by James Morrow
The pistol had turned up during a routine frisking. First rule of the hooker biz: never admit a customer until you’ve disarmed him. Take away his snubnose, blackjack, stiletto, hand grenade. Leonard, he’d called himself, barely seventeen. He had a skin disease. While Leonard sat on the bed drinking her rum, Phoebe slipped the Smith & Wesson into her panty-hose drawer. Maybe it was the rum, maybe the lack of proximity to his revolver, but the poor leper couldn’t get it hard. He hurried off in a fog of shame laced with Bacardi, leaving behind the Smith & Wesson and a thousand discs of dried flesh, pennies from hell.
Lepers. Christ. Still, freelancing was better than franchising. Over the phone, Phoebe could usually screen legitimate customers from pimps, though occasionally one snuck past her guard, in which case she got out her Deauville Hotel dynamite. One glance at Phoebe holding a match in her hand and a nitroglycerin stick between her teeth—for the sake of effect, she’d replaced the electric detonators with gunpowder fuses—and the pimp knew here was a woman to avoid, a woman who, when you least expected it, might nuke your cock.
She fixed herself another diet rum and, taking a swallow, patted her stuffed friend, H. Rap Brown Bear. She ate a Do-si-do. Finished the rum. Scratched her left temple with the Smith & Wesson. Such an exquisite gun, she thought. Its muzzle smelled like Robbie the Robot’s asshole.
Act, girl. Do it. Die. She coiled her tingling finger around the trigger. Each chamber was full, Atlantic City Roulette. Her hand vibrated as if she were operating a chain saw. Slowly she flexed her finger, tighter, still tighter: she might leave a note behind after all, written on the wall in blood and rubbery loops of brain.
A small, sharp explosion.
The bullet grazed her scalp and burrowed into her refrigerator.
Missed? Missed? How could anyone miss? The blood felt thick and warm, like a glob of egg fresh from a hen’s toasty womb. No time to waste. This time the muzzle would go elsewhere, past the lips and across the teeth. For blowjobs, Phoebe always insisted on a condom, but this case was exceptional.
Finger on trigger. Gun in mouth, the oily metal teasing her taste buds. Flexing…
The phone rang.
Ah, the wondrous, beyond-the-grave powers of Alexander Graham Bell. The phone could interrupt intimate conversations, screws, shits, suicides, anything. Phoebe lifted the receiver. “We’re out of business. Try humping your hand.”
“Phoebe?” A woman’s voice.
“Take two aspirin and call me in the afterlife.”
“Is that you?”
“I can’t come to the phone right now. I’m shooting myself. If that fails, there’s always the dynamite.”
“Phoebe, it’s me! Julie!”
“Katz?” Phoebe wrapped the phone cord around her arm like a tourniquet. “Julie Katz?”
“Don’t do anything! Don’t hurt yourself!”
“Katz? Fifteen years? Katz?”
“Right.”
“Fifteen goddamn years?”
“Fifteen. Give me your address. Where are you?”
“Simple funeral, please. No flowers. Only one band.”
“You’re in West Philly, right?”
“A rock band, not a brass band.”
“West Philly, Phoebe?”
“South Forty-third Street.”
“Where on South Forty-third Street? What number?”
“You really in town?”
“Yeah. What number?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your street number!”
“Forty-third Street.”
“No, the number!”
“Five twenty-two. Why? You want to get laid?”
“Listen, I’m sending Bix over. We’re married. Stay on the line. You can live with us. Let’s sing a song, Phoebe. ‘On the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, we will walk in a dream.’ Stay on the line, honey. Don’t do anything.”
“I’m going to pull the trigger, but I won’t do anything else.”
“‘On the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, life will be peaches and—’”
“See you in hell.”
Phoebe pumped two slugs into the phone, sending a spray of plastic and metal against the refrigerator, and lovingly licked the hot smoking muzzle.
522 South 43rd Street. A converted row house, one apartment per floor. On the mailboxes, faded illegible pencil scrawls adorned semidetached labels, as if the tenants had no ultimate interest in receiving their mail. No. 3—P. Sparks. Julie grabbed the knob, a bulb of engraved brass worn smooth by a century of flesh. Why had the idiot hung up? Just once in her life, couldn’t Phoebe do what she was told? The door opened. Julie charged up the steps, swerving past the second-floor banister, Bix puffing behind her.
