After we’ve been open for a few months, our evenings have settled down into a not-unpleasant monotony. On one particular night, Mayor Impellitteri is playing backgammon with the police commissioner as a handful of New York City Ballet dancers, giddy from that evening’s performance, crowd around his table. The ballerinas start flirting with the guests nearby, not knowing they’re butchers from the meat markets around the corner; movie stars trawl around the room, expecting to be noticed as they mingle with jazz musicians and subway-token clerks and society swells and artists and a prince and a priest or two.
Belladonna ignores them all. She is wearing a simple multifaceted ensemble, “her drink jewels,” she calls them. Her bracelet, earrings, and rings are all studded with diamonds the colors of cocktails: Rémy Martin, Dubonnet, Lillet, Chartreuse. And of course the Belladonna. Blood-red, the color of vengeance.
We are sitting at our regular table, silently wishing that somebody useful might show up. A large party of Europeans is installed at the next table, boisterous with joyful proximity to Belladonna. The men drink too much, and the ladies try not to stare too overtly. They are blabbing too loudly, making sure we can hear them. This is their little fantasy act; they think that if their wit is somehow so dazzling, Belladonna herself will lean over and say, “Darlings, please, do join me. Tell me all about yourselves and we’ll become the best of friends, forever and ever.”
As if!
Finally, one of the men leans toward us and says confidentially, “How delighted I am to have met you, la bella Belladonna. It is such a pleasure to see you at last” He looks to his friends for moral support, and they all grin and nod their heads. “Tell me,” he goes on, “what can I do to give you pleasure in turn?”
“To give me pleasure,” she says. They are in raptures that the divine creature has actually addressed them herself. The sound of her voice! The sparkle in her eyes! “Would you really like to do that?”
“Yes,” he says, slightly surprised at the strange tone in her question.
“But really?” she presses. “You would do anything I say?”
“Of course.” Now he is licking his chops.
She signals to the Ringer, and as the band stops playing the spotlight from the stage is turned on our table. “Cherished guests, ladies and gentlemen,” she calls out standing up, “I should like you to meet one of my most beloved patrons here at the Club Belladonna. For, you see, this gentleman has generously offered to give me pleasure. Indeed, he has offered to give me enormous pleasure this very minute.”
She laughs, and the other guests sigh, intoxicated with happiness, before they start clapping and whistling. Then she holds up her hand, pointing her fan at the man who’s spoken to her, and the crowd is instantly stilled.
“Ah, pleasure,” she says. “How splendid pleasure can be. And this gentleman is goodness personified, offering to bestow pleasure upon me. To do anything I say. Anything whatsoever.” With that she laughs again.
The man is beaming, basking in adulation. “Whatever you say, my dear,” he says loudly.
“You would do anything I say?” she repeats. “To give me pleasure?”
“Anything. Name it. Whatever you say.”
“Very well.” She pauses for effect, the light shimmering, hot and bright, so that her jewels seem lit with a secret fire. “Leave my club.”
She snaps her fan shut and sits down. The light remains on the man’s face, which is suddenly flooded with color, until he slowly gets up and walks out of the hushed room, banished from paradise. His friends soon follow. As soon as the spotlight goes off, everyone starts talking all at once, delirious with delight that they’ve been witness to such a scene in the Club Belladonna.
Besides, this will give the humiliated man’s companions something delectably vicious to gossip about and spread all over town until it sounds as if Belladonna had practically poured poison down their throats before they departed in a panic.
No no no, boredom in the Club Belladonna simply will not do. Our routine is suddenly seeming too, well, routine. Rosalinda gets up when we are all fast asleep and takes Bryony to the Little Brick Schoolhouse. The rest of us roll out of bed by noon, eat a light breakfast, read the papers. Belladonna listens to the radio; she must have one on and near her at all hours. We watch the dogs romp. We have three trained wolfhounds now, although we call them all Andromeda at the club. Bryony names the other two Froggy and Tinkletime. I’m sure you can imagine how Tinkletime got her name.
