by Tanith Lee
“I went out.”
“Can you come for a walk? I want to ask you something.”
“Maybe. I’ll see. What?”
“Tell you then. Meet you by Stratfords.”
Jo was already waiting by the shop, looking carefully at an array of oil-heaters, kitchen implements, and crockery in the window. Her tall sausage-like body was clad in a longish skirt and loose blouse. Her short, naturally-blonde hair, her only potential attraction, was greasy and pushed back behind big ears, as if she meant deliberately to be as charmless as she was able.
Susan could not be proud of Jo. Could not introduce her to anyone with a flood of pride – “My friend, Jo.” She resented this in Jo, and felt guilty for resenting it. It didn’t matter what people looked like. (No?) On the other hand, Jo could also be tactless, critical, and sometimes something that Susan would later refer to, in her late twenties, as spiritually obtuse.
They walked along the public paths of the common, as the last russet light dripped through the trees.
Young men, bare bronze-armed and legged, strode or bicycled past them, casting neither of them a single glance.
Nor did Jo have a boyfriend. She appeared not to want one. She was going to secretarial school, and an uncle had already promised her a lucrative secure job in a big London office. This seemed to be her only goal. Jo had never been in love, not even with anyone on celluloid. “Oh him,” she would say. “He’s all right, I suppose.” Even when Susan spoke admiringly of some glamorous woman: “Wish I could look like that,” Jo would sniff, “They don’t look like that in real life, you know.” How did Jo know anyway? Jo was very good at maths.
“My dad says I can have a flat,” said Jo abruptly. “I mean, when I start college. It would mean I was nearer to college, and save time in the long run.”
“Really? A flat?”
“Well, a room. But a good one in a respectable house. Clean. No people taking drugs, fixing.”
“You are lucky.” Susan did not know if she really thought this, but clearly congratulations and envy were expected. “Are you pleased?”
“Well, I will be. But the only thing is, Dad says I have to share with another girl. He says it’s not safe, me being there on my own. And if I shared, the expenses would be halved, of course.”
“Yes.”
“So, what do you think?”
Susan stared at Jo. “Me?”
“Dad says you’re steady. He likes your Mum – the Brave and Fair Anne, he calls her,” she added, too thick to be ashamed of him. “He said I should ask you. It would be handy for Silverguilds, too, because that’s near my secretarial college. We could travel on the same bus. And you’ll have your grant, same as I will, and there’ll be what Dad gives me, too.”
Susan thought about sharing a room with Jo. The prospect was rather unappealing. Jo was a stickler for all sorts of things – she liked rules, (knowing where she stood, as Jo put it.) She liked lots of little ornaments, and dusting them…
“Only,” Susan said, “my mother – we may be going to the U.S.A.”
“For a holiday?”
“Sort of. It’s a bit more than that.”
Jo’s unemotive face settled. “All right then. I’ll have to ask someone else.”
“Jo – I don’t want to go to the States – I’d hate it – she’s got this horrible man – he’s foul –”
Jo stared at Susan with a deep latent intriguement striving behind the dough of her cheeks. “Why?”
“He just is. I want to stay here.”
“Shall I speak to your mum,” said the deadly grown-up Jo, “about my flat?”
“No. I’ll talk to her. Tomorrow.”
“All right. But I need to know soon. I’m already having to start college from home, and that’s going to cost a lot and be a long journey.”
America seemed familiar because of TV. There were the same terracotta and brown brownstones, baking in hot, late summer light, the same sidewalks, playgrounds and lots, and, at the centre of the city of New York, the same incredible surrounding image of a metropolis of the far future coexisting here and now.
Coming in over the highways and bridges, darkness already down on the September air, (which smelled of cinders and gasoline) the lighted skyscrapers rose from the void, pinned by a million diamonds to the night. And then later, other floodlit buildings lifted twenty miles above the ends of Manhattan’s cobbles, like waterfalls of blue ice with ruby spires.
But wonder was prevented from spreading its wings. Because Wizz was there, in the car, and the aura of Wizz overlaid everything.
