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CHAPTER 1 • scene 1
CHAPTER 1
SCENE 1
“You had yourself a crazy lover, becoming frozen trying hard to forget her.”
“Girls, this house has got plenty of space, you could go anywhere and do that,” I commented from across the room, leaning against the wall and balancing a cigarette between my lips, my right hand plunging into my trousers’ pocket for my lucky matchbox. I knew for sure I’d tucked it away there earlier, recently restacked, but now I couldn’t find it. I thrust my hand in harder, repeatedly, searching out every little cranny. Still nothing. I felt annoyed but couldn’t tell whether it was Paula and Miriam having a regular snogfest halfway in over the piano or the matches missing.
Entering the sitting room from the kitchen across the hallway, Hardy caught sight of the two other women first, then gave me a sideways glance. Pointed. It isn’t like you care about the instrument, she seemed to say. Shrugging, I finally located the matchbox and so, I pulled it out, quickly lighting my smoke.
In the meantime, Paula and Miriam stopped sucking on each other’s tongues, drawing back at the same time, resulting in a disappointed moan from the other side of the piano where Paula’s husband, Brad, was sitting at the dining table, nursing a whiskey on the rocks. He was here and not in some military operation currently like half of America, because he had paid his way out of the army, and he was quite proud of it, too. He told the story to everyone who cared to listen or sat still long enough, but I wouldn’t say it was worth retelling, honestly. Now, he gestured with one hand and said, “no, come on, get back to it!”
Paula, the taller of the two, all legs and lean lines, that girl, stepped back from the piano, letting Miriam slide back on the floor on naked feet. At some point during the evening, she had lost her pumps. She looked around for them, but didn’t start actively searching, instead fixing up her hair, wiping lipstick off her mouth. She and Paula liked to wear different shades, like consciously emphasizing their different personalities. Paula used a sharp scarlet, Paula’s more brick red, maybe ochre if she was being dramatic which wasn’t uncommon; she was an actress, after all, drama was what she did.
That and Miriam, sometimes.
Not tonight, though.
“Kiss her yourself,” Miriam told him, walking around Paula as she finally started in on the searching part. The shoes had been left on the couch in the corner, I’d seen them earlier. When our eyes met, Miriam’s dark and tense from impatience, I just nodded towards the spot where she had kicked them off before dragging Paula into an intimate slow dance in waltz time, as played by Hardy herself. Our queen of the chanson. Miriam raised her chin at me, all the thanks you were gonna get with her, and hurried over to pick them up, slip them back on. Paula followed her with her eyes the entire way. Same as me, different reasons.
Different personalities.
I don’t wear lipstick that often.
“Where’s the fun in that,” Brad called back. Paula’s shoulders slumped for a second, cringing outwardly.
“Yes, it would be nowhere near as pretty a sight, would it, Bradford,” Hardy asked in her thick French accent as she joined him at the table, pouring herself a whiskey as well, sans ice. He grinned and shoulder-bumped her from the side, a gesture she completely ignored. Gracious of her, I’m sure.
At the center of the table stood a large vase with branches of Mme. Hardy’s roses, whitish-cream-colored, the first harvest of the season. Hardy was nicknamed after them. Her real name was Hélène Barbier. Lily said she refused to move into the house before the rose beds had been planted and were in full bloom – and while the first part might be true, I couldn’t imagine Hardy being sentimental enough to insist on the second.
Still, it had become a part of our shared lore.
The truth about Madame Hardy’s Club.
“Palti needs me to be home before ten o’clock tonight,” Miriam excused herself, catching Paula’s gaze one last time, holding it, before she marched in direction of the lobby, the clicking of her heels followed her the entire way. I watched Paula, shoulders slumping further, less cringe, more resignation at this point. Although it happened that they shared a shade of lipstick and a breath, Miriam and her, it happened more often that Miriam ran off afterwards, back to that private life of hers she thought we were completely uninformed about, the rest of us.
We didn’t know much, but we saw the curtain she drew every time to conceal it. That was proof enough.
In the end, I didn’t know if Paula saw it and was sad that she wasn’t invited, or if she didn’t see and was sad because she consistently had her chances snuffed by some unknown factor without a name that she could even refer to. Either way, this was how the story went with Paula and Miriam. They were magnets to each other, in every imaginable, physiological way.
Attract and repel. Attract and repel. Elementary school stuff.
Turning my lucky matchbox over between my fingers, playing with the small piece of cardboard which Tommy had been allowed to deck the front and back of in Mommy’s paints sometime years ago, and he had been terribly good at basic color wheels even at six, very good contrasts, so I had kept it ever since, I slowly lifted my eyes and pushed off the wall, sauntering over to the piano. The echo of my step, flat leather shoes, nothing like the other girls’ heels, didn’t drown out the whispering sound of Miriam talking to the maid in the lobby, presumably being handed her coat, her gloves, hat, before the front doors finally opened, closed, followed by a telling silence and Paula’s shoulders seemed to drop to ever new levels. I stopped briefly next to her and pocketed Tommy’s artwork, reaching up with my now free hand to bounce one of her blonde curls with a flick of my finger. With the fingers of my other hand, I plucked the cigarette from between my lips, blew a heavy smokescreen between us, whether for her pride’s sake or to fend off the desperately hungry look she turned on me, then, who could really say. I just knew how, often, when she couldn’t have Miriam, she tended to go for similarly unavailable things.
The strand fell into her eyes, and she pushed it away irritably, turning away from my exhaust towards the table where her husband and Hardy as well as Lily and my own Hector at the other end were sitting, the latter two trying to pretend they had nothing to do with the whole ordeal – when in Hardy’s club we were musketeers, one for all, all for one.
