Queenie

by Hortense Calisher

Then the bottom drops out of unreality.

  Above the telly, one of the ikons is gone! One of the St. Georges—that old tycoon. So the two of them are paying their own way down there after all. Or could the ikon have gone sometime back, toward a silly girl’s education?

  That hits me, like a pensée.

  Doesn’t seem to be anything left to do but look at my grades.

  Which now I have my contacts in, I see the postmark is from Brazil, or the Argentine, or the Philippines. Somewhere on the Spanish Main. But I’m not one to stop to smell a letter to see what disease it brings, before I open it.

  Out falls his card. With that half-yearly scrawl you can spend a year deciphering.

  What makes the envelope thick is the poem. Which is typed in the same red, but this time is signed. So I can read it easy, and all over again. “Down here in youth, our abattoir——”

  So that louse has poems like this in his psyche. I’ll bet he can beat any guys he meets in the ring.

  But it’s the card that I cry over.

  That door at the grieve-in has traveled so far. That sincere door, with my name very small on it, and what I wrote. Turning up for him to read, across all the waving pampas, and the Roll-on-thou-deep-dark Byronic seas.

  How was I to know what world concern could bring me personally?

  And that I too am a cause going down the drain of history? I can read it in my own words, copied right there on the card. “Oh why don’t people remember that they for-get?”

  Isn’t that poignant?

  I can’t cry with contacts in. Besides, if you’re crying for just everybody, it doesn’t last long.

  Also the return address on the envelope is illegible.

  So I have to phone Palm Springs.

  Aurine comes on suspiciously full of fancy nonchalance, like the mother of the bride. But it’s Oscar who reads me that envelope. He always knows where those two are; he’s Tekla’s executor. His voice comes over just the same—full of aphorisms for me to quote later. “Old people are each other’s executors, Queenie. They have to keep in touch.”

  The tycoon is real enough, I hear, though he’s no longer down there. They’ve discovered what he really wants is this house.

  I’ve been spared one thing though that hit me the minute I smelled setup—he’s not Giorgio.

  But the two of them can tell that romance is what I’ve come down to. And that I intend to be practical about it.

  “It’s as hard a place to get to as Cuba,” Oscar says. “You have to be hijacked there too.” But he has faith in me. He tells me from where.

  I say, “Aurine—I’m taking my diamond along.”

  She says, “Of course, dear. You may need it someday. For Giorgio.”

  I almost start to cry again.

  “Aurine,” I whisper, “have you any suggestions for carrying it? I’ve hit on one, but it’s kind of obvious.”

  “Darling——” she crisps back, “but of course!” Asking them for recipes always energizes them. “Look in my lingerie drawer, to the left of the sachets. Next to my medals.” Holy ones. “You’ll find two bras Alba once brought me back from Paris; they should fit you now. Two gives you a change. Look carefully for the wee pockets—pity the diamond isn’t two of them.” How charming her laughter is when it’s mercenary!—Oscar is laughing too. We are for his amusement again.

  Oh it’s good to come from people unconcerned with world welfare, with nerves built on love and wine without guilt, and money just a little tainted with joy!

  “Get off the line a minute, Oscar,” says Aurine.

  She says there’s a little silver-wire-and-mesh gadget I’m to take along too. In case I ever want to show the diamond to him. “It’s called a cache-nombril.”

  Oscar’s still on the line, breathing omnisciently. “Life repeats itself,” he always says, “but it takes a smart customer to catch the echoes.”

  And before your three minutes are up.

  “Oh darlings——” I say. Education chokes me up. I want to tell them the truth, but lovingly. “You’ve been the best background ever. How could you help it’s a fucking world outside!”

