People in Trouble

by Sarah Schulman

  4

  KATE

  Rain made the day feel like night, but warmer and without threat. When Kate walked along in the dark afternoon she could see people sitting inside slightly illuminated restaurants. The ones with the flattest colors reminded her of the old days when she was a student in that very same neighborhood. Kate picked up a New York Times and walked into a relic on the corner that still had a lunch counter with a General Electric malted machine. In the sixties that coffee shop had been considered overpriced, but now it seemed comfortingly plain and ethnic, given what other enterprises had erupted along the walkway. She opened the paper, drank her coffee and then leaned back to stretch and look around because the news was always the same.

  At a small table was a red-haired man with a black woman he really liked.

  You don’t see that so much anymore, Kate noted, remembering when interracial couples were a normal part of Greenwich Village life. Nowadays there were a number of single older women, with gray frizzy hair and Jewish expressions, exhausted by their brown-skinned, up-to-date teenage children. Very few of those couples had stayed together. Of course, that could really be said about anyone who fell in love idealistically. Love with political implications had always interested her from a distance, but there was this ever present threat of violence accompanying it that she had managed, until now, to avoid.

  The red-haired man at the next table liked the black woman he was with. He grinned when she talked to him and was pleased just to see her. She had spaghetti dreadlocks and a strawberry malt. Everyone in the place had different hair. There were two bald guys in old orange sweaters talking slowly in the corner because they’d known each other for a long time and could relax. There were a couple of aging punks drinking black coffee and some skinheads on skateboards buying ice cream.

  It had been a hallucinatorily hot summer with AIDS wastes and other signs of the Apocalypse washing up on the beaches. Kate had spent it working in her studio, only in the evening, hoping to find some relief there. But she was still forced to cool off in the shower every hour and wear a T-shirt soaked in cold water before being able to concentrate on what she was making. One night she had heard many loud voices, as though someone had been shot or the drug dealers were arguing again. Then there was an incredible noise, a machine approaching like a war movie in Dolby sound. In the midst of what had been a hot, still night, the mess in her studio began to blow around the room because a helicopter hovered outside almost level with her windowframe. When it moved on, she stuck her head out all the way, leaned to the left and then saw crowds swarming. There were a lot of skinheads but also many regular neighbors plus punks and aging hippies. There were officers on the edges grabbing others arbitrarily and kicking them or hitting them with police sticks. It was more police in one place than Kate had seen since the sixties. It was real violence in the midst of great confusion. It was not a movie of the week. It was hot. It was stylized. It was unbelievable when it happened so openly. She stayed at the window watching and then made the decision not to enter into it.

  She drank her second cup of coffee checking to be sure her purse was still tucked under the lunch counter. Now that it was September, that hot night had become a screen, another newscast, a spectacular event. It was the shred of an idea. Now, the same skinheads were buying ice cream in their sweatshirts, red bandannas and baggy army pants. Girls and boys with bleached blond military haircuts were hanging out again wearing T-shirts claiming I Survived the Tompkins Square Riot.

  ‘Would you watch my raincoat while I go to the bathroom?’ asked an earnest young woman clutching a notebook.

  ‘Sure.’

  She returned quickly, slightly apologetic.

  ‘I bought a new raincoat,’ she said, brushing it off with her fingers.

  ‘It’s a nice one,’ Kate said.

  ‘It’s crisp,’ the woman answered caressing the sleeves. ‘It’s the first new coat that I’ve had in ten years. It fits. It’s light for the summer and later, if it gets cold, I have a lining I can put in. The pockets won’t have to be restitched every season. It zips.’

  She folded it carefully over the back of a chair.

  ‘You know what scares me?’ the woman said quietly like she was talking about the dead. ‘You look all around and know that it is the end of the empire. Then I look at myself and I have a new coat.’

  She was mousy, this woman, and a little bent over from too much scribbling in too many notebooks. Too much reading and not enough time in bed.

  ‘When you get something new,’ she said conspiratorially, ‘you have to watch out that it doesn’t get stolen. You have to avoid people who need money and people who need raincoats and keep them away from yours. But I feel bad being dry on the street when my brothers and sisters have nowhere to sleep.’

  ‘And contradictions are what let us know that we are fully human,’ Kate said.

  ‘But?’ the woman answered, waiting.

  ‘But?’

  ‘But,’ she said running old-looking hands over a young-looking face. ‘But then what?’

  There were three or four things that terrified Kate and they came to her in moments, like the first sight of flamingo faces on the subway. Or, that pause after the nebulous closeness of love-making when the person’s voice suddenly rang louder than all others. Kate feared the consequences of chaos but was comfortable with fragments, when they were freely chosen. In fact, she had lately been more excited by shreds of ideas and the partial phrases that paraded before her than in anything actually completed in her studio. But that did not worry her, because Kate had been making artwork long enough to recognize the patterns of frustration and breakthrough, denial and breakthrough, passion and frustration and breakthrough and change. Something was changing in the way she was seeing and it had started to affect her drawing.

