—
Four o’clock, lunch shift over, dinner not begun, and it was already darkening. Outside, movie lights glared on a camera crew surrounding a checkered cab. Trailers lined the block. Kelly and I drank sherry at the bar, watching, awkward as teenagers.
He was pale and needed to shave.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Ahgg,” he groaned, running hands through hair. “Weird morning, is all. Well, bad morning. I was on a subway that hit someone.”
I made a face. “That’s awful.”
“It was. It was awful.”
“Did you see the person?”
“Uh, no. Just saw all the cops. They wouldn’t let us out; they wouldn’t open the doors. But we felt it, the train running over something. Word came through the cars.”
I could feel my eyes shining with morbid light. “Girl or boy?”
He rubbed his stubbled jaw. Then he looked at me. “I don’t know.”
“Young or old?”
He looked at me an extra minute. “Don’t know.”
Under electric moonlight, a woman got into the cab, and out of it, then into it again. Kelly was staring as if about to ask me something. So I got up, blurted that I had to pee, and hurried downstairs.
* * *
—
Listening to Yves breathe in the dark, I imagined myself in a white Yves Saint Laurent suit, with a wide hat and cane, like Bianca Jagger. “Sweet Thing” by Van Morrison playing as I strolled down the aisle. I imagined drinking from a champagne bottle, slumped on a hotel room toilet. Yves and I poised in front of red curtains, pushing white cake into each other’s mouth, bulb flashing. If I could make sense of the wedding, I might comprehend marriage. But it was too medieval: powder-blue garter, veil, first waltz, bloody sheet.
My mother told me love was work. I don’t know if she believed or practiced that, but she loved to say it. I wanted desperately to take that leap because something had to change, because a window of chance had opened, because I felt like saying yes. I feared, however, that the dream would crash in record time. I’d be that girl: on a terrace in Tahiti, pale in black lingerie, crying into my coffee and papaya, bawling from one end of the honeymoon to the other. Stranded for life with a man I didn’t really know, which turns any Eden into hell.
* * *
—
While I worked the next few days, I thought of all the loves I’d imagined over the years, all the men who didn’t exist whom I’d desired. I remembered my Fifth Avenue fantasy, in which we were subversive socialites, like F. Scott and Zelda, swinging from chandeliers and losing our minds. In my Las Vegas dream, we drove our white Ferrari, miniature Doberman in my lap, from pawnshop to casino to presidential suite. I’d bought into the Calvin Klein Eternity fantasy: the handsome family in a landscape of sand and cashmere and snow.
I’d held out for the stockbroker with the heart of gold, the cattle rancher with a taste for Proust. I’d dreamed in abstract: baseball players, surfers, Navy Seals, Japanese gangsters. I’d dreamed in pairs: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Luke and Owen. I’d managed to pine after dead men: Chet Baker, Steve McQueen. For Christ’s sake, my whole life I’d had a crush on Huckleberry Finn, who was, first of all, a child and, second of all, a character in a book. I’d imagined that Kai would come back, and everything that was wrong with him, which was everything, would be right. I might have denied it, but I’d even wished Kelly would fall into money, be struck by the lightning of ambition, become someone he never wanted to be.
* * *
—
And then I reviewed my reality.
Besides Kai, I’d dated a bulimic man who, after a big meal, slept with Skoal in his lip to puke effortlessly in the night. Learned it on the college wrestling team.
I’d dated an amphetamine freak. He’d get to the bar before me, order anything I might have wanted, from martini to rum and Coke, and have all six or seven drinks lined up on the table.
A one-night stand who lived in Red Hook and let his pit bull lick cum off his hand.
A painter who dragged me to yoga and made me smoke on his fire escape in the rain.
The married one was the worst, of course. He turned out to be not only married but keeping his other girlfriend in a studio in the building where he lived with his family. And the girlfriend babysat his little boy when he came to me. I discovered this when we walked out of my building one golden afternoon, starved from sex, holding hands, and a white Nissan idled on my curb. A kid sat in the driver’s lap and practically crawled out the window when he saw Dave.
