City of Girls

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  “Just out of curiosity, Billy,” Edna said, “what would you be doing right now if you were back in Hollywood?”

  “What is it, Tuesday?” Billy asked. He looked at his watch, sighed, and said, “Right now, I’d be playing tennis with Dolores del Rio.”

  “That’s nice, but didja get my smokes?” Anthony asked Billy, just as Arthur Watson peeled opened one of the sandwiches and said, “What? No bloody mustard?”—and for a moment there, I thought Billy might deck the both of them.

  Peg had taken to drinking during the day—not to the point of visible intoxication, but I noticed that she kept a flask nearby, and she would take frequent nips. Careless as I was back then about drinking, I have to admit that this alarmed even me. And there were more instances now—a few times a week—when I would find Peg blacked out in the living room amid a tumble of bottles, never having made it upstairs to bed.

  Worse, Peg’s drinking did not serve to relax her, but made her more tense. She caught me and Anthony necking in the wings once in the middle of rehearsal, and snapped at me for the first time in our acquaintance.

  “Goddamn it, Vivian, do you think you could manage for ten minutes to keep your lips off my leading man?”

  (The honest answer? No. No, I couldn’t. But still, it wasn’t characteristic of Peg to be so critical, and my feelings were hurt.)

  And then there was the day of the ticket blowout.

  Peg and Billy wanted to buy rolls of new tickets for the Lily Playhouse, to reflect the new prices. They wanted the tickets to be big and brightly colored, and to read City of Girls. Olive wanted to use our old ticket rolls (which said nothing but admission), and she also wanted to use our old ticket prices. Peg dug in, insisting, “I’m not charging the same thing for people to see Edna Parker Watson onstage that I would charge them to see one of my stupid girlie shows.”

  Olive dug in harder: “Our audiences can’t afford four dollars for an orchestra seat, and we can’t afford to print new rolls of tickets.”

  Peg: “If they can’t afford a four-dollar ticket, then they can buy a ticket in the balcony for three dollars.”

  “Our audience can’t afford that, either.”

  “Then maybe they aren’t our audience anymore, Olive. Maybe we’ll get a new audience now. Maybe we’ll get a better class of audience, just this once.”

  “We don’t serve the carriage trade,” Olive said. “We serve working people, or do I have to remind you?”

  “Well maybe the working people of this neighborhood would like to see a quality show, Olive, for once in their lives. Maybe they don’t like being treated like they are poor and tasteless. Maybe they think it would be worth it to pay a bit extra to see something good. Have you considered that?”

  The two of them had been bickering about this for days, but it all came to a head when Olive burst in on a rehearsal one afternoon—interrupting Peg while she was talking to a dancer about some confusion over blocking—and announced, “I’ve just been to the printers. It’s going to cost two hundred and fifty dollars to print the five thousand new tickets you want, and I refuse to pay it.”

  Peg spun on her heel and shouted: “Goddamn it, Olive—how much money do I have to pay you to stop talking about fucking money?”

  The whole theater fell silent. Everybody iced over, right where they stood.

  Maybe you remember, Angela, what a powerful impact the word “fuck” used to have in our society—back before everybody and their children started saying it ten times a day before breakfast. Indeed, it was once a very potent word. To hear it coming out of a respectable woman’s mouth? This was never done. Not even Celia used that word. Billy didn’t even use that word. (I used it, of course, but only in the privacy of Anthony’s brother’s bed, and only because Anthony made me say it before he would have sex with me—and I still blushed whenever I spoke it.)

  But to hear it shouted?

  I had never heard it shouted.

  It did cross my mind for a moment to wonder where my nice old Aunt Peg had ever learned such a word—although I guess if you’ve taken care of wounded soldiers on the front lines of trench warfare, you’ve probably heard everything.

  Olive stood there with the invoice in her hand. She had a distinctly slapped look about her, and it was something terrible to behold in one who was always so commanding. She put her other hand over her mouth, and her eyes filled with tears.

  In the next moment, Peg’s face went sodden with remorse.

