I Wish I Was Like You

by S. P. Miskowski

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Not kidding. I’ll say I’m an exchange student and you took advantage of me. You’re the fucking fall guy. You punched me and made me help you…”

  “Okay, I get it!” We laughed so hard Alisa heard us inside the shop and waved through the back window.

  Thus began our habit of setting aside what we needed. It worked that night and every time we tried it. We couldn’t take much at once, only a couple of dollars here and there, but it added up and I never missed a rent payment.

  I often thought about how and why we got away with our crime. Success depended on a number of things but there was one overriding factor. To put it bluntly, Tam and I were not that hot. If we had been prettier our method would have failed. Customer scrutiny would have nailed us. In reality we were two nondescript twenty-something girls behind a counter.

  Nobody ever cares about waitresses, cashiers, ushers, car washers, pool cleaners, dog groomers, valets, babysitters, gardeners, housekeepers, salesgirls—all expendable, a blur of bodies carrying out mundane business while more significant people go to important places and do exciting things.

  We couldn’t afford to go anywhere. A couple of times a week we got drunk at the Comet but the beer was cheap. ‘Pukin’ ale,’ as Tam used to say. No guilt if it came back up.

  On my days off I walked—downtown, or south to Beacon Hill; the bustling U-District to the forest of Ravenna; or the top of Queen Anne and over the bridge to Fremont. Or I wandered up Broadway, past the funeral home and on to the park. Not Volunteer Park but the crummy little patch of weeds and concrete next to the reservoir, where homeless people slept and the grass was littered with needles. Where stoned white people played hacky sack in their rastacaps and blond dreadlocks.

  The long days rolled by. Tam and I filched money from the register every week, almost every night. Not huge sums, but they added up and kept me from starving.

  Greenlake on a slow day, midweek, dappled with sunlight. The path encircling the water is dotted with shallow puddles beginning to evaporate. Quaint bungalows line the narrow streets leading to and from the lake. A scent of pizza wafts from a corner shop to the two-bedroom house with a wooden sign in the window.

  Judging by the description of Reiki healing on the sign, I would expect a quiet, slender master of technique waiting beside a table with a background of gurgling water flowing over a rock sculpture and the reedy notes of a flute in the air.

  I didn’t expect you. A middle-aged woman of one hundred and sixty pounds, your hair over-saturated with fox-red dye and spiked with hints of magenta, your feet bare and sort of broad with unimaginably short, square toes. Your face is lined with a sadness you try unsuccessfully to overcome with each new client. Your last love stripped you down and left you bare, and now here you stand, welcoming anyone who wanders in.

  Five years ago, you had given up hoping to be swept away. Love was crap, and you didn’t want to talk about it anymore. Then you fell hard, in one night, watching Rudy shred a bass guitar on stage at the Crocodile. You saw her again waiting in line for the bathroom. She smiled. You ducked your head. She cupped your chin in her hand and kissed you, giving your lower lip a tug with her delicious mouth.

  Rudy followed you to another, older club after her set, this one infested with roaches and bad music. She offered a joint, took you by the hand and hauled you outside to the alley, pressed you against a cinderblock wall, pressed her mouth between your lips, made you come with her fingers inside you.

  How you longed to fall headlong, crazy. “Feel this,” Rudy told you. “It’s going to happen.”

  For a long time it seemed right, this traipsing around together without wanting more. Then you wanted more.

  You earned a license in Swedish massage and made decent money for the first time. With your leather-clad Rudy grumbling all the way, you bought a house and decorated it with purple lounge chairs, silver paint, tiny spaceships, and sex toys from all over the world.

  You let your stay-at-home girlfriend Rudy bathe you, gliding the soap across the slippery curves of your flesh. She said this was ‘it,’ this was complete; she said you were the lady she had been looking for, the woman of her most splendid lucid dreaming. You let her hands convince you.

  Rudy liked to play music and ‘have fun.’ She didn’t like ‘jobs and boring shit.’ You bought two cars together, a Volkswagen for the city and an SUV for navigating country roads. You hiked and made out and rented a cabin.

