I Went Down (NaNoWriMo Read-Along)

20 Emmy Jane

Emmy Jane lay very still. The alcohol was beginning to evaporate from her mind. The band was still playing. The other chorus girls would be dancing and singing. Pearline would step up to take the lead in the songs that should have had solo performances by Emiliana Josephine, because Emmy Jane was not on stage. Somehow she was in the bedroom that she shared with Davina, the quietest of the Angiers girls.

Jimmy Primrose had followed her down the hallway; she had opened the hidden door in front of him and he—“It’s fall outside and so many things are dying, but you are like spring,” he said. “You smell so sweet. You are a spring flower.”

“It’s the perfume you gave me,” Emmy Jane had said, or tried to say. His face against her neck, trying to breath in some scent under the heavy alcohol haze emanating from his own mouth. The stubble of his beard rough against her skin. Promises to buy her more perfume, a place on any stage in the city that she wanted as he pressed her backwards.

Emiliana Josephine lay on the blue satin bedspread for which she had paid a week’s salary at Bellea’s and listened to the music. It was muffled by several walls but she recognized the tune. She would not see the clock unless she turned her head, but the song told her that it was very late; practically morning.

“I’m a good friend to have.” The voice in her ear when she could not suppress a little cry of surprise and shock as fingers pushed into places that had previously been untouched. “We are friends, aren’t we?”

Had any reply made its way past her lips? Would it have mattered? Everyone was a friend to Jimmy Primrose. It wasn’t possible not to be, when every seat around the table was filled by one of his men. Thickset Pelagoans with knife smiles and loud laughter as they poured drink after drink for themselves and for her. And Cal and the man called Dapper Jack, who everyone whispered was a murderer, Plainsmen who lifted their glasses to the Pelagoans and laughed at their jokes when every Plainsman would spit and call them Pels when there were none in the room. There were even songs that the chorus sang when the audience was only Plainsmen. But when the Pelagoans were there, everyone was a friend to Jimmy Primrose. And then no one was there but him. Emiliana Josephine had gone somewhere else, just when she should have stood up and said—what should she have said? “You are not my friend, stop. Stop, stop, stop, stop.” And Emmy Jane had not been able to speak either. Who was she to say no to Jimmy Primrose, when even Cal nodded and said yes to everything the Pelagoan demanded?

Then he was gone, and she was alone on the silky coverlet of her bed. Another recommendation from Marietta: silks and satins everywhere to make you feel rich, to become rich. A leading lady always had the very best.

She had been lying here for several hours. Her bare skin was cold, and goosebumps covered her thighs, her belly, her breasts. All the places that his hands had been. Reaching up beneath her dress.

Emmy Jane turned her head and looked at the clock. It would be dawn soon. The chorus would sing up the sun; the last song of the show every night.

When the song was over, the girls would come back to their rooms. They would find her, ask what had happened, how did she feel, how did it feel, was he gentle or rough, and all the other hundred questions that would feed whispered conversation for the next week, the way that Marietta’s abortion had.

Emmy Jane sat up. A violent shiver caught her and twisted her body. Not a sob, only a shudder. She was cold from lying so still so long, half naked. Her thighs were still damp; there was a smear of blood on her skin. The dress might be saved if she rinsed out the blood with cold water now, before it set.

She stood up and let the dress fall to the floor. The blue bedspread had a dark spot of wetness on it as well. She shivered again and rubbed her hands over her arms before she pulled on her robe. If she hurried, she could take a shower before the others came in.