  5

  KATE

  Kate’s last major stylistic shift had come four years earlier, when Spiros had put her on retainer and mounted her first successful solo show. She took in more money that season than Peter had in years of steady employment.

  ‘You’re using my ideas,’ he had complained. ‘You know there’s no market for my work. No one can hang my work over a fireplace. Pure design challenges capitalism’s view of the object. People always get rewarded for creating commodity products.’

  As he was speaking, Kate was looking sympathetically at his face. His lips were swollen and purple with wine as though they had been bruised. His face was covered by a thin slick of oily sweat. After years of being who he was and doing what he did, Peter’s gestures had become a list of habitually repeated actions. Had her own as well? Years of the same expressions had turned his body into a collection of these shapes. But there was at the same time something endearing about his stubbornness, about his commitment to his art. She saw that he could be a fool or a hero, depending on how he was viewed. It was that quiet observation that had provoked Kate’s switch to portraits.

  She went straight from the coffee shop to her studio, letting the rain drip down her forehead and along the end of her nose. Without even taking off her coat, she went to a stack of old paintings and flipped through them impatiently. She wanted to smash them. She was tired of standing too far away from a person’s face. She wanted to show what she saw making love or in a fight. It was a flash of lip, a pimpled cheek, sweat between the breasts, an unidentified slope or shadow that seemed suddenly more important. Sex and violence were sensual experiences, not visual ones, although they did have a visual component. In order to bring out the touch in the visual she had to get closer, as though her eye was on his chest looking up the side of his neck. That was where she wanted the image to be.

  She opened her window wide and leaned out over the ledge, one hand grabbing the molding. The park had been quiet since the summer and was still green. There were thirty or forty makeshift shacks, tents, lean-tos serving as temporary shelter for at least 150 people. But no riots and very little noise from the police. Some stragglers had wrapped t
hemselves in empty garbage bags while others just sat stoned and got soaked. The public bathroom was so overflowing with homeless people trying to stay dry that the crack smokers had to step over them to get inside.

  Kate had never been homeless and she had never been hopelessly hungry. She had been mugged a number of times and raped once, years ago. She felt aware of the variety of violence she had both lived and missed and honored them all by clipping resonant images from papers and magazines, then taping them to her walls. There were black-and-whites of young Negro men being bitten by American police dogs. There were colored images of acknowledged heroes lying in swamps of their own blood. She searched each one for the particles of physicality that captured the fear, the pain and especially the willingness of some individual to enter into it. This was one aspect of what she meant by chaos. At times the sum of her collection drew such a repulsive conclusion that she couldn’t imagine anything worse. But, looking out her window at the unprotected bodies, she considered that this worse thing was somehow present there.

  On the side table by the single bed in her studio, Kate propped up a twenty-five-year-old photo from Life magazine. It showed a Buddhist monk who had set himself on fire in Saigon. The photo was one frame but it was all in motion. It caught the man at the point where he was so completely burned that his body crumpled over into the flame and flesh fell off his bones.

  Does destroying yourself purposefully make a tangible impact?

  What Kate retained from the photo of a collapsing human flame was a flash of light that put its faith in smoke and ashes.

  6

  KATE

  Kate dialed Molly’s number. She loved that she could call up this younger woman and the woman wanted her. It was great.

  ‘I miss you,’ Kate said into the phone. ‘I want to get together soon.’

  Get together was her euphemism for making love.

  Then Peter knocked on the door of her studio.

  ‘I have to call you back,’ she said into the receiver. ‘Someone’s walking in.’

  Peter wanted to know what he should pick up for dinner. ‘I thought I’d get some sausages,’ he said.

  ‘Okay, but get them at the new Italian place.’

  ‘I was thinking about Polish sausage.’

  ‘No, too greasy,’ she said. ‘Go to Rocco’s, get some pasta too. I’ll make a sauce.’

  ‘Spinach pasta?’ he asked.

  ‘Or ravioli.’

  ‘I don’t like ravioli,’ he said. ‘I think linguini would be better.’

  ‘What do you mean you don’t like ravioli? You eat it all the time.’

  ‘That’s true,’ he said. ‘But what about linguini?’

  ‘Okay, fine, get that.’

  When he left, Kate dialed the number again.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘When are you free?’ Kate asked, feeling flirtatious, fingering her lilacs. ‘Peter is going to be working tomorrow afternoon, so there’s time between two and four, or are you working tomorrow?’

  ‘I’m working until three. I could meet you then.’

  ‘No, Peter might stop by here at about a quarter after four.’

  ‘So, don’t answer the bell, or tell him you have a date or you don’t want to be disturbed. Tell him you’re going to see me.’

  ‘What about Friday?’

  ‘Listen, Kate, I have to talk to you about something.’ Kate could hear Molly straining to resist her seduction. ‘You saw me walking down the street Thursday and you pretended you didn’t know who I was.’

  ‘I had to,’ Kate answered very quickly. ‘I was with Peter. You know that.’

  ‘Peter knows what I look like. I keep telling you. I found him standing outside my apartment the other day.’

