Listening to Billie

Billie is late—of course, she is always late—but the crowd in this small packed room is not resigned: people are restless, and tense. There is a lot of lighting of cigarettes, looking at watches, loud orders for more drinks. And there are scattered rumors: she’s sick, she’s not coming, been in a wreck—she’s just phoned to say she’ll be there in ten minutes. And eerily, throughout all that waiting for Billie, on the huge and garish jukebox one of her records is playing; from out of all that poison-colored neon tubing Billie’s beautiful, rich and lonely voice is singing, “I cover the waterfront, I’m watching the sea—”

And then suddenly she is there, and everybody knows, and they crane their heads backward to see her, since she has come in by the street entrance like anyone else. Or, not like anyone else at all: she is more beautiful, more shining, holding her face forward like a flower, bright-eyed and smiling, high yellow cheekbones, white teeth and cream-white gardenia at her ear. She is wearing a big fur coat, and behind her is a slouch-hatted man with a huge dog, a Dane, that is straining on a leash. The man has a bandage on his hand: he is Billie’s manager, and the dog, Billie’s dog, bit him on the hand on the way to the show, and that is why they are late.

With a wonderful gesture Billie throws her coat down on the stage, and for a moment she stands there in the spotlight,
mouthing the words that are coming from the jukebox—“Will the one I love, be coming back to me?”—as everyone laughs and screams and applauds.

Somewhere in that audience, probably up near the front, is a very young and pretty small girl, who is not paying much attention to Billie. Eliza Hamilton, with long smooth blond hair that curls suddenly at the ends, and dark blue eyes. She has serious and obsessive problems of her own: is she pregnant? Her heavy breasts are heavier, and sore. And if she is pregnant, what should she do? Should she marry Evan Quarles, the paler blond and sad, Deep Southern young man at her right? He would like them to marry, and that is strange: Eliza knows that she is more in love than he is, but it is he who urges marriage. He is deeply disturbing, mysterious to her; she is both excited and obscurely alarmed by Evan—is that “in love”? He wants them to marry. He has a teaching job for next fall at a small boys’ school. Raleigh, in New Hampshire. Now she looks at Evan with a mixture of enmity and curiosity: who
is
he?

Eliza is barely listening to Billie, who now, with her small combo in the background, is singing, “Once they called it jazztime, to a buck and wing—”

Singing, swinging it out.

But Eliza retained that scene of Billie’s entrance, and Billie singing. (Singing what? What was she wearing?) She kept it somewhere in her mind; she brought it out and stared at it as she might a stone, something opalescent. At times she wondered how much of it she had imagined. She was a somewhat literary girl, who occasionally wrote poems, although she never finished them, and she did not take this occupation seriously, not yet. For one thing, she felt that she was not the right shape for a poet; a poet, a woman poet, should be tall and thin, like her mother, Josephine, who was a successful writer—powerful, impressive, really formidable—but not a poet. I am too small and round to be a poet, Eliza thought, and of that she thought, Ridiculous!

•  •  •

Should she have an abortion? Who would know a doctor who would do it? Who would pay for it? Not Evan, and certainly not Josephine; she could never even tell Josephine.

But even in the midst of such frenzied speculations, Eliza is aware that this evening—these hours—are important; she
knows
she will remember. And she thinks of the following Monday, when she will be back in Connecticut, in school, and she will tell her friends about seeing Billie—how beautiful she was, her voice. How Evan Quarles, the interesting older man, took her to Fifty-second Street to hear Billie Holiday. She will not tell any friend that she might be pregnant.

Billie has stopped singing, left the stage, and Evan says, “I’d buy you a gardenia if I weren’t allergic to them.” He laughs ambiguously, and he waves away the haggard, spike-lashed woman with the tray of corsages—gardenias, wilting rosebuds. “You haven’t finished your drink,” he says. “Drink up. God knows they’re weak enough.”

