But the food that sits on the glass table in the corner is steak and red boiled potatoes with parsley and fresh green beans, and the smell is overwhelming. You close your eyes a moment, just inhaling.
Rick says, “God, will you
stop
that?”
You blink. “I’m sorry,” you say, confused. “Stop what?”
“Stop
lusting
like that. You look like you’re about to come.”
You flush, embarrassed. “Oh, Jesus,” you swear. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean….”
“It’s okay. No, well, it’s not okay, but it’s not your fault. Sorry.” For the first time since you’ve met him, Rick seems at a loss. He shakes his head and then says, “Siddown. Eat. I’ll talk, then when we’re done eating, we’ll sign the papers.”
“What papers?”
“The contract. It’s standard boilerplate for performers.” Rick gestures for you to sit down, and you do. The meals are already plated, with sprigs of parsley for decoration, a far cry from the unidentifiable gray mass you’d tried to eat at the soup kitchen. And it’s delicious—the steak rare, the beans crisp, and the potatoes buttery and just soft enough. “With the exception of a privacy clause. You have to agree not to talk about the club to anyone. All interviews, questions, inquiries, anything like that comes directly to me or Coco. For convenience, we also ask that you don’t take any job outside the club without clearing it with me or Coco.” He gives a quick grin as he takes a bite of steak. “We’d
prefer
that you don’t take any job outside the club, but some people have extra expenses.”
“I’d thought to get a day job,” you admit, “for security, you know. I mean, I’m not stupid. I know that these gigs don’t always work out, and I want to find someplace, I mean, someplace nice to live, and two hours a night, even with tips, won’t cover that, and….”
He reaches out with his fork and touches the tines gently to the back of your hand. You stop talking. “If what we’re paying you doesn’t pay for a nice apartment,” he says levelly, “then your standards of ‘nice’ are a helluva lot higher than mine. And as for the security—this is a
contract
, Nate. We’re asking you to commit to us for three years. At the end of that time, we expect you to move up in life, not down. You’ll leave here with a recording contract, a nice nest egg, or not at all.”
“
Why
?” Your cry is heartfelt and confused. This can’t be right. This can’t be happening, not after everything you’ve been through. You’re too used to being on the bottom for this to even make
sense
. “What do you get out of this?”
“Are you kidding? Baby, when you sing, you make
magic
.” He takes the fork from your hand and drags you to your feet. “Leave this a minute. We’ll come back when we’re done. Come on.” And he drags you out the door by the hand, down the stairs, and up onto the dais.
The musicians look up curiously. “Remmy, Jake, Rob, this is Nate. He’s the singer. He’s gonna sing right now.” He looks into your eyes. “Nate, I need you to sing for these guys. For us. Before the customers come in, just us, right now. Can you do this?”
You blink, dazed, and nod.
“What do you want to sing?”
The words come out of your mouth without you thinking them. “But Not for Me,” you say.
Rick snorts and then says, “Okay. Guys, you know that one?”
“Gershwin, right?” The guy at the piano plunks out a few notes. You nod. He starts playing the intro, and you start.
The song is harsh and cynical, and it’s what you’ve thought and felt over and over again throughout the last years, as your life spiraled further and further south. This, this
dream
of a job, this beautiful man, this…
hope
. It
hurts
.
You’re angry now, at Rick’s high-handedness, at this lovely dream of a possibility that can’t possibly be real, at this vision of what life could be like, and the venom comes out in your voice. When you sing about love songs and lucky stars and how they aren’t yours, you’re not just singing lyrics. You’re singing your
life
.
Your gaze is basilisk-like, locked on Rick’s startled dark eyes, holding him paralyzed with your anger, your voice, your music.
You’re vaguely aware that the others in the room have stopped moving too, but it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters but the beautiful man standing in front of you that you know you can’t have, no matter how kind he is; he’s so far out of your orbit he might as well be that film star he looks like. Or a real star, somewhere up in the night sky, scintillating and lovely and untouchable. Even if there were a chance he might want you, you know he’d grow bored and move on—you have nothing to offer such a bright being. And having once had him, to lose him would be unbearable.
Anger diminished by realized loss, you try to make him understand the ending words of the song, make him understand you.
