People in Trouble

by Sarah Schulman

  The first time Kate and Molly had made love was easy because Kate had decided not to decide anything. She did not consider even one consequence.

  ‘I love your breasts,’ she had said, lifting them in her hands, letting them fall over her face and squeezing them together so she could suck both nipples at once. ‘I love your caramel eyes and your mustache and your breasts and your buttocks and your clit.’

  She was lying back in Molly’s arms feeling nervous and open and silly, being held by a woman that way. Even though Kate was long, she was also very light and could be carried through the making of love.

  ‘What animal are you?’ asked Molly. ‘You’re sleek like a mink but the size of a panther. Only it is the color that dominates everything. To give you a coat of black fur would be a lie. Is there a red fox who is like a swan but warm, that growls, who can turn into a tree to be watched and only then decide to bend? What do I have in my arms tonight?’

  ‘Let me smell your breath,’ Kate said. ‘Mmmm, so sweet.’

  ‘That’s because I’ve been eating you for the last half hour. Do you know why I like eating you? Because I like your come all over my face.’

  ‘No wonder men like big breasts,’ she said. ‘Who wouldn’t? This is my favorite part.’

  She slid her hand back and forth over the slope in Molly’s waist. ‘This shape, what is it? How can you say what this is, this hidden incline?’

  ‘It’s just because I’m female.’

  ‘Men are getting more female,’ Kate said then, becoming chatty and thoughtful, like she had just put on her eyeglasses. ‘At least in New York City.’

  That was over a year ago, Kate thought now, pushing her hands into her pockets and pulling the shawl more tightly around her shoulders. I would never say that now, knowing the way she hates men. Imagine me having brought up men at a time like that. Shows how deeply I care for Pete, I guess, he’s always on my mind.

  Only certain kinds of people are out alone with regularity late at night. Some are going somewhere and the rest are already there. That particular night four people stopped and asked Kate for money. And because she needed something to identify with this transitional state between Molly and Peter, she took a moment, on each occasion, to pull out her wallet and offer them something. The exception was a white wino sitting on a stoop who was too fucked up to stand and receive it. He expected her to come over and deliver, which was something she was not prepared to do. Especially since it would go directly to alcohol and not a more acceptable vice like food. But she did give to a disoriented black man wearing too many coats. He held out a paper cup and mumbled without acknowledging her gift. In fact, he didn’t see her at all.

  There were so many people living on the street it was unbelievable. Surely there were more now than there had ever been. Kate was warm and wet between her legs. She brought her hands to her face for Molly’s smell, which was still on her fingers.

  ‘Do you have any extra change?’ a tired woman in gray clothing asked. Actually, it was her skin that was gray, her clothes were nondescript. ‘Thank you for stopping,’ she said slowly, articulating. ‘And God bless you. It is people like you who keep me employed. This is the one job I will never be fired from.’

  Do they say the same thing to each person, thirty times an hour, twelve times a day? Why aren’t they rioting? Why are they standing so politely on street corners?

  Kate passed graffiti on a wall that said Arm the Homeless

  She shook. If the homeless were armed, people like her and Peter would be killed immediately. They would slash the throats of everyone who had a nice place to live and gave only fifty cents.

  Where do they go when it gets so cold?

  ‘You don’t ever go with men, do you?’ Kate had asked that first night.

  ‘I’m just not that interested in men.’

  Of course, Kate thought, Molly was quite politic to answer so hesitantly.

  ‘They usually don’t have anything to say about the things I’m interested in, so we end up talking about what they’re interested in and I get bored.’

  They had been on a mattress on a floor surrounded by candles and dried flowers. There was that sweet smell of sex and the taste of the same on each of their faces.

  ‘I’m going to take you to Ibiza,’ Kate said. Then she said, ‘Someone should dress you in red silk with one of those long slashes to show off your girlish back.’

  Five months later she had watched Molly wish on a star.

