City of Girls (17 page)

FOURTEEN

Billy had committed the outrageous act of calling auditions for the play—
real
auditions, advertised in the trade papers and everything—in order to get a higher class of performer than the Lily was accustomed to.

This was a wildly new development. We’d never had auditions before. Our shows always got cast through word of mouth. Peg and Olive and Gladys knew enough of the actors and
dancers around the neighborhood to be able to pull together a cast without anyone having to try out. But Billy wanted a better class of performers than what we could find within the perimeter of Hell’s Kitchen, so official auditions it was.

For an entire day, then, we had a stream of hopefuls pouring into the Lily—dancers, singers, actors. I got to sit with Billy and Peg and Olive and Edna as
they reviewed the aspirants. I found it to be such an anxiety-producing experience. Watching all those people on the stage who all wanted something so
badly—
so glaringly and openly—made me nervous.

And then, very quickly, it made me bored.

(Anything can get tedious after enough time, Angela—even watching heartbreaking acts of naked vulnerability. Especially when everyone is singing the same
song, doing the same dance steps, or repeating the same lines, hour after hour.)

We saw the dancers first. It was just one pretty girl after another, trying to stampede her way into our new chorus line. The sheer volume and variation of them made my head spin. Auburn curls on this one. Fine blond hair on that one. This one tall. That one short. A big-hipped, huffing, snorting, dancing dragon
of a girl. A woman who was far too old to be dancing for a living anymore, but who had not yet boxed up her hopes and dreams. A girl with sharp bangs who was so awfully severe in her efforts, it looked like she was marching, not dancing. All of them breathlessly hoofing with all their hearts. Puffing away in a hot panic of tap dancing and optimism. Kicking up great clouds of dust motes in the footlights.
They were sweaty and they were loud. When it came to dancers, their ambitions were not merely visible, but
audible
.

Billy made a slight effort to engage Olive in the audition process, but the effort was futile. She was punishing us, it seemed, by barely watching the proceedings. In fact, she was reading the editorial page of the
Herald Tribune
.

“Say, Olive, did you think that little birdie was
attractive?” he asked her, after one very pretty girl had sung a very pretty song for us.

“No.” Olive didn’t even look up from her newspaper.

“Well, that’s all right, Olive,” said Billy. “How dull it would be if you and I always had the same taste in women.”

“I like that one,” Edna said, pointing to a petite, raven-haired beauty throwing her leg over her head onstage as easily as another woman
might shake out a bath towel. “She doesn’t look quite as desperate to please as the others do.”

“Good choice, Edna,” said Billy. “I like that one, too. But you
do
realize that she looks exactly like you looked, twenty-odd years ago?”

“Oh, dear me, she does a bit, doesn’t she? That
would
be the one I was drawn to, wouldn’t it? Heavens, I’m such a vain old bore.”

“Well, I liked a girl who looked
like that back then, and I
still
like a girl who looks like that,” said Billy. “Hire her. In fact, let’s be sure to keep the height down on all the chorus girls. Make them all match the girl we just picked. I want a bunch of cute little brunette ponies. I don’t want any of them dwarfing Edna.”

“Thank you, love,” said Edna. “One does awfully dislike being dwarfed.”

When it came time to audition
the male lead—Lucky Bobby, the street-smart kid who teaches Mrs. Alabaster how to gamble and who ends up marrying the showgirl—my attention was miraculously and quite suddenly restored. Because now we had a parade of good-looking young men gracing the stage, taking their turn singing the song that Billy and Benjamin had already written for the part. (“In summertime when days are nice / a fella
likes to roll his dice / and if his baby doll’s a bore / he likes to roll a little more.”)

I thought all the guys were terrific, but—as we have established—I wasn’t that discerning in my taste for men. Billy, though, dismissed them one after another. This one was too short (“He’s got to kiss Celia, for the love of God, and Olive probably won’t let us invest in a stepladder”); this one was too
all-American-looking (“No one’s going to buy that corn-fed midwesterner as a kid from a tough New York neighborhood”); this one was too effeminate (“We already have one boy in the show who looks like a girl”); this one was too earnest (“This ain’t Sunday school, folks”).

