Club Storyville (15 page)

Maybe she told Ariel to remind me to get ready for bed each night, to tell me which side of the train was the right side, to take my arm when we got off the trolley to make sure I didn’t stumble down the stairs. They were bosom pals, after all, Nan and Ariel. And me? I was no more than Nan’s granddaughter, and to Ariel I was... I was nothing.

“Well, I know you want gumbo,” Ariel tried to coax a better attitude out of me, and, admitting my self-pitying thoughts weren’t entirely true, that Ariel always had tried to be friendly, no matter how our circumstances changed, I smiled at her against my will.

“Now Ladies,” the waiter declared a few minutes later, after Ariel ordered what sounded like everything on the dinner menu, “I ask that you sit back and enjoy your wine. Good food takes time.”

“We’re in no hurry,” Ariel told him, and, left to our table, she sipped at the wine the waiter had recommended, and I tried to hide my grimace as I took a drink, wondering if ‘dry’ meant awful in wine-speak and wishing I’d ordered a sweet tea with my dinner instead.

With nothing much to do but take in our surroundings, it didn’t take long to notice, with the abruptness with which a bee stung, that Ariel and I still didn’t blend. Either Mama wasn’t wrong, or everyone believed as she and Daddy did, that women shouldn’t be out on the town alone, because we were the only two women in the room without male companions.

The groups of men without female companions more than tilted the scales, though. Scattered throughout the dining room in groups of twos and threes and more raucous tables of five or six, they were likely business associates or old school friends, who would never be questioned as to why they were out at such a fine establishment without their wives or mothers at their sides.

Like at the bus stop, those men without other women to keep their eyes occupied paid attention to a table of two women alone, especially Ariel, I was certain, which made me intensely uncomfortable and irritated as I drank the unappealing wine and waited for my dinner. My desire to tell them to find something else to look at was strong, but so was the feeling I had no right. Those men had no reason to think Ariel and I were anything other than two friends out for a night of fine dining, and, whether it was true or not, it was safer to let them think it.

“Men are quite fond of you.” The same truth that had been impossible to ignore on the train was prevalent again. Punctuating it with a small laugh I didn’t feel, my eyes rose from the white table cloth to gauge Ariel’s reaction, but there was no reaction to gauge.

“Are they?” Ariel’s gaze was unflinching upon me, and I lost all nerve. Just as I had been starting to sink into the feel of being in such a fancy place without my parents, when adulthood felt just out of reach, two words from Ariel made me feel naive and absurd and like a scared little girl again. “If you have something you would like to ask me, Elizabeth, just ask.”

Staring into her eyes, they appeared grayer than usual, and, feeling more like I was being tested than given access to the mysteries that lived inside of her, I knew the wisest thing to do was say nothing, to shut down my mind and insist it find focus someplace else.

“Have you ever...” It was jealousy I couldn’t quite control that wouldn’t let me keep my mouth shut. Realizing what I was about to ask her, I glanced away, wondering what would happen if we were overheard, wondering if I could get through the question without my face turning such a deep shade of red the people around us thought I was choking on bread. At the discovery that no one close enough to hear was paying us a bit of attention, I took a sip of water to steady my nerves, finding it did little more than make my mouth feel drier. “Have you ever been with one?”

“Been with?” Ariel refused to make it easy for me, and, unable to meet her eyes, I could feel the flush crawling up my neck.

“Have you ever... you know,” I breathed, wishing she would just tell me without making me suffer for it. “Have you ever been intimate with a man?”

When Ariel didn’t immediately answer, or say anything for several long seconds after, I was forced to look up, and the expression on her face was mostly shock I had managed to get the question out at all.

“Yes.” I, too, was more surprised that she elected to actually answer me than by the answer itself, though I couldn’t say her response didn’t take me by surprise. “People will do most anything to be normal.”

As the words left her mouth, my mind went instantly to Jackson, across the ocean with Scott, with my promise, but not my heart, while across the table Ariel sat, not knowing how much of my heart she held in her hands, unable to promise me anything, because the world would never accept a promise between us.

