The House of Impossible Beauties

by Joseph Cassara

  It was the summer months, with their heat and humidity, that made her think of Brazil. She lay in bed thinking about the pictures she had seen of Rio and São Paulo. The beaches, the thongs, the giant Jesus at the top of the mountain with his arms open wide to feel the power of the wind. If she had all the money in the world, that’s where she’d go. And she’d drink caipirinhas and chain-smoke in the bars; flirt with all the muscular, tan men; and wear neon-colored thongs at the beach every day.

  “I hear that in Brazil,” she told La Loca one day in August, “all the men go crazy for the boys in drag. They call them travestis, I think. Now doesn’t that sound nice?”

  “That don’t sound like the world I know,” La Loca said. “I think you’re lying.”

  “Am not,” Venus said.

  “Well then that sounds like it’d be damn fabulous.”

  “We could wear thongs everyday,” Venus said.

  “Oh, hell to the no,” La Loca said. “Well, first I need to get my surgery. But I don’t even like to floss my teeth, what makes you think I want floss up in my cheeks?”

  Venus laughed and slapped the side of La Loca’s arm. “I’m just daydreaming, you don’t have to crush it for me, damn. All I’m talking about is a little bit of whimsy over here.”

  Venus knew it was just a dream and nothing more. She couldn’t even earn enough money to pay for rent, how was she going to hop on a plane and think she could afford rent in another country? She also knew that La Loca was dealing coke with Sugar Cookie to help save money for her hormones and blockers and surgery. La Loca had told that secret one night while they were drinking vodka out of a plastic handle. They mixed it with the orange juice that the nuns kept in the fridge with the other juices.

  “I’m scared that Sugar’s gonna leave me if I actually get the operation,” La Loca told Venus later that day as Venus lay on her bed flipping through a travel magazine with a whole photo essay on Brazil. Ipanema: women lounging on towels, wearing bikinis, throwing peace signs into the air, applying baby oil to their skin, drinking from coconuts.

  “Well, don’t he love you?” Venus said, looking up from the photos.

  “Yeah, but I’m just scared that if I get the surgery down there and become a real woman, he’s not gonna be turned on anymore.”

  “That just sounds confusing,” Venus said. She was amazed at how sometimes a girl could know what a man wanted, but other times, it felt like a mystery.

  Late nights became a time when they shared secrets with each other. It was perfect because they didn’t have to scurry away from Sugar Cookie, who was either out dealing the coke or blowing rails of it on whatever surface was in front of him. Didn’t matter if he was in the common room or in the bathroom, if it was one o’clock, he had to cut a line on the flattest surface available to him. “Or I’ll die,” he was in the habit of saying. Venus thought it was some addict-level shit.

  The next night, La Loca told Venus to meet in Loca’s room at midnight. Sugar Cookie would be out on a coke run and they could close the door to have silence. They all knew the doors in the entire place didn’t lock, but no one had ever busted down a door if it was closed, especially if it was closed after ten at night.

  By the time Venus arrived, it was just past midnight and she could tell that La Loca had been crying. The room already smelled like that bad handle of vodka—the smell was borderline rubbing alcohol. The taste too. But it was on the cheap, and even though they didn’t like cheap, it was all they could afford to buy at the only bodega in the area that was willing to take La Loca’s stamps in exchange for booze.

  “I can’t take it anymore,” La Loca said. She stood up from the bed too quick and almost fell over. That was how drunk she was already. Venus told her to hush and sit back down. That it would all be okay.

  “I gotta tell somebody,” La Loca said. “I just feel like nobody knows who I was. Like my past is all dead and that I’m just a zombie.”

  “Honey,” Venus said, “I got no clue what that means.”

  La Loca told Venus that her name used to be Ramón.

  “Funny,” Venus said. “I never would’ve pegged you for a Ramón.”

  “Don’t be brutal with me,” La Loca said, “and don’t you dare ask to see my baby pictures.”

  “You know I wouldn’t.”

  She told Venus that when she was seven, her mother’s boyfriend was watching her while her mother was at work. He said he was going to watch baseball on the couch and maybe he’d teach Ramón how to play catch one day.

