Valerie

by Sara Stridsberg

  The large black receiver, the hopelessness, and the sand whipping fiercely into your eyes. Her voice sounds as if it were underwater during these conversations. The smell: salt, iron, lies, and menthol.

  Sometimes she weeps, sometimes she holds lengthy monologues about her life in the desert. Silk Boy sits outside the phone booth, waiting.

  ALLIGATOR REEF, WINTER 1955

  THE HIROSHIMA MAIDENS ARRIVE IN NEW YORK FOR FREE PLASTIC SURGERY

  Sweeping over the beaches is the cold breath of the white shark, the strong smell of cigars and dollars. The umbrellas disappeared long ago, there is frost in the reeds and it is no longer possible to sleep on the beach. You can stay as long as you want on the mattresses in Mr. Biondi’s solarium. There is food in the house: bread, spaghetti, potatoes, and things in tins, and dope. All day long the boy sits in front of mirrors with salt crystals in his hair, making lipstick kisses, kissing all the mirrors, writing on the glass in lipstick, Valerie Jean Solanas will be president of America. On the veranda he works on his seahorse collection, small dried seahorses in different colors that he sorts and organizes. Some still have seahorse babies in their stomach pouch, some are shriveled and atrophied and it looks as though they have wept for their young.

  SILK BOY: This little dad has two babies in his pouch.

  VALERIE: When’s Asshole coming back?

  SILK BOY (fingering the seahorses): He’s called Mr. Biondi. One small and one large baby seahorse. The mothers aren’t involved at all. They take off pronto. Water duty, water fantasies, all sorts.

  VALERIE: Listen, Sherlock. We have a problem. A problem other than seahorses. Bigger than seahorses.

  SILK BOY: I wish you were a little male seahorse with a tiny pouch like that and I could live in it.

  VALERIE (picks up some of the seahorses and talks to them in a seahorse voice): Right now we’re living in an asshole’s house. And right now I’m wondering how we can get out of here … (holds the seahorses in front of his face) … This is Asshole. And this is Dope Boy … And this is Valerie … Once upon a time there was a low-down Mr. Shark who loved naïve little dope boys … masochistic little dickhead whoreboys …

  SILK BOY (pries open your hands and takes the seahorses from you): Stop it. They break when you do that.

  VALERIE: We’ll have to sort out this matter of the seahorses another day. I don’t want to live here anymore. And you don’t, either.

  SILK BOY: Without Mr. Biondi, there’ll be no money for college.

  VALERIE: It’s not real college money. We’ll just be whores there too if it’s Biondi Asshole money.

  There are no more temporary photo labs in the campsite toilets. He has got his own little lab at Mr. Biondi’s; he generally gets what he wants from Mr. Biondi. A real room with real equipment where he can work all night in the subdued light. When you are allowed in, you usually sit with a little flashlight under a blanket, reading a book and commenting on the photographs he drops down to you. And when Mr. Biondi returns from his travels, Silk Boy moves upstairs to the large floral bedroom.

  A cold spell sets in, sharks glide in and out of the bedroom, black leaves fall on the small garden and at night you lie in the porch seat wrapped in blankets, planning for the future, sending off for educational materials from every university in America.

  Or recording a tape for Dorothy.

  Snow falls on the beach, a thin layer of frost on the sand and the lifeguard towers and the parasols. You record the sound of the ocean and then the sound of the snow falling on the beach. It is crackly and strange, but beautiful. Silk Boy moves noiselessly at the edge of the beach, under orders to be quiet.

  Afterward you pull the ribbon out of the cassette and use it as decoration for a present you are sending to Georgia. In the box, sand and marine toys; shells, seaweed, starfish, reeds.

  And some of the wind, too, that chases between the blue-black palms.

  BRISTOL HOTEL, APRIL 15, 1988

  NARRATOR: The deceased is talking to herself again.

  VALERIE: What’s she saying?

  NARRATOR: She’s talking about various things. She’s saying: It’s hypothetical. She’s saying: It’s not hypothetical. She’s saying that she doesn’t like arithmetic.

