by Maddy Wells
“It’s so far out,” Alex said. “In Kenya, she had a different man crawling into her hut every night to renew himself.”
“The whole place wanted to renew itself through me. Jesus, was I exhausted,” Moon Goddess said. She laughed and I could see her teeth were wore down unevenly, the teeth on the left side of her mouth almost completely stubs.
“She’s a cooner,” Alex said. “She softens the skins with her teeth. She’s headed back home to Maine, but I’m trying to convince her to go to the agency with me. I think they would go mad for her.”
But Moon Goddess left for Maine the next morning, to get back to her raccoons, and the three of us were left with ourselves. Alex didn’t offer any apologies for her late show, and Lance didn’t demand any explanations. She had a slightly disheveled quality new to her. Ordinarily she was remarkably put-together, especially for a girl who didn’t give a damn about that sort of thing. The difference was that now she carried lots of bags, whereas before she had traveled light. She brought back souvenirs of the Amish country for everyone. An ashtray for Lance. I told her I didn’t think the Amish smoked. For me, a music box with a twirling Amish couple on the top. I told her I didn’t think that the Amish danced. It was against their religion.
“Is it?” she asked, irritated.
I put the music box on the tank in the bathroom, trying to make a joke of the present and in a few days it disappeared.
Alex was getting call-backs from go-sees. Lance was home quite a bit, photographing models and would-be’s. He basically ignored me, so we didn’t actually have to talk for me to know that he considered our indiscretion a one-time mistake that wouldn’t be repeated, even if I had wanted it and I most definitely did not. I suspected that he hoped that not speaking about it would mean it never happened. The more silence that came between now and the event, the less real it would sound if I tried to bring it up.
I cooperated in his denial, but the air was uncomfortable, and with him and Alex encouraging me to find a job, to at least get out of the apartment, I started taking long walks out of our neighborhood and one day found myself on Orchard Street where it seemed every store sold leather or dry goods to the trade only, and in front of each store sat men in folding chairs wearing yarmulkes, white polyester shirts, and black slacks, reading Yiddish newspapers. One man looked up when I walked by and smiled at me.
“Come in, look around!” he said, getting up from his chair.
“I don’t really need anything,” I said, following him into the store, which was a button emporium. Shelves of small plastic bins, accessed by a rolling ladder, lined the walls from the floor to the top of the sixteen-foot tin ceiling. Rolls of ribbon were on giant spools in the front of the store. I wondered at his interest in me, when he asked, “Are you a designer?” and pointed at the dress I was wearing that Alex had brought home from a shoot. “My sister is,” I lied and told him I was looking for a job, and I started work there that afternoon, minding the store and dusting the shelves for one dollar and thirty cents an hour with a ten per cent commission if I sold anything in quantities of one hundred.
It was a long walk to the button store from where Lance lived, but at least I had something to talk about in the evenings besides my usual complaints and it made me less likely to blurt out to Alex what had happened between Lance and me, but I had the feeling that she already knew and didn’t want to talk to me about it. Or more precisely, that her own life was becoming so interesting, the puny events of mine seemed to her a little dull. She and Lance started making dinners together at night, and laughing about people I knew nothing about. People in the business. The way Adrian Colin, the photographer, tried putting the make on every model he caught in his view finder, “And he likes little boys!” they said together.
At first they explained their jokes to me, but it was forced and finally they stopped doing it altogether. I could feel their orbit tightening. Although they kept their lovemaking quiet, I knew what was happening just beyond my rattan screen and through the beaded curtain, and I hummed to distract myself, sometimes consoling myself that I had been in Alex’s position that one night, and for once I knew exactly what it felt like to be her. Even so, it was the first time in my life I had felt lonely, because it was the first time Alex wasn’t exclusively mine.
I saw Rick, of course. He had a regular Saturday night gig at a psychedelic basement rock club on St. Marks Place and a Sunday afternoon gig as a sessions musician at a recording studio in Brooklyn. I went to hear him play rock, none of it original and eventually my attention would wander, and I would be at the bar. I told everyone who asked, and everyone did ask, that I was a Gemini, although it wasn’t true, I was a Cancer. But since we’d decided to be twins and share a birthday, Alex and I had made one up and decided that as twins we should be Gemini’s. What else could we be? I read everything I could about Gemini’s and tried to fit my personality to the profile. I looked at it as good preparation for acting. Once, I decided I should work out a persona for each sign. That would be really good practice. But I never got around to it.
I took up smoking, which I found titillated my nerves as well as giving me something to do. Rick tried to get me to quit almost the instant I started, saying that it was an expensive habit and we wouldn’t be able to afford cigarettes on our budget once we started traveling together.
“And that would be when?” I asked, blowing tar and nicotine in his face. “When are we going to start traveling?”
He said a few times he wanted to meet my sister. He said she looked interesting in her photos that Lance had plastered around the loft. I knew why, of course, and although I wasn’t in love with Rick, I liked him well enough and we were making half-assed plans to travel to London together when we had saved enough money. I didn’t want to see the moon-struck look on his face when he met Alex and I didn’t want to hear his amazement, as I had heard from so many boys in the past, that we really were sisters. Of course, if Alex were to come with us, he would have to meet her. I just wanted to choreograph the meeting and control the fall-out.