No matter what or how she feels, Belladonna ties a scarf around her head, puts on oversize dark sunglasses, and picks up Bryony from school. It is only a few blocks away, and she relishes the task. The other mothers know her only as Mrs. Robbia, that she is a recently bereaved widow and is quiet and pleasant but prefers to keep to herself. The thick sunglasses are tinted a brownish hue, so the famous eyes of Belladonna look more hazel than green. But she needn’t have worried, because there is absolutely nothing in her demeanor to suggest that she ever sets foot in the Club Belladonna.
Bryony is thriving in kindergarten, and has lots of little friends to play with on weekends. She takes ballet classes twice a week, and often practices around the house, sliding on the highly polished floors. At home, surrounded by the familiar faces of those who are as likely to speak to her in Italian as English, she feels secure and loved. Our odd schedule is all she knows, and she is young enough not to think our lifestyle anything out of the ordinary. Orlando gives us all judo and karate lessons, and Bianca often whips up a mean pesto from her kitchen pots of basil. She isn’t quite Caterina, but our neighborhood is weird enough without us having to worry about spells and potions.
For the moment.
When we have some free time and feel like roaming, Matteo and I busy ourselves with exploration of the city, which has about as much in common with our childhood streets across the East River in Bensonhurst as Siberia. We walk by the lot at Gansevoort and Hudson where college students are playing lousy basketball and head for lunch at Louis’, a short walk away in Sheridan Square. There we eat the house special of spaghetti and meatballs and salad for sixty-five cents and listen to the proto-beatniks discussing J. D. Salinger and Jackson Pollock and free love and atomic testing and how broke they are. We doze in the sun to indescribably horrible poetry readings by scruffy and bearded perpetual students in Washington Square or snoop on conversations by budding Freudians befuddled by the baloney spouted by their analysts. If possible, we dash uptown for matinees. On evenings when the club is capriciously closed, I like to check out the other bars in the Village. Mostly, they’re dives, like the San Remo or Minetta’s or the White Horse Tavern or Marie’s Crisis, whose singer I wished we could appropriate for gigs at our club. Chumley’s, a dark and dusty former speakeasy on Bedford Street near Bryony’s school, is one of my favorites, because the door is unmarked like ours and locals like to hang out in it. Matteo and Orlando love to slip out to Eddie Condon’s jazz club or the Village Vanguard or the Five Spot in Cooper Square to hear Charlie Mingus and Miles Davis and John Coltrane. They come home, eyes glowing and clothes reeking of stale tobacco, after hours spent enraptured by the music and the hep crowd so unlike the overstuffed and coiffed guests of the Club Belladonna.
The men we are looking for don’t go to jazz clubs, unfortunately.
All is calm, too calm. The cameras click the recorders hum, the files grow. The Club Belladonna is more popular than ever. But we’ve been open for months, and haven’t yet spied a soul who has sparked any sort of memory in Belladonna. She is beginning to fret, Matteo and I decide, although she never breathes a word of her anxieties. Instead, she tells us it’s time to start having theme balls. She hands us a list of ideas. What a dope I am; I’d forgotten I’d mentioned them to Jack, when we’d had tea at the Waldorf.
On ball nights, we’ll bend the rules and draw up a select list, sending out only a few dozen highly coveted invitations"on our thick lemon-colored cards with Club Belladonna engraved in ruby ink at the top"to a
quixotic selection of people from all over the world. From all professions, all strata of society. Especially society people from England.
Surely someone will have a connection to the members of the Club.
In the meantime, at least we’ll be amused deciding how to decorate our club for each party, and whom to ask to it. All the staff add their ideas to Belladonna’s list. And the prize for best costume"complete with mask naturally"is to sit with Belladonna herself, so our guests will outdo themselves.
Indeed they do. For the Circus Ball, we cover the floor with sawdust and bring in performing poodles and clowns; there are enough costumed ringmasters and tutu-clad trapeze artists to start our own troupe. Even more fun is the Coney Island Carnival, where we have fire-eaters and tattooed bearded ladies and a miniature merry-go-round on the dance floor. The prizewinning costume goes to the man who comes as the owner of a peep show. He’s literally fitted a large box on his body, covered with black silk, and when you peep through a hole you see two tiny figures, carved of ivory, inside, locked in an embrace.
