by Maddy Wells
I think that was the first time I ever felt anything like hatred toward her. She was stealing the life I’d planned for us and using it all up herself. Hadn’t I done all the planning? And now she was leaving me behind. I expected that from everybody else on the planet, but not Alex. I’d convinced myself that our love was a constant, the one immutable force in a bewilderingly inconstant universe. There was such a holy aura around peace and love back then, I didn’t figure out ‘til much later that love is the most self-serving of all emotions, having nothing whatever to do with altruism or reciprocity.
So, I saw Alex, but I only managed to catch her on her way to somewhere else. Her career was blasting off. She was in print and billboard ads for whiskey and cigarettes, usually as part of a party scene. Drinking a whiskey sour in an ad in Newsweek that I was scanning during a lull in button store commerce. Smoking a cigarette on a billboard on Houston Street. It always made me laugh because in real life she wouldn’t touch either of them because they would wreck her face and here she was shilling as if they were the secret to her good looks.
And, of course, in Lance’s apartment. There was no surcease to the burgeoning temple to Alex that Lance’s apartment had become. He printed every frame he had ever taken of her. The blow-ups became bigger, the overlaps between them less tidy. We dined with our plates set on the out takes, sat on pieces of her lovely face enlarged to grotesque superhuman size. We spoke of her in the hushed tones of church. She had left us. She was always with us.
Zealot that I was I still imagined Alex wasn’t lost to me completely and prepared for her return. I found a pattern of dishes, since she had unaccountably developed a taste for domesticity, in Macy’s. I would walk across town on the way home from work to shoplift a few pieces.
The first night I walked around with a plate, pretending to examine it under better light in a different part of the store, near the women’s dressing room on the second floor. The store dick, a middle-aged man with the raw skin of a redhead, was wise to me at once. When I turned around to nonchalantly slip the plate into my book bag, he was watching me. He tipped his hat back, interested, but instead of running, I made myself stay calm and sashayed into the dressing room, leaving the curtain flipped up over the pole and looked him coolly in the eye over the rack of woman’s skirts that separated us. While he watched, I took off my shoes, then my socks and blouse. Finally, I pulled off my jeans and panties. I could see his face, poking up above the racks of sweaters and skirts, turning purple, then red, finally white and shuddering as I performed my languorous strip. I didn’t have any problem making up a dance at the end. My nude pas de deux.
I enjoyed watching his misery behind the skirts and every day I added new flourishes to my act just to watch him cave, to lose all self-respect and possibly his job, for the pleasure of seeing me strip. I performed my dance until I had a complete set, wishing I had the nerve to do on stage what I didn’t mind doing for Macy’s house detective.
They were display pieces I told Lance when he asked me how the hell I could afford Lenox.
“Don’t you think Alex would want some dishes that weren’t touched by every bum in New York?” he asked meanly.
I remembered Alex laughing at the other things I had bought for her and felt a helpless rage, which I sought to quell by throwing a plate a Lance. It shattered on the cabinet behind his head. He grinned wickedly and tapped the top of his head as if to reassure himself it was still there, but went back to examining some proof sheets under a magnifying glass without saying a word. I took a walk trying to subdue my heart, which was about to explode. It took me an hour, just to be able to breathe again. When I got back to the apartment, Lance was gone.
We were always taking walks to avoid one another. I started walking west, trying to see what the rest of the city was like, trying to see if the party continued elsewhere. I walked past the art school, Cooper Union, through New York University and about twenty blocks later, at noon, I found myself on a West Village street whose store windows were filled with black leather jackets, studded wrist bands, and other assorted sexual weaponry. Shirtless men dressed in leather chaps and jock straps lolled in front of them. It was so different from Samaria, where we had known only one openly gay boy, who was forced to skulk around searching for like souls and finally, in his unhappiness, saw a shrink who told him he had until sundown to get out of town before he called the cops. There’d clearly be no cop-calling around here. Everyone was overtly on the prowl. A month ago there had been a riot at a big gay bar on Christopher Street and now being gay was a political fuck-you. One bearded man, dressed as a fairy princess, roller skated circles around passers-by. At first I thought he was panhandling, but as he rolled by, backwards, facing me, his chiffon ballerina skirt sweeping shag carpet hairy legs, I saw that he didn’t have a container for money. He only wanted exactly what I was giving him: ten seconds of strict attention. After he got it, he skated on without a smile to the next person. Extracting his toll from everyone.
