Vixen (20 page)

But now things had changed.

It was a rule that you couldn’t wear street clothes on school grounds, but Gloria couldn’t show up at the Green Mill looking like a student. She had changed out of her school uniform—ankle-length gray skirt, short-sleeved white cotton blouse that was positively bristling with buttons—in the gym’s locker room and donned her favorite Patou floral day dress, a bell-skirted, high-waisted shepherdess-style frock. Then she had pulled a broad-brimmed hat onto her head and strolled out the back of the school. If anyone had seen her, they would have thought she was a substitute instructor, or one of the more glamorous mothers.

Gloria reached the street and found waiting the taxicab she’d arranged for early that morning.

Now Gloria crossed the dance floor, her clacking heels the only sound aside from the low drum of water through pipes. This was her third lesson, technically, since she had sat in on
two of the band’s rehearsals, but her first private lesson with Jerome. Alone. She hadn’t slept a wink last night, she was so nervous with anticipation. It was like the feeling of going out on a first date with someone you’re crazy about.

Except this wasn’t a date. It was a singing lesson. And Jerome wasn’t someone she was crazy about, because she had a fiancé. Jerome was a musician, and her boss, and he was nowhere to be found!

“I thought there was a tap show going on out here.”

“You’re late,” Gloria said, wheeling around. When she saw him, her heart seemed to stop: Jerome Johnson, all long limbs and long fingers, mysterious and poised and oh so sure of himself. He was wearing tan trousers and a black shirt that was open at the neck, exposing the smooth skin of his chest. She gulped. “By twenty minutes.”

“You’re in the music business; you’d better get used to it.” He grinned, his smile lighting up the room. “We should get started. We’ve got a lot of hard work ahead of us.”

“I’m ready for it.”

“That’s the kind of attitude I like to hear from my pupils. Though they’re usually about yea high,” he said, marking the air at his hip.

“Oh, you teach children?”

“One of my day jobs—giving piano lessons to little peanuts.” Gloria thought it was cute that he referred to the kids as peanuts; he obviously had real affection for them.
This surprised her. She hadn’t pictured Jerome Johnson as a sensitive type. “What, you think I can pay my rent from this gig alone?” he asked.

“Right, of course,” she said, shaking her head. But what did she mean?
Right, of course
. Gloria had never thought about paying rent before, let alone paying for anything else. Or working to survive. Or the life of a struggling musician.

“Don’t tell me you were depending on this job to get by,” Jerome said.

“Of course not! I’ve got a … a …”

“A boyfriend?”

“God, no!” She laughed uncomfortably. “I was going to say a … waitressing job. As a waitress. In a … diner.”

“I thought I saw you with some blond boy at the club, so I just figured …”

He must have meant Marcus. “He’s just a friend,” Gloria reassured him. “One of the only ones I have here since, uh, moving.”

There was an awkward silence. She hadn’t been prepared for the boyfriend question. Jerome had noticed Marcus—maybe he’d been paying more attention to Gloria than she’d suspected.

“Come on,” Jerome said, walking back behind the bar. Gloria watched as he studied the floor. It was untiled, just darkly painted wood, still dirty with scuff marks and footprints from the night before. Then he bent and hooked
his finger into a nearly invisible latch. When he pulled, a section of the floor came up on hinges.

“It’s where they store all the liquor,” Jerome said. “Also, in case we ever get busted by the cops, there’s a tunnel to the next street over.”

With everything else going on—her fledgling singing career, her disturbing attraction to Jerome Johnson, the hasty preparations for her wedding with Bastian—Gloria had nearly forgotten that the only reason places like the Green Mill existed at all was because alcohol had been made illegal.

She’d been fourteen when the Prohibition started, and hadn’t fully understood it at the time. Later, in her civics class at school, she’d been made to study it—its actual name was the Volstead Act, passed in 1919, but everybody called it the National Prohibition Act or the Eighteenth Amendment. Suddenly, in 1920, it was against the law to make or sell alcohol anywhere in the country. Which sounded like a good thing on the face of it.