  VALERIE: Arithmetic … No credit, no discount. No credit, no discount. I don’t like arithmetic. And don’t have gang wars over territories. It’s not nice.

  NARRATOR: I’ll tell them to change your sheets. I’ll tell them to bring some food up for you.

  VALERIE: Tell who?

  NARRATOR: The staff. I’ll sort out your papers and your ideas. If you want, I’ll make notes for you. Or read aloud from the manifesto.

  VALERIE: There’s no staff in this hotel. I don’t make notes anymore. Instead, tell me what you were thinking about when you were sitting there in the window before.

  NARRATOR: I suppose I was thinking about you.

  VALERIE: You’ve fallen in love with someone who doesn’t exist.

  NARRATOR: A virtual love affair. A girl in the sand who vanishes, my mother’s childhood, my father’s broken heart.

  VALERIE: It’s not your death material. It’s not your screwing material.

  NARRATOR: May I hold your hand?

  VALERIE: You’re romanticizing this and sentimentalizing it. The notes will go up in flames in the backyard in Ventor. The dying material is just vomit, diarrhea, phlegm, and fear. There is no point in sitting here waiting. All this is just nothing-at-all material. It will all vanish.

  NARRATOR: I’m so sad you won’t survive this story.

  VALERIE: There’s really nothing to be sad about. I’ll give you some good advice if you’re sad, because the story ends here. Invite home a ragged girl panhandler who needs somewhere to sleep and something to eat. Invite the girl addicts who sleep in garbage cans. Invite a crack whore, a bag lady, a maniac. Stop in the subway and talk to the psychotic hookers. Don’t walk away when she starts ranting and raving about nothing. Ask where she comes from, what she needs, what you can help with, what she has in her notes, if you’re so interested in dying crack whores. Visit hostels, mental hospitals, drug ghettos, red-light districts, jails. The world’s out there waiting for you, baby. The material is called SHE’S EVERYWHERE.

  NARRATOR: I’m not stupid.

  VALERIE: And not particularly smart, either.

  ALLIGATOR REEF, SUMMER 1955

  The birds lie on the shore, battered by the wind and abandoned, and he patrols up and down in his tattered jeans and salt tangles and the perpetual cigarette in the corner of his mouth. White feathers flutter around him as he carries them away to bury them in the reeds, lifting them out of the sand with such care. The giant birds, the ernes and the largest gulls, look like children in his arms. The clouds consume the last of the wintering light and you have grown tired of the camping life and Mr. Biondi and the ocean’s way of being merely beautiful and unconcerned. Silk Boy and you each have a place at Jacksonville College for the autumn and he weeps through the night because he thinks he will appear a fool there.

  VALERIE: I don’t think you should touch those disgusting creatures.

  SILK BOY: I don’t want them to lie there all alone.

  VALERIE: Death is lonely. And they’re only rubbish. Shit corpses.

  SILK BOY: I can’t be here and know they’re lying alone all over. You don’t need to stay and stare.

  VALERIE: It makes no difference how many you bury. There are more all the time. They stink. They make your hands smell of death.

  SILK BOY: Would you leave me lying dead here on the beach?

  VALERIE (laughs): —Little idiot—

  SILK BOY (a gull under each arm): Would you?

  VALERIE: I’d never let you die. I’ll make sure that you get to a school. We’re going to be students. We’re going to take on all of this.

  SILK BOY: But I’m just a fool.

  VALERIE: You have a research project on the coast. And you have research manager and research coach Valerie Jean Solanas by you
r side. I swear on my career that I wouldn’t let you fall like them.

  SILK BOY: My brain is full of dope and dicks.

  VALERIE: Your brain is full of dead birds.

  The underwater days at Alligator Reef are coming to an end; the shutters are open for the season, but the tourist beach is still empty. The water tastes of seaweed and the salt water stings your eyes. You walk along wearing a wet suit or jeans and a jumper beside Silk Boy, who has a cigarette in one hand and the little worn-out hash pipe in the other. Your clothes are salty and flecked with white. The ice crystals still keep forming in your breast and he chases you across the motorways and sand dunes in his dainty dresses with his delicate wrists. You read your books and reread them, and the pages are covered in ink scrawls, a drawing of the heart, kisses, stars, moons, and inky glosses in the margins: wet kisses, girls, male seahorses, future.

