by Maddy Wells
“The calluses, idiot.” He sounded perturbed, then rethought his reaction and treated me to a phony smile. His teeth were as dingy as his fingertips. “You get these from jamming, from gigs.”
He seemed pleased with himself, so I said, “Oh!” trying to appreciate his dedication to his art.
“You have to find out what you’re good at and dedicate your life to it. You’re not going to find anything in there.” He pushed the newspaper aside. “What are you good at?”
I ignored the question of what I was good at, and he evaded the question that hung over the head of every twenty-year old male who wasn’t wearing a real army uniform if he wasn’t in school. We chatted about inconsequential things and made vague plans to get together later for a drink. Rick kissed me lightly on the cheek and said “Ciao, bella” as he left, which pleased me because I knew enough Italian to know he thought I was pretty, and I was still open to the possibility that I very well might be, if seen through the correct lenses and at the right angle. And if I had time to rearrange my face beforehand.
My job search stalled after filling out a few applications for receptionist positions. I needed that indefinable something to take phone messages and greet visitors. My charm wasn’t enough. Or perhaps I had overestimated my appeal.
“Do you know who you’ll be greeting?” one office manager asked me. “You’ll be greeting dignitaries from all over the world. This is the United Nations!” I was clearly unqualified for that position because, for beginners, I needed at least a second language and a college education was essential. Just to say hello.
I got a copy of Variety and checked out the listing for auditions. There was an open call for Oh, Calcutta! “Femme standup—must be a dancer/actress who can sing, perform in the nude, when necessary. Bring photos and resumés to the Eden Theatre, 12th Street and Second Avenue, New York.” I resolved to practice dancing that night in the nude, so I could try out. I didn’t know anyone in New York anyway, so what difference did it make if I pranced around with no clothes on. And that summer everyone was talking about how beautiful the body was and how it was a sin to be ashamed of nakedness.
I made use of the time that Lance and Alex were gone by going through all of Lance’s personal belongings. He had stacks of photos of models. They were undeniably beautiful and I wondered if Rick would still call me bella if could see these women. Or if he would, what superlative would he bestow on their flawless images? It seemed so unfair that I had to share a planet with these goddesses.
In the dark room, in a closet, were photos of these same women but naked. They weren’t necessarily dirty, but they were certainly erotic and my heart beat fast as I flipped through, hoping that Alex hadn’t consented to pose for him like that.
He had a small desk where paperwork was piled up. Unpaid electric bills, phone bills. Second billing notices to ad agencies for uncollected fees, typed on his old Adler manual typewriter, were stuffed in cheap white envelopes waiting to be mailed. “Dear Sir,” one letter read, “If payment is not forthcoming, I will be compelled to alert my attorney.” I felt a rush of tenderness for him. He was just small fry in a city of barracudas. But wasn’t that exactly why I wanted me and Alex to flee? I wanted to be part of the eaters, not part of the feast.
I had just picked the lock on an old briefcase that contained more photographs of women—this time in probably illegal poses—when I heard the key and the bolt clunk out of position. I threw the photos in the case and shoved it back in the metal cabinet jammed with developing chemicals just as Lance came in the door.
“Oh, it’s you,” he said, relieved. He squinted, trying to adjust his eyes to the darkness. “You didn’t lock the police lock. This isn’t Philadelphia. The city is a dangerous place. You have to lock all the locks.”
He didn’t say anything about me being in his darkroom, so I just quietly closed the door behind and pretended I wasn’t snooping. “I thought you weren’t coming back till Thursday.”
“The idiot models drank the water. They had mixed drinks with ice cubes in them. Those geniuses couldn’t figure out that ice is water. Jesus. I would line up the shot then the model would bolt for the bathroom. A complete waste of time.” He wandered over to his desk and absently shuffled his pile of unmailed invoices. “They’d better pay me, that’s all I can say. Expenses, too.” He looked around, suddenly missing something. “Where’s Alex?” he asked.
“In Lancaster. Remember?”