But people weren’t so eager to give up their booze. Right after the amendment passed, speakeasies began appearing—places where people could go and drink and have a good time. They were open secrets. Always hidden, with passwords needed to get in, and in places no one—especially the police—would think to look. Yet everyone knew they were there.

Not only was Gloria breaking her curfew to sing at the Green Mill, and her parents’ trust: She was also breaking the law.

Jerome snapped his fingers. “You ready?” He motioned down the flight of steps. “I would say after you, Miss Carson, but I’d better lead the way.”

He descended the steep staircase, and Gloria followed. On the penultimate creaky step, her heel slipped and she tumbled into the darkness.

But Jerome was there to catch her.

She clutched his sturdy arms and found her balance. Neither of them moved. His breath against her cheek, his hands around her waist. In the dark, hidden from the world above, he wasn’t black or white. He was just a man.

Gloria felt that something was on the brink of happening. But then he gently released her. She stepped backward, shaken.

“Thanks,” she mumbled.

“Don’t mention it.”

He flipped on a flashlight.

Following its narrow cone of light, she felt as if she were walking through a haunted house. Or a tomb. Corpses of cockroaches littered the floor, piled up next to soggy boxes of liquor; loose electrical wires and rusted pipes ran across the ceiling. Every so often, they passed a half-open door, and Jerome would say things like “Poker parlor,” or “Conference room,” or “Room I really shouldn’t talk about because if you knew what they did in there you’d never want to come back to this joint.”

“Here we are,” he said. He yanked a chain dangling from
the ceiling and a dusty bulb lit up. The room was barely big enough for the two of them, let alone the decrepit-looking piano that filled the space.

“
This
is where we’re practicing?” she asked, shivering. It felt like a meat freezer.

“Were you expecting Carnegie Hall?” Jerome lifted the cover away from the aged upright and coughed as the dust settled around him.

Gloria was used to rehearsing in the grand hall in the music wing of her school. But looking at Jerome, she felt ashamed. What did he know of grand concert halls? How snobbish of her to sneer at this practice room. “I’m sorry,” she said, “this is completely jake.”

“We’re going to begin with some breathing exercises. Do you know where your diaphragm is?”

“I beg your pardon?” She took a step back.

“Your
diaphragm
is a muscle system, fastened to your lowest ribs. It’s what singers use to control their breathing.”

“Oh, right.”

“See, if you breathe high in your chest, your breath is just gonna come out as air. But if you breathe deeply, all the way into your diaphragm, where your solar plexus sits, then it’s gonna come out as emotion, sound, color, vibra—” His eyes narrowed. “Is that gum you’re chewing?”

Her jaw froze. “I guess I forgot that it was still—” She began to rummage through her purse for a scrap of paper, for anything. “Here, let me just—”

“Give it to me.” He held out his hand.

Mortified, she plopped the spearmint-green wad into his hand. “I’m really sorry,” she managed to squeak out.

“If you’re not gonna take this seriously, then don’t waste my time.” All the funny, sweet things he’d been saying earlier were instantly forgotten. “I’m not the one who needs to learn how to sing.”

“I do take it seriously. I said I was sorry.”

“And stop apologizing.” Jerome tore a piece of newsprint from a daily paper on the floor and wrapped her gum in it. He looked up at her. “If you’re gonna get up there and make every single person in that audience fall head over heels in love with you when the first note comes out of your mouth, you gotta own that stage. And your voice. And who you are, no apologies. Understand?”

“Yes,” Gloria said. Jerome’s intensity was infectious and unnerving—he was passionate. Bastian didn’t even consider jazz to be music. Bastian didn’t have an ounce of passion in him—not even when he kissed her.

“Now, are we ready?” Jerome asked.

“Ready.”

