WITH A START HE THOUGHT at first it was his wife, before he remembered a moment later that wasn’t possible. “It’s Saki, Papa,” she said. He didn’t answer, either that night or the next day, and Angie had decided the possibility for reconciliation was lost forever until, as she finally came to tell him goodbye, he suddenly took her hand in his own, still staring out the window, still conceding nothing, still disowning her with his silence, but holding her hand in a grip that wouldn’t let go.
My bright little star, he had whispered in her ear at exactly 7:02 on the evening of 6 May 1968, as he slipped her stuffed bear from her arms. For a moment little Saki, lying in her bed, was confused: my bear, she called, reaching for it in her father’s hands. Looming over her, her father shook his head. You’re not a baby anymore, he answered, closing her bedroom door behind him as he left, so stunning her with both this news and the loss of her companion that it was several minutes before the enormity of it all sank in and she began to cry. Outside, other kids still played as the Nevada desert sky faded to dark. Four months shy of her sixth birthday, she was already precocious in all matters except stuffed bears, including her sleeping habits; she was quite certain she didn’t know a single other kid who had to go to bed at the ridiculous hour of seven o’clock. But her father was as unyielding about it as he was about the bear, as he was when he had insisted on naming her Saki, as he was when he whispered in her ear My bright little star, not as an endearment, not as an encouragement, not as a hope or even a demand, but a warning.
When she started kindergarten, he began to hang the sign on her door every morning, in the form of a single word. At first it was a game for her, to wake each morning with great excitement and see what waited on the door. Early on, the daily sign reflected his expectations and aspirations in the first words of English he had so resolutely taught himself upon his expatriation from Japan to the United States: EXCELLENT. AMBITIOUS. DETERMINED. SUCCESSFUL. Only as the years went by did the sign on the door monitor both her fall into trivial girlish adolescence and the commensurate, steady deterioration of his approval, branding her life with the ways she let him down: DISAPPOINTING. LAZY. SILLY. FAILURE.
Saki Kai was the only child of parents who assumed that when it came to the matter of producing superior children, one opportunity should be sufficient. What need was there to have more than one child when the first should turn out so well? Already displaying the potential of a clear prodigy, she showed early talent at the piano and tested high on all her early intelligence exams, with scores in mathematics near genius level. Nonetheless, except for the piano lessons which she loved, she was bored by education, and in school her grades were mediocre, baffling her mother and enraging her father. By the time Saki was fourteen, the battle lines between the three of them were drawn, and at sixteen she rescued the stuffed bear from an old box under the stairs and moved out of the house, working underage as a waitress in a seedy downtown bar and as a dancer in another club up the street where all the girls took stage names, not in the interest of self-invention but confidentiality. Hers was Angie, inspired by a popular rock and roll ballad she had loved at the age of ten, and which happened to be the song playing when she auditioned for the job. She wasn’t certain which she hoped for more, that her father would never find out, or that he might happen to stroll into the club one afternoon just in time to see her standing on a table in nothing but her black high heels. That would have been a revelation for both of them, and might have rendered the old battle lines suddenly obsolete.
AT THIS POINT IN HER LIFE SHE HAD HAD SEX EXACTLY TWICE, WITH neighborhood boys. Of course neither was for love, both were for rebellion. In the club she was a bad dancer, either too shy to dance sober or too drunk to dance at all. For some of the older men, however—in a way she was still too innocent to understand—her awkwardness stirred a kind of debauched wistfulness.
An investment analyst from New York in his early sixties, flying into Vegas every three weeks for the weekend, became particularly attached to her. She would sit and listen to him talk about things she didn’t care about in the least, and he would ask her questions about this and that, and over the course of several conversations it came out she wanted to become a concert pianist, which he found so wonderfully absurd it practically made his mouth water. After they talked a couple of more times, he called long distance just as she was coming on to the afternoon shift, and explained that if she had the wherewithal to get herself to New York, he would set up an appointment with the musical director at Carnegie Hall, and reserve her a room at the Hilton down the street.
It was now the autumn of 1978, when it was apparently still possible for a precocious teenage girl from the Nevada suburbs to be a little stupid about some things, even one who had danced in a strip joint four or five months. Angie packed one suitcase with as much as a small stuffed bear left room for, took every penny she had, which just covered the plane ticket and the cab ride from JFK to the Hilton on Sixth Avenue, registered at the front desk as Angie Kai, and checked into her room, where she ordered room service and delighted in signing the bill she so blithely assumed was being taken care of by Carnegie Hall. When the telephone rang that night at eleven o’clock, it was not Carnegie Hall but the investment analyst down in the hotel lobby, explaining that the audition was “all set up” for the next afternoon and perhaps it would be a good idea if he came up to the room and explained some things to her, just so as to assure everything went well. A little stupid or not, Angie was finally beginning to have a not-so-great feeling about the situation when she hung up the phone. She was trying to dispel this feeling when the old man showed up at the door with a bottle of champagne.
