Ladies' Man (5 page)

"Hey!" Jackie snapped. "Dim those lights, hah?" The lights were dimmed, people glanced at each other across tables and shrugged. "Again, please."

"Fee-lings, nut-tin more dan fee-lings." My gut dropped out my ass. La Donna was screwed. Also, he was fucking horrible. His phrasing made Leo Gorcey sound like Rex Harrison. The mood he conveyed was about as romantic as somebody poking a finger in your chest. He wasn't singing, he wasn't even talking, he was arguing. People started yakking immediately. He lost everybody from word one.

"Feelings like I nev… Hey! A little quiet, hah? I'm singin', okay with you? Like nev-ver lost… Yeah! I'm talking a
you
! yah cracker bastad!" Jackie stepped to one end of the stage and pointed his mike at the drunk Texan who had made the Lady Clairol crack. The Texan, a six-foot-plus potbellied gray-haired dude in a sitting tie, tried to get to his feet, but his friends, red-faced from laughing, pulled him down. He collapsed in his chair and started laughing too. The whole joint was laughing. Jackie looked as if he could kill the world. He slapped the mike against his thigh, nodding his head in small up-and-down motions as though he had just made a decision and seconded it. "Fuck you," he spat into the mike. "You're all fuckin' slobs. Consideration, you ever hear that word?" That doubled the laughter; He couldn't think of anything else to say and finally dropped the mike like it was infected, snatched his music off the piano—the player had to duck—and stormed off the stage, pushing people in the aisle out of his way and vanishing behind the plastic curtain.

Danny Rifkin came jogging upstage, swinging the clipboard. He picked up the mike and made wild eyes at the house. "Thank you, thank you. That Was the charming and talented Jackie di Paris. Jackie di Paris. Jackie had to leave us a little early, he just heard they finished cleaning his cage. Okay, number thir-teen,
thirteen. La Donna, a singer."

It war pretty cold in the room, but I was sweating. My hands were shaking so bad my ring was c
linkin
g like castanets against my glass. La Donna came trancing down the aisle from the parted curtain like there should've been a chaplain behind her droning the Twenty-third Psalm. She knew. When she gave her sheet music to the piano player, she was wincing. Danny Rifkin helped her adjust the mike, wound up giving her an exaggerated once-over and jacking off the mike stand. The place broke up. La Donna wasn't hip to what he did, and I wanted to tear that smartass sheeny bastard from Bloomie limb to Bloomie limb. I wanted to hug her, protect her, save her, take her a thousand miles away. .

"Excuse me one second." Rifkin scanned the back of the room, shivering and squinting. "Is the thermostat guy here? Why don't you lower the heat a little more, Larry, I wanna hang some fuckin'
meat
from the ceiling, okay?" Big laugh from the Texans. He almost knocked her over getting offstage. She had to backstep to give him room. Cocksucking pig.

The piano player began and La Donna closed her eyes. "Feelings . ." It was all over. The place broke put in hysterics. People were on the floor. She could have sung like Streisand, been the ghost of Judy Garland, it wouldn't have made a goddamn difference.

"Bring back Jackie!"

"Duet! Duet!"

By the time she walked offstage she was crying- She had skipped two verses,, forgot the Spanish part, and three quarters of what she did sing was drowned out by competing hecklers. But she did remember to lift her chin and close her eyes at the end, and she did plow through it like a real trouper—she might even have been good.

She wouldn't talk to me. We sat at the tail end of the bar. She stared at her drink like she was using X-ray vision. I wouldn't have touched her arm on a dare. Even though it was pushing 2 a.m., the barroom was still packed. All the amateurs were sitting around waiting to hear if they made the five-person Sunday showcase.

The place was considerably quieter because most of the entertainers had made assholes of themselves and they knew it. Everybody was stewing in their own self-shit image. Jackie di Paris sat a few stools down from us, hunched over, glaring at his drink, tilting his glass back and forth. The guitar girl had resumed her pose, nervously fingering her guitar case as if it were a cello. Chuck Steak was riffing but nobody was listening; the more nobody listened the more urgently he rifted. Mona sat at the bar doing needlepoint and frowning. Nobody was even drinking. The last act of the night was on—the black kid with the Johnny Mathis shtick. Because of the relative quiet we could hear him. He had a pretty good voice. He sang "Nature Boy" to a nice round of applause. Ten seconds later he emerged through the curtains sweating and beaming. The maître d' appeared with the clipboard.

