by Various
She heard thunderous footsteps and turned just in time to see a hulking young man in an ill-fitting green suit and a feathered hat running up behind her.
“Sally Jean!” the young man bellowed.
“Why, who on earth—Brett!”
The whites of her eyes grew at the sight of him, and it was only with conscientious effort that she softened them into a look befitting the occasion.
“Darling!” he said as he pulled her close to his sweaty cheek.
“Oh, honey,” she said as she pushed him away. “Not here!” This with a smile and a look toward the oblivious crowd around them. “Oh! Let me just look at that extraordinary suit you have on. Somehow I thought you’d be in a uniform forever.”
He spun for her, tipped his feathered hat and picked up her bag and her hatbox, and they began to walk toward the exit.
“Pretty sharp, huh? And you wouldn’t believe the deal I got.”
She hummed noncommittally. No deal could have been too good; the suit was dreadful. Thick, green, out of fashion, and it concealed quite effectively his fine figure. Sally Jean felt a flash of outrage at this costume, as if he had wooed her under false pretences, in disguise. She had kissed a soldier and awoke to find herself with a man who wore a feathered hat and a clumsy old suit. His face was flushed with excitement, the creases around his eyes and at his mouth white in contrast. He leaned in close and she could see tiny droplets of sweat clinging to his upper lip.
“You must be exhausted, darling.”
And suddenly she was. Sally Jean feigned sleep as they rode to the hotel in Brett’s creaky old Model T and didn’t look out the window once; she wanted to leave it fresh for when the city was hers alone. Brett had arranged for separate but connecting rooms, and it wasn’t until she was in her single bed with the door to the other room safely bolted, that she allowed herself to open her eyes fully. This wasn’t going to do. She wasn’t going to be the same girl who sat passively on that veranda. She wanted to feel things, to be things. She wanted to be a modern woman, and getting married at eighteen to a man in a feathered hat wasn’t part of her agenda. Having confirmed this with herself, she closed her eyes and fell into a deep sleep.
* * *
The polite knocking at the bolted door awoke her from a deep dark sleep.
She called through the door, “Just a minute, honey. I seem to have accidentally locked this silly thing.”
“Take your time. I’m going to go down and have a cup of coffee. I’ll come back in twenty minutes and take you to dinner and a show. I know this really fantastic place.”
* * *
He parked carefully along a curb, hemming and hawing the car into position while Sally Jean regarded him with barely concealed irritation. He seemed a little nervous, and she worried that he was taking her to a party to which they hadn’t been invited.
“This is it,” he said as they stopped in front of an unremarkable brownstone marked 333 with bronze numbers.
“You do know these people, don’t you, honey?”
“Well, not exactly, but you’ll see. I came here with a fellow from the office.”
Oh, poor Brett, he clearly doesn’t belong in the North, she thought, her pretty jaw clenching. They entered the unlocked door and instead of a parlor were greeted with a darkened staircase. She didn’t want to go down; it smelled like spoiled milk and wet wood. At Brett’s insistence, Sally Jean followed him down the rickety staircase and nearly ran smack in to a gigantic man with wide-legged trousers and a matchstick between his lips. The giant didn’t say a word, just looked at them.
“I think we’re in the wrong—”
“Texas sent me,” Brett said to the giant. And to Sally Jean’s surprise, the giant took one heavy step to the side and indicated the door behind him with a nod. As he did, Sally Jean thought she saw the flash of a gun beneath his dinner jacket. She was about to dash back up the rickety steps when Brett opened the door and she saw into the room beyond.
It was like looking into the peephole of a sugared Easter egg and seeing the miraculous jeweled world inside. A splendid dining room, all red velvet and chandeliers, spread out before her, filled with the most elegant people Sally Jean had ever seen. And there was a stage at the front where a tuxedoed band was playing. She couldn’t have dreamed that such an opulent place could be hidden in the bowels of the world like this, behind such a door, beneath such a staircase.
