Why should St. Cyr get to plant herself here in Vegas and rake in all the profits when I knew Nate could somehow make her contract with the El Rancho—or any other hotel here—disappear and make a contract with my name on it appear in its place. I wasn’t going to be on Nate Stein’s arm forever, if his marital history was any indication, which was exactly why the shade of Benny Siegel had shaken his head at me so sorrowfully. But while I was still gripping his coat sleeve, I could make use of my position.
“Tell me what you want,” Nate was always saying to me. “Tell me what I can give you.”
Until now, I had nothing to ask for.
So when the curtains closed on St. Cyr, I turned to Nate. Maybe it was the champagne. Maybe it was the memory of my mother’s sigh. But I said to him, “I want to do that.”
He blinked at me. What?
I wanted that second gig. With any luck, it would soon be my only.
He didn’t like it. But Nate nodded. “Okay, E.”
Done. Simple as that.
35
My father and I drove over to the brand-new Las Vegas Jockey Club racetrack northeast of the Strip on its opening day in early September just to see the clubhouse, the concourse, the grandstand, all of which I thought we had left behind forever when we left our old Hollywood Park racetrack in Inglewood. Just the sight of the new track going up in the distance had made me homesick for the green-and-black tile of our old concourse, the low-fenced paddock with its saturated green grass where the horses were shown off, up close, a few feet from your hand, before they were led down to the track itself, the old-school oil paintings of horses and jockeys, never of bettors or owners, hung everywhere on the concourse walls, the betting windows that received and delivered the money that drove this whole endeavor. The track’s buildings here had been painted a dusty pink, in homage to the famous Hipódromo Rosado racetrack in Buenos Aires, minus the ornate flourishes of its Spanish colonial style or the high-flying Argentinian flag. Like everything else built out here in the desert, we wanted it modern, concrete, clean-lined.
It was hot, of course, because it was September in the desert, 97 degrees, the heat made worse by some bottleneck of a snarl at the parking lot gate, which created a backup of cars that stretched from that misbegotten entrance all the way down to the street and beyond. Nothing was moving, and the survival instinct soon had people climbing from their cars to fan themselves with whatever they had at hand— newspapers, hats, I saw one woman flapping a child’s diaper—and as the minutes crept by, plenty of those cars turned around and headed home. But it had been a long time since my father and I had gone to the track, and apparently we had both missed it, and so we were determined to wait, getting in and out of our Cadillac, standing beside it and fanning ourselves with paper maps of California and Nevada we unfolded from the glove compartment, and then jumping back into the car any time there was an opportunity to roll forward a few feet. Yes! We were ridiculously grateful for those few feet!
Eventually, people began walking up the drive, having abandoned their cars at the side of the road, a road we could no longer see, but we were too far up the drive to do that and so we were trapped, inching forward, my father cursing the goddamn miserable heat. And it was true—the heat was terrible, no breeze, just that desert sun like a giant atomic ball of fire in the sky, and while I flapped my paper map and climbed in and out of the car, I worried about the horses who had to race in this heat, just as I had worried about the horses at Hollywood Park during the big Los Angeles rain of 1938, when I’d imagined them swimming, panicked, as the water rose, lifting them from their stables, the swell carrying them up to the Turf Club heights where they’d never been. In this heat, though, the horses wouldn’t swim, they’d suffocate instead their stables, stroke out before they came anywhere near the finish line.
And some beautiful Thoroughbreds had been trucked out here to the desert from the balmy, oceanfront Del Mar track to run, prizewinners, horses like Lefty James and Blue Reading, and with them came star jockeys like Tony DeSpirito. Old habit. I still followed the races, quietly, easy enough to do out here, with all the sports books. I wondered if my father did, too. We didn’t talk together about the horses anymore.
