Last Night at the Telegraph Club

by Malinda Lo

  “Go ahead and try it,” the woman said with a grin. “No one’ll stop you.”

  Claire laughed. “I’m not dressed for it, honey.” She turned to Lily and said, “Your friend downstairs—Kath? She said she’s been here before but you’re a new one, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  Claire leaned her shoulder against the wall and said companionably, “When I first came here—oh, two years ago now, can you believe it?” She paused a little in wonder, and then went on: “I had no idea what this place was. I was beyond shocked. I grew up in San Mateo, you know, and we only ever came up to San Francisco for shopping or special occasions. Where are you from?”

  “Chinatown.”

  A toilet flushed, and someone down the line let out a faint cheer as the women edged forward.

  “Chinatown, of course.” Claire gave her a conspiratorial smile, but Lily didn’t return it. Claire’s smile faltered a bit before she rushed on. “I mean, there’s nothing like this in San Mateo. And then I found this place and—wow, it was like the clouds parted and I had arrived at the promised land.” Claire laughed a little.

  Lily noticed some activity at the end of the hall, and she looked past Claire to see whether someone had left the bathroom. The door to a different room had opened, and a blond woman emerged; she wore a tight powder-blue sweater tucked into a charcoal pencil skirt, and red high heels. Directly behind her came Tommy Andrews, still dressed in her tuxedo and black tie, her hair as gleaming as ever. She was smoking a cigarette, and the smoke trailed after her in a thin white stream.

  As she passed the line of women, she greeted some of them by name. “Frannie, hello. How’s Midge? Haven’t seen you in a while, Vivian.”

  Meanwhile the blonde preceded her, a faintly worried look on her face, until she caught sight of Claire, who was waving at her as she said, “Lana! Lana, how are you?”

  Lana’s worried expression turned to pleasure. “Claire! It’s so good to see you.” They embraced, barely two feet away from Lily, and she caught a whiff of Lana’s floral perfume.

  Claire and Lana were talking in excited whispers, and all the while, Tommy came closer. She was shorter than Lily expected, but the way she held herself made her seem tall. She was waiting behind Lana now, because the hallway was narrow enough that she couldn’t pass, and her eyes were sweeping over Claire, and then over Lily and beyond her—and back again, curiously. Lily felt Tommy’s gaze as if it were a breath on her face. Goose bumps rose on her skin.

  Tommy said, “I have to get back downstairs. Sorry to break it up, girls.”

  Lana gave Claire an apologetic look before saying to Tommy, “This is Claire, don’t you remember? I haven’t seen her in weeks.”

  Tommy nodded at Claire, giving her a quick grin. “Hello again, Claire.”

  “Hello, Tommy,” Claire said, placing a strange little emphasis on Tommy’s name. Tommy leaned toward her and they kissed each other on the cheek, as if they were old friends, though Lily saw the little flare of pink on Claire’s face as she pulled back. “Come and find me, Lana,” Claire said. “I’ve got a table downstairs with Paula. We should catch up.”

  “Will do,” Lana said, and then continued toward the stairs.

  Tommy was passing right in front of Lily now. She kept her gaze fixed downward, and so she saw the neatly pressed crease of Tommy’s tuxedo pants, the satin stripe running liquidly down the side, the shine of her black shoes. They were men’s shoes, oxfords. Tommy paused in mid-stride and said, “We don’t see many Orientals around here.” And then: “Does she speak English?”

  Lily looked up straight into Tommy’s eyes; they were brown and creased at the edges in a little smile. Lily’s heart pounded, but her voice seemed to have left her.

  “She’s with me,” Claire said. “This is Lily.”

  Tommy nodded to her with a slow grin, and then raised her cigarette to her mouth and inhaled, the ember at the tip glowing red. “Hope you’re enjoying the show, China doll,” Tommy said, and then followed Lana down the stairs. A fragrance trailed her—not the sweet floral perfume that clung to Lana, but something warmer, a little spicy.

  There was a faint roaring in Lily’s ears. She was vaguely aware of the other women gaping at her; some were giggling, others openly curious. Claire was saying, “Look, she’s stunned! The poor girl.”

