Leo had bought the painting just before she’d met him, at an estate sale, when he’d been living off his winnings from the game show Wheel of Fortune. “Show business is show business,” he explained. With his quick game-show money, he’d moved from San Clemente to Los Angeles, found this apartment, furnished it with a wooden kitchen table and chairs, a plush sofa. As a girl just out of college, Gwen had been impressed. His apartment had a feeling of solidity. And she’d let her guard down and stayed.
She sighed. She was here, might as well make the best of it. Staring through the smoke at the ceiling, at the plaster, the way the lamp lit its raised shapes, she noticed faces there, too—like there were in the shower. But these were the faces of animals. The face of one animal and the body of another. There was a pig-fish—the face of a pig, or else a peccary, and the fins and tail of a trout. Maybe the peccary was becoming the trout, or the trout the peccary. Or maybe she was breathing too much of the ambient pot smoke. And there, with the wings of a bat, was the face of the mountain lion from this afternoon, staring down at her with its huge eyes.
“I saw,” she said. “Today when I was driving—” And then she didn’t want to go on. To tell her encounter would be like telling a dream. She’d lose it, she knew, in the telling.
“Leo,” she said, changing direction. “Sorry. Zero.” He looked at her now, and she went on. “Today, when I saw you stepping out of the smoke, you were so American, you were epic, almost. Like you were emerging from a battle with the Brits or something. Why not be Revolutionary Man and walk into East L.A.? Why be naked?”
“You’re asking me?”
“Well?”
“So you’re the only one who can be naked, then?”
“I’m naked where one expects to find nakedness.”
“Where one pays for it.”
“And where it isn’t illegal.”
“How fucked up is that? It’s illegal to be in our natural state. To be naked in public. Unless the purpose is to entice, to titillate,” he said, emphasizing the tit in “titillate.”
“At the club, it’s nude, not naked.”
“Nude, naked,” the Count said, crushing his cigarette into the ashtray in a single twist. “Come, my dears, let’s put it to use. You’re both cordially invited to my lair at two A.M. for a party in which we will wear nothing. Or at least nothing that counts, or nothing that covers where it counts. You get the picture.” He stood and opened his box of cigarettes and then closed it. “Fuck. These will have to last me.”
Gwen pulled herself off the sofa.
“You’re in?” he said, making his way to the door.
“We’re in.” Gwen kissed his cheek, and the Count opened the door.
“You should speak for yourself,” said Leo, slamming the refrigerator shut, and the Count, who could sense drama coming from a mile off and wouldn’t miss it for the world, let the door close. He lit another cigarette and, taking a seat on the sofa, settled in for the show.
Gwen refilled her jar with water. She’d never been so thirsty.
“You know what, Leo?” she said. “I think it’s a splendid idea—the naked East L.A. thing. A triumph of a plan. The plan to top them all. I think this is one you have to do. For real. In fact . . .” She paused, thinking it through. “I’m going to help you. All you need is a white flag, right? Ought to be easy enough.”
She grabbed a wooden spoon. “Too short? Let’s see, you want the flag to fly above your head. To flap around in the breeze. Innocence. Peace. Love. You’re sure you want it to be white? I know it’s the flag of surrender—you ride across the battlefield with a white flag and it means your side surrenders—but in this case the tension is all, well, so black-and-white. Maybe a color would be more neutral? Maybe a green flag? Like Whitman’s flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. You know, when he’s talking about the grass as a uniform hieroglyphic, growing among black folks as well as among white?”
She caught her breath and looked at him. He sat in the chair and stared at her. This was the most she’d said to him in months. Always she was in a hurry to get to work, or she was spent after a long night. Or she was guarding her space, writing in a fever—annotations, poems—her next deadline for graduate school just around the corner. And when they did have a rare moment together, he was the one with the diatribe and Gwen was in the chair, pretending to listen.
“Are you all right?” Leo said.
“Is she all right?” the Count said. “Are you kidding? The girl is lucid as hell.”
“You stay out of it,” Leo said.