“I’m sorry, baby,” the woman said around the struggling child. “He was so upset he was hyperventilating.”
On my first date with Yves, I was in it for filet mignon and Barolo, and I’d perversely been looking forward to tempting then disappointing him. I’d had some cat-and-mouse game in mind. I expected him to be pompous. Instead he told stories about blind-drunk karaoke in Tokyo, his grief the night his best friend won Yves’s date by standing on a chair to shred gladiolas in the ceiling fan. The red petals spiraled into ladies’ laps, wineglasses, the necks of men’s shirts. He showed me cufflinks made for him by a Hong Kong hotelier: binoculars, in honor of a night Yves fell down opera-house steps.
Listening to him, I forgot myself. Rapt, I propped my cheek on one hand, watched as he carved a dollhouse that floated above the table; each room was a story. His Adam’s apple rattling.
That night he’d ordered me a Town Car outside the restaurant, overpaid the driver, and didn’t even kiss me good night. Instead he hugged me, held on after I’d tried to pull away, until my body relaxed, and his warmth seeped through my clothes. At first I was busy formulating the mocking story I’d tell Belinda, but when his warmth reached me, I was comforted to the bone. It was everything I could do to get the car to drive off before I started crying.
* * *
—
Walking home from work, I passed the hooker whose forehead was marked where the stitches had been removed. She was sitting on the hood of a car with another woman. The wind biting. She was nodding in the cold.
Inside that scarred, befouled, gray-skinned shell, her soul could have been seeing paradises that would make us all cry. Trees plump with pomegranates, fields scarlet with poppies, and an aquamarine sky. Everyone we’d ever lost was alive, love was free, strangers kissed, their mouths sweet as candy, arms and legs golden and strong and unmarked. Puppies and kittens chased one another, and a naked man came forward, bearing one white rose whose center was infinite, blooming petal after petal after petal. Under bruised eyelids, the orbs of the girl’s eyes chased a butterfly.
That night, instead of dreaming, I lay awake to think long and hard about dreaming.
* * *
—
My mother debilitated rapidly. We didn’t speak for two precious weeks after she officially refused the operation. The surgery was more likely to damage than to help, but it had been her only chance. She insisted she didn’t want anyone “breaking into her.”
“What the fuck do you mean?” I asked, crying hysterically.
She called every day. “Do you still love me?”
“What do you mean?”
“I just want you to say yes, Lee.”
“Mom, what are you talking about, for Christ’s sake?”
Her fate sealed then, we decided to visit Carmel. An aunt of hers had never stopped talking about her vacations there, and my mother couldn’t let it go. When I picked her up in Bridgehampton, I smoked outside while she packed as carefully as if we were flying to heaven, not California. I stared at a clover bud, its curved ivory spears converging to form a ball: it looked like a plant grown on Saturn.
This sense of being a foreigner to my own planet increased during our walk in the state park on our second day. We were in a bad science-fiction film. A cove of blue Lucite was sheltered by bluffs of eucalyptus, the plants sucking into cliffs’ crevices. Octopus arms of weed trailing as water climbed onto white sand and
fell back. Sluglike otters we took for dead were suddenly resurrected by cold turquoise waves that lost color as they washed up. A goose waddled with chartreuse goslings, the mother’s stare obsidian, aristocratic, ruthless.
Since we’d gotten on the plane, we’d been fighting. How much do we tip the cabdriver? I don’t know, eight dollars. That’s too much. Then why did you ask? I wanted room service; she wanted breakfast downstairs. She wanted to bring umbrellas on our walk; I didn’t think it would rain.
We meant something else, of course. How dare you leave me? Well, how dare you let me go? You seem to want to go so you’ll never be disappointed again in this world. How do you know, when you’re too afraid to ask me? I think you’re rushing to darkness. But will you still love me? What do you mean?
I was livid, convinced on some level she was relieved to escape the burden of her dreams. And it was true that after I’d left our life together, my mother finished fewer and fewer of the things she’d started. As if without me, the blue jay feathers and snowbells lost purpose. Even her house smelled a bit of compost.
