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“I kneel into a dream where I am good & loved. I am good. I am loved. My hands have made some good mistakes. They can always make better ones.”
— Natalie Wee, ‘Least of All’
*
Midge walks down the busy corridor, its crappy fluorescent lighting casting stark shadows around the women running around, feathers and sequins trailing behind them, only to see Lenny Bruce leaning against the half-open backdoor with a cigarette in his hand.
“There she is, the marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Great job on that bit about male strip clubs, really got me thinking,” he greets her, tapping his finger on his temple and then right at her.
“You are a terrible, terrible person,” she retorts, nicking the cigarette from his hand and pressing it between her lips. “I’m going to be finding wrappers in my hair for the entirety of next week.”
“You did good.”
“And you’re enjoying this way too much.”
“No, I mean it, it’s not easy to hold a man’s attention in a strip club while fully clothed.” He shrugs, and asks for the cigarette back with an outstretched hand.
“Yeah, well, the trick is to imagine I’m naked.” Lenny’s mouth curls up at that and his eyes waver down only to her collarbone before springing back up. She feels the invisible trail of his gaze like a burning flame on her skin and faces the street for a breath.
“Now, now, Midge, don’t go giving me ideas like that. The rabbi warned me about this, he said, ‘Leonard, beware of the yetzer hara, something, something,’— I forget the details, you know, it was a long time ago. I’m quite a decent man with an honest reputation around these parts of town and I will not have you soiling my good name by tempting me.”
Rosie the Riveter walks by the two of them just then, red bandana hanging limply around her neck which she cranes coyly in their direction as she singsongs, “Hi, Lenny.” In one swoop, completely destroying his poorly constructed defence of himself with precision timing. He raises a hand to wave to her retreating form, covering half his face in a display of false shame that Midge knows is just to get a smile out of her.
“Oy vey,” she exhales with a grin.
Lenny Bruce keeps showing up when she least expects him, strikingly casual as he fills every room with electricity, and knocking her off kilter just enough so that when she gets back up, she feels five feet taller. It’s the way he smiles at her, she thinks. Like he’s fucking glad she’s doing nothing but standing there in front of him.
Maybe she understands that, too. Something in her always lights up at the sight of him.
“Are you done for the night?” he asks.
She doesn’t want to look him straight in the eyes in case he’s still got that look on him, so she goes for staring at the cigarette that’s crookedly dangling from his mouth. It’s really the worst idea she’s had since shoving her ivory skirt out of the window of that cab.
“Why? Have you got some more things in your pockets you want to throw at me? Because, let me tell you, if you’re about to pull something out of there that’s going to leave a stain, I will not be held responsible for what I’ll do to you.” She doesn’t mean it to come out sounding the way it does, her voice lilting a little, the threat dissolving into a fondness she doesn’t want to name.
He sticks a hand in his pants pocket and it comes back empty. “Fresh out of ink it seems. How about I buy you a drink instead?”
Despite the fact that Midge keeps running headfirst into stupid decisions she makes for herself, and keeps having to set everything upright methodically over and over again once the woman-made storm has passed, she says, “Sure.”
-/-
“Did you really not know I was working tonight?”
“I’d heard you were seen around the club, I just figured, ya know,” he raises his eyebrows in indication of where his thoughts are heading. His thoughts are always heading there when she holds eye contact with him the way she does. Her eyes do this fucking thing under the moonlight that he hasn’t quite found a name for yet, but it makes his chest feel like it’s gonna fucking explode.
“Ah, so you came to see me take all my clothes off,” she replies.
“You’ve done it before, haven’t you?”
“Every single day since I was old enough to unzip my own dresses.”
“Well, isn’t that somethin’.”
He didn’t really come to see her strip, but it makes her smile, the way they play this game. Back and forth, setup, punchline, a burst of laughter when one of them catches the other off guard. When they aren’t playing this game, it gets serious. He has nothing against serious, but she’s already turned him down before, and he’s only got so much self-pity for each hour of the day.
But if Lenny’s being serious, he came to see her. He’d missed her. Once the news about Shy and his tour and a woman being left behind on the tarmac with her belongings eventually got to him, he found himself trying to get back to the city as soon as possible.
They had decided to walk because he knew a bar close by and if he’s honest, he just likes the way they gravitate towards each other when they’re next to each other. He’s a fucking shmuck but she smells clean and flowery and the edges of her dress make a swishing sound when the wind blows, and he could live in all that forever if he was allowed to.
He doesn’t mean anything by it when he says, “So this is what you do now.”
“Well, no, this is what I do for now. I’m not really interested in working for people or with people that have a problem with what I say and how I say it.”