He rummaged through one of his bags and pulled out a big package in brown wrapping paper and tied with coarse string. He cut the string and starting unraveling Margarita glasses and a pitcher. “She’s going to love them. She says I live like an animal. Nothing matches.” He admired the heavy blue glassware. “These are great.”
“You got these for Alex?” My shoulder twitched, anticipating the load Lance was going to make us carry. We had to travel light to get where Alex and I were going. We couldn’t be carrying glasses and pitchers. I couldn’t imagine a scenario where we would do the serving. We would do our drinking at clubs where other people would pick up the tab. “I don’t think she’ll like them.”
Lance seemed deflated by my assessment of his gift, re-arranging the glasses on the counter with less confidence than he had originally displayed them.
Nonetheless, he readied the apartment for Alex’s return. Clothes disappeared into hampers. The beautiful wood plank floor, a relic of the shirt factory the building once was, was visible for the first time as Lance swept and swabbed. The model shots were taken down from the walls, and for the rest of the afternoon the red light was on outside the darkroom, as Lance created gigantic prints of Alex to replace them. Each improvement made me sadder and more anxious to leave.
I went to 12th Avenue, to the Eden Theatre at 2 o’clock, but didn’t go in. I stood outside and stared up at the marquee, trying to make my feet move inside the building. An older man paused to look at me then the sign, Oh, Calcutta! He smiled as if he could divine my aspirations and found them ridiculous. I clutched my cloth bag to my stomach and hurried away. Even if my body passed inspection, my face with its horrible acne would never be allowed to grace the Eden Theatre. Maybe if I didn’t have to take off my clothes, my face wouldn’t seem so naked. It made no sense, but that’s what I thought.
The day I’d arrived in the city, a man in a dirty white robe was sitting on the inside steps of Lance’s building by the freight elevator. He had a brown beard and wore Ho Chi Minh sandals and had the general appearance of being old, but on second look, he wasn’t more than twenty-five. One of his eyes was brown and the other a startling, almost artificial, blue. He had glared at me then, and I shuddered, but when I asked Lance about him later, he only said he was the Guru of Tompkins Square Park.
“He takes the bus in from Jersey City every day,” Lance had said. “Or at least that what he says. I think he actually lives in our stairwell now. He spends most of his day in the park.”
“For what?”
“What do you mean, for what?”
“What does he do in the park?”
“He’s a Guru.” Lance laughed, and I dropped the subject after he told me he was a harmless acidhead, trying to blunt his superior intelligence with drugs. The Guru had told Lance that his unhappiness was caused by being so much smarter than everybody else. He was lonely. He thought that if he killed some brain cells and became stupider he would find some companionship or at least accumulate some followers. At first this interested me, as I sometimes felt like that myself, but then Lance said, “He can do the Sunday Times crossword puzzle as fast as he can read the clues.”
I was unimpressed with that kind of brains that I’d never thought of as intelligence at all, more like being a human encyclopedia. “As long as he doesn’t hurt anyone.”
“Only with his wit,” Lance had said. “Don’t provoke him.”
Today, though, the Guru initiated a conversation with me. Maybe because I took the stairs instead of the elevator just to check him out.
>
“Out of the shadows and into the light, Pock Face,” he pronounced, raising his hand in a Jesus gesture and blocking my way.
“Out of my way, Freak,” I said, kicking him as I inched my way onto the steps. He grabbed my leg. I tried to wrest myself out of his grip, but he held on, forcing me to look at him. “You’re just a fucking freak,” I said, emboldened by the thought that Lance had said he was harmless. He wouldn’t let go. I stopped struggling, but was off balance.
“Freak?” he laughed. He held on with one strong hand, while with his free hand he plucked out his blue eye and popped it in his mouth. He rolled it around, making smacking sounds before he retrieved it and stuck it back in the formless pink tissue that used to house a real eye. He laughed maniacally then released me to run up the stairs.
