Swing Time

by Zadie Smith

  Tracey wriggled off his lap back on to her own stool. “You’re a fucking pisshead,” she muttered, and the barman, overhearing what she’d said, laughed and told her: “’Fraid that’s a condition of membership round here, love . . .” Chalky turned to Tracey and kissed her sloppily: “Come, come, you wasp; i’ faith, you are too angry . . .” “Look what I’m dealing with!” cried Tracey, pulling him off her. Chalky had a fondness for dirge-like Shakespearean ballads, it drove Tracey up the green walls, in part because she was jealous of his beautiful voice but also because when Chalky started singing of willow trees and faithless shrews it was a reliable sign that he’d soon have to be half carried down that steep and rickety staircase, heaved into a cab and sent back to his white wife, his fare prepaid with money Tracey had lifted from his wallet, usually taking a bit more than was strictly required. But she was pragmatic, she only ended the night when she’d learned something. I believe she was trying to pick up what she’d missed this past three years and I’d gained: a free education.

  • • •

  The show was very well reviewed and in November, backstage, five minutes before curtain, we were gathered together and told, by the producers, that our run was to be extended, past its Christmas deadline and into the spring. The cast was delighted, and that night they took their delight out with them on stage. I stood in the wings, happy for them, too, but with my own secret news tucked up inside me, which I hadn’t yet told the management or Tracey. One of my applications had come through, finally: a production-assistant position, a paid internship, at the newly launched British version of YTV. The previous week I’d gone for an interview, hit it off with my interviewer, who told me, a little unprofessionally, I thought, given the queue of girls outside, that I had the job, there and then. It was only thirteen grand, but if I stayed at my father’s it was more than enough. I was happy and yet hesitant to tell Tracey, without really asking myself what was at the root of my hesitancy. The Hot Box Girls dashed past me, fresh from Make-up, and on to the stage, dressed as cats, with Adelaide front and center and Hot Box Girl Number One just to her left. They puffed up their chests provocatively, licked their paws, got a hold of their tails—one of which I had pinned on Tracey ten minutes before—crouched like kittens about to pounce, and started to sing, of mean “poppas” who, holding you too tightly, make you want to roam, and other, gentle strangers, who make you feel at home . . . It was always a riotous number, but that night it was a real sensation. From where I stood, with a clear view of the front row, I could see the undisguised lust in the eyes of the men, and how many of those eyes were drawn specifically to Tracey when they should have rightfully been on the woman playing Adelaide. Everyone else was eclipsed by the litheness of Tracey’s legs in that leotard, the pure vitality of her movements, truly cat-like, ultra-feminine in a mode I envied and could not hope to create in my own body no matter how many tails you stuck on me. There were thirteen women dancing in that number but only Tracey’s movements really mattered, and when she ran off stage with the rest and I told her how wonderfully she’d danced, she did not, like the other girls, second-guess me or ask for any repetition of the praise, she only said, “Yes, I know,” bent over, stripped and handed me her balled-up tights.

  That night the cast celebrated at the Coach and Horses. Tracey and Chalky went with them and so did I, but we were used to the drunken and intimate intensity of the Colony Room—also to our own seats, and to hearing ourselves speak—and after about ten minutes of standing, screaming at the top of our voices and not getting served, Tracey wanted to leave. I thought she meant back to the Colony Room, with Chalky, to do as we usually did, so she and her lover could drink too much and go over their impossible situation: his wish to tell his wife, her determination that he would not, the complication of his children—who were around our age—and the possibility, dreaded by Chalky but unlikely I thought, that the papers might find out and make some kind of story of it. But when he went to the bathroom Tracey pulled me outside and said, “I don’t want to do him tonight”—I remember that “do”— “Let’s just go back to yours and get caned.”

  It was about eleven thirty when we got to Kilburn. Tracey had rolled one on the train and now we smoked walking down the street, remembering the times we’d performed this same action down the same road aged twenty, fifteen, thirteen, twelve . . .

  As we walked I told her my news. It sounded very glamorous, YTV, three letters from a world that had preoccupied us as teenagers, and I felt almost embarrassed to bring it up, obscenely lucky, as if I were about to be on the channel rather than filing its British post and brewing its British tea. Tracey stopped walking and took the joint from me.

