Last Night at the Telegraph Club(40)
The rear of the stage was covered by a black curtain, and Lily wondered if someone was going to step out from behind it. She had been waiting for this for so long that these last few moments seemed interminable. She quivered in her shoes as she gazed at the stage, at the people seated near the edge—she was jealous of their proximity to that microphone—and at Kath, who was watching the stage just as she was. Then there was a murmur behind them, and all the people packed into their section turned toward the archway.
Someone was making their way through the crowd.
Lily couldn’t see the person clearly, only the motion of others making way, like a wave, but she followed the ripple and turned along with her neighbors as that person strolled through the audience, and finally stepped onto the low stage and into the spotlight.
Lily knew that this was Tommy Andrews, male impersonator. She knew that the entire point of the show was the fact that the performer was not a man. Someone nearby whispered, “Is that really a woman?” And Lily squirmed with embarrassment, because that question led her to imagine what Tommy’s body looked like under her suit, and that seemed so disrespectful—like those men who had leered at them at the bowling alley. Lily felt a queasy, selfconscious confusion. It was wrong to stare, and yet Tommy was onstage, and they were supposed to look. It would be rude not to watch, so she did.
At first Tommy stood with her back to the room while the pianist continued to play, and the notes began to coalesce into a melody that Lily recognized. The spotlight gleamed on Tommy’s short hair, highlighting the way it was cut sharp against the nape of the neck, right above the white collar that was crisply framed by a black tuxedo jacket. Tommy pulled the microphone toward her mouth, with her face still turned away from the audience and toward the black curtain, and began to sing the first lines to “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered.”
The voice that emerged was pitched low and husky, like a jazz singer with smoke on her breath. A faint gasp went through the audience as if people were surprised, but Lily knew it wasn’t surprise. It was acknowledgment of how immaculate the male impersonation was, how shockingly well staged. The contrast between Tommy’s voice (especially when it rose smoothly to the higher notes) and silhouette (legs spread and shoulders cocked) was deliciously scandalous. Lily felt her heartbeat thrumming in her chest as she watched; she was afraid to blink; she was afraid to miss the moment she sensed coming closer—and finally, there it was.
At the end of the first verse, Tommy spun around with a cocky smile on her face, and the audience burst into applause so loud it drowned out the rest of the verse.
The black-and-white photograph in the Chronicle had been a poor imitation of reality, smudged and blurry. It had left out all the important details: the sheen of pomade on the waves of Tommy’s hair; the precise folds of her black bow tie; the gold signet ring on her pinkie finger as she cupped the microphone close to her mouth. It had given no sense, Lily now realized, of Tommy’s physicality. The way she stood, the way she moved—her swagger—so like a man and yet—
It was that yet that made Lily’s skin flush warm. The knowledge that despite the clothes that Tommy wore, despite the attitude that invited everyone in the room to gaze at her, she was not a man. It felt unspeakably charged, as if all of Lily’s most secret desires had been laid bare onstage.
Tommy didn’t change the lyrics. The song was languid and liquid, with a hint of jaded self-reproach as if Tommy were confessing that she had fallen in love against her wishes. Hearing her sing to an unnamed “him” while dressed as a man was a sensation. The audience whistled at her, and she winked at them, so sure of herself it made Lily’s face burn.
She didn’t want Tommy ever to stop. She could stand there in the hot crowd, craning her neck to see around the heads of those who had been lucky enough to get a table, gazing at Tommy in her tuxedo, forever. She had heard the song before, of course, but never like this, never the way Tommy sang with a purr in her voice that felt like she was whispering directly in Lily’s ear.
Lily’s blouse clung to her damp skin, and she became increasingly aware of the press of people around her and the heat that rose from their bodies. The air was close and smelled more strongly than ever of cigarette smoke and alcohol, and the undercurrent of perfume now seemed shockingly intimate, as if she were nuzzling the necks of all the women here.
And all of a sudden it was almost painful to watch Tommy onstage. She had to look away as if she were a drowning person surfacing for air. She saw that there were some men in the audience—husbands with their wives or girlfriends, seated in a clump on one side of the room as if they had huddled together for safety. The men seemed to be having a good time, applauding and grinning, giving each other approving glances as if to congratulate themselves on their adventurousness. The wives and girlfriends were more mixed in their expressions. One looked absolutely mortified and could barely keep her eyes on the stage; one leaned forward with a broad smile, occasionally giving her husband a smirk. The smirk was so thick with suggestion that it made Lily queasy, even though she didn’t understand what it meant. The not knowing made it worse; it opened a Pandora’s box of implication, and yet she was painfully aware of her own na?veté. She couldn’t even imagine what that woman wanted, but she was certain it was shameful.
Beyond those couples, most of the audience was women, and some of those women were dressed like men. None as finely as Tommy, but some wore ties and vests, while others wore blazers with open-collared shirts. Some women were done up for a night on the town in cocktail dresses, with sparkling earrings and necklaces around their pale throats. There were a few Negro women seated together, but Lily was the only Chinese girl in the room. That meant there was no one from Chinatown to recognize her, but it also made her stand out all the more.