MINNA
I was very small and the room was very quiet for he had stopped breathing, my Papa, and then the room was full of my mother’s sobbing, but what I noticed most was the smell of cigar smoke, the room was hazy with smoke, he’d had a last smoke before dying, he’d drawn into himself the smoke that I later understood helped kill him and then he’d breathed it back into the room and it hung in the air all about me, the smoke from his ravaged lungs hung all around and I knew he’d left me, I knew Papa had left me, and Ignaz my betrothed came home from Oxford and he lay in his room coughing and bleeding from the lungs and I stood in the doorway and he waved me away, perhaps for my sake, and he coughed and coughed again and then he left me also, and even when he is naked, Sigmund smells like cigars and he coughs a nasty rattling cough, but I know how I have done this, I know why I can tolerate loving him: because when he leaves, it won’t be me he’s leaving, it’ll just be my sister
LIZZIE ANDREW BORDEN
44, murderer, acquitted in 1892
NANCE O’NEIL
30, actress
in O’Neil’s home, Brindley Farm, Tyngsboro, Massachusetts, 1904
LIZZIE
her hands the hands of Lady Macbeth that first time I saw her at the Colonial in Boston, she stands in a bright spot of light, her crimson hands flaring delicately before her, her eyes aflame at the only man in her world because he is a coward, and her vast, trilling voice fills me A little water clears us of this deed and I stand for a long while before him as he sleeps in the sitting room on the mohair sofa in his morning coat, his feet on the floor, and he is snoring, this man whose name I bear, whose touch I bear, my Papa, and the stepmother is finished already, upstairs, and the short-handled ax is light in my hand and I wait upon myself to decide: he gave away our farm in Swansea to the dead cow upstairs and he gave away the house on Fourth Street to her sister, and though to do all that would never have occurred to him on his own, he could not resist, he is a coward, and now Lady Macbeth pulls me close: a little of her wetness clears me of this deed
NANCE
from a poisonous heaven I want nothing to do with or from a hell in what may secretly be a just universe, look upon your daughter now, Father, look upon my nakedness and Lizzie Borden’s and pound your chest in shame as you did with me trapped in the middle of a packed pew where you placed me so you could cry out my evil to heaven and the congregation She goes off to a life in the theater and thereafter to an eternity in hell and I tried once more with you, my bag was packed and I was looking beautiful—I could see myself in the foyer mirror and I trembled at myself and wanted you to tremble too—and you cried Get thee behind me but Lizzie would know what to do with you, Father, she would know: your hands are as hard as ax heads, Lizzie, your hands are as hot as blood, your hands have spots upon them, sweet Lizzie, just rub them clean on me
JAMES JOYCE
24, writer
NORA BARNACLE
22, his wife
in their apartment on the Via Giovanni Boccaccio, Trieste, May 23, 1906
JAMES
in the midst she’s suddenly ghosteyed and boyfingered and she’s gone away from me: who’s that knocking at my door? a semen-sappy boy soprano singing It’s only me from over the sea, I’m Barnacle’s Mike the sailor and in he comes from his grave and he’s ready to rollick her all over and he’s barely had a chance to elbow Jim to the side in his own bed when I am moved to cry Who the lungbloody hell is knocking up my door this time? to which, in gas-worky tenor, comes It’s only me from over the sea, I’m Barnacle’s Mike the sailor and sailor Mike the First, otherwise known as her girlhoodlove Saint Michael the Typhoided, having horned in, now horns out, and we slide away together side-by-hornied-side and press against the wall and sailor Mike the Second, otherwise known as her girlhoodlove Saint Michael the Consumptive, enters in from his grave and he sits beside us and we are trinitized before the flail of her and I implore them both to neither Nora burrower nor a Nora bender be, but I am the Madeflesh here and I’ve got God and the Holy Ghost on either side of me and how do I ever find frigging peace without having to die first
NORA
I can hear his voice clear as can be and he’s singing and it’s August hot all around and it’s dark but I am sitting still in my seat at the Antient Concert Rooms and he’s in the bright lights onstage and John McCormack the Great is upcoming to sing but he sings first, my Jim, and it’s the Croppy Boy confessing to a priest that he’s going to fight for Ireland and the priest is a yeoman captain in disguise who jails him and murders him and I listen and I play the part of the croppy boy though it’s me in my girl body and it’s Jim that’s hiding in priest’s clothes and not knowing it’s him I confess my lust for him since I’m after slipping my hands down his trousers when early we went walking and Jimmy was getting all jammy in my fingers and he sings so sweet so much sweeter than anyone could possibly sing even John McCormack and I’m still confessing to Father James and then he throws off his vestments and he jimmies me open and I’m trying to sit still in my seat his voice is so sweet and in my head he jims me full to bursting and though the concert room is deep summer hot my body shivers cold with joy as if there was snow falling all around
PABLO PICASSO
24, artist
FERNANDE OLIVIER
25, model
on the forest floor on the slopes of Pedraforca in Catalonia, Spain, July 1906
PABLO
