Twilight Girl

What could be seen of Mavis’s dress was dull black and shapeless. Lon lifted the second bottle, drinking back the chagrin.

“This dress what you call a saque,” Mavis said tonelessly. “Been with me a long time. Man, couple years back the modistes caught up with me. But I pass ‘em up again. Now nobody in style but me!” Flashing a snowflake grin, the whiteness melting into brown repose. “Sassy say I look beat. Them beat cats jus’ catchin’ up with me, too. I beat befo’ they latch on Zen. Long befo’ they pick up on Gide. Baby, I beat from awa-a-y back. An’ don’t need to make some cafe expresso scene provin’ it.”

Now Lon faced the new bewilderment. Mavis fluctuated between a cultured enunciation and what seemed to be deliberate parody of minstrel show dialect. Finding courage in swallows of the tart beer, she said, “You sound like you know a lot. But you don’t talk like—” And stammering in the self-induced confusion, “You perplex me!”

Mavis lifted a cigarette from Sassy’s case, lying on the table between them. “Trouble is, you tryin’ put me in some peg-hole. Baby, go ‘head an’ crucify me. Go ‘head an’ vilify me. But don’t go messin’ ‘round tryin’ to classify me! I one thing now. Tomorrow I gonna be something else.”

“Don’t you want anyone to know how sharp you are?”

Sucking in the blue smoke, Mavis said, “That way I get me invited into white-color brain circles. Them folks can go home, tell they neighbors they had tea with a colored gal could quote Spinoza. Big deal! Man, I take a good ole-fashioned down-South nigger-hater over them kind.” Then, staring into the dim haze, “I talk my way. I read about some decadent French cats, that Proust talk. Read about some festerin’, slime-ooze creeps down South, that Faulkner talk. Ain’t for me.” And in a sudden spurt of animation, the heat of white-hot, white-directed resentment burned like the tip of her cigarette. “Mavis talk. That all you ever gonna get from me!”

The juke broke out with Poison Ivy. And Sassy, obviously bored with the pressure of being impressed, lifted her brows at the Violet kid. “Dance?”

“Crazy!” Violet wrinkled the little round nose, laughed her delight.

Sassy was even taller than Lon had suspected. The statuesque and the stubby left the table to jiggle their way into the moving crowd.

An alien excitement fell over Lon. Alone with brown Mavis and too tense to express what had lain dormant in her, Lon tried to force herself. Now, now, when at long last the closed doors had strangely opened to her. Feebly offering, “I’ve never known anyone named Mavis. Mavis what?”

“Jus’ Mavis.”

“Everybody has a last name.”

“Some born without ‘em. Some lose the right to use ‘em.”

Lon sensed that she had treaded on shaky ground. And began again. “You said you play the piano.”

“Yea-ah, Sassy got this Knabe grand. Used to be jus’ furniture in that fancy pad where she live. That big ole piano cryin’ its gut out f’lonesome till I come by.”

“I thought you said she used to go somewhere to hear you play.”

“Ruggio’s. Baby, I play in more pi-ano bars ‘n’ you got years. That the last place I play before I git unemployed. Ruggio, he tie the can to me.”

“Why?” Asking it indignantly, marking the faceless Ruggio a sworn enemy.

“Oh, couple gay gals start hangin’ ‘round. Ruggio don’t want that. I tip these gals, but that don’t stop ‘em comin’ on, comin’ on, requestin’ I play this numbah ‘n’ that numbah. Till one night he blow his stack. I gotta git!”

“But it wasn’t your fault, was it? Just because he didn’t like …” Lon swallowed the hard core taking form in her throat. “Were they girls like these?” Gesturing to indicate the dancers.

“Man, they don’t come no gayer. These gals, they both on the make. They wear a big neon sign keep flashin’ what they is. Same as these cats you seein’ now.” Mavis dragged deeply, exhaled, cooled the smoke with draughts from the brown bottle. “I say one thing ‘bout you. You look the same. But you diff’runt. You don’t wait till Sass leave the table, ‘nen make a pass. Too young? Too chicken?” She laughed shortly. “I perplex you? Well, you perplex me!”

