each other for weeks. I’d missed all this, of course, because I was so entangled with Anthony. But it seemed Celia had found herself some new best friends, when I wasn’t paying attention.
Not that I was jealous, of course.
I mean—not so’s you’d notice.
We drove around that evening in Shipwreck Kelly’s opulent, cream-colored, custom-made convertible Packard. Shipwreck drove, Brenda was in the passenger seat, and Arthur and Celia and I sat in the back. Celia was in the middle.
I disliked Brenda Frazier instantly. She was rumored to be the richest girl in the world—so just imagine how fascinating and intimidating I found that, will you? How does the richest girl in the world dress? I couldn’t stop staring at her, to try to figure it all out—captivated by her, even as I was actively disliking her.
Brenda was a very pretty brunette, dressed in a pile of mink, wearing on her hand a diamond engagement ring approximately the size of a suppository. Underneath all those dead minks was a fairly staggering amount of black taffeta and bows. It looked as though she were going to a ball, or had just come from one. She had an overpowdered white face and bright red lips. Her tresses were styled in lush billows, and she was wearing a little black tricorn hat with a simple veil (the kind of thing that Edna used to disparagingly call “Tiny Bird’s Nest Teetering Precariously on a Giant Mountain of Hair”). I didn’t exactly embrace her style, but I had to hand it to her: she sure looked rich. Brenda didn’t say much, but when she did speak, she had a starchy finishing school accent that grated on me. She kept trying to convince Shipwreck to put up the roof of the car, because the breeze was ruining her hairstyle. She didn’t seem like fun.
I didn’t like Shipwreck Kelly, either. I didn’t like his nickname, and I didn’t like his red, jowly cheeks. I didn’t like his boisterous teasing. He was the kind of man who slaps you on the back. I have never liked a backslapper.
I really didn’t like the fact that both Brenda and Shipwreck seemed to know Celia and Arthur so well. By which I mean—they seemed to know Celia and Arthur in tandem. As though Celia and Arthur were a couple. This was immediately evidenced by Shipwreck hollering to the backseat of the car: “You kids wanna go to that place in Harlem again?”
“We don’t want to go to Harlem tonight,” said Celia. “It’s too cold.”
“Well, you know what they say about the month of March!” said Arthur. “In like a lion, out like a lamp.”
Idiot.
I couldn’t help but notice that Arthur was in an awfully gladsome mood suddenly, with his arm securely around Celia.
Why did he have his arm securely around Celia?
What the hell was going on here?
“Let’s just go to the Street,” said Brenda. “I’m too cold to drive all the way to Harlem with the top down.”
She meant Fifty-second Street, which everyone knew. Swing Street. Jazz Central.
“Jimmy Ryan’s or the Famous Door? Or the Spotlite?” asked Shipwreck.
“The Spotlite,” said Celia. “Louis Prima’s playing.”
And so it was decided. We drove that ridiculously expensive car a mere eleven blocks—which gave everyone in midtown enough time to see us and to spread the news that Brenda Frazier and Shipwreck Kelly were heading toward Fifty-second Street in their convertible Packard, which meant that there were a number of photographers waiting to snap photos of us as soon as we stepped out onto the curb in front of the nightclub.
(That part, I must admit, I enjoyed.)
I was drunk in a matter of minutes. If you think waiters back then were quick to bring cocktails to girls like Celia and me, you should’ve seen how fast drinks landed in front of the likes of Brenda Frazier.
I hadn’t eaten dinner, and I was emotional from my fight with Anthony. (In my mind, it was the worst conflagration of modern times, and I’d been all but undone by it.) The alcohol went right to my head. The band was clobbering away, loud and hard. By the time Louis Prima came over to pay his respects to our table, I was blotto. I couldn’t have cared less about meeting Louis Prima.
“What’s going on between you and Arthur?” I asked Celia.
“Nothing that matters,” she said.
“Are you fooling around with him?”
She shrugged.
“Don’t you stonewall me, Celia!”
I watched her weigh her options, and then settle on the truth.