Pink Slip

by Rita Ciresi

  The clean white sign for North Lagoon, with its silver script, inspired another picture. This time I imagined that Dodie’s friend was older, maybe even silver-haired. After I had gone a block along the beach road, I shook my head, as if to rattle the sign for North Lagoon out of my head and bring into focus the real inspiration for this image: Strauss. As I peered at the numbers on the mailboxes, I formed one last string of pictures of Dodie’s friend, and they all were of a gay version of Strauss—Strauss with a better haircut, Strauss in chinos, Strauss in contact lenses, Strauss with a shiny clean faucet, Strauss in Docksiders with no socks underneath.

  Then I thought, Lisa, you are fucking absurd. Stop it right now. Just stop it.

  A low-slung blue sports car—a convertible—was parked in the driveway. The house was an A-frame, painted antique blue. The windows were floor-to-ceiling and covered with white sheers that I expected any minute would pull back when the people inside realized I needed to be welcomed. But no one came out of the house, even after I hoisted my duffel bag and boom box (a safety precaution I automatically performed after living so long in New York) out of the car and knocked on the front door twice, then three times.

  I took up my gear and went around the back. The house was set high above the water. A flight of rough-hewn log stairs led down to a private dock, where the yacht Dodie had promised—a big white gleaming thing called The Young Girl—was anchored. The boat came as no surprise. Its owner did. He and Dodie were sitting on matching chaise longues on the boat’s deck, and when the man saw me he nudged Dodie, and they both stood and waved. The man had six inches—although probably not more than an extra year—on Dodie. Even at that distance, I could tell Dodie’s new friend was the kind of material who could take any girl’s—or guy’s—breath away.

  “Come on down!” Dodie called.

  I hauled my duffel bag and boom box down the precarious flight of stairs to the dock, and then scrambled up the plank leading to the boat, sweaty and out of breath. Dodie gave me my usual hug, but no kiss.

  “This is 800,” he said.

  What could I say? I said nothing. 800 was a knockout. He was dressed in chino shorts and a maroon polo that seemed tailor-made to fit his lean, tight body. But the dark five o’clock shadow on his beautiful chiseled face betrayed the fact that his hair—a gleaming blond—had been bleached. No matter. It was still sexy. Almost too sexy. Dodie had hit the jackpot, and his playful eyes, as they looked at me, seemed to jing and whiz like the slot machines at Atlantic City.

  “Lisa, right?” 800 asked.

  “Right,” I said, and shook his hand. In an instant, looking into 800’s mirrored sunglasses, I knew I should not question his odd name. I also came to the instant conclusion that I didn’t like him.

  The feeling—of dislike, at least—didn’t seem to be mutual. 800 obviously was so used to being a popular guy, he didn’t pick up on the bad vibes I probably was emanating. After I shook his hand—too quickly, trying to avoid my own distorted reflection in his sunglasses, which made me look fat—I became ridiculously conscious of my breasts. Maybe it was because my T-shirt was soaked with sweat and plastered against every curve of my body, but I hadn’t been so aware of being a girl since the time I went to a pool party in sixth grade and some boys lapped their tongues and said “Ooh la la” when I took off my shirt. I was only 32A back then, but I wished at that moment that I could cut off my breasts and never have to deal with all the rest of the stuff that inevitably would happen once they got bigger—which (fortunately) they did.

  Dodie got me a director’s chair, which forced me to sit up straight. I felt hot from the drive and peeved that Dodie did not come around to the front of the house to meet me.

  “A drink?” 800 asked.

  “Whatever you’re having.”

  It was Long Island Iced Tea. Knowing how susceptible I was to alcohol, Dodie called out, “Not so strong,” to 800, who disappeared below deck with the comment, “I make no promises.”

  I sat there with Dodie, the sun beating down on my knees, and looked out over the water, which shimmered in the light. A gleam of silver shone on the roof of the house on the next lot—which was at least one acre over, partially hidden behind a windbreak of cypresses. Dodie stretched out his legs—like 800, he was wearing loafers without socks, which made me feel like an ass for wearing white tubes underneath my Reeboks.

