by Amy Hoffman
Ignoring my words, he said, “Go on back to work, young lady.” He looked at the bicycle cop and shrugged. “Just another day in P-town,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” said the bicycle cop.
The older one folded himself into the patrol car, slammed the door, rolled down the window, and leaned out. “Back to your beat, son. Nothing else to be done here.”
I watched the cops leave, then rolled up Janelle’s poster and gathered up the broken lock and chain. After putting it all away in my locker, I went back to finish my shift. The line was longer than ever. With my reappearance it began to advance, slowly, but everyone both in front of and behind the counter was exasperated with me for having caused the backup. Later, as I punched out, the manager gave me an official warning—but you had to accumulate three before they would even threaten to fire you, and the store was short-staffed just then. My job was pretty safe.
Roger Gets Over It
After Janelle’s parking lot protest, it seemed to fall to me especially often to work the Saturday morning opening shift. “Nah, you just think so,” insisted the manager when I objected. “You must take your turn like all the other girls. And look at me—I gotta be here all the time.”
“But that’s impossible!”
“Yeah, but you think I am, right?” She laughed. “My secret weapon.”
Diligent and efficient, she did give the impression of omnipresence.
I’m a morning person, but not 5:00 in the morning, and the shift was misery, especially since I had to wake before dawn, usually after a night when Miss Ruby had had the TV tuned to the white noise and gray snow channel. She still kept to her irregular hours, despite Tony’s attempts to nudge her into a normal human schedule of sleeping and waking. One early morning, when I emerged from the shower, she was bustling around the kitchen, frying me an egg.
“Thanks, Miss Ruby,” I said, struggling with the egg. It was really very thoughtful of her.
She beamed. “No problem! I was up, so I thought I’d do something useful.”
She must have been a fry cook at some point, because the egg wasn’t bad, but all I felt capable of at that hour was coffee, black. Something with no nutrients.
And afterward, walking home, I was hungry and tired, and my feet ached from hours of standing. I had a headache, and I needed a nap. Passing the Green Teddy, I didn’t feel up for a scene, played for the amusement of the patio regulars, with Roger, who came rushing out of the shop. I had been ambling along until then, but hoping he hadn’t noticed me, I kept my eyes focused straight ahead and picked up my pace. Apparently, though, he had been watching for me. “Nora! Nora!” he called. “Wait up!”
“No!” I called back.
“I’m not going to yell at you!” he yelled.
I stopped. “Yell at me?” I said as he caught up. “Why on earth would you yell at me, since all I’ve been trying to do all along is help?”
“Not all along,” he said. “You have to admit, I warned you.”
“I have to admit? Come on, Roger, you of all people. You know how these things happen. It was supposed to be a minor flirtation, a fling.”
“Une aventure amoreuse.”
“Oui! Pas une affair de coeur. Mais, pourquoi nous parlons français?”
“Je ne sais pas,” said Roger. “Your accent’s terrible, by the way; I can barely understand you. I guess because it’s easier than apologizing in English.”
“I didn’t deserve to be cut off, Roger. We were friends.”
“Don’t rub it in, my dear. It doesn’t become you.”
I let him take my arm. “What brought this on?”
“Don’t know.” He shrugged, and we walked in silence for a while. “Okay, I miss you. And I’m kind of worried about Janelle. Her moods—well, you know, you helped out with those cops the other day. She’s so angry all the time—and she’s normally so even tempered and basically happy. Which is so rare, and it’s always been one of the things I love about her. Other people get blue—but not her. But now, when she’s not berating me, she’s hiding in her room.”
“Really? That’s awful; I had no idea. I thought you two were so close.”
“We were. Are. But she says I get on her nerves. I drove her for a checkup the other day, to Hyannis, and she barely said a word the whole way there and back, and when I asked how it went, she literally snapped. ‘Same’s always.’ She’s gotten as monosyllabic as my father. I’ve been going to the library a lot.”
