I pictured Howard getting ready to leave, freshly shaven, in his tuxedo and blue-studded shirt. Me saying good-bye in my stay-at-home peach bathrobe.
“There are always women on the make in those places,” Sherry said. “All dolled-up and cha cha cha. They’re either divorced or single or married to the asshole dancing around with a flower in his teeth.” She even knew a story about a bride who ran off with the bass player minutes after the ceremony.
I crossed my arms in defiance. “Sometimes you have to take risks in this life.” It seemed a strange thing for me to be telling someone who usually carried a diaphragm and a toothbrush in her pocketbook, just in case.
“If I were you, I’d take out a little insurance,” she said. “Why don’t you just go along from time to time?”
“Do you mean as a watchdog? As a spy?”
She shrugged. “Well, you could always make yourself useful.”
“How? By turning the music? By carrying the drums? Sherry, they don’t need me.”
“I don’t know.” She was thoughtful. “Maybe you could be the vocalist.”
“Are you crazy? I can’t sing. Tap dancing was my specialty, remember? And there isn’t much call for that these days.”
“I’d think of something if I were you,” she said. “Shake the maracas or something, like what’s-her-name, with Cugat.”
“Howard has a jazz combo,” I said. “And anyway this whole conversation is stupid. A very important part of the marriage bond is mutual trust and respect. I trust Howard and he trusts me.”
Then Jason started screaming from the other room, letting me have the triumph of the last word.
It was Sherry’s cue to leave. A screeching, soiled infant was more “reality” than she could handle at the time.
I walked her to the door where we embraced in a shaky truce, her African warrior’s neck-piece nicking my throat. “Are you still writing much poetry?” she asked, getting the last word in after all. I listened to her footsteps from behind the closed door, as she walked quickly back to uncertainty and loneliness, cha cha cha.
6
Later, ambition will wake
and rouse the other hungers
and light the lamps in
all the chambers of the night
You’ll want more; something
never satisfied by voice or touch
but now love’s heart-knock is enough.
May 16, 1958
AFTER SUPPER, AFTER JASON was put to bed, talcum-sweet and overkissed, Howard and I staggered into the living room to talk. This was the best time of the day. We couldn’t afford real analysis, so we did one another instead. I was quite classical in my approach; I went back to childhood, digging up traumas, but Howard liked to deal with the recent past. He took his first marriage out like a stamp collection, and we looked at it together. Howard talked about that time as if he were just begun then himself, as if he expected me to feel some nostalgia or regret for the poverty of their relationship. Grudgingly, I did. I saw them in their marriage bed, ill-fitting like two parts of different jigsaw puzzles. I listened to Renee talk him out of sleep, pry him from dreams with the wrench of her voice. “Is this mole getting darker? Listen, Howard, is this a lump?”
She was always a hypochondriac, and Howard, who had such a tragic sense of life, easily became one too. By the time I met him, he was dying from a thousand diseases. I laughed at all of them. “Are you kidding?” I said.
He was skeptical but hopeful. “How do you know? You’re not a doctor.”
But I wouldn’t allow him a single internal mystery, and in time he was cured. The laying on of hands, I called it, covering him with my own healing flesh. “Oh, you don’t know!” Howard cried, but I did, and he was cured of palpitations and bruises and fears of castration.
Now we lay in an embrace on the living room sofa, settling in for our evening talk. “You first this time,” Howard offered, and I went spinning back. One of my earliest memories is of myself tap-dancing on the shining surface of the kitchen table while my mother clapped in rhythm from the sink. Shirley Temple had invaded her heart and her brain, and she could hardly think of anything else. This miracle of her own battered womb, dimpled and brown-eyed, and sort of dirty blond, might turn out to be another Shirley Temple. And who was Shirley Temple anyway? Just a lucky little kid, or maybe only an ambitious midget.
“What did your father think?” Howard asked.
