White Leather and Flawed Pearls

by Susan Altstatt

  Lots of kids spend years concealing drugs or liquor from their parents. What I hid were little packs of peanuts off airlines I’d never flown on, exotic bars of soap from luxury hotels around the world. That the Belshangles posters I collected weren’t marketed in the U.S., and the Belshangles photos and memorabilia in the manila folder on my desk couldn’t have come from Movie Memories, those were the secret “highs” I hid.

  I sent him things, too. My school grades. Stuff that amused me from the local papers. Kid stuff, bits of my life, just as he sent me bits of his. We never wrote letters, exactly. In ways unexpected, he was a very cautious man.

  ———

  We’re almost at the top, when Garfein gets the gall to re-format his question: “Well how did you ah—ah—”

  “I took a thorn out of his paw one time.”

  Whizz.

  The obligatory big mirror, facing the elevators on the top floor. This one is gilded art deco, with a little table built into the front, and a beefy Belshangles guard lounging back on it, elbows planted behind him, jacket hiked to free the holster underneath. When he saw me on Garfein’s arm, he grinned. When we trucked off down the hall, he followed.

  The high-water mark of last night’s partying remained in corners, a damp sea wrack of paper plates and napkins, orphan beer bottles in plastic cups. Behind closed doors someone of indeterminate sex (male maybe) was vocalizing, a bawdy operatic soprano shifting by stages into vigorous screams.

  Other doors slammed open just ahead, and a man came out in his boxers: a state in which I’d never seen Belshangles drummer Rollo McInery; I knew who it was just the same.

  Spotting us, he said one word: sounded like “Wotcher.”

  A rangy young woman in a bright blue teddy materialized behind his shoulder.

  Whiffs of grass, taped music, and two bearded dudes in Levi’s and Belshangles T-shirts drifted out the next door; a naked toddler with an older brother in pursuit fell out the next.

  It reminded me of—well, I knew what exactly.

  My mother is a circus nut. Every summer, sure as Ringling Brothers makes its rounds, Mama’s got tickets. All the summers of my childhood, front-row seats, right down where you can smell the tiger pee and dodge the elephants.

  She used to get ’em for Oakland or S.F.: Ringling always gigs on both sides of the Bay. One year she bought too late, and could only get Cow Palace tickets, way around the end where she’d never have chosen. Then we found, to reach those seats, you went along a section of the concourse the performers used also, between the arena and their trailers in the exhibit barns.

  You could stand right next to those death-defying demigods of sequins and sawdust and admire them shyly. They didn’t seem to mind. They laughed and went around in bathrobes and smelled of greasepaint and garlic and talked a torrent of Bulgarian.

  Afterwards she never bought seats anywhere but there.

  Like that now. Except that circus, however glittered up, is for children of all ages, sexless. And rock bands were designed for adolescents, to be the furthest opposite there is.

  Like touring the halls with a fife and drum, the rate we’re gathering volunteers. McInery’s pal is still among the frontrunners: she’s popped a T-shirt over the teddy, the chest reads “Love is Blind; Lust Doesn’t Give a Good Goddamn.” We reached the side corridor at last, and a door at the end. The same as three years earlier? Memory crazes current events, an untrusty kaleidoscope. Same or not, Garfein coaxed it open with a key, and, ushering me through, rounded on our little mob of spectators. “Now look ’ere!”

  ———

  All I heard, because the door swung shut. That may have left me on the inside; but not, I discovered, alone.

  Harlan Parr. Nemesis in a black silk dressing gown: sunk deep on the back of his neck in the sofa across the room. Black hair spreading on the sofa back. Black inscrutable glasses fixed on the door, and me. Neat impeccably expensive shoes cocked up on the coffee table. The soles were that peachy virgin-leather color. They had never been off a carpet. Indescribably erotic somehow: the sweet glazed unmarred paleness of the soles of his new shoes.

  Harlan got up, made me the smallest formal bow, and vanished down the hall. What I can imagine: the carpet smoking under his exquisite little feet.

  Lord God, Father Almighty who made me—

  Have mercy on me—

  What I can feel building up inside, a good loud scream.

