Manhattan Noir

CRYING WITH AUDREY HEPBURNBY XU XI

Times Square

for William Warren

Yeah, the ring’s for real. Why would I pretend about that?

So what is it you want to know, kid? That I wouldn’t be “dancing” if not for Ron? That things might be different if he hadn’t pulled his vanishing act? Ron never introduced me to his family. Said they didn’t give two shits about him after his mom remarried, so why stay in touch? Guess I can’t blame him.

Of course, I’m hardly one to talk.

Still, though. Might have been nice to have some American in-laws, even if they’d never come to Manhattan.

Okay, kid, write this down.

Mother cried over Audrey Hepburn movies…

“She’s so elegant,” she sniffed, “and helpless. No wonder men look after her.”

On television, Sabrina was approaching its illogical conclusion. It was Saturday, February 29, 1964, the night of my father’s fifty-ninth birthday. I was fourteen. A-Ba was at a dinner hosted by my three older brothers. We didn’t go because of Audrey, but also because Mother said fifty-nine wasn’t a big deal, and that my brothers and their wives were wasting time sucking up to A-Ba, hoping to get his money.

“I don’t know what you’re crying about,” I said. “It’s just a movie. It isn’t real.”

My mother dried her eyes with a silk handkerchief. “It wouldn’t hurt you to soften up a bit and be a little more elegant.”

Mother was Eurasian, but if you looked at her face front, she passed for Chinese. Exotic perhaps, but Chinese. Her mother was an American missionary’s daughter who married a wealthy Cantonese trader against her parents’ wishes. My father was a Cantonese businessman who made and sold soy sauce-“Yangtze Soy”-when he wasn’t boozing. Whenever his commercial aired, the one where sauce cascades down cleavage to the opening of Grieg’s piano concerto, Mother switched off the television in disgust.

“Here,” she said, handing me her crochet work. “Put this away, please.”

I complied and escaped to my bedroom, grateful to surface above the vale of tears.

Elegance. Facing the mirror in third position, I studied my feet. Six and a half and still growing; already, it was hard finding shoes my size. Mother would die if she knew I danced all the boys’ parts. “Ballet will help you be more graceful,” she insisted when she started me up nine years earlier. “It’s important for young ladies to be graceful because gentlemen like that.” Mother’s graceful. She had jet-black hair, large eyes, high cheekbones, and a figure like Audrey’s. I could imagine her in Humphrey Bogart’s arms, dancing to “Isn’t It Romantic.” Mother loved to dance, but A-Ba couldn’t foxtrot to save his life.

Sabrina is such a silly story. Bogart and Holden are these unlikely brothers of a wealthy Long Island family. Audrey’s the chauffeur’s daughter who has a crush on Holden. She dis-appears off to cooking school in Paris, returns grown up and sophisticated, which is when he finally notices her. But the family doesn’t want her marrying Holden, so Bogart turns on the charm, intending to pay Audrey off. Instead, Bogart falls for her, and they end up getting married. The End.

My hair’s limp and a faded mousy brown. I have Mother’s height and A-Ba’s frazzled eyebrows, beady eyes, and ugly mouth. I look pathetically Eurasian. My brothers inherited the best of my parents; they pass for Chinese and all made it over 5'8', a real asset among Hong Kong men. Leftover blood coursed through me, the accident, seventeen years after the last boy. Good thing I was a girl. That way, Mother fussed over me in her old age and didn’t even mind the way I looked.

In the living room, Bogart and Audrey were sailing off to their Parisian honeymoon in black-and-white. Personally, I couldn’t see what she saw in him. I would have taken Holden any day, philanderer though he was. After all, there was no guarantee what Bogart would be like after Paris.

But kid, I’m getting too old for this.

What? You think Ron happened yesterday? Audrey Hepburn died, that’s what happened yesterday. Papers said cancer. Too bad Ron’s not here. We’d have honored her passing together.

So you want to hear the rest of this story or not?

On her way home from lunch with friends the next afternoon, my mother was killed by a hit-and- run driver.

“She was running across the street again,” my father shouted.

“Always running!”

He had seldom been as angry. A-Ba’s an ugly man who was once better looking. Smashed his face against a cracked toilet bowl when he was drunk one night, and emergency did a lousy job on his jowl. In his fury, his gnarled, contorted face resembled a lion’s head in the dance-a shiny red and gold mask with fierce eyes.

“It was an accident,” I said. “The police said so. Besides, the driver should have stopped.”

“Always running,” he muttered.

Can’t recall much about the funeral. My three brothers did the adult things and said very little to me. We were virtually strangers, since they were gone by the time I was born. I wanted to scream at everyone to shut up and stop crying. I didn’t cry. My thoughts zigzagged from the driver who left my mother on the road to die, to my father who never spent time with her, to Audrey, dancing in the moonlight in the arms of Bogart, the ugly industrialist, the man who would look after her for the rest of her life as Sabrina. Only in celluloid, not in Hong Kong.

Hey kid, I’m on. We do five shows Friday night. You’re going to wait? Suit yourself. Back in fifteen, max.

How did he get me started? Asked about the ring, that’s how. This one’s different. Got a little class. Been in a few times, always buys me a drink. Looks at me when he speaks. Most guys can’t. All they see is… well, you know.

Ron couldn’t even watch me dance, never mind this act. But if it weren’t for my little specialty, I couldn’t keep this job, not now. Occasionally, he’d wait outside, even in the snow, before things got bad. “Times Square’s no place for a girl after dark,” he’d say, whenever he walked me home. Afterwards, we’d watch movies together till sunrise.

I miss that.

Vegetables? Funny? I suppose they are. There was the cigar, until some joker lit it. Scorched thighs hurt. Like the boss says, every act needs to change. Cucumbers taste better anyway.

Oh, so now you want to know what happened next? You’re the funny one, kid.

Six months later, A-Ba sent me away to an all-girls boarding school in Connecticut.

“You’ve been begging to go to the States,” he said over my protests. “I’ve made all the arrangements. Besides, I can’t look after you.”

He hadn’t touched any of Mother’s stuff since the funeral.

I wanted to find a keepsake among her silks and jewelry, but didn’t dare without his permission. Being the only girl, it was my right to have the first go. Once I was gone, my sisters-in-law would ransack all her beautiful things and there’d be nothing left for me.

I sulked my way to Connecticut.

Didn’t like the school. We weren’t allowed late-night TV. Despite the rules, we sneaked out after dark to meet boys. My classmates were in competition to lose their virginity. I won on my sixteenth birthday, easy. You don’t have to be either graceful or beautiful in the backseat of a car. Being the only foreigner added to the freak factor. Anyway, it’s not like those boys would bring me home.

I wrote home, dutifully, once a month. My brothers I never heard from. A-Ba only wrote brief notes with money, once each semester.

Mother would have written me long, gossipy letters, full of movies and news of society friends. If she’d seen an Audrey, her words might have flown. Mother survived on sentiment. She used to say, “One day, I’m taking you to New York where we’ll do ‘breakfast’ at Tiffany’s. We’ll buy the diamonds for your wedding there.” When it all