Lair of Dreams
“So everybody up to my room!” Evie shouted, and the stampede began. The Hungarian girl in the feather boa handed the monkey’s leash to the hapless hotel manager, who stood paralyzed as the partygoers swarmed the elevators and stairs.
“You looking to get evicted again, Evil?” Theta asked as they dashed up the gleaming wooden staircase. “What is this, hotel number two?”
“Three, but who’s counting? Besides, they won’t evict me. They love me here!”
Theta looked back down at the hotel manager, who was shouting at a bellhop who was trying to distract the screeching beast with a broom while a telephone operator frantically connected cables in search of someone, anyone, who could remove a monkey from the Grant Hotel.
Theta shook her head. “I’ve seen that look before. It ain’t love, kid.”
Evie’s room was so thick with people that they spilled out into the elegant damask-papered hallways of the Grant’s third floor. Evie, Theta, and Henry took refuge in the bathroom’s claw-foot tub, leaning their backs against one side of it and resting their legs across the other. In the room just beyond, the accordionist launched into the same doleful number he’d played twice before.
“Not again!” Evie growled and drank from her flask. “We should get him to play one of your songs, Henry. You should write for the accordion. An entire accordion revue! It’ll be a sensation.”
“Gee, why didn’t I think of that before? Henry DuBois’s Accordion Follies! The Ins and Outs of Love…” Henry sighed. “That’s almost bad enough to be a Herbert Allen song.”
“Herbert Allen! I’ve heard his songs on the radio!” Evie said. “I like the one that goes, ‘I love your hair / I love your nose / I love you from your head to toes, My daaaaarling girl!’ Or the one that goes, ‘Daaarling, you’re top banana / Baaaby, you’re my peaches and cream / Orange you gonna be my Sherbet—’”
“For the love of Pete, please stop,” Henry groaned, cradling his head in his hands.
Theta poured the rest of her booze into Henry’s glass. “Herbert keeps getting his rotten songs in the show over Henry’s just because he’s published,” she explained. “It’s all the same song. The same horrible song.”
“Gee, they do sort of sound alike, now that you mention it,” Evie said, thinking it over.
“Every time I play something for Wally, Herbert finds a way to sabotage it,” Henry said, picking up his drink again. “I tell you, if Herbie Allen fell off an apple truck tomorrow, I wouldn’t cry.”
Theta appraised Evie coolly through her cigarette haze. “Jericho asked after you.”
“Oh? And how is dear old Jericho?” Evie kept her voice even, though her heart beat faster.
“Tall. Blond. Serious,” Theta said. “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that big lug is sweet on you. And you on him.”
“You don’t know better!” Evie mumbled. “You don’t know at all.”
“You can’t stay away from the Bennington forever, Evil.”
“I can so! May I remind you that Uncle Will wanted me to keep my talent under lock and key? Why, if I’d listened to him, I wouldn’t have any of this,” she said, throwing her arms wide and nearly knocking Henry’s drink from his hands.
“We’re in a bathtub, Evil,” Theta said.
“And snug. As. Bugs.” Evie knocked back more gin. A warm buzz was starting to take the edge off the headache from her object reading and she wanted it to stay that way. “I refuse to become morose! This is a party. Tell me something happy.”
“Flo’s calling a press conference next week announcing our new act and letting me give my first interview as Theta St. Petersburg-ski, smuggled into this country by loyal servants during Revolution,” Theta said, in an exaggerated Russian accent. She scoffed. “What a load of bunk. And I gotta sell that act to those tabloid jackals.”
“Well, it’s not like they can prove otherwise. For all you know, you could be a Russian aristocrat. Right, Henry?”
“Right,” Henry said, staring at his drink.
Evie squinted at Henry. It wasn’t like him to be so solemn. “Henry, you’re very quiet this evening.” She put her face up to his. “Is it because you’re an artiste? Is this what artistes do? Get sad and quiet in party bathtubs?”