Girl Unwrapped (32 page)

“This new breed of girls that comes around, they’re so vague.” Renée waves her hand dismissively. “Not one thing or another, neither ladies nor gentlemen, something in-between. A bunch of ‘its.’ What are they here for? Are they for real or just tourists? I like to know who I’m dealing with when I come to the club.” She regards Toni with disapproval from beneath long black lashes and purple-powdered lids.

Stung, Toni is about to retort in anger, but a warning gleam in Juanita’s eyes keeps her quiet.

“Don’t take what my better half here says too personally,” Rhonda pipes up. “The little lady gets upset, and I don’t blame her. We’re sick of those women’s libbers. They want everyone to look the same. They don’t talk to us, you know.” She indicates an earnest circle of women near the bar. “We’ve all been living the life for years. That crowd more or less just got here, like you, but they act like they own the place. They go to the university, so they must know it all. But hey, maybe you’d rather be with them. Go where you please. Don’t feel obliged.”

Toni has no desire to join the college girls, whose backs seem pointedly turned against Juanita’s corner and who seem as snooty as Rhonda suggests. A beer is coursing pleasantly through her veins. Her table mates are unlike any people she has ever met: exotic and strange and thus thrillingly beyond the bounds of ordinary judgement.

“I’ve never been here before,” Toni says, sliding carefully past Rhonda’s last comment. “So I didn’t know what to wear. If I had a suit like Juanita’s, I’d wear that.”

A cheer goes up at her table. Juanita slaps her on the back. When they ask whether she has a job, she says she’s a store clerk, doesn’t mention it’s a bookstore or that she’s been accepted for the fall term at McGill. A fresh round of beers and a cocktail for Renée appears on the table, ordered by Juanita. Toni tries to whip out her wallet to pay, but Maggie pushes her hand down.

“Watch yourself, kiddo. Don’t insult Juanita. You’ve been lucky so far.”

Toni buys the next round. The night wears on, heats up, as girls take to the dance floor. Arms entwine, foreheads touch, lovers gaze deep into one another’s eyes. Toni focuses on the beer bottle in her hand to keep from staring too obviously through the smoke haze at the sensuous scene. Juanita winks and leans toward Toni in a brotherly fashion to point out characters and explain the ropes, her voice low and confiding.

“Rick there, she grew up in the bars, was a bodybuilder once, tough as nails. She knows her business, how to keep out the creeps, how to make the crime bosses happy, how to handle the cops. They don’t raid like they used to, but still, Rick wasn’t shitting you, you’re underage, and so are half of the ladies in this establishment. Anyway, them cops don’t need no excuses. They can walk in here anytime, wham, lights go on, everybody who doesn’t skip out the back door gets hauled off in the paddy wagon. Nine times out of ten, no charges, but you’ve spent the night in the slammer anyway with those pigs jeering and feeling you up. But, like I said, Rick takes care of us. She can sniff out a spook a mile away. If the lights flicker on and off, that’s the signal. You dive for the back door, or if you can’t, at least make sure to let go of the girl you’re dancing with. Now, about the no-jeans rule, that’s to keep the place classy. Some of our kind can be tough customers and Rick, she likes a nice clean club. No fights, no drugs. You want to do hippie drugs, you go out into the alley. Act in a way Rick doesn’t like and, believe me, she’ll take you by the scruff of your neck and fire you out on your ass.

“Renée doesn’t know what you are, but I spotted you right off for butch. You’ll be fine. Have yourself a girl in no time. See that knockout blonde in the silver dress? She’s a stripper at Babylon’s and a little more besides. We were an item once, but I stay away from rough trade now. Not worth the hassles. Every woman’s beautiful when you get her clothes off. Women are easy. Want to know a secret? Straight women are easier. I’ve had dozens—factory girls, secretaries, horny housewives.”

“Don’t believe a word she’s telling you. She’s a fucking liar,” Maggie slurs, having returned from a trip to the toilet and a fruitless cruise around the room. Her face is flushed and sweat gleams along the edges of her close-cropped mop of curls.

But Toni does believe—because of Juanita’s suave ducktail, her hawk’s-beak nose, her smooth, easy manner, and her hands, most of all her hands, which are strong, well-manicured, a subtle blend of male and female, and full of knowledge. These are hands that have held a dozen manual jobs, brushed sweat off the flanks of racehorses, wielded brooms and rakes, guided taxis through snowstorms, and, with the same light, sure touch, unzipped the backs of numberless gowns. Toni would give her life-blood to possess such hands.

