City of Girls

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  I would say nothing (because I could say nothing) and he would just grin wider and say, “Sorry, baby, I can’t hear you. You gotta enunciate.”

  But I couldn’t say it—at least not till he taught me how to say it.

  “There are some words you need to learn, baby,” he told me one night while he was toying with me in bed. “And we ain’t doin’ nothing more till I hear you say it.”

  Then he taught me the nastiest words I’d ever heard. Words that made me blush and burn. He made me repeat the words after him, and he relished how uncomfortable it made me. Then he went to work on my body again, leaving me splayed and flayed with longing. When I had reached such a peak of desire that I could scarcely draw a breath, he stopped what he was doing, and turned on the light.

  “So, here’s what we’re gonna do now, Vivian Morris,” he said. “You’re gonna look me dead in the eye, and you’re gonna tell me exactly what you want me to do to you—using the words I just taught you. And that’s the only way it’s ever gonna happen, baby doll.”

  And Angela, God help me, I did it.

  I looked him dead in the eye, and I begged for it like a two-dollar hooker.

  After that, it was Katy bar the door.

  Now that I was infatuated with Anthony, the last thing I wanted to do anymore was go out on the town with Celia, picking up strangers for cheap, fast, pleasureless thrills. I didn’t want to do anything anymore but be with him—pinned to his brother Lorenzo’s bed—every moment that I could get. All of which is to say: I’m afraid I dropped Celia rather unceremoniously once Anthony showed up.

  I don’t know if Celia missed me. She never showed any indication of it. Nor did she pull away from me in any notable way. She just went about her life, and was friendly to me whenever we collided (which was usually in bed, when she would come stumbling in drunk at the usual hour). Looking back on it now, I feel that I wasn’t a very loyal friend to Celia—in fact, I’d dumped her twice: first for Edna, and then for Anthony. But maybe the young are just feral animals in the way that they shift their affections and allegiances so capriciously. Celia could certainly be capricious, too. I realize now that I always needed somebody to be infatuated with when I was twenty years old, and it didn’t really matter who, apparently. Anybody with more charisma than me would do the trick. (And New York was filled with people more charismatic than me.) I was so unformulated as a human being, so unsteady in myself, that I was constantly grasping for attachment to another person—constantly anchoring myself to someone else’s allure. But evidently, I could only be infatuated with one person at a time.

  And right now, it was Anthony.

  I was glassy-eyed in love. I was dumbstruck with love. I was all but undone by him. I could barely concentrate on my duties at the theater, because honestly, who cared? I think the only reason I even went to the theater anymore is because Anthony was there every day, spending hours a day in rehearsal, and I got to see him. All I wanted was to be in his orbit. I would wait around for him after every rehearsal like the most absurd little twit, following him back and forth to his dressing room, running out to buy him a cold tongue sandwich on rye whenever he wanted one. I bragged to everyone who would listen that I had a boyfriend, and it was forever.

  Like so many other dumb young girls throughout history, I was infected with love and lust—and moreover, I thought Anthony Roccella had invented the stuff.

  But then there was the conversation I had with Edna one day, when I was fitting her with a new hat for the show.

  She said, “You’re distracted. That’s not the color ribbon we’d agreed on.”

  “Is it not?”

  She touched the ribbon in question, which was scarlet red, and asked, “Does this look emerald green to you?”

  “I guess not,” I said.

  “It’s that boy,” Edna said. “He’s commanding all your attention.”

  I couldn’t help but grin. “He sure is,” I said.

  Edna smiled, but indulgently. “When you are around him, dear Vivian, you should know that you look exactly like a little dog in heat.”

  I rewarded her for her candor by accidentally stabbing her in the neck with a pin. “I’m so sorry!” I cried out—and whether it was about the pin-stabbing, or about looking like a little dog in heat, I could not have said.