What had just played out before them was part of their reality, too. The afterquake would inevitably shake their world.
“She’ll be back,” I said, not truly reassuring the actress best known for not fooling anyone, stuffing the filter of my smoke back in my mouth and moved the rest of the way over to the table before she could make the move herself, sitting down in the empty seat next to Hector who was watching me out the corner of his eye. Seating in Hardy’s house was always flexible, no chair bore your name, if you were lucky, you could even steal one under Brad’s nose. No one had ever agreed that was something to strive for, but the Davis heir had gotten used to his seats getting claimed as soon as he turned his back with the good-humoured overbearance of someone who got to watch pretty girls having fun without him on the weekly even so. For now, he was watching his wife with some kind of dislike, difficult to say. We were all watching Paula.
“We are all going to be back,” Paula complained or contemplated, waving one hand at Brad to indicate she wanted him to stand, it was their turn to leave now, “next week, same place, same time. Nothing ever changes around these parts.”
“Bless,” Lily interjected with a slight smile. Paula shot her a furious look that she pretended not to notice.
“The year is 1942 and everything changes all the time,” Hardy observed, meeting my gaze across the table as she also fished out a cigarette and her heavy silver lighter, a parting gift from Charles before he’d let himself enlist. Like my lucky matches, she rarely let it out of her sight. We all had our charms like that, if not in looks, then in mementos. Well, Hardy had both. Couple of years older than me and she still looked closer to thirty. It is the French gene, she used to reply when people complimented her about it.
Though, worrying for Charles had added age to her eyes already. Nothing could counteract the strain put on your soul, my father used to say, and it seemed applicable here. Nothing, not any magic French gene either.
“I like unchanging,” Brad sulked, getting up only reluctantly and shrugging into his plain, black dinner jacket that had been hanging over the back of his chair. Mine is nicer, I thought with one eyebrow raised at the way his arm got caught in the right sleeve. He cursed and banged his fist through the hole. No wonder Paula called him the Bed Ape when we were alone, not a man in sight. Mine is that great shade of charcoal. Fits the fedora.
It wasn’t a pissing contest, of course, just an observation. Bradford Davis wasn’t particularly aesthetically inclined, he only cared about the looks of the boobs he buried his face in. And they weren’t Paula’s most of the time, though Paula had a great pair on her, don’t get me wrong.
“Unchanging, as in eternally twenty-five,” Paula huffed as she moved past him to bend down and kiss Hardy’s cheeks, right first, then left, la bise. Behind her back, Brad rolled his eyes. Paula moved on to Lily, right cheek, left. Hector got a hug. I got a kiss on the mouth, having just killed my cigarette in the nearby ashtray. It wasn’t particularly passionate, more for show. An act, always an act with the actress, right? Brad whistled from the doorway where he’d stopped to wait for her, he never told anyone goodbye. Lily used to say she was equally disappointed every single time it didn’t mean that he wouldn’t return. Fake advertising, she’d moan.
Paula’s kiss felt like fake advertising, too. She drew back, cupping my cheek in one hand and smiling, sadly, at me. She knew I saw all of it. Artists have an uncanny ability to notice what others don’t, what others aren’t supposed to. “Night, Georgie,” she muttered, pressing another kiss to my cheek, leaving trails of lipstick, ochre for the drama tonight, behind.
“You take care, Paula,” I told her in return. She nodded. Joined Brad in the door, hissing at him when he tried grabbing for her elbow. The quiet they left the sitting room in after they’d made for the lobby was total.
“Well,” Lily said, waiting for the tell-tale slam of the front door again before continuing, “isn’t it always Shakespearean tragedy with them?” Hardy sighed. Hector snickered.
I gave him a sideways glance. “Do you want to head home, too, A.,” he asked politely, because that was the kind of man I had married, like I bested Brad’s dinner jacket, I had definitely bested Paula’s husband. I didn’t let the ochre lipstick dictate my actions. Or my lust for a body. My longing. I was generally a creature of good and common sense.
Which was why I was the only Hardy’s girl who didn’t sleep with any of the other Hardy’s girls. It was not out of fidelity to Hector who knew I wouldn’t touch his genitals with a hot fire poker now that we had our son and that part of the deal was done, and neither was it because I didn’t sleep with plenty of other girls when I felt like it. It was because friendship remained a sacred thing in my mind, and you needed to keep the appertaining spaces purified.
Something I said as a mostly unreligious person. My friends were my church, my congregation and my god. To them, I was devoted.
Not to all the rest.
Nodding, I pushed my chair back, got up and shrugged into my charcoal dinner jacket, righting my tie, slipping on my fedora of a matching color. Hector, twenty years older than me and generally more formal in his attire, put on his top hat and grabbed his cane off the edge of the table. Hardy was the first to get up to say farewell, Lily following closely after. She always hugged Hector the tightest, had done so since he had filled her dressing room with flowers that night after her Nutcracker debut a year and a half ago. Meanwhile, Hardy kissed my temple, whispering, you picked a good one, Beau.
With her, it was always difficult to tell whether she was complimenting my spouse or my clothes. I was going to assume both.
“I know,” I told her with a smile.
They’d seated themselves again before we’d left the room, two women on their lonesome, sitting close enough that their ankles were more entwined than simply crossed beneath the table. Without Charles here, the man of the house, they were the only ones, like a married couple all on their own. Lily was whispering something to Hardy in a low voice that made Hardy smile and I liked to imagine how, for a moment, the shadow hanging heavy in her gaze lifted at it.