Subtraction

by Mary Robison

“Flippo, we all like Andy,” said the blonde. “Andy’s one of the good ones, not who we’re criticizing. Though I bet even he has his moods.”

  “Oh, he’ll hit me in the eye,” the brunette said.

  “The time?” Raf asked me.

  “Um, central, subtract an hour, it’s nearly five.”

  “O.K., come on. A performance thing to show you,” he said. “Although walking into this abstemious will be weird.”

  He drove us to an upscale community where on either side of a four-lane highway ran a mile of mall and villages of condos. Everything around was elaborately planted. There were vines and snaking ropes of ivy.

  The mall offered a boxcar line of retail stores—Roy’s Jewelers, Ann Taylor, Video Rentals and Sales, Pattie Pauley’s Academy of Dance. We parked midway, before an unmarked building painted steel blue.

  “Is this gonna be more lowlife, Raphael?”

  “Well, yes. Or no. You’ll see.”

  Now I noticed the establishment’s framed poster. It was unillustrated, with simple printing: SWEETNESS—ADULT ENTERTAINMENT.

  “I can’t go in there,” I said.

  “You can, in fact. In fact, this’s a white-collar couples’ place.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means men and women go in.”

  A fellow who looked like banking or middle management—young, cautious—approved our clothes and said, “Welcome, take any table. Waitress’ll be with you.”

  Behind us, the slow-swinging door shut and we were caught in a dark aisle. Raf guided me to a table on a stairstep row.

  The table had a linen drape, a generous ashtray, a lamp with a small shade. Tethered to the chairs were silver helium balloons.

  Pink and white paper streamers dangled from the ceiling. Mirrors hung: wherever a mirror would fit.

  A disk jockey was babbling into a microphone from a Vegas-style stage. On a runway that jutted from the stage posed a girl in white boots and a G-string with loopy elastic suspenders.

  Big heavily amped music pounded.

  “See?” Raf said. “Lots of couples here.”

  There were couples seated at the various tables, men and women wearing business suits.

  “Raf!” I said. “That dancer just waved at you.”

  “I know her slightly. Her name’s Pru.”

  Pru did a handstand, and while upside down, stamped her white boots on the mirror behind.

  “How about that?” asked the d.j.

  Pru scissored out of the handstand. She cartwheeled, landed in a gymnast’s leg split with her bottom flush to the floor.

  “Yipes,” I said.

  “She claims you gotta do stuff like that these days,” Raf said.

  “Is it sexy?” I asked him. “I honestly would like to know.”

  “Yeah, Paige, it’s considered sexy.”

  We ordered Cokes. “That’s four-fifty for each,” the waitress said.

  I said, “No, can’t be right.”

  “We understand,” Raf told her.

  “I know you. Hey,” the pretty waitress said, bending low to study Raf.

  All the waitresses were pretty; more like beauty-pageant contestants than drink slingers in a stripper place.

  “Your hair may be different but I know I remember you.”

  “Never been here,” Raf said.

  “Yeah, you have. Remember? There was a fight or something?”

  “Look, I’ve never been here,” he said. “And direct Pru over to us as soon as she finishes.”

  A deeply drunk man wandered from his table to the stage.

  Pru sidled up to the drunk and, with her white boots far apart, did a rotational hip grind.

  The drunk man beamed.

  “He loves it!” said the d.j. “Show her some green for her trouble.”

  Pru knelt and let the drunk customer drop folded bills down into the slingshot V of her G-string. She bounded up and resumed her dance.

  “Does she have to do that part?”

  “Incessantly,” said Raf.

  He glanced around annoyed. He said, “You see how embarrassing this place is. You don’t wanna look but there’s Pru doin’ double backflips, yet you know she’s so bored she’s counting the seconds. So if you look, you’re a fool, but ignoring her’s insulting, especially when she’s a friend.”

  “How many friends do you have here, Raf?”

  “Only Pru. We came to pick her up one night and there were, you know, assorted wretchednesses ensuing.”

  “A fight?”

