The House of Impossible Beauties

by Joseph Cassara

  Once she was in the director’s office and had explained what had happened, the topic turned to the small details. The pricing estimate, which was a bullet list of points.

  “Why are you charging me for nail polish?” she asked James, the parlor’s sales guy. “This much for nail polish?”

  “It’s not just the polish,” he said, as if he had said it five hundred times before. “In that fee, you’re also paying for the specific type of polish used and for the expertise of the embalmer who knows how to safely curate the body.”

  She didn’t know what to say, so she just shook her head.

  “You said your friend didn’t—” he said, “didn’t have the virus.”

  “Not that we know of,” Angel said. “She was strangled to death.”

  “Right, right,” he said. “This makes things easier, as I’m sure you can tell.”

  “Could I save that money by painting the nails myself?” she asked. “I think I have just enough expertise in that department.”

  He told her no. Unfortunately, it would be a safety hazard to have a non-embalmer near the body. And what did she know? She hadn’t done any of this before. It amazed her that even the people who worked in Death could turn it all into a business. There was money to be milked everywhere, even if you weren’t alive. Who knew? She didn’t. Hector was buried on Hart’s Island, for fuck’s sake. She had promised herself that no one else she knew and loved would get the funeral of an abandoned crack baby. Not if she could help it.

  * * *

  When she opened the door and stared into the closet, she knew that she would have to do some reaching. She used both hands to part the clothes that were dangling by their hangers. She got to her knees in the dark of night so Juanito and Daniel wouldn’t see what she was doing. She took out the memory box that she kept in the back corner. There was the envelope. It was thick now with bills that she had been saving. She held the one marked Dreams in her hands, then she turned it upside down so the money could fall to the floor beside her.

  She organized the bills into piles of ones and fives and tens and higher. She counted and recounted to make sure the number wasn’t wrong. She got the same number three times and knew there was no way it could be off. That should be enough, she told herself.

  She put the bills back in the envelope from smallest to biggest. She picked up the picture of her and Hector from the Coney Island photo booth. (It was the photos that made the memory box the hardest to open.) On her absolute life and soul, she couldn’t believe how young she looked in those pictures. If she could go back to that time, she’d tell herself to enjoy things more, to not worry so much. What a babyface she had, letting the foto rest on her bedside table. Time was something else entirely.

  She thought about the Chanel suit that she was so close to buying. She refused to accept that it would never be hers. Sure, she was emptying her savings, but that didn’t mean Chanel was out of reach. It would just take longer. She didn’t know how she would be able to go up to that Saks counter without Venus or Hector by her side, to say, Yes, Mama, Wear That Chanel, but she’d take those steps when she came to them. Now, she was back to square one.

  The next morning, she returned to the funeral parlor exactly when they opened. It was strange to see James come up to the door to unlock it. Just like when she was young and in school, she imagined that all her teachers lived under their desks and never left the building. It was the same with James and the funeral parlor. She couldn’t even imagine what his life was like outside of this place.

  “You’re a little short,” he said, blushing. “Let me recount. Maybe I made a mistake.”

  “No,” she said, inhaling deeply. “I counted three times at home. Count again. I’m positive it’s right.”

  He thumbed through the stack again, then another time. She sat straighter in her chair. Posture, she thought, posture, posture.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said, “you are indeed short. By four hundred fifty.”

  What she would do for a goddamn cigarette. She would draw the nicotine in and hold it in her lungs until she passed out. “But I don’t have four hundred fifty more,” she said. “I just don’t have it.”

  He looked at her and sighed. He looked back down at the money that was there and she wished for the magical ability to make more appear.

  She’d have to come up with some other plan. And quickly. She spun her mind to think of options: Go back on the streets? Pick up another job? Even if she did both, there was no way she could come up with almost five hundred in that short of a time span. She tried to think of who could lend her money. Dorian? No, that wouldn’t work. Dorian had her own struggles.

  “What about,” she said, “a city burial?”