Twenty minutes later she screamed persuasively enough to send the barely dressed patron of the arts scrambling out into the hallway with her naked disillusionment trailing along after him. “God, Saki,” she said, sitting in front of the hotel mirror looking at herself and wondering what the sign on her bedroom door back home would read now if her father knew; and there and then she began to write the shorthand of her broken heart: “Disgrace. Disgust. Humiliation. Lost.” Ten years later, when she once again saw the sign on the door, she would find she had known her father pretty well at that.
She had no money. Any hope she had of squeezing another night or two out of the hotel was dashed with a call the next morning from the manager. “We have just been notified,” he explained, “that the gentleman who placed the deposit on your first night will not be paying for the second.” A pause. “How do you wish to handle the charges?” Up and down Sixth Avenue she dragged her suitcase in a daze, even to Carnegie Hall, where she lingered outside on the sidewalk in the long-shot hope maybe an audition really had been scheduled after all. That night she spent constantly on the move, darting from one dark and dangerous street to the next, eventually discarding everything but the bear; by the morning of the second day she was hungry and exhausted, by the morning of the third desperate and terrified. By the evening of the third she had forty dollars for doing something she would never speak of or think about again. By the evening of the fourth there was just enough of the forty dollars left to buy dinner—a can of cream soda and an over-the-counter bottle of sleeping pills. When she woke, her head pounding and her stomach very sore from having been pumped, she wasn’t sure whether it was still the fourth day or the fifth; she was in the indigent ward of a county hospital that almost anyone else would have reasonably considered a horrorshow. But in a bed under a roof, with a meal in front of her that by subnormal standards was nearly edible, she was as happy to be there as she would have been anywhere, assuming being alive was the only option offered to her.
She was perfectly content to stay on a while, in fact, until a nurse told her that the hospital had been trying to notify her parents. Please not my father, Angie begged; there was no way of fully explaining the overwhelming oppression of his disapproval, the unbearable burden of his disappointment. He hangs a sign on my door that says FAILURE, she tried to explain. The d
octors and nurses and hospital administrators seemed more confounded than sympathetic. You don’t understand, she finally cried when all her pleas had fallen on deaf ears, he named me after a nuclear holocaust. Next thing they knew, they turned around and her bed was empty and, except for the bear, she had left behind all the last remnants of Saki. By the end of her first week in New York, she was Angie through and through, hitting the strip clubs of Times Square where the owners took one look at her and saw she was a bad dancer and that it didn’t matter, and didn’t ask too many suspicious questions about how old she really was.
She went to work in a place at Forty-sixth and Broadway, where the owner was willing to advance her a hundred bucks, and one of the other women, who called herself Maxxi Maraschino, put her up for a while. Maxxi, brushing up against one side or the other of thirty, was a Bardot-look-alike blonde who also sang in a punk club downtown. At night in Maxxi’s flat at Second and Second, known to the punk scene as Depravity Central, where someone or another was always slumped in the corner, Angie slept on the couch while Maxxi explained the situation: here’s how it works. The club doesn’t pay you, you pay the club—a percentage of your tips for the high honor of getting to take your clothes off there. Not every guy is the kind who will go into a strip club, Maxxi went on, but the same hunger that makes some guys go into strip clubs exists in every guy. Some guys have suppressed it, some are threatened by it, some feel bad about it, some like to think they’ve outgrown or civilized it, but they’ve all got it. There’s the weirdo so incapable of relating to a woman that his interest in that little bit of tissue between your legs is virtually gynecological. He’s too pathetic to think about, like worrying about a gnat watching you undress. There’s the loudmouth who’s there to convince himself he exists, there’s the quiet one who’s there to convince himself he doesn’t exist. There’s the tourist whose whole life is a tour. There’s your bread and butter, the obsessed romantic—he starts coming just to see you. He’s your best opportunity and your biggest problem, because somehow he’s got it in his head he’s going to fuck you, or rescue you, or maybe even marry you, except if you ever did marry him, neither of you would ever be able to forget for a minute what it was you used to do for a living.
The whole thing about a strip club, Maxxi went on, is that it’s set up as though the guy’s in control, when anyone can see that the guy is the only one in the situation who’s not in control. Anyone with a tenth of a brain is going to figure out he’s never going to lay a finger on you, let alone put any part of him inside you. He’s never going to know your name, he’s never going to have anything to do with you whatsoever except to keep giving you his money, again and again and again. You’re in the lights and he thinks you’re exposed, he’s in the dark and he thinks he’s hidden. But he’s not hidden, he’s dead, and you’re not exposed, you’re alive.
After a month Maxxi told Angie about a photo session for a magazine layout, which led to another magazine session, which led to a movie in which Angie had sex for the third time in her life, a fact she protected as carefully as her date of birth. The seduction of making these movies was unmistakable and nearly irresistible; whatever was happening in front of the camera could almost seem vindicated by the very glamour of the process, even if it was a distinctly seedy version of glamour. More than this it offered Angie an identity that was tangible and attainable, in terms that, for better or worse, were completely her own and no one else’s. Being fucked by several men on film, she didn’t say to herself or to her father or to anyone else “Shame,” in the way her father had taught her to proclaim “Failure,” reducing everything she felt to a defeated emotional monogram. Rather, for the moment her shamelessness so demolished any last possibility of shame she was almost euphoric. Shame wasn’t just a foreign concept, it was beyond the given psychological physics of the universe she lived in.
