The Soho Press Book of '80s Short Fiction

by Dale Peck

  CHAPTER 4 : No/Yes

  I threw caution to the wind and never used any contraception. Nancy finally convinced me I might get pregnant this way and made me an appointment at Planned Parenthood. It was a Saturday appointment and that night I had a date with John, a painter from the Midwest, a minimalist. So the doctor put the diaphragm in me and I kept it in, in anticipation of that meeting. Besides, I had lied to the woman doctor when I said I knew how to do it—I was afraid to put it in or take it out. Let it stay there I thought, easier this way.

  We met at the Bleecker Street Cinema and watched a double feature. Godard. Walked back to his place below Canal Street. We made love on his bed and he said, “I’m sorry. This must be one of my hair trigger days.” “What does that mean?” I asked. He looked at me skeptically. It was difficult, very difficult, for men to understand and appreciate how someone could fling herself around sexually and not know the terms, the ground, on which she lay. He said, “It means to come too quickly.” “Oh,” I said, “that’s all right.” I kept comforting men. He fell asleep fast.

  I awoke at three a.m. with just one thought. I had to get the diaphragm out. If it were possible and not already melted into my womb or so far up as to be near my heart or wherever diaphragms go when you’re ignorant of where they can go.

  I pulled a rough wool blanket around me and headed for the toilet in the hall. John awoke slightly and asked where I was headed. “For a piss,” I said.

  The heavy door opened into a dark hall. The toilet door opened, just a toilet and no light. I stood in the dark and threw my leg up on the toilet seat as shown in various catalogues not unknown to the wearer.

  Begin searching for that piece of rubber. Think about Margaret Sanger and other reassuring ideas. Can’t reach the rim. Reach the rim; finger slips off. Reach it, get it and pull. Can’t get it out. It snaps back into place as if alive. Go into a cold sweat. Squat and try. Finger all the way up. Pull. Then try kneeling. I’m on my knees with my finger up me, the blanket scratching my skin. It seems to be in forever. This is a Herculean task never before recorded. An adventure with my body. In forever.

  I pulled the blanket up around me and stood, deciding to leave it in for now and have it removed surgically if necessary. In a colder sweat I left the dark toilet to return to the reason for all this bother. I couldn’t pull the loft door open. It seemed to be locked or blocked. I began banging heavily against the metal door. Hot sweat now. When John finally opened the door he found me lying flat out on the blanket, a fallen angel, naked at his feet. I’d fainted. He revived me and we were both stunned. “The door,” he said, “was open.” That’s what they all say. He gave me a glass of water and we went back to bed.

  The next morning, even though he said our signs were right, my fainting had indicated other signs. Signs and more signs. I walked toward Canal Street and a sign on the wall read Noyes Electrical Company. I read No/Yes Electrical Company. No/Yes, I thought, that’s a crazy name for a business.

  CHAPTER 5: An American Abroad

  Rome was hot and strange in the summer. Nancy and I had been in Europe three weeks. We were tourists on the Spanish Steps. She met a Spaniard called Juan and I met his friend called Ricardo. Ricardo and I didn’t get along very well and he thought I was an “egoist” as I tried out my college Spanish. All my sentences began with Yo and I was either tired, hungry or hot. Nancy and Juan began a five-year relationship that had her living in Yugoslavia for four of those years. Ricardo returned to Madrid.

  Mao appeared one day at the steps. He was tall, thin and brown, a French Vietnamese. Suddenly he was my boyfriend and we were going to go to Greece together. Ours was a silent love affair and I’m not sure how we reached a decision like we were going to go to Greece together. My French was slightly worse than my Spanish, always akin to the pen of my brother is on . . . I believe we used interpreters, particularly when we fought. I discovered that I was sullen in both French and Spanish, but the languages, on my primitive tongue, seemed to lend themselves to moodiness.

  Together, Mao and I did all the right things like eating in a poorhouse run by Franciscans and trying to get into one of the numerous movies being made in Rome. About fifty of us were taken on a forced march to a suburb outside Rome where Anita Ekberg or some other blonde star looked down on us from her balcony to single several of us out as looking like hippies. The rest of us were sent back to Rome, not right for the part.

