The House of Impossible Beauties

by Joseph Cassara

“You don’t gotta tell me shit, that’s what. You just gotta go find another room.”

  “I just got here,” Venus said. “Why do I gotta move my stuff when you’re the one with the problem?”

  “Don’t give me that kind of tone.”

  “I ain’t giving you no tone,” she said, channeling all the living patience in the world. “I’m just saying—”

  “Do I look like I care what you’re saying?” La Loca said. “No, look at my face and tell me if I care? I need to see you packing it on out of here.”

  Venus didn’t need an enemy, so she packed it on out and found another room. Her new roommate was an old black woman with swollen ankles who cried all the time and liked to feed pigeons.

  Now she was sharing a smoke break with that loca bitch’s man out by the Dumpster. “Your girlfriend,” Venus said, “got mad issues.”

  “Yeah,” he dragged on the cigarette and handed Venus back the lighter. “Girlfriend—eh. I don’t like to use formal terms and shit like that.”

  Venus flicked her own cigarette butt to the curb. “All I know is that I had to switch rooms so that you two could be in the same room together. She really rose hell and back.”

  He nodded. “Word,” he said. “Don’t fuck with her, that’s all I’m saying.” He held out the baggie of coke and gestured at it with a point of his chin. “You sure you don’t want none?”

  “Nah,” she said.

  “You’re wack,” he said. “Never seen nobody turn down free blow.”

  He took out a camera from his back pocket and told her to smile. But it all happened too quick. She didn’t have time to fluff up her hair or make sure her smile was right. He had taken the shot before giving her the chance.

  * * *

  She loved to be photographed. She loved to look at the camera lens and think that it was a tiny eye, except this eye reserved judgment. This eye couldn’t hurt with its gaze, couldn’t throw shade. Only captured her as she was, especially if she was standing in the right light. She knew, of course, that a camera had its own kind of cruelty. It could show a person back to themself, no compassion. So that’s why the hair, the glamour, the costumes had to be just right. Some days, she’d spend an hour in front of the mirror with her blow-dryer. All for the camera, baby.

  When she was young, sometimes Nonna took her into Manhattan and told her to look at all the limousines. “You never know who’s in there,” Nonna had said. “Maybe it’s a Hollywood director looking for a new star.” Nonna said that was why they had to always look their freshest, bestest. That was Nonna’s logic—always smile and always look good because no one ever knew who they’d run into.

  So when Venus walked down the street, she liked to think of herself as a ray of light, and the camera was just a tool that a person could use to take that light and transfer it to paper, where it could stay forever.

  Her favorite shot: Sitting on the edge of a stage, rocking a summer dress and white gloves. Hair permed out, wearing a costume couture necklace of chunky square beads, holding her snakeskin pump up in the air like she’s hailing a cab with it. She’s in front of a table full of trophies, sprawled before the judges. The emcee is shouting BODY over and over: BODY, BOD-Y, BOD-AY, GIVE IT TO MAY. So she gives him body. She gives the judges banjee. The audience whistles and kikis. She gives them what they want, and she always knows what they want.

  They want body, they want light.

  * * *

  “Is that the Bible?” Venus asked Sugar Cookie, who was sniffing like if he didn’t hoard what was left of the air, there’d be none left for him to breathe.

  “Yeah,” he said, “only book in this place.” He placed a dollar bill flat on the black hardcover and smoothed it down with a charge card.

  It must have been a little after midnight, and Venus had only stumbled upon him because she noticed the common room light was on while she was on her way to the bathroom. “Damn,” she said. “Don’t you think that’s kind of fucked-up? On a Bible?”

  He used the card to chop up the rest of the powder like he was dicing vegetables, and then he split it into thick, even lines. “Why? You religious, little VV?”

  “Maybe I am,” she said for the sake of saying it. Back at Our Lady of the Flowers, the bad boys used to wear their atheism as a badge of honor. Even though Venus had her doubts—the doubts had begun when she learned that Mary apparently got knocked up by god after a conversation with an angel, which made no sense to her—she didn’t like to wield her nonbelief as if it were a blade. The way she reasoned it was simple: she didn’t believe in paying no attention to people who didn’t give a shit about her. Didn’t matter if that person was a person or god herself.