  I am a latter-day Don Quixote, happy in my private landscape of windmills. Tom Rhymer is my Dulcinea; I have no intention of being put off, put down, or put out of the running by the extraordinary, any more than I have of letting some nice young ordinary guy come along and help me to forget him. I have no intention of forgetting him! He still fills my measure of “Beauty Incarnate”!

  And it’s not that I don’t really know the worst about him; I remember the contents of my crash course in “Thomas Peter Rhymer, Human Being” very well. He laid it squarely on my head himself: into every drug in sight, designer and generic; into everybody too, male and female—What was it but the classic tale of woe that goes with his profession? I was fourteen years old. All it did was shift my emphasis, from the “beauty” part to the “incarnate.” My hero had feet of clay, a great unexpected relief, and far as I knew, the material all human feet are made of. His were still the prettiest feet of clay around.

  And the only person he’d ever loved—for sure loved—

  ———

  So here I am, standing in Their Room. Thinking. About the May ’86 cover of Time I pinned to the wall above my bed.

  The caption: Tommi Rhymer, Harlan Parr: Charity Rocks On. A gaudy artist’s rendition of those two launching into their act, hitting the stage in a pool of white light, glued so close together back to front, the wonder was how Tommi kept his butt out of Harlan’s guitar pickup.

  Could be Harlan’s down the hall crying his eyes out even now. Could be that’s why he had the shades on. My stomach is beginning to churn. Harlan has the face of a Renaissance angel. Botticelli would have chased him down the street to use him for a model. How awful in the end, if all that beauty couldn’t guarantee him endless love.

  Lord Jesus Christ,

  Who takes away the sins of the world

  Have mercy on me—

  Pretty soon, a second little niggling, giggling inner voice beside my prayer begins to chant, “I fought the windmills, an’ the windmills won!”

  Stop that! Deal with it. Look around.

  Pray harder.

  It is the same suite as before, and maid service hasn’t gotten to it yet. I see pieces of clothing, the morning’s newspapers with scissored columns, stray cocktail napkins, used olives and toothpicks in the ashtrays. Not garbaged out, but certainly the lived-in look. Lived in by Them. Time was, I would’ve ripped off tidbits of their trash and treasured it. Even now I feel the urge. After high school, one does not do such things. Eighteen is a woman, however green.

  The room has a sweet scent. Subtle. Warm. Not pot smoke, but mind-bending. A scent out of imagination: drowsy sun on the King’s strange garden. It gives me an unsettled head and heavy eyes.

  A scrunch of keys in the door: Garfein again, nearly bashing me in the back, reconnoitering the emptiness.

  “Nobody here?”

  “Except Harlan. And he left.”

  “Aw Christ,” he says, and lumbers off distracted toward the bedrooms. Down the hall, where Harlan went.

  Bittersweet scent. Illusive. Playful. Clear fountains in blue tile courtyards. Plates of dried fruit. Lemon trees and water lilies.

  But oh, talk about Earthly Paradise—on the table lately graced by Harlan’s heels, between the coffee cups, sits a real one of those fancy, tiny mixing-and-dubbing decks musician mags all advertise (“Fits in your lap; carries on; do your composing on the plane—”) plugged into a headset and a quarter-size sparkling white guitar. Harlan’s toys.

  Midway of the rug, I realize I’m moving.

  Nearly to the couch
now: it’s the plushy, sink-in-to-your-hip-bones kind. Where Harlan had been sitting left a dent. I consider sitting in it. I consider sitting next to it.

  God help me, and I’ve only just begun! It’s much too soon to get depressed!

  I sit in Harlan’s dent. It is noticeably body-warm.

  Actually, I’m not depressed. I’m scared shitless.

  So damn easy to think up a vilest possible contingency, then a worse, like Dr. Seuss’s “Glunk”—nearly impossible to “un­thunk” once the old mind spewed it out. I don’t think I’m about to die a horrible death—he might be into S&M, and kill me making “snuff movies,” deep-six my body in the bay—that kind of thing. Nobody knows where I was going. I don’t even think he’d throw me to his roadies and watch them tie me down and stuff beer bottles up me, like you read about in trashy rock mags. The Tommi I remember is a battered child-man with a gentle heart.