“No comic ever is,” he agrees.
“And I keep finding myself back in the same place again and again and obviously, that means I’m doing something wrong, right?”
“Right.”
“No, wrong,” she corrects.
“No, I’m saying you’re right.”
“Oh, then yeah, right.” She blinks to get back on track, in and out of conversation in a millisecond as he’s used to her doing. “Is it just that everyone’s gotten too sensitive? That definitely can’t be it because I hear the things the men say up on the stage at Bobby’s, which, by the way, aren’t even funny things to say. They aren’t even original, for fuck’s sake. You know who’s original and fucking funny? Me. And I get thrown out on the street on my ass and end up in jail because some dick decided he couldn’t have a woman on stage two nights in a row.”
“Be careful or your criminal record is gonna get longer than mine.”
“It’s just because I’m a woman. No one ever looks at you funny when you say the obscene things you say.”
“I have been arrested many times,” he reminds her, the thought a little tiring to even think. “But you’re right, the world’s a fucked up place that lets assholes fuck it up more, and we’re just supposed to keep our mouths shut.” Should he be egging her on like this? He doesn’t know, but he likes hearing her talk. And she’s not wrong, but it’s mostly the first thing. “So, what, you’re gonna keep opening for Miss Cleopatra over there just because no one’s censoring you?”
“You don’t think I should,” she says, indignant, and stops in the middle of the sidewalk in punctuation. “Susie didn’t think I should either.”
“I’m not saying that. I think you were fantastic up there. I’ve played in plenty of strip clubs in my day, and I loved every bit of it.”
“But you think I should be doing something else.”
“You’ll do something else when it’s time,” he reassures her. It doesn’t seem to reassure her.
“I want to be great, Lenny. One of the greats. I don’t want to open for hacks or fight some middle aged balding man for his spot at a club or get kicked off someone else’s tour because I’m running my mouth. It’s my job to run my mouth. People like it when I run my mouth. I get up there and make people listen to me and they laugh . I want to be able to say what I’m thinking without tying it up in a pretty little bow, because that’s when it’s great. I can’t be anything if I’m not great.”
He lets that sit in between them for a second. He rarely ever sees her all jumbled up in herself like this; still, even now she’s determined, a hard set to her jaw. Let it be known that Miriam Maisel was never one to stay down.
It’s not cold, far from it, but he watches her cross her arms over her chest and he sighs. He slips his buttons deftly out of the holes they’re in, and tells her, “You will be great. Some even say you already are.” Lenny places his jacket over her shoulders and pulls it to join the fabric in the middle, fingers grazing her skin. “Some say you’re the best thing since Lenny Bruce.”
Her mouth ticks up just a little at that, eyes softening. Midge brings her hands up over his and squeezes once. “Those guys are idiots.”
“So are the ones that kicked you off the tour.” His thumb glides down the side of her neck, unable to help himself. “You’ll do it all, Upper West Side. Your very own tour, the aisles will be packed, and I’ll show up in every other city — can’t be blowing off all my money on you, mind you — and yell the most indecent things you’ve ever heard from the front seat, from right where you can see me.”
“Everything is Bellmore,” she parrots.
“And don’t you forget it.” He thinks for a second, adds, “No comic ever got anywhere by being agreeable. Leave the virtue for the Synagogue and tell every uptight asshole to do the same.”
Midge gives him that smile again, the one that makes her whole face tender. It makes him tender. She drops her hands from his and he shoves his own in his pockets, unwilling to let the remnants of her touch wear off.
“What about you?” she asks when they start walking again, catching him a little off guard.
“I left my virtue a long time ago,” he jokes.
“What are you doing back in the city?”
“Oh, you know, spreading my cynicism like a door-to-door salesman. Hey, you ever heard the one about the waiter that walks up to a table of Jewish women?” Midge huffs out a laugh and Lenny relents, her expression pulling the truth out of him. “Among other things, I wanted to see you.”
“It’s good to see you. It always is,” she adds.
He bows his head in acknowledgment, and agreement.
“What are the other things?”
“Some gigs here and there.”
“Here, there, where?” She’s never been one to let him off easy.
“New York, North Beach, some clubs.” He adds casually, “Carnegie.”
Midge stops him again with a hand on his arm. “Carnegie? The Carnegie Hall? Shit. That’s— wow. That's amazing.” The light in her eyes is genuine, he notes. She’s still standing outside his play dates; it spreads this humming warmth inside of him. “When is it? I’ll take a night off, I’ll buy a ticket. I’ll bring erasers.”