“What d’ya think?” he asked them, driving boldly on the ‘wrong’ side of the road in yet another vast flash car. As if he had invented the city, or discovered it, like a sort of belated Columbus. Did they have to thank him for building New York?
Downtown, Upstate, said the signs slung above the road.
They drove into Manhattan, to Wizz’s loft.
After all, Anne and Susan hadn’t flown to the States with Wizz, he had only picked them up at Kennedy International (JFK, said Wizz.)
At Heathrow, Anne took Susan straight into a bar. “Let’s pretend you’re eighteen, Susan. Then you can have a gin and tonic with me.” This by now sometimes happened at home. And Susan was so nervous she had been more than glad of the dizzy quick glow the gin gave her. By the time they walked down the claustrophobic area, (screened as if from horrors) on to the plane, everything seemed feasible, and all right.
The flight was uneventful, enervating due to the cramped seats. Wizz’s tickets had put them in Business Class, but Anne had seemed a little disappointed. At one time she had been speaking predictively of Concorde.
Sometimes, beyond the window, Susan saw clouds below her, wrapped over the blue surface of the world, as if she watched the earth from space. Coupled with the glass of wine she had had with the plane meal, this too seemed to put everything in perspective. The in-flight film was oddly dreamlike; she dozed. When she came to, they were nearly there. Susan now felt warm and sleepy and dirty. Apprehensive. Anne though was all alight, make-up redone, hair burnished, only the lines rather too deep at the sides of her eyes and mouth. “Wizz! Wizz darling!” she exclaimed, as they emerged from immigration – where arrest had seemed, to Susan, imminent.
“Baby!” sludged Wizz. He was more American, but also more East London. A confusing combination, if perhaps not for him. “Hi, Suey.”
The loft had been organised for him by the firm, he said. A huge open space, with other rooms leading off it. Only five floors up, it was reached by a cranky elevator Susan was afraid would stall, or fall. She was generally afraid of the elevators in New York. Of travelling up and down hundreds of floors, with the legacy of all the cable-snapped crashing elevator cars she had seen in thrillers.
The floor of the expensively furnished loft was of naked polished wood, with rugs strewn over. “See those patterns – Native American Indian.” Ranks of windows looked out over buildings which, in day’s sunlight, would burn rose-red and cobalt. There was a domed jukebox on one wall, which flickered lime green and played scratchy, ancient numbers for a dime – or was it a quarter? “Art Deco, see. Brilliant,” said Wizz.
Anne and Susan got ready in the big, brand-new, black and gold bathroom – there were two bathrooms – where there was a pair of black and gold washbasins, and also a pair of black and gold lavatories. “Anne – does that mean two people go to the loo – at the same time?”
“I guess so,” glittered Anne, Americanly. If she was offended, nothing showed. (It was only years after Susan learned that two-looed bathrooms were not the U.S. norm.)
The bath in the big bathroom was also big. When full, you could put your head on an air pillow and float about in it.
Wizz drove them to a restaurant. “They call New York Pig’s Paradise,” said Wizz. “You can get any food here. Anything in the world – French, Italian, Thai, Hawaiian, Sudanese, Jewish, Japanese. And I gotta take you to Chinatown.”
The restau
rant was overwhelming. It seemed full of black light, with spotlit tables, tall white lilies, impeccable, automatic waiters. Susan propped her eyes open. They seared with tiredness. She felt fluey.
Wizz and Anne drank and drank.
“Don’t give her any more wine, please, Wizz. She’ll have a hangover.”
Susan didn’t want any more wine. Or any dinner. She already felt sick from the need to be asleep.
Everyone else in the restaurant was smart and beautiful, wide awake, and sometimes loud with confidence. Susan grew smaller, but not in the correct way. She knew she was too fat, her skin pebbled, her hair not right, her clothes all wrong – how had immigration let her in?
In the morning, she was still exhausted after eight hours sleep. But they had to be up and out by ten, because Wizz wanted to take them ‘around’.
