The House of Impossible Beauties

by Joseph Cassara

  She didn’t know why she was reacting this way, like stone cold. She had to have figured that he had exes, but why’d he have to bring it up like that? Her heart was fluttering a little. She sat up and reached for her pack of Newports on the floor near the edge of the bed.

  “Getting a tattoo with someone is a big-ass deal,” she said. “It’s permanent on your body.”

  “Girlfriend, you know how it is sometimes,” he said.

  “Do I though?” she said. The nicotine hit her straight after the first inhale. Her mind felt a clearing. “What does that even mean, that I know how it is sometimes.”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  She told him that she was surprised she was acting this way. She thought maybe it was a sign she liked him more than she had thought. “And then what happens when you leave me for your ex,” she said. She counted in her mind: there had been Kevin, Jaime, some other lesser loves that didn’t bear repeating.

  “That’s not gonna happen,” he said.

  “Such a smooth talker,” she said. He leaned over for a puff on her cigarette. She rolled her eyes and moved her hand over so he could reach his lips to the cig without breaking his neck.

  “Tyler doesn’t live in New York anymore,” he said.

  “Did you love him though?” she asked. The cigarette was almost done.

  “Of course I did,” he said. “But it’s not like we only have enough love reserved for one person. It’s possible to love multiple people over time. If you ask me, I think that every time you experience love, it feels and looks and sounds different.”

  Angel nodded and pushed the cig into the glass ashtray. She didn’t want to tell Hector that she had never really fallen in love with anyone yet. There had been flings, but nothing that made her want to scream out on the street and announce it to the heavens.

  “I don’t got any tattoos,” she said. She stood up and spun around slowly so he could capture every inch of her body with his eyes. “Maybe one day though.”

  * * *

  At night, before sleep, he’d whisper into the crook of her neck: C’mon, Angel. All you gotta do is think about it. He wanted to start a house in the ball scene. He would be the father, she the mother. All Latin. What if they got nowhere to go? Or nobody? Just like the morenas at Paradise Garage. And the white queens that trek out to the far reaches of Long Island. Shit, we don’t have cars to go out there joining them. She liked the idea of it, but she knew it would be a lot of responsibility to be a mother. At least the good kind of mother who knew how to love and appreciate. Not like she was racing to make the same mistakes that her own mother made, so she didn’t want to get too excited too fast.

  Then Princess Diana got married. Angel was awake at the wee hours of the morning and, like the rest of the world, was peeled to that television like Gay Santa Claus was about to shower the world with diamonds. Hector held her as they sat on the floor of his sala. She watched Diana walk down that aisle in her mega-long train of ivory taffeta and antique lace. She was so overwhelmed by Lady Di’s beauty that she cried. She thought of all the hands that sewed the thousands of pearls and sequins, all done with love and admiration, so that Diana could wave to her people.

  “See?” Hector said. “Diana is an up-and-coming mother of that house.”

  “She is,” she said. “She will be.”

  Hector watched the whole procession even though he told her that he thought it was too stiff. They ate their bowls of Cheerios and drank their glasses of OJ and Hector wiped her tears with the edge of his white pajama shirt.

  “I got an idea,” he said, standing in front of the TV.

  “I can’t see through you, babe” Angel said. “You’re not a ghost.”

  “I’ve already seen this story before,” he said. “They get married at the end.”

  Angel rolled her eyes and took their bowls to the sink.

  “So my idea is,” Hector said, “that we should dress up and go to Saks.”

  Angel pursed her lips like what for, what are the two of us gonna buy on Fifth Avenue, Mr. Pipe Dream?

  “For window shopping,” he said. “No sé—we could try on shit, have a look-see in the mirrors. You know—the mirrors in Saks are magical.”

  Angel sat back down on the floor and kicked out her feet so Hector could move out of the way of the TV. “Are they made of crystal?” she asked and Hector laughed.

  “No, but wouldn’t that be the shit,” he said. “No crystal, but they do make you look like pure glamor.”

  “But the real question is,” she said, “do they have dresses with hand-sewn pearls?”