  “So what do you think, Lise?”

  “Handsome,” I admitted.

  “You can do better than that.”

  “All right. So he’s Adonis. But why’s he called 800?”

  “It’s short for Hot Fuck.”

  “Huh?” I asked.

  “1–800—Hot—Fukk. Fuck with two K’s instead of a C.”

  “Doesn’t he know how to spell?”

  “He went to Yale.”

  “Big deal. My beau went to Harvard.”

  “Competitive, aren’t we? But more on your Cambridge man later. 800 has to spell it wrong so he gets away with it with the FCC. It’s a phone—order business. For sex toys.”

  “He takes orders for dildos for a living?”

  Dodie gave me a long, alcohol-induced laugh. “He owns the company. He’s never answered one of the phones in his life.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Now I can rest easy.”

  Below deck, 800—or Hot Fuck—was breaking up tray after tray of ice cubes. I heard the cubes tinkle into each glass.

  “What’s his real name?” I asked.

  “Homer Francis.”

  “I’ll stick to 800.”

  Dodie always had insisted on the importance of not mixing the personal with the professional, of accepting only certain kinds of favors from clients, such as extra tickets and use of country—club facilities, but not becoming too close to anyone, especially not becoming what he called a capon for the old ladies who wanted a sexless escort service when their husbands left town. Although I certainly wasn’t in a position to criticize anyone for blurring the distinction between work and social life, I asked, “Your client?”

  “Yup.”

  I shrugged. “Beats the bar scene.”

  “We’ve sworn off that.”

  We so soon? I wanted to ask. But I didn’t. I felt an unfounded, unsettling envy rising up inside me, that Dodie could sit there and say we while I sat miles apart from Strauss.

  800 may have owned a million-dollar company—which explained how he owned that cute car and the gorgeous house and this ostentatious boat—but that did nothing to explain how he came to own Dodie. Although he had decent enough manners, he also showed he knew too well the privileges accorded to the wealthy and the beautiful. He called me Cuz and called Dodie Bugle Boy and Duck Head, which I suspected had less to do with Dodie’s choice of clothes than the activities he engaged in with 800 once his clothes had been shed. Dodie, in turn, called him H.F. or Homer or Eight-Oh-Oh with a touch of undue respect. When I stopped to think about it, I realized that Dodie always had worn the pants in our relationship. He had talked more, chosen the restaurants, dispensed the drugs, bought the drinks. I had never seen Dodie play the boy before. It bothered me.

  Then I wondered what Dodie would make of me and Strauss. Not much, I thought. But what’s it any of his goddamn business? Who on the outside knows what’s going on in any relationship? For that matter, who on the inside knows a blessed thing either?

  I slurped to the bottom of my Long Island Iced Tea in five minutes flat.

  “Long time since you’ve had a drink, Lise?” Dodie asked.

  “Get your cuz another,” 800 told him.

  With that comment, I felt intense relief not to be sitting in Park Slope with my knees pressed too firmly together, having to monitor everything I did and said to win over Strauss’s mother and father. I didn’t give a damn what 800 thought of me. I drank—and drank—until it was no longer a conscious decision to tie a good one on. To the delight of 800 and Dodie—who also seemed eager to drown whatever sorrows they had—I got wasted.

 
800 started to grow on me, probably because he seemed the perfect antidote to the conservative duds who worked at Boorman. He had a huge repertoire of rude regional jokes (Why’s it called a toothbrush instead of a teethbrush? It was invented in West Virginia!) and pulled out puns like a magician drew scarves from his pockets. But he preempted my usual role. The kind of repartee that Dodie and I usually engaged in wouldn’t fly here. All the push and pull was between 800 and Dodie, and a lot of their joking seemed to revolve around references back to New Haven. Only instead of comparing versions of the city, as Dodie and I did, 800 and Dodie contrasted them. What irritated me about the whole thing was the obvious delight Dodie took in landing a Yale boy, who clearly had not been a scholarship student.

  “I’ll bet you never once crossed the Q the whole time you went to school there,” I told 800.

  “What’s the Q?” 800 asked.

