People in Trouble

by Sarah Schulman

  ‘Take a look.’

  Molly watched Kate’s face framed by Molly’s legs, one cheek against one thigh, looking at the layers of her cunt and realizing how specific they were.

  When it became that time when Kate had to be accounted for they parted. Something about that close loving and sexy sharing disappeared for Molly as she put on her clothes. While Kate readied herself for the next event, Molly left something of herself behind, as anyone does who begins an experience with another person and always finishes it alone.

  14

  PETER

  Peter examined himself in the window of Tiffany’s. He was in no rush. There was plenty of time until he had to be at the theater by five. He could run uptown and down again by then and still have an hour to check up 0n things. He had to be constantly vigilant with technicians to ensure the designs were completed with perfect accuracy. Every instrument must be precisely focused or the lighting would have no soul. It would be muddy, not crisp. Sometimes muddy is the best choice, of course, but it must be chosen. Whenever he worked a show with dubious structure, like this one, he could correct the shape without anyone ever suspecting. When an actor crossed the stage for no reason, Peter could give him a light to step into, which was at least an illusion of meaning. That’s what it was to build shape. Technicians were grunts for the most part. If they could be artists they would have been. So they didn’t care as much as they should and often violated the design by being sloppy. Peter was never sloppy. He was diligent.

  He continued down Fifth Avenue, stopping suddenly in front of something very unusual. There was a billboard, of all things, hanging over Rockefeller Center. It was Ronald Horne’s huge nondescript face, about two stories’ worth, and underneath his nostrils in red, white and blue, it said:

  Horne: For a Better America

  After that Peter walked for a minute and then decided to step into Saint Pat’s. Peter often walked into churches but he never got down on his knees. He never lit a candle. He just sat back and watched the show. There were a lot of tourists in the cathedral on Sundays. They were not only Americans with mobs of towheaded kids fresh from hotel breakfasts, but also wealthy visitors from Latin America in good suits. There was a sprinkling of African students with Instamatic cameras dangling from their languid wrists. Asian families lined up for photographs in front of someone’s patron saint. There were street people everywhere who just needed a rest, trying to be inconspicuous in the pews. In fact, it seemed that every time Peter entered a church, a park or waiting room anywhere in the city, there were street people looking very tired. Every square of public space was occupied by someone asking for money or too out of it to be asking. But in the cathedral they were seated right next to little-old-lady good Catholics in tiny hats and gloves with patent leather pocketbooks and legs that could easily snap. On the edges of the crowd were visiting nuns traveling in packs or in couples on vacation. Peter wasn’t Catholic but he often ended up in Catholic churches. They were everywhere, like Sheraton hotels. You could go anywhere in the world and there they were. His father hadn’t belonged to any church. His mother went when she had to. She’d dragged her son along enough times to be sure he knew everything he’d need to be able to participate. But Peter remained faithfully unaware of the larger meanings behind the rituals. The priest entered. They all rose. An organ played. There were murmurings in various languages and constant movement as people came and went from their pews. After all, this cathedral was a major tourist attraction. This wasn’t some quiet neighborhood church.

  Peter made wishes. He always made the same ones, in the same order. He had kept those wishes in that order for years and years. He wanted to do good work, have it be recognized and stay healthy. Kate should stay healthy too. These didn’t seem to be outrageous demands. And he wanted to be loved. As he was reciting his own private liturgy, about forty men stood up together from among the worshipers and turned to face them. These forty men turned their backs to the pulpit while the service was in progress. Peter’s eyes happened to focus on the face of one who seemed somewhat familiar. Perhaps he lived in the same neighborhood. The man was thin and unsure of what he was doing. He was lanky and older with a gray mustache and bushy gray hair. He was uncomfortable. The man wore a black T-shirt with a pink triangle and the word Justice across his chest. It did not make him look like Superman. He was an anxious, regular guy. All the men had the same shirts. Some were robust and effeminate. Some were shy. They were all strong-willed and very serious. The men stood with their backs to the priest who continued his service as though nothing was happening. One of them held up a sign that said Living with AIDS for Two Years and Five Months – No Time for Red Tape.