  They decided that they needed to dress as proper as possible. Hector searched through his closet to find his suit, an old thing he had got for a wedding a few years ago. He wet his hair and combed it to the side, then doused it in hairspray until it hardened. Angel went the route of simplicity—a zebra-print button-down with chunky green buttons and a white faux-silk foulard tied around her neck for an added ounce of pizzazz.

  They took the uptown bus from Hector’s apartment in Alphabet City and when they got there, the first floor was divine. The rush of people was mostly elegant women and less elegant tourists, all clutching bags of items gobbled up from previous purchases. The perfume spritzer girls looked hungry, the handsome men in suits simply stood in their corners—the clacking of heels, the shine of the lights against the waxed floor. Angel felt dizzy. She felt like she was walking into a Ralph Lauren ad from the pages of Vogue, except these people didn’t look like they were about to hop on their horse and play a match of polo.

  “Holy shit,” Hector said. “That woman is wearing a full-on Saga nishiki getup, do you see her?”

  “Yes,” Angel said. She saw her alright. “And I want to give her my digits so we can be friends.” The woman must’ve been in her fifties, with the tautest skin Angel had ever seen. She had blue eye shadow, hair that screamed Madison Avenue salon, eyebrows in a permanent state of raised wonder, like the world was constantly throwing her pleasant surprises. She looked like the kind of woman who knew how to hydrate.

  And that Saga nishiki blazer with golden buttons! Could have been straight out of the Met costume archives. The woman walked right past them and Angel got a whiff of her perfume—surely some kind of floral scent, maybe from Paris, maybe Milan. Somewhere far away from where she was standing.

  As Angel looked around, first at Hector, who had stopped at the Guerlain counter to get a tester spritz of some green cologne, then at the other women wearing silk foulards around their neck, suddenly everything felt so wrong. Angel’s foulard wasn’t Gucci, wasn’t Fendi, Dior, or Chanel. It was some polyester piece of shit she got at a cheap boutique downtown. Everything was all wrong. They would be spotted. They would be seen for exactly who they were—two poor Puerto Rican boys who could barely afford a three-course meal in Midtown, let alone any kind of shirt from Saks. When they took the escalator upstairs, she realized that she couldn’t even afford the panties. What were they thinking? Who were they trying to fool?

  They took the escalator one floor higher. Hector held her hand and guided her to his favorite section: Chanel suits. There was a little boutique section set aside for each designer house. A woman in what must have been a Chanel suit was standing behind a counter, reading from a giant binder. She had a silver pen in her hand, but she wasn’t writing anything. To Angel, she looked like a living mannequin, with those white gloves and a long strand of pearls around her neck. She was flaca y elegante, vibrating to the tune of Audrey Hepburn circa 1961.

  Hector whispered into Angel’s ear. His directions were simple: pick out any suit and he would buy it for her.

  “Are you out of your loco, ever-living mind?” she said.

  “A new outfit for the mother of our house?” he said.

  “With what money?” she said.

  “¿Qué dices?” he said. “I work. I get money. Aren’t you trying to get in with Dorian and make it into the scene?”

  Hector had a
point. Dorian was all about acquiring the clothes, not mopping them like some of the other girls. Most of the other girls. Dorian’s rules were simple: If you can’t make it yourself with the fabric from the Garment District, then you gotta buy it. Don’t be déclassé and steal, because stolen clothes never looked good or right on nobody.

  Angel chose a black-and-white herringbone jacket with an all-white collar and a long, black silk tie that fell down the chest. There was a matching skirt that would hit just below the knees, but she would need to try it on first to see how it looked. She imagined herself with white gloves and a long, Breakfast at Tiffany’s cigarette holder, standing in front of the Eiffel Tower.

  When Angel tried to make eyes with the saleswoman to get a fitting room, she realized that the woman wasn’t giving them no focus at all. She must have decided, Angel thought, that they weren’t going to buy anything. Angel had been right after all. This saleswoman had seen through them. She had detected that Angel was not the kind of boy who could wear a black-and-white herringbone suit in front of the Eiffel Tower.