  “Shit turned real quick,” La Loca said. “He was all like, You’d be a cute little girl, because my skin was real smooth, and he said he’d give me a dime if I licked his finger.” She downed the rest of the vodka that was in the paper cup.

  Venus took a sip of her drink too, not because she was thirsty, but because she wanted to show La Loca that she was in tune with her. That Venus could drink when La Loca drank and listen when La Loca spoke. She watched as La Loca picked up the pack of cards and began fingering through them like she was about to start shuffling.

  “So I licked it,” La Loca said, “because—shit—I wanted a dime. Get me some gummy candies at the shop, you know? And when I licked it, he grabbed the back of my head and told me to suck the finger and roll it around with my tongue, and then he took his other hand and slided it down my pants and he was watching the tele while my mother was out and he slided down my pants and put his fingers on my nalgas and in my culo, and when my mother came back home later that night, he was sleeping on the couch and I told her what happened.

  “Like, I was all excited and shit, because I didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to do that. I thought it was like a grown-up game, like, that all the kids had people feeling up on them like that. Like it was something special. You know?”

  Venus didn’t know. Antonio was a real sonuvabitch, but he had never done any of that to Venus when she was young. She looked at La Loca and shook her head. “I’m sorry,” Venus said. She said she didn’t know, but maybe she could try to understand.

  “And you know what that cunt said to me?” La Loca said, looking at the corner of the bed now. “She told me to shut the fuck up with my lying mouth. That she’d wash my tongue out with suds. She threw a mop at me and some Lysol and said that if I wanted to be a woman, I should learn to clean up my mess.”

  Venus held La Loca as she cried. “Damn,” Venus said. “That’s so fucked-up.”

  “Pour me another drink?” La Loca said.

  “Now that I think about it,” Venus said, reaching out for the handle. “You should’ve chopped his dick off. Chopped it right off, then he wouldn’t fuck around with you no more.”

  La Loca took the cup and downed the vodka shot. “I don’t want to think about it anymore,” she said. “I just had to fuckin’ tell somebody about it. I couldn’t keep it inside me anymore, because if no one else knew, it’d eat me up, you know?”

  “Sort of,” Venus said.

  “I can’t tell Sugar this kind of shit,” she said.

  Venus didn’t ask why. She watched as La Loca reached over and picked up the rock that Venus had given her. She used the rock to hold down papers—all the job applications that she applied for and never heard a word from and all the paperwork from the welfare office.

  La Loca got up and poured them both more screwdrivers, using up the rest of the OJ. “Oh shit,” she said. “The nuns are gonna be pissed. We drank all the juice.”

  “Yeah,” Venus said. “But it was in the common room. I think if anyone knows how to share, the nuns do. No?”

  “You got a point.”

  Venus heard steps walking down the hall. La Loca must have heard too because she froze midpour. She rushed to put the handle of vodka under the bed and then sat down next to Venus. If they got caught, they might get kicked out, but Venus wasn’t totally sure what the punishment would be. They both stared at each other and didn’t move.

  Whoever it was, they were outside the door. Venus held her br
eath, and then the steps kept moving down the hall until she couldn’t hear them no more and she could breathe again.

  La Loca looked at Venus and they laughed. Venus took a sip of her screwdriver, raised her eyebrows, and said, “Damn, this is strong tonight.”

  “Why drink,” La Loca said, “if that shit ain’t gonna be strong?”

  Venus chuckled. “I don’t even know what you mean.”

  “Mmm—like hell you don’t,” La Loca said.

  It didn’t take Venus long to feel the drink. She was two, three down by now. She watched La Loca as she painted her nails glitter-silver, a color she liked to call Glam. Just Glam, nothing else.

  “So,” La Loca said, fingers splayed out so they could dry. “You gonna share your life story or what?”

  Venus stared at the last drops at the bottom of her cup. Wouldn’t it have been nice, she thought, if they had never had to front in the first place? Like it was a real shit that La Loca had to posture when they first met. Being all mean like she was Kween Bitch of the place just because she was insecure about people attacking her. And yet there La Loca was, telling her story to Venus when Venus didn’t know if she could do the same. Talk about insecurities.

