People in Trouble

by Sarah Schulman

  Some nights in an audience Kate felt happy because she and her lover had just embraced. Sometimes that made her warm and loving toward Peter because his silence permitted her this pleasure. She’d slide her arm around his and pull him closer to her knowing that any show of affection lulled him into a happy contentment. Sometimes, though, she’d feel lost in Molly and indifferent to her husband, for which she’d compensate immediately with much direct attention. Two relationships, she’d noticed, required the constant application of triage. But mostly, the transition from Molly to Peter was natural.

  Kate looked down at her toes. They were clean. Her toenails were trimmed. The hair was red around her ankles, so light it didn’t need to be shaved. Her eyelashes were pale orange, like an evening sun, and long enough to dust her face. She always kept the hair under her arms clipped with a small scissor hanging over the sink for that purpose. She and Peter looked good together aesthetically.

  He was sweet from the first time they met. At that time he was a girl. His face was smooth, anyway, for a man, but Kate used to dress him up in girl’s clothing. She’d put him in panties. They’d laugh and he’d prance around twisting his hips like a fag. She’d put her fingers on the lace and feel his dick underneath. He was not afraid to dress that way. He knew who he was. He was a girl.

  ‘Peter’s such a girl,’ Kate would say to Molly every now and then.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He’s a baby. He’s passive. He whines and can’t take care of himself. He never carries the heaviest thing.’

  ‘That’s not like a girl,’ Molly said, that annoyed tone in her voice. ‘That sounds exactly like a man to me. I hate when you say things like that. You’re not thinking for yourself. You’re just repeating something you heard. Just because Peter isn’t brutal doesn’t automatically make him a hero, you know.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  Kate thought about something else then. She had no intention of engaging this kind of thinking. She thought about some other different thing.

  ‘How come you never had children?’ Molly had asked her one afternoon as they were kissing by the water in East River Park.

  It had to do with her family, but it seemed like too much to go into right then.

  ‘I had one of those families,’ Kate said, looking for an entertaining detail that would explain them without too much effort, ‘where we all had first names beginning with the same letter. Kathleen, that’s me, Kelly, Kevin, Kerry was my sister who died, and Keith. We had pillow fights and breakfasts and went to Latin mass on Sundays. My mother was a dentist. The only time she ever touched us was when she worked on our teeth. My dad was more fun, a drinker, a businessman, a little more intimate.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound too bad.’

  ‘No, Molly, it wasn’t bad, it’s just that I grew up in America and every time I think about having my own kids, I remember that they would have to live there too and be young Americans for at least twenty years. That’s when I decide no.’

  ‘That’s not my America,’ Molly said, leaning over the railing into gray-green-white smoke backgrounds. ‘I had one of those families where my mother would say “Children in Brooklyn are starving” and my father would say “Yeah, starving.” He always had some friend sleeping on the sofa because my parents could not say no. When I marched in the gay pride march my mother said “You wear your problems like a banner on Fifth Avenue.” And my father said “Yeah, Fifth Avenue.” ’

  ‘When you think back on all that, how does it seem to you?’ Kate asked.

  ‘Old-fashioned,’ Molly said. ‘But so am I. That’s why I don’t want children.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Kate said, moving closer. ‘Being Mom is the most old-fashioned thing a woman can do.’

  ‘But,’ Molly answered, taking her hand as they walked along, ‘it also means entering fully into the modern world. I don’t want certain things in my life like computers, pop stars or TV shows. I choose oblivion to all that. With children, the outside world becomes unavoidable unless you isolate them completely.’

  ‘In which case,’ Kate added, ‘they’d end up totally helpless to defend themselves against a nation of monsters raised on Tang. Besides, I feel like I already have a husband and a child or a mistress and a son or a mother and a father but mostly two children.’

  ‘Shows what kind of parent you would be.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean? That I would seduce my own daughter?’

