White Leather and Flawed Pearls

by Susan Altstatt

  “Tom’s never heard me.”

  He handed me the bass. “Well, I’d like to. Come play with me?”

  My mind fractured. Part went off trying to recall what age exactly kids get too old to ask their friends to “play” (unless they’re talking dirty or mean instruments):

  Say, say, oh playmate,

  won’t you come play with me,

  and bring your dollies three?

  Climb up my apple tree,

  splash in my rain barrel,

  slide down my cellar door,

  and we’ll be jolly friends

  forever more?

  Not bloody likely. But what the fuck was I going to do? (That was the other part.) Plod and mangle through my pitiful bag of Belshangles tunes, things this little darkness maybe wrote? Out of the inside of his head? What a heavenly, delicious, wish fulfillment opportunity. And be damned if I will. Be damned damned damned damned.

  I said “‘Louie Louie.’”

  “Mm. Easy out.”

  “Or ‘Wild Thing.’”

  “Well, they’re quite the same, aren’t they? Your part at least. Probably the first you learned to play.”

  Not so. My first was “Just Good Friends” off the Steel Tears album, and I can hear the hump and slide of that bass line in my mind, the part that goes

  —White hot immaculate

  Noontime pleasure,

  Cool black and sumptuous

  Midnight treasure,

  And nobody says—

  What nobody sees—

  ’Cause they never could see

  the forest for the trees—

  But if he thinks I’m going to admit that, he’s got another think coming. “My teacher claimed it’s the one song you can be too drunk to fuck and still get through.”

  “Having never been too drunk to fuck,” he said, “I wouldn’t know.”

  We Louie-Louied, not so badly. I was sweating like a horse, but I had a wool shirt on. Maybe it didn’t show.

  “Right enough,” he said. “This time, stand up.”

  “No.”

  “What?”

  “No.”

  “I said, stand up.”

  “I heard you.”

  “So do it.”

  “Can’t.”

  “Why ever not?”

  “Guess I can’t do two things at once.”

  “That’s absurd; do you breathe while you run?”

  “That’s different from holding up the instrument and—”

  “It has a strap to it.”

  “—And managing my hands, and managing my feet, and remembering the music, and—”

  “Why?”

  “I guess because I’m no damn good!”

  He clicked his tongue. “Don’t slag yourself; you’ll find others better qualified to do it for you.”

  I know when I’m stuck; just when I thought I’d got my self slag off perfected, a kind of mental firewall against the inroads of the better qualified, I am utterly stuck, staring up slack-jawed at a man whose music (say nothing of his person) I have nearly (at times) worshiped.

  He is staring back.

  Long black hair, long black lashes. Gold leaf eyes in a white face. Not milk white: almonds and honey, the marzipan of mythology. He is enough to scare the socks off anybody.

  So which is it to be?

  Subservience for life to the Marzipan Martinet? Cave in to him just once, it sets a precedent. Or: “Fuck off, you’re not my mother; you can’t make me!” A precedent for lifetime enmity with Harlan Parr. God, I really didn’t want that. I’d rather cast him as the bad guy than me. I put the strap around my neck. I stood up.

  All he said was “One free measure?”

  We started “Louie Louie.”

  Harlan was embarrassingly easy to follow: minimal motion, but he still conducted with his whole body. After several measures though, he turned it into “Wild Thing.” Well okay. My part truly was the same. I thumped along. By a kind of relentless crystal logic, “Wild Thing” turned to “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.” And either I was too distracted to notice, or I wasn’t messing up. A moral or immoral victory for somebody, as “Eine Kleine” gathered to itself melodic bits of “Get Off of My Cloud,” “The Sloop John B,” “The Star-Spangled Banner.”—Then came to the solo. Jimi Hendrix versus “The William Tell Overture.” And it was close, but Jimmi won.

  The last power chord popped his hands right off the strings as if they’d shocked him. He raised his eyes.

  I thought I’d try a small shrug of my own. “The Kingsmen it wasn’t.”

  “Was it supposed to be?”

