White Leather and Flawed Pearls

by Susan Altstatt

  Running into him produced a good giddy OD; I retreated to the restaurant. Harlan ordered lunch.

  I was beginning to get a fix on him.

  All his days began the same. On the bar in our suite stood his electric coffee grinder, his electric orange juicer, and his French filter coffee pot. In its refrigerator was a giant sack of oranges and a small one of Arabian Mocha coffee beans, the real old $20-a-pound kind Mama never bought because they cost too much.

  Harlan’s Arabian Mocha could have powered a Saturn rocket. His fresh orange juice wasn’t any slouch either. He’d handed me mine this morning with an announcement: we were shopping for a wedding dress.

  I said, “I have a wedding dress.”

  When he realized I meant the white cotton knit mini, his scorn was total and mirthless. I explained its special qualities carefully, how it was one of the very few dresses I’d ever really liked, how I’d personally pulled it from the bottom of the five-dollar bargain bin at the Esprit factory outlet store, where they toss all the damaged stuff, the ugly stuff that didn’t sell, and the occasional nifty one-of-a-kind sample; further, it was sanctified. I’d gotten married in it once already.

  He countered: it was hideously out of keeping with Tom’s white damask 1830s frock coat.

  It was still my wedding dress. My piece of the real.

  He asked if I thought Esprit might replicate it for me in finer fabric and full length.

  So I took him to the factory outlet, right down in the warehouse district on the edge of the windy, skittering bay. He saw my point at once. The place is a supermarket. Nothing wrong with that, the clothes are fun: its just no place to look for individual service. All their stuff is Fabriqué à Hong Kong anyway.

  And the Muzak at Esprit is select solid vicious rock (with the Belshangles admixture prominent), played non-stop loud enough to cook the brain. The effect on teen female better judgment is very dependable: buying frenzy, like a feeding frenzy of sharks. It never worked that way on me; it made me mad: like the songs were being whored with and I was being bribed. I loved the music so much better than the clothes.

  So we wound up back at Union Square.

  First at Gump’s. Their street-level boutique had a special on furs. Black ranch mink. Half price, only $6000. Almost out the door, I saw the bomber jacket: white ermine with the little black tails on, flippety-floppety, one to a fur. That was a proper giggle, and I almost took to it: traditional royal drag transmogrified. The quintessential rude girl thing. And I’ve got no qualms about fur; I eat meat too, and I wear leather shoes. But the tag said $3000.

  Then at Sak’s. The clothes were 100% rayon, and they all had shoulder pads. I don’t need shoulder pads. I have shoulders.

  Then at Needless Markup, first the wedding salon, then in the restaurant, empty handed. Doing what the Stones’ song said: “sitting, drinking (mediocre Chardonnay for him, ice tea for me), superficially thinking—” If I could tell Harlan all about the Holy City New Jerusalem, and the tears wiped away from the eyes, might he possibly understand?

  Did he have any religion?

  Maybe he didn’t, and that was the problem.

  Maybe he did, and that was the problem.

  How much did I know about him, anyway? His father was an Anglican priest, a bishop’s confessor. Wow. As stunning an argument as I could think of for the celibacy of the clergy.

  Oh, and I’m so deadly tired of watching him order food he doesn’t enjoy.

  At last he said, “You know, you have three thousand dollars. You have thirty thousand dollars.” So that was what was on his mind. The ermine jacket. No rude girl thing is worth three thousand dollars; it’s a contradiction in terms.

  “Look,” I said, “I’m the kid whose belt buckle always slid around under one arm, whose blouse was out of her skirt, whose nails broke off, whose socks came down, whose hair was parted crooked, and whose shoes had horseshit on ’em. There’s only so much you can do.”

  His look of honest frustration, fierce and innocently rumpled like some big black-feathered bird of prey, is more appealing than I care to admit.

  I said, “Did you ever dress up a kitten?”

  “What?”

  “A kitten. A baby cat. In doll clothes.

  “Whatever for?”

  “Cause you were a kid and didn’t know any better. They turn out silly, stuffed, lumpy, frumpy, scared, mad, smelly, undignified, and shaped wrong!”

