by Nik Cohn
“At Pansy Keane’s wedding just.”
“Well, not to worry, we all have to start somewhere. I was thinking they might need a man in the place I dance, a dump but the drinks are free and you’d get to see my bazooms.”
But John Joe, she knew, could see those right now, tax-free, framed by the loose V of her lounging pyjamas where they dangled tubular, half-ripe. “My boyfriend thinks I’m beautiful, my boyfriend drives a Spyder, my boyfriend has a magic flute,” Anna said, singsong. “I love that boy to death.” Opposite her picture as the dying swan was an Art Nouveau mirror adorned with nymphs and Ganymedes that she used to brush the blue shadows from under her eyes, the feverish patches like TB stigmata from her cheeks. “Spend all you have on loveliness, don’t make me laugh,” she said. Her long sprung foot, turned out in reflection, was ropy with sinews, swollen veins. “What age am I?”
“I’d say twenty-nine.”
“Marry me,” Anna said. “You might as well.”
At Sheherazade the smell of incense was strong, the smell of Lysol stronger. Bani Badpa, proprietor of record, sat drinking ouzo and glooming over his losses. “This is John Joe Maguire, he works for you,” Anna said. “You owe him forty dollars.”
“I am a dead man,” said Bani Badpa.
The storage space that Anna called her dressing room was out behind the kitchens, its shelves were full of canned chickpeas and roach motels, soiled tablecloths, sweetmeats, Raid.
One wall was covered with step-charts from Belly or Bust, mapping out the moves for the Cairo Snap, the Floating Veil, the Anatolian Shimmy, and a cyclostyled quotation from Serena, stuck to the wall with spirit gum, reading Glide in innocence. Endure with age. Untiringly seduce the world, and through that wall came the sound of someone flushing a toilet that wouldn’t flush and swearing tonelessly, Khar Kosseh, Khar Kosseh. “Last year when I worked here first I was Xanthia, wine-red rose of the Aegean, this year I am Zenaide from Zonguldak, veiled houri, and the John still doesn’t work,” Anna said. “Then again, what does? My last husband sold sand, tons and tons of the stuff, enough to floor a desert, but Hurricane Hugo blew it all to hell and gone, nothing left but bar bills and blisters. So what could I do? I caught a Greyhound north. Sought solace, and found Ma Root.”
Midway across the storage space was a length of cord strung between two nails and draped with chiffon scarves to form a makeshift screen, and behind it she got changed. “You want to hear a dumb story? I had this boy, his name was Chase, we lived in a vat full of feathers and everything was aces. But then, come Christmas, I took it in my mind to put on my clothes and go to church, though I knew I shouldn’t, still I did. St. John the Baptist’s for midnight mass, all us Crows are Romans, of course, though I’ve heard there are other religions, I’ve even seen them on TV. So down on my knees I knelt and prayed and sang till I was hoarse, Silent Night, Holy Night I sang, then I fled. Rushed back to the vat of feathers and dived right in, home again, but when I hit bottom you know what I found? Another woman’s falsies.”
Through the wall came sounds of hammering and wrenching, a strong man in his passion beating on a metal pipe. Khar Kosseh, the man’s voice kept saying and saying, “Iranians, they never know when to quit, enough’s enough, like Ferdousine, the old goat, with his two left feet and wandering hands, just look at my poor toes black and blue, my ass pinched purple, and his touch, lordamercy, icy-cold like death and taxes or frozen lobster claws, I could eat them till I throw up, just scrumptious, where was I?” Anna said.
“In the vat. Full of feathers.”
“With another woman’s foam, that’s right. And Chase was not even there, I found him in the yard trimming hedges in khaki ducks and an alligator shirt, doused in English Leather, and I knew I’d lost him, gone forever, so what choice did I have, I took a Chief Wigwam bow-and-arrow and shot him through the heart, well, I would have done, but I missed my aim and hit his throat instead.”
“Was he hurt?”
“Not a whit. He just died.”
In the hallway Bani Badpa was kicking tin cans, banging on locked doors. “Two minutes,” he said.
“Khar Kosseh,” Anna replied. “The whole thing was just so unfair. I mean, I barely touched him, only pinked his Adam’s apple, no more than a pin-prick, one bubble of blood; then I drove myself up to Charleston, stayed drunk two weeks on King Street, stole a gun, and by the time I made bail he’d croaked.”
