The House of Impossible Beauties

by Joseph Cassara

  Charles held out the small bag. His fingers pinched the top of the white strings on the handle. Even in the dark, she could see that the bag was robins-egg blue. She took out the box inside and untied the white ribbon knots. It was from Tiffany & Co. A sterling silver bracelet.

  “Oh, wow,” she said as he put it on her wrist. “For me?”

  “For you?” he said. “For who else would it be?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “And something else,” he said. “But it’s a surprise. I got tickets for a show, but I’m not telling you which one yet. Just meet me here tomorrow at six o’clock.”

  Six o’clock! So early. At six o’clock, she would be in the bathroom singing her Gloria Gaynor and shaving her piernas, trying not to slip on the tile floor so she wouldn’t get a disco concussion.

  “It’s too early,” she said.

  “It’s never too early,” he said. “You won’t regret it, I promise you.”

  She stared at the chain-linked bracelet on her wrist, then jiggled her hand around so that she could see the silver glimmer in whatever light was spilling into the car. “Oh, alright,” she said. “But only because you promised.”

  * * *

  Angel was always accusing her of confusing the heart and the head, to which Venus snapped back, “I’m not confused if I feel them both at the same time.” Every time Angel hurled her accusation, Venus would flash out her fingers and run them through her hair and say, “When you got good hair, you don’t got to care . . .”

  “What am I gonna do with you, nena?” Angel always said back, like a film reel on repeat. It was so predictable of her.

  And because of that, Venus wasn’t gonna tell Angel about Charles. What she didn’t know wasn’t gonna kill her. Plus, Venus was in a good mood. Like so damn good. Her emerald cha-cha shoes were on point, her hair was looking especially fly, and Daniel baby was getting into cars like he was a big ol’ gay mechanic. And no one had tried to stab him yet! Pues, never mind that Daniel had thrown up on that first guy. That was no matter. Time would soften that blow. Eventually they would be able to laugh about it. If Venus had a nickel for every time someone made her gag, well, she’d have enough coins to do a load of laundry, and ain’t that the truth.

  It was almost time to meet Charles at the corner, but she didn’t see his car yet and she needed a light for her smoke. She walked down the sidewalk and opened her clutch to make sure she had her ciggies. She popped out a Newport and asked the next guy who passed her for a light. When he ignored her and kept on walking, she huffed. “I just wanted to be lit up,” she screamed. “I wasn’t soliciting your sorry ass.”

  She held the cigarette between her fingers and popped out her right hip. Across the street, she thought she saw one of the LaBeija children, but she couldn’t tell which one. She scurried over to her, careful not to twist her ankle on any of the small holes in the cement.

  “Girl, I been jonesing for one of these bad boys,” Venus said, holding up her cig as proof. “Please tell me you got a lighter handy.”

  “You’re in luck,” the black queen told her. “Because lord knows I been jonesing for one of those bad boys over there,” she pouted her lips and chin-nodded across the street to a group of three, fine as hell morenos smoking cigarettes around a botellón of Colt. “And they ain’t payin’ me any light of day.”

  She lit Venus’s cig and then whipped out one of her own so they could smoke together. “Well, they must be acting a fool,” Venus said, “not realizing what they are missing out on because you are a radiant queen in that hot pink dress.”

  “Thank you, darling.”

  “Hold on, stand in closer to the curb so I can see it in the light.” Venus took a drag on her cigarette. “Oh yes, confirming what I already felt to be true. Lurex is one hell of a fabric. Look at you shimmering in that light.”

  The queen did a slo-mo 360 with her cigarette hand in the air, looking like a princess on a rotating pedestal. “Well I’m certainly glad to meet you, honey,” she said to Venus, “because I just been standing here, so sad and angry that I could shit a diamond.”

  “Mmm,” Venus hummed. “If only it were that easy.”

  The queen nodded and dragged on her cig.

  “I’d have so many carats, my eyesight would be laser sharp.” Venus blew a puff of smoke. “Just blinding, I tell you.”

