Mamie wondered if Gertrude would teach her own girls the secrets she had passed on to her and Claire. Mamie thought that she might not, that she and Claire might be the last repositories of such significant information as how to prepare a love potion from red sugar cane, and sensible advice like “always leave ’em steef.” Mamie had limited herself to kissing, and any deliberate attempt to leave them stiff so that they would come back to her would have seemed to her, at sixteen, dishonest. Her admirers were to like her for herself. Given what she now knew about Claire, it was clear that Claire had profited early from Gertrude’s sensible counsels. Mamie, when she thought about these things, had been prepared to admit that perhaps Claire, despite Orval Nalag, had got it right and that she had done it all wrong.
She no longer thought that way, however; certainly not after her night with Alder. She was so agitated, in fact, by her night with Alder that in the short time she sat that morning before the window, she convinced herself that she had been, until twelve hours earlier, a virgin. And, in a way, she had been.
Mamie, perhaps because of the novels she had read, believed that there could be little that was more erotic than longing; to be a young woman at a ball, with the formal restrictions of mothers and dance cards, as well as one’s own glittering inexperience; to be raced across a spinning, warm room to the moon-pull of a Strauss waltz; to fall in love at the ball, perhaps unwisely, had always seemed to Mamie to promise a kind of sexual yearning that modern love could not provide. Given this nineteenth-century ideal, it is not surprising that Mamie should have found Tommy Sheehan from San Diego a little disappointing. Mamie might have lived on for years, an excited Natasha awaiting her first invitation to dance, if Lady Studd had not taken the trouble to explain to Alder Stoddard how she masturbated her dogs.
She did not fully understand it until much later, but she believed that Alder Stoddard, too, knew the possibilities of longing. Because he was a man, he was able to exploit it by the way that he used his body and her body; and because she was a woman, she was able to draw him to her and hold him inside of her. With any luck, and without having to resort to any of Gertrude’s tricks, she could keep him there.
In honor of her good fortune, she put on the waltz in A Flat Major by Chopin, the one written for the Countess Bronitska. It would not have been Gertrude’s way of celebrating, but then Mamie was far from home. It was perhaps a sign of Mamie’s increasing willingness to live in the twentieth century, her own century, that she admitted to herself for the first time, that no one, not even Prince Andrey himself, could have danced to the Chopin waltzes. They were too fast or too slow; they were meant to be performed in salons. Mamie smiled at herself and changed the record. She did not put on Gabby Pahinui, which was another promising sign. She did put on Billie Holiday, but that was only to be expected.
TWELVE
Claire and Mamie were on the subway. It was a concession Claire had made to Mamie when Mamie said that they did not have the money to take a taxi to Greenwich Village and home again. Claire, who was not working, but who had enrolled in another class, lifesaving, and who was dependent on Mamie, had to agree. They had been invited to dinner by Toni. Or rather, Mamie had been invited and, as an afterthought, Toni had said, “And bring your sister, if you like. The one who goes out.”
“It’s that people look at you,” Claire said on the subway. “That man over there has been staring at us since Fifty-seventh Street. And, what’s worse, it makes me stare at him.”
“Well, in taxis they talk to you,” Mamie said in her ear. “The other day a Chinese man turned around and asked me, ‘Good for suck?’ Chinese, can you imagine? So unlike them.”
“Suck?”
“Yes.”
“I think it’s your sweet voice, Mamie.”
“You mean it’s my fault?”
“Not your fault. Just your voice.”
“I wanted to ask you, was it my imagination or did Brooke really train her pubic hair to grow in the shape of a heart?” Mamie looked around to make sure that no one was listening to them. “You know, like topiary.”
“She had it waxed for Valentine’s Day and everyone liked it so much, she kept it that way. Isn’t it cool?”
“This was the girl who wouldn’t go down a flume.”
“She’ll go down just about anything now.”
They sat quietly for a few stops. Mamie liked the graffiti in the subway cars and she stared at it while she thought about Brooke and Courtney.