  Venus didn’t know what it felt like to be protective over a man like La Loca was with Sugar Cookie, but Venus had seen what it did to people. She saw her mother live in a fantasyland where Antonio would be the type of man who never hit her and would leave his wife, bring her to Hawaii, and actually show some kind of interest in getting to know Thomas. What a weird place that fantasyland was in some people’s minds. The rent was so high in what it demanded from people—pride, security, money, blood, secrets—but people still wanted to live there. They didn’t want to vacation there, they wanted a house with a basement and a fence.

  It must have been hard for La Loca to tell that kind of story, about that piece of shit who should have his dick chopped off and set to rot in a vat of bleach. Now that would teach him. Venus took another shot of vodka. She decided to tell a different story. “My name was Thomas,” she said. “You ever heard of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton?”

  La Loca shook her head no.

  Venus told her that the nuns at Our Lady of the Flowers loved Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton. And they couldn’t just say Saint Elizabeth or Saint Seton, it was Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, like it was one long word. “I must have been a little bit dyslexic, right?” Venus said. “So when they picked me to read the story of her life in front of the gym assembly, I was thinking, Me?—of all people?”

  It had happened on the first day back from Christmas break and everyone was excited to see each other. Vanessa waved at Thomas; Venus waved back at Vanessa. Venus was so nervous to give the speech in front of everyone, and it didn’t matter if the words were right there in front of her at the podium. “You’ll be fine, Thomas,” the sisters told her.

  “But instead of saying Seton, like I was supposed to, like it was written there on the paper,” Venus said, “I kept saying Satan, but it was just because I was so nervous, not like I did it on purpose. Oh god, it was horrendous.”

  La Loca gasped. Whenever she was drunk, her eyes were just as expressive as her sassy mouth was while sober. “No you didn’t,” La Loca play-screamed. “And the nuns completely lost their shit?”

  “Uh, yeah,” Venus said. “Sister Agnes—I’ll never forget her name or that face—she stood next to me at the podium with a meter stick. And every time I fucked up, she beat my ass with that stick until I said Seton all properly.”

  “Oh shit, I’m sorry,” La Loca said. “I shouldn’t be laughing.”

  “No, no,” Venus said. “It’s fine. It’s funny now. I was all Satan—no, Seton—yes, See-ton.”

  Venus hadn’t fucked up on purpose. She really was so nervous that the words got flipped and the more times Sister Agnes beat the shit out of her, the more nervous she got. The other students had laughed at first, but then the nuns gave them that stare that said they would raise hell and back if there was even so much as another chuckle. For the rest of the speech, no one laughed. Venus kept her eyes peeled to the words on the pages because she couldn’t bear to look up and see Vanessa or Sal or anyone else.

  “I feel bad for nuns,” La Loca said. “I wouldn’t be able to live without dick.”

  “I know you can’t,” Venus said, “you chickenhead.”

  “Hey!”

  “I’m saying it with love,” Venus said. “Every species is valued in the ecosystem of the gay world. Without the chickenheads, the rest of the ecosystem would crash out and die.”

  “What the fuck are you talking all this science shit to me for?” La Loca said.

  “It’s a joke, girl,” Venus said, putting her arm around her friend. “Calm your damn titties.”

  * * *

  Not all stories needed to be told. She felt that sometimes it was the stories that people didn’t tell that spoke more loudly about who they were or where they came from. Venus didn’t tell La Loca about Antonio and the dog, and she didn’t know why. She could have, and maybe she even felt a little guilty about not sharing with Loca, even after Loca had shared her own secrets. But then Venus began to wonder what other stories lurked beneath Loca’s surface, the ones that only La Loca knew. The ones that were held so close to the fibers of her soul, the very act of speaking them aloud would destroy the framework of her being.

  If Venus had told La Loca that story, this is how it would’ve gone down:

  Thomas was ten years old. His mother and Nonna had to run to a funeral for an old woman in their building named Rose. Rose was a widow who had a son, but then, one day, she didn’t have a son no more. All Nonna kept saying was, “By his own hand. His own hand.”