  Hector grabbed the woman’s attention, and she came over to unlock the door. She gave Angel a silent side-glance, eyebrows raised in doubt. It was such a quick look that Angel wasn’t even sure that it had happened. Angel felt enraged as she slid off her clothes and put on the Chanel. The woman’s doubt made her want the suit even more, so she could wear it and give off fuck-you vibes to all the people who tried to front with her.

  She looked in the mirror and felt what she imagined all the brides-to-be in the world feel when they first see their gowns. That sense that this was the outfit that had been preselected by the universe at the very instant she popped out of the birth canal.

  She smoothed out the fabric that bunched under her armpits. The herringbone felt soft and supple between her fingers. She put on her sunglasses and waved to an imagined audience of fans. Did she look like Lady Di? No, she thought, but she was exuding the same energy.

  The problem came at the register. “It’s okay,” she whispered to Hector. She stood next to him at the counter while he recounted the five C-notes, as if there was some kind of mistake. He didn’t have enough cash on him.

  “Babe, it’s really okay,” she said again. “I don’t need this.” She tried to say the words as softly as possible, as if they were for both Hector and the saleswoman, who really did look sorry that she couldn’t sell the Chanel to them. The saleswoman looked almost embarrassed herself, as if they had caught her eating with her hands at a formal gala.

  They stepped onto the escalator that would bring them back down to street level. “It’s not okay,” Hector said. “I wanted to buy this for you.”

  “I’ll just go to the Garment District and make my own,” she said. “I’ll give you Princess Diana realness any day of the week, with or without Coco Chanel on my side.”

  As the escaltor steps disappeared into the ground, they had to readjust their strides to the ground below them.

  He insisted that they not leave empty-handed, so he went to the counter and bought something he could afford. When she held the bottle up to the light, the perfume looked like melted, translucent gold. Chanel No. 5. The glass was thick, unbreakable, with a topper that looked like a giant crystal.

  I told you I’d get you Chanel, didn’t I?

  Angel would replay these words in the back of her mind as the years passed, as everything and everyone passed before her. She didn’t know it at the time, as she walked out the door with her small paper bag with the words as elegant as ink on bone—Saks Fifth Avenue—but she would come back to that glass bottle and spritz it on her neck, her wrists, for every funeral she’d ever have to attend. It would become her goal, years later, to never have to reach the end of that bottle. Because she didn’t want to think about what it would mean when that unbreakable glass was finally empty.

  HECTOR

  1978

  He met Tyler in dance class. Tyler was this beautiful, muscular faggot-queen that practiced next to Hector at the barre. The man could get into fifth position quicker than anything Hector had ever seen. His allongés made Hector confused about his own desires. He didn’t know if what he felt was envy or lust or both wrapped in one.

  They practiced next to each other every week. Stretches, hip openers, the gamut. The view from the window was of the brick building right across the way, so Hector’s eyes wandered from barre to brick to boy. Of course his eyes did, how could they not? Tyler’s body was lean muscle. Gold hoop earring. Moustache.

  Their instructor was trained in the Martha Graham method. She was a middle-aged Russian woman named Katya whose footless black tights exposed a series of corns, blisters, and cracked skin. Sometimes Hector’s eyes would be drawn to her feet, a warning of the horrors that could happen to the human body. She didn’t seem to care though. She wore them, it appeared, like they were a badge of honor for every shock her feet had been made to endure over the years. Hector was careful not to let her catch his wandering eyes, fearing the tongue lashing she would surely deliver. He was supposed to be focusing on his own body.

  “Children, now we will move to the center,” Katya screamed. “I need to see you harness the core energy within your vaginas—both your physical and metaphorical vaginas—and jeté, jeté, jeté. Harness!”

  They tried to harness the power of the vagina. Even the several men in the room, like Hector and Tyler, whose vaginas were merely metaphorical. She told them that she had seen enough of their attempts at whatever it was they were doing. She told them all to sit on the floor, backs straight.

  Tyler was to demonstrate the choreography for the class, she said. Of course it would be Tyler. Hector was not jealous about this. He was relieved that he could sit and watch Tyler in motion. All anyone had to do was look at the man dancing and they could see that he had been tapped by something divine. Watching him was like watching time open up into air.