The dark eyes mocked, then softened as Lon looked to the beer-wet redwood. Lon lifted her face at last to drink, thirsty swallows, drowning her lack of understanding. And still knowing. Knowing that you can belong and not belong, knowing how much and how little she knew. Until Mavis, wearying, it seemed, of the jazz-man, end-man jargon, dropped her cigarette to the concrete floor, bent to grind it under her heel and spoke with the precise diction of a speech-department pedant. “Sassy happened to be at Ruggio’s the night he fired me. Strangely enough, she had come alone that night for the first time. And I could have called the agent who booked me. Complained to the union. But I was beat. You know? Sassy’s folks were in Hawaii. Like when people find themselves in Pittsburgh—it’s raining—it’s a drag, so they get married. Later they ask themselves why.” She laughed again, the quick-dying jab of laughter. Amused by her story? More likely getting a laugh from Lon’s stunned reaction to the abrupt change in delivery. “Sassy’s got no imagination. You see, I have this dark skin. Types me with people like her folks. So we meet this housekeeper at the door. Sassy’s got one idea. I’m the new maid. Trite, but that does it! I’m still living there, making with the dustpans. Fractures me, watching Sassy cover up for the way I do a bed. It’s a funny hype.”

“But you can work in some other night club. Why do you want to—to lower yourself that way?”

Almond eyes explored the table with a soft melancholy. And Mavis echoed again her cotton-patch talk. “Sass an’ me, sometimes we dig each othah. Got a fine piano there. Got books. Don’ know, baby. That butch needs me bad. Jus’ don’ know.”

“You mean you’re going to stay there?”

“Toss-up. Do I leave Sassy, or do she tell me leave? Don’t look now like Sassy’s evah goin’ let up, but hard tellin’.” Mavis shrugged an indifferent shoulder. “Don’ nuthin’ last.”

“I’ve thought about that a lot,” Lon said. The cold beer warming her inside, the words coming easily now. “I’ve thought about a place where people weren’t always—spoiling things for each other.”

“Keep tellin’, baby.”

“A place where—people leave you alone. I mean, where they aren’t always stopping you from doing what you want to do.”

“Fine place,” Mavis encouraged. Picking up her rhythm from the juke.

“I decided it would have to be—well, an island.”

“Now yo’ makin’ sense!”

“Somewhere in the Pacific.” And bursting like a bag of popcorn at the dusky girl’s approval, “I’ve never told anyone, but I have it all planned.”

“Swingin’!”

“Everybody could do whatever they enjoy doing.”

“Take me at once to yo’ leadah!”

“I’d … temporarily, at least, I’d be in charge. Because I know all the plans. I’m doing all the preliminary work.”

“It figures, baby.”

Then, with the beer and the beat drowning out, hammering down the earlier timidity, “Mavis, how would you like to be the Second High Priestess? If this thing really goes through, there has to be somebody … I mean, I have all these chants written down. Really weird and … exotic. Do you think you’d …?”

“Secon’ high priestess. Hot damn!”

A chill suspicion trickled down the length of Lon’s spine. Was Mavis making fun of her? Fighting boredom, the way Sassy was killing time on the dance floor with Violet? They had danced by a moment before and the tall blonde had been yawning. With dampened enthusiasm, Lon said, “I still have a lot of details to work out. Transportation’s my main problem. I have to figure out how to get a boat and where to find somebody that’ll know how to sail it.”

“Man, you talk to Sass. Her daddy, he got him a yatch. She know mo’ ‘bout yatches anybody you evah meet!”

And spurred again, Lon said, “Really? Does she really?”

“That cat’s made the Catalina scene all by her lonesome.” Mavis dropping her pose once more, like a seagull letting go of a fish. Then adding significantly, “Don’t count on her, though, baby. The way Sassy’s goin’, don’t anybody count on her for Thing One.”

Lon would have asked for an explanation. But the girls returned to their table. Violet ecstatic, Sassy apparently disgusted. “God, what an obvious crowd of neurotics!”

“They neurotic,” Mavis agreed.

“That’s one a the kinds a persons I can’t stand,” Violet echoed.

And Sassy winked at Mavis, snickering behind her beer.

“They psychotic,” Mavis added. “Pore chillun!”

Then Sassy, in sudden irritation, “God, will you cut that plantation bit? Talk about sounding neurotic! Where’s your goddamn pride?”

Mavis sighed, shrugging once more. “Can’t be queer, effen you ain’t neurotic.”

Lon watched Sassy’s anger flare. “I detest that word, Mavis. Literally detest that word.”

“Okay, baby. Yo’ bi-sexual. Ain’t queer nohow. Yo’ bi-sexual.”