“I thought you were with the Butcher of Santo Cristo last night,” Mamie said as she suddenly remembered that Claire was supposed to have been at their aunt’s for dinner.
“Brooke telephoned just as I was getting ready to leave. Gosh, Alysse was really, really mad this morning. At the last minute, she had to put Mrs. Crooker next to General Barrios instead of me and Mrs. Crooker told the general that she admired his country’s handicrafts. She was just trying to make dinner conversation, poor thing, but he thought she was making fun of him since there aren’t any hand-embroidered tablecloths left after fourteen years of civil war.”
“He’s very sensitive. I suppose dictators are.”
“He told Mrs. Crooker that as far as he was concerned she could suck out his asshole. In perfect English. Alysse said I ruined the party and hung up.”
“I had no idea you figured so prominently in her social plans.”
“Not any more,” said Claire. “Look, that guy over there, the Italian guy, he wants you, Mamie.”
“Me?”
“You think he has permanently chapped lips? Or maybe it’s just a nervous habit. He’s trying to tell you something.”
Mamie turned sideways in her narrow seat so that she could not see the man lifting his eyebrows in invitation and sensuously flicking his big tongue at her. His tongue was green.
“Poor man just ate a whole box of Tic Tacs,” Mamie said.
“He reminds me of Orval.”
“Maybe it’s you he wants.” Mamie sat awkwardly in her seat, her knees sticking out into the aisle.
“I think he’s coming over,” Claire said, starting to laugh and now she, too, looked away.
Mamie giggled, unable to help herself, furious at Claire for encouraging the stranger.
They were both very relieved when the car stopped and he swung out the open doors like a trapeze artist. Mamie looked up. He gave her a big wink and she couldn’t help but smile back at him.
Toni lived in an old clapboard row house off a gloomy brick courtyard overgrown with dusty ivy and ailanthus trees. The little courtyard was entered through a small wrought-iron gate and the low shuttered houses that enclosed the courtyard were painted red with white doors and window boxes.
Toni opened the little crooked door and Mamie had to shout to introduce Claire over the loud barking of dogs. Schnauzers leaped and nipped around them. The ground floor of the house was a dog-grooming salon. Toni took them upstairs, carrying Pépé in her arms.
There was a woman in the tiny kitchen taking a meat loaf out of the oven with a big fireproof mitt that looked like a lobster. Toni introduced her. It was difficult for them to shake hands because of the mitt. The kitchen smelled of parsley and garlic.
Her name was Jean. She had a small, pale face, made smaller by the huge amount of thick black hair that seemed to stand straight out from her head. She had a space between her front teeth.
Toni handed them each a glass of red wine and they sat down to eat at a table in the front room.
Toni, who was not given to random conversation, spoke very little, although she was an attentive hostess and jumped up to open a bottle of wine when she saw Claire looking for wine on the table.
Jean spoke one soft command to the hysterical terriers and they lined up, as if in a drill, and sat down, and quietly stayed that way for the rest of the evening. It was Jean who had the dog-grooming business. She washed and trimmed dogs and sometimes, when it was requested, painted their nails. Mamie noticed ribbons and cups from dog shows
on a shelf of the bookcase.
Claire ate voraciously. “Did you go to the Puerto Rican Day parade?” she asked.
Jean and Toni admitted that they had missed it.
“There were thousands of people on Fifth Avenue, with lawn chairs and Eskimo coolers and little cooking stoves. It was if they had just moved in, with all of their relatives and all of their belongings. There were even a few people with beds. That’s what New York is like in the summer. Businessmen; and then hundreds of thousands of nice brown people. Where are all those big white women in Ferragamo Shoes and all those blond children with book bags?”
Toni laughed and lit a cigarette. She had not eaten very much.
“When do you go to Chicago?” she asked Mamie.
“Two weeks from Wednesday.”
