Broadway Baby by Alan Shapiro

already holding the match flame up to it.
    T HAT NIGHT, SHE pasted a postcard picture of the Balinese Room in the scrapbook. She wrote, “Spent the evening with my family; Curly and I danced all night. Food not so good.” He wrote, “Miriam had a fracas with family.”
    C URLY SIGNED THEM up to perform in the Camp Lee couples talent show. Miriam flew down to Virginia for the performance. It was almost like being in show business. One minute she was home in Boston in the middle of winter, and the next she was in Virginia, on stage in high heels, fishnet tights, and a barmaid getup with a short black skirt. Behind her stood Curly and two other men dressed to the nines, replete with top hat and cane. And as she sang “Embraceable You,” the men behind her twirled their canes in unison as if they were rifles. Her voice sounded low and sultry. Her lips fondled and clung to every note, as if reluctant to let it go, to let it disappear into the next note and the next. Left to right, she stepped across the stage, singing, “Just one look at you . . .” while, right to left, the ham-handed Maurice Chevaliers marched behind her, canes tipping the top hats down over their eyes. Th en Curly broke out of line and took her in his arms, his beautiful wife-to-be, and sang, “Come to papa,” and as he dipped her down and smoothly drew her up, they sang together, My sweet embraceable you. Th e soldiers in the audience went wild.
    F INALLY THEY MARRIED and she moved to Charleston where he was stationed. Just shy of nineteen, and here she was in the Deep South, far from everything she knew, in a small apartment on the base. Th is would be the first meal she would cook for him. Her neighbor, Gloria, a friendly big-boned redhead with enormous breasts, had given her a recipe that she called “Southern Spaghetti.” Miriam spent all afternoon getting ready—cleaning, buying groceries, preparing the sauce. She borrowed from Gloria a checkered tablecloth and two tall candleholders. And though she and Curly didn’t drink much, she bought a bottle of expensive red wine to mark the occasion. When he got home, the room resembled a Parisian bistro on the left bank of the Seine.
    Here they were at last, facing each other across the wobbly metal table, in flickering candlelight. She held up her wine- glass, watching him intently as he lifted the first forkful of the first home-cooked dinner of their married life.
    He tasted. “What kind of shit is this,” he blurted out. Th e glass flew from her hand, and he ducked. What the . . . ?! Th ey looked at each other. For a moment, they had no idea who it was they saw.
    M ARRIED HOUSING UNITS were more like bunkers than apartments—theirs was a studio, with a fold-out couch, a floor lamp, one table to dine on with two chairs, and a galley kitchen with a staticky Philco radio on the counter and a porthole window above the kitchen sink. It was so small there was nowhere not to be in someone’s way. And the walls were thin, and every night, in the next apartment, every single night, Gloria and her husband, Tommy, went at it longer and louder than Miriam thought was possible. She felt judged by every shriek and groan, by the bed board banging on and on against the wall, on the other side of which Miriam and Curly lay unable to sleep after doing or not doing whatever it was they did or didn’t do.
    M IRIAM COULDN’T DENY it anymore: she loved best the appearance she and Curly made together. He was so good-looking, especially in uniform, that she felt more beautiful beside him. She loved the outward show of married life, the handsome and adoring newlyweds with their future all before them. He was a good man, too, a family man. She loved all that about him. Sex was the least of it; sex had nothing to do with devotion or beauty or being seen. Sex was the opposite of being looked at as they made an entrance. It was like dancing in the dark when no one’s watching, performing a play to an empty theater. Sex