counties.
Kiki showed me a clipping once with a coincidence that made her believe in destiny. It's was an item out of Winchell, which said, 'Dot and Dash is a mustache. Yaffie is an arrest. Long cut short is a sawed-off shotgun. White is pure alcohol. Simple Simon is a diamond… ' It appeared the day before Kiki met Jack at a nightclub party, and she was just about to go into rehearsal for a new musical, Simple Simon.
I look back to those early days and see Kiki developing in the role of woman as sprite, woman as goddess, woman as imp. Her beauty and her radiance beyond beauty were charms she used on Jack, but used with such indifference that they became subtle, perhaps even secret, weapons. I cite the dance floor episode at the Top o' the Mountain House as as example, for she had small interest in whether it was Jack who danced with her or not. Her need was to exult in her profession, which had not been chosen casually, which reflected a self dancing alone beneath all the glitter of her Broadway life. 'I must practice my steps,' she said numerous times in my presence, and then with a small radio Jack had given her she would find suitable music and, oblivious of others, go into her dance, a tippy-tap-toe routine of cosmic simplicity. She was not a good dancer, just a dancer, just a chorus girl. This is not a pejorative reduction, for it is all but impossible for anyone to be as good a chorus girl as Kiki proved to be, proved it not only on stage-Ziegfeld said she was the purest example of sexual nonchalance he'd ever seen-but also in her photogenicity, her inability to utter a complex sentence, her candor with newspapermen, her willingness to trivialize, monumentalize, exalt, and exploit her love for Jack by selling her memoirs to the tabloids-twice-and herself to a burlesque circuit for the fulfillable professional years of her beauty and the tenacious years of Jack's public name. More abstractly she personified her calling in her walk, in her breathing, in the toss of her head, in her simultaneous eagerness and reluctance to please a lover, in her willingness to court wickedness without approving of it, and in her willingness to conform to the hallowed twentieth-century chorus-girl stereotype that Ziegfeld. George White, Nils T. Granlund, the Minskys, and so many more men, whose business was flesh, had incarnated, and which Walter Winchell, Ed Sullivan, Odd McIntyre, Damon Runyon, Louis Sobol, and so many others, whose business was to muse and gossip on the ways of this incarnated flesh, had mythicized. And as surely as Jack loved pistols, rifles, machine guns-loved their noise, their weight, their force, the power they passed to him, their sleekness, their mechanical perfections, their oily surfaces as balm for his ulcerated gangster soul-so did he cherish the weaponistic charms of Kiki. And as the guns also became his trouble as well as his beloved, so became Kiki. She did not know such ambivalence was possible when she met Jack, but her time alone with The Goose on the mountaintop was the beginning of her wisdom, painful wisdom which love alone could relieve.
A quick summer storm blew up and it started to rain as Fogarty drove Kiki, Jack, and me back to Haines Falls after the golf. There was talk of dinner, which I declined, explaining I had to get back to Albany. But no, no, Jack wouldn't hear of my leaving. Wasn't I done out of a champagne lunch by the canary scene? We went to the Top o' the Mountain House to freshen up before we ate, and Jack gave me the room The Goose had been using, next to Kiki's. Jack joined Kiki in her room for what I presumed was a little mattress action, and I pursued a catnap. But the walls were thin and I was treated instead to a memorably candid conversation:
'I'm going back to New York,' Kiki said.
'You don't mean it,' Jack said.
''I don't care what you do. I'm not staying in this prison with that goon. He never says a word.'
'He's not good at talking. He's good at other things. Like you.'
'I hate having a bodyguard.'
'But your body deserves guarding. '
'It deserves more than that. '
'You're very irritable tonight. '
'You're damn right I am.'
'You've got a right to be, but don't swear. It's not ladylike.'
'You're not so particular in bed about ladylike.'
'We're not in bed now.'
'Well, I don't know why we're not. I don't see you for two days and you show up with a stranger and don't even try to be alone with me.'
'You want a bed, do you? What do you want to put in it?'
'How's this? How does it look?'
'Looks like it's worth putting money into.'
'I don't want money in it.'
'Then I'll have to think of something else.'
'I love to kiss your scars,' Kiki said after a while.
'Maybe you'll kiss them all away,' Jack said.
'I wouldn't want to do that. I love you the way you are.'
'And you're the most perfect thing I've ever seen. I deserve you. And you don't have any scars.'
'I'm getting one.'
'Where?'
'Inside. You cut me and let me bleed, and then I heal and you leave me to go back to your wife. '
'Someday I'll marry you.'
'Marry me now, Jackie.'
'It's complicated. I can't leave her. She's in a bad way lately, depressed, sick.'
'She goes to the movies. She's old and fat.'
'I've got a lot of money in her name.'
'She could run off with it, wipe you out.'
'Where could she run I couldn't find her?'
'You trust her, but you don't trust me alone.'
'She's never alone.'
'What is she to you? What can she give you I can't?'
'I don't know. She likes animals.'
'I like animals.'
'No, you don't. You never had a pet in your life.'
'But I like them. I'll get a pet. I'll get a cat. Then will you marry me?'
'Later I'll marry you.'
'Am I your real lay?'
'More than that.'
'Not much more. '
'Don't be stupid. I could lay half the town if I wanted to-Catskill, Albany, New York, any town. Unlimited what I could lay. Unlimited.'
'I want a set of those Chinese balls. The metal ones.'
'Where'd you hear about those?'
'I get around. I get left alone a lot now, but I didn't always.'
'What would you do with them?'
'What everybody does. Wear them. Then when nobody's around to take care of me and I get all hot and bothered, I'd just squeeze them and they'd make me feel good. I want them. '
'Will you settle for an Irish set?'
'Can I keep them with me?'
'I'll see they don't get out of range. '
'Well, see to it then.'