“My father didn’t want any part of it. He had his job in the Post Office; man’s work, the stuff that kept our nation number one in the world. He stayed out of things at home, out of my mother’s way. Fantasy and dreams of glory were woman’s work.”
I told Howard how my mother used to lie in bed, restless with aspiration, and make up stage names for me: Tiny Starr, Merry Bright, Dolly Sweet. She would get up finally and roam through the house, wringing her hands because it was the middle of the night and she was in Brooklyn where nothing would ever happen. In the morning she would be serene again, willing to wait through dancing lessons and elocution lessons for the talent scout who would scoop me up and take us all off to Hollywood.
“She bought a little wooden platform for me,” I said. “And she invested in an electric curling iron. She always singed my hair, so that the ends looked gray and smelled like burnt chicken feathers.”
The elocution lessons were given by a Miss Peel. We, the undiscovered, called her Miss Banana or Miss Lemon within our limited capacity for revenge. She taught us to recite “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” and “Miniver Cheevy.” Then she taught us some original numbers that included Irish dialect—“And the top o’ the mornin’ to you, too, Mrs. O’Grady”—and German—“Ve must give ze boy lessons, Mama. Little Ludvig has musical talent!” There was a pseudo-oriental thing too, for which I had worn a kimono and had to bow a lot, saying, “Velly, velly good.”
“Stop laughing,” I told Howard, pinching his arm. “It was serious. If I made good, I’d have a walk-in dollhouse and a canopy bed. I could quit school, which I hated, and have a private tutor played by Mischa Auer who would make learning fun. You should have seen me as a butterfly, ever so lightly kissing the flowers, or as a spastic old woman being sent by ungrateful children to the poorhouse. There wasn’t a dry eye. I would have broken your heart. But I always loved the dancing best. I was going to dance on the steps with Bill Robinson, just like Shirley.”
“Show me,” Howard said.
“Do you mean now? I can’t. I don’t remember. I don’t have shoes.”
But he urged me with his eyes, with his hands, until I got up from the sofa and stood in the center of the living room. I began to turn slowly in time to the music inside my head. I imagined a baby spotlight hitting the drapes behind me and two pink ones fused into a heart shape and lighting my face.
Smile, baby, smile. Brush, step, brush, step, dah, dah, remember to smile always because a smile makes them forget their troubles. Smile, one two, their troubles dropping like flies in the aisles.
God, I remembered almost everything and it felt so nice, turn and spot and turn with my hair gently slapping my face. Ah, Bill, will you take my hand and show me how, will you dance with me with your tippy tappy toes? Didn’t my mother say he was one of a kind, the only colored man she had ever trusted? And I put my hand in that worn pink palm and came down a step at a time, every step a separate little stage and that spot bouncing after us like a playful pup at our heels. Taking my cue from Bill who smiled, smiled, a credit to his people and to 20th Century-Fox and I was a credit to everyone, a credit and a joy to Jack Oakie and C. Aubrey Smith and Jimmy Dunn and Jane Darwell and Mommy and Miss Peel, who would get a special seat onstage—
I was out of breath and a little dizzy and the neighbor downstairs was banging on her ceiling with a broomhandle.
“Jesus,” Howard said. “No wonder you didn’t make it.”
“Was I awful?” I asked happily. But I could see that he was touched.
“No, you were beautiful i
n a way. But Bill Robinson would have shoved you down those stairs.” Howard brushed the hair back from my flushed cheek with one hand.
“Yeah,” I said dreamily, snuggling up again. “My mother cried like a baby when he died. As if the dream finally ended there. Although it already had, a long time before.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing really. No talent scout ever showed up. My curls drooped and my hair got darker. Lemon rinses didn’t work. And I began to grow, faster and faster. I burst out of those tutus, popped the seams of the kimono. That was it, folks. The End.”
“I don’t think your mother ever got over it,” Howard said.
It was true. Whenever she saw an old Shirley Temple movie on television, whenever she saw that curly-headed moppet singing her way out of an orphanage and into the hearts of America, she’d have to take a couple of Bromo Seltzers before she felt calm again.
