People in Trouble

by Sarah Schulman

  ‘What does he want, a mural in his medicine cabinet?’

  ‘No, no, just the opposite, in fact. It turns out that the city, in preparations for upcoming mayoral elections, is about to make a token gesture to the arts. They have promised real-estate developers millions in tax rebates if they provide funding for public artwork on their properties. There are a number of projects under way to convert former public buildings, long in disrepair, into refurbished private space, relocating the public facilities onto barges. The mayor’s office will be promoting and publicizing the efforts in a bus card campaign called “Privacy Is Golden.” Now, I know that there are large areas of park and sidewalk space available that would be suitable for the piece you have in mind. I think I can help you get into this granting program. Frankly, it is your only available financial option and the work would be seen by people on the streets going to work, et cetera. It would not be shut up in some exclusive, out-of-the-way gallery.’

  She drank down her glass of wine.

  ‘Interested?’

  ‘Why do I feel suspicious, Spiros? I have never been involved with businessmen or corporations before.’

  ‘Well, your work is getting bigger now. It needs to be supported in a larger way. These men are the new patrons of our day. Better they should spend their discretionary income on the arts than on the Contras.’

  ‘But what if they spend it on both?’

  ‘Look, Kate,’ he said, taking her hand again. ‘It won’t be hidden away in their private offices. It will be seen by the people of New York City.’ He dropped the hand. ‘And that’s the best I can do.’

  Kate thought she was going straight home from the restaurant but then decided on the studio but ended up back at the funeral instead. She stood across the street, watching what seemed to be the end of the service. There were Molly and Pearl in the front and a lot of gay men all around. These people at the funeral came into her mind like a sentence. The family stuck out. They looked miserable, crunched together shrinking from the community of mourning friends, not understanding any of it. They were denying themselves the comfort within arms’ reach. They hadn’t asked enough questions to be of use.

  Kate’s own parents had raised her to live comfortably. They had taught her to strive but differed on the goal. Kate still couldn’t be real with her mother, even though she was past seventy. Her father had gotten quieter and quieter and finally died. Peter would be the same way. She thought of them all with great love.

  She had vague memories of shapes that felt more like incidents than relationships. Something forbidden had happened with another girl. What was it? Her cousin had pubic hair, thick, black and slippery. It was secret and sexy to be excited by hair on your older cousin at the age of seven. Did she really want all this information? There were many more details, Kate was sure, but toward what conclusion?

  She walked in the door of her studio. That family. They didn’t find out who their son was, so when he died they couldn’t understand his funeral. They couldn’t find solace with his friends who had stood united before them. There was a deprivation that accompanies this kind of ignorance. She couldn’t get them out of her mind.

  23

  PETER

  ‘What’s this?’ Peter said pulling at her necktie. ‘Is the Annie Hall look coming back?’

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘How’s the new piece coming?’

  ‘I started out using a lot of earth colors, but then it got too purple, man-made colors and metallics, so I’ve moved away from that for a while.’

  ‘Still using the cutouts? I want to come over and take a look soon.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve got the photos and some collage, using a lot of underpainting and then missing it and madly scraping with a razor blade.’

  Peter was looking for a way to make her laugh. Things had been so strained between them lately. He knew that she was seeing that girl again, but this time Kate acted strange. It was becoming hard to overlook.

  ‘I’m going out for a walk.’

  She didn’t say anything. Not ‘Can I come?’ and not ‘Where are you going?’

  We still have sex, he thought. So what’s the problem? Is Kate old enough for menopause?

  ‘Peter?’

  ‘Uh-huh?’

  ‘I’m having dreams in the middle of the day.’

  Finally, he thought with relief.

  Peter went and sat down behind Kate on the couch. They liked to sit that way together, where he stretched out behind her and became just another cushion to sink back into.

  ‘Human furniture,’ she said with a sigh of relief. This is what she always said when he did that for her. They could be normal. He could comfort her now as always. Nothing was going to change that.

