Chapter Thirty-Two
They transformed the hotel suite into a rehearsal studio.
With the help of two porters, Mallory and Bette moved most of the furniture from the center of the living room to a far corner to make an open space. They borrowed a wide full-length mirror from one of the other suites and propped it against one wall. Then they got down to business.
But three hours into their “rehearsal,” Bette still hasn’t shown Mallory a single step of her choreography for the party.
Instead, she insists on painstakingly teaching her the foundations of burlesque.
Bette spent close to an hour just on the art of removing a glove so that Mallory understands that the power of burlesque is built on the anticipation, not the reveal.
“Now you need to learn the bump ’n’ grind. I’m going to teach it to you the way I learned it from Jo Weldon.”
“Who?”
“A great performer who also runs the New York School of Burlesque. Okay, so stand with your feet apart, knees slightly bent. Now, imagine an apple hanging from the right hip, an orange hanging from the left, and a coffee bean hanging between your legs. Okay, now bump the apple with your hip. Bump the orange, now rotate your hips in a circle around the coffee bean.”
Mallory follows her direction, her hips so stiff she can almost hear them creaking.
“Now do it in the opposite direction.”
She tries, watching herself in the mirror.
“It doesn’t look as good as when you do it.”
“You can practice later. We have to keep moving. Now take off your shirt.”
“Why?”
“You’re going to try on some pasties, and I’m going to show you how to twirl the tassels with your breasts.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Of course you can. Everyone can.”
The pasties are gold sequined with fuchsia tassels.
Bette whips out some false eyelash glue from her cosmetics bag and coats the back of them.
When the glue is still slightly tacky, she presses them onto Mallory’s breasts, covering her nipples.
Mallory is mesmerized by the sight, but Bette is impatient.
“Okay, now shimmy.”
She shakes her torso as if she’s trying to get a mosquito off her shoulder.
“Not like that—the tassels need to move in circles, not side to side. Open up your rib cage. That’s it. Try to isolate your rib cage from your hips.”
“I can’t—if I move my rib cage my hips move. They’re attached.”
“They’re not attached. Here, sit on this chair. Now shimmy your shoulders.”
Mallory focuses on her movement and, sure enough, the pink tassels twirl.
“Oh my god! I did it!” With her red hair and bare, tasseled breasts, she feels Moxie coming alive.
Bette nods with approval.
“There’re a few variations, but we need to keep moving. I wish we had a week to do this. Okay, onto fan dancing.”
“Does that mean you’re finally going to show me the routine?”
“No, not yet. Patience! I’ll be right back.”
While Bette retrieves the fans, Mallory practices twirling her tassels.
She imagines facing a crowd of people. It doesn’t feel like it’s herself, Mallory Dale, standing there with bare breasts with only sequins between her nipples and an imaginary bunch of strangers.
It feels like she’s in a play or a movie, inhabiting a character who has nothing to do with her actual self.
And yet, the character is in some ways the purest form of herself.
Bette reappears with the fans. They aren’t the small paper variety, like the ones she’s seen in Chinatown. That’s what she’d imagined. Instead, they’re giant wings of black feathers.
“You packed those in your suitcase?”
“Yes. Carefully. They’re collapsible. Ostrich feather.
Okay, now watch me. And notice that with the fans, as with the gloves, it’s about the reveal.
They only work if you’re effectively concealing something with them.
Teasing the audience. Just waving them around randomly does nothing.
You have to be purposeful in your movements. ”
She cups the fan around her body, giving Mallory only a glimpse of her leg, her arm, the arch of her back while her ass is concealed. She makes it look simple, but Mallory knows she’s going to struggle.
“Do you have a laptop with you?” Bette asks when she lowers her arms.
“No. Why?”
“I want to show you just a gorgeous example of fan usage. If you can visualize it, I think it will really help you during your own performance. Let’s go downstairs and see if the front desk has a laptop we can borrow.
They traipse down to the lobby and find the familiar front desk clerk, a young man with wire-rimmed glasses dressed in dark jeans and an argyle cardigan.
“Sorry to bother you again,” Mallory says. They’d already enlisted him to help with the room modification.