"Okay, people, here are the five we want back on Sunday. You ready?" Chuck Steak suddenly grabbed his coat and left "If any of you can't make it, tell me now because we want to announce the finalists to the audience, okay? Here we go. Roger Rector!"

"Yo." A squat kid with bulging cheeks and bushy eyebrows raised one finger and tilted it forward. He did Shakespearean monologues in Donald Duck talk. Got a lot of laughs.

"Chandu the Bizarre!" That was Rasputin. He nodded to the maître d', arms folded across his chest, still smiling his evil grin. He did ten minutes of razor magic out there and scared the daylights out of everybody.

"Annie Akins!"

Annie Akins collapsed against the wall in disbelief. A six-foot, two-hundred-pound hulk of a broad dressed like Daisy Mae Yokum. Barefoot, wearing a polka-dot blouse and cut-offs, she had sung "Jubilation T. Corn-pone" in a voice you would have paid to stifle. She was so bad that the meaner members of the audience were screaming for an encore. I didn't understand what was going on here.

"Jackie di Paris!"

Jackie just sat there hunched over, examining his drink. When he heard his name, he snickered, shook his head grimly, slapped the drink down on the bar and got up. "Fuck you," he muttered halfheartedly and left. All of a sudden I understood what was going on and I prayed to God number five wasn't going to be who I thought it would be.

"La Donna!"

Shit on rye. La Donna didn't look up. She raised a slightly trembling hand to her face and slowly rubbed it across the bone ridge of her eyebrows. She exhaled noisily and briefly glanced at me. I couldn't tell if she knew what was going down. They wanted a freak show. They wanted back all the people who were either so out to lunch or so atrocious that they had to be seen again to be believed. If Jackie di Paris hadn't sung "Feelings" first, Donna wouldn't have gotten her laughs, wouldn't have been picked. They were screaming for a duet, and they would get it. Heartless bastards. La Donna caught the maître d's eye and nodded okay. My jaw dropped, and I stared at her incredulously. She returned her gaze to her drink. Was she that stupid?

"What happened to di Paris?" The maître d' fretted. The kid who'd sung "Nature Boy" was holding his gut like he just took two slugs. Mona gave an uh-oh whistle, packed up her needlepoint and left. The guitar girl gingerly fingered her cheeks and stared straight ahead like she was Helen Keller.

"If di Paris don't show, we'll go with Ronnie Landau."

"Oh, thank God!" the chubby singer blurted, crumpling his "September Song" score to his chest. The black kid stared at Ronnie Landau with bulging eyes, as if not only was he gutshot but he had just gotten a ticket for jaywalking as he staggered to the hospital.

"C'mon, let's go. I got work tomorrow." I headed for the street. La Donna followed, silent The street was dead and heavy with windless cold. The amateurs filed out behind us, walking slowly north and south. I flagged down a Checker. I sat in the far corner hoping she would, on her own, choose to sit right up next to me. Instead she sat in the opposite corner, staring expressionlessly out the window.

"Seventy-seventh between West End and Broadway."

All the way home I watched her alternately chew her fingernails and bunch her hands into fists. Her eyes never came within 180 degrees of me. While we were sipping through Central Park she said, "I'm not doing 'Feelings' Sunday," and that was it She had left her picture and letter from Tony Randall in the club, but I was afraid to remind her.

All I could think about was her hand on my crank in the deli, her promise that I was in trouble tonight Forget it Sometimes when I was a kid I would be promised a toy that was never bought. And I knew that no matter how badly I wanted that toy, if I badgered or whined, or even hinted, I'd get cracked in the face. And all that I could do was sit there and go over the conversation of the promise in my head, feeling tragic and wretched.

