Queenie

by Hortense Calisher

  Do I? Wait until he meets the real me….So people actually have them!

  “Want me to tell you again how you got here?”

  He’s been doing that every morning for the past three weeks. But I’m awake for good now. And I’ll tell him.

  “We had to get off the island, didn’t we? They did. Those two who were us.”

  He understands me perfectly. “Yop, the international situation got wise.”

  We got too international.

  “But before we left, did you cut one beautiful disc for yourself, Queenie! For all of us. In a kind of raga rock.”

  …Oi hoi polloi, do I remember! Hear this. Island to island, with the whole world listening. Laughing. At the first coup d’etat on tape…

  “Then the real fuzz comes, didn’t they.” Just as the tape is finishing. Get an axe, I say smartly. And up they come like turnips, over the shoreline.

  Then I crawled once more into the baggage compartment, and got hijacked out. And into a bed.

  “A bed is always bienvenida.”

  “Hmmm?” He’s taken out an old stub of a pencil and a pad whose cover I know well.

  “Concussion’s over.” But I still know how to parachute.

  I clip-clop over to him and take up the second pencil. The pad has two. “It’s going to be so hard for her,” I say, in a scenario voice over his shoulder and waving the pencil. “To hold onto reality.”

  I’m acting it out for him. My autobiography. This is how we collaborate.

  “Put down how, much as she loves him, she doesn’t want to end up in his poem.”

  “How do you think he feels?” he says, busily writing. “When he finds himself in the middle of one of her tapes?”

  …So I guess we’re happily stuck with each other, in a realistic way…

  Just then, Umberto the busboy—and the night and day clerk and the second cook—walks in as usual beaming, with the day’s armful of cables. Actually his beam is slightly at half-mast because of certain head bandages, but we pretend not to notice.

  I have never listened to so many cables in my life as I have since living with Giorgio.

  “The Presidential Trip——” he says, looking up pleased from the pile of them. “Why, do you know—it is deemed to have had an influence!”

  “Well, we knew it was selling,” I say sadly.

  Which up home when you want to do something flame-worthy but not violent, seems to be about the best you can hope for.

  “Well, soon we can pay Umberto’s bill,” he says. Umberto owns the joint. “And get on home.”

  “Gee, but money depresses me,” I say. “It always has such a direct influence.”

  And home this time means home.

  He’s opening the last cable. “I was sure right to sign that trust money over to Oscar,” he says, pleased again. “Money just doesn’t stick to him.”

  “Yeah,” I say gloomily, “but it sticks to Aurine. What’s she let him do with it?”

  …Oh, I am being so gloomy—maybe my childhood is cured…!

  “Oscar wants to back the show.” He tosses me the cable. Pleased and proud to help bring Queenie in. To any amount.

  We are rehearsing in Rio. Umberto is backing it.

  “Not going to let him,” says Giorgio. “Oscar’ll have to learn to waste my money in his own way.”

  “Know how he was supporting Aurine lately?” I say. “Selling off his collection of antique studs.” And suddenly I cheer up again. I can always depend on my background.

  …Especially, can I depend on Aurine? That’s kind of been worrying me, right in the middle of reality. And whenever I look at Giorgio.

  Right now he’s got on a scarlet T-shirt picked up from a voodoo artist in Haiti, over the last of his size shorts to be found in the Burlington Arcade. Both of them are muscle-bulged. All his angles are very intense. Since he’s stopped flying, his eyes are wider. And his jaw positively protrudes with poetry. He looks like some overdrawn comic-book hero—who God at the last minute has corrected with intelligence. And every now and then, God help me—and may Aurine give a push also—I feel like marrying him…

  And every now and then, he says—in particular when he catches Umberto gooning at me, but sometimes even only when I amuse with an innocent crack or two—he feels like asking me to. To elope. “We have as much right to rebel as other people our age,” he says. “From the system that made us what we are.” And stay the hell away from verandahs, Queenie, with anybody except me.

  It’s a worrying situation. No telling how long we can laugh ourselves out of it. So yesterday we send a hurry call to Aurine.

  Because if we do elope, how do we explain that to the older generation we’re saddled with? “I could face Oscar,” Giorgio says thoughtfully, “but I see you could never face Aurine. Unless you do it under duress maybe. What say I force you?” But I say no, she’d want a practical reason. “How about you do it to keep up my dignity, then?” he says. I say, “Uh-uh—one look at you and she’d see you have too bloody much.” He looks at me squinty-eyed, as if he’s flying again. “Call it the call of the wild.” he says. “Toward the conventional.”

