In Sunlight or In Shadow Read online

  Before he leaves, he covers the canvas with the same old shabby muslin he always uses. She’s never been allowed to look, not until it’s done.

  But his sketchbook is right there on the kitchen table. There’s nothing covering it and she’s never heard any rules about that. So she lifts its cover and takes a peek at the first sketch, a blaze of color from the special Dixon pencils he made her steal from the office.

  It’s a woman on a dark stage, spotlight illuminating her. In the band pit beneath, a cadaverous drummer sits, facing away. Facing toward her are the charcoaled heads of several men in the front row, heads tilted up hungrily, like baby birds.

  She is nude, save the narrowest, flimsiest blue fabric, far too narrow to be called panty briefs.

  She is nude, and parading her nudity, nut-brown bob shimmering, a cream-pink body, breasts fulsome and high, arms lifted, almost like a bird, wings spread, a long blue fabric swinging behind her. The legs and feet aren’t done yet, but she can see the charcoal lines, the legs curved, strong, a faint skein of stretched skin along the left hip.

  Head tilted, the face has an expression Pauline recognizes but cannot name.

  “My, but that’s something,” she whispers to herself. “I look like a queen or something.”

  She’s not a fool. She knows this must all be about Bud’s story, the dancer he saw with nipples like strawberries. Maybe she should be bothered by it, like her mother might have, or the Bible punchers back home. At one time, it might have made her sad. But it doesn’t now.

  It makes her start thinking of things she hasn’t thought of in a long time. Like when she was a seven or eight, looking for her father’s shoeshine brush in his chifforobe. On tiptoes, she reached inside the top drawer and felt the cool gloss of a photograph. Yanking the drawer further, it fluttered to the floor, a tinted image of a young woman wrapped around a long-necked swan, nude except for long curling red hair that reached her perfect white toes. It was the first time she’d ever seen a dirty picture and the first time she found out about certain things on a woman’s body, a grown woman. That flame of red between her legs.

  Her mother found her looking at it and whipped her with boar bristle brush for what seemed like the longest time.

  She hasn’t thought about that picture in a long time, had put it in a chifforobe in the back of her head, and shut the drawer.

  The following day, on her lunch hour, she stops at the department store with the sumptuous window displays. Mostly, she buys her things at the Woolworth’s, with its corn cures and girdle supporter displays. But sometimes, especially at the holidays, she peeks in here to look at the sumptuous glass cases, especially the cosmetics department where the walls are pink damask and they sell perfumes in colored bottles and powder puffs like snowballs.

  As she walks through the aisles, the cases like shimmering jewel boxes, she thinks of the woman in her husband’s sketch, the proud lift of her jaw, those legs like calla lilies though a thousand times as strong.

  The salesgirl behind the counter beckons her, holding the tiniest rose-colored bottle in her palm.

  “It makes time disappear,” she says, rubbing it into Pauline’s hands, making stroking circles until her hands feel like warm silk, like she imagined the soft inside of a fur muff might feel.

  Moments later, in the fourth-floor ladies room, behind one of the wooden stall doors, Pauline wriggles and squirms until she can slide her dress down a bit.

  Slowly, she dabs the lotion over her collar bone, chest, her breasts—running her hand beneath them, dotting her nipples. The smell is suddenly too much, making her dizzy. She has to sit down and count to one hundred before she goes back to work.

  Late, very late, the sky black as pitch out the kitchen window, he stops working for a moment and looks at her over the top of the canvas.

  “How would you do it?” he asks, abruptly.

  She lets her arms fall, resting them. “Do what?”

  “If men were to see you like that,” he says, his voice tightening suddenly, like a screw. “Would you really stand like that? Would you really show them? Like that?”

  She knows these are not questions, and she knows better not to answer.

  Without saying anything, she steps off the stool and takes two beer cans out of the refrigerator and punches them open.

  They both drink them greedily, and then Pauline gets on the stool again. The smell of the afternoon’s perfume is strong and she has never been happier.

  In the morning, she finds him sitting at the kitchen table, Bromo-Seltzer before him, and a dark look in his eye.

