The House of Impossible Beauties

by Joseph Cassara

  Sal had laughed at him. “It means she’s a nasty bitch,” Sal said.

  “But Vanessa’s so sweet,” Thomas said. “She isn’t a cunt, don’t say that.”

  “Like you would even know, you fucking fag.”

  Now Henry put his elbows on the table, hands to his face.

  Saturn, Thomas wrote. Has seven ring groups. They are separated by gaps in space called divisions.

  “But seriously,” Nonna said. “Why you put five hundred on the Mets? Do you even know what is this sport?”

  “They’re gonna bounce, Rosaria,” Henry said. “I can feel it.”

  “You’re in a lot of debt,” she said. “Don’t tell me what you can feel.” Nonna put her hand on Henry’s shoulder and he started to cry. “I’ll tell you what. Let me get the book.”

  When Nonna left the room, Thomas stared at Henry as he wiped his eyes with a napkin. “Those napkins,” Thomas said, “are really rough. I can get you a tissue from the bathroom. Or toilet paper. If you want something softer.”

  “You’re sweet, Tommy,” he said, “but I’m fine, thank you.”

  Nonna came back with her marble composition notebook, the same kind of notebook that Thomas used except Nonna’s pages were filled with numbers and dashes, and the book was so full, the cover could barely stay closed. She had to use a rubber band to keep it tight.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” she said. “Maybe if I fudge the last zero, it will look like fifty. Then you can just pay that, good?”

  Thomas looked back down at the worksheet. How many rings does Saturn have? Henry thanked Nonna. “But you tell no one, eh?” Nonna said.

  “Not a soul,” Henry said. “You’re a lifesaver.”

  “And for the love of Jesus and his heavenly mother,” Nonna said. “Start to think about this game. The Mets are a path straight to hell. The Yankees, sure, they have lower return pay, but at least the odds are better.”

  “But I can just feel the Mets—”

  “Eh!” Nonna screamed. She cupped her hands under her chin and cradled them back and forth. “What I just said about this feeling? You want odds or you want safety?”

  “Safety.”

  “Well there is no safety in this game,” she said. “I help you this one time, but no more if you continue with the shenanigans.”

  “Thank you, Rosaria. Thank you so much.”

  How many rings were there? Was this a trick question? We don’t know how many rings Saturn has. The number could be in the thousands, (maybe?!), he wrote. Thomas imagined Vanessa sitting at home, wondering the same thing about the rings. Could Vanessa put a finger on a number? Could she say: Yes, there are 2,753 rings circling around Saturn and they all look like blue spaghetti strings, except made of ice crystals. Numbers were weird, he thought. He felt bad for people who believed in the power of numbers to tell them anything about the world. There were too many of them, too many to ever count. It was better that he didn’t know how many rings there were—that no one could know—because then there was mystery. And mystery was always a beautiful thing.

  ANGEL

  1981

  There was a write-up in Christopher Street magazine that caught Angel’s eye about some diva named Dorian Corey. The foto was a black and white: Dorian center stage, dressed in ivory silk georgette, cigarette in hand, and hair as big as Pomeranian fluff. Her mouth was open midlaugh.

  Angel trekked down to Collage one night to see Dorian turn one of her shows. Angel was still dressed like the flaco Boricua boy that the world saw her as: a down-low Bronx baby-gay shooting through the underground tubes of the city in jeans and a Yankees cap to that hole-in-the-wall club. Her eyebrows were plucked, but that was it.

  The stage took up the entire dance floor. Dorian was dressed like Marie Antoinette that night, lip-syncing to Kim Carnes’s “Bette Davis Eyes.” Just the song made Angel jones for a bubble bath and a cigarette.

  Dorian went all out with three gowns, one atop the other like there wasn’t any shame in the world. She had a feather cap big enough to cover a Cadillac, so that when she shed her damask gowns like a lizard shedding its skin, she revealed a sequined body stocking. Two shirtless men with abs and pecs like nobody’s business raised her silk organza train up on wooden poles so that the audience was swept under her outfit like a tent. There was a smoke machine and a disco ball and a fake guillotine. Someone even fainted, but not before shrieking. It was fabulousness incarnate, and it was so much for Angel to handle, she wept.