  The words made her want to cry, but what could she do? She had no options. The money she had saved wasn’t enough. She had failed.

  “A city burial?” James said. “You mean Potter’s Field? That’s always an option, but—”

  She said yes, and said we, she meant I, a few years ago, um—her lover died three years back and she couldn’t afford a pot to piss in at the time. She didn’t really remember what the process was like for city burials and she wanted to know if he could help her fill out the paperwork.

  “Your lover is buried on Hart Island?”

  She had to sit on her hands so that she didn’t have to feel them shaking anymore. She couldn’t look at him because she was so ashamed, so she looked down and nodded her head.

  “Oh, Christ,” he said. “I can’t let you do this right before Christmas.” He brought his hands onto the desk and put his forehead into his hands. “Okay, I’ll figure something out. We can make this work.”

  “What?” she said. “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “We’ll cover the rest of it. That look on your face is breaking my heart and it’s been a hard year. I’ve never had to bury so many young people. Every week. I don’t understand what’s going on.”

  “Thank you,” she said. Now they were both crying, but she knew they were crying for different things. She couldn’t ever say why another person was crying at any given time, because she couldn’t read minds. That seemed to her one of the most heartbreaking things about being human.

  She wasn’t just crying for the friend that she would never get back, the friend that she had failed to help, even though she didn’t know how she could’ve helped her in the first place. She was crying because if it weren’t for James’s offer, she didn’t know what she would have done. Yes, she was grateful for all of that, but she was also sad that she wasn’t lucky enough to have the kind of life where she didn’t need to depend on the kindess of strangers.

  * * *

  As soon as she got back to the apartment, she wanted to collapse into a ball. It was dark and Daniel and Juanito had beat her to the sleep game. They must’ve fallen asleep together on the couch on accident. She watched them snuggling, arms intertwined. She walked, careful not to clack her heels so that the sound wouldn’t stir them awake. She adjusted the cotton blanket over them to make sure that when they eventually woke up, they wouldn’t find themselves cold.

  Tomorrow, she thought, tomorrow we will plan this service together. She went to her room and everything was throwing shadows. She left the lights off and looked at everything sitting in the light that poured in from the street lamps. There, standing alone on her dresser, were her trophies from all the balls she had won. So many that the one shelf couldn’t hold them all and they spilled over to the floor. Golden plastic statuettes of winged women with hands reaching up in the air, holding torches above their heads, all perched on fake marble bases. They each had the name of the ball they belonged to and the year of the event. She kept them in time order, from the early years to present. She loved to see the sizes grow as her talent had grown.

  She turned around and peeked into Venus’s room across the hall. She looked at her collection of trophies from the same balls. Oh, how they had laughed and kiki’d when th
ey won shit together, like they were gonna take over the world with their sass, charm, charisma, beauty.

  Angel walked over to the bed, which Venus had left unmade before venturing out. There was a purple camiseta on the edge—perfectly ironed and waiting for somebody to snatch it up, put it on. She picked it up and brought it to her nose and inhaled the spritz of Jungle Gardenia that Venus always sprayed on her trigger points. “Porque,” she could hear Venus saying, “those are the points on the body that make the perfume come up off the skin. Makes a girl smell like a thousand bucks.”

  More than anything, Angel needed several large gulps of white wine and something to eat. When she walked back out to the cocina and opened the nevera door, the yellow light spilled into the room. Pero there wasn’t nothing inside: no wine, no food, only a little tub of butter that Angel thought may have been expired. Even if it wasn’t, she wasn’t about to eat butter straight with a spoon. She was too tired to run back downstairs to get something from the bodega. She closed the nevera door and the light went out again.

  Around the wall, she peeked out at Daniel and Juanito. She wanted to wake them up so she wouldn’t be all alone, but she figured she would let them be. They were tired and she knew how that went. She was tired, too, damn it. She went to the closet and pulled out an extra blanket, spread it out on the floor next to the sofa where they lay still, and curled up on the floor right next to them. She closed her eyes and wished Hector were still around to hold her through all of this. Pero she knew that was an impossible dream, so as she focused on sleep; she thought, Tomorrow, tomorrow we will get back up together and figure out what the hell to do next.