  Hendrix jogged my memory. “By the way, the kid from the coffee shop: was he any good?”

  “Who?”

  “The one Tom invited up. ‘Hendrix was a spastic.’ You know, the guitarist kid with the tapes?”

  Harlan pouted. Slowly shook his head.

  “He did come up?”

  Shake turned to nod.

  “Pity.”

  He gave me a long, strange look.

  I said, “Tom hoped he’d be good.”

  “Thomas was charmed. Thomas charms easily. Pity, I agree, but charming doesn’t necessarily play guitar (as his own came off over his head), any more than long practice necessarily makes perfect. So,” he yawned, “take me out.” A contained, luxurious small-animal stretch. “Entertain me.”

  “Where do you wanta go?” New trial. At least a change of venue. He had the guitar neatly away. I handed him the bass.

  “Anywhere. Ah, except for Castro Street. I refuse to do the Castro again. Everyone who’s shown me San Francisco has, in some misguided assessment, deposited me there. I find ghettos unacceptable, and am repelled by clones.”

  I couldn’t see him lining up on the bleachers with his popcorn and his beer for “Dynasty Night” at your friendly neighborhood gay bar, that’s for sure.

  “—Would you believe, I actually owned a Cuir Noir jacket at one time? I fear it haunts the hind parts of my wardrobe still. Once I’m home, I will donate it to OXFAM. Promptly. Unless some more—imaginative—disposal can be thought up for it.”

  At last, an opener for a plain old conversation. “I was at Anarchy Bookstore once,” I said, (a hesitant opener), “when these like, real doctrinaire-type punks walked in: the shredded denims, and the tartans, and the holocaust hair, the whole post-nuclear tribal trip. And one of them had honestly just found a biker jacket in the street. They all got talking: what was the baddest thing he could do with it. What he decided was, slit the leather up all over, and pull through strips of plaid from the inside—”

  “Like German mercenaries in the Hundred Years’ War?” He looked amazingly relieved and enthusiastic. “You know the story goes,” he went on brightly, “under their combat rags they put on silk shirts looted from enemy officers, and teased out little puffs through all the tatters; it set the cultivated style for half a century.” A pregnant moment passed. “Anarchy Bookstore?”

  I said, “Haight Street.”

  “As in Ashbury?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “As in the ‘Summer of Love’?”

  “Only different. You haven’t been anywhere, have you?”

  “That,” he said, “is what I hoped I had made plain.”

  So we went there.

  After all that jazz about Cuir Noir, Harlan wore his black leopard fur jacket over the Levi’s, and a haze of beetle-wing green shadow around his eyes. “Don’t worry,” he purred. “I’m safe on the street.”

  Harlan had never encountered Zippy the Pinhead. He was openly delighted. He bought all the Zippy books they had, and a Zippy “Yow! I’m having fun!” pin, which he fastened through a belt loop on the front of his jeans. Tom’s jeans. We ate piroshki from a place down the block; we laughed and walked in the sun, eyed the vintage clothes and records.

  Hard to help eyeing him (covertly). He didn’t look like a gay. He looked like a guitar wizard. Line him up between, well, say, Jimmy Page and Eddie Van Halen
—anyone with eyes would recognize three masters of the same far-out arcana.

  Generic gays look light years straighter and more up to date than that: neat, conformist sporty clothes, trim non-threatening hair. Manly little moustaches. The hairy lip trip may be declining, but for the longest time, if I were gay and wanted to be sure no one suspected, the first thing I’d have done was shave the moustache.

  Harlan was just an order of magnitude prettier, is all. Eddie Van Halen, hang your head. Jimmy Page, eat your heart out. In that same Anthology of English Verse which yielded me Bermudas was another little piece. Straight, as written, it didn’t show me much. Ah, but sex change it:

  He walks in beauty, like the night

  Of cloudless climes and starry skies,

  And all that’s best of dark and light

  Meet in his aspect and in his eyes—

  I could never make it dry-eyed past the first four lines.