  Edna coolly dabbed at the spot of blood on her neck with her handkerchief and said, “Don’t give it another thought. It’s not the first time I’ve been stabbed, my dear, and it’s probably richly deserved. But listen to me, darling, because I’m old enough to be an archaeological relic, and I know some things about life. It is not that I don’t celebrate your affections for Anthony. It is delightful to watch a young person fall in love for the first time. Chasing your boy about, as you do—it’s very sweet.”

  “Well, he’s a dream, Edna,” I said. “He’s a living dream.”

  “Of course he is, darling. They always are. But I have a spot of advice. By all means, take that racy young man to bed with you and put him in your memoirs when you get famous, but there is something you must not do.”

  I thought she was going to say, “Don’t get married,” or “Don’t get pregnant.”

  But no. Edna had a different concern.

  “Do not let it capsize the show,” she said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “At this point in a production, Vivian, we all must count on one another to sustain a certain degree of judiciousness and professionalism. It may seem as though we are just having some larks here—and we are having larks—but much is at stake. Your aunt is pouring everything she has into this play—heart, soul, and all her money, too—and we wouldn’t want to drive her show over a cliff. Here is the solidarity of good theater people, Vivian: we try not to ruin each other’s shows, and we try not to ruin each other’s lives.”

  I didn’t understand what she was on about, and my face must have showed it, because she tried again.

  “What I’m trying to say, Vivian, is this: if you’re going to be in love with Anthony, then be in love with him, and who could blame you for wanting your little exploit? But promise me that you will stay with him till the end of the run. He’s a good actor—far better than average—and he’s needed for this production. I don’t want any disruptions. If one of you breaks the other’s heart, I stand to lose not only a surprisingly excellent leading man, but also a damn good dresser. I need you both right now, and I need you to be in your right minds. Your aunt needs it, too.”

  I still must have looked awfully stupid, because she said, “Let me put it to you even more plainly, Vivian. As my worst ex-husband—that awful director—used to say to me, ‘Live your life as you wish, my peach, but don’t let it bitch up the bloody show.’”

  FIFTEEN

  City of Girls was now in the full swing of rehearsals, with the date set for the premiere of November 29, 1940. We would open the week after Thanksgiving, to try to snag the holiday crowd.

  Mostly it was going well. The music was sensational and the costumes were choice, if I do say so myself. The best thing about the play, of course, was Anthony Roccella—or at least in my opinion. My boyfriend could sing, act, and dance up a storm. (I’d overheard Billy saying to Peg, “You can always find girls who can dance like angels, and some boys, too. But to get a man who can dance like a man—that’s not easily found. This kid is everything I’d hoped he would be.”)

  Furthermore, Anthony was a natural comic, and he was absolutely convincing as a clever delinquent who could hustle a rich old lady into establishing a speakeasy and bordello in the great room of her mansion. And his scenes with Celia were fantastic. They were such a great-looking couple on stage. They had one particularly outstanding scene together, where they did the tango as Anthony seductively sang to Celia about “A Little Spot in Yonkers” that he wanted to show her. The way Anthony sang it, he made “A Little Spot in Yonkers” sound like an erogenous zone on a woman’s body—and Celia certainly responded as though it were. It was the sexiest mo
ment of the play. Any woman with a pulse would have agreed. Or at least I thought so.

  Others, of course, would have claimed that the best thing about the play was Edna Parker Watson’s performance—and I’m sure they were right. Even I, in my infatuated daze, could tell that Edna was brilliant. I’d seen a lot of theater in my life, but I’d never seen a real actress at work before. All the actresses I’d met so far were dolls with four or five different facial expressions to choose from—sadness, fear, anger, love, happiness—that they kept in rotation until the curtain went down. But Edna had access to every shade of human emotion. She was natural, she was warm, she was regal, and she could do a scene nine different ways in the space of an hour and somehow make each variation seem like the perfect one.