  ‘In my last dream I was going to Vietnam as a tourist. I forgot to bring my guidebook. I was sitting on the airplane, panicking. I thought, This is what you get. How stupid worrying about a guidebook when people don’t have enough to eat. This wasn’t war-torn Vietnam, this was the modern Communist one. They don’t care about your dollars here, I told myself. You fool, there are no tourist attractions in a people’s republic. Things we take for granted like airport signs translated into English are just details of capitalism. You know?’

  This wasn’t exactly what Peter had expected. He wanted something about fear, or her family. He wanted her to say, ‘Peter, I love you so much. I don’t want anything to ever come between us.’

  He wanted something tender where he could be strong for her, not dreams about Ho Chi Minh City. She seemed older every time he looked at her. She was not staying in as good shape as he was. She wasn’t sleeping enough and she wasn’t working out. There was no way Kate could make it through the whole winter without getting sick.

  ‘Are you eating enough, Katie? There’s chicken in the fridge. Have you had any?’

  ‘Yes,’ she lied. Then seemed to regret that. He reached over and touched her. He started to rub her neck.

  ‘That feels good.’

  Everything was all right. He should watch himself and not let some lesbian make him paranoid.

  ‘I’ll take the garbage on the way out,’ he said. ‘I bought these new garbage bags because the other kind broke going down the stairs. Did the super fix the intercom yet?’

  ‘No,’ Kate said. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘I talked to Don on the phone,’ he said, rubbing her shoulders. ‘He wanted to know what to wear to a job interview at the Public Theater. I told him to be clean.’

  ‘I would have said to dress exactly like Joe Papp, loose jacket, white shirt, no tie.’

  Peter started to relax.

  ‘I got the tickets for tonight,’ he said. ‘It starts at nine. I couldn’t decide between Pound’s Electra or that Borges Tango thing. I figured the Electra would probably close first. Besides, we can definitely get weekend comps for the Tango but Carrie could only promise me weekday comps for the Pound. “Seal sports in the spray.” Is that Pound?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Of course you do. Let’s look it up.’

  ‘I don’t feel like playing that game right now,’ she said. Then she said, ‘I’m sorry, Peter, I’m not feeling that well at all.’

  ‘You always do that. You always say something really hurtful and then you apologize immediately after so that I can’t get angry and you don’t have to feel so guilty.’

  ‘I don’t feel guilty.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, standing up abruptly and pulling on his jacket. ‘You should.’

  Then he waited for her to say something. He waited for her to say ‘You’re right’ or ‘You’re wrong’ or ‘Shut up,’ to engage him on some level. But she just closed her eyes and shifted away from his direction, curling into a napping position on the far end of the couch.

  ‘I’ll be back by seven,’ he said. ‘Do you want to eat before the show?’

  ‘I’ll have to see. I’m not really feeling very well.’

  ‘Not well like how?’

&nbs
p; ‘Not that way. Just normal flu or something. Have a good walk. Bring me back some magazines.’

  For that art project, he thought. She voraciously clipped from magazines, anything – True Detective, People, National Geographic, Personal Management, Heavy Metal.

  ‘Peter?’

  ‘Yes?’

  That’s how they always were, calling each other back. Their hands were always in each other’s pockets.

  ‘If you hadn’t had this life, what do you think you’d be doing now?’

  ‘I’d be a dad,’ he said without any doubt. ‘Maybe teach school in New England. Make things in the basement after work. Coach Little League. Be an upstanding citizen.’

  ‘I could have been a housewife,’ she said. ‘An alcoholic one. Or a frigid professional. I probably would have been an art teacher in an elementary school having a twenty-year affair with the married science teacher, ignoring the janitor’s advances and watching the legs of the twelve-year-old girls. What else do weird women do when they find themselves in normal places? I could have opened the Kathleen Connell Dance Academy on Main Street and put on The Nutcracker Suite every Christmas in the basement of the Calvary Church. I’d do my food shopping in a beige leotard and ballet slippers. Or, I could have been a whore at the Sly Fox Cafe in Covington, Kentucky. But with any of those possibilities I’d still end up going out in the middle of the night to buy my liquor and the only place open would be the mall.’

