoulda predicted this, boss,” I say to Valorous.
“Ain’t that the truth,” he says, flicking a napkin over his forearm. “Dames! The Chrysler’s in love.”
For eleven months, from 1930 to 1931, the Chrysler’s the tallest doll in New York City. Then the Empire is spired to surpass her, and winds up taller still. She has a view straight at him, but he ignores her.
At last, it seems, she’s done with his silence. It’s Valentine’s Day.
I pass Victor a cigarette.
“He acts like a Potemkin village,” I say. “Like he’s got nothing inside him but empty floors. I get a chance at a doll like that, I give up everything, move to a two-bedroom. Or out of the city, even; just walk my way out. What’ve I got waiting for me at home? My mother and my sister. He’s got royalty.”
“No accounting for it,” says Valorous, and refills my coupe. “But I hear he doesn’t go in for company. He won’t even look at her.”
At Thirty-fourth and Fifth, the Chrysler stops, holds up the edge of her skirt, and taps her high heel. She waits for some time as sirens blare beneath her. Some of our fellow citizens, I am ashamed to report, don’t notice anything out of place at all. They just go around her, cussing and hissing at the traffic.
The Empire State Building stands on his corner, shaking in his boots. We can all see his spire trembling. Some of the waitstaff and members sympathize with his wobble, but not me. The Chrysler’s a class act, and he’s a shack of shamble if he doesn’t want to go out with her tonight.
At 6:03 p.m., pedestrians on Fifth Avenue shriek in terror as the Chrysler gives up and taps the Empire hard on the shoulder.
“He’s gonna move,” Valorous says. “He’s got to! Move!”
“I don’t think he is,” says The Soother, back from comforting the members in the lounge. “I think he’s scared. Look at her.”
The Soother’s an expert in both Chinese herbal medicine and psychoanalysis. He makes our life as waiters easier. He can tell what everyone at a table’s waiting for with one quick look in their direction.
“She reflects everything. Poor guy sees all his flaws, done up shiny, for years now. He feels naked. It can’t be healthy to see all that reflected.”
The kitchen starts taking bets.
“She won’t wait for him for long,” I say. I have concerns for the big guy, in spite of myself. “She knows her worth, she heads uptown to the Metropolitan.”
“Or to the Library,” says The Soother. “I go there, if I’m her. The Chrysler’s not a doll to trifle with.”
“They’re a little short,” I venture, “those two. I think she’s more interested in something with a spire. Radio City?”
The Empire’s having a difficult time. His spire’s supposedly built for zeppelin docking, but then the Hindenberg explodes, and now no zeppelin will ever moor there. His purpose is moot. He slumps slightly.
Our Chrysler taps him again, and holds out her steel glove. Beside me, Valorous pours another round of champagne. I hear money changing hands all over the club.
Slowly, slowly, the Empire edges off his corner.
The floor sixty-six waitstaff cheers for the other building, though I hear Mr. Nast commencing to groan again, this time for his lost bet.
Both buildings allow their elevators to resume operations, spilling torrents of shouters from the lobbies and into the street. By the time the Chrysler and the Empire start walking east, most of the members are gone, and I’m drinking a bottle of bourbon with Valorous and the Soother.
We’ve got no dolls on the premises, and the members still here declare formal dinner dead and done until the Chrysler decides to walk back to Lex. There is palpable relief. The citizens of the Cloud Club avoid their responsibilities for the evening.
As the Empire wades into the East River hand in hand with the Chrysler, other lovestruck structures begin to talk. We’re watching from the windows as apartment towers lean in to gossip, stretching laundry lines finger to finger. Grand Central Station, as stout and elegant as a survivor of the Titanic, stands up, shakes her skirts, and pays a visit to Pennsylvania Station, that Beaux-Arts bangle. The Flatiron and Cleopatra’s Needle shiver with sudden proximity, and within moments they’re all over one another.
Between Fifty-Ninth Street and the Williamsburg Bridge, the Empire and the Chrysler trip shyly through the surf. We can see New Yorkers, tumbling out of their taxicabs and buses, staring up at the sunset reflecting in our doll’s eyes.
