After Delores

by Sarah Schulman

  “What is the second thing?”

  “The second thing,” she said, jumping up from her chair, “is that we’re going to build a houseboat in here and a gangplank. The lights will be so beautiful. White and hot at noon, the way the sun falls directly on your head and dulls the water. Then in the evening it will be midnight blue, cool and cold, the breeze coming in off the sea.”

  She looked right at me again, her eyes very full.

  “I am not a monster. I am just a woman in all her complexities. We must be able to accommodate a wide variety of simultaneous feelings within the confines of our feminine bodies.”

  I watched her skin, primarily, and the way her wrists moved. She had the manner of inner grace and intelligent beauty that women only begin to realize in their late thirties. Everything is texture and wise emotions. It was in her voice, her gestures, in every habit. A certain familiarity with obstacles. She glanced, not fleetingly from side to side, but up and down, to herself and then back to me. Her eyes were deep and tired with wrinkles from the sides like picture frames. Beatriz’s veins stood away from her neck and those thin wrists, so beautiful—there I could see every sorrow and useful labor. I got excited for the first time in a long time, realizing that this was in my future as well. Not just knowing her, but myself, becoming that beautiful. It had been too long since I had such hopeful imaginings.

  “In this play, Charlotte is the abandoned friend, a woman who lies to herself. When you walked in, I was planning a scene in which every line is a lie.”

  “Is that the play you were rehearsing when I met you the first time?”

  “Oh no. That was a silly exercise. Charlotte doesn’t play naïve things. She must always be very frightening.”

  “She sure scares me,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to get on her bad side. She looks like she could smash a chair over your head, just like that. Like she could destroy you if it happened to occur to her or she had nothing else to do.”

  “No, no, no,” Beatriz said, a bit too aggressively. “Anybody can destroy another person. Only, most people won’t admit it. A good actress admits these things for us. That’s why we love them so much.”

  Beatriz had the voice of a reformed smoker, bluesy with a cough in her laugh. She was skinny from way too much energy.

  “Charlotte and I have been together for a long, long time. We have adapted to each other’s failings. Charlotte has affairs and as long as she pays attention to me, I tolerate it. I do that because I love her and want to be together with her. What is more important to me than the category or theoretical concept of the relationship is that I love Charlotte the woman.”

  “Triangles are a big mess,” I said.

  “No,” she answered curtly, as though I was misinformed. “Everything can work, but all the responsibility is on the new lover. A romance is always more exciting than a marriage, and a new lover has moments of more power than the old one because you are not so familiar with their bag of tricks. Unfortunately Marianne did not have the grace to adapt to the limitations of her role. The best newcomer is one with a great deal of respect. They have to respect me and they have to be considerate of me. Then we can all be generous and each one satisfied on some level.”

  She took a large bottle of seltzer out of a paper bag and poured it into two well-worn cups. Without the sweet shot of liquor that I was used to, it tasted sickly, like gas.

  “My old girlfriend, Delores, she wouldn’t be generous like that to me.”

  “Well, then you’re lucky to be rid of her. Don’t worry, she’ll do the same thing to her new woman when her number comes up. Then you can rejoice. People never change their modus operandi.”

  That made me angry. It started in my upper arms, they began to ache. I got jumpy like I wanted to smash everything and scream at myself in the mirror.

  “She just didn’t love you. It’s obvious.”

  I wanted her to shut up.

  “You sound like you don’t even care that Marianne is dead. You don’t even care that someone squeezed her neck until it broke. Think about how scared she must have been. Don’t you give a shit?”

  “She was my rival. I have the right to be cold. Charlotte likes those young women. I can’t stand them. I don’t like them aesthetically. I don’t like their skin. It’s too easy to be gay today in New York City. I come from those times when sexual excitement could only be in hidden places. Sweet women had to put themselves in constant danger to make love to me. All my erotic life is concerned with intrigue and secrets. You can’t understand that these days, not at all. Lesbians will never be that sexy again.”

  I wondered if her hands were too small to have fit around Punkette’s neck. And then I asked a larger question. What makes a person suddenly able to commit murder? It’s easier to hate than to kill, that’s for sure. But I bet the combination brings the greatest satisfaction. When you kill the woman who took love out of your life, it can be an act of honor. But if you kill a woman because you saw her go-go dance in East Newark and wanted to feel her neck snap, then you too deserve to die. I marveled at how easily I accepted the difference.

  11

  THERE IS A limit to what you can do for yourself. When the mess you’re in is too scary and overwhelming to possibly unravel, you have the choice to call in outside help. The best candidates are smart, compassionate, and creative. That narrows it down quite a bit. They have to have some free time, and finally they have to care about you a little. When I considered all the necessary qualifications, there was only one option: Coco Flores.

  If everybody’s got a best friend, I guess she’s mine. She’s always been a good talker but she learned to listen since she started working as a beautician. We met when she was managing an all-girl punk band called Useless Phlegm. Their name accurately described both their music and their personalities. When Coco suggested changing it to Warm Spit, they fired her. Then she enrolled in beauty school and got a job working a hair salon in the strip of new stores along the waterfront where the fuck bars used to be. Coco liked to hang out outside. She knew all the street people and they knew her. She knew the first name of every person begging for money between the park and the F train.

