I walked over to the far corner, slid down the glass wall, sat on the floor and reopened my book. I’d decided to establish a new rule for myself: read for half an hour an evening, no matter what. The book I had chosen was not long, but I hadn’t got very far in it. Reading was basically impossible when you worked for Aimee, it was seen, by the rest of the team, as deeply impractical and I think in some sense fundamentally disloyal. Even if we were flying a long stretch—even if we were heading back to Australia—people were either answering Aimee-related e-mails or flicking through a stack of magazines, which could always be disguised as work, for Aimee was either in the magazine you had in your hand or very soon would be. Aimee herself read books, sometimes decent books, recommended by me, more often self-help or diet nonsense that Judy or Granger put in front of her, but Aimee’s reading was something separate, she was Aimee after all and could do as she pleased. Sometimes she took ideas from the books I gave her—a time period or a character or a political idea—which would then end up, in a flattened and vulgar form, in one video or song or another. But this did not change Judy’s opinion on reading in general, for her it was a kind of vice because it took up valuable time we might otherwise spend working for Aimee. Still sometimes it was necessary, even for Judy, to read a book—because it was about to become a movie vehicle for Aimee, or was otherwise necessary for a project—and in these situations she would use our long-haul flights to read a third of whatever it was, with her feet up, and a lemon-sucking look on her face. She never read more than a third—“I get the basic idea”—and when she’d finished she would give one of four possible judgments. “Zippy”—which was good; “Important”—which was very good; “Controversial”—which could be either good or bad, you never knew; or “Lidderary,” which was pronounced with a sigh and an eye roll and was very bad. If I tried to make a case for whatever it was Judy would shrug and say: “What do I know? I’m just a little bogan girl from Bendigo,” and this, said within Aimee’s earshot, killed any project dead. Aimee never underestimated the importance of the heartland. Though she’d left Bendigo behind—did not sound like her people any more, had always sung with a faux-American accent and often spoke of her childhood as a form of living death—she still considered her hometown a potent symbol, almost a form of bellwether. Her theory was that a star has New York and LA in their pocket, a star can take Paris and London and Tokyo—but only a superstar takes Cleveland and Hyderabad and Bendigo. A superstar takes everybody everywhere.
“What you reading?”
I held up the book. She drew her legs back together—from where they had landed, back in the splits—and scowled at the cover.
“Never heard of it.”
“Cabaret? It’s that, basically.”
“A book of the movie?”
“The book that came before the movie. I thought it might be useful, since we’re heading to Berlin. Judy sent me in here to crack the whip.”
Aimee made a face at herself in the mirror.
“Judy can kiss my bogan arse. She’s been giving me such a hard time recently. Think maybe she’s menopausal?”
“Think maybe you’re just annoying?”
“Ha ha.”
She lay down and lifted her right leg up in front of her, waiting. I went over and knelt before her, bending her knee into her chest. I was so much more heavily constructed—broader, taller, weightier—that whenever I stretched her like this I felt I had to be careful, that she was fragile and I could break her, though she had muscles I could not imagine having and I had seen her lift young male dancers almost as high as her head.
“The Norwegians were dull, weren’t they?” she muttered, and then an idea came to her, as if none of our conversations of the past three weeks had happened at all: “Why don’t we go out? Like, right now. Judy won’t know. We’ll go out the back way. Have a few cocktails? I’m in the mood. We don’t need a reason.”
I smiled at her. I thought about what it must be like to live in this world of shifting facts that move or disappear, depending on your mood.
“Something funny?”
“Nope. Let’s go.”
She took a shower and got dressed in her civilian outfit: black jeans, black vest and a black baseball cap pulled low, which made her ears stick out through her hair and gave her an unexpectedly goofy look. People don’t believe me when I say she liked to go out dancing, and it’s true we didn’t do it often, not in the later years, but it did happen and it never created much fuss, probably because we went late, and to gay places, and by the time the boys spotted her they were usually high and happy and full of an expansive sort of goodwill: they wanted to be protective of her. She’d been theirs years ago, before she was anybody’s, and looking after her now was a way of demonstrating that she still really belonged to them. Nobody asked for autographs, or made her pose for pictures, no one called the papers—we just danced. My only job was to demonstrate that I couldn’t keep up with her, and there was no need to fake this, I really couldn’t. At the point where my calves burned and I was as wet with sweat as if I’d stood under a hose, Aimee would still be dancing, and I would have to take my seat and wait for her. I was doing just that, in the roped-off area, when I felt a great thwack on my shoulder and something wet on my cheek. I looked up. Aimee stood over me, grinning and looking down, sweat dripping from her face on to mine.
“On your feet, soldier. We’re shipping out.”
It was one in the morning. Not so late, but I wanted to go home. Instead, as we approached the Village, she lowered the partition and told Errol to keep going right past the house, to head for Seventh and Grove, and when Errol tried to protest Aimee stuck out her tongue and raised the partition. We pulled up outside a tiny, scuzzy-looking piano bar. I could already hear a man with a grating Broadway vibrato singing a number from Chorus Line. Errol wound down the window and glared at the open doorway. He didn’t want to let her go. He looked at me pleadingly, in solidarity, as two people in the same boat—in Judy’s eyes we would both be held responsible tomorrow morning—but there was nothing I could do with Aimee once she’d set her will on something. She opened the door and pulled me out of the car. We were both drunk: Aimee overexcited, dangerously re-energized, me exhausted, maudlin. We sat in a dark corner—the whole place was dark corners—with two vodka martinis brought over by a barman of Aimee’s age so overwhelmed to be serving her it wasn’t clear how he was going to get through the practical matter of putting the drinks in front of us before he collapsed. I took the glasses out of his shaking hands and endured Aimee telling me the history of Stonewall, on and on, Stonewall this, Stonewall that, as if I’d never been to New York and didn’t know a thing about it. At the piano a group of white women at a bachelorette party sang something from The Lion King; they had horrible, shrill voices, and kept forgetting the words. I knew it was childish but I was in an absolute rage about my birthday, my rage was the only thing keeping me awake, I was feeding off it in that righteous way you can if you never mention out loud the wrong you are being done. I sank my martini and listened without comment as Aimee moved on from Stonewall to her own early days as a jobbing dancer, in Alphabet City, in the late seventies, when all her friends were “these crazy black boys, queers, divas; all dead now,” stories I had heard so many times I could almost repeat them myself, and I was despairing of finding any way of stopping her talking when she announced she was “going to the dunny,” in an accent she used only when very drunk. I knew her experience of public toilets to be limited but before I could get to my feet she was twenty yards ahead of me. As I tried to pass through the drunken bachelorettes the piano player looked up at me hopefully and grabbed my wrist: “Hey, sister. You sing?” At the same moment Aimee skipped down the basement steps and disappeared from view.
“How about this right here?” He nodded at his sheet music and passed a weary hand over the ebony sheen of his bald head. “Can’t listen to these girls no more. You know it? From Gypsy?”