The Empire has an awkward heart-shaped light appended to his skull, which Valorous and I do some snickering over. The Chrysler glitters in her dignified silver spangles. Her windows shimmy.
As the pedestrians of three boroughs watch, the two tallest buildings in New York City press against one another, window to window, and waltz in ankle-deep water.
I look over at the Empire’s windows, where I can see a girl standing, quite close now, and looking back at me.
“Victor,” I say.
“Yes?” he replies. He’s eating vichyssoise beside a green-gilled tycoon, and the boxer Gene Tunney is opposite him smoking a cigar. I press a cool cloth to the tycoon’s temples, and accept the fighter’s offer of a Montecristo.
“Do you see that doll?” I ask them.
“I do, yes,” Victor replies, and Tunney nods. “There’s a definite dolly bird over there,” he says.
The girl in the left eye of the Empire State, a good thirty feet above where we sit, is wearing red sequins, and a magnolia in her hair. She sidles up to the microphone. One of her backup boys has a horn, and I hear him start to play.
Our buildings sway, tight against each other, as the band in the Empire’s eye plays “In the Still of the Night.”
I watch her, that doll, that dazzling doll, as the Chrysler and the Empire kiss for the first time, at 9:16 p.m. I watch her for hours as the Chrysler blushes and the Empire whispers, as the Chrysler coos and the Empire laughs.
The riverboats circle in shock, as, at 11:34 p.m., the two at last walk south toward the harbor, stepping over bridges into deeper water, her eagle ornaments laced together with his girders. The Chrysler steps delicately over the Wonder Wheel at Coney Island, and he leans down and plucks it up for her. We watch it pass our windows as she inhales its electric fragrance.
“Only one way to get to her,” Valorous tells me, passing me a rope made of tablecloths. All the waitstaff of the Cloud Club nod at me.
“You’re a champ,” I tell them. “You’re all champs.”
“I am too,” says Tunney, drunk as a knockout punch. He’s sitting in a heap of roses and negligees, eating bonbons.
The doll sings only to me as I climb up through the tiny ladders and trapdoors to the eighty-third, where the temperature drops below ice-cream Cupid. I inch out the window and onto the ledge, my rope gathered in my arms. As the Chrysler lays her gleaming cheek against the Empire’s shoulder, as he runs his hand up her beaded knee, as the two tallest buildings in New York City begin to make love in the Atlantic, I fling my rope across the divide, and the doll in the Empire’s eye ties it to her grand piano.
At 11:57 p.m., I walk out across the tightrope, and at 12:00 a.m., I hold her in my arms.
I’m still hearing the applause from the Cloud Club, all of them raising their coupes to the windows, their bourbons and their soup spoons, as, through the Chrysler’s eye, I see the boxer plant his lips on Valorous Victor. Out the windows of the Empire State, the Cyclone wraps herself up in the Brooklyn Bridge. The Staten Island Ferry rises up and dances for Lady Liberty.
At 12:16 a.m., the Chrysler and the Empire call down the lightning into their spires, and all of us, dolls and guys, waiters and chanteuses, buildings and citizens, ki
ss like fools in the icy ocean off the amusement park, in the pale orange dark of New York City.
They went back a long ways, to the days when Warhol walked the earth, Manhattan was seamy and corroded, and an unending stream of young people came there to lose their identities and find newer, more exotic ones.
BLOOD YESTERDAY, BLOOD TOMORROW
RICHARD BOWES
1
“Ai Ling show Aunt Lilia and everyone else how you can play the Debussy ‘Claire de Lune,’” Larry said as his partner Boyd beamed at his side. Lilia Gaines was at the dinner party as a friend of one of the hosts, Larry Stepelli.
She had, in fact, been his roommate in the bad old days. Twenty-five years before, she and Larry had entered Ichordone therapy as a couple and left it separate and apart.
The exquisitely dressed Asian girl sat, tiny but fully at ease, at the piano. At one time Lilia had wondered if only well-to-do gay couples should be allowed to raise kids.
