“No kidding!”
“Yeah, in the Miss Illinois pageant. I was in all the papers.”
“Well, sure, I remember now. How could I forget that face?” Of course, I didn’t remember her. Cheesecake photos were a dime a dozen in the Chicago press, and cute as this little doll was, she was just another showgirl… albeit one with a black eye.
“Of course, I didn’t win the state title,” she said, “and go on to Atlantic City or anything…and I didn’t have any use for the scholarship money…. College was never in the cards for me.”
“And so your friend the talent agent got you an audition for the Chez Paree.”
She nodded. “I was always a good dancer. I worked at a grocery store, in high school, to pay for ballet lessons that my parents didn’t know I was taking.”
“Which is where you met Rocco…. The Chez Paree, I mean, not the grocery store.”
She laughed and nodded again. “I know you won’t believe this, but he was really sweet, at first. Rocco, I mean. He’s no matinee idol, I admit…”
“Maybe if the matinee is a horror triple feature.”
She smiled at that, a little. “He took a big interest in me. I didn’t want to just be in the chorus—I wanted to be featured, to be a headliner someday, to sing and dance, like Judy Garland or Betty Hutton. He said he’d get me lessons.”
Rocco had encouraged her to quit the Chez Paree chorus line—she was too good for that, he’d said—and she had moved in with him, in the penthouse on Sheridan. After all, Rocco and his brothers, particularly Joey, had all sorts of show business connections.
But the lessons never happened—Rocco claimed he couldn’t find teachers worthy of Jackie’s talent—and before long, she was shoveling coal on the Fischetti model railroad.
“He was sweet for the longest time,” she said. “Then one day I asked about my lessons—I wasn’t snippy or sarcastic or anything, that’s not my way—and I’d asked lots of times before, about the lessons, plenty of times…but this time he slapped me.”
I felt my eyes tighten. “Why didn’t you leave?”
She was staring at her hands in her lap. “I don’t know…. For quite a while, the beatings were real occasional —’cause he was drunk or in a bad mood or I said the wrong thing. Somehow I convinced myself each time was a fluke. He’d apologize. Give me flowers. Be sweet again.”
That was the pattern of these woman-beating bastards.
She was saying, “Anyway, I knew I couldn’t get my job back at the Chez Paree, ’cause he and his brothers were in business with the owners. And nobody in town would hire me if Rocco said don’t hire me, right?”
“Right.”
“It’s a beautiful penthouse—I was alone a lot. You didn’t see some of the rooms, with the Italian Renaissance antiques— Charley picked them out; that was his passion, antiques, before he started in on that modern stuff; he gave those pieces to Rocco.”
Hadn’t she realized she was in a well-appointed prison?
She went on. “I’d use the piano—I can play a little—and practice my singing. Sometimes Rocky was gone for weeks at a time. There are servants, I was waited on hand and foot, fed like a queen, treated like I was still Miss Chicago or maybe Miss America, after all…except by Rocco, when he got mad.”
I was sitting closer to her now: I took her hand and held it, squeezed it gently. “I can’t imagine you doing anything that would ever make me mad.”
Jackie wasn’t looking at me; her voice was soft and small—barely audible above Vic Damone singing “You’re Breaking My Heart” on the radio.
“The last few weeks,” she said, “Rocky would just yell and slap me and hit me without me even saying anything. I think…I think he had just got tired of me. I see that all the time with his trains.”
“His trains?”
“Yeah. He would send away for expensive model trains and when the delivery man brought them, he would tear into the packages like Christmas. And for a week, maybe two, he’d sit and play with that new train in that room of his—hour after hour, with this dumb little smile on his face. Then he’d get bored and put them on the shelf…and buy something new.”
After that we talked about me, for a while. About my marriage, and how my wife had cheated on me and ruined everything, and about my son, who was going to be three years old in a few days, and how I wouldn’t be there to see it. That made her sad, and she came closer, very close, and put her arms around me, and kissed me, very soft, very tender….
I was twice her age, and then some, but I didn’t give it a thought: she’d been living with Rocco Fischetti, who was older than me and a homely fuck to boot.
So I had no pangs of conscience about accepting affection from this girl, who badly needed some affection herself, right now. Most strippers, most showgirls, were much younger than me, and damaged goods; this was nothing new. But she had this special sweetness, like she’d wandered off the set of an Andy Hardy picture into
She asked me to switch off the light and I did, and then in the dimness of unreal blue-tinged city light coming in from Michigan Avenue, she tugged off the pink sweater by its long sleeves, revealing a white lacy bra, which I undid for her. Miss Chicago was not as voluptuous as the would-be Miss California I’d been with not so long ago, but she was stunning nonetheless, with uptilting breasts that made perfect handfuls and a dramatic rib cage and a tiny waist.
That she was a dancer became obvious when she stood before me, arms outstretched, naked to the waist, with the formfitting slacks still on. There was something fabulously sexy, wonderfully dirty, about her standing there