Sassy leaped up from the bench, seething. “You make me so damned—” Her sudden motion upset a tray with which Betty was trying to wriggle through the narrow aisle between tables. A beer bottle toppled, rolled down Sassy’s back, crashing to the concrete floor in a burst of glass and foam.

“You clumsy bitch!” Sassy whirled on the waitress in a scarlet-faced rage. “Goddamn clumsy—you did that on purpose!”

“Got her monkey wet,” Mavis murmured senselessly. “That monkey gonna ketch pneumonia.”

Sassy caught the muttered phrases. They meant something to her, Lon decided, for the fury turned on Mavis now. “Keep your nasty little mouth shut!”

Betty stared open-mouthed, shocked by the force of Sassy’s outburst. A small, curious group gathered around the table, watching with detached interest.

And Sassy reached back to assess the damage, shrieking, “My back is soaked. Literally soaked, you goddam, stupid …”

“One more word, debutante, and you’ll go home in a basket.” The grim figure in the black tuxedo had materialized from nowhere. Rags, with menace written all over that pale, pitted face. Sassy towered over her. Like a eucalyptus tree in a poppy field, Lon thought. But evidently Sassy caught the threat in that throaty masculine voice. She stopped in the middle of her sentence, violence suspended in mid-air. And then Lon saw why Goliath curdled in the face of this tiny David. The something that Rags turned slowly in her hand was a breadknife. And Sassy stood still, pulsating with the hateful silence, eyes helplessly drawn to the saw-toothed blade.

No one moved. They stood around, sat around, immobile in a tableau of motionless waiting, breath suspended. And Lon caught up in a tremulous excitement of heroic battle, siding with the underdog in a T.V. writer’s struggle for truth, honor and justice. Still, it was Sassy who owned a boat—Sassy who knew how to sail. And Sassy who would bring Mavis if Mavis was to come again. Apart from the other spectators, Lon waited for the next move.

“I suppose one should expect this sort of thing in a place like this,” Sassy said, breaking the impasse with lame defiance.

One of the observers hooted, “Hey, Rags—whyn’t you pick on somebody your size?” Jeering laughter routed what was left of the drama. Slowly, Rags lowered the breadknife. But her eyes had preserved the glint of its blade. “Beat it, debutante. Go do your slumming somewhere else!”

Sassy threw back her head in a gesture of contempt. “Scum. Literal, uncouth, uncivilized, neurotic scum.” She edged her way past the onlookers, pushing disdainfully against the rigid wall of unfriendly shoulders. Lon sensed the blood churning invisibly inside, the gray-blue eyes deliberately unseeing, as though by her unawareness Sassy had dismissed them all. “If I thought it was worth the bother, I’d have my dad pull the right strings.”

“Before you start shutting us up,” Rags said, her voice deadly level, “figure out a good excuse for your daddy-O.”

And picking up the cue, another voice cried, “Yeah, tell him what you were doing here, rich-bitch!”

“Are you coming, Mave?” Sassy, halfway across the dance floor. Not bothering to turn her head.

Mavis sighed. “Don’ make no never-minds to me, baby.”

Rags wedged herself between Mavis and the narrow aisle. “We don’t hold anything against you. We don’t want you to think we aren’t—well, democratic.” Still wearing the unsmiling mask: “Don’t think you aren’t welcome here because you’re colored.”

Lon nodded approval. The T.V. drama was going according to all the principles. Truth, honor and justice. These were great kids. Really great kids, and Violet had not been wrong. Lon found time to drain the second bottle.

“Hot damn, you sho ‘nuff democratic! You so democratic, man, I overwhelmed!” Mavis having herself a ball. “Heah I thought you Republican.”

“If you haven’t got a way home, I’ll drive you myself,” the poker-faced owner promised, the dusky sarcasm escaping her.

And timidly, Betty piped, “Don’t mix in between them, Rags. If you were that other girl, I’d stick by you. Even if you were wrong, I’d walk out of here with you.”

Rags considered the protocol of loyalty and stepped aside. “I just wanted her to know how I feel.”

Lon missed the next few bits of by-play. Violet clutching her arm and whispering desperately, “Jesus, kid, what’ll I do? If I go out now, Rags won’t ever leave me in again. But I gotta see that Sassy again. Kid, I jest went ape over her!” The lavender-blue eyes following Sassy Gregg out of the room, miserable. “If you was me, would you make up some excuse that she fergot somethin’ an’ follow her to the parking lot? Or what, kid?”