Lenny’s grin is uncontrollable. “There’ll be a ticket waiting for you at the door. Do you need an extra or…?”
“Nope, just me. Seriously, Lenny, this is a huge deal.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“So things are good?” she asks earnestly.
Things aren’t the best for him, too many lawyers and not enough cash in hand. Too little sleep and the crushing weight of failing pressing down on him most days. But Midge smiles at him and he can’t find it in himself to complain. Her hand is still on his arm and he pulls it in to settle it against the crook of his elbow. “Come on,” he smiles, “we’re almost there.”
-/-
The bar is what she’d expected in an area like this, with its sticky floors and very loud patrons. There’s a table full of men somewhere behind her that keep laughing, and not one of them is saying a single thing in between that laughter; they stop and just start up again. They’d definitely be an easy crowd to perform for. She could get up on the table right now and she’d kill without even having opened her mouth.
But she’s all tapped out for the night, and lets herself relax her shoulders in a rare moment of calm.
Lenny orders her a gin martini because he remembers that she likes to eat the olives after, and himself a whiskey. The soft shadows glide over his face in a way that makes her want to trace the edges of it, just to see which parts of it are a trick of light. He’d let her, too. The way he looks at her sometimes, it seems like he’s even asking for it.
But she can’t fuck this up, and he can’t stay. Which is fucking hilarious because he’s one of the most stable things she’s known for the last two years.
In her daydreams, she gets as far as sleeping with him, but then it fogs up and gets blurry no matter how much she squints. She wonders just how far he gets. How far they could get in a perfect world. He’s talking about how the crowd in Florida was delightfully prurient when the drinks arrive.
Catching him mid-sip, she says, “Let’s play a game.”
He swallows, asks, “Isn’t that what we’re doing?”
“What?”
“Nevermind, continue. What kind of game?”
She makes a mental note to ask him about that later but lets it slide for now. “The kind where we pretend.”
“To be, what? Airplanes? That’s what kids do or something, right?”
“That’s what you think kids do?”
“They stick their arms out and pretend they can fly, I don’t know, you’re the one that has kids.”
“Ethan used to think he was a chair but that lasted one summer and was, frankly, quite disturbing because I don’t think he was pretending. I think he actually thought he was physically a chair. But, no, not airplanes. Pretend—,” she reaches out to cover his hand on his glass and lifts it to take a sip of the whiskey, watching him over the rim. When she sets the glass back down, she doesn’t move her hand.
Lenny flexes his fingers under her touch. “And does this game end tonight?”
She takes a second, says, “I haven’t decided yet.”
“Right, right.”
“So when we get out of this bar, we’ll go home,” she says simply.
“Your apartment?” he asks carefully.
“Our apartment.”
“Where you live with your parents and children.”
“And Zelda.”
“Can’t forget Zelda.”
“And Susie right now.”
“Did she lose her place?”
“No, she can’t go back because someone died in her apartment.”
“This is New York, someone’s died in every apartment.”
“It’s different,” she dismisses. “Anyway, yes, unless you have a different idea.”
He lifts her hand up and twines their fingers together so he can drink with his other hand. From the pads of his fingers, she can feel his heartbeat and she’s suddenly glad she isn't wearing her gloves today.
“We could get a different apartment. One that isn’t occupied by the entire Weissman family tree, and Susie. Not on the Upper West Side, it’s far too clean for me. Or we could stay in hotels.”
“Hotels aren’t a place to live, they’re a place to rest your head when you’re doing a million shows a day and need to be in a different city the next day,” she reasons.
“We could go on tour together,” he suggests. His free hand comes up to show her an imaginary marquee, “Side-by-side acts, Maisel and Bruce. We should even play a strip club or two. We alternate the order we go on every night, and at the end of every show, we leave together.”
She grins at the image of Susie trying to wrangle them both, a thousand curses flying out of her mouth at rapid speed.
“But what happens when we’re not on tour?”
Lenny tilts his head at her, a smile beginning to pull up at the edges of his mouth. This in-between expression of his is her favourite, the way his eyes begin to light up in a slow dim and then hit her in full force. Midge has always felt a rush of pride in making people laugh — it feeds her ego, it gives her a sense of purpose, makes her feel like she’s got a place in the world with a perfectly well-timed quip. It’s who she is, who she’s always been. He’s looking at her like he always does and she thinks she could spend forever just trying to make Lenny Bruce smile. No over-the-top hyperbole about the misfortunes of her life. No heavy handed crude jokes. Would that be what it would be like to be with him every single day?
“When we’re not on tour, I’d make you breakfast, and you’d argue with me about how my weed smelling jackets are too close to your fancy dresses because you don’t have enough closet space, and we’d kiss and make up by dinnertime.”
