UNFORTUNATELY THE TAP ROOM’S BRIGHT light policy had ended at about the same time as the dim-out began. In its place were heavily shaded wall sconces and candles that provided just enough light for a waitress to make it to your table without spilling your drink, but not quite enough for her to be able write down your order. I arrived ten minutes late and stood at the entrance to the restaurant and scanned the crowd. Every man in New York had taken out a woman who looked exactly like Jayne. I eliminated them one by one until I found Garvaggio crammed into a corner booth with his back to the wall. Jayne was at a safe distance from him, and their table was littered with empty glasses and half-filled ashtrays.
I’d tracked her down, but I needed a plan. Pretending to casually bump into her was way too amateurish—even in times of war a woman didn’t go to a supper club by herself. Claiming I’d been sent to retrieve her after getting word that her mother was sick seemed too obvious and would only invite further inquiries that might create problems for Jayne later on. I decided to go with devastated best friend searching for a beloved shoulder to cry on.
I ducked into the ladies’ room and locked myself into the stall. I thought about Greta Garbo’s death scene in Camille and managed to squeeze out a tear that vanished as soon as it appeared. Next I summoned the last days of Pip, a rat terrier I’d loved as a child and who’d met an unfortunate end beneath the wheels of an ice truck one hot summer’s day. Poor Pip didn’t do the trick though—there was too much distance between my memory and my emotion. It was time to bring out the big guns. I closed my eyes and replayed Jack’s last words to me as he boarded the bus to the navy yard, his final stop before he climbed aboard a frigate and hit the ocean. He’d been cold and cruel that day, out of retaliation, no doubt, for my own frosty response to the news of his departure. As the bus pulled away, I realized how ridiculous it was to hold a grudge against him for enlisting. It was too late, though. He was gone.
That did the trick. I was crying. Then I berated myself for using such an awful memory to pull this cheap stunt, especially after I’d spent the evening in the arms of another man. This made me sob even harder. I was a terrible person. I couldn’t even give my memories the respect they deserved.
Maybe this was the evil Zelda was alluding to.
Before I lost my nerve, I left the bathroom and cut back toward the main entrance to the restaurant. Desperate for a prop, I pulled Ruby’s unmailed letter out of my pocketbook and smashed it into my hand. With mounting hysteria, I approached Jayne’s table and caught her eye.
“Rosie? What are you doing here?”
“He’s done it,” I said. I squeezed the letter into a ball. “I just got a Dear Jane. He couldn’t even wait until his leave to break up with me.”
“No!” She left her seat and wrapped her arms around me. I upped my sobs, and she whispered beneath the din, “It’s about time. I was about to fake a fever.”
I continued my display of woe. “I’m so sorry to bother you. I didn’t know what else to do. I was afraid if I stayed home by myself I’d…I’d…” More tears. I was getting good at this.
“It’s all right. Shhhhh…” She pried the V-mail from my hand and held it out of my reach.
“Those are his last words to me!”
“And that was the last time you’re ever going to read them. He’s not worth this.”
“I thought we’d be together forever! I don’t know how I can go on without him.” I pounded my chest. I wailed. I was Medea clutching the corpses of my children. “Now I’ve ruined your evening. You must hate me.”
“We don’t. Do we, Vinnie?” Jayne elbowed Garvaggio in the ribs, though how she made contact with him through all those protective layers of blubber was anyone’s guess.
“No problem, doll,” he said by way of consolation. Apparently his acting ability only extended to pretending that Gloria had talent. “Why don’t you join us?” He attempted to make more room in the booth, but all he really achieved was bumping his belly into the table. The empty glasses danced before settling back into stillness.
“Oh, I couldn’t join you. I’m miserable company.” Translation: I didn’t want to. I wanted to grab Jayne, hit pavement, and find out what he had told her before I arrived.
“I insist,” said Garvaggio. “One drink. It’ll take the edge off.”
The thing about men like Garvaggio was that they’re impossible to say no to. It’s not that they’re particularly persuasive, but everything they said and did carried with it the air of a threat. It was a phenomenon I’d noticed with Tony before and, to a lesser degree, Al. A made man could be as soft as a bunny, but because he was what he was, you always felt like you had to do what he said, just in case.
My ma was like that, too, and she wasn’t even Italian.
“How about a smell from barrel?” he asked.
I assumed he was offering me a drink. “All right.” I slid into the booth next to Jayne and found her hand. “I’ll take a martini. Dry.”
One way to determine a man’s power was how quickly he could get service workers to respond to him. Tony could raise an arm and a waitress would be at his side within seconds. All Garvaggio had to do was wiggle a finger.
He ordered my drink, and the three of us sat in silence. Although my tears had stopped, the heavy emotion that had brought them on hadn’t. Jack’s departure weighed on my mind. I fumbled for conversation to distract me.
“What do you think of the show?” I asked. “Are you happy with how it’s going?”
Vinnie smiled. One of his bicuspids was malformed, and it gave him an inadvertently terrifying quality, like an otherwise friendly dog burdened with fangs. This was the spot where he normally rested his cigar, since there was not only room there but the malformed tooth easily locked onto the stogie and held it in place.
“I think it’s going great,” he said out of the side of his mouth. “Couldn’t be happier.”
“Is this the first show you’ve been a part of?”
“Nah. I’ve backed lots of stuff.” He swirled a rocks glass full of whiskey.
“Anything I would’ve heard of?”