  “But you’re not going to leave right now? In the middle of a run?”

  I shrugged and confessed: “Tuesday. Are you really fucked off?”

  She didn’t reply. We walked in silence for a bit and then she said: “You planning on moving out as well or what?”

  I wasn’t. I’d found I liked living with my father, and being near—but not in the same space as—my mother. To my own surprise I was in no hurry to leave. And I remember making a lot of this to Tracey, of how much I “loved” the old neighborhood, wanting to impress her, I suppose, prove how firmly my feet were still on the local ground, notwithstanding any change in my fortunes, I still lived with my father as she lived with her mother. She listened, smiled in a tight sort of way, lifted her nose into the air and kept her counsel. A few minutes later we reached my father’s and I realized I didn’t have my key. I often forgot it, but didn’t like to ring the bell—in case he was already asleep, knowing he had to be up early—so would go down the side return and let myself in the back kitchen, which was usually open. But at that moment I was finishing the joint and didn’t want to risk my father seeing me—we had recently promised each other we’d stop smoking. So I sent Tracey. A minute later she came back and said the kitchen was locked and we’d better go to hers.

  • • •

  The next day was a Saturday. Tracey left early for the matinee, but I didn’t work Saturdays. I went back to my father’s flat and spent the afternoon with him. I didn’t see the letter that day though it might already have been on the mat. I found it on Sunday morning: it had been pushed through my door and was addressed to me, handwritten, with a little food stain on the corner of one page, and I think of it as the last truly personal written letter I ever received, for even though Tracey had no computer, not yet, the revolution was happening all around us and soon enough the only paper addressed to me would come from banks, utilities or the government, with a little plastic window to warn me of the contents. This letter came with no warning—I hadn’t seen Tracey’s handwriting in years—and I opened it as I sat at my father’s table with my father sitting opposite me. “Who’s that from then?” he asked, and for a few lines I still didn’t know myself. Two minutes later the only question remaining was whether it was fact or fiction. It had to be fiction: to believe otherwise was to make everything in my present life impossible as well as destroying much of the life I had led up to this point. It was to allow Tracey to place a bomb under me and blow me to smithereens. I read it again, to make sure I had understood. She began by speaking of her duty, and of it being a horrible duty, and that she had asked and asked herself (“asked” spelled wrong) what to do and had felt she had no choice (“choice” spelled wrong.) She described Friday night as I, too, remembered it: walking up the street to my father’s, smoking a joint, up to the point where she went down the side return to let herself in via the kitchen, unsuccessfully. But here the timeline broke in two, into her reality and mine, or her fiction—as far as I was concerned—and my fact. In her version she walked round the back of my father’s flat, stood in the small gravel courtyard, and then, because the kitchen seemed to be locked, took two steps to the left and brought her nose right up to the back window, to my father’s bedroom window, the one in which I slept, cupped her hands upon the glass a
nd looked in. There she saw my father, naked, on top of something, moving up and down, and at first she had naturally thought it was a woman, and if it had been a woman, or so she assured me, then she never would have mentioned it, it was none of her business or mine, but the fact was it was not a woman at all, it was a doll, human-sized, but inflated, and of very dark complexion—“like a golliwog,” she wrote—with a crescent of synthetic lamb’s-wool hair and a huge pair of bright red lips, red as blood. “You all right, love?” asked my father, across the table, as I held that comic, tragic, absurd, heartbreaking, hideous letter shaking in my hand. I said I was fine, took Tracey’s letter to the back courtyard, took out a lighter and set it on fire.

