Night and Day Read online

  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.

  You’re staring at the dark sky when you hear the footsteps in the hall, going past your door: quick, but not running. Curious, you go to the door and open it and look out into the corridor, but all you see is a flash of dark cloth in the dim light of the wall sconce by the stairs. Dark brown, maybe, or purple; you’d bet purple because you have a suspicion of who it is, and he’s just the sort to wear a purple silk dressing gown. Not a robe. A dressing gown.

  And it’s not quite a suspicion, but more of an instinct. Your body thrums like a sympathetic tuning fork when he’s near, just as it did with Bertie.

  You let the door close quietly behind you and follow him, up the stairs instead of down, to a door that stands open against a sky still spattered with stars. Silently you creep up the stairs and stand looking out the door at him. He has his back to you, his face turned toward the paler sky in the east, his feet bare on the tarpaper of the flat roof. There is nothing else here, just the furnace chimney and the low, dingy brick walls that frame the roof. Just him and you and the dawn sky.

  The first edge of sunlight creeps over the horizon, and he drops the dressing gown, letting it slither down his body to lay in a tumble at his feet. Your breath goes still in your chest.

  He stretches his arms out as if he is basking in the watery light. His shoulders are taut with muscle, his arms long and strong, his lean back leading down into a dimpled, firm bottom and long, powerful thighs and legs. He is completely nude, standing with
his arms spread like a king, like a sacrifice, his head thrown back. In the dark of the club, his hair looks black, but now you see that it’s brown and bronze, and the sunlight as it moves across the roof raises sparks of red and copper. And it’s long, down to his shoulder blades—it hadn’t been that long last night, certainly not. It fits him, somehow. Not Rick the club owner, lazy and laughing, but this creature, this king, this worshipper.

  And then he begins to glow. First a soft, subtle gilding of his skin that makes no sense; he should be dark and silhouetted against the sun, but he is golden, glowing. Brighter and brighter he shines until the sun has cleared the city horizon, and by then he is incandescent. And finally, light explodes around him, white and painful and glorious.

  When you open your eyes again, you are back in your bed, and it’s only the ceiling that you see, this time in the pale light of very early morning. You blink, confused, and then realize you must have dreamed going up on the roof, dreamed seeing Rick shining like an arc light, taking in the sun as if it were sustenance.

  There’s a light knock on the door, and Rick himself sticks his head into the room. “You’re up,” he says in surprise. “Thought you’d still be asleep. You were dead on your feet when you came up last night.”

  “I’m awake,” you acknowledge. “And I feel fine. Hungry.”

  “Throw some clothes on, and I’ll meet you downstairs in ten minutes. Mario doesn’t come in until noon, but I know a place not too far away that makes an excellent breakfast. Coco’s still asleep; she loathes mornings, so I don’t often have company.” Then he’s gone, the door closing with a quiet click.

  You get up and go to the closet to find that some kind brownie has cleaned and pressed your shabby clothes and hung them up on the rod beside a handful of Arrow shirts in your size, and fine wool trousers folded over pants hangers. There is a white linen suit hooked on the back of the closet door with a note pinned to the lapel that reads, “Wear Me.” It makes you laugh, but it would look stupid with your battered black lace-up shoes, so you reach instead for your second-best trousers, your first-best having been the wool ones you wore for three straight days and never want to wear again. But then you see a pair of white-and-cream shoes on the floor of the closet beside your brogans, and you crumble to the silent pressure of the Bellevues’ generosity and your own desperate need to look good for Rick. A five-minute shower and shave and a brush of your teeth with the new toothbrush in the glass, a quick process of dressing in new clothes from the skin out, and you’re only a minute late meeting Rick.

  He’s waiting by the front door of the club, a straw fedora on his head and another in his hand. He tosses it to you and you put it on. “Ready?” he says.

  “Yes. Thank you. For the clothes and things. And the bed. And….”

  He laughs and opens the door. “Consider it—”

  “An investment,” you finish for him. “Yes. But I’m still grateful.”

  There’s a car waiting at the curb, a beautiful golden Lincoln Model K, with its low, sweeping lines. The interior is white leather, and it occurs to you that the Bellevues must have their fingers in more pots than just a little supper club that caters to oddball types. And the people you met last night were oddballs, all right, not just in their social or racial or physical characteristics, but something much deeper, much less clear. You’re not quite sure what it is, but you push it to the back of your skull to cogitate on later, when you have the inclination.

  For now, you want to enjoy this moment, the ride in a sleek high-powered car beside a sleek high-powered man, on a cool, clear morning with empty streets. You shoot him a quick sidelong look and are oddly comforted to see that his hair, while definitely brown, is not electric with copper sparks and no longer than it was last night.

  “It’s not far, and at this hour, before the traffic, it should only take about twenty minutes. If you’re desperate, there’s a Thermos flask full of coffee under the seat. I made it earlier. But that’s the extent of my cooking ability.”

  “I can wait,” you say.

