Maybe that’s why she likes communal life.
Hmm. I never made that connection. They made her do most of the housework, too, laundry, cooking, vacuuming, while they watched. They seemed to think it was cute, a game. They told her she was playing maid, and sometimes they even pretended to pay her.
Pretended? Real money, fake money, or what?
I think real. I didn’t go into it. I’m not a novelist. She also told me things about her ex-husband that you wouldn’t believe. She said he was really a woman.
I don’t get it. An actual woman? Someone from the commune?
Just then the waitress comes by. “Everything all right here?”
“Superb,” says Q. “Ottimo.” They ask that, he murmurs, so later if you get ptomaine poisoning and sue them, they can say they asked if everything was all right and you said yes.
A woman? I repeat.
Oh, Laura, my love, you’re always so literal. He waves his hand in a cavalier way I like, almost knocking over his beer bottle. No. He’s a man. Technically. A swimmer—he almost made the Olympic team. I saw him once in a supermarket in L.A. Muscles, mustache, all the secondary sex characteristics. Works in a bank, drives a big car, very manly. But deep inside he’s a woman, she said. At home he dresses up in women’s clothes, at least he did when they were married.
I suppose that could drive you to a women’s commune.
When they made love, Q. continues, she had to pretend he was a woman. She had to call him Roberta or some such. His name was Robert.
What do you mean, had to? Did he put a gun to her head?
I’m speaking loosely.
Actually that’s not as unusual as you might think, I contribute. I saw a TV program once about men who dress as women at home. Married men. I was in a motel somewhere, on a book tour. I always watch those morning programs when I’m in motels. That’s how I learned who Geraldo was. They didn’t go into what they do in bed, though. Was it like two women making love, or did she have to pretend to be the man?
I don’t know, love. It was a long time ago and she didn’t go into detail.
Did he wear a nightie?
Q. laughs. I don’t know if he wore a nightie, Laura.
(What I should say is, Why are you telling me this? But I’m intrigued. I think of the data bank. I remember the men on the TV show quite well; maybe one of them was this Robert.)
How would a man pretend he’s a woman? I inquire.
Do I know? You have to imagine it. Well, for one thing, she wasn’t allowed to touch his cock.
She wasn’t?
No. Off-limits.
I thought she didn’t go into detail.
Well, just that. That was all.
I was under the impression men liked that.
Yes, well, they do. You’re correct on that score. Senz’altro. But she wasn’t allowed to.
Didn’t she find anything odd in this?
Of course. I don’t suppose they did it very often. And eventually she left.
So how did she act with you? (Am I actually asking for more?) Did she pretend you were a woman? Out of habit, I mean?
No, no, she was perfectly normal. There was just one thing, though.
The waitress appears again, running her fingers through her spiky hair, and asks if she can take our plates. I have some salad left and Q. is chewing his last French fry, the fork still in his hand.
“No, would you mind leaving them?” he says. “I like to sit awhile with the empty plate in front of me. It feels more like home.”
She rolls her eyes and sidles off.
They’re always in a hurry to take the plates, he says. It’s the fastidiousness of modern life. They want to destroy all evidence of physicality. Puritan America—as if the sight of leftovers were too sordid.
What’s the one thing?
I could never tell when she came. You know how with women you can always .. . I mean, even if they don’t make a lot of noise there are physiological signs. . . .
(Funny how he can look me in the eye and say these things. He wouldn’t be so clinical with a woman he’d never slept with, or with a woman he was currently romancing. How useful I am. Irreplaceable.)
Yes, I’m aware of that, I say.
Well, with her I could never tell. One time things were very quiet and I said, Did you come? And she said, Sure, I came six times.
(Did you come? One of those little jokes. When after a great display, things had calmed down, Did you come? he’d say. Sometimes I’d punch him lightly. Sometimes I’d say no.)
