Zadie Smith - Swing Time

“That’s because as usual she has no idea what she’s getting into. The whole thing is absurd.”

They were leaning on each other, watching the magician, an engaging gentleman in a Savile Row suit and a bow-tie who’d been at Jay’s eighth birthday, too. He was doing the trick of the Chinese rings. Light poured into the Rainbow Room and the rings slipped in and out of each other despite their apparent solidity. Lamin looked mesmerized — everybody did. I could hear, very faintly, Chinese prayer music, and understood, in the abstract, that this must be part of the effect. I could see what everyone was feeling, but I was not with them and could not feel it.

“You are jealous?”

“I wish I could fool myself the way she can. I’m jealous of anyone that oblivious. A little ignorance never stopped her. Nothing stops her.”

Fern emptied his glass and placed it awkwardly on the ground.

“I should not have spoken. I believe I have misinterpreted the situation.”

His love language had been very silly but now that he returned to his more usual administrative language I felt sorry. He turned and went back indoors. The magician finished. I watched Aimee get up and approach the little, rounded stage. Jay was called up, or at least arrived at her side, and then Kara, and then Lamin. The whole party surrounded them in an adoring crescent shape. I seemed to be the only person still outside, looking in. With one arm she was hugging Jay and Kara, with the other she held up Lamin’s left hand in triumphal pose. Everybody clapped and cheered, a muffled roar through the double-glazed glass. She held this position: a room full of cameras flashed. From where I stood it was a pose that collapsed many periods in her life into one: mother and lover, big sister, best friend, superstar and diplomat, billionaire and street kid, foolish girl and woman of substance. But why should she get to take everything, have everything, do everything, be everyone, in all places, at all times?

The thing I remember most vividly is the warmth of her body as she ran off stage and into the wings, into my arms, where I stood ready with a pencil skirt to replace her satin dress, or a black cat’s tail to be pinned on her behind — once she had shimmied out of the pencil skirt — and clean tissues to wipe the sweat that always sprung from the bridge of her freckled nose. There were of course many other guys and dolls to whom I had to hand guns or canes, or fix a tiepin, straighten a seam or set a brooch just so, but it’s Tracey I remember, holding on to my elbow for balance with one hand and stepping lightly into a pair of bright green capri pants which I then zipped up the side, taking care not to catch her skin, before kneeling down to tie the bows on her stack-heeled white taps. She was always serious and silent during these quick changes. She never giggled or fidgeted like the other Hot Box Girls, nor was she in any way self-doubting or in need of reassurance, as I soon learned was typical of chorus girls but alien to Tracey’s nature. As I dressed or undressed her she remained fixated upon whatever was happening on stage. If she could watch the show, she would. If she was stuck backstage in a changing room and listening to it over the monitors, she was so focused on what she was hearing that you couldn’t engage her in conversation. It didn’t matter how many times she saw that show, she never tired of it, she was always impatient to get back inside it. Everything backstage bored her. Her real life was out there, in that fiction, under the lights, and this confused me because I knew, as no one else in the cast did, that she was having a secret affair with one of the stars, a married man. He played Brother Arvide Abernathy, the kindly older gentleman who carries a bass drum in the Salvation Army band. They didn’t need to spray any gray in his hair, he was almost three times Tracey’s age and had plenty already, a salt-and-pepper Afro that contributed to that air theatrical critics like to call “distinguished.” In real life he was Kenyan-born and raised, followed by a stint at RADA, followed by another at the Royal Shakespeare Company: he had a very plummy Shakespearean speaking voice, which most people laughed at, behind his back, but that I liked to hear, especially on stage, it was so luxuriant, verbal velvet. Theirs was an affair conducted in little pockets of time, with no freedom to expand. On stage they had almost no scenes together — their characters came from two different worlds, a house of prayer and a den of sin — while off stage everything was clandestine and harried. But I was glad to take on the role of intermediary, scouting out empty dressing rooms, keeping watch, lying for them when lying was required — it gave me something concrete to do with my time instead of wondering, as I did most nights, what on earth I was doing there.

Observing their affair was interesting to me too for it was curiously constructed. Every time the poor man caught sight of Tracey he looked as if he might die of love for her, and yet she was never very kindly to him, as far as I could see, and I often heard her call him an old fool, or tease him about his white wife, or make cruel jokes about his aging libido. Once, I interrupted them by mistake, walking into a dressing room I didn’t realize they were in, and found a singular scene: he was on his knees on the floor, fully dressed but head bowed and frankly weeping, and she was sitting on a stool, her back to him, facing the mirror, applying some lipstick. “Please don’t,” I heard her say as I slammed the door shut. “And get up. Get up off your fucking knees…” Later she told me he was offering to leave his wife. What was strangest to me about her ambivalence toward him was how severely it disturbed the hierarchies of the theatrical world she occupied, in which every soul in the production had a precise value and a corresponding power, and all relations conformed strictly to a certain schema. Socially, practically, sexually, a female star was worth all twenty chorus girls, for example, and Hot Box Girl Number One was worth about three chorus girls and all the understudies, while a male speaking part of any kind was equal to all the women on stage put together — except perhaps the female lead — and a male star could print his own currency, when he entered a room it re-formed around him, when he chose a chorus girl she submitted to him at once, when he suggested a change the director sat up in his seat and listened. This system was so solid it was unaffected by revolutions elsewhere. Directors had begun, for example, to cast across and against the old class and color lines — there were black King Henrys and cockney Richard IIIs and Kenyan Arvide Abernathys sounding just like Larry Olivier — but the old onstage hierarchies of rank remained firm as ever. In my first week, lost backstage and confused about the location of the prop cupboard, I stopped a pretty Indian girl in a corset who happened to be running by and tried to ask her for directions. “Don’t ask me,” she said, without slowing down, “I’m nobody…” Tracey’s affair struck me as a form of revenge upon all that: like watching a house cat capture a lion, tame him, treat him like a dog.

I was the only person the two lovers could socialize with after hours. They couldn’t go to the Coach and Horses with the rest of the crew, but they had the same urge to drown a post-show adrenalin high in alcohol, so they went instead to the Colony Room, where nobody else from the show went, but where he had been a member for years. Often I was invited to go with them. Here everyone called him “Chalky,” and they knew his drink — whisky and ginger ale — and it was always sitting on the bar waiting for him when he arrived on the dot of ten forty-five. He loved that, and the stupid nickname, because it was a posh English habit to give stupid nicknames, and he was devoted to all things posh and English. I noticed he hardly ever talked of Kenya or Africa. One night I tried to ask him about his home but he became irritable: “Look, you kids, you grow up here, you think where I come from it’s all starving children and Live Aid or whatever the hell you think it is. Well, my father was a professor of economics, my mother is a government minister, I grew up in a very beautiful compound, thank you very much, with servants, a cook, a gardener…” He went on like this for a while and then returned to his preferred subject, the glory days of Soho. I felt embarrassed but also that he had deliberately misunderstood me: of course I knew his world existed — that kind of world exists everywhere. That wasn’t what I’d wanted to know.