So you find your girl and sit down next to her between shows, in a restaurant, or a sitting room, or best of all a park, on a bench. Courtesy and courage. You rest your right elbow on the back of the bench, near her shoulder, make a bow of your arms, hands clasped in front, your left elbow pointing at your left hip. Maybe a bow of your legs, too, your ankle crossed on your knee. Smile as though she has just told nine tenths of a long joke that promises to be the funniest thing you ever heard, you can taste the punch line. Don’t touch her, but keep close. Ask her questions. Look her in the eyes, sure, but look away, down to her lap, at her shoulder — you’re either a confident man made shy by her beauty, or an emboldened shrinking violet; either transformation’ll charm her. If you hold still enough, she will be the one to put her hand on your nearby knee, and then slide it closer to your hip, and then, on a good day, she will spread her overcoat across your laps. Better still, a newspaper, which will rattle but is disposable, and makes more sense as a prop. You are theatrical people, after all. Tabloids are too smalclass="underline" you need something respectable and full sized. You are only sitting with your girl, reading the paper together — is the right movie playing at the right theater — and you look at the paper, and then at your girl, your free hand holding your side of the daily news, and hers hers. The prim pigeons will fly away, but squirrels are worse perverts than old ladies, and will loiter. One set of her garters has come undone (Oh, you men who care nothing for fashion, let me tell you a story about the days before pantyhose!) and the pale stocking has fallen around her pale shoe on the dark grass like a ring around the moon. If you are a good actor, and a quiet careful polite boy brought up in a houseful of girls, only those local squirrels will wonder why you don’t run a finger along the newsprint, why the far left columns crumple in your grip, why she folds the horoscope nearly in half, her thumb threading it between her fingers, her tongue between her teeth. Why it takes so long for the two of you to fold the paper up, neatly, as though you are making the bed.
6. Ah! It’s You!
We were playing the Casino Theater at Coney Island when Rocky became enamored of a nearsighted chanteuse named Penny O’Hanian, a pretty girl with a great deal of nut-brown hair who specialized in love-gone-wrong songs. Maybe she was just a good singer, but despite a thin voice she sounded like she meant every stepped-on word. Her eyesight was so bad (she refused to wear glasses) that she had to sidle stage right and feel for the curtain with her fingers. Then she whipped it around herself like a cape — that was her exit — and whipped it back for her bow. Sometimes in the whirlwind of velvet, she nearly toppled over.
Even backstage, she made noise: she sang under her breath so people would know she was coming. Years later, when I heard about the way bats navigate, I thought of Penny, singing out as she groped her way through life. She fixed on her face a standoffish expression because she didn’t want to smile at strangers, and you could get quite close to her before she could make out your features, and this was her charm. The minute you came into focus, Penny would suddenly look delighted, relieved, nearly heartsick. Just the person I was longing to see! She’d grab you by the forearm. She wouldn’t let go.
You had to love Penny for that, and Rocky did. He never noticed that she did it to everyone she knew.
“She’s adorable,” he told me.
“She is,” I answered, and I thought, Right up until she opens her mouth. I found her — forgive me, Penny, I didn’t know you well then — maddening. Completely. She couldn’t shut up. Spending time with Penny was like walking into a crowd of chickens: that noisy and that meaningful. Or like she’d been having a conversation with herself all day, and there was no way you’d catch up. Rocky, no mean talker himself, watched her babble, happily shaking his head. He started keeping company with her. At least I think he did. It was hard to tell. Maybe I was keeping company with her. All I knew was that for a week at the Casino, followed by a week at Loew’s Majestic in the Bronx, then finally in Manhattan at the Eltinge (named after the famous female impersonator), she was around all the time, at dinners, in taverns. She’d reach out and snag one of our forearms and say, brightly, “Where will we dine tonight, boys?” I’m still not convinced that Penny wasn’t just desperate for a couple of seeing-eye friends. It must have been a great relief to her not to totter into a burlesque house thinking it was a department store.
For instance: at a midtown chop house, Rocky was telling a story about Julian Eltinge, the theater’s namesake: he’d once punched Rocky in the nose.
“Why?” I asked.
“He thought I made a comment about his virility.”
“Did you?”
Rocky looked theatrically sheepish. “No. No words were exchanged at all.”
“So why did he hit you?”
“I patted him on the keester. I thought it was a compliment, from one professional to another.”
“What a beautiful dress,” Penny said.
We had manners, we were game: we looked around to see what dress Penny meant.
“The one I saw Eltinge in,” she said. “He was fat already, but, my God! I wish I looked that good.” Then she said to Rocky, “I mean, you’ve never patted my keester.”
“I’m a gentleman,” Rock explained. “That was my problem: so was Eltinge.”
“I could use a nice dress.” Penny sighed. “I like blue.” Then, moments later, “I like cut flowers in a vase.” She sensed movement in the room, and called out to the man who was approaching our table, “I could use a fresh napkin.”
The guy in question was a tall blond young man in a tan suit with oversized shoulder pads and a dizzying checked yellow tie. The waiters, on the other hand, were all puny Jewish fellows in short red jackets and black bow-ties. “Couldn’t we all?” the guy said amiably, and kept on going toward the Gents’.
“Was that the maître d’?” Penny asked.
I laughed. “For Pete’s sake, Penny, why don’t you get glasses?” Maybe I was just a glasses snob, having gotten my first pair at age twenty-five. I admired myself in the mirror constantly, though I don’t know whether that was because they suited me or because I hadn’t clearly seen my own face for several years. Or because I had also just purchased my first toupee, and I was working on not noticing it.
“I don’t need them,” Penny said. Then, to Rocky, as if I’d suggested she should wear a mask to cover her puss, she said, “Mike thinks I should get glasses!”
He said, “Not till we’re married, sweetheart,” and slapped me heartily on the back.
That was a joke, I was sure. He thought she was pretty sweet — it was all he could do to resist picking her up and carrying her around so she wouldn’t bump into things — but he wasn’t even sleeping with her. I thought he should give it a try. Penny was so eccentric, not to mention free with her fingers, that it would at least have been an interesting experience.