Slut Lullabies

by Gina Frangello

  In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the Communist official’s wife opened her window and Tomas climbed right in, but the picture windows of Chicago high-rises do not open. In order to reach her, the washer would have to go past the doorman, through the lobby, up the elevator. She would have to mouth the apartment number through the glass—she imagines their hands meeting on opposite sides of the pane, like prisoners and their wives on visitation day.

  Except that here, she is the prisoner, by choice, in a very expensive cage.

  He probably thinks she is a prostitute. He must figure Brent for some kind of exhibitionist homosexual who pays a beautiful woman to come to his apartment and put on a show for the young hotties who do physical labor at his building. What woman, after all, would voluntarily spend the first Friday of every month performing sexual acts in front of a stranger outside the window—sometimes more than one stranger?

  He probably thinks, on the mornings she has been unable to get Brent to stay put and put out (so she masturbates alone with her eyes clamped shut), that her john is lurking somewhere just out of eyesight, surveying his whore’s performance from the other side of the wall.

  Nicky stood on her parents’ front porch waiting for her to come out and say good-bye. It was August then like now. She emerged with cotton stuffed between bare toes, nails glimmering with purple polish. He held out a can of MGD and Annette took a big swig, lipstick leaving a waxy lavender smudge. They stood swallowing hard like small town teens on a first date.

  “They’ll make you cut your hair,” Annette said. His hair was not inordinately long. He stared at her, his expression vague, grasping.

  “You’ll be cool, Netty. You’ve got a job, a diploma—shit, your dad’s right inside that door eating dinner with your ma, not rotting in jail like my old man. You’ve got everything going for you, babe. You don’t need me.”

  She’d scraped her wet toenail against the tiny rocks embedded in the cement of her front steps, ruined all her hard work. “I never said I did.”

  “Yeah, see.” He punched her in the arm. “You’re tough.” Then, like he couldn’t make up his mind: “Don’t be that way.”

  He was right. His control over her life had always been conceptual, not actual. Sweat drizzled the bones of her chest, bare above an old terrycloth tube top she’d had since eighth grade. He was right. No point in even bringing up the three abortions she’d had over the past seven years at his counsel, or the fact that only the first guy to knock her up even merited a punch, while the other two were in his inner circle, entitled to plant their seed even if they did not want to raise it. No point in asking why he’d never shed any tears for her dead children, his thick blood, even when Channel 7 panned in for a close-up of his dramatically rolling tear over the probably-brain-damaged product of junkie parents. Annette’s nose membranes were so abused they both knew hers would have been brain damaged, too.

  He leaned in to kiss her cheek, some kid sister too young to care that he was heading off to college. She turned abruptly so he got her lips instead. He jerked back and she glowed, triumphant, but then his hand reached out just as quick, so fast she feared he might belt her. Instead his fingers grazed lightly, almost lazily over her collarbones, downward, wiping away perspiration. She jumped, bumped her hip against the door frame. He grinned, and all at once it was a smile of everything, a smile of I could’ve had you if I wanted to, a smile of See, I did the right thing there, too. She sensed he wanted her to be grateful somehow, for leaving her intact. She felt abject, insignificant, naked. Nothing like gratitude.

  But he was backing down the stairs, hands spread between a wave, an apology, an offering. Her lips parted to speak: nothing else. His eyes were over her already, busy doing his bad-boy-poet thing, dreaming of the stars.

  This is how a hero is fashioned: like everyone else who knew him, the Army was impressed by Nicky. With the earnestness of a new convert, he set about devouring every education they could offer. In the span of four year’s time, he finagled not only a GED, but a BA in computer science, then hurled with all his might toward the Peace Corps. To Ghana, where fellow aid workers muttered how he’d “gone native”—that he failed to exhibit the proper alarm when flies congregated on an open sore. He wrote these things in letters at first; he wanted to impress her, maybe. He preached of his determination to drag his corner of the third world into a technological age that, here in Chicago, still baffled Annette. Words like archaic rolled off his pen. He learned to see art in the dusty dirt powdering a young African girl’s night-black skin. He forgot the audience of his letters home, then forgot to write letters home altogether. He was home.