the chase through the trees her naked body flashing in sunlight her skin Yellow Ochre lightened only a little, a stand of downy oaks their foreground barks Cobalt Black cut and cut by Lead White, the trunks going darker as they recede into the shadows all around, the shadows black from Ultramarine and Rose Madder and a little Viridian to take out the purple, a black that has not forgotten the sunlight but where the Iberian wolves can live, and she is laughing and I catch her up and we fall and she rolls away, her body growing dark from the forest floor and my palette turns simple: it is the carbon black of charred bones of a cave-mouth fire and the flat yellows and browns and reds of the earth itself mixed with animal fat and I paint her on rock like an ancient beast with a thin stroke of black going into her to bring her down and there is a rushing in me and my hands are restless my hands are ravenous they move and with the fire-blackened stump of a wood shard I bring a wolf from the forest and it rages into her and rips her body apart beneath me and I paint in her blood, heavy and hard, impasto layer on layer, the Alizarin Crimson pure, my brush slashing like the teeth of the beast
FERNANDE
in the first moments I was wet through with an August rain and he blocked my way into the Bateau-Lavoir though it seemed I could just rush over him he was such a small thing and he had a wet kitten tucked into the crook of his arm and I was living where I was living having escaped the fists of a father and a shop-clerk husband and then a sculptor and yet I could be alone in this strange warren of artists and I could be naked with them and they would be across the room and I could just sit and hold very still and this was a small obstacle, this man, until the few moments after the first moments when I looked into his eyes and no layer-after-layer of Cobalt Black could put the darkness of his eyes on canvas and yet—and yet—he held up this kitten mewing in his hands and he said in terrible French that he was its savior and I knew he was and I began to purr
GERTRUDE STEIN
36, writer
ALICE B. TOKLAS
33, her companion
in their apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus, Paris, 1910
GERTRUDE
I touch her black wisp of a mustache the bottom edge of her black mustache just above her lip, certainly it is her mustache certainly it is hers the black mustache is hers certainly I touch her wisp of a mustache certainly with my fingertip along her lip certainly it is her lip certainly I touch above her lip I draw my fingertip along her black mustache above her lip I draw with my fingertip along her mustache from left mustache to middle indent along her mustache to right mustache and to middl
e indent and to left I draw my fingertip along her black wisp of a mustache: a melody, a shadow, an antimacassar, a white stain is wet weather is wet whether or not my fingertip draws a line that my fingertip draws along her mustache: this is this, this is certainly this mustache: her mustache is her mustache is her mustache
ALICE
only done a few minutes ago typing upon her large novel on the big black Smith Premier in the atelier from the sheets of foolscap she wrote in the night that fall beside the desk as I type like leaves from a white tree and my fingers are slim and quick and they can do this thing for her whose hands are heavy with man muscle and whose fingers are plump and not suited to this work and for her also I sat with Madame Matisse this morning and spoke of the weather and the fashions and the vegetables while the husband spoke of genius with my Lovey in another room and I am happy to do this for her whenever a genius shows up with his woman, Madame Braque and Madame Gris and Picasso’s Fernande and all the rest, and in the other room my Lovey is the plumpest manmuscled genius of any of them and when she touches me she is more man than woman the most man of any woman the most woman the most womanman the most woman who is a man who is a woman and she is both and both is she and both is so much better
VICTOR DE SATODE PEÑASCO Y CASTELLANA
18, of independent means from Madrid
MARIA JOSEFA PEREDEZE SOTO Y VALLEJO PEÑASCO Y CASTELLANA
17, his newly wed wife
in their first-class cabin, C-65, on the RMS Titanic, near midnight, April 14, 1912
VICTOR
Señor John Jacob Astor smiled at me, he came into the first-class dining saloon from the private party in the à la carte restaurant and it was time for cigars and he was speaking to an older man whose name I did not know and then he looked across at me and then at my wife and then back to me and he smiled, one gentleman to another, one man to another, the two men with the most beautiful wives on the ship—his as young as mine, which made the smile even better, wiping away the years between us, we were simply two men who know what this sweetness is—and tomorrow I will stay for the cigars and I will approach him and we will smile and we will smoke a Fernández Garcia together, man to man, but tonight it is not man to man, I am married to the most beautiful woman on this great ship and I carried her to the room so she would know she is mine forever as her father promised, and now we are together and I feel her tremble at my touch and as if by magic the whole room trembles with her
MARIA
at the bottom landing of the Grand Staircase he swept me into his arms without a word and we looked each other in the eyes—we had seen each other’s faces for such a little time—our true faces and not just photographs, not just the faces we put on sitting twice in my parents’ parlor—and I did not know Victor de Satode Peñasco y Castellana to be a man who would lift me as easily as a goose-down pillow and to hold me close, but he is such a man, and he began to climb and I threw my head back into the nighttime sunlight of electric lights and we climbed and a bronze cherub appeared holding a lamp and this was our floor, only one above the dining room, and I whispered Higher and he carried me up to another landing and another until all I could see were the lights in the vast dome right above me and when we reached the top of the staircase I realized that we are married also for love, and I am breathless now with him upon me and all at once I tremble, but it is not from within me, something has happened