That was about the level of desperation I would get into about sex with her. I wasn't insensitive. I knew all about appropriate and inappropriate. I knew what La Donna was going through but what
I
would get into transcended logic, intelligence, compassion. I would get swallowed up in that childhood intensity, that self-centered ocean-sized feeling of life and death around sex. And it would happen anytime I was scared or felt hungry or needy around people. Any time my brain-would slip into a survival head the order from Central was stick it in. When in fear, fuck.

Out of all the artichoke layers of bullshit that made up my life, the only
thing
that never switched up on me was my dick.

The house was cold. The spic bastard super didn't think people were awake after eleven at night, so he shut down the heat.

"Coffee, babe?"

"No." She went into the bathroom and closed the door. I made myself instant coffee and brought it to the dining table in the living room. I sat there fingering a vein of tiny splits in fee fake butcherblock surface. Through the wall, I could hear her washing off her make-up. It was so cold I put my coat back on. I still wasn't sure if she was hip to what had happened. She-came out of the bathroom, disappeared into the bedroom, finally re-emerging into the living room wearing only a tight tank top and' panties. Her hair was down and her nipples stood out like little pointy noses. She stared at my coffee, oblivious to the cold. I took off my coat.

"I made a lot of stupid mistakes tonight," she said to no one in particular. "Never should have done that song. It's not right for my voice. I was very lucky tonight."

Lucky. I felt like a shit. I couldn't bring myself to give her the lowdown because I couldn't handle the chain reaction that would follow. I was afraid ill confronted her with the real story we would never fuck again. Her soft fuzzy bush bulged slightly against the white nylon. Over the summer, one hot night we trimmed her pubic hair into a heart shape. It was either that summer night or the night before we fucked on the fire escape! She sat forward on my lap and cupped my balls in her palms in front of her.

"Right now I think it's a mistake to wander off too far from Dionne Warwick." She paced the living room, arms folded across her chest. I stared at her toes.

In the beginning she would love to take it in the ass. We wouldn't even need Vaseline. She would even reach behind her and grab the backs of my thighs to force me in deeper. When I went down on her she would sigh so deep and soft I would shoot my wad with her cunt in my mouth.

La Donna padded into the bedroom. I heard the sheets rustling. "I'll be in in a few minutes." I raised my voice. She didn't even kiss me goodnight, even
say
goodnight. She used to jerk me off and kiss the tip of my dick as I was coming—loud wet smacks—her face covered with jizz as she turned her head from side to side, eyes closed, running the head across her lips. There would even be come in her eyelashes. I sat staring at my coffee, took pleasure from my cigarette—long slow drags, a real nightcap.

When I turned back the covers I was horrified to see that before passing put La Donna had taken off her panties. She was dead asleep on her side wearing only that tank top.

Whereas most people who sleep on their sides would
sleep curled in, she curled out—her head and feet curved back toward each other and her hips and belly thrust forward like a cross between a drawn bowframe and a Pontiac hood ornament.

I slipped in bed as noisily as I could, but she didn't budge, wake up, nothing. Laying on my side I tried to conform to her spine, pressing my crotch into the crack of her ass, thrusting my belly into the small of her back, arching my head to avoid getting her hair in my mouth. I ground my cock a little into her buns and stared red-eyed at tile digital on her night table: 2:47. My back was killing me. I draped my hand over her ribs and touched her nipples. She clucked in annoyance and, still asleep, flopped over on her belly. I rolled on my back and stared at the ceiling.

Sighing deeply enough for six generations of damned souls, I bounced a few times and got out of bed. Her breathing was even-steven. I went back into the living room, had half a cigarette, returned to the bedroom and stood over the bed, my guts grinding and aching so badly I felt like whimpering. I started to crawl back under the covers, stopped, walked over to the window and went through the motions of adjusting the Venetian blinds. I rattled the blinds for thirty seconds. She began to snore.

I lay in bed staring at the ceiling again.

"Feed me"—more to myself than out loud. I could hear the grinding of the kitchen wall clock. The bed pulsed slightly with breathing.

"Feed me"—louder, a harsh whisper. A neck vein twitched hotly under my jaw. My eyes itched.

"Feed me, bitch." In a normal speaking voice. She slowly raised her face from the pillow and stared at me in the darkness. I thought I would die.