It became clear to Angie from the beginning that there was a choice to be made. Many of the girls in these films were aspiring actresses hoping to go legit sooner or later, but as one told Angie on her second shoot, “There’s no doing both. You can’t do this”—waving her hand at the bed a few feet away—“and do legit too, it’s one or the other,” and for a while Angie fell in with this tribe of actresses and directors and cameramen, moving out of Maxxi’s place and staying with one or another of the other girls. Though she had no particular interest in being an actress, it seemed to her one also couldn’t live in both the world of shame and the world of shamelessness, it was one or the other, and she might well have chosen the world of shamelessness if, five films into her new career, someone didn’t finally get more inquisitive about her age. When it got out she was barely seventeen, the films she made had to be pulled from circulation by a distributor so enraged—and with enough underworld connections—that Maxxi Maraschino strongly suggested Angie lie low for a while.
Angie got a job with an escort service and moved out of Depravity Central and into her own place near Seventy-fourth and Third. The afternoon she went back to Maxxi’s to finally get the few things she had left behind, Maxxi was gone and the place was empty, no rock stars or groupies or junkies laid out on the floor, no signs of any life at all except in the back bedroom, where she herself had slept a couple of times: now, written on the door in the kind of black marker ink her father had used, was the word OCCUPIED. From behind the door, she thought she could hear a strange sound like the echo of a distant, cavernous roar. She went over to the door and stood for a while, her ear pressed against it, until she finally called out. She thought she heard someone moving around inside the room, and maybe someone answer, though she couldn’t be sure, and so she called out again, “Hello?” and now someone distinctly answered from behind the door, Yes. It was such an emphatic yes it frightened her, and she stood back from the door, again reading the word written on it in black ink. She was afraid to open the door and let out whatever was behind it. Then whatever was behind it began beating on the door furiously, and that frightened her even more, and she backed away, and turned and looked around the flat again to see if anyone else was there. She had to use the toilet. When she came back out of the toilet the flat was still empty, and the sounds from the back room, including the beating on the door, had stopped. She crept back to the door and listened for a while, and though not at all confident of her intuition, she unlocked the dead bolt as quietly as possible and left as quickly as possible.
Though no one yet knew it, she was living in the dawn of the moment when chaos would kiss love with a new malevolence. Waiting for this fatal unforeseen future, the women of the age writhed in their beds, veins flooded with the recognition of their desires, the air of the dying Seventies full of a sex both voluptuous and revolted, with the membrane between the two soon in tatters. During these months Angie’s only romance was a brief one with an aspiring playwright in his mid-twenties named Carl, whose day job was as map master for the city of Manhattan. Carl had a hundred maps at his disposal, maps of streets and maps of bridges, maps of sewers and maps of subways, maps of power grids and maps of water ducts, maps of sound currents and maps of wind tunnels; on the walls of his tiny St. Marks apartment he had maps of his entire life, coordinates for where he first got drunk, where he first had sex, where he had begun writing his first play, where he had gotten stuck on the third act. It was during the third act, one morning while he was sitting in his usual Village café drinking his usual morning espresso, writing his play by hand on a large pad of paper, that Carl had begun his first map: a character had just walked onstage, opened his mouth, and nothing came out. Stumped for the right bit of dialogue, Carl sat staring at the espresso and pad of paper for an hour, and began to draw a map of the play, which he hoped would reveal to him what the character wanted to say. That led to another map and then another. “You’re obsessed,” Angie said simply, the first time she saw all the maps.
“Not at all,” Carl answered, and she had to confess he didn’t seem the obsessed sort Maxxi had told her about. “I’m not obsessed
with my maps”—he smiled—“my maps are obsessed with me.”
“Are they really.”
“I have faith,” he explained, “and faith transcends obsession.”
“Mystification,” Angie replied, “envy, too.” A lapsed Jew, Carl freely admitted that perhaps he put his faith in faith itself, also suggesting, however, that at bottom faith itself was the only thing anyone ever really had faith in. He was more idealistic about his desire than any man she had ever met, or would meet; forty years later, living in the penthouse of an abandoned old hotel in San Francisco, he would remember her telling him so. He rhapsodized about her smile more than her body, and seemed to mean it, and she was still too young to understand that men always love a woman’s smile more than her body, even if they neither confess nor know it. Carl planned to retire someday to Provence and work in a vineyard—he had spent a couple of college years in Europe, and maps on the walls memorialized the autumn in London, the winter in Paris, the trip to Toulouse, the train to Vienna—and Angie had the feeling that, in his mind, he saw her working there in that vineyard with him.
The Sea Came in at Midnight Page 10