  PART THREE

  THE SKY VIEW

  (1991–1992)

  The moon is always rising above your house. The houses of your neighbors look dull and lacking moonlight. But he is always going away from you. Inside his head there is always something more beautiful.

  —Sarah Ruhl, Eurydice

  DANIEL

  Better believe that every part of his life had a soundtrack: a set of tunes so fine or so feeling, all it took was an un-dos-tres ritmo to get the soundboards of his mind spinning and shaking their cassette tape memorias. When he thought of his days with Juanito, he saw them in quick bursts of images with no sound. Some in color, some without, pero con sound? Nunca.

  Like, one: there they were at the door, bags in hand, re-learning how to whisper. They needed to decide whether or not to kiss Angel goodbye. He was scared that one of them, or maybe the both of them, was gonna die on those streets, pulling tricks with those sketch-ass johns. Once Venus was dead and gone, he felt like he was seeing the potential for death everywhere.

  He knew they couldn’t say goodbye to Angel. (Ya, Dani—Juanito said to him—ya tú sabes que she’ll kill us, fucking scratch our eyes out, if we don’t say goodbye.) He knew Juanito was right, but he also knew that they couldn’t say goodbye because, if they did, they never would’ve actually left.

  Y dos: rickety subway ride alone on a Wednesday night, graffiti up the wazoo, watching some nena with permed out hair hurl vomit all over the plastic orange seats. Dos-dos: heading down to the pier and thinking, Damn, how did we get to this?

  At least it was May, which meant not too warm, not too cold. He slept on the bench with one arm under his shoulder for support, y el otro with the switchblade—porque he knew that Juanito wasn’t capable of—even if they were in danger—hurting any small thing.

  Tres: on to the shelters, on to the job interviews in oversize suit jackets from Salvation, on to the nights when things got so bad, he wondered if they were going to wind up starving like the bums who were lined up on the Bowery. It didn’t matter the time of day or night, there was always one dead that they’d have to tiptoe over, always careful not to disturb a body or else their soul’d find them and haunt their ass until kingdom come.

  There they were, he and Juanito. Ain’t nothing had nothing on them. They were louder than love. Louder than love, because damn, love ain’t no low drumbeat. Love was so loud, they couldn’t even hear it. Only see it, like light—flashing forward and giving not a single fuck for what stood in its way. There they were, he and his man, hand in hand, so loud you could only see them flash.

  * * *

  It took them a year on the streets plus two years in and out of shelters before they got their own place. With their old days and ways behind them, the apartment was a total matchbox on Driggs. They had a bed (taken from the street), but no frame. They had a TV, but no sofa, a VHS player, but no cable, an oven, but no microwave. They loved it anyway because they were only looking up to see if they had a roof—and they did.

  In their first few weeks there, they developed certain rituals. They picked up plates and cheap utensils at the thrift store, and they washed and rewashed them. “Ay, Dani,” Juanito said. “Look at how this fork sparkles. Just like brand new.”

  They would shower and walk around the living-dining room completely naked, just because they could. He would whistle at Juanito and tell him how beautiful he was and that he should work, work, work that room like he owned it. He took it all in: the way that Juanito’s calves flexed as he took each step, the way his abs v’d down to his patch of pelitos, the way his tiny pecs were defined just enough, and how his lower back muscles pinched in and accentuated his beautiful little culo.

  After they bought their barely working TV—a bulky thing with antenna ears from god knows what year—at the used-electronics store, they started to rent scary movies from Blockbuster. They set up a bunch of blankets on the sala floor each week and held each other while the most fucked-up shit happened to the other people on the pantalla.

  “Ay, por favor,” Juanito would say whenever shit was going down. He rose in tone and intensity each time: “por favor, por favor, por fa-vorrr,” as if each please would make the action stop. Like Carrie was just gonna stop midstab and be all, I forgive you bitches, let me just excuse myself and go home to eat Twizzlers and play with my cat.