  The car is open, so you both are quiet, silenced by the wind of your passing as he speeds through the city streets. It is only a matter of minutes before you have left the city behind and are tooling along rougher country roads. There aren’t any mountains within a hundred miles of the city, but the river cuts through bluffs to the west, so the road climbs in switchbacks up to the higher ground. You arrive at your destination, a small restaurant on top of the bluff, and Rick pulls into the gravel lot. The sign says Delphie’s. As you climb out of the car, the front door opens, and a small woman comes running out to leap into Rick’s arms. He laughs and hugs her. She plants a loud kiss on his cheek before dropping to her feet in the gravel and giving him a good, solid punch to the upper arm. “Four weeks!” she yells at him. “Four weeks!”

  “I’ve been busy,” he says weakly. “She’s been good?”

  “She’s fine,” the woman says, and then turns to you. “Hullo. I’m Delphie. You’re…?”

  “Nate Petroff,” Rick says. “Our new headliner.”

  She doesn’t say “Never heard of you,” but the phrase is loud in her skeptical look. But she shakes your hand anyway. “Meetcha,” she says, then to Rick, “Come on in. You can visit her while I’m fixin’ up your breakfast. Coffee’s ready, on the sideboard.”

  The restaurant is tiny but clean, and the coffee is hot and black and perfect. Rick takes the cup you pour him and leads the way through a door at the back and up a short path to an even tinier cottage. He raps on the door once and then pushes it open.

  The little living room is redolent with the sweet smoke of marijuana, but it’s not a jazz musician or flapper holding the joint. It’s a little old lady in a rocking chair, her eyes vague and filmy. “Hey, Auntie,” Rick says softly.

  “Don’t you call me ‘Auntie,’ boy,” the woman says. “When you don’t hardly come to see me no more.”

  “I’m sorry, Auntie. I brought you a present.” Rick reaches into his jacket pocket and takes out a brown-paper-wrapped package.

  “Better be the weed,” “Auntie” says.

  Rick laughs. “Of course.”

  “I suppose you want me to look at him?”

  “If you like.” Rick is noncommittal, but he glances at me.

  The woman is crotchety, but little and frail. She doesn’t scare you until you sit on the hassock in front of her rocker and she leans forward. She smells of lavender, soft and powdery, and of pot, sickly sweet. Your empty stomach roils and you clench your coffee mug.

  She says nothing, but stares at you a long moment. Then she turns to Rick and starts speaking very fast in a language that sounds Greek or Turkish or something Middle Eastern. He listens, going still, and then finally nods, slowly, as if unwilling to hear what she says. She winds down eventually and turns back to you. “It’s as well,” she says to you, as if you have a clue what she’s talking about, then sits back in her rocker and raises the joint to her lips again.

  “Come on,” Rick says, and leads you back out of the smoky cottage.

  “She has severe rheumatism.” His voice is apologetic as you walk back down the short path to the restaurant. “I bring her the marijuana because it eases the pain. She’s very old.”

  “She’s very strange,” you counter. “What did she say? And what language was that?”

  “It’s a Greek dialect. She’s from the same little village my family’s from. Of course, we’ve been in America for a long time.”

  Delphie is waiting at the door with a big basket, which she hands to Rick. “Too nice a day to sit indoors. You go on up to the picnic spot.”

  Rick gives her a buss on the cheek, and you follow him across the gravel lot to a stand of trees. Just past the trees is a wooden table and benches on a place near the edge of the bluff, overlooking the river. Rick sets the basket on the table, then turns to you. His face is serious, but the hand he reaches out to brush your jaw is gentle. “It wasn’t anything important. Just a cr
azy old woman’s ramblings. I shouldn’t have subjected you to that, but she has so few amusements. Ready for breakfast?”

  There are rolls, and omelets in steaming bowls, and crisp bacon and spicy sausage. And more coffee, in a vacuum flask. And slices of melon in multiple colors. You and Rick eat silently, but when you’ve finished and set down your fork, he says, “What happened after the war?”

  You blink. “After the war?”

  “After you were discharged. What did you do?”

  “I went home to Michigan for a while. I’d gotten a scholarship to the Detroit Conservatory, which they’d deferred for anyone who was fighting in the war, so when I left home, I went there.”

  “They didn’t look at your war record?”

  “Of course they did.” Your voice is sarcastic but you can’t help it. It hurts. “They asked me why I was dishonorably discharged.”

  “What did you do?”

  “What would you do? I lied. I told them that someone else had made advances to me, but that when I rebuffed them, he went to his officers and said I was the one. I had no proof, but neither did he, and so I told them that the officers chose to believe him.”

  “Is that what you told your family?”

  “No. I told them the truth. Which is why I left Detroit.” Your voice is shaking, so you take a moment to bite into a danish. The thick, sweet raspberry goo drips on your chin, and you wipe it off, licking your finger. When you look up, Rick is staring at your mouth.

  Angrily, you say, “And then when I failed there, I went to New York and tried to get work there, and failed, and Philadelphia, and failed, and Boston, and failed, and took a job as a longshoreman, and then lost my job when the market crashed, and now I’ve come here, and you think I’m not going to fail again, and you’re crazy, you know that? I don’t know what you want of me, but I suspect, and I don’t like it. I’m not a charity case. I won’t be.” You drop the rest of the danish onto the plate and say, “So if that’s what it is, we can just say forget it. Drive me back to the club, and I’ll get my stuff, and get out of your hair.”