We stood on the cliff, looked over the wild sea. We stood side by side, shielding eyes with hands. We looked at the horizon, and there was nothing there. I’d turn to say something, but when she’d look, I’d turn away. When I looked back, she turned away.
God, this legacy she gave me, this legacy I took from her. Our poor halfway souls. And our sad midway love—her up there, me down here. I wanted to go back to that cliff, more than anything in the world, and take her small shoulders in my hands and turn her to me.
FIVE
“I suppose you think I’m one of those hysterical girls who are always threatening suicide. That only shows you don’t know me at all. I’ve never ever made up my mind to kill myself before; I’ve scarcely even considered it. Because I think it’s a madly tiresome thing to do, and the only possible excuse for making such a nuisance of yourself is to wait until you’re quite quite certain you want to. Then you’re pretty sure to do it properly. Until yesterday evening, there was always something left to stop me from being certain—some tiny little thing, like feeling curious about a movie we were going to see, or about what I’d eat for dinner, or just what was going to happen next. Well, yesterday I suddenly found I’d come to the end of all that.”
“How do you mean?”
“I just knew I’d come to the end. It happened in a bar on Sunset Boulevard, way downtown, in the middle of the evening. I caught my own eye in the mirror and I looked at myself—not the way you usually do—really looked. The bar was crowded, but I might just as well have been alone on a desert island; that was how I felt. I knew this must be the end, because I saw that now I’m not good for anything—anything at all.”
—CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD, from Down There on a Visit
Yves sat in my orange chair, legs crossed at the ankle, scotch held in the air. I perched on his lap, piling gold lamé on my knees. I looked around the place. I’d accepted Yves’s proposal the week before, and tonight I planned on telling everyone. Gray afternoon exploded into purple evening.
“Oh, Yves, this might suck,” I whined.
“Have another drink,” he said, shifting legs under me in obvious pain. “Only way to kill the jitters, Lee.”
We had both decided to forget the only other time he’d come here. I’d made dinner but overcooked the lamb because he was late, driving in circles. He wouldn’t say, but I don’t think he was lost; he just couldn’t believe it was the right neighborhood, with the graffiti, burned cars, live-poultry shops.
We ate by candlelight so he wouldn’t see the grimy walls, but darkness, of course, invited roaches. He devoted his body language to seeming relaxed, but I caught him wiping grease from his wineglass, crunching a bug under his shoe, sneaking gristle from his mouth. I got despondent, staring at our flickering shadows.
“Hey,” he’d said, brushing my cheek with his knuckles. “I’ve got an idea. Apple crumb at Fanelli’s to finish the night off.”
So we’d driven into the city, and I was silent until we were seated at the bar. He ate dessert. I drank whiskey. And suddenly my poverty and dependence seemed glamorous again. I was the urchin selling violets in the dusk, skin burning anemic, eyes ablaze. He was the stranger in the bowler hat, strolling in the shadows, pennies jingling in pockets.
* * *
—
Friends transform an apartment; it’s not unlike watching a sick person gain back weight. The epicenter was the turntable. Through the smoke, bracelets and lips glittered. Men leaned in thresholds. My friends looked wild, with diamond eyebrow studs and pink hair and tattooed necks and hand-sewn shirts. Why had I forgotten the impression they made? It had been a long time since I’d thrown a party. I kept checking Yves’s reaction, but his expression didn’t stray from generic benevolence.
A Chihuahua trotted between shoes, hair cut into a full-body mohawk. Giuseppe put a cocktail napkin over its head: “Look! An Amish puppy!”
Audrey sat back in her chair, seltzer clasped in hands, and observed beatifically. At one point, Ozzie pressed his ear to her belly. I overheard him telling her to name the kid Ozzie.
Kelly sat cross-legged on the floor, sifting through album jackets. Cheeks pink, hair damp, blue hooded sweatshirt with the words “South Beach” in white. The tip of a tattoo extended beyond the sleeve.
