Last Night at the Telegraph Club(44)
“You didn’t have to wait,” Lily said, surprised.
“I wouldn’t leave you up here alone. You looked a little lost back there.”
There was only kindness in her voice, and Lily felt overwhelmed by it. “Thank you,” Lily said.
Claire shrugged it off. “Let’s go. Tommy’s second set is usually better, because it’s after the tourists leave.”
Lily followed her back down to the stage room, where Tommy was singing in the spotlight. When they returned to their table, Kath leaned close to her and said, “I was getting worried! I got you another beer.”
The idea of drinking another one seemed scandalous to Lily, but she didn’t want to be impolite, and she could practically hear Shirley saying, Don’t be such a square. “Thanks,” she said to Kath, and picked up her glass. The beer was cold, and with each sip it became easier to watch Tommy onstage, to laugh and applaud when the others did. Perhaps it was because the initial shock of seeing a woman impersonate a man was wearing off, and she knew a little about what to expect now. Or perhaps it was because the tourists had mostly left, as Claire predicted, and the audience was almost all women. The club felt looser now; it felt lighter, as if finally Tommy was among friends. The one or two men remaining in the audience could be overlooked at last, and Tommy did overlook them.
Lily thought that Claire was right: Tommy’s second set was better than the first. She changed the lyrics to the songs she sang now, and the changes were so direct that Lily could hardly believe what she was hearing. When a beautiful lady like you / Meets an irresistible gay girl like me. The rest of the audience wasn’t as surprised, though; or if they were, it was a delighted kind of surprise, because they laughed to hear it.
Tommy flirted shamelessly with a woman in a green dress seated at a table near the stage with two other women, and the woman in the green dress loved it so much Tommy brought her onstage to serenade her with “Secret Love.” This time Lily was fairly certain Tommy hadn’t changed a single word, and Lily was struck by how duplicitous a song could be, as if multiple languages were hidden within the lyrics. Tommy ended her set with a rollicking rendition of “Keep It Gay,” and when it was over, she sauntered offstage and back to the bar, and the way some women shook her hand or slapped her shoulder, it was obvious that they knew her.
Afterward, Lily assumed it was time to go home, but when she looked at Kath, she didn’t seem to be in a rush. Lily touched her arm and asked, “Should we go?”
“We can if you want. They’ll tell us when last call is, and then we’ll have to leave, anyway.”
“What time is it?”
Kath held her watch closer to the votive candle, angling it to catch the light. “About half past one.”
Claire had gotten up as soon as Tommy’s set was over, and now she returned with Lana and two glasses of wine in tow. They pulled over an extra chair, and Claire introduced Lana all around—“We met Kath here tonight, and you remember her friend Lily”—and the question of leaving seemed to fade. Lily finished her beer and wondered whether Tommy would join them. It began to seem inevitable, and her pulse quickened as she imagined what might happen. Tommy would drag a chair over and sit down, taking out her pack of cigarettes; she would offer them around, and Lana would accept one. There would be more beers, and more conversation that Lily didn’t quite understand, and all the while she would have to work hard not to stare, not to gaze at the way Tommy’s hair was artfully slicked back with that little wave, or the way her collar pressed intimately against her throat.
A shout went around the room—“Last call!”—and several women got up to go to the bar and buy their last drinks of the night, while others headed to the hat check.
“We should go,” Kath said.
Lily nodded, and realized with a mixture of disappointment and relief that Tommy wasn’t going to sit with them after all. She put on her coat, and she and Kath said goodbye to Claire and Paula—Lana politely shook their hands—and then they began to move through the emptying stage room toward the narrow bar area. Tommy was walking toward them, carrying two tall glasses of beer, and for a heart-stopping moment Lily thought Tommy was bringing one of them to her—but then Tommy passed her by briskly, a whiff of her cologne floating behind her. Lily turned her head to follow Tommy’s progress; of course she was going to meet Lana and Claire, and there was Paula standing up to take one of the beers. Lily felt Kath’s hand on her arm, and Kath said, “Are you coming?”
“Sorry.” Lily followed Kath down the length of the bar, past women still nursing their final drinks, and through the black door and onto the sidewalk.
The cool night air was welcome after the smoky, stuffy interior. Women were standing in little clumps outside the club, lighting up cigarettes and talking, prolonging their nights out. Someone said there was an after-hours club a couple of blocks away; someone else suggested heading to Chinatown for some late-night chow mein. Lily glanced at her watch in the light of a streetlamp as she and Kath walked away from the club; it was two o’clock in the morning, and all the neon signs on Broadway were still ablaze. Men and women were emerging from the other clubs on the street, some of them stumbling drunk, others squealing with laughter. The entire city seemed to be awake, living a second life she hadn’t known existed until now. When she and Kath reached the intersection where they had to part ways, they paused on the edge of the sidewalk to avoid the other pedestrians.