When you finish, there’s silence in the room, and you’re as drained and exhausted as if you’d never had the lunch or the nap or the half-eaten steak dinner upstairs. The applause and whistles come as a surprise, and you look up, confused.
Only Rick is still, unmoving, his expression shattered. You stare at him until your eyes get blurry, then you step off the dais, push past him, heading for the stairs and your suitcase, desperate to get out of your borrowed finery, your borrowed life, into your own filthy clothes, away from here, away from him.
He catches you up halfway to the stairs, his fingers hard on your upper arm. He jerks you around, and his other hand grabs your other arm so that he’s holding you still. “Where are you going?” he snaps.
You can’t answer. You don’t know. His face is dark with rage, flushed and angry and hurt. You didn’t mean to hurt him; you only wanted to push him away, to save yourself the grief you knew was coming.
The tears spill over then, and you curse yourself, and you curse him, and you curse God for making you like this, and for taking everything away from you so that you have nothing to offer this man,
nothing
. But the only thing that comes out of your mouth is his name.
“Rick….”
And then his mouth is on yours, and it’s not the friendly peck he’d given you earlier. No, this is a kiss, hot and hard and hungry, and hands dragging you into an embrace that’s less about affection or comfort and more about need. This is lust. This is heat. This is desire.
And God save you, you reach for him with both hands, digging into his brilliantined hair, yanking him down and kissing him back just as hard as he kissed you.
In front of a room full of witnesses. In front of his
sister
.
Who, when you come up for breath, dazed and lost and aching, says, “Now that you’ve gotten that out of your systems, will you sign the damn contract so I can put you on the payroll?”
And Rick throws his head back and bellows with laughter. “It’s not just me,” he tells you. “It’s
her
. And she gets what she wants.” He turns you around so that you’re facing the room, the waitstaff and the cigarette girls and the bartenders and the band. His body is solid and warm behind you. “Look at them,” he whispers in your ear.
White flutters all around the room as people wipe their eyes or blow their noses. A waitress sobs into the breast of one of the waiters. Two other waitresses are weeping on each other’s shoulders. “One little song,” Rick murmurs. “One little song—not even a long one—and they’re yours. You made them cry. You made them feel. I haven’t seen magic like that since, since
Orpheus
.”
You know who Orpheus is, but the classical reference confuses you. “I thought he played the lute,” you say.
“The lyre.”
“Right. He wasn’t a singer, was he?”
He snorts. “Yeah, he was, but what’s the difference? He made magic. So do you. Zeus fuck, baby, why the hell hasn’t anyone seen that before?” His hands are on your shoulders, squeezing. “Now do you see why we want you? Why all it took was one song for us to know you belonged here?”
You shake your head. When he turns you toward the stairs and takes you back up to the office, you obey blindly, too tired to argue.
He sits you back down at the table and makes you finish eating before taking out the papers to look over. You think maybe you should have a lawyer look at them, but you can’t afford one, and don’t know any anyway. Still, they seem pretty straightforward, no small print, no confusing lawyerly language. No more complex than a lease or the application forms you filled out at Harry’s. A thought occurs to you. “How did you know about the Detroit Conservatory?” you ask. It’s the first thing out of your mouth since the scene downstairs.
“What?”
“The Detroit Conservatory. You mentioned it.”
“Oh, yeah. While you were napping, I rang Harry and asked him to send over the stuff you gave him. Your education was in there.” He was quiet a moment, then said, “You’re older than you look.”
“Is that a problem?” You give him a level look.
“No, not at all.” He shrugs. “I’d have pegged you at late twenties, but thirty-five isn’t exactly old.” He folds some papers back into an envelope before going on. “I was surprised to see your war record.”
“Why?” you ask. You can’t quite keep the bitterness out of your voice. “You figure because I’m queer I’m a coward as well?”
His laugh is low and humorless. “No. Not that you were a soldier. But that you served for over two years, won half a dozen medals and commendations, and still got a dishonorable discharge.”
“That’s what they do with queers,” you say shortly. “I went in with the Brits in ’16, but when the Yanks got in the next year, I transferred over to an American battalion. Should have stayed with the Brits.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Long story.” You don’t want to tell it, don’t want to even think about it. So instead you grab the fancy fountain pen and scrawl your signature recklessly across the bottom of the contract. “There. You’ve got me—I’m yours for three years.” You cap the pen carefully before tossing it back across the table to him; even angry, you can’t bring yourself to mar the virginal whiteness of the room. “What next?”
