by Camille Roy
After Dark Shadows, Willa and I went down to the pasture and jumped on the backs of a couple of the Budds’ scrappy Appaloosas. Beating their sides with our heels, with sticks, we got the old quarter milers to race. It felt like one big throb. Maybe it’s always like that, when you’re on an ex-racehorse and he knows you’re asking for speed. My shadow drifted along like the shadow of a plane, but my body was caught in the roar of takeoff, with the thud of hooves and wind and rocks thrown up and to the side, as one leaping stride after another ended in hard dirt.
One day, for a change, Willa hopped up on the old swayback mare, Maxine. I got on behind her, and then we galloped bareback up and down the meadow, the old horse wheezing. After a while Maxine got fed up and bucked us off. We sailed through the air and hit the ground with my hands still around Willa’s waist. The mare yanked at some tall grasses and eyed us evilly. Willa sat up and dusted herself off.
—There’s a party tonight up on Red Hill, Willa said.
We walked up to the party. It was a cool blue evening and the crickets were out. The view was so big you could fall through it, the whole valley gaping and shadow-streaked at our feet, dark in its cracks, under a haze of orange dust. Strings of barbed wire sagged at the edges. Laid down carefully in the red dirt was an asphalt road, oily and smooth. It fed driveways to hidden houses, built to suck in the milliondollar view.
—That’s the lot Elton John bought.
Willa pointed out a slope of broken rock, tipped with a cloud of Indian paintbrushes, weedy tufts of red and coral and pink and orange, poking up between the stones.
—After he bought it, he sued his neighbors for having a cow.
She snapped a grass stalk, chewed it.
We found the driveway and walked down it towards a building made of heavy cedar logs. The door opened soundlessly, and Willa and I slipped in, to smoke and the smell of tequila. The young crowd flowed nervously over low couches and Indian rugs.
—That’s the hostess, Willa said under her breath.
There was a chair carved with gargoyles and Gothic crosses, all black, fifteen feet high. The woman sitting in it was waving at me. Actually, she was waving dreamily at the crowd, like a beauty queen in a car. Her smile was stretched so tight she could have been wearing a nylon over her face, like a bank robber. Face lifts?
—She’s incredibly old, I whispered to Willa.
Was that why everyone seemed grabby? Half full drinks were everywhere, as were glasses overflowing with butts. Willa didn’t hear me; she’d found someone and his hand was on her shoulder. Snag. She slowed down, distracted, that awkward drag across her face, creamy and horrible.
I went off to look for Shane. I found him telling a story to some girls. His eyes were blurry as his big hands sliced through the air.
—Dude was wearing a monster Navajo belt buckle; the biggest one I ever saw. He’s a belt buckle collector. He told me he’s a Republican. A law-n-order man, anti-taxes. This guy is the biggest coke dealer in the state, and he has two miniature poodles, he calls them Spunk and Junk.
The girls tittered. I fled to the yard. Party sounds sagged in the crystal-clear air.
—Rod Stewart fucking kills me, I muttered.
—What?
It was a girl’s voice. I took a suck off my beer and wiped my mouth and continued,
—I can’t stand it. Spunk and Junk. Poodles?
—You’re too sensitive.
—My mom told me this town used to be artistic…
—Hey I’m a musician. A violinist. I’m at the summer music school.
The girl had a head of rolling black hair and was wearing something orange, like a dress. I guess it was a dress, but the filminess was confusing. She was looking at me with one eyebrow raised, mockingly.
—Music school. What’s that like?
—Oh…kinda boring. I practice violin all night and my roommate practices bassoon. It’s so loud I think we’re confusing the furniture. Then I go to bed. Then a couple of hours later I wake up cause my roommate is fucking whoever he picked up that night in the fag bar.
—Wow, I said.
—Fucking noises, she said, every night.
—That’s…intense. For you, I mean.
She laughed, then touched her lip with her finger. Then she looked at me coldly.
—So, I told him he had to take me to that bar. And he wouldn’t.
—Why?
