The House of Impossible Beauties

by Joseph Cassara

  That day, what the vieja in front of the counter didn’t understand was that she couldn’t get the sofa delivered overnight. Even if she paid extra—Daniel lied—there was no way that it could be done.

  “But I live on Eighty-Sixth and Park,” she said, putting her hand up to her neckline so she could take each of her pearls between her fingers and roll them back and forth.

  “I understand, ma’am,” he said, staring at the bones in her hand. He always thought that the hands were the most intimate part of the body. All the face-lifts in the world, but the hands? Ain’t nothing the doctors could do to the hands. “But there’s still no way.”

  The woman leaned over the counter and huffed. “Listen, young man,” she said, “there is no need to take a tone with me.”

  It always shocked him when white people felt they could reprimand him. He didn’t realize that he had dished over any kind of tone. At least not any worth noting. The irony of the situation was that she was taking a tone with him. He took a deep breath and thought, This too shall pass.

  “I apologize if you’re hearing a tone,” he said. Customers were a daily struggle.

  But she was technically right. There was something he could do for her delivery, but he didn’t feel like doing it. It’s not like he thought of himself as a blazing mentiroso who told lies for no reason. He preferred the white lies, they were the harmless ones. He relished the sweet kind of power he felt when he told them. He couldn’t deny someone a couch or a table or a thousand-dollar glass vase—if they were loca enough to buy one—but he could certainly delay their shipment if they were rude to him.

  “But I don’t think you are understanding what I am telling you,” the woman said. “We are on the same island. It’s only a matter of blocks. Which is a few miles away. What could it take a truck? Twenty minutes?” She spoke to him, he felt, as if he were a child: slow and steady, so the words could soak themselves in all good. “For goodness sake,” she continued, enraging herself as she kept talking. “There is a near-empty truck outside that you could put the sofa in if you wanted to. But you simply don’t want to.”

  He smiled, which was maybe the wrong thing to do. He reminded her—for the third time—that shipments only went out once a week, and that it took two days to process the orders. “And you haven’t technically placed your order yet until we carbon copy your charge card,” he said. “You haven’t even decided on a model.”

  “Even if I do select a model, I would really like it delivered tonight. May I speak with the manager?”

  “She’s at lunch,” he said. “I’m sorry, it’s just not possible to deliver today.”

  Of course anything was possible if she was willing to pay big bucks, and over the course of five months working at Black & White Decor, he had quickly learned that anyone north of Seventy-Second Street was willing to pay, as long as they felt that their demands were being met.

  If he had to be real about it, he wanted that sofa for himself. For nearly two months, he’d been lusting after it in a way that was borderline weird to be lusting after a piece of furniture—how it would look in their empty room, how buttery soft the leather would feel against their skin as they watched their pelis, how shocked Juanito would be to see that he’d saved the money and actually gotten the damn thing. And it was (would be!) all theirs. No more piles of blankets no more.

  It was a white leather Maurice Villency, completely flat with no back to rest on, as if it were a daybed, with two long tube-shaped pillows on the ends. “You gotta come see this sofa.” He had called Juanito during his lunch break when it had first arrived two months earlier. “I can just see Lorraine Bracco walking into our apartment, clapping her hands twice, and saying, The furniture’s all Maurice Villen-ci-a.”

  “Stop it, you are joking.”

  He could hear Juanito’s adorable giggle over the line. “Well, yeah, I’m joking. But only kind of. We’re gonna buy this sofa, Juanito. We need to.”

  “No me tomes el pelo,” Juanito said. “And with what money?”

  “I don’t even know,” he said. “I’m still salivating over it.”

  “You know we can’t afford it, babe.”

  He knew they couldn’t afford it. When he had got back on the floor, he checked the tag. Two grand. Two whole grand. For a sofa. So he had spent the course of those two months—eight weeks and three days, to be exact—saving pocket change and picking from his paycheck, which came in the form of an envelope of cash at the end of each week.