At the Zodiac Ball, the masks people wear are fantastical creations representing each of the twelve signs; when we do the Garden Ball, we lay sod down on the floor, haul in huge potted ficus trees with trained doves cooing in the leaves, and stretch a painted twilight blue sky with twinkling stars across the ceiling. Each table sports a miniature landscape of ferns and mosses, like the floor of some primeval forest.
We all have lots of fun at the Animal Ball. Belladonna is wearing the mask Caterina made from poor dead Fluffy’s ostrich feathers, with fanciful matching wristlets. She especially likes one woman who comes with her face rouged, red claws attached to her gloves, and a red turban cunningly tied so that she looks like an impertinent lobster. Guests are instructed to bring their house pets, and the boring ones arrive with little lapdogs choked by jeweled collars like Andromeda’s. (She, poor dear, has to stay home that night, or there would have been far too much barking at the door.) Those with slightly more imagination bring costumed teddy bears, and iguanas on leashes. I let loose Petunia, the parrot I’ve diligently trained to talk. Only a few select phrases, mind you, would she say. When I give her one of her favorite peanut butter crackers, she’ll let rip with a special sentence.
We have long been fed up with Dolly and L. L. Megalopolis, you see; we nickname him “Loose Lips.” We don’t mind write-ups in their columns, of course, but we object to constant lying, vague innuendos, and slandering of people who’ve done nothing to harm us. And they are always pretending they’ve been in the club, when, in fact, Andromeda won’t let them get close unless we want them to be. Dolly is worse than Loose Lips. Matteo compares her to a giant snail, leaving a trail of slime in her wake. A vile gasbag who thinks Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons have class, she is so feared in society circles that no one raises a voice to challenge her.
Except us, of course. The night of the Animal Ball, Dolly Daffenberg finally gets a dose of her own medicine. I calmly wait for the perfect moment, when the club has quieted after laughing at one of Petunia’s particularly loud squawks.
Vengeance is like comedy; timing is crucial.
And then Petunia says to the hushed audience, “Dolly’s a bigger whore than her mother. Dolly’s a bigger whore than her mother!”
She repeats it so many times the whole club is in stitches.
Can you sue a parrot for slander? Dolly wouldn’t dare try.
One night, our guests seem drunker than usual, as if they are forcing themselves to be merry. Perhaps it’s because it’s summer, sultry and stifling in the city. Perhaps they’re bored with the world, and crabby. Perhaps they sense that Belladonna is not herself that night, that the snaps of her fan as she wanders among the tables are harsh and angry. Her odd state is infecting the club.
She returns to her center banquette, and we begin snooping on the conversation at the next table only because we’re temporarily too lazy to do anything else.
“Oh, her,” one of them says. “Claudia. He took her to bed, on his famous black sheets, and he said she was so fat she resembled a stranded dead fish.”
“He’s a horror,” says another.
“Not Luca! He’s like champagne.”
“More like gin.”
“Gianni, do you know Claudia?” the simpering guest asks.
“Of course I do, Sylvanna. Don’t you remember all the dreadful things we said about her yesterday?” says this Gianni. “My poor dear Claudia, how she talks and talks and talks. She’s not a woman meant for men. She doesn’t know anything about how to serve them, or how to amuse them. All she can do is bore them.”
I have taken an instant dislike to Gianni, this voluble Italian so unlike Leandro, with his eyes like Portuguese oysters, glinting and oily as the pomade in his hair. Still, hearing him, I am overcome with longing to hear Leandro’s voice, and I wonder if Belladonna misses him even more. She rarely speaks of him, or of anything that happened before.
Every night, we hope. We wait. And we leave with headaches from the noise and the babble and the wondering.
“If I have to talk to a woman for more than twenty minutes I stop wanting her,” Gianni is boasting. “Besides, most females are shameless, heartless, or dull.”
“Gianni, you are terrible,” says Sylvanna with a giggle.
“Basta,” he replies, pouting. “Why is it that everyone is always talking about how terrible I am and how many women I’ve seduced, but no one ever says how good I am in bed?”