  She was a generous actress, as well. She made everyone’s performances look better, by her mere presence onstage. She coaxed the best out of everyone. She liked to step back a bit in rehearsal and let the light shine on another actor, beaming at them somewhat as they played their role. The great actresses are not often this kind. But Edna always thought of others. I remember Celia coming to rehearsal one day wearing false eyelashes. Edna took her aside to caution her not to wear them in performances, as they would cast shadows over her eye sockets and make her look “corpselike, darling, which is never what one wants.”

  A more jealous star would not have pointed out such a thing. But Edna was never jealous.

  Over time, Edna made Mrs. Alabaster into a far more subtle character than what the script suggested. Edna transformed Mrs. Alabaster into a woman of knowing—a woman who knew how ridiculous her life was when she was rich, and then knew how ridiculous it was to be broke, and then knew how ridiculous it was to be running a casino in her drawing room. Yet she was a woman who bravely played the game of life anyhow—and allowed the game of life to somewhat play her. She was ironic, but not cold. The effect was a survivor who had not lost the ability to feel.

  And when Edna sang her romantic solo—a simple ballad called “I’m Considering Falling in Love”—she brought the room to a state of silent awe, every single time. It didn’t matter how many times we’d heard her sing it already; we all stopped whatever we were doing to listen. It’s not that Edna had the best singing voice (she could be a tad chancy sometimes on the high notes), but she brought such poignancy to the moment that one couldn’t help but sit up and pay attention.

  The song was about an older woman who was deciding to give herself over to romance one more time, against her own better judgment. When Billy wrote the lyrics, he hadn’t intended them to be quite so sad. The original point, I think, had been to create something light and amusing: Look, how cute! Even older people can fall in love! But Edna asked Benjamin to slow down the song and alter it to a darker key, and that changed everything. Now when she got to the last line (“I’m just an amateur / But what are we here for? / I’m considering falling in love”) you could feel that this woman was already in love, and that it was terminal. You could feel her fear at what might happen to her heart, now that she had lost control of herself. But you could also feel her hope.

  I don’t think Edna ever sang that song in rehearsal that we didn’t stop and applaud her at the end.

  “She’s the real deal, kiddo,” Peg said to me one day from the wings. “Edna is the real blown-in-the-bottle deal. No matter how old you get, don’t ever forget how lucky you were to see a master at work.”

  A more problematic actor, I’m afraid, was Arthur Watson.

  Edna’s husband couldn’t do anything. He couldn’t act—he couldn’t even remember his lines!—and he certainly couldn’t sing. (“To listen to his singing,” Billy diagnosed, “is to have the rare pleasure of envying the deaf.”) His dancing had everything wrong with it that dancing can have and still be called dancing. And he couldn’t move around the stage without looking as though he were about to knock something over. I wondered how he’d ever managed to be a carpenter without accidentally sawing his arm off. To his credit, Arthur did look awfully handsome in his costume of a morning suit, top hat, and tails, but that’s about all I can say in his favor.

  When it became evident that Arthur couldn’t manage the role, Billy pared down the character’s lines as much as possible, to make it simpler for the poor man to get through a sentence. (For instance, Billy had changed Arthur’s opening line from “I’m your late husband’s third cousin, Barchester Headley Wentworth, the fifth earl of Addington” to “I’m your cousin from England.”) He also took away Arthur’s solo. He even took away the dance number that Arthur was meant to have with Edna as he was attempting to seduce Mrs. Alabaster.

  “Those two dance as though they’ve never been introduced,” Billy said to Peg, before finally giving up on the idea of having them dance at all. “How is it possible that they are married?”

  Edna tried to help out her husband, but he didn’t take direction well and got sputteringly offended at any efforts to refine his performance.

  “I never understand what you’re talking about, my dear, and I always will!” he snapped at her once, insensibly, when she tried to explain the difference between stage right and stage left for the dozenth time.

  The thing that drove us the craziest was that Arthur could not stop himself from whistling along with the music coming from the orchestra pit—even when he was on stage, and in character. Nobody could get him to stop.

  One afternoon, Billy finally shouted, “Arthur! Your character can’t hear that music! It’s the theme from the goddamn overture!”