“Doubtful. Most of ’em were a while ago.” His hand slid toward Jayne’s and made tentative contact with it. I could feel her stiffening beside me, and so I did the only thing I could possibly do to help her: I started crying again. This time there were no real tears, just loud, fake sobs. I wasn’t going to continue mining my memories of Jack for a man who thought our current production was going great.
“Rosie.” Jayne freed herself from his touch and put both hands on me, safely out of his reach.
“Here I go again.” I blew my nose onto a cocktail napkin. “I just can’t bear to see you two…knowing I’m alone…it’s just so…” I buried my head in my hands and made a general spectacle of myself.
“We should go,” said Jayne. “Thanks for the drinks, Vinnie. And the conversation.”
He tried to stand, but he was wedged in too tightly to move. “You want a ride? I got a car out front.”
“Thanks, but I think Rosie’s going to need some fresh air to get this out of her system. See you tomorrow.”
Jayne kept her arm wrapped in mine, and I feigned misery until we reached the subway platform. There, like two toddlers whose inconsolable sorrow was zapped by the promise of a lollipop, we snapped our heads up and shared a grin.
“For a man who tops three hundred pounds and is missing a tooth, he’s surprisingly charming,” I said.
“And fast. If I ever get stuck alone with him again, I’m wearing pants.”
We boarded the train and made it past the derelicts, factory workers, and good-time girls who made up the subway’s population at this hour.
“Brilliant performance by the way,” said Jayne. “I actually felt bad for you when you first showed up.”
“It was either that or tell him your mother had just died.”
She searched the subway car and knocked on what she thought was wood.
“Did you learn anything?” I asked.
“A little. I mentioned Paulette. Asked him what he thought of her. It was weird. He knew who she was, of course, but I didn’t get the feeling she’d ever stood out to him. Certainly not like a dame he’d been seeing after hours.”
I found us two seats and pointed them out to Jayne. “Maybe he’s put enough distance between him and her to make it seem that way.”
“Maybe. I said I was kind of scared to join the show after what had happened to her. He assured me I was safe, says there’s lots of security going on behind the scenes that I don’t even know about.”
Someone had abandoned a newspaper on the seat. I picked it up and attempted to fold it. “That’s a funny thing to say.”
“How so?”
“Paulette’s supposed murderer is in jail, a fact he certainly knows. Don’t you think he’d tell you there was nothing to worry about since the bum was locked up?”
Jayne frowned. “Maybe he was more interested in using my fear to get close to me, you know, like ‘Don’t you worry, this big strong man will protect you.’”
The column on top of the folded newspaper was the “News of the Stage.” The writer had gotten wind of Olive’s exit and my entrance and pithily captured the event with the headline: MUSICAL COMEDY THREATENED WITH TOO MUCH DRAMA: WITHOUT WRIGHT WHAT ELSE WILL GO WRONG? I flipped the page and eyeballed an article on a U-boat battle in the North Atlantic. The navy was reporting casualties. Great. “Did Garvaggio say anything else interesting?” I asked.
She examined her nails. She’d painted them Jungle Red for her night out with Vinnie, though in either her haste or her anxiety she’d smeared them before they’d completely dried. “Not really. I asked him what he does with himself when he’s not at the Bernhardt. He says he’s got a number of other businesses demanding his attention.”
“But he didn’t tell you what they were?”
“Nope.” She cleaned the color from her cuticle. “I might be easier to talk to than Gloria, but he had no intention of sharing anything with me. What is this anyway?” Jayne shifted in her seat, setting off a chorus of crinkling paper. She put her hand in her skirt pocket and pulled out Ruby’s V-mail.
“A letter Ruby asked me to mail.”
“And which you promptly forgot to.”
“It’s her own fault: she knows I’m unreliable.” I folded the sealed letter in half and put it in my coat pocket.
“How was your evening?”
I stretched my legs. After a day of rehearsal and an evening of dancing, every part of me hurt. “I spent the last five hours at the Stage Door Canteen washing dishes and dancing with a navy pilot named Peaches.”
“Cute?”
Was he? It was getting hard for me to remember. “Persistent. He expects me to be there on Saturday.”
“And judging from your tone, you won’t be.”
I hadn’t been planning on standing him up, but now that there was distance between him and me, it was easy to imagine doing exactly that. “Would it be terrible of me if I didn’t show?”
“It wouldn’t be the greatest thing you’ve ever done. What’s the harm of going there and dancing with him again?”
I traced an engraving on the back of the seat in front of us. Someone had drawn a heart with the initials E.F. in the center. “I don’t want to give him the wrong impression.”
“Don’t worry, I don’t think he’ll ever think you’re a good dancer.”
I tapped her knee with mine. “Very funny. You know what I mean.”
She was silent for a moment. “If you’re really not interested in him, you should let him know. If you’re not interested because of Jack, I think he deserves to know that too. There’s enough lying going around right now.”
Pity she hadn’t told me that before I gave him a phony name.
“Would you go with me?” I asked.
Jayne’s head dropped to her chest. “Rosie…”
“I rescued you tonight, remember?”
“You were fifteen minutes late.”
“But I came, didn’t I? I came, I rescued, and I cried like a baby.”
She lifted her head and rolled her eyes at the ceiling. “All right, I’ll go. I’ve always wanted to see what the Canteen was like.”
“And while you’re at it,” I said, “could you be sure to call me Delores?”