Ella Dean is a (chanteuse) wrote in rooms, @ 2014-06-12 16:00:00 |
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There were clubs like this one all over the town. Small, with the right people on the door who knew people in the local police establishment and who had paid the right money to the right racketeering network. The light was dim when you walked in, thick velvet at the windows that blocked out the light during the day and soaked up the sound at night. The bartender knew how to make a dirty martini with purloined liquor behind a bar that could look like it never existed during an inspection, and the small stage was drenched in light. There were men jostled in at tables too small to fit their knees under, and women in silks and fur, the smell a muddle of perfume and the acridity of the gaslights and sweat. She wore borrowedwhite and the floats at the lip of the stage lit up every bead and glowed. Her hair was sticky down her back and her lips were painted carmine and her throat rasped from her set. There was no microphone, nothing to lift the voice above the murmur and hubbub of those talking, drinking, laughing, just each breath and the diaphragm. It wasn’t like Julliard and it wasn’t like singing at auditions in Vegas, sequins scattered in the corners of the stage from last night’s performance. Backstage were other girls, with names like Lily and Pearl and April and she had thought, at the beginning, the first time she’d been through the door and found backstage that maybe she’d hidden her name the same way she’d done all those months before, May instead of Ella. But it had been Ella written up on the schedule, and they called her name to announce her and they said her name right then as she finished the last song and slid down from the stage toward the bar. The bartender handed her a tumbler that clinked with ice, and was clear like gin, but when she put it to her lips it was nothing but water. Ella stood with her elbow on the edge of the bar and her glass in her hand and she watched, the black and the glitter on her face near rubbed away with the heat from the lights, and the silk that would get hung up in the dressing room before she left, sheer with damp. There was nothing in the twenties that worried Ella. It wasn’t Vegas, there was no neon and rush, rush, rush. There were no bodies, no Ian, nothing that was more complicated than standing up on stage for four hours a week and singing the way that made her heart happy. She had an hour longer at the club, encouraging people to spend money on the drinks and make them think they got to know the singers, and she rubbed her thumb over the glass to smudge away the carmine stain there. Jude was handed many things in his life, so he ultimately wasn't surprised when Gatsby opened its doors to him without reservation. It was a place of glitz and glamor and his family was known for both when they wanted to get attention. He came across with his wealth, with his power, with a job that he needed to study for swiftly. He was excellent at pretending, and that was exactly what he did. Just enough so he could sort through the exact laws of this time. He couldn't very well call on statutes from later on. But people seemed to know him by reputation, they brought him cars and to important locations and he schmoozed with the right clients. He was full of charm and grace when it came to an artificial eye, they all were, when debutante balls and dinner parties were attended from childhood. Yet when he could, he withdrew into solitary. Jude liked people or perhaps he truly liked puzzles, but he hadn't been the same since Wonderland. Since he was a breath's away from death in the hotel and his sister cried and covered herself in blood and pushed him through the door. He remembered bits and pieces of then, of confusing whirls and everything feeling wrong, to him at least. It was strange, being in the head of a mad man. Or maybe it cleared his sanity. He was arrogant and haughty, but introspective too, as far as Murphys went. He liked Gatsby, it was much more comfortable than Vegas. He was dressed well, in a suit, perhaps a dime a dozen in a place like this, but he wore it like it was an extension of his skin. Dark hair was slicked back, a glass of something heavy in his hand, and he watched from the bar. The lounge singing went out of style, and he regretted it now, looking at the stage and the woman on it. He watched her from the other end of the bar and then decided on a whim to approach. "If you want it to seem like gin, you need to swallow harder, make it seem harder going down." His accent was upper class British, smooth on his tongue. He was rich. Ella knew it the second she turned her head and saw the suit that fitted the way a glove would hold a hand. He was rich, and wealth oozed off his skin and he spoke like he didn’t belong even if he looked like he could buy out everything behind the bar, even the liquor with the price of weighted diamonds. She rolled the glass in her hand, heavy-bottomed