  “Not much of one,” Raf said. The iris of his glass eye picked up some of the red-pink lighting. “Mostly bad talk. All mine. You can imagine.”

  “You want food?” he asked me. “They got chips, I’m sure, or they could Xerox a sandwich.”

  “Pass, but thanks anyway,” I said.

  In the mist of colored spots, Pru seemed unreal, more hologram than live woman. She looked tactile and dimensional, but at the same time a projected image.

  I said, “I’ll grant this. She’s perfect.”

  Pru twisted into a complicated painful-looking position. On her neck, the pressure of the pose made a vein bulge the size of my little finger.

  A group of men whooped.

  “ ‘The lust of the goat is the bounty of God. The wrath of the lion is the . . . something . . . of God,’ ” Raf said.

  I helped him. “ ‘The wisdom.’ ”

  “Right, and ‘The nakedness of woman is the work of God.’ ”

  “But Blake never spent time in the locker rooms at the Y,” I said.

  As Pru finished her act on her belly, she seemed passionately involved with the surface of the stage.

  She left and was replaced by a garbed woman, soon to be ungarbed.

  I had drunk my cola and risked teeth by chewing the remaining ice cubes.

  Pru emerged from a dressing room. She strolled to our table; nodded hello to Raf, smiled bashfully at me. She wore mules and a dragon-lady dress, weed green.

  “Never figured I’d see you back here,” she told Raf.

  “My wife, Paige,” he said.

  “No fuckin’ way. Really? You know I’ve read all the poems in that one collection of yours or the—what do you call it?—chapbook. ‘At the Clam Bar’ or something—that one.”

  “And I’ve seen you dance,” I said.

  “No, I mean, why would you believe me, but I love your poems. I probably sound asinine. And that wasn’t dancing, that was just my job” said Pru.

  “I don’t think you need apologize to Paige,” Raf said.

  “I was impressed by how well you did your job,” I said.

  Pru said, “You wouldn’t guess, but this is a highly competitive field. Girls have to audition hard to dance here. But then they make fuckin’ bundles, and it’s clean work—no side stuff unless they want. But you do have to perform in some way—have a special thing, you know? It’s why I do the contortionist shit. See Tanya? She almost made the Olympics when she was young but she got too tall.”

  “Paige is new in town,” Raf said.

  “How do you like it?” asked Pru.

  The doorman in the banker’s grays had moved close to us.

  “He wants me to hustle drinks,” Pru said.

  “I like it fine,” I said.

  Pru stared at me.

  Raf lit a cigarette to cut into the silence.

  “Excuse me, you like Houston?” Pru said.

  “Ah, sure.”

  “You got that one poem, I forgot the title, but it’s about Mercury as the morning star and how all the sidewalks smell like bad meat?”

  “Something like that,” I said. “Not my cheeriest work.”

  “I live by it,” Pru said.

  “It kept me indoors for a while,” Raf said.

  “I’m just so astounded you like Houston. I mean, you wanna know why I work here? You probably don’t care.”

&n
bsp; “Well, I do wonder, in fact. You don’t have to say, but feminism aside . . .”

  “Contempt,” Pru said.

  “Now you’re talking,” said Raf.

  “Yeah, ’cause it’s too late in history for feminism to make any difference, Paige. It’s all coming down. I’m only alive for contempt.”

  “What’s coming down?” I asked. “You sound as though you’ve been enrolled in Raf’s joy-of-living seminar.”

  “Everything. Every goddamn thing’s coming down. Look at who’s president! Or back up to the Iowa primary and who won that—a fuckin’ televangelist! When Pat Robertson can get enough votes to be in charge of roach removal, then I’m living in the wrong damn country. I especially despise the South,” Pru said. She looked left and right—a spy-movie gesture as if checking for listeners. “I mean to rub my bare ass in the South’s face.”

  I said, “The thing is, I don’t imagine the South minds your doing that too much.”

  “You could pretend I’m the South,” Raf said.

  Pru said, “I hate every pinhead in a ballcap, who drives a pickup truck, shoots deer, kisses my tits on Saturday, the Bible on Sunday. . . .”

