It was Tamara who saved her, in the end. Tamara, whose distant oracle eyes were enough to quiet Mrs. Grundy. Tamara, running down the steps and into the garden and embracing Phyllis as tightly as she could from behind. The hands smacked her and struggled, but the body that held them wasn’t as strong as it used to be. Tamara could endure it.
“Leave me!” Phyllis gasped. “Before they hurt you!”
Tamara just squeezed harder. Phyllis sighed and then tilted her head back into the embrace. After half a minute, the chokehold did its work and Pea slumped into unconsciousness.
The night Tamara decided to leave the Pelican hadn’t seemed particularly notable to start.
Oh, sure, Clyde and Dev were off in the war, the cards were as mute as a dead soldier, Pea was pregnant and strange as the queen of diamonds. Victor was dead. For all that Walter was an able mob boss, he didn’t have the social panache of his predecessor; or maybe it was that Tammy was mourning Vic after all, the sadistic ofay shit, who had, in spite of it all, given her free rein with the best little gin joint in the whole world.
Whatever the case, Tamara had been gloomy as she made herself up for the first Wednesday jazz night at the Pelican since the events that had led to its temporary closure and change in management. She’d had to buy Charlie four steak dinners at Frank’s (Five dollars a pop! No wonder half the time they were the only black folks eating, and in the middle of Harlem.) to sweet-talk him into his grand return. Charlie played in mob joints when they wanted his music, but unlike Tamara and Phyllis, he’d just as soon leave them for something poorer and safer. The Pelican, she had cajoled Charlie, was something special, it wasn’t just a paycheck, though of course she’d double his pay (she knew she’d had him then, it just took two more trips to Frank’s for him to admit it).
Pea had met her that night in a cab out in front of her apartment, bundled up in a mink that Tamara didn’t recognize. It wasn’t Dev’s style, though it might have been Walter’s. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing that Pea bought for herself, but you never knew these days with the new Phyllis; nobody’s angel still carried her knives.
She smiled when Tamara got into the cab, but she had been impassive a moment before, not so much as a wrinkle between her eyebrows.
“Something wrong?” she asked after Tammy slammed the door.
“I just don’t like this feeling,” Tammy said. The cards in the band of her brassiere seemed as heavy as stones.
“What feeling?”
Tamara’s lips twisted. “Things are changing feeling.”
At that Phyllis’s smile surfaced, more natural than before. “Things are always changing, baby.”
“Not like this. Not so fast.”
Phyllis just raised her eyebrows and put an arm around Tammy’s rounded shoulders. There was a crowd trying to get into the Pelican, which had gained some notoriety after recent events. The police had closed the joint and Walter had paid significant sums of money to significant people to get it opened again. She had tried to thank him, but he had waved her off with a large hand and a curt, “Cost of business, Tammy. You just keep making her the kind of place that people spend money in.”
She had been buoyed by the sentiment, but now all of that optimistic joy had drained out of her. Everything was changing, everyone good was gone; Clyde had fought with her again before he left and now wrote her with some farmboy actor’s idea of chivalry that made her want to swim the Atlantic just to tell him where to put it.
Still, some old pleasures endured. She and Phyllis climbed out of the cab right in front of the Pelican’s velvet rope. Everyone was out in their finest duds, even if for some that meant combed cashmere coats and for others suits in bright colors with shoulders wide enough to sit on. Whispers followed them like eager puppies as they sailed past the line and through the swinging double doors.
Pea gave her coat to the doorman and turned to Tamara with a very hard smile, the kind that had both scared and attracted her when they first met. Now, it dared someone to say something about her dress, whose silk pleats seemed designed to accentuate the distinct curve of her belly.
Tamara’s only thoughts came up in a wave of longing and jealousy and a fear so bright she squinted. What if Clyde didn’t come back? What if she never had his baby?
She came out of it when Pea chafed her hand between hers, barely any warmer. “You’re still fixing on that letter?” she said, quiet.
Tamara sighed. “Forget Clyde.” And then, grudgingly, “You look beautiful.”
She lost track of Phyllis for a while amid the laughter and admiration, the sheer rush that nights at the Pelican always gave her. This time Tamara didn’t even have to keep an eye open for Victor, lurking by the bookshelf entrance to his office, awaiting his obeisance. It was Walter, instead, who put a warm hand on her back and then Charlie’s shoulder and toasted competently to the Pelican’s return. “It’s been an interesting few weeks, but I’m grateful to see so many familiar faces here once again. Here’s to another decade of the Pelican, the only place in the Village you’d find us all sharing our liquor together—entirely legally acquired, Detective, I can show you the papers in the back—” Laughter. The detective, a white man so firmly in Walter’s pocket he had his own billfold, gave a terse smile and lifted his glass. “Now, let’s get back to what we do best: listening to
