by Maddy Wells
“I think we should stay together here,” he said. “You have no business staying with Lance and being one of his women.”
I laughed, but imagined that perhaps men left their scent on you or an imprint that was visible only to other men. There was so much I wasn’t sure of. “I am not one of Lance’s women. What gave you such an idea? He’s my sister’s boyfriend. Come on, I have to open the store.”
I unlocked the door, making the bell clank noisily, and turned on the lights. “Would you please turn on that contraption over there,” I asked him, pointing to the coffee pot. It was a timed coffee maker, a fancy model from Germany, but the timer had broken years ago and instead of getting a new one, Shel insisted on manipulating this one. I had told him that they were cheaper now than when they’d first come out, but Shel wouldn’t spring for a coffee pot that actually worked. I had to rig it so that it made any coffee at all.
“This place looks like it’s in mourning,” he said.
I had that reaction myself the first day I opened the shop. All the counters were covered with white sheets to keep the dust off. Buttons didn’t exactly fly off the shelves and dust was a bigger problem than it would have been in a store with more popular inventory. Some of the more beautiful buttons, like the onyx with rhinestones, had been here for years, Shel said. I entertained myself by imagining the clothes some of these exotic buttons would hold together. I would have been heartbroken if someone had bought them.
I went through the store whipping off the dust covers. Rick watched, didn’t help. “You’re just an innocent, you know.”
“I am not,” I said, blushing because I thought of my bad behavior with Lance several nights ago. It was liberating to think that something as bad as a betrayal wouldn’t even show. I’m ashamed to say that it presented the possibility that I could perhaps get away with even worse.
“You’re like all these birds in New York who come from small towns. You don’t have a clue which end is up and you act all sophisticated, but really, it’s all new to you. And that’s why you get into trouble.”
“I’m not in trouble. Where did you get an idea like that?”
I folded the dustsheets with less energy than I’d whipped them off.
“You must make something here. Between that and my gigs, we could afford something.”
“What are you talking about? What about London?”
“We can have London later.”
The button shop seemed suddenly small. New York seemed smaller, too. All the centrifugal force I was counting on to propel me out further into the world, Rick’s and Alex’s momentum was slowing down. “What do you mean, later? I want to live now.”
Rick laughed. “What’s the hurry, you’re only 18 years old.”
“Yes, that’s right. I’m eighteen years old. I’ll never be eighteen again. I’ll never have this chance again.”
“What chance is that?”
I crushed the sheets and jammed them in the back room behind a chintz curtain. A person like me wouldn’t get many chances in life. If the universe granted me any success at all, it would be because I managed to slip in behind Alex before they thought to check my credentials. Alex, who I felt was trying to shake me off, run the race without encumbrance. Time was critical.
Rick was my back-up, mostly because I thought he wanted the same things I did. Didn’t he want to live, too? Did he all of a sudden want to settle down? The reason I liked him was his wanderlust. Without it, his body was a little too skinny. His hair too long and dirty. He trapped me between the wall and the red buttons, his breath heavy from a night of cigarettes and dope.
“You can’t stay with Lance.”
“What do you have against Lance?” I shoved him away and stood in the aisle. “The man’s been nice enough to put up me and Alex for free until we can get on our feet. He buys the groceries and the booze. What else could you want from a guy?”
Rick put his guitar case on end and sat on it. “I don’t know,” he said. “It sounds stupid, but I don’t have a good vibe from him. I think he’s taking advantage of you somehow.”
Usually Lance ignored me. And why shouldn’t he? He had herds of models crowding in all day. He had Alex in his bed at night. What could he want from me? Witty conversation? I reddened. It wasn’t pleasant to think that there was nothing I could offer a man as ordinary as Lance. What chance would I have with an extraordinary one?
It was only Rick’s persistent stroking of the back of my neck that convinced me that Lance might be the littlest bit sinister. But it was still out of the question that I move in with Rick. I saw myself getting sucked down the swirling drainpipe to obscurity.
Shel came in and looked at Rick hopefully. A potential client.