They sat at a table right near the front. Brett ordered a very fine dinner for them and they were able to drink real cocktails. It wasn’t moonshine or some stuff from someone’s bathtub, but real liquor from real bottles. It tasted like freedom to Sally Jean. And the show! There was a comedian who made Brett laugh like Peony, her horse at home—her horse in South Carolina—and a juggler who juggled martini shakers and finished his act by pouring a drink for a bald-headed gentleman at the table next to theirs.
After that trick Brett looked over at her with a gentle, proud smile, and she felt a small part of her heart melting under his glance. She smiled at him sweetly and felt a sort of sleepy nostalgia for him. Brett was a good man, honest and true, patient and kind. The lights dimmed; a new act was coming on. Maybe she wouldn’t be able to stay frozen after all; maybe she’d just soften and melt back into being his girl, being his wife. She wasn’t even sad about it, just felt a kind of sweet remembrance as if she was being led into a dance that had been going on for years and years. Maybe she was going to lose the battle for secession all over again.
And then the woman came on stage: tall, all in blue, with black bobbed hair. She beckoned with one lean arm and then there was a whole crowd of them, leggy girls in sapphire-blue costumes with bands of diamonds strung round their heads like glittering crowns of thorns. Sally Jean sat straight up in her chair, forgetting for the first time that day what she looked like and what others must be thinking of her. Brett squeezed her hand, but she pulled away. There was a miracle taking place on stage. The music was deep and suggestive, full of sliding trombones and a timpani beat from a tightly pulled drum. And the dancers—they moved like mermaids, like horses at the Derby, like angels. They were made of lightning, flashing across the stage with their legs high in the air. The past seemed to dissolve around them as they set forth some sort of dancing manifesto, a vision of the future described in kicks and spins. When the act finished, Sally Jean clapped as loudly as anyone in the theater.
Brett turned to her.
“That wasn’t too much for you, was it Sally Jean?”
His face reflected concern and, to her, an artificial sense of propriety. As if she hadn’t seen women’s legs every time she took a bath! She smiled at him in the same way she might smile at an old woman talking about the exorbitant fee for overdue library books. And then the next act began.
The women had changed their costumes, adding long gold skirts and Egyptian-inspired headdresses. Their eyes were rimmed extravagantly in kohl. Sally Jean drank her cocktail in one swift swallow without taking her eyes off the stage. The music was silky, Middle-Eastern, and the girls, the women, the dancing horses, were even silkier. Sally Jeans eyes flicked across the stage, looking for the woman with the black-bobbed hair—there she was, at the far left of the line. And though the black-bobbed woman wasn’t in the center for this number, Sally Jean was sure that everyone was watching her alone. Everyone and everything was drawn to the woman, and Sally Jean felt that any second, the stage itself would tilt toward her and all the dancers would slide uncontrollably to the left, pulled by her immense gravity of being.
Unlike the others, the woman in the black bob didn’t smile; her face was incredibly still, fixed in an odd expression Sally Jean couldn’t name, and her eyes, which peered out into the crowd, seemed not to be looking at the enraptured audience but somewhere else, into the future or into the past, as if she could see angels and phantoms. This woman, this creature, this future-dancer, this is who Sally Jean wanted to become.
* * *
Two more acts followed, and then t
he lights went up and the air seemed to return to the room. On the ride home, Sally Jean kissed Brett twice out of pure exuberance. And then it was night and then it was day again. Sally Jean put off visiting Brett’s aunt and, after getting a new short dress and a pair of silk stockings with seams along the back, claimed she was too worn out to shop for her wedding dress. But when eight o’clock came, her energy miraculously returned and Brett found himself driving to Forty-fifth Street once again.
The show was just the same as the night before: the comedians; the singers; the sketch about the man from New Jersey who found a cow in his closet; the lanky woman who swung a long string of pearls around her neck while singing the national anthem; the martini juggler (this time Brett was given the martini and Sally Jean joyously ate the olives from a tiny plastic sword); and then the real show, the dancers.
Just as the night before, the air thinned and the moment froze as the sapphire girls took their places. Sally Jean was fixated on the black-bobbed dancer, staring at her as if she were a ring in the window of Van Cleef & Arpels. And when the show was over, Sally Jean felt the same sense of rejoining time. There was another act afterward and Sally Jean relaxed back into her seat. She smiled at Brett.