  PART SEVEN

  Late Days

  One

  I didn’t set eyes on Tracey again for eight years. It was an unseasonably warm May evening, the night I went out with Daniel Kramer, a first date. He came to the city quarterly, and was one of Aimee’s favorites in the sense that he did not, by virtue of being handsome, meld entirely with all the other accountants and financial advisers and copyright lawyers she regularly consulted, and so in her mind had been granted things like a name, qualities like a “good aura” and a “New York sense of humor” and a few biographical details she had managed to recall. Originally from Queens. Attended Stuyvesant. Plays tennis. Trying to keep the arrangements as loose as possible, I had suggested to him that we go to Soho and “play it by ear,” but Aimee wanted us to come first to the house for a drink. It wasn’t common at all, this kind of casual, intimate invitation, but Kramer didn’t seem surprised or alarmed to receive it. The twenty minutes we were granted passed with no customer-like behavior. He admired the art—without overdoing it—listening politely as Aimee repeated all the things the dealer who sold the art to her had told her about the art when she bought it, and soon enough we were free, of Aimee, of the oppressive grandeur of that house, skipping down the back stairs, both a little giddy on good champagne, emerging on to the Brompton Road and into a warm, close night, muggy, threatening a storm. He wanted to take the long walk into town—we had vague plans to see what was on at the Curzon—but I was not a tourist and those were my salad days of impossible heels. I was about to look for a taxi when, for “fun,” he stepped off the curb and waved down a passing pedicab.

  “She collects a lot of African art,” he said, as we climbed into the leopard-print seats—he was only making conversation, but primed against any hint of a customer, I cut him down: “Well, I don’t really know what you can mean by ‘African art.’”

  He looked surprised by my tone but managed a neutral smile. He relied on Aimee’s business and I was an extension of Aimee.

  “Most of what you saw,” I began in a tone better suited for a lecture hall, “is actually Augusta Savage. So Harlem. It’s where she lived when she first came to New York—I mean, Aimee. Of course, she’s a great supporter of the arts generally.”

  Now Kramer looked bored. I was boring myself. We didn’t speak again until the bike stopped at the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue and Greek Street. As we pulled up at the curb we were surprised by the existence of a Bangladeshi boy, whose independent reality we had, up to that point, entirely forgotten, but who had undeniably brought us this far, and now turned round on his bike seat, his face soaked with sweat, hardly able to explain, through gasps, how much this form of human toil cost per minute. There was nothing we wanted to see at the cinema. In a slightly tense mood, our clothes sticking to us in the heat, we wandered toward Piccadilly Circus, without knowing which bar we were heading for, or whether we should eat instead, both already considering the evening a failure, looking straight ahead and confronted, every few steps, with the giant playbills of the theaters. It was in front of one of these, a little way down, that I stopped dead. A performance of the musical Showboat, a shot of the “Negro chorus”: head-handkerchiefs, rolled-up trousers, aprons and work skirts, but all done tastefully, carefully, “authentically,” with no hint of Mammy or Uncle Ben about it. And the girl closest to the camera, her mouth open wide in song, with one arm stretched high above her head, clutching a broom—the very picture of kinetic joy—was Tracey. Kramer came up behind me to peer over my shoulder. I pointed a finger at Tracey’s upturned nose, as Tracey herself used to point at a dancer’s face as it passed across our TV screens.

  “I know her!”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “I know her really well.”

  He tapped a cigarette out of a packet, lit it and looked the theater up and down.

  “Well . . . you wanna go see it?”

  “But you don’t like musicals, do you? Nobody serious does.”

  He shrugged. “I’m in London, it’s a show. That’s what you’re meant to do in London, isn’t it? Go see a show?”

  He passed me his cigarette, pushed open the heavy doors and headed to the box office. It all of a sudden seemed very romantic and coincidental and well timed and I had a ridiculous girlish narrative running in my head, of a future moment in which I would be explaining to Tracey—backstage somewhere in some sad regional theater, as she pulled on a pair of tired old fishnets—that the very moment I realized I’d met my love, the moment I came into my true happiness, was the same moment I happened to spot her, quite by chance, in that very small role she’d had, back in the day, in the chorus of Showboat, all those years and years ago . . .

  Kramer came back out with two tickets, great seats in the second row. In lieu of dinner I bought myself a huge bag of chocolates, of the kind I rarely got to eat, Aimee considering such things not only nutritionally fatal but clear evidence of moral weakness. Kramer bought two large plastic tumblers of bad red wine and the program. I searched through it but couldn’t find Tracey. She wasn’t where she should be in the alphabetical list of the cast, and I started to worry that I was suffering from some kind of delusion, or had made an embarrassing error. I flicked the pages back and forth, sweat breaking out on my forehead—I must have looked crazy. “You OK?” asked Kramer. I was almost at the end of the program again when Kramer pressed a finger to a page to stop me turning it.