“Good morning, sir,” Shel said, ignoring me, the hired help, The Poor Little Button Girl. “Find what you’re looking for?”
Rick gave a nod. “I’ll have to come back later. I have to go to the bank.”
Shel seemed surprised, but pleased with this news. Most of the buttons went for three cents a piece. It was unlikely that someone wouldn’t have a couple of bucks on them, but still the specter of the young man coming back later would cheer him through the day until it became apparent that Rick wasn’t going to come back and buy a bag of buttons from us. And then Shel would sink into a depression that would be solved only by his going back to his war room to plan another strategy. Shel had a marketing scheme. The old men with their schmatte factories who bought most of the buttons were dying off, as is God’s will, he said, but there was nobody coming up to replace them. You need fresh soldiers, he said. When the front line goes down, the second row steps up smartly to take their place. That’s the only way to win the button war. Where were the young designers buying their buttons? he asked. They couldn’t all be using zippers, he almost spat out the word. Or, even worse, snaps. The thought that hip, young designers were using zippers because they didn’t know he had the largest selection of buttons in New York sent him into a rage. “I’m right here! Right here with the buttons!” he would rail. I was a key pawn in his marketing strategy. As a young person with a sister in the business, I was to lure young designers in to buy buttons. As a young person, surely I had friends, other young people, to whom I could nonchalantly pass on the word about Shel Sonnenfeld’s button emporium.
I haggled with a modishly dressed woman over the price of a few ivory buttons before lunch. She was a clothing designer with a storefront in the East Village. She was my only customer all morning. Ivory buttons are expensive, in large part because of the intricate and delicate carving on them and the amber glow they acquire with age. Anyway, we only had five left.
The woman, a peculiar New York type—that is, from somewhere west of the Mississippi hoping to be discovered in New York—carried a bag from Harrods department store in London. It was an ugly green affair, coated in a gunky plastic in defense against the British weather, hanging lightly, as if it were empty. It was empty. She gave me a sweet look as she fingered the five precious buttons.
“Five dollars is way out of line for a button,” she said.
“They’re genuine ivory,” I said. “They’re really works of art. Some poor craftsman whittled away at them.”
She looked at me. “Poor craftsman? Poor me having to pay five dollars for one of these.”
“We have others. Plastic that looks like ivory. You can’t really tell the difference.”
She looked suspiciously at the imitations I handed to her. “People can always tell the real item. You can’t mix fake and genuine.”
She tapped nervously on the counter, and I sighed as I returned the offending imitations to their bins. Before I could show her others that might be suitable, she was hurrying out the door. The bin that housed the ivory buttons was empty. They were in her Harrods’s bag. The little bell jingled as the door slammed.
I had a few customers that afternoon, some teachers who wanted bric-a-brac for costumes for their pupils to watch the moon landing on televisi
on that night. Bric-a-brac and trim was how we made our money in the button emporium. The buttons, I am sad to say, were becoming curiosities. But everyone wanted bric-a-brac. Shel came out of his war room a few times to note the lack of young people, then went back behind the curtain, trying to devise a new strategy for attracting the second tier soldiers he needed to insure the survival of his enterprise. I went home that night feeling that I had let him down.
I wasn’t too surprised when I saw Rick pacing in front of our building, his guitar and a small suitcase stashed in the doorway.
“Just be for a few nights. Until I can get my shit together,” he said. “Those bastards didn’t give me any time to get my shit together.”
I invited him up, unsure really what to do with him, and we examined our meager finances. Not quite enough to get us to London and certainly not enough to get us our own place.
Although Rick had kissed me a few times, he had never pressured me to go further. I was curious about that. I had never known a boy to stop at a mere “no.” But now he seemed anxious to cement our bond and ploughed away on me, over my protests that Lance or Alex could walk in at any moment.
He kept apologizing between moans of pleasure, and I knew by the apologizing that he didn’t really care about me. But no matter. It was no better or worse than the other botched lovemaking I’d participated in. I had been right in my former resistance to sex, which I now had enough evidence to pronounce messy, violent, and inevitably ending with embarrassment.
