My stepsisters, Jules and Mary, were just a few years older than Robbie and me. They were both caustic, wisecracking types and had inherited their mother’s tall, handsome looks and her low, throaty laugh. The last time we’d seen them had been ten years ago, on the front steps of Daddy’s apartment building on Humboldt Avenue, where we had stayed with him during the summer. We’d all sat on the steps and discussed our parents’ romance.
“It looks like your dad is gonna marry our mom,” Jules, the older and more serious sister, informed us.
“Yeah, that’ll be good.” I figured that now Daddy would have someone to look after him and not be on his own anymore. And we’d have sisters to play with in the summers. It would be like a real family.
“And I can babysit!” Jules smiled.
I laughed, thinking of all the fun we would have making tents out of blankets and chairs in the living room and having slumber parties, telling scary stories by flashlight.
But Mother had whisked us away before that dream could become reality—kidnapped us, really, furious that our father had found happiness—and our stepsisters, not us, had grown up with our dad. A part of me couldn’t help feeling jealous of them, of the years we had lost, of not being a part of what seemed like a normal family. Especially compared to our twisted home life with Mother.
The table was set for Christmas dinner; instead of china, my stepmother preferred funky pottery dishes in vibrant colors of orange and blue that brought to mind New Mexico, one of her favorite places, where she and my father tried to spend time during the brutal Minnesota winters. Steaming side dishes of potatoes and green beans were strewn about the table in mismatched bowls, and squat, fat candles burned in curly iron holders, casting the room in a golden haze. The standing rib roast sat on the table in front of my father, looking like the severed antlered crown of a mythical beast. We all took our places, and my dad raised his glass.
“A very merry Christmas to all,” he announced gaily.
“Merry Christmas!” we all sang.
“And I must say that I am especially overjoyed this year to have Wendy and Robin with us.” His eyes shone in the candlelight.
“Thank you, Daddy,” my sister and I replied in unison, just like the little girls we used to be.
My father carved the roast, and everyone dug in.
I looked at Robbie across the table and knew she was thinking the same thing: it just wasn’t fair. It made me even more furious at Mother. Also, I desperately wanted to know why Daddy had chosen not to rescue us, or at least why he didn’t show himself when he found out where we were. But our first Christmas together in ten years didn’t seem like the time to bring it up.
Although our stepfamily did everything to make us feel wanted and welcome, everything was, for me and for my sister, tinged with sadness and a melancholy sense of loss. I was woefully aware of just how much we stuck out as the strangers in the room that evening when Robbie and I sat at the dining table listening to stories about vacations, parties with wacky friends and relatives, and my stepsisters’ kooky teen escapades, in which our dad sometimes figured as the savior and sometimes an accomplice. They were marvelous stories, and Robbie and I laughed out loud with the others at many of them, but a lot of the time we didn’t know whom they were talking about because we simply hadn’t been around. It was like watching somebody else’s home movies. Robbie and I exchanged forced cheerful looks, putting up a front so as not to show how weird this all was to us. In a way, the sting of meeting our new family was worse than never having known them before. Like rescraping a badly skinned knee or the way a healed broken arm throbs when it rains, the pain had always been there, dormant, and was now being brought to life. Maybe it would ease over time—but for now it felt fresh and raw on the surface of my skin.
We went to the movies and out to lunch at restaurants where the maître d’ always knew Daddy and Sarah by name, made a fuss over them, and gave us a great table. You’d think we were the royal family of Minneapolis or something. Sarah took all of us girls clothes shopping—something I could never remember doing with my own mother. We played games—poker and Trivial Pursuit—laughing into the night.
After one evening of playing cards at their house, Robbie and I went back to our motel, flopped down on the ugly bedspreads, and cried.
“This is so hard!” Robbie sobbed into her pillow.
“I know!” It was exhausting doing our sister act, feeling awkward and guilty about pretending we’d immediately bonded with our new family, and I had a headache from all the bourbon I’d drunk trying to keep up with everybody else. They were a tough crowd to match drink for drink.
