One-Eyed Jacks Read online

  She’d auditioned at the Blue Parrot that morning, after hearing about the job from her ex-manager, whose continuing expertise in the business was such that he was now selling suits on garment row. The Parrot’s manager, Mel Dunston, was looking for somebody to cover for his regular headliner, a girl named Tempest Torrence.

  “Tempest Torrence?” Lee had asked. “Didn’t she do the weather at the CBC?”

  “I’m not sure about that,” Mel had replied.

  It seemed that Miss Torrence was winging her way to Hollywood to screen test for some musical. The story was familiar enough to Lee — she’d run basically the same gauntlet a couple years earlier. Now she’d come full circle — what goes around comes around.

  She and another girl — a blonde named Lorraine something or other — had in turn sung along to a phonograph for Dunston and some runny-eyed flunky called Bix or maybe Blix, who was there, as near as Lee could figure, to jump up and down at Dunston’s request to try to make the manager look like a bigger wheel than he would ever be.

  Lee had sung ‘Moonlight in Vermont’ and ‘My Blue Heaven’ while Dunston sat fatly in a chair chewing a toothpick, and Bix/Blix hovered behind. The girl Lorraine had a great set of pipes, but Lee got the job and they both knew that the difference had been Lee’s appearance. Maybe she should have been bothered by that, but she wasn’t. She’d come to believe that her looks had brought her as much grief as they had good fortune over the years and that things eventually evened out anyway. Yeah, what goes around comes around.

  “Maybe next time I’ll wear some padding,” blonde Lorraine had sniffed as she packed up her records and aspirations to go.

  “This is just me, kid,” Lee had told her. “You think what you want.”

  “You’re probably sleeping with him,” Lorraine decided then.

  “Dunston?” Lee had laughed. “I’d fuck the Riverdale Zoo first.”

  The job was a hundred a week, and it was good for a month at least, long enough for Lee to get on her feet and decide what she was going to do with what was left of her screwed-up life.

  “We’ll have a sign made up,” Dunston said as she was leaving. He was short and fat and he combed his hair straight forward from the back of his head to conceal impending baldness. “It is Lee Charles? Spelled as it sounds?”

  “Well, I was thinking ‘bout maybe using Hurricane Hazel,” Lee told him. “But I hear it’s been taken.”

  Dunston nodded uncertainly. “Yes, I’ve heard of her.”

  Dunston’s sign painter was no Matisse, but he worked fast. That afternoon — out looking for a room — Lee had walked by the Parrot and seen the new billboard in the window: Lee Charles, Recording Artist. Appearing nightly, the sign had advised. Recording artist, for sure. If you count two singles cut seven years ago. And don’t bother asking for them in your local record stores, folks.

  She took a cab back to her new home on Baldwin. She’d been on her feet all day and she’d be goddamned if she was going to lug her bags fifteen blocks in the heat. After unpacking she washed some stockings and underwear in the sink down the hall and hung them in her room to dry. Then she walked to the market and bought some fruit to eat for dinner.

  She didn’t start at the Parrot until the next night, the Friday, so she had the evening to herself. Another familiar feeling. She went down the hall and had a long bath before the other tenants, who were working girls, came home. She shaved her legs and washed her hair and then went back to her room and fell asleep. For the first time in months, she dreamed of Tommy.

  Her dream life was as fucked up as the real article. In it she was singing on an outdoor stage — it seemed to Lee that she was at a county fair or carnival, which surprised the hell out of her since she had never been to either. But she was onstage singing, and her microphone wasn’t working, and the crowd, mostly rural types, was ignoring her completely.

  Worse yet, Tommy was in the front row and he was talking and laughing with two farm girls — buxom lasses in gingham dresses, brightly coloured ribbons in their cornsilk hair. And there was Lee onstage, fighting with the unco-operative mike and watching Tommy Cochrane, who never favoured her with as much as a glance.

  “Son of a bitch,” she said when she woke up.

