Black Tickets

by Jayne Anne Phillips

  That summer she was nine. We read Star Parade in a tiny back bedroom strung with ribbons from horse shows in the forties. I was a little older but she was taller, her eyes were cerulean and her legs were freckled. When he dies we won’t come back here anymore, she said, and her mother, a heavy woman in her fifties with shoulder-length white hair and those same pure eyes, spent afternoons in town. Jit had to sweep the linoleum floors with a broom. He spat in a bucket and she emptied it. We went behind the house to pick mint for his pitchers of ice water; she cracked the ice trays in the sink and cursed him in even tones. He was deaf and couldn’t hear unless she yelled. Lazy Jitterbug? he shouted. Where’s my water? The sparse white hairs on his concave chest were damp and he wiped his armpits with a towel. Here, you old buzzard, she said. What’s that? he asked, and watched her lips. Sir, she said. Yes sir.

  Finally he went to sleep in the room with the double bed. We walked up to the snake pit on the winding cow paths and threw pebbles at copperheads coiled on the rocks. Cows gathered farther down at the trough, licking the salt block to a bulging oval. Sometimes she walked, slow motion, into their midst, then turned up her head and screamed. They jerked, stumbling away, and rolled their broad eyes like palsied girls.

  When the heat was worst we slipped through the double doors of the old garage. The mossy walls were covered with license plates of dead Mercurys and photos of their ghostly two-tone fins. Burlap bags of feed, torn lawn furniture, hoses and pieces of cars; a radio that played Top Ten at three in the afternoon. We lay on a cot pretending we were Troy Donahue and Sandra Dee, touching each other’s stomachs and never pulling our pants down. The Lettermen did billowing movie themes. There’s a summer place, they sang. Where our hearts. Will know. All our hopes. She put her face on my chest. You be the boy now, she whispered. Insects got caught in the warm putty of the windows and horseflies drifted up and down the panes. They were furry and weighted, blunt, and their heads were blue.

  In winter she sent me her picture and wrote letters. Just because you’re a year older than me, her last one said, is no reason not to answer.

  The Patron

  I’M FINE until he coughs. Then I head for the bathroom. I might grab the chamber pot under his chair and carry its sloshing contents in my flight. I might sprout wings, nearly run up the dark hall holding a squat chalice engraved with angels. His tiled bathroom smells of churches. Incense he asks me to buy and burn there in pewter trays. He doesn’t know I get it cheap from the Krishna nuts on a corner just outside his Second Avenue mausoleum—spend the rest at Harry’s Peek-A-Boo when my shift is done. And think all day about my favorite films as he pukes and scratches and changes soap operas with a button.

  It’s the coughing I can’t stand. I run and leave him fumbling for Kleenexes, endless powder-blue sheets, gagging finally in a crescendo that leaves him exhausted. Wobbling his little blue head from heaped white cashmere in winter, pastel silks in summer. Wobbling, his eyes unfocused, lighting yet another Silva-Thin. He doesn’t mind that I run, terrified, from his hacking fits. He only wishes I’d come back in time to light his thin cigarettes, all four packs a day of them. Bend over him with the sterling silver table lighter, cocked just so in my palm. Croon there we go, there now, as his dappled bald head moves up and down. Sucking, snorting, sniffing. As though he suffocates through slender tubes, filters the color of palominos. Sputtering. There now.

  Maybe I’m his goddamn son. He cops an incestuous thrill as I gather his bones together, wrap him up, deposit him in his blue suede chair. You think I’m kidding. No, it’s a blue suede chair, sky blue. He sits there on the verge of speech as I strip his bed, peeling fragrant wet sheets from the plastic guard underneath. His piss is not piss, he drinks only mineral water and produces a cloudy chartreuse flow that smells of summer grass.

  His night nurse has raised the shades halfway, so the 8 A.M. sun cascades through leaded glass. Casting knots of light on my hair, my chest. I snap the dry white sheets; they billow out over red tulips pulsing in mahogany casements of his windows. Ah James, he whispers. How are you James?