“Who’s that guy they kept talking about?” Robbie blew her nose loudly.
“I don’t know.”
We finished our little crying jag, and I turned on the radio to see if anything cheery was on. The “Russian Dance” from The Nutcracker burst from the speaker. We had seen the ballet a few times at Lincoln Center during our privileged Manhattan early childhood. I turned it up and looked at her, smiling. Within seconds we were up on our feet, dancing to the music in our shabby little room, laughing and spinning each other around, doing our best Cossack imitation, and trying to forget that we had spent all day feeling like newly adopted orphans. I imagined people out on the snow-covered street looking into the window of our room and seeing two crazy girls, arms raised, giddily hopping up and down, screeching with laughter. We would have to make our own happy memories—and it was a start.
• • •
Back in New York, I settled into the domesticity of life at the apartment, in the bosom of my chosen family, Pete and Jenny. I happily helped with the cooking, making stews and curries from inexpensive cuts of meat I bought at the shady, smelly grocery store nearby. Completely different from the spotless and fancy Gristedes from which my mother used to order over the telephone on the Upper East Side, the Red Apple, on Ninety-sixth Street, reeked of mouse droppings and freezer burn. Rat-catching cats who lived in the store pounced on the cockroaches skittering across the floor. The linoleum, missing tiles, was cracked and uneven, so that pushing your tiny cart through the narrow aisles was more of a strength exercise than a leisurely stroll through the dairy or meat section. The produce was droopy, cans of tuna and soup were past their expiration date, and only one checkout lane was ever open. But it was cheap and only a block away.
In a sort of zany American take on Jules and Jim, Jenny, Pete, and I were like a love triangle sans the sex, in my mind anyway. Cheap rent was an added benefit—I paid $175 a month and my share of the telephone. Even better—my insane mother didn’t know where I was. I was off the grid.
I got a job working in the textbook department of the Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue and Seventeenth Street. My boss was a thirtyish, whippet-thin gay guy named Rodney. He was like a skinny African American Paul Lynde, with a nasal, whiny voice and a lit Benson & Hedges menthol always sticking out of one corner of his mouth. He had a shaved head, favored earth tones, and wore oversized Swifty Lazar glasses with Coke-bottle lenses.
The job was easy: all you had to do was sit at a communal desk in the textbook department, wait for the telephone to ring from a school or a student, and take the order. Because the work was fairly mindless and Rodney was a pushover, we could pretty much do whatever we wanted when the phone wasn’t ringing—read, take frequent breaks to smoke in the loo, eat, or drink coffee—as long as we picked up the phone.
Another girl my age, Annie, worked there, too. A punk Snow White dressed in black, she had porcelain skin and dyed-jet hair and wore bright red lipstick. She had the mien I’d always dreamed of having: exotic and dark with a kind of mystery and edge. We were the youngest people working there by far; everyone else was sort of faded and middle-aged and had been there for years. Losers who had once had dreams of fame and fortune in New York but now were stuck in a crap job. Of course, Annie and I were just passing through a
nd would be moving on to bigger things any day now.
She and I bonded over music and books and these sandwiches we adored at a nearby restaurant, Patsy’s, called Steak Bunnies. She was from Maine and had a boyfriend and a second job as a salesgirl at the ultraposh department store Barneys a few blocks away. When I’d swing by to visit her there so she could sneak me some samples, she reminded me of the model Esme, whom I used to see working behind the counter at the Urban Outfitters in Harvard Square before she was discovered; they both had the same smoky looks.
At the bookstore, Rodney sort of doted on us in his own way. I think he liked our youth and thrift-store style.
“Love that skirt, Wendy. And, Annie, well, that leather jacket is divinely you.”
“Thanks, Rodney,” we chirped in unison. We had just gotten back from lunch fifteen minutes late, but he didn’t seem to care because we were so flash.
Rodney placed a skeletal arm around my shoulders one morning and rasped into my ear, the smoke from his Benson & Hedges stinging my eyes, “Don’t tell anyone, Wendy, but you and Annie are my favorite ones.”
“Gee, thanks, Rodney.”