  ———

  Dinner: pretentious, meager, and overpriced, in the farthest confidential nook of the nouvelle trendy hotel restaurant. Harlan curled a polite lip at his mesquite-broiled sturgeon in sorrel sauce, and poked the last of it in circles ’round his plate.

  He’d gotten a mental hammerlock on the wine steward, twenty minutes of esoteric vintage notes, and what must have been the finest bottle of California Chardonnay in the hotel cellar. Even I could appreciate. I was raised on good wine, just never too much of it at once.

  A glass for him and a glass for me. Another glass for him. Regret. I said, “No more for me, thanks.” Harlan and the steward glared. I stonewalled. Getting all sloshy and moth-happy under Harlan’s acid scrutiny fit my every last criterion for risky business.

  So Harlan passed on the dessert and doggy-bagged the Chardonnay. As he unlocked our door, the phone was ringing. Without a word, he was on it. After a while he started to giggle and bop like a kid with hot rock on his Walkman.

  “Sorry, love,” he murmured at length. “Not that easy. No, No. Nothing fatal. Bit of hardship establishing her identity, that’s all. Oh, Christ, no. You have the only papers proving her right to your name. Yes. No. No, don’t. I take it the ones you have aren’t certified. Fear not; wheels are in motion. Certainly. We’ll keep busy. Well what did you expect? Building her a wardrobe. She’s nothing at all. A wedding dress for her to marry in? Having her hair done, her face done, her nails done—”

  I wanted to poke him. I would have poked him, if I could’ve done it without touching him.

  He mouthed, “There’s an extension in the kitchenette.”

  I flew at it. Tom, on the far end, said “—have her looking like you before you’re finished—”

  Harlan stiffened. “Is there something wrong with the way I look?”

  “Yeah, you’re better at it. I got one of you already. Her hair’s straight now; you leave it alone. You’ll only make her look all older, and I don’t want that—”

  “How old do you want her to look?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “What?”

  “Well? I took to her the first I saw her; does she have to look so different? I happen to like young girls.”

  Harlan giggled. “Pervert.”

  “Oh! Oh you! Six thousand miles away, you think you’re safe!”

  Harlan said, “I’m counting on it.” He giggled again. “Child molester.”

  “So you want me on the next available to San Francisco? I’ll child molest you!”

  “Is that a threat or a promise? Thomas, you can’t come here. You have your jig to organize: five hundred randy bands, five thousand London bobbies, the Department of Public Works, ten thousand famine relief volunteers—”

  “—And a partridge in a fucking pear tree,” said Tom.

  “Exactly. So you can’t get at me, really. And I can’t—quite—get at you. Do you truly want this child to look fourteen?”

  “Yeah,” said Tom. “Fourteen. And forward in her ways.”

  “Define your terms.”

  “Get her to do it for you.”

  “Can I put a word in here? What’s wrong with Levi’s? The stuff I ordinarily wear?”

  “Nothing.” Harlan looked up mildly: “If you want the London media to eat you whole. And doting Thomas with you.”

  I could hear Tom on the other end going, “What’d she say? Harlan, what’d she say?”

  “Levi’s.”

  “So make it Levi’s and a hockey mask. Levi’s and chain mail. Levi’s and lizard skin boots. C’mon, you two can figure it out. For that matter what do I get married in? Ha? What about me? Have you thought about me at all?”

  Harlan laughed. “What can I say?”

  “If I knew, I wouldn’t be asking.”

  “You want me to play arbiter elegantiae and list your options for you?”

  “How you usually do, ain’t it?”

  “Well.” Harlan considered. “You could go the morning coat and striped trews route. The old school uniform.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “People’d say I’d sold out.”

  “All right then: rock soigné, lavender tailcoat, lavender ruffled shirt, lavender—”

  “Turning myself into a Duran clone is not what I signed up for. Now don’t bother telling me to do it naked and dipped in orange glitter either. I’m not into mocking the sacrament of matrimony, I’m only trying to contract it in public, according to my lights.”

  “And you want my judgment.”