Once we had finally parked, waved in by one of the sweaty, exhausted uniformed attendants who looked as if they’d been beaten up and probably had been, having fielded a multitude of curses thrown at them by the attendees, curses that could batter you as much as a punch, and once we had gone inside to wander the concourse, to inspect the paddock and the track and its green infield, which did not host a flock of Inglewood flamingoes or any birds at all, for that matter, I opened up my purse. But my father told me, “I don’t want to bet today, baby girl. Let’s just watch the horses run.”
My father didn’t want to lay a bet? He never passed up a chance to put down a dollar or two or twenty. I stared at him. He took off his fedora and wiped at his face with his white cotton handkerchief, monogrammed IS, black thread against the white. His face was lined now, I saw suddenly and too clearly, as he passed the handkerchief across it. Two deep grooves had impressed themselves into his flesh, the grooves running from the sides of his nose to the corners of his mouth, and the flesh around his mouth and jowls had thickened, perhaps in response. And sometime over the past six years, his hairline had gradually receded both left and right so that now only a peninsula of dark hair remained up top. Why hadn’t I noticed this before? Because I rarely saw him by daylight? He put his hat on. I looked down at my hands. Okay. So he didn’t want to bet. Because today he was not Magic Ike, Lucky Ike. Or maybe it was because if we’d learned anything from our years in Vegas, from all that my father had seen on the casino floors and in their counting rooms, it was that the house always wins and that everything was a fix.
And today at this track, not only was everything a fix, but also everything was a mess—and not just the parking. Even before the first race, the tote board bearing the odds broke down, its glowing white numbers blinking, vanishing, reappearing, flickering, and then gone for good, and the crowd on the concourse let out a collective moan. While my father went off to buy us hot dogs to take down to the grandstand (my old job!), the machines at some of the betting windows went on the fritz, and I watched as all the high rollers in their summer suits scurried to stand in line with the common man at the one-dollar windows, the big daddies with rolls of fifties and hundreds in their fat impatient hands chockablock by the low rollers with a jumble of coins in theirs.
My father laughed when I reported this to him, back with our tray of dogs, still served in fluted paper, I saw—at least that was the same—and we went all the way down to the first row of the grandstand to sit, careful to stay beneath the shade offered by the enormous concrete overhang. It was like sitting in a hot cement cavern. I could see the open standing room area right by the fence, where, when I was so little and so eager to please, I had stooped for those breeze-driven discarded tickets, my tangled hair flying while I said my little prayer, “Please God of the Horses, please God of the Horses.” I hadn’t changed much, even if today I wouldn’t be stooping. I was still praying for luck of some kind for my father and me.
I looked behind us. The grandstand was only half-filled, if that. Apparently, no one wanted to leave the casinos to waste an afternoon here. Race after race with lulls in between could chew their way through your whole afternoon. You could throw the dice thirty times during the wait between races, another few times during them, which was why Lansky and company had little interest in supporting this track, which had other investors, or in bailing it out when it failed. So there would be little roar of the crowd today, which had beat in my ears as a child in Inglewood.
My father and I bent over our hot dogs in the still heat, waiting for the bugler’s trilling call that signaled the starting time of the first race. And we waited for the announcement, “The horses are on the track. The horses are on the track,” in from the paddock, led toward the gates, both the Thoroughbreds and the
ir stablemates, the latter to calm the nerves of the former. Which was I of our odd pairing, racehorse or stablemate?
My father ate quickly, hungrily, in a hurry, dropping his fluted papers to the ground as soon as he was done, and then he lit up one of his Chesterfields, adding heat to the heat. He seemed troubled, on edge, even though our outing was supposed to be a lark, a slice of the sweet cake of our past.
He dropped his cigarette butt on the ground, put his heel on it, lit another, and he didn’t look at me when he finally spoke. “When we came out here, Esme, it didn’t even occur to me to worry about what would become of you, what there was for you here. You were such a little girl.”
I widened my eyes at him when he turned his face toward mine.