  Now, the woman slipped her bony fingers away from the necklace and squeezed her black leather wallet like it was a nutcracker and she was trying to break the world’s meanest chestnut. “Well, I suppose we could wait until next week,” she said. The words sounded like they were paining every cell in her body. “I suppose we just have no choice, do we?”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am.”

  “What do you think of the sofa anyway?” she said.

  “Oh,” he said. “I think there are other options—to save money. We have some new arrivals toward the front of the store that are a little cheaper—”

  “Goodness,” she said, “money isn’t the issue. Neither is function. I’m referring to the style. What do you think of that style? I suppose I’m just a tad worried that my husband will see it and think it looks a bit too faggy.”

  It didn’t bother him that she had used that word—even though the word itself was also fucked-up—but that she had said it to him in a whisper, as if it had been a joke shared between them and no one around them was meant to hear it.

  “I’m not quite sure what you mean,” he said. The words felt stiff in his mouth. Nothing had ever made him more aware of who he was—and how damn different he was—than being forced to interact with customers who spent thousands of dollars on muebles. He would take their words and phrases, try them on for size, see how comfortable they felt in his mouth, as if he were sitting down in a recliner to judge how comfy the cushions were. Not quite sure what you mean: the words felt like an antique wooden chair, hard with an unreclinable back. What he really wanted to say: every palabrota he had ever heard, even the ones he never had the cojones to say to rich viejas. He wanted to go full Evangelina from Cadenas de amargura on her old ass.

  She must have noticed the look on his face—what that look was, he had no idea, but surely there had been some sign of rage, because she said, “Oh dear, I’m terribly sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “It’s not a problem.”

  “I had no idea.” She got closer to his face and whispered. “Plenty of my friends are homosexuals. My intention wasn’t to be gauche. I do think it’s a lovely couch.”

  * * *

  That night, he and Juanito downed some beers on the roof of their building and he asked Juanito what he thought the woman had meant by the word.

  “She was just acting a fool,” Juanito said. “I don’t think you should get too worked up about it.”

  “I’m not getting all worked up,” he said. “I’m just trying to make sense of it. And she even knew that I was offended by it, but I didn’t say nothing about nothing.”

  “Well, were you fucking some other guy on the couch?” Juanito said, laughing. “Then it would make some kinda sense for it to be a fag couch.”

  “Faggy, she said faggy.”

  “Es igual, ¿no?” Juanito rolled his eyes and took a swig.

  “I guess,” he said. He thought about what it was that people saw and made them realize he was gay. Or not gay. And when. He didn’t understand how a person in the straight world could know these things. Sure, there came a moment when two men, walking a straight line down the street, eyes peeled to the ground, could look up and see and recognize another maricón walking down the street. The eyes might linger for a moment, drop down to check out the cuerpo, por un poco, then move on. No need for words. But with straight people? The idea that a straight person either could or couldn’t tell made Daniel feel unsafe, not because he didn’t want them knowing, but because he
wanted to know when they knew so that he could feel safer in his own body.

  With Juanito, who was as fem as the sequins on a Vegas showgirl bodice, there wasn’t much to look past. But Daniel had always thought he was more about the banjee effect with his own masculinity. But banjee was just that: an effect, nothing more. “Do you really think I’d be fucking some other guy?”

  “Claro que no, Dani,” Juanito said. “Ay, you’re really hot and bothered by it, huh? I think you’re just angry because she took the sofa from you.”

  “Bueeeno, it was never ours in the first place,” he said. “And we knew it’d never be ours.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” Juanito said, sipping from the beer’s bottle neck with his pinky up, all delicado.

  It had taken all the strength he could muster, and then some, to fight the urge to take out a Sharpie in the stockroom and scribble all over the white leather so that, a week later, when it was rolled away and shipped out, she’d be in for quite the little sorpresa. He didn’t know why he was being such a baby about it, but it was really bothering him.