And then, toward the end of the day, out of the wings came a tall, lanky, dark-haired young man in a shiny suit that was a
bit too short on him in both the ankles and the wrists. His hands were stuffed in his
pockets, and he had a fedora pushed way back on his head. He was chewing gum, which he didn’t bother to conceal as he took the spotlight. He was grinning like a guy who knows where the money is hidden.

Benjamin started to play, but the young man put up a hand to stop him.

“Say,” he said, staring out at us.
“Who’s the boss around here, anyhow?”

Billy sat up a bit straighter at the sound of the young man’s voice, which was purest
New Yawk
—sharp and cocky and lightly amused with itself.

“She is,” said Billy, pointing to Peg.

“No,
she
is,” said Peg, pointing to Olive.

Olive kept reading her newspaper.

“I just like to know who I gotta impress, you know?” The young man peered closer at Olive. “But
if it’s
that
broad, maybe I should just quit right now and head home, if you see my point?”

Billy laughed. “Son, I like you. If you can sing, you’ve got the job.”

“Oh, I can sing, mister. Don’t you worry about that. I can dance, too. I just don’t wanna waste my time singing and dancing when I don’t gotta sing and dance. You hear what I’m saying?”

“In that case, I amend my offer,” said Billy.
“You’ve got the job, period.”

Well,
that
got Olive’s attention. She looked up from her paper in alarm.

“We haven’t even heard him read,” Peg said. “We don’t know if he can act.”

“Trust me,” Billy said. “He’s perfect. I feel it in my gut.”

“Congratulations, mister,” said the kid. “You made the right call. Ladies, you won’t be disappointed.”

And that, Angela, was Anthony.

I fell in love with
Anthony Roccella, and I’m not going to dillydally around, pretending that I didn’t. And he fell in love with me, too—in his own way, and for a little while at least. Best of all, I managed to fall in love with him within the space of just a few hours, which is a model of efficiency. (The young can do that kind of thing, as you must know, without difficulty. In fact, passionate love, executed in
short bursts, is the natural condition of the young. The only surprising thing was that it hadn’t happened to me sooner.)

The secret to falling in love so fast, of course, is not to know the person at all. You just need to identify one exciting feature about them, and then you hurl your heart at that one feature, with full force, trusting that this will be enough of a foundation for lasting devotion.
And for me, the exciting thing about Anthony was his arrogance. I wasn’t the only one who noticed it, of course—that cockiness was how he got cast in our play, after all—but I was the one who fell in love with it.

Now, I’d been around plenty of arrogant young men since arriving in town a few months earlier (it was New York City, Angela; we breed them here), but Anthony’s arrogance had a special
twist to it: he
genuinely
didn’t seem to care
.
All the cocky boys I’d met thus far liked to play at nonchalance, but they still had an air about them of wanting something, even if it was only sex. But Anthony had no apparent hunger or longing about him. He was fine with whatever transpired. He could win, he could lose, it didn’t shake him up. If he didn’t get what he wanted out of a situation,
he would just stroll away with his hands in his pockets, unfazed, and try again somewhere else. Whatever life offered, he could take it or leave it.

He could even take it or leave it when it came to me—so, as you can imagine, I had no choice but to become completely smitten with him.

Anthony lived in a fourth-floor walk-up on West Forty-ninth Street, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. He lived
with his older brother, Lorenzo, who was the head chef at the Latin Quarter restaurant, where Anthony worked waiting tables when he didn’t have an acting job. His mom and pop used to live in that apartment, too, he told me, but they were both dead now—a fact that Anthony relayed to me with no evident sense of loss or sorrow. (Parents: another thing he could take or leave.)

Anthony was Hell’s
Kitchen born and raised. He was pure Forty-ninth Street, right to the core. Grew up playing stickball on that very street, and learned how to sing just a few blocks away at the Church of the Holy Cross. I came to know that street awfully well in the next few months. I certainly came to know that apartment awfully well, and I remember it with warm fondness because it was in his brother Lorenzo’s bed
that I experienced my first climax. (Anthony didn’t have a bed of his own—he slept on the couch in the living room—but we helped ourselves to his brother’s room when Lorenzo was at work. Thankfully, Lorenzo worked long hours, giving me ample time to receive pleasure from young Anthony.)

