The Likely World
Page 14
The health farm was kind of a commune, kind of a self-help retreat. Rich people would come and pay, mostly to lose weight but also sometimes because they were having nervous breakdowns or had crashed their cars drunk. The kitchen staff had some hot guys, Nancy said, and two job openings. Andi turned up in Western MA, sick on drugs and running from a bad boyfriend and so the two of them, Nancy and Andi, ended up making granola and being healthy and sleeping in a hayloft. Mostly healthy, Nancy qualified.
“Tell me about you,” she said, during our most recent phone call.
“Not much to tell,” I said.
“Obviously the stuff they do here, the guided meditations and the vision sessions: whatever. Still, Mellie, in my readings, you keep coming up.”
“Me?”
“It’s probably groupthink. How you get sucked in. I know, but, whatever, stay in touch. Speaking of which, guess who’s flying in from Russia this week?”
Anyway, this time, whoever’s trying to reach me isn’t Nancy. The number rings at a Greek restaurant. I replace the receiver and check myself in the mirror. Eyeliner blurry beneath my lids, and thicker on the left side to make up for my one smaller eye. I’ve gotten good at it, finally.
And just in time. Beyond the locked door of Mr. Boyfriend’s apartment, the elevator door sighs open. I hear the laden tread of Mr. Boyfriend with his cardboard containers of supper. He jingles the key in the lock, decides he can’t manage it one-handed, sets down the bags and then tries the key again. In the mirror, I look good. Obviously, he’s in love with me. He obviously still loves me, even and despite what he’s figured out about the missing checks. There’s room for forgiveness, in those take-out containers. I rehearse my smile.
My beeper crawls across the coffee table. 7285. Almost suck. Almost salt, saul. And then, I see the whole thing. 487 7285. I-T-S-P-A-U-L. The second lock turns; Mr. Boyfriend’s keys slide into the pocket of his 501s; he opens the door with a bottle of wine, my favorite dinner, and a sucker-punched face. He wants to look enraged. He is trying to make his mouth about not accepting apologies, trying to be all business, but he’s missed me, and his lips love me before he can make them behave.
“I can’t stay,” I say, grabbing the beeper. “It’s an emergency.” I have told him I am a volunteer EMT; this is where I am to him when I’m downtown. I make up all kinds of shit about arteries and anaphylaxis.
“Tell them no,” he says. “Mellie, this is important.”
I peck him. I take my glasses off. Mr. Boyfriend likes me this way, but also it’s easier to lie when I can’t see the details of his face.
“Mellie,” he says. “This isn’t like every other time. This is a big deal. I need you to tell them no.”
I give him a longer kiss, curve my hip into his with the suggestion of nasty things I can make available and I imagine I am drifting through the blue twilight.
“I promise I’ll be back,” I say sliding my lenses back over my eyes. “Someone’s stomach just needs to be pumped.”
“It’ll be midnight,” he says, sighing. “At least take your dinner.”
I will eat the penne on the 1/9, the salad on the F. But I will not be back by midnight.
Two
New York City
1993
St. Mark’s Place—panhandlers and gutter punks and up too late and cigarette butts and iron grates and tattoo shop and forty ounce and photo shoot. I weave between obstacles, trying entrances on the building without luck. The directions I have to meet Paul are vague. From a pay phone, I dial Paul’s dad in Brookline, but Mr. Greene doesn’t answer. I scroll through my pager, looking for Nancy’s most recent call. “Hello?” Over the voice of the woman who picks up the line, I hear the clatter of dishes, the easy laughter of dinner crew. “Sorry. Can I have her call you back?”
A man turns onto the block, coal end of a joint burning between his lips, pauses, spits on his fingers and carefully extinguishes the ember. He draws my eyes, the way details do on a film set. The man is handsome, not tall but muscled like a dancer. He wears a bandana over his longish hair. He mounts the steps, fishes a lanyard from under his shirt and opens the door to the building.
The place is a theater, a three-story venue with dormitory space for resident troupes and just whoever lucks out and is invited to crash there. I pocket my pager.
