“Hey, Vivvie,” she said, blinking away the sun. “Thanks for sharing your bed. That cot they gave me is torture. I couldn’t take it anymore.”
I hadn’t been fully confident at this point that Celia even knew my name, so to hear her use the affectionate diminutive “Vivvie” flooded me with joy.
“That’s all right,” I said. “You can sleep here anytime.”
“Really?” she said. “That’s terrific. I’ll move my things in here today.”
Well, then. I guess I had a roommate now. (That was fine with me, though. I was just honored that she’d chosen me.) I wanted this strange, exotic moment to last as long as possible, so I dared to make conversation. “Say,” I asked, “where’d you go out to last night?”
She seemed surprised that I cared.
“El Morocco,” she said. “I saw John Rockefeller there.”
“Did you?”
“He’s the pits. He wanted to dance, but I was out with some other fellows.”
“Who’d you go out with?”
“Nobody special. Just a couple of guys who aren’t about to take me home to meet their mothers.”
“What kind of guys?”
Celia settled back into the bed, lit a smoke, and told me all about her night. She explained that she had gone out with some Jewish boys who were pretending to be gangsters, but then they ran into some real Jewish gangsters, so the pretenders had to scram, and she ended up with a fellow who took her to Brooklyn and then paid for a limousine to take her home. I was entranced by every detail. We stayed in bed for another hour as she narrated for me—in that unforgettably gruff voice of hers—every detail of an evening in the life of one Celia Ray, New York City showgirl.
I drank it all down like spring water.
By the next day, all of Celia’s belongings had migrated into my apartment. Her tubes of greasepaint and pots of cold cream now cluttered up every surface. Her vials of Elizabeth Arden competed for space on Uncle Billy’s elegant desk against her compacts of Helena Rubinstein. Her long hairs laced my sink. My floor was an instant tangle of brassieres and fishnets, garters and girdles. (She had such prodigious quantities of undergarments! I swear, Celia Ray had a way of making negligees reproduce.) Her used, perspiration-soaked dress shields were hiding under my bed like little mice. Her tweezers bit into my feet when I stepped on them.
She was outrageously entitled. She wiped her lipstick on my towels. She borrowed my sweaters without asking. My pillowcases became stained with black smudges from Celia’s mascara, and my sheets were dyed orange from her pancake makeup. And there wasn’t anything this girl wouldn’t use as an ashtray—including once, while I was in it, the bathtub.
Incredibly, I didn’t mind any of this. On the contrary, I never wanted her to leave. If I’d had a roommate this interesting back at Vassar, I might’ve stayed in college. To my mind, Celia Ray was perfection. She was New York City’s very distillation—a glittering composite of sophistication and mystery. I would endure any filth or befouling, just to have access to her.
Anyhow, our living arrangement seemed to suit us both perfectly: I got to be near her glamour, and she got to be near my sink.
I never asked my Aunt Peg if this was all right with her—that Celia had moved into Uncle Billy’s rooms with me, or that the showgirl seemed intent on staying at the Lily indefinitely. This seems awfully ill-mannered, when I think back on it now. It would have been the most basic act of politeness to at least clear this arrangement with my host. But I was far too self-absorbed to be polite—and so was Celia, of course. So we just went ahead and did whatever we wanted to do, without giving it another thought.
What’s more, I never really worried about the mess that Celia left behind in that apartment, because I knew that Aunt Peg’s maid, Bernadette, would eventually take care of it. Bernadette was a quiet and efficient soul who came to the Lily six days a week to clean up after everyone. She tidied up our kitchen and our bathrooms, waxed our floors, cooked dinner for us (which we sometimes ate, sometimes ignored, and sometimes invited ten unannounced guests to). She also ordered the groceries, called in the plumber nearly every day, and probably did about ten thousand other thankless tasks, as well. In addition to all that, she now had to clean up after me and Celia Ray, which hardly