  “Psht,” he said. He used his pointer fingers and thumbs to roll the bill into a tight tube. “What kind of sick sonuvabitch wanted to create a world this fucked-up?”

  “Excuse you,” she said, “but maybe god is a woman. You ever think about that?”

  “A woman?” he said. He snorted the line and made a crunching noise with his throat. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, closed his eyes, and relaxed his head back so that he was looking at the ceiling. “Sure, leave it to some sick bitch to make all this mess. You got a good point, maybe he is a woman.”

  “Or maybe a drag queen,” Venus said. “Then she’d have the best of both worlds. I imagine Drag Queen God perched on a cloud, singing ‘The Way We Were’ as she floods the world for Noah’s Ark.”

  Sugar Cookie laughed.

  “But damn, Sugar,” Venus said. “What if the nuns see you out here? Snorting coke under a crucifix like that?”

  The crucifix in the common room hung in the same place as it did in all the rooms—just above the door frame. Jesus’s body was small, with little grooves for ribs and a painted-on frowny face and crown of thorns. “Nah,” he said. “What of it? They like me. Not like they’re gonna throw me out of a shelter. They’d have too much of that Jesus guilt to do something like that. Right, Jesus?” he said to the crucifix. “Can you hear me? Doing lines with god’s kid watching down.” He held his right hand up to his ear, as if waiting for a response. “See? Stone-cold silence.”

  “Yeah, but still,” Venus said. “And where’s La Loca?”

  “She’s out cold,” he said. “And that bitch can snore.”

  Venus had to fake a cough to cover her laugh. Sugar Cookie offered her a rail. “Why you being all nice to me?” Venus said, giving him a skeptical look. “Your girl fucking hates my guts for no reason, so why are you being nice to me?”

  “She’s just jealous of you.”

  Venus laughed. “Oh, puh-lease.”

  “It’s true,” he said. “You can pass for a woman more than she does.”

  She waved a hand like oh stop it.

  “And god knows she sure as hell tries real hard to pass as a woman,” he said. “She probably figures that I wanna fuck your brains out.”

  “Oh, that’s never gonna happen,” Venus said. “Not in this lifetime or the next.”

  He put the dollar up to his nose, bent over, and inhaled the next rail, guiding the dollar bill from one end to the other. Venus watched the blue vein bulge out of his arm as he rubbed his finger across the Bible, then wipe that residue against his teeth.

  “And how ’bout the next one after that?” he asked. He glided his tongue over the front of his teeth and she imagined what it would be like to fuck him. She imagined he would be the kind of hulking, selfish top who would fuck until he came, not giving a shit about his partner’s orgasm.

  “It’s never gonna happen,” Venus said. “Never.”

  * * *

  The next morning, Venus went into the common room and found La Loca sitting on the couch, flipping cards onto the coffee table. It looked like a game of solitaire. The Bible was gone. Cookie was gone. Venus sat down next to La Loca as she continued slamming the cards down, face smeared with pout. Even a game of solitaire was a chance for La Loca to practice her rage.

  “I got words for
you,” Venus said.

  La Loca paused with the cards. She turned her head to give Venus a look-over. “What the hell do you want?”

  “Why’re you throwing so much shade at me since I got here? I didn’t do nothing to you. I even left that room for you to be happy and shit,” Venus said. “There can be two of us in this shelter, you know.”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “You think I want to steal Sugar Cookie from you,” she said. “Is that it, huh?”

  “Pssssht.” La Loca rolled her eyes and flipped another card.

  The game was strong on the diamonds and spades, but the hearts weren’t giving. Homegirl couldn’t get an ace of hearts if the world depended on it, and she needed it to free up the twos and threes in the hand. She flipped over a queen of clubs—couldn’t use it. Flipped again—two of diamonds.

  “Go roll those eyes and your face’ll be stuck like that,” Venus said. “And no disrespect, but I don’t want Sugar Cookie. He’s ugly like it’s nobody’s business. No tea, no shade.”

  “Girl,” La Loca said, stopping midflip to give Venus a hair flip. “What you saying about my man?”