  “Wait, wait, hold it. Then why do you live here?” I asked her.

  “I won’t for long. I’m getting out. Me, my daughter, we’re migrating to Canada. Fleeing before the Inquisition, if there’s time.”

  Raf had shut his eyes and smiled along with Pru’s attack as if she were thumping a drum solo.

  “I hate the U.S. I hate the South. I hate men,” she listed.

  “Oh me, more of that,” I said.

  “So I work as a stripper and gorge on contempt. I’m like on fire with it. It keeps me fueled,” Pru said.

  “You really hate men?”

  “And women,” Pru said. “Although not you.”

  “Raf?” I asked.

  “He’s O.K. Now look at Tanya.”

  We did.

  Tanya was in a position that would’ve been right for urinating in a drainage ditch.

  “Born-again Christian,” Pru told us.

  Raf said, “This birth didn’t work out either. She should try for one more.”

  “Ever been to Canada?” I asked Pru.

  “Yes, and it’s better, Paige. Better.”

  “But there are pinheads and child beaters and flag wavers up there as well.”

  “It’s still better ’cause they’re not Americans, and not from the fucking South, at least. I can deal with all the other shit if there’s time,” said Pru.

  “I like a person with a goal,” Raf said.

  “Really? Well, then I wonder if you’d be real sweet and buy some drinks from me. It’s gotta look like I been working to that pecker who runs the floor.”

  We ordered, and on her way to the bar Pru shot the banker fellow a hundred-watt smile.

  “A person can be bad and still have a lot of courage,” Raf said in the car.

  “Bad?”

  “Yeah, very bad,” he said.

  Raf’s America

  MOTORING OVER TO PRU’S in the smoke-colored car a day later, the radio amazed and impressed me with its clear delivery of the La Scala production of Un Ballo in Maschera. I liked this version, but knew enough Italian to get that the baritone was singing: “Three o’clock! Three o’clock! It’s three, three, three, o’clock!”

  “ ’S really an honor, come in,” Pru said.

  Her apartment was in the art-gallery district; in an eighties’ cake-shaped building that rose five layers tall. Wrapping each story were strips of chrome piping.

  “This is my daughter, Lilith,” Pru said, introducing a three-year-old well-nourished child with white-blond pigtails and ribbons. Lilith wore a long T-shirt that fitted her like a dress, “RICHARD HELL,” the T-shirt said.

  I crouched and shook her chubby hand.

  Nearly the whole fourth floor of the round building was taken up by Pru’s apartment. It had no interior walls. The place reminded me of a dance studio.

  Back in the living area, pieces of cubistic furniture made a kind of corral, and there a wall of bookshelves showed hundreds of bright waxy spines.

  “Dress codes are coming back strong in Texas schools. So’s hair length,” Pru was saying. “Now, having too-long hair can get you suspended from first grade.”

  “Probably Lilith won’t be doing her schooling in Houston,” I said. “Just a guess.”

  “It’s the home of textbook adulteration. This is where they censor textbooks for the whole U.S.; the new home of book burning. People want Creationism taught in schools. The mugginess and stinking heat here ruined their brains a long time ago; parboiled these people’s brains to shit. You can’t think in places where there’s no winter. I mean, consider California.”

  We lingered in the studio section at the front of the apartment. Here, ceiling-to-floor windows let everything be bathed by sun.

  “You definitely make out at that job,” I said.

  “This place? Hell no. I fuck a married guy who owns the property so he charges me just utilities. Nothing for the layout.”

  “Well, right there, Pru . . .”

  “Contempt!” she said.

  “O.K., but how much self-contempt is involved?”

  “Not one fuckin’ drop.”

  She glided into the kitchen area, to a vast refrigerator with stainless-steel doors.

  Her shorts—cut high and floppy—enhanced the shape and length of her legs. With the shorts, she wore a blue leotard.

  “You want coffee, tea, or some kinda alcoholic drink? I got all politically correct beverage products. And I make my coffee and tea with bottled water, not that radon urine that runs from the tap.”

