People in Trouble

by Sarah Schulman

  32

  KATE

  The cashier in the Chinese restaurant was listening to a preparatory cassette for her green-card interview. The windows were fogged with pork grease pouring out of the kitchen, but the front door was open too, so spring came in in bits and pieces. Kate and Molly got buzzed on the sunshine and too much Chinese tea.

  ‘Are you willing to take the full oath of allegiance to the United States of America?’ asked the authoritative male voice with a mid-Atlantic accent, speaking on tape. He had no intonation.

  ‘Yes,’ said the woman automatically, rolling chopped meat into dumpling dough. Her teenage daughter was chewing on the edge of a pencil, going back and forth from her calculator to her notebook at one of the empty tables.

  ‘Are you willing to bear arms for the United States?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Have you ever sold drugs?’

  ‘Sewed drugs?’ she repeated with some doubt.

  ‘Prostitution?’ said the tape.

  ‘Pastu shin?’ she said, again quizzically.

  ‘Adultery?’ said the tape.

  ‘Adol?’ she said.

  ‘No!’ screamed her daughter. ‘Sold drugs! Prostitution! Adultery! Adultery! Adultery!’

  They both cracked up laughing then and inhaled in unison before returning to their separate tasks.

  ‘When we were making love this afternoon,’ Kate said, tracing the veins on the inside of Molly’s wrist, ‘I felt my hand almost completely inside you and I could touch a ball of fire, a hot core. Then you gripped me and brought me deeper into the heat.’

  ‘What do you like best about me?’ Molly asked.

  ‘There is a sky below,’ Kate said. ‘And a pair of jeans, a calico rose in the middle of your skull. A red mask. A red egg. A moonscape made of glass. Magnified tongue cells, salted spongy things, mountains of black. Gray hills.’

  ‘I’m so happy,’ Molly said. ‘This is great. This is like sitting next to a waterfall. This is Paradise Now.’

  They turned the corner at 103rd Street and walked into the lobby of Mount Sinai Hospital, where Scott had been for the last few days. It wasn’t his first time there, and it wasn’t his first complication. James had called around welcoming visitors since Scott felt too isolated, not seeing familiar faces.

  He was propped up in bed with his hair brushed out loose around his shoulders. He looked like a Madonna, even though his skin was coming apart.

  For Kate there was no more sun, there was no more closeness. There was only this other world with two distinct smells: ammonia clean and filthy, stinking dirty. It was hard to believe this raw, bleeding skin was Scott and not just something laid on top of him. She had known, intellectually, that once someone’s immune system was shot, every little thing became something enormous. But she had breezed into the hospital room without having accepted that she was going to visit the first friend of hers who would probably die of AIDS.

  Funny, she thought. Cancer used to be this big dramatic event. Now, with people dropping dead, cancer is just another thing.

  She looked at Scott. Only a month before, all four of them had eaten dinner together at the guys’ apartment. Scott’s two daughters had been over too, spending the weekend.

  He had done all the cooking and serving up the plates. Then the girls bowed their heads for grace so Molly and Kate followed.

  ‘May we each have everything we need and want, immediately, plus self-determination for all people. Amen.’

  ‘I was married for four years,’ Scott told them over dinner that night. ‘Now we live three blocks from my ex-wife’s so I can be near my girls. Greta is seven and Andrea is nine.’

  While he was speaking James helped Andrea to some food and made sure that Greta didn’t get sauce all over her clothes.

  ‘Dad?’ Andrea said with a mouthful of food.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Can a kid be brought up to be antigay and still be gay?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Because,’ Scott answered, patting her long hair, wrapping it over her ears and away from her face. ‘Because people don’t become what they were brought up to be, people become themselves.’