“He’s right,” Gwen said. “I’m lucid as hell.” She opened the refrigerator. In the drawer she found a cucumber, somehow still crisp. She washed it off in the sink and bit into it. It was perfect. And the smell. She thought she’d never really smelled a cucumber before—so bright and green, like being in a garden on a wet spring morning.
“You’re set on white?” she said.
Leo didn’t answer.
“It was your vision, right?”
He squinted at her as if trying to bring her into focus. He nodded.
“He isn’t saying much, is he?” Valiant said.
“Not so much,” said Gwen.
Leo looked from Gwen to the Count and back to Gwen. He clenched his jaw and folded his arms across his chest.
“Well, white it is,” Gwen said.
She stood on the kitchen table and took a curtain rod from above the window. The white curtain fell to the floor. “Here’s your pole,” she said, holding the metal rod.
She took scissors and cut a square from the top of the curtain. She put the rod through the tube of fabric at one end of the square, and with duct tape she wrapped the rod from top to bottom so the fabric would hold.
“Here it is,” she said. “Your white flag.”
“Very nice,” said Valiant, exhaling.
She waved the makeshift flag and did a little dance down the living room aisles and back into the kitchen, where she handed the flag off to Leo as though it were a baton in a relay race.
The Count grinned, applauding gleefully. And she felt herself glow. How she did adore an audience. “Your turn,” she said to Leo. “And if you’re going to hit the streets at dawn you’ll need your rest.
“Count,” she said, turning to him, “he’s sorry, but he can’t make it tonight. There are urgent matters to which he must attend.”
She bit into the cucumber, smiled as she munched. “Leo,” she said. “I won’t wake you when I get home tonight.” She kissed his forehead and raised his hand that held the flag so it was straight up.
“Looks good. The news is going to love you. Zero. Our new savior,” she said and turned and left him there, holding his flag and without a thing to say.
She glanced back at the Count, who was openmouthed, agog and aghast, but thrilled, as if she’d just thrown him a surprise birthday party.
She walked into the bedroom and closed the door behind her. She latched the French windows to shut out the singed smell of the night, to try to at least. She lay down on the bed. The walls were thin. She could hear arguing, name-calling and expletives, as though they were brothers fighting, and then the door slammed.
At last it was quiet. And she knew Leo was too high to come in and talk to her. He had no intention of being brought down.
Her body was pulsing, still, with adrenaline, as though she would have to run, keep her body in motion to stay alive. It had been too long a day already. She let her body sink into the bed. She was safe, alone. The windows to the courtyard were shut, the curtains drawn.
She watched the dimming twilight as it held each object. This room she had slept in for years was still very much Leo’s. His oak headboard and chest of drawers made the room warm and heavy, of another place and time was what she’d thought in the beginning—an apartment in Paris in the fifties, someplace where she could curl up and forget—the strings of auditions and actors, and the callbacks (from both) that hadn’t come—forget
how tired she was of running, forget all those nights she’d spent in her studio apartment, listening to the classical radio station and reading a book, alone. And now that time was gone; it was long ago when she’d felt saved from herself, when this place felt like somewhere she could stay for a while, safe from the world.
In the corner, Leo’s arrangement of old stuff—suitcases and wooden tennis rackets, a violin in its case and a pack of Lucky Strikes—had a kind of hopeful, sad, romantic charm. As if his life had once possessed ease and luck, lighthearted whimsy. Of course they were only props, the old stuff. Set dressings. He’d never played tennis, nor had he smoked or played the violin. At first the arrangement had been fresh, crisp, like newly displayed dried flowers, and it was now covered with dust, now it was old, old stuff, and it made the room feel stuffy and crowded, like an attic.