  Venus looked at the deck in La Loca’s right hand, ready to move to the side if that left arm came out to swing for Venus’s face. “What I’m saying is that I don’t want his ugly ass,” Venus said, “and I never will, so we can be civil to each other and not have to worry all up in here.”

  La Loca’s left eyebrow twitched up and hung out there. Then she flipped the cards again. Nine of spades, no use. Next.

  “You and I,” Venus said, “are very similar. Look—we both ran away from shit. And we’re here. We got enough in common to be friends, not enemies.”

  “Don’t act like you know me.”

  “You’re right,” Venus said. “I don’t know much about you. But I do know you ran away from somewhere or someone. And you know that I ran away too. I know we’re at this fucking shelter with the nuns. I know that my room buddy is obsessed with pigeons. So,” Venus said, running out of things to list, “there’s all of that.”

  There was the ace she needed. La Loca placed the two on top of the ace and flipped over the hidden card. A king of hearts, sword right in the head. La Loca turned to her and smiled. She held up the card. “I hate the king of hearts,” she said. “What kind of king be all stabbing himself in the head when he’s the king of a fucking kingdom?”

  Venus laughed.

  “Like, would you do that?” La Loca asked.

  “I don’t really know,” Venus said. “It makes no sense. What about you?”

  “Girl, I don’t want to be no king,” La Loca said. “Spent too much time as a man already, almost got enough money for my hormones. I’ll be damned if I become some shit other than a queen.”

  “I hear that.”

  “K-W-E-E-N,” La Loca said. “Queen. And plus, he’s the only king in the deck without a moustache. What the fuck is that all about? Everybody knows that moustaches are sexy as hell.”

  * * *

  On the Brooklyn Promenade walkway, Venus rushed to finish her ice-cream cone before it melted into a pool of milk. She licked the sides and caught the trails of sprinkles that rolled like tiny boulders down an ice-cream mountain. “See?” La Loca said. “What’d I say? I’m all about the cup business. Shoulda gotten a cup, not a cone.”

  “But the cone is the best part.”

  “Yeah, sure, when your shit ain’t melting all over the place. You look like a princess trying to finish a BJ before the clock rings midnight and you turn back into a ho.”

  “Daaamn,” Venus said. “That burned.”

  “And we all know that the art of fellating takes time.”

  “You’re too much,” Venus said, and laughed. She rubbed some vanilla onto her lips and licked it slowly, erotically. “You like that?” she asked the ice cream in her best sex hotline voice. “I bet you like that.” She stuck out her tongue and licked the ice cream so slow, just scooping it up at the tip. They grabbed each other’s arms for support, threw their heads back, and laughed at how silly they could be.

  It was all Venus’s idea to get the ice cream. Back when she was younger, she went out for ice cream whenever her mother was upset. Which meant, whenever she was upset with Antonio. She would take Venus out for a shopping-and-ice-cream run, all with Antonio’s checkbook. One time, her mother wanted to get a pair of jeans. “Thomas,” she asked Venus, “what do you think?” Her mother opened the dressing-room door, still wearing the sunglasses that she hadn’t taken off all afternoon. Venus had smiled, giving her a thumbs-up. The jeans looked good, but Venus knew that her mother wasn’t hiding anything with those sunglasses. The black eye was still there from when Antonio whacked her in the face. Nonna had been at the Elks Lodge that night for Bingo Wednesday. Antonio had found out about the fudged numbers, but didn’t know about Henry. Antonio had worked himself into a rage. He was convinced that Nonna was stealing from him and busting the money on bingo and those lotto scratch tickets she kept inside the refrigerator for extra good luck. And there was her mother, looking at her ass in the mirror to see if the jeans looked good, thinking that shaded lenses could hold back the truth from the world.

  Venus believed in the power of ice cream to bring people together. Her mother used to get a vanilla cone with chocolate fudge on top, hardened into a shell that she cracked with her lips. And Venus would get strawberry with rainbow sprinkles because she was convinced that strawberry flavoring tasted more like the color pink than the actual fruit, and she liked that.

  Now she walked down the Promenade with La Loca, finishing up their ice creams and pointing at the Twin Towers across the river. The Brooklyn Bridge stretched out, connecting the two boroughs. They sat down on a bench and Venus reached into the plastic bag that she carried all her stuff in. She liked to call it her plastic Fendi because she had drawn F logos on it with a black marker from the arts and crafts closet at Serenity.