  “Live in the moment,” said your lover Rudy. “Fly as high as you can!”

  You co-signed a second mortgage and opened this massage studio in Greenlake, six blocks from home. You took on as many clients as you could manage, so many you blistered your hands washing their skin and their smells away. At night you imagined epidermal flakes gathering all over your body, encasing you, sealing your eyes and mouth shut, suffocating you.

  Your bones ached, your back hurt constantly. So you quit massage and studied Reiki—your tremulous hands, still shiny from over-cleansing, wavering in the air, never touching the client’s skin, locating energy fields, auras, sites where psychic pain accumulated. You told your clients you were changing focus, offering Reiki instead of massage. They left you in droves.

  “All I want is a massage. I want you to get in there and get that kink out of my lower back…” one of your regulars told you, the day she left for another masseuse.

  When the bills and hateful calls from the bank became overwhelming, you put on your French sunglasses and went shopping. You bought a burgundy sectional for nine hundred dollars and ripped a hole in it. You cried yourself to sleep and wondered where your beloved Rudy was sleeping.

  You felt too many emotions. You knew what it was to let loose and scream and cry. The day Rudy announced she was leaving you for a postal worker named Gwyneth you didn’t die. You thought it was a prank. You didn’t know you’d stopped being the woman of Rudy’s ‘most splendid lucid dreaming.’

  No amount of arguing made a difference. Your ex- Rudy packed your bags and put a For Sale sign on the lawn. She drove you to your studio in the SUV, backed out of the short driveway, tires crackling over the gravel, and sped away to her new life on a houseboat with Gwyneth and a sheepdog.

  You live in your studio now. You keep your smock and clothing clean. You greet every client—two or three a week—with a smile so brave it only elicits pity. You have favorite sayings printed on cards.

  ‘Today’s struggle is tomorrow’s strength.’

  ‘When we are at peace inside, the outside will change naturally.’

  You stand at attention beside the table. Your hands are quivering, uncertain about all those auras and energy fields, and afraid you’ve already seen the only passion you’ll ever know.

  “Hey,” I say. “What are you waiting for? Your car is parked nearby. See the lake across the street, the smoothness of the green surface? Isn’t it inviting? Wouldn’t you like to slip into the water?”

  Once you clear the road and then the dirt path, you barrel right into the lake. A splash denotes contact followed by a sort of whoosh, and you glide. Round and bright white, your Volkswagen settles and floats naturally. Not a swan but a pleasant duck.

  You have time, now, to view the dainty gingerbread houses lined up on all sides of the water. You think of how many lies are told inside those pretty homes. You have time to watch a small crowd gathering. Baby strollers come to a gradual stop. Joggers and roller skaters skid, pull over, and stare.

  I’m telling you, your heart is too big for this town, too big and caring and stupid. I almost know your name, it trips at the edges of my awareness, and I almost stop myself.

  Then I stop myself from stopping, and a thin stream of water shoots through a leak in the floor, bubbles between your stubby toes, and tugs you down, down, down while the neighbors and skaters look on in shock.

  Chapter Eight

  By this time I had a sort of friend in my apartment building. Vau
ghn managed a wine shop on 15th Avenue. He was square-faced, short, and built like a boxer. His hair stood on end, no matter how he combed it.

  Vaughn’s great love was classical theater. We met the day he came into the shop to run a stack of fifty flyers.

  “Hello, there,” he said when I rang up his order. “Not to alarm you but I think we share living quarters, in a manner of speaking.”

  I must have looked blank.

  “I’m your upstairs neighbor,” he went on. “Vaughn Roberts. Vaughn Evans is my nom de plume. How do you do?”

  “I’m Greta,” I replied.

  “Please, have a flyer. It’s an invitation. I’m presenting a staged reading this Sunday.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I don’t go to the theater much…”

  “This is informal. We gather in my living room.”

  “Fifty people?” I asked.

  Vaughn laughed, a boisterous, generous, theatrical laugh.