“Felix may surprise you,” Toni said. She squinted to keep the smoke from her eyes and waved the smoke away with her hand so that it would not disturb Claire, who was having more mashed potatoes. Jean rose to clear the table and Toni stood up to help her. Mamie noticed that they were very solicitous of each other. It had never occurred to her that Toni was homosexual, but now that she understood, it did not shock her.
“He’s had great success with women,” Jean said.
Mamie did not feel the sexual attraction of Felix, but she had seen enough at the salon to know that the women like Alysse who came to buy their clothes wholesale, and many of the girls who worked for Felix, were very, very fond of him. They trusted him. Unlike other men, he paid attention to the things that interested them. It was his business, after all. When a woman asked Felix if he liked her shoes or her breast implants, he told her the truth. In Felix, a woman had someone who would make love to her and then spend hours discussing the kind of neckline that best suited her. It was no wonder that he was a success.
“I don’t like him,” Jean said. She brought a lemon meringue pie to the table.
Toni laughed. “Jean hates his clothes. She says that like all bad designers, it’s about the sleeves. Too much shoulder.”
Mamie watched Jean cut the pie. She had not thought about Felix’s sleeves, but she could see that Jean was right.
Claire said, “Our stepcousin—is she our stepcousin, Mamie?—told me that she broke up with her last boyfriend because he complained that she ruined his Hermès ties when she tied him up.” She held out her hand to pass the dessert plates.
Mamie held her breath. She hoped that the lemon meringue pie would stop Claire.
“She sounds smart to me,” Toni said calmly.
Jean asked, “Will you have coffee?”
“I’ve been thinking about it all day,” Claire went on. “Is there a way to do it so the ties won’t be ruined? A slip-knot? What is an Hermès tie, anyway? Perhaps this relationship could have been saved.”
“I’ll have coffee, please,” Mamie said to Jean.
“Maybe this would be a perfect use for Velcro,” Claire said thoughtfully, as if she were considering rushing down to the Patent Office in the morning.
She looked up and finally saw that Mamie was embarrassed. To be fair to Claire, it was almost never true that she set out to offend or shock. She was spontaneous and these things interested her. Even the night when she’d asked the Ambassador if his wife cupped his balls when he came, she had spoken in temper, not from a desire to titillate.
“People say the most extraordinary things to me,” she said, trying to make it up to Mamie. “If you’re a girl, they think you can’t be too smart, so they tell you anything. Even other girls. They think you won’t remember.”
Mamie looked at Toni. She was holding Pépé in her lap and she was smiling. Mamie was relieved.
“You know,” Toni said, “I told Jean that you are always in museums, Mamie, and that she should go with you sometime. She has only just recently started to visit them again.”
Jean put down her fork. “I had to stop going because I had this strange idea that the museum guards knew something about the paintings. They stood there day after day, year after year, looking at them, and I just knew that they would have, well, certain thoughts about them.” She stopped. She was blushing.
“She made the mistake of asking one or two of them about certain paintings,” Toni said. She looked at Jean fondly.
“They thought I was crazy, of course. They didn’t even know what paintings I was talking about.”
Mamie laughed.
After Claire finished the pie, the sisters offered to carry in the dishes, but their help was refused. Toni lit another Camel and said that she had to take out the dogs. She would walk Mamie and Claire to the corner. They thanked Jean and shook hands in the kitchen, Jean wiping her wet hand on an apron.
Toni took them down the narrow staircase and out into the warm, quiet night. The courtyard was very dark and the weedy ailanthus hid the gray sky and the reflected glare of the huge, lighted city.
They walked slowly up Grove Street, stopping at each mottled sycamore tree for the dogs. The tree bark reminded Mamie of the white patches on Mr. de Beaupré’s legs.
“I wanted to tell you something,” Toni said to Mamie as they waited for Pépé. “You needn’t do anything you don’t want to.”
Mamie looked at her. She couldn’t see her expression in the shadow of the trees.
“Don’t be afraid to be difficult. If something doesn’t feel right, don’t do it. Your instinct will always be better than theirs. The difficult ones are always the most interesting, anyway.”