When a waltz plays on the juke box, Rhonda and Renée get up to take a turn. Renée, whose natural stance is to be thrust forward because of her hump, rests her chin on Rhonda’s shoulder and presses her ample bosom up against her partner’s flat chest. Looked at from a certain perspective, they could appear as caricatures, but Toni feels the heat between them, sees the bold tenderness with which Rhonda caresses her lover’s deformity, how they exchange sly smiles and nestle closer together, as if the bony protrusion at the top of Renée’s spine were a secret erogenous zone. Embracing couples float through clouds of blue smoke. Elvis croons from the juke box. Normally, his saccharine voice would give Toni the creeps, but now it’s part of the charming scene, of the melancholy and longing that flows through her.

In the ladies room, she encounters a drunk Maggie, who manages to reach up and plant a beery kiss on Toni’s mouth before Toni can push her away.

“Aw, sorry, honey, sorry. I’m terrible, I know. Bet you wish you never came through that door.”

In mid-apology, Maggie again gropes for Toni’s waist and is again rebuffed, more roughly this time.

“Lay off,” Toni mutters, but adds, “I’m glad I came.”

She is less offended by the kiss than she would have thought. Maggie’s lips were surprisingly gentle. And despite the older woman’s lumbering drunkenness, there’s dignity along with the mischief in her eyes. Toni decides she would happily endure a hundred such clumsy come-ons for another night of magic at Loulou’s.

chapter 25

The club has become her beacon through the long, grey week. During the hours in which she dusts shelves, sorts books, writes out receipts, Toni dreams of women brushing hips in a smoky room. On Saturday nights, she drives down to the dimly lit area around Loulou’s and finds a dark side street on which to park. Crouching low, she changes into the button-down shirt and herringbone blazer she bought at the men’s wear department at Ogilvie’s. Around her neck she knots a wine-coloured tie. A peaked black leather cap completes the outfit. Then she dashes through the frigid air to the door beneath the stairs. A quick tap-tap and she’s welcomed into the warmth and laughter, the embrace of that throbbing, hidden world. As she leans against a pillar by the bar and scans the scene for faces new and familiar, she feels her shoulders broaden, her body stretch to its full imposing height. All week long she’s been a muted, grubbing Cinderella. Here, at last, she can be a prince.

Juanita’s gang hails her and she strides forward, proud to be loyal to the old guard at the club and to be considered under Juanita’s tutelage.

“When you’re interested in a lady,” Juanita says “you have a drink delivered to her table and then, when she turns to see who it is, you nod. Don’t grin like an idiot. Give her a look, like James Dean, steamy and cool at the same time. When you dance, you lead, right? You’re the gent. Don’t forget that for a second or it breaks the spell. Once you get her home, you’ll be fine, little brother. Had my first when I was fifteen. She was an older woman, married. We fucked all night while her husband lay drunk on the floor.”

Just the word “woman” coming from Juanita’s mouth, flavoured with her Spanish accent (
woo-mun
), conjures up delectable visions; Marilyn Monroe blowing kisses or Sophia Loren, hot-eyed, full-lipped, from the film
Marriage Italian Style
. Juanita’s ease in tough streets, the hint of hard knocks in her past fills Toni with envy. How perfect to live for the moment, nothing but the moment, with that earthy, essential élan of the prol.

A few weeks after her first appearance at Loulou’s, the story comes out that Toni’s Jewish. A chill falls over the table.

“Little rich kid, eh? Shoulda known,” Maggie says, narrowing her eyes. “She’s come down our way to slum.”

“I’m not rich,” Toni says fiercely, while realizing a truth she’s known all along—she’s of a different class. They would regard her home in Snowdon, her university savings fund in the bank, even her job in a Park Avenue bookstore with suspicion. Maggie and Rhonda are factory workers, Renée waits on tables in a diner, Juanita is on the dole. Her last job was in the stables at Blue Bonnet’s race track. Until now, no one has asked Toni about her background. It’s understood Loulou’s is where you leave the outside world behind. And so it would have remained if she hadn’t opened her big mouth to boast about the beautiful girls of Jerusalem.

“Goldblatt, hmm,” Renée muses. “Jews always have names with gold and silver in them.” The big boss at the shirt factory Rhonda works in happens to be a Mr Silverstone. There’s no malice in Renée’s voice. She’s quite unaware of the nonsense she’s spouting, and so Toni sits flummoxed. Juanita rubs her chin thoughtfully and says nothing.