  “Oh no,” he assured me. “I’ll hand out these flyers to people I know and maybe eight or ten will show up. Free wine and cheese, a quiche if I’m feeling ambitious. Please, join us, if you have time.”

  Offering wine and cheese to a person who is five pounds underweight because she has to decide between rent and food one week out of every month? The money Tam and I filched could only cover so much. And we didn’t dare put a larger dent in the profits. When I got home after my shift, I taped the flyer to my refrigerator and started counting the hours until Vaughn’s get-together.

  On Sunday I put on a skirt and my least worn-out T-shirt and sweater. I even brushed my hair before finding my way upstairs to Vaughn’s apartment at two p.m.

  Including me, there were five guests. One was a tall, obsequious man who applauded after every scene. Another was a tall, cheerful woman who made use of the ninety-minute reading to finish a sleeve of the sweater she was knitting. The other two divided their time between rolling their eyes at the obsequious man’s applause and shaking their heads over the knitting woman, who hummed quietly while she worked.

  The play was a Jacobean pastiche. There were thirty-seven roles read by five actors employing eleven wigs and more British accents than I could count. Four actors (including Vaughn) played multiple roles while the fifth performer—a stunning, dark-haired young man—played the female lead and romantic interest, Susanna, to Vaughn’s primary role, that of the dashing and promiscuous Fletcher. Only the female lead appeared in full costume, equipped with long sleeves ending in wide cuffs and an impressively cinched bodice. The four multiple players indicated changes of character with an astonishing number of feathered hats and varying sizes of ruff.

  The story centered on Susanna, a lady who had fallen on hard times and had to make her way in the world by masquerading as a boy performing tragedies for the king’s pleasure. Susanna’s real secret, revealed in the third act, was that she was a boy of nineteen masquerading as a lady who had fallen on hard times. This part of the plot was never explained. By the time of Susanna’s final unveiling, Fletcher has fallen madly in love, having come close to losing his mind in a confused state of arousal while admiring Susanna from the wings.

  The script was in rhyming couplets. These were occasionally delivered with devilish winks, and received nods and murmurs of appreciation from the audience. Twice the action was interrupted by spontaneous outbursts of applause.

  In the final act Susanna is compelled to disrobe for a second time, Fletcher ravishes the male Susanna, and the play skitters close to a happy ending. But of course Susanna discovers an inherited estate from a previously unidentified father and gives up the stage forever, leaving poor Fletcher to collapse, his passion wasted, his great love vanished to another continent, and his theatrical ambitions ruined.

  When the actors stepped forward for their bow I felt like I’d taken a tumultuous cruise. I applauded along with the others, and jumped to my feet in anticipation of more Gouda and merlot. I pocketed a miniature baguette and a couple of croissants for later.

  An occasional trip to see Vaughn’s friends in a slightly overwrought but entertaining performance of one classic or another was the price I paid to never run out of wine and cheese. And every other month I was enlisted to serve fancy snacks at one of Vaughn’s play readings in his apartment. The same friends gathered to hear these scripts, each of them written ‘in the manner of’ a famous playwright.

  When I told Vaughn about my parents he dubbed me his ‘little orphan’ and took me under his wing. He checked my refrigerator once a week and added a few items surreptitiously—butter, eggs, milk, bread, a head of romaine lettuce, a bunch of carrots, a bottle of olive oil. One time he sent me to his dentist and paid the bill when I needed a filling. He introduced me to other neighbors in the building and filled me in on each one’s history.

  “Fiona Jarrett, she’s a publicist at the opera. Works like mad, poor darling, and they don’t appreciate her. A nasty little ambitious thug is trying to push her out of the way. I’ve asked around and I have his contact information. If anything happens, he will definitely hear from me…

  “Ivy Traeger and Bunny Campbell are the sexiest couple alive but I don’t expect things to last. Bunny’s so young she doesn’t have a clue. She’s a pixie with a mean streak. Here she is, in the romance of a lifetime, and she’s running around telling people she might be bi, which is news to Ivy. And Ivy is delicious! A bit taciturn but wonderful when you get to know her. She’s a costume designer for the Empty Space and a couple of smaller fringe companies. What a gorgeous, talented, dark-eyed beauty. She’ll need all the friends she can get when our young Bunny breaks her heart…