  That night as they sat and talked, Scott and James looked so happy together. They couldn’t help but be close and touch from time to time, until James gave into his feelings and curled up in his boyfriend’s arms. Kate saw Molly watching her during all of this. At the same time Kate was watching herself. She was seeing herself as part of gay coupling, socializing as a lesbian, watching two men in love with no need for restraint or nervousness. She had become part of their natural environment. And vice versa, almost.

  ‘I’ve been reading a lot of books about catastrophic human disasters,’ James said. He was a social worker for the Jewish Board of Child and Family Service, but he said he got a lot of reading done traveling back and forth on the subway every day.

  ‘I’ve read books about the plague, about the Holocaust, about Hiroshima, slavery, apartheid. I have read every novel about AIDS that the publishers can get into the stores and it’s all unsatisfactory in the same way.’

  ‘What way?’ It had never occurred to Kate that there were actually novels about AIDS.

  ‘When a person faces death,’ James said, ‘especially a deliberate, uncalled-for and avoidable death, they only seem to have two reactions. Why me? and I don’t want to die.’

  ‘What about the philosophers of the Holocaust, for example, like Primo Levi?’

  ‘Those are survivors,’ he said. ‘I’m talking about facing death. The only reaction we can really have is a banal one because death is the last experience of life. It’s not like love. There is no retrospect. The challenge is to turn it from an overwhelming personal void into a group effort, to try to help others avoid the same fate. But this kind of extraordinary response means agitating against the grain of the habit of human reaction.’

  Sitting in Scott’s hospital room, those ideas seemed completely inadequate as far as Kate was concerned. This man was dying. The more she focused on it, the more out of control she felt. But he was smiling and turning his head. He was talking to her.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Kate, I said, did you see the newspaper today?’

  She read aloud to them from the Times op-ed page.

  ‘ “Of course homosexuals are in distress, but they have to learn how to achieve their ends through legislative process. These marauding vigilantes using the misnomer Justice are in blatant violation of the values upon which this nation is built.” ’

  Scott beamed at that one. Then Molly reached over and brushed his hair off his forehead with her hand. Kate thought about touching that kind of skin.

  ‘Scott,’ Molly said, ‘I brought you some supplies for entertaining guests. Here are two kinds of caviar: black and red. And two boxes of Carr’s wheat biscuits. Also a bottle of champagne for the starving masses of friends.’

  ‘You know,’ Scott said, ‘it’s much easier having visitors who are used to seeing their friends sickly and weak, because there’s no expression of shock on their faces when they walk in and see me. In fact, they look relieved. What’s more, everyone has perfected such elegant bedside manners. After visiting a couple of different friends you figure out creative things to bring to the hospital instead of that endless procession of nervous flowers that leave you lying in state when they get excessive.’

  The room was decorated with rainbow balloons, pictures of Scott and James kissing, drawings and paintings by the girls. He was surrounded by images of loving and hugging and dancing – all the happiest moments of life. A cassette deck was playing Betty Carter and Scott was in the middle of it in his baby blue pajamas with surfboards and blond men playing volleyball.

  ‘What kind of treatment are you going with?’ Kate asked, finally relaxed enough to talk. She had never seen anyone so young dying before.

  ‘Well,’ he said, very evenly. ‘There are these aerosols
of pentamidine, but they don’t know how much you need to take or how often. I’m having trouble now with the skin on my chest and face and arms. It’s starting to come apart. But they are giving me sunlamp treatments which will not only hold my body together but I get a tan on top of it.’

  ‘They should change the name of this place to Mount Sinai Club Med,’ Molly said.

  ‘You know,’ Scott said. ‘You can heal yourself or you can’t. I’m trying the best I can, but you know what? It’s very hard. It’s really very hard.’

  33

  KATE

  The subway station was a mess and too disorienting after the hospital. Brown garbage was piled on the stairs and had to be stepped over gingerly like small rocks across a creek. There was a seemingly endless, faceless sea of beggars standing or sitting on many of the steps, ranging from a nine-year-old panhandler/pickpocket to a nun with an upturned tambourine packed with change. Every single seat on the platform had a person sleeping in it.