  ‘What did you wish for?’

  ‘A trip to Ibiza.’

  That’s when Kate realized that Molly was waiting for her to make it come true.

  ‘I remember words,’ Molly told her. ‘So be careful what you say to me. I waited for months for you to produce a red dress, or at least suggest going to the stores and trying one on. I tried on some myself but I never knew if it was the right one.’

  What could I possibly have said to that? Kate thought, feeling annoyed. Feeling slightly sorry and a bit put-upon. Molly was describing someone that Kate would never become. She would never pay that much attention, and that was fine. Peter didn’t want that kind of attention.

  Some day she’s going to get so angry, she’s going to slap me across the face.

  Kate felt slightly guilty then, a bit uncomfortable. Her underarms hurt.

  ‘You’re easy to be with,’ Molly had said that first time, lifting Kate’s body to hers so that their brown and red pubic hair met like an advertisement for National Brotherhood Week.

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘One o’clock. I guess it’s time for you to go.’

  ‘This was more comfortable than I expected,’ Kate had told her. ‘I wish I could stay the whole night. I really do. But I can’t. Peter would be too hurt. Are you angry?’

  ‘No.’

  Kate didn’t know what else to say. She got dressed while Molly sat there, naked, watching her. That became a ritual between them. Kate kept her eyes on Molly’s eyes until her own breasts and genitals were covered, then she’d switch her gaze to the door.

  ‘Red silk,’ she had said, walking out the door. ‘Your back is so white.’

  Kate got to the front of her apartment building and looked up. The light was out. Peter was asleep. She felt filled with energy then. She wanted to run everywhere. She didn’t want to go upstairs and lie still in a black house. On impulse she turned sharply and almost bolted toward her studio. Then she regretted the decision. Then she accepted it and started walking.

  Now he’ll think I’ve finally stayed out all night with her and won’t believe me when I say I’ve been working. But it will be completely true.

  This was such a complicated game of truth or dare. Peter forced her to lie to him in some ways and made her tell the truth in others. There were ways he wanted to be lied to, like about how much the two women saw each other and how important it had all become. But he wanted the truth when it came to the fact of Molly’s existence. He wanted to hear about a meaningless affair with an unknown woman. Funny at first, the fact that it was a woman threw them both off guard. She didn’t panic and neither did he, because they didn’t expect that to mean anything. It just snuck up on both of them. If it had been a man it never would have gotten this far. Neither Pete nor Kate would have let it happen. Now Peter wanted to know everything and never see any of it. Kate was left with the responsibility of finding some acrobatic technique for accomplishing this unspoken request.

  The first night Kate and Molly spent together, she’d walked home wondering, seriously, how Peter could have possibly committed himself to a lifetime of making love to a woman with such small breasts. The next time she and Pete had sex she was bursting with curiosity about this and many other questions pertaining to a man’s view. She had rubbed her nipples in his face, like Molly had done for her. She did it with a shake of her shoulders that she had never used before.

  ‘Hey, you’re in a good mood,’ he’d said. He was clearly surprised that she should be so sexy when i
t was just a regular night, when he wasn’t expecting to make love at all.

  But Kate got scared all of a sudden because something brand-new was making itself known. She saw right then that she and Peter knew each other so well sexually that if either of them was to introduce a new idea or act or word or response or fantasy or direction, sexually or otherwise, it would be so disruptive as to be obvious, because these feelings had to come from somewhere. Either she had to tell him the truth or blame it on the movies.

  So, she had said it right away, that first night. She said that she had a lover and it was a woman whose name was Molly and she was younger. It would be half a year before Molly claimed he knew what she looked like. But that first night Kate told him that she loved him. That she would grow old and die with him. That he was her best friend and her best lover and nothing was as important or exciting to her in the world as he. Since then she had been losing sleep and walking home in the cold and heat and not having enough time for herself trying to keep all of that true. But it was those statements alone that ultimately convinced him to accept this preposterous situation.