  “Of course I can hear it!” Arthur protested. “The bloody musicians are right there!”

  This had caused the exasperated Billy to go on a long rant about the difference in theater between diagetic music (which the characters onstage can hear), and non-diagetic music (which only the audience can hear).

  “Talk English!” Arthur had demanded.

  So Billy tried again: “Imagine, Arthur, that you are watching a western with John Wayne in it. There is John Wayne, riding his horse all alone across a mesa, and suddenly he starts whistling along to the theme music. Do you see how ridiculous that would be?”

  “I just don’t see why a man can’t whistle these days without being attacked,” sniffed Arthur.

  (Later, I heard him ask one of the dancers, “What the devil is a mesa?”)

  I used to look at Edna and Arthur Watson and try with all my might to imagine how she coped with him.

  The only explanation I could come up with was that Edna genuinely loved beauty—and Arthur was undeniably beautiful. (He looked like Apollo, if Apollo were your neighborhood butcher—but, yes, he was beautiful.) This made a certain amount of sense, because there was nothing in Edna’s life that wasn’t beautiful. I never saw anybody who cared about aesthetics more than that woman did. I never once saw Edna that she wasn’t exquisitely put together, and I saw her at all times of the day and night. (To be the kind of woman who is perfectly kempt even at the breakfast table or in the privacy of her own bedroom requires a certain amount of labor and commitment—but that was Edna for you, always ready to put in the hours.)

  Her cosmetics were beautiful. The tiny silk drawstring purse in which she held her loose change was beautiful. The way she read her lines and sang onstage was beautiful. The way she folded her gloves was beautiful. She was both a connoisseur and a radiator of pure beauty, in all its forms.

  In fact, I think part of the reason Edna liked to have me and Celia around her so much was that we were beautiful, too. Rather than being competitive with us—as many other older women might have been—she seemed enhanced and invigorated by us. I remember one day the three of us were walking down the street together, with Edna in the middle. She suddenly clasped us each by the arm, smiled up at us, and said, “When I walk around town with the two of you towering young ladies at my side, I feel like a perfect pearl, set between two gleaming rubies.”

  It was now a week before our opening and everyone was sick. We all had the same cold, and half the gir
ls in the chorus line had pink eye from sharing the same infected cake of mascara. (The other half had crabs, from sharing their costume bottoms, which I had told them a hundred times not to do.) Peg wanted to give the performers a day off to rest up and heal, but Billy wouldn’t hear of it. He still felt that the first ten minutes of the play were “spongy”—not moving along at a brisk enough clip.

  “You haven’t got a lot of time to win over an audience, kids,” he said to the cast one afternoon as everyone was hacking their way through the opening number. “You’ve got to catch them right away. Doesn’t matter if the second act is good, if the first act is slow. People don’t come back for the second act if they hate the first one.”

  “They’re just tired, Billy,” said Peg.

  And they were tired; most of our cast was still putting on two shows a night, keeping the regular schedule of the Lily running until our big new play opened.

  “Well, comedy is hard,” said Billy. “Keeping things light is heavy work. I can’t start letting them sag now.”

  He made them do the opening number three more times that day—and each time it was a bit different and a bit worse. The chorus line braved it out, but some of the girls looked like they regretted ever having been cast.

  The theater itself had become filthy during rehearsals—filled with folding camp chairs, cigarette smoke, and paper cups containing the remnants of cold coffee. Bernadette the maid tried to keep up with it all, but there was always trash everywhere. An impressive din and reek. Everybody was cranky, everybody was snapping at each other. There was no glamour in this for anyone. Even our prettiest dancers looked dowdy in their various snoods and turbans, their faces heavy with exhaustion, their lips and cheeks chafed from their colds.

  One rainy afternoon during the final week of rehearsals, Billy ran out to pick up our sandwiches for lunch, and came back into the theater soaking wet, his arms full of soggy lunch bags.

  “Christ, how I hate New York,” he said, shaking the icy water off his jacket.