Jamie bartended, concocting custom cocktails. She tottered over, pressed a sticky glass into my hand.
“This is a little something I call the Bombay Hooker.”
“Dare I ask what’s in it?”
She looked at me for a moment. “Old family recipe. Kind of sacred,” she said, and went back to work.
“You have no idea what you put into it,” I accused her.
“That’s what I meant,” she called from the kitchen.
The Israeli boys sat in the kitchen, pale faces trying for indifference. They watched Vanessa snort a line off a bald stranger’s head, then nodded in time as she danced.
Sherry fell asleep on the toilet, red mouth open, lavender panties around ankles, black thigh gleaming. I said her name, and she started, wiped her eyes lazily, cute as a Vargas girl.
The only friend who didn’t come was Belinda.
* * *
—
Yves spent most of the night sitting, tumbler in hand, smiling like a sphinx. He rarely got up, and when he did, it was to peruse books or freshen his drink. Once, he offered a handkerchief to Jamie when Sherry, swing dancing, bumped her drink.
Reflected in the Empire mirrors of his eyes, the clumsy lot of fools: maraschino cherry between teeth, white lines on a mirror, Vanessa’s red fishnets, a black hand holding a pimiento olive.
I cleared my throat, the speech ticker-taping through my head. I was poised to clink the martini shaker with silver stirrer. Gazing onto faces, I knew my ears were turning scarlet.
Sweat beaded my upper lip. I was floating, pressed to the ceiling like an astronaut, looking down on my own self. I could actually see the middle part down my red head. The lavender valley between my big white tits. Crimson toenails peeking from under the gold hemline.
“I feel like your chaperone,” Yves said, having come up beside me.
“What?” I said. “Oh, please, you can drink these kids under the table.”
“Not tonight,” he said. “I think I’m still tired. Would you call me a car?”
“No! If you leave, I’m going with you.”
“Let me go home gracefully. Let me call it a night.”
No one had known that I planned on making an announcement, not even Yves, although he must have suspected that was why I had the party. He did look tired, like someone off a red-eye flight. How like me, to hold a celebration but fail to provide the reason. Suddenly I was nauseated by how many things I’d never completed. I knew I should tell everyone now, but I also knew the words would not come out of my mouth. Instead I apologized to Yves, and he waved me away.
“For what, Lee? Have a good time. Ha
ve fun.”
* * *
—
Jamie and Vanessa jumped around to Devo, and Martine told an endless story to Tyrone, who was rolling a blunt. The dog licked a piece of cheese on the kitchen floor.
Sherry was lap dancing over Marcus, who was passed out.
The bald stranger sketched Sherry and Marcus on a paper bag.
Candle wax dripped off the table. Records everywhere. Cigar extinguished in coconut drink. Chico cha-cha-chaed up to me, asked what the party had been for, anyway.
“Oh, nothing,” I said. “A very merry unbirthday to you.”
A crew left for Blondie’s. Red wine spilled on shag carpet. Record skipping. I took off my shoes and kissed people good-bye.
The Israeli boys were the only guests left, playing quarters in the kitchen.
Besides Kelly, who sat in the butterfly chair, beer can between thighs. Shoulders broad as eagle’s wings. Ringlets fallen from the elastic. Plump lips, like he’d been eating sour candy. He didn’t look ready to leave.
* * *
—
I wrapped a ratty turquoise afghan around my shoulders and sat on the floor next to him. The downstairs boys, hands in pockets, filed past us. They morosely thanked me. I asked Kelly if he wanted another beer.
“I haven’t finished this one,” he said.
“You’ve had it forever. I’m sure it’s warm.” I said I’d make a nightcap.
“Are you kicking me out?” he asked.
“Of course not.”
I mixed us Kahlúa and milk. He said nothing while I made drinks. My back burned, and I was blushing when I sat down. I spilled a bit of drink, licked it off my hand.
“So, what do you want to know about me?” he asked.
“What?” I scoffed.
“Come on, you ask me one question, I ask you one.”
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