  * * *

  The surprise tickets that Charles had were for the Winter Garden, to see Cats. The whole time she sat there thinking, Whaaaat the fuck is this? Pero at least the dancers could glide. She couldn’t even imagine how hot they were in those furry getups, under all those lights. She cried when that Grizabella kitty sang her memory song. Who knew that an old cat’s sadness would cause waterworks?

  That night, he didn’t ask her if she wanted to go back to his house. He said that he was taking her to a hotel in Times Square. Hotels, she thought, aren’t as dangerous as houses because at least in a hotel room, a girl can scream and someone might hear. When she walked into the room, he asked her what she thought.

  “About what?” she said. “What I think about what?”

  The question could have meant anything. What did she think of him, of cats singing jellicle meow-meows on a Broadway stage, of Nancy Reagan’s closet, or what?

  “The room,” he said. He held his hands out like they were standing at the Waldorf.

  “Well it ain’t the Plaza,” she said, regretting how harsh it sounded. “But it’s nice. It has a bed. It has”—she peeked into the bathroom to confirm—“towels.”

  The room smelled like stale cigarettes and the wooden furniture looked like it was a couple decades old. Charles pulled the window treatments closed and he fucked her on the sheets that were white and smelled like cheap detergent. At least they’re clean, she thought. At least it’s more cómodo than a car.

  He used his spit as lube and he came inside her and touched her hair. He cuddled her afterward and, the next morning, he gave her an extra hundred dollars. He smiled as he gave it to her and she looked down at the bill. “Thank you,” she said, not meeting his eyes. She didn’t want him to see her disappointment. She thought the show had been a gift, not a payment. If he hadn’t given her that extra money, she would’ve forgotten that the night was nothing more than a business transaction.

  When they stood in the elevator and he looked up at the floor numbers descending, she said, “Next time, take me to your house.”

  “Are you sure?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, even though she wasn’t sure at all. She wanted his tenderness. She wanted white cotton sheets, cuddles, the feel of his five-o’clock shadow rubbing against the side of her neck and the insides of her thighs. If going to his house was the way to get that tenderness, then take her to that house, open that door, and welcome her in, damn it.

  * * *

  Two evenings later, it was the kind of night for the roof to be down. She was in the passenger seat with her right arm up to feel the air whoosh past her. Her left hand was on Charles’s leg as he drove them from the piers to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. She could see the blue twinkles of the Verrazano Bridge on the horizon.

  Venus didn’t like Staten Island. She had always felt like it was more a part of New Jersey than the city. She didn’t like that the ferry was the only option to get there if you didn’t have a car. And she didn’t have a car.

  The last time she had taken the ferry to Staten Island to visit a client, the man had handcuffed her to his bed and invited two other men to come over. The man had blindfolded her so she couldn’t make out any faces, only their voices, as one of them told the others that they should use condoms because who knew what the bitch had festering down there. She would’ve smacked them all with the heel side of her shoes if she hadn’t been tied down. The latex was dry and hurt her and she screamed so that, at the very least, the sons of bitches could hear the pain they were putting her through.

  That had been two years ago and the only reason that
she didn’t stop Charles from heading over the Verrazano this time was that Venus knew he was more gentle than that. And okay, Staten Island wasn’t Westchester or the Hamptons, but at least it was a suburb with houses and lawns and driveways. As they headed over the bridge, she looked to her right to see the lit up skyline of Manhattan. The Twin Towers, the Empire State, and all the other scrapers that sprouted up out of the cement.

  And there was Charles, next to her, humming his jazz beats and getting a hard-on. She moved her hand around his upper thigh to excite him even more. She thought of Juanito and Daniel, probably up on one of those distant building roofs, falling hard for each other. She hoped that Daniel wouldn’t hurt Juanito. She thought of Angel, sitting at the kitchen table staring at the two fotos of Hector that she thought Venus didn’t know about. She thought of Charles and if maybe she had found the man who would finally support her just like the white girls got treated by their rich husbands. Charles took the first exit off the highway and down streets that had trees and row houses. When they hit Howard Avenue, there were houses that looked like villas with long driveways. The Verrazano Bridge twinkled baby blue. The wind blew through her hair and she let out a laugh. “Who knew the wind was so fierce,” she said, “when the roof is let down.”