Six times? I echo. My dear Q., with all due respect, I don’t believe that. Researchers have found that some women who never have orgasms think all the nice little feelings along the way are orgasms. If she came six times you’d be able to tell, believe me. You know, what’s truly curious is that she picked you. Because you’re a woman in a way, too, so maybe for her it wasn’t so different from her ex-husband, not to mention the commune. I mean it as a compliment, you understand. You talk, you listen, you do all those womanly things.
Yes. Q. laughs. But I also let people touch my cock.
(As I well recall. But let it go.)
So, did you ever get to the motel for the obligatory lovemaking?
Yes, we finally went. She stayed for an hour. After she left, I stretched out on the bed and gazed out at the ocean. Then I took a long bath. I turned on the TV and watched the news. By that time it was evening. I watched the sunset out the window. I read a book. It was wonderful.
Tell me something. Do you talk about me, too?
You? He looks shocked. Never. I’ve never spoken like this to anyone about you and me. You know I wouldn’t.
Why? Because I’m not weird enough?
Because the way I love you is too important.
I see. Listen, Q., I just can’t sit up anymore.
Come, we’ll go back so you can lie down. I’m sorry I went on so long. He waves for the check. I got carried away, he says.
I encouraged you. It’s grotesque that you tell me these things and I listen. It’s not even titillating. Or only intellectually.
He takes my arm and we walk back to the apartment, into Peter’s bedroom, a maelstrom of clothing, suitcases, books and papers. Still, the bed is welcoming. One is as good as another—I’m promiscuous about beds. I shove things over and flop onto it. Q., too.
Oh, are you going to lie here with me?
Well, where else? Do you want me to sit in the living room and we’ll shout back and forth? Unless—and suddenly he’s not ironic but considerate—unless you really want to sleep?
No, I don’t want to sleep, just rest.
Lying on a bed with Q. is not restful. Many nights we spent together left me frazzled: as a sleeper, he could be jumpy and clutchy or aloof, bunched in a corner. How could I have imagined sleeping a lifetime with him? I would have died young from sheer exhaustion. Yet I’m exhausted now in any case.
Lying next to any man generates sexual vibrations, but with Q. they’re fraught with ambiguity. Since the day I threw him out, that is, and he closed the door so silently.. . . After that, I was always bitter over history while he was bitter because I married. Each of us too proud to show a need, waiting for the other to make a move. At least I think that’s how it was. Why else would he pursue me over the years, always wanting to lie down? Just to be lying beside a woman? It’s also true that he’s happiest with his feet up—probably low blood pressure. I’m the same way. Why stand on ceremony, after all we’ve been through?
With such a tangle of pride and need, it’s a miracle we’ve made love through the years. How does it happen, if neither of us can yield (a bad example of push hands, the Tai Chi teacher would say)? It happens. We touch, we fall together, and it’s happening. It’s ready to happen at a touch. Then it goes on for a while until something else happens, a hasty word, a flare of anger, a love affair—his, not mine, after all, I was married. . . .
Today, though, is different. I want only to lie still. Let’s hope
he doesn’t come too close, so I don’t have to back off and hurt his feelings.
He senses how I feel and doesn’t come too close. My feelings are hurt.
On my way here I stopped in Cleveland to see my sister, he says, rolling onto his side, head propped on his elbow to face me. I hadn’t seen her in almost a year, Madonna. Not since her latest divorce. I went over for dinner, saw the ragazzi, that was fine, the usual teenage pandemonium. Nice kids. All different fathers, but they get along. The next night I took her to dinner at my hotel so we could talk. I was staying downtown. The seventeenth floor was all they had, with a little balcony. You know how I feel about heights, Laura. Anyhow, that night Gemma was totally different. Like Mr. Hyde. Ms. Hyde, I should say. She was getting hysterical in the restaurant so we went up to my room. It’s this man she’s in love with. He’s married, what more need I say? She wept and moaned and tore her hair. She wanted me to tell her what to do. Me, of all people! Why? Because I’m still the big brother. Gemma, you know, is a woman who lives for love. She’s spent her whole life searching for love. Amore. In between that, she’s a CPA, as you know, but in actuality she lives for love, not figures. This man, though, also a CPA—he’s in her office, no less—sounds like a CPA to the bone. He doesn’t live for love, I’m sure of that. He sounds very practical. I tried to tell her that. Gemma, I said, for all the wild passion, this Herb sounds like a very practical man. He’s not going to leave his wife. When it comes right down to it, they don’t, most of the time. They stay where they’re comfortable. That is the nature of the beast, says Q., changing his position and leaning closer. I can feel the warm stream of his breath, slightly beery, not unpleasant. I could fall asleep this way, if I let myself.
