Page 10 of Shadow Ticket
“Come on, it’s only a song…”
“You’re in trouble, Hicks.”
“Long as it’s with you, Angelface.”
“You’re in big trouble and you don’t know it.”
“Fine one to talk.”
“Lounge lizards and wayward hubbies, Lunchmeat, forget all them, this time it’s serious.”
“To the great life lesson Money Talks,” as Boynt has often lectured him, “is now added Lesson Two—Romantic Partners Stray. For reasons that continue to escape me you keep questioning both these principles, which happen to form the bedrock of our profession, choosing again and again not tocash in whenever a sure thing is handed to you on a plate, and continuing to believe against all evidence in true and faithful love, although to look at you nobody’d ever know it. Another romantic chump.”
By the time Hicks understands he should’ve been paying closer attention to what’s been going on, the moment has arrived when April is using the movies as an alibi for her whereabouts, a regression to high school Hicks would never have expected.
“The Public Enemy, again? It’s three in the morning.”
“They’ve started running it all night, round the clock, young American womanhood, you know, we can’t get enough ofthatJimmy, knocked all gaga in fact, plenty there to swoon over, case I haven’t drooled enough about him to you already.”
“Only part I remember’s that grapefruit really…don’t spoze you’d happen to have one around…”
—
Each night in her gigat Arleen’s Orchid Lounge, whenever midnight happens to fall, April sings what’s gotten to be her trademark ballad, backed by a minor-key semi-Cuban arrangement for accordion, saxes, banjo-uke, melancholically muted trumpet—
Midnight in Milwaukee,
Not exactly Paris,
Not exactly swilling champagne, twirling yer
cane, down the Champs-Élysées…
Ev’ry hour’s so blue now,
How much, can it matter,
Might as well be suds in a stein,
Any time, night or day…
[bridge]
Down along the Lake,
nothing much awake,
Till it almost seems…
[fill phrases from the band]
Harp lights by the shore
whisp’ringje t’adore,
how could it be more
than a doorway to dreams?
