Gatsby: log Jake R and Lyra V Who: Lyra V and Jake R What: Jobs and double-dealings When: Recently! Where: the Vega
For a young man who'd grown up out of time, things could have been much worse. His grandmother had cherished the archaic dust of antiques(which were now state of the art and all the rage), she'd move her mouth along wordlessly to mimic the monochromatic glamour of silent films(many of which he could now catch a viewing of at the theater downtown). Jake had learned about the importance of waistcoats and cufflinks and pomade before he'd learned to drive.
Now, he moiled the little wooden button on the cuff of his shirt sleeve. Twisting at it nervously while big blue eyes gawked up at the extravagant building front that was the Vega. Vega. It was a name that he'd heard some of the burlesque girls in the troupe talk about. Their eyes went dewy as they spoke of money and booze and men dressed to the nines, all of it with such breathy fervor that it sounded like a dream shared amongst the working class and not a real place at all. But it was real. A gangster that was sleeping with the magician's assistant gave Jake the address, tossed him a dime, and told him to get his shoes shined before he went.
Jake looked clean, with hair parted and slicked down. A white button-down shirt and brown leather suspenders. Dark corduroys had a patch on one knee, and Jake's eyes had a slightly sunken quality that said he hadn't had a good meal or a good night's sleep in weeks. But his shoes were shiny!
Hunger was what ultimately propelled him to the front door and past a boogeyman bouncer. Hunger that had everything to do with ambition and only a little to do with the gnawing ache in the pit of his stomach. When he asked after the owner, a man told him to take a seat. He thumbed and twisted at the button on his sleeve while looking over the decor, and he didn't even notice when he twisted the damn thing right off in his hand.
The turmoil of transition was long past. The chrysalitic alteration to the Vega was that of restoration, her bones exposed, her spine straightened, the pantheon of her futures lay ahead of her, divergent and she had more choice than a virgin in a newly-minted brothel. She stood tall, the gleam of her paint wicked black and the shuttered windows blanked out her eyes until she stood with lowered eyelashes, a promise of sin in the flash of red, the curtain drawn smartly across the maw of the door. The jangle of music was audible from the street from half past four until half past three, a full eleven hours of insurrection and blatant disregard for the law of the day. No man left so worse for wear that he couldn’t find a lie upon his lips for his state and the local Temperance union had disapproved so strongly that their leaflets named the Vega, advertizing that ran the length of the streets.
Inside, the miasma of smoke hung blue and heavy over the bistro tables that huddled together, the constellation of small candles on each drew the eye toward the North star of stage and spotlight, the gleam of silvered hair and the throaty croon of the girl who slithered on stage to the choreographed backdrop of a chorus of others like her. The shiver of icecubes against expensive, thinned glass chattered in the hand of the man sitting nearest, his hat leaning drunkenly from the neighboring chair.
Lyra had been enveloped by her era; the flush that rode along her cheekbones was more than the heat of the compressed crowd in the room, her eyes glittered satisfaction. She was a knife-blade in a room full of people who leaned away as she passed through, a sliver in black chiffon and silk that swayed with beads. She had been called away from back-stage, and she brought with her the smell of greasepaint and sweat and women’s perfume, all the mysteries of behind the curtain in red lipstick, and her eyebrow arched beneath the sloped sleek curve of her hair as she looked down on the young man who sat at the edge of the room, his inability to pay the entrance fee obvious, and she slid into the seat opposite.
“You asked to see me,” she said, as she clicked open a gleaming cigarette case, and extracted a slim white cylinder.
Grown from ghosts, and tended to in the strange luxury of Hollywood gone to mildew and moth balls, Jake took his cues from the movies. The old movies with the song and dance, the filtered lenses, the trench coats and the cigarettes. He believed in substance, and romance, and that piano players should be stationed everywhere. But it wasn't all glitter and feathers. He knew that the world could be a void. The death of his mother and the subsequent loss of his father promised that. The ending of Casablanca just reaffirmed it. Jake was always a little more Bergman than Bogart, though. Maybe if he worked on his smoking more than his curious staring. With that in mind, Jake withdrew a small pouch of tobacco and rolled a quick cigarette. He'd gained a lot of practice in rolling papers and licking seams so that it all stuck; the burlesque girls smoked like chimneys.