  “Well none of this morning’s exercise was my idea!” (His lashes are black kohl smears below his wide gold eyes; you want to wipe ’em off, only they aren’t mascara) “I call the whole of it a thundering, provincial snore: if that’s the all your San Francisco has to offer—”

  Now he’s hit me where I live. What could he have been doing here while Tom and I were in the mountains, hanging by his heels from his hotel ceiling like a bat?

  “If it wasn’t your idea, whose was it?”

  “I’m following you, as per instruction.”

  “I wouldn’t be caught dead buying clothes in this place!”

  “Nor elsewhere, by the look.”

  “This is ridiculous. I like thrift shops,” I said, “and vintage clothes shops—”

  “So do I. We dressed from them for years: they give one at least a chance to substitute intelligence for money.”

  “—I like weird old things there never were too many of, and now there’s only one!” I flopped my hand and rings smartly on the table. Day-Glo orange diamonds, half a weird old thing there’s only one of. The other half’s in London.

  “Although,” he said, “given my head, in your case I might proceed quite differently—”

  “Such as?”

  “Mm—trot you ’round to Hermes of Paris, say, and have them dress you out.”

  “Harlan, ‘dressing out’ is what you do to game you’ve shot—”

  Didn’t he know. He was the utter mischief, and I’d called him by his proper name. Damn. A first. It just slipped out. He grinned at me sideways, and his hair fell in his eyes. Tom’s gesture. He had it down exactly.

  Wednesday, August 27

  Trouble is—

  Sex is addictive.

  After only One Week’s Free Trial Offer, something awful is happening to me. I’m losing my grip on fantasy. Love has left me dreamless. I pulled the extra pillows off my closet shelf last night, and made a pillow husband for my bed. Tom was my hinge pin and pivot of all dreams anyway; now he’s gone and gotten real. Absent lovers, absent lovers.

  I could dream myself in Harlan’s place once. He’s real too. I think. I don’t know what Harlan’s place is anymore. Stuck with me, incognito in San Francisco? God. Okay, I’ll humor him. We had our mocha and orange juice; we had our guitar session. I started out standing up:

  da dump, da dump, da-da-da

  da-da-da-da dump, da dump

  da doodi dadi doodi da—

  doo wah, doo wah

  doo wah doo waah, do wa-a-ah!

  Don’ wanna be your sla-ave!

  (da dump, da dump),

  Don’ wanna be your sla-ave!

  I didn’t bellyache and he didn’t comment.

  Suppose he knows anybody here? Lots of music types around San Francisco. Huey Lewis, The Tubes, The Grateful Dead. I’m sure he knows Bill Graham. Suppose he’d ever introduce me? People call him on the phone and make him laugh. Except for Tom, I don’t know who they are, or where they are. Tom’s the only one who makes him sing. And if he has any amorous night visitors in that bedroom next to mine, they’re supernaturally quiet ones.

  Wonder if he makes pillow lovers in his bed.

  I took him to Britex on Geary street, which displays more fabric per cubic inch than any other store on earth. That’s what he’d determined we were after, a rare exotic legendary white silk: and we’d have some local extrapolate an upscale copy of my dress.

  Just to look helpful, I wore the dress. He wore a black velvet three-piece suit, and looked like nothing earthly.

  Britex’s
back door lets out onto Maiden Lane, and the silks are next to it. And they were all for dated little Chinese cast iron yuppie-matron cocktail dresses: the kind they wear to high school awards night when their sons win first in everything. Nothing legendary. Prim pale damasks, with peonies on ’em.

  Nah. I can’t afford to look disappointed.

  We wandered on down Geary. There is another little shop, advertising “Unusual Fabrics.” And they sure were, in the Cyndi Lauper sense. Being weird is not enough.

  It wasn’t precisely that I didn’t believe in Santa Claus. Hell, I even believe in faeries. I was embarrassed. I didn’t believe in me. That was all there was to it. I didn’t pray for anything at all. And if Harlan had his own list of Tings 2 Pray 4, I didn’t want to know about it.

  Of course, the Psalm says, “I prayed: because You answered.” Answers prove the prayer exists. They’re all that does. So the real world must be crowded, jammed, and littered, in fact, made up of the interlocking artifacts of other people’s prayers. I don’t think I’m alone. Do I? Like the old joke about the guided tour of Heaven, and the quarter the tour bus has to cross in total silence ’cause it’s where the Roman Catholics are, and they think they’re the only ones there.

