Home Town

by Tracy Kidder

  He became a Castaways regular, and his self-designed therapy created odd scenes. On a typical late afternoon in that dim room, he sits on a stool at the far end of the runway and orders an astronomically overpriced drink. Nearby, a middle-aged man leans his elbows on the railing, wearing a rapt expression. If he were a cat, he would be purring as he gazes through half-closed eyes at a dancer. She sits naked on the linoleum runway floor, facing that other man, earning his dollar bill by caressing her breasts, while she chats with Alan, over the noise of slow New Age wind-chime music.

  “Are you still working at the restaurant?” Alan asks. He helped her get a job at a Northampton restaurant not long ago.

  “Yeah!”

  “Are you waitressing or hostessing?”

  “I’m waitressing now and hostessing on Sundays. It’s been really tough, though. I incurred so much debt because I was taking time off from here, so I had to come back here.”

  “I know you hate it,” says Alan.

  “Yeah,” she says. Absentmindedly she runs a finger around a nipple. The man sitting nearby wets his lips. “And, like, during the days at the restaurant it’s pretty slow. It’s tough. I mean, I love the place and I love the atmosphere.” She lifts a breast, eyeing the other man, then bends her head and licks her nipple. The other man leans forward a little. He licks his lips delicately.

  Alan doesn’t look half as strange as many of the other patrons. He talks to the stripper about her jobs, her dreams, her grades in school, her boyfriend; finally, she stands and lets the other man run his dollar bill up and down her leg, then stick it in her garter. Alan puts a five on the ledge. There is no question of his touching her garter belt. She murmurs thanks to Alan, and moves off on her high heels to attend to the other men, saying to Alan over her shoulder, “The only thing I’m scared of is that I won’t be able to handle both jobs during the semester, and I might have to choose this one over the other one because this is the one that, I can pay my bills.”

  Alan grew weary of the Castaways. It had served its purpose. It had allowed him to relearn the female geography. In retrospect, this hadn’t been very difficult. “After all,” Alan later said, “it’s pretty obvious.”

  He graduated to photography. Primitive Leathers, a tiny but well-stocked erotic-gadget store, lay just a few blocks south of Alan’s building. He began to shop there, buying paraphernalia for his photo shoots—feather boas, platform shoes, leather mesh bikinis, chains. He set up a studio in his apartment. Word spread fast in the quasiunderground world of erotic catering. He paid well for models, always careful to make sure they were over eighteen, always getting signed releases, and letting them strike the poses of their choice. One wanted to do elaborate S&M tableaus. Alan had a carpenter construct an apparatus in his studio, like the framework of a tepee, from which a model, if she chose, could hang by chains. Nothing dangerous, just exotic. He didn’t like the idea of seeing anyone get hurt. He worried a little about the rumors that were bound to spread through town, and what they would do to his reputation. Then he thought, “Well, it’s a little late for that.” He stayed behind the camera, treading on the brink of real engagement.

  Many of the things poets have said about love—love distills desire upon the eyes, love brings bewitching grace into the hearts of those he would destroy, love is more cruel than lust—could be said of Alan’s experience when he at last fully reentered the contaminated world of Northampton. He met a beautiful twenty-nine-year-old woman who was living in town and working a respectable but low-paying job there. Her name was Suzanne. The first time he saw her, drinking coffee at a table on Main Street, she took his breath away. He asked if she’d let him photograph her. She said she’d think about it. He persisted. Finally, she told him no, and he stopped asking.

  A few weeks after that, feeling a bit lonely and sad, Alan stopped at the Castaways for the first time in months.

  When Alan Scheinman approached her, Suzanne thought, “He’s probably far from a photographer.” Not that she objected in principle to being photographed with her clothes off, which was what she suspected Scheinman had in mind. But she didn’t think she wanted anything to do with him.

