Letter 10 — The Performance

Dear Lilith,

I have spent eleven years of my life making other women beautiful for rooms I was never invited into. I pin silk violets to velvet brims in the back of Mrs. Kessler's shop on Halsted Street, and I watch through the front window as the women who'll wear my hats climb into motorcars in gowns that cost more than I make in a year, and I have never once, not for a single evening, been the thing a room turned to look at.

Until three weeks ago, when Onyx Watt asked me to dance for him.

Not the way a girl dances with a fellow at a party, some shuffle of feet and his hand too warm at her waist. He meant something else, and he said it plainly, in that unhurried voice of his that always sounds like he already knows how the evening's going to end and is simply waiting for you to catch up.

"I want to watch you dance, Reenie. Alone. On the stage, after everyone's gone, with the lights the way I like them."

We were in his office above the club, the Marigold Room, which sits behind a flower shop that sells actual flowers until six o'clock and something considerably stronger after. I'd known him six months by then. I knew the shape of his hands and the low rasp that came into his voice right before he kissed me and the particular patience he had for undoing the twelve buttons up the back of my good blue dress, one at a time, like he had nowhere else on earth to be. I did not know, until that night in his office, that I wanted to be looked at the way a lit stage looks at a woman. I only knew that when he said it, something under my ribs went hot and loose at once, a want so sudden it frightened me more than the asking did.

"Who'd be watching," I said, because I am a practical woman even when my body has already decided something my mind hasn't caught up to.

"Just us," he said. Then, after a beat too long, "And a friend of mine. Someone I trust completely. They'll sit in the back, in the dark. You won't even know they're there, if you don't want to."

I should tell you, Lilith, that I said yes before I'd finished being frightened. That is not how I imagined myself saying yes to anything. I have always been the sort of girl who thinks a thing over twice and then a third time out of spite. But Onyx has a way of asking that makes refusal feel like the smaller, sadder choice, and under that, under the frightened part of me, was a hunger I didn't have a name for yet. I wanted, God help me, to be worth watching.

So there I was, three Mondays later, standing in the wings of a stage the size of a parlor rug, in a dress Onyx had sent up from a costumer on Wabash: dull gold sequins that caught the light like fish scales, a hem that stopped scandalously above the knee, no back to speak of. My own stockings, rolled and clipped, the seams straight because some habits a milliner's assistant does not abandon even in the grip of madness. The house was empty. Chairs up on tables, the bar towel-draped, the smell of spilled gin and cigarette smoke settled into the velvet like a second skin of the room. Onyx sat at the piano, not because he needed the light to play (he'd played that little upright a thousand nights blind drunk and sober both), but because he wanted his hands on something while he watched me, I think. A man needs somewhere to put his want too.

"There's one light," he told me before I went up. "Just the one, on you. I'll play. You do whatever the music tells you to do. Nothing else matters in this room but that."

He did not say where his friend was sitting. I looked, once, into the dark beyond the edge of the light, a black rectangle where the tables should have been, no shape to it, no face, and then I made myself stop looking, because if I kept looking I would talk myself out of the whole reckless business.

The needle found the groove. Something slow, brass-heavy, a torch song with a beat like a pulse. And the spotlight came up on me alone.

I want you to understand what that is like, Lilith, because I don't think I understood it myself until it happened. It is not like being watched by a man across a room, which is a thing I knew, that ordinary weight of an admiring look. This was different. The light itself was a kind of hand. It found my shoulders and my throat and the notch of my collarbone and it did not let go, and for the first ten seconds I stood there stiff as a shop mannequin, arms not knowing where they belonged, because eleven years of standing two steps back from every beautiful thing does not undo itself in an instant.

Then Onyx's hands found the low notes, and he looked up at me. Not politely, not the careful watching of a man being a gentleman, but hungry, unhidden, his eyes moving over me like they were memorizing something they meant to keep. Something in me answered that hunger instead of shrinking from it.

I moved my hips first. Small, testing, the way you test ice before you trust your whole weight to it. The sequins caught the light and threw it back in little gold sparks across the black curtain, and I felt, for the very first time in my adult life, beautiful in a way that had nothing to do with what I'd sold someone else or sewn for someone else's head. This beauty was mine. I was making it happen with my own body and no one could take the credit for it but me.

I let my shoulders drop. I let my head fall back, just slightly, so the light ran down the long line of my throat, and I heard Onyx's breath catch even over the piano, a small broken sound he probably didn't know he'd made, and Lilith, that sound went straight between my thighs like a struck match.

I unhooked the little clasp at my hip that the dress had been built around, and let the gold slide, an inch, then two, baring the curve of my waist. I was still dancing, hips finding the brass rhythm, one hand trailing up my own ribs the way I imagined his would if his hands weren't full of the piano, and I watched him watch me do it, and understood for the first time what he'd meant, weeks before, about a room built only to adore me. This little stage, this single stubborn spotlight, this was that room. I had built it myself, tonight, out of nothing but my own nerve.

That was when I heard it. Small. Almost nothing. A breath let out too carefully in the dark beyond the light, a woman's breath, and under it, unmistakable even after everything, a huff of a laugh, soft, delighted, helpless, that I would have known blindfolded in a burning building, because I have heard that exact laugh across a hundred kitchen tables and church pews and gossiped afternoons at Kessler's counter.

Ann.

My oldest friend in the world. The girl I learned to sew a hem beside when we were both twelve. The one who held my hand at my mother's funeral and never once let go until I stopped shaking. Ann Ready, sitting in the dark at the back of a speakeasy, watching me undress under a spotlight, and laughing. Not cruelly, not with mockery, but with something that sounded, God help me, like relief.