  “When someone asks you for money, you have to give it to them,” she always said. “How can you say no? Dollars are best.”

  Of course, a beautician can’t hand out dollars like business cards, so she developed a priority list which was topped off by two black dykes who regularly asked for cash. One worked the corner of Fourth and Second and the other stood under the scaffolding on Saint Mark’s Place where construction workers had taken out a movie theater and were putting in a David’s Cookies. They were definitely lesbians, Coco pointed out, and you have to take care of your own people first, so she saw them as her personal responsibility. There are more and more women in general panhandling on the street, but women asking for money usually plead. They cry or they will tell you what good reason they need the money for, like getting home to New Jersey. Not these women. They lean against buildings and talk to you real honey-like.

  “Baby, can you give me a couple of dollars?”

  Coco could get along with just about anybody and was, therefore, obviously unique. Somewhere in the background she was Puerto Rican on both sides, but they’d come over in the thirties so now she was more New Yorker than anything. Coco had never been a salsa queen but she did dabble in Latin punk and was always dyeing her hair a multitude of colors. But Coco’s most special feature was that she could talk poetry. She could turn it on and talk beautiful words that didn’t exactly belong together but worked out all right in the end. Sometimes listening to Coco’s stories was like swimming. You forgot where you were until it was over and then your arms felt freer. She’d read all the time, steal words for her spiral notebooks, and then throw them into one-person conversations that others could only watch.

  “Hey Coco, isn’t it a beautiful day?”

  “I know,” she said, flipping her chartreuse frost over her shoulder. “It’s t
he gold-feathered bird.”

  “What is?”

  “The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.”

  We were heading toward the Hudson River, trying to get across the highway, dodging in and out of speeding vehicles, so I didn’t quite catch what she said.

  “The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down,” she yelled over the traffic. “It means believe in the imagination, but it doesn’t mean politically like you should. The words just do it by example.”

  “Where did you learn that, Coco?”

  “My three o’clock appointment took a course at the New School. Next year she’ll take two. She told me about it waiting for her perm to take.”

  In a minute we were on the dock, sunny and warm. I had a beer. Coco had an iced tea.

  “Tell me a story, Coco. Tell me one of your great stories about some girl.”

  “Sure.” Coco flipped her hair back and looked out over the water. It was almost pretty the way the sun brought out the blue and hid the garbage and dead fish.

  “We were both up in the country at the estate of a rich faggot whose boyfriend went to beauty school with me. She was married and older but we flirted the whole weekend in front of everyone, although her husband, thank God, was absent. Finally, with big smiles, we decided to meet at midnight but forgot to say where. So I waited in bed lounging, making myself fuckable, wet, and sparkly. And, at the same moment, she was waiting for me, picking the perfect lighting and music, putting clean sheets on the bed. It got later and later, both of us waiting, wondering if the other would ever show. Finally, I decided I would not be disappointed and assumed my responsibilities as suitor by walking over to the guest house where she was staying.”

  At just this point in the story, Coco took out a nail file and started doing her nails.

  “So anyway, the woods were dark that night, barely one star. Still, I found the dirt paths easily and walked them without a light, since my excitement was fluorescent. I was bouncing along, feeling the night when, right then, ahead on the same road, in another direction, a single spot shined my way.

  “‘Who’s there?’ she called out, knowing full well it was me coming to make love to her.

  “‘It’s me,’ I said. ‘It’s Coco Flores.’

  “Well, let me tell you, it was fun. Everything was happening just the way it should.”

  “What did she say?” I had to know.

  “She laughed and said, ‘Oh, great,’ and ‘You’re hot, you’re really hot.’ She said that to me because I was on her neck and scratching her fingers with my teeth outside in the woods. She held my hand in her leather glove. We were shy walking together in the night, but happy between kisses. During them we weren’t shy at all. So I put my hand on her ass like it was mine. ‘You are forward,’ she said.”

  “Did you do it right there in the woods?” I asked Coco and then felt bad for the crassness of the question.

  “No, we made it back to my floor, and I, being taller, younger, and the lesbian, unbuttoned her shirt until one forty-year-old breast showed with a nipple as dark as the eyes of Latin women. Do you know what was the most surprising? That she was so caring and willing to desire me. I was really touched, in that sexual way that leaves waves of sweet nausea that always end in the cunt.”

  Coco slurped her iced tea. She was really talking now.

  “We enjoyed everything and kissed each other’s mouths more than expected. ‘Your breasts are great,’ she said to me. ‘Do all your girls tell you that?’ When I went to her asshole, it was a cave inside a rock formation. When her fingers went inside me, they flew.”

  Coco got very quiet then, like she was feeling something dreamy and romantic, like all she wanted to think about was those fingers.

  “You know,” she said, “when you love women the way I do, when your life has been built around the pursuit of women’s love, there are a hundred moments bathed in shadows cast from a fire or candle or the strange yellow light of an old kitchen. She was so tender with me.