Behind Ai Ling the windows of the West Street duplex looked over the Hudson and the lights of New Jersey on a late June evening. And amazingly, almost like a beautifully rendered piece of automata, the child played the piece with scarcely a flaw.
Amidst the applause of the dozen guests and her fathers, Ai Ling curtseyed and went off with her Nana. Lilia, not for the first time, considered Larry’s upward mobility. This dinner party was for some of Boyd’s clients, a few people whom Larry sought to impress and one or two like her whom he liked to taunt with his success.
A woman asked Boyd what preschool his daughter attended. One of his clients dropped the names of two senators and the president in a single sentence.
A young man who had been brought by an old and famous children’s book illustrator talked about the novel he was writing, “It’s YA and horror-light on what at the moment is a very timely theme,” he said.
Larry smiled and said to Lilia, “I walked past Reliquary yesterday and you were closed.”
“Major redecoration,” she replied. Their connection had once been so close that at times each could still read the other. So they both knew that wasn’t so.
He tilted his handsome head with only a subtle touch of grey and raised his left eyebrow a fraction of an inch.
Lilia knew he was going to ask her something about her shop and how long it could survive. She didn’t want to discuss that just then.
Larry’s question went unasked. At that moment the young author said, “It’s a theme that sometimes gets overworked but never gets stale. The book I’m doing right now is titled, Never Blood Today. You know a variation on, ‘Jam tomorrow and jam yesterday but never jam today’ from Alice in Wonderland. In fact the book is Alice with Vampires! Set in a well-to-do private high school!”
The writer looked at Larry with fascination as he spoke. Boyd frowned. The illustrator who had a show of his art up in Larry’s gallery rolled his eyes.
Larry smiled again, but just for a moment. For Lilia, the writer’s conversation was an unplanned bonus.
A woman in an enviable silk dress with just a hint of sheath about it changed the subject to a reliably safe one: how nicely real estate prices had bottomed out.
Then Boyd suggested they all sit down to dinner. Boyd Lazlo was a corporate lawyer: solid, polite, nice looking, completely opaque. Lilia Gaines knew he didn’t much trust her.
Lilia and Larry went back to the time when Warhol walked the earth, Manhattan was seamy and corroded and an unending stream of young people came there to loose their identities and find newer, more exotic ones. Back then, they two were roommates and Boyd was still a college kid preparing to go to Yale Law.
That summer Manhattan was gripped by nostalgia for the old sordid days and Lilia had something to show Larry that would evoke them. But it was personal, private, and she hadn’t found a moment alone with him.
At the end of the evening he stood at the door saying good-by to the illustrator. The young writer looked wide-eyed at Larry and even at Lilia. The mystique of old evil: she understood it well.
As Larry wished him farewell, Lilia caught the half wink her old companion gave the kid and was certain Larry was bored.
She remembered him in the Ichordone group therapy standing in tears and swearing that when he walked out of there—cured of his habit—he would establish a stable relationship and raise children.
Boyd was down the hall at the elevator kissing and shaking hands. Lilia and Larry were alone. Only then did he put his hands on her shoulders say, “You have a secret; give it up.”
“Something I just found,” she said, reached into her bag and handed him a folded linen napkin. You’d have had to know him as well as she did to catch the eyes widening by a millimeter. Stitched into the cloth was what, when Lilia first saw it years before, had looked like a small gold crown, a coronet. Curving below that in script were the words “Myrna’s Place.” The same words were above it upside down.
Before anything more could be said, Boyd came back, looking a bit concerned and as if he needed to speak to Larry alone. So Lilia thanked both of them for dinner and took her leave. She noticed Larry had made the napkin disappear.
Years ago—when New York was the wilder, darker place—Larry and Lilia had shared an apartment on a marginal street on the Lower East Side, pursued careers, and watched for their chance. He acted in underground films with Madonna before that meant anything, and took photos; she sold dresses she’d designed and made to East Village boutiques.
Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe was the model for all the young couples like them: the poker-faced, serious girl with hair framing her face and the flashy bisexual guy. They were in the crowd at the Pyramid Club, Studio 54, and the Factory. Drugs and alcohol were their playthings. Love did enter into it, of course, and even sex when their stars crossed paths.