  Here I am, poking idly through bolts of synthetic glitz and fringe, of eyelash acetate and Lurex leopard skin, a Holy Lonely Roman Catatonic Church of one, socked in by spiritual fog of my own making, while—

  “May we use your phone?”

  —Salesperson, fortyish, sharp, and Asian, is saying to Harlan, “I don’t promise—” She checks her privacy, and writes on a slip of paper she first tears from the pad, “—but it should be entertaining.” (In come two young guys with moustaches.) “You’ll find a pay phone, I believe, in the lobby next door. Good day, sirs, may I help you?”

  ———

  Harlan stuck the receiver between my ear and his: the phone booth was too small for comfort, and smelled of Moorish palaces. A little surge of gagging panic came and went as his dark hair swept my cheek.

  Steady. Look at the paper in his hands.

  Look at his hands. Look at the muscles in his fingers, the way the cords rise across his knuckles. God, I don’ wanna look at his hands!

  Above the number on the paper in his hands is written “How Sam Wah, Silk Merchant.”

  Business hum and traffic noise. A brisk man’s voice (abandoning the middle of another conversation) chirps, “Sam’s. C’n’I help you?”

  “I am calling a Mr. How Sam Wah, is this—”

  “Moment sir, put y’on’nother line, c’n’y’hold? Thanks.”

  My eyes are shut, so I can’t see his hands. On the wall outside the booth was this big red-black-and-white poster for an AIDS support group: testing, lectures, counseling hotlines. A new tomb, and more getting laid in it daily. An entire city crying with Tom’s voice, “I don’t want to die of that stupid, goddamn ignominious disease! I don’t want to die at all!” I kept the eyes shut, and prayed that Harlan wouldn’t notice.

  At least there was no canned music. Don’t think I could stomach “Greensleeves.” Or “Moon River.”

  The other line, responding, bore an accent, rich, female, quiet as luxury: a Chinese plum sauce voice.

  I whipped across the street, ultimately glad to be delivered from that phone booth, and bought a map. We’re looking for 17b Dalton. Dalton is an alley not so far away, tributary to Grant. The darkest heart of Chinatown. Our appointment with the silk merchant, if the woman with the voice, and we, have understood each other (neither certain), is at two o’clock.

  Harlan’s watch says 12:33.

  Just off Union Square is a place that makes real, true sandwiches, sandwiches which are. Avocado, bacon, and sprout sandwiches on thick sweet slabs of fresh-made bread. With an hour to kill, and a sudden heartfelt need to see Harlan eat California and like it, I ordered for us both.

  Delight. He ate his with a look of quiet wonder. He picked the last sprout and bacon crumb out of his plate. He even asked about dessert. I tried to get him on sliced pears and yogurt, but he shuddered politely. Back outside.

  We had to pass a street entertainer on the downhill corner of the Square, a kid getting out of chains, padlocks, and ropes he bullied his crowd into fastening on him. A crew of friends passed the cap and managed to wring out three collections while he strutted, bragged, claimed he was starring in a movie on Houdini, and showed himself off naked to the waist. Brassy and skinny and limber as a snake.

  At last all possible pigeons were milked; his bondage was firmly in place. He raised one shoulder high, dropped the other past the limits of anatomy and started to shimmy. Chains began to hit the sidewalk. He moved exactly like Tom. Sandy-haired. Tawny. Fifteen years younger.

  As we left, Harlan tossed a small green spindle into the cap. Maybe, I thought, he’d stuck his name and phone inside the money, like the bold chicks do at concerts.

  Half a block later I’d guilt tripped myself into a vigorous stomachache. Ow. Harlan’s watch said 1:45. We hiked up Grant street. Ow ow. Lower than stomach. A sharp pang, like runner’s cramp. Guilty-gut ulcers, the worst kind. I was the one who’d thought the kid was sexy. Me. Harlan only gave him money. He and Tom had worked street corners for a living once.

  Crowded shops and Chinese hustle pass me in a haze. Off Grant, the crowds thin out. One-room factories make fortune cookies; strange trash ferments in gutters, and steep old stairways go to joss house temples on the second floor. One more turn leads into damp, pungent solitude.

