Even when he showed up wearing a cologne that I didn’t recognize and with an extremely livid bite mark that I only found when opening his shirt, he was lukewarm on going to the Cendrillon.
Of course I could have just dragged him along as I had to the Lyric, but doing the same at the Cendrillon had been disastrous for me a time or two. Instead I described it to him, and watched with fascination as a cloud of confusion, fear, and longing came across his face. It settled into a kind of stony wariness, and he sat back from me, shaking his head.
“I don’t know why—I’m not like that.”
I tilted my head to one side, examining him with a careful eye. We were having a nightcap at my place just past four in the morning. He was getting used to late nights, and making himself presentable in other people’s bathrooms, but now he looked more nervous than he had in a few weeks.
“You’re not?” I asked, and he shook his head hard.
“No. Absolutely not. I don’t go to that kind of place.”
“I am, and I do,” I offered, and Nick gave me a little smile that understood more than he let on.
“I know you are and that you do. You’re different. It’s different for women.”
“Not at the Cendrillon,” I said, but he took my hand, not looking at me.
“I’m not like that,” he said, his voice shaking just a little. “Please?”
“I’m not the one who decides that,” I said as gently as I knew how. I cupped my hand over the back of his head, ruffling his hair slightly with my fingertips. I kissed him on the ear.
“All right. Never mind. But that’s where I’m going on Saturday.”
* * *
There were a dozen and one ways that the Cendrillon got away with being what it was. It was on the border between Cathedral Heights and Harlem, it paid off everyone from the local patrolmen up to the commissioner, and the owners, a pair of spare older men whose suits were worth more than most of my closet put together, were easily three times as paranoid as any place like the Lyric or Roberson’s.
At the Lyric, only the method for getting there was hidden. At the Cendrillon, unless you wore the right flower on your person, unless you knew the password, and unless you had a look the doorman liked, you would simply be at a rather shabby theater that rotated through a complement of dull comedians, inexpert tumblers, and bad tenors. I once passed a sulky night at one of their shows when I’d forgotten that I should have been wearing a white gardenia instead of a spray of baby’s breath on my lapel. There were apparently some people from the neighborhood who honestly thought it was just a sad little theater.
Some serious magic—some infernal, some subterranean French, some American swamp medicine—made it so that the Cendrillon was overlaid by the ramshackle theater. You didn’t go up into a loft or down into a basement. It was the same space, and when the magic ebbed just a little bit, sometimes you could see one from the other, quickly and more like déjà vu than anything as solid as a mirage.
I found out about the Cendrillon when I first came to New York, and it had taken me four months to get up the courage to go. I had to find Margot Van Der Veen, and then I had to go into that cautious dance of hints, looks, and shared references that told her I was the right kind of safe. In Louisville, I had crashed through the world like a cannonball, but here, I could see that that wouldn’t serve. There would be a time for crashing through the veils and birch wood screens, but it couldn’t happen when I was seventeen and so achingly new and strange.
The first time I went, I was in a shimmering black beaded dress that was rather too old for me and too soaked in Scandinavian gloom for words. I wore a red rosebud pinned to my dress, and I’d stolen Aunt Justine’s sparkling diamond earrings to complete the picture. I shook a little, thinking that this was when everything was going to change. I had escaped Louisville, come to New York, and everything would be different.