and watched the ice slide and clink together lazy in the bottom of the tumbler and smiled at it. “Most don’t go on and see what’s in the glass,” she said. Her voice was husky from the stage, rasped over syrup-South and soft eliding syllables. “Just that I have one.” And they didn’t buy her one or put an elbow on the bar’s edge and compliment a borrowed dress she didn’t own if she had a drink in her hand, because they figured someone else had done it just a minute or so before. Ella liked the patrons of the club because they weren’t original. She put the tumbler down, where the bartender whisked it away and refilled it with soda-water that fizzed and sparkled and cordial that made it look like she’d picked something off the menu that went for pages and pages. She took a sip. She didn’t gulp at it, however much her throat was raw, she tried out that ‘swallowing harder’ thing he was talking about. The smile glowed more than the borrowed beads, the brilliants in her ears that looked like diamonds if you didn’t know what to look for. “Better?” Jude was rich to the point where he legitimately had trouble understanding the every day plight of others. He read about it and intellectually gathered the information, but it wasn't something he could experience for himself. He was responsible for a rich boy; he didn't buy new cars every day or splurge on fancy trips. He worked for a living and he enjoyed it, even if it was the career the wealthy aspired to the most, outside of doctors and businessmen. His suits, those were his armor. He had money to waste and nothing in particular he could think of to waste it on. No children of his own, unfortunately. He thought about marrying some simple creature he could stand for longer than an hour, but it seemed like too much effort. "Most aren't looking at the glass at all," he pointed out with a wry smile. Oh she was lovely, in her own way, and there was something about her that seemed a little different from the rest. He couldn't put his finger on it. Perhaps this conversation would lend itself to an answer. Jude smiled when she swallowed after his instruction. "Much better." She had a pleasant smile and fake diamonds. All the chorus girls did, but he studied her casually. His eyes were an unusual shade of green mixed with gray and blue. They seemed dark from a distance, and whenever he was troubled or deep in thought. Not now, though. "I'm a bit new to the area and trying to act like I'm a native, how's that going for me?" Outside of the accent, that set him apart, and he never bothered to push out of his voice since it was proven jurors liked the accent. They thought it sounded smart and trustworthy. She thought the accent stood him apart like a garish tie at a funeral. He wasn’t going to blend, even if he looked real careful at all the ways he might smudge himself down at the edges until people saw him a little less. “You sound like you’re from far off,” she said, the glass curled into her fingers like an anchor at sea and she watched the ice lap at the sides, quaking in her hands. The lights beat down as unforgiving as a summer’s sun high over the grass but day was night and night was day inside the club, cloistered behind shutters and with the heavy scents of twined perfumes, gas lamps and of sweat. “No native sounds like you, honey.” No, he didn’t belong in his fancy suit and his accent that cut like diamonds. She liked it. It was clipped off at the ends, the tight flattened sounds of something crisp, sharp like apples and cold days and newspapers. She didn’t sound like a native either, lazy-sway of syllables, soft like sun-warmed molasses. “But I haven’t been here long enough to tell you how.” "Over the pond to the cloudy melancholic skies of England." Jude found himself missing the simplicity of home. He left the nest when he could, although his time at home was mostly spent for holidays and occasional summers. He was in boarding school early and went straight to college. His experience left him wondering about how little he appreciated his past. The time was wasted. Still he was in transition. And a distraction from a pretty singer at a bar was fine. He gestured to the bar to get him a Bronx cocktail, gin and masking the stronger homemade booze taste. "Alas, always an outsider." Her accent was unfamiliar but picked up too, perhaps somewhere in the American south. Or it was a drawl, warm and intriguing. "A newcomer too. May I ask from where?" Jude hesitated and took the drink. "My manners. I'm Jude Martin." The changed last name was intentional and fit smoothly with the rest. It was somewhat related, after all. He wasn't certain why he felt like lying, perhaps in small way his reputation here was unnecessary. He offered his hand. She took it. The tips of her fingers were rougher than one of the chorus girls, no kid-gloves and cold cream to keep her hands satin smooth, but her handshake was warm and her smile clear, unsullied blue eyes and the warm curve of mouth. Ella didn’t look for hidden traps