  He’s not going to be the first to speak. Standing there, taking off his helmet, why should he? In that white silk suit I mistook the back of for a pilot’s uniform, his huge shoulders look as if they’re shrugging; he’ll never again be narrow enough for a tailor’s dream. Oh I have such respect for him, he looks at least twenty-five! Burned black as his face is now, he still looks North American, and his nose isn’t really broken, it’s only more there. He has on one of those dark blue shirts men up home still declare their manual labor with, but I’ll soon learn he’ll just as soon wear any mild pink or howling purple that takes his eye at a stall; he’ll tell me that a shirt can’t express your idea of the world. Neither can an art collection, or a model factory, he says. Or even a small, choice guerrilla airforce where every man in it has cut his disc or two in rock.

  He’ll tell me they’re only his ways of expressing himself. He’ll say, “Queenie, the one sure way to express your view of the world—is to state your view of it.” But just now, he’s not going to be the first to speak.

  And I’m not.

  I can already tell this lagoon we’ve landed on will be so right for me, especially in an orange bathing suit. The wooden dock we’re on has that dark green barnacle slime which can’t be faked, wet and salt and full of integrity. And creaking slowly. Fish are down there, mauve and Matisse. The U.S. plane stands on the beach like a housefly on a travel folder. Oh the natural world is so full of natural metaphor—maybe I’ll never need to talk again. Beachcombing the language nits out of my hair, oiling my skin with the silence here—maybe making just a few dolphin squeaks in bed. Night after night.

  I don’t know yet we’ll be spending only one here. Restlessness is the real riches, when you’re rich enough. Meanwhile, looking along the dock, I feel like a macaw in a monastery. Aren’t there any women here? No prejudice. But when you dream, a nearby woman can help check on what you’re getting.

  On the plane, there was nobody but those same two melon faces, any-country color, with south-of-the-border smiles but no chitchat, even in the airpockets. I tried a rapport, saying, “I don’t share the American contempt for tropical sugar republics,” but they didn’t answer.

  They are now scuffing up the plane’s metal with a sander, and painting out the number with a name. They’re treating that plane like a girl. I have to smile when I think that, and when I see the name they’re putting on her, in words I know from the subway notices: EL TREN. Don’t leave el tren if it stops between the stationes. Inquire of the guard, or the polizia.

  When I smile, Giorgio’s face flies open.

  When I laugh, he lets out the South American for ho-ho. Underneath, I can hear he hasn’t forgotten his English.

  We end up shaking with laughter at each other—may be he can tell I haven’t forgotten anything. But neither one of us is going to be the kind of crap artist that puts feeling into words. Or not the first.

  I don’t want any more interlocutors, not down here.

  Right now, I’m out of the whole electronic, apostolic situation up there.

  I’ve got my tapes in my bag, a whole dowry of them; if the need arises, I’ll play them back for him. Now and then maybe, between squeaks. He doesn’t look as if he needs diamonds.

  But now I’m all talked-out and tentative. I just want to make my move.

  I mean I want him to.

  Later on, I’ll know that’s all he ever does, with women or the universe. Or bean and sugar cooperatives.

  He says most men go from ideas to action; he goes the other way. If you can’t think what to do, he says, act! Your muscles will teach you your philosophy. The brain is the biggest muscle of all. And the realpolitik of love is the simplest. It’s just doing it.

  Later, he’ll say what stops him, there on the beach, is that I am still an idea. And not only his idea. This is what has him cocking his head a
t me now, those eyes of his every time wider, like a dog that doesn’t know it’s a movie star. And compressing his mustache like a man who does.

  He’s seeing I am my own idea. In fact I look like a whole bloody bunch of ideas, ready to go into action. He shrugs his shoulders, but I see he knows he’s not going to get by on his reflexes. He’s going to have to use his brain.

  I just want him to show me how not to.

  I have that quote On My Narcissism in my bag—but that’s just to remind me.

  I want him to help me make my move.

  Circumstances are a great help in some situations.

  EL TREN starts taxiing, the wrong way. Toward us.

  How important wrong ways are!

  He doesn’t speak. I don’t.

  But making your move is different.

  In bed, in bed, in bed.

  Terribly warming, isn’t it. Begun, middled, finished—and never ending.

  Doing something means you don’t have to describe it.

  But I’m talking.

  “I knew I couldn’t be honest much longer,” I say. “I always knew I’d settle for somebody real.”