  Yet when he weighed the options and imagined how the scene would go, he decided against it. He imagined that the woman would call the store and complain to his manager, Charlene, the no-nonsense closeted lesbiana who had taken a chance on hiring him despite his being, as she said, a little rough around the edges, like he was some kind of cardboard cutout that hadn’t been traced carefully enough. So there were his options: revenge or food? So he didn’t pick up the Sharpie—didn’t even look at it.

  Juanito asked him if he wanted the last beer.

  “No,” Daniel said. “It’s all yours for the taking.”

  He admired how Juanito didn’t care about these incidents that he took so personally, like straight to the corazón. Pero, there was Juanito who didn’t seem to give one single, flying fuck about how others perceived him. Must’ve learned that from Venus. When Juanito was doing the ball circuit years ago, one of the Duprees threatened to cut a bitch because Juanito had worn the same leopard-print leotard that one of their queens had worn at the last ball. “So what?” Venus had yelled, “like we’re some kind of sacrificial-fucking-lamb. You bitches can eat my ass!” And when they called Juanito a copycatted, uninspired, little spic, Juanito didn’t lose his shit like Venus had. He had simply held up her three fingers and said, “Read between the lines, that is, if you can read, you ignorant little cunts.” He must’ve learned that from Angel. Yes, Juanito was cool-calm-collected in the way that Angel was: they could both call someone an ignorant little cunt and still sound as classy as the Queen of motherfucking England.

  Then there was the time when they had first moved to Williamsburg. They were holding hands on their way to the bodega to get some cold cuts and chips. When an older Hasidic man wearing an oversize suit and black felt hat walked in the middle of them—like it was some kind of fucked-up game of Red Rover—grabbed each of their wrists and threw their hands apart, Daniel had been so enraged. The man had just kept on walking like it was nothing. Daniel wanted to turn around and punch the man in the face, but Juanito grabbed Daniel’s arm and said, “Don’t do it, papi. It’s not worth it. I’m tellin’ ya.” Of course Juanito had been right, but it made Daniel wonder why he was no longer the reliably calm one in the relationship.

  He finished off the last of his beer and let the glass bottle roll down the tilted cement surface of the roof. “I wanted that sofa,” he said, “and she took it away from me.”

  “Pero mi amor,” Juanito said. “It wasn’t yours in the first place.”

  What was worse was that the sofa would sit there for a week, taunting him, with a white piece of paper that said SOLD in order to warn the others to back off, that shit was already taken.

  “You know what she did when I imprinted her Amex?” he said. “When I handed her the pen to sign the slip form, our hands touched for, like, a second. And she fucking froze and looked at her hand like I had just given her leprosy.”

  “Ay, por fa-vor,” Juanito waved his hand in the air.

  “Like she thinks that just because I’m gay that I’m infected with the virus? Look at these hands.” He threw his hands up, fingers out. “Okay, they’re a little dry and I gotta clip my uñas, pero mira—no marks, no bruises, no sarcoma shit. No fuckin’ virus.”

  “Daniel, ya, already.”

  “But for real, babe. For once, why couldn’t that sofa just be mine,” he said, looking out at the way the dark clouds over Manhattan moved in front of the needle at the top of the Empire State. It was a building that he had never visited in his entire life, but one that he noticed maybe every day. The view from the top, he thought, must be one hell of a fucking view. The park, the water, the puentes, and that edge on the horizon where the sky meets the land. That view, he imagined, you could probably see it all and then some.

  * * *

  The plan was simple: when Juanito was taking a shower, he would play the Psycho music in the cassette player with the volume on blast, and as the bathroom was filling with steam, he’d take the BBQ rib and pretend it was the knife, and then he’d pull back the shower curtain, and then the practical joke would be over and they’d laugh and kiki.

  He got home from work in the evening, and Juanito was getting ready for a deejaying gig at the dance joint Lalalandia. “Ay, Dios mío,” Juanito had said, “you should see those crazy white people letting loose.” Since Juanito was never one to be really into the music scene, whenever he said things like that, Daniel thought maybe Juanito was really digging the job, or at least, the people-watching opportunities it afforded him. One time he told Daniel that a woman came dressed in an Easter Bunny costume, except instead of wearing the bunny head, she had painted her face paper-white and had a mop head as a wig. “And it wasn’t like one those moño-weaves, but more like, dangly. You know? Fatal with a capital F.”