He looked up when she sat down, struck into dumb silence by the lightning of her presence. Beauty on ice, fine bone china with nerves of steel. Jake had auditioned enough knife-throwing assistances to know that this woman would not quiver when the apple was placed on her head. She wouldn't close her eyes. She was Bacall at the firing squad, and it took him a moment to snap out of his wordless staring. Jolted back to reality, he struck a match on the edge of his thumb and held it out for the end of her cigarette.
"Yes, Ms. Vasiliadis." He didn't stumble over her name, he'd practiced saying it on the whole walk here. "My name is Jake Ross, ma'am." Polite as peach tea. "I was hoping you might have work for me."
She leaned forward. The shiver and snap of beads jostled onto the lip of the bistro table, the blade of her collarbone sharp as her cheeks hollowed, the cigarette tip glowed like a brilliant, and the diamond drops of her earrings fell forward, twisted in the murk of her hair. Lyra sat back, lowered eyelashes over critical green stare. All sorts of young men presented themselves at the door, to the men who stood between man and the mysteries promised by the thick velvet curtain drawn over the entrance. They wanted to work with the sylphs on stage, not the room full of girls out back, heavy with cigarette smoke and with perfume, the glittered costumes hanging on the walls and the fetid warmth of flesh, of bodies, of softness that was poured into brassieres and stockings, strong accents that were taken off and put away for the stage.
“What is it you do?” Her voice curled around the question, sticky-sweet as opium. There was no Anais here to take away the sting of the knife’s slice, Lyra sat with one knee hooked over the other, leaning back against the spindles of the chair. The dress parted, all beads and fringe and little substance, shocking white thigh above the whisper-thin silk of stockings, the dark stripe of suspenders. She blew smoke toward the ceiling, let the cigarette hang between her fingers. “Or do you suppose that if I have a place at all, you will find a way to fit it?”
He was polite. He looked wholesome, milk-fed and moon-faced. He was young. The girls would eat him alive. Lyra’s smile was serpentine.
"I can do anything," he said with the certainty of youth that had yet to prove to him otherwise. Jake was sufficiently accomplished in everything that he pursued, well every venue but one really, but he put less of an emphasis of importance on relationships than he did with baseball or books. Besides, the truth stretched like boardwalk taffy for professional liars, people wholly invested in the makebelieve of art and reaffirming self-importance. Jake didn't seem uncomfortable or nervous anymore, not since she'd approached. Stage lights might as well have popped on because he had the lines and the smile. A smile that wasn't cinematic storytelling, but front row theater realness. He never looked like he was lying. Maybe it was the big blue eyes or maybe it was the fact that even he wasn't aware of it when he was doing it.
"I could drive for you, or make drinks, or repair your roof." His eyebrows lifted, and Jake tried to get a read on her in order to tell if he was going in the right direction of possibility. The woman proved difficult, like discerning smoke through a veil. In the dark. He was quiet for a moment before speaking again, adamant. "I won't steal from you. I won't hang around your girls. I won't even talk if you don't want me to." He tried for a smile, but his was at the bottom of the food chain compared to hers. His wanted to please.
He wanted to please. How novel.
Lyra was a creature more steel than silken, more than the champagne fizz of the cups held up to the candlelight, the quinine bloom of gin on the tongue. The men in Vegas had not pretended it was her pleasure they sought. They wanted to stay alive. They wanted to kill. They wanted to fuck something or to put it up their noses or in their veins, it had little if anything to do with her desires. Women were creatures made for wanting to please. It was in the flutter of Anais’s fingers as she carded them into her own yellow hair, or the little girl who had stood on a chalked line in the attic for hours and hours.
Men didn’t know how to please. They learned to be selfish in their pleasures early.