  “‘So,’ I asked, ‘when was the last time you made love with a woman?’ And she said, ‘Eleven years ago.’

  “At that moment,” Coco said, “I saw her pain right away. It jumped out at me. I touched her face and asked, ‘She hurt you, didn’t she?’

  “‘Yes,’ this woman said, so real. ‘The woman I loved hurt me. She left me for a man. She was incredibly selfish. I wasn’t heaven either, but she was incredibly selfish.’

  “I touched her face like she was my baby, because she was so brave to have made love with me that night. I knew the humiliation she had been carrying longer than decade. I’d seen it many times before, across tables in bars, whispered in dark rooms and in the mirror.”

  Coco got sad for a moment and fixed her hair.

  “So she looked up at me beautiful and naked and said, ‘Women are so much easier to love than men,’ and I wondered what would become of all this because I was so very deeply touched.”

  Then Coco was finished. She took a little bow my way and started chewing on her ice cubes.

  “Coco,” I said. “That was a great story. What happened next?”

  “Her husband came up the following day,” she said, sucking the lemon. “And that was that. Oh, she called me a few times in the city, but she wanted to run around street corners where no one would see us, holding hands and kissing. I couldn’t get involved in a trip like that. I wanted to have sex in my life.”

  12

  COCO’S STORIES HELPED me think through things. They were like therapy or hypnosis probably are. But as soon as I got home and was alone again, it was back into the real self. I couldn’t get away from the sprit of Delores that haunted my apartment and clawed its way back into my mind. Every time I sat in that place, the demon took hold. The only thing that led me away from my pain was to think about Charlotte. Then I could forget who I was.

  I finally decided that the thing to do was to ask Charlotte if she honestly thought that Beatriz could have had anything to do with Punkette’s death. If she was guilty, I wonder how long it took her to plan the murder. What was the final blow that made her decide, “Yes, I will take this step now”? If I killed Sunshine, I wonder what would happen next? I’d probably just sit in the apartment waiting for the police to come. There’d be no need to run away. Where would I go? Why? They’d come and take me to one of the women’s prisons and I’d have to wear green smocks, trade cigarettes, and learn how to play cards all day long with the other girls. When they bring you into court, is the press really waiting in a sea of flashbulbs, or does nobody notice, so you end up spending fifteen years in Bedford Hills taking Thorazine? Or, do you ever get away with it? Did Beatriz?

  “You get used to the handcuffs,” this customer told me.

  She had been in Bedford for passing bad checks.

  “’Cause handcuffs means you’re going somewhere and somewhere is better than here. It’s like a dog jumping around happy when he sees the leash.”

  I met her when she ordered an orange soda at Herbie’s and sat there for an hour sipping it.

  “All the girls don’t feel the same about it. That’s just my way of looking at things.”

  She had tattoos on her arm made from a blue pen and a pin.

  “It gets pretty boring, so you look for little things to do.”

  They were straggly and uneven. One tattoo said “Danger” inside a heart. That was her lover’s name, she said. Danger got out first but they never did try to meet on the outside. She told me that women who were there for murder, some of them, told her that right after you kill someone who really deserved it, you feel great. But right away you have to pay for setting things so right.

  The couch was getting pretty dirty from me sacking out there every night, but I could not bring myself to walk into the bedroom because as soon as I stepped into the doorway, all of Delores’s lies came back to me.

  “I love you so much,” she said. “You’re my family.”

  Sometimes it got so bad that all I c
ould do was lie there on the couch and watch the sky. If I had money I would have gone to a decent psychiatric hospital, but instead I was just another pathetic person on the Lower East Side. Charlotte and Beatriz were really my only happy thought. I hoped Beatriz didn’t do it. Some people’s passions are so unique that reality doesn’t have the right to invade. That’s how I felt about her and Charlotte in general—that they couldn’t be measured by regular standards. They were exceptional. They’d staked out a means of survival on their own terms, working together to take care of things. I’d rather think of them that way, then there was something for me to learn that was positive, instead of growing into another dimension of anger.

  There were bars on my windows and outside them there were trees. I could hear radios from the street and at night, the moon peeked out from behind the projects. Sometimes I got so angry I thought my teeth would break. The only other thing I could think of to do was go find Charlotte. So I washed out Delores’s shirt and put it on again. It hadn’t totally dried and was starting to look a little tired.

  Being out on the street felt better for a minute because everything was interesting there and I saw different levels of pain and possibility in a combination that was somehow palatable, or at least diverting. It’s only when you’re open that the harshest thoughts pop right in. Delores and I, we had our honeymoon and then we had our crisis. That’s when everything stops dead and you find out what the other person really thinks. It was that mundane. But all along I thought that if we could have stayed together through our little war, it would have been an opportunity to love each other in the most honest way. When you get informed, that’s when the real loving starts. Now I’d have to explain myself to someone all over again. And, truthfully, there’s so much confusion that the explanation seems to be an impossible task.

  When I knocked on Charlotte’s door, it was Beatriz who answered.