Pépé was entangled in the leash and his old, spindly legs were bound together. Mamie bent down to free him. When she stood up, Toni reached out and held Mamie’s chin gently in her hand.
Mamie smiled at her. “Were you one of the difficult ones?”
“Not difficult enough,” Toni said quietly and took her hand away.
In the subway on the way home, Mamie was grateful that Claire was quiet. She said nothing about the two women and their domestic arrangement. Perhaps she was too full from dinner, and still a little tired from her night with Brooke and Sean. She said only that Jean was a wonderful cook, and that she liked the little house. She said, too, that she thought Toni should have the old dog put to sleep immediately, he was so decrepit, but Mamie didn’t answer her and they sat in comfortable silence until Seventy-second Street.
The phone was ringing as they came into the apartment. It was Alder. He had been trying to reach Mamie for hours.
“How is the horse?” she asked.
“I’m afraid she died.”
Mamie knew that he wasn’t being funny. Danny Harrington at the ranch in Hanalei had a cutting horse that had foundered.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“She ate too much.”
“Just like Claire. She ate too much tonight.”
“Shut up, Mamie,” Claire said from the sofa.
He laughed. “She’s not dead, though.”
“Not yet,” Mamie said.
Alder and Mamie went to the movies. She sat in the dark next to him, so conscious of his body there beside her that she had to keep herself from brushing against him too many times as if by accident. She had a hollow, airy feeling in her stomach, a little like stage fright. She had not eaten very much since the night she stayed at his grandmother’s house. He saw that she was staring at him, so he turned from time to time and leaned forward to look at her in the dark to reassure her.
They walked after the movie. There was a light rainfall and it felt sharp and fresh on Mamie’s warm face. There was the smell of black tar from the steaming streets. Alder was not hungry, either, and they decided to keep walking, east along the edge of the Park.
It never occurred to Mamie in the movie theater or at any time after, that Alder Stoddard might be experiencing any of the tortures of love that she herself was undergoing. Even when he yawned, and said apologetically that he had not been sleeping well, she did not suspect, even for an instant, that it might have anything to do with her. Mamie was simply following her heart.
Alder, who, as Alysse had said, had known many women, was caught by surprise by Mamie. He was fascinated by her individuality, and without pitying her, he saw clearly that she was troubled by her inability to set things right. He saw that she could not do it, and, worst of all, that she could not get used to it. Alder believed that you were given your life on the understanding that to the very end, you tried to set it all right, so he understood Mamie’s struggle, even if she did not understand it herself. He recognized in her the anxiety and guilt of someone who fears that something has been left undone. He was able to recognize her distress because he, too, had the sense that he had forgotten something very important. The difference between them, as well as age and sex, was that Alder took the distress as something good.
“I liked the movie,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Do you think we like the same things?”
He looked at her. “You mean a shared passion for Jacobean furniture and The Duchess of Malfi?”
“Is that how you pronounce it? I don’t personally admire Jacobean furniture, so perhaps I am all wrong.”
They walked to the crooning of the traffic. The car tires in the wet street made a stream of hissing sound and Mamie could smell the horse dung lying at the curb where the horse-drawn carriages waited for customers.
“Alysse has been trying to reach me,” he said.
“She doesn’t like that I see you. I had to drop off a ball gown from Mr. Felix and she wouldn’t allow me in the library. Once a week, she and Mrs. Washburn have a French lesson and tea with an assistant professor from Columbia and they aren’t allowed to speak English the entire two hours. I knocked on the library door and she yelled, ‘Attention! Attention!’ ”
Alder laughed. “Are you coming home with me?” he asked.
They went again to the guest room on the third floor and she saw that someone, perhaps Alder, had made the beds with fresh linen and put piqué blanket covers on them, and pillows, and had taken the dust-sheet from the Louis XV chaise longue in the corner. The window to the garden was open and there was the smell of old, wet leaves. It was a feminine, formal room, with little grisaille panels between the boiserie. How funny, Mamie thought when she saw it, I liked it better the other way.
The Whiteness of Bones Page 17