The men who came to this Vega were no different. Wedding rings winked in the table lamp light, no pretence made at freedom. They bought purloined liquor and listened to music and they touched if they could or they were allowed. “And if I were to swear you to silence,” it was a purr, a sibilance that rode mirth. One elbow pinioned to the table-top, her cigarette wreathed smoke about her face. “You wouldn’t speak? You wouldn’t breathe? You wouldn’t beg for just one word?” He was a child. He was a boy. He was innocence who had walked into the debauchery den and begged a ticket.
Asking to meet with her did feel a bit like requesting a dance with the devil. Her reputation and the reputations of those that frequented establishments such as these preceded them like red carpet to walk upon. Ghost stories of glitter and heinous, beautiful things. But Jake did not think it was a mistake to come here. He wasn't afraid of blood or noir. He'd been raised on the deaths of too many people that he cared about, it left a quiet grave inside of him that was waiting patiently to be filled. Even he didn't fully recognize the appetites of his hungry heart, if he had, he might have steered clear of this place and the prospects that it hid away in the velvet lining of curtains to back rooms.
"I would not," and this assurance came about with a kind of solemnity. That sadness that bled into happiness, backward emotions that muddled like gin and tonic. The spike of a feeling that at least felt solid and therefore could not be entirely bad. He had the brief thought that it would be such a relief if he was wordless, maybe it would make him quiet on the inside as well. Maybe it would chase away the darkness like a vowed silent saint with a Catholic candle.
"I would be a ghost if it pleased you, ma'am."
She didn’t care about her reputation. She had left her family name back among the neon, a bare spot at the foot of the Strip. She was a ghost now, an echo of something that might be, centuries later and there were too many deaths to count a single person as missing. The beads swayed and laughed at the little-boy-solemnity, a promise made with a dying ember pinched between his fingers.
He was a good sycophant. Someone had trained him well. Lyra’s glass-green eyes glittered acquisitively across the table. He was somebody’s son, somebody’s prized possession and he had wandered here where the second-hand was traded and bargained for, with stolen booze behind the bar. “I don’t choose to acquire more ghosts, I have enough of those.”
He took a breath, uncertainty pinging in the line of his jaw. A nerve was struck and it jumped, tick-ticking like a clock with broken hands. Jake knew that he had a way of speaking, it was informal sleight of hand brought on by too much T.S. Eliot and not enough care for grammar. But he filled in the blanks with a lot of politeness and Savannah drawl, so he figured it all worked out to pan even in the end. She didn't want him to work for her, she didn't need him to work for her. Jake had no defined skills that a woman such as herself would find in short supply and utter necessity. He'd of offered to entertain like a court jester, but the girls here did the entertaining and he doubted there was much room or curiosity given to a young man, even one that knew card tricks and songs, face paint and how to charleston.
There might have been nothing for him here, but there was nothing for him anywhere. Its why he'd left home in the first place, eyes set on big city skylines like the fairylight glow might burn some of the hate out of him. "I don't have anybody," he told her without quite mapping out why he'd venture into saying such a thing. But it was true, and he said it. His father was fighting the dead, so what was he supposed to do? Even assuming he could survive in there, his dad and him hadn't been close in a long time, if they ever had been. Jake liked to assume that they were the best of friends when he was little, but the truth is that he doesn't remember much of those days.
She didn’t have a heart, if you asked her. Lyra had a sliver of ice lined up along the bones of her ribs’ embrace, she could stand and watch a man die without blinking, bored by others’ terror. She didn’t have a heart and there was no one to keep one for her, Anais had the little gray shadow to keep for the time being. Anais had the mouse, and the shadow, and this round-faced boy who looked like he hadn’t been touched yet, perhaps she was missing something - a pet.
“I didn’t have anybody,” Lyra said calmly. It was a lie before but it was not a lie now. She had nobody who had known her as she was and nobody who had known her father’s name as a curse. She had no history, she was cut loose. “I chose my people.” The men who watched from the corners of the room, she paid them. They weren’t hers for blind faith and terror, but for a handful of bills and she knew that was a risk here. When people were willing to die for you for nothing, you had power.