It was on one of my forays into the West Village that I saw our brother John. He was walking with another man on West 4th Street, their heads close together, the sunlight between their faces barely visible. I stepped quickly into a doorway, waiting until he passed, but I don’t think it mattered because I was invisible to him. He could see only his companion. I turned around and watched them, jealous and in awe of their open affection.
Although I swear he didn’t see me then, he tracked me down, arriving unannounced after I came home that night from the button store. He flipped an announcement of his upcoming show on the kitchen counter. His art was the daring kind popular then, although more of a curiosity now. He used bodies, not only his, rather than a brush to apply the paint.
“A show already?” I asked. “What are you doing, sleeping with the gallery owner?” The address was on Prince Street and from my walks in that neighborhood I knew that there were no art galleries there. It probably was some kind of garage gallery. That area of the city was all for rent and for sale signs, and spur of the moment music and art events were staged in the absence of legitimate tenants.
John laughed, looked around the loft, and seeing nothing but Alex on the walls, on the seats, on the tables, asked, “Where’s Alex?”
He didn’t seem alarmed when I told him she had “run away” with a musician. “She always had a soft spot for musicians,” he said, casually telling me that he’d stopped to stare at a model’s face on a poster for a fashion event, wondering if it was hers. “Anyway, it’s hardly running away when you’re in the same city,” he pointed out, and to my irritation at his complete lack of understanding of the situation, he said it didn’t qualify as running away when it was only your sister you were leaving.
“Not just sister,” I said, trying to up the ante, give her betrayal more weight. “Her boyfriend, too.”
“Boyfriends,” he said, smiling. “I know about those.”
I wanted to ask him about being gay, but I didn’t dare. Despite the leather chaps and jock straps I saw on beautiful boys in the West Village, I was still ingrained with the Samarian view that being gay was something that was better done in secret. Anyway, we didn’t have the words to talk about it then. It wasn’t until I held his bony wrist fifteen years later, feeling him die, telling me of endless bath-house-body-part sex, of lovers whose lust was stoked with violence, trying to make sense of his yearning to be loved at any price, even the cost of his own life, that I learned how similar our souls were.
He smiled now and pulled a brown bottle from his jeans pocket and tapped out a few green and black capsules. “Just to help you relax. Nadia, get mellow. You can’t go through life riding the back of a blade.” He went to the sink and filled one of the margarita glasses Lance had brought back from Mexico. He held it out to me. I waved him off and he threw a handful of pills in his mouth and chased them down with a swig of water. He rolled a joint, which we were enjoying when Lance came in. John offered him a hit, which Lance not only took, but kept for himsel
f. John abruptly left, giving me a kiss and protective pat, eyeing Lance warily. Lance and I stared at each other until we heard the gates of the elevator close.
“What’s with the macho bullshit?” I asked.
“He’s a fairy.”
“Yeah, so?”
“You becoming a fag hag now?” Lance asked, noting the time of the opening of John’s show, probably wondering if Alex would be there, if she had a connection to this man. He finally pushed the brochure off the table and into the waste paper basket.
“He’s our brother,” I said.
“No kidding?” Lance said. He picked the brochure out the wastepaper basket and read it again. “Another prettier sister.”
I picked up the half full glass John had put down on the table and threw it at Lance, hitting him on the shoulder. It crashed to the ground, but the damned thing didn’t break. It bounced.