  “I’m fine,” Lily said automatically, and tried to laugh it off, but her own laughter sounded false, and soon enough the other women lost interest, because the line was finally moving more quickly. Downstairs, the piano began again; Tommy’s second set was starting. Lily couldn’t make out the melody through the roaring in her ears; everything sounded muffled, even the flushing of the toilet. Claire had been pulled into conversation with the woman ahead of her, who was intrigued that Claire knew Tommy. “Well, it’s Lana I know, really,” Claire said modestly.

  Finally, there was the door to the bathroom. Claire went in as another woman came out, brushing past Lily to hurry back downstairs. At last it was Lily’s turn, and she stepped into the bathroom and found that there were only two stalls, and one of them had a handwritten sign taped to it that read out of order. She went into the one that Claire had vacated—Claire was washing her hands at the sink—and the stall smelled of urine, but Lily had no choice but to use it. She hovered above the seat so that she wouldn’t have to touch it.

  When she was finished, she pulled the chain on the tank and water plunged into the bowl. She straightened her blouse and skirt and stockings, and as she reached for the latch on the door she noticed that all sorts of messages had been graffitied on in pen, or scratched through the beige paint. for a good time call joanie, someone had written, and beneath that a different hand had added: just don’t call before noon. There was a heart scratched above the handle of the stall door, and inside the heart were two names: nancy + carol.

  A swell of applause rose from downstairs. She hurried out to wash her hands, and then found Claire standing in the hallway, smiling at her cheerfully.

  “You didn’t have to wait,” Lily said, surprised.

  “I wouldn’t leave you up here alone. You looked a little lost back there.”

  There was only kindness in her voice, and Lily felt overwhelmed by it. “Thank you,” Lily said.

  Claire shrugged it off. “Let’s go. Tommy’s second set is usually better, because it’s after the tourists leave.”

  Lily followed her back down to the stage room, where Tommy was singing in the spotlight. When they returned to their table, Kath leaned close to her and said, “I was getting worried! I got you another beer.”

  The idea of drinking another one seemed scandalous to Lily, but she didn’t want to be impolite, and she could practically hear Shirley saying, Don’t be such a square. “Thanks,” she said to Kath, and picked up her glass. The beer was cold, and with each sip it became easier to watch Tommy onstage, to laugh and applaud when the others did. Perhaps it was because the initial shock of seeing a woman impersonate a man was wearing off, and she knew a little about what to expect now. Or perhaps it was because the tourists had mostly left, as Claire predicted, and the audience was almost all women. The club felt looser now; it felt lighter, as if finally Tommy was among friends. The one or two men remaining in the audience could be overlooked at last, and Tommy did overlook them.

  Lily thought that Claire was right: Tommy’s second set was better than the first. She changed the lyrics to the songs she sang now, and the changes were so direct that Lily could hardly believe what she was hearing. When a beautiful lady like you / Meets an irresistible gay girl like me. The rest of the audience wasn’t as surprised, though; or if they were, it was a delighted kind of surprise, because they laughed to hear it.

  Tommy flirted shamelessly with a woman in a green dress seated at a table near the stage with two other women, and the woman in the green dress loved it so much Tommy brought her onstage to
serenade her with “Secret Love.” This time Lily was fairly certain Tommy hadn’t changed a single word, and Lily was struck by how duplicitous a song could be, as if multiple languages were hidden within the lyrics. Tommy ended her set with a rollicking rendition of “Keep It Gay,” and when it was over, she sauntered offstage and back to the bar, and the way some women shook her hand or slapped her shoulder, it was obvious that they knew her.

  Afterward, Lily assumed it was time to go home, but when she looked at Kath, she didn’t seem to be in a rush. Lily touched her arm and asked, “Should we go?”

  “We can if you want. They’ll tell us when last call is, and then we’ll have to leave, anyway.”

  “What time is it?”

  Kath held her watch closer to the votive candle, angling it to catch the light. “About half past one.”