  It wasn’t a question, even though it sounded like one. She felt like the universe had just let her in on a secret that only people with convertibles knew about—and she loved to hold on to little secrets like that.

  TWO

  DORIAN

  Skinny bitches think they are hot shit. The poor damsels. If only they could get some sense knocked into them and realize—well, they need to realize many things. First of which, they aren’t gonna stay skinny for long. Metabolism is just like death and taxes, it’s gonna catch up to you one day. But that’s a minor thing compared to all the foolishness I see in them. Shoplifting. Selling their body and not asking for nearly enough money. Putting sparkling objects on their priority list, but the rent check is bouncing. The list is plenty.

  But I think the biggest misconception they got is with love. It’s always love this, love that. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying there is anything wrong with love. Isn’t it our love that got us into this whole mess in the first place? The misfortune of being born with too much love for the people that society says we can’t love.

  The issue I see, and when I see it, it makes me sad. It’s that these young queens—well, it’s not just the fem realness queens. It’s the banjee boys too, and the butch queens, and the lesbians. They think that love is going to save them. I know, doesn’t that sound nice? How biblical. So they get out on the streets, skinny as shit because they aren’t eating, and then they want to maintain that because they want to be fuckable. Because they think in order to find love, you first have to be fuckable. So they go out into the world thinking that if they find someone who will love them—because their mother couldn’t, because their father couldn’t, because their god couldn’t—if they go out and finally find someone who can, then everything is going to be set right. So they starve so they can look good, and they steal so they can look good, and they don’t realize that all along, it don’t matter who you find to love you, that love isn’t going to make you feel anything more for yourself than you don’t already got.

  It is about love, but a different kind. A kind that you can only find and not substitute for. And I think it’s hard for them to realize. So they go out to the balls for all the wrong reasons. Not all of them, but most of them. They go out seeking an audience of adoring fans who aren’t gonna hurl shade. And they go out looking for their Adam or their Eve, their other half, the other pea in the pod, or whatever you want to imagine it as.

  I just want to shake all of those darlings. Love is great, it is. But it’s also so brief. Didn’t these kids ever learn that even in the Garden of Eden, someone betrayed the other?

  DANIEL

  As the man drove up, he pointed to the monument and asked Daniel who was buried in Grant’s Tomb, as if Daniel was supposed to know who the fuck was buried in a giant tomb. Daniel sat on his hands and chomped on his gum and looked out the window. The tomb was down a walkway, surrounded by trees, and anyways, it was too dark to see shit. “I don’t know,” he told the man, “who?”

  The man laughed at him. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “You drove me all the way up here to ask me about some tomb?” he said. “Don’t waste my time, dude. If you’re gonna be wishy-washy, you can just take me on back to the piers.”

  They were sitting in the back seat of the man’s black Benz, parked somewhere between Riverside and Broadway. He wiped the sweat from his palms on his jeans and popped a big-ass bubble with his chicle.

  “I’m not paying you to give me attitude,” the man said. “I’m gonna fuck you. I’m sure as hell gonna fuck you, but first I want to know who you think is buried in Grant’s Tomb.”

  “Yeah, I heard the question,” he said. “But how the fuck is a boy supposed to know if you don’t tell him first? I mean, really.”

  The man put his hands up to his face and Daniel could see the sliver of gold from his watch. It was a shiny thing, must’ve cost him a lot. Daniel shrugged and popped another bubble.

  “It’s Grant,” the man said. “Grant. Grant is buried in Grant’s tomb. Seriously, at least you’re kind of pretty, otherwise—”

  “So why the hell did you ask me if you already knew the answer?” Daniel said. “Fuck you, dude, don’t laugh at me. Was this some kind of joke?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

  “You’re wasting my time, man. Making me feel stupid, which I don’t appreciate.”