“Cheap sonnofabitch glasses,” I said, coolly, before noticing that Lance was coming at me, his eyes cold blue marbles.
“What? What?” I went to the other side of the table. “It didn’t break,” I said. I pointed to where the ugly glass lay. “See for yourself, it didn’t break.” I had never seen Lance angry.
He followed me around the table, holding his hands together as if to restrain himself from killing me. “Those are Alex’s glasses,” he said. “I got them for her. And they’re going to be here when she comes back.”
“She hated the fucking things,” I said. “They’re ugly and she hates them.”
He shoved me against the kitchen sink. If he wanted to kill me then, he probably could have. Instead he began kissing me with his eyes closed. Roughly.
My heart was pounding the same way it was the night I threw the plate at him and had to go for the walk so I wouldn’t blow up. I felt totally at the mercy of some foreign chemical that had hijacked my normal calm.
“Stop it,” I said, “Stop it!”
I tried to remind myself that I hated this man, but this wasn’t about hatred any more than it was about love. I tried to pound him off. Then I gave in. I closed my eyes and began kissing him back.
Chapter Six
So sultry nights drifted into mornings where a tang in the air teased me that my misery might end with the summer. Although I didn’t linger too long on that reassurance. Part of the pleasure of youth is the complete conviction that no one has suffered as much or with as few uncaring witnesses.
Lance and I fought every night then made love, if you could call it that. It was almost a game where the rules changed nightly and the stakes grew increasingly frightening. And thrilling. I would instigate a fight and Lance would at first ignore me, then he would slap me, hard, trying to shut me up. If I cried, he would hit me again. He began to take off his belt and whip me with the smooth side, little welts formed up and down my backside. Once he tied me to the coffee table with it. Another time he gagged me with the belt to stop my screams. Or moans. Even now, I can’t tell you which they were.
These were the only times we didn’t talk about Alex, but she was there. Her photos loomed over on us like the statues of saints in a church. Once, when Lance threw me to the floor and I accidentally smashed my head on the end of the coffee table, I swooned and thought I was a sacrifice in a cult mass.
Gradually, the nightly dope parties stopped, whether because the people who came really were friends of Alex and Rick’s, or because they saw nothing in either me or Lance to warrant return visits. I don’t know. Dr. Lombardi, who it turned out was an actual friend of Lance’s, came by once, saw my face, puffy from a battering, and got the hell out of there lest he be accused of being an accessory to domestic violence.
“I have enough shit to worry about,” he apologized. Although I didn’t think he actually did anything with his days, he claimed to have a rich work life. He was just one of those people, common then, who lived on other people’s sofas and exchanged the largesse of their dinner companionship for a supply of pharmaceuticals.
Shel in the button store was startled the first time I showed up with lips bruised and swollen. He peered closely into my face, looking for a confession or a plea for help. Something. He gripped my forearm tightly, holding me until I would look at him. I shook him off.
“I fell,” I said, unconvincingly.
Shel was pulled between absolute indifference to me and humanitarian compassion. On the one hand, he’d lost interest in me weeks ago when he realized that a youth army wasn’t following in my wake, and if he came out of his back room at all it was just to sigh sadly and retreat. Only his Talmudic sense of loyalty kept me employed, because you didn’t have to be an accountant to know I was a losing investment.
He never forced anything out of me. Domestic abuse then wasn’t the cause célèbre it would become, and people felt it was none of their business if a husband or lover landed a few punches on a spouse. And anyway, how could I tell him that the blows weren’t anything I didn’t want? How could I tell him the pain was welcome because it was the only way I felt anything at all? The only time someone was paying attention to me.
Shel gave me an unasked-for raise of ten dollars a week, holding up his hand to fend off my thanks. Fending off explanations of where I got my bruises. It was hush money.