The days became a kaleidoscope crush of events, food, places, moving figures, information: of a terrifying elevator ascent of the Empire State Building, the zoo in Central Park, the Brooklyn Bridge strung with pearls of lamps, subway rides. Cops with their guns in their belts. And they seemed always to be eating, too. The coffee shops and restaurants Wizz chose were high-class, with menus like novels. Even the dim burrow under the red banners of a smoking Chinatown, was select.
They stood and gazed up and up, at Wizz’s instruction, to the tapering reflecting heights of glass mountains, while below humanity rushed through the canyon, and the yellow taxis zipped like angry bees.
And there were the dress stores, Wizz waiting to pounce with his American Express Card, where the assistants said to Anne, “That is just gorgeous on you,” and to Susan, “I guess the bigger size is in order.” And the dresses sticking like toffee to her shame-and-heat tacky back, and never quite fitting, regardless.
Height on height, slight on slight, humiliation on humiliation.
She was overweight in the country of physical perfection, and sixteen. And – it went on and on.
“Come on, wake up. You got just half an hour to shower and get ready. Put on the white dress Wizz bought you.”
“It doesn’t fit. I’m tired.”
“No. Come on, Susan. We’re driving out to Penn today, have you forgotten?”
What did she afterwards remember of Pennsylvania? The hours-long drive. Fields. A bridge over a river. City night; skyscrapers, and a forgotten movie in an air-conditioned cinema so cold she shivered. They stayed in a hotel. Susan’s room was pink. Across the hall, Wizz and Anne made love.
Susan dreamed of driving, or being driven, forward, onward, endlessly.
Back in New York they went to the Cloisters and the Met. Inexorably, Wizz escorted them. The Met had an exhibition, what was it? Great suits of Eastern armour, perfumes wafting on electric breezes. Girls slender as pencils.
“We could drive out to Washington DC, if you like. Take a look at the ol’ White House.”
The Statue of Liberty swirled in a greenish miasma of fog and jet-lag.
“You can’t have jet lag still. We’ve been here over a week. And I didn’t have it at all. Buck up, Susan. You’re being a drag.”
“I didn’t want to come,” Susan said, humbly.
“Yes, I know that. And now you’re intent on cutting off your nose to spite your face, aren’t you.”
Then Wizz had to be at work, in something called the Anchor Building on Broadway, the New York branch of the firm. He took Anne with him, wanting to show her off. Susan was also meant to go. That morning her period started, early and painful.
She imagined Anne telling Wizz why Susan couldn’t go with them.
Yes, she had told him. He winked at her as they went out. “You poor messed-up women,” the wink said, “I can guess what you go through. Lucky me to be a man.”
Susan thought how the male Jews thanked God every day for not making them female.
She thought of thanking God for not making her Wizz.
In the afternoon she felt much better. She felt she could breathe, even in Wizz’s loft.
Alone, she played the juke-box, leaned from the window and watched the streets below She began to think about America, what she had seen of it, to acknowledge the excitement of it from a distance. If only she could have been here without Wizz being here. If only without the threat of Wizz, and, the future with Wizz, hanging over her – but with whom? With Anne? Alone? Yes, perhaps alone…
Sitting on the four-seater white couch, Susan thought about Anne saying, “How can you stay behind in England, Susan, if I go to live overseas? Tell me that. I don’t care if you are sharing with this Jo. You’re sixteen and a minor. I’m legally responsible for you.”
“I could lie about my age,” Susan had said. She did not add, Like I lied all the times you were out at night and I had to pretend you were next door.
Anne had concluded, “Don’t be stupid.”
The American afternoon went quickly.
Anne had declared she and Wizz would be back by four from the Anchor Building. They were catching a show that night. However, when the elevator clanked to a halt by the doors at four fifteen, only Wizz walked in, in his sharp light suit.
“Where’s Anne?”
“Oh, Wilde made a big hit. She and Eve Frenowsky just clicked. Gone off to Maceys. She’ll be back in a while, calm down.”
Wizz went to the Coca-Cola machine that stood by the water dispenser, and got two ice-cold cans.
He drank both of these, walking slowly around the main room of the loft.