  17

  MOLLY

  Another friend of Molly’s died.

  ‘That’s the problem with having friends,’ she said. ‘You have to watch them suffer and die.’

  Jeffrey Rechtschaffen 1960–1988. She was in a great rage. She was so angry, clicking her jaw, uttering a variety of obscenities. She spoke them with such a fury that a crease appeared between her eyes in the morning and by that afternoon it was deeply embedded. She didn’t know what day it was. She didn’t look both ways crossing the street. She didn’t think to button her jacket against the December wind. All she knew was anger. She alternately burned and tightened on the way to the bus station to pick up Pearl, who had come down for the funeral. Thank God for Pearl. Pearl let her know she belonged to someone.

  She couldn’t call Kate because they had just seen each other and she was supposed to wait for Kate to call her. More accurately Molly just couldn’t face ‘There’s someone here, I can’t talk,’ one more time. Her head began to ache. She saw other people noticing her acting peculiar, so she tried to think of something else, something calming. But there was nothing else. It wasn’t like turning to another channel on the TV because AIDS was on all of them, but only in the most idiotic terms. Everyone on television who died of AIDS got it from a blood transfusion. Or else it was a beautiful young white male professional with ‘everything to live for,’ and even then the show focused on his parents and not him.

  Why can’t they just say it? Why can’t they just say ‘ass-fucking’ on Channel Four?

  Jeffrey had been a journalist for a gay newspaper in Washington, D.C. He knew every politician on Capitol Hill who was sucking cock. When a senator died of a ‘blood transfusion’ Jeffrey knew he had been living with his boyfriend for years.

  ‘That’s how they do it,’ he said. ‘They keep the wife and five kids back in the house in Shaker Heights and the boyfriend’s in the townhouse in Georgetown.’

  When Jeffrey was first diagnosed he decided to move back to New York City and worked at the AIDS Hotline whenever he felt well enough. Sometimes Molly would meet him for lunch right near the office. He ate strictly macrobiotic. Jeffrey had looked around carefully at treatments and he chose the creative visualization approach combined with various medications. He wore crystals. He carried a teddy bear and went for daily massage. He did yoga and said ‘I love you’ to himself in the mirror every morning and night. It kept him alive for four years and three weeks when he was supposed to die in eighteen months. He hung on long enough to be wheeled in a wheelchair at the front of the Gay March on Washington so he could see what six hundred thousand homosexuals looked like smiling and cheering in front of the White House. He wore a shirt that said I Have AIDS – Hug Me.

  Jeffrey said that the reason he lived so much longer than he was supposed to was that at the same time he embraced life, he accepted death. ‘Otherwise you die angry and the angry die quicker.’ But toward the end he changed his mind about that and got really furious. He said that the release would help him live longer. Molly thought that probably meant that feeling whatever he was feeling at any given moment meant better health generally.

  The day he died the New York Post reported a bank robbery in midtown by two men in black T-shirts with pink triangles on them over which was scrawled Justice. They did not wear masks. They had no guns. According to Cordelia Williams, a teller interviewed by the Post, they slipped her a note that said ‘We have AIDS. We have nothing to lose. This money will go to sick people who have no health insurance.’ She gave them fifteen thousand dollars without setting off the alarm.

  ‘My brother died of AIDS,’ she told reporters as she was led away in handcuffs. ‘So why should I send the police after those poor brave men?’

  ‘You know what’s really incredible?’ Jeffrey had said over one of those macrobiotic lunches of steamed brown rice, steamed tofu, steamed adzuki beans and hijiki with mushroom and onions. ‘It is amazing for me to see firsthand the extent to which people calling the hotline will go to deny their homosexuality. There are so many closet cases out there, even when it is anonymous to a stranger over the phone.’

  Jeffrey was a long-legged Jewish gay man with a mustache; a cultural stereotype. He was always reading three books at one time like Walter Benjamin, The Tao of Physics and I Once Had a Master.