  I shrugged and let Dodie explain. The Q Bridge was the long elevated stretch of highway that separated the marshes and the gated liquor stores and the shoemaker shops of our old neighborhood from what Dodie and I used to envision as the wealthy, ivy-walled paradise of downtown New Haven. When we were small, our parents hated to drive the Q, for it had no shoulder to pull over on in case the car broke down (and ours broke down plenty), and because the Q took us over New Haven Harbor, which always gave off a foul smell no matter how low or high the tide. The Q intrigued me. I got ushered into downtown New Haven only two or three times a year by my father: to attend the Columbus Day parade and La Festa di Santa Maria Maddalena on Wooster Square, and to see the Christmas window decorations at Macy’s. Once, on the Q, we rode in a hushed limousine with the lights on low following the hearse that contained my grandfather’s body. Our family, for some unknown reason, always was buried in Saint Lawrence Cemetery, those green-gated acres that stretched beyond the Yale Bowl.

  The Q’s very name always seemed mysterious to me, perhaps because my mother could not pronounce the ancient Indian word Quinnipiac—and so she shortened it, like many other Italians, to simply the Q. But she couldn’t even say that single letter right. She said Cu—Cu Bridge—pronouncing the Q the same way vo-tech boys used to taunt kids in the high-school marching band by stretching the damning word queer into two syllables: cu-weer.

  The Q, perhaps, was most memorable to us under another name: Suicide Bridge. Yalies who couldn’t make the grade were said to jump from Harkness Tower. But townies—the depressed teens and desperate lovers who could not face leaping off East Rock to impale themselves on the jagged stones below—sometimes chose to throw themselves off Q Bridge into the dull, murky green depths of New Haven Harbor.

  As a teenager, I vowed I would kill myself if I never made it out of New Haven. My worst fear since moving out had been of coming down with a terminal illness and being forced to go home and die in my father’s house under my mother’s care. I had nightmares of getting into a car accident and ending up a quadriplegic. I envisioned Mama parking me in a wheelchair, feeding me acini de pepe, and wiping my hairy chin half—raw with a rough paper napkin as Truth or Consequences and Wheel of Fortune flickered on her black-and-white TV.

  If I ever got deathly ill, I thought, Strauss would take care of me. But then I remembered the snap of the Audi’s power locks and I felt confused and carsick, the way I felt whenever I went home and drove over the Q Bridge, frightened I would run into a traffic jam when I reached the top. Heights terrified me. Below me lay the water, beyond that the pink and green oil tanks on the shore, and far beyond that the rust-brown facade of the Coliseum and the glare of the Knights of Columbus tower. I thought about how easy it would be—and yet how hard—to turn the wheel and jump the rail. Which would it take—weakness or strength—to do it?

  Darkness engulfed the boat. Then the full moon rose above the trees, pale and silver, and 800 flicked on a switch so the lights strung around the deck—fanciful strings of chili peppers and cacti that gleamed red and green like Christmas-tree bulbs—glowed and winked at us. The mosquitoes came out in droves, and 800 took his lighter to the citronella candles on the table. Neither Dodie nor 800 nor I were inclined to pry ourselves off the deck chairs, except to go below for more drinks and to replenish the wicker plate that held water crackers and brie, which seemed all there was to nibble on. By nine o’clock I was so blitzed I didn’t even blink when 800 got up and lowered his fly to pee over the side of the deck into the lagoon.

  “Ignore him,” Dodie said, his laugh sputtering out like an engine gearing up to go nowhere.

  “I’m trying my best,” I said. My head spun. “Why do you call this boat”—and to the snorting delight of Dodie, I held back a hiccup, or was it a burp?— “The Young Girl?” Then, as if 800 were retarded, I repeated the question.

  800’s voice sounded disembodied to me. “Gary Puckett.”

  Puckett. No, fuck it. The metal legs of Dodie’s and 800’s chairs vibrated on the deck as they shook with laughter and explained—in halting, alternating voices—that at one time 800 had a business partner—or was that a sexual partner?—who had been involved with producing—or was that seducing?—an album made by that group from the sixties called Gary Puckett and the Union Gap.