“Thirty seconds.”
“Rust on the tin arrow was all. Blood poisoning, caries sphacelus, he was gone.”
A flourish of Mid-Eastern music sounded, drifting through the kitchens, and Anna when she pushed aside the screen of chiffon scarves stood posed against the shelves of chickpeas and Turkish Delight and Raid, in gold sandals and a turquoise veil, a shimmering lamé skirt slit to the hip, a jewelled headband enclosing a black-lacquer wig, sequins spangled in her bra, green glass like an emerald eye stuck in her navel.
In the mirror she was a dark girl, plump and sleekit, with her flesh oiled to gleaming olive. “I told you it was a dumb story,” she said.
Sheherazade at midnight was not filled to overflow, only fourteen men to watch her dance, and eight of those Bani Badpa’s relations. Still, the patch of dancefloor that served as a stage went black, a drum roll sounded, and a disembodied voice like treacle or a blocked John declaimed, “Bani Badpa Productions in collaboration with world-famed Sheherazade are proudly to present for the first time anywhere Innocence Caged, written and directed by Bani Badpa, his whole creation. This unique work is picturing an innocent maiden imprisoned by a much wicked vizier, although her love is already plight to a farming boy of her village. However, the vizier will not release her from succumbation to his lustful whim. In her cell alone with her griefly thoughts, now the maiden seeks escape in dreams. As performed tonight exclusively for your delectation of delight exclusively by international award-winning danseuse orientale, the ZENZATIONAL ZENAIDE!!!”
So here went nothing in a turquoise veil, trapped in a caged circle with a dim spot for moonlight and the faint throbbing of a darbuka on the soundtrack. She could never think what to do with herself, just waggle her fingers she guessed, and act griefly. Bani Badpa’s programme notes called for “sybilant sighs like stirring wind” which was simple enough, kindly pass the dill pickles, but when it came to making her “roseful bosom jib,” her mouth “gap with lunging,” she was flummoxed, what did he take her for? Or no, don’t answer that. Not after today and the Liberty Inn. When that TV hooker had put his hand on her and spun her round to see her face, the puzzled look in his eyes as if to say I know men, I know women, I know men’s that’s women, but what in the name of fish and fowl is this? With the heat so hot you couldn’t breathe, and those men all bloodstains on their white coats, and Lesbos running not rhyming through her like distemper, I am packing the hard potatoes like good clothes, I am packing the babies, I am packing the sick cats, what could a girl say?
Not a whole fucking lot.
Not when the darbuka gathered speed, the oud began to wail, and the prisoned maiden had to stir herself “like a wakeful snake awaking,” rising up in ripples, her belly quivering like jello and flashing light from its emerald eye. Offering up her hips while bending her spine slowly backwards in one smooth arch till her wig touched the dungeon floor. Lordamercy, the rush of blood to her head, she almost blacked out, but she didn’t have the time. The kemenche had started shrieking like a thing possessed, the oud was going bananas, and now Zenzational Zenaide was zooming to her big finish, “then a crazed madness enters in,” where the maiden flung herself at the bars, and the bars flung her back, and she flung herself again, and again, “flickersome like a firefly she whorls within the crudest cage, O woe! The tender flesh of the pulchrous girl is torn by vile bonds infernal.” Until at last she was knocked to her knees, her dreams of freedom dashed, her lovely head bowed in defeat, while the music fluttered softly with broken wings, the kemenche with a last shriek perished, and the maiden was back where she
’d started, take her out the oven, she was done.
Not much applause, none, in fact. By the time the house lights were raised Bani Badpa’s relations were sitting around the kitchen drinking Wild Irish Rose, and the other marks had all gone home to bed, where Anna would be herself if she’d had a flyspeck of sense. Leaving only John Joe Maguire, plunked like a wooden Indian behind the bar with the bouzoukis and the ceramic lobsters in a red cutaway jacket, a stained bow-tie to match.
And Willie D.
Drinking something dark and sinister in a yachting blazer by Ralph Lauren, navy-blue double-breasted with anchors embossed on the brass buttons for the look that says salt, says spray, and a face on him like thunder. “Mi corazon, what ails you?” Anna asked.
