“Well, that’s a relief,” Anna said, but Nell caught her teasing tone and cocked her head, smiling into Anna’s eyes. “You’re funny,” she said.
“So are you,” Anna said, and Nell took her hand, tugging her toward the boil of music and voices, and Anna supposed this exchange was as much a declaration of friendship as Nell made to any girl—like becoming blood sisters with Lillian Feeney when they were ten. What made it possible was that Nell looked so ravishing in her cream satin dress with its plunging cowl neck, it was inconceivable Anna would divert even a trace amount of male attention from her.
Descending the shallow flight of stairs into the nightclub felt clashingly unreal—as if she’d been thrust across an invisible barrier into a moving picture. She needed to prepare, to ease in slowly, but there wasn’t time; she was engulfed by an orchestra, a fountain, a checkerboard floor, and a thousand small red tables humming like hives. Nell shimmied among these, pausing often to exchange shrill, passionate greetings with their occupants. Anna trailed anxiously behind.
Three men awaited them at a table beside a crowded oval dance floor. They registered as more or less identical, with silk handkerchiefs in their breast pockets and expensive-looking tiepins. Their only distinguishing traits were that one of the three was handsome, and one of the non-handsome ones looked older than the rest. Of the volley of shouted pleasantries that followed, only phrases managed to punch through the general roar.
“. . . celebrate . . .”
“. . . the Japs made . . .”
“. . . sitting over there . . .”
“. . . champagne . . .”
“. . . be a darling . . .”
Anna tried to listen, well aware that she was coming off as stiff. She’d never been good at banter; it was like a skipping rope whose rhythm she couldn’t master enough to jump in with confidence. The war seemed not to exist here, despite the presence of officers in uniform. Why hadn’t Nell’s two younger suitors been called up?
Clams casino arrived, along with champagne. The waiter, a boy with a noticeable tremor (4-F, Anna thought), struggled to fill five shallow glasses. Anna had never tried champagne; at the Fraternity House she’d had only beer, and the liquor at home had always been whiskey. The pale gold potion snapped and frothed in her glass. When she took a sip, it crackled down her throat—sweet but with a tinge of bitterness, like a barely perceptible pin inside a cushion.
“Say, this is delicious!” she cried, and Nell rejoined breathlessly, “Isn’t it grand? I could drink it all day long,” and Anna was on the verge of kidding that they should bring some to work in a thermos, if they could get it past the marines. She remembered not to just in time.
Her glass emptied quickly, but the waiter was right there, refilling it. And from one moment to the next, as if turning an oven dial and feeling a hot gush of flame in reply, the scene around Anna softened into a smear of brightness—music, sparkle, laughter—an impression, as Pearl Gratzky would say, glimpsed from the corner of her eye, more than an actual place. And this change dissolved whatever barrier had been stranding Anna outside of it. She was vaulted into its midst, hot-cheeked, with a galloping heart.
A fast number began. The younger non-handsome suitor reintroduced himself—Louie—and asked Anna to dance, cheerfully swatting away her demurral. “Stop fibbing, every girl dances. Up you go,” he said, taking her hand and hauling her over the checkerboard tiles. Anna noticed he’d a slight limp. So that was it. She worried fleetingly that the twenties dances she’d learned from her mother—the Peabody, the Texas Tommy, the Breakaway—would not be convertible to the Benny Goodman–style swing this orchestra played. But Louie made it easy, moving her around with a deft economy behind which she sensed a great deal of care—possibly to conceal his limp, which he managed flawlessly.
“Are you having fun?” he asked. “Are you sure?” Louie had apparently assigned himself the role of host, responsible for the happiness of their party. “What about Nell, is she having fun? You can never tell with that one.”
“She is,” Anna reassured him. “We all are.”
Back at the table, their glasses had been filled again. Nell returned from dancing with the handsome suitor, and Anna supposed he must be her sweetheart. But as she and Nell pushed through the crowd toward the ladies’, Nell whispered, “My date is a no-show, the swine.”
“Oh,” Anna said, confused. “Is he—”
“He looks like Clark Gable, that’s what everyone says. Let’s check the entrance.”
When their checking turned up nothing, Nell grew fretful. “Damn that louse!”
“Is he unreliable?”
“He’s—attached. He can’t always get away.”
“Attached meaning . . .”
Nell nodded. “But his wife is a shrew.”
“Have they children?”
“Four. But he’s hardly alive at home—he just counts the minutes until he can see me again.”
“You sound like a girl in a love serial,” Anna said.
“You shouldn’t listen to those,” Nell said. “You’ll rot your brains.”
“My mother puts them on.”
“Why isn’t he here? The whole point of those drips at our table is to give me a spot to perch until he arrives.”
“Louie isn’t a drip,” Anna said. “He’s a sweet man.”
“They’re one and the same,” Nell said.
Anna returned to the table bent on dancing with the handsome suitor, now that she knew he wasn’t attached to Nell. Instead, she found herself back on the floor with Louie, who kept her entertained by pointing out a brigadier general, a state senator, and a famous Negro scholar. There was Laird Cregar, whom she’d seen in This Gun for Hire last spring, and Joan Fontaine, who’d won an Academy Award for Suspicion, a picture Anna had loved. Shadowy tales of the city were always her favorites—the sort of pictures that made your stomach seize when you heard footsteps behind you after leaving the movie palace.
“You know everyone, Louie!” she said.
“I suppose I do,” he said. “The shame of it is, they don’t know me.”
Anna studied him: a slight man, teeth overlarge in his narrow face. The limp. “What sort of work do you do?”
“Actuarial,” he muttered, brushing past the topic before Anna could ask what it meant. “Yourself?”
Having barely avoided mention of the Naval Yard several times, Anna was ready. “Secretary,” she said vaguely.
“I suppose the purpose of joints like this is to make us forget about jobs like ours,” Louie said. “Moonshine has just the right naughty edge.”
“Where?” Anna cried. “I don’t see the naughty edge.”
“Ah, you can’t—that’s the point. They’ve gaming upstairs, high rollers only. Baccarat, canasta, poker—so my sources tell me. And you’ve all types in here, including gangsters. You girls love the gangsters, of course.”
“I’ve never met one!” Anna said. “Can you point one out?”