Later, Howard and I went into the bedroom where he undressed me and I undressed him. Where was Shirley Temple at that very moment?
In the morning when I went to the bathroom, there was a message soaped across the mirror: A Star Is Born.
7
“TELL ME ABOUT IT, Sweetheart,” I said. “You’ll feel better.” I propped an extra pillow behind his head and lay down again.
Howard was doubtful. All his life, he had been the victim of seduction, and he didn’t think talking about it would help at all. The minute his mother first saw him, ether-dazed and slick from the birth canal, she fell wildly in love and threw his father over in Howard’s favor. Subsequently, grandmothers, aunts, neighbors and teachers were crazy about him. Sometimes when we’d visit, his mother would drag out old photo albums to document his history and remind me of my privileged position. There was Howard as a small boy, ducking his head, smiling with that heartbreaking appeal, between the skirts of his mother and sister. There was Howard in adolescence, the tall, dark center of a bouquet of girls. He was thinner then, he looked shy, and with a shining promise of the beauty yet to come. Some of the girls had signed the photo. To Howie, with all my love forever. Don’t forget to write.
Marilyn, Roz, Lucille, and Janet, who had added an open-mouthed lip print in indelible Tangee Coral. What had happened to all those girls?
He had a summer job when he was in high school, at a place called Kaplan’s Kabins, a colony of small bungalows in the Catskills, with a gnat-studded casino for weekend entertainment. He and a couple of other boys, a trumpet player and a drummer who doubled on the piano, formed a pickup band. They hardly had time to tune up before they left for the mountains with their instruments, and their wallets bulging with condoms, enough to last them into the Afterlife.
The married women went after him too, the ones who couldn’t seem to wait for their husbands’ Friday night pilgrimages from the city. Howard was educated on squeaking bedsprings that stilled the singing crickets outside those screened rooms. Babies slept close by in mosquito-netted cribs. The women smelled of suntan lotion and the moist fragrance of lust. He was such a romantic boy, he tried hard to be in love, but there was always too much variety and never enough time.
“Now tell me everything,” I said, wondering if I actually wanted to know. It was the main purpose of our night talks. We would be each other’s personal historian. Confession would work as a catharsis, leaving us clean again for one another. At first Howard was reluctant, sticking close to the recent past, to Renee, who hardly counted in a narrative of passion.
But then we went gently back in time, back through early fantasy, through tender crushes, to first infantile fingering and revelation. We probed at early memory in search of connections. “Oh, you felt that way. But so did I!”
We had grown up at different times in similar neighborhoods. I loved to think that Howard was a schoolboy when I was still an infant, that he might have wheeled me in my stroller or held my hand crossing a street.
I had been lonely in school. Howard had broken his arm on three occasions. We had both stolen money when we were young. I had stood on a boy’s dime for an hour, pivoting slowly in place, pretending sympathy, pretending to help him look, until the streetlights came on and mothers called us home to supper, when I pocketed the dime and ran. My confession encouraged Howard’s own. He had once taken money from his mother’s purse and, sin upon sin, had spent it on a book purchased from an older boy in school. It was “The Adventures of Mutt and Jeff,” as never seen in the Sunday supplements; a well-worn edition, dog-eared and stained by the sweat of other hands and God knows what else.
He only had it about a week when his older sister Beverly found it on the floor of his closet, under old toys and real comic books. He tried to remember what she was doing in there in the first place. Had he wanted her to find the book? We didn’t go into that. We were cautious, shying away from being too analytical—it slowed the progress of our stories, and besides, Howard didn’t believe in it.
“Disgusting,” Beverly had said. “This is disgusting and you’re disgusting.” And Howard, who could find no other rationale for the wild ecstasy of his feelings, had been convinced. Beverly had threatened to tell those proper authorities, their mother and father, and Howard knew he would soon be the object of everyone’s disgust. Even his mother, who defended him in all family arguments, who allowed only him the luxury of bad moods, would be made to see the revolting truth. He pleaded with his sister not to tell, and finally she agreed, keeping the offending book in her adjoining room in a nervous settlement.