  Lord Jesus Christ,

  Who was once a human child

  Have mercy on me—

  But what if—what if he’s just polite? That’s the kind of possibilities my reason refused to unthunk. Polite. Invite me down to coffee. Say, “Gee, how awfully nice to see you. Let me take this opportunity to thank you; what’s more, my lover thanks you. Now, what are your plans for college? You must fill me in on how you’re doing, the next time we tour through.”

  Lord God, Holy Spirit, Comforter—

  Have mercy on me,

  Take away my pain.

  I shut my eyes. Put my hands over them. Let the room get truly dark now, make it go away. (I either know a lot about answered prayer or even more about self-deception.) I wait while all the sparks and lightning flashes fade, and nothing shows but pure rich dark. Then I open them. Tom Rhymer is watching me from the end of the hallway.

  White cotton shirt with no tie. Cloth shoes. Cream cotton wash pants. Ordinary clothes, right? Not on him.

  I am thinking: what an insupportable, terrible tragic loss, if, in some dry season, my instant knee-jerk to this man should ever stop being “Grab fast! Ask questions afterwards!” and a mental memory dump of all the love poetry I ever was exposed to—this time, fittingly:

  My Beloved is white and ruddy,

  the chiefest among ten thousand—

  (Ten thousand is like nothing. There’ll be some beautiful kid in any high school who’s chiefest among ten thousand. Ten million, and you might be getting there—)

  His head is as the most fine gold, his

  locks are bushy, and black as a raven—

  But his aren’t; Harlan’s are.

  Now I’m standing up. I shot up when I realized he was there. Not proper. Not grown-up in the least, or ladylike, or liberated, or—

  —His hands are as gold rings set with Beryl:

  his belly is as bright ivory overlaid with sapphire,

  His legs are as pillars of marble,

  set in sockets of fine gold:

  His mouth is most sweet:

  yea, he is altogether lovely:

  This is my beloved, and this is my friend,

  O daughters of Jerusalem—

  Oh shit, and he’s laughing at me, too: exactly the funny almost-lover I remember, under cover of the Song of Songs.

  “Well,” the man says, head on one side, “You didn’t turn out half bad.”

  “You’re no old bag yourself.” Now we’re both laughing.

  “Where to?” I said finally.

  “Y’want to talk about it?”

  “Can we talk here?”

  He thought. Glanced back down the hall. “Coffee shop.”

  (Now here’s the place for my nightmare to begin—the “I thank you, my lover thanks you; now where will you be going to college” one—)

  “Okay.”

  “Moment; I’ll phone up the lads.”

  Tom loped to the bedroom. I listened open-mouthed. Phone dialing. What he said was short, and much too low to catch. (What “lads?”)

  But he came back with a smile and took my arm, and his hands were warm as—hands are as (Oh God, here we go)—

  —gold rings set with beryl—legs are as

  pillars of marble—mouth is most sweet—

  yeah man, altogether lovely—this is my—this is my—

  Out in the hall now. Not a soul in sight.

  Until we rounded a corner and came to the elevators. Two black guys were standing there: two hundred fifty pounds apiece, and they weren’t fat either; they were six-and-a-half feet tall. They were dressed in a colorful West African sort of way, and I noticed as we got closer, one had gold rings on his left hand and a gold earring in his left ear. The other’s rings and earring were on the right. Apart from that, they were exactly alike. Mirror images. Tom grinned. “Hussein,” he said pointing at left earring, and at right, “Hassan.”

  I bobbed and mouthed “How d’you do?” and regretted it.

  They both made silent little flourishing salutes, right-hand fingers to the heart, the lips, the brow, and finally to me. They could have been the Sultan’s deaf-mute eunuchs out of the Arabian Nights. They could have been genies out of lamps. Tom was a porcelain miniature between them.

  Two elevator doors whizzed open: one on a fat old couple who gaped at Tom and his demon guardians in horrified awe. We got into the other. Nobody spoke. Hassan hit the down button. Tom leaned across, after the doors came shut, and kissed me, kindly, meticulously, and briefly, on the mouth.

  He said, “Y’don’t smoke, either.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Good: saves you the trouble of quitting. Never could abide the taste, myself.”

  Of cigarettes? Or smokers’ musty mouths? I knew without being told. I felt all down my back pop out in a fine slither of sweat, my pulse keep rising and rising.