  I tell myself I have it easy. He’ll die and leave me something, anything. The truth is he’ll outlast me by five years, like he outlasts all the rest. In two years I’ve seen four crowds of them come and go. His boys. His muscular neurotic boys in Danskins and determined eyes. Waiting in the foyer with the marble lions while I oil his drying skin, button him into linen shirts, silk scarves and diamond stickpin the likeness of a locust. Plant him banked in tulips, snapdragons, dark wood and Turkish rugs where he receives them. The French one kissed his wrist on its bald blue vein. The Orientals bowed. The black ones have a sheen like ebony, their biceps ripple. Long muscles in their legs turn and flex in white trousers, gathered at the waist to blouse on molded hips. They smell of herbs. Walk poised on balls of their feet like leopards, big loose cats. They come and go, commit suicide, move to Paris, leave New York for a San Fran mime troupe. Or they overdo it with the big H, shooting up in the ass to preserve their trackless arms.

  It’s no secret he thinks I’m one of them. He buys my clothes in the same places, wants me to take lessons with their teachers. The Dance, he says. Dancers appear once a week, singly. One of them carries a bamboo cane with a brass mosquito inlaid in its ivory tip. He wants what he sees but he is calm, he is nearly disguised. He tells me no, the old man was never a dancer. Some lover he followed around, who knows. There are stories. He taps the blond cane once, he smiles at me. He asks me where I study. I study at Harry’s Peek-A-Boo. He nods, leans back against the velvet wallpaper. How is old Harry? In leaner days they starred, all of them, in some of Harry’s films; Harry fancies himself the porno avant-garde. But I never watch those films.

  I watch the old ones. The ones in machines for a quarter. Put your face to the lens, a binocular of secrets. 1940s and ’50s. Kinks were subtle and women were always alone; climbing ladders and bending over long finned cars. How beautiful they were, breasts the size of oranges, powdered brows. Glistening lips so dark they look black in black and white, shining like rain on night streets. And they were so modestly teasing, smiling their serious smiles. So innocent you can’t think of them that way.

  There’s the blond whose cheeks look bruised with rouge, kneeling beside a bathtub and scrubbing it out with a long brush. She’s wrapped in a towel, her permed hair falling in her eyes as she stretches to swipe the drain, makes a circle with her mouth. She turns on the water and gets up awkwardly, slipping the cloth below her breasts. Says Oh as they emerge, catches the towel in the vee of her crotch. Turns as the camera pulls back to get what you must call her derriere. Her long white thighs, her shaven calves, her ankles, her ever-present black spike heels. It ends, like all of them, before it is over. She moving as though to step in … You can’t believe she’s being paid.

  In her shoes, I tell Harry. They never take off their shoes.

  Kid, yr a case, says Harry. You really got a case.

  He is sorting his sodomy postcards, animals mostly, and eating a tuna-on-rye. He’s been here fifteen years, keeps free coffee in the back and reuses the plastic cups. The film stalls smell of his cigars. His plastic-covered magazines are layered over with dust and fine plaster. Harry says he’ll die in his chair, a high stool with a back and doughnut cushion. Harry has a bad prostate. He’ll end up dribbling too, but he doesn’t think about it.

  See ya kid, says Harry. He’s talking to himself before I’m out the door. What a case, he says to the empty store.

  I watch the old man’s fingers. They are the size and color of varnished chopsticks. They flutter imperceptibly, like antennae. Then he begins to cough.

  Once a month his boys perform. I wheel him to the drawing room. Lilies and jade trees. Polished floor. He sits in a rapture in diapers and clamp, wrapped in Colombian blankets, as his dancers leap on supple legs. Swirling, arching arms, straight toes touching floor in quick half-snaps. They move one by one across his range of vision; pliés, grands jetés. Their eyes fix on t
he unseen; they dive and come back to it, magnetized. They come back to it, even music can’t conceal that they are slaves. Smooth and perfect but shaking, muscles a hidden vibrato. And when they finish they are drenched. Eyes still focused, point of light in the pupil like they are hurt with something sharp and making room. They stand panting, each pectoral a hard and glistening oval under skin. They heave, shining. They drip.

  He grips my hand. As I wheel him back to his room I smell his sweat rise, pure as wet fruit. The dancers stand motionless behind us; the long hall is still and rose under its stained-glass dome. His room is shadowed. I have drawn the tapestried drapes until one slit of light falls through to waste on the parquet floor. He mumbles words I can’t quite hear, a name I won’t recognize. His eyes retain that focus stolen from the dance, so wide, his amethyst eyes. Iris purely violet in a yellow aqueous. He stares, begins the name. I lay him out in the darkened room. Take away his silken clothes, his jewels, his linen underwear. His diapers, the clamp enclosing his penis; a penis pale, very soft, uncut in its fragile hood. I sponge him with alcohol and scented water. Stroke his small body as it cools, the bones thinly covered in a flesh almost transparent. I see their shadows holding still beneath his skin like something underwater.

