Page 64 of A Love Song for Ricki Wilde

“She’s not Colored, Felice. In Hollywood, you’d play her servant or her slave, if you’re lucky.” Breeze had heard that LA brothels were populated by white girls who were beauty queens backhome but, after moving out west, were told they were too chubby, snaggletoothed, or uncharismatic for the big screen. What happened to Colored women who couldn’t find work?

“Tell you what,” started Breeze. “I know everybody in town; I’ll find out who has the picture and buy it. Then I’ll track down the photographer and buy the film. All right?”

Tears streaking her rouged cheeks, Felice fixed him with her fluttery-lashed smile and huge, pleased eyes. And just like that, her thunderstorm passed, and the sun shone bright.

“You’re the bee’s knees, Breeze.” She stood on her tiptoes and nibbled on his earlobe, her hand traveling down the front of his pants. “You’d do that for me?”

Of course he would. Why be successful if he couldn’t help people he cared for? He’d lost Sonny, his last surviving family member. Breeze no longer had anyone to help.

Just as he was about to tell her this, she got distracted. Gasping, she turned to face the sidewalk. “Is that… Oh my word… Is that…”

It was Adelaide Hall.TheAdelaide Hall, of Broadway musical fame. Stopping to speak to a fan, she looked like the Platonic ideal of a modern woman, wearing a mink and a lacquered bob. Delighted, Felice clasped her hands together under her chin.

“Her gown’s by a Parisian designer, I reckon. Chanel? Lanvin? I wonder if it’s a Worth.”

“It’s a-worth plenty,” cracked Breeze.

Felice scanned her from head to toe, settling on her luminous four-strand pearl bracelet.

“Breeze, look! Why, if I had a bracelet like that, I might be the happiest girl alive.”

She purred the words with bald eroticism, reaching backward to rub her hand up and down the front of Breeze’s pants. Abruptly, she spun around and pushed him farther back into the shadows of the alley and up against a wall. Right then and there, Felicedropped to her knees and sucked him off, mere feet away from civilized café society.

God, he’d come so far from Fallon County. Getting head from a gorgeous cabaret dancer at 4:00 p.m. off Lenox? If that wasn’t cosmopolitan, he didn’t know what was.

And it was why, between dropping Felice off at rehearsal and prepping for the rent party, Breeze was inspired to visit a jeweler to buy a replica of Adelaide’s flashy pearl bracelet.

225½ West 137th Street. It was an odd address, neither here nor there. An in-between house definitely befitting a party starting at midnight on February 29, the weirdest day of the year. Leap day.

The tenants lived on the ground floor of a stone-gray brownstone with dramatic bay windows. The parlor was the scene of the soiree, and to make space for dancing, they’d moved all the furniture to a corner. There were buckets of bootleg gin and whiskey (Prohibition’s finest), a rug, and damn near fifty-five pairs of feet stomping the house down.

Breeze and his square piano were in the center of it all. For hours, he banged his keys with ease, pulling the strings of every flapper, cook, gangster, porter, and painter in the place. He had the crowd in a chokehold, providing the beat, the rhythm, and the throbbing undercurrent that stoked their Dionysian delights.

Happy! Sad! So good to be bad!

Breeze watched the ecstatic rush overtake the crowd, the wild abandon in their faces, pleased to be the architect of it all. It was 3:00 a.m., and the whole place smelled like gin, tobacco, reefer, Chanel No. 5, and sweat: Eau de Rent Party, 1928. And now Breeze’s hands ached. Good thing one of his Friday Knights was on hand to fill in for him while he took a break.

Felice was acting strange. Her dancing was frenetic, chaotic, like a conjure woman raising the dead. All night, she danced the Charleston madly through the crowd, pausing every so often to peck Ezra on the lips as he sat behind his piano. This was more territorial than anything else. When she kissed him, it was passionless, her expression terrifyingly blank. Every so often she’d stop dancing to lurk in a far corner, slowly peeling off her nail varnish, her eyes darting around the room as red flakes pooled around her feet.

Happy! Sad! So good to be bad!

She looked enticing, all gussied up with rouged cheeks, lips, and knees. But as with most things Felice-related, it was a cover. Something was wrong. He’d seen her act like this before, most recently after a white shopgirl ignored them at Lord & Taylor downtown. Felice had begun shaking violently with rage, breathing erratically, and muttering horrific blasphemies. Breeze had rushed her home, humming to her and rocking her in his arms.

Her manic episodes were scary, and Breeze feared she might hurt herself or someone else. But he felt for her, too. And maybe, deep down, he envied the way she felt everything. His feelings were tucked away, calcifying inside him. But Felice accessed her rage with a terrifying immediacy. She let it out. Her emotions didn’t eat her from the inside out, the way his did.

He came up behind Felice and kissed her cheek. “Let’s go to the roof for a minute.”

She beamed, all lashes and empty flirtation. “I thought you’d never ask.”

He grabbed her fur and his overcoat and hat, and they snuck out into the freezing February night. Breeze pulled down the fire escape in the back of the building and lifted Felice up onto it. Together, they climbed up to the flat unfinished roof. There was no railing, just a chimney pumping swirling plumes of smoke into the night sky.

The full moon was red. Fire red, and Felice was—as she liked to call herself—a voodoo chile. Ezra wouldn’t forget the vivid image of that moon as long as he lived.

She stood there, wrapped in her furs, hugging herself. Her face was curiously blank. She’d wrapped a piece of lace around her forehead, ornamenting it with costume jewels, as was the fashion. She could’ve passed for a child playing dress-up. At twenty, she’d lived enough lives to be forty, but at times, she reminded Ezra of a helpless kid.

Breeze stepped closer to her. “Felice, are you feeling poorly?”

Calmly, she averted her eyes and backed away from him. “I’m all right, why?”

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