  24

  PETER

  Why did she have to say that part about the twelve-year-old girls?

  Peter jammed his hands into his pockets as he walked down Sixth Avenue. He knew she threw those things around just to hurt him. She had to let him know she was going to do whatever she wanted no matter how it made him feel. Fuck her. He could have affairs too, he just didn’t. There was that actress in The Blacks, Sandra King. He could have had an affair with her. Her skin tone was perfect for stage light. She had a smooth deep tan, like fine leather. He hadn’t lit many black casts before and he couldn’t stop looking at her in the light. Her hair was straightened, which was not the style in those days. She wore it back, showing off a hairline that was a designer’s dream, the way the Mexican shoreline looks from an airplane. It framed her face perfectly. Kate was still painting scenery then, and she often got fed up easily and left early while Peter stayed working late. Sandra had big bony features and her skin was pulled as tightly as her hair, stretched taut over her chest. She wore large earrings and jerked her hands up and down as she spoke, as though she were pulling herself up a bramble-covered hill. He wanted to see her by the ocean. He remembered a vivid fantasy of standing seaside on a cliff at night with his arms around her looking out over the water together until the first amber rays of dawn would sneak into the sky. So, one day, he slipped a cut of Bastard Amber into the gel frame and as she turned stage right, he brought up the blue and then eased in the BA slowly, maybe a twenty count. It was only up to level three but it was there and she was by the sea. Peter remembered how the night was cold but her body was warm and as the water growled onto the shore, he knew he’d be entering her and lying with her under many blankets.

  In reality they did have coffee once. She was married to a Jewish actor. They had one child. She was worried about the usual things. After the show closed he didn’t see or hear of her for years until one morning when they ran into each other jogging around Washington Square Park. She said she was divorced and working as a buyer for ladies’ swimwear.

  Peter was wearing a new black leather jacket. It was so soft and smelled great, like a comfortable chair or the country. It gave him some feeling of sensuality and security on those dark, cold New York City gray days. The winter made the streets quiet for a moment, almost reflective, and gave it the illusion of being safe and manageable. There were practically no loud noises at those times.

  He stopped at the Cineplex Odeon Horne Quad Movie Center (formerly the Waverly Theater) to consider a movie. There was an action romance with hip young actors, a British import that was clearly slow, and two star vehicles. He could tell from the posters that the male star vehicle involved various forms of mechanized death and the female one contained a variety of fake foreign accents. Then he noticed two women, half his age, kissing against a car. He stared at them. They were beautiful really, both with long dark hair and he was glued to their absolute abandon, kissing so openly right there on the avenue. Their dungarees were rubbing against each other. One had her fingers hooked in the other one’s belt loops. As the other kissed her neck she turned her head and then, accidentally really, her eyes met Peter’s full on. She was flushed with cold and lust. As soon as she caught this man staring at her, she flashed a laugh like a knife. It was a weapon, a stare and an icy resistance. Her gaze was a powerful sexual defiance of him and his. But then their eyes locked in sudden recognition which transformed her expression. It literally fell off her face and clattered onto the sidewalk and was replaced, immediately, with guilt. It was so clear a change that Peter saw, in a jolt that froze his skin to the leather, that he had finally confronted Molly face to face and at the same time he had caught her cheating on his wife with another woman. He felt offended for Kate’s honor and then ashamed for his own. But he had finally seen that face in full.

  She has a mustache, he thought. And she’s fat. Not fat exactly, but definitely out of shape. Her clothes don’t fit well.