  The easel is in the center of the kitchen, and he’s staring at it.

  “Something’s wrong,” he said. “I didn’t see it until just now.”

  “Wrong?” she says.

  “The painting,” he says, eyes fixed on it. “She’s all wrong.”

  There is no posing that night, or the next.

  Saturday, he goes to play cards at the veterans’ hall, but he’s home before midnight.

  She finds him on the sunporch, strewing his sketches all over the floor. They are, mostly, details: a half dozen of her legs, the soft bulge of calf muscles from every summer of her youth spent milking Holsteins at the dairy down the road.

  “Met a guy tonight,” he says, without looking up. “A new fella works in the city. Said he saw you having lunch with a fella this week at the Barrowman Hotel in the city. Said it looked pretty cozy.”

  “I told you about that,” she says, trying to keep her voice even. “That was for work. He’s our new printer.”

  In one clean move, he backhands her, a crack like a ball bat.

  “You keep a cold bed, my girl,” he says after, catching his breath. “And you never once made a good Sunday roast.”

  The next day, there are carnations.

  He’s working on the painting again but says he no longer needs her. There’s a girl coming from the art school, and she only costs two bits an hour.

  That Monday, just after dawn, she steps into the kitchen, eyes fixed on the easel, ghostlike with its tattered coverlet.

  She prowls across the tiles and, without pause, lifts the cover, tossing it to the floor.

  At first, she thinks something’s gone horribly wrong. Grabbing for the kitchen matches, the dawn-dark space, she lights one and holds it up to the canvas.

  What is this, she thinks.

  It’s nothing like the sketch at all. Yes, it’s a woman, naked, a stage. The pose is the same, but different. Everything is different. The feel is different.

  In place of her chestnut bob is a long hennaed mane, stiff as a wig. The cream pink body is chalkier, and the feet and legs look nothing like the sketches. They’re narrow, spindlier, the hips bruised looking. On the feet are ankle-strap pumps with Cuban heels, electric-blue to match the woman’s scarf.

  Instead of her large but firm breasts, of which she is so proud, these jut out like little ledges, small and conical, the nipples garishly red, like the pointed hats of circus clowns.

  The face, though. The face is what she can’t stop looking at. From a distance, it’s almost like a smudge. When she looks closer, the features look harder, the lips painted a hard red, the cheeks rouged, also like a circus clown.

  “I lost my wallet,” he says when he comes home that night.

  The lining of his left pocket hangs loose, like a comic strip rummy.

  “Where have you been?” she asks, the spaghetti noodles mushed cold in the pan. “Where were you all day and all night?”

  “Looking for work. Met with the guy who owns the Alibi Lounge. Says maybe I could paint a mural on the back wall.”

  “Is that where you lost it?” she asks. “Your wallet.”

  “No,” he says, and tells her it was probably walking home along the train tracks. “Like some kind of hobo.”

  There’s an edge in his voice that shuts her up. He pours a glass of milk and drinks it over the sink. When he passes behind her, there’s a smell on him she
doesn’t like. It’s not booze.

  He’s stepping out of a smoke shop when she sees him. She can’t guess what he’s doing in the city during the day, especially without his portfolio.

  She’s returning from the printer and needs to get back to the office, but instead she follows him as he heads west.

  It’s hard to keep track of him, the crowds thick and the blare of car horns, barking newsboys.

  The theater is one of the small ones, red brick and smoked windows.

  Nipples like strawberries. But she never took off her g-string. And she never spread her legs. That’s what she’d heard Bud say to her husband. Then adding, insinuatingly, Maybe you’ve seen things I ain’t.

  She isn’t thinking at all until he slips inside.

  A five-foot-tall poster shrieks at her: Direct from the West: Rondell Bros’s Burlesque! A MusiGAL Revue Feat. the Shanghai Pearl! Concha, the Snake Girl! Continuous Shows Daily!

  And beneath it, a banner: Tuesdays: The Irish Venus Ascends!

  There is a drawing of a red-haired beauty emerging from the half-shell.

  Standing in the alley, out of the crush, she smokes two cigarettes and thinks.