“Wow, Roger, I’m so sorry. It’s hard to even imagine all this; she’s usually so kind hearted.” I hesitated, because I was afraid to ask. “Do you think there’s something else wrong? Something—you know—the doctor found and she hasn’t told you about?”
“Oh, no, Nora honey, no. Don’t even go there. It’s a phase. Physically I really think she’s okay. Tired sometimes, but she’s actually coming back pretty well. Her hair’s growing in and all.”
“Well, who wouldn’t feel that way?” I said. “Sad. Angry. The whole thing’s depressing. Not that she should be venting it on you.”
“She shouldn’t,” he agreed. “But then, who better to get mad at than some guy who’s around all the time, bugging you to take a bunch of vitamin pills?”
“Yeah, she was like that with me, too, during her treatment,” I reassured him. “But after a while she changed. She still loves you, Roger; I’m sure of it.” When we reached the house, I had an impulse. “Come see my studio,” I invited him.
“You have a studio?”
I pointed. “Up there. I needed a place to work, after Janelle put me out. Miss Ruby found it for me. I’m working on a big project; I’ll show you.”
We crossed the yard, and I fumbled with the padlock I had installed, although the wood was so soft that a perceptive thief would have realized he or she just had to give the doors a couple of good shoves and the screws would pull out. Finally the lock popped, and I let us in.
“Wow,” said Roger.
Originally I had imagined somehow collaging images of P-towners and native animals into the backdrop of sea and sky and streets, but once I had started on the studies, I had become more interested in each individual—Baby and her long legs and her boots, Miss Ruby and the cat, which I had restored to her lap, unlike in real life. So now I was working on a series of large portraits, done in flat fields of color, with expressive faces and gestures, which I was very pleased about—I had been succeeding, I felt when I stood back and looked, at capturing the spirits of my subjects, something at which I had apparently not always been adept. “Skilled, certainly, but cold,” my one reviewer had said. “Where is the energy? The risk? Is this portraiture in the age of the Internet?”
Blah blah blah, the Internet, I had thought at the time. It got blamed for so much I almost felt sorry for it. But the insult had planted itself in my brain as the definition of what I could and could not do—even as I understood how false and confining this was. For a long time my New Year’s resolutions had included letting go of the idea that I couldn’t portray emotion, along with all stifling labels and old resentments. But I hadn’t ever totally succeeded, especially at the old resentments part, and yet now my supposed limitations had simply drifted off, as unnoticed and irrelevant as balloons after a party. In the Provincetown paintings I was onto something new.
“Roger, let me do you too,” I said.
“You mean now? But I’m not ready. I just threw on this outfit, and my hair—I have an appointment to get it cut next week.”
Roger was the sort of person who would probably look put together even after an all-night session in a back room with Blaze. And he didn’t have enough hair to worry about. “You look fine,” I said. “It’s not a fashion shoot.”
“Oh no, I couldn’t. You don’t understand how embarrassing—”
I patted the seat of the plastic chair and, as though I had hypnotized him, he sat down obediently. I set up my easel with the big pad of newsprint, rolled my shoulders back and forth a few times to loose
n up, and took out a pencil. “Just a few sketches to start with. You can come back on a day when you’ve had a chance to get ready, and I’ll fix the hair,” I lied. I was pleased that I had thought of grabbing him unprepared, and I had no intention of fixing anything. Roger, in my opinion, had gotten handsomer as he had aged. His face had grown craggy, not wrinkled, so his smile, though friendly, was unexpected. And of course he kept himself in great shape. I supposed he had put on some weight as he had aged, just as I had, but it made him look less fragile, more grounded.
“Take out some of the gray.”
“Sure, you’ll look ten years younger when I get through with you. Maybe even fifteen.” This was absurd, but Roger took it seriously.
“Well, okay, then, that would be great,” he said. “Maybe you can do something about the abs, too. Tighten them up.”
“Come on, Roger, I have my limits,” I said, starting to sketch. “And don’t guys like you as you are? Bears and all?”
“I am not a bear. I’m a clone.”
