A Firefly Hour
by Ana Teresa Pereira
part 1
For me, it was just another man detaching himself from the silver background. I took the blue ticket from him and ripped it in two. I didn’t look at his face; I never look at their faces. Grey suit, white shirt. Clean shirt.
It was my body that felt him first. The hand on my waist, the hand on mine were firm but not insistent. I could feel his light smell, a fresh cologne and cigarettes. A few months before, I had spent a week’s pay to buy a small bottle of perfume: white jasmine. It wasn’t even my kind of scent; I like fruit scents, orange, cherry. But I wanted a strong perfume, and to wear a lot of it, to protect me from their smell. It didn’t work.
Somehow my body accepted his hands, his scent, his breath, and my nipples were hard. I didn’t know if it showed in the black evening dress, but I hated it. I also hated the dress. It was cheap but not ugly: there wasn’t much of it; my shoulders were bare, my small breasts half-visible, my waist and legs accentuated. I had sworn I’d never wear an evening dress again, or black stockings, or high heels. I’d never dance again.
They had said I was too skinny for the job but changed their mind when I tried the black dress, the stockings, the shoes. Some men liked that kind of... elegance, one of them said. And I went out of the room and changed into my clothes, feeling humiliated and glad to know where the next meal would come from.
I went into a bar and had a decent dinner, I bought a magazine and a forgotten bunch of violets. That night, I washed my hair, my straight, shoulder-length hair, out of fashion but with natural copper strands.
They called the place Dance Academy; that sounded good for a joint where men paid a dime to hold a girl for a few minutes. Not too close; it was a serious place. They didn’t sell our souls, only the right to shatter them. The first nights, I was just tired. But it got worse with the weeks, with the months.
I had always loved music, especially jazz, and the orchestra was not bad; perhaps it was the sequence that was driving me crazy: the same songs night after night, as one man followed another. Until the notes of “Kind of Blue” started, a music that should never be played in a place like that, and I knew it was almost over.
It was only half-eleven, the music was something by Duke, and my nipples were hard. I looked at the man’s face; he was staring over my shoulder. He was tall, dark, and sad. Handsome too, with black hair and green-grey eyes. The suit was old but well cut. He looked down at me. “Are you tired?”
“Never.”
“You’ll be here for another hour and a half.”
“Have you been here before?”
“The last few nights.”
“Have we danced before?”
“You know we haven’t.”
The song was over, and he went to the bar. In a moment someone else was coming, and I grabbed another ticket. Those blue tickets made me think of a fairy tale. I was lost, and I dropped them, and a man followed them... Sad fairy tales.
My sad fairy tales.
I wanted to be an actress; I could act; I looked good. I was tired of my small town, of dating the boy next door, of working in a shop, of going to the cinema on the weekends. One night I ran away; I didn’t say good-bye to my mother or my sister, I only left a note. I was going to be an actress.
Four years later I worked in a Dance Academy. And a man was holding me too close, and I didn’t even care. Not much. Or perhaps it was that glimpse of desire I had felt minutes before: I wanted to be touched.
“He” wasn’t at the bar or on the dance floor. Maybe he was outside. Sometimes they arranged it with the manager, and they took us outside. I hated that, but at least I was out of the Academy, no music, no dancing, no damned silver lights. Just some stranger kissing me in a bar, in an alley, nothing more than that.
At five minutes to one, the lights went dim, and the orchestra finished the last song, skipping a few parts. I went to the dressing room where the other girls were changing almost in silence. We were all talkative before eight o’clock; we had nothing to say at one.
My lipstick was smashed as if I had been kissed, some strands of hair getting loose from the pins. I washed my hands, keeping them a long time under the cool water, and put my black coat on.
He was waiting outside. His trench coat, like his suit, looked old but expensive. That face... I remembered a French actor I had seen in a movie. For a moment I feared he was waiting for one of the other girls. Doris was quite pretty, if you like the Betty Grable type. He was lost in his thoughts; then he saw me and came towards me. “Can I take you home?”
“Do you have a car?”
“Not in New York. We can take a cab.”
I smiled, and he smiled back. He looked very young, about my age, when he smiled. But he was twenty-eight.
“I don’t live far from here. I always walk.”
“Oh, yes. You’re never tired.”
“At least the air is fresh. And there are no lights. And no music.”
“Don’t you like jazz?”
“Not anymore.”
“You will heal.”
“I wonder.”
He took my arm, and it felt good. There were even stars. Someday I will heal, I promised myself.
“What do you do?”
“I write pulp stories.”
“Books?”
“Magazines. But I wrote a novel once.”
“What happened?”
“It didn’t sell much, but the critics loved it.”
“Why didn’t you go on?”
“I can go much deeper in my stories.”
We had stopped in front of my building.
“Do you want a coffee?”
“Yes.”
My room looked awful as always. The faded wallpaper. The precarious furniture. The rusty nails behind the door where we left our coats.
I sat on the bed.
He kneeled in front of me. “You’re beautiful. Like the girl in my stories.”
“Is it always the same?”
“Yes, I don’t even change her name.”
He took the pins from my hair, and it fell loose. He touched my shoulders, slowly. He pushed down my dress, my bra, and touched my breasts.
“Do I still look like the girl in your stories?”
“Yes.”
Then he lifted my dress and passed the fingers on the skin where the stockings ended. “Yes. My girl.”
But he didn’t kiss me. He stood up and lit a cigarette. “You better quit tomorrow. You won’t go back to the Academy.”
“I have to earn a living.”
“I want you to come home with me.”
“Why?”
“We can feed each other.”
* * *
Sometimes I had the feeling it was scenery, like the ones they use in movies, to make you think the actors are near a harbor or a mountain covered in snow. A narrow street, two identical houses and the woods.
