High Cotton: A Novel

by Darryl Pinckney

  Through my glass I saw Bargetta stride toward me. I could not look at her without thinking of a leopard cruising in a diamond collar or a poster by Zig. We stood cheek to cheek in the silver honky-tonk light several minutes before speaking. Bargetta was, as she liked to say, dressed to the nines: black top, black miniskirt that caught the beams of passing headlights, black fishnet stockings, black flat shoes, a black rayon scarf that wound its way around her head and rediscovered itself at her waist, and the black leather jacket she wore when she stood in need of luck.

  “You look serious, preacher man, but kill the shoes,” Bargetta said. “He’s at another party, in another part of the country.” I hadn’t asked about Pierre-Yves. Love me, love my three-legged dog. Her mascara was thicker than it had been Stateside. She said what I smelled was the eucalyptus she put on her temples to cure headaches. Across the street, in front of the dim Hôtel d’Angleterre, perched on little scooters, pink-haired boys and girls with severe buzz cuts passed a bottle and “chased the dragon”—snorted lines of brown heroin. “My mother told me to be careful because she heard there were a lot of drugs and blacks in Paris,” Bargetta said.

  All that night I followed Bargetta through the dizzy streets. Though the weight of the bag on my back made me cry, I had long ago learned to go along with Bargetta’s program without question. Her talent for sussing out the hideaway where, for instance, Keith Richards might be sucking on a Guinness made her a coveted companion. We rolled from café to café, moved whenever a song on the jukebox did not meet with Bargetta’s approval. “I’d rather shoot myself than sit through that shit.”

  Holland seemed far away, but in between stops, on the streets, Bargetta was pensive and remembered herself as guide with one-liners such as “Quasimodo hung out here.” If I didn’t know that she slept all day I would have thought her stamina miraculous. In Bargetta’s code it was okay to throw up in a club—so long as it wasn’t her—but it was definitely uncool to be seen taking a sudden dip with the sandman in public. She once said that her greatest fear of Manhattan was that she might fall asleep in a taxi and wake up in another girl’s clothes.

  For the first time since I’d known her, Bargetta seemed to be stalling, to be waiting for an idea. She hoisted herself up and directed us toward the Champs-Elysées. I thought we were going to a party until Bargetta put a finger to her lips. I crept behind her up several flights of polished stairs. She smuggled me into an apartment, around the proper mixture of squeaks and moans, and into a pantry where there was a mat among mops and boxes.

  “Happy birthday,” Bargetta said.

  “You remembered.”

  It was pitch-dark in the closet when Bargetta shook me awake. She led me by the hand, Harriet Tubman taking a runaway to free territory. I heard snores and the mutter of someone in the throes of a terrible dream. A pale blue rose behind the blur of trees. We walked in a trance up the yellow-and-cream streets. At a café near the river a youth whose shirtsleeves smelled of smoke brought warm red beers.

  Bargetta said we had been in the apartment of a Brit from the record company who was letting her stay for a while, but the Brit was on simmer, rising to a boil about the number of people crashing on her floors and the rings left in the swank bath. One more guest, Bargetta feared, would send the poor girl over the top. Bargetta apologized for getting me up, but she wanted to escape before the woman started her body count. We watched the barges on the Seine. “A girl can end up with nothing if she knows how to work it right.”

  “If you come from a close family, you tend to feel lost without them,” Bargetta said. “So what’s my excuse?” We were on our way back to the apartment, to pretend I had just dropped by, and then to test the possibilities of taking a nap. Bargetta talked more to the stone dressing over the streets than to me. “I used to feel sorry for him, but he’s just another rich kid in disguise. I think he should paint on velvet, get in touch with his real level.”

  I remembered Pierre-Yves from one of his heavy New York visits. He had inherited his mother’s devious looks and one of his father’s apartments. They were pieds-noirs, and had his father been alive Bargetta probably would not have moved in. A woman was only as good as the man she lay under, but what Bargetta liked about Pierre-Yves was that he had gone to a slick school like Saint Martin de Pontoise and forever afterward was unable to get himself together. “The cold thing about it is that I spent all this time building him up, and the next thing I knew he believed me.”