  The first car they stepped into had homeless people stretched out on the benches and in all four corners. They moved into the second car.

  ‘You know,’ Kate said, putting her arm around Molly in the little double seat by the sliding doors, ‘the main thing that I have learned from being with you is that I am a growing, changing person. But I don’t really understand your politics. Don’t try to explain them again either. There’s just something I absolutely do not comprehend about what the big deal is at the core of your world view.’

  Molly laid her head against Kate’s shoulder and periodically closed and opened her eyes as the train sped downtown.

  Molly’s always in motion, Kate thought, watching her. But slowly, like t’ai chi. It wasn’t movement in the extremities but the constant shifts in weight, gaze and position. The face was always changing. It was hard to get a fixed image of what it really looked like. If Kate turned away and looked back conventionally, as one would in conversation, it would never be the same woman. But if Kate was bold and happy and they let themselves look at each other fully, then Kate could see all the changes in one frame. It was something like that speeded-up film of the opening of a flower. There was no particular image in any stationary moment, just the shift that became important. It is that change, Kate thought, settling into the rumbling of the subway car, that I recall when I think of her.

  ‘Kate, I was remembering about a weird thing.’ Molly pulled her knapsack onto her lap. ‘When Pearl and I were still a couple, one weekend we went for a vacation upstate. We checked into a redneck hotel run by Ukrainians up near Lexington, New York, where Pearl lives now. She walked up to the owner that time and asked for a double bed, even though I had specifically begged her not to. You know, I intend to live to be thirty. But Pearl must have things exactly the way she wants them at all moments regardless of the danger. So then I was scared the whole first night, wouldn’t raise the curtains to let in the moonglow, wouldn’t make love with the light on. I was sure I saw something hovering by the window. Plus, she makes loud noises during sex and the next morning the desk clerk smirked right in our faces. His wife, who ran the coffee shop next door, was icy cold and didn’t say a word.’

  Molly found the lotion she was looking for and rubbed it onto her hands. Kate could smell the cucumber.

  ‘I was used to smirks but began to suspect more serious troubles when this group of three men who were also eating breakfast decided to befriend us, with winks to the owner watching from the corner. I wanted to get out of there but we only had a couple of days and it would have ruined everything to have to pack up and go shopping for a new place. When we came back from the woods they were all there having supper. That’s when we found out that one of the guys was working as the clerk that night. The other two started pressuring us to drive with them to Hunter to go to a disco.’

  A man whose feet were wrapped in filthy rags staggered in at the Forty-second street station. There were also two teenage boys who seemed borderline emaciated. The boys had thin jackets and sat silently huddled. The man immediately stretched out to sleep on the seats across from the two women. Molly was rubbing lotion into both hands and lifting them to her face and neck.

  ‘I didn’t want to go out with them and I didn’t want to dance with men.’

  Kate winced.

  ‘Why do you always have to say something bad about men? Maybe they were nice men. Maybe they were good dancers.’

  ‘I just don’t like to dance with straight men. I’m not going to pretend I do. I don’t care whether I’m attractive to them or not. I don’t want to hear about it.’

  Kate knew that this was a direct dig against Peter.

  ‘So anyway, we said, “No thank you.” Then they said, “Why not?” Which really surprised me since I’ve built my life in such a way that very few people in it try to make me do things that I don’t want to do. Present company excluded.’

  Another dig against Peter and one against me, Kate noted. She should stop trying to pretend she’s so nice and take a little responsibility for her hostility.

  ‘So I said, “Because I don’t want to,” and got annoyed until they sulked off into their car, leaving behind the buddy who worked overnight. I said to Pearl, “Let’s get out of here. When those guys come back drunk we’re going to have big problems.” This was before the gay rights bill so they could have thrown us out too. But Pearl was stubborn, so we stayed. Still, I barricaded the door and propped up the back of a chair underneath the knob. Then I closed and secured all the windows.’