He was going to lecture me about my burlesque act, again, the act I had already begun rehearsing. He had been unhappy with even the prospect of my act, saying when I first told him about it, “I don’t know why you want to do this, baby girl.” Baby girl. Exactly what I didn’t want to be any longer, with its concomitant powerlessness. I was tired of being Baby E, baby girl, baby doll. He, jostling among all those big boys, should be able to understand that. “Why can’t you just go on being a showgirl?” he’d said, which he hadn’t been happy about, either, if I remembered correctly, back when I first put on my pink feathered costume at the Flamingo. When I told him, “I’m still a showgirl, I’m just a solo act now,” he pulled a face at me. But I knew he’d eventually come around. My act wasn’t all that much different from what my mother had confected for the Clover.
But it would take time. Because now what he said was, “Don’t do it, Esme. It’s not going to turn out like you think.”
And from the look on his face, I could tell he didn’t think it was going to turn out well, and that what came after this would not be any better than what I was serving up for myself right now. Worse, probably. In his mind, worse definitely. Harold Minsky’s bump-and-grind worse.
“I’m going to be a headliner, Dad.” Something I’d said, oh, roughly a hundred times to him already.
But he just shook his head at this as if I were a big fool. “Tell me. Have you been happy here in Vegas?”
I shrugged. Unanswerable.
“Because you know what I’ve been thinking about? I’ve been thinking this place is a lot like Hollywood. You give the big boys everything you’ve got, and they make their money off your back or your brains or your looks or your talent and then one day, they’re done with you. Boom. You’re out. Used up.”
He gestured. It seemed to me that he wanted to say something further. But he didn’t.
Instead he just stood and stretched, the backs of his trouser legs damp and wrinkled. I looked up at him, at the back of his head, his creased jacket, his hat, the way I had looked up long ago at all those men holding their tickets while they rushed the fence, shouting, “C’mon, daddy, c’mon, daddy,” before they threw down those tickets, time up on their thirty minutes of value. Over. Gone.
Too late for us to get back in the gate now.
The bugle sounded.
My father looked down at me. “Let’s go stand by the fence, baby girl. Like old times.”
And he held out his hand.
We left after two races. The track lost money that day. And the next. And the next. Then it closed for two weeks to fix the erratic tote board and the broken betting machines. It opened again, briefly, in October, then closed. For good, it seemed. The horses had run for thirteen days.
36
Nate stood right behind me, whispering to me in the wings as the club slowly darkened, his voice a sound meant to reassure me, but I couldn’t distinguish his words over the buzz in my own ears and the ambient noise out front—the chalky murmur of the patrons, the chime of the silverware, the slow beat of the jazz music because there always had to be music, something singing alongside the eating and the drinking and the unfolding of menus. I could feel Nate’s hands at my ribs and my thigh and the crisp cuff of his tuxedo sleeves against my bare arms. My ears and wrists and neck were heavy with glass and paste jewels, I was suffocating, my long hair fashioned into a helmet so stiff with hairspray—because Nate did not want anyone to see my hair—it almost bent my neck with its weight. How had my mother made her transition from the closed soundstage of the studio to the live stage of a Sunset Strip club? From chorine to solo act? I wished I could ask her. I wished I could be a Donn Arden dancer again, one of a dozen girls, having just finished my last show, peeling off my eyelashes and wiping at my Pan-Cake with a cotton ball.
I should have listened to my father.
At dress rehearsal this afternoon, I had needed oxygen. Nate himself had sprung up from his table on the floor to wheel the tank out from the wings, handing me the rubber mask and pulling the elastic bands secure at the back of my head, pushing my coiffure up into a poof, Ah, his face a raisin of concern. “E, you okay?” And at that rehearsal Nate and my band and my dresser had been the only ones there, a tiny attendant audience but one before which I had felt so unbearably naked. And now, tonight, I would be revealing myself before hundreds of eyes. What would happen when I was out there on the small stage that suddenly seemed so vast? I’d probably need two tanks of oxygen. A trucker tank full.