But for Julie’s flesh, but for her bladder, she would never have discovered the fateful phone number. The search for Phoebe, a frantic three-day marathon conducted out of a Kensington hotel, had taken them through every human catalogue in the Delaware Valley, through police files, coroner’s reports, taxpayer lists, welfare rolls. They placed an ad in the Philadelphia Daily News: Phoebe, Get in Touch—Queen Zenobia, Box 356. Then, ten minutes after the Upper Darby Township Justice of the Peace pronounced her Bix’s wife, Julie went to the ladies’ room and saw, scratched in the gray paint, “For Professional Sex, Contact the Green Enchantress, 886-1064. All Genders Welcome.”
Apartment 3 was locked. Julie pounded, no answer. But now came Bix, Father Paradox to the rescue, hurling his two hundred and twenty pounds against the door.
A tornado’s wake: clothes in ragged heaps, newspapers and Bacardi bottles strewn about, a decrepit, unraveling teddy bear surrounded by Tastykake wrappers and boxes of Girl Scout cookies. Beyond, in the sallow kitchen, a figure in a mint bathrobe slouched at the table, crusted blood clinging to her forehead like a snail.
Julie charged. Oh, let me be divine again, Mother, I won’t lose heart, I’ll fix every neuron…
“Hi,” slurred Phoebe, waving a revolver over her head. “You’re gonna pay for that door, fatty.” She gulped down the contents of a plastic Pluto cup.
“Jeee-ssus,” wheezed Bix, snatching the gun away.
Alive. A mess, a sunken-eyed drunk, a whore, her hair a nest built by psychotic sparrows. But alive.
Julie reached out. The hug cure. Phoebe hiccupped. Food cascaded from her mouth, the steamy stinking remains of a thousand cakes and cookies, splashing into Julie’s shocked palms, rolling through her startled fingers.
“Wasn’t a nice greeting for my old buddy, was it? Shitty greeting. Remember when we dropped those dead fish on that Fourth of July parade?”
“We’re bringing you home with us.” Gritting her teeth, Julie marched to the kitchen sink, jammed with oily frying pans and scabby dishes. The slime in her hands was heavy and warm. “We’ve got a house on Baring,” she explained, washing.
“You think I want to live with deities and pigs?” sneered Phoebe, stuffing cookies into her mouth. Trefoils, Do-si-dos, Thin Mints, Samoas. “Whatever else they say about me, I supported the Girl Scouts.”
They pulled off her bathrobe and stuck her in the shower, holding her upright like two people trying to erect a Christmas tree. “Get him out of here,” she moaned, flailing at Bix. “He wants to see me naked, he pays.” The water grew pink as it hit her bleeding head. Her thinness frightened Julie; she had a ballet dancer’s chest. “Better not mess with my metabolism, Katz. You mess with my metabolism, I’ll punch you out.”
“I’m not divine anymore. I’m just another geshmatte Jew.”
“I’ll bet.”
After stuffing Phoebe in the only clean clothes they could find—black bicycle pants, a man’s Hawaiian shirt—they flagged down a taxi and took her to the detox center at Madison Memorial, where a bony young paramedic named Gary, tall as a basketball center, sonogrammed her liver, pumped her full of vitamins, and locked her up in a ten-by-ten lucite chamber equipped with a closed-circuit television camera.
“She tried to shoot herself,” Jul
ie explained as Gary ushered them into the observation room. On the monitor, Phoebe punched and kicked the air like Saint Anthony beating back temptation.
“That’s often the point when we see them,” said the paramedic with a knowing nod. For all his height, he did not inspire Julie’s confidence. The world was not set up to save its Phoebes.
“Get me out of here!” Phoebe’s voice zagged out of the speaker.
“You find the gun?” asked Gary.
Julie nodded. “I think she’s got dynamite hidden away somewhere.”
“Dynamite? That’s a new one.”
“Bastards!” wailed Phoebe. “Gestapo fascists!”
“I want to help you!” Julie screamed into the microphone.
“You never helped anybody in your life!”
At last an M.D. appeared, a Dr. Rushforth, a tall, pompous Englishman with enormous hands, strutting into the observation room on a cloud of noblesse oblige.
“Get your friend to stop drinking, and there’s a fifty-fifty chance her liver’ll bounce back,” he prophesied, unfurling the sonogram printout.
Phoebe screamed, “Storm troopers!”
“Stop? How?” moaned Julie.
“Nazis!”
Rushforth knotted his sausagelike fingers. “She seeing a psychiatrist? We use Dr. Brophy. And encourage her to attend an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. In this town you can find one every day.”