“I want you to start imagining your voice as a beautiful maple tree. Here,” he said, touching the top of her head, “is the top, made up of a thick bunch of rusty leaves.”

“Gotcha,” she said, trying to stretch her spine and stand as tall as possible.

“And here,” he said, touching the sides of her ribs, “are
your branches. You wanna fill them up while keeping ’em very still.”

She filled her lungs with air and puffed out her chest. “Not like this?” she asked.

“No, not like that.” His grip tightened around her waist like a corset. “Try again. Inhale, but don’t move my hands.”

She tried, but how did he expect her to control her breathing with his hands sending out-of-control vibrations through her body?

“You need to work on that,” he continued. “Finally, here’s the base of the trunk—your diaphragm.” He placed a hand right beneath her rib cage. “The most crucial part of your voice. Besides your vocal cords, anyway. This is where your breath begins.”

Gloria began to squirm as if she’d been tickled. Though she wasn’t ticklish at all, and this certainly didn’t feel ticklish. It felt heavenly. Just as she had imagined his hands would feel. Strong. Intense.

“What’s so funny?” he asked sharply, removing his hand from her stomach.

“Nothing!”

“Is this funny to you, country girl?” His voice was suddenly harsh. “Does this seem like a joke?”

“Not at all,” she insisted. She couldn’t tell him that no man had ever touched her so easily before, and that it had startled her.

“This is serious business—you’re going up on that stage in
one week. And if you look bad, not only will you never work in this town again, but I’ll get all the blame,” he said, his eyes darkening. “Think you’ll be laughing when that happens? Do you have any idea what Carlito will do to me?”

Gloria cringed at the gangster’s name, and at Jerome’s tone. “Do you speak this way to all the girls?”

“While you’re working for me, I can speak to you however I want.”

Gloria stared at him in disbelief. “You’d better watch your tongue, because I can walk out for good at any second.”

“This is your big break—you wouldn’t dare.”

“Oh yeah? Think again.” She turned toward the door. “Let’s see who gets the last laugh. It certainly won’t be your boss.”

He caught her wrist and pulled her close. She could see flecks of gold in his eyes. As confused as she was, there was something pulsing and sparking between them like an electric current. She couldn’t tell whether she loved or hated him. She couldn’t tell whether he was about to kiss or slap her.

“Show me where it is again.”

“What?” He let go of her wrist.

“The base. Of the maple tree. Where is it?”

Jerome relaxed. “Here,” he said softly. And ever so gently, he placed his palm back beneath her sternum.

She took a deep breath in, then let it out. This time, she didn’t laugh.

Jerome sat very straight at the piano bench and placed his fingers on the keys. “Why don’t we just start singing?”

Then he played the first few chords of a melancholy song she had never heard before, though some part of her felt as if she were born to sing it.

The more Gloria stared at her shrimp cocktail, the more she imagined that the shrimp were staring back at her with their beady little eyes.

“Darling, are your shrimp undercooked?” Bastian asked. “Because if they are, we can send them back.”

“No, no, they’re fine,” she said. It wasn’t just that the shrimp seemed alive; they seemed to be judging her. They knew where she’d spent the afternoon: at the Green Mill, in the basement with Jerome. A world away from where she was now.

Even though the Drake Hotel had opened three years before, the members-only club was still considered extremely exclusive in the circles Bastian ran in—the waiting list was two years long. But Bastian had connections with the right people.

“Let me give you some of my dish.” He shoveled some of his striped bass appetizer onto her plate. He was wearing a dark navy suit, looking dapper. His hair was perfectly combed and oiled, and he was freshly shaven—he could have been a movie star. “Try this, dear.”

She took a small bite and grimaced. “Ugh, I forgot how much I dislike Hollandaise sauce.”

“Since when?”

“Since right this second.” She considered spitting it out into a napkin, but Bastian would have an absolute heart attack at how unladylike that was. Which made her want to do it even more.