Jami Attenberg - Saint Mazie

Paul loved our work, loved our show, all three of us, me & Skip & Felix, and he offered to show us the town. He was one of the mayor’s special assistants in enforcing Prohibition, which made him an expert in exactly where you weren’t supposed to go but sometimes could. There was a wink after that, a wink just for me. Yes, we will go with you, Paul, wherever you go, yes.

He had his own car, the fanciest I’ve ever seen, with a driver who tipped his hat at us once when we got inside, and then never spoke to us again, quiet as a ghost in the front seat, he might as well have been a puff of smoke. We went from speakeasy to speakeasy, Paul shaking hands with all the men in fancy suits hovering near doorways, surveying the scene, running the show. I’m in Skip’s arms the whole night dancing, but I can see Paul watching me, burning a hole through Skip with his eyes like he’s not even there, and I’m staring right back at him, and I know something’s going to happen because I want it to and all I have to do is say yes.

So yes, I say, yes yes yes, I scream it. He’s married, who cares, yes. He’s a criminal maybe, yes yes yes. You’re just a girl he tells me, I say yes yes yes. You’re so skinny I could slip my hand right through you, he says. Oh I’ll feel it, I say. A skinny pretty Yid from New York City, he said. Never did I know that was a thing that could be desired, but in fact it is a thing that he desired, and so he had it.

What about Skip? How did I get it past him? We shared a room, like a married couple, husband and wife, till the curtain closes for good, he used to say, but we were definitely not married. The answer is that I’m an excellent liar, I have lied for years, so long that it has become as easy as telling the truth.

It went on for a few weeks, me and Paul, sneaking around Chicago, seemed like he had keys to every door in town, hotels and warehouses and clubs, front rooms, back rooms, a key to my door too. He offered me money sometimes but I always said no, because I didn’t need his money, and also I might be a liar and I might be a cheat, but I’m definitely not a whore.

Every day my hair was a mess, messy sex hair, and Elizabeth hadn’t the time to get it right every day, the tight waves and curls, the two of us racing to get it done before Belle’s set. She said she didn’t know what to do with me, that the Chicago wind must be stronger than she knew, and I laughed, a dirty laugh, a good-time-girl laugh, and she gave me a look like maybe it wasn’t the wind, maybe it was Skip, and then she sighed, “Oh those Folsom boys.”

Then one day we were running later than usual and Belle was in a monstrous mood, her husband was in town and he was not a part of the road family, him being bossier than Belle herself, and there couldn’t be two bosses of the show. Belle started griping that Elizabeth was her girl and not my girl, and we were wincing hearing her voice, so beautiful when she sang but intimidating when she spoke, and Belle was right, it’s true, Elizabeth was hers and not mine. And Elizabeth said she’d rather just cut all my hair off and be done with it, and then I told her to do it and the very next day she did, it was a bob, and it was done.

Now the men in my life had even more ardor for me, this new me with the new hair. Paul liked it because it was different, spontaneous, a change of plans, and Skip liked it because it was smart and stylish and fresh. I liked my hair because it didn’t slow me down. I was a twirling, racing, breathless, desirable woman. I felt like I had everything I needed for one perfect week.

But one morning I woke up with a pain in my stomach, serious and low, slow and steady, and along with that my undergarments were stained with a white mess, and that didn’t seem right either. And I tried all the old wives’ recipes I’ve heard, gypsy recipes too, but alas and alack, the pain would not stop, the undergarments continued to spoil, and I knew I was ruined in some way.

I didn’t believe I could tell anyone in my road family about my pain, not Elizabeth or Belle or Felix and especially not Skip. This is the hard part when you’re a liar and a cheat and you have secrets, because you’re really alone when things are bad, then you’re really invisible. So I found a doctor for ladies and he stared at me down there for a while and coughed and hemmed and hawed and then, without looking me in the eye, told me I had the clap. The clap! Here I was, living for applause all this time, and boy oh boy, did I get it.

Now I knew I could have gotten the disease from either Skip or Paul, but I had an idea it was from Paul because I was sure I wasn’t his only girl on the side, that there were other girls, ones who took money from him, and those kinds of girls sometimes have the clap, although there I was with it too, so who was I to judge or say anything? I asked Paul about it, I asked him if he had a little something going on down there, and he said that when you lived a life like his, there was always a little something going on down there.

Then I had to tell Skip, and I didn’t want to, but I knew I had to, so I raced to the theater to tell him, to the backstage dressing room, and he was sitting there with Elizabeth looking serious, and when I looked at his face I saw that he already knew he had it too. I said I was sorry, awful sorry for everything, and that it was all my fault, and he said my name and shook his head and couldn’t look me in the eye, and then Elizabeth reached out and held his hand and I felt shame. And then I saw Elizabeth was crying and I realized that she had it too, and that she and Skip were lovers. Then I could really hear the crowds roaring in my head, an ocean of applause for me, Jeanie, the girl in the air, taking down everyone around me. It was only a few minutes later that Felix showed up, whistling, humming, ready for another show, and then we had to tell him, all of us, that our road family was sick, we had all given each other a case of something horrible, and the minute we told him he walked out and didn’t return until right before the show.

Elizabeth left to do Belle’s hair, I smoothed mine down on my own, Skip sat next to me in the mirror, I put on my lipstick, I kohled my eyes, I looked at him in the mirror and I couldn’t tell what he was feeling at all, who was this person next to me, this beautiful fair-haired boy, but he wouldn’t look back at me, somehow he was looking anywhere in the room but at me, and then I knew he was just as much a liar and a cheat as me, we were the same, me & Skip, and Skip & Elizabeth were the same, and it was only poor Felix who got the short end of it all, happy, whistling Felix, now on fire like the rest of us. And then it was showtime.

It took about five minutes into our act, the first real spin of the night, for me to fall. I can’t say as to which one of them dropped me, Skip or Felix, because when you’re in the air like me you lose track of who is supposed to be catching you. You just close your eyes and hope everyone’s doing their job, and this time they weren’t. Skip or Felix, Skip & Felix? I didn’t get a good look at their faces afterward, I was up in the air, and then I was down, and I felt a crack in my leg, a very particular crack, and I screamed, and all I saw was stars in my pain, stars and theater lights and then blackness, and then I passed out.

I woke up in a hospital, a doctor telling me if I had landed differently I would have broken my back. It’s how you fall, he said, that matters. Youth helps, fitness, and how you fall. He’s telling me how lucky I am, lucky with the cast up past my knee. I told him I didn’t believe in luck, I’d make my own fate, thanks.

No one came to visit me the first day, not Skip or Elizabeth or Felix, but then finally Belle, my old friend Belle, showed up at my bedside. She told me that she was sorry but that I would have to leave town, or at least leave the show, and that as soon as I was recovered enough to travel she would be happy to buy me a train ticket back to New York City, back where I belonged, with my family. She said she had taken a chance on me and I had failed because I had upset the balance of the road family. But also she said that she loved me like a sister and she bore me no ill will, would hold no grudge, and would be happy to keep all of this a secret amongst our mutual friends and family as long as I would agree to do the same. And when I looked deeply into her eyes, those hooded soulful eyes, I knew that she had the clap too.