That night I tried to talk to Alex into moving on. I had a job now, dinky as it was. I had a good vibe from one of the auditions I had gone on. She was starting to make a ton on money modeling for catalogues. We could do better, I told her. We had so many plans when we decided to come to the city. There was no reason to get stuck in a holding pattern in the first apartment we crashed in.
“It would be premature to just jump without knowing where we’re going to land,” Alex said. “Let’s just give this a go for a while. What else do you want?”
I wanted the life I hadn’t yet lived. I wanted to be surprised at what the day would bring. I wanted to meet people I hadn’t had the pleasure of meeting. I wanted to see their pleasure when they met me. I certainly didn’t want to retire from a button store.
I forgot to mention the city. The Big Apple. The city that causes fear and excitement and that is not the same for any two people. Seven million of us crammed into a space so small that the city had to build towards to the sky to make enough room for everybody. They say that everyone experiences the city differently. It can be anything you want. Nasty panhandlers squat on corners where furry socialites pass on their way to lunch. Hippies float above it all, their perspective distorted by dope and head bubbles. Each sees the sidewalk from a different perspective. I expected to see the city from Alex’s perspective. From the height of Olympus with all the privileges therefrom. I had grown accustomed to the ease with which beautiful women pass through life, not because, as I’ve said before, I was so beautiful, but because I considered the favor with which Alex was regarded as my birthright and I was loath to give it up. Maybe if Alex hadn’t come to me so early I would have formed a character of my own and could have accepted her as my brothers did; as a nice but unessential addition to their lives. Even in games at school, when I look back on it now, I’m sure I would have never been chosen for teams if the others weren’t scared of losing Alex’s favor, her loyalt
y to me then was so fierce. So I blame her, too, for creating the half cripple that I’d become. I might have learned to walk if she hadn’t been my crutch.
When we discovered boys, too, I liked to think that it was partly my charm that lured them into the net, but it wasn’t true. Boys liked me well enough, and I was attractive in my own way; beautiful eyes and a great butt. But I knew they were using me to get to Alex. And when they met me first, as Rick had, they quickly forgot me when confronted with my dazzling sister. Who wouldn’t? I had to content myself with table scraps but at least I was at the feast. I couldn’t bear the thought of an eternity lived at the level of a button store.
Once, back in Samaria, Alex and I spent an entire week planning to become Rolling Stones groupies. She wanted Mick Jagger, which was fine with me, because I never found scurvy rock musicians as devastatingly attractive as she did. But I had to pick one, she said. You just can’t go backstage after a Rolling Stones concert and not know which boy you wanted. I finally decided on Charlie Watts. I thought he was the most benign of the bunch and anyway he was married, and I figured he wouldn’t want anything to do with me. We could just lie in bed and chat while Alex got it on with Mick. She had it all figured out, how we would by-pass security and obtain access to the Stones inner sanctum when all she had to do was show her lovely face.
We never implemented our plan, but the point is that this is as far as she dared to dream. A Rolling Stones groupie? I guess I didn’t have the soul.
Chapter Three
The next morning I awoke to the now familiar sound of the garbage truck in the alley. I angled my watch to see its face reflected in the light from the street: five thirty. I lay with my eyes open until the sound of the empty cans bouncing on the sidewalk blended with the other sounds of a city whose energy ebbed and flowed, but never quite shut off. One of the things that Alex told me when I first arrived was that the city never slept. If you wanted a doughnut at 3 o’clock in the morning, someplace within walking distance would sell you one. It was a comfort to know that a fresh doughnut was there if needed. Later, of course, I would find out about the other, more interesting, services that were available in the middle of the night in New York, but then I was pleased about the food.
I had dreamt of Mr. Thwaite, our next-door neighbor in Samaria. When Alex and I turned thirteen and became intent on acquiring a tan, Mr. Thwaite took up photography, feigning artistic interest in the flora in my mother’s garden in order to catch Alex in his viewfinder. The first time we caught him Alex wrapped herself in a towel and fled into the house. But I stayed outside and pretended to read, stretched, turned, squinted at the sun and removed my bathing suit top, tsking about tan lines, while Mr. Thwaite clicked away. We had a few such silent dates that summer and one the next. I got more adventuresome, coping poses I had discovered in my brothers’ pornography. Mostly breast stuff. Arching back with my breasts tilted towards the lens. Massaging them with tanning oil. He gave me a print when I threatened to tell my folks. He died suddenly, not over that I’m sure, but how, I don’t remember. Probably a heart attack, now that I think about it. People still died regularly of heart attacks in those days. I can’t recall his face, only his silent adoration. I can’t recall the dream, either, only that I had dreamt of him and woke up aching for more of that adoration. Wanting to see what he saw in me.