  Kate was surprised by the matter-of-fact perversity that had crept into her conversation but then felt pleased at being able to express it so easily.

  ‘Listen,’ Molly said. ‘You do not have a maternal relationship to me. I’m your lover. I’m just younger. But you don’t take care of me, so don’t pretend that you do.’

  When Molly spoke to her that way, Kate didn’t want to listen. She heard the challenge, imagined the reason and knew enough to let it go at that. It didn’t mean that her feelings never changed. They did, but not because Molly said they should. So the tensions continued, slightly under the surface. This one was resolved some months later in an afternoon when they were ready for love.

  ‘Kate, take my earrings out for me, will you? I don’t feel like doing it for myself.’

  Kate felt the silver slide through Molly’s ear, casting shapes on her neck like Indonesian shadow puppets. Then the pieces of metal were lying still in her palm. Kate surprised herself by thinking, How could two women ever be closer than this? Later she realized it wasn’t so much a sudden closeness but that she had grown to love Molly. She hadn’t loved her at first, but she did now.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ Molly asked.

  ‘Thinking about you.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘That you are becoming more real to me.’

  ‘Good,’ Molly said, holding her, holding her head against Kate’s chest, so girly and soft. ‘Now I don’t have to be your child anymore. From now on I’ll be your mistress.’

  It didn’t feel like a threat.

  7

  PETER

  All summer, every single person had been uncomfortable. It was not unusual for the city to smell of baking garbage and decomposing bodies. But most New Yorkers found a point each season when they begrudgingly accepted the heat. They no longer tried to defy it. They picked out the air-conditioned subway cars, knew which banks to stop in to cool off between the subway and work. They slowed down their pace of accomplishment in order to accommodate it. But this summer had been different. There had been a suffocating brutality that seemed brand-new. It was the absolute lack of relief that put each person into a private state of wondering if it would ever get cool again. This year Peter noticed that the air had stayed so warm there was a creeping sensation of melting polar ice caps and a lot of speculation about the greenhouse effect as seasons came to an end as a concept.

  Peter was past forty and intended to live as long as possible. He took care of his body, but more importantly, he had developed an approach, a way of facing the world that left him enough room to breathe. He never scheduled one event on top of another, so there was always extra time to do new things on a whim, like run that strip of land along the Hudson River where developers were demolishing the piers.

  It is so important to have flat, open space by the waterfront, he thought, inhaling the salt. It was the only place a man could go to get between the city and the sea.

  All along the route someone had spray-painted the word Justice inside stencils of pink triangles. He wondered if that was just another rock band, but then got lost in the feeling of the open city over his left shoulder and the sea breeze on his right. He was having a good run until the air between him and water started to get more complicated and cluttered with the beginnings of various constructions. There were ditches, then pipes and strips of metal until, surprisingly, there was no more water at all. Instead he came upon an incongruous addition to the island of Manhattan. It was stuck on like some clumsy extensi
on or unsightly tumor that had grown where the borough was once sleek and symmetrical.

  The sign said:

  Welcome to Downtown City

  Ronald Horne, Developer

  Then he remembered from his newspaper reading that this was created land. It was invented real estate. He had recently skimmed an article about this in the New York Times business section. Manhattan was running out of property, so Ronald Horne had extended it by filling in the water around the island, piece by piece. Eventually a person would be able to walk to New Jersey and Ronald Horne would collect the toll. In the meantime, Peter decided, he’d better keep on top of zoning laws if he wanted a grasp on his own future.

  Downtown City’s main drag was called Freedom Place. That was the perfect name for this morally slipshod era – meaninglessly patriotic and so crass. The buildings were mostly sky-rise condominiums, although there were a few newly constructed waterfront townhouses reminiscent of Henry James’s Washington Square. That way the truly wealthy could stare out at Ellis Island through their bay windows as they drank down their coffee every morning. The only visible storefront was Chemical Bank.

