Payback

by Mary Gordon

  So who would she be for the audience today? She had made her name by urging people to give up the stance of victim, to replace it with vengeance seeker, justice seeker. But there had to be a moment in which the audience felt sorry for the contestant—the moment when they inhabited the place, that she, Quin Archer, would lead them out of. So would she have to allow that…allow that transitional moment in which her audience saw her as a victim? If not, there would be no pleasure for them in seeing Agnes Vaughan brought to her knees.

  So she would paint herself a victim, but a glamorous one. A victim of the 1960s, which her audience saw as the bad time and yet were not impervious to its glamour.

  There was nothing glamorous about those years. So many of them. Eight. April of 1972 to December of 1980. Wasted years. Sordid. Squalid, but in a limp, mousy way.

  * * *

  —

  She had the thousand dollars, which she kept in a roll in the tip of her boot, all too aware of thieves that were everywhere in New York. Every night she fingered the dollars, damp from the sweat of her feet, spread them overnight till they were dry in the morning. And every week, she paid her hotel bill, the cheapest she had been able to find near Penn Station, a weekly rate of $200. She had only a thousand. After three weeks, she would have to do something.

  What had she done those three weeks, walked and walked, aimlessly looking for something, anything, fighting the urge to call Miss Vaughan and say, Come and get me, I need you, it’s not too late. Her parents were in Chile, she didn’t even know how to get hold of them, and she would rather die than ask Elsie and Hans for help. This was when she remembered the saving power of contempt. She remembered something her father put on his face when he cut himself shaving. Styptic, it was called. Its function was to dry the blood. A styptic pencil. He touched it to the bleeding cut, and it was immediately dried. She had found it magic—sometimes her father could be kind, letting her sit with him while he shaved some mornings—and contempt was her styptic pencil drying the wound made by longing, by belief that someone would be there to help, and the disappointment when there was not.

  And so, walking up and down, buying a few outfits—replacing the boots with sandals as the summer approached, a pair of jeans, an Indian print skirt, a leotard, a peasant blouse…her pride and her contempt were the styptic that dried out her desire to cry out for help. And with the dryness: pride. I have done this. I am entirely on my own. I need no one.

  Someone had left a copy of The Village Voice in the hotel lobby. She picked it up and took it to her room, intuiting somehow that this was the place to go for things that would help her make a new life.

  She bypassed stories about demonstrations, about experimental films, tried to read someone named Jill Johnston and then Jonas Mekas and then with a start of excitement realized that what she really needed was the Classified section: she needed to find a place to live; soon she’d be running out of money.

  She asked the desk clerk for change for five dollars; grudgingly he gave her a fistful of coins but said he couldn’t keep doing that, she’d have to go to the bank sometime. She made her way to the phone booth in the lobby, which stank vaguely of sweat and what she hoped wasn’t urine.

  She called the number on the first ad she saw: “Female seeking female. Share spacious apartment. Washington Heights. River view.”

  Washington Heights. She had no idea where that was. But if she had a river view, that would be something to brag about when it was time to brag…and she knew that someday that time would come.

  She had refused to admit to herself that she was lonely, that she wanted company, but the girl on the other phone, Debbie Marshall she said her name was, sounded so enthusiastic, “Hey, if you’re not busy, come right up. I think you’ll really like it.”

  She told herself afterward that she should have called more than one person, answered more than one ad, but it seemed the right thing at the time to seize the opportunity. She took the subway uptown to 157th Street, and walked toward the river.

  Debbie Marshall. The thought of her makes Quin sick. The smell of patchouli. The smell of cat piss. Kitty litter under your feet. The loose scarves, skirts, blouses, the hanging necklaces. To hide the fat, the disgusting fat. Calling herself the earth mother when she was nothing but a pig. Her middle-of-the-night gorges on ice cream, on cookie dough that came in tubes that she ate raw, on butter that she mixed with sugar when there was nothing else. Giggling when she was found like a naughty child…but she was just a disgusting pig. And Heidi had been taken in for a while. “I’m just an earth mother…a mother hen, and I think…well, you’re like my little sister, my little chick.”

  There’s a view of the river.

  I can help you with furniture.

  Can you move right in?

  Oh, this will be fun. You can sleep on the couch tonight and tomorrow we’ll go to Goodwill.

  The next day, a mattress on the floor, a table, a lamp, blankets that smelled of mothballs…sheets they bought in the Spanish-speaking stores on Broadway…cheap, but new.

  Debbie buys flowers for Heidi’s new room. Contributes a vase from some cabinet. Perhaps her grandparents’.

  Treats her to meals: till you get on your feet.

  I’m a film student.

  But she never goes to classes, or only if there’s absolutely no reason not to go. The commute to NYU is long; so if the weather isn’t good or if she has a headache or she’s just not into it…she never seems to go.

  An endless stream of “incompletes.”

  Years, thousands of dollars.

  People let her get away with so much. Why? Because she made herself so weak, presented herself as almost boneless…had no malice…wouldn’t hurt a fly.

  Disgusting.

  The disgusting cat.

  The filthy kitty litter.