—He said it was a bore. So small town the men don’t even dance with each other. They just sit and drink and stare.
She stroked one hand with the other and sighed, deeply and with disgust.
—Let’s go, I said. Maybe we’ll run into your roommate.
We left that party and surfaced at a table with a round of sweet drinks, the kind that make the back of your throat close up. Fuzzy wuzzies. How is it that drinking age was never an issue? No one in town noticed. I vaguely remember dodging some tourists as they flopped around the dance floor, so perhaps we came in through the back. The interesting part was all the men crowded in the front and along the sides. No one was talking. They reminded me of animals in a dark barn, stamping, shifting their weight, letting out long sighs. There was that thickness, almost a chewiness, of animals being present. The human element was a strong feeling of paranoia.
It made me focus on the girl across from me, on her hands as they wandered around the table and across her lap. Her silences, which I felt I was supposed to fill up. She crossed her legs and scratched the corner of her lip.
—So, I said, listen to what happened last week. Willa and Shane and I, we went up into the high country and everything was fine for the first three days but then we wandered completely off our maps. So, what do we do… It’s always safe to walk down, right? We do that, walk down, and eventually we come into this enormous valley, wide, forested. We crash though the woods, through cowboy camps, nude girls carved into the pines and rusted cans. After a couple more hours we get to a road. We have no idea where we are. We wait for an hour. The first car that comes by, stops. We all climb in the back, the three of us. A pair of skinny old cowboys are in the front. They start telling stories.
I sighed. It’s hard to capture the important details, to peer through the haplessness of every person, especially myself. And when I do get to the point, I feel lost.
—What’s your name? I asked.
—Isabelle.
—OK, Isabelle, so what was amazing was their stories. They had been ranch kids. They’d each run away from home at fourteen. Home was Wyoming, the flat part, land of antelopes and future steak. That’s so far away from any place I’ve ever been, I couldn’t even visit. Do you know what I mean?
—Uhh, yeah…
—So, they joined the rodeo circuit. That’s what they did, that plus running drugs from Mexico, racing across the border in a pickup. They’d done twenty years of horses, bulls, and speed. Anyhow, they drove us all the way home. It took hours. And we drank the whole way. Cheap whiskey from a paper bag. Around and around that car went the paper bag, and we got so deeply drunk, like sliding into warm dirt. Shane passed out, then he woke up and couldn’t stop giggling. I kept looking out the window and thinking, at this moment there’s no fear. It’s gone, disappeared, and that feels like forever. Maybe it was because the guy driving had been thrown so much. He’d hit the ground hard so many times, every joint in his body was loose. That’s the opposite of fear, dontcha think?
—I don’t know, she said.
We looked at each other. She was such a girl—delicate, highly trained. What kind of person plays the violin?
—At least you’re not bored, Isabelle said.
—There’s that, I agreed.
—Maybe we could do something sometime?
She wrote her phone number down on a piece of paper. I bent my head humbly and accepted the paper, rolling it into a tube and slipping it into the pocket of my jeans. Then the Rod Stewart song came on, the same one that had been playing at the party, and Isabelle stood up furiously.
—It’s that song you hate, she said, as though it were an affront to my dignity.
Actually, I loved the song. I couldn’t stand it, but I loved it. It’s about a teenage boy involved with an old woman named Maggie.
At night you take me to bed
In the morning you kick me in the head.
Oh, Maggie I couldn’t keep trying, anymore…
I followed Isabelle out of the bar and stood by her in the doorway as she ran her fingers through the long black wool that sprang from her head. She was talking about rehearsals, concerts. It sounded worrying. Sympathy for her troubled life… My neck wobbled and my head dropped, plunging through all of her hairs. Push, then kiss. Her lips felt cool, so I tried it again. A streaky dazzle dropped from my ribcage into my pelvis, distant but piercing…that part that shoots like a star. Her tongue was warm. I could smell her hair.
—That was nice, I said, and I touched the gauze of her dress. Did you like that?
—Of course.
She meant it. But she sounded irritated too and that edge dragged through my gut. It thrilled me; I couldn’t tell you why.