Since they needed money, they also had an informal business selling antiques and weird collectibles at the flea market on Sixth Avenue in the Twenties.
In those days that stretch of Manhattan was a place of rundown five-story buildings and wide parking lots—fallow land waiting for a developer. On weekends first one parking lot, then a second, then a third, then more blossomed with tables set up in the open air, tents pitched before dawn.
It became a destination where New Yorkers spent their weekend afternoons sifting through the trash and the gems. Warhol, the pale prince, bought much of his fabled cookie jar collection there.
During the week Larry and Lilia haunted the auction rooms on Fourth Avenue and Broadway south of Union Square, swooped down on forlorn vases and candy dishes, old toys, unwanted lots of parasols and packets of photos of doughboys and chorus girls, turn of the century nude swimming scenes, elephants wearing bonnets and top hats.
Since it kind of was their livelihood they both tried to be reasonably straight and sober at the moment that Sunday morning stopped being Saturday night. While it was still dark they’d go up to Sixth Avenue with their treasures in shopping carts, rent a few square feet of space and a couple of tables and set up their booth.
In the predawn, out-of-town antique dealers, edgy interior decorators, and compulsive collectors—all bearing flashlights—would circulate among the vans unloading furniture and the tables being carried to their places by the flea market porters.
Beams of light would scan the dark and suddenly, four, five, a dozen of them would circle around a booth where strange, interesting, perhaps even valuable stuff was being set up.
Lilia and Larry wanted that attention. Then came the very drowsy weekday auction when they found a lot consisting of several cartons of distressed goods: everything from matchbooks and champagne flutes to mirrors and tablecloths all with the words “Myrna’s Place” in an oval and the gold design that looked like a small crown, a coronet.
The name meant nothing to them. They guessed that Myrna’s was some kind of uptown operation—a speakeasy, a bordello, a bohemian salon—they didn’t quite know.
Larry said, “Fleas—” old hard-bitten market dea
lers called themselves “fleas”—“call the trash they sell ‘Stuff.’ ”
“And this looks like Stuff,” Lilia replied.
“And plenty of it,” they said at the same moment, something that happened with them back then. They bid fifty dollars, which was all the money they had, and got the lot.
That Sunday morning they rented their usual space and a couple of tables. Other recent finds included a tackily furnished tin dollhouse, a set of blue-and-white china bowls, a few slightly decayed leather jackets, several antique corsets, a box of men’s assorted arm garters, and a golf bag and clubs bought at an apartment sale. They had dysfunctional old cameras and a cracked glass jar full of marbles. Prominently displayed was a selection of Myrna’s Place stuff.
The couple in the booth across from theirs seemed to loot a different place each week. That Sunday it was an old hunting lodge. They had a moose head, skis, snowshoes, and blunt heavy ice skates; Adirondack chairs, and gun racks.
Larry and Lilia set up in the pre-dawn dark as flashlights darted about the lot. Then one beam fell on them. A flat-faced woman with rimless glasses, and eyes that showed nothing turned her light on the golf clubs.
She shrugged when she saw them up close. But as she turned to walk away, her flashlight caught a nicely draped tablecloth from Myrna’s Place. “Thirty dollars for that lot,” she said indicating all the Myrna items.
Larry and Lilia hesitated. Thirty dollars would pay the day’s rent for the stall.
Then another light found the table. A middle-aged man with the thin, drawn look of a veteran of many Manhattan scenes was examining Myrna’s wine glasses.
“Five dollars each,” Lilia told him and he didn’t back off.
To the woman who had offered thirty for the entire lot, Larry said, “Thirty for the tablecloth.”
The woman ground them down to twenty. The thin, drawn man bought four wine glasses for fifteen dollars and continued examining the merchandise.
That morning, Lilia and Larry had the booth that attracted the flashlights. It was like being attacked by giant fireflies. It was all Myrna’s Place. Nobody was interested in anything else. Old Fleas paused and looked their way.