“Well, that’s all right, Olive,” said Billy. “How dull it would be if you and I always had the same taste in women.”
“I like that one,” Edna said, pointing to a petite, raven-haired beauty throwing her leg over her head onstage as easily as another woman might shake out a bath towel. “She doesn’t look quite as desperate to please as the others do.”
“Good choice, Edna,” said Billy. “I like that one, too. But you do realize that she looks exactly like you looked, twenty-odd years ago?”
“Oh, dear me, she does a bit, doesn’t she? That would be the one I was drawn to, wouldn’t it? Heavens, I’m such a vain old bore.”
“Well, I liked a girl who looked like that back then, and I still like a girl who looks like that,” said Billy. “Hire her. In fact, let’s be sure to keep the height down on all the chorus girls. Make them all match the girl we just picked. I want a bunch of cute little brunette ponies. I don’t want any of them dwarfing Edna.”
“Thank you, love,” said Edna. “One does awfully dislike being dwarfed.”
—
When it came time to audition the male lead—Lucky Bobby, the street-smart kid who teaches Mrs. Alabaster how to gamble and who ends up marrying the showgirl—my attention was miraculously and quite suddenly restored. Because now we had a parade of good-looking young men gracing the stage, taking their turn singing the song that Billy and Benjamin had already written for the part. (“In summertime when days are nice / a fella likes to roll his dice / and if his baby doll’s a bore / he likes to roll a little more.”)
I thought all the guys were terrific, but—as we have established—I wasn’t that discerning in my taste for men. Billy, though, dismissed them one after another. This one was too short (“He’s got to kiss Celia, for the love of God, and Olive probably won’t let us invest in a stepladder”); this one was too all-American-looking (“No one’s going to buy that corn-fed midwesterner as a kid from a tough New York neighborhood”); this one was too effeminate (“We already have one boy in the show who looks like a girl”); this one was too earnest (“This ain’t Sunday school, folks”).
And then, toward the end of the day, out of the wings came a tall, lanky, dark-haired young man in a shiny suit that was a bit too short on him in both the ankles and the wrists. His hands were stuffed in his pockets, and he had a fedora pushed way back on his head. He was chewing gum, which he didn’t bother to conceal as he took the spotlight. He was grinning like a guy who knows where the money is hidden.
Benjamin started to play, but the young man put up a hand to stop him.
“Say,” he said, staring out at us. “Who’s the boss around here, anyhow?”
Billy sat up a bit straighter at the sound of the young man’s voice, which was purest New Yawk—sharp and cocky and lightly amused with itself.
“She is,” said Billy, pointing to Peg.
“No, she is,” said Peg, pointing to Olive.
Olive kept reading her newspaper.
“I just like to know who I gotta impress, you know?” The young man peered closer at Olive. “But if it’s that broad, maybe I should just quit right now and head home, if you see my point?”
Billy laughed. “Son, I like you. If you can sing, you’ve got the job.”
“Oh, I can sing, mister. Don’t you worry about that. I can dance, too. I just don’t wanna waste my time singing and dancing when I don’t gotta sing and dance. You hear what I’m saying?”
“In that case, I amend my offer,” said Billy. “You’ve got the job, period.”
Well, that got Olive’s attention. She looked up from her paper in alarm.
“We haven’t even heard him read,” Peg said. “We don’t know if he can act.”
“Trust me,” Billy said. “He’s perfect. I feel it in my gut.”
“Congratulations, mister,” said the kid. “You made the right call. Ladies, you won’t be disappointed.”
And that, Angela, was Anthony.
—
I fell in love with Anthony Roccella, and I’m not going to dillydally around, pretending that I didn’t. And he fell in love with me, too—in his own way, and for a little while at least. Best of all, I managed to fall in love with him within the space of just a few hours, which is a model of efficiency. (The young can do that kind of thing, as you must know, without difficulty. In fact, passionate love, executed in short bursts, is the natural condition of the young. The only surprising thing was that it hadn’t happened to me sooner.)
The secret to falling in love so fast, of course, is not to know the person at all. You just need to identify one exciting feature about them, and then you hurl your heart at that one feature, with full force, trusting that this will be enough of a foundation for lasting devotion. And for me, the exciting thing about Anthony was his arrogance. I wasn’t the only one who noticed it, of course—that cockiness was how he got cast in our play, after all—but I was the one who fell in love with it.
Now, I’d been around plenty of arrogant young men since arriving in town a few months earlier (it was New York City, Angela; we breed them here), but Anthony’s arrogance had a special twist to it: he genuinely didn’t seem to care. All the cocky boys I’d met thus far liked to play at nonchalance, but they still had an air about them of wanting something, even if it was only sex. But Anthony had no apparent hunger or longing about him. He was fine with whatever transpired. He could win, he could lose, it didn’t shake him up. If he didn’t get what he wanted out of a situation, he would just stroll away with his hands in his pockets, unfazed, and try again somewhere else. Whatever life offered, he could take it or leave it.
He could even take it or leave it when it came to me—so, as you can imagine, I had no choice but to become completely smitten with him.
—
Anthony lived in a fourth-floor walk-up on West Forty-ninth Street, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. He lived with his older brother, Lorenzo, who was the head chef at the Latin Quarter restaurant, where Anthony worked waiting tables when he didn’t have an acting job. His mom and pop used to live in that apartment, too, he told me, but they were both dead now—a fact that Anthony relayed to me with no evident sense of loss or sorrow. (Parents: another thing he could take or leave.)
Anthony was Hell’s Kitchen born and raised. He was pure Forty-ninth Street, right to the core. Grew up playing stickball on that very street, and learned how to sing just a few blocks away at the Church of the Holy Cross. I came to know that street awfully well in the next few months. I certainly came to know that apartment awfully well, and I remember it with warm fondness because it was in his brother Lorenzo’s bed that I experienced my first climax. (Anthony didn’t have a bed of his own—he slept on the couch in the living room—but we helped ourselves to his brother’s room when Lorenzo was at work. Thankfully, Lorenzo worked long hours, giving me ample time to receive pleasure from young Anthony.)
I’ve mentioned before that a woman needs time and patience and an attentive lover in order to get good at sex. Falling for Anthony Roccella finally gave me access to all three of those necessary features.
Anthony and I found our way to Lorenzo’s bed on the first night of our acquaintance. After the auditions were over, he’d come upstairs to sign a contract and to get a copy of the script from Billy. The adults all conducted their business, and then Anthony left. But only a few minutes after he’d walked out, Peg instructed me to run after him and speak to the young man about costumes. I snapped right to duty, yes ma’am. I’d never flown down the Lily’s stairwell faster.
I caught up with Anthony on the sidewalk, grabbed him by the arm, and breathlessly introduced myself.