  Suzanne grew up in an old working-class New England town. She went to the Polish church because her mother was the organist. Suzanne had a good voice and she liked to sing; eventually she gained enough poise to do it in front of a microphone. When she was fifteen, the priest asked that she take part in the Lady of Częstochowa Holy Mary Mother of God procession. “I had a long white dress like a bride, and a veil and all these little children who grabbed the veil. It was something even more gaudy than a first communion, because we all wore white linen and there was incense in front of us and behind us, a procession of virgins or something, and, of course, I’m like squirming and blushing, because I’m like smoking joints and drinking rum and doing everything but screwing with my boyfriend. And, oh my God, why couldn’t it be a black veil? Standing up and selecting the lilies and putting them around the statue and reading whatever was the psalm of the day. And the only way I could justify it—I was a student of the classics, of Latin. Five years. The only way I could justify it, I was a vestal virgin. I was like chosen by the high priestess. I just kept having this illusion that this was just a modern-day version of that. That I had power because I was in that position, even though I felt really humiliated.”

  She left home and childhood full of potential and, she felt, unequipped to use it. She still didn’t know why. She had energy. She was adventurous. She had gotten excellent grades in high school and she got excellent ones in college, first at Boston University, then at the University of Massachusetts. “I had something going, I was really good, as an English student. I did really well. I was told by a professor, ‘You wrote the best paper I’ve ever read by an undergrad.’ And I thought it was a pretty large compliment to be paid, you know, and he said, ‘I assume you’re going on, aren’t you?’ And I just said, ‘No, actually I’m not. I’m going to New York City and hang out with my boyfriend and try to get into the film industry.’ I mean, that’s what he was doing. And, you know, I was just trying to ride on someone else’s wave, really, and at the time that was more important to me? Love was like the number one thing for me in my life, being loved by somebody, and I seemed to have kind of a deficiency and so I based my decisions on that, rather than my own career.”

  She spent her twenties in furious action, which, she felt, led nowhere. She acted with an experimental theater group in Boston, and made some cash delivering what are called strip-o-grams. She’d arrive in a gorilla suit or French maid’s uniform, or—one of her favorites—a bag lady costume, and she’d dance as she unzipped them. She never jumped out of a cake. She worked on a small newspaper, which opened and closed during her tenure. She wrote some stories, but didn’t save her clippings. She described her philosophy this way: “Live for the moment, work your butt off, but you’re not going to amount to anything.” She got married, but it didn’t last. Her husband, she said, “objectified” her. With him and most other boyfriends, she felt adored, even worshipped, and left without room to breathe. The young Arab who wanted to possess her in a tent he set up in his living room was only one extreme example. A man she’d thought was just a friend ruined her friendship with his wife by propositioning Suzanne. She didn’t think she’d encouraged him.

  She had lived in Northampton as an au pair during her last year at the University of Massachusetts, and she loved the town. She thought of it as “Cambridge West.” It was, she felt, a very safe place for a woman, and lively enough for her besides. She returned and began to look for a job. She didn’t find much. Northampton’s new prosperity, so apparent downtown, depended largely on a corps of young men and especially young women who would work for low wages as clerks and waitresses just for the privilege of being here. She had to compete with thirty other people to land a minor managerial position that paid only $20,000 a year. It was a better job than many, but rents were high in Northampton. She ended up
sharing a small house with a couple of other single people, one of them a young woman who, Suzanne noticed, kept strange hours. The clues accumulated. Finally Suzanne asked her if she was a stripper.

  “It’s at this really surreal club,” her housemate told her. “It looks kind of like something in a David Lynch movie, out there in the country on Route Five. Come up and see me there some time.”

  “Well, I need some cash,” Suzanne said. “And some play money, too.”