  These are men with AIDS, Peter realized. Forty of them. But that one doesn’t look like he has it. He looks like he works out. The thin one has definitely got it.

  He took another look at the familiar one and decided that he had definitely seen him somewhere before and that that guy probably didn’t have it.

  That black man, thought Peter. I wonder if he’s gay or if he got it from drugs.

  Then the black man spoke.

  ‘The church is the world’s most powerful hypocrite,’ he said. Peter noted that the man’s voice and gestures were campy.

  They shouldn’t have let him be the spokesman, Peter thought. They should have picked somebody more masculine, so people would be more sympathetic.

  The man kept speaking.

  ‘Why don’t all you gay priests and nuns come out and get the church off the backs of your brothers and sisters? Stop spending poor people’s money trying to take away everyone’s sexuality. Spend it on affirmative care for people with AIDS.’

  The crowd behaved pretty well. All these months of media blitz had prepared them in some way for this moment. A flurry of simultaneous translation into a variety of languages subsided once the audience was fully informed as to the content of that man’s speech. Some of the visitors murmured with disapproval, others with compassion. Some looked like they wished they hadn’t brought their children. Some tourists brushed it off as one of those ‘typical New York experiences’ they’d heard so much about, then prided themselves on actually encountering. Some took pictures with flash. The men stood quietly, the worshipers sat quietly and the only noise was the voice of the priest droning over the sound system as though these men were nothing, as though they were not there. Then the mass was over and the men filed out. Peter decided to be natural and went to the front steps trying not to express any opinion to anyone who might be looking at him. It was a windy day, suddenly, for the first time all season. Some of the men were cold because they had not thought to bring sweaters. They stood around not knowing what to do for the rest of the afternoon. The ones who were used to being sick always carried sweaters, which they put on over their T-shirts. Then they dispersed, quickly. Some went off to have coffee, others went home to rest. Once those shirts were covered, they stopped looking like gay men with AIDS. They looked just like everyone else.

  That, thought Peter, is their most effective trick.

  15

  PETER

  The play he was designing that week was called Crossing the Border, about a love affair between a Mexican migrant worker and a Russian émigré nuclear physicist. It was a musical. Peter knew he couldn’t work the best material all the time and that really his finest work was ahead of him. He’d always dreamed of designing for the greats, for Richard Foreman or Bob Wilson or the Wooster Group. But those jobs were sewn up by an elite clique. So in the meantime he had a generally accepting attitude about the work that did come his way.

  Peter’s new intern was waiting for him inside the theater. He had been working all day but was wearing a suit and tie. Every time he climbed up the ladder, the intern carefully took off his jacket, unbuttoned his sleeves, folded them twice up his forearm and then climbed. When he came down again he put his clothing back in order immediately. He was a short black man named Robert who had just graduated from Yale Drama School
and was assigned to Peter by the playwright, who was an old college buddy of Robert’s father. Something about him annoyed Peter deeply. He was organized, true, but he was businesslike, that was his problem. He looked like a stockbroker, not an artist. Robert carried a briefcase. He never opened it balanced on one knee. He always laid it down deliberately on a flat surface and snapped the metal clasps so that they clicked and popped at the same time. He had been one of five black students in his prep school and one of five black students in his program at Yale.

  He moved similarly to Peter, like a man who knew he could have been in finance but chose something more dangerous and obscure. But his briefcase reflected those other options a bit too blatantly for Peter’s tastes. Inside it were little compartments for tools and a tape measure. He had smaller cases to hold his brand-new stencils for drawing leikos and Fresnels. At Yale he had learned up-to-the-minute technology for the various applications of mechanized light.

