Helen Beck’s stage name was Sally Rand, and I’d met her when I was in charge of pickpocket security at the Chicago World’s Fair. She had caused a sensation there with her nude fan dance in ’33, and a bubble dance encore in ’34. She had been a small, pretty, curvy blonde, and still was.
Her long blonde Lady Godiva tresses had always been a wig, the hair beneath a darker blonde now, shorter and worn up. She had lovely blue-green eyes, pretty features with a mouth that was probably too wide by most standards, but not mine.
The indirect lighting in my bachelor pad was subdued—Mancini jazz was playing (
Mr. Lucky
)—so neither one of us looked our age. But she was doing so well at staying youthful that boys were still paying good money to see a woman who was old enough to be their mother dance in the buff.
Helen and I were friends and occasional lovers, though I hadn’t seen her for a long time—at least ten years. I sometimes called her Sally, by the way, but usually Helen …
always
Helen in bed.
She’d phoned out of the blue, this morning, catching me at the office where I often put in a couple of hours on Saturday. She wondered what I was doing tonight.
“I hope I’m seeing you,” I told her.
“Giving you such short notice, Nate. I’m really sorry.”
“Are you between marriages?”
“As it happens, I am.”
“Then don’t be sorry. Where do I pick you up?”
“I’ll come to you,” she said. “What time? And where are you these days?”
I told her, then said, “Hey, I can probably get us tickets to Second City.”
“But that’s a popular show, isn’t it? Won’t they be sold out?”
“Yeah, but I have my ways.”
I’d done a job for the comedy coffee house’s founder Bernie Sahlins, getting one of his performers, Del Close, out of a jam.
“Make it here by six,” I suggested, “and we’ll have a chance to grab a bite first.”
That all sounded fine to her, and we’d had a fun evening starting with steakburgers at Chances R, where it was a little too loud for us to talk, really. This was followed by several hours of wild humor in the black-walled, table-crammed little venue on Wells that was the Second City.
Helen’s favorite sketch: bully kicks sand in weakling’s face, bully walks off with weakling’s girlfriend, weakling bodybuilds, returns to beach, slugs unfaithful girlfriend, and walks off arm in arm with … bully. My favorite part was a musical number, the Mayor Daley Twist: “
Vote for Mayor Daley and we’ll throw in for free, A trip to Cal City on your Gaslight Key!
”
Now we were back at my place. Helen was a nondrinker, part of her health regimen, but I’d put a few beers away. I made us coffee and we headed for the couch by the front windows, where we could finally get around to some real conversation.
“So what brings you to town, Helen? You’re usually working on a Saturday night.”
“I’m between bookings,” she said, too casually. She sipped at her coffee cup, then set it on the nearby coffee table. “Actually, I’m here to drum up some business.”
“So where are you staying?”
“The Lorraine.”
That spoke volumes. The Lorraine in the Loop was known as a stripper hotel. No fleabag, but at four bucks daily …
“Not exactly the Drake,” she sighed, then forced a little laugh. “Remember that all-white suite I sublet from that flamer? Right out of a Harlow movie, remember?”
“I recall the bedroom. The rest is a little blurry.”
She patted my arm. “Were we really that young?”
“You look young to me right now.”
“How much have you had to drink, Nate?”
“Not that much.”
I kissed her. It was lingering, trying to make up for lost time. We weren’t finished when she pulled away.
“I must taste like coffee,” she said.
“I like coffee. Who doesn’t like coffee?”
“But also cigarettes. I smoke too much.”
She smoked at Chances R and at Second City, too, pretty much nonstop. And right now she was lighting up a cigarette with a silver Zippo from her purse, from the coffee table.
“When I started,” she said, waving out the match, “the ads said it was good for you. Relaxing.”
“Helen, do you need my help?”
The blue-gray eyes flashed. “You mean financially? No. I’m okay. I’m not flush, but … the setback I had, it was more career than financial.”
“Career setbacks
are
financial.”
She let out smoke, then said, “Hasn’t caught up to me yet. But it did … I admit this particular setback hurt my confidence.”
“You’re still a very beautiful woman, Helen.”
