I gave the password in my most unaccented voice, conspiring to look bored when the man looked me over and opened the door. If I didn’t pass muster, I wondered if I was prepared to spend the next hour or so watching the Amazing Ming juggle plates in the scanty dusty theater or to walk out in defeat. There were already a few people in the seats who looked excited by the prospect and I was certain that if I had to sit with them, I would simply perish.
The man at the door nodded me in, and the moment I stepped past the threshold, I felt as if I were falling, not plummeting down a rabbit hole, but instead that gut-clenching rush of missing the very last steep stair in the basement. My foot came down, and I looked down into an elegant ballroom of veiled mirrored walls, a long bar of rosewood and brass, and an integrated orchestra that were, to a man, playing blindfolded.
I felt a rush of heat and pleasure when I looked down at all the people below me and knew, rather than suspected or hoped, that they were like me. Of course they weren’t, but that single moment left me speechless and almost in tears before a party of young men arrived behind me and pushed me out of the way to descend the stairs and join the fun.
That shove broke me out of my spell somewhat, but even four years later, I felt a trace of that old wonder as I came through the door with a showy pink peony tucked behind my ear, wearing my emerald green silk slip dress with its dancing fringe of copper beads. I had come with plenty of energy to spare that night, and as the band struck up the first song, I found myself in the arms of a fat Black girl in a white tuxedo, the satin of her lapels gleaming like stars in the soft light. She had long eyelashes that curled up like angel wings, and when she pressed her round cheek against mine, she made my heart beat faster. She was light on her feet, but I wondered if she had mistaken me for someone else because she passed me on at the end of “Broadway Baby.”
After the girl in the tuxedo came Maurice Wilder, who struck a strange and exciting chord in me by being the most handsome boy in a flaming red dress.
“Tacky,” I teased him, liking the blush that came up on his narrow face when I did, and he pulled me close to hide his face in my hair. Someone should have told him to wear a slip, because I could feel every inch of him through the gossamer fabric, but I was glad that no one had told him yet. He let me pull him behind one of the vast Boston ferns to kiss him, but I let him go when he wouldn’t let me do more.
Like every halfway fashionable thing, I had a tab at the Cendrillon. Mine was under the name Miss Shanghai, something I absolutely did not choose for myself, but it still got me delicious drinks in Venetian glassware. I was wearing green that night, and fortunately they had a good absinthe, straight from their supplier on the Gulf. I leaned against the bar to watch the bartender set the drink up for me, from the thick glass tumbler just barely tinted to enhance the green of the drink to the slotted spoon where a little sugar cat crouched, its face, paws, and tail lightly singed brown. The bartender balanced the spoon in the notch on the tumbler’s edge, and then holding the cloudy bottle high so that the arc was elegant and narrow, poured the green alcohol over the cat. When the sugar dissolved entirely and the tumbler was three-fourths of the way full, the bartender slid the glass towards me, and I smiled, taking the spoon to mix my drink and find myself a seat.
People make such a fuss about home. Daisy talked in raptures about Louisville and Chicago, while Nick, when he had a few, could be quite a pain about Minnesota snow and the pale faces and gleaming eyes seen from the car in the cornfields. I listened, but I never cared all that much.
Despite that, the Cendrillon was one of my homes, and I could perch on the high stools by the ruby-glass mirror and sip my drink, my legs crossed so that if someone I wanted walked by, I could tap them easily on the thigh and make them look at me.
Without windows, the Cendrillon had an underground feel. It kept things cooler in the summer months, but it was New York in one of the hottest years on record. We were in a roiling boil, and I only kept cool by filling an old perfume atomizer with water and spritzing myself liberally as the night went on. I added a few drops of actual perfume to the mix, so not long into the evening, I was lightly drenched in citron, but still a little cooler and a little more alert than the other people there.