  It was dark outside and in the room. She flicked on a light and sat up in bed and ate an apple from the market. She got up to toss the core in the garbage pail and stopped briefly to examine herself naked in front of the mirror. But her body didn’t interest her as much as it did everybody else, and she crawled back into bed and tried to read a magazine she’d bought a couple weeks earlier on the coast. But she gave up on it again and decided in a snap to go out.

  The dresses she’d carried across the country would only encourage pursuit (oh yeah, those Hollywood rags drive men wild, don’t you know?). She ignored them and pulled on houndstooth slacks and a white blouse. Then she fastened her hair behind her neck again and put on the brown leather jacket Tommy had given her ten years earlier. She checked the results in the mirror, hoping that the woman she saw there would discourage any pointy-shoed Romeos who might be prowling the dark Toronto night. But she had little faith in the notion; it had never worked before.

  She gathered her purse and her cigarettes and went down the two flights and into the street, heading south toward Queen. For all the heat of the afternoon, the night had grown cool and she was glad as she walked that she had worn the old jacket, although that’s not what she had in mind when she put it on. She had a cigarette as she walked, puffing guiltily, knowing it was lousy for her voice, which wasn’t in the best of shape these days anyway. She hadn’t sung much these last months and she would find out in a hurry tomorrow what she had to work with. She would cut out the cigarettes if she had to. She’d begun to smoke years ago to irritate her mother, now she only used the weed when she was bored. She’d been smoking a lot lately.

  She went to the Rooster without thinking; when you lack the energy to run your life, just turn it over to old habits. The place was maybe half full. There was a folkie on stage singing Woody Guthrie songs and strumming a twelve-string. Lee walked in the front door and ran directly into her old pal Patty Simmons. They’d sung the Colgate jingle together all those years ago.

  Patty squealed and gave Lee a crushing hug.

  “How you doing, kid?” Lee said, pulling away. “You’re squeezing the life out of me, I hope you know.”

  “My God, look at you,” Patty said. “It’s not even fair. Don’t you get any older?”

  “Every day. Take my word for it.”

  “Like hell,” Patty said. “You could pass for twenty-one, woman. You make me sick, you know that?”

  Lee laughed. “Yeah, well God gave me good genes and poor judgment,” she said. “I’d trade ’em one for the other if I could.”

  Patty had put on a few pounds, Lee could see, but she looked good. Her black hair was in a bouffant and she was fairly poured into a blue dress. She was a wild one, part Mohawk Indian and part Scottish; she loved to sing and she loved to drink. And she loved to sing while she was drinking. They’d done some commercial work together years earlier; Lee could never keep up with her though.

  “You still got half of Toronto after your ass?” Lee asked.

  “Me?” Patty shouted in indignation. “Men were jumping off the goddamn viaduct when you left town. They were hauling ’em away by the truckful. Broken-hearted loverboys, squashed like bugs on the parkway.”

  “Wasn’t that a country song?” Lee asked.

  “Hank Williams, I believe,” Patty said. “Come on, I’ll buy you a drink. You still like gin?”

  “I wouldn’t turn Tom Collins down,” Lee said. “But I have to tell you, Patty, my serious drinking days are behind me.”

  “Say it ain’t so.”

  “I guess I just got sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

  “I’m gonna cut back too,” Patty said. “Bobby and I are trying for a kid. Once I get a bun in the oven, then that’s it for the
booze, I have to take care of myself.”

  She went to the bar and got a Tom Collins for each of them, and then they walked to a table away from the stage and sat down. Howard Coulter was working the lights for the folkie. When he spotted Lee he waved his arm like a man flagging a cab. He would be over directly, she knew.

  “So who is this Bobby?” she asked as they sat. “Don’t tell me you got yourself domesticated?”

  Patty showed the gold band on her finger. “You remember Bobby Saleski, the horn player? We’ve been married two years.”

  “He was Robert when I knew him.”

  “He’s Bobby now. He’s a DJ over at CHIK, and it’s a better image. Bobby is hip — Robert is kinda like your old granddad or something.”

  “For sure,” Lee smiled. “So this hip Bobby cat is trying to knock you up, is he?”