She gave me a sly look. “I saw your picture in
Playboy
.”
“The one where I was covering myself with a towel?”
She slapped my shoulder playfully. “No. You weren’t identified. You’re not famous enough. But you were at some party, hobnobbing at the …
what
does he call it?”
She meant Hef, obviously.
“His mansion,” I said.
“You and all those young girls. Walking around half naked.”
“I swear I was fully clothed.”
“Do you date them, these overdeveloped children?”
“Sometimes,” I said.
Truth was, for the last several years, Bunnies from the Playboy Club downtown and Playmates in town for their photo shoots and young actresses who flowed through the mansion and the club had been just about the only women I’d dated. One of them, Krista, had been with me six months and would have broken my heart if it hadn’t been misplaced some time ago. She was out in Hollywood now, engaged to a producer of Saturday-morning kiddie shows.
“Do they have staples in their tummies, Nate?”
“Why, yes they do. And they’re airbrushed all over.”
That made her laugh. She drew in more smoke, let it out. “How much work do you do for that guy, anyway?”
Again, she meant Hef.
“The A-1 is on yearly retainer with his company. They get threatened by all kinds of suits and blackmail schemes. We handle it.”
“And you two are pals?”
“Nobody’s Hefner’s pal. He’s very self-contained. But we’re friendly. Like you saw in the magazine, I go to his parties now and then.”
She gestured vaguely around my little world. “And are you happy, Nate?”
“No, I’m miserable. Can’t you tell?”
“You might be at that. You’re like me—you’ve been on a hamster wheel of a career forever, and all we’ve got to show for it is busted marriages.”
“Only one busted marriage for me, Helen, and I have a son.”
“Yeah, so do I, and a mother to support, looking after him.” Her tone softened. “You get to see Sam often?”
“School breaks, including most of the summer. He’s coming in a few weeks for Thanksgiving vacation.”
“In high school, like my boy, right?”
I nodded.
“So, Nate … what
is
your life like, really?”
“It’s not bad. I work hard … not much investigating anymore, but I’m the face of the agency, and really am kind of famous, Helen. So the clients always want to meet with me first, before I delegate whatever it is they’ve brought me.”
“No more true detective stuff, huh?”
“Now and then. A couple of criminal lawyers locally like having me handle things personally. And they pay for the privilege. But mostly … I’m just another executive.”
“With a fuck-bunny pad.”
That made me laugh.
“Yeah,” I admitted. “With a fuck-bunny pad.”
I was used to hearing her talk that way—she could make a stevedore blush. But not me.
Her eyes were traveling. “They
are
some digs.”
“They are.”
“I bet you get more tail than Sinatra.”
“I bet I don’t.”
“Has there ever been a naked woman in this place over thirty?”
I thought about it. “Not over thirty-five.”
“Would you like to see one?”
I didn’t have to think about that. I stood and held my hand out to her.
I said, “I haven’t shown you my round bed, have I?”
The lighting upstairs was suitably dim for a pair of lovers in their fifties. Sally Rand had never been a stripper—she was a dancer, who with balletic grace gave glimpses of heaven from behind huge ostrich feathers or that diaphanous balloon she bounced around.
So there was no striptease to it, at all. She just pulled that too-young jumper over her head, then the turtleneck, kicked out of her half-heels, and stood there with sheer panties worn over nylons and garter belt, in good Girl Scout be-prepared readiness. A push-up bra emphasized breasts that had gained prominence with the passage of time.
“So far so good?” she said, with a truck driver’s grin.
“So far so good,” I admitted, and got out of my trousers with as much grace as a guy my age with a raging hard-on could manage.
She slipped off the panties, leaving the nylons and garter belt on—her pubic triangle was trimmed and dyed blonde, for onstage purposes, but it worked just fine in private. The bra came away and the breasts did not droop at all. Her nipples were erect within aureoles as round and big as a lucky silver dollar.
For some reason, I’d got out of the loafers and trousers and underwear first, and I was standing there still in my blazer and shirt and tie with my dick sticking out between the front halves of my shirt like a coat-tree prong when she came over smiling wickedly and grabbed me, not by the hand, and led me over to the full-length mirror between closets. She did not have a fitting in mind. Or maybe she did.