  Juan and Nancy wanted to sleep outside in the gardens of the Villa Borghese. Though I had a hotel room, Mao and I decided to join them. They disappeared behind a tree, some several yards above us on a small hill. Mao and I spread our blanket on the ground, took off our pants, made love and fell asleep. He was very beautiful and the lovemaking was nothing much at all.

  It was a hot night and very still in the garden. I awoke, feeling light shining down on me. There are lights shining on us, the headlights of a cop car. Two policemen are standing at the foot of our blanket. They shine flashlights. Mao stands up pulling on his trousers. I can’t find mine, they’re hidden somewhere and I try to pull the blanket around me as my hand feels the ground, looking for them. But those Italian cops are fast, fast to spot a piece of ass. “Nuda, nuda,” one yells, pointing at my ass as if I were already behind bars or in a zoo. My ass I figure is probably reflecting the light of the moon. I wonder if this image could ever be seen as romantic. The other echoes his cry: “Nuda, nuda.” Now we’re in for it, I think, semi-nude fornicating hippies found in elegant Borghese gardens. An international incident.

  I become hysterical, nuda nuda, still searching for my clothes. I find them, put them on and stand up behind Mao, who is attempting to hide me from the cops. This gesture is futile and indeed ridiculous, as if Adam and Eve could hide from the authorities. They’re not at all interested in Mao. I decide to play dumb. I point at my head and my chest, emphatically declaring, Stupido americana, stupido americana. I’m not at all sure of the agreement, but I figure they’ll get the point. And the point is that if I admit I’m an idiot, particularly an American idiot, Americans are hated in Europe, if I admit all this, they may go easy on me. Mao stands by the blanket. They lead me to the cop car. I’m being taken away.

  They push me into the back seat of the car. One cop gets into the driver’s seat and the other tries to slam the back door after me. I shove my leg out so that he can’t close the car door, unless he wants to cripple me. I leap out of the car and go running into the night. I keep running and the cops don’t follow, they just get back into their car and drive away.

  Nancy had watched from safety, behind a tree. Said it was the funniest thing she’s ever seen. Like a Keystone comedy. Mao and I continued to communicate badly with one another until I said something which hurt him deeply—something I never understood, perhaps it translated poorly—and he left Rome, or so a friend of his interpreted.

  Nancy went off with Juan and someone who called himself a friend of Juan’s, seeing me alone, offered me his sister’s house as hospitality. I fell asleep in the front seat of his Mercedes as we drove away from Rome toward what I supposed were the suburbs. I awoke in the car which was parked next to a field. After he raped me, he said, “Now we go to my sister’s house.” It had seemed pointless to fight him off and then go running around the Italian countryside in the dark when I had had a taste of what the police were like. He thought, because I hadn’t resisted, that I liked it.

  Two days later I got out of Rome, following the sun to Greece, hitching with a sixteen-year-old English boy who carried my rucksack on top of his. On the Continent, only, can one trust Englishmen to be old-fashioned.

  CHAPTER 6: Coming of Age in Xania

  I was sitting on a sidewalk in Athens, sitting on the curb in front of a shoe store. Jack saw me and called out, “Are you an American?” and I answered, “Yes,” and told him I was looking for a hotel. “Share mine,” he said, “a dollar a night.”

  Jack was
from Chicago, a spoiled and wealthy Irishman who wanted to write. He had just gotten to Athens from Tangier. He had reddish hair, pale skin and eyes Carla would have called “sadist blue.” He was recovering from an unhappy love affair which, having ended badly and to his disadvantage, made him vindictive and self-righteous. I didn’t want to travel alone and he looked like a life-saver. We went to Crete and he hated me or at least it seemed that way. “Look, Jack,” I told him, “you can stay in the house I’m renting but our being together is insane since you criticize me constantly.” He didn’t argue this point and we agreed to be housemates only. But Xania is a small city and a small Greek city at that and a young woman doesn’t leave a man simply. Or at all. Friends of Henry Miller littered the island and all would later descend on me for my unfairness to Jack, who was drinking so much now.

  I had fallen in love with Charles who arrived with Betsy and her child. She was separated from her husband. He had remained in their native land, South Africa. Charles told me that he and Betsy were friends. They seemed like adults to me, the big-time, and when Charles looked at me longingly, I returned the look. At first we were secretive. Betsy, who was older and probably wiser, seemed to take this in her stride and Charles moved out, into his own room near my rented house. Jack still slept in my bed and every night I would leave my house and go to Charles’ bed. He wanted to be a writer too. Jack and I would have pleasant talks together on the terrace. We’d smoke some grass and he’d talk about his broken heart. Things seemed ok and in fact they were extremely bizarre.