  Now he’s down to the last cable, and though he doesn’t mention it, there’s still no answer to ours.

  “How’re we going to bring in the show?” I say idly. “If we don’t let Oscar.” And how’re we going to get home?

  “What about those royalties?” he says, not looking up.

  From the Presidential Tape?

  Up to now, we plan to hold them for charity. Meaning revolution around the world. Since we haven’t got either of them yet, that seemed only fair.

  “Gee,” I say, “I don’t mind if my art has to support my life.” Like maybe plane fare to New York. “But I don’t think it ought to support my autobiography.” Or not on Broadway.

  Trouble is, he doesn’t think my tapes are art. He knows they’re me.

  And the one that is me now, is looking at him.

  He’s now crouched over the pad like a prizefighter, with all his moxie at the point of the pen. There’s a connect between money and poetry, he says, but he hasn’t made it yet. The thing about poetry is that at first it’s very pure.

  “How can you write it before breakfast?” I say.

  “This isn’t the masterpiece,” he says, grinning. “This is the one before….Where is that coffee?”

  We stare at one another. Umberto can’t do everything at once. But I have also been very obedient about verandahs. And yesterday, I pushed him off one.

  …There’s an end to everything, Sam Newber used to say. And credit, Queenie, is among the first to go…

  “Got an idea,” I say, brightly quavering. “Gotta new song for you. How about I act it out?” And getting up out of that bed, I wave myself slowly backward and offstage.

  Peering from the dressing room, I see he is still full of dignity. I am meanwhile both dressing and undressing. I feel as punchy as if I’d been in the ring with him. So here it comes, Queenie. You are not going to keep yourself up to the mark.

  When I walk out again, I am wearing the cache-nombril.

  I have a good navel cavity.

  So I just stand there. No hoochee-koochee needed. In certain circumstances, a cache-nombril can be sufficient to itself. When you simply have to show what you’ve got.

  Ordinarily, he’d of hauled off and grabbed me. But diamonds make a man polite.

  “It’s real,” I say, quaking radiantly. “And it’s yours.”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  I consider. “From my childhood.”

  “Where you been keeping it?”

  I don’t answer. Because those bras long since wore out. Oh, the cavities that women have!

  He stands there, grimly considering.

  Then he breaks down and says what he always does, no matter what I have on.

  “Take it off.”

  We are almost decent again, when Umberto knocks. Since he never did that before, he must have bee
n listening. He couldn’t have been watching, because when he sees the two of us, he almost drops the tray. Between the bandages, his beam stretches to full sun again. Then he shakes his head and goes out.

  The tray has coffee on it. And a cable.

  I grab for it.

  “Uh-uh,” Giorgio says. “Let’s have coffee first.”

  We do that.

  When I grab again, he says, “First—where’s that song?”

  So I think I understand, of course. Our lives are in the balance again. He has to keep himself up to the mark.

  “Okay, here goes,” I say. “Female confessing: Recitative—”

  It’s only the dream-half of it anyway. In dreams, you always hold a few pensées back.

  When I finish, he says “Well, well. Up from under. In waltz-rock. But that’s you, Queenie.”

  “Yeah, it’s me,” I say. “In good and bad faith.”

  He gives me a long look. “Exactly what crossed my mind.”

  And do you know, what with fooling around, we almost forget that cable?

  …(Who am I thinking to?)…

  When we remember, I say generously, “You open it.”

  He says “No, you.”

  But when I start to, he says “Wait. Queenie…our cable. I changed it.”

  “How?”

  This I would never have believed.

  He’s addressed it to Dear Father and

  Mother.

  Inside, of course.

  When I can get my breath, I say furiously, “As if I cared who they are, fink.”

  When I can get it again, I say, “You

  over-interpret me.”

  He says, “I wanted to find out for

  myself.”

  He turns pink when he tells me why.

  I’ve under-interpreted him.

  He hasn’t seen her for years of course. But he’d rather think of her as my mother. “You mean Aurine.”

  After some thought, I giggle, “Think of Oscar as my father,” I say. “That’ll be enough.”

  We tear open the envelope together.

  I knew I could depend on them.

  It’s signed “Us.”

  After that, the answer itself is scarcely in the running. As Giorgio says later—when we’re collaborating again, “Queenie has her questions. But have you noticed how the one she isn’t sure of the answer to, she seldom asks?”