Susan grew frightened. She could always get frightened of things, but especially now she was frightened of Wizz, of being alone with Wizz. She didn’t know why. It was like that other time in England, in the kitchen.
She was scared too in case he took off his jacket and shirt. That had happened already, one morning, seeing him roll from the bathroom in just pyjama bottoms. His body was good, muscular and brown, except at the waist, where it bulged a little… He was also very hairy, his back was hairy. His back scared her most of all.
But now Wizz only walked about. Then suddenly, he turned, and came towards her. He sat down opposite her on the blue couch, which faced the white one.
Susan felt her heart hammering in her dry throat.
She could smell the faint bad smell she always associated with Wizz and knew couldn’t be there.
“Look, Sue, let’s have a talk, shall we?”
She stared. He was waiting. She managed to say, “Oh, yes, if you like.”
“Well, you know, Sue, it’s not really what I like. I just think we oughta. Okay?”
Now Susan was the one to wait.
She could see him, studying the floor rug, thinking, mulling it over. Then he looked up, and his pale eyes settled on her face and she couldn’t glance away from them.
“There ain’t no nice way I can put this, Sue. You’ve been a right little fucking arse-wipe, ent ya?”
The elevator, which so far had never fallen, now plummeted through Susan’s ribcage into her intestines.
Even if she had wanted to speak, it wouldn’t have been an alternative.
He wasn’t talking loudly. He was quiet and level. So she had missed a bit, too, from the shock.
“… you here and tried to give you a real good time, but you won’t have it, will ya? You just can’t handle it, can ya? But you see, Sue, your mother means a lot to me. And I want her to have a good time even if you fucking poker-arsed bloody won’t. So let’s make a deal, okay? Let’s just say it was your time of the month –” (even in the abysm of terror she writhed with embarrassment) “and now you’re gonna be like a normal fucking girl. Okay? Like any other girl with a great mother and a guy like me trying to make it special for her. Not like some fucking little constipated tart. Is that it, eh Sue? You’re constipated? That can turn a girl into a bitch. Take something for it. I’ve had enough of you. You were like a fucking wet weekend from the word go. Little bitch. Jealous maybe. Well, I can see that would happen. You’re no oil painting, eh, Sue? With those big spots all over your fa
ce and that fat body like a bloody porpoise. Christ, I look at her and I think to myself, Where’d she get this kid? Your dad must’ve been – he must’ve been a real prince. But you can’t help the way you look, I guess. They might even get you ironed out over here. They can do that, you know. Get girls like you looking halfway human.”
All this venom, squeezed out, bit by bit. So level and controlled. Not raising his voice. This hatred. As if he held her there and vomited, slowly and methodically and over and over and over her.
She thought, in a giddy whirl of horror, I must get away. But her legs were leaden. She couldn’t move. The ton weight of his vomiting malice held her there in place.
“…see what I want now, Sue, is you act like a proper girl. You act like you appreciate what I done. What she done for you. She deserves a life, Sue, don’t you think, after mollycoddling you for the past sixteen fucking years. So pull yourself together, girl. I want to see a change in you, I really want that, Sue. No. I expect that. Okay.”
Then he stood up. She had thought he would never ever stop. But he moved off, and as he crossed the loft, through its strips of red westering sun, he began to whistle softly. And then he was gone along the corridor to the bedroom he used with Anne.
After a while, Susan too got up, very slowly. She found she could walk. So she walked into the bedroom he had said she could have. She shut the door, and sat on the bed. Then she shut her eyes.
Susan visualised Anne coming home. Trying to get Anne alone. Telling Anne what Wizz had said. Susan knew she would not be able to. It could never happen. She knew she could never speak of it, to anyone.
And he too must know this. That she could and would never speak of it, that she would, from now on, try very hard to appear as he wished her to, and that she must fail. But still, she would try.
He had split her apart from Anne as even the act of birth had not done, and Susan understood that exactly, even if the thought did not enter her stunned, reeling mind.
Alone? She was. She thought anyway she might be afraid now of Anne, too. Since Anne belonged to Wizz, was a part of Wizz, like that thing in Hamlet about husband and wife being one flesh – therefore my mother.