As if on cue, Lance and Alex came in just at the wrong moment. They had been out shopping and had bags of groceries with long thin French loaves sticking out. They were talking loudly when they unlocked the door, but then hushed suddenly when they realized what was happening. Then they giggled and went behind their beaded curtain while Rick and I attempted to bond in the afterglow of his orgasm.
The dinner that night was wonderful. Lance made a roast, his only dish I discovered, and we got pleasantly drunk on cheap red wine. The only person who abstained was Alex who pleaded that she had a shoot the next day and needed to look at least human. Rick, naturally, was transfixed by Alex.
We ate cheese doodles from a bowl and watched the moon landing that night on television. It looked fake to me and I said so loudly and drunkenly. Who is holding the damned camera, I asked? It looked as if it were being filmed at a movie studio. Everyone laughed, but Lance asked how someone as supposedly brilliant as I claimed to be could be so damned ignorant.
“I trust my own eyes,” I told him. “I don’t believe all this damned pap the establishment feeds us. Maybe if you weren’t so damned old, you’d be a little more cynical.”
“Cynicism is an obnoxious trait, especially in someone your age,” Lance said. He looked at Alex for affirmation, but she was suddenly distracted by something the news commentator was saying.
“It’s impossible not to be cynical, the way you people fucked everything up,” Rick said. “Nadia’s right. This whole fucking thing is probably a hoax. It does look fake, now that you mention it. She’s right.”
He was talking about me, but looking at Alex, who turned to smile at him.
Lance jumped up suddenly. “Let’s ask the Guru.” He had a desperate edge in his voice. “He knows everything, right?” He went into the hall, hollered down the steps, but the Guru didn’t answer and Lance came back to the sofa.
“He takes the five-thirty to Hackensack,” I said, sarcastically, enjoying the fact that Lance could see Rick’s and Alex’s attraction as plainly, and painfully, as I did.
“Who’s the Guru?” Rick asked.
Lance settled down and quietly lit a joint, which he shared with Rick. I sat on the floor in front of Alex and she absently stroked my hair, staring over my head at Rick, laughing at something stupid he said and I remembered the days of our groupie plans, unhappily. Her attraction to musicians. I’d been so preoccupied with fending off the full frontal attack by Lance on our duo that I didn’t recognize the Trojan Horse I’d wheeled through the back door.
I had too much to drink and so I don’t remember whether I asked if Rick could stay, but nobody said he couldn’t, and after a few days when it was clear he wasn’t going away, he was officially moved in.
Chapter Four
If Lance minded Rick staying with us, he didn’t say. Before bed and sometimes in the morning I could hear their deep voices arguing over nuances of the Yankee’s pitching staff. It was friendly talk, but I have since learned that men will talk of inconsequential things to anybody, especially someone with whom they have a blood feud.
Lance and Rick would laugh, but I never heard the joke that preceded it. What I did hear of their conversation ranged from the banal to the irrelevant. If they exchanged vital information, they said it out of my range.
Alex pretended not to notice the way Rick adored her, the way he dropped whatever he was doing when she came in the room, the way he asked her ten times a minute if he could get her something to drink or eat.
“You’re kind of thin,” he told her, getting out the ham which Lance bought and preparing a Dagwood sandwich which she would barely touch. He wanted a reason to keep her in his sights.
He tried not to be obvious, I’ll give him that. He was cordial and asked her polite questions about the modeling business. Didn’t she get tired holding those poses? Wasn’t it tough fending off all the horny men on shoots? He basically made an ass out of himself, as if he had never been in the vicinity of a goddess before. He was a musician in New York, and New York was packed with beautiful women. But with Alex he was paralyzed.
Our sex became great, though. In the middle of it once, I had a vision, and granted I was stoned, we were always stoned, that I was an entire symphony orchestra and Rick was the conductor. The strings and brass were going all at once. Timpani banging. Brass wailing. He really put a lot of effort into it and I responded. Response, he said when we finished and lay back with our heads against the wall, did more to make a women attractive than the proportions of her body. He appreciated my response. And when we were alone behind our screen, he was vocal in his appreciation. He was full of theories and Lance and I found him increasingly a bore. We would roll our eyes at the same time when he started expounding, for example, on the bankruptcy of our parent’s generation. Lance and I would catch the other’s look, smile, but I would quickly look away, ashamed that everything Lance and I shared was poisoned with disloyalty. Alex, I noticed with no surprise, couldn’t unglue her eyes from Rick.