—You have my number, she said.
Then she walked away down the dark street. I watched her get smaller. It was like watching someone I would never know, any girl in an orange dress.
Later that night, I held up my long stringy hair and studied it in the bathroom mirror. The door was locked. I was naked, except for steam, and the long hair which I held up like a crown of wires. My tits stared back at me, small sunny faces. It was absurd, the cheeriness of my own body… Was there something faggoty about that?
As I was folding up my jeans, Isabelle’s phone number slipped out of the pocket. I stared at the tab of white paper, luscious little thing. It yanked me somewhere, but I didn’t want to go. Why go anywhere? I decided not to call. Then I decided not to decide and slipped the paper back into the pocket.
Mina
Days passed. Willa and I hung together, loosely, twins of gloom. We hardly talked, but that didn’t matter. Budd family life flowed around me. I was absorbed and startled by it at the same time, especially by Mrs. Marian Budd. She had a sincere earthy sweetness that everyone ran over, took for granted, ignored. It was their dirt. I don’t mean that in a bad way.
One morning over breakfast, Willie set down his coffee cup and made an announcement.
—Pussy is having a lawn party. We are invited.
Pussy? I looked to Willa for help, but she was mouthing her scone slowly and with distaste, as if it were some foreign object. In my neighborhood, that word appeared on the back wall of the supermarket, the playground, the school… Gang tags alternated according to turf, but Pussy was everywhere. No one actually said it, though.
—I love Pussy’s lawn parties, piped in Marian. Last time there were violinists, and what were those drinks?
—Gin fizzes.
—Yummy.
—Pussy is our landlady, Willie said dryly. That means everybody goes. Except Camille. You can do whatever you want.
—It’s the horse barn that we rent from Pussy, Marian explained. She lives in that lovely house that overlooks it, the dark one.
Anyone would notice that house—at the end of Willie’s pasture was a tiny lake, and on the other side, at the top of a rise and surrounded by tall pines, a Victorian mansion. A spire rose between the trees, its windvane shining with gold paint. Otherwise the house was painted black and seemed to disappear with all its bulk into the gloomy shroud of surrounding pines. I chewed thoughtfully. So that was the chilling house of Pussy.
—Maybe Mina Loy will be there, Marian added.
—Of course, she’ll go. Pussy gives her money. How else could Mina afford to keep a room in the Hotel Jerome? Especially when she mostly stays with Pussy. They are some weird old people.
Shane gave me a look drenched with significance.
—Shame on you! Marian’s words reverberated through every helpless family member, like some sort of call of the normal. She continued,
—Camille don’t pay attention to Shane. Mina is elegant and intelligent. And Pussy! Well, she built the ski runs, financed the music school. She’s a fine lady too.
The Budds dressed in powder blue for that party. Probably Marian sewed all those clothes. They drifted in a cloud down the street, easy and relaxed, the sweet airs of summer sliding around their bare arms and legs. I watched them go in my baggy shorts which sagged from the prongs of my hips. I was too comfortable in my grunge to go somewhere nice. On the other hand, Pussy’s house was a draw. I’d seen its stained-glass windows gleaming dully in the pine thicket like the scales of a dark lizard. Its general atmosphere of obscurity and elegance made something sprout in the back of my throat. Something like appetite. I wanted to attach myself to that like a tick, and suck.
I tailed the Budds sheepishly. When they disappeared into a swarm of people on a lawn, I took a deep breath and followed. What can I say? It was a lawn party. The sun sparkled on the beds of pink impatiens and the alto knock of croquet mallets against balls sounded sweet. True, gloomy pines towered overhead. But everyone was circulating and pressing hands and making a kind of love which even then I thought had to do with money, specifically real estate money. It was coming to town. That released a zest, like shaving the rind off a lemon.
The Budds were nowhere to be seen. Instead women with frosted pink lips and heavy turquoise necklaces struck poses on the grass. They were tall & very thin, trophy wives, mostly from Texas. Cowboy hats were perched on their gleaming blond hair helmets, decorated with clever feather hat brim ornaments. As new arrivals made their way up the lawn, the women rotated their lovely heads gracefully, and all at once, like a team of synchronized swimmers.