  Silk Boy has a bad memory and bad teeth and he hides himself away in photo fluids in the campsite toilets and he forgets that you have to go to Jacksonville to register; he carries on working with the photographs of male seahorses, as if your departure were not imminent. You smoke two thousand five hundred cigarettes outside and talk to him through the toilet door. In the pink developing light he is happy, contentment glinting off him when he comes back out to hang his photographs on washing lines between the trees. The photographs are of you, the Atlantic, crabs, starfish, handbags, and the dead kitten that washed ashore.

  SILK BOY: You’ll have worn all those books out with reading before we start.

  VALERIE: It’s just reading for pleasure. I’m not learning anything.

  SILK BOY: When I’m nervous, I forget what you’re supposed to do when you’re reading. I read bits of that book about seahorses over and over again. Then, when I get kind of electric, I forget to concentrate and the words stop meaning anything.

  VALERIE: I’ll be there the whole time.

  SILK BOY: But there’ll be nothing left of the books after you’ve finished, so I won’t have anything to read.

  VALERIE: Have you packed your bag?

  SILK BOY (with his gaze on a saltwater photograph): Go on your own, Valerie.

  VALERIE: Why?

  SILK BOY: It’s better if you go and collect the papers and everything. I’ll just get nervous and start stammering and fill something in wrong and back to front and give us away. And we need more money.

  VALERIE: Sometimes I think you’re in love with Asshole.

  SILK BOY: I’m just scared of ruining something.

  VALERIE: Nothing to be afraid of.

  SILK BOY: Biondi ran down a flamingo yesterday. There was blood on the car when we got back to the house. I don’t want to stay here, either.

  VALERIE: Silly darling.

  He stands in the doorway with an octopus over one shoulder and lipstick on his teeth. That hopeless, silky-smooth boy, the fifties boy. The summer rain keeps falling on the beach and the little trailer, the new one you broke into when you left Mr. Biondi’s solarium. Together you sort out all the things you need for the journey. Pages of notes, yellow and ink-stained, books and photographs with the boy’s face cut out. You have written a tale about two campsite whores in a trailer on a beach in nowhere land and Silk Boy laughs into the cigarette smoke and outside the violence of the ocean rages; and in the story the campsite whores fight back against the sharks. The sun spots move softly over his small hands as he turns the pages; his mouth tastes of dope and snow.

  SILK BOY: How does it end?

  VALERIE: The sharks’ bodies are shooting targets.

  SILK BOY: How does our story end?

  VALERIE: A happy ending.

  SILK BOY: You won’t leave?

  VALERIE: I’m going nowhere without you. Do you like it when I read?

  SILK BOY: I think you’re a true writer. I think you’ll be president of America.

  VALERIE: And you’ll be the president’s wife. The most beautiful first lady.

  SILK BOY: I’m just a regular campsite whore.

  VALERIE: You’re the sweetest campsite whore in America.

  When you walk to the bus, he is asleep. The little whoreboy with so much money in his pockets and so much aversion to schools and unknown cities. You kiss his warm wrists and gather up your things.

  The ocean birds screech outside the trailer and when he talks to himself in his sleep he sounds like a child—I don’t want more ice cream—not the sharks—no, not more sharks—I promise—just sing a smutty little magic song for nice Mr. Biondi. His shins are sticking out over the damp, threadbare mattress (there are hundreds of Polaroids of his shins) and he sleeps with his hand covering his dick.

  This silk boy is so beautiful. So beautiful and frightened and unfettered. He loves swimming where it is deepest and darkest. He loves swimming when the warning flags are up on the beach. He spends all his nights in strange cars, but he does not dare take the bus the twenty-odd miles north to register at college. Only you can save him with your books, your schools, and your faith in the future.