  Pierre- Yves got out of taking Bargetta to the country by saying that he hadn’t been able to work, implying that she was the cause. His holiday coincided with the disappearance of a girl who hung around the apartment too much for Bargetta’s taste. “You know, one of those girls in ankle socks who’s into Zen and sleep therapy and macro diets. I warned her not to work me, but she kept coming over with all that rice.”

  A sinner needs a witness or else something is missing. Pierre-Yves flaunted Bargetta in front of his mother. “It killed her to have me to dinner. She watched me like crowds do when somebody’s out on a ledge, just waiting for me to pick up the wrong fork.” His mother, that amanita, decided to surprise him and have his apartment redone while he was away. Bargetta was in the shower when she brought over the crew. To finish off what could not be defended, she refrained from inviting Bargetta to stay with her.

  Bargetta said that when a man got analytical it meant trouble. “I should have known after our first night. I’d set him up. Made him think he was one of nature’s rapists. And me thinking the cracks in his ceiling were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I slept with his glasses before that. I stole them. I should have stopped there.”

  Bargetta had emptied the contents of a bag on the mat—shades, tortoiseshell combs, Borghese lip gloss, Chloe, Motrin, Efferalgan, valerian root, Aspro effervescent, Xanax downs, Zo-max ups, Halcion sleeping pills, Coedetheline Houde, dagger letter opener, joint, address book, and a quantity of black cotton headgear—when screams and household articles flew by the crack in the pantry door. All explanations end at some point. The Brit had snapped. Her Carr’s biscuits and hearts of palm had vanished, as had the caviar and the tin of cassis stashed behind the floor wax. She found two couples on her futon, one of which she didn’t even know. “The domino theory of eviction,” Bargetta said, and looked wistfully up through the banister. “She has that ten little Indians look in her eyes.”

  Along boulevard St. Michel, near Cluny, guys with guitars—in 1980—lined the curbs. I saw some flower children who rivaled the holdouts of Amsterdam, and Bargetta grabbed me. A fight had broken out in McDonald’s, an old-fashioned rumble complete with everything not bolted to the floor going upside down. People ran out and then ran back to watch. We heard metal twisting loose and scattered as the huge window of the restaurant jumped down from its hinges to challenge the mob. It shattered into a thousand pieces, glimmered for an instant, like a summer swarm of mayflies, and then crashed to the pavement.

  Bargetta took off when she heard les flics. She was fast in her kid slippers, was, in fact, yards ahead of me. I stopped and watched her race on, her lucky black leather jacket aloft in her fist.

  “Am I having a good time?”

  “The baddest.”

  She said the movements of street sweepers in the Gare du Nord had the beauty of survivors, and Barbès, the African-Arab quarter north of the peep shows, was the headquarters of those determined to hang in there. Migrant widows waited near the equator for paychecks as the sources of their mail, black and brown men, distressed the streets around us.

  We entered a couscous den and extinguished conversation. Goat and the music of Nass el Ghiwan cooked behind a moldy partition. Molecules heated up, closed in, and Bargetta breathed through her mock-debutante smile. “One thing about money, if you have it you can tell certain people where to go.” Pierre-Yves had taken Bargetta—at gun point, but he took her—to the Grand Vefour. She phoned ahead to make sure the kitchen knew a vegetarian was on his way. The waiter pr
esented the most beautiful omelette the world had ever seen. “I do not eat eggs,” Pierre-Yves said. She liked losers.

  I was no help, dragging our bags around town, riding with used or no tickets, feeling more freakish and fifth-wheelish than usual while Bargetta fended off gypsy kids and made change for the phone booth. She distributed cigarettes like the Red Cross on the steps of Sacré-Coeur. We missed the Mass for St. Rose of Lima, who, though prudent, had failed to be martyred and was therefore only second-string. Bargetta had no need of intermediaries, being on the direct-dialing system with the Lord. “Now somebody up there slap me. Hard.”