  At the end of the show, Angel rushed backstage and opened Dorian’s dressing room door without knocking. Dorian, who must have been in his forties, was there with a handsome man about half his age. Dorian and the man looked at her and blinked at a glacial rate.

  “And who are you?” Dorian said.

  Angel introduced herself and gushed—she expressed her love, her admiration, her absolute fucking desire to follow in Dorian’s steps, if only Dorian could explain how Angel could make it happen.

  “Another one,” the man said, fanning himself with an old Broadway Playbill like a Spanish lady on a summer day.

  “Hush, Hector,” Dorian said to the man. “I didn’t order any tea tonight—iced or hot—I want none of it.”

  Angel didn’t know whether to stay or go, until Dorian looked at her and said, “Alright, baby, but first let a queen get changed. Hector, honey—the wig.”

  Hector lifted the wig from Dorian’s head. It was all white-gray curls, the size of a multitiered wedding cake. “As I was saying,” Hector said to Dorian, ignoring Angel completely, “I think Rashida’s pulling a fake, and if she ain’t pulling a fake, she sure as hell is pulling a stunt on the whole damn group.”

  “Well, you always knew she was a shady little cunt,” Dorian said.

  “Oh, you’re such a bitch,” Hector said, “and that’s why I love you.” He placed a hand on Dorian’s shoulder and they both laughed until Dorian coughed. Angel lit a cigarette and leaned against the dressing room door.

  “And she smokes!” Dorian said. “Menthols? Be a doll and give mama a smoke?”

  Hector put the wig in the closet and when he turned around, Angel could see his eyes scanning her, head to toe.

  “Be a doll, darling,” Dorian said to Hector. “Let me speak with the damsel.”

  “You asking me to leave?” Hector crossed his arms.

  “You throwing shade, honey?” Dorian said. “Because I’ll read your ass all the way to the New York Public Library, fool. Don’t be trifling.”

  * * *

  All Angel wanted was someone to look up to. When she turned on her television, or went to the movies, or flipped the pages of a magazine, she never saw anyone that looked like who she was, who she had been, or who she wanted to be. She had left her digits with Dorian and then waited by the phone every night, hoping it would ring. After a week passed, no one had called for her and she began to lose hope. It made her sad, the thought that a drag queen had seen her and decided no.

  A week later, Hector rang. He was calling on behalf of Dorian. Leave it to a diva to have someone else do her bidding. Angel’s hand shook as she held the receiver to her ear. Hector told her that the first month would just be a trial period. Then if Angel could handle things without getting in the way, she could stay on. “There’s no money here though,” Hector said, “so don’t be coming to Dorian looking for a paycheck.”

  She whispered into the phone, even though the apartment was empty. She wasn’t expecting to get paid. All she wanted was to learn the ins and outs. She wanted to see what it took to be a working woman in the clubs, performing for the crowd.

  For three weeks, Angel wasn’t allowed to touch the wigs. Only Hector could, and he guarded them like the crown jewels. “If you drop one,” Hector said, “and it gets knotty, you will never hear the end of it.”

  In the fourth week, Dorian wanted to go out on stage as Olivia Newton-John. “There just wasn’t a choice,” Dorian said while eating a mozzarella stick. The cheese strung from her mo
uth like a tightrope ready for a high-wire act. Dorian had to reel the cheese in slowly with her tongue. “I’m surprised my neighbor hasn’t murdered me yet. I’ve been belting out ‘Summer Nights’ in the shower, in the kitchen, in the goddamn hallway, for god knows how long.”

  “Good thing you can carry a tune,” Hector said. “If it was me, the bitches would burn my house down.”

  “Why?” Angel said. “You can’t hold a note?”

  “Hold a note?” Hector said. “I’m basically tone deaf.”

  “He is, darling,” Dorian said. “I can confirm. And so now I’m just living Grease. I simply need a pink jacket for my performance. I want, I need.”