  ‘It’s irrelevant whether he does or not,’ Kate said worrying about Peter. ‘As long as he doesn’t say anything about it to me, everything will be easier for all of us. I can’t imagine me and Peter walking down the street and stopping to chat with you. It would be absurd.’

  ‘Look,’ Molly said, very calmly. ‘Last week you had your face between my legs and now you want to be there again.’

  ‘Don’t you?’ Kate said.

  When she hung up the phone Kate sat quietly at the edge of her soft bed.

  Of course, Molly had answered. But I don’t want to organize my fucking around Peter’s schedule.

  Kate’s bed had a fluffed feather comforter and matched clean sheets.

  I just don’t want to hurt his feelings, Kate thought. I love him.

  There were dried tulip petals in a bowl surrounded by paint and fresh lilacs, so fragrant by her pillow.

  What makes Peter so special is how smart he is, and how committed to his work. I admire that. I want to be able to have that much confidence, to believe so totally in what I am doing.

  Peter was too large to sleep with her in that bed. They could make love but they couldn’t sleep. Molly and she could sleep together quite comfortably there but they’d never had an entire night. Molly had a double bed at her house but the sheets were not as soft.

  Molly had successfully insinuated herself right into the middle of Kate’s habit of living and had then started agitating from the inside for change.

  ‘Look,’ Molly had said. ‘If you want out, then get out now. If you want in, get in.’

  Kate knew exactly what Molly was trying to pull. And yet she felt surprisingly vulnerable to these frequent separations with threats of permanency. They pushed her into just enough panic to clarify what would be missing from her life without a girlfriend, without Molly specifically, with only Peter again. Molly had power over her. Molly forced Kate into symbolic concessions like eating dinner with her instead of with Peter and then making it up to him later, or more likely, eating twice. She always did give in eventually, which at first felt begrudging, but she got used to each step toward closeness and wondered if she was in over her head. No, she wasn’t. Kate would never grant Molly free access, not in one lump sum and not piece by piece. It would never be that complete a relationship. On this point, Kate was certain.

  Her hair was bright orange, naturally, and cut so close to her head that the strands stood up like bristles on a scrub brush. It was a buzz cut, exactly the kind Peter had worn as a little boy. She had seen it most recently on teenage girls and liked it in the mirror. Kate did not worry about being the only buzz-cut woman over forty in most public situations.

  New Yorkers were not familiar with red hair. They didn’t know how it worked. All they ever lived with was thick curly brown or straight black. Everything else was exotic. Red hair, blue eyes and red lips in New York made Kate a perpetual outsider except on Saint Patrick’s Day. Old Jewish ladies stopped talking when she walked into the room. People always gave her directions even though she’d known where she was going for over twenty years.

  Kate was a big woman with strong shoulders, sleek, and a neck of ivory. She could wear anything that black women wore; wild African prints, canary yellow and deep turquoise. Peter was her height and when they kissed they were eyeglass to eyeglass. Molly was much shorter and had to stretch to reach her mouth. Was that why she kissed Kate’s neck so much?

  ‘I always knew I would get to a woman eventually,’ she had confided to Spiros, sitting over coffee one late afternoon in the back of his gallery. ‘But I could never picture precisely how. I couldn’t imagine growing apart from Peter or any of the horrible scenes that would have to take place to separate us.’

  ‘Are you two fighting?’ he asked carefully.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘There is a silent tolerance.’

  ‘So continue with them both forever.’

  ‘If she will allow it.’

  ‘Well,’ Spiros said, rolling his lips back between a smile and a purse. ‘Can you and this girl have a future?’

  ‘With Molly so many things could go wrong. She’d get bored or want to eat me up. She wouldn’t leave me any free time. She’d trap me, try to turn me into
a lesbian. I wouldn’t be able to do my artwork if I was with her.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because … she’s not intellectual enough.’

  ‘Well then, it is clear,’ he said. ‘Good to be sure about that.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because, Kate. If you are going to invest in the past you’d better end up choosing the past. If you give priority to the past, don’t find yourself in the future. Waiting for you there will be a very angry young woman.’

  ‘I never know, Spiros, whether you are threatening me or just giving friendly advice.’

  ‘All right, I won’t tell you anything more. You tell me. If you were going to name a sonnet after Molly, what would you call it?’

  ‘ “Six Lines of Enjoyment.” ’

  ‘But a sonnet has fourteen lines … oh, I understand.’

  Even as a teenager Kate had never spent so much time kissing on the street as she did now, leaning into Molly’s mouth against a parked car. She found her body pressed against all kinds of surfaces as these public kisses began to span seasons. There were barstools and doorways, bare patches of rare grass in a few straggly parks. And always a longing refuge in her lover’s body.

  When they couldn’t meet at night they kissed in the late afternoon and made love and were outside again kissing by dusk. Then she had to go meet Peter, usually to get to the theater. Most evenings of every week she and Peter sat next to each other in an audience. She was not the kind of woman who wanted to sit alone. She wanted to sit with him. Then they would have something to talk about at night; what they had just seen. Kate would be so lonely without someone sitting next to her agreeing.