She looked small, a curvaceous little thing, like the White Rock mineral water fairy, as she got on her knees on the off-white carpet, positioning herself before me. The blue-green eyes gleamed up at me.
“Go ahead and take off your coat and shirt. You look a little silly.”
I had no comment. Just did as I was told. I did still have my black socks on, which gave the tableau a stag-film ambiance.
She began to suck me.
I was feeling a little drunk, not from anything I’d imbibed, and would glance down at her, then at her reflection in the mirror, as her pretty face took the length of me in and out of her full, smiling mouth.
She would now and then pause for a remark between smooth, wet strokes. Once she said, “You
like
watching?”
I managed a nod.
“Even though I’m not a little fuck-bunny?”
She had me so damn close.…
I said, “Hell you aren’t,” and we didn’t make it to the round bed. I knelt worshipfully and buried my face in that moist muff till she moaned for the real thing. Then fucked her on the floor, on the carpet, where I could still glance over at our reflection where two lovers in their twenties or maybe thirties were humping like crazy, not a couple in their late fifties trying to recapture something, no, two lovers in their goddamn fucking prime.
Still, out of deference to our bones and lower backs—which did not entirely share our enthusiasm, at least at the postcoital stage—we did find our way to the round bed, after she’d made a stop at the bathroom, and got under the covers and she sat sheet-draped with her lovely breasts showing and pillows propped behind her and smoked a Lucky Strike. She’d brought them and the Zippo along, in anticipation of the postgame recap.
“Not bad for a couple of old farts, huh, Heller?”
“Not bad at all. So. What was the career setback?”
“The world’s fair.”
“What world’s fair? Century of Progress has been over a while, you know.”
“Not
that
fair. And not the one on Treasure Island at San Fran a lifetime ago. This
current
one.”
New York World’s Fair.
She blew a smoke ring and watched it dissipate. “There was a lot of talk, a lot of press, about me appearing there. Bringing everything full circle, you know? I was the toast of Chicago, probably the one thing everybody remembers about that fair. And people associated with the new fair…”
She gestured grandly, and her tone grew arch as she spoke an official name.
“… the New York City
Planning
Commission … were talking to me about it. I had that booking right in my fingertips when that stuffy prick Robert Moses snatched it away. I wasn’t dignified enough. I would … ‘send the wrong message.’”
“Shame, Sal.” She was Sally Rand at the moment, so that’s what I called her.
“Now, they aren’t even gonna
have
a damn midway! This Moses character may know how to build a bridge, but he knows jack shit about putting on a world’s fair. People go to a fair to have fucking
fun
! And the midway is where the most fun is.”
“Their loss.”
She sighed smoke. “It’s gotten a little tough, Nate. I’m still working forty weeks a year, you know … mostly one-night stands. But not once in all that time a strip joint. Not
once
—always legit theaters and supper clubs and nightspots. You know, I always travel with half a dozen girls, trained dancers, who do a fan-dance ballet before I come out. Real lookers. I
know
I look good for my age…”
“Yes you do.”
“… but it doesn’t hurt to give the younger fellas some nice fresh firm female flesh to look at, before I do my classic routine.”
“I take it bookings are slow.”
“Yeah. Well, that’s how this setback hurt. I got a lot of publicity about being considered for the new fair … but also a lot for being rejected. Plus, the landscape out there’s changed, Nate. Lot of venues dead and dying.”
“What can I do?”
The blue-green eyes batted at me. “What about your pal Hefner?”
Suddenly she remembered his name.
“Maybe,” she said, anxious, eager, “he’d do a layout on the living legend that is Sally Rand. He seems to have a sense of history. Nostalgia’s a big thing lately.”
“I don’t know, Helen. Hef’s all about the girl next door. Sweet young things who wanna fuck you silly. I don’t know if he’s capable of admitting a woman your age can still be sexually appealing.”
She smirked. “You’re probably right.” Her eyes tightened. “But you know, Nate, this is the thirtieth anniversary of the
real
world’s fair. The Century of Progress. Maybe that still means something in this town. Maybe you could … could you …
think
of something?”