  The story was jumbled, and close to incoherent, and punctuated by snorts of laughter, resulting in Dodie spilling ice down the front of his shirt and 800 disappearing below deck to bring up a cassette tape, which he inserted in my boom box after tossing aside the Beatles cassette too close to the citronella candle—where I would find it melted into a blob of black in the morning. 800 turned off the string of chili-pepper lights, pushed down the PLAY button, and held out his hand to invite Dodie to join him on the dance floor in the pale yellow glow of the candles. The song “This Girl Is a Woman Now” took me back to junior high school and those long, hot afternoons I spent longing for love on the beach, coming home with nothing but a burn that puckered the skin on my shoulders and back.

  For more than five years I had lived in or around New York City. With—and without—Dodie, I had been to gay bars, transvestite hangouts, a Forty-second Street peep show as research for my human-sexuality class, and Saint Mark’s to catch the black-leather-and-whips scene—but I had never seen two men slow-dance together before. 800 was the lead. Dodie was in his arms, his head on 800’s shoulder, his feet side by side with 800’s Docksiders, his legs pressed against 800’s thighs. I could not take my eyes off them, and as the song continued, I had the feeling this moment would be locked in my memory forever.

  But why? Because the light was yellow. Because the mosquitoes were biting so hard I slapped away blood. Because I remembered a trip Dodie and I made a few years back to the Murray Hill Playhouse where we saw Cabaret. I heard Joel Grey’s strange hiss, like ice cubes expanding in a glass, in the language that movies and documentaries had taught us to associate only with Hitler (and that Dodie and I both speculated was best suited for weird sex): Wilkommen. I remembered the dance with two ladies. And the strange scene in which Sally Bowles and Maximilian and Christopher all danced together, and then they all started to kiss, and the men seemed to become women and the woman became a man. I remembered how much Dodie and I had laughed when the master of ceremonies first introduced the Jewish gorilla as his girlfriend (I ask you: Eez it a crime to love?) and how bummed out we felt at the end when the drums rolled and the camera moved slowly across the frosted glass, finally freezing on the armband of a Nazi soldier, the swastika distorted in the image.

  It had been a midnight show. Afterward Dodie and I had walked back to his apartment, in what our parents used to disparagingly call “the wee hours of the morning” (as if no good could ever come of anything done at 2:00 A.M.). We had been scared walking the deserted streets but tried not to show it. Like Scouts at camp who have to make a midnight trip to the latrine, we walked with our arms around each other and sang to keep up our courage:

  Reuben, Reuben, I been thinking

  What a great world this would be!

  If all the boys would move to
China

  Then the girls could rule the sea!

  How unaccountably happy I had felt on that long walk! How fun it was to drink too much wine when we got back and to step into the cramped bathroom and dress myself in a pair of Dodie’s blue-and-white chambray pajamas—described as his no-sex tonight outfit. But as I climbed into the bottom, I noticed the pants had a drawstring waist. I was drunk. I remembered thinking, idly, If Dodie weren’t gay and he wasn’t my cousin, I would marry him in a heartbeat.

  When I came out, Dodie was drying the wineglasses with a linen towel. “You don’t look half-bad in those PJs, Lise.”

  “You’re just saying that because they make me look like a man.” I gave him a dizzy smile. “What if I were a man?”

  He held up one of the goblets to make sure he had rubbed off the spots with the towel. “Such a boner would I have for you, babe,” he said, and then we both burst out laughing in a way I knew Eben Strauss would deem “unhealthy.”

  What would Mr. Eben Strauss make of this? I thought, as the music played and Dodie—perhaps remembering Cabaret too—held out his hand toward me and invited me to join him and 800 on the dance floor. I shook my head. Suddenly I pictured Strauss—sitting in right field, drinking a ballpark rip-off-priced beer with his seventy-nine-year-old father, and maybe even eating some Cracker Jacks, a treat my father always bought me at Yankee Stadium. Then I was back on the boat, wondering who was more real—the woman who told Strauss “Bring back a Cracker Jack surprise for me,” or the girl who had eyes only for Dodie’s erection, visibly pushing against Homer Francis’s chinos?