Beside it, the desk loomed. His desk. Wooden, with a fold-down top, he’d cleared it for her when she moved in, so she’d have a place to work. It, too, was neglected, piled high with mail and drafts of poems, journals and books. There wasn’t even space to write. And what she wanted more than anything was to write, to sort her mind—the tangle and tumble of thoughts, like kelp and sea stones heaped along a shoreline. There were treasures, she was certain. Beautiful, sea-worn stones having come so far, taken so many years to round. She could hear the roar of the waves, the clattering of the stones, the hiss of the foam. There would be time, she told herself. Soon. Time to search this ocean inside her. Soon, when she wasn’t so bloody tired.
Her head throbbed. She took off her jeans and T-shirt and bra and slipped naked between the cool sheets. She’d sleep a little. And then she’d bathe and wrap herself in a robe—that frayed silk robe of her mother’s. She’d wear a high pair of heels and a strand of long, fake Mardi Gras pearls. She’d show her tits and everything else, because that was what you did when there was a curfew and you were pregnant—your body changing fast. That’s what you did when your best friend was dying and your boyfriend was planning a stunt that, were he to follow it through, could get him arrested or beaten or killed the very next morning. That’s what you did when your city was burning, the city in which you’d lived and dreamed and loved; that’s what you did when you had just this night.
Fourteen
VALIANT’S HEAVEN-BLUE LIVING room twinkled with strings of little white Christmas lights he’d draped around the windows and doors, and with the devotional candles on the vanity, which, centered along one of the long walls, was the focal point of the room. Gwen stood before the mirror, looking at herself in the black silk robe, the Mardi Gras pearls, and her high heels. At least twenty candles of Saint Sebastian lined the edge of the vanity with a flickering rim of fire. His wrists bound, his body a pincushion of arrows, he was, she knew, patron saint of both masochists and the dying. His image multiplied made a circle that challenged pain and death itself. Fuck you, the candles said. Bring it on. Without you, there can be no ecstasy, no release from the self, no transcendence. You are wax and wick, the candles said to pain, fuel for liberation, for light.
Below the center of the mirror, a single candle faltered: the Virgin of Guadalupe. The dark Virgin, the one Gwen had always felt most drawn to. It reminded her of her grandmother Carlotta, whose pendant she had, still, somewhere. When had she last seen it? She had found the pendant years ago in Carlotta’s gold-leafed antique jewelry box. It was after her funeral and Gwen’s mother and aunts were diving in, dividing her treasures—the diamond rings and bracelets and necklaces—among which the Guadalupe pendant on the thin silver chain had stood out. Its tarnished edges and its enamel face had spoken to Gwen of her grandmother’s girlhood, of that time before she’d met the man who would be her husband, who’d buy her diamonds and dresses and escort her to charity balls, before she’d exchanged the name Carlotta for the anglicized Carla. Gwen had never seen her wear the Guadalupe pendant. With its red and green and gold, it was too bright. Too Mexican. Gwen had put it on then and there. For a long time after that, all during high school, she never took it off. And now she needed to find it. She wished it hung over her heart, instead of these fake pearls.
The Guadalupe candle was new. It would have to burn awhile before the image would really light up, like sun through stained glass. You could still see, over the rim of the candle’s clear glass, the flame—the blue base, the yellow tip, and, between them, the pellucid window, oblong, like those windows in submarines, or in illustrations of submarines, the window from one world into another.
On the vanity, inside the ring of candles, Valiant’s wigs framed their mannequin heads. The black rocker wig and the one with the straight bangs—the pageboy he wore when he wanted to look pretty. In a wooden box between them he kept his makeup. Black eyeliner and mascara, eye shadow and blush and translucent powder.
Waiting for the Count to emerge from his bedroom, where he was still engaged in who knew what preparations, Gwen took off her black silk robe and hung it over the vanity chair. Leo was downstairs asleep on the sofa, which meant this party would consist of just the two of them—Valiant and her. They hadn’t seen each other naked before, but it seemed natural, a fitting progression of their friendship. In just her heels, she realized she felt clothed, her body a sort of rubbery costume she wore with confidence. She was a little prickly, the hair on her pussy, her legs, and her armpits just starting to poke its way out of her skin. It was a luxury, those days she didn’t have to shave, when she could let her body do what it wanted—to bristle as if in defense, to grow its veil of hair. And, yes, there was the razor she still needed to buy.