  “Well, we’re working on it. Bobby’s hot to have a couple of kids, right quick.”

  “How about you, Injun?” Lee asked. “You looking forward to a papoose?”

  “Yeah, I think I’m gonna like it. I can tell you one thing — I’m sure getting laid a lot. One of the fringe benefits of motherhood no one ever told me about.”

  Lee smiled again and tasted the gin. They made a decent Collins at the Rooster; some things did stay the same.

  “So what’s up with you?” Patty asked. “You home for a visit?”

  “Yeah,” Lee said. “Maybe a long visit. I kinda left that scene out there. It wasn’t going anywhere I wanted to be.”

  “Christ, you were in a movie!”

  “Actually, I was in three movies, kid,” Lee told her. “And if you went for a bag of popcorn or blinked your eyes, you would have missed me.” She shook her head. “It was just horseshit out there, Patty, don’t let anybody tell you different. Sitting around in a bungalow all day, painting my goddamn nails and reading magazines. I wasn’t singing, I wasn’t acting — except maybe acting happy for a bunch of jerks who claimed to have my best interests at heart. And living with these dense broads, all bleached blondes, sitting around doing bust-enlargement exercises and talking about going to the Academy Awards some day. Every couple weeks my agent would show up and tell me that they were still looking for something special for me. A property, he’d say. Well, I’ll tell ya, if I want to wade in shit every day, I’ll get a job with the sewer department. Me and Ed Norton, right?”

  The folkie onstage broke into a spirited version of Guthrie’s ‘This Land Is Your Land.’ A going-into-break song if she’d ever heard one, Lee thought.

  “So you just left,” Patty said in disbelief. “You walked away from Hollywood, the movies.”

  “No, I ran away from Hollywood and the movies.”

  Patty was looking at her like she had two heads.

  “A couple weeks ago,” Lee told her, “there was a casting call for this new Elvis Presley movie. And this auditorium is unbelievable — wall-to-wall bimbos, all squeezed into girdles, tits pushed up, lipstick smeared all over their faces. And there’s nothing these girls wouldn’t do to get a part in this movie. Nothing — you hear me? So I decided I either had to be like them or get the hell out of there. I mean, are you willing to blow some sweaty old man to get your face on the screen for maybe ten seconds? That’s what it comes down to.”

  “But did you meet him?” Patty asked.

  “Who?”

  “Elvis!”

  “Oh, he walked through the room with a bunch of guys. To tell you the truth, I doubt he knew any better than I did what was going on.”

  “Wasn’t he sexy though?” Patty asked. “God, I could just eat him alive.”

  Lee shrugged. “There was a bunch of these guys together and they all looked the same. I don’t even know which one was him. I guess we didn’t exactly catch fire. If you want, though, I can make up a wild story about him and I swimming naked out at Malibu at midnight.”

  “Please do.”

  Onstage the singer finished and mumbled something about a break. Howard Coulter would be on his horse, Lee thought, and then she saw his approach register in Patty’s eyes.

  “Old times coming to visit,” Patty said.

  Howard swung into the chair between them, his fresh face shining. He was wearing a suede jacket and a soft felt hat, which he removed to show off his blond curls. He propped his elbows on the table and, with his hands framing his face, he looked at Lee.

  “I can’t believe my eyes,” he said.

  “How’s Howard these days?” Lee asked.

  “Better than I’ve been,” he said. “Are you a sight for sore eyes. I swear, I thought an angel walked through the door.”

  “Damn, I must have missed her,” Lee said, looking around.

  “Nice to see you too, Howard,” Patty said.

  “Hey, Patty,” Howard began to apologize.

  “I know. I know. You can see me anytime. But an angel — well, I can understand.”

  Lee gave Patty what she hoped was a cherubic smile. Howard was too busy being enraptured to notice.

  “So, you back for good, Lee?” Howard asked.

  “Well, I’m back. I don’t know whether it’s for good or bad, Howard. You’re working here now?”

  “For the time being,” he said. “I’m putting together a recording studio though — two-track stereo, all the latest stuff. You still singing, Lee? God, I’d love to record you.”