in Gatsby. The book had been desperation and manic attempt to feel where money anesthetized any attempt so to do. Gatsby was easy, it was men in smart suits and expensive colognes stopping to have a drink for a few hours, and she was gone before anything got complicated. It was easy, and Ella relaxed into easy like the time in Vegas was reeled back onto a bobbin, stripping away all that anxiety. She didn’t know a Martin. Jude was a jolt, a familiarization that couldn’t be coupled together with why but Jude was a name, same as any other. “Ella,” she said, and she looked at the back of his wrist. It was clean, his hands too - he didn’t have dirt under the nails so maybe he worked somewhere like a bank, or a business. He was slumming, in this little club where the girls didn’t do anything extra but sing, and girls like her, they didn’t make it to the big stages, the clubs with names and lights and famous people rustling in and out in search of a good time. “You can ask,” she said, light and teasing, but she didn’t say where or when. “Why did you come here from England?” Jude might have been more flowery when meeting a woman, a kiss on the knuckles or a flare, but he got the sense this woman might not appreciate it. He shook it instead, needing no fanfare. He noted the rough pads on her skin, curious, but this probably didn't pay enough to do it only. He assumed she might have another job. His name did stand out, although it wasn't difficult to tie it to names that had nothing to do with him. Judah, for example. Judas, when he was feeling playful. He was sleek and polished and his full attention was absorbed in her. "Ella," he repeated. An old memorizing trick. Repeat the name, connect it in the mind. Jude met a great many people by day, but he had an excellent memory. His mind was a vault of information he'd gathered over time. He was slumming, yes, but he'd been to the high class places. They were pleasant and dull. "I came over for work. I'm a lawyer. And it's difficult not to wonder about this land of glitz and freedom I'd heard so much about." America seemed exciting in comparison, and he did like starting over. New pathways to learn. "And is this a way station, this place of yours, or only a chapter in the rest of the story?" Ella liked the club. She liked the smell of it, warm candle wax and perfume and the gas lamps ghosting over the honest sweat from the dancers and she liked the manners. The twenties were an age where if you were a woman, no matter what kind of woman, a man took his hat off when he came into a room and he stood mostly when you stood too. They didn’t feel like they owned you, just for standing there, and she turned her hand in his as it slipped free, fingers over the back of his knuckles without a thought for anything more flowery. She could shake hands here, knowing no one was going to touch her without her say-so and there was a man backstage who would make certain if anyone tried. She didn’t think it was glitz and freedom. There was more behind the curtain backstage than glitz, the sparkles were tawdry when they were out from under the lights and the girls were tired beneath the make-up, the reddened lips and darkened eyes. But maybe it was glitz for him. “Freedom from what?” she asked, stepping around his question because it wasn’t her chapter, not really. It was a different book. Ella’s attention was held as cleanly as she had held the glass, and it wasn’t glossy or polished, it was genuine in the way the acts were not. “Are you running away from something?” Her mouth ticked, the smile was tucked into its corner, but there. “From lawyering? Or something else?” Gatsby was growing on him. Much more than Las Vegas. Jude hated Vegas long before he had any reason to. He stepped off the plane and curled his lip in disdain at it. He spoke with lawyers about getting a job there, but he was never serious about staying. It became obvious to him quickly the right thing to do was to get his siblings out of the city, rather than putting down roots. Gatsby on the other hand, it was fresh. It was unique. It had a certain elegance with an undercurrent of discord, and it appealed to him. He missed his siblings, but he'd take it over Vegas. Jude hadn't realized he let slip a little truth there. Truth was not something he knew well. His eyes flickered in recognition and he tapped a finger along his glass. "I meant America was said to be a beacon of freedom." Only in the modern day would people go 'Murica and patriotism was at its highest. It didn't suit the current mood here. Another thing he liked about it. "I suppose you could say I was running from a story already written. If I stayed there, the future was paved out in a certain way. It was terribly dull." There was more truth, mixed in with a distraction. He spoke of stories often, of chapters and endings, as if that was the way to the world worked. A series of puzzles. She didn’t think he’d meant a beacon of anything; Ella was too much of modern America with its plastic wrap