  “Now kneel on the floor,” Katya instructed Tyler. He knelt on the floor, rolled out his neck and shoulders, and looked straight at Hector. Tyler held his gaze and Hector felt his face flushing red. Katya stomped her foot on the floor and told Tyler to raise his leg close to his chest, then to his head, then beyond his head. The body in deep contraction. “We call this the vaginal cry,” she yelled at the class, “for all that she cries to her lover. Her husband. Her child, or her children. I want to see sharp angles. Nothing soft, so help me. Now all of you: harness!”

  Tyler remained frozen, leg up above his head. His arches as rounded as a banana. Hector had never seen thicker calf muscles. Simply imagining the amount of core strength that this must’ve required sent a sharp pain behind Hector’s eyeballs.

  “We dance for the memories of things we dread to remember,” Katya said as the rest of the class went into position, raising their legs up, then beyond the head. “We dance for the things we wish to forget.”

  * * *

  The things he wished to never forget, in no particular order: what it meant to grow up on la isla; parents that up and died before he could remember their faces; living all his memory with his abuelitos; listening carefully enough to the coquís chirping into the night; running through the streets of Viejo San Juan up to El Morro, pretending that the castle-fort was all his for the taking; the days when Abuela didn’t have to work at the Caribe Hilton and they ate lemon piraguas on the street under the orange-ball sun; Abuelo showing him how he worked the tram cars that connected Viejo San Juan to the rest of things; imagining what it would be like if the cannons were still there to shoot at the ships in the water; the way the blue waves crashed into rock, turning to foam; when he was all alone in the fort’s stone alcove and he stood on his tippy toes just like Señora Rodrigues had taught them in ballet class, staring at the golden square of sunlight on the ground, kicking his right leg back, left arm forward, fingers up into an arabesque . . . Less rigid, niños, don’t be so pedestrian; fingers soft, Hector, so that a droplet of water can dangle off the edge. Remember this.

&nbs
p; * * *

  They started to arrive early each week so they could do their floor warm-ups together, before the others came. Tyler was working Hector’s abs like a bitch on wheels. Making him go from high plank to curling his forehead in so he could reach his knee to his nose. It felt like he was wringing his body out like a sponge. When they did standing barre, sometimes Tyler arched his body in toward Hector. For a quick second, Hector could smell the musk in Tyler’s cologne. It would hit him like a wave, and then it would be gone. As if it had not happened at all.

  It only took two or three weeks for Tyler to ask Hector out. Hector tried to play it cool, saying, Give me a day to think it over, even though he knew he would say yes. The next day, he dialed Tyler and said yes.

  Tyler took him to Saturday Mass at Paradise Garage. It was Hector’s first time, so Tyler insisted that they take a cab. Tyler’s treat. “It’s not Studio Fifty Four,” Tyler said. “But at least in a cab, we can pretend to make an arrival.”

  So they pretended to make their arrival. It was a two-story parking garage with a long line to get in. Tyler told him to wait there in line, he’d go talk to a friend in the know. As Hector waited alone, a middle-aged queen several people downstream was talking loud about her date the night before. “You know it’s always an ordeal when they’re fucking hot, but dumb-dumb-dumb,” the queen was saying to a confidante but projecting for all to hear. “And he was a California Republican, so gag me with a spoon already. I told him if he didn’t stop talking about the virtues of former Governor Reagan, I’d be forced to manually shut him up by sitting on his face. And he said he didn’t see a problem in that, so it was a win-win for everyone if you ask me. I didn’t have to hear him blather and I got to sit on his face for two hours. It was delicious, I’m sure. Only way I knew he wasn’t suffocated and dead was that his tongue wouldn’t stop moving.”

  Hector felt an arm; Tyler was back, dragging him to the entrance. The bouncer nodded, and in they were. The first thing that hit him was the curled smell of alcohol mixed with sweat. The floor was a little sticky. Tyler ushered them through the mob of people to the side tables. It seemed like there was no bar, just the tables with self-service punch bowls. Tyler handed him a clear-plastic cup. They raised them up and cheers’d. Head back, Hector downed the purple punch.