  “Are you leaving early this morning?” she asks Brent when he slings his suit jacket over his arm: another man with a mission.

  “Early for what?” he asks. “I was supposed to be at the office five minutes ago.”

  She has no answer. She has long suspected he is secretly aware of her games with the window washer—that he allows himself to be detained in order to play along. But no, Brent is a shy man really. He once told her a story about going to a nude beach with friends and pleading with his wife not to take her suit off so that he would not be the only one who refused to undress. His wife laughed at him and flung her bikini off. Annette has seen photos of her (clothed) and she is overweight, very Tipper Gore. Brent has a nice body, swimmer’s shoulders and no spare tire to speak of. The story surprised her—made her wonder for the first time if his wife might have a lover, too. If she might not consider Brent any great loss.

  She re-dresses in the lingerie she wore last night, it having spent only five minutes on her body before Brent peeled it off. Patiently, she reclines on the leather sofa—but it is only 8:15 and she will have a long wait. She stands and paces the room, restless in luxurious captivity, touching everything she passes, leaving her scent. Brent’s bookshelves bear titles too divergent to reflect the mind of a man she has never seen reading anything but the Wall Street Journal: from self-help for golfers to volumes on the Ming Dynasty to Stephen King to Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. Although the city apartment is mostly his, perhaps some of these belong to his nudist wife. That she is utterly uncertain which—cannot differentiate her lover’s taste from that of a woman she has never met—saddens her only vaguely. Among the closely packed book spines, she recognizes the name of the same angry Czech who wrote The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Has this always been here? It is a short story collection: Laughable Loves. A less imposing title, surely. She extracts it carefully, memorizing the books on either side, brings it back to the couch.

  Annette’s course without Nicky was a smooth ascent among married men. From hostessing at ristoranti run by whichever of Nicky’s friends she was currently banging, to affairs with coke-loving options traders who frequented these establishments, and finally to the fortysomething head of a prestigious, privately-owned trading firm. Once she met Brent, being a “restaurant girl” didn’t fit anymore—didn’t leave her evenings free enough to accommodate a busy lover, made her too visible, exposed her to the eyes of too many men. Her breakfast of coke, snacks of speed, and bedtime milk-and-cookies of Flexiril compromised her looks, her ability to say the right thing at all times, so she quit cold: her own choice. She learned never to wear eyeliner on the inside of her lower eyelid—to wear just enough makeup to look like she doesn’t need makeup. To wear very high heels, but not too-tight clothes. She keeps her nails short and square.

  Yet here she is. She cannot understand The Unbearable Lightness of Being. She does not even have a job. Her apartment is a shithole because she spends all her money on the maintenance of beauty, and Brent will help—as they all have—but not so much that she might feel she has enough and want to leave. Not so much that someone better might mistake her for being in his league. Her haircut is more flattering now; her life has been prolonged by getting off drugs; a rendezvous in Paris with a lover who speaks French beats those old weekends in Vegas hands down—obviously. Annette knows t
hat Nicky saved his own life when he saved a stranger from a man just like him.

  But what is that woman doing now, with her miscarried pregnancy and husband in prison? Is she in Ghana, too? Or is she letting some other jag-off pistol-whip her, hoping he gets it right this time without some freak playing Superman barging in?

  Why couldn’t Nicky have just let that stupid woman die?