I’ve mentioned before that a woman needs time and patience and an attentive lover in order to get good at sex.
Falling for Anthony Roccella finally gave me access to all three of those necessary features.

Anthony and I found our way to Lorenzo’s bed on the first night of our acquaintance. After the auditions were over, he’d come upstairs to sign a contract and to get a copy of the script from Billy. The adults all conducted their business, and then Anthony left. But only a few minutes after he’d walked
out, Peg instructed me to run after him and speak to the young man about costumes. I snapped right to duty, yes ma’am. I’d never flown down the Lily’s stairwell faster.

I caught up with Anthony on the sidewalk, grabbed him by the arm, and breathlessly introduced myself.

In truth, there wasn’t much I needed to discuss with him. The suit he had worn to his audition would be perfect for his costume.
Yes, it was a bit modern for our play, but with the right suspenders and a wide, garish tie it would do the trick. It looked just cheap enough, and just cute enough, to suit Lucky Bobby. And while it might not have been the most
politic
thing for me to say, I told Anthony that his existing suit would be perfect for the role, precisely because it was so cheap and so cute.

“You callin’ me cheap
and cute?” he asked, his eyes crinkling in amusement.

He had highly pleasant eyes—dark brown and lively. He looked like he spent most of his life amused. Examining him this closely, I could see he was older than he’d looked onstage—less of a rangy kid, and more of a lean young man. He was more like twenty-nine than nineteen. It’s just that his skinniness and his carefree step made him seem a
lot younger.

“I might be,” I said. “But there’s nothing wrong with cheap and cute.”

“You, on the other hand—you look expensive,” he said, and gave me a slow appraisal.

“But cute?” I asked.

“Very.”

We stared at each other for a while. There was a good deal of information conveyed across the silence—a whole conversation, you might say. This is what flirtation is in its purest form—a conversation
held without words. Flirtation is a series of silent questions that one person asks another person with their eyes. And the answer to those questions is always the same word:

Maybe
.

So Anthony and I just looked at each other for a good long while, asking the unspoken questions, and silently replying to each other:
Maybe, maybe, maybe
. The silence went on so long that it became uncomfortable.
In my stubbornness, though, I wouldn’t speak, but nor would I break eye contact. Finally, he started laughing, and I laughed, too.

“What’s your name, baby doll?” he asked.

“Vivian Morris.”

“You free tonight to spend some time with me, Vivian Morris?”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Yes?” he asked.

I shrugged.

He tilted his head and looked at me closer, still smiling. “Yes?” he asked again.

“Yes,” I
decided, and that was the end of the
maybe
.

But then he asked it again: “Yes?”

“Yes!” I said, thinking perhaps he hadn’t heard me.

“Yes?” he said one more time, and now I realized that he was asking me about something else here. We weren’t talking about going out for dinner and a movie. He was asking me if I was
really
free tonight.

In an entirely different tone, I said, “
Yes
.”

Within a half
hour, we were in his brother’s bed.

I knew instantly that this was not going to be the same sort of sexual experience to which I was accustomed. First of all, I wasn’t drunk and neither was he. And we weren’t standing up in the cloakroom of a nightclub, or fumbling in the back of a cab. There was no fumbling to be had here. Anthony Roccella was not in a hurry. And he liked to talk as he worked,
but not in a horrible way like Dr. Kellogg. He liked to ask me playful questions, which I loved. I think he just
liked to hear me say
yes
again and again, and I was more than happy to oblige him.

“You know how pretty you are, don’t you?” he asked, once he’d locked the door behind us.

“Yes,” I said.

“You’re gonna come sit on this bed with me now, right?”

“Yes.”

“You know I’m gonna have to
kiss you now, cuz of how pretty you are?”

“Yes.”

And sweet mercy, could that boy
kiss
. One hand on each side of my face, with his long fingers reaching behind my skull, holding me still while he softly tested out my mouth. This part of sex—the kissing part, which I always loved—was usually over far too quickly in my experience, but Anthony didn’t seem to be heading toward something more. This
was the first time I’d been kissed by somebody who was getting as much pleasure out of kissing as I was.