Re: log: joey & ella, gatsby
Ella knew New York gritty and the brickwork dark from years of cars and people and smoke curling toward the sky from street-level. She knew her favorite bakery and she knew the house the lady with the piano lived in, the one who hired out her living room for five bucks an hour and let her play real keys, yellow with age that dipped when you pressed them and held a note electronic keyboards didn't have the know-how to do. She'd had no sense of direction since she was five and pigtails and crying on the way home from school because she couldn't figure the right way to run and she relied real strong on the electronic maps on a phone in her pocket, walked the wrong way half the time even with a little blip on screen.
But Gatsby was too old for maps and the landmarks lived longer than the new version of New York held onto its own. She didn't see criminal enterprise in the sticky spread of the bar or the jangle of the backdrop music. She saw light where there was tinsel and she liked the way the stage lights glowed, nothing bare electric about them.
She pulled at the fingers of the gloves, one by one. They were stained, on the inside of the cuff but no one looked real close at gloves. It was like snow made out of bits of paper, like spangles on the hem of a stage fairy's dress. People looked for the artifice because they wanted it bad enough to make it real and the gloves, they were part. But the man across the table had seen her real, the way Vegas had been real and cold and cruel and she pulled off the gloves quick, stained satin curled into the palms of her hands like she could take some of the falsity out of the taste, like spooning sugar in after a bad taste.
"Thanks," she smiled something that shone truer than stage lights, and she looked at the girl on stage who was singing something sweet and simple about loves lost. She'd make good money on it, Ella knew, and she'd soften a bunch of hearts that still had room to soften. But it was quiet, and she took the compliment as if it was burnished up real pretty and dimpled over it. "I used to sing a long time ago. I never did it for real until here, and this place isn't real the same way. But I like it a whole lot. You like it?" This was tentative, darting. She liked her snow-globe, her fly made precious by the amber around it, but maybe Joey liked things truer than that.