  “But isn’t that your girl?”

  I looked again: it was. She’d changed her common-sounding, barbarous last name—the name by which I’d always known her—to the Frenchified and, to me, absurd Le Roy. Her first name, too, had been adapted: now it was Tracee. And in the picture her hair was straight and glossy. I laughed out loud.

  Kramer looked at me curiously.

  “And you’re good friends?”

  “I know her very well. I mean, I haven’t seen her in about eight years.”

  Kramer frowned: “See, in guy world we’d call that an ‘ex-friend,’ or better still: ‘a stranger.’”

  The orchestra started up. I was reading Tracey’s bio, parsing it furiously, in a race against time before the house lights dimmed, as if the visible words were hiding another set, with a far deeper meaning that required decoding and would reveal something essential about Tracey and the way her life was now:

  TRACEE LE ROY

  CHORUS/DAHOMEY DANCER

  Theater Includes:

  Guys and Dolls (Wellington Theater); Easter Parade (UK tour); Grease (UK tour); Fame! (Scottish National Theater); Anita, West Side Story (workshop)

  If it was the story of her life it was disappointing. It lacked the ubiquitous accomplishments of all the other bios: no TV, no film, and no mention of where she’d been “trained,” which I took to mean she’d never graduated. Apart from Guys and Dolls, there was no other West End work, only those bleak-sounding “tours.” I imagined small church halls and rowdy schools, empty matinees on the stages of abandoned cinemas, minor local drama festivals. But if some part of all this pleased me, another part, equally large, was incensed at the idea that this bio of Tracee Le Roy could be fairly compared—by any of the people in the theater presently reading it, or by any of the actors in the cast—with any of t
hese other stories. What did Tracee Le Roy have to do with these people? With this girl right next to her in the program, the girl with the endless biography, Emily Wolff-Pratt, who had studied at RADA, and who couldn’t know, as I did, the huge statistical unlikelihood of my friend standing on this stage, or any stage at all—in any role, in any context—and who perhaps had the temerity to think that she, Emily Wolff-Pratt, was a true friend of Tracey’s, just because she saw her every night, just because they danced together, when in fact she hadn’t the slightest idea of who Tracey was or where she had come from, or how much it had cost her to get here. I turned my attention to Tracey’s headshot. Well, I had to admit it: she’d turned out rather well. Her nose didn’t seem so much of an outrage any more, she’d grown into it, and the cruelty I’d always detected in her face was obscured by the megawatt Broadway smile she had in common with every other actor on the page. The surprise wasn’t that she was pretty, or sexy—she had already been in possession of these attributes as a very young teenager. The surprise was how elegant she had become. Her Shirley Temple dimples were gone, along with any hint of the provocative fleshiness she’d carried around as a child. It was almost impossible for me to imagine her voice, as I’d known it, as I remembered it, coming out of this pert-nosed, slick-haired, delicately freckled creature. I smiled down at her. Tracee Le Roy, who are you pretending to be now?

  “Here we go!” said Kramer, as the curtain parted. He placed his elbows on his knees, his hands in two childish fists under his chin and made a facetious face: I am agog.

  Stage left, a Southern oak, draped in Spanish moss, beautifully rendered. Stage right, the suggestion of a Mississippi town. Center stage, a showboat in harbor, the Cotton Blossom. Tracey—along with four other women—was first on stage, appearing from behind the oak, holding her broom, and behind her came the men with their various hoes and spades. The orchestra played the opening bars of a song. I recognized it as soon as I heard it, the big chorus number, and at once felt a panic, without knowing why, it took a moment, until the music itself prompted the memory. I saw the whole song laid out on the old sheet music, and remembered, too, how I’d felt the first time I saw it. And now the lyrics, shocking to me as a child, formed in my mouth, in perfect time with the orchestra’s preamble, I remembered the Mississippi, where the “niggers” all work, where the white people don’t, and I gripped the armrest and felt an urge to rise up out of my seat—it was like a scene in a dream—with the idea of stopping Tracey before she even started, but as soon as I’d had the thought it was already too late, and over the lyrics I’d thought I knew some new words had been substituted, but of course they had—no one had sung the original words for years and years. “Here we all work . . . Here we all work . . .”