“Not at all! Anything in the name of art. What can I do for you ladies?”
“Do you have a laptop we could use for a minute?”
He slides open a drawer, pulls out a MacBook. He hands it to Bette but says she can’t take it from the lobby. So she stands right there at the desk, turns the screen toward the two of them, and cues up a video of a performer called Ms. Tickle.
“Watch and learn,” she says to Mallory.
The music is slow, melodic, and haunting. The woman’s white costume is an elaborate bodice with a shell-shaped skirt of feathers, like those on the ostrich fan Bette has just shown her.
Mallory leans closer, observing the dancer’s slow, deliberate movements. The arc of her back and arms suggests that the dancer has had serious dance training. The dancer moves with excruciating precision, her body perfectly attuned to the song.
This performer is nothing like Bette, who leads with her dark sexuality. This woman, with her precise movements, is like a ballerina. The music reaches its first crescendo and the dancer pulls off the side panels of her skirt, revealing them to be fans like white angel wings.
The audience in the video howls and claps, and while that only adds to the thrill of a live performance, it seems like a blemish on this pristine moment of art.
The dancer uses her fans to conceal her body, at one point cupping one fan overhead and one fan underneath so that she’s like a baby bird just beginning to emerge into the world.
“That move’s called the clamshell,” Bette said. “I’m going to show you how to do that next.”
Mallory barely hears her. She’s mesmerized.
By now, the front desk clerk has walked around to watch, too.
The music peaks again, and this time the dancer pulls apart the fans to reveal her body.
She wears a spangled bikini top and bottom, and she gyrates like a belly dancer.
The audience screams and hoots, and it seems entirely inappropriate to Mallory. This woman deserves silent reverence.
When it ends, the clerk says to Bette, “Is that you?”
“No. But tomorrow night, it’ll be her.” She smiles at Mallory.
Riding the elevator back upstairs, Mallory checks out her reflection in the mirrors.
She straightens her back and holds her fingers loosely posed in ballet hands.
She remembers how, when she was a child, her teacher explained to her that the best way to remember ballet hands is to pretend to be holding a fluffy cotton ball between your thumb and middle finger without crushing it.
She could tell Bette had never danced ballet.
“How did you get started doing this?” Mallory says.
“It was a random thing. I was in college, stripping and nude modeling for tuition money.” She says this casually, as if she’d been waiting tables.
“And one of the photographers came to see me strip, and then she invited me to see a show at the Slit. I thought it was cool. The photographer introduced me to Penelope Lowe. She’s this rich society brat and owns the club.
I auditioned but didn’t get it—they always want crazy things like that one performer who sticks knives up her pussy. Not my thing.”
Mallory shudders.
“But if you needed money, why’d you leave stripping for burlesque? You told me Agnes barely pays.”
“I think the idea started one day when I was reading a magazine I found in the trash compactor room of my building. One of my neighbors had a subscription to every magazine you could imagine—Vogue, WWD, Vanity Fair … Every few months she left a massive pile in the trash room. I always picked up Vogue and WWD so I could rip out the best photos to tape up around my apartment. This was before I could pay for prints. I love photography, you know.”
“Yeah. The first thing I noticed in your apartment was the photographs.”
“So there was a gorgeous editorial spread of Marilyn Manson and Dita Von Teese at their wedding. It was like they were covering a royal wedding of the underworld. She wore an incredible, deep violet Vivienne Westwood gown. I’ve never seen anything like it.
But the point is, they never would have featured her so prominently if she were a stripper.
But she was a burlesque performer and had made a name for herself doing a routine in a giant martini glass—props can be a big part of defining yourself as a performer, but we don’t have time to get into all that now.
Anyway, I knew that was what I wanted and what I would go for: the Vogue spread, the celebrity wedding.
When a celebrity marries a stripper he’s a punch line.
But a burlesque performer … she’s a creative equal.
So … the Blue Angel. The only thing missing was the famous partner.
And believe me, lots of musicians and actors have come through the Angel.
I knew I could sleep with them once or twice.