  “If you have any plumbing problems, and you will, we all do, call Ted or Stacy, not Druida, who thinks she’s a handyman. She’s broken half the toilets in the building…

  “Are you sure you’re straight, sweetheart, because Ivy’s going to need a friend soon and I hate to see classic beauty like hers go to waste…”

  Whatever I might find frivolous about the Jacobean and Elizabethan five-act plays he loved, and the pastiches he wrote, Vaughn believed in himself. He earned an excellent living managing the wine shop but he would say he was an artist, first and always. He was certain of his talent, and sure of the genius of each of his friends. He believed any dismissal of his writing was based on ignorance or envy. He had banded together with a composer to create a theater company called Wicked Pursuits.

  For a long time they had put on shows in Vaughn’s living room, charging a dollar a ticket. Then they stumbled onto the deal of a lifetime.

  The composer knew a retired couple dabbling in real estate. For a few thousand dollars the couple had purchased a two-story brick building in Belltown back in 1982, and did nothing with it for years. The top floor had superficial fire damage along the southwest corner and the plumbing was noisy. Otherwise the dump was structurally sound.

  This couple, the Jensens, had been locked in a zoning battle for several years with an acquaintance who owned the property next door. The guy, Alan Cutler, was forever trying to sell apartment units as condos. Nobody was buying, Vaughn said, because poor and single people lived in apartments while families bought houses. Condos in Seattle were unheard of. Nevertheless, Cutler persisted. His modern homes were ‘the wave of the future,’ he said. His sales pitch promised ‘security and serenity in a refined urban setting.’

  The Jensens told a couple of weekly papers Cutler was gentrifying the neighborhood and driving artists out. They also said he used his personal fortune to fund questionable programs, hinting at fascist youth camps and survivalist compounds in Idaho.

  Cutler responded to the criticism by closing down a studio where three generations of musicians had rehearsed for two dollars an hour. The Jensens retaliated by dividing their Belltown property into studios, rehearsal rooms, and performance spaces they rented for three dollars an hour, attracting a continuous line of shambling artists, musicians, and homeless people. They painted the new name of the
building—RatLand—vertically next to the street-level entrance.

  Vaughn and his friends leased an upstairs room at RatLand. The space seated forty. With a few strategically placed floor cushions, they could have squeezed in another six or eight. But they never needed the extra space. There wasn’t enough demand for tickets.

  The company painted the walls and the original fixtures black, connected an illegal lighting grid, tacked up a couple of fire exit signs, and tempted fate with staged readings of Vaughn’s plays and productions of adapted classics. Three Sisters in drag as a one-act didn’t thrill me any more than the dusty, three-hour original. But their hearts were in the right place and their work kept edging toward something good.

  Opening nights generally packed the house but the rest of the time attendance was sparse. The general theater rule was to cancel a performance if fewer than ten ticket buyers turned up. Vaughn and Wicked Pursuits considered the traditional command—‘the show must go on’—to be sacred. They would arrive at the theater early, prepare physically and vocally, put on their makeup and costumes and tread the boards with the gusto of European opera stars even if only five people were watching.

  Inevitably a night came when I found myself in the center row of the center section with only three other patrons in the room. For two and a half hours, every speech and every song in Vaughn’s musical version of The Tempest was directed at the four of us. After the first intermission, they were directed at the remaining two of us and after the second intermission, at me. I sat alone, dead center. Every actor in the cast of eight made a point of making eye contact with me, as though I were an integral part of the show. It was the most exhausting night of my life.

  I was the usher at a fundraising event featuring excerpts from three of Vaughn’s scripts. The suggested donation was five dollars. Vaughn invited everyone he knew and a surprising number of people showed up. Dressed in $500 leather jackets and Armani slacks, the men sporting Van Dykes and stringy hair, they slouched into the cramped space reeking of weed. Almost every one of them tried to slip past me without paying.