  ‘I supervised the put-in,’ he said. ‘And I programmed the cues.’

  ‘I hate computers,’ Peter said trying to be personal. ‘I’ve refused to learn how to use them. It is a lot more interesting to try to run a show by candle or flashlight than to push one button and have everything done by computer.’

  Robert sharpened his pencil.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, meaning nothing. ‘Let’s run the cues.’

  Then he carefully removed his jacket and draped it over the back of his chair, folding his sleeves up his brown forearms. He had clearly been one of those kids who wore suits to school. A kid who was most comfortable in a jacket.

  ‘Okay,’ Peter said. ‘The audience has come in and taken their seats. So, flick the houselights and then, take them down.’

  ‘They don’t flick,’ Robert said. ‘They are not programmed to flick. They can go bright or dim, on or off, but not both.’

  Peter couldn’t imagine what to say. He felt very tired suddenly. He felt older than he’d ever felt in his whole life. His role was becoming obsolete. He was being replaced by something with a level of information and ability that was not higher than his.

  ‘Do you know how to make lights out of coffee cans?’ he asked, hearing himself creak like someone’s backwoods grandfather asking ‘Do you know how to make a fishing pole?’

  ‘No,’ Robert said.

  ‘No,’ Peter repeated, completely unprepared.

  ‘No,’ Robert said. ‘Why would I want to?’

  That, Peter thought, is the difference between theater and science.

  After the cues were run Peter did warm up a bit because Robert had done everything perfectly. He sat back and watched the young man roll down his sleeves.

  ‘Do you know anyone with AIDS?’ Peter asked, suddenly. For one second he panicked because maybe Robert had AIDS, but then he looked at him again and decided that Robert was not a homosexual. He was probably a virgin or else had the same girlfriend since high school on whom he made a lot of demands.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Of course.’ Then he said, ‘Do you have AIDS? I’m not afraid of people with AIDS. I can still work with you if you have AIDS.’

  ‘No, I’m straight.’

  Peter watched Robert’s facial muscles. Throughout this entire encounter he had not changed his expression. He would have stayed calm even if Peter had said yes, because Robert was growing up accustomed to being with dying people.

  ‘My father’s lover has AIDS. He was already in dementia when they gave him the AZT. He was walking around on a cane like an old, old man. The AZT brought him back. He has a lot of nausea and diarrhea but he’s still there. You can talk to him and go places with him. He’s an actor. He was around in the sixties.’

  ‘I used to work in black theater,’ Peter said, realizing immediately that the man in question might not be black, and then added, ‘In the sixties’ to pretend that was the connection.

  ‘I’m not interested in black theater,’ Robert said. ‘I don’t care about a woman in a black leotard doing jazz monologues. I think black actors should be able to play any parts they want to play and not always have to play black.’

  ‘Well,’ said Peter, relaxing into his favorite kind of distance: discourse on the role of theater in everyday life. ‘Of course actors should be able to play a wide range of characters but community theater is an important training ground.’

  ‘You don’t know anything about black people,’ Robert said with the same tone he had used to say, ‘Do you have AIDS?’ ‘Do you know what kind of music young black people listen to? They don’t listen to jazz and they don’t listen to blues. They don’t listen to soul or R&B. Did you know that? Have you been keeping up to date?’

  ‘No,’ said Peter, ‘I’m out of date.’

  ‘You should correct that,’ Robert said. ‘So that you at least know what it is you feel superior to.’

  ‘I’m totally out of date,’ Peter said. ‘I have no idea what’s going on.’

  ‘Look,’ Robert said, swinging his jacket over his shoulder and letting it hang from one finger like the guys in the ads for Harvey’s Bristol Cream. ‘Just watch two hours of TV a week and you can find out.’

  He snapped the two metal clasps on his briefcase, swung it by the handle off the table and smiled at Peter as though he was the oldest man in the world. As though he, Robert, was in charge now.