“But no one’s a clone anymore! How can you be a clone if there’s no one to be a clone of?”
“I just am,” he said. “So what if I’m a throwback? The style always felt right to me. Plus, you wouldn’t believe the amount of time and money it takes to get a pair of 501 Levis to fit right—all that washing and tailoring. They’re an investment.”
“So that’s why you’ve always had a mustache?” I asked as I sketched it in. I had thought maybe he had a weak upper lip or an overbite that I had never seen. “Naturally it looks great on you!” I added, realizing he might think that my question was disapproving.
“For your information,” said Roger, “I’ve never gotten any complaints about my upper lip. Or my lower one. And I have an excellent dentist. And as anyone but a lesbian would have noticed, the well-groomed but not overly mannered mustache is coming back as a male fashion accessory.”
“Not those big twirly ones, I hope.”
“Good goddess, no.”
I tore off the sheet of newsprint I had been working on and started a new sketch.
“Actually,” said Roger, “I like looking like a gay man of the 1980s. Even if no one gets it—I mean, the image isn’t all that different from today. I’m not outlandish.”
“Of course not!” I said.
“I am a memorial,” Roger declared. It was an odd thing to say, and I stared at him. “You remember my boyfriend Paul Wong.”
“No, I never met him. I only got to know you later, after—”
“Oh, right,” he said. “And I’m so sorry about that, because it’s a loss, for anyone who didn’t have the chance to know him. He was so smart and quick and dear. Deeply, deeply funny—but never mean. I mean, never—completely devoid of that killer instinct most of us sissies have cultivated. For Paul it was all about delight. The human comedy. He was an enthusiast—just threw himself into whatever was happening around him. Totally in the moment, totally attentive, totally interested.
“He wasn’t like you, though—not an artist. No gift for creating anything tangible or permanent.”
“Just his life,” I said, offering the cliché, in order to offer something.
“And that’s over,” he said. “Long enough ago that I’ve stopped glimpsing him on the subway, and I have friends like you, old friends, who never met him. I remember his face, his body, his voice, so clearly—but not anything specific that he said. Not his jokes, not even his favorite endearments. Isn’t that strange?”
“So you wear his clothes?”
“Of course not, Nora—how grotesque! He was shorter than me!”
“I meant you adopted his style.”
“At the time I was more the bohemian punk type—black, black, and black, right down to the boxers. Paul, though, in addition to the height issue, he was, well—rotund. I guess most people wouldn’t have found him attractive, this chunky Asian guy trying to do the whole plaid-shirt-jeans-work-boots thing and mostly failing to bring it off. But somehow that made him even more sexy to me. Like a secret treasure. He’d come home, and his shirt would be half-untucked and his glasses on crooked, his hair hanging over his collar and falling in his eyes, but I never told him to get it cut more often. In bed I used to grab a handful, at the nape of his neck, and sometimes I just hung onto it all night.
“Sometimes I thought he should’ve had a stricter boyfriend, one who would have made him shave off the wispy mustache and put him on a diet. But Paul took such pleasure in food, in a dinner party—the shopping, the preparation. The tasting of the evening’s concoction—he was always experimenting. The friends around the table. Toasting us and feeding us and charming us—he loved all of it.
“I want people to have a fleeting thought when they see me, subconscious almost: I remember that; where’d they all go? And then of course they’ll realize.”
“I wish I’d known him,” I said. “I missed meeting a lot of great people.”
“Yeah, too bad, right? Look,” he said, closing his eyes for a moment, trying to find the patience to deal with my courtesy, “they’re dead. Gone. I hate it when people try to pretend they’re somehow still around. Remember that AIDS movie where all the dead guys came back at the end, onto the beach at Fire Island? I guess you weren’t supposed to take it literally—the scene was about their friends remembering them or missing them. Whatever. They came back in good health, too. Buff, tan. No emaciated faggots hobbling around and throwing up and fainting, or disfigured, with KS blotches eating up their face.”