At Valiant’s bar on wheels—the low cart with booze and mixers and a full canister of ice that he called his rolling bar—she started to pour herself a vodka and tonic before she remembered. Her body—this suit she wore with such ease—was changing.
It was hard thinking of her body as a machine, busy all by itself. Busy making someone. Someone else. All she had to do was supply the right ingredients—to eat and drink the right things, pure things—avocados and oranges—to breathe pure air, to think pure thoughts. All she had to do was be healthy, good to herself.
She wasn’t sure she knew how. And anyway, she’d not decided.
You get an abortion and it’s over was what Tony had said. It’s over. There was such finality to it. There would be no turning back from that. No erasure. When she was forty-five, and her clock with its nonrechargeable battery was nearing the end of its ticking, and the silence was looming, she wouldn’t be able to return to this time. She wouldn’t be able to choose again.
She left her glass on the bar, untouched, and sat at the vanity, Valiant’s shrine to transformation. Above the mirror and to both sides hung his triptych self-portrait. He’d painted his body black and while the paint was wet pressed his flesh against the raw white canvases. To the right was his face in profile, his shoulder and arm, a few ribs. To the left was the canvas with his feet and legs. And in the middle, above Gwen, hung his thighs, his ass, and his hips, the form a dark, open hibiscus from which his cock emerged—the majestic stamen. He’d painted it, Leo had told her, before Gwen had met him, just after he’d tested positive. And she could see why. Here his full-sized body (his cock, she figured, had to be a bit larger than life) was cast in permanent shadow. A perfect negative of himself, the painting was the world without him in it. It was like those cartoons in which the character runs right through the locked door, leaving a hole in their shape punched out of the wood. The painting was an act of bravery—his way of looking things in the face, his refusal to hide.
Gwen dipped his powder brush in the jar of loose powder. It was the color of moonlight, of starlight. She dusted her forehead, the tip of her nose, her collarbones, her aching nipples, her belly with its slight swell. In the candlelight, she almost glowed. She was Tink, still, made of air and shimmer. As if she might lift right off the chair and float on out the window.
These Last Days was playing on the fifties radio. It was Valiant’s favorite show, to wh
ich he’d tune in religiously for his dose of weekly humor. Veronica Lueken, a white, middle-aged, self-proclaimed prophet from Bayside, New York, saw Mary appear on the fairgrounds near LaGuardia, while devotees flocked to hear her message. The show always started with Veronica’s secretary, in her heavy New York accent, giving the update on Veronica’s health. This week was no different. “Veronica has not been doing well. Her pancreas has been giving her problems, as well as the medication prescribed for her diverticulitis.” And then Veronica herself came on, overwhelmed by what she saw, her voice strangulated with zeal. “I, I can see Mary. It’s Mary. She knows me. She’s, she’s wearing a blue robe and underneath is—ah, ah, ah—a flowing white vestment, and she has sandals on her feet. She sees all her children gathered here and she’s happy, she’s smiling, she’s, she’s, she’s talking to me now. How lovely you all are, she says. Oh! And now, she’s crying. It’s the sinners, the homosexuals. They’ve brought this plague upon us. The AIDS. She says they must repent. She says—”
Valiant entered from the hallway, switched off the radio. “She says they must change their evil ways,” he said, imitating her fervent breathlessness. “I’ve heard this one,” he said in his own voice. “It was on a few weeks ago.”
“Why do you do that to yourself?”
“Come on, Gwen. It’s hilarious.”
Ready, apparently, for the riot-night festivities, he stood behind her, wearing his aqua satin robe, its sash in a loose bow at the waist. He took a black scarf from where it hung on the mirror and tied it around her neck. The scarf was almost too tight. Cradling her jaw in one hand, he tilted her face up, toward the Christmas lights. He turned her face to one profile and then the other. Was she a model to him now? Or an old film actress? What part would he ask her to play?
Further Out Than You Thought Page 11
