Sometimes then, five in the morning, Penny would sing. She missed her New York nightclubs, and tried her best to re-create them in the silk jersey dawn. Band members still among the living would gamely try to play along with her. Lately, she had acquired a taste for blues numbers full of murder:
I love you like a razorblade
I love you like a knife
I love you like a Gatling gun
You love me like a wife.
Or:
Poppa, don’t push me.
I’ve killed men before.
You’ll be kissing the threshold
If you walk toward that door.
An unsavory song over scrambled eggs. It seemed just right.
Some nights I brought over a lady comic I’d met at the Hollywood Canteen named Sukey Decker. We were pals. Sukey was bucktoothed to that narrow margin of beauty between forgettable and unfortunate: with some effort she could make herself look comic straight on, but she couldn’t help her gorgeous profile. Lovely figure, too, the kind that comics trace in the air with the flats of their hands, saying zowie or hubba hubba. The movies didn’t know what to do with her; she would pal around with the leading lady and crack wise and only show her legs as a burlesque punch line. On radio, and later on TV, she did well. Her shtick was a kind of world-weary man-hunger. Her voice was like that, too, low and slightly soft around the edges: hearing it was like tasting expensive candy. Till then, you’d never realized how lousy most candy was.
The four of us often ended up at Rocky’s basement bar and smoked cigarettes and insulted each other and drank too much. “What time is it?” Penny would ask, unable to see the clock over the bar. “Tomorrow,” Rocky would answer: nine in the morning, or ten. “A little eye-opener never hurt anyone,” said Sukey, who could outdrink us or anyone.
I like Sukey a lot. As far as we knew, she’d never married. She didn’t even go with anyone, though on the radio she joked that she could do without silk and nylon and meat and gas and sugar, but the man shortage was about to kill her.
“She likes me,” said Rocky one drunken tomorrow morning, though that wasn’t true. She hated him; she only came to his parties because he had great taste in musicians. But Sukey fascinated Rocky. “What’s her story?” he asked me, though Sukey was sitting next to him. He hooked an arm around her neck.
“Who knows?” I said.
“Okay, sweetheart.” He pulled her in and kissed the top of her head. “You tell me your story.”
“What story?” she asked.
“Boyfriends,” he said, giving her a wobbly gesture that meant, Do you have any?
“I’m allergic,” she said.
Sukey was like a high elevation: when she was around you, you got drunker quicker. Penny was already drowsing like the dormouse on the edge of the bar. “You’re afraid,” Rock said, sloppy and sage.
“Of what?”
“Men,” said Rocky, in a pure imitation of how Sukey as a leading lady’s best friend would have said it, equal parts contempt and longing. That he managed this was a coincidence, the way sometimes the third verse of a long-forgotten song will come cresting into your brain on too much whiskey.
Sukey laughed. “You sadden me,” she said. “You amuse me. But you don’t frighten me.”
“Okay,” said Rocky, “sex. You’re afraid of.”
“Oh, sex. No, I’m not afraid of sex. I’m all for sex. Sex doesn’t give me a second’s pause. Sex?” she said. “Sex is swell.”
“Good,” said Rocky, puzzled.
“But romance,” said Sukey, “mortifies me.”
Sukey liked me fine as a friend, and I pretended that the feeling was mutual, that all I longed for was her company and clever wit and the occasional firm handshake. Really, I wanted to get her into bed. I mean, not just into bed, because I also loved her company and clever wit; it’s just that her firm handshake tortured me with its possibilities. I suspected that the Professor had monkey-wrenched my love life: she would have gone for me if I’d been a leading man. I decided I could wait her out. She wasn’t your usual girl; she required unusual tactics. But Sukey seemed quite immune to my charms. In retrospect I’d say she was immune to charm, period; she hated anything that smacked of pretense or practice. She was a devout cynic, which meant that only naïve sincerity could melt her heart. In other words, she adored Penny and her five-in-the-morning declarations of homicide. Sweetheart, I’ll stab you/Tangled up in my bedding./I want to cry at your funeral/Not at your wedding.
“She’s like a cartoon girl,” Sukey once told me, and I realized who Penny had always reminded me of: certain female impersonators who’d studied girlishness. “Betty Boop,” Sukey called Penny, who giggled and showed her garters. The four of us mostly palled around together at Rocky’s place, because Sukey did not want to be photographed next to me at a nightclub with a caption that only said the truth, but suggested much more: Funnyman Mike Sharp and Funnylady Sukey Decker, out on the town, insist they’re “Just Friends.”
Penny finally ordered a Ferris wheel when Rock and I were out on a bond drive, and one Sunday she invited Sukey and me over for its inaugural spin. We had cocktails by the pool, under its empty turning shadow. Penny kept trying to talk me onto it.
“Keep talking,” I told her.
She wore a green top with slim green pants and green shoes, and lay across Rock’s lap on a chaise longue. She looked like a piece of parsley on the blue plate special. “Suit yourself,” she said sleepily.
Then she rolled to her feet and put her hands out to Sukey, Will you dance, and Sukey took them in agreement. That was one of the loveliest things about Penny: she’d ask anyone to dance, old men and grandmas and five-year-olds and homely single women, though this might be because all of the above looked the same, to Penny; what she could see, from across the room, were shoulders shifting longingly in time to the rhythm.
“It Had to Be You” played on the portable record player. Penny was the stronger dancer, and so she tried to use her advantage to force Sukey into leading. This ploy failed, but they looked lovely dancing together, in time but out of step. Both of them wore giant Andrews Sisters rolled hairdos; Sukey had on a fascinating halter top and a pair of camel-colored bell-bottoms. Penny placed her hand on the knot that held up Sukey’s top.