like the bad angel sitting on one shoulder, whispering in your ear.
“As you’ve said a few times, Piper, a lot of it is luck,” I told her, mainly to get her to stop cursing out the casting director and his assistants, who were all “too stupid” to be in executive positions. I wasn’t used to a woman, especially one close to my age, using such raw language about the anatomy of people who had passed judgment on her talents. According to her, all the men had small penises and the women had their vaginas sewn shut. And that was just the beginning of her rant.
Getting her to accept bad luck as an excuse at least got her off the topic. Luck, after all, was random and had little to do with a decision about your talent, even whether there was any there. That helped her feel less terrible about being rejected, not that she ever took it as hard as I did. She would rather talk about her social life, anyway, which was still built around her patron of the arts, as she called Jerome, after I had explained what that was. She was more intent on not missing any parties than she was on not missing auditions. Over the next few weeks, she continually tried to get me to go to some, even directly from work, but I repeated how I was here for a career, not a social life. Besides, I was really tired and wondered why she wasn’t.
“You can have both, you know,” she said. “A professional life and a social life.”
“Not me, not yet. First, I want to get a foothold on my singing career.”
“You’re wasting your youth,” she warned. “Won’t be long before men stop looking at you. I saw it happen to my mother, but that’s not going to happen to me.”
She paused a moment, thought, and smiled.
“Don’t disappoint that Jon Morales, or if you want, send him my way. I could give up Jerome for him in a heartbeat, even if he isn’t a patron of the arts.”
She laughed. I ignored her whenever she mentioned Jon, always assuring me that Puerto Rican men were great lovers. She said she’d had a few and spoke from experience, experience I didn’t care to hear described. If anything, I thought she was behaving as if she and I were at some college, living in some dorm with our real lives out there yet to be begun. Maybe I came off snobby or boring, but most of the time, I felt I was the older of the two.
I was certainly more responsible when it came to caring for our apartment. Her room always looked like wild boars had charged through it: clothes strewn about over chairs and tables, and some even left on the floor, including panties! She rarely made her bed, and if she did, it looked like it was made by a four-year-old. When she wasn’t home, I ended up straightening it a bit, especially to pick up any food she had left on the night table or even in her bed. I had to do the same in our living room and kitchen. It worried me. Mice or maybe even rats were probably shopping these tenements looking for a banquet.
However, despite fighting it, I did think about Jon Morales occasionally, maybe more than occasionally. Whenever a young man in a jacket and tie entered the Last Diner, I would pause, expecting it might be he. Marge, who had made me a personal cause, caught my interest and started to tease me a little.
“Waiting for someone?” she’d ask, smiling.
Of course, I assured her I wasn’t, even though I knew I was revealing some disappointment that it wasn’t Jon, a feeling of disappointment that surprised and disturbed me. I was still very determined not to permit anyone, especially a man, to distract me from my goal. But it increasingly seemed like I had to remind myself more often than I would have thought necessary.
After a while, I convinced myself that I was relieved he wasn’t pursuing a relationship with me. I knew that other girls my age would spend more time wondering why and thinking perhaps that they were lacking in some respect. Maybe they could make themselves more attractive or more pleasant to be with, or maybe they could flirt just a little more. I had heard girls back in England talk like this when they were pursuing one boy or another. I thought I