Chapter 15E

On Friday night Ronnie had a date that precluded our usual threeway dinner and "extended dessert," as Ronnie called it. Martha met me for a quick dinner at a diner in the West 70's and prepped me for my meeting with yet another of her teenage girlfriends, Jessica.

She said while we ate, "The man in charge of the summer drama program at Jessica's high school is a friend of mine. His name is Howard. I told him about you several times, and he's looking forward to meeting you. I haven't seen him in a while, myself, I guess for a few months. He's letting us sit in on a rehearsal for a play held by the girl's school where he teaches. So, hopefully you'll have some interest in that, just in case you don't like Jessica."

I said, "Or just in case Jessica doesn't like me."

She shrugged, shaking pepper onto her leg of lamb. "That's possible. But not likely."

"How are you so certain about these things?"

"Because I know Jessica. I know her family, too, and thank your stars I'm introducing you to Jessica, but not to her family."

"This is another spoiled rich girl?"

"All rich girls are spoiled." She looked up at me from lowered eyes. "And you're one to talk."

"My family's not rich."

"Not your immediate family, hon, but your folks on the Ricci side did very well after World War Two. Half your uncles got killed off and whoever was left inherited everything." She arranged her napkin on her lap. "Too bad they died without leaving you a few male peers you could get along with. I hope this friend Chris proves helpful."

I started chewing. "The Ricci gals who were left weren't so great, either."

"Oh, yes? What about Josephine Louise? I've seen the way you look at her." I didn't say anything, and she took a bite, eating cheerlessly, and after a moment she said, "There weren't enough healthy men around for you to get close to, either. What I really wish is that they had spoiled you with a little confidence in yourself instead of with toys and clothes. You've been raised by too many fussy old women." She sighed and picked up her fork. She muttered under her breath, "And I'm getting to be one of 'em."

I watched her eat for moment. I asked, "Why are you so crabby tonight?"

She chewed, and then used her knife and fork to cut her meat into little chunks. "This wonderful career of mine is making me old too fast. Much too fast." She sliced and sliced and said, "We don't have much time, Steven."

I glanced at my watch. "We have over an hour."

She said quietly, "I was taking about Memphis. There are some very important things you have to learn, before you can tackle Memphis again."

"Like what?"

She said, "Let's start with Jessica."

Martha took me to an enormous, gothic Presbyterian church on the West Side, where a group of teenage kids were rehearsing for a play in the theater, located in the basement of the church. It was a small theater with about one hundred fifty seats. On stage were a group of teenage boys and girls standing around in casual clothes, talking and looking over their scripts. Seated in the center of the audience were a handful of adults, two of them guys in business suits, and two ladies with clipboards chatting merrily away, and a guy in a sport coat and white shirt who was talking with two teenagers.

Martha introduced me to Howard, the guy in the sport coat, who seemed very glad to see her. He was a nice looking guy in his late twenties or early thirties, in dark rimmed glasses, with a flock of unkempt but healthy looking hair and a trim, athletic build. I was immediately jealous.

He gave me a healthy handshake. "So this is the famous Steven! Well, well, we meet at last!"

I blushed, my entire body shaking with my hand. "Uh, not famous. Not just yet."

"Well, you should definitely keep Martha as your press agent. She gave you great billing over the phone with me, several times."

He introduced me to the two teenagers who were going to be stage managers for the show, and to the two women with clipboards who sat nearer the stage taking rehearsal and costume notes, and to the two guys in suits who were supervisors in the church. Then he had Martha and I sit a few rows down and told us the rehearsal would start soon. He said as he seated us, "These are the critics' seats, y'know, best seats in the house. Now, Steven, don't be too rough on us."

I smiled. "I expect I might be too busy learning a few things than criticizing anybody."

He raised his eyebrows at that and joked, "Now, there's a diplomat if I ever saw one. Martha, you've been coaching this guy?"

"No," Martha said, smiling at me, "that's strictly Steven."

He stood rubbing the back of his neck absently and looking down at Martha as she made herself comfortable in her seat beside me. He said, "Well, Martha, I was so surprised when you called and asked if you and Steven could come around. But mainly, I haven't *seen* you, I've been so busy all summer."

Martha said, "It's very nice having us over. Steven will really love this."

