Free Legs by William Kennedy

sixty-four. Jack was coming to respect my eye at least
as much as he respected my legal acuity.
    From bowling we went to miniature golf, where we
played eighteen holes. Some holes you climbed stairs to and putted
downhill. Kiki went first at one of those, and when you stood to the
rear of her, as Jack and I did—Fogarty and The Goose were consuming
soda pop elsewhere—you had total visibility of the girl's
apparatus. She wore rolled silk stockings with frilly black garters
about five inches above the knee, the sheerest pair of lace panties
I'd theretofore seen, and areas of the most interesting flesh likely
to be found on any mountain anywhere, and I also include the valleys.
    I see her there yet. I see her also crossing and
uncrossing her silkiness, hinting at secret reaches, dark arenas of
mystery difficult to reach, full of jewels of improbable value, full
of the promise of tawdriness, of illicitness, of furtiveness, of
wickedness, with possibly blue rouge on the nipples, and arcane
exotica revealed when she slips down the elastic waistband of those
sheerest of sheers. They infected my imagination, those dark, those
sheer, those elasticized arenas of that gorgeous girl's life.
    I did not know that the
infection would be prophetic of Kiki, prophetic of revelations of
flesh, prophetic of panties. Nor did I know that this afternoon, with
its sprinkles of rain interrupting our sport, would be the
inspiration for Jack to initiate his organized shakedown of hot dog
stands and miniature golf courses all over Greene and Ulster
counties.
    * * *
    Kiki showed me a clipping once with a coincidence
that made her believe in destiny. It's was an item out of Winchell,
which said, "Dot and Dash is a mustache. Yaffie is an arrest.
Long cut short is a sawed-off shotgun. White is pure alcohol. Simple
Simon is a diamond .... " It appeared the day before Kiki met
Jack at a nightclub party, and she was just about to go into
rehearsal for a new musical, Simple Simon.
    I look back to those early
days and see Kiki developing in the role of woman as sprite, woman as
goddess, woman as imp. Her beauty and her radiance beyond beauty were
charms she used on Jack, but used with such indifference that they
became subtle, perhaps even secret, weapons. I cite the dance floor
episode at the Top o' the Mountain House as as example, for she had
small interest in whether it was Jack who danced with her or not. Her
need was to exult in her profession, which had not been chosen
casually, which reflected a self dancing alone beneath all the
glitter of her Broadway life. "I must practice my steps,"
she said numerous times in my presence, and then with a small radio
Jack had given her she would find suitable music and, oblivious of
others, go into her dance, a tippy-tap-toe routine of cosmic
simplicity. She was not a good dancer, just a dancer, just a chorus
girl. This is not a pejorative reduction, for it is all but
impossible for anyone to be as good a chorus girl as Kiki proved to
be, proved it not only on stage—Ziegfeld said she was the purest
example of sexual nonchalance he'd ever seen—but also in her
photogenicity, her inability to utter a complex sentence, her candor
with newspapermen, her willingness to trivialize, monumentalize,
exalt, and exploit her love for Jack by selling her memoirs to the
tabloids—twice—and herself to a burlesque circuit for the
fulfillable professional years of her beauty and the tenacious years
of Jack's public name. More abstractly she personified her calling in
her walk, in her breathing, in the toss of her head, in her
simultaneous eagerness and reluctance to please a lover, in her
willingness to court wickedness without approving of it, and in her
willingness to conform to the hallowed twentieth-century chorus-girl
stereotype that Ziegfeld. George White, Nils T. Granlund, the
Minskys, and so many more men, whose business was flesh, had
incarnated, and which Walter Winchell, Ed Sullivan, Odd McIntyre,
Damon Runyon,