“Fuckers!”
“You’re not going to discharge her,” Bix protested.
“We haven’t admitted her, sir.”
“Cocksuckers!”
“Admit her,” Julie pleaded.
“We’re not a treatment facility, Mrs. Constantine,” said Rushforth. “Call Brophy tomorrow. And get her to A.A.”
Julie winced, recalling Marcus Bass’s opinion that sending an alcoholic to a shrink made about as much sense as sending a heart patient to a poet.
And so Phoebe was on their backs again, the addict as addiction. They carried her out of Madison Memorial and maneuvered her onto the Market Street subway.
“Dear Sheila, I’m a lousy whore!” she screamed over and over above the screeching and clacking of the train. Like Judeans avoiding a leper, the passengers moved as far away as possible. “I’m hungry! I just puked my guts out! Get me some fucking food!”
They took her to the Golden Wok in Chinatown, where, by threatening to rip off all her clothes, by threatening to “make a scene,” she cowed them into buying her a bottle of plum wine. She drank it in ten minutes and, seizing a moo-shu-pork pancake, filled it with the contents of the nearest ash tray.
“Phoebe, no!”
But already she was stuffing the befouled pancake into her mouth. “Yum,” she said, choking it down. Charred tobacco flecked her lips; her tongue curled around an orphan Marlboro filter. Phoebe the agnostic ash eater, the false penitent, going through the motions of contrition. “Yum, yum,” she said, and promptly passed out.
Everyone was watching. A scene after all.
“Now what?” said Bix.
“I want to bring her home,” said Julie. “I mean, I don’t want to, but—”
“That’s a crazy idea.”
“I know. You have a better one?”
Considering the modest rent, their neo-Victorian house in Powelton Village—a bohemian enclave on the west bank of the Schuylkill, a world of brick sidewalks, dozy cats, and walk-in garages jammed with bearded young men welding hunks of squashed metal into art—was astonishingly large. Crumbling, true. Roach-ridden. But certainly a surfeit of space, including a relatively uninfested back parlor. They dumped Phoebe unconscious on the living-room couch and set about preparing for the worst, nailing bed slats over the parlor window, installing a dead bolt, and removing every object with which she might stab or strangle herself—sash cord, table lamp, radiator valve. A war was coming, Julie sensed. They must dig their trenches and gird up their loins.
“Should we call that psychiatrist?” Bix asked after Phoebe was imprisoned.
Julie threaded the key through a length of twine. “I think this is bigger than psychiatry, Bix.” She suspended the key around her neck like a Saint Christopher medallion—like a millstone, an albatross, like Phoebe’s weighty and confounding dementia. “I think this is war.”
“Happy honeymoon,” said Bix.
Had Julie not actually lived in Andrew Wyvern’s domain, she might have called the subsequent six days hell. Grotesque, impossible, nerve-shattering, but not exactly, not quite hell. “Life imitates soap opera,” she moaned. To enter the back parlor—here, Phoebe, eat some chicken; hey, kid, we have to empty the commode—was to invite a skirmish, Phoebe swooping down on you like a fascist angel, kicking your shins, uprooting your hair. A war. A war, complete with artillery fire, Phoebe’s screams answered with her keepers’ pathetic replies: Phoebe, settle down, Phoebe, get a grip on yourself. Like Eskimos naming the myriad varieties of snow, Julie and Bix catalogued her screams, each unique in pitch and rhythm. There was the scream that signified general despair, the scream that accompanied her pleas for beer and rum, the scream that underscored her demands for her Smith & Wesson. It was like living with a diurnal werewolf, a lycanthrope from the new spinning city in the sky called Space Platform Omega, world of eternal moonlight. They wanted a silver bullet, anything to put Phoebe the werewolf out of her misery, anything to get her out of their lives. They wanted to bash Phoebe’s brains out with a silver-headed cane as Claude Rains had done to Lon Chaney in Roger Worth’s favorite movie, The Wolf Man.
On the seventh day, Julie marched up to Phoebe’s door, tugging on the key. “Phoebe?” The twine pressed against Julie’s throat like a garrote. “Phoebe, you there?”
“Get me a drink.”
“Phoebe, I’ve got something important to say.”
“A beer. One damn Budweiser.”
“This is important. I’ve seen your parents.”
“Oh, sure. Right. Get me a six-pack.”
“Your mom and dad—I’ve seen them.”