  Dorian sent them out on a mission to find the pink jacket by the end of the week. It took them two hours to realize that they had a problem: it was impossible to find the pink jacket in Dorian’s size. All three of the Broadway costume places they had checked only went up to double-XL. “Impossible,” Hector said, holding the large by its hanger. “She’ll look like a salchichón if we try to squeeze her into this.”

  Angel laughed and told Hector to stop being silly.

  “Or what?” Hector said. His neck swayed all playful.

  “Or nothing, excuse you,” Angel said. She put on the pink jacket in size S. She turned to look at herself in the mirror. “Ay, I don’t know. Maybe pink is just a bit too much for me.”

  “No,” Hector said. “It looks fine. But we’re not here for you.”

  She could have sworn he winked at her, but it all happened too quick to know if her mind wasn’t making up games. “If you have a sewing machine,” she said, “we can get the biggest one they have, cut it down the middle, and tailor in some more fabric.”

  Hector nodded. He said that he did, indeed, have a sewing machine that had belonged to his abuela. “The issue is,” he said, “I don’t got the fingers for it.”

  “I can sew well enough to put it together,” she said. “We’ll just need to scout out the garment stores. So we just need the jacket to give a little in the back, right? Maybe in the arms, too.”

  “Right,” Hector echoed. “We just need the back to give a lil’-lil’.”

  * * *

  She sat in Hector’s cocina—shoes off, toes out—for an hour, working her magic at the sewing machine. She had banished Hector to the sala because he was talking her ear off and she needed to concentrate. She could swear that he was staring at her from where he sat, but she didn’t take her eyes off the needle to check. Or else she’d accidentally add a zigzagged line right down the middle of Dorian’s jacket. During her monthlong trial run? Absolutely not.

  When she was done, she slipped into the jacket. “Penny for your thoughts?” she said, standing before Hector. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor with a yellow pencil and a crossword.

  “Only a penny?” he said. She laughed at this. “It looks way too big for you.”

  “It’s not for me,” she said, too literal for her own good. “It’s for Dorian, you know this already.”

  “I know, I know. I’m just busting your balls. Give me a twirl?”

  She put her hands in the jacket’s pockets, bit her lip, and looked to the side. She spun around slowly, gyrating her shoulders.

  “My, oh my,” he said in a drawl. “I do declare, you look beautiful, Georgia belle.”

  * * *

  Pre-show, on a Saturday night, when Hector ran outside to fetch a pack of Newports, Dorian gave Angel an up-and-down look. “Well don’t you look radiant this week. Glowing, really,” Dorian said. “You two are fucking, aren’t you?”

  Angel giggled. “Ay, Dios mío,” she said. “No, we aren’t doing it. We’re just, you know, spending time with each other.”

  Dorian rolled his eyes. “It’s worse than I thought,” he said. “He’s got you feeling emotions.”

  “Shh, what if he comes back and hears you?”

  “Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match,” Dorian crooned. “Find me a find, catch me a catch.”

  * * *

  Angel must’ve been the only girl at the zoo that had the absolute gall to wear a Lurex halter top with matching flared trousers. And it was, like, 90 degrees. The horror: fabric all sticking to her. Even the moscas were sticking to her.

  Near the lagoon, Hector told her that flamingos were pink because they ate a lot of shrimp. “So if they were to eat,” Angel said, “just for hypothetical’s sake, nothing but pineapples, you’re telling me they’d be yellow?”

  “I got no idea,” Hector said. “Why you asking me?”

  “Because you’re the one making claims,” she said.

  At the buffalo area, they argued about whether the right way to say it was buffalo, buffala, or buffalos. They couldn’t agree, but it sure as hell made them laugh. “What about buffalo mozzarella?” Hector asked.

  “A good cheese, indeed,” Angel said. “Very tasty. We should make pasta tonight.”

  When they got to the hippos’ tank, there was this fat old hippo mamacita with her baby, just all blubbery and cute. The baby spun and twirled in the water for Angel as she put her hand up to the glass.

  Hector was leaning against the wall. “Ay, would you look at this?” she said to him. “I’m having a connection over here.”

