Ella Dean is a (chanteuse) wrote in rooms, @ 2014-07-18 21:04:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | !great gatsby, *log, ella dean, joey alexander |
Gatsby: log Ella and Joey
Who: Ella D and Joey A
What: It's not coffee.
When: Recently
Where: Gatsby
Warnings: These two do not need warnings.
Tuesday night wasn't a crush but the club still played to an audience, shoulders in smart town suits shoved companionably up against country cousins who were trying the novelty of mixed drinks and verboten gin in tiny glasses. The music was redolent, velvet-dark in a single silvery spotlight and the girls tonight weren't high-kicks and knowing looks but the mournful magic of the hedonist age imagining the misery of their grandparents and of their grandchildren, comfortably wrapped in Art Deco and cushioned from the blow of the 'Crash by the door that opened on a back alley right by the club. The key unlocked into the back-store, and you emerged in dust thick enough to play blanket for mice, where the mellow gold of bathtub brews glowed from jars kept on the back-shelves. Jim, the barman, he liked drinking far too much to be honest with the cash, and he liked a smoke almost as much as he liked to watch the girls. He loitered, Ella knew, by the back door but close enough to the store over to flirt with the girl who lived over it by the window, and if it was a regular romance or just something to amuse one another with, it distracted him long enough that Joey wouldn't have a problem with the door. Inside, light was gas-flare low, the indolent buzz of people drinking, and playing cards, and having a good time, and feeling self-congratulatory that they were having a good time when others weren't. It was a night with good tips, several of the worn dollar bills that went for serious money in a dealer's shop she'd found in Marvel New York, were tucked into the crusted strap of her dress, borrowed blue that finished with beaded fringe from way high up to the knee and swung and clattered around her as she moved from the bar to backstage and back again, laughing. There were regulars here, regulars who looked around with the same keen, warm wanting she recognized from Vegas and New York, from people who reached with expectant greedy hands and cold eyes, except here they wanted a song, and maybe they wanted to flirt a little, and in Gatsby, when the light was soft and low and it felt like walking around in a movie instead of real life, it was real easy to play along a little for another of those five dollars that made itself a lot more back home. She didn't look like a lost little girl with hair-ribbons, full of back-to-school-fears and she didn't look lost grown all the way up in too big cardigans. She was borrowed blue and gleaming hairpins that glittered, paste but paste that looked real and silky gloves that climbed from finger to elbow, and no one cared if she felt anything or she felt nothing. It felt real, the way dreams do, it felt safe like reading herself into a storybook when she'd been little and you could grow up to be anything you liked. And she wanted Joey maybe, to have a little piece of it, of make-believe that was kind, and gentle and pretty instead of fouled up with death. She looked for him, now and again, her glass full of colored water the clientele paid outrageous sums of money for on the understanding it was gin, and her smile was full and bright as the gas-lamps turned to high. She'd climbed the stage before, her throat scratchy with it and husky, and she swung once more against the press of the people looking to get a drink, toward the single stool in the spotlight, to change places with the girl out on stage. |