“What’s your name?” Her head tipped, coromant-sharp. She exhaled, the cigarette ashed onto the bistro table and she flicked it away with the dark-tipped fingers of her hand.
"Jake Ross." He told it to her without alias or pretense. No reason to hide, or no awareness in the fact that he potentially should. He was a young man from another time, and even if he were situated in the present, Jake was still horribly uninformed. He knew nothing of his father's old gig, of the reasons behind bloodshed, of vendettas bought and paid for with bullets.
And wasn't he his father's son? The looks were his mother's, but there was something else there, a determination and a darkness that sat deep inside him, and that was all Graham's to pass down. "Or whatever name you'd prefer me to use in your company, ma'am." There was a quirk to his mouth when he said it that suggested he might have been joking. But nothing was face value with him, and there was difficulty reading between the lines.. so maybe he wasn't joking at all.
Names had power. History, to struggle against. There was no other Vasiliadis to war with reputation, no handful of chosen blooded few to play guard. Jake Ross. Ross was lost, old faithful turned spooked beast. A dead wife and a handful of flowers, Lyra’s pupils shrank to pins. Her mouth slid upward at one corner; he was Hippolytus, beauty unaware of its own taint. “I don’t name you,” she said. It sounded like laughter; the boy believed the stories, the hype. The Vega had become its own mythos. Maybe she was the knife blade, the bitch unchained they’d told her she was for years. Maybe she was all that in spite of time, instead of moored by it.
“You can stay.” A rapid decision, made as the cigarette furred down to the filter. She’d forgotten it. The beads clattered as she sat back to look at him. He wasn’t a pet and he wasn’t a child and he wasn’t a man. What was he? Anais might know. “You’re not from here, are you.” It wasn’t a question, it was a knowing, but she picked up his hand from across the table, unfolded it to look at the lines that marched across his palm. “This isn’t your place.”
He thought it might have been his smile that had done it, that paved cement around his workboots and whispered stay. There'd been a hint of laughter to her voice in the moment prior, but it seemed gone now. Quicksand took it away, replacing it with the cool precision with which she stared at him.
Jake went still, mercury stabilized, watching as the woman pulled his fingers away from the way they'd folded cautiously toward the center of his palm. A fist of uncertainty, hands that didn't know how to be his hands, only how to pretend to be anything else. He'd thought he fit in, that his costume was fitting and his naivete appropriate. But something of him whispered the truth, and he doubted it was the lines of his palm. Although in that moment, he wasn't very sure of anything, and blue eyes stitched narrow with contemplation, looking at the lines as she looked at them.
"No, I'm not.." The admission came with a moment's pause, and his stare lifted to trace her where she sat across the table. Looking at her clothes and contemplating the way she'd held her cigarette, as if some clue might rise from the ashes that speckled the table's edge. "I'm not from here, but this is my place." He'd make it his place. Jake had never felt whole, something had always been missing Georgia. It was pursuit of that something that led him into this hotel trouble in the first place. But he thought fate had a hand in it, and he'd turned up here for a reason. He'd walked into this woman's establishment for a reason. If there was something missing in him, the emptiness would be solved with all the ease of turning over a playing card.
She held his hand as if she knew how to read it, to see what would come. (She could - she knew how things would be if he stood with her and his name rang like singing glass, his past twisted along in their wake like a coupled shadow). Her forefinger slid along his lifeline and forked toward his fingers. The twenties suited her. Too few women forged their own fates here, she was a surprise and Lyra liked being a surprise. “You can have a room upstairs.” He looked at her like he was trying to undo a knot, the quizzical contemplation of a youth who didn’t know how to hide it.
“You’ll stay away from the girls,” she let go his hand, and she sat back in her chair as though it were a done thing, one finger lifted as a warning. “They are here because I chose them to be.” The girls who shimmeyed into the gas-light’s flicker and flare were selected from those who came and asked, and those who she visited in other clubs, selected like a pearl-diver sifting through silt. Some of them had histories; what did she care if they had husbands, lovers, children hidden away in their pasts? She lacked judgment for the sobrietes behind the sylphs. “You can learn the books.”