“You’ve been really terrific to me, you know that Brett? It’s like we’re sitting here side by side and I feel like I’m with one of my best friends in the entire world.”
“Best friends? I should hope we’re—”
“Absolutely. Really the best,” she cut him off. She didn’t want to talk about who they were to each other or who they had been. Her world was splitting in two. Her future had two paths and she could only take one. “And I just want you to know how grateful I am for you taking me here.”
“Why sure, Sally Jean, why sure. After all, you are going to be—”
“Look!” Sally Jean whispered insistently. “Look at the table next to us.”
Brett saw an urbane bald-headed gentleman and recognized him from the night before. He watched as the man pulled out a chair for a young woman. It took Brett a moment to recognize her as one of the dancing girls.
“It’s her,” Sally Jean intoned breathlessly. “Let’s watch.”
Dutifully Brett watched as the dancer, now dressed in a low-waisted burgundy cocktail dress and a matching cloche, sat with the older man.
“Do you think that’s her husband?” Sally Jean whispered into Brett’s neck.
The older man and the black-bobbed woman talked quietly together. The woman leaned on one tanned arm, and Sally Jean could see lean, hard muscles flex beneath her skin. The man said something. The woman glanced toward the back of the theater, nodded to the man, and removed her necklace. It seemed to be made of pearls, black pearls alternating with white pearls, and Sally Jean had never seen anything like it. Handing them over to the bald man, she strode back, past the tables, toward the door where they had entered.
“Guess he wanted his stones back,” Brett whispered loudly. “She’s probably his mistress and his wife just showed or—”
“I wouldn’t mind another cocktail,” interjected Sally Jean with a kiss.
Brett suppressed his surprise, and without comment began to flag for a waiter. After a minute he gave up and went to the bar himself. There was a line, and he was gone some time. Left alone, Sally Jean fixed the elderly man under her soft-eyed scrutiny. Soon after, the woman returned and, sitting beside the man, retrieved her pearl necklace and allowed him to assist with the clasp. She conferred again with the man, her face almost hidden behind the swing of her black hair, and seemed to indicate that something satisfactory had taken place. As she drank her cocktail—what looked to Sally Jean to be a gin and tonic—another man approached the table.
The older man stood and shook the younger man’s hand. He slapped him convivially on the back and gestured to the seat on the other side of the woman. A waiter came by Sally Jean’s table and, without a thought, she ordered a gin and tonic. She watched as both men talked to the woman with the black-bobbed hair. The younger man was wearing a sharply cut suit and a peppermint green shirt, and she imagined for a moment that he was the man she was destined to marry. He and the black-bobbed woman laughed, and Sally Jean felt a pang of jealousy, of desire, fresher than anything she had felt with Brett since she was fifteen years old.
Soon Brett returned to the table.
“I got you an old-fashioned, darling.”
“Well, aren’t you sweet, but somehow I ended up with this.”
She held up her almost empty drink. Brett looked at the lime in her glass like it was a rare goldfish.
“I didn’t know you drank gin.”
“Me neither. You know they used to think the juniper in gin drove women crazy. Isn’t that funny?”
“I think I heard something about that,” he said grimly.
The hours passed and the crowd only seemed to grow. Sally Jean watched as different people stopped by the table next to theirs and paid homage, sitting with the group for a while, exchanging kisses, and then departing for another table like a jolly school of fish swimming wherever crumbs of gaiety and laughter were offered. She watched how the younger man stared at the black-haired woman. He’s in love with her, she decided. Sally Jean sighed. Nobody loves me like that. Nobody.
Brett touched Sally Jean’s arm tenderly but couldn’t get her attention. He was beginning to grow restless; early the next morning he had to be back at the office where he worked as a copywriter. But Sally Jean gave no indication of readiness to depart and Brett didn’t want to displease her. He began to work over some ideas for the ladies shaver campaign. Sell the sizzle, not the steak, he reminded himself. What on earth sizzles about ladies’ leg hair? After what Brett counted to be her fourth gin and tonic, Sally Jean announced that she wanted to meet the black-bobbed dancer.