  The first week in Xania I was cast, in my naïveté, as the young thing who arrives in town and enters a world she doesn’t understand. This was my screen role in Charles Henri Ford’s film Johnny Minotaur. I had been given Ford’s address by a Greek called Stephanos. He approached me on the Spanish Steps, urging me to go to Crete and look up Charles Henri. He said Charles would want to put me in his movie. Luckily for Charles Henri who left Xania shortly after filming Jack and me in a classic beach scene—I wore a skirt and held a black doll in one hand, a pinwheel in another—he never saw his second heroine descend into her role.

  Xania is made for secretive strolls, its lanes curve from house to house. I took these turns recklessly, leaving my house every night, strolling a curved lane to Charles’ bare room where we would lie together on his skinny cot. Morning would come and I’d stroll back to my house. Breakfast at the Cavouria restaurant and a swim before lunch. I took to going fishing and the fishermen would smile as I walked down the pier to the tower and cast my line into the sea. I never caught anything.

  Betsy continued to be civil to me. We went dancing at a taverna where the Greek sailors did their famous carrot dance. Charles didn’t come and I sulked. Betsy was understanding and her graciousness made me uncomfortable. We watched a sailor place a carrot at his crotch and another sailor hack away at it with a sharp knife. I went to sleep outside the taverna in Betsy’s car and woke to find Greek sailors peering through the car windows. I was driven home.

  The strolls continued. Charles was good-looking, moody, given to short-lived enthusiasms and other things I can’t remember. Jack and I socialized with Greek waiters. Waiters have always been partial to me—my mother has always said I had a good appetite. One such waiter took us for really good food in a place where men who looked like officers cracked plates over their heads, even though this was then against the law. The waiter took us to his home and fed us some plum booze that’s thick as a hot night. Jack and I went home and I went for my usual stroll. Several weeks later it was common knowledge that the waiter’s common-law wife wanted to kill me. Alfred Perles, his wife, and Betty Ryan—the friends of Miller—all accused me of destroying Jack. It was the right time to leave.

  The woman who took care of my rented, decrepit house and lived just across the lane offered to wash my hair and bathe me. I hadn’t had a hot bath in two months. She heated the water in a huge black cauldron over a fire in front of her house. She sat me in a plastic tub. She even scrubbed my back. I felt she had some sympathy for me, and had watched, from her position in the chorus, other, similar young women.

  There was no love lost. Charles slept at my house on my last night in Crete, Jack having sailed away, alone, almost nobly, a week before. I refused to make love with Charles, complaining of the heat and the bugs, and as a final indignity kept my underpants on and slept over the covers, while he slept beneath them. Charles and Michael, who had played Count Dracula in Ford’s movie, drove me to the airport. On a similar ride one year later Betsy’s husband who had come, I imagine, to win her back, would be killed in a car crash. I made it back to Athens.

  CHAPTER 7: A Pass for the Night

  Jos and I had been living together eight months, first in London and then in Amsterdam, where he and I ran a cinema and a film cooperative. He was in Utrecht visiting his girlfriend and I was in our room, wearing my Victorian nightgown and suffering. It was as if I were still taking speed—couldn’t sleep, the night was ragged and endless. It wasn’t easy to find sleeping pills or tranquilizers in Amsterdam. The Dutch were more into natural drugs, like hash. Later heroin.

  Piet was a painter who lived just around the corner; he had been in a Godard film, was traveled, had a French wife who often left him; he was tough. He might have some pills.

  I threw my fur coat over my nightgown. It was winter. In Amsterdam one can visit unannounced. I put on a pair of old-fashioned shoes and headed out in the middle of the night. It was snowing, all white out, like my nightgown.

