The reporter and photographer remained outside the dressing room while Ruby slipped into a kimono. I let the men in and watched as they tried to keep their eyeballs in their sockets. Sitting before them was a stunningly beautiful woman with just the thinnest silk between them and her naked flesh. Funny, isn’t it? Men see us every day. They see us in our clothes every day. We’re naked under our clothes every day. But present them with a different picture-a girl wearing nothing beneath her kimono-and they can think about only one thing. And in her own way, Ruby was shrewd. As soon as she came offstage, she covered up. She never paraded around so the guys in the band could see her, but, boy, did they ever try. All anyone actually saw was her twitching derriere as she ducked through the velvet curtain at the end of her act.
“I started out using fans, just like Sally Rand taught me,” Ruby chirred. “But using fans is hard work. Each one weighs twenty-five pounds and-”
“They keep more of you covered,” the reporter finished for her, his voice predictably gruff.
“Do I look like I could heft all that weight?” Ruby asked, oblivious to his tone. “I still dance with the fans, but I much prefer my bubble.”
“What advice would you give to our female readers to attract a man?”
“A woman should always look elegant,” she answered.
“What’s the fun in that?” he asked.
“Not everything is about fun.” A tiny frown crinkled the space between her eyebrows. When I first met her, she’d said she wanted glitter in her life. Since then, she’d figured out not only how to have glitter but also how to “sell” glitter and glamour to an audience. “Grace, the other performers, and I do all sorts of things to help our community,” she continued. “We’ve performed at charity shows in Santa Cruz, Salinas, and San Jose to benefit the Rice Bowl Campaign. None of us Chinese like what the Japanese are doing in China.” This was her story, and she was sticking to it! “And once a year, before the big game, Cal alumni rent the Forbidden City for a night to raise funds. Charlie stacks five hundred people in here. We’ve got the Cal band and Cal glee club, but we give them our regular show too. Go Cal!”
The reporter scribbled all this in his notebook. Then he glanced up, serious. “Our readers would like to know if you’re truly naked behind your bubble.”
Ruby’s laugh filled the room like tinkling crystals. “That’s for me to know and you to find out! You boys need to go to your table now. The other girls have to get ready and”-she leaned forward and caressed the reporter’s knee with a red-lacquered fingernail-“so do I.”
After the show, the boys from the Associated Press wanted to see what we did next.
“I’m not the kind of girl who needs to be taken to expensive joints, but I sure like them,” Ruby confessed.
Actually, if Ruby and I had been alone, we probably would have gone somewhere for noodles. Or, if we wanted to spend a little more money, we would have joined up with a group of show kids to go to other clubs.
“What’s happening tonight at Bimbo’s 365?” someone might ask.
“Shall we go to Finocchio’s? Or would you prefer the Italian Village?”
“How about Andy Pond’s Breakfast Club on Kearny? We can eat bacon and eggs and listen to jazz at the same time.”
“If we’re having breakfast, let’s go to Coffee Dan’s.” (The café was open twenty-four hours a day, and you could get a shot of bourbon in your cup of joe.)
Or the kids at the Sky Room might throw a party, and we’d all go to that. (No one brewed bad blood about which club was more popular or classier.) Some nights everyone came over to Ruby’s and my apartment. Oh, maybe fifty people in the living room, sometimes more. I played an upright piano while others sang. Pretty soon, the guys were bringing their ukuleles and their guitars. Or we’d put on a record and dance until we couldn’t breathe.
We took the newspaper boys to an all-night coffee shop that served Chinese dishes and American food like custard pie.
“What about stage-door Johnnies?” the reporter asked Ruby as the photographer snapped a few more shots. “Are they a nuisance?”
Ruby laughed so long that I stepped in.
“You’ve got it wrong, mister,” I said. “They bring her flowers and chocolates. They write fan letters-”
“And love letters,” Ruby added. “Those boys are so sweet. I treasure them all.”
Yes, Princess Tai had plenty of beaus, and she enjoyed their company. All except for one fella named Ray Boiler, an Occidental short-order cook twice her age, from Visalia, who visited once a month after he received his paycheck. “Something isn’t right about him,” she told me one night after he’d followed us home. “He gives me a bad feeling even when he smiles at me. Especially when he smiles at me!” But, as she pointed out, we worked in a nightclub, where the mix of men like Ray Boiler, booze, and scantily clad women was inherently dangerous. She didn’t tell any of that to the Associated Press fellas. She just smiled and laughed and flirted. That’s what made her Princess Tai.
NOTHING WITH RUBY would have worked if things hadn’t gone well between Joe and me. He didn’t come back to the club for a month after my return to San Francisco. By then, I’d stopped searching for him in the audience. I was on my way to have drinks between shows with a couple of cattle brokers from Omaha when I bumped into him. He blushed, sheepish. No wonder. The last time I’d seen him, I’d seen a lot of him. Only I could put that behind us. I gave him a friendly hug, and he instantly began to loosen up. He pulled out a chair and I sat down. (So much for the cattle brokers.) He talked at me a mile a minute-still nervous, of course. I looked great… I was still the best dancer in the line… He’d missed me… He had so much he wanted to tell me… When his speech finally slowed and he gave me that lopsided grin I so loved, I was relieved. It seemed he could forget that embarrassing night, if I could, and be the person he’d always been. When he invited me to lunch, I readily accepted.
The following Sunday, he took me to a little Italian place in North Beach. “I hope we can take walks together, like we used to,” he told me, and we did. “We’ll talk, like we used to,” he said, and we did. He said he was sorry that I’d seen him making love to Ruby, because I was “just a kid” and shouldn’t have had to see something like that. I reminded him that on Treasure Island he’d told me I was too young for him; now I saw that he was too young for me. He laughed and laughed. He apologized for running out that night instead of sticking around and explaining things to me. “Water under the bridge,” I said, and we made it so.
He started coming to the club on weekends regularly again, and we fell into a pattern-one almost identical to what we’d followed on Treasure Island: I kept Joe amused, while Ruby-naked-entertained other men. He still liked her, and she kept him on a string-meeting with him sometimes before the club opened, dancing close to his table, even having an after-hours meal with him on occasion. They were strangely locked together, but from day one I’d been the third corner of the triangle. Many nights, as soon as I finished putting on my makeup and applying Ruby’s powder, I’d go out front and talk to him. Or later-after the last show-I’d quickly change and go sit with him. But I wasn’t some stray pup nosing around for attention anymore. We spent time together because we liked each other’s company. I often told him things I’d never tell the girls, and he confided in me. He’d graduated the previous year and was now at Boalt Hall at Cal, studying law. His dad had offered him a job once he passed the bar, but Joe wasn’t sure he wanted to go back to Illinois or be a lawyer. Flying was still his passion, he said, and he’d talked to the folks at Pan American to see what it would take to fly a Clipper ship. Mainly, though, I listened when he got wistful about Ruby.