And Howard, who can’t remember how he knew what was expected of him, scratched an infinitesimal peephole in the painted French door between their rooms.
His sister is married now and has three children. They live in Los Angeles, and she sends photos of herself and her family posed around their backyard swimming pool. Her bathing suit is a one-piece affair with a skirt. I can see she is an ordinary suburban matron, smiling and squinting into the sunlight.
But secretly I always think of her as The Stripper, that long-haired, sly-eyed girl removing the clinical-looking underwear girls wore in those days, in a slow, calculated rhythm, guaranteed to disturb her brother’s pulses. Her bedside lamp had a green towel draped over the shade, giving everything an eerie and theatrical glow.
He never touched her, except for the wild scenes that passed through his head like landscape seen through a train window. In reality the glass door stayed between them, a board between bundlers. But, oh, she knew he was watching, and he knew that she knew, increasing the excitement on both sides, pushing the experience far beyond the two-dimensional cut-ups of Mutt and Jeff.
“She told anyway,” Howard said.
“Wow,” I said. “What did you do?”
“Denied everything, of course. I said she was crazy. Her brain must have gone soft from those curlers she wore. I said she had scratched that hole herself—how did I know why it was on my side? When she wasn’t home I shredded Mutt and Jeff until I could flush the pieces. I pretended a passionate interest in Hebrew school. If they started up with me, I pretended to be praying. I planned her execution.”
The family moved to another apartment, this one with real wooden doors. Howard’s father inspected them monthly for boreholes.
Things were not good after that between Howard’s mother and his sister. They quarreled over surrogate issues, about messy rooms, about doing the dishes, about hair in the sink drain. Beverly called him names; she grew long fingernails like the Dragon Lady’s and she raked him in passing. If he was in the bathroom for more than a few minutes, she hammered on the door. His mother and sister screamed. His father banged on the table for peace.
Then Beverly fell in love with an outsider, breaking the incestuous chain. Howard’s mother became calm again, planned an engagement party and a trousseau, and Howard was restored to his favored position. Even Beverly grew tolerant of him. She no longer called him “the animal.” Instead she referred to him as her “little” kid brother, with teasing affection, when other people were around.
Finally she married and moved out.
“But I’m glad you got started early,” I said. “You’ve had all this time to get so accomplished.” Privately, I wished it had been me starting him off. I wished I could have erased all of those girls and women from his memory and from his life. “Does it all still bother you?” I asked Howard, ready to offer consolation.
“No, no, of course not,” he said. “I was only a kid.”
But I think he was left with the burden of guilt anyway. Despite what Howard says, you can’t go too far back for things like that. Why else would he have married Renee, whose body promised nothing but terrifying cell changes? Of course she was down and out at the time; between jobs, between dress sizes. And Howard, raised on Superman and the Green Hornet, believed in heroism and the miracle of transformation. Renee took off her eyeglasses and unpinned her hair. Ta-da! But blinded, she only careened into furniture, and her shoulders blossomed with dandruff. Someone else would only have befriended her, lent her money perhaps, and a sympathetic ear. But Howard, gallant and optimistic, had gone all the way. They lasted only seven months. Later, he helped her move into another apartment, carrying cartons up three flights, hanging pictures, setting mousetraps under the sink.
I felt sad after we talked, the price of counter-transference, I supposed, but I could see that Howard felt better. He went inside and brought back his saxophone. He rolled up his shirt-sleeves and he played thrilling and melancholy numbers from an earlier time. He played “Laura” and “Dream” and “Body and Soul,” holding some notes in a long, breathless embrace. His cheeks billowed and dimpled and I could hear the gentle sibilance of his spit on the reed.
In the Flesh Page 4