The anticipation of the audience began huffing and pawing at me now through the closed curtains. Interest in my act had drawn a herd of my former colleagues. So the eyes out there weren’t entirely anonymous. Or friendly. They belonged to some of my old sisters at the Fabulous Flamingo, to my envious current fellow Arden dancers, to Donn Arden himself, all high forehead and greased hair and pissed-off expression because I’d told him I wanted to choreograph my act myself, why did I need him telling me what to do?, even to some of the celebrity headliners at the various hotels, because Vegas was suddenly exploding now, in the early fifties, with entertainers like Frank Sinatra and Milton Berle and Vic Damone and Red Skelton and Rosemary Clooney and Eddie Fisher all on the Strip all at once, and when they finished their own gigs, they headed out to the other clubs and lounges to see who was doing what at 2:00 a.m. and no one went to bed until the sun had bleached the neon to a pathetic pallor.
The one person who wasn’t here tonight, by mutual agreement, was my father.
My cue.
Nate squeezed, then kissed, my gloved hand.
When the curtains opened, and when, as I had to, I left the wings behind, it seemed my spirit left my body, as well. My fear was so acute it was as if some part of me was looking down at myself from the catwalk, where I could see myself moving out into the black-and-white flickering light, could see that white train, that blond head of hair, those arms and legs, that torso and those breasts, which the audience would eventually get to see but not for long, and for Nate, that brevity was important, because my body, like my long blond hair, belonged to him and he wanted to ensure that only he would ever fully see it.
But on this stage my body was not really his anymore nor was it entirely my own—it was a tool, separate from me, an object I manipulated to entertain. The audience was a necessity—I could feel it out there, a large, warm mass—and so was the stage that separated me from it, and both the crowd’s size and anonymity and my distance from it offered me a privacy I hadn’t felt at my dress rehearsal, privacy and the freedom of display.
For my debut, we decided for reasons of economy to keep the stage almost bare. What we lacked in props, we’d make up for in daring. And, after all, I, not the stage set, was the show. So for me, a soft dark of twinkling lights suggesting a winter evening, early dusk, winking stars, and a man-size fan in the wings blowing my winter wind. As I crossed the stage, my long white satin gown with its chiffon train no longer than the gown’s hem lifted behind me as if a child’s hands carried it. After my quiet parade through this suggestion of a windy winter landscape, I stepped into the suggestion of an interior, just three hinged flats paned with glass and a single armchair.
Behind the small panes illuminated snowflakes fell, or were made to
seem to do so, and the little bulbs above me flickered quietly, starlight now made candlelight, and the music flickered quietly in concert. I slowly unbuttoned my gloves, unhooked my train and laid all three over the back of the chair, and turned to my invisible lover, my partner in all this, who now bid me to undress further for him, this private moment enacted in a public venue. I lowered my head obediently, looking for his direction and approval as I progressed, slowly, shyly, until I stood garbed only in undergarments, the brassiere and corset and garters, massive and impenetrable contraptions of elasticized fabric, and yet, as undergarments and despite the coverage they offered, still agents of the erotic. And I could feel that the audience was as torn as I had been that night at the El Rancho, by the exquisite tension between the degradation of the performer’s self-exposure and the power of her absolute command. She could not lose the latter. The audience wanted both on display, simultaneously.
Under these glimmering lights, what Nate and I had once kept private between us, the only sexual experience I had, was about to be as unmistakably revealed as my flesh. Beneath my chiffon train, I freed myself first from one undergarment and then another. The most difficult part of this whole undertaking was to make these maneuvers look graceful—no wonder St. Cyr had used a standing screen for the final part of her act—but I wanted this opaque cloth to suggest my desire for my lover’s body against mine. Disrobing this way was difficult to do despite the innovations of my costume designer and the tape that replaced the usual hooks and eyes and snaps. When I stood, finally, in profile, draped only in the soft, translucent material of the train, I offered to my lover and to my audience an obscured view of my naked flesh.
The Magnificent Esme Wells Page 20