Rick was never around when I visited them. “Practicing,” or “At a gig,” Alex said. His career as a sessions musician was ramping up. A lot of the rock stars in those days were charismatic performers who needed backup musicians to make them sound, well, musical. Rick was in increasing demand. She handed me two tickets to a music festival in upstate New York. Three days of music and art, the tickets read.
“Who am I supposed to take?” I asked.
“Anybody you want,” she answered indifferently. Her self-possession was maddening. She and Rick had formed a protective shell around themselves that allowed no one else in. Alex and I had had that once. But theirs was sealed with the sticky stuff of sex, which hardened like shellac.
“How am I supposed to get there?”
“Anyway you can.”
Lance, would you be my date to Woodstock? I laughed thinking of us on anything like a date. What we had was so beyond a date. Dating was for children and the white gauze of a David Hamilton girlhood. We had even stopped eating. I had lost the ten pounds that everyone thought was keeping me from beauty, plus more. Once, in the middle of our games as Lance called what we did, someone knocked on the door, but we didn’t open it. We froze, waiting for the clank and moan of the old elevator cables. I laughed, imagining the reaction, if they could see us, of whoever was behind that door until Lance slapped me back into our reality. I had finally become world-weary, but it had taken on an unspeakable aspect. I couldn’t even tell Alex. I was hoping that she wouldn’t notice my face, because I didn’t know what I would tell her, but then I was pissed that she didn’t, because I wanted her to know that in one area, at least, I was superior. That’s how I felt. I was experiencing something she never would. I took the tickets.
“We’ll see you there,” she said, shutting the door behind me.
I did go to John’s opening, at 96 Prince Street. His paintings, bold swatches of primary colors smeared on gigantic stretched canvases, had price tags of thousands of dollars for each one. I would have to work a whole year at the button store to afford even one of them.
He steered me to the table where the wine was being poured. “It’s all a head game. The more elemental the painting the more you have to charge to be taken seriously.”
“No offense, bro,” I said, “but I could do this.”
Instead of being insulted, John laughed, obviously delighted with his turn of fortune. A little red dot was attached to the square titles next to every painting. John’s paintings were sold out. The boy who didn’t go to his high school prom was a smashing success in New York City.
John was dressed all in black. A man dressed exactly like him came up shyly behind him and touched John gently on the small of the back with an index finger. John grabbed it with
out looking and held on for a moment before turning him around to introduce us.
“Glenn’s a dancer,” John said.
“Ahh, a dancer.” It was the same man I had seen John with on the street. Could they be in love? I had become accustomed to the physical aspects of male love because between the leather jock straps and chaps and porn shops I had seen in the West Village there wasn’t much left to imagine. But the idea of two men being in love intrigued me, just because I had never considered it.
John told me our father had written him a letter and he wanted to come to New York to see his children. The idea appalled me. I’d begun to think of myself as a creation that sprung out of the head of some major god instead of slogging my way down a mortal’s birth canal. And the idea of my father—Dickie work pants, black lunch pail, neck crooked upwards as he looked for his children in the lofty regions of the city instead of the curbs where they actually dwelled—broke my heart. Would he want to film us now?
When the gallery was almost empty, the building owner who’d consented to give the show for a piece of the profits told us he had a surprise he wanted to share. He locked the doors and gestured for the dozen of us still there to ride to the 5th floor in the freight elevator. Then we followed him through a trap door onto the roof. He stripped off his clothes, climbed a wooden ladder up the side of the old wooden slatted water tower, and without looking down on us disappeared off the side with a splash. He hoisted himself out of the water and gestured for us to join him. It took several stunned beats for it to register that in an act of improvisational urban genius he’d converted this giant utilitarian rain tank into a swimming pool. We cheered, stripped, clambered up, and dove in.
An hour later, drip dried and stoned on our host’s grass, my brother’s beau Glenn, before he and John left for party’s unknown, gave me the name of professional theatrical pancake make-up that would cover my “battle scars,” as he put it, better than the “pussy Maybelline stuff” I had been using.