Will he want to make love later? Will he take her back to his place, on Horatio Street, in the Village? Eliza can’t be sure of anything with Evan. She gulps at her drink obediently.

Evan gestures that the room is too noisy for conversation. True enough, but is he not having a good time?

Eliza looks around at all the other talking people, and she suddenly perceives, feels, that there is an extraordinary number of handsome young men, all strangers, all unexplored and possible. She looks at them intently, the gray flannel suits or tweed coats, the young male faces, some still with summer tans—and so
attractive
, all of them. Aware of her own look, its intentness, she wonders what message she is delivering: is she somehow inviting them, or saying goodbye, as she would to other men if she should marry? And if she should not be pregnant, will she meet one of these new young men months later, and together will they remember hearing, seeing Billie? Will that happen?

Then Eliza notices that the young woman at the next table is heavily pregnant, so huge she must sit back in her chair. Eliza’s spirits sink, her fantasy vanishes. She recognizes that young woman as an omen, a terrible sign: she, Eliza,
is
pregnant.

Most of Evan’s friends lived near him in the Village, around Abingdon Square, West Fourteenth Street. Young men recently down from Harvard or Yale—a few from Princeton, Evan’s school. Some had graduated, a surprising number had been expelled—it was never quite clear for what.

They worked in publishing, or on magazines. They were all vaguely “literary.” They “wrote.” All except Evan, who wanted to give up all that; he was serious about teaching. They were fond of Twenties’ fiction, Thirties’ poets. Firbank and Fitzgerald, Auden and Isherwood and Spender. They were also fond of veiled jokes about “boys who like boys,” and their code words for that condition, thanks to Senator McCarthy, were “Security Risk.” “Do you think he could be a Security Risk?” “Well, it’s not unlikely.” Discreet laughter.

All, to Eliza, heady and hyper-sophisticated stuff.

Some of them even smoked marijuana, then called “tea.” Evan didn’t like it. “I’ll stick to my proved old bourbon.” Heavy drinking was also new to Eliza. She and Evan always were a little drunk when they made love.

Evan wanted to get away from his friends. Eliza understood that they made him nervous. He wanted to make a new life in the New England countryside. With her.

Now Billie is walking back onto the stage; amid thundering applause, shouts and whistles, she saunters into the smoke-beamed center of light; she stands there, one hip thrust forward. She scans the crowd as though she could see everyone there. Is she possibly seeing the men and feeling the urgent attraction that
Eliza felt a few minutes before? Her eyes are blank, and her smile says nothing.

“She looks bad,” Evan whispers—too loudly, Eliza feels, even in that noisy room. “Drugs—she can’t last long.”

“Georgia, Georgia, no peace I find …” sings Billie, whose beautiful face has come alive, whose eyes say everything.

Married to Evan, and pregnant, Eliza sometimes played Billie’s records, always remembering her face and the creamy velvet flower in her hair.

Evan was excessively busy; he took his teaching and his students with a passionate seriousness. He seemed to believe that sex was bad for pregnant women. Eliza felt heavily distasteful to herself, as well as to Evan.

When their child was born, a fat blond girl whom they named Catherine, Eliza knew that she was no longer “in love” with Evan, but perhaps that had been replaced by motherhood? In any case she loved her daughter very much. Having vaguely felt that her own mother, successful Josephine, was unmaternal (did Josephine ever feed her? Eliza could only remember maids), Eliza concentrated on feeding and loving Catherine.

Perhaps forgetting Evan?

One bright fall day at lunch, in his soft Southern voice, Evan announced, “The most beautiful boy in the world has appeared in my Cicero class.”

Eliza was feeding Catherine in her highchair. “Really?” she said. She was distracted, spooning mashed plums into Catherine’s purple mouth.

“Really. He’s enough to make me wonder if I could be queer. A Security Risk.” Saying this, Evan laughed unsuccessfully, ending in a cough. He had gained a lot of weight in the past couple of years. He was drinking too much.