and cheap food, the blaring-bright neon and the lightshow of sins that was Vegas to remember Gatsby’s sole, green light, promise and hope bound up together. She hoped and maybe she dreamed but she didn’t cant her head and join the two together, this sparkling, champagne-short-lived version of life and all those dreams. Discord drew her, like oil curdling in water. She didn’t know when she’d stopped wanting life perfect, but she felt like footsteps in snow, like marring everything because it couldn’t stay that way for long. “You don’t want to be told what to do.” It was simplistic, the way Ella said it and she nodded her head as if she knew, soft South and bright curls and the glass of nothing in her hands, all sage truth. “You want to find it out yourself. Your story,” she liked that. She liked the way books were, promises tied up in musty paper, words lined up on a page. She’d sat with books for months before she learned how to read them, trying to find the people that lived in them, the ones her mother knew as intimately as friends. “I guess I feel the same way.” She turned, a swing-sway of beads and a ripple of silk, toward the bar and she tapped two fingers on its polished surface twice. It was a signal, to a bartender who smiled at her and she smiled back, and a glass full of colored something was slid along to her. Close-to, it smelled of gin. “What made you pick America? There are plenty of places to run away to.” England was old and established. Steady and resilient. It was a very practical country, all things considered, and that was reassuring. It was also rather boring. The rest of the UK had fiercer moments, but there was something very attractive about the United States. It was younger and rougher. It was an excellent place to go while extremely rich, and he wouldn't want it any other way. The modern America was tainted in a way, but this was early. They hadn't quite lost the shine of who they wanted to be in the Gatsby era. I "One never stops getting told what to do, it merely changes the strength of the influence. I've done what my family wanted, but with a twist." He was out of his father's watchful eye, except for being required to check in regularly. Now that was lost to him, and it was freeing. He couldn't very well call him from the hotel, although he thought that might be an option, but Jude was supposed to be dead. So were the rest of them. He smiled when she said she was the same way. "There are less interesting ways to start a story, probably. This place is anything but boring." A little seedy, perhaps, but she got to perform and bump elbows with strangers with stories of their own. Jude noticed she traded out her drink for a real one and his green eyes were amused. He liked the idea it seemed like she was sticking around, at least for more conversation. "The wealthy do well here. The laws are complicated. England's been mostly the same for a long time. I could recite those in my sleep. We don't have anything like this establishment. It's all pubs or upper class bars." Nothing in between. ‘With a twist’. It sounded like a drink order, Old Fashioned Orders taken with a twist. It sounded like Max, the Max who was out of the service and out of the government, still hiding in dark places, still fighting to stand still. Max who hadn’t been a good little soldier, not where it counted. Ella didn’t think the place was boring. She thought it held promise, the held breath of anticipation. She liked the stage and she liked singing until her voice rasped in her throat and she liked conversation when she could walk out and shut the door behind her, and leave the conversation behind, like tissue paper might tear and be thrown away. She notched her elbow back against the bar, frail silk and beads chiming as she cocked her hip - not close. Not close enough to be anything but the warmth of another body in a small space - and looked up. She caught amusement and she followed his gaze to the glass in her hands and she flushed; once, and warm and high. “You don’t want well-known?” she said. Novelty was nice. But she liked the man who came, old enough that he had to have known the place before it wore the dress it did now, who would come every night until he couldn’t any longer. He was old enough that he was harmless, and he sat in the front even if he didn’t tip, and they all knew his name. Sam. “The laws are complicated - you’re a lawyer?” The feathery blond eyebrow arched; Ella looked surprised. He’d looked wealthy enough she’d figured a trust-fund baby, someone who didn’t need to work a day in his life. Promise was not something he knew well. Jude was a skeptic, through and through. Not pessimistic exactly, but he preferred to prepare for the worst. And that could mean any number of things. For him, boredom was at the top of the list. His taste for excitement turned to murder and consequences. Now he was hesitant to go down that path again ... but he wondered if it would come around again. A part of him was tied up in his failure, in