  The guy stretched out across the aisle was scratching his head furiously and sliding his hands down his pants for comfort.

  ‘That night we were sleeping and at five in the morning they tried to kick in the door. They climbed up the trellis and tried to climb in through the windows. And all along I thought, we can’t scream for help because we were two naked women in one bed. So we lay there absolutely silent, holding each other’s hands, and eventually they went away laughing. I know that the owner heard the commotion. I mean, they could hear Pearl’s orgasms, surely they heard these guys trying to gang-rape us. But no one came to help. The next morning when we checked out the desk clerk didn’t say a word.’

  Why is she always telling me these stories about how awful men are? Kate thought. She’s trying to make me feel guilty for having a man. She’s manipulating me. I hate when she talks like this.

  ‘You’ll see,’ Molly said, settling back down against her lover’s shoulder. ‘Someday if we travel together, it’s really different. Everywhere you go men come over and talk to you. They always interrupt. They always want your attention.’

  A couple of cops strode into the car in their blues, swinging sticks skillfully on their leather straps. Then they hit the sticks into their hands, the way girls on a softball team throw the ball into their own mitts. The slap is the thing.

  ‘Move on,’ one cop said, hitting the guy on the wrapped bottoms of his feet.

  ‘Where to?’ the guy said, rolling over and closing his eyes.

  ‘I’m coming back in ten minutes,’ the cop said. ‘Don’t be here.’

  Then he and his partner sauntered out again. The guy took one last look and then rolled over and went back to sleep.

  ‘If he’s planning on hitting the soles of every sleeping person in the next car it’s going to take him more than ten minutes to get back to this one,’ Molly whispered.

  But Kate had other things on her mind.

  ‘Molly, why don’t you get yourself a second girlfriend? If you had a regular girlfriend you wouldn’t be so dependent on me. You really want a lesbian and I’ll never be a lesbian. I like cock.’

  ‘Do you have to keep saying that? Please stop saying that, it ruins my whole week.’

  Kate’s teeth were set into her peach-colored lips. She wore no makeup. Her eyes were creased.

  ‘What are you, some kind of martyr?’

  ‘Good question.’

  ‘Well, if that’s your trip, Molly, then take it somewhere e
lse.’

  ‘Please don’t say that. You’re going to make me walk away from you and it’s not even my stop.’

  ‘Don’t play that hurt martyr game with me.’

  The sun was setting later and later, so the afternoons had begun to spread out luxuriously. As they walked along in silence from the station Kate noticed that it was really warm and people had all the time in the world. Soon it would be so hot that no one would have to wear jackets and people could sit up on the roofs talking about going to the country.

  ‘Do you think I could have AIDS?’

  ‘No,’ Molly said. ‘Can I come in?’

  They were standing in front of Kate’s building.

  ‘Don’t do that. You know you can’t come in.’

  Peter was home and conspicuously busy. He was making dinner obviously. He was silent. He was moping. He was a martyr too but not even a cheerful one.

  ‘Peter, just say what you have to say. This is not “Million Dollar Movie.” Just say it.’

  ‘You should move in with her for a while.’ He spat it out. ‘Then she’ll see how much I put up with.’

  She knew what he wanted. It was obvious. He wanted her to put her arms around him and console him but she couldn’t do that. She was sick and tired of both of them.

  ‘Look, Pete. Get this through your thick skull. I don’t want to live with her. I want to live with you. Pete? Pete?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You think the trouble we’re having is because of her, but the truth is that it’s about me. Me. I am changing. Do you understand?’

  His face was flat.

  ‘I’m changing, and do you know what? I’m glad. Do you want to be the same person with the same opinions and the same habits for the rest of your life? Give in, Pete.’

  ‘Everything’s for you,’ he said. ‘You’re selfish.’

  ‘I’m changing my life. Why don’t you stop wishing I wouldn’t and do something about yours?’