Silence. Then, “My father? You saw my father? Christ—where?”
Hope, Julie concluded. A nibble from God. “I’ll tell you…when you start going to Alcoholics Anonymous.”
“Is Mom okay? Dad alive?”
“Promise you’ll go to A.A.”
“Assholes Anonymous,” Phoebe wailed. “I tried it. Bunch of macho dorks bragging about their binges—forget it. Is Mom all right? Tell me that.”
“Get your act together,” said Julie, “and we’ll talk about your parents.”
“Two drinks a day—okay? What’s my dad like? He in America?”
“Zero drinks a day.”
“You’re lying! You don’t know where they are.”
“Think it over.”
Perhaps it was the week of mandatory sobriety she’d already suffered, perhaps the proposed bargain, but ten hours later Phoebe declared that she’d seen the light.
“I’m a new woman, Katz.”
Julie said, “Tell me about it.”
“Really. A new woman. Where are my parents?”
“Do you love me, Phoebe?”
“Of course I love you. Where are they?”
“Will you stay sober for me?”
“I’m a new woman. I’m no bum.”
“Will you stay sober for twelve weeks?” Twelve weeks, Julie figured, and Phoebe would be home free. “Can you ride the wagon that long?”
“I told you—I’m no bum.”
“Twelve weeks, okay?”
“Whatever you want.”
Twelve weeks, and—what? The truth? Both your parents were murdered, Phoebe, too bad, kid? “In twelve weeks I’ll tell you everything.”
“Deal, buddy. Unlock the fucking door.”
A new woman? Ambiguous. Uncertain. On the surface, things looked good. Phoebe returned to 522 South 43rd Street and prospered, supporting herself through a conglomeration of part-time jobs—McDonald’s server, laundromat attendant, grocery bagger. She calle
d Julie every day.
“Sobriety bites the big one, Katz.” Phoebe’s voice was wobbly but clear. “Sobriety sucks raw eggs.”
“Can you hold out?”
“My hands shake. There’s a Brillo pad in my mouth. Yeah, I can hold out. Pussycat. Watch me.”
According to Bix, Phoebe’s transformation was a sham, the deal she’d cut with Julie a farce. According to Bix, they were “walking on eggs.” Julie disagreed; Bix didn’t know Phoebe as she did. Bix had never peed off a railroad bridge with Phoebe or collaborated with her on bombarding a Fourth of July parade with dead fish. Julie and Phoebe’s love would conquer all. It would conquer the Courvoisier Napoleon, shoot the Bacardi bat, run the Gordon’s boar to earth; it would defeat Old Grand-Dad, Jack Daniel’s, Jim Beam, Johnny Walker…
On Phoebe’s birthday, Julie visited 522 South 43rd bearing a bottle of Welch’s Nonalcoholic Sparkling White Grape Juice and a stout chocolate layer cake. Happy Third Week of Recovery, the compliant clerk at the Village Bakery had squirted onto the icing.
“Know what I really want for my birthday?” asked Phoebe, sipping the virginal champagne. Her face seemed deflated; her eyes looked like rusty ball bearings. “I want to pack up H. Rap Brown Bear and move in with my best friend.”
“We’ve got roaches.” Julie slashed open the cake with one of the stilettos Phoebe had confiscated during her career as a hooker.
“Yeah.” Phoebe devoured Recovery. She was dressing in style these days—a green blouse made of the flashiest new silkoids, a gold earring dangling from her left lobe. “I miss ’em.”
“We’ve got my husband.”
“He doesn’t like me, does he?”
“Bix likes you fine,” said Julie. Bix could not stand Phoebe. Yet he would agree, Julie knew. The man was loosening up. “I’ll take the boards off the window.”
“Great.” A new woman. Before, Phoebe would never have wanted the sun.
As spring wafted into Powelton Village, Julie came to realize that ministering was both harder and more satisfying than having a ministry. Saving a friend from rum easily eclipsed saving humankind from nostalgia, especially since the former ambition lay within the possible.
Not that this life could hold her forever. True, there were no overt signs of Revelationism in Philadelphia, no hints that anyone hunted heretics on the American side of the Delaware. Ostensibly the founder of Uncertaintism was as safe at 3411 Baring Avenue as anywhere. But a stark fact remained: Milk’s ravenous theocracy was barely seventy miles away, so close that, lying beside her husband at night, Julie imagined she heard the squeal of Ned Shiner’s pickup truck hauling dead sinners down the bone-lined expressway.