  Would you mind just dealing with that…it’s just…it’s hard for me. I have asthma.

  So Heidi becomes the cleaner of cat shit, and when the cat sprays (I can’t stand to have him neutered…it just seems so unnatural), she is the one who sprays and sprays ammonia, and then Debbie takes her in her arms, the floppy breasts, Oh, you’re the best…my little sister…I’ll take you out for a really good meal.

  Chinese food. Not expensive. But better than what Heidi can provide herself. There is a view of the river. She tells herself that’s why she was taken in, because she did have that to look at: the river, gray in all seasons, but occasionally shining like a strip of metal.

  Do you smoke?

  Not really.

  Debbie had an endless supply of marijuana, so there were days spent in a haze of reclining, eating, watching television test patterns, giggling…she had money. Her parents paid the rent; it had been her grandparents’ apartment, and the family had held on to the lease. Rent controlled. Which is why she could charge Heidi only sixty dollars a month.

  Heidi needs a job and takes the first one she sees, in the dry cleaner on 158th Street.

  Two old people, stunted like midgets, the Levensons. Benjamin and Hortense. The husband repairs things…he is meticulous and short tempered; he will spend what seems to Heidi an absurd amount of time getting spots out of a tie, a suit jacket, with what is called “white spirit” but smells like poison. But the minute there is no work, he reads books on international socialism. The wife constantly complains about being overheated. She pins the slips with the customers’ information onto the garments, places them in a bin, and waits for the person from the central dry cleaner, who arrives every day: the high point of her day, she complains to them; some listen, some refuse to listen and simply bundle the clothes up, turning their backs on her without a pretense even of politeness. Every night it is one of Heidi’s jobs to go over the floor with a powerful magnet that picks up the pins. She rather enjoys this, it seems magical. Mrs. Levenson praises her, “Your penmanship is very neat. That�
��s very important. If names are illegible…we’re lost.”

  Heidi makes no attempt to ingratiate herself with the Levensons or with the customers. She exchanges only the necessary words, and refuses pleasantries. “You could be a little warmer with the customers,” Mrs. Levenson says, and Heidi says okay, she’ll try.

  Every week they pay her on time.

  On Friday nights and Saturday mornings they pay her to turn the lights on and off. To press the button on the electric kettle.

  They have no children.

  They say nothing about their past, but they were not born in America.

  She has no contempt for Mr. Levenson, but they are mute to each other, nodding, allowing each other’s existence with complete neutrality.

  She works there for two years. Saving her money…she doesn’t know for what.

  She cuts her hair short and dyes it blond so no one will be able to find her.

  But no one seems to be looking.

  * * *

  —

  Occasionally, Debbie lures her downtown to where “it’s happening.” Music, young people…parties in dark rooms with plentiful drugs. She goes because there is no reason not to and she doesn’t want to pay for pot, which she increasingly needs to get through her days.

  Sometimes Debbie brings a man home, and always the next morning she wants to talk endlessly about how wonderful it was, how she thinks it’s really going to lead to something, but it never does. She gets fatter and fatter.

  Heidi allows no one to touch her.

  Only once, she loses her temper with Debbie. She must have been really stoned, because she was trying to put more kitty litter in the box (instead of cleaning it, she just piled litter on top of the shit until Heidi gave in and cleaned it), she was probably trying to make coffee for one of the guys…and when Heidi woke up for work…walking over to the light switch that was above the kitchen sink…she stepped in a mixture of coffee grounds and kitty litter.

  She screamed.

  Debbie came out.

  “You can’t do this, you can’t do this, I can’t live like this,” Heidi said.

  “It’s my apartment…you can leave whenever you like. No one’s keeping you.”

  She closed the door. The cat meowed in front of the door; she let him in and shut the door.

  The cat. Named Cat. How she hated him; all his effluvia, his hair on every surface and always in the air, as fat as Debbie, who loved overfeeding him as she loved overfeeding herself…

  Heidi often fantasized about poisoning the cat.

  But Debbie would know it was her.

  And she had nowhere else to go.

  And then, suddenly Debbie decides she’s “into women,” and Roxanne enters their lives.

  * * *

  —

  Roxanne was a waitress at the Italian restaurant that Debbie occasionally treated Heidi to. Small, compact, quick moving…a slash of red on her lips—no one is wearing red lipstick in those days and so it seems original, and daring. She is expert at whisking plates away and making full plates appear: she seems like a magician. “You move like a cat,” Debbie says to her, and Heidi can see it: Roxanne has understood Debbie as a mark; Heidi sees that she notices that Debbie always pays. “Come late on a Wednesday or a Thursday, we can hang out afterward, I’ll bring you free drinks from the bar.”

  It happens three times; Heidi is bored by the talk, which is all a kind of sexual bragging; Roxanne has been in porn films…goes to visit her parents in New Jersey every weekend because they always put twenty dollars in her jeans pocket. “They haven’t got a fucking clue.” A brother in Vietnam. A brother cop. It’s why she likes both parts of being in porn films, she says, the pay easy money for the movies and her family thinking she’s a good girl working in a nice “family” restaurant. “We’re all Italian, so it’s like they think someone’s looking out for me instead of my giving blow jobs for a better station.”