The houses seemed to reflect each other. There were slight differences, the ones I had created myself: the new curtains in our windows, the violet pots on the windowsills, the wind chimes at the front door. I had spent whole days plucking the weeds, and some plants were blooming, lavender and daisies. The other garden had layers of wilderness; I couldn’t even see the front door.
I said I’d never wear an evening dress again, or high heels, but I condescended with the black stockings, sometimes, with a dark blue skirt and my white blouses. My hair was loose, or slightly pushed back behind my ears; Tom said I looked like a squaw in a western. And I had kept my perfume, because he also liked it.
I don’t think I had ever been loved before. So many boys in my hometown, so many men in New York, and yet I had never been loved. Adored: I didn’t even know I wanted to be adored. And I was healing. Once in a while he played one of his records, and the old magic was there. But I wouldn’t dance.
He sat at his desk in the evening, with a cup of coffee and a packet of cigarettes, and I fell asleep with the far sound of his typewriter; at dawn his body was beside mine, and God, he felt so good.
I had been reading some of his stories. When they were illustrated, the girl looked a bit like me, no plump blonds with big breasts, but dark slim girls with red dresses and beautiful legs. But the stories were scary. I didn’t know how he did it, after a few lines I was inside a well, and there was no way out.
“I don’t know how you do it.”
“What?”
“You write a word, and it becomes terrible.”
“No, I show it was terrible.”
“It was terrible even before you touched it?”
“Yes.”
“And you don’t reread the stories.”
“Never.”
They didn’t need it. Somehow, I felt they were right. Like an orange is right.
But the houses weren’t right. I had asked Tom who lived in the other one, and he shrugged.
“I think it’s empty.”
“But the newspaper boy leaves a paper there every morning.”
“There was a guy, once, about my age.”
“Has he moved?”
“I don’t know. We never got acquainted.”
“You’re not too sociable, I know.”
He touched my chin. “Neither are you, baby.”
* * *
There was a time when I also wore my hair loose, rounded skirts, flowery dresses, but not black stockings, and I was quite sociable. I had friends; we went dancing; we went to parties. Even the idea of going away was a joyful one, becoming a movie star, first small parts, then big ones. To have my photos in magazines, on the back covers of books. I could do it. I could do anything.
I don’t think it was the first two years in New York that killed it. It was not being a waitress and going to auditions. I had hope, and the cheap room I rented was just a place to wait. And men had faces, they were kind or disgusting, but I could look at them. It was afterwards, the dancing, and the black dress, and those hands, and those breaths, night after night.
I thought about going back home, but that would be admitting defeat. And each night at eight o’clock I was in the dressing room with the other girls, we talked, we laughed... and a few hours later we were silent. They don’t sell your soul at those places; they know better than that; they only shatter it.
I often take the bus that passes at the end of the street and go shopping in the next town. Fresh bread, fresh fruit, some fish, some salad, a bottle of cheap red wine. I bought vases of violets, and sometimes I buy a bunch of fresh flowers, and I come home to my man, who is smoking on the porch, waiting for me.
I often sit on the porch at the end of the afternoon reading his stories. His scary stories. They are short and deep as wells. When I reach the last lines, I have the impression of coming from another world and clenching my wounded hands on the edge of reality.
A girl went out of the cinema with her new boyfriend and felt his hand on her waist become a claw. At home, taking her dress off, she saw the tears in the cloth, the wounds made in her skin by his nails. I read half a page and was terrified. The rest of the story wasn’t up to that, but it was still a nightmare.
The children of the fog: in winter nights, a man felt his hands become heavy, with a life of their own. And even though he couldn’t remember anything, young girls were found murdered at dawn. The darkness came, the fog submerged the streets, the first drops of rain fell, and the man didn’t know who he was anymore.
Grandfather’s house, where Ketty, Sigrid and the protagonist spent the holidays when they were children, the ivy climbing the stone walls, the fog coming, so dense that they got lost in the garden. The young actress who only played dead characters; the wax masks she made herself, the velvet curtains that moved behind her, the apartment in a Paris immersed in fog.
Some images were recurrent, obsessive. The claw. In one of the stories, one of the most terrifying, the girl went upstairs and felt her hands turning into claws, her feet scratching the floor... the weight of the wings.
The cupboard full of stuffed birds. He had told me that one of Jung’s patients believed she was attacked by birds, and one day, in the garden of his house, a murder of crows appeared suddenly and threw themselves at her.
That frightening book in which the girl went to a basement, and there were reservoirs with dark, freezing water, and rare fishes, that lived inside an endless night. In the darkness of the cave, there was a man whose hand was like a claw that went down to the back of her head. She fell into the water, swallowed a gulp of dirty water, and felt the viscous fishes rubbing her body. When she got up to the surface he was there, the man who wanted to kill her, his tall figure on the edge of the water, and she could not run away.
Where did he find those images? How deep has one to dive to find them? And the poor readers who bought a pulp magazine to have a good time, and found themselves caught in a nightmare...
One evening, I found the story of the two houses. A young couple in their new home, far from everything. The girl was frightened of the cottage on the other side of the street, because there was a man there, watching her.
I closed the magazine with a feeling of unreality. I looked at the other house just in time to see a curtain moving slowly; someone was watching me.
I stood up, dropping the magazine. And then I had a strange sight at the end of the garden. Tiny yellow lights among the leaves. I went closer and stood still. After the fear, the magic.
When I went back to the house, I wasn’t afraid anymore. Tom had said he would be home for a late dinner. I put the fish and potatoes inside the oven, opened a bottle of wine. He would be home soon. He would hold me with his tough hands, he would kiss me, and I would take my skirt off, and he would touch my skin just where my stockings ended, the black stockings I was wearing for him.
* * *
Copyright © 2023 by Ana Teresa Pereira