  A hotel was our last resort. We ended up on the rue des Trois-Freres, in the rump of an ash-colored dwelling with a rancid charcuterie downstairs. The torn and divided rooms that reeked of sulphur and the carpet of vintage kitty litter belonged to Gilles, a boy Bargetta knew in Memphis when his absenteeism got his mother kicked out of Jack ‘n’ Jill. “Did I say friends, ha, are my aces high?” He visited Bargetta frequently in New York, selecting the longest butts from the hubcap she used as an ashtray, and it annoyed me how everyone said what a handsome couple they made. Not only was he the first black at Harvard to be asked to join the Fly Club, he was the first to turn them down. I offered myself the dubious consolation that Gilles never wanted me around because I could read his mind. I knew that he liked to be the only “shine” in the room and resented the presence of other black men.

  When I was in the fourth grade, a new boy in class became the most popular. He had wavy hair, “good hair,” it was called, and wasn’t dumb. He wore black bow ties, white shirts, and red mohair sweaters. The girls sang “Do-wa-do-wa-do-wa-diddy, talk about the boy from New York City,” and ooed when he got up on Savings Bond day, to buy fifty stamps instead of the decent twelve. I bullied my mother until she let me dress like him. Then we moved and I didn’t need him anymore. There were real whites at my new school. When happiness comes it brings less joy than we expected, Cavafy said.

  It was pretentious for someone whose real name was Luther to call himself Gilles. I said that I didn’t believe his stories about Fez and St. Bart’s, about the grams he had consumed in a producer’s town house, about his mother, a sex therapist, being overly married, four or five times. I didn’t even believe he went to a shrink. I couldn’t touch his will to cool. Bargetta said I had nothing to worry about because Gilles went out only with white boys.

  We didn’t shake hands. Mine was cramped from the straps of Bargetta’s bags. I was being unfriendly, Bargetta’s glare said. After all, he was giving shelter to strays. “You look as though the world is too much with you,” Gilles said. He was supposed to be away. Bargetta had called him on a hunch. He didn’t say where he’d been or why he’d come back, but a bruise was waking up under his right eye. We’d interrupted him in the middle of a brick of mujahedin hash. He was busy cutting out pictures of young workers with mustaches barricaded inside the Lenin shipyards.

  “If Cheetah could talk she’d tell my story,” Bargetta said, and brandished a Marlboro. “I’m afraid of going cold turkey.”

  “I hear you, Sister Girlfriend,” Gilles said. “My heart resembles an Etruscan vase. Broken and mended, broken and mended.”

  There were shutters that looked out on other Montmartre shutters, empty flower pots, bedbugs, and fleas, but Gilles didn’t care, he was just passing through. He made enough money as a model in Milan to do nothing for months. Passive, with airbrushed magazine-cover looks, Gilles was, I had to admit, completely without vanity. He had the melancholy that never goes away, of someone who has lost a parent at an early age.

  Gilles got by the door at the Safari, cadged Veuve Cliquot at the Privilege, avoided the tab at Le Drug Store, and another at the Bains-Douches. When he was having fun, he reminded me of guys in New York who picked fights with the Hell’s Angels after having silicone implanted in their cheekbones and called themselves neo-romantics.

  “Cut the herbivore loose. Forget him,” Gilles said.

  “I can’t. Your phone?” Gilles shrugged. Bargetta dialed her mother’s number in Memphis. “Maybe I should let her know my new number. No, I should wait until I need serious money. Mad money.” Bargetta dropped the receiver. “I’ll skip town. I’ll just book. I was once on Corfu in a heat wave. On cobblestones. It was like stepping into a pizza oven. I had to go every day to the fortress where the national guard took their swim breaks. I had errands. There was this policeman named Lazarus. He didn’t shower after the beach. He was salty. He would come to the hotel on official business and interrogate mercilessly. Am I horrible? Do I deserve to die? I can’t remember the Greek word for it. But that photograph in his wallet wasn’t his wife. That’s where we should go. You would be worshipped as a god. They would carry you through the streets.”

  Bargetta said Pierre-Yves was a crucial investment. She said she was tired of being alone, tired of the loneliness that was like a mortgage she could not kill off. I couldn’t think of a time when Bargetta had ever been by herself, but she insisted that Pierre-Yves was her last stop. “If things don’t work out, I can always sell my lingerie and retire. I can take up where Miss Beane left off, right?”

  “She had so much fun it killed her,” Gilles said.