  “If I’d wanted somebody else’s, I’d’ve asked.”

  “Then I think you should wear the 1830s frock coat and breeches from the Andy video. They’re in your wardrobe and will cost you nothing, time or money. And they’re certainly according to your lights. Suitable in every way.”

  I thought he’d been disconnected.

  “Are you suggesting I should wear white to my wedding?”

  “Yes,” said Harlan, a calm little French aristocrat before the guillotine. “Assuming that I’ve understood the rationale behind your grand display of identical engagement rings and wedding bands, I quite believe you should.”

  Tom said, “Thank you.”

  I set down the phone, and got away from it.

  Harlan was back to laughing. Listening and laughing, turning rosy. “Oh,” he whispered. “Oh, oh oh, it washes out. It really does.” The giggle turned into a tune under his breath, sung to little wordless syllables. I hungered to pick up the phone again, to hear if Tom was singing harmony, to hear if his half had the words, to try and figure what it was—an old shared joke in melody, and I didn’t know the punch line.

  Maybe I ought to leave the room. Go down the elevator, down the street, and not come back. It was Harlan’s room. And it wasn’t just fear on my part, but certain knowledge: Tom was the medicine of life to him, body and soul.

  Harlan held the receiver in the air.

  “Here,” he said. “He wants you.”

  Instead of picking up the phone under my hand, I saw myself go, trancelike, to the one offered. “How’s the child bride?” said the far side of the world.

  “Just fine.”

  Harlan trailed off contentedly into the kitchen. I saw him pour a nightcap of the Chardonnay, hesitate, and pour the last of it into a second glass.

  “Y’know, I miss you.”

  I said, “I miss you.”

  “I’m used to having all the company I care to keep. Now I get married, I’m in bed by myself. Not the way it was to work out, was it?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “My fault, mostly.”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you. But please come soon.”

  “Okay.”

  “G’night.”

  “I thought it was morning where you are.”

  “I got the curtains drawn. C’mon love, tell me good night.”

  “G’night.”

  I listened to the dial tone for a long time after he was gone, wondering what it was that washes out. After that,
I collected the glass of Chardonnay Harlan had poured me from the counter end, and went to bed.

  ———

  So we were in the restaurant at Needless Markup, Union Square, recuperating from the wedding salon. The place doesn’t call itself Needless Markup: Papa and his friends do, relentlessly, consistently. It was years before I knew it was Neiman Marcus, or there was any joke at all.

  You don’t buy a wedding dress off a hanger at Needless Markup. The wedding salon has no hangers. It has soft lights, a little stage, an elegant desk for the wedding consultant, and sink-in-to-your-hip-bones chairs. The wedding consultant has albums of fashion design photos, fabric swatches bound in sumptuous books, and compendious catalogs of laces and embroideries.

  Back at my craziest (age thirteen or so), Mama had, in a fit of terminal frustration, tacked a quote from Revelation to a bare spot on my wall between the Belshangles posters. Such unauthorized additions got torn down and garbaged usually. But this was rather different and it stayed:

  I saw the holy city New Jerusalem coming down from heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband—

  And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold the dwelling of God with men, and he shall dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and he himself shall be their God.

  And he shall wipe away all the tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death nor sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away.

  And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I am making all things new.

  She thought the key phrase was the bit about the tears.

  But that’s what I knew—basically, all I knew—about the adorning of brides. Now here I was, standing in the Needless Markup wedding salon, with my jaw hanging. It was like special ordering a car from the factory. For exactly the dress, with all your options added to the sticker price, racking up a $10,000 total was easy. A girl was in there with her mother, doing it.

  At some point, I turned around very fast, before anyone could ask me what I wanted, and bolted. Head on into Harlan standing quietly behind me.

  Harlan smells.

  It was his scent that filled the hotel room when I first came there: never cheap or overpowering, delectable. Until you began to suspect it was hallucinogenic, and he was your hallucination. Like Moorish palaces: musk and bitter herbs and incense resins, blended with some kind of very subtle excellent sweet food.