  ELMHURST PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL, AUGUST 10, 1968

  Dr. Ruth Cooper appears to have unlimited time for meaningless consultations with patients, and in the end they are preferable to walking around amid the ward’s wreckage of girls and women. And after a couple of conversations with Dr. Cooper, you no longer remember who you are. You are Dorothy, Samantha, Cosmogirl, you are a hundred thousand murdered women prostitutes on the beaches. Sereena, Mona, Jacqueline, Heather, Diane, Angele, Brenda.

  Hey, hey, hey, Dr. Cooper. What do you know about love?

  The curtains are being sucked out of the window and are flapping sharply against the hospital concrete. Dr. Cooper, under her impeccable hair, sits and waits for you to start crying, but you do not cry, as there is nothing to cry about. It is the hottest summer in New York in seventy years. It is 1968. Andy Warhol is dying and Cosmogirl is not there anymore. On Fifth Avenue Daddy’s Girls are marching with their ridiculous posters about abortion and the pill and date rape, moronic demands to be broodmares and cocksuckers on their own conditions. A female political agenda not even laboratory mice would accept. Daddy’s Girls read aloud from the manifesto. They kiss each other and burn their middle-class underwear, while all you do is wander along asylum corridors in a secondhand dress, black with yearning for death.

  After persistent requests and entreaties, Dr. Ruth Cooper has obtained permission for you to wear your own dress in the ward, not the raincoat, not the mirrored spectacles, but the dress. Your bag is still impounded and the manifesto and your notes have been confiscated indefinitely.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: It’s okay to cry here. Everything you say will remain in here.

  VALERIE: Andy Warhol is in the hospital playing dead and I have no desire at all to die.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: You can rely on me absolutely for complete confidentiality. I’ve spoken to the hospital administration and I’ve obtained permission for you to wear your own clothes in the ward.

  VALERIE: And my bag? Is it still impounded?

  DR. RUTH COOPER: You’ll get all your things back when you leave the hospital.

  VALERIE: Still confiscated then. I’ve got nothing good to read, just those romantic novels they bring round on their stupid little library trolley.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: I think you should read Alice in Wonderland.

  VALERIE: I bet you do. But it wasn’t quite what I had in mind.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: I still think you should read it. I’ll get it for you. It has meant a lot to me. There are similarities between you and me. We’re both women, we’ve both studied psychology in graduate school.

  VALERIE: I won’t read it.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: You’re extremely gifted, Valerie.

  VALERIE: I’m bored.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: Don’t throw all that talent away. You can be whatever you want.

  VALERIE: Half a nation on its knees prevents me from doing that. Millions of doormats are spoiling my view of the sea. A room of one’s own is a fiction that does
n’t work.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: Half a nation and a million doormats are beyond your control.

  VALERIE: And all those waiting outside in the corridor?

  DR. RUTH COOPER: That’s my responsibility. And the hospital’s.

  VALERIE: Then I think you should grant entrance to all those who are waiting. I have more important things to do.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: Things change. Women no longer accept life as second-class citizens.

  VALERIE: Thanks. I know. An army of lobotomized Barbie dolls is marching along Fifth Avenue with their ridiculous posters about abortion and the pill and date rape. I can’t even remember if they’re for or against date rape.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: Being alone is a utopia. Two people thinking the same thing makes a reality. They might be reading from your manifesto.

  VALERIE: Of course they’re reading from the manifesto. That’s the problem. I assume they’re kissing each other. I assume they’re burning their middle-class underwear. I assume they’ve got round-trip tickets to hell.

  DR. RUTH COOPER: Next time we see each other, I’ll have a book for you.

  VALERIE: Absolutely, Miss Higgins. Can we consider this little consultation concluded now?

  DR. RUTH COOPER: One last question. Did you finance your college education by means of prostitution?

  VALERIE: You’re darned right I did, Doctor.

  LABORATORY PARK

  BRISTOL HOTEL, APRIL 16, 1988

  NARRATOR: Did you fuck up your doctorate?

  VALERIE: There’s more than one way to fuck up …