  He was surprised. Kate took such care with how she looked, so he imagined that any woman she’d be involved with would too. A woman is a woman, after all. She should be attracted to the kind that she wants to be. But this one swaggered. He’d have known she was gay immediately. As soon as there was any real difference of opinion she’d be a real bitch, not conceding anything to a man, just for the principle. Then he’d have to make excuses to get away before she accused him of being a sexist. They were all like that.

  Molly turned from him and spoke to her companion, who looked up at first but then turned away as well. They walked down the block holding hands and never looked back. Peter knew this because his eyes followed them all the way. Then he paid for the movie, not remembering which one he’d chosen, and headed directly for the men’s room. Once inside, he stood in the stall sweating, holding his balls and rocking back and forth. It left a smell on his hands that he liked. His balls were leaking. Peter thought about the most unusual thing. He remembered a long-ago lost memory from college, of a day like this one in New England. John Craig stopped him in the school cafeteria to say that he knew a girl who would fuck five guys that night at her brother’s apartment. Johnny would let Peter be one of those guys.

  They all went over there and sat on the living room couch giggling at first and then somberly sipping Scotch as each, one after the other, passed behind the closed bedroom door. Fifteen minutes later, each would reemerge, tousled, flustered and grinning. Peter was last. He wasn’t used to drinking and felt tingly and light. He was hard the whole hour waiting for his turn. But something about the smell of that bedroom made him dizzy when he first stepped in. It was rank, like a slaughterhouse, and there was scum all over the sheets. He took down his pants and she made a little wet cup on her stomach with her hands and saliva that he slid in and out of until he came. Then he stood up with his pants at his knees and looked at her and said, ‘Why are you doing this?’

  But she just laughed. The expression on her face was so blank and frightening that he grabbed onto his balls and rocked back and forth, back and forth, holding on to a towline to safety.

  25

  MOLLY

  Molly took Pearl to the bus station early Wednesday morning and spent the rest of it staring out the window over a cup of plain tea. At noon she wandered over to work, which began with a hello to Danny who ran the concession stand. They began every day by drinking Cokes with extra syrup so they could be peppy for the customers. She could eat as much as she wanted to of anything that couldn’t be counted, which meant unlimited soda and popcorn but no Goobers or Raisinettes becau
se they would show up missing on the inventory. Then she sat in her booth, put in new colored ticket rolls, filled out the cash sheet and did the crossword puzzle.

  The double feature that day was The Damned and The Night Porter, so that attracted all the Nazi freaks and so-called decadent types plus a lot of masturbators and some film students. Every once in a while a thin nervous man would approach the window and not ask for a ticket. He would not reach for his wallet.

  ‘Justice?’ she’d ask, with the same inflection she used to say ‘Night Porter?’ Then he’d slip a yellow piece of paper through the money slot and she’d say, ‘Thank you. Have a nice day.’

  Not all the men making drop-offs were that mysterious. A few sauntered by with friends.

  ‘Wait a minute, will ya? I have to drop this off. Hi there. Are you from Justice?’

  Then she’d smile and he’d smile and he’d go on his way. One guy got into the full spirit of things by saying ‘Thank you, sister,’ flashing a victory sign with two fingers on his right hand followed by a fisted salute. Either he was an old radical or he was showing off the manual technique he’d picked up at the Mineshaft.

  All day long she collected little slips of yellow paper and never once looked at them, taking her assignment as a messenger quite literally. Then Kate came up to the window in fedora and pinstripe.

  ‘Night Porter?’

  ‘The Damned, please. I miss you. When can we get together? I’m horny. When do you get off work?’

  Now that Kate was wearing men’s clothes she’d gotten a lot more forward, Molly noted. And here she was coming and asking directly for things. Maybe it wouldn’t take quite so many days for the phone to ring as it used to. On the other hand it bothered Molly a little to hear Kate say she was horny because that’s what her husband was for and if he wasn’t living up to the demands of his marital duties then why was this guy still in the picture?