But none of them really interested me that much and I’m terrible at faking it. ”
“I guess that’s where Zebra comes in,” Mallory says, feeling a little disillusioned by what Bette just told her. She’d hoped Bette had found someone she was really interested in, not just someone who could help advance her career. She tells her as much.
“Oh, Mallory—you’re such a romantic. Look, I’m crazy about her. And there’s the potential for something real there. But yes, it helps that she’s super famous. That’s part of the attraction.”
“That’s not what makes a relationship work.”
“I know, hon. Not for you. And it’s great that you and Alec have been in love since you were kids and there’s a purity to that.
But it’s more complex for me. I’ve never been in love.
I would like to feel that way, believe me.
And I know that being with someone like Zebra is my best chance at feeling in love and getting what I want out of life. ”
“Being in love is the best feeling in the world. Better than any audience can give,” Mallory says. She feels tears coming. “I miss Alec so much.”
“Then you’ll figure it out. But for now, put him out of your mind. We have work to do.”
It’s close to midnight.
Mallory sits on the couch, every muscle in her body aching.
She spent the past six hours learning variations of the bump ’n’ grind, tassel twirling, glove peeling, showgirl posing, and ten different fan dance techniques.
She’s thankful Bette had taken the time to show her the video of Ms. Tickle performing; when she had moments of feeling like she was just going through the motions with no end in sight, she thought about that magnificent dance and how it pulled all the pieces together to make magic.
And then there’s Bette’s choreography for the Baxter party performance.
Just watching it left Mallory breathless.
The dance was a perfect combination of Ms. Tickle’s grace and subtlety and Bette’s signature fierce sexuality.
It’s extremely ambitious and she feels like a fool for thinking she can just step in and take Bette’s place.
“You think I can do this? I’d imagined something simple, like your Alice in Wonderland routine. Oh my god, what have I gotten myself into?”
Bette opens a bottle of red wine.
“Don’t stress. See, that’s why I didn’t want to show you first. Just take a step back and think of the pieces of the performance. It’s just the things I showed you strung together. And the costume helps, doesn’t it?”
It does. At its core is a bubblegum pink satin corset with a sweetheart neckline that lifts and frames her breasts.
Delicate black lace trims the top edge, adding a touch of vintage glamour.
Around her waist is a skirt made entirely of lush, black ostrich feathers that sway with every step.
The look is finished off with fishnet stockings and pink satin opera-length gloves.
The only thing she doesn’t have is shoes, because Bette’s are too small, but they’re going to find replacements at the Hustler store on Sunset.
Even Bette’s black sequined pasties are the right size because they both have small, delicate nipples.
“I really appreciate you doing this for me, Mallory. It was a stroke of genius, and it’s giving me the chance to have something with Zebra.
So here—cheers. To friends, lovers, and the official debut of Moxie. ”
They touch their glasses together with a delicate clink.
Mallory can’t help but think that she should be studying for the bar exam, and instead she’s cramming to learn a burlesque performance. She shares this with Bette.
“I guarantee tomorrow is one test you will pass—big time.”
“Bette, I can never thank you enough for opening my eyes to all of this. I was so stuck before. I couldn’t even admit to myself how much I was second-guessing my decision to be a lawyer. I really thought Alec was the one who would have an interesting career. I was trying to settle.”
Bette shakes her head. “A true lady never settles.” She stands up and stretches.
“Get some sleep,” she says. “Everything we rehearsed will sink in overnight. You’ll wake up owning it.
Trust me. I just wish I could see it. Justin usually bans cell phones, but I hope someone sneaks a recording for YouTube. ”
Mallory feels her stomach drop. “Don’t even say that!” She can’t let herself think about it ending up online, about Alec discovering it.
“It’s not a big deal. We all end up on there eventually.”
“Well, that can’t happen tomorrow night. I told Alec I was just here to relax—that this trip has nothing to do with burlesque.”
“Why did you say that?”
“Because at the time, it was true.”
“So tell him you’re helping me out. It’s not a big deal.”
“It is a big deal. He broke up with me because of the night you and I hooked up. He blames the Blue Angel for me losing my job.”
“It’s your life Mallory. Not his.” She kisses her on the forehead and starts packing up her bag. “So get some sleep … Moxie.”