“It’ll be our little secret.” He pretended to lock his lips and throw the key away. I nodded solemnly to show I understood. Sometimes I felt that he wasn’t so much our boss but our babysitter.
I worked at the B&N during the week, and on the weekends I had a gig that Pete had found me, modeling for an artist friend of his, Dan. They’d grown up together in a small town in upstate New York. Dan was a talented painter and printmaker; his work had been bought by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Walker in Minneapolis, and by private collectors. Even with these impressive credentials, he was still a starving artist, barely able to pay the rent on his share way uptown in Washington Heights. He drove a dilapidated, rusted-out, yellow Volkswagen Rabbit, which always seemed to be in need of a jump. He was tall and softly bearish in build, with dark blond, scraggly hair and an unkempt beard. He had a chipped front tooth, which made him look kind of sweet and defenseless, which he actually was, like a little boy. He wore plaid shirts and worn corduroys and looked as if he slept in his car. He was the kind of nice guy whom women shunned and generally mistreated.
He wanted to do a series of large portraits, four in all, and needed a model. Pete had volunteered me—and I was excited. It would be fun and fairly easy work—after all, how hard was it to stand around? The job also had a hint of glamour, à la Dora Maar, Picasso’s famous muse and mistress. Just as important, Dan was paying $10 an hour, more than I had ever made doing anything else. Pete had mentioned that I might have to pose nude, and I thought it might be cool to have a picture of me, naked, hanging in someone’s living room. What the hell, right? It’s not as if anybody who saw the paintings would know me. I was psyched—it was almost like having someone write a song about you, something I’d fantasized about my friend Lee Thompson doing, though he hadn’t yet.
Passing by the tatty mélange of cheap restaurants with their stink of rancid fried food, and bargain clothing and housewares stores—the kind of places where you could buy a giant pack of tube socks for a dollar or an oversized suitcase to mail your grandmother back to Mexico in for ten bucks—I walked down Fourteenth Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, where Dan’s studio was. Below the studio was a great Cuban place, where I picked up a café con leche before traipsing up the rickety stairs.
Dan’s studio was basically an empty room with a low tin ceiling and grimy windows overlooking Fourteenth Street. A huge easel stood in one corner, and at a spattered worktable crowded with coffee cans stuffed with brushes, he would furiously squeeze tubes of paint. The air smelled of turpentine and mold even though it was drafty. A banged-up boom box sat on the window ledge, playing staticky music from a classical station. One chair perched atop a wooden box against the opposite wall, with a shadeless floor lamp casting a flat, white light across the room. The chair was for the model—me. We didn’t talk much—I knew he had to concentrate on what he was doing. Surprisingly, I wasn’t bored. Sitting for Dan gave me all this time to think, like being on a train and looking out the window—it was like mental floss. I would think about what I was going to make Jenny and Pete for dinner, how my sister was doing back in Boston after opting not to return to college, and what the hell I was going to do with my life.
In the first painting, I wore my street clothes—a white-collared shirt underneath a black crewneck sweater. After a few sittings, Dan finished it.
“Can I take a look?” I hadn’t wanted to crowd him by asking to see it before it was done, even though I was dying of curiosity.
“Sure.”
I walked around to his side of the easel. It was beautiful. I looked ethereal, even ghostly, as if you could see right through me. Maybe trying to forge your own identity was like a painting, layers and layers applied until people could see you, and you could become your own person. Looking at myself on the canvas, I could see I wasn’t quite there yet.
“You look like an angel,” he said, showing his snaggletooth smile as he wiped a brush on a rag.
I didn’t think I looked like an angel, but I loved the way my eyes looked in the painting—they had a fierceness that I wanted to believe showed in my real life. I yearned for something—
I didn’t quite know what—and he had captured that. It was a little window into my soul.
As we moved on to the next portrait, I asked Dan if he wanted me to take my clothes off. I wanted to try on being that tough chick who strips not giving a damn who sees her. I also wanted to see if I could shock him with my brazenness. Before he could answer, I popped my sweater off over my head and started to unbutton my shirt.