Howard said, "Well, Steven this is not Broadway, as you've guessed by now. Just a community thing we do in the summer." He grinned down at Martha enthusiastically, "Well, it's so good to see you again! You look so great. Still devastating, as usual."

"Devastating?" She looked up at him. "You mean that in the best possible way, right?"

He grinned, wider, playing. "Of course. Of course I do. You and Steven will be around after rehearsal, I hope? We don't plan to keep you kids up late, but we still plan on a little get-together later."

"Sure," Martha said, "we'll love it."

He glanced at his watch. "Okay, uh... couple of others should arrive soon, hope you don't mind if they sit here, behind you folks?

Martha said, "It's your show, Howard."

"Well, like you, they're just watching. I like to have a least a small audience for the later rehearsals, you see, it really helps the kids in the cast." And he said, laughing, "That way, if not a soul shows up on opening night, the cast at least gets this much of a real audience!"

He and Martha joked for a moment, easy and friendly, Martha asking if any audience interest was evident so far, and Howard talking about how the kids at the school were pushing the play and that they expected a good turnout. And I sat beside Martha getting overly warm in my stiff collar and tie and sport coat, wondering why Martha had never mentioned this guy Howard, whom she seemed to know very well, until just a couple of days before. The way Martha behaved among adults her own age was again evident, as it was when I met her coworkers in the coffee shop and her acquaintances at the Carreras party; she had class, Martha did, and plenty of it. Her easy, bantering laughter was a world away from our own, more subdued behavior together. Again, Martha was right: I still had a lot to learn.

During the few minutes before the rehearsal got started, Martha set up an easy rapport with the two women and the guy seated behind us. She introduced me, and of course the subjects of Memphis and Elvis and Nashville and the Grand Ole Opry surfaced as usual. I joked a little with them, trying not to be so polite as to seem disgustingly obsequious. In fact, I did seem to feel more comfortable than I used to in such situations.

As the lights were dimmed in the house, Martha took my hand and gave it a little squeeze. She whispered, "Good, Steven. Really, Very good. You're doing much better tonight. Here, let me fix that tie again. How do you get it over to the side like that?" She turned in her seat to fiddle with my tie.

I whispered sarcastically, "Thank you, Aunt Martha."

She said, "Okay, I get it. You're right, I'm fussing over you too much. I should just let you be." She finished with my tie and settled into her seat, leaning closer to me and pointing toward the stage. "You see that girl over there on the right? In the white blouse and blue skirt? Next to that guy in the red plaid shirt."

Onstage, the cast of ten or twelve stood up to hear a few words of instruction from Howard, and I looked at the girl Martha was pointing to. She was pouty and cute, really very pretty, and definitely looked sixteen. She had dark, sensual brown eyes with very visible eyelashes, curly brown hair, and a small but puffy, sexy red mouth on an immaculate, girlish face. She was trim, about five-foot-three, long legged, with firm, young breasts straining against the white blouse. Her eyes had a nice glitter, even from six rows back, but there seemed to be something hard in them, tough maybe, or just bored.

I leaned to Martha and whispered, "Martha... she's... she's just too cute. She'd never go for me."

Martha frowned at me. "Well, Anita's cute, isn't she?"

"Oh, Anita's beautiful. But Jessica's different, she's --"

"If Anita liked you, Jessica certainly will."

"But she's --"

"Hon, stop worrying about looks. I didn't introduce you for your looks. You happen to look good, but I'm introducing you to people who--" She stopped and settled into her seat, sighing and shaking her head. "Oh, you're incurable."

Howard gave the word for the rehearsal to begin with Act Two, Scene Two, and as the cast shuffled around getting into position, Martha kept shaking her head, muttering crossly, "Maybe I just shouldn't bother any more. Complaining that the girls I have you meet are too attractive."

She gave another little huff, and I grabbed her hand and joked apologetically, "I could have said she wasn't good enough for a bright, young, rugged cowboy type like mahself, honeh."

"Stop it. Be serious. You're making me angry with you."

Okay, I told myself, Martha's on a rampage, so behave. It couldn't have been her period. Maybe she was getting as antsy as I was, with Memphis seeming to appear everywhere on the horizon.

Two young actors on the stage started the dialog in the scene, and Martha muttered, "Maybe you'll like Becky better, she's more homespun."

"Becky? I thought Kathy was next."

"Forget Kathy. She just lost her virtue to a new boyfriend, and she won't look at anyone but him." She glanced at me. "In this town, you have to move fast."