“Well, you get the grand tour. Since Roosevelt signed the Cullen-Harrison Act this spring, we can officially sell 3.2 beer and what Coco refers to as ‘the ghosts of grapes.’ Of course, that’s only officially.” He stands, and you follow suit. “Leave the dishes—someone will clean up in here.”
You follow him downstairs. Corinna comes up and regards the two of you with a raised brow, eerily like her brother despite the difference in coloring. “Contract is signed, Coco,” Rick says, “and Orpheus is ours.”
“Orpheus,” she echoes thoughtfully. “The lamenter, he of the darkness, the orphan. The singer of magic. Acolyte to Dionysus and Apollo. Dionysus, in jealousy, had him murdered by maenads.” She muses a moment, then adds, “I’m not sure if he was jealous of Orpheus’s talent or his love for Apollo.”
“I know which I’d wish for,” Rick says.
She gives him that raised-eyebrow look and retorts, “Murdered is murdered, whatever the cause. And afterward there is only vengeance left.”
She’s sweet, and delicate, and fairylike, and the words in her angelic voice freeze you to your bones.
“He’s here, and he’s ours,” Rick says, “and nobody’s going to murder him for whatever reason. Unless you have enemies we don’t know about?”
This question is directed to you, and you shake your head. “No one,” you say, “only….”
Bertie
“… one, and he’s not an enemy, just… no longer a friend. No enemies, no friends, no family. I got plenty of nothing.”
“Not anymore,” Rick says. “You have a contract, and we’ve got you. Come on.”
He shows you the rest of the place: where they hide the good booze if they get raided (the place used to be a speakeasy, until the spring; then they turned it into a legal supper club to take advantage of the easing of the Volstead Act. Rick tells you Prohibition will be repealed by the end of the year. He’s so certain you almost believe him); the room in the back where the games are (all straight, even the roulette wheel; Rick tells you Corinna has an obsession with justice, and while she’s not above breaking the law, she won’t cheat an honest man); the fiery kitchen with the dark-browed Mario in command (he has a clubfoot, but that doesn’t slow him down; his knife flashes in the dim, steamy heat, the fires under his pots giving the place the reddish glow of a furnace. Or maybe Hell. But it’s a well-organized Hell; his assistants are quick and sure and seem to almost read his mind. It could just be fear of his knife. You don’t think you’ve ever seen one as long that wasn’t stuck on the end of a rifle).
Rick takes you through the kitchen out to the alley, where he lights up a cigarette and stares at the sky. It’s coming on dusk now; you can hear the sound of automobiles out front as they disgorge the early arrivals. He stares at the west, where the sun is already out of sight, the clouds gone purple and rose and gold against a sky going indigo. “And so it ends, and begins,” he says softly, and turns his back on the sunset. “There’s the moon. She’s almost full tonight.”
You don’t look. How many nights did you and Bertie gaze up at her beautiful, serene face from the filth of the trenches, lying close in mud, watching the moon rise behind the forward emplacements? There were moments then when you didn’t mind the mud, didn’t mind the sound of the guns, didn’t mind the stench or the cold or the wet. Moments when Bertie’s hand would touch yours, trailing a finger across your wrist; or when he’d shift so his hip brushed yours, or his shoulder. And you knew that later, you and he would be crawling into an abandoned side trench, trying to find a dry spot where you could fuck each other in hurried silence under that same moon, sometimes not even unbuttoning your damp wool uniforms, just rubbing up against each other, the only skin that touched being your hands and your mouths.
“Oh, well,” Rick says quietly, “I like the daylight better myself.” And he opens the door, and you go back inside.
WHEN YOU
wake it’s still dark, and you lie in silence and confusion, not sure where you are. Then you remember, and stretch luxuriously in the clean sheets, in the clean if threadbare nightshirt you’d pulled from your suitcase. You couldn’t have gotten more than a couple of hours of sleep, but you’re as rested as if you’d slept for days; it’s not a challenge to rise and go to look out the open window. It faces east, and while it’s not quite dawn, there’s a lightening of the sky that matches the lightening of your mood.