The entire table bursts out laughing. Except for Gianni’s hapless date, who’s becoming less enchanted with each passing moment. He sticks his tongue in her ear, then grabs her hand and places it underneath the table. How exquisitely subtle. I glance over to Belladonna. She hasn’t missed a thing, her mouth set. All of a sudden I know what it is"he reminds me of Mr. Nutley. I never thought that damp pudge-pot would come to mind again, and certainly not in the Club Belladonna.
“You, sir,” Belladonna says to him, rapping her fan on her wineglass. On this fan is a painted scene of the Trojan horse, with Helen looking down from the city walls at the men come to steal her away. What a coincidence"she looks just like Belladonna.
Everyone at the next table stops talking, and Gianni perks up, having been flattered into provoking the attention of the great, secretive hostess. If he were a canary, he’d be preening.
“Do be so kind as to share the no-doubt delightful comments you were lately whispering in the ear of your lady,” she says to him.
The poor date blushes with mortification. She looks like an unfortunate minnow trapped in a tank with an unwieldy whale.
“For you, signora,” he says, “I was merely remarking on the delectability of her … “ His voice trails off.
“Of her, yes?” Belladonna’s eyes are darkening into a dangerous green, the color of a pond teeming with algae.
“Of her earlobes,” Gianni says.
“I see,” Belladonna says. “How quaint. How romantic.”
Gianni downs a glass of champagne, then looks to his friends for support, laughing. “Yes, all American women have delectable earlobes,” he says, expansively throwing his arms as if he were sweeping the room with his embrace. “But they know nothing about tenderness.”
“I see. American women know nothing about tenderness.” Her voice sounds like a steel trap clanging shut. “And what brings you to this momentous conclusion?”
“Because, cara, they know nothing about pleasing a man.”
“Ah.”
There is a nervous silence at their table. Everyone is starting to look this way. One of our waiters, bless his cunning little heart, signals to the band to finish their song. Something is about to happen in the Club Belladonna. Another scene. How marvelous!
Belladonna whispers to me. I go the bar, and come back with our house cocktail, then offer it to Gianni. “With our compliments,” I say. “A particularly unique Belladonna, one replete with tenderness.”
He is not duped by my dazzl
ingly charming smile. He’s heard all those ditties.
Pretty poison is her cry.
“My dear Gianni,” Belladonna says. Her voice is low, yet dripping with savage charm. Everyone in the club is straining to hear what’s going on, but her words are for Gianni only. “As we have taken the trouble to concoct an especially tender cocktail for you, I shall be most insulted if you do not join me in a toast. A toast to tenderness.”
Reluctantly, Gianni raises the drink to his lips and takes the smallest-possible sip. Belladonna’s smile widens as she drinks from her own glass.
“I should like to ask you, my dear Gianni, to explain to me the difference between a steak of some tenderness and a woman’s flesh,” Belladonna goes on, her voice lower still as she leans close to him. Lucky boy, the other men are thinking, watching this, to be so close to Belladonna. Whatever can they be talking about? “If she does not succumb to your advances, does that make her not tender?”
Gianni hasn’t quite understood her implication. He is nervously wondering if he’s about to die. Boor that he is, he makes a dismissive gesture with his hand. Naughty boy.
“What precisely do you know about tenderness, Gianni, darling? What regard have you for the sweetness of a woman’s body or the pleasuring of her tender needs? Hmmm?” Belladonna continues, fanning herself as if she hasn’t a care in the world. “When has her satisfaction been more important than yours?”
“I hardly think"”
“Quite right. You hardly think,” she says in a fierce whisper.
Gianni’s lips narrow. He is angry, but also panicking. For once in his life he doesn’t know what to say. How could any man know what to say to the imperious Belladonna at such a moment?
I realize you could hear a pin drop in the room as Belladonna stands up suddenly, snaps her fan shut with a harsh click, and walks over to the bandstand, her peach-colored brocade skirt swaying gently. Her wig is towering high honey-colored this night, interwoven with strands of pearls and opals to match her necklace. Her gloves are also peach and each finger sports an opal, glistening like magic irides $$$ent beads of milk in the spotlight. Everyone is entranced, wondering what is about to happen. She has spoken to the crowd before, but not from up on the stage. Some of the women are trying hard not to bend over to see her fantastic diamond-studded shoes as she passes by.
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