the wonder if he planned it better, would it have been a success? He knew Sam was on here. But no, he was a fresh start. "Well-known, not particularly, it seems average here. I'll never throw one of the extravagant parties this city is known for. I like to only attend." Jude knew the right things to say, the compliments, the schmoozing, the congratulating themselves on being born on the right side of the sheets. He knew the book. He read it, Dickens was required reading, and he envied the Gatsby situation at times, exposed emotions and shallowness and decadence. Now he was there and not enjoying it. But he did enjoy her and the way her hip swayed and the sound of her voice when she sang. Oh he remembered her performance. He chuckled. "Are you surprised? My father believes firmly in working for money." And his father before him. They enjoyed the excess of wealth, but there was a pride in adding personally. "But it would be terribly dull to spend all my time on a yacht. I'd miss out on this." “Because there’s such a lot of this to miss.” Ella hadn’t gotten used to the glitz and the glitter, not so quick. She didn’t know the difference between diamonds and paste, they sparkled the same under the light and even if he smiled pretty and had the right clothes to look like someone important, she wouldn’t know if all that refinement lay on the surface, good varnish over cheap wood. But she’d been here long enough to know that parties happened every night instead of special occasions and that even if the alcohol was banned, that didn’t stop it flowing easy. Her voice was droll, it took in the way the club stayed the same, light or dark outside and the people crammed in around the tables like the show would close in a minute and never come back. “Plenty of folks would just take the yacht,” Ella thought about bright young things, dripping ash on the tablecloths, with their champagne glasses swinging from their fingers, “If you’ve got money, why shouldn’t you enjoy it?” It was artless, a statement made from lack of money instead of lots of it, the assumption that money held the charms of strong walls and rent paid, of safety cut and dried, folded into a thick bill-fold. “So you’re private.” It was a safe assumption, a man who partied but never opened his home. Or maybe he did, and nobody knew. Ella smiled against the idea of an English Gatsby from across the ocean, and turned it into her glass. "There is a lot of it to miss, I wonder how people keep up. Don't tell my colleagues I said so, it's part of building a reputation to act like sleep and solitude are nothing compared to extravagance and parties." He didn't lack the drive for it, and it was a perfect place to get business and make connections. In school he did plenty of it, schmoozing was how people got by and found work later on. At the same time, Jude found too much of it distasteful. A non-stop party sounded exhausting rather than fascinating. He would prefer a smaller party with lively conversation instead, but when in Rome. "Good point, I know a lot of people who did take it. The thing is I don't think ultimately they're happy floating from one place to the next." He saw them regularly when they checked in, talking about the many places they'd been, but none of it seemed to get past a shallow level. They saw the sights and spent money, but it didn't mean anything to them, it was just something they did because they were told to. You must go to Rome and see the ruins, but they got there and thought it was a boring pile of broken rocks. Of course he knew that was simply rich people problems. He understood only mildly the plights of the poor, but he never pretended that he knew them or where they came from. "I'm new, that could change." He might have to give in to the times, and it might be entertaining, at least once. He smiled at her and tipped his drink in her direction. "If I do ever decide to throw one, I'll have to send you an invitation, Ella." He found that he truly meant it too. She was more interesting company than he expected or found so far. The glass came down on the polished bar-top and the bartender whisked it before it had a chance to sit, ice pooling in a muddled mess at the bottom. A finger beckoned from the dark behind the stage, and Ella smiled, something more glitter and distracted than properly gold and she let go the idea of a party that was built in clouds and the bottom of the glass. She wasn’t Daisy and she didn’t plan on finding Gatsby inside the door. Even if he had money to give out in handfuls. She slid away, a ripple of those borrowed skirts gleaming under gas-light and the click of her heels was buried under the talk and chatter and the lazy jazz from the stage. And when she got back behind the stage where the powder was thick and snowy on the air, the reminder that time had run out and she was due back was hissed in her ear. Ella stole out of the back into the cool of the street, and she didn’t think once of Gatsbys and lawyers as she hurried back to Marvel. |