“Gash got my cash,” said Willie.
Ill, it was ill.
You gave your trust, and this was the thanks you got. You showed a little compassion, and the bitches took it for weakness, they rolled you and used you for tampons.
When he thought of the first time he’d seen her, working the beat outside the Lincoln Tunnel in the rain and driving sleet, her and her sorry-ass friend, any other man would have kept right on going. Any man in his sane mind would have said It’s none of my business, I don’t need the grief. But he’d always been a sucker for losers. Mouse Williams said it was his Achilles heel, his fatal flaw, but he couldn’t help himself. So he’d pulled his El Dorado over to the kerb, right in the mouth of the tunnel, the pit. You just won the lottery, he told her. Climb in, and bring your needle friend with you.
She was called Trish then, and her friend was Sammi Jo; they came from some dump in Jersey. Just another pair of channel swimmers hooking for their habit. Snuffling and scratching the whole way downtown; they called it flu, and he was such a boy scout then, he didn’t even laugh.
The truth was, he’d spoiled them. He took them into his home, cleaned them up, gave them methadone and fresh underwear, changed their names to Ivana and Maria, turned them into sisters, bought them fancy clothes and the finest in shoes, taught them how to eat asparagus, introduced them around town, got them connected with Men of Power, Sandman Ames and Patsy O, even Deacon Landry, the world of movers and shakers, and all for why? Because he cared, that’s why. And because he had a vision. In the split-second it took to drive past them at Lincoln Tunnel, he’d caught a flash of something live, a spark, and the coldness wasn’t in him to let that spark get snuffed out.
Cut right down to the bone and what he’d done, he’d put his faith in the human heart, and if that was considered a sin then pardon him to hell. So he should have known better. Agreed. But he was the way he was. And even today, after everything he’d suffered, he wasn’t ashamed of it. When Maria took up with that jumped-up bricklayer from Queens, he didn’t even ask for his investment back, just wrote it off to education. But Ivana? This one was bitter. She was the one he’d spotted first, the one he’d always felt closest to. The Alpha dog, the one he couldn’t afford to lose. Because, if he did, he lost part of himself.
Forty-eight hundred bucks, to be exact.
He’d kept it stashed inside the room in Brighton Beach, rolled up in the hollow leg of her metal-frame bed, where the duck hunter with the cast could keep his eye on it. Not that he was superstitious. On the contrary. Flipflop, as the Deacon would say. People thought if you were Rican, every move you made was altars and ashes and drinking chicken’s blood, you couldn’t pick your nose without consulting the Babalawo. Which was the furthest thing from the truth. That stuff meant nothing to him. But casts, those were different. Their power had been laboratory proved, it was a known scientific fact. Any doctor could tell you.
That room had been his snug harbour, it seemed as safe as any bank. Safer, face it, with Patsy O back in town. Any time he made a score, he’d wait his time till Ivana was working or nodding, and pump the roll. Building patiently till the nut hit ten grand, and he could move on Tyger’s Topless.
He’d had a dream. Now the dream had turned into Pedigree Chum. And whose doing was that? No prizes for guessing. Ever since the fat white woman had whipped her eye on him, his pants had been turned upside down.
It was like he had been coldcocked. Or hit by some curse, who knew? Maybe Anna Crow like a stopped clock was right for once, and this Kate Root really was some witch. Any way you cut it, she was bad news. One moment he had been cruising, in total control. The next, everything was mess. The murdered shoes, and that bird trailing him round town. And then, of course, the knives.
The moment Anna mentioned them, he had known them for a sign. Some kind of act with knives, she’d said, and he flashed an image of the fat woman in white tights and a whalebone corset. She looked just like those sepia photographs he’d found that time in the attic when he was in Sixth Grade.
He’d used to look over them on rainy days and days when he went lost. One of the women was strapped flat on her back to a white stallion with flaring nostrils and flying mane. Adah Isaacs Menken, he could still remember her name. She wore tights so close to flesh you had to strain your eyes to see she wasn’t nude. And strain he had. With moth-eaten clothes and broken-down prams and mildewed books all around, dust up his nose and in his eyes, rain driving at the skylight, his kid sisters raising Cain in their bedroom down below, and all these hot bitches, dead a hundred years, with their chunky thighs, wasp waists, and their tits fat like that, balloons, the nipples would put your eye out.