She settled back again. I gave her hand another squeeze, and she looked at the stage and she squeezed mine back, hard, and then harder, her mouth firming as her hand gripped mine until it hurt and I stiffened in my chair. She relaxed her grip and with her other hand she stroked mine, and whispered, "Shh. Behave."

They stopped the scene several times. Jessica played one of the marriageable young women in 'The Importance of Being Earnest', and I had to admit as I watched her work that she was very, very good. Her understanding of the lines surpassed her age, and she had the talent to use her voice, body, and face to express the lines properly. Her only problem was the way she smiled -- a little cockily, out of one side of her mouth. And it was a sexy little offbeat smile, but it didn't jell with the kind of British gentry in Wilde's play. I wondered if Jessica was doing that on purpose, or if that was simply the way she smiled.

After the rehearsals, the young performers met with the people in the audience, and Martha introduced me to Jessica.

"Oh, hi," Jessica said, her voice polite, but I saw her eyes give me the fastest once-over I'd ever experienced. She looked at my eyes and then hers dropped down and rose again so swiftly that it was more like a blink, and she managed to go through that entire sequence during the mere instant it took for her to say the words "Oh, hi." Then she gave me that smile from the corner of her mouth, and I knew that it was her natural smile and not a stage device.

"Martha's told me a lot about you," she went on. And then everything seemed to stop. Martha excused herself immediately to go speak with Howard, leaving me to contend with Jessica. My brain did a swift search of possible replies and question.

I said, "Well, Martha told me a little about you, too."

"Yeah?" She stretched her offbeat smile a little more to one side, looking cocky, and said, "What'd she tell ya?"

I shrugged. "She told me your name is Jessica."

She laughed. "That's all she said?"

"That's about it."

"Well, that's not much to work with." She had a lazy voice, a little breathy, a sensuous huskiness underlying it, and she was bending down to gather her scripts and purse from one of the seats, and she straightened up, and looked at me, her eyes doing that rapid once-over again, so quickly it was barely noticeable. And she just waited, giving me that grin that was beginning to look a playful dare, like saying, "I dare you to think up something phony and clever to say next."

I borrowed a line from Anita and said, "Introductions are always a little clumsy, aren't they?"

She shrugged, starting to move away, "I dunno. Sometimes, yeah."

And I thought: uh-oh, mild mannered wimpy stuff won't work with this gal. Definitely not a sweetie-pie, Jessica. A little less sensitivity, a little less the princess and more the young sex pot.

She turned to me. "You're coming with Martha to the restaurant, right?"

"Yes, I'll be there."

She beamed, a nice, cheery smile. She said, "Good. Let's talk some more when we get there. You can meet the gang."

"Fine," I said, "that'll be great."

She turned to leave, but not before doing that rapid-fire eye check again, and she walked away with three other kids.

I walked the three blocks to the restaurant with Martha and Howard and several others, with Jessica walking farther ahead with another group. Jessica looked and walked as if she'd been to dancing school, or had some sort of personal training. Her walk was smooth and effortless, and as she walked she talked and listened to a girl beside her with that constantly askew grin, and there was a low grate in her lazy voice, a rough boyish frequency that I could hear from several yards behind when she said, "Yeah? Is that right?" And I kept thinking that she looked very, very good, but why did Martha choose her for me?

In the restaurant I sat a table with her and several cast members, all within my own age range. They hailed from a lower economic scale than did Anita's friends. They were more rambunctious, less refined but just as teeny as any teenagers I'd ever meet anywhere. Jessica was different in that she had a smoother manner, her remarks less course and more informed, sometimes a little condescending.

She had a habit of looking directly into my face when she talked. It was an honest approach, lending her a certain genuineness; and there was that grin, always present, even when she frowned humorlessly at an insulting joke someone made, to which Jessica replied with a sarcastic grimace, "C'mon, I don't like insult jokes. C'mon, it's... not... funny." But she seemed to have six basic reactions to everything: mildly funny, mildly unfunny, mildly interesting, not even mildly interesting, I'm mildly interested, I'm mildly uninterested. And almost always that curl at the corner of her mouth. And a very nice body and a perfect, young model's face, and that low, scratchy vibration under her soft voice. All very nice. And my problem was, no bells were ringing and no fuses were blowing.