“I have to work. My mother has to work,” Toni says doggedly, then adds, “We don’t go to synagogue or anything like that.”

Instantly her face flames as if her blood is in revolt against her words. The last time she tried to make her Jewishness less offensive to others was when she was a kid playing with her gang. In those days too, “Jewish” was an accusation, though of nothing specific. Toni would use the line about not being religious to prove she wasn’t like those Nutkevitch girls. They were the real Jews. A sick feeling rises in her throat.

“I was born Jewish, and I ain’t ashamed of how I was born,” she says, with a defiant thump of her fist on the table, while a nervous inner voice sneers,
Oh yeah? Since when do you use words like ‘ain’t’?

But Juanita breaks out in a husky “bravo!” She claps her hands slowly. “We’re none of us ashamed of how we’re born, eh, ladies?”

Everyone nods and the subject is changed, though the tightness in Toni’s throat remains. Her new companions are at ease with bald, ignorant assertions. A term her mother would use springs to Toni’s mind. They are
primitive.
Gaily, innocently so. Sooner or later the masks must fall. She pushes these thoughts away, grateful when Juanita leans over and points out a pretty, long-legged woman in a short skirt, seated alone at the bar.

“That’s Marie. She’s on the loose. Broke up with her lover. Go for her before someone else does.”

“Don’t you want her yourself?”

“Ha! Don’t worry about me. I got other fish to fry.”

So Toni leaps from her seat before she can lose her nerve, and swaggers off to the bar, conscious of all the spectators appraising her performance.

“Manhattan for the lady, please,” Toni tells the bartender. She straightens her tie and makes her approach.

“Hi, doll. Don’t think I’ve ever seen you here before,” Toni says in her deepest, most suave voice. There’s an empty chair beside Marie, but Toni doesn’t sit. Instead she leans forward, as she’s been coached, elbow on the bar, biceps flexed. Cool and steamy. She whips out a pack of cigarettes from her pocket and taps the pack so that one fag is thrust forward like a finger extended:
take me
. Marie helps herself, her lips curling slowly upward. She’s an older woman, thirty at least, with sad eyes, a smirking mouth shiny with lipstick, and a long, willowy body. Amazingly, she seems happy to see Toni turn up. Soon they’re on the dance floor, swaying to a hot new number by the Supremes. When a slow song starts, Marie tugs on Toni’s tie to pull her close. Applause and wolf whistles erupt from the table in the back.

“I like my partners tall,” Marie sighs in Toni’s ear.

She smells of patchouli and vermouth. When her bosom meets Toni’s dead on, a wave of heat floods Toni’s groin. Her head swims, her knees are mush, but she tries not to give anything away. After a few more dances, she drives Marie home to an apartment building just east of downtown. In the flickering light of the elevator, Marie’s lips are the luscious colour of plums. The polished steel wall behind them mirrors two romantic figures, one in a close-fitting feminine coat, the other in a jacket and rakish cap. Marie’s nyloned knees brush against Toni’s legs just as the elevator door purrs open on a long, dimly lit corridor. Toni staggers out, follows Marie down the hall. Marie smirks and fishes in her purse for her key. And then the air grows thick. The knot of Toni’s tie presses against her throat. She feels a rush of absurdity and sordidness. Instead of Marie’s eyes, she sees Janet’s—haunted, miserable, shocked, accusing—the way they looked out at Toni that morning after the night of disastrous gropings. It’s one thing to play the game at Loulou’s, to wear the uniform, perform the moves, evoke cheers from her buddies, another thing to contemplate being naked with a stranger. Two strangers actually: the one she’s taken home, the other within her own skin.

Who am I? Neither male nor female, neither fish nor fowl. Outside
God’s creation. Not even the tiniest twig on the evolutionary tree. An
unclean spirit. An It.

“I gotta go. It’s not you, you’re beautiful but … I … ” Toni searches for an excuse. “There’s someone waiting,” she mumbles lamely.

She bolts for the emergency stairs.

“You two-timing fucker!” she hears Marie shout at her retreating back.

Tiptoeing in sock feet into the house, Toni encounters her mother in the corridor. Dark circles like bruises lie beneath Lisa’s eyes. She clutches her housecoat to her throat and shivers with the March cold that Toni’s brought in through the door. Or perhaps what makes her tremble are the forebodings and haunted dreams that assailed her during the long hours in the empty apartment.