I froze. The record kept turning. Onyx's hands stilled on the keys, and he looked at me with a question in his face, plain as if he'd spoken it: do you want to stop. I understood then that he had told her, or she had told him, some arrangement made between the two of them that I had never been let in on, and my first feeling was a hot flash of betrayal.

"Reenie." Ann's voice, from the dark, quiet as a confession. "I asked him. Months ago. I asked if I could ever just watch you be as lovely as I've always known you were. I didn't think he'd say yes. I didn't think you'd ever let anyone say yes."

I stood there half-undressed in a stolen spotlight with my two dearest people in the world watching me and waiting to see what I would do with the truth they'd just handed me, and Lilith, here is the thing I understood, all at once, standing there: I was not ashamed. I had expected, if this moment ever came, that I would want to run for the wings and never come out again. Instead there was only a fierce, funny gladness, because Ann had watched me arrange flowers on other women's hats for a decade while she pined, apparently, for a version of me I'd never once let her see, and now she was seeing it, and she was glad, and so, God help me, was I.

"Stay," I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt. "Both of you. Stay and watch."

The record found its rhythm again. I let the gold dress fall the rest of the way to the boards and stepped clear of it in nothing but my stockings and my nerve, and Onyx made a low sound in his throat that was half reverence and half plain animal want, and from the dark, Ann's breath went ragged too, and knowing she was there, knowing exactly who was watching me now, made the heat under my skin twice what it had been a minute before. Being seen by a stranger had been a thrill. Being seen, wanted, by the two people who knew every plain, unglamorous version of me was something closer to being unmade and rebuilt at once, gold light and all.

Onyx left the piano.

He crossed the little stage slow, the way he does everything, like a man who has never once needed to hurry to get what he wants, and when he reached me he didn't kiss me first. He turned me, one hand firm at my hip, so I faced the dark where Ann sat, so the light still found me but now she could see my face too, see exactly what his hands did to me, and I understood he'd done that on purpose, for her, and for me, and the thought of it made me wetter than his hand did when it finally slid low over my stomach.

"Let her see you," he murmured against my ear, low enough that only I could hear the words, though certainly not low enough to hide the meaning of them. "Let her see how you look when I have you."

His mouth found my throat first, unhurried, and I let my head fall back against his shoulder, eyes open, looking straight out into the black where I knew Ann sat, and it was the strangest, most freeing thing, Lilith, to be held and touched and to look at the one person who'd known me longest while it happened, no curtain between us anymore, nothing hidden. His hand slid down over my hip, between my thighs, and found me already slick, and he made a rough sound of satisfaction against my skin.

"That's my girl," he said, and I felt the words land somewhere low and greedy in me, the way praise from him always had, except tonight it wasn't only for him. It was for Ann too. For the dark she sat in. For the fact that she was watching and glad of it.

He turned me again, this time face-first toward the old upright piano, and bent me forward over its closed lid, my palms flat against the cool black lacquer, my back arched, the spotlight sliding off my shoulders and down the long bare line of my spine. I heard him undoing his own trousers behind me, unhurried even now, and I pushed my hips back toward him, wanting, past any shame I might once have manufactured for the occasion.

"Look at her," he said again, to me, or maybe to Ann, or maybe to both of us at once, and then his hand closed over my hip and he pushed into me from behind, one long slow thrust that dragged a sound out of me I'd never made in my life, high and open and unashamed, into a room that held my two dearest witnesses and no one else.

He filled me completely, and for one suspended second neither of us moved, his chest against my bare back, his mouth at my ear, both of us catching breath. Then he began to move, deep unhurried strokes that built a rhythm to match the record still turning somewhere behind us, and I braced against the piano lid and pushed back to meet every one of them, and I turned my face toward the dark, toward Ann, and found I could see the pale shape of her now, closer to the light's edge than she'd sat before, as though she'd leaned forward without meaning to, as though she couldn't help it.

"Ann," I said, and my voice broke around the word as Onyx's hand slid around my hip and found my clit, slow deliberate circles timed to his own thrusts, "come closer."

I heard her rise. Heard the scrape of her chair, the soft fall of her footsteps on the boards, and then she was at the edge of the light, close enough that I could see her face fully, flushed, wide-eyed, her own hand pressed flat against her own throat like she was holding something in, and Onyx didn't slow, didn't stop, only angled me slightly so both of them could watch my face while he took me, and I let them.

I had spent eleven years two steps back from every beautiful thing. I was not two steps back from anything now. Onyx's fingers worked me exactly the way six months had taught him I liked, and his cock filled me on every stroke deep enough to make my knees go loose against the piano, and Ann stood close enough to reach out and touch me if she chose, and did, finally, her fingers sliding along my jaw with a tenderness that had nothing to do with taking and everything to do with years of quiet, patient love finally let out into the light.

I came apart first, hard and sudden, a cry that I didn't try to muffle, my whole body clenching around him as the pleasure broke over me in a wave that started somewhere behind my eyes and ended in my curling toes. Onyx groaned my name into my shoulder and followed a few strokes later, his hips stuttering, his hand fisting tight at my hip as he spent himself inside me with a low broken sound that was as close to worship as I have ever heard a man come.

We stayed like that a moment, all three of us breathing hard in a room built for a hundred and holding only us, the record spun out to hissing silence, the single spotlight still burning gold and patient over my bare skin.

Ann kissed my forehead, once, soft, and said nothing at all, and it was somehow the loudest thing anyone said to me all night.

I do not know yet, Lilith, exactly what we three are to each other now, whether this was a single gift given once or the first night of something larger. I know that I have stopped being the girl who stands two steps back. I know that being looked at, by the right eyes, chosen freely, asked for honestly, is not the same as being used — it is closer to being crowned. I gave that performance to myself as much as to them. I intend to give it to myself again.

Yours, still catching her breath, Reenie Wilkins