  An American named Marty was with Piet. Both had similar reputations. It was odd to see them together. I had met Marty a week before on the night I’d received notice from Jos that he wanted to move out, that he wanted us to live separately. He loved me, he said. I knew from the loveletters left on our bed that Jos was fucking someone else. This is the stuff that tries our souls. Oh, we hadn’t been happy. I felt I was being finished off, planed down. After his phone call, I went, unhinged, to Cathrine’s, where Marty happened to be. I cried as if I knew him or as if he weren’t there. Cathrine handed me a joint. Misery became an awful joke. “Marty,” I laughed, “do you know a man for me?” His response, and I can’t remember it exactly, indicated he was a man. I couldn’t understand why a man would want a woman in pain. I wasn’t sophisticated about sadomasochism.

  That was a week ago and here I am in Piet’s studio with Marty, and I’m an inmate with a pass for the night. I kept on my heavy fur coat to hide my nightgown, which made my presence even more eccentric. We listened to Dylan’s latest album. Piet didn’t have any pills, just hash. Marty said, “I like your shoes.” It was an erotic comment, slightly perverse from his lips. He said he wanted to photograph me. I wish he had. I would have liked a picture like that, in the same way that I’ve always wanted to steal one of those US Post Office pictures of the Ten Most Wanted.

  He stayed until 5 a.m. We fucked. I was a ghost. He left to return to his Dutch wife, to awaken in their bed. I didn’t care at all. “Stay beautiful,” he called out as he closed the door behind him. I stayed awake for several more nights.

  By the time Jos returned I had accepted my destiny, the universe and his leaving our room. I wanted him to go. He didn’t. And then I accepted that too. Marty, seeing Jos and me together, never flirted with me again, though we remained friendly. I wasn’t sure if it was disinterest or respect for another man’s territory. I didn’t really care either way. I was the one who finally moved out of the room on the Anjelierstraat (Angel Street). But that was not the end.

  CHAPTER 8: Lies in Dreams

  Breaking up is hard to do. After more than a year with Jos, I went alone to Paris and London. Jos followed; my parents and one of my sisters were in Paris but I didn’t introduce them to him. He wasn’t supposed to be there. I went to London and Jos and I lived together again, briefly, in that city until we had to find another room. Searching for a room in London proved too much for our poor spirits. Jos
returned to Holland.

  I met John at a film festival in London, thought he was an interesting man. He told me he was a poet and a publisher and might publish my work. Since I had no work to publish, I didn’t pursue him. He pursued me. One morning Jos left for Holland and that night John was at my door. We went to see Warhol’s Bike Boy. John’s uncanny instinct for the kill would reappear, but not for another two weeks. He would come calling and I’d never be at home. He’d leave word that he’d been. I became interested and sent a postcard telling him I was going to New York and Amsterdam but would see him when I got back to London. I was blasé. That night John appeared and found me. This moment having built to a fevered pitch, it was love at the front door. Then we had some tea.

  I had not remembered any of our previous conversations, held at the film festival. He told me that we had had a long discussion about why I could not watch Otto Muehl’s film Sodoma in which an animal is killed, and at the same time I was not one of those who wanted to stop Muehl from making a live action in the theater itself.

  That second but first evening we joined my friends Susan and David for dinner and, later, a lecture at the Etherius Society. Got stoned during dinner and dropped a Van Morrison album from quite a height onto the record player after being told “one can do things better when stoned.” This reminded me of that line in Djuna Barnes’ story about her sister, “She sugared her tea from too great a distance.”

  The Etherius Society’s leader was Charles King, a medium who believed himself to be in direct contact with the Venutians. The Society held its meetings at the end of the Fulham Road and in the basement of what appeared to be an ordinary English house. London always gives the appearance of the very ordinary. The lecturer was dressed in a business suit. John and I were in no ordinary state. The audience was mixed—old, young, artists, housewives and businesspeople. The lecturer spoke for two hours or what seemed a lifetime. John and I laughed without sound. Our faces were impacted with mirth and, though the lecturer glowered at us as he spoke about the Venutians and the Martians, we really couldn’t help ourselves. It was when the tape of Charles King’s conversation with the head Venutian played that some awful guttural sound came from me. “Come in, come in, Venus,” King called. And the head Venutian answered, “Nim Nim two two, Nim Nim two two, I can hear you, old chap.” The lecturer was furious now and John who was used to how ordinary English craziness is was able to control himself. The lecturer continued to stare straight at us and said, “We are now going to say the Venutian prayer. The lights will dim. And I would like to say one thing. You can snigger at the Martians but you cannot laugh at the Venutians.”