  Everywhere, unframed canvases were mounted on Pru’s walls. They were big as Sunfish sails and featured males in Klan costumes. The Klansmen toted branding irons, dildos, flaming crosses. The eyeholes in their sheets smoldered a fluorescent red. Parts of flayed female carcasses—gray slashed-off limbs and trunks—littered the tar-black foregrounds of the paintings.

  “My friend does those,” Pru said. “She’s talentless, of course, but, you know . . .”

  Pru uncapped a jug of Polish water. “You realize you can no longer drink the tap water in most of the continental U.S.? Radon’s been in the fuckin’ ground but now they’re admitting it’s in the air and water supply. It’s the cause of most internal cancers.”

  “Read the papers much?” I asked.

  I had dropped onto a cube of couch in the living-room area.

  Lilith wandered.

  Pru arrived eventually, serving glasses of dark coffee that swam with chemical-free ice.

  She folded up next to me, close on another piece of couch. She said, “The number one best school in Texas is a place where they teach girls to be contestants in beauty pageants. Guyrex it’s called because it’s run by two men.”

  “Whose names are Guy and Rex,” I said.

  “You fuckin’ bet they are. The worst school, of course, is that fascist-front institution, Texas A and M.”

  I asked Lilith what she did with her days.

  “Nothing,” Lilith said.

  Pru started in talking about witches, about the necessity of their role in early New England communities. “Everybody recognized they weren’t witches, actually. Really, their function was blame,” she said.

  “I didn’t know,” I said.

  Pru shrugged. “It was a way to deal with spinsters, ’cause unmarried women were threatening to a culture so small and so—you’d be astounded—so sexually active.”

  Her eyes, I noticed, were shaded cobalt-blue.

  “And not that many witches were actually burned, actually,” she said. “You probably know all this and you’re humoring me.”

  I said I didn’t. I hadn’t heard Pru’s version, anyway.

  “How was it you met Raf?” I asked her.

  “Riff-Raf? Oh, he and this guy I fuck—
or, used to—Raymond Hollander. They picked me up from work one night after my car croaked. Raf was real sick but he was cool behind it—he looked good—and he was fun to talk to.”

  That was pretty much my own assessment of Raf, I supposed, except he wasn’t always fun to talk to.

  I had a meeting with an SHS administrator—Carla Cook.

  I said, “Carla,” but her focus stayed stuck on the memo before her.

  Around her office, green and rhubarb-red plants exploded from macrame hangers. She had up a Wagner poster. Raspberry gulls flew off the rim of her teacup.

  “Carla?” I said again.

  “Let me interrupt you,” she said, “or I’ll lose the thought. To remind you about the president’s picnic for the summer people. It’s tonight, at five, in front of Lee Auditorium.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Now. As you know, I’m not working here anymore but you did promise to pay me up-top, although I learned the checks aren’t being processed till mid-September. Also—doesn’t matter now—but my parking decal and library card and swimming-pool pass still haven’t come through.”

  Without glancing up, Carla handed over an envelope inscribed with my name. “That was left with us,” she said.

  Inside was a poem from Barny, the particle physicist. I lowered into an armchair to read the folded page.

  In the cyclotron is shattered

  Matter into antimatter

  Straining meaning through a sieve

  Till all the world’s a negative.

  “Sorry to appear rude, but don’t settle in,” Carla said. “Briefly let’s just agree we won’t enter anything into your work record, Mrs. Deveaux. We’ll pretend nothing happened.”

  “With my class? Nothing did happen except one day they all decided they didn’t want to write poetry anymore.”

  “I don’t buy it,” Carla said.

  “I don’t care, it’s true.”

  “True,” Carla said, without looking at me.

  “You know it is,” I said. “I know it is. Your ugly plants know. What’s true is true.”

  Davey Salizar, who’d got me the conference job, said, “Maybe she was right.”

  “Shut up, Davey. For you the truth is whatever’s hardest, most loathsome, and disagreeable.”

  “Those’re starting points,” he said.

  We were perched on the front stoop at his house, which was close to the Astrodome. He’d given me a can of lukewarm Lone Star beer.