  There’s a tall man lingering by the box office. He may be looking at her.

  Pauline turns away from him just as he calls out to her: Hey, good-lookin’.

  “Got a light?” a female voice sounds out, and Pauline turns to see a woman walking toward her from the far end of the alley, the backstage door. Something about the way her body moves, her pale arm outstretched, her narrow legs and bright blue shoes, is familiar.

  “Do I know you?” Pauline finds herself saying.

  The woman pushes her up hat brim with one painted finger, and leans into Pauline’s struck match.

  The deep red hair, so brassy in the painting, looks so vivid in person. And the face, far from a charcoal smudge, is lively, bright.

  “The Irish Venus?” Pauline asks.

  The woman grins. “You can call me Mae.”

  The tall man loitering by the box office is now at the foot of the alley. He’s looking at both of them.

  “That man,” Pauline says.

  Mae nods. “He’s a bad baby, that one. Grabbed my heater one night so hard I had bruises for two weeks.”

  She starts walking toward him. “I see you, Mr. McGrew,” she shouts, cupping her hand over mouth. “Keep it in your trousers. I call Wade, you won’t even have a tongue left to flap.”

  The man’s face goes white and he scuttles away quickly, like a crab.

  “Who’s Wade?”

  Mae beckons her to the mouth of the alley and points to a pair of dice on the ground. Or were they pearl collar studs?

  Peering down, Pauline gets a better look. She remembers seeing something like this at a boxing match. The pale middleweight, his mouth like a red fountain, teeth scattering across the ring.

  Mae kneels closer. One of these, she sees now, is a molar.

  “Keeps a pair of pliers in his sock garter,” Mae says.

  Pauline wonders where she has found herself.

  The man returns to the foot of the alley.

  “Wade!” Mae calls out into the open theater door. “Wade, Bingo Boy is back.”

  Pauline looks at Mae.

  “Maybe,” Mae says, “you should come inside.”

  The backstage smells strongly of smoke, old coffee, and the tang of sauerkraut.

  “Greta makes her own every cold day,” Mae says, winking. “You can take the Kraut out of Yorkville, but you can’t take the Kraut out of her.”

  Pauline can barely hear her over the kick drum and caterwauls on the other side of the tall curtains, brocade so smoothed by time it looks like it would disintegrate between her fingers.

  Quickly, they maneuver past a row of streaked mirror stalls, netted garments drying over radiators, coffee cups stacked, stained makeup towels, the ghostly remains of painted faces, scattered across folding chairs.

  In one alcove, a girl in a golden kimono is slathering something from a bottle all over a naked six-foot blonde, transforming her in seconds from ruddy and veined to satin-skinned.

  In another, Pauline sees two long-legged girls with matching brittle blonde waves straightening the green feathers on their costumes.

  “Mae’s mama’s come to take her back to Kansas,” one of them mutters, eyeing Pauline. “Get religion back in her cooch.”

  Pauline starts to say something, but Mae tugs her arm, moving them past. “Don’t feed the parrots. You could catch trench mouth just by looking at those two.”

  They arrive at a tiny private dressing room with two mirror stalls, the air so heavy with powder, Pan-Cake, and perfume, Pauline can barely breathe.

  “Come on,” Mae says, beckoning her to a stool. “Cleo got bit by her snake again, so I’m solo today.”

  Once she’s seated, Pauline begins to breathe again, and she wonders what she’s doing here. A trombone wails from the stage and suddenly she’s worried she might cry. Clenching her hands at her side, she steels herself from it. Refuses it.

  Meanwhile, Mae is watching her and probably figuring everything out.

  In the softer light of the bulbed mirrors, her hair is even more striking, specked with gold. And when she bends down to slide off her spectator pumps, creased with street soot, Pauline can’t help but notice her legs, like stretched satin.

  “So. You followed your old man.”

  Pauline doesn’t say anything, her eyes snagging on something, a pair of slippers on the floor beside Mae. They are still sitting in their box. Pauline knows what they will look like before she reaches down to push the paper aside. Absinthe green.