  This Doctor Havel, who stars in two stories, might as well be Tomas. The plots are different, but the same things happen here, really. It’s simple: Big-Brotherish political backdrops, women reluctantly experiencing sexual pleasure divorced from love, succumbing to freedom. Annette is reminded of Tomas’s wife, Teresa, and her adulterous jaunt with the architect who may or may not be a Communist spy. Kundera’s women are so often devastated that bodies have wills of their own—Annette feels for them even though the only man she has ever loved is the one she never fucked. Still, she recognizes herself here—a roving shame turned into language—and if she were forced to read a million books (imagine reading a million books!) and told none of the authors, she would know these words as Kundera’s. The restrained violence of his jaw and his personal demons are smeared all over the pages. This time, she finds herself scanning stories almost hoping to find musical bars transposed onto the page, obscure references to composers and philosophers of whom she’s never heard—she longs to greet her own confusion like running into an old friend after many years and recognizing his befuddling traits and viewpoints as familiar and comforting. Rage boils, obliterating her desire to reach into the pages and grab Kundera’s hand—if this writer who makes his living adopting masks cannot hide his own soul behind the words, then how then can Nicky, who had scarcely ever written more than his name before he left her? Did even the fingerprints on his Army gun become different than on the one he carried in Chicago? How can the boy she loved shield and remake his identity so completely as to shut her out?

  Knocking, rap rap rap. Where is it coming from? Annette jerks, bolts upright from where she has been curled over her book, whips her neck around to survey the room. Then she sees him: the Mexican window washer thumping Brent’s window with his wiper—has he already tried his own stocky hand and found the thick glass muffled all sound? She looks up and meets his eyes square on. He smirks at her expectantly, raises his eyebrows in question: Where’s the show?

  She lowers her head again, searches for words on the page, a soul to recognize.

  But the noise continues. Staccato, persistent, so she stands. Outside the window, the boy grabs his crotch, motions down—she thinks at first he’s suggesting she grab her crotch, too—but no, he is pointing at the ground. Gestures his watch, holds up all five fingers spread wide and mouths five since her track record of behavior surely necessitates stupidity. Her feet move.

  It takes only moments to dress and make her way through the lobby to the wall of hot wet air waiting outside. Once out in the open, she nearly scurries to hail a cab instead, then stops, marches to the side of the building where she has seen trucks pull up—where workmen sometimes congregate. In the distance, that monstrous Ferris wheel watches over the city from Navy Pier, the pier itself remade from merely the ship’s port of her childhood into a tourists’ amusement park full of bells, whistles, and glitz. Annette’s legs plant strong on the pavement, waiting, her blood simmering a witches’ brew of shame and hope.

  Then he is there. Walking with a cluster of six other men: the men who share his days, mock his frailties. Men he may someday surprise by saving a woman he does not know from a danger that does not quite have a name. He walks as though one leg is slightly shorter than the other; his jeans are too big. His hair, dark brown, looks dusty, and Annette thinks: I could find poetry here, too. I could see like Nicky sees. They approach, so close she can almost feel the steam of their cluster. They are a tangle of accents, but everyone is speaking English. Relief floods her—he will understand. Then terror. Understand what? Why is she here? He moves on, cloistered in his herd of men.

  Her secret Tomas has passed. She stands, decked out in her filmy Gucci dress, hair slicked back tight from her face and suddenly pinching her scalp. Among the men he was with, two others have seen her naked. She turns to leave.

  Their bodies collide—Annette stumbles. Inches from her body, spewing apologetic murmurs for his clumsiness, is, finally, the Mexican. He looks at her and, like a character in a soap opera or Shakespeare, blinks hard as though she is unrecognizable to him under the disguise of her expensive clothing. Where is his crotch grabbing now?

  “You’re awfully shy,” she drawls. She wants to scare him, to be a scary, inappropriate woman; she does not know why. “For somebody who’s seen me give my boyfriend head in his dining room.”

  “Shi-it,” the boy drawls, laughing. Then: “At first I thought you couldn’t see us, but I hear you do that all the time, huh? Put on a show for Canji. Hey, I would, too, if I were fine like you—you look pretty good even in them clothes. We see some weird-ass shit in this line of work, lemme tell you, but ain’t half of it fine like you—”

  “Canji—is that the other guy?” she bursts. “Good-looking, maybe Eastern European—”

  “Damn straight, mama, he goes for your show every time. Personally, I think a person ought to share, but the boss man heard about you and he don’t like no trouble. Guess he wants to keep you from wolves like the rest of us.” He howls: “Ahhoouu!”