“No, Wendy! Stop!” Raising his arms and practically making the sign of the cross, he seemed mortified. I realized that I had embarrassed him, so much so that he was acting as if I’d asked him to take off his clothes. It seemed like the opposite of the artist-model relationship to me, and I was a bit offended.
As I slowly got to know him better, I began to realize that Dan was quite religious. He was completely unlike Pete’s other friends from childhood I’d met, like crazy Colin, Pete’s flamboyantly gay chum who wore leather, shot heroin in the closet of the apartment, and got into bar fights regularly. Or the guy who once arrived for dinner at our door stark naked. Dan was like a monk compared to them.
I finally convinced him to let me wear a camisole for the last two paintings—I didn’t own a bra because I was so flat-chested. These portraits had a more brutal, confrontational feeling to them—my mouth was an angry red smear and my eyes looked empty. Something had clearly changed between us. Whether I’d upset or frightened him I would never know. The first, more innocent, portrait remained my favorite—the phantom girl. She seemed full of possibility, and I looked forward to filling in her blanks.
• • •
Back at the Barnes & Noble, I was answering the phones with Annie and taking orders as usual. Rodney spent the days talking to his boyfriend on the phone and smoking. He always looked tired and hungover. I imagined him voguing until dawn in some gay club in the Meatpacking District.
I’d dragged Annie to a B-52s concert the previous night. The band came out in these crazy neon-colored suits and dresses. The women wore towering beehive wigs in purple and hot pink, leopard-print minidresses, go-go boots, and huge dangly earrings. We danced to songs about going to outer space, dance parties, poodles, and ancient Egypt. The B-52s were all about having a great time and looking outrageous while you did it.
But Annie had a lukewarm response to the band; she liked the Talking Heads more because, she said, they were intellectuals, in addition to being artists. Because I liked Prince, she accused me of having frivolous taste in music.
I’d seen the Talking Heads a few years before in Boston at the Berklee College of Music. All dressed in black, looking like actors in a modern dress play or beat poets,
and barely acknowledging the audience, they’d picked up their instruments, unsmilingly, and began to play. After each song, they said nothing, not even introducing the songs. At the end of their set, the lead singer, David Byrne, said, “Thank you,” into the microphone, and that was it—they walked off the stage. Maybe they had lightened up since then.
“The Talking Heads are serious thinkers with a super deep message, don’t you see?” Annie sucked on the straw in her Diet Rite, her heavily kohled eyes looking at me as if I were an idiot. “They don’t have to put on a show for you—they’re doing it for themselves. And fuck what you think.”
“But they acted like assholes. It was like they hated us.” I shrugged. She was so intense sometimes. It was just rock ’n’ roll, for Christ sakes.
After work we walked together across Eighteenth Street and turned down Seventh Avenue to find a bar and ducked into the Riviera Café, a joint in a brick building across from Sheridan Square on West Fourth Street. It had once been a hipster hangout in the late sixties and seventies, but was now just a place where you got a cheap drink after work. We were playing the jukebox, drinking rum and Cokes, and bumming a few cigarettes from the bartender when this wraithlike man walked in with a young boy, about ten years old or so. The man looked familiar to me, but Annie ID’d him right away.
“Jesus H. Christ, Wendy! It’s Iggy Pop!” she hissed to me behind her hand, her black-rimmed eyes opened wide. I knew he hadn’t heard her, but somehow his radar picked it up, and he made a beeline for our table.
“Are these seats taken?” Iggy Pop was asking if he could sit at our table. With us.
After a sizable pause, I answered, “No,” because Annie had been struck dumb.
Iggy and the boy sat down. He introduced the kid as his son, Eric. Eric played waiter and asked us what we were drinking, then he went to the bar and ordered drinks for all of us.
Everything about Iggy looked cadaverous, except for one thing: his eyes. They were the only part of him that looked alive. His face and body looked leathery, and his skin hung from his frame, clearly having turned on him, but those blue eyes burned in his face, searing into you. I was terrified; it was like seeing someone who’d come back from the dead.
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