Luck Be a Lady Tonight

Luck Be a Lady Tonight - Part 2

I was set up on a blind date with someone the month after Bobby left me. Bobby left in March of 1949, and by April, my aunt was eager to set me up with a suitable young man so I wouldn’t become one of those “bitter girls,” as she put it. I just remember that small white flowers were blooming on the trees everywhere you looked and it devastated me just looking at them, at their beauty. It had been a month, and I still couldn’t stop crying. So this blind date came to the door and I was sitting there sniffling and my roommate told him I had gotten some cake mascara in my eye.

I remember her twice or three times saying, it’s nothing, really, and taking his arm and pulling him a little closer towards me as I sat there trying to compose myself.My college roommate was a nice, friendly girl named Constance who would have smiled sweetly at the devil. She sewed her own dresses and had no interest in cigarettes or being mysterious like some of the girls. Constance was probably the nicest person I have ever known. I’m sure she wonders what ever happened to me. I wonder if she prays for me. I wonder if she is smiling sweetly at the devil right now.

He told me his name but I couldn’t hear it or forgot it instantly. My date. He was wearing a smart young man’s suit, a simple gray suit. I tried to look at him, but couldn’t, and I forgot to wonder if he was going to be a gentleman. He was. I’m sure he opened the car door, said the right things, and all that. As we began to drive, I asked him his name again, and he told me, and I still either couldn’t hear it or forgot it instantly. He said he had reservations at an Italian place nearby. I was so quiet that he thought maybe I didn’t want to go there, but I was really just trying not to cry. So he asked where I wanted to go. For whatever absurd reason, I replied, “Atlantic City.”

He laughed. His laugh shook me out of my solitude and I looked at him and realized what I had said, and I smiled weakly. This poor man had been set up, by his aunt in concert with my aunt, to go out with a young woman desperately clinging with bloody fingernails to the edge of sanity. I reached out for his hand in sympathy, knowing I was wasting his time utterly, completely. I have only ever been with one man. I only ever kissed, ever loved, just Bobby. There was only one man in my lifetime and he turned out to be a gay, social-climbing opium addict. Yes, opium. Bobby had thought it was romantic. Nostalgic. Eccentric. I still don’t even know what opium is or where you would buy opium, just that my grandmother would occasionally see something objectionable to her, in the street or the New York Times, and say, “Those filthy Chinese should be locked up in their own opium dens!” I would cringe for every possible reason.

When my grandmother got much older and couldn’t leave her bed, she would say it whenever Harry Truman came on the radio. She never understood how Franklin Roosevelt could be deposed and she somehow thought that Truman was Chinese. Sometimes, when I’d come to visit, she’d ask me plaintively, “What has that Chinese done with our President?” There was always a glass of water and a radio by her bedside, and the radio was always on. She died that year, my sophomore year at Radcliffe, probably from the trauma of Harry Truman’s Chinese coup d’etat over the United States Government.

I am sure that my blind date had never even tried opium, or would have turned it down if it were offered to him. I had to ask his name again. He told me again, and again I couldn’t hear it, but I decided I wouldn’t ask again, it would be too mortifying. At least I’d made him smile and he had made me smile and we had that.

“So, what’s the best way to get to New Jersey from here, then?”

He surprised me with this. I asked if he was serious, and he replied that he was “the adventurous type” and sure, why not. We didn’t know how long it would take, but we would go. Maybe he was almost mad too, from something or someone else.

We rode for almost six hours and didn’t talk at all about Harvard or Radcliffe or our stupid, boring lives. We listened to the radio and talked about everything we saw along the coast, or thought we saw. It was dark by the time we got down far enough to see the Atlantic. You could smell it though. He was talking about something, I don’t know what, when suddenly the radio didn’t sound as crackly. An instantly hypnotic song came on that I had never heard before.

“Hey, listen to this,” he said, sounding like an advertisement, and turning up the radio. I went silent and the radio sang. A woman with a rich voice was singing in a way that sounded like chanting. Most people live on a lonely island, lost in the middle of a foggy sea. Most people long for another island, one where they know they would like to be. I wasn’t a teenager anymore but the song made me swoon, and although I knew she wasn’t singing to me, she sounded like she was. I indulged a little in the traces of my lost love, which lingered in the periphery of my view of the Atlantic, and I felt the sea spray of a deeper longing inside of me. I wondered where songs came from, really. I listened and half-imagined a place, somewhere in the ether all around us, where songs come from, as if they were a kind of orchid. The song enveloped us both in the hothouse. Bali Ha’i will call you, any night, any day. In your heart, you’ll hear it call you, ‘Come away, come away.’

After the song was over, my date said he was going to New York City soon, with his parents, to see South Pacific on Broadway. I hadn’t heard of it, didn’t follow that kind of thing. He explained that we had just listened to Bali Ha’i, which was one of the songs in it. He said the book was better, but that his mother sent him a clipping of a very respectable review.

“The reviewer said it had…” he paused so as to recall it perfectly, “‘the bright promise of a tasty plum pudding of a production.’”

“Well, that song certainly is something else.” I said sincerely. I was feeling a little queasy from the long car trip, not to mention the surrealism of the internal landscape I kept traversing back and forth from, and I couldn’t muster more than that. He agreed and we drove on.

Around midnight we arrived in Atlantic City as awake as if we had just left the house. I don’t know what to say about the rest. I think that’s where the story ends. Someone else wouldn’t think so, but I do. Because in that next moment, the moment when I walked into the casino, I realized that that it had all been a farce, my life until then. My surroundings until then. I had been living in what I had previously thought was, at worst, a dignified kennel. But it had been worse than that. My old life had been nothing more than a lurid dream-world masquerading as refinement, the word “Radcliffe” was just a cheap red velvet curtain hiding the filthy opium den that it was.