  “Does he?” Sweat stains must be visible. Now that is what the rich really should invent: clothing that under no circumstances shows moisture—that lets you truly look like a different breed. “So Canji’s supposed to protect me, huh?”

  “Naw, man.” The boy cannot stop laughing—Annette is not sure whether she makes him nervous, or if he is simply giddy at his good fortune to be talking to the building’s stripper right out in broad daylight. Sing-song: “It ain’t like that—he-be-likin’-the-boys. He’d rather be watching, like, Broadway, eh? It’s an offense, for real, I’m telling you. I didn’t sign on for this kind of work thinking I’d have to be up on a ledge alone with a faggot. I’m scared for my life, if you know what I mean!”

  Annette’s mouth has gone dry. “You’re lying,” she tries. “You’re telling me he’s gay because you know I like him.”

  “Sheee-eet! Naw, I would not a-guessed that one, no ma’am. I ain’t shitting you, I swear on mi abuela’s soul, no bull. You can ask anyone. You want me to call one of the guys right now? Hey, I can do it, I got my cell—”

  “That won’t be necessary.” Annette’s hand flutters to the gap in her suit jacket; the flesh stretched across her breastbones suddenly feels indecent. “I’ve got to go.”

  “Hey, naw, don’t leave!” His voice, so loud—can the others hear him?—chases her through the tunnel of her own humiliation, her heels clicking on hot concrete. The air itself seems far away. She is heading the wrong way to best hail a cab.

  “I’m no faggot!” the boy calls. “We don’t got no other faggots on our crew. If you’re lookin’ for a date, you look me up. My name’s Angel, remember, like I-will-be-your-Angel-of-Love. Uh-huh, girl, I’ll give you a real man, you come asking for me . . .”

  Annette gathers the suit jacket tighter together until it skims her throat. Her heart, thrashing so loud in her ears, pounds like heavy running on the ground behind her—like the whole crew in hot pursuit. When she looks, though—once, twice—there is no one. She can no longer hear the boy’s voice, taunting. Inviting. She stands in the middle of Olive Park, in the shade of trees, the deceptive bliss of green sanctuary amid urban sprawl, body trembling. Is Canji really gay? And if it were a lie, then what? Did she expect him to arrive at her door with flowers, open the passenger’s door of his battered car, kiss her closed-mouthed at the drive-in and ask her father for her hand? What made her think she could go backward? What, exactly, made her think it would be less stifling this time around than when she and Nicky were so hot to court death just to get out?

  A man can join the army. A ma
n can save one woman and make up for the trail of female bodies strewn behind him, just like that. Presto change-o, instant hero, the world at his feet.

  A woman can clamp her legs shut tight, declare No more, and watch herself become even more invisible—give up what little of the world she has.

  Annette gropes through her Louis Vuitton tote for a tissue; her fingers brush her Tiffany’s keychain. Her mail key, Brent’s key, the key to an apartment she despises. Then: the slightly ragged paperback cover of Laughable Loves. She didn’t even realize, in her haste, that she’d taken it. Her fingers plunge deep inside the pages like into a bucket of ice or a Bible: some chilling relief. The sun scorches, a mere sliver of the heat of Ghana, this thin book under her hand a slim substitution for the redemption Nicky found under the African sky. There had to be a way he could have taken her with, like he planned when he was going to be a wise guy and shoot them to the moon. She was good enough to ruin, not good enough to save. But no, Nicky hadn’t ruined her fully either—he’d made sure she knew that, knew it was his choice. A hero would have let her believe in her own decency, her own importance—would have allowed her one small moment of triumph on that porch. OK, maybe she was merely beautiful, not entitled to transcendence, even in the anonymity of a movie theater, the pages of a book. But what more right had Nicky to the transformational, sun-parched, ugly beauty of this wide world than she?