Roger turned away and sneezed, or made some sort of choking sound, and when he turned back to me he was calmer. “I learned a lot of skills, though,” he said, trying to sound upbeat. “There’s that.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Cherry Ames routine,” he said. “And look at Janelle’s new organizing thing. She’s finally starting to understand politics—and I got schooled by the best, ACT UP. I’m trying not to take her outbursts personally.” I glanced up from the easel to check the shape of a shadow, and Roger caught my eye. “You shouldn’t either, Nora.”
“It’s a little more complicated between her and me, don’t you think?” I said.
“Maybe,” said Roger. “Maybe not.”
Wet Suits
My reconstruction of events—and I’ve given this way too much thought: Baby and Broony emerge from the frigid Atlantic of late winter. Even wearing wet suits, they’re chilled to the bone. But they’re laughing, pleased with themselves as they peel off the suits, stripping down to their speedos and toweling off, and quickly pulling on sweats and fleeces. The swimming is something they’ve committed to doing, and they’re proud of themselves, they’re following through. They can feel their muscles getting stronger and their strokes more powerful. Their bodies have, after several weeks, become acclimated to exercising in the cold.
Baby pulls off her daisy bathing cap, shakes out her hair, massages her scalp with her fingers. Broony, too, tugs off her cap—plain black—revealing that she’s cut off her braids. A true pro does not wear braids; she must be sleek all over like a seal. So she’s gotten herself a crewcut, her only frill a strawberry-colored cowlick in front. Baby is entranced. She reaches out, rubs Broony’s hair the wrong way, to feel its rough edge under her palm, and Broony shivers, not from the cold. Baby’s hand moves to cup her chin as she leans in close for a long, warm kiss.
Oh, why go on! It was clear from the beginning that Baby would find additional interests—additional, not other. She had no intention of abandoning me. Baby loved everybody and would not hurt a fly. She was like a Buddhist monk on a road trip who, getting into the car, hesitates to flick on the windshield wipers to clear away the previous day’s grime, for fear of harming any insects that might be clinging to the clouded glass. I had not, probably will never, attained her level of enlightenment, her compassion for all living, suffering beings, from bugs to Broony.
To me—I too was encompassed in the pleasure Baby took in each moment. But it wasn’t
enough for me: I longed for her undivided attention, which I mistakenly imagined I had had and lost to Broony. I became miserable and furious and clingy—not a combination that Baby found appealing or even, as most people would, guilt inducing. On my worst days, she tried to avoid me. I became convinced that she was screening her phone calls, although it’s quite possible that she was simply busy in her store, enjoying a walk on the jetty—or swimming and frolicking with Broony. So I began avoiding her—to show her, to take my ridiculous revenge.
Of course, this is not how the world works. Throw a tantrum, and people have to pay attention. Withdraw, and no one frets about where you’ve hidden yourself or what she may have done to cause your disappearance; no one even notices that you haven’t come around in a while—or if she does, it doesn’t occur to her that it has anything to do with her behavior. I retreated into my studio, slammed the door, and waited for Baby to come crawling back.
The Ballad of Tony and Ruby
And waited. Sitting in the plastic chair with nothing to occupy my mind but jealousy and thwarted desire, which got boring after a while, I took another look at my mural. I left the backdrop I had made as it was and turned to the canvas I had started, in happier days, of Baby in her swimming gear. Then Tony volunteered to sit for me: I suspected she was looking forward to showing off her torso. “It’s a point of pride with me, Nella,” she explained, tugging off her T-shirt and wiggling around to find a comfortable position in the chair. She stretched her legs out in front of her and threw her arm around the back. “Some of the kids get a tattoo when they finish treatment—to show how their life is going to be different from now on. But the scars are enough for me.”
“Nora,” I said.
“Aw, come on,” said Tony. “You know I’m just teasing you, Norm—Nora. Right?”
It was a concession, and I appreciated it. She had succeeded in nudging Miss Ruby into a better state of physical and mental health—which was more than I could claim to have done. “Right,” I said. “Teeny.”