  Peter jogged past the playground filled with black maids watching white children, past the stretch limos and sportier imports. But when he got to Liberty Avenue he just had to stop and stare. There were two huge brand-new office buildings of identical design with their names emblazoned in gold: New York Realty and United States Software. These were Ronald Horne’s largest and most profitable holdings, according to all the profiles and interviews Peter had seen of the billionaire. The guy was on TV more often than Walter Cronkite. Was Walter Cronkite still on TV? Looking around him at all that wealth, Peter saw immediately how Downtown City was advanced capitalism’s version of the company town. It was like those snowy corners of the Northwest that he’d passed through on tour, where the Wallace Company Store was on Wallace Avenue and everyone worked at the Wallace Mine which all added up to Wallace, Idaho. Only, in this case, Downtown City was a huge barracks for investment bankers. Even though the complex had only recently been inaugurated, Liberty Avenue was designed to replicate the solid turn-of-the-century Rockefeller-style riches usually found on Fifth. There was a square, pre-Depression, old-money austerity; an impenetrable magnificence. No expense had been spared and yet there was nothing garish; imported marble, tasteful ironwork, elegant windows. It had all the elements of a made-to-order American shrine.

  It is design machismo, Peter thought, deciding to share this observation with Kate later. It is intimidation architecture. He had to be sure to tell her that one too.

  Peter ran on through Battery Park past all the signs warning of rat poison and past all the homeless people avoiding the lines of tourists waiting to see the Statue of Liberty. He sprinted through the South Street Seaport, Manhattan’s only shopping mall, down around the big Pathmark where every morning black men and old Chinese women in straw hats stood together on line waiting to cash in the empty cans they had collected for the five-cent deposit. The river smelled of abandoned cars, old fish and stale beer. Peter turned up East River Park, under the Manhattan Bridge, and jogged slowly back over to the West Side. That morning, everything had been white; his T-shirt, his jock, shorts, socks and running shoes. Now they were soaked in his sweat and covered in the city’s filth. He was happy. He was a dirty, sweaty man.

  He stopped in a restaurant for an iced tea, and leaned back in the booth, feeling his blood pulse. At the next table were two young men, overdressed in fashionable new wave suits and short haircuts showing clean necks with equally pristine ties.

  ‘Look, you stop talking about Rick and I’ll stop talking about the goddamn cat.’

  Peter watched them whine like two suburban matrons. He hated to see men act like that. No, he corrected himself, he hated when anyone acted like that. A third man joined them then, just as overdressed and just as slight. Peter noticed that his own chest was twice the size of theirs.

  ‘There you are, did you find them?’

  ‘Yes I did,’ the newcomer snapped, tired and annoyed. ‘Here you go.’

  He dumped a pile of black ribbons onto the table, then picked out one to wrap around his upper arm, finally extending it for a companion to fasten.

  ‘I tried to tie it on myself,’ he said. ‘But I couldn’t get the ribbon to lie flat. Will you pin it?’

  8

  PETER

  Peter drank down his tea and thumbed through a discarded copy of New York magazine. The Horne family was featured on the cover seated around a bountiful dinner table. The men all had oversize heads with receding blond hairlines and Quasimodo postures. There were huge portions on their plates.

  Some art director’s idea of political commentary, thought Peter; The women were uniformly thin-lipped over plates of diverse lettuce. They smiled, watching their husbands eat.

  ‘We have a close family,’ Horne told the reporter. ‘My children never have to make appointments to see me.’

  On the next page Horne was in the backseat of his limo talking on the phone and printing out on his mobile fax machine.

  ‘Private sector,’ he said. ‘That’s the future. The whole city should be run by businessmen. I could do a much better job with the prison system than any government official. I’d love to buy the prison system and show New York how to treat its criminals. And my attorneys have assured me that having a monopoly on crime does not violate any antitrust laws. It just has to do with your definition of trust.’