  She kept her night job a secret from colleagues at her daylight one. Most weekend days downtown she’d see three or four of her fellow strippers window-shopping and having coffee, and she’d wonder, “Are we the women of the scarlet letter around here?” Not that she was ashamed. She thought she performed a service. Some of the men at the club said things to her that they probably couldn’t say to their wives or girlfriends. Or maybe some of them had said those things at home, and now the only way they could get a glimpse of a female body was if they paid for it. But better for the wives and girlfriends that those men should have a place to go. And the money was good. She could earn $200 to $300 in about five hours of working the runway and doing table dances. She was older than most of the others—twenty-nine—very fit, thin and muscular, and unlike most, she enjoyed the work. “I’m a good dancer, and a frustrated performer also.” Most of the men who came to watch her and laid their dollar bills on the ledge of the runway were pathetic, but for once it wasn’t the men who were in charge. Not when she was up on that linoleum stage. “It’s actually part of my therapy,” she thought. “There’s a certain power that I’m reclaiming, and maintaining, and experiencing.”

  Unlike some of her colleagues at the Castaways, Suzanne actually did dance and she actually did strip sometimes—that is, she started out with some clothes on. She planned her performances. She gave some thought to her music and her costumes. Tonight, a Saturday night, she planned to try out some new music—“Liz Phair, and she’s like quote unquote feminist, and it’s a little country-sounding.” She’d wear one of her good costumes—“This very demure kind of a little farm-girl milkmaid’s outfit.” It was still evening when she climbed onto the runway, dressed in a blue-and-white checked miniskirt, a little white shirt, not buttoned but tied above her navel, and a straw hat with flowers on it. She had just started strutting around and stripping, aware of the faces gazing up at her but, as always, distant from them, like an actress, when she saw Scheinman—the bushy mustache, the odd, quick, nervous-looking mannerisms—come in the front door.

  It occurred to her that she might leave the stage and hide out in the dressing room. “This is a moment of truth,” she thought. “Am I a professional or not?” She could tell he hadn’t noticed her yet. He was standing alone near the bar, looking around, as if he might be thinking of leaving. She kept watch on him from the corners of her eyes, as she paused to let a patron slide a bill under her garter. Then she saw his face turn toward her. Then he started squinting at her. She thought he must have recognized her. Then she thought he hadn’t. He came to the runway, still squinting up at her, and sat down at the far end. She was naked now, except for her milkmaid’s straw hat. Turning away from Scheinman, she tilted it forward a little, so that it would cover some of her face.

  She’d planned to fling it off at some point. Maybe she’d just keep it on, keep her back to him and her head tilted down for the next twenty minutes. But that wasn’t possible. “All right,” she thought. “I’ll just give the bastard my best show.”

  She worked the entire crowd with special vigor, all the while keeping half an eye on Scheinman. He looked mesmerized, she thought. He didn’t seem to be looking at her face anyway. Finally, she moved to the end of the runway and squatted down in front of him. She had kept the hat on for this moment. She pulled it off and leaned her face toward his. With all the irony she could put in her voice, she said, “Surprise.”

  They talked later that evening. Since he’d found out her secret, she decided she might as well let him photograph her. He said he’d like to take her out to dinner first.

  Soon Alan had begun to get his teeth repaired and to purchase a new wardrobe. Eventually, he shaved off his mustache. Without it, he looked ten years younger. But of course he could never look as young as Suzanne.

  Alan often breakfasted at Sylvester’s, a historic spot on Pleasant Street, the renovated former home of Sylvester Graham, a vegetarian who invented the cracker that bears his name—though the commercial version doesn’t much resemble his. Graham proselytized for twelve-hour-old whole-wheat bread, for opened bedroom windows, for cold showers, and for the reform of courtship. Ralph Waldo Emerson described him as “the poet of bran bread and pumpkins.” Graham influenced American diet profoundly, it is said. Once, during a lecture in Boston, he dared to discuss sex publicly, and on top of that suggested that for the sake of health, it should be carefully regulated—that, in effect, women should have the power to decide when to have sex with their husbands. And that shouldn’t be more than once a month, he felt. A near-riot ensued. Graham spent his last years here in Northampton. The place didn’t treat Graham very well. A local newspaper article of 1851 made sport of the elderly man: “The people of Northampton were amused one day last week by seeing this philosopher of sawdust pudding trundled on a wheelbarrow from his house to the barber’s house.” Perhaps Graham’s greatest offense was to go before town meeting and say that because of all he had done for the world he shouldn’t have to pay taxes. Children sometimes threw rocks at him.