“Hey,” I call to the man in the bandana. “Hey, hold that.”
The dancer-type turns around. I have banked for most of my life on looking wholesome, but lately—my darker eyeliner, my blackberry lipstick, the honor roll fat melting off me—I’ve lost that thing that made strangers want me to take their picture with their hundred-dollar cameras.
But the man in the bandana decides to chance it or is too high to judge, and holds the door open until I get in.
Paul had been in Russia on a college theater program trip, a sort-of theater program trip which was also somehow a professional production. He’d gotten onto IRC from a computer room at Lemonsov Moscow State University, and Nancy and I logged on from our college computer labs, and we could chat to each other with barely any delay. Moscow was shitty. The food was shitty. They’d been fed a meal that consisted entirely of turnips. He had been to Siberia and fallen off a train and no one would X-ray his broken arm.
[22:48:45]
[22:49:03]
[22:49:23]
[22:50:01]
I’d given him the pager number during the chat, but I hadn’t expected he’d actually get in touch. I chalked his desire to connect up to the exuberance of homesickness.
The visiting troupes of actors at the St. Mark’s theater are housed in the attic dormitory. No elevator. I climb the one-hundred-year-old stone stairs. They shine in the center, are worn into a form of smile from so many heavy feet. I should exercise more. I should eat less cloud. Near the top story, the silence of the lower floor falls away. Someone is playing music; people are laughing. I recognize the singer as Tom Waits. He’s singing about home, how you won’t go home. I walk between racks of clothing with bright plumes and sequins and bustles. A dozen carnival masks with long, villainous noses and sharp leather teeth hang from a papier-mâché tree. The place smells of body odor and glue.
A naked woman runs by me, halts, and retraces her steps. She has a luxuriant growth of pubic hair, enormous bare breasts.
“Do you have any pizza?” She strokes my sleeve and offers a hazy smile. When I don’t reply, she trips off into the forest of hanging clothes.
The next room is kitted out as a dressing room, mirrors and bulbs and grease paint. A blond boy is curled up on a tutu. I step over him into the next room, which is where Paul’s group has been sleeping. There are two dozen metal cots arranged along the eaves. A man with brightly fresh tattoos is dancing to the Tom Waits tune. He’s also naked, his half-erect penis jumping as he frog steps to the music.
A young woman, clothed, sits cross-legged on one of the cots writing in a journal. She gives me the nod, the orderlies-in-the-nuthouse nod. “You must be Mellie,” she says.
“That’s right.”
“I’m the stage manager,” she says, waving her hand around the room. “All these guys have been together for ten weeks. It’s full-on mass hysteria.”
“The wooden palace,” says the naked man. “The spring festival.”
“Night and day,” says the stage manager. “And our most important set piece has been lost in some former flipping socialist republic. Everyone’s pretty rational, considering.”
“Georgistan,” says the naked man. “Turkekraine.”
I locate Paul among the rumpled bedclothes. He is asleep on a cot beneath a parade float dog with wild red eyes. Paul’s broken arm is in a sling, resting on a dirty pillow. He’s changed, sharpened in the lines of his face, but he’s still as hairless as a girl, still as pret
ty despite the black exhaustion under his eyes.
“Hey,” I say. “Hey.”
He startles in sleep and cries out. I touch his shoulder, on the uninjured side. He blinks. He rubs his eyes. Then, finally, he recognizes me and the panic fades from his expression.
“You came.”
“Of course. You doing OK?”
“I can’t sleep here,” he says. “That last half hour is the most rest I’ve had in like—”
“Jet lag,” says the girl with the journal.
“Amphetamines,” says the dancing man.
The boy with the tutu snores and the naked girl farts as she runs by.
“You could crash at my dorm,” I tell Paul.
“God, seriously?” he says. “That sounds like. God. Yes. Let’s go.”
