Attack of the Theater People by Marc Acito

got?”
    “What’s wrong with my suit?”
    “Nothing, if you’re headlining in Vegas.”
    Maybe I shouldn’t have rolled up the sleeves.
    “Tomorrow morning take yourself to Brooks Brothers,” he says. “I’ll arrange for you to put it on my account.”
    The conversation proceeds amiably from there, particularly since this is the second time in less than a week someone has bought me a new suit. Our food arrives and, with it, a bottle of wine, and soon I’ve banished whatever worries I have that Chad knows anything about my past dealings with embezzlement, money laundering, identity theft, fraud, forgery, and (just a little) prostitution. He tells me about his old Kentucky home, where his family raises racehorses, and about going to business school at Stanford, but I just luxuriate in his low bedroom voice, not to mention the ambrosial wine and the sophisticated surroundings. The men’s room even has those thick, napkin-like towels embossed with the Hotel Carlyle’s crest.
    What a week it’s been. First, to be the Life of the Party at a party written up in the
New York Times
,
Women’s Wear Daily
, and the
New York Post
. None of them mentioned me but I’m thrilled just to have been at an event that made Page Six, right next to a photo of Andy Warhol at a gallery opening with James Freeman Foster, the Brown University junior who’s the talk of the town with his debut novel,
Coke Is It.
And now, at last, an adventure! It may not be hopping a freight train or working on a fishing boat, but, still, it’s an adventure. Corporate espionage. Clandestine meetings. Maybe even a secret romance. Of course, I don’t know whether Chad is gay or not, but he did suggest we see Bobby Short. And is very well groomed.
    Just when I think the night can’t get any better, the lights dim and a cherubic man with a cannonball head and skin the color of cognac bounces into the room and springs onto the platform where a grand piano sits gleaming in the spotlights. Bobby Short smiles, his grin as white and wide as the piano keys, and he flings out his arms as if he were trying to give every one of us a hug. He is tastefully turned out in a tuxedo, yet has an eager, boyish quality to him, like the child performer he was in the 1930s. He hops onto the piano bench, plays a flourishing arpeggio, and begins to sing:
    The man who only lives for making money
    Lives a life that isn’t necessarily sunny…
    I don’t recognize the song, but am immediately struck by his husky voice, which has a tremulous, fluttering vibrato, the way you’d imagine a bird’s wings would sound if you could hear them. It’s a voice that invites you to inhabit the song with him, and his nimble, rolling style on the piano doesn’t so much accompany the lyrics as converse with them.
    When he reaches the chorus, I finally recognize the tune. It’s the Gershwins’ “Nice Work If You Can Get It.”
    I take it as a sign.

Eleven
    I’m roused, as usual, by the sound of construction, my alarm clock a wrecking ball. This after repeated wake-up calls from New York’s dedicated Department of Things that Go Bump in the Night, which apparently uses my street to crash-test crosstown buses. Even at the building’s quietest, I can still hear the scuttle of roaches and mice in my apartment walls, fighting for turf like the Jets and the Sharks. No wonder New York’s the City that Never Sleeps. Still, I feel invigorated because I’m off to Brooks Brothers. That is, after playing the following Neil Simon scene with Natie:
     
    NATIE: So how’d it go?
    EDWARD: How’d what go?
    NATIE: Your meeting. I thought you said this guy had a job for you.
    EDWARD: Oh, yeah. He wanted to talk to me about the internship program at Thorpe, Sharpton, and Riley.
    NATIE: You mean Sharp, Thornton, and Wiley.
    EDWARD: Right.
    NATIE: The internship program? To be a stockbroker?
    EDWARD: Yup.
    Natie goes to the window and looks outside.
    EDWARD: What are you doing?
    NATIE: Just checkin’ to