That night, Rick came by, unannounced. His gig was canceled and he wanted to see where I lived. He wore cowboy boots, which made him a few inches taller, and put his thumbs in his pockets as he stomped around inspecting the place. He admired Alex’s pictures that crowded the walls. When I told him she was my sister, his eyes flickered with disbelief.
I hadn’t told him anything about Lance, and he seemed surprised when Lance emerged from a marathon session in the darkroom and introduced himself. Rick was a musician, I didn’t think he would be judgmental, so I was surprised when he grilled me later on our sleeping arrangements. He kissed me hard before he left. It was our first kiss, but I felt as if he had done it merely to reassure me of my worth. In my mind it wasn’t a kiss at all, and he didn’t call me bella.
The next day, Lance and I prepared a welcome home dinner for Alex, a roast beef and root vegetables, because, Lance said, they don’t feed you on those shoots and he didn’t want her becoming obsessed with the weight thing like most models. As it was, Alex was a little too thin in his opinion and he didn’t want her to starve. We made the dinner together and while I hated the cozy domesticity of the arrangement, he made me laugh and I actually thought that maybe Alex could do worse than him. In a few years, that is, after we had already sucked all we could out of life.
Lance showed me a trick he had learned, to slit the roast beef and insert cloves of garlic. “The smell alone” he said, “is worth all the work.” Although it wasn’t any work at all. He was just showing off.
The roast was ready by six o’clock, when Alex was supposed to be home. He had made a pitcher of Margaritas, which we had drunk by seven thirty, so he made another. The roast was overdone by eight so we gnawed on that while drinking our second pitcher of drinks out of his proud Mexican glasses. We both were conscious of the place setting that hadn’t been sat at. He brought out a joint, and nonchalantly fired it up.
“Want some?” he asked.
Despite the deal Alex and I had made not to do dope in New York until we were established, I grabbed it and took a hearty drag. Then another. We finished that and clumsily and funnily made another pitcher of drinks and by the time we finished that we stopped talking about Alex and he started kissing me, and I let him. Suddenly he jumped up.
“You know,” he said, “With just the right light, you wouldn’t be bad.” He got a Nikon with a motor drive and began putting the light meter up against my face and sweater, then fired away. “Really, they’re good,” he said, and for a while I got caught up in the pleasure of having someone find me worth looking at. Though stoned, I thought about my uneven complexion and trusted his skill with lighting to even out the craters. I even hammed it up a little, as if I were in front of the mirror, becoming a thousand women, each with a different past and an even more interesting future. Pretending I had some tangles in my hair so I could play with it and flip it around a little.
“That’s it!” he cried, “That’s perfect. I always thought it was just your attitude that was keeping you from being beautiful.” He put down the camera for minute and studied me. “You know, your eyes are just like Alex’s. Same set, same color.”
“We are sisters,” I said. “Twins, remember?”
He let me into the darkroom, that Sanctum Sanctorum, while he developed the film and made contact sheets. We hadn’t stopped drinking the entire time and when he finally showed me the contact sheets, I realized I was quite glamorous, and more full of my own power than I had ever been before. I even allowed myself an instant to believe that I was Alex’s equal.
It was the era of free love and, while I disliked Lance on the principle that he would hem us in, define our world in tiny terms, I had nothing against him as a man who wanted to participate in the banquet I had envisioned for Alex and me. So when we awoke the next morning in the same bed after some hours of drunken, lurching love-making, I didn’t feel guilty.
Lance, however, made a hasty retreat from the bed, not bothering with a good morning kiss. He headed straight for the bathroom to take a shower and I was a little humiliated to think he wanted to wash me off. I was sore, not because of Lance’s prowess, but because of his birth-control method which was to shake up a Coke bottle and shove the foaming explosion up my vagina as a spermicide. He had read about this procedure in the Joy of Sex. Or maybe the Playboy Advisor, he couldn’t remember.