  What I did ask is simple enough. “Advise whether best for by-blows to legalize them. Have less than nine months to decide.”

  And had to pay for by-blow as two words.

  Their answer is simpler. “Take a look at yourselves. STOP. Then decide.”

  When we do that, we roll right over. This time only from laughs.

  Because Giorgio is now wearing the cache-nombril. For safety’s sake, he says.

  I am now wearing the T-shirt. For Umberto’s sake.

  Navel to navel, there’s certainly more behind mine.

  But Giorgio’s has a fifty-thousand-dollar diamond out front.

  We are equal at last.

  When we stop laughing, I say “Plus which, we’re both amusing each other.”

  What could be more equal than that?

  We send a return cable saying no to Oscar’s offer, thanks for the rest. Collect. But signing it “Us.”

  So by the time Umberto has brought us up a surprise champagne supper and gone off again—he admits he opens all the cables beforehand and says he was only being sympathetic on the verandah—the moon is once more coming up.

  …Surprise again, all that champagne and excitement has shook me loose. I’m not as pregnant as I thought I was.

  But that moon will come up anywhere…

  From our usual dateline, in bed in the Hotel Bienvenida, we are looking at it. And I am remembering politics.

  “That moon is about as political as I am,” I say. “It’s possible that if you could get to the heart of it—not just walkie-talkie around on it—you would find a moon tape.”

  Giorgio walks me to the window to watch. I can see by his face that it still cuts him deep.

  “Well,” he says, “we’ll soon be bringing the show into New York.”

  He says Umberto has already good as sold the diamond for us. To a tycoon who is fleeing the revolution and wants his assets portable. To Palm Beach.

  “And you’ve finished ‘The Abattoir,’” I say.

  “How did you know?”

  “You’re wearing your vest.”

  …And I’m bringing in Queenie, but privately. Everybody has to be his own revolution. That’s mine…

  “There’s no doubt about it,” I say. “Our private and public lives will be synonymous.”

  …And am I liberated? Or was I born free?…

  That’s a question I’m not yet asking.

  “Queenie,” Giorgio calls, “come out on the balcony.”

  Out there he grabs me. Just for grabs. “Goddam the empyrean,” he says, looking at it. “I still want to fly.”

  I say, “Maybe there’s a way to do everything.”

  We are both full of the revolutionary spirit.

  “We’ll do it yet,” he says. “We’ll explain youth to the world!”

  The view from Rio is some view.

  “Oh, I will, I will,” I say in my new musical-comedy voice. Off-Broadway, though. “And except for this once, I’ll never even mention the word ‘sex’.”

  Then we just stand there. For a moment in a language I cannot name. Holding fast to each other, it feels like the future might even be around somewhere. But I don’t mention it. I’m not a bomb-virgin anymore.

  We don’t mention it. This is the secret life.

  “The empyrean,” I say hoarsely. “At this time of night, is still slays me.” Blowing cool, dark and forever, through my spit curls. While all the grief is still wallpapering the world.

  “Oh you cosmos, you’re no Cakewalk,” Giorgio says, looking up, and holding me tighter.

  Well, I’m me, I think. And for me, that’s something.

  “Ciao, cosmos!” I say. “We three are all together now. Everybody’s here.” Over there, like in a corner of it, is even my childhood, that big baby-doll.

  …Ciao—that kind of hail-and-farewell word you pick up when you are traveling…

  Ciao, everybody. Hi. Be welcome. What else can you say when you are traveling?

  “Ciao, childhood!” I say. “Be happy.”

  I don’t know yet whether I mean hello or goodbye.

  About the Author

  Hortense Calisher (1911–2009) was born in New York City. The daughter of a young German-Jewish immigrant mother and a somewhat older Jewish father from Virginia, she graduated from Barnard College in 1932 and worked as a sales clerk before marrying and moving to Nyack, New York, to raise her family. Her first book, a collection of short stories titled In the Absence of Angels, appeared in 1951. She went on to publish two dozen more works of fiction and memoir, writing into her nineties. A past president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of PEN, the worldwide association of writers, she was a National Book Award finalist three times, won an O. Henry Award for “The Night Club in the Woods” and the 1986 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for The Bobby Soxer, and was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1952 and 1955.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1971 by Hortense Calisher

  Cover design by Kelly Parr

  978-1-4804-3895-8

  This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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