Refusing to give into the pain of what I knew I shouldn’t feel, not while Ariel was being open with me, I tried to think of all the things I wanted to know most, my deepest, most pressing questions.

“Was it really that bad?” was all I could come up with.

“It didn’t damage me, if that’s what you mean,” her voice turned sharp, but, beneath its razor edge, I was sure I heard pain, and I shook my head with vehemence.

“No, I didn’t... I don’t think you are...”

I thought she was perfect. I thought she was beyond perfect. That was what I wanted so badly to be able to say to her, but I didn’t have the courage to say anything like that, to go against the opinions of an entire society of people, doctors and preachers included, and tell her there was nothing wrong with her, that everything about her was right, and the silence settled on the table between us like an insurmountable wall.

“You could have anyone you want,” it was several long seconds before I attempted to climb over it. It was the truth, and included me, even if it was impossible and made me achingly sad as I looked across the table at her.

“As long as it’s a man?” she countered, and, her question sounding bolder than any of my own, I glanced to the strangers paying us no attention.

“Do you not even want a husband?” I asked her, and when Ariel broke into helpless laughter, it had a strange, hollow vibration, like she was trapped at the bottom of a deep hole she hadn’t meant to get herself into.

“No,” she declared, and it sounded absolute.

“Then, what do you want?” I was both dying to know, and completely confounded, and I hoped she would explain in a way I could wrap my mind around.

It was such a difficult thing for me to comprehend. Despite women taking work in the factories, finishing college like Ariel, being asked to serve in the Army, even with them getting paid to play baseball in the North, those things were necessities brought about by the economy and the war. They were not a woman’s place in the world.

Even Nan, with her long, untamed youth, ended up a wife and mother in the end.

The answer to that question not coming as quickly or as easily, Ariel at last took a deep breath, and it drew my eyes to her lips, lightly painted peach, as she exhaled.

“Right now,” she quietly responded, “all I want is to have a nice night. So, unless this conversation is imperative to this very moment, I would appreciate it if you would change the subject.”

The conversation was imperative, to that moment and every other moment, all that came before and all that would come after. Unable to admit that, though, I dropped Ariel’s gaze and reached for the undrinkable wine, forcing it past my lips and down my throat.

“Did Nan come here a lot?” I finally found a question that meant almost as much as the one that went unanswered.

“Not a lot, I don’t think,” Ariel said. “But she did come here. This place has been around longer than her.”

“That’s a long time,” I said.

“It is a long time,” Ariel replied, and I was just grateful she was still talking to me.

“Nan’s lived quite a life, hasn’t she?” Looking around the opulent dining room, I could imagine her sitting in a seat at our table, as young and sure of herself as Ariel, before I remembered her back in Richmond, as old and feeble as she was ever going to be, and wondered if we would make it back in time.

“I think she has,” Ariel smiled.

“Like you have,” I stated. Recalling the places she had already been, how many years she’d lived on her own, how educated she was in her field and in the ways of the world, I felt undeserving of Ariel in any way. “You’ve done so much. I feel like I’ll never catch up.”

“It’s not about catching up,” Ariel countered, her eyes finding mine and holding them in a way that made me feel safe and on the edge of something alien to me at the same time. “Nan lived at home until she was nearly my age before she went off on her own,” she reminded me. “There are circumstances that lead people to stay, and circumstances that lead people to go. Sometimes, that’s all it’s about.”

The sad declaration settling over the table, I wondered what circumstances had made Ariel go so often, but, not wanting to ask any more questions that might make her get upset at me, I picked at the bread and drank the bad wine and waited for something else to talk about.

When it finally came, it was in the form of our food, gumbo first, which I tried without asking what each ingredient was, knowing if I knew exactly what I was eating, I would be less likely to open my mouth.

The dish proving as rich and unmatched in Richmond as Nan promised, my waiting grew far less patient by the time the main course came.

“Try this,” Ariel indicated a plate a minute after the waiter left, after I had looked at all the plates twice and couldn’t decide where to start.