  Claire had gotten up as soon as Tommy’s set was over, and now she returned with Lana and two glasses of wine in tow. They pulled over an extra chair, and Claire introduced Lana all around—“We met Kath here tonight, and you remember her friend Lily”—and the question of leaving seemed to fade. Lily finished her beer and wondered whether Tommy would join them. It began to seem inevitable, and her pulse quickened as she imagined what might happen. Tommy would drag a chair over and sit down, taking out her pack of cigarettes; she would offer them around, and Lana would accept one. There would be more beers, and more conversation that Lily didn’t quite understand, and all the while she would have to work hard not to stare, not to gaze at the way Tommy’s hair was artfully slicked back with that little wave, or the way her collar pressed intimately against her throat.

  A shout went around the room—“Last call!”—and several women got up to go to the bar and buy their last drinks of the night, while others headed to the hat check.

  “We should go,” Kath said.

  Lily nodded, and realized with a mixture of disappointment and relief that Tommy wasn’t going to sit with them after all. She put on her coat, and she and Kath said goodbye to Claire and Paula—Lana politely shook their hands—and then they began to move through the emptying stage room toward the narrow bar area. Tommy was walking toward them, carrying two tall glasses of beer, and for a heart-stopping moment Lily thought Tommy was bringing one of them to her—but then Tommy passed her by briskly, a whiff of her cologne floating behind her. Lily turned her head to follow Tommy’s progress; of course she was going to meet Lana and Claire, and there was Paula standing up to take one of the beers. Lily felt Kath’s hand on her arm, and Kath said, “Are you coming?”

  “Sorry.” Lily followed Kath down the length of the bar, past women still nursing their final drinks, and through the black door and onto the sidewalk.

  The cool night air was welcome after the smoky, stuffy interior. Women were standing in little clumps outside the club, lighting up cigarettes and talking, prolonging their nights out. Someone said there was an after-hours club a couple of blocks away; someone else suggested heading to Chinatown for some late-night chow mein. Lily glanced at her watch in the light of a streetlamp as she and Kath walked away from the club; it was two o’clock in the morning, and all the neon signs on Broadway were still ablaze. Men and women were emerging from the other clubs on the street, some of them stumbling drunk, others squealing with laughter. The entire city seemed to be awake, living a second life she hadn’t known existed until now. When she and Kath reached the intersection where they had to part ways, they paused on the edge of the sidewalk to avoid the other pedestrians.

  “I’ll see you on Monday,” Kath said a little awkwardly.

  “See you Monday,” Lily replied. She thought she should say something more, but she felt inexplicably shy—as though she hadn’t just spent more than two hours with her friend in a nightclub full of gay women. Even the thought of those words made her nervous, and she was sharply aware that there were people all around them, and she was only a block away from Chinatown.

  Kath turned to leave, and at the last moment Lily reached out to touch her arm. “Thank you for taking me,” Lily said.

  “You’re welcome,” Kath said.

  The traffic was a moving river of red and white and yellow lights reflected in miniature in Kath’s eyes. She smiled. Lily looked away self-consciously. Someone honked repeatedly, and a black car careened up Columbus, and the pedestrians nearby shouted at the driver to watch out.

  “Good night,” Lily said, stepping back.

  “Good night,” Kath said.

  Lily forced herself to turn away and walk home.

  * * *

  —

  She kept to the shadows of Grant Avenue as much as she could, walking quickly through the pools of light that spilled out the doors of the Sai-Yon all-night restaurant and the Far East Café. Her fingers were steady when she quietly unlocked the front door of her building; she was utterly silent as she slipped off her shoes and carried them up the stairs. The flat was hushed and dark and so quiet she could hear the faint sound of her brothers breathing as she passed the cracked-open door to their bedroom. The door to her parents’ room was closed, and she tiptoed past quickly.

  She rolled the pocket doors to her room shut behind her. She left the light off. She unzipped her skirt and thought, This is what I wore the night I met Tommy Andrews. She unbuttoned her blouse and felt the lingering traces of dampness in the armpits where she’d sweated. Normally she would air it out on the laundry line or put it in the wash, but she couldn’t do that in the middle of the night. She unrolled her too-thick stockings and peeled off her girdle and unclasped her bra; the toes and creases and seams were all a little damp, too. It was incriminating: the residue of her body on these bits of fabric. She knew she should find it revolting, but she didn’t; somehow she felt triumphant. It was proof that she had been to the Telegraph Club and breathed its warm, perfumed air.