She started spending more time at home in the evenings, just hanging out, and I allowed myself to believe that she was coming to her senses and was getting ready to take off with me. But she only wanted to talk about Rick. She never came right out and said it, she was cooler than that, but whenever there was an opening in the conversation where he could be inserted, there he was.
People, friends of Rick’s I assumed, because he was the only one not surprised to see them, started coming over to get stoned with us. Folks would show up, bring out the dope and presto that was your evening. Lance had a hi-fi that he hadn’t used in ages, the dust was so thick, and it was on top of the metal cabinet in the darkroom. He retrieved it and soon people started bringing records with their weed, pissing and moaning about the effect of a monaural system on their new stereo LPs. But they stayed. Someone found Lance’s collection of records, too, and brought them out for derision as if they didn’t belong to the host at all. The Tijuana Brass, A Million Strings, Xavier Cougat. Old fashioned shit like that. The album covers had half-naked women with lacquered hairdos, cavorting in champagne bubbles or whipped cream. Everyone mocked the music, as if the owner of such stuff had no soul, but I suspected Lance had bought the records more for the covers than the music inside. A case of being found guilty for the wrong crime. Anyway, when a Jewish guy with a curly Afro had too much to drink and decided to give the platters the fate they deserved, that is, he sailed them, one at a time, out the window Lance didn’t protest. He laughed with everyone else
, but removed the album covers to his locked darkroom.
The Guru began popping in as well, and we didn’t throw him out. Why should we? We didn’t throw any of the others out and no one even knew some of their names. Or even why they had come. Why not smoke your dope at your own house?
I did my first hit of psilocybin.
“Your first time, I’m so jealous,” the Mermaid (so named because of a recurring vaginal infection) said. She poured me a bath with lavender oil, stealing flowers from a café flower box to strew about the water. “My first time, I was in the Louisiana bayou, and I lay down on the deck of my boyfriend’s boat and looked up at the gnarly trees, and it was as if they wanted to screw me. Like I was having sex with this wet forest. Mushrooms are always sexual. The first time is always the best.”
Her bracelets clanked against the edge of the tub as she checked the water’s temperature. Her long Arthurian sleeves draped carelessly into the water, and soon she was in the water herself, fully clothed. Forgetting that it was my tub. The Mermaid had set my tab of psilocybin on a coaster on the back of the toilet, “like a sacrament, to be dropped at the appropriate time” she’d said, and I reached for it then, but it was gone, swimming, apparently, in the swamp waters of the Mermaid’s very own bayou brain.
I soon found a replacement, although I didn’t take it that night, because we never had a shortage of drugs. A physician, Dr. Lombardi, would show up wearing fatigue pants from which he would dispense pills, powders and capsules. “First do no harm!” he would shout to whoever hadn’t heard him before, although everybody had. His brain played only one tape, and that was a newsreel of his experiences in Vietnam. “Why keep the fuckers alive to endure a miserable existence? Notice, I say ‘endure,’ because after ‘Nam there is no life.” We would patiently endure his ramblings which always ended with him saying “whatever the fuck” because then he would get down to dispensing his medicines, taking a tab or a snort for each one he handed out, as if treating himself for an incurable disease he’d contracted back in the jungle. Dr. Lombardi was a member of a bizarre class of politically disenchanted physicians who would give anyone a note saying he was unfit for military service. “Who the hell is fit for military service? For crawling around on your belly in the mud, killing the bejeezus out of other guys crawling around on their bellies in the mud,” he would rail. “If you’re fit for that kind of crap, you’re a psycho! And the Army claims it doesn’t want psychos! I got news for them, all it gets are psychos. If you’re not one when you go in, you’re certainly one when you come out!” The only person I ever saw him have what looked like a regular conversation with was the Guru.