  “Olive, I’m sorry! I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it. I’m an ass.”

  She stepped toward her secretary, but Olive shook her head and skittered away backstage. Peg ran after her. The rest of us all looked around at each other in shock. The air itself felt dead and hard.

  It was Edna who recovered first, perhaps not surprisingly.

  “My suggestion, Billy,” she said in a steady voice, “is that you ask the company to start the dance number again from the top. I believe Ruby knows where to stand now, don’t you, my dear?”

  The little dancer nodded quietly.

  “From the top?” asked Billy, a bit uncertainly. He looked more uncomfortable than I’d ever seen him before.

  “That’s correct,” Edna said, with her usual polish. “From the top. And Billy, if you could please remind the cast to keep their attention on their roles and the job at hand, that would be ideal. Let us be mindful to keep the tone light, as well. I know you are all tired, but we can do this. As you are discovering, my friends—making comedy can be hard.”

  The ticket incident might have dissolved from my memory, but for one thing.

  That night, I went to Anthony’s place as usual, ready for my standard evening fare of sensual debauchery. But his brother, Lorenzo, came home from work at the unforgivably early hour of midnight, so I had to beat it back to the Lily Playhouse, feeling more than a little frustrated and exiled. I was irritated, too, that Anthony wouldn’t walk me home—but that was Anthony for you. That boy had many sterling qualities, but gentlemanliness was not among them.

  Okay, maybe he only had one sterling quality.

  In any case, I was flustered and distracted when I arrived back at the Lily, and it’s likely that my blouse was on inside out, as well. As I climbed the stairs to the third floor, I could hear music playing. Benjamin was at the piano. He was playing “Stardust” in a melancholy way—more slowly and sweetly than I’d ever heard. Old and corny as that song was even back then, it has always been one of my favorites. I opened the door to the living room carefully, not wanting to interrupt. The only light in the room was the small lamp over the piano. There was Benjamin, playing so softly that his fingers barely touched the keys.

  And there, standing in the middle of the darkened living room, were Peg and Olive. They were dancing with each other. It was a slow sort of dance—more of a rocking embrace than anything. Olive had her face pressed against Peg’s bosom, and Peg was resting her cheek on the top of Olive’s head. They both had their eyes closed tightly. They were clinging to each other, squeezed together in a silent grip of need. Whatever world they were in—whatever era of history they were in, whatever memories they were in, whatever story they were knitting back together in the tightness of their embrace—it was very much their own world. They were somewhere together, but they were not here.

  I watched them, unable to move, and unable to comprehend what I was witnessing—while at the same time, unable to not comprehend what I was witnessing.

  After a while, Benjamin glanced over to the doorway and saw me. I don’t know how he sensed that I was there. He didn’t stop playing, and his expression didn’t change, but he kept his eyes on me. I kept my eyes on him, too—maybe looking for some kind of explanation or instruction, but none was offered. I felt pinned in the doorway by Benjamin’s gaze. There was something in his eyes that said: “You do not take another step into this room.”

  I was afraid to move, for fear of making a sound and alerting Peg and Olive to my presence. I didn’t want to em
barrass them or humiliate myself. But when I could feel that the song was ending, I had no choice: I had to slip away, or be caught.

  So I backed out and gently closed the door behind me—Benjamin’s unblinking gaze on me as he finished playing the song, watching to make sure I was good and gone before he touched the final, wistful note.

  I spent the next two hours in an all-night diner in Times Square, not sure when it would be safe to return home. I didn’t know where else to go. I couldn’t go back to Anthony’s apartment, and I still felt the power of Benjamin’s stare, warning me not to cross that threshold—not now, Vivian.

  I had never been out alone at this hour in the city, and it frightened me more than I cared to acknowledge. I didn’t know what to do, without Celia or Anthony or Peg as my guides. I still wasn’t a real New Yorker, you see. I was still a tourist. You don’t become a real New Yorker until you can manage the city alone.