“I’ve just got to talk to her! Look what fun they’re having.”
“Aren’t we having . . . a good time? This here is fun, isn’t it Sally Jean?”
“Yes,” she said, weighing the question. “But it looks like they’re having some kind of important fun. Do you know what I mean?”
He had no idea what she meant. In fact, as he thought back over the last two days, he felt there were quite a few moments during which he had had no idea what she meant. And she was drinking so much. She must just be nervous about the wedding. Feeling a surge of love for her, he reached over to pat her hand reassuringly, and found it missing.
He spotted her standing at the adjacent table, the short skirt of her dress riding up past her knees. Brett blushed. But before he could jump to her rescue, she was seated at the table, clinking glasses with the dark-haired dancer. Brett sat back down and sipped at his drink contemplatively.
“Well, aren’t you just a gem for saying so,” said the black-haired woman in her breathy voice, shaking Sally Jean’s hand like a man.
“I think you were just, I don’t know how to say it, like an angel out there. Like an angel and also sort of like my horse, Peony—”
“Peony!” The whole table laughed.
“That’s her name. It’s a flower.”
“Isn’t she a gem,” said the woman, turning to the older, bald-headed man.
“A diamond,” he concurred.
“A diamond in the rough,” said the younger man, looking at her with a flash in his appraising eyes. He winked at Sally Jean and the black-haired woman laughed.
“Ardita,” said the black-bobbed woman looking directly at Sally Jean.
“Come again?” asked Sally Jean politely.
“Ardita O’Reilly, that’s me.”
“Oh, I’m so pleased to make your acquaintance! Sally Jean Baker, that’s me.”
Again the table laughed, but their laughs were friendly and warm.
“She’s the real McCoy, isn’t she? A gen-u-ine innocent.”
“I know! Let’s keep her! Why don’t we just adopt Miss Sally Jean Baker here, and keep her all for ourselves?” This was Ardita, breathless, delighted. “How about it
, Mr. Whiskers? What do you say?”
“Is that you?” Sally Jean asked the elderly man sincerely, “Are you Mr. . . . Whiskers?”
The table roared.
“That’s what they call me,” he told her confidentially, “on account of my excessive hairiness!”
“But you don’t have—”
And then they all laughed, including Sally Jean.
“I’m the proprietor, the owner of this particular establishment,” said Mr. Whiskers. “Ardita is my greatest find, my lovely ingénue. And the rudely silent gentleman to your right is Tom Valentine.”
Tom Valentine gave her a generous smile and, with an exaggerated flourish that didn’t deny the genuine chivalry of his actions, half stood and planted a kiss on Sally Jean’s hand. Ardita clapped with delight.
“And I am Brett Blakely.”
The table turned and Brett stood there, looking like a boy scout who got run through the wrong wash cycle.
“Sally Jean’s fiancé.”
Awkwardly Brett pulled up a chair and introductions were made. Mr. Whiskers ordered another round of drinks. The men started to talk of the Great War and Sally Jean had a moment to look at Ardita. What she saw made her lose an ice cube down the front of her dress. Ardita had one blue eye and one green eye. It wasn’t the kind of thing you couldn’t see from the audience, but up close it was undeniable. Sally Jean stared into those eyes and the rest of the room disappeared. She wanted to swim in them; get drunk in them; vanish into their blues and greens. Ardita smiled and Sally Jean smiled back; an infant hypnotized by the most beautiful mobile.
“Hi,” said Sally Jean.
“Hi,” said Ardita. And her eyes flickered with that same strange look Sally Jean had seen on stage. Was it passion? Anger? Resignation? All Sally Jean knew is that she wanted her own eyes to be blue and green and hard and full of secrets.
The next half-hour passed as in a dream. The band picked up their instruments and decided to play for their own enjoyment. The music was wild and fantastic. The air was thick with smoke. One song ended, and before the next began, Sally Jean heard Brett talking confidentially to Mr. Whiskers.