  “Close your eyes,” she told La Loca.

  “What? Why?”

  “Just do it,” she said. “I got a surprise.”

  When La Loca closed her eyes, Venus told her to reach out and open her hands. She pulled out the rock from her plastic Fendi and placed it on La Loca’s left palm. “Open,” she said and La Loca opened. “It’s shaped like a little heart—”

  La Loca eyed it hard. “But it’s just a rock—”

  “Yeah. I know,” Venus said. “But it’s not just a rock. I don’t wanna sound cheesy and shit, but I found it in Central Park when I first ran away. And I don’t know—I just thought it was cute and shit. Like, it was a really rough time for me, and then I thought it was a sign from the world that everything was going to be okay—because why else would it be shaped like a heart when I felt like all I needed was some little signal of love? It was like the world was sending that love message to me in the form of that rock.”

  La Loca ran her fingers over the smooth surface. She moved her index finger into the groove that dipped down, the groove that had convinced Venus in the first place that it was shaped like a heart.

  “I want you to have it,” Venus said.

  La Loca curled her hand around it and put it in her pocket. She gave Venus an air-kiss on each cheek and said thank you.

  “What is this now?” A young guy walked up to them. He only looked tall because they were sitting. “What do yous think this is? Tranny Central? Shouldn’t you twos be at Meatpacking?”

  He looked like he was in his thirties and he was drinking from a bottle that was tucked into a brown paper bag. “Fuck you,” La Loca said. She stood up and hawked a wad of spit at his face. It missed, but still landed on his neck.

  Venus didn’t stand up for him. She wanted to reach out her hand to stop Loca’s gold hoops from vibrating in her earlobes. Loca was trembling like whenever they were on the express train and the subway’s vibrations traveled up through their bodies.

  “What the fuck?” he said, wiping the ball of phlegm off his neck. All it did was smea
r onto the neckline of his shirt. “This is a family area. You hos shouldn’t be strutting your shit around here.” He took another swig from the bottle.

  “We’re not hos,” Venus said. “We’re just walking down the block, doing our thing in peace.”

  “Hey, Lady Boy,” the guy said. “Shut the fuck up. Nobody likes it when a piece of ass starts mouthing off.”

  La Loca crossed her arms. She towered over him—she was already six foot, but now with her heels and that big-ass disco hair, Loca probably had half a foot on the guy. “Did you just call my friend a ladyboy?” she said.

  “Just speakin’ truth to power,” the guy said.

  “Bitch,” La Loca said, “the fuck does your pathetic ass know about truth or power? All you know how to do is speak bullshit when your mouth should be zipped.”

  La Loca knocked the bottle out of his hand. Venus watched as a straight couple stopped and gawked. La Loca grabbed the guy’s earlobe and yanked his head so that it was facing Venus. “Her name is Venus,” La Loca said, “not Lady Boy. So I want you to apologize to Venus. You want me to spell it out for you?”

  The guy winced but stayed silent. La Loca tugged on his earlobe even harder and he moaned. He looked at Venus—his eyes were watering and his breath stank. He said sorry twice and then asked how much they were charging.

  “We aren’t charging, you ass,” La Loca said as she let go of his ear and pushed the side of his head.

  He picked himself up off the ground and ran away. The straight couple kept gawking. Venus imagined that anyone who had seen would stop what they were doing and clap, like when subway riders yelled at obnoxious people and the rest of the train clapped for the person who stood up and smacked down. But the people just stared, they didn’t clap, and Venus thought that maybe the guy was right. Maybe no one wanted to see them strut it down the Promenade. Maybe they weren’t welcome there after all.

  * * *

  Some days Venus woke up at eleven or noon with the mixed feeling that she had both slept too much and not enough. The room was small and neat and her roommate was always gone to feed the birds. On the bureau, there were plastic bags filled with slices of white bread that her roommate collected and chopped up into pieces that were tiny enough for the pigeons to peck at. During the summer, Venus woke up with sweat all up on her face. The sheets felt damp, and she had to get up to turn on the electric fan. All she wanted was for the breeze to blow a little air her way. She wanted to cool down.