They are doing a play, have been touring a play across Siberia. They are the first Western theater troupe to visit that region, but this turns out to be something like being the first Western theater troupe to Mars: the journey as interminable; the audience when you get there just as lively. The tundra had not exactly nurtured a love of experimental arts in its people with the result that the troupe had played to unheated concert halls in former prison colonies, two rows of senile women smoking cheroot and nodding off. The actors have various theories as to what went wrong, kickbacks or an underdeveloped travel industry or an outright scam perpetrated on Davos, their director. At last, they are home for their New York run, but they all have weird diseases from travel, have all been secretly sleeping with each other’s girlfriends, and the play, they suspect, is not very good.
The travel has maybe wrought other traumas, as well. There’s an obsession with the missing set piece that seems misplaced and a too-deep silence around the train journey through Siberia which ended with Paul’s falling from the train. Paul is wide-eyed and manic on the subway trip uptown, packing and repacking his Prince Rounded Flavors, flicking his Zippo. “Was it always lit like this on the subway? How long have they had that ambulance-chaser ad? Does it seem hot in here?”
Maybe I should not be so surprised that Paul has gotten in touch. By senior year, Paul and I had basically turned into normal friends. How it happened was Paul was living on his own, in a two-bedroom apartment with like four other guys. Mice were leaping from the trashcan. Once every three weeks, they assembly lined dishes in the bathtub. Eventually, the landlord gave notice. It didn’t seem abnormal when Nancy suggested he crash with me. Meantime, my mom had found a boyfriend and so she was sleeping out of the house, and leaving me like a hundred guilt dollars a week for take-out. “They hit him, at home,” I told her, to get her on board. It pleased her, when one of my Brookline friends’ parents did something horrible. It meant even though we lived in an apartment with bugs, we were still as good as them.
For my part, I’d had two actual boyfriends in the intervening years, so it seemed reasonable to assume I was over whatever sixteen-year-old business there had been between me and Paul. Factor in, it was winter, and the bugs didn’t appear until spring, and we all agreed it made sense.
For a while after that, Paul living in my house and leaving fingernail clippings in the bathroom and me eating take-out Greek salad, I thought I’d figured something out. I found a way of listening to him that was less about gobbling things up, and more about just learning which made the thing of us feel more regular. Regular, except I would sometimes go into these cloud comas and wear one of my mom’s aprons and stir fry rice and clean the toilet and I would imagine I was in my own future and that Paul and I had ended up married with a brood of half-Jew, quarter Chinese, quarter Irish babies. So I guess I was still hung up after all.
The last night he stayed with me, he smoked weed on the back patio and I took a spoonful of cloud. I never wanted anyone to know I was a user. Even Nancy, she knew I had a spoon now and again, but not how much. But with Paul, I stopped privately licking spoons behind the shower curtain. I don’t know. It seemed like a step, like a part of how we were making something outside of Nancy.
Anyway, that last night, it was near Christmas, and there was frost on the ground, but it wasn’t really cold yet. A client of my mom’s had dropped off a bottle of red wine which I knew she’d never miss and we poured it into juice glasses and sat out there where I used to keep my moon journal. I thought about saying something to him about used-to liking him, but I instead I just listened and let my lips turn purple and looked at the sky. Waxing. Gibbous. Nancy was right. It stayed more or less the same. You didn’t need to watch it to be sure.
Paul was waiting on college acceptances. He wanted to go to conservatory, for acting, instead of small liberal arts, but his parents were too wrapped up in which one of them would pay, and how much, for him to even get this conversation on the agenda. Nancy meanwhile had a whole plan for embezzling the tuition; he could go to Europe like he wanted to; she could get her parents to pay her way by blackmailing them about what shits they were. Fuck college. School of life, motherfucker.
“It might have worked,” said Paul, “except my mom is a lawyer.”
That last night was the first time I heard him talk about her, the mom. I had seen her once, an unhealthily large Chinese woman with a stack of silver bracelets digging into her skin. She’d been the only Asian woman all four of her years at Wellesley and now she worked for the state. It was, Paul said, because she didn’t make as much as a regular lawyer, as one from one of those downtown firms with all the windows, that she had trouble paying her bills. In her opinion, Paul said, networks of prejudice conspired against her, to keep her from what was righteously hers. Was that true? I asked him. Partially, he said. You always are who you are, and then the world starts getting in its licks because of who they think you are.