  So here the two of us are, down in youth’s abattoir—but it’s hopeful. Two happy childhoods are better than one. And everyone knows this kind of abattoir doesn’t last long.

  Nothing frivolous I have ever done has been so serious.

  We are still making our moves daily, but have also branched out.

  Giorgio says, “You and I were born precocious just in time.”

  Because the world is getting younger every minute, he says. It’s getting ready to be born again. “In the usual clouds of fire.”

  “And the usual pillars of salt,” I say. The kind that shouldn’t have looked back. “Giorgio, why are the pillars of salt always female?”

  He says, “That’s the kind of question only a female can answer. Or a pillar of salt.”

  When a man of action has ideas, there’s punch in them.

  “Tekla taught me a lot.”

  He’s terribly proud of her. Tekla’s in the ring herself now, in a ladies’ wrestling program up in Portland, Maine. Her private life is resolved too. She is now the wife of a local minister, Unitarian, in his valuable colonial cottage—a nice mild guy with a flair for investing her stocks. All she needed was to be beat up occasionally in public. So her private-public life is now in perfect balance, though on a small scale.

  “That’s all people her age can afford,” he says.

  But for us it will have to be different. We have to be. Young people have to be the ones to show the world how to live the public-private life.

  “Queenie,” he’ll say, “we have to act like the eternal verities have stopped.”

  Because, except for death, they have of course. And even it is taking new forms. The other eternal verities are all cooling off, he says. Like the world’s crust.

  I don’t like to ask directly what the others are.

  I say, “But older people say there’s something bigger than us.”

  “Sure,” he says. “Them.”

  “I wish you would speak all this in public,” I say. “Then everybody would know.” And acting it all out is so chancy. Like what we’re doing now.

  “Carita, that’s shit!” he says. “Oh, excuse me.”

  In private he’s getting very courtly, maybe he’s getting ready to hit me in public. For the sake of the world. We are still finding our balance.

  “Once you settle down to speaking, Queenie, your power is gone.” Of course this part of his theory has great appeal for me. “In fact once you act sensible in any way—you’re a goner. So let the old do it. For them it makes sense.”

  I’m beginning to know all the answers now. The revolutionary ones. And it’s beautiful really. Sensible—though I’m not telling him.

  And there are some lovely Anglo-Saxon moments in between.

  And I don’t have to say f——anymore.

  Otherwise, since his family’s cut him off for a spell—they understand revolution when it has style, but his mother being in the ring with him sent a blush over the whole Argentine—we are having to be rather precocious about money. He won’t come into his trust fund until he’s twenty-one.

  So where’s it all coming from, the stuff we spend for all these midweek investments in little island republics, which are promptly turned over to the peasants, promptly turning them into Republicans? Or for all this jet-set intellectuality on the weekends, when he says our business is to be where nobody would think. Where even we wouldn’t. And never to think ahead. Or phone for reservations.

  Although I am learning to be a very good, good front for him.

  When we walk into a hotel on his continent, I say to the desk, “I understand in this country a woman doesn’t have to be a man,” and I begin to smile.

  When I walk into a European one, I say, “I am one of those stinking, warmongering Americans,” and I begin to cry.

  But upstairs, if I begin to laugh and cry, all he says is: “We have a gold mine.” A weekly one.

  What kind of a mine is that?

  And why do we spend the middle of the week doing good deeds, and the weekend sort of undoing them?

  He only smiles, and says, “That’s part of it.”

  When I charge him with being some kind of a dilettante, he says sure, a revolutionary one. “Wrong world, dead cause. But in the end, its unutterable fascination always returns.”

  He says I am wrong for him in the same way. In a way I am like world welfare.

  He’s a sweetie. Dead wrong, but alive.

  But the worst of it is, when he does come into his trust fund, he’s going to put it right back in trust again, until he’s forty-five. “As a declaration of belief in the continuity of the universe.”

  “And of you,” I say.

  He says I’ll never be a saint, but if we’re still together by then, he may be, and he wouldn’t want to be caught short.