  ‘Today this guy calls with pure macho panic in his voice. He thinks he has AIDS because he had sex once, two years ago, with a prostitute and he didn’t use a condom. So I told him he had nothing to worry about. “You probably can’t get AIDS from women,” I told him. “Unless you swallow their menstrual blood. Did you swallow her menstrual blood?” I knew he hadn’t, of course. Too macho. So he says, “But they say on TV you can get it from prostitutes. They said it on the movie of the week.” “Don’t believe what you see on TV,” I tell him. And then I try to explain to the guy the amount of men claiming to have gotten AIDS from women is so minute that they are probably just guys who don’t want to admit they’ve been getting fucked in the ass or shooting drugs, so they say they got it from prostitutes. I told him it was probably impossible and a lot of people think that as far as sex goes, AIDS requires multiple exposures, so he probably didn’t have anything to worry about at all.’

  Jeffrey’s hair had gotten very thin. He sipped boncha tea. His clothes were all too big on him.

  ‘But the guy wouldn’t get off the phone. He kept hemming and hawing saying, “Are you sure? Are you sure?” So I finally got the message and gave him what he wanted. “Are you having sex with men?” I asked. “No, no, no not me,” he says. “Are you sure?” I say. “Are you sure you didn’t do it just once? Just to see what it was like? Once because you were really horny? Once because you were so drunk you didn’t realize what you were doing and before you realized it, some faggot …” “You know,” he says. “Something is coming back to me now that you mention it. Yeah, I think I was really plastered. Totally smashed.” Like that.’ Jeffrey sighed and ordered a piece of orange tofu pie.

  ‘You have to give them every excuse in the world so they can tell you what they did without admitting to being gay. I think we should change the name of this country to the United States of Denial. This epidemic will never be taken care of properly until people can be honest about sex. Not even what they desire, just what they do. And you know, Molly, the world will have to stand on its head before the people who live in it will be honest about what they feel sexually.’

  Jeffrey’s apartment was covered with fresh cut flowers and he always played soothing music. Even when he went into the hospital for the last time, his buddy from Gay Men’s Health Crisis dragged along Jeff’s cassette player, so he could go out listening to gamelan music. Gamelan and fresh flowers. But at the end, of course, being human, he panicked. He got mad at his buddy when Jeffrey was moved to intensive care. Then he refused to sign the release form saying he didn’t need to be k
ept on life supports.

  ‘I won’t need it,’ he said.

  Three days before he died Jeffrey got a letter from some people in San Francisco who were doing an anthology of journalists with AIDS. Did he want to submit a piece?

  ‘No,’ he said, emaciated. ‘It wouldn’t be fair. I mean, I’ll be the only one in the whole book who is still alive and for the rest of my career I’ll have to shake the stigma, you know, the AIDS thing.’

  18

  MOLLY

  ‘Molly, do you realize how easily that could have been me?’ Pearl said first thing after getting off the Greyhound bus.

  ‘I know, I thought of that too. If women could pass it on as easily as men it would be us and our lovers that the world was mourning or ignoring. Instead it’s just our closest friends.’

  Then they touched.

  ‘I had a hard time with Jeff for a couple of years,’ Pearl said on the way back downtown. ‘When we would go out he was always looking around. I mean I’m glad I saw those days of disco, crystal, MDA, you know, “I’ve gotta have it I’ve got to have more.” But sometimes I couldn’t have a conversation with him walking down the street because he was always looking around at men and not listening or responding. I remember when the Saint wouldn’t let women in. It was gross. But when AIDS happened men needed more friends. The back rooms got shut down and the bars needed more cash and started going coed. Now it’s easier to be close, but I always keep an eye on their body weight.’

  Pearl was one of those big, powerfully beautiful women who had to dress down to keep the men away. Molly felt about her the way people are supposed to feel about their families – someone to borrow money from if you need an operation.