I became aware of the sound of dishes in our kitchenette and finally the smell of coffee. I got out of bed, not bothering to put something over the oversized Yankees tee shirt I used as a nightie, and wandered to the table where Lance sat poring over proof sheets. As usual, he didn’t say anything in the way of greeting, so I helped myself to some coffee and sat at the table enjoying the scalding sensation on my tongue, which I believe did more to wake me up than the caffeine. I pulled one of the doughnuts from an open box that had been on the counter since yesterday morning and gently squeezed it until red jelly oozed out of the hole. I licked the confection and powdered sugar from my fingers and drank some more coffee, enjoying the struggle to wake up. I edged one of the photo proofs over to me to get a better look. It was the blond girl I’d met at the elevator. Lance had made her look a lot better in the photos than she did in real life.
“Don’t get shit all over them,” Lance said.
Chastised, I licked my fingers clean. “She’s beautiful,” I said.
“She’s ordinary,” Lance said. “But she has her moments. It’s my job to capture those moments.” He looked at me for the first time all morning. For the first time in days. “I can make anyone look beautiful. I even made you look respectable, remember?”
It was his first reference to our night together, and I wanted to protest that he found me more than respectable then, but I didn’t. He stared at me hard, and I blushed under his scrutiny.
“If you stop eating that shit,” he nodded at my doughnut, “and cleared up your skin, I could make you look beautiful, too.”
I looked at the gooey pastry which was apparently my only obstacle to beauty and felt dizzy. “Not everyone thinks it’s the most important thing in the world to be beautiful.”
“I don’t know a woman alive who doesn’t think it’s the most important thing in life.”
“I don’t,” I lied, thinking of the auditions I wasn’t going to. A little beauty would have given me a lot of confidence, even to do something that had nothing to do with my appearance. It would have given me a hell of a lot more confidence in life.
He laughed.
“Anyway,” I said, angry that he had the nerve to criticize me, “you didn’t mind my skin the other night.”
Lance ignored my reference to our night of ersatz passion, and we were discussing the merits of beauty in our superficial age when Alex came in and sat down, eyes half-closed against the morning sunlight. Her lilac colored robe, a gift from the Spiegel people, flapped open carelessly. She had nothing on underneath. She smiled.
“I’m glad to see you two are finally getting along,” she said.
“We get along,” Lance said at almost the exact moment I was about to say it.
I saw in Lance’s eyes a strange look, like he was in a conspiracy with me to make Alex happy. Please, his eyes pleaded, let her think that we get along. It would please her. It was a strange thought, that I would be in league with someone to protect my sister from unhappiness. Unhappiness that I, unbelievably, had caused.
“I told her that if cleared up her acne, I could do something with her,” he said, his eyes never leaving mine.
“I always said you were pretty. You should be going to auditions.” Alex rummaged through the cups on the shelf until she found the chipped one, oddly her favorite. “Get Lance to do some promo shots of you and just start going to auditions. Maybe then you wouldn’t have to work in that dreary button store. No one can see your face from the audience.” She swept her hand over her own face.
“It’s not so dreary,” I said, thinking of Shel Sonnenfeld, the owner, who believed that buttons held the world together. Buttons were responsible for every advance in civilization since the wheel, which incidentally inspired the button, the second greatest invention. You can’t do much if your pants are falling down, Shel said. You can’t be inventing cars and space ships and such if you think that at any moment you’ll be exposed. Zippers, he said, would be obsolete in a few years, when people got tired of getting their skin stuck in them. No, buttons were the heroes of our civilization, silently working to keep things together. Not asking for anything except to be appreciated. But until they lose one, no one paid them the slightest bit of attention. He would lower his head as he said this, and I knew he had reduced his life to the level of a spherical object with two holes which existed for the sole purpose of holding up pants. Alex was right. Could anything be more dreary?
I escaped into the bathroom. I let the hot water run down my face and examined that face in the mirror imagining how it would look without craters. That’s what I called them, craters. I thought if I uttered the most loathsome word,
it would lose its power to hurt me. So, my acne scars were craters. But even with a smoother surface, my face didn’t have the flair of even the lesser beauties who tromped through Lance’s studio. I sucked in my cheeks and tried to mime myself beautiful. They were humoring me and I felt the humiliation of self-deception. I fled to my immediate destiny, the button store, late as usual.
To my surprise, Rick was waiting for me, sitting in the doorway. He had his guitar with him. His head drooped slowly, he was dozing off, then jerked back up.
I squatted down besides him. He looked troubled, as if he had been sleeping there all night. “Are you okay?” I asked.
“Nadia,” he said, taking my hand, “I’ve been thinking.”
“Not here, I hope,” I said.
“No, no, I got in late from a gig. We jammed a little, and then I went for breakfast. And then I just walked and landed up here.”
His hand held mine like a vise. He was a terrible liar. I shook him off.
“I think,” he said, “that we should move in together.” He sounded anxious, desperate, as if he were saving my life, when he was going to ask me to save his. His roommates had probably thrown him out, but instead of being a negative, I found it sort of romantic. No one I’d ever known had gotten thrown out of an apartment. It gave him an outlaw aura.
“What about London?” I asked. We always talked about London, a city of almost infinite possibilities we agreed. London was the source from where all life-worth-living flowed in those times. Every style nuance, every music breakthrough came from London. I also thought that it would be neat to acquire a British accent, which I felt would open up even more possibilities for me in the theater. “We could stay together in London.”