Wealth could seep out of the dirt. I hadn’t known that. Here, the local ranchers were land rich. They’d lucked out and they were beaming, in their nylon blend boot flare jeans and western shirts snapped over their spreading bellies.
I was learning so much. Just this morning, Willa had taught me about ticks. She had stretched out her woolly sheep dog so we could peer into the soft nook between his foreleg and chest. A mommy tick had taken up residence there. Once hard as flint, she had swollen up into a gray and puckered balloon, and all around her head, baby ticks were nursing on dog blood. They looked like little brown petals.
I strolled along, thinking of ticks. How could something so hard get that soft? She had snapped her tiny jaws shut and sucked and sucked and then blew up into a purse of blood…
—Watch it, barked a waiter.
His tanned and muscled chest heaved through his open shirt. I backed off, apologizing.
I noticed a pair of purple shoes in the grass. The heels were wide at the bottom, like Turkish coffee pots, and a nubbin of suede decorated each toe.
—Excellent shoes, I said.
—Do you think so? bubbled from a wide coral mouth, a shapely mouth, although it belonged to an old woman with a big mat of gray hair.
—Peggy bought them for me in Venice when I showed up at her doorstep, shoeless. It happens, dear.
I stared at the woman, waiting for a moment of recognition. Then I remembered I’d never seen a photograph.
—Are you, by any chance…Mina Loy…?
She stood there, looking like a fairy godmother, until I interpreted her silence as yes. Then I blurted out,
—I know your poems. My mother is…uh, a fan…
Mina swiped a glass of champagne off a passing tray and took a swig, rolling it from one cheek to the other, surveying the crowd.
—I suppose I should be appreciative…I try, Lord knows. Do you like this…place?
—Sure. Why not.
—Well I wouldn’t be anywhere near this town if it weren’t for Pussy. Do you know they’ve hammered decorative icicles to my window at the Hotel Jerome? It’s summer, for heaven’s sake… There she is. Pussy, come here—
A blue-eyed woman in a black skirt and squarish loafers approached us. Her gray hair was pu
lled back in a stubby ponytail.
Mina grabbed my hand and placed it in Pussy’s.
—She’s the culprit. The root of it all, our accidental mother…
Pussy smiled at me dryly as Mina held our hands together.
—Pussy came here before anyone. The town was a wasteland, in every way. When Glenn Gould came out to visit, she had to open up the Hotel Jerome and have the only piano in town dragged out of the basement, so Glenn could give a concert in the lobby. Twelve people showed up. They stood around the piano afterward, gossiping and drinking sherry. Glenn said, Pussy, why don’t you start a summer music school? That’s how it started. It should be called Pussy’s Music School.
I took back my hand and smiled awkwardly. Pussy looked bemused. Then Mina’s expression slid disconcertingly towards the tragic. She indicated me with a flick of her wrist.
—The girl says her mother is a fan of my work.
—Mina, Pussy said patiently, That’s nice. We’re happy about that.
She gave me a wide smile, one with teeth.
What could I say? Mina’s poems decorated our bathroom—they were wall upholstery. On the other hand, I knew them well. I knew them by heart. So…
The human cylinders
Revolving in the enervating dust
That wraps each closer in the mystery
Of singularity
Among the litter of a sunless afternoon
Having eaten without tasting
Talked without communion
And at least two of us
Loved a very little
Without seeking
To know if our two miseries
In the lucid rush-together of automatons
Could form one opulent well-being…
—Marvelous, crooned Pussy.
Even Mina lit up with a smile, tender as a baby’s, and then she slipped her hand into the crook of Pussy’s forearm. A sparkle hit the air; it was Pussy’s eyes, glittering. She put her arm firmly across my shoulders and quietly said,
—You must come over. We’ll entertain you. We’ll have tea, or something. Say next Tuesday, at 5?
—Sure, I said.
