Free Stages by Donald Bowie Page A

are worse things than wearing your overcoat over your shoulders,” Melanie said. “If there wasn’t a little glamour in the nighttime nobody would come out after dark at all.”
    “We probably would,” Mike said. “Ah, the lure of the bright lights. Tell me, Mel, do you really want to be famous? Wait, don’t answer that question until I get another drink.”
    Mike caught the bartender’s eye and got his drink. “Well?” he said.
    “Yes,” she replied primly.
    Mike blinked at her.
    “I was just picturing myself arriving at the Academy Awards,” Melanie said. “In a limousine, with Warren Beatty.”
    “Fat chance,” Mike said.
    “Fat chance, skinny chance. Who knows?” Melanie replied. “If I have some luck, I won’t worry about whether or not it has a weight problem. The way I see it is, the world is made up of the haves and the have-nots, and what the have-nots most often haven’t got is imagination. You’re never going to get where you can’t see yourself being.”
    Noticing Melanie, a nearby customer said to his friend, “Is that a drag queen?”
    “Of course,” said the friend. “An actual woman could never look that real. ”

14
    Paula was behind in her work, so three weeks before finals she decided to go home to Queens for a long weekend in order to get caught up. The big advantage of going home to study rather than for a vacation was that when she was there to work, her mother scrupulously refrained from hocking her about things, lest her grades should suffer. As it happened, Jonathan Bernstein, the little male ingenue who hadn’t wanted to play the Fool in Lear, was going home for the weekend too, and his family’s house was only a few miles from where Paula’s parents lived. So she was able to get a ride with him.
    Jonathan’s car was a brand-new Chevrolet Corvette. It was like his roommate’s car, only it was a different color. Jonathan’s roommate was a rich southerner, cultivated in his decadence, and living according to his whims. His name was Hooker Hamilton. Since he was given to velvet sports jackets and pomaded hair reminiscent of a Beardsley print, Hooker’s sudden appearance in September in a sports car associated with American machismo—“Route 66” and all—created a stir. The stir almost became a row when, in October, Jonathan’s parents, not about to be outdone, presented their son with a Corvette of his own. Jonathan was a JAP as well as an ingenue.
    David had to explain to Melanie and Paula why the fraternity crowd was so outraged by two faggots tooling around the campus in Corvettes. He said that they thought of it as a terrible social injustice, mitigated only by the fact that both cars had automatic transmissions instead of four speeds, which rendered them, as true performance machines, almost—but not quite—impotent.
    Melanie and Paula had laughed until their sides ached.
    Now Paula was going to get to ride in Jonathan’s Corvette all the way to New York, and the prospect amused her. She liked Jonathan and his roommate. They were not lovers, and they lived together rather like two ladies in an English seaside resort. They were dilettantes and aesthetes, making spur-of-the-moment transatlantic telephone calls to friends spending their junior year abroad, and quibbling with salesmen at Brooks Brothers over whether or not their trousers should have cuffs.
    While Jonathan’s parents were well enough off, Hooker’s parents were startlingly rich. They had an estate in Albemarle County, Virginia, that had its own air strip, and Hooker had simply flown his whole life-style up to Boston with him, right down to his embroidered opera slippers.
    It was partly this, their cavalier way of dismissing out of hand all of life’s burdens and inconveniences, that made the two roommates charming. Though jaded, they were genuinely free spirits, and Paula liked to associate with them, because the idea of being absolutely free to do whatever you wanted with your life