  Lee laughed easily. “Get yourself a rock and roller, Howard. You want to make money, that’s the way to go. ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ beats the hell out of ‘Ebb Tide’ any day.”

  “Just your picture on the album would sell a million, Lee.”

  She laughed again. “That’s it, to hell with substance. Screw the music, just give ’em pretty pictures. You oughta be in California, Howard. That kind of approach could make you a rich man.”

  But she couldn’t even insult him. He just leaned back and regarded her fondly. Lee looked over at Patty, who batted her eyes like a lovesick cow before coming to the rescue.

  “Lee’s been making movies, Howard,” she said. “Three of them so far.”

  “All classics,” Lee said.

  “So you’re going back?” Howard asked.

  “No, I believe I’ll retire from film. My work there is done.” She dropped her voice. “I vant to be alone.”

  Someone was calling Howard from the direction of the stage. He got to his feet unhappily.

  “You gonna stick around, Lee? We’ll grab a bite later.”

  She told him not tonight. She’d forgotten what a persistent bastard he was.

  “Where are you staying?” he wanted to know.

  She lied, said she was still looking.

  “I’ve got plenty of room,” he told her. “I’m still in the old place.”

  She told him she’d keep it in mind. “You better go,” she said. “That man in the white jacket’s about to pop a vein.”

  He touched her hair and backed away, hat in hand like a beggar on a street corner. Patty was watching her.

  “Well, shit,” Lee said.

  “You hear violins?” Patty asked. “I swear to God I can hear violins.”

  “I never knew he was still that way,” Lee said. “Christ, it was eight years ago and it never lasted a month. Why me?”

  “Because,” Patty said. “Everybody wants what they can’t have.”

  Lee rolled her eyes and watched Howard by the stage. He kept looking back at her, his face bright.

  “He looks like Harpo Marx,” Lee said. “Did he always look like that?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  Lee smiled. “Well, it’s too bad he doesn’t have Harpo’s way with words.”

  They decided to have another drink. Her last, Lee insisted — she wanted to be gone before Howard finished working. The waiter brought the gin, and then she told Patty about the Blue Parrot.

  “Hundred a week’s not bad,” Patty said.

  “What’s this Dunston expect anyway?” Lee asked. “The guy’s dumber than lint. What
goes over there?”

  “It’s kinda uptown,” Patty told her. “Be a snap for you. A little Porter, some Patti Page, maybe some Broadway stuff. You want to do Billie or Bessie, you have to bring it up a little. They don’t want no sad songs, you know what I mean.”

  “Mel likes happy diners, is that it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “I do a funky Doris Day.”

  “Perfect,” Patty laughed. “You got rehearsal?”

  “Tomorrow. Why don’t you stop by? I’m kind of lost here. Don’t know what to sing, don’t know what to wear.”

  “I’ll say. What’s with the longshoreman’s duds? If I had that body I wouldn’t wear nothin’ but a smile.”

  Lee glanced up toward the stage. “Discretion,” she laughed. “No shit, I’ve been leered at every day for the past two years. Guys who think grabbing your ass is a compliment.”

  “I doubt anybody grabbed yours and got away with it.”

  “I landed a couple right hooks,” Lee said. “Tommy taught me a thing or two about using my dukes.” She did a low-rent Brando. “I coulda been a contenda.”

  “You hear from him?”

  “Brando?”

  “Tommy.”

  “No.”

  “I guess you know he got beat a few months back. In New York.”

  “I read about it.”

  “It was too bad,” Patty said. “They were talking about a title shot.”

  “Some things are never meant to be.” Lee looked into her glass. “Maybe I didn’t know that ten years ago, but I know it now.”

  Then she smiled quick to deflect the tone. No need for that stuff. Not tonight.

  Not ever.

  “I should tell you, Lee,” Patty said. And she wished suddenly that she had just let it go. But she couldn’t now. “There was some talk about Tommy after the fight. A lot of people around here lost money on him and they say he took a dive.”