  17b is a door with nothing on it but the number. 17a was bricked up in the last century. It’s plastered now with old concert bills (one for the Belshangles tour), old politicians, old agitprop, and most recently, the AIDS support group poster. In Chinese.

  Harlan leaned on the buzzer. It sounded (if at all) so far inside, no rumor reached the street.

  No “Greensleeves.” No “Moon River.”

  Trouble is (ow), sex is addictive. Eighteen years I’ve done without. Eight days, and it seems like the real old natural order, indispensable. OW ow ow.

  Somebody unbolts the door, one of those perfectly sleek young Asian women who’s about four inches at her thickest, front to rear. Her dress is tiny black silk, slit at the sides and fastened on her shoulder with curled black satin frogs.

  The glimmer of her flawless nylons and dainty black silk heels precedes us up a dark, canted staircase, along a hall, through a door. Inside, a buzzing office full of skinny little men at desks are answering phones, typing, keeping ledgers. Across the room, a jagged hole is kicked out of the wall, four feet tall by four wide, maybe. I can fantasize Godzilla’s big green toes protruding through it. Now, I didn’t pray for this. I’ve never thought of anything remotely similar. But at last and at least, here is my city: not Act III of the Masque of the Red Death, and not a thundering provincial snore.

  Our guide glides on between the desks. No one glances from his work. She dips and bows through the hole in the wall like a Chinese dancer, and we have to follow, around three sides of a balcony or mezzanine above some industrial operation (old-fashioned looms? or presses?) clattering away a floor below.

  Down a second dark, sagging staircase. Down a hall. Into an exquisite little office, with a deep blue carpet, low chairs, and lacquer tables, and sliding doors to a garden (stone lions on boulders above a dry stone stream), laid out with wit and nerve in the strip of shadowy waste, six feet narrow, between one warehouse and the next.

  There is an old man at the far desk, black dressed, black-eyed and moth fragile. The girl introduces How Sam Wah the Silk Merchant, in the voice we heard on the phone.

  And Harlan starts to talk.

  He takes about ten minutes explaining who he is, who Tom is, who I am, where London is, why we’re here not there, and exactly the sort of silk (white fantastic) we need (He needs? I need?) for a wedding dress.

  The girl listens, dutifully dazed, and turning, makes Chinese of it for the old man, in about half the time. It did occur to
me, they both might understand quite well; she might be saying something else. He replied, about a sentence worth: a voice as soft as caterpillars in the mulberry leaves.

  She turned to us. “He says, no white.”

  “What?” said Harlan.

  “He says, in China is the color of—how we say.” She made small puzzled shapely gestures. “The dead are in white, and those who—”

  “Mourning?” said Harlan.

  “Yes.” (relieved) “Is color of mourning.”

  The old man spoke.

  “Also, he says, is only the rough, the raw silk: is not the fine silk used for mourning.”

  “Well, scratch this plan,” I said.

  Harlan shook his head, an almost imperceptible “no.”

  “Do you deal exclusively in China silk? What about silk from Japan, or Thailand, or—”

  The girl had already begun her translation.

  “He tells us, is all same. In all part of Asia, white for the dead.” She smiled helpfully and said, “Color of mourning?”

  Back where I started. A new tomb in which no one had been laid. White for purity. White for deprivation. I would feel a lot more comforted if I knew what the difference was. Harlan is still talking, about comparative symbolisms of color. And I have paranoied myself into a stomachache bordering nausea.

  At the old man’s ring, waiters come with steaming pots of jasmine tea, and cups and plates and trays of Dim Sum. Egg rolls. Pearl balls. Tiny little pork buns.

  Personally, I prefer my pork buns large.

  Harlan has hobbit blood. Harlan has a hollow leg. Dude, he’s barely finished one big lunch; I’m having to defend my territory, or he’ll get all the pearl balls.

  Harlan can be an awful bore.

  I guess enough exposure to anyone’ll demonstrate they aren’t the Fourth Person of the Blessed Trinity after all, but now he’s arguing philosophy of art or something: about synthetics, and why they can’t ever be esthetically pleasing as natural fiber, as if these people even knew the words: what a crock—And the tea was all poured—and the food was all gone—

  Even Motormouth Parr appeared to have run down. The silence grew embarrassing. Then painful. Nobody moved.