“I’m not going to get pregnant,” I’d told him, offended by his clumsy attempt to rid me of any part of him. Anyway, I was confident that since I had technically been a virgin until last night I was safe. I didn’t think it possible to get pregnant the first time. The Pill was generally unavailable to girls my age unless you lied and told the doctor you were engaged. Lance told me he got one girl pregnant and didn’t want to go through that again, didn’t want to go the back-alley abortion route again. “It’s horrible,” he said, “You don’t know if you’re going to see the chick again.” He didn’t want to go through it. His self-absorption was mind-blowing.
When he came out of the bathroom, with a towel wrapped around his middle, he seemed surprised that I was still there. I made a show of being in no hurry to scurry to my own quarters. He became irritated after he had made the coffee to see me still in his bed.
“Don’t you have an interview or an audition or something this morning?” he asked.
I picked my toes for a while, trying to ignore the hangover that was building in my head. I did have an interview, receptionist for a magazine, but I probably wouldn’t get the job anyway, so what was the point. Lance said it would build my character, just going on these interviews, but my character was the least interesting organ I owned at the moment.
I stayed in bed, thumbing through yesterday’s newspaper. I wouldn’t have minded if Alex had found us in bed, because it would have shown her that Lance wasn’t to be believed if he said that he loved her alone. And part of me wanted to rebalance the equation between us. Still I was relieved when it was apparent that she hadn’t yet made her way home.
“I guess Alex found a party,” I said as Lance poured us coffee.
He grunted and put out some of the rolls from the uneaten dinner of the night before. In our haste to the bed we had left everything out. Even if it had tasted good, which it hadn’t, the food would be spoiled. I started cleaning up the mess.
“Just get out of here,” he said.
“I don’t have to go to that interview,” I said. “Maybe I’ll never get a job. Maybe I’ll just stay here.”
“Just go! I’m shooting someone at eleven.”
“It’ll just take me a minute,” I said, curious. Since I’d arrived, no models had come to his studio. I wanted to see what a shoot was like.
“Just get out. They get skittish if someone is gawking at them. They’re like race horses.”
I didn’t have a large selection of clothes, two new pairs of bell-bottoms which nicely accented my ass—my best asset—so it didn’t take long to choose something and be out of the door.
“G’bye,” I said, but Lance was cleaning up and didn’t seem to hear me.
I didn’t want to use the stairs in case the Guru was still there, and somebody was coming up in the freight elevator, so I waited for it, tell
ing myself I hoped it would be Alex. The gate opened, then the heavy door. A thin, nervous looking girl got out and looked around anxiously. She wore a midriff-baring top and tight bell-bottoms. She had the required straight long blond hair and carried her portfolio like a handbag. Her eyes narrowed when she saw me, sizing me up as possible competition.
“Lance Wilson, do you know which studio is his?” she asked, apparently hoping I wasn’t one more obstacle on her path to success. If she was coming to Lance to take pictures for her portfolio, she was new to the business. That first night we had stayed up talking, Alex told me about the dirty tricks models played on one another to kill as much of the competition as possible. With a few exceptions, there wasn’t a lot of variation among beautiful women. They were more or less interchangeable and aware that their marketability depended on more than just perfect looks. There was that elusive thing called luck. At her first go-see one of the girls told Alex that a friend, who looked “almost exactly” like Alex was turned away yesterday because she wasn’t the type they were interested in. Alex believed her and left. The model who lied to her got the job.
The blond girl fidgeted with her portfolio. She looked as if she had one more rejection in her life she would go berserk. In my first act of kindness since I’d arrived in the city, I looked around and shrugged. “Lance Wilson? Got me,” I said.
The would-be model gave me a condescending smile and I was sorry I had wasted any sympathy on her.
Alex came home the next day. Without Blueberry, but with a new girl named Moon Goddess, with whom she had hitchhiked from Pennsylvania. Moon Goddess was a giantess, 6 feet tall and at least 200 pounds. She had just come back from a trip to Kenya where she literally was a Goddess. She had walked into a village with her boyfriend wearing a halter-top that revealed the moon and stars tattoo on her shoulder. The natives, seeing this, fell to the ground at her feet, because their legends had it that their pale earth mother would come back to reclaim her children, and she would be carrying the moon and stars on her shoulders.