behind the city itself—sucked into this wild urban river of music and lights and revelry. Other times, it felt like we were the ones dragging the city behind us—because everywhere we went, we were followed. In the course of these heady evenings, we would either meet up with some men whom Celia already knew, or we would pick up some new men along the way. Or both. I would either kiss three handsome men in a row, or the same handsome man three times—sometimes it was hard to keep track.
Never was it difficult to find men.
It helped that Celia Ray could walk into a joint like nobody I’ve ever seen. She would throw her resplendence into a room ahead of her, the way a soldier might toss a grenade into a machine gunner’s nest, and then she’d follow her beauty right on in and assess the carnage. All she had to do was show up, and every bit of sexual energy in the place would magnetize around her. Then she’d stroll around looking bored as can be—sopping up everyone’s boyfriends and husbands in the process—without exerting the slightest bit of effort in her conquests.
Men looked at Celia Ray like she was a box of Cracker Jack and they couldn’t wait to start digging for the toy.
In return, she looked at them like they were the wooden paneling on the wall.
Which only made them crazier for her.
“Show me you can smile, baby,” a brave man once called out to her across the dance floor.
“Show me you got a yacht,” Celia said under her breath, and turned away to be bored in another direction.
Since I was by her side, and since I looked enough like her now (in low light, anyhow—since I was not only the same height and coloring as Celia, but now wore tight dresses like hers, and styled my hair like hers, and modeled my walk after hers, and padded my bosom to slightly resemble hers), it only doubled the effect.
I don’t like to boast, Angela, but we were a pretty unstoppable duo.
Actually, I do like to boast, so let an old woman have her glory: we were stunning. We could give whole tables of men a pretty decent case of whiplash, just by walking past.
“Fetch us a refresher,” Celia would say at the bar, to nobody in particular, and in the next moment, five men would be handing us cocktails—three for her, and two for me. And in the next ten minutes, those drinks would be gone.
Where did we get all that energy from?
Oh, yes, I remember: we got it from youth itself. We were turbines of energy. Mornings were always difficult, of course. The hangovers could be quite unsparingly cruel. But if I needed a nap later in the day, I could always do it in the back of the theater, during a rehearsal or a show, collapsed on a pile of old curtains. A ten-minute doze, and I’d be restored, ready to take on the city once more, as soon as the applause died down.
You can live this way when you’re nineteen (or pretending to be nineteen, in Celia’s case).
“Those girls are on the road to trouble,” I heard an older woman say about us one night, as we were staggering down the street drunk—and that woman was absolutely right. What she didn’t understand, though, is that trouble is what we wanted.
Oh, our youthful needs!
Oh, the deliciously blinding yearnings of the young—which inevitably take us right to the edges of cliffs, or trap us in cul-de-sacs of our design.
I can’t say that I got good at sex during the summer of 1940, although I will say that I grew awfully familiar with it.
But, no, I didn’t get good at it.
To get “good” at sex—which, for a woman, means learning how to enjoy and even orchestrate the act, to the point of her own climax—one needs time, patience, and an attentive lover. It would be awhile before I had access to anything as sophisticated as all that. For now, it was just a game of wild numbers, executed with a considerable amount of speed. (Celia and I didn’t like to hover too long in one location, or with one man, in case we were missing something better that might be happening on the other side of town.)
My longing for excitement and my curiosity about sex made me not only insatiable that summer, but also susceptible. That’s how I see myself, when I look back on it now.