She tilts her nose down and dramatically sniffs at his suit jacket. “Yep, smells like weed. Guess I’m gonna have to figure out the best way to get that out. Maybe vinegar, or was it baking soda? Besides, I’d leave my clothes in the big apartment.”
“Oh, so now we have two? And you run back and forth between them in a bathrobe when you need to get dressed?”
“Maybe I do my closets in rotation, move my clothes around every few weeks.” She bites down on an olive and watches his eyes snag on her lips. Midge scoots just a little closer to him on her stool so her knees touch his thigh.
“What an interesting way to live.”
“Says the man that’s always running around from one place to the next.”
“I’m only ever doing that to make sure I get to come back here and sit next to you.” There’s a touch of sincerity on his face that feels like too much as he says it and Midge swallows, thinks of a hundred different nights where she wears his jacket over her shoulders but doesn’t give it back to him. Where, instead, she hangs it up, wrinkle-free and ready to be cleaned, before she falls asleep beside him.
“Remind me again how you proposed to me,” she segues instead. Like it’s any fucking better.
“Oh, I didn’t. I’m not exactly marriage material, as my ex-wife will tell you. And I hardly think that I’d be an appropriate suitor in the eyes of your parents.” His thumb floats over her knuckles in gentle movements. She can tell that he’s enjoying this. So is she, if she’s being honest.
“My mother definitely has an aneurysm every time I bring up your name then,” Midge smiles wickedly at the thought. “And don’t you remember when my father offered you large sums of money he definitely didn’t have to put on a suit and make an honest woman out of me.”
“Your father did not say honest woman.”
“You’re right. What he really said could get a man arrested.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened to him,” Lenny smirks.
“He likes you, though. You appeal to the part of him that once burned down a federal building,” she tells him. Goes on blurring the lines again and again as she skirts the truth.
“I don’t think I could say a single rude thing about him, since he did bail me out of jail and all.”
“And you’re telling me I didn’t mind not going wedding dress shopping?”
“Of course you did, sweetheart,” he smiles. This time instead of lifting the glass, he lifts his other hand that’s entangled with hers and presses her skin to his mouth softly. His lips move against her when he adds, “But we kissed and made up by dinnertime.”
He kisses her skin once more before resting their hands on his thigh.
To anyone around them, their game would look real. If she lets the fog build up and doesn’t squint, it’d look real to her too.
-/-
Lenny doesn’t want to go home.
It’s a stupid, childish thought but Midge looks too sweet, dripping with this kind of intensity that makes him want to move closer and closer to her. Home isn’t really home anyway, it’s a room on 44th where the furniture is mismatched and there’s a single crappy painting of the fucking ocean above the bed.
Here, he exists with her in a way that is foreign to him. Comfortable. Like every terrible thought that rattles around in his brain has suddenly quieted.
It can’t be just because of her, he thinks. Surely not. But when he yanks at his tie to loosen it, she gingerly fixes his collar, pulling and folding and skimming a hand down his chest before ordering another drink. And he can think of absolutely nothing else.
There’s that thought again. He doesn’t need to be funny, or scathing, or anything at all; just himself. And that’s—
He doesn’t know what it is. Good, bad, somewhere in the middle. Lenny decides that, in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t fucking matter at all.
He’s good at make-believe, weaves it into his sets all the time. He’ll stay here with her in this delusion they’re crafting until the seconds tick by and it stops, disappearing without a trace.
“Did you like my set today?” Midge asks, like always.
“Yes, dear, we’ve had this conversation already.”
“No, you said you liked one bit in my set, not the whole set.”
Lenny has half a mind to just lean forward and kiss her when she’s being like this. He doesn’t know the rules but he won’t toe the line like that, so he purses his lips. “I loved all of it.”
“I didn’t think I’d be able to come back from fucking up the tour. It seems silly now, I guess, but nothing made sense then. It was like when Joel told me he was fucking his secretary, that’s exactly how I felt when that plane took off, but this time it was like the hole got bigger and bigger. Like I wanted to jump out of my own skin to make it stop.”
She slips her fingers out of his, much to his dismay, but then one by one lines them up against his. Both their palms open, like she’s measuring the two.
“I don’t ever want to feel like that again,” she adds with a furrowed brow, watching their hands.
“I hate to break it to you, but you will. It’s just show business.”
“Anyone ever tell you you’re shit at giving pep talks?”
“Hey, I’m not gonna lie to you, you know that. Besides, you’ve already been through it now.”
“That doesn’t mean I want to keep going through it,” she huffs.