  Alan liked the feeling of a historic place. At another time he might have thought it amusing that he should eat his breakfast here, in what had been the last abode of the former oddest man in town. But he was entirely preoccupied these days with what he called “the relationship.”

  He reviewed the facts of his recent return to the world. “Initially it was just a complete, total, mindless joy,” he said. But now he had calmed down enough to look at matters clearly. He’d gone into a tunnel for ten years and come out in his early fifties, more mature. “All the things that I took for granted for years and years and years, like sex. It was like starting all over again, but not as an adolescent. I had already realized what it meant to be alone and what it meant to miss the touch, the loving or lusting touch of another person, or to have a loving or lusting touch or both toward someone. It’s been like the first time every time. I don’t think it’s going to wear off.” He added, “Not to say I’m a model of mental health now, but I do enjoy things now.”

  He had learned how to live more entirely alone than most hermits. Now it seemed he would head into the future accompanied. Suzanne had beauty, intelligence, and energy, and hadn’t yet figured out how to make the best use of them. He’d given her money so that she could quit her dead-end day job, and see a therapist regularly. Eventually, they’d launch some sort of enterprise together, with his money and experience, her energy and imagination. Was she in this for the money? Of course, he’d posed that question to himself, and he’d pulled the thorn from it by offering the money before she could have asked for it, and also by giving it to her in a lump sum. “So that if things don’t work out between us, she’s not caught in the middle.” And if money were all that mattered on her side of the relationship, she wouldn’t have told him his teeth made her uncomfortable or asked him about the bizarre rumors she’d heard about him. And she would have agreed to let him retire her from stripping. But she had refused to quit. He didn’t like that, but he could live with it.

  “She’d walk naked through the streets of Northampton if it was at all possible,” Alan said. “That’s her. I mean, she’s completely unfettered in her mind. She’s just frustrated that she can’t do all the things she wants to do. So I don’t know. That’s very threatening in a sense, but what’s good about her and what makes me much less threatened is that I can tell she’s serious about the relationship, because she puts things on the table.” He had never met anyone quite like her. All that vast potential wasted in a sordid little s
trip joint. All she needed was opportunity. He could provide that, then stand back and watch her fly. “She’s not quite successful yet, but she’s heading that way. I’d love to see her do that. I can’t do it for her. I don’t have the skill, and no one can do it for her anyway. I don’t want to make her my tool. I just want to lay out a smorgasbord in front of her. Let her make her own decisions. She’s a person who can’t be controlled, and I don’t want to control her.”

  Now when Alan laughed, the sorrowful sound was gone. “I can survive the relationship with her and I can carry my end of it. I feel pretty confident. I don’t know if I can keep her completely satisfied, because she’s a very juicy woman, very passionate, and I have moments of passion, but I don’t sustain passion. I’m a grinder, though I’m highly opinionated and I certainly have a well-developed ego. There’s part of me that’s coldly dispassionate about her and the relationship. Which isn’t to say that I’m not involved with her, but I’m clearly not losing myself in the relationship. I’m clearly maintaining myself strongly from this relationship, and I’m encouraging her to do the same thing, though she needs less encouragement than I do. I would have a tendency to throw myself in. I’m trying to throw myself in, trying to entertain all sorts of possibilities, but maintaining a sense of self. I’m not certain that it’s entirely possible. When I said this to my shrink, he smiled a little bit, but he said, ‘Well, sounds like everything’s proceeding as well as it possibly can right now. You seem encouraged and I think you oughta be.’ ”

  People used to say he looked like a rodent, scurrying across the streets. The furtive, harried look was gone now. He still wore shorts and ragged sweaters at times, but at other times he actually dressed up. He sat at breakfast with careless-looking ease, silk shirt opened halfway down his chest. When he smiled now, he looked like a boulevardier.