  Hector smiled at her. It was as if the hippos could see her body standing there, with her hand on the glass. The mama did another loop-the-loop for her just like her baby did, with that goofy hippo smile, like she was proud of her baby just for doing its own little thing. Hector walked over to stand next to Angel and he placed his hand over hers, and they stood there having a precious moment together.

  They walked around until Angel’s feet were all blistery. They sat down on a bench near the pretzel stand. “Ay, Dios mío,” she said. “I can’t believe I was tonta enough to wear kitten heels to the damn zoo.”

  Hector laughed and put his arm around her. “You want me to rub your little toes?”

  “Ay, fó,” she said. “Don’t be fochi. We’re still outside and people are staring at us.”

  It was true—people were staring at them. Or maybe they were just staring at her. Angel didn’t want to give a flying shit what anyone thought. But when it came down to it, she did care. She didn’t want people to glare at the way Hector’s arm rested on her shoulder. She didn’t understand why people had to be so shady. She knew she shouldn’t have worn that halter top. Not that day, not that place.

  “What’re you looking at?” Hector said to a mother who was trying to redirect her toddler from walking over to the bench where they were sitting. “We’re not gonna steal your kid if he comes close to us.”

  The woman’s other child was around five or six years old. He was devouring a blue cloud of cotton candy. He pointed a blue-sugar finger at Angel.

  “Deja,” Angel whispered to Hector. “Dont make a scene. Let them stare if they wanna stare.”

  * * *

  A week later, he brought her to the New York Public Library. The actual, physical location. The main reading room was a large marble cave with old-time chandeliers. She looked up at the big lightbulbs, the pink clouds painted on the ceiling square of blue sky. “It must’ve taken them lifetimes to do all that molding,” he said.

  “Damn,” she said. “I can’t even imagine.”

  When they walked around the hallways, Angel loved the echo sounds of people’s soles and tacones against the floor. He told her that the building was so old, if she wanted to request a book, they’d go back and use a pulley system to get it.

  She gave him a side-eye. “A pulley system?” she said. “They don’t have anything more up to date?”

  He laughed. “Sure, maybe they do in some places,” he said. “But I don’t know, I find it charming.”

  She nodded. Yes, it was charming.

  When they stepped outside to sit on the steps, she missed the smell of the place already. Like vanilla and almonds and a little bit of dust. There was something freeing about being back outside though, with the sun and
the wind. She was worried that if she coughed or sneezed, the concentrating people would be up in arms.

  “Sometimes I go to the Lincoln Center branch,” he said. He bought them both ice-cream sandwiches and they sat on a bench looking up at the skyscrapers. “Like watching dance tapes with the headphones on. Get to seal out the rest of the world for just that moment.”

  “I love when people dance,” she said. “Never seen someone look sad when they’re dancing to the right beat.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” he said. “That’s what I want to be. A dancer. And a father. And maybe, if I got some money, I’d buy a house somewhere.”

  The ice cream was melting fast. Even though there were two reasonable-size bites left, she took it all in one. Licked a white drop of vanilla on her thumb. She looked up to see if Hector had saw. He did and now her cheeks were bulging. “What kinda house?” she said through the mouthful.

  “Ha!” he said. “At least the nice thing about having no money is that when you dream big, you can dream whatever because it ain’t gonna happen anyway. So I think a beach house, with a porch for playing dominoes outside. Or maybe a cabin in the Poconos. Learn to chop some wood, set a fire, make s’mores every night for dessert until you never want to see another marshmallow again in your life.”

  “A penthouse right on Madison Avenue,” she said. “All glass.”

  “With a marble sauna the size of a bedroom,” he said.

  “And a driver.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Getting places would be very important. A driver is a must.”

  * * *

  In bed that night, she traced her fingers over his tattoo. It was a slash, like / about the size of a thumb between his hip and armpit. Her head was resting on his shoulder, but she could still see him wince a little as he looked at the ceiling. “Am I hurting you?” she asked. “Like is it hurting when I touch your ink?”

  “It’s not that,” he said. “Just brings back a memory. Got this tattoo with my ex. It’s nothing, forget about it.”

  “Oh.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that oh.”