He sighs, interlaces their fingers again because he misses the warmth. “No one does. But see, there’s this woman who wears these classy dresses and swears like it’s nobody’s business — a total knockout if you ask me. She got on stage one night and bombed, so what did she do? She went home and wrote more jokes. Better jokes. Fixed the holes in her routine. She got on a damn live telethon and did this bit where she ran around and answered phones that I still think about every now and then. After that, she goes and pisses off the wrong people, gets fucking blackballed. Not a single person would book her. Next thing you know, she gets herself signed onto a tour with the star of the decade. And when that blows up, what does she do?”
He raised his eyebrows and gestures at her.
“She gets a job working at a strip club?”
“Knowing you, you’re gonna be running that place in a week. Two, tops.”
“Boise would love that,” she scoffs.
“At least the curtain will actually come down without a hitch.”
“Now you’re just asking for miracles.”
“Blame my mother,” he shrugs.
“Insufferable,” she mutters fondly.
“Blame my mother.”
She rests an elbow on the bar and he mirrors it. He’s itching for a smoke but can’t bear to break the spell by moving. Her mouth is hitched up in one corner, not like she’s getting geared up to tell a joke, but like she’s reminiscing. Lenny gets it, he’s living this moment but he misses it already.
“I didn’t do any of that alone,” Midge says. “Susie helped. You helped.”
“So did you,” he offers, meaning it with every part of him.
For all his morbid soul-searching and its concluding realisation that all he’ll ever be is alone, Midge makes him feel less so. He had sworn to himself that he was content in his loneliness, the bitch of a thing, but that was before Midge started popping up, foul-mouthed and stunning and stealing the air from his chest. Scooping him up with her delicate hands when he feels like he’s drowning. He’s not sure what he’s supposed to do with that; she’s a hell of a woman but she’s not his. She could never belong to anybody.
There is no what will be, only what is. Midge is one of the greats. He is exhausted living in his own skin. She is sensational. He cannot get enough of her. They are to each other what they will always be.
Maybe it’s something playing over his face that makes Midge reach out and cup his cheek slowly, deliberately. Lenny leans into it easily and without a thought. It’s always easier around her, anyway.
Midge moves closer and presses a lingering kiss against the corner of his mouth. He breathes her in, sugar coated flowers and cigarette smoke, the place where her lips touched his buzzing. She stays there, resting her forehead against his.
“You’re one of my dearest friends, Lenny Bruce,” Midge practically whispers.
He rests his hand against the back of her neck, and in the minimal space between their open mouths just before he kisses her, says, “Likewise, Mrs. Maisel.”
-/-
In her defence, she doesn’t give him his jacket back because he doesn’t ask for it. She also doesn’t remember, too busy kissing him once, twice, thrice, before he nudges her into the cab with a saccharine smile and a shake of his head.
She’d just wanted to know what it would feel like, that’s why she’d done it. She’s rarely ever denied herself anything; all the damage and debris in her wake is proof of that. She’s always been careful with him, though — it’s always felt delicate. But there was something dancing in his eyes that was innately tortured and full of yearning, and she had just wanted to take it all away from him, the way he’d done for her so many times.
She’d thought to herself: Fuck it. And Lenny had kissed her back, really kissed her, and then she couldn’t find it in herself to stop.
“Call me?” she requests through the window.
“I threw all my change on you when you were up there,” he reasons with a shrug.
“That hurt, by the way.”
Lenny leans down and kisses her cheek as if in apology, but he’s still holding on to that smile full of mischief. He’s carrying himself in the same casual way he always does, and gives her a wave as the cab drives off.
She falls asleep with her eyes on the jacket, draped neatly on the back of her chair. In the morning, her hair still smells faintly of weed and sandalwood; things she knows she’ll never stop associating with Lenny.
It’s too early and she’s restless. Only Zelda is awake and about when she wanders into the kitchen.
“Good morning, Ms. Miriam, I will make some coffee. This came for you,” Zelda informs her brightly, nodding to the table.
Midge has already been eyeing the flowers, of course. They take up too much space to miss. She knows she only has a matter of minutes to enjoy it for herself before her parents appear in the doorway, can practically hear their reactions — Momma gasping and demanding, Papa tired and not above sticking his fingers in his ears to ignore the situation altogether.
The flowers are beaming up at her, filling the space with bright colours and a gorgeous smell. She feels his kiss as she stands there in her kitchen, bright and zipping through her. She has the striking thought to never put a stop to whatever it is between them that she initiated yesterday and leans into it.
Midge plucks the card out from between the flowers.
It reads: I found some change. Let’s kiss and make up for dinnertime?