He hadn’t thought of the pictures in years. Adah Isaacs Menken, Mazeppa. And Evelyn Nesbit, Poor Butterfly. And Lillian Russell, the Jersey Lily. But now that it had snuck back in his mind, he couldn’t flush it loose. All the time he was humping Anna, his mind had seen only Kate Root, a middle linebacker with tits, and the knives buzzing round her like bees. Not a pretty sight, you’d say. But it got him so hard, he hurt.
The way he felt then, he had no will of his own left, no mastery. As though he’d been kidnapped somehow. Like he was stolen property.
With a bone that wouldn’t die.
All day afterwards, he’d been forced to move through the city with his hands folded in his lap. He couldn’t think straight, couldn’t catch his breath for the burn. Blue-ball murder, it was; such an agony he’d almost paid a visit to Tia Guadalupe and copped one of those Elegguas he didn’t believe in. Anything at all to ease him, reverse the curse.
After dark he dropped by Chez Stadium, had cocktails with Deacon Landry and the rest. For a heartbeat he was almost tempted to confide in him, that’s how far and deep he was gone. But what was he going to tell them? Dear Abby, there is this tub of lard whitemeat with a bird, fifty if she’s a day, who took one look at me, now all I can picture is her getting knives thrown at her head, and I’m so hard you could hang Old Glory from me, what remedy would you suggest? He fancied not.
So he sat silent, suffering, while the rest of the table swapped toasts and bull, and Mouse Williams told this story about a freak his Uncle Cyrille had sent him from Hotlanta, Ruby Redd her name was. How she’d come into his room in her travelling coat with not a stitch underneath, twirling and pirouetting round the floor like some bright young Bambi at the cotillion ball, saying “What do you think? Am I not beautiful?” And Mouse he’d just stared at her, that graveyard look he had, and said, “Beautiful?” he’d told her, “It ain’t beauty till the blind man smile.”
The blind man smile—for Willie, it was like hitting a switch. One line out of darkness, and suddenly he could see his way clear. To be exorcised from the knives, he needed knives of his own. And he knew just the blind man to provide them.
He left without laughing, drove out to Coney Island. But his dick still gave him no peace. Shooting pains raked his groin, his balls, so evil he couldn’t steer right. No way he was fit to deal with any blind man in this condition. So he took a sidebar to Brighton Beach, down the tunnel beneath the El, past the Russian news-stands and the kvass stalls, and called on Ivana for relief. Only to find she was gone.
As if she’d never been. Her clothes and w
igs and make-up, her drugs and works, even the smell of her was wiped out. And so was Willie’s nest egg.
She hadn’t even troubled to cover her tracks. The metal-frame bed was slashed and trashed, its hollow leg swinging loose like a broken crutch. Inside, where the cash should have been, there was now just a puddle of hot-sour soup.
How could she do this thing? She had covered up the cast, that’s how. Forty-nine duck hunters in rowboats were repeated on the wallpaper, with their walrus moustaches and their rifles across their knees, and each of them now sported an eyepatch, kelly-green, coloured in with Magic Marker.
So this was grief.
Anna Crow had told him a story once about this boy she shot who’d died, of course he hadn’t believed a word, but he didn’t like to show bad manners, so he asked her how she’d felt, and all Anna said was, “Old.” Which had made no sense to him at the time, hardly anything she said ever did, but now the word came back on him, repeated like a Sabrett’s frank. And his dick went limp.
Not just limp, but lost. As though he had been plunged into icy water, or a swimming pool filled with starving piranhas. So shrivelled he was, he could have thrown up for shame. But that was not feasible. Men of Power, when they were cornered, were at their most dangerous. Muhammad Ali had been like that, Richard Nixon as well. And Willie was from the same school. Never mind the blood, just give him one more round, and he’d get equalized.
Time to visit Anna Crow.
When he walked into Sheherazade, she was doing her dumb number in the cage, and there was a new man the colour of jaundice behind the bar. He looked like someone had whacked his eye with a branding-iron, his mama probably, but Willie in his condition could not be bothered to ask.