  Every morning. He is there, the wide bed stretching around him like a room. Bruno, the big night nurse, has fed him his yogurt and strained pears. A nectar pulverized to mush by Bruno, who cooks and cleans and walks unbending; a tree on legs. Bruno, his globular arms, his Roman nose, his tight cedar-colored curls. He is a brute with a sensual mouth, lifting weights in his rooms on the third floor. He is never far away. Disappears for my eight hours and returns, ready with tiger balm in an etched brass box and small rubber balls to exercise the old man’s skeletal hands.

  Evenings. Bruno nods once as I pull on my coat, make for the door. The old man reaches for him but his violet eyes follow me around the bed, the chair, the massive closet door opening with a clean swish. Rustling of hangers sewn in padded silk, padded blue silk. His violet eyes turning, watching, sucking strange and tentative at my arms. Then the voice, faintly. James … take care … James, have you plans for the evening … I am flying through the hallway, down the banistered stairs past frozen lions, through double doors carved with gods and snakes, and the static knockers shaped in cold brass crows. Already Bruno is rolling those red balls in the yellow palms, moving the aureate fingers, the flaxen arms stripped of cover. And I am opening the orange door to Harry’s Peek-A-Boo.

  Harry’s layered toupee, his beady face, appear between the shelves. He wobbles toward me, happy, on his sequined platform shoes. Hi ya kid. Harry gives me thick black coffee laced with Jack Daniel’s, brewing since noon. He touches my shoulder, says he’s got some new films in, those goofy ones I like, collector’s items. Just my style, not a cunt shows in the bunch. Look here kid.

  The old film curls apart in his hands, cracked along the edges, where tiny holes of light appear. Shaking a little in his fingers, his small thick hands. Hands of a fat child with a tremor. He loads the machine and tosses me a quarter.

  Volleyball by the high seawall. San Diego, 1942. She is standing by the net; she is going to play alone. No, she is only walking, her black hair waved and blown to expose her neck. She drops her eyes, painted lashes, looks up as the camera pulls away. She is told to turn, toss the ball into the wavering net. Striped, bouncing off, it rolls into the surf. Stripes seemingly unwinding across the sand. A round pinwheel, and she is slowly after it. Laughing, pulling the loose bow of her bra until it drops. Struggling a little in the waves, the incoming tide. Turning to kick water at the camera, and her foot emerges bare as the shoe flies off. She lunges for it. Pasted wet hair shows her round face rounder, wartime starlet eyes a little slanted. Her expression strives to make them wider, not so black. She is falling into a corner of the frame, and there, where she has entered, the ocean starts to burn. A flat amoeba shape eats up the film.

  Sorry kid. Damn films get hot in the machine, too old. Have a sandwich. Harry sits in the front, eating. Rubbing his wrinkled face. His store window sees the whole corner, the cars and changing lights. Krishnas dancing in their orange clothes to catch the rush-hour traffic, and the old man’s house rising above its wall. That wrought-iron balcony on the second floor, the sun going down.

  At sunset Bruno picks him up, holds him twenty minutes or so by the window. I see them now, outside on the balcony though it is only early spring. Old man just a swaddled bundle, no head, and Bruno a dark shape.

  Harry wipes his hands on his pants and winks. Queers, he says, I love em. Perv fairies. Happens all over when the sun goes down.

  I think of them. At night. I believe he sits on Bruno’s lap, wrapped in those big arms and several blankets. They never speak. They watch television until the picture fades to one burning spot the size of an eye.

  I hold back just enough. He puts out a hundred a week for prescriptions, vitamins, imported Korean ginseng, papaya root, subtle sleeping powders, exotic capsules of pure oxygen. He writes me a check, I buy them all. Overcharge him just enough and keep the difference. Make and label some of them myself, pills of sugar, dried lemon peel, peppermint in a clear digestible shell. Or I dye them bright colors so they range in my hands like rainbows. Offer them on cut-glass trays, tip the goblet to his lips. And he swallows, thirsting for tropics, the juice of the mango. His vitamins sit waiting in clear cannisters, delicate in cotton and glass. I switch them, give them to him in strange bottles, pretend to buy them twice. The violet eyes grow more luminous, the skull almost visible in the bald head.