  Bargetta was comparing herself to the mascot of Manhattan, Dee Dee Beane. It was one of their big themes and I’d often spent lunches picking at my plate while they went over and over poor Miss Beane’s career.

  “Self-destructive people can make their point only if they can take a few people with them,” Gilles said.

  Bargetta said it was not a good sign that she had dreamed about her three nights running. Dee Dee Beane was, for Bargetta, the outer limits. They had pretended to great indifference to each other when they both did a short stint at the same black woman’s fashion magazine in New York. Miss Beane, as Bargetta called her, to draw attention to the unmarried state of the older black woman, got the boot when she tried to put Andy Warhol in blackface on the magazine’s cover.

  Miss Beane intrigued Bargetta because she was beyond disillusionment. “There she was, thinking she could inhabit her skin like a litter, raised above the mob, and she rode herself out of town on a rail.” Bargetta heard that Miss Beane had been in love, but—who would not sleep with the brave—the heir’s family hired detectives who broke up the wedding. They paid Miss Beane to take a hike. She came back when the money ran out and they threatened her. Bargetta had every sympathy for the wound that never heals.

  Miss Beane’s history frightened Bargetta more than her temperament. Back when no one knew anything, Miss Beane let people think she was the first black ever to have gone to Radcliffe. Miss Beane had a first-rate, logical mind, Bargetta said, which she wasted in dissecting the faults of others. She could tear people asunder. “You had to be a man to think she was amusing,” Bargetta said. “But I had dates; she had walkers.”

  Miss Beane had no respect for anyone, except for an art history professor or two back at Harvard. Nevertheless, she was cared for and watched over by the Class of ’59, who remembered her as a brilliant amanuensis, a born schoolmarm. She typed many papers for others and improved them. But her standards were so high and what white people thought of as her self-esteem was so great that she inevitably fought with everyone. She had burned her way through many careers, from the Fogg to being a bouncer at Max’s Kansas City.

  Scorn was Miss Beane’s empire, but she ruled over a territory depopulated by drunken scenes. Bargetta said that Miss Beane took a neutron bomb or Khmer Rouge attitude toward life in the city: empty it out, leave the buildings standing, and start over. She purged everyone she had ever known and threw away every chance she had ever had. She refused to acknowledge her own sister on the street. When she was mugged by two black men, she was elated, as if her part of a cruel bargain had been canceled.

  “One night she noticed that I wasn’t white,” Gilles said. “She decided that I was socially undesirable. She hated black people. Black people were scum. She called me a t
wo-bit whore. I got up, crossed the room, slapped her, and said ‘Sorry, Sister,’ and sat back down. What could she do? She ordered another drink. Hard stuff. None of this fine-wine business for her.”

  But Bargetta was attracted to her antisocial stance. A vituperative, vitriolic, Indian-looking black woman small enough to fit into snappy children’s clothes, Miss Beane drove parties into the kitchen and when she walked into the kitchen people escaped back into the living room. At one party in the Village the host stumbled onto the terrace where Miss Beane sat alone and fell over the railing into his garden. “He left,” Miss Beane was said to have answered when his guests finally missed him.

  Every night with her, Gilles said, ended with her passing out and falling off a chair. She liked being in the swing of things so much that she became a vehement example of that celebrant of metropolitan life since Juvenal—the fag hag. She called herself “the spade of queens.” The lofts, town houses, and Southampton decks Miss Beane haunted she called the Fruit Stands. Gilles said that her sackcloth was that she tried to seduce young men who had no interest in her. The photographers, painters, museum workers, architects, lawyers, and parasites with whom she fell in love were the Forbidden Fruit and she was the Fruit Fly. She drew the line at airline stewards. She never had a crush on an airline steward, much like a drug addict who doesn’t consider himself a junkie because he doesn’t touch needles.

  “There was a white faggot trapped inside her black woman’s body,” Gilles said. “She hung in all the sawdust bars. She felt she had been cheated. She envied the freedom.”

  “The farther you are from something,” Bargetta said, “the more wonderful it seems. You’re walking down a street in a foreign country and spot one light in a dark house and wish you could have that life. But if the window were yours you’d be plotting to break out of it.”