“What is it?” I made the mistake of asking.

“Alligator.”

“Alligator?” I repeated. “Are you kidding?”

“No,” Ariel’s soft laughter repelled the worry and hard feelings that pressed in around us. “I’m not kidding. It’s good. Try it.”

Realizing, as she speared a small piece of meat and held it across the table, I would try anything she asked me to, I rested my hand over hers under the guise of keeping it steady, though, I noted with intense interest, it was only as my hand covered hers that Ariel’s shook.

Leaning forward, I pulled the alligator from her fork, thinking, as my lips slid against the metal, it was the same fork that had been between her lips only seconds before, and my eyes fluttered momentarily shut as I chewed the exotic food that tasted like nothing else.

“What do you think?” Ariel’s voice rasped against the background noise of the restaurant, and when I opened my eyes, I could scarcely believe what I saw in hers. If I were to try to describe it, I could only say, in that instant, Ariel looked at me the same way I had felt for months in her presence.

“It’s different,” I said, and it was so incredibly different. The food, the freedom, and the feelings I had for her that wrapped around me with such affection, while threatening to rip me apart at the same time, all of them unlike anything I had ever known before.

“Different good or different bad?” she questioned, and I wished I knew.

“Just different,” I replied, and, as Ariel pulled her hand away, I missed the feel of her acutely.

If something truly had been there, in that moment, the tiny sliver of time that belonged solely to us, it was swallowed up in a flurry of new foods, as I tried everything Ariel gave me to try, surprised to find I liked far more than I didn’t.

Mostly, though, it was the time with her I liked, even if I shouldn’t and part of me wished I didn’t like it so much. Sitting across the table from Ariel, I let myself dream for a moment it could always be that way, the two of us together in nice places with exotic foods and free of chaperones, a life of autonomy desired by many, but, in our world of social rules and propriety, afforded to few.

‘T
here is such a thing as too much liberty,’ Daddy often said. ‘When men are free to do as they want, they do as they want.’

That was his reasoning as to why laws had to be enacted and enforced, and, dinner lying rich and heavy in my stomach as Ariel and I got off the streetcar once again and walked through the decorous streets of the French Quarter, I found his warning true.

Free from the watchful eyes of my parents, liberated, if only for a fleeting moment, from the fear of how it made me feel, I slid my hand around Ariel’s arm, ignoring the way she tensed at my touch, too thrilled by the sensation to let her go.

Since the garden, I had been so afraid to reach out to her, afraid of what people would think, of the lustful thoughts a simple touch could sometimes send racing through my mind, of the hedonistic places to which an innocent touch between us could potentially lead. Feeling Ariel’s arm bend slightly, creating a better crook for me, I wondered if that was why she had been afraid to touch me for so long. Now that I knew what it meant to touch her, it made it harder to be casual about it, to pretend it meant less than it did.

A block away, the theater lights shined below the awning like a beacon to time being frivolously spent, Mama might say. Nan had taken us anyway, though, Edward and Scott and me, against all Mama’s protests, and it had gotten inside Scott’s head for a while - the lights and glamour of Hollywood.

“What’s a good character?” he would come running to me as I was doing school work or setting the table for dinner. “Who should I be now?”

“How about the president?” I might say. Or, sometimes it would be a ventriloquist, or a pirate with a heart, or a man who was half zebra. “But a president who always wanted to be a superhero, so he has a whole cabinet of people with amazing powers who go around the country fighting bad guys.”

“What kind of bad guys?” Scott’s eyes would get so wide with excitement when he liked my story.

“Gangsters,” I would say. “And Martians. And giant bug people.”

The ones that weren’t all human always made Scott’s nose crinkle in disgust.

“Don’t worry,” I told him. “That’s why you have Professor Komodo in the State Department. Since he’s part lizard, he eats the bug people for you.”

“Eww, Lizzie,” Scott would laugh, before rushing off to scrounge a costume from his closet, or Edward’s, or mine, or sometimes Mama and Daddy’s if Daddy was at work and he thought he wouldn’t get caught.