  I could fence his rings and bracelets at Harry’s, there are boxes he ignores. He is too thin to wear them, he is unconcerned. Emeralds, rubies, opals gleam unseen. Moonstones glow in the dark. And his bracelets, Indian, Egyptian gold, old turquoise, tooled Irani silver. All neglected. Even the necklaces. He says he cannot breathe beneath the faintest gold chains, smallest pearls, jeweled chips tiny as grass seed. They oppress him.

  Only the locust, heavy emblazoned diamond on its stemmed gold pin. He asks for it repeatedly. I fasten light silk scarves around his throat, locust burning a fiery head large as the nail of my smallest finger. Nestling in the cloth. Ruby eyes, the studded wings, the thin gold legs curled so they disappear.

  He believes I admire the locust. As he sleeps, long afternoons, I open the drawer beside his bed to watch it. Jewel in dark brocade. The gold set is true to the insect, that single particle of ravages and swarms. Winged grasshopper, pestilence. Its head flawless, diamond, the thin gold tongue protruding, and lower, the segmented legs. I want to take it, hide it in my clothes and not come back. In the drawer the locust glints and almost moves.

  I touch it. From the bed a wheezing sigh, an exhalation that catches on itself and chokes. I jerk, my finger barely touching the head of the jewel, the brilliant thorax. The old man rolls, wakened, but I look again and the locust’s head is faintly smeared. A prong of the setting is loose and jagged. My finger, the stinging. I suck the blood away and shut the drawer.

  In summer the street gets hot. Heat wavers from its surface and the Krishnas dance, jerking thin skirts dark in sweated patches. Jingling ankle bells. Leathery feet, thud, calluses so deep tiny worms lay eggs in their cracks.

  But his stone house is cool, the street a muffled hum. Bruno rigs his bed with a clear tent and a metal tube of oxygen. We keep the tent rolled up until he sleeps and then we lower it, Bruno’s perfect hands soundless on its plastic walls. Inside the old man sleeps with his eyes open; veiled in a clear dry veil.

  At noon I prop him in a chair and wrap him up, feel his heart knocking in his ribs like something trying to hatch. Cover his legs with soft wools, his feet in cowhide slippers, golden, lined in gold. His feet are too long for his bony ankles, the peaked shank bones of his legs. His toes seem longer than fingers, their nails thick, manicured, embossed with blue half-moons and a natural sheen. As I fit the slippers his toes rise together, once, poised like the hand of some inte
lligent damaged creature.

  Hey kid, whaddya know? Harry gets a little fatter every summer. Points to his line of quarter machines. Antiques, he says. Every one of em, found out last week. He crows, says he’s got some valuable property here. He grins.

  In summer the store is hot, old dirt in the floors smells old. Only his dedicated customers appear. Overhead the old ceiling fans whirr and buzz. Black points in the center, a blur of blades.

  I don’t come every night. Only sometimes. Watch the house from Harry’s streaked window, watch the corner close down and turn crazy.

  Harry shakes his head at me. Kid, he says. Yr getting skinny. Yr losing weight kid.

  The old man is always cool, pale as a root. Once a day there is the walk to the bathroom, clump of the aluminum walker and slow scud of his feet behind. He can’t go the whole distance; this week I carry him from the bathroom door to the toilet. Floor an endless series of marble dots.

  A dancer’s thin support bar runs along the wall. Last year he walked up and down its length grasping the metal, jerking his legs along. Once he fell, broke his ankles. They mended badly, they hobble him, inching, tottering. Like a Chinese girl with bound feet; a girl of good family whose feet are the feet of a baby.

  Bathroom. Wide, marble, windows wavy and leaded. Light so dim the crickets sing all day. They hang in tiny cages from the ceiling, suspended by strings of prismed beads. There is a skylight, but the ragged palms have grown so tall they diffuse the sun.

  I carry him, he begins to shake. A spasm beginning; I want to put him on the toilet and leave, wait in the hall as always until he presses the call bell, chimes his strange high note. The toilet has a padded back and sides, he is strapped in, he won’t topple over as the coughing progresses. Waiting, I try not to hear, frightened, clenched—the scraping, the shuddered hacks, the yellowed phlegm he drools. It smells of his disease, deep, damp. Not lilies and silks, mahogany, blond bamboo. It is this smell, putrid, comes out of him. I wait, outside in the long hall.