  Thomas didn’t know Rose’s son. He had moved to California in search of a dream. That was another thing that Nonna said. She didn’t understand why someone had to go so far from his own mother to find a dream when there were plenty of dreams to be found in New York.

  Rose died a week after her son did and all the people in the building said they didn’t care if the autopsy showed natural causes. The fact that her heart had stopped was proof enough that it was broken. When Thomas heard this, he imagined that his own heart was made of glass, and that there was a little fairy inside of him who had a chisel. Every time something horrible happened—something he saw, something he heard—the fairy would make a small dent. It wouldn’t take one small dent to kill a person, but he could see how in the case of Rose, who had lived for long enough to remember different drinking fountains, the dents added up and shattered the heart. And everyone—even people who had never seen The Wizard of Oz!—knew that a person needed a heart in order to live.

  Thomas asked if he could go to the funeral, but Nonna said no. He was too young. She said it was open casket and she didn’t want him to learn that about the world yet.

  So he stayed with Antonio for the evening. Antonio’s wife was visiting family in the Catskills that weekend. Antonio had a dog and Thomas’s mother thought that he would have fun playing with the puppy for a couple of hours. Thomas thought that he would like that too, but then he met Antonio’s dog. Her name was Eva. She was a seventeen-year-old basset hound with glaucoma. She was also deaf. When Antonio went up to his bedroom and shut the door, Thomas lay on the floor and threw a bouncy ball, but Eva only stood there and stared at him while wheezing. Her eyes looked like clear aggie marbles.

  The rowhouse was dark and sad, even though it didn’t need to be. Thomas thought that Antonio could open up the curtains, or change the dark wood paneling, or buy a few more lights. Anything, really, could be done to lighten the place up. It smelled like Eva, which is to say that it smelled like wet fur and sagging dog skin. Eva limped around the first floor, her nails clacking away against the shiny wooden finish.

  Thomas walked up the stairs and knocked on Antonio’s door. He waited and stared at the doorknob, as if the longer he stared, it would magically untwist and open. He heard sounds coming from inside the room,
so he knew Antonio was in the room. He knocked again.

  A thump, then footsteps. Antonio opened the door with a towel wrapped around his waist. He wasn’t wet, and Thomas stared at his chest hair. “What you want, kid?” Antonio said.

  “You’re not really married, are you?” Thomas said. He wasn’t totally sure about his accusation, but it was a hunch. Behind Antonio’s arm, Thomas could see two nudie ladies on the TV. They were running their French manicures against their pink nipples. “You’re just telling my mom that you’re married so that you don’t have to marry her.”

  “I don’t have time for this bullshit,” Antonio said. Thomas knew he had hit a nerve. He must be right, then. Antonio wasn’t denying it. Thomas wanted to say, Of course no woman in their right mind would live in this tacky, wood-paneled hellhole. But of course he didn’t say that.

  “She’s not in the Catskills because she doesn’t exist,” Thomas said. “And that makes you a liar.”

  Antonio reached for the remote on the bed and turned the TV off. “Who the fuck do you even think you are, you little son-of-a-bitch brat?”

  That was all Thomas wanted to see—Antonio struggling to compose himself. He watched as Antonio bent down to pick up his undies, then as he squirmed to put them on under his towel. “What you want from me, kid?” Antonio said. “Not like you know anything about the world yet.”

  “I’m hungry,” Thomas said. “Can we have dinner soon?”

  Once they were in the kitchen, Antonio pushed him to the floor, pulled a big knife out of the drawer, and said, “Here. Make yourself something.” He walked out of the kitchen and closed the door.

  And what was Thomas supposed to do with that? He stared at the knife. When he opened the refrigerator, it was empty except for a head of lettuce and a rotten bowl of strawberries covered in gray fuzzies. When he moved to open the door and leave the room, he realized he was locked in. He banged and banged on the door, but he knew it was no use. He knew that he had picked the fight and now he was feeling Antonio’s fucked-up revenge, and he wanted to scream.