  “Ah,” Mae says, following Pauline’s gaze to the slippers. “That’s the one, huh?”

  Pauline nods.

  “He’s a regular Romeo. Gave me those, too,” she says, nodding her head toward a large, heart-shaped candy box perched on the edge of the next dressing table.

  Pauline nods again, picking up the candy box and looking at it. She wonders at the absence of something inside her. She no longer wants to cry. Something else is happening.

  “For what it’s worth,” Mae is saying, “he didn’t get anywhere.”

  “It’s fine,” Pauline says, distractedly stroking the heart of the candy box.

  “He moved on to Cleo. She’s used to snakes.”

  Pauline fingers the candy box heart and can’t make any words come, the boom-szzz-boom of the drums hovering in her ear.

  Mae looks at her, twisting her lips a little, then turns to her mirror and begins painting her face. Taking a pot of rouge, blueish-red, she dips a finger in and begins swirling it on her cheeks, conflagrating them.

  “Hey,” she says, pointing one red-tipped finger at the candy box, “can you pluck me one? I’m famished.”

  Pauline sets the box on her lap. Madame Cou’s Crème Bon-Bons. The inside is lined in coral satin and when she opens it, she sees a dozen confections, gleaming globes of brilliant pink, glossy white, gold-leafed and fairy sprinkled.

  “You too,” Mae says, “you first, honey.”

  One tap of the tooth, and they give themselves away.

  Gleaming maraschino jam, tongue-curling cream, nougat like sea foam, nose-tingling liqueurs of almond, bitter orange, soft apricot.

  Huddled close, grinning like two schoolgirls at church, they eat two apiece, then two more. Pauline has never tasted anything like them.

  “When I was seven, another girl caught me stealing a box of divinities from the Five and Dime,” Pauline says. She’s never told anyone this ever. “She promised if I shared she wouldn’t rat me out.”

  Pauline thought of it now, the freckled girl with two skinned knees. They hid behind the leg display in the hosiery section and ate the whole box, stuffing the wrappers in bedroom slippers. The cardboard legs above them, all those candies, it was sugar and magic.

  Mae licks her index finger and thumb, smiling. “Trouble shared is trouble halved.”

&nbs
p; Pauline grins.

  “Have another candy,” Mae says, holding her box out. “Or something.”

  The sweetness is making her drunk, is making her forget everything. Maybe it’s the rums and liqueurs in the candy, or maybe it’s just Mae, her curved white legs draped across Pauline’s lap now, her head back, laughing. Her mouth as red and luscious as one of those cherried confections.

  “Mae,” Pauline says, “will you help me do something?”

  Mae looks at her and says, “Sure.”

  “You might get in trouble.”

  “Haven’t you heard?”

  They both laugh.

  “Have another candy,” Mae says. “Or something.”

  Taking everything off is easy. Easier than in the kitchen with him watching.

  She should feel cold, her dress whorled at her feet, but she doesn’t

  Mae unrolls her stockings for her, Pauline’s foot propped on the dressing table.

  “Now, the first trick I ever learned,” Mae says, dipping two fingers back in the red rouge pot. Leaning forward, she daubs both Pauline’s nipples. “They love this.”

  Pauline swallows her candy.

  “Aren’t you cute?” Mae says, swirling the rouge now, swirling them into tiny roses. “Squirming like a mink.”

  It feels warm and sweet, like the candies, which maybe were sitting under the lights too long.

  Mae points to the pocked mirror, a cold cream thumbprint in the corner.

  Cradling her daubed breasts under her hands, Pauline looks at herself and smiles.

  The costume is only a delicate patch of sequined peacock-blue netting between her legs. It covers her, barely.

  “I’d’ve lined the flap with plush for you,” Mae whispers, making sure the sequins lay flat, “if we had more time.”

  Pauline looks down at Mae’s red-maned head, her fingers arranging things along Pauline’s hips, between her legs.

  For a second, unaccountably, she can’t breathe.

  “And you’ll need this if you wanna stay out of the paddy wagon,” Mae is saying, draping a peacock feathered cape over Pauline’s shoulders, tying it under her neck.