The man twisted to look at her. His arm moved across his lap, and he took her hand. “Martin Wallace,” he breathed. His eyes were blue, alert. He did not smile. He continued to hold her hand as Julia murmured her name in reply. He leaned closer to listen. His grasp faintly rolled her fingers like the swell of an ocean wave. The scent brushed her again as he repeated her name before straightening to face the dark stage.
Without moving her eyes from the spotlighted orchestra, Julia saw every contour of his immaculate head, motionless beside her. She registered the spotless gleam of his collar, the heat of the shoulder not two inches from hers. When she reached for her glass, he mirrored her movement—the stretched arm, the lingering sip—but his eyes also never left the stage.
The fabled Carlotta’s floor show had begun.
CHAPTER 8
The orchestra settled into a lively jazz melody, and a column of pink feathers streamed onto the stage from each far corner, joining in front of their table. Costumed in lavish headdresses, skirts of three-foot-long feathers, and glittering halters, twenty or more dancers whirled and dipped through a complicated pattern of maneuvers. They seemed almost printed, to Julia’s bookish mind, each was so alike: tall, lithe, and pale. Arms linked, they ebbed and flowed toward the audience, huge smiles and high-focused eyes never faltering.
Applause swept the dancers back through the curtains as the music shifted. Two comical figures in padded raggedy clothes and tar-black painted faces bounded toward center stage, bellowing an exaggerated dialect. After their nonsensical repartee set the audience to laughing, the comedians broke into a more intelligible but still dizzying dialogue. Each wore a huge wig of woolly Negro hair. Pointing to her partner’s nest of kinky curls, the woman bawled, “Man, you got mailman hair!”
“Mailman hair?” the man shrieked. “Whachu mean, inky pink?”
“Each knot’s got izzown route!”
The audience roared. The man pranced around his partner and sang, “Child, yah hair looks mighty good.”
The woman patted the stiff hanks, ironed flat in the current fashion, covering her ears. “Yeah? Well, Madame Walker just been over.”
Her partner gripped her shoulder and spun her around, where the back of her hair was every bit as full and springy as his own. “Yeah? Well, she fuhgot t’ walk through yuh kitchen.”
Her hands flew up to wrestle the wad into a bandana scarf, the audience hooting and clapping. The act went on for several more minutes, their mugging and startling slang reducing the crowd to helpless laughter.
Julia had been to several cabarets in Paris and London. This show was similar in its pace and kaleidoscopic variety, with lavish chorus numbers blending into dancing blending into a ballad blending into comedy, and so on. She knew that, as a headliner, Eva would have the most extravagant number, likely near the end.
In fact, when Eva did appear, Julia did not at first recognize her. Following the tap-dancing Barney Brothers—who repeatedly leaped high into the air, newsboy caps secured low over one eye, and landed with heels skating in opposite directions across the polished floor—the stage went dark and silent.
The lights came up on a tight huddle of half-naked men in the center of the stage. They made a great knot of muscle and bone that began to throb to a low drumbeat, soon joined by a clarinet’s sullen sob. As the men began to dance, writhing as a single pulsing form, their deep voices wordlessly echoed the drum’s throb in a counterpoint rhythm. Bare feet sliding in an intricate weaving motion, the circle slowly released first one thrusting arm and then another, and another, each fissure revealing glimpses of something shiny and motionless in its center. The mound began to sway in a slow-drifting circle, then spin. In some impossible choreography, the men danced faster and faster, heads and arms still knit together at the shape’s center. The pounding of their feet rocked the floor. Julia steadied her chair’s slight wobble. The whirling form seemed about to fly apart when, with a clash of cymbals, it suddenly froze. The men sprang up to their full heights, arms outstretched. With another cymbal strike they lunged toward the center again, then arched back, their thighs straining as shoulders hovered over heels. They teetered in tense balance, spines curved in crouching backward Cs.
Julia realized her mouth was open. Her heart hammered. It was impossible not to be caught in the swirling web of energy. It was a human fountain, a spring of life and power bubbling up out of some inchoate form and finally bursting free. A creation myth? There was something frightening in the sheer power of this potent mass blooming into men. Julia moistened her lips and folded her hands, glad for the darkness. She was an adult. She mustn’t gape like a five-year-old at whatever spectacle came next.
Another keening high note from a single clarinet. One thin white arm, its hand splayed wide, rose from a folded mound of flickering gold. Slowly a head appeared above the men’s splayed forms. Beneath a fantastic headdress of heaped gold chiffon, fixed by thin gold chains draped across her brow and over her ears, Eva’s face emerged. A few loose layers floated to her shoulders. Expressionless, eyes closed, she rose, slowly unfurling her body’s full length. Her shoulders and arms were bare, but her torso and legs were swathed in more gold chiffon, secured by long coils of chain that circled her hips, waist, ribs, and throat. From each chain-wrapped wrist hung a polished gold ball the size of a tangerine.