  So I had gone to the most brightly lit place I could find, where a tired old waitress kept refilling my coffee cup without comment or complaint. I watched a sailor and his girl arguing in the booth across from me. They were both drunk. Their fight was about somebody named Miriam. The girl was suspicious of Miriam; the sailor was defensive about Miriam. They were both making a strong case for their respective positions. I went back and forth between believing the sailor and believing the girl. I felt like I needed to see what Miriam looked like before rendering a verdict on whether the soldier had been untrue to his sweetheart.

  Peg and Olive were lesbians?

  It couldn’t be, though. Peg was married. And Olive was . . . Olive. A sexless being if ever there was one. Olive was made of mothballs. But was there any other explanation for why those two middle-aged women were holding each other so tightly in the dark while Benjamin played the world’s saddest love song for them?

  I knew they had quarreled that day, but is this how you make up with your secretary after an argument? I hadn’t been around a lot of business concerns in my life, but that embrace didn’t seem professional. Nor did it seem like something that would happen between two friends. I slept in a bed with a woman every night—not just any woman, but one of the most beautiful women in New York—and we didn’t embrace like that.

  And if they were lesbians—well, since when? Olive had been working for Peg since the Great War. She’d met Peg before Billy did. Was this a new development or had it always been this way? Who knew about this? Did Edna know about this? Did my family know about this? Did Billy know about this?

  Certainly Benjamin knew. The only thing that had rattled him about the scene was my presence in it. Did he play the piano for them often, so they could dance? What was going on in that theater behind closed doors? And was this the real source of the constant bickering and tension between Billy and Peg and Olive? Was their underlying argument not about money or drinking or control, but about sexual competition? (My mind raced back to that day at auditions when Billy had said to Olive, “How dull it would be if you and I always had the same taste in women.”) Could Olive Thompson—she of the boxy woolen suits, and the moral sanctimony, and the thin line of a mouth—be a rival to Billy Buell?

  Could anybody be a rival to the likes of Billy Buell?

  I thought of Edna saying of Peg: “These days she wants loyalty more than fun.”

  Well, Olive was loyal. You had to give her that. And if you didn’t need to have fun, you’d come to the right place, I suppose.

  I could not parse what any of it meant.

  I walked back home around two thirty.

  I eased open the door to the living room, but nobody was there. All the lights were off. On one hand, it was as if the scene had never occurred—but at the same time, I felt that I could still see a shadow of the two women dancing in the middle of the room.

  I slipped off to bed and was awoken a few hours later by Celia’s familiar boozy warmth, crashing down next to me on the mattress.

  “Celia,” I whispered to her, once she’d settled in beside me. “I have to ask you something.”

  “Sleeping,” she said, in a gluey voice.

  I poked her, shook her, made her groan and turn over, and said louder, “Come on, Celia. This is important. Wake up. Listen to me. Is my Aunt Peg a lesbian?”

  “Does a dog bark?” Celia replied, and she was sound asleep in the very next instant.

  SIXTEEN

  From Brooks Atkinson’s review of City of Girls in The New York Times, November 30, 1940:

  If the play is destitute of veracity, it is by no means destitute of charm. The writing is quick and sharp, and the cast is nearly universally excellent. . . . But the great pleasure of City of Girls lies in the rare opportunity to witness Edna Parker Watson at work. This lauded British actress possesses a flair for the comic that one might not have expected from so illustrious a tragedienne. Watching Mrs. Watson stand aside to appraise the clown show in which her character regularly finds herself is a marvel. Her reactions are so richly humorous and subtle as to make her walk away with this delightful little piece of lampoonery tucked tidily under one arm.

  Opening night had been terrifying—and also contentious.

  Billy had stocked the audience with old friends and loudmouths, columnists and ex-girlfriends, and every publicist and critic and newspaperman he knew by name or reputation. (And he knew everyone.) Peg and Olive had both objected to this idea, and strongly.

  “I don’t know if we’re ready for that,” Peg said—sounding just like a woman who is panicked to learn that her husband has invited his boss over for dinner that night and expects a perfect meal on short notice.

  “We’d better be ready,” said Billy. “We’re opening in a week.”