He sucked on his one-hitter, repacked it. There had been, he told me, a whole drama when he was fifteen; her mailbox became crammed with dire letters from credit agencies. She couldn’t bear to open them. Her car was repo’d and the condo foreclosed and a bunch of other shit. He thought: she’ll turn it around now. But instead, she just had the mail forwarded to an old address, and the whole cycle started again. I thought about it. He was the only kid I knew, my entire time of growing up, who was also a renter. The places he and his mom lived were nicer than our apartment, but maybe there was some connection forged, being the only two people we knew who had actual money worries.
In the end, Paul’s parents scraped enough together for a year of Colgate, and there Paul was, summer of his eighteenth year, still going back and forth between houses on the court-ordered schedule. I guess neither Nancy or I was surprised when he left upstate New York to travel with this director. I guess we both kind of thought that for Paul, it was probably better to be an experimental actor in Eastern Bloc countries than to continue to flunk out of private college.
“You’ve changed,” Paul says as the N train carries us uptown. “You’re less—you’re more—”
“Tell me about the play,” I say.
The lights in the train flicker off and on again. Paul rambles. It’s a fairy tale, Nordic, ancient, about a fortunate man who has an only daughter. This girl is so beautiful, the clan becomes convinced she’s divine. They begin to leave offerings for her rather than the troll people who live in the forest surrounding their settlement. You see the trolls from the first rise of the curtain, in the shadows, moving in and out of the wings, but you don’t know what they are at first, whether set piece or character. Talking, Paul loses the thread, gets distracted.
“These ads for genital warts, it’s some kind of entrapment. You can’t help but look at them, but then because it’s public looking at them implicates you, suggests that warts are relevant to your life, that you need their help with warts.”
“The play,” I remind him. His neck leans, his head almost touching my shoulder. The train speeds. Rickety rack rickety rack rickety rack.
It is lonely, Paul tells me, being a rich man’s daughter, being treated like a goddess. Being worshipped is different from being
loved, and being beautiful can hurt like wind hurts, like cold. When winter comes, the beautiful daughter fashions herself an ice brother. There’s a song, and snow falls, an effect they manage with buckets of ivory flakes and then these soft silent brooms. Then, inevitably, the spring. For the first time in the production, the trolls enter into the light, and the makeup, the costuming, they transform out of the shadows. They are not what we expected, the trolls. The beautiful daughter begs them. She begs and begs for them to bring her ice brother to life so the sun cannot destroy him. The trolls agree, although we know like all magical bargains, this one will turn out poorly. Paul’s eyes close for a moment, in the telling.
“Time to transfer.” I shake him gently. I notice a smell, an odor of an old man, which is nonetheless his own, as if the smell of his future is already upon him.
We navigate 114th Street, Paul making wide arcs around the musicians and the homeless. He’s nervous like a tourist, but he does not stop talking.
“I’m trying to think how many times I’ve actually been to the city. My father won’t come. It’s like it’s still the seventies or Central Park jogger but I tell him it’s cleaned up. Is it cleaned up?”
“Not really. Not yet. Who’d want it to be?”
With the old ladies, he takes a bench on the 1/9 platform. I am close enough to touch. The train comes, and it’s running express and that’s fine by me, fine, because he leans against my arm while he talks and it seems like he thinks it’s natural that I should lead him, that I should tell him where to sit.
So much for friends, I tell myself.
The rich man’s daughter, Paul continues, keeps him secret, her ice brother. He’s not a brother, maybe. That’s one thing the play leaves open, the possibility that he’s a lover or another self. It’s summer, and they meet at twilight and there’s a song where they’re happy and it’s just them, an hour just for them. But then it switches to harvest music and everything is flushed in an orange glow, and the villagers appear carrying sheaves of wheat and buckets of red berries. The villagers dry fish over fires, and the rich daughter presides, taking their offerings, and the trolls, back in the shadows, gnash their teeth and complain of hunger. A hush falls, the industry of the villagers continuing in pantomime, and then it is twilight and the ice boy appears.