MATA HARI
37, exotic dancer and courtesan
JACK JOHNSON
35, world heavyweight boxing champion
in a room at the Hotel Friedrichshof, Berlin, during Johnson’s exile from the United States, 1913
MATA HARI
I dance: I dance for Shiva I dance to ask Shiva to destroy me once more I am Mata Hari born of a temple dancer who died at my birth and I was but thirteen when I myself first danced naked for Shiva at the temple but Shiva destroys me and remakes me yet again and I am Princess Anuba sending her lover to the bottom of the sea and he returns savaged by sea monsters and dying but he has in his bloody hand my heart’s desire, the sacred black pearl, and the black pearl has become a man and has entered now into Anuba and I take him and he is part of me and Shiva destroys me as I dance once more, I am the temple smoke and I am the sea and I am the falling veils and I am my naked body, and what I am not is Margaretha Geertruida Zelle, and I am not a Dutch wife to a man who beats me, and I am not the mother of a son poisoned to death in Java by the husband of my husband’s lover, I am not, I am dead, I am destroyed and I live again
JACK
the tenor is in my head and he is singing sweet, this troubadour, this wanderer with no place in the world, and he knows how things be and he sings Deserto sulla terra, col rio destino in guerra—I heard him a dozen times in Paris—and I got the words up now in English and I can see myself back a few years in Reno and James J. Jeffries and me is waiting to start and the crowd is chanting Kill the nigger and the band is playing All Coons Look Alike to Me and then suddenly I step forward before the bell, I go out in the center of the ring and I start to sing in a voice so loud they all shut the hell up and they listen and I sing All alone on the earth, I’ll go forty-five rounds with my evil fate and they don’t make another sound till I’m done and I only need fifteen of those rounds and I’m still the champ, and so is Mister Verdi, me and him are the heavyweight champs of the world
GEORGE HERMAN “BABE” RUTH
21, baseball player
JOSEPHINE RUGGLES
24, prostitute
in the Chambre Rouge at Lulu White’s all-octoroon Mahogany Hall, Storyville, New Orleans, 1916
BABE
a bat in my hands a hickory bat long and heavy and the color of tobacco spit and I’m about to hit my first one and it’s little Jack Warhop on the mound throwing his rise ball and it’s the third inning in the Polo Grounds, and say but I’m swell at last, it’s fine for me as a pitcher breaking off curves on the corner of the plate, but try to slip one by me with my bat in my hand and see what I can do, and here I am now in a fancy bed with a girl and she might as well see it all, she might as well see what I can do, and the same for all you girls in all the fancy rooms and in all the cheap cribs in Storyville, I’m out of the goddamn boy’s home at last, out of St. Mary’s, through being an orphan with two parents working a tavern across town, and now Mom’s dead for real, and little Jack is standing sixty feet away and this is how you get it all back: your feet close together and your right shoulder swung around to him and the bat sitting easy on your left shoulder nuzzled in the crook of your neck and he winds and throws, and his rise ball is what he’s got that says I don’t belong where I am, and I can see the ball spinning, I can count the stitches, and what I do starts in my stomach, it starts in the center of me right there and it flows easy into my arms and hips and legs and I hitch back and glide on through and the groove is there and it’s sweeter than any pussy, me passing into this invisible place, and there’s a little push against the bat and a swell chunking sound and the ball is rushing off and up and up and it flies fast and far and farther still and it falls into the straw hats deep in the right-field stands and it’s my first home run and I am still feeling its kiss, it kissed me hard and wet right on my bat
JOSEPHINE
he yawps and grunts, this overgrown boy, and of a sudden he cries Say but I’m swell and now is off to whooping again, but you’re not that swell I can tell you and I just try to hear beyond him, the piano trickling up from the parlor downstairs, Lulu has let a colored boy in tonight to play and he’s doing it fine and they’re down there dancing the ragtime one-step on the parquet floor, not the mudbuggers like this boy but the Americans from Uptown in evening clothes, and I could be doing it with them, doing what I really do: pulling the arm of a true swell around my waist and facing him a little off center and taking his left hand in my right and finding that easy-glide spot—our hands just a bit away from us and a little up from the waist, my right elbow slightly bent, my left hand cupping behind h
is right shoulder, my back straight upright, my heels together and my toes turned outward, perfect, like finding the lay of me in bed when I’m finally alone and can sleep—and tonight we’ll do the Castle Walk so I go up onto the balls of my feet and stiffen my legs and I pull ever so slightly with my palm behind his shoulder and with the tips of my fingers at the back of his hand and he doesn’t even know I’m leading and we’re off, stepping away long and smooth and quick around and around Lulu White’s whorehouse parlor and nobody does the one-step like Jo and it’s all for free
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