  The man told him to take off his pants. Daniel didn’t know his name, he didn’t know if he even wanted to know. Sometimes he would ask these men for their names, and sometimes they would tell him. They never asked for his name though.

  “I’m not taking my pants off,” he said. “I already told you last week that I ain’t letting you fuck me. I don’t get fucked.”

  “Well what good are you?” the man said under his breath.

  “I fuckin’ heard that,” Daniel said. “I’m not Helen Keller over here. I got ears that work. You said you just wanted a blow job.”

  It was true that the man had said he wanted a blow job when he rolled up his car to where Daniel had been standing near the piers, leaning up against the corner. The man wanted to go to some abandoned warehouse that sat near the Hudson, a place that he said had couches and tables, which made Daniel think it didn’t sound that bad. Pero when they walked in, half the windows were broken to shards that looked like cartoon-explosive stars. There were only four couches, and they were already occupied by a group of guys having an orgy fuckfest. “Fags,” Daniel remembered the man had said, huffing under his breath, as if the man weren’t one himself. Daniel watched the men fuck each other with their shirts on and jeans down by their knees, and then the man had grabbed him by the wrist and lead him back out from where they came—out the door, back to the car.

  So the man insisted that they drive uptown, west side, to a place he knew that was dark and free. Now they were there, near the tomb. The man reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and took out a fifty. It looked so flat, so untouched, that Daniel had to touch it to believe that it wasn’t a fake. He held it in front of Daniel as if it weren’t even a question. “It won’t hurt,” the man said. “I promise.”

  “I want your watch too,” Daniel said.

  The man laughed and rolled up his sleeve to look at the watch as if he had forgotten it was even there. Daniel stared at the pelitos that were a hot diggity mess on the man’s arm. Someone needed to tell him to trim, but Daniel wasn’t about to throw shade.

  “You want this?” the man said, but he sounded angry now. “You want my Rolex? Are you wasting my time now?” He was yelling and Daniel wanted to say, Whoa, whoa, whoa, chill out. It was just a joke, but he didn’t mean it as a joke at first. Like so many things he had seen and
wanted, he wanted that watch. He wanted to see it on his wrist, so chunky with gold that it would weigh his wrist down everywhere he went.

  “It just looks nice, is all,” Daniel said. “And I never had a watch before, that’s why I—”

  His head flew back into the headrest of the seat as the man flung his arm into Daniel’s face. It was backhanded and if Daniel had been smiling, the watch would’ve smacked him square in the teeth.

  “Shut the fuck up,” the man said. “Take the fifty or get out of my fucking car.”

  Daniel took off his jeans and positioned himself on his knees. He wasn’t doing it because he felt scared. If that were the case, he could always take out the blade from his pocket and wave it around, causing hell. He moved, ass up and head looking down at the speckles of dirt on the beige rug of the car. He did it because he wanted the fifty.

  He didn’t want to see the man as he fucked him. He sprawled his fingers straight out on the camel-colored leather that was so buttery, the sweat from his palms made his hand slip. The initial thrust was quicker and smoother than Daniel had expected. Pero sigue, sigue, sigue, sigue, and the man was more cariñoso than Daniel thought he would be. Tender—maybe that was the word.

  There was a moment at the end when the man sped up and Daniel thought, No, no, I don’t want this anymore. I want it to stop. But the man’s cold watch rubbed up against his right shoulder blade, like the man was leaning his elbows on top of him as if Daniel were a table. And Daniel kept looking down and he thought of the two watches he could buy with that fifty dollars. No Rolexes, but still watches. Watches that could tell time, at any time, day or night. For himself and for Juanito. Matching.

  The man came inside him and Daniel squeezed his eyes shut. He didn’t want to focus on the wet, full feeling, so he forced himself to think about the way a crisp bill smells. He thought about whether anyone would pass by the car and see what was being done, or wonder, maybe, who was buried in that tomb over there behind the trees, as if anyone gave a fuck what was buried behind marble.