  Across the wide brass-and-glass lobby with its indoor trees and flowering carpet, small groups of girls were keeping watch for Tom. They let off a kind of silent shrilling when he came in view, like supersonic burglar alarms. To the trained ear. Mine is infinitely trained. Look, you Daughters of Oakland, San Jose, wherever, I can relate: you’ve kept vigil, all night maybe, for your Idol, your Icon of Desire. Now, mid-morning, he finally appears, escorting some dumb chick in a suit. I half expect them to school Piranha-fashion and rush him, teeth gnashing.

  But we’re safely past them, Tom moving fast and me on his arm, the two huge Blacks in wing formation. Past the flower shop, past the Ticketron, homing in now on the dark mouth of the coffee shop, and the coffee shop hostess standing there, immaculate stack of menus on her arm. Latest lacquered hair, lacquered makeup, lacquered linen dress, a long slim shoulder-padded number divided diagonally, hem to shoulder, “smoke” and “champagne.” No wrinkles across the crotch of that dress; being judicious, she has never tried to sit in it.

  She doesn’t see us yet.

  Now she does. Her whole face comes apart in looks which have no place there: “Why me, Lord?” panic. Human awkwardness. Undisguisable terminal yearning.

  I hear her whisper, “Oh, Mr. Rhymer—”

  And we’re past her too, into the shop, all tile and stainless ’30s chic—headed full-throttle for a roped-off section of tables. The clip-clip-clip of her embarrassed little heels is loud as she scurries to reach the velvet ropes ahead of us and get them down. Tom spurns her immaculate menus, and salves her with a shy smile as immaculate. “Just coffee, love, be kind: it’s the middle of the night for me.”

  He takes his seat in the very middle of the unused section, at least one row of empty tables between us and the world on every side. The “lads” have vanished, if anything that large aspires to vanishing, to a table on the full side.

  All food-and-conversation noise in the place was squelched by our arrival. You can honestly identify the Mood Muzac, an early Belshangles tune blandly rearranged, disarmed.

  Tom looked up at me. Dark red forelock, dark red lashes, pale, pale eyes. “I didn’t ask if y’wanted more than coffee.”

  “No problem. Coffee’s wonderful
.”

  He waited for the noise level to rebuild, for Muzac to spin its next, with only the bass line audible.

  “And are y’still virgin?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “All right. So what do you want from me?”

  I opened my mouth; I thought about men like trees walking, and almost said “Ut videam.”

  He laughed, and shut his eyes, put the tips of his long fingers together. “Let’s start by saying, I owe you. Look at me: can you imagine? I’ve fans who write to say I look too healthy? I find that a bitter kind of love.

  “—I’ve even come through without a bottle of Jack Daniel’s growing to one hand, unlike some people I could mention. I don’t drink at all. I’m wealthy, and perhaps a bit wiser than you saw me last. Lot of things to be said, maybe, for going through life radically anesthetized; but holding on to your money is not one of ’em. And if it wasn’t for that little stunt you pulled on me, I’d be—well, I wouldn’t be any of those things.”

  I guess I laughed.

  “What?”

  “Radically anesthetized. Only other place I’ve heard that was Greenpeace. The guys who skin seals admitted clubbing ’em first might not exactly kill, but left ’em—well, what you said.”

  “Listen, the way I was when we first met, y’could’ve had my skin off, and I might not’ve noticed for an hour or two—”

  A man loomed over him, dressed in black so grand he had to be the maître d’ from the nouvelle cuisine enclave across the lobby. The little hostess’s immaculate stack reposed now on his arm. “Good morning, Mr. Rhymer, it’s shortly before noon; would you prefer the luncheon or the breakfast menu?”

  “I’d prefer my coffee, if y’don’t mind; I never take food at this time of night.”

  “Very well, sir, as you wish.” He bowed.

  Tom gave him a little rock-royal wave of dismissal. He bowed again. Tom waved. He bowed. Tom waved. And when he was gone:

  “—Say it was accident I finally crashed while you were watching: not somebody else. Say it was coincidence y’had your place to take me, and the means and the guts to take me there. Say it was pure beginner’s luck I didn’t die in your friend’s car, and fool’s luck of some kind I didn’t kill myself, or you, or somebody, before I cleaned up.