  ‘I want to get a job on the new Horne musical opening on Broadway, Ronald’s Dream. They’ve got lasers. Do you know anyone there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or Stephen Sondheim. Do you know him?’

  ‘We were at the same party once.’

  ‘Well then.’

  Peter watched the boy walk out the door. Then he went into the house manager’s office and took out the portable TV. He plugged it in and waited. There was a show on called Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Some guy went around interviewing movie stars in their luxurious homes and the audience watched them play tennis and cook. The most startling aspect of the lives of these celebrities was that they could be so famous and at the same time Peter had never heard of any of them or any of the shows or movies that they appeared in. Then Peter reached over and switched on the office radio, flipping through all the stations from Top Forty to country. He didn’t know one song. He had never heard of any of the groups. He put his hand up flat against the right side of his face and thought for one fleeting second that he had turned into a very silly man. He flipped to the jazz station and listened to that for a while. Then he went home.

  When Kate came back from the studio that night she asked what he’d done all day.

  ‘I listened to jazz and worked on a show,’ he said. ‘Working on a show’ was the perfect way to explain away any block of time. Then he raised his eyes to hers and saw that she had that look. She had on her sunglasses and her scarf and too much lipstick and a big smile with lots of ‘yeah’s so he knew that she also had a secret because she was being much too polite.

  16

  KATE

  By the end of October Kate realized that she had developed a habit of taking the same walk once or twice a week down the same street. Only the weather changed. The neighborhood was still jumping, though, with people trying to have their last outdoor party, their last street-corner conversation before the cold weather’s isolation. There were so many people on the street asking for money.

  During the many months of late-night walks home from Molly’s Kate had often wondered, Have there always been so many?

  There was a huge black market on Second Avenue every night after eleven between Saint Mark’s Place and Seventh Street. You could buy anything. There were people selling hot ten-speed bikes for thirty dollars and hot three-speed bikes for fifteen. There were crates of brand-new tape recorders and cassettes and CDs with cellophane still around them. But there were also entire contents of various people’s ripped-off homes that were pulled out and excreted onto the sidewalk. You could buy half-used tubes of oil paint, half-eaten jars of peanut butter, plants, worn bedroom slippers a
nd dirty towels. There were endless answering machines with the messages still on them and endless leather jackets.

  There was something very different happening when Kate walked alone than on all those late nights walking with Pete. Coming home from some event she’d walk with him and look at him and talk to him and not see much of anything else. But coming home alone from her lover’s had changed all of that. Men now talked to her constantly because Peter wasn’t there. They said anything to her that they liked. She stood out, of course, with that coloring, especially late nights smelling of sex. Instead of Peter’s wide mass next to her like a wall or a shield, she was in a wind tunnel, completely alone and unguarded. Kate pulled her shawl around her chest. Coming back from Molly was the first nighttime ritual she had experienced without Peter standing next to her and it changed what she saw when she walked down the street.

  Some nights she wanted to get home as quickly as possible because she was tired from making love and would have preferred to just stretch out to sleep on Molly’s rough sheets. But she couldn’t. Or, sometimes she got so turned on by making love that she wanted to do that for hours, but she couldn’t. Peter would be so hurt. So, she stumbled home instead and silently slipped into bed. Or, she’d get turned on on the walk home, thinking about what she had done and would make love with Peter when she got there.

  Having a girlfriend makes sex better with your man, she thought.

  Or, sometimes, if he was awake, they’d sit up at the kitchen table over a beer or tea and she’d make up something that had happened at the studio. Something very rich and specific. Or she’d get home and he’d still be at work, so she’d regret having left Molly so soon, or revel in a moment to herself or feel lonely for Peter and wish he’d get home. But some nights Kate went home very slowly because she was swimming in sex and felt some special power and explanation for watching things more closely. You see so much more when you walk down the street alone. That’s why people work so hard to avoid walking alone too often. What people see when they’re alone can drive them mad.