  Heidi can see that Debbie is excited…but she doesn’t actually believe half of what Roxanne says.

  “What’s it like, being in a porn film?”

  “Actually, it’s kind of boring…everybody’s like pretending they’re just not there.”

  Roxanne invites Debbie to a “really cool place, a bar downtown.” She does not invite Heidi.

  And then Roxanne is there, living in Debbie’s room, cooking for the two of them, Heidi understands that they want her there, to watch. Roxanne usually walks around in her underwear; sometimes only her panties; she has perfect small breasts and Heidi is aroused, although she forbids the feeling when it comes.

  “How much do you make at that dry cleaner?” Roxanne asks when Heidi comes home from work, clearly exhausted and dispirited.

  Three bucks an hour.

  “Chicken feed, don’t be a patsy. I’ll get you a job at the restaurant. You’ll make more in tips in one night than you make a week working for those old misers.”

  “I’ll try it out.”

  “Have you ever given a blow job?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Believe me, you’d know. Come on, we’ll practice.”

  Roxanne takes a banana from a bowl on the sticky Formica counter. Every surface in the apartment is always sticky even though Heidi tries to keep the surfaces clean…somehow Debbie’s touch undoes all her work almost before it’s done.

  Roxanne sticks the banana in her mouth. “It’s important to keep your jaw slack, and to keep the dick forward so that you don’t gag. And remember: you don’t have to swallow. Just tell him you don’t swallow.”

  Heidi is sickened, yet fascinated. This is sex. This is sex with no moral tincture, no sense of attachment. Sex as a skill. Sex as a commodity: a job like any other, preferable because it’s quicker.

  Heidi quits her job at the dry cleaner. She had thought that the Levensons would have some sort of response, but they just seemed resigned.

  For a month, she works in Paisan, the Italian restaurant. Roxanne makes a joke of everything: introducing her to Joe the manager—“She knows the score”—to the other waitresses, much older than she, with thick pained-looking legs and tight dyed curls, probably not candidates for the preferential blow job. But no one ever asks her for one.

  But she’s not very good at any of it, and she hates doing something she’s not good at. She can’t make small talk with the customers, and Joe tells her if she wants good tips that’s what she needs to do. He tells her she’s going to have to stay later to help with cleanup in the beginning, which really disgusts her: the leftover food, fresh from someone’s mouth, the greasy pots, the stinking garbage. She regrets giving up her job with the Levensons, the tasks she was good at, writing people’s names in her careful script, picking up pins with the big magnet.

  She has never spent much money, so she decides she’ll find someplace else to live: the years of subservience to that fat pig are over.

  She looks in The Village Voice for someone wanting a single woman to share an apartment. 200 West Ninety-Third Street. Talia Clark. Frizzy hair desperately clenched to her head with clips and bobby pins; stocky legs, a skirt below her knees, loafers, no makeup. She works for a lawyer, though she tells Heidi she taught high school Spanish until she realized she hated every single kid. When Heidi laughs and says, “I hear you,” Talia offers her the room. She wants a month’s security. Heidi can give it to her with ease.

  * * *

  —

  Talia Clark is almost completely silent. Each morning she makes herself a cup of Taster’s Choice instant coffee with nondairy creamer, Shredded Wheat with a banana and skim milk. She washes her dishes instantly (Heidi is pleased with her tidiness), disappears to shower, and then leaves for work. She asks Heidi about her employment prospects.

  “I was waitressing, but I hated it.”

  “Yeah, of course. Can you type? You
need to know how to type.”

  “I never learned.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  A week later Talia says, “One thing, and the money’s good, these publishers that do law books, they need proofreaders…are you good at spelling?”

  “Really good.”

  And so Heidi enters the world of nighttime legal proofreaders; she leaves the house at eight p.m. and goes to a windowless basement in the Fifties where a tribe of moles sit under bad lights and make marks with a blue pencil on long rolls of newsprint that are slapped down in front of them by the foreman who decides who will get what to work on and how much. No one talks very much. She is discovered to be excellent at it, and is offered more and more work.

  The foreman invites her into his office. He puts his hand on her behind. He asks her if she is a virgin. She says no. He asks her if she’s interested in more hours, more work. She says yes. He says, “Don’t worry, I’ll be sure you won’t get pregnant.”

  “Taking it up the ass” was what it was called. Parts of it she finds appealing, her body’s tight resistance, the possibility of degradation if he pulled out his prick and it was covered with her shit. And above all she didn’t want to see anybody’s face…not at any time, not in the swoon of pleasure or the idiotic release.

  The arrangement pleases her. It pleases both of them.

  She collects her money, more than enough to live on, and makes her way home at six in the morning. Every day she passes the homeless black man who walks up and down the street, whacking the garbage cans with a big stick, saying over and over, “Everyone think he the big shit. Everyone think he the big shit.” It’s the closest she comes to regular human contact; Talia leaves while Heidi is still sleeping; sometimes they overlap for an hour or two, but neither of them makes the slightest pretense at wanting to spend time together, which seems to suit them both.