  Daniel wasn’t quite sure why Juanito liked those pelis so much, because they seemed to scare him shitless. But he liked the routine of it. Maybe that was what Juanito loved about it too. They had finally become the type of people who fell into a routine, who were able to live out and express their love for each other by agreeing to lay together each Friday night and stare at a pantalla.

  He would lay there with Juanito each week, holding his love in his arms and feeling Juanito’s body tense up. He loved that Juanito could still be a total sass machine, even when he was scared shitless: about The Exorcist (ay, now that is one fucked-up little chica with a nasty vocabulary), Freddy Krueger (pues, por supuesto, if Johnny Depp was in my bed, I’d want to eat him to death también), Chuckie (uff, por favor, that creepy little muñeco es feísimo), Carrie (oh hell to the no).

  Sometimes Daniel glanced over and watched the blue TV light against Juanito’s face. He took in the way Juanito’s body fit with his like a llave, and just at the moment when he felt like all was right with the world (he had always said it wouldn’t take much to make him a happy man), he had mental flashes of the stories that Juanito shared with him about his childhood. He imagined Juanito as a little boy in pain, naked as his father beat the shit out of him for being too much of a damn princesa. In those moments, he looked at the pantalla to watch people die deaths with one hell of a lot of blood. Always blood: squirting, spraying, oozing. But couldn’t a person just die from being hit to the head one too many times? The images on the screen seemed, somehow, better than imagining Juanito’s young pain because, por lo menos, Daniel knew that shit in the peli was all fake. It was all death and blood and white girls screaming on a set somewhere in the past, and when the credits rolled and the room was black and the TV was turned off, it was all over.

  During Jaws, Juanito caught him staring. “¿Qué?” Juanito asked. “What’s wrong with my face?”

  “—it’s nothing,” he said. “You just have an eyelash on your cheek.” Juanito’s long eyelash
es were his prettiest feature, Daniel always believed. They curled upward naturally, for sure making every chica jealous of the way it made his eyes look real fem. (Once, a morena in Duane Reade had asked Juanito if he wore mascara, and he watched as Juanito smiled and said, “Girl, whatchoo think?”) He picked off the eyelash between two fingers and told Juanito to make a wish.

  Daniel felt Juanito’s shoulders tense up and he pulled Juanito in closer. “Ese tiburón,” Juanito said as Jaws rushed out of the ocean. “I don’t understand why he’s gotta eat all those innocent people when there are other things he can eat in the ocean.” A body went under and the water foam went red. “Ay, por favor. Enough, Jaws! We get it.”

  “Dunna, dunna, dunna-dunnadunnadunna, ahhh!” Daniel hummed, and softly bit into Juanito’s neck. Juanito flinched back as he laughed. “Yeah, but without Jaws,” Daniel said, “it would be like, family goes to beach, family enjoys beach, family goes home with all their limbs.”

  “Exacto,” Juanito said. “Why can’t I just see a nice happy family story? That’s all I’m sayin’ I want.”

  Daniel pulled the blanket over their eyes and kissed Juanito on the tip of his nose, then on his lips. “You know what?” Daniel said. “You’ve got the prettiest eyes I’ve ever landed on. We’re about to make our own happy family story.” This was his dream, after all: no more hustling, then maybe one day they’d have their picket fence.

  “Ay, you know how to make a boy feel like a princess.”

  “Ya tú sabes.”

  “I never want these movies to end,” Juanito said. “Even if they’re fucked-up and shit.”

  “¿Por qué? You wanna see more people get eaten by a killer shark?”

  “I just hate endings, that’s all,” Juanito said, snuggling his head into Daniel’s shoulder. “I just never want anything to end.”

  * * *

  He worked at a furniture store to make the rent. Sometimes fancy-rich customers would push his buttons. They could be so demanding, he wanted to quit on the spot. But then he’d think about the rent, and swallow whatever anger the customers had provoked.