  “I don’t want critics in this theater,” Olive said. “I don’t like critics. Critics can be so unsympathetic.”

  “Do you even believe in our play, Olive?” Billy asked. “Do you even like our play?”

  “No,” she replied. “Except in spots.”

  “I cannot resist asking, though I know I’ll regret it—which spots?”

  Olive thought carefully. “I might somewhat enjoy the overture.”

  Billy rolled his eyes. “You’re a living tribulation, Olive.” Then he turned his attention to Peg. “We’ve got to take the risk, honey. We’ve got to spread the word. I don’t want the only important person in the audience that first night to be me.”

  “Give us a week at least to work out the kinks,” said Peg.

  “It doesn’t make any difference, Pegsy. If the show is a bomb, it’ll still be a bomb in a week, kinks or no. So let’s find out right away whether we’ve wasted all our time and money, or not. We need big gravy people in the audience, or it’ll never work. We need them to love it, and we need them to tell their friends to come and see it, and that’s how the ball rolls. Olive won’t let me spend money to advertise, so we need to ballyhoo the hell out of this thing. The sooner we start selling out every seat in the house, the sooner Olive will stop looking at me like I’m a murderer—and we can’t sell out every seat in this house unless people know we’re here.”

  “I think it’s vulgar to invite one’s social friends to one’s place of work,” said Olive, “and then expect them to provide free publicity.”

  “Then how do you aim for us to alert people to the fact that we have a show, Olive? Would you like me to stand on the street corner in a sandwich board?”

  Olive looked as though she wouldn’t be against it.

  “As long as the sign doesn’t say THE END IS NEAR,” said Peg, who did not seem certain that it wasn’t.

  “Pegsy,” said Billy, “where’s your confidence? This mule kicks. You know it does. You know this show is good. You can feel it in your belly, just like I do.”

  But Peg was still uneasy. “So many times over the years you have told me that I was feeling something in my belly. And usually the only thing I was feeling was the unsettling sensation of having just lost my wallet.”

  “I’m about to stuff your wal
let, lady,” said Billy. “Just you watch me do it.”

  From Heywood Broun, writing in the New York Post:

  Edna Parker Watson has long been a gem of the British stage, but after watching City of Girls, one wishes she had come to brighten our shores sooner. What might have been seen as a mere curio transforms into a memorable night of theater, thanks to Mrs. Watson’s rare understanding and wit, as she portrays a down-on-her-luck society doyenne who must turn bordello madam in order to save the family mansion. . . . Benjamin Wilson’s songs crackle with delight, and the dancers are brilliantly ascending. . . . Newcomer Anthony Roccella smolders as a flashy urban Romeo, and Celia Ray’s distracting carnality gives the show an overall adult savor.

  In the last few days before opening night, Billy spent money like crazy—even crazier than usual. He brought in two Norwegian masseuses for our dancers and stars. (Peg was appalled by the expense, but Billy said, “We do it in Hollywood all the time, with your jumpier stars. You’ll see—it calms them right down.”) He had a doctor come to the Lily Playhouse and give everyone vitamin shots. He told Bernadette to bring in every cousin she’d ever had—and their kids, too—to clean that theater until it was unrecognizable. He hired men from the neighborhood to hose down the façade of the Lily, and to make sure every lightbulb in the big electric sign was firing at full blaze, and he put new gels on all the stage lighting, as well.

  For the final dress rehearsal, he brought in catering from Toots Shor’s—caviar, smoked fish, finger sandwiches, the works. He hired a photographer to take publicity photos of the cast in full costume. He filled the lobby with large sprays of orchids, which probably cost more than my first semester at college (and was probably a better investment, too). He brought in a facialist, a manicurist, and a makeup artist for Edna and Celia.

  On the day of our opening, he wrangled up some kids and unemployed men from the neighborhood, and hired them (at fifty cents a pop, which was a pretty good wage, for the kids, at least) to mill about outside the theater, giving the impression that something tremendously exciting was about to happen. He hired the kid with the loudest mouth to keep shouting, “Sold out! Sold out! Sold out!”