  Peter closed the magazine, replacing it neatly underneath the umbrella stand. He looked through the coffee shop window at some goings-on at the church across the way. It was a large crowd that morning, a somber one. Many of the men were wearing suits but some were more relaxed, in tasteful white slacks or light prints. Even the pallbearers lifting the casket out of the hearse had something very casual about them.

  I would never wear white to a funeral, Peter thought. Some of the men had ponytails, others were more normal. The women were somehow not as attractive as the men. Not that, exactly, they just weren’t as well dressed.

  Something is not right here, he thought. Only then did Peter realize that the men were arriving alone or with each other, in couples and groups. The women came in couples or with men they couldn’t possibly be involved with.

  This is gay, he thought. This is a homosexual church.

  Then he realized that it was not a homosexual church, but a Catholic one, filled with homosexuals. He watched them walking up the white marble staircase, preparing to mourn.

  Ever since Kate had begun her gay affair Peter had been slapped in the face by homosexuality practically every day. How ironic that her affair had coincided with this AIDS thing. It was like running into someone he hadn’t thought about for years and then seeing them coincidentally three times a week until the recognition became an embarrassment. Peter had always been around gay men – being in the theater, how could he avoid it? Not that he wanted to avoid it, of course. Anyway, most technicians tended to be straight except for the women. But he had to admit that his and Kate’s inner circle were all heterosexual couples. It had just turned out that way. Some of the men he knew had been bisexual at one time, but those experiments were all over now, he noted with some relief. Now things were more clearly defined.

  Peter had once had a gay affair. It was with a master electrician named Carl Jacobs. Carl was twenty years older and had taken him on as an apprentice. When Peter worked with someone closely he always fell in love. It was part of being in theater. When the show was over they would rarely see each other again, but that distance wasn’t resented. It was normal. Carl’s hair was completely white and his face was wrinkled. He had a purely white beard, trimmed but full, and white hair poked out of the top of his shirt. They had worked together like guys work; quietly, no gossip, just moving their bodies at the right times and understanding each other’s rhythms. They took very good care of each other, running errands, sharing cigarettes and barely talking.

  Wh
en it was time to focus and they were finally down to the last light, Carl came and stood next to him. Peter could feel the old man’s body heat with his torso, and the heat of the light with his hands.

  ‘Would you move that slightly upstage please, darling?’ Carl said with a quiet growl.

  At the word darling, Peter took his hands from the electricity and put them on Carl’s soft, soft face, kissing his mouth. He was meaty and large compared to Kate or any woman. There was something to hold on to. They pressed their bodies against each other’s and Peter felt his cock get hard against Carl’s. It was such a beautiful feeling; two men and two cocks, both scented and of the same mind. When Peter tried to blow Carl, the old man’s dick swelled in his mouth and Peter gagged on it, feeling a sour spit rising in his throat.

  ‘That’s all right,’ Carl said kindly. ‘Use your hands.’ Then they sat naked next to each other on the stage eating sandwiches, not talking. Peter sat there smelling him, looking at his cock against his thigh, looking at the old man’s eyes and the veins in his legs. Then Carl turned to him and said, ‘You are not just lighting the action and the image. You are lighting the voices. You give them light to hear by. What could be more subtly defined than differing dimensions of air?’

  After paying the restaurant check, Peter decided that he wanted to be around gay people more. Kate was probably spending more time with them and he wanted to, too. It would bring them closer together. That’s what had been troubling him all week, actually. Kate and that woman had clearly had a fight. He could tell from the pained expression she tried to hide. She was sour sometimes, with a particular distaste that only comes from longing for a lover. He was honestly curious to hear the details, to know the scenario of their fight and separation, to comfort her. But after having fully imagined Kate’s tearful confidence about her lost girlfriend, he realized that such an event would reduce his stature in her eyes to that of friend or brother and not the husband he was determined to be. It was better to wait patiently for Molly to simply disappear. Then Peter decided to go into the church.