She wept more and more, he goes on. She wept and moaned so much that it got very late and finally I said, Look, Gemma, cara, it’s very late. Why don’t you just sleep here in the extra bed? You’re in no state to drive. Call the ragazzi and tell them—they’re old enough to stay by themselves, they’ll be fine. So she stretched out on the bed and I lay down on the other bed and turned out the light. Like the old days. Then just as I was falling asleep I heard her starting all over again.
Gemma, I said to her in the dark. I was trying to be patient. Gemma, everybody has gone through this. We’ve all had our love affairs and gone through our pain and heartbreak. That’s all it is, nothing unusual, just pain and heartbreak, magari. I didn’t know what else to say at that point. I was down to the rock-bottom truth. Isn’t that the truth? Finally I fell asleep. When I woke early in the morning, six-thirty, she was gone. She didn’t even leave a note. How do you like that? The first thing I did was, I went out on the balcony to see if she had thrown herself off. I was terrified to look down. Besides how I feel about heights, I thought I’d see her body spattered there in the middle of downtown Cleveland.
But it wasn’t, I say.
No, grazie a Dio. I called her at the office a little after nine just to make sure she got there. She was fine. Ms. Jekyll. As if it had never happened.
Jilly once told me, I say drowsily, about a performance artist who jumped out of a window and managed to have photos taken of himself in midflight. A second-story window—he didn’t really mean it. It was for art, you know. The seventeenth floor would be more than an artistic gesture, I guess. But you’d have more time to get the photos.
I don’t think it’s artistic from any floor. At least I wouldn’t want to see it. I honestly thought she was capable of it, though.
So you’ve seen her secret life, I say.
It’s everyone’s secret life. But why do they tell me?
Because you listen like a woman. Or at least a hermaphrodite.
Huh! I’m improving. Other times you said I was a frog.
That, too.
Dropping off to sleep, I picture Q. slipping into his male costume each morning, hairy skin complete with musculature and genitals. Maybe he keeps on talking while I doze, it’s not impossible. When I open my eyes, Peter is packing clothes in suitcases with Q. following along, trying to help.
“Hello, Laura. Stay where you are, it’s all right. I’ll work around you.” I used to dread Peter’s finding me in his bed. Or on it, as now. Today I don’t care. How will I get home with my eyes hot and my legs clogged with sand, is what I care about.
“Hi, Peter, it’s been quite a while. I’m so sorry about Arthur—how’s he doing?”
“Still dying. What about you, Laura? Quinn tells me you’re not feeling so well.”
“Oh, it’s nothing. Just a little tired.”
The relativity of suffering is a problem. No objective standards of measurement, we’re all entitled to our own—so say the experts. Yet in the face of Arthur’s dying I can hardly complain of my sandbag body, or the little things that slip from my grasp, or my inability to stay upright for more than a few hours at a stretch.
I thank Peter for the hospitality of his bed, and Q. accompanies me downstairs. Peter is moving in two days, he says, holding open the front door. I’ll be working here for a couple of weeks. I never got to tell you about the movie. You wouldn’t by any chance have any room for two weeks, would you, Laura?
(Ah. That’s what the frogs always say in the stories. It’s not enough to have me in your garden, you must keep me by your plate at table; it’s not enough to have me near your plate, you must keep me on your pillow.)