  Now he had the rib in his hand and the bathroom was filling with steam because Juanito liked his showers to burn so hard, the skin on his legs would turn red. Daniel played the tape and when he pulled the curtain, Juanito screamed like the moon and the sky had merged midair.

  “Why would you do that!” Juanito screamed, hitting Daniel on the arm.

  Daniel laughed. Water was getting all over the floor. “I was just trying to be funny,” he said. “Wait, are you crying? Ay, Juanito—I thought you’d find it funny.”

  “Ay-con-el-funny,” Juanito said. His skinny body was covered in soapsuds. His hair was slicked back with conditioner. “And it will be mad funny when I get some rabid dog from Bay Ridge to come play Cujo with your prankster ass, right?”

  “Oh, psh,” he tried to joke. “I can take Cujo any day. I’m sorry, babe. I didn’t mean to start something.”

  * * *

  Cujo. Now that was one fucked-up little doggy. (Little? Not quite, but still.) That dog was something vicious entirely.

  Daniel loved dogs. He loved how they were always happy to see their owners and greet other humans. He loved their sloppy-tongue hellos. When he was a kid, over the summertimes, he liked to watch the doggies who fell asleep outside the pool club across the street from his building. Since no dogs were allowed inside the club, people had to tie them up so they wouldn’t run away. Daniel was always bothered by this. He didn’t understand how someone could say they loved a dog and then want to tie them up to a pole. So, when his mother was out of the house or taking a nap, he’d go down and pet them and watch them sleep and feed them saltine crackers. He watched the way some of them twitched and moved the tips of their nose as they slept, as if they were dreaming of sniffing and running and being wild-wild in their sleep.

  This is what Juanito’s nightmares reminded him of, except más fuerte.

  On the good nights, Juanito would just twitch and move slightly in Daniel’s arms. It wasn’t a big deal, but it was noticeable enough to wake Daniel up. It seemed like they were getting worse every week. Sweat absorbed into sheets, skin that was hot to the touch. Daniel wondered if maybe th
ey were watching too many scary movies. Or maybe it was the practical jokes. He knew night sweats were a symptom of the virus but that would be impossible—they had just been tested. There was just no way. Even so, that wouldn’t explain the night terrors. They couldn’t afford a doctor’s visit, but maybe they were gonna have to splurge. Oh, he really didn’t know what to think, so he did what he always did: he blamed himself.

  What baffled him even more was that Juanito always woke up and pretended like everything was okay. Daniel didn’t want to make things awkward or embarrassing by bringing it up—he figured that eventually, if things got bad enough, Juanito would bring it up himself. But then there were the bad nights. Those nights scared Daniel the most.

  During one fit, Juanito jolted straight up in bed like he was possessed by some dolor sin sentido. He watched as Juanito’s mouth opened as if to scream like living hell, but not a single sound came out of his mouth.

  “¿Qué pasa?” he begged Juanito. “What’s happening, what’s going wrong?”

  Juanito’s mouth stayed open and Daniel put his hand on Juanito’s shoulder to try to get him to snap out of it. But he wasn’t snapping out of nothing. Several seconds passed until Juanito’s face went back to always and he fell back down to the pillow and started snoring.

  “You’re having nightmares,” Daniel said the next morning while waiting for the toast to pop.

  “Oh?” Juanito said. “It’s nothing. No te preocupes.”

  But Daniel could sense that this was a mentira, maybe the kind of mentira that people who were in love told each other to help save feelings and avoid anxieties. And he believed Juanito, who said that everything was alright, because that’s what he wanted to believe in the first place.

  Two weeks later or so, Daniel found the glass pipe and the mini-blowtorch in the back of Juanito’s sock drawer.