  “If I’m fool enough to want the stuff by then, I’ll de serve it.” Then he stares at me. “Why are you always sewing those f——g—excuse me—those attractive brassieres?”

  “Because the two I brought with me are worn out.”

  “But we were in Paris yesterday.”

  “I know.” I left an order for some with Alba’s lingère. But will I ever get back to pick it up? We are in Paraguay for the morning. He says he is working on this week’s gold mine. In other words, I think, our grubstake.

  “Well, it’s an attention-getting device. What say we go inside the outside?”

  We specialize in places with verandahs. Copulating in a bedroom makes him nervous. “My father died in one. In the middle of things.” The penicillin cause-of-decease being a gag put out by his father’s wife, because she wasn’t there.

  Sometimes, I think I’m going down the drain of his history. But it’s fun.

  So later he’s standing there, thumb hooked in his belt, nursing his navel. A characteristic gesture, especially afterward. Which I point out.

  He says, “Oh I feel as if I’ve got one now; I’m earning it.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Oh, not with you.”

  Hmm.

  “Don’t you feel we’re all placed in the position of earning our right to be born?” he says. “We aren’t born into the human race, when you come to think of it, we’re only drafted for it.”

  Ideas like this are characteristic afterward too.

  “I’m dazzled,” I often say. “Someday I hope to believe it all. On alternate weekends. Or when we stop traveling. What date is this country anyhow?”

  In spite of all he can do, I still have my time sense.

  “I’ll do the thinking,” he’ll say. “Your turn to act.” So off we go again, for another Anglo-Saxon moment, which can also be referred to in Latin, ancient and modern, or even classical Greek. Anything printable. Down here, revolution and the bod are kept separate, at least in conversation. Political f——g is out.

 
I learn all this the first week. But nothing else.

  “Giorgio,” I say, one night, “just what is our gold mine?”

  He’s putting a bougainvillea, it looks like, in his buttonhole. Two nights ago it was edelweiss. “Why is it the U.S. always wants to know right away what a man does? We Latins, we might stab you one day for what we think you’re doing. But we let you keep it to yourself.”

  “Then let me guess,” I say. “Is it poetry?”

  He stares at me. “Christ, no!—excuse me.” Politeness to women and Jesus go hand in hand here. “Poetry is public, with us.”

  That’s why I thought there might be income in it.

  But who are “us”? I can’t believe it’s just us.

  So I go along another day, thinking about it. Where does all this money come from that we spend like water—no, like aquavit, like Château-Neuf du Pape, like pulque, like tequila. Sometimes even like Coca-Cola—always depending where we are. And why do we always have to get rid of the grubstake by the end of the week?

  Finally, I decide how to find out. I get him, one beautiful evening near Belgrade, after a long drive out over the Danube, and the moon coming up like it had never been profaned. Or been lucky enough to have a president’s name put on it.

  …Giorgio’s very bitter about that. He says, up to now, living in a Latin American perspective like he has, it looked to him like at home people our age wasted half their time hating presidents. Father-images, like the papers say. But he doesn’t hate Tekla, who is the only father-image he’s got. “Besides, for politics, Tekla somehow isn’t transferable.”

  But since the moon walk, he agrees something will have to be done. He says, given the history of the world, he can see some clunk claiming the moon for the masses. Or for the nation. “But what kind of cosmological cretin goes and puts his own name on it?”

  “There was a campaign picture in his Fifth Avenue apartment,” I say dreamily. “Their taste in lamps is terrible…”

  The poor, wounded moon is meanwhile looking rueful, like it always has. Even in all this pure socialist air, it doesn’t look any better pleased. Maybe it always knew what was going to happen to it.

  What I am busy thinking—as I swallow the last of a five-course, Serbian-style meal consisting entirely of sausages—is that we’ve just spent almost the last of the money again. All week, we’ve been spending it like—slivovitz. Which though I don’t usually drink, I find I adore. Giorgio says at home alcohol is a symbol of middle age, but abroad it is different.