Won’t they put you up somewhere while you’re shooting?
Queens. He gives a pathetic grimace as we head for the comer.
I’m sorry, Q., but I don’t feel well enough for a guest. Besides, I think our time for living together has passed.
Since when am I a guest? I’ll take care of you. I’ve done it before, Laura, don’t you remember? Whatever you need. I’ll make you soups. I’ll rub your back. In fact I’ll rub anywhere you say. You just name it.
It’s too hot for soups. It was April, last time. Look, don’t you have any women here these days? Or have you been away too long?
Nobody. You have the wrong idea about me.
Really. Nobody on the set?
There’s someone who interests me but she’s much too young.
(It’s easy to imagine her, assuming she really exists. I know just what he likes. So well that I could earn a finder’s fee. Elegant women, but not ethereal. Not too thin, firm, not fragile, with a certain grace. A touch of earthiness. Never coarse or crude, yet with an ineffable, barely discernible hint that they might be crude at the right moments. Intelligent, but not quite as intelligent as Q.—there’s my failing. Vastly tolerant, optimistic women.)
How young? I ask.
Never mind. Too young. She’ll be ready in about ten years. Besides, she’s in the motel in Queens, too. He pauses. You know, Laura, you make me say these things. You deliberately provoke them.
Do I? Did I provoke you to tell me about Nadine?
Nadine? Who’s Nadine?
The sexual savage from El Paso.
Oh, Laura. Che sciocchezze. I forgot all about her. It was nothing.
Maybe. But you told me unprovoked.
I thought I could tell you anything. You were the one person. .. . It was amusing. But I see I was mistaken. I remember now. You hung up.
(Indeed I did. It was during a spell when we, more likely he, had decided it was too difficult being lovers; we should be “just friends,” an arrangement that left him free to confide his escapades—after all, I was his best friend. The damnedest thing happened in El Paso, he said over the phone. We did M. Butterfly, and afterwards there was a cast party given by—
Which one were you? I interrupted.
I was the diplomat. What did you think?
I thought maybe you were the mistress, you know, the man who pretends to be the woman all those years.
No, that has to be an Asian.
They could always fix you up.
There are limits. I’m too big. That kind of actor has to be able to look delicate. Anyway, why do you think that?
B
ecause, I keep telling you, you’re a woman at heart. I think you’d be great in that role.
Well, I wasn’t. So anyway, the Chamber of Commerce gave this party and I was introduced to one of the county judges and his wife, Nadine, her name was. She looked young, especially to be married to a judge, but he was a young judge. I guess out in El Paso there’s not a huge supply so they take them younger. Now, you know I’m not captive to Hollywood standards of youth and beauty. That kind of thing means nothing to me. To me a woman is a woman, a person, not flesh at a particular stage of ripeness. I’m definitely not American in that, I’m glad to say. You were the youngest, I’m pretty sure, and you’re not so much younger than I. What is it, ten, twelve years? Well, anyway, this nubile Nadine must have made up her mind the minute she saw me—she was a character, I’ll tell you—because as soon as she got the chance she literally rubbed up against me. That’s the only way to put it. There was definitely some . . . chemistry, magari. I didn’t think much of it, it was just droll. After all, the judge was right across the room, and at this point, well, I’m not one for quickies in hallways and things of that nature, not that I ever was, much. But before she left she asked me my room number at the motel. Expect me, she said, just like that. Wouldn’t you know it, later that night there’s a knock at my door. Circe of the Sunbelt. Not a word of explanation, how, what, anything. There wasn’t time, frankly. It was one of those wild, once-in-a-lifetime things. This woman, Laura, was like a savage. I’ve never seen anything so uninhibited in my life. Q. chuckled. What could I do? She brought out the beast in me.
I pressed my finger soundlessly on the button, then kept the phone off the hook for a while, holding my breath, as if it required my total rigidity to break the connection. A few seconds after I replaced the receiver, the phone rang.
The Fatigue Artist Page 10