  She folded her clothes in the dark and gently laid them in the bottom dresser drawer. She felt for her nightgown and put it on, the pink polyester sliding cool as water over her warm skin. Her bed creaked slightly as she lay down and drew the covers up to her chin. She closed her eyes, but she wasn’t at all sleepy.

  She remembered the way Tommy had leaned the microphone stand over in one hand, the spotlight making her signet ring sparkle. She remembered the curl of Tommy’s lip as she smiled at the woman in the green dress while she sang “Secret Love.” And she remembered the hint of cologne she had smelled on her; there had been an edge to it that felt distinctly, confusingly masculine. It sent a giddy thrill straight through her—as if Tommy had run a fingertip right up her spine. She lay in her bed for quite some time trying to catch that scent again, as if she might call it into existence out of the sheer force of memory.

  22

  Saturday afternoon, Lily nodded off over the kitchen sink, her hands gone slack in the warm soapy water.

  “You’ve been staying up too late reading again,” her mother said.

  Lily started, her hands jerking up and splashing water over the counter and the front of her blouse. One droplet flew into her eye, and she raised her hand up instinctively, causing dirty liquid to trickle down her wrist and into her sleeve. Her mother silently held out a dish towel.

  After blotting her face and blouse, she returned to the dishes, fishing the rag out from beneath the stack of rice bowls. Behind her, Eddie was seated at the kitchen table doing his homework. Her mother was putting away the lunch leftovers, and down the hall she heard her father talking to Frankie. No one seemed to be able to tell what she had done or where she had gone Friday night, even though she felt as if it must be written on her forehead. It gave her the disorienting feeling that perhaps she had imagined the whole thing.

  (The graffiti on the bathroom door—Nancy + Carol. Who were they?)

  Sunday morning at church, she worried that someone would surely know she had stepped outside the bounds of her life as a good Chinese daughter. What if someone from
the neighborhood had seen her Friday night?

  (The Telegraph Club’s black front door, swinging open to reveal that long narrow bar, the glowing lights overhead like distant moons.)

  But she got through the church service and the potluck lunch without a single person mentioning they had glimpsed a girl who looked like her crossing over to North Beach in the middle of the night.

  Monday morning, Shirley was the same as ever, maintaining the cool politeness she’d instituted since the dance. Shirley’s obliviousness stung the most. There had been a time when Shirley noticed every new thing about her: a hair ribbon, a rip on her sleeve, shadows under her eyes if she hadn’t slept well. Shirley barely looked at her now.

  Only Kath knew. When Lily saw her at school, she felt a quick excitement go through her, and Kath’s pale face colored. (Tommy’s eyes half-closed as she crooned into the microphone she held to her mouth.) Of course, Kath said nothing about it. They sat in the same row in Senior Goals and listened in silence as Miss Weiland announced that there would be a standard air-raid drill later that week. Lily eyed Shirley, who had taken a seat across the room near Will, and it seemed as if Shirley could feel her attention, because she raised her head and met Lily’s gaze.

  Shirley’s eyebrows drew together as if she were puzzled, and Lily thought, Maybe she can tell. How could she not? She was surprised by the strength of her yearning to have Shirley detect a difference in her—as if that would make her experience real.

  (Tommy in the hallway by the bathroom, cigarette between her fingers as she looked at Lily with that tiny smile in her eyes.)

  Shirley broke the gaze, and the moment passed. Lily felt deflated. Miss Weiland was distributing pamphlets about nutrition for their next Senior Goals unit. On the glossy cover was an illustration of an all-American family: a blond mother, a dark-haired father, and a blond girl and boy with freckled cheeks and wide blue eyes. They sat at a kitchen table set for dinner, where a reddish-brown meatloaf rose from a platter decorated with pineapple slices, and a pat of yellow butter melted on a mound of mashed potatoes in a green bowl. Lily had only ever eaten meatloaf in the school cafeteria, and the thought of its salty, slick interior made her queasy. She flipped the pamphlet over so that she didn’t have to see it.