Sex Wars

by Marge Piercy

  Smoke, bad air, the smell of unwashed bodies and cheap perfume choked him, made him dizzy so that he wanted to flee, but he plowed on, following Edward to a seat. Waitresses in harem costumes sidled among the tables with trays, occasionally stopping to flirt with a man who bought them a drink. Sometimes they sat on a man’s lap wriggling in a manner he could only suppose was some kind of obscene activity. Up above on a balcony, women hung over the edge and called to men at the tables. They wore low-cut dresses and little else, being uncorseted, with their hair hanging loose and wanton. This was the kind of place those obscene books Edward bought near their office led him to frequent.

  Edward ordered a whiskey for himself and soda for Anthony. Anthony would not stoop to alcohol even to blend in with the ruffians who frequented this place. Why would Edward waste his scarce money here?

  A brawny man whom everybody seemed to know as Charlie the Chopper announced that a fight was about to start. A space had been cleared in the center of the room for two men stripped down to long underwear and undershirts to square off with bare knuckles. The fighting did not bother Anthony, although he knew prizefighting was illegal. At least the worst the men would get out of it would be a battered head or a bloody nose and bruises. Still, he could not share the half-mad excitement that swept the room. Even women were jumping up and down rooting for their favorite, Dan the Drayman, who was fighting a bigger man called Hooting Tommy. Tommy was bigger, but Dan was faster and more experienced as a fighter, Anthony judged. He had a good jab and an unexpected uppercut that staggered the bigger man. Anthony idly wondered if he could take Dan. He had a mighty jab of his own, honed in his army scraps. He noticed that Dan dropped his hand after he hit Tommy, leaving himself open. Yes, he could take him.

  Anthony watched the audience instead. Certainly the bloodlust they were screaming out was unedifying, but less appalling than the open sexual lust he had observed before. At least for the length of the fight, even the ladies with their bosoms mostly bare hanging over the balcony stopped trying to entice male patrons and egged on the fighters. The fighters were ill matched and Dan got his man down not once but three times. The third time Tommy was out cold. He was hauled off to the alley. Dan raised his bloody hands in triumph and was given his purse. Then he passed among the crowd in his underwear with cap in hand to collect what people would give him. Several women embraced him.

  Charlie the Chopper got back on his chair and bellowed, “Drink up or clear out, boyos! In half an hour, Katie and her Girly Girls’ll dance the cancan. Let’s all have a drink and toast the serving girls and have a good time.”

  A fight broke out near the bar that ran the length of the immense room. Two burly men who appeared to be official bouncers quelled it. Charlie mounted his chair again to shout that he would not tolerate fighting between the patrons unless it was an official fight. The bouncers threw out the three men involved, and what passed for normality in the saloon resumed.

  Anthony observed a regular passage of men up to the balconies. The women disappeared into curtained alcoves with their clients. Edward introduced him to four other young men, employed downtown by importers or law offices, clerks come to the city like himself from respectable and God-fearing families—here in this den of shame where women were garishly painted and men handled them at will. Some seemed much too young to be selling their bodies. Others looked too old to be salable, but all seemed sought by men who should know better. One of the women took a seat on his right. He suspected that Edward had motioned her over, for he bought her a drink. Drinks for the women cost more than for the men, Anthony noticed. She put her arm around him, leaning close, her bosoms loose in her gown. He froze.

  “Don’t be afraid, dearie. I won’t hurt you. I know something about young men, and what they need.” Her breath reeked of beer and she smelled unclean. She put her warm moist hand on his thigh, then stroked his manhood through his trousers.

  He was ashamed by his reaction. He closed his eyes for a moment and thought of the eternal fires of hell. “I’m not interested.” He pushed her hand away.

  “Sure you are, dearie. I can feel you. You’re just scared.” She tried to touch his manhood again, but he caught her wrist.

  “What I fear is what I should fear. Please let go of me.” He disengaged himself and stood.

  “Then I won’t waste my time on you. Maybe you like the boys better, um?” She flounced off to pester someone else.

  “Anthony, you passed up a golden opportunity. Sally’s a good whore. You could do a lot worse for your first time.”

  “You’ve been with her?”

  “When I can afford it.” Edward looked after her longingly. “She knows I don’t have the wherewithal tonight.”

  The air was foul and getting thicker. He drank his soda and ordered another. He tried to discuss the place objectively with Edward, but his friend was accosted by another young man who began arguing the merits of various terriers used to fight rats in pits. Such fights offered an opportunity for gambling, as did, he gathered, dogfights and cockfights.

  Charlie the Chopper mounted his chair. “Now the main event of the evening for all you sporting gents. Here comes Katie Sullivan and her Girly Girls ready to dance the cancan. And afterward, if you’re up to it, you can buy the girls a drink and drink in their charms.”

  The woman who led the way out for three others was red-haired and sharp-featured, no spring chicken, dressed in a bright red outfit with several petticoats which, as the pianist started banging out some rancid ditty, she began kicking high up, turning and kicking some more, and finally holding her leg high above her head as she turned on one foot, hopping awkwardly. All four women including one who looked barely sixteen and had no more curves than a rake were kicking with great vigor but little grace, screeching out some incomprehensible and repetitive lyrics. Anthony suddenly realized that they were exposing their most private parts. Blushing, he turned away to fix his gaze on the tabletop scarred with initials and phrases from a dozen penknives. Around him men were rising to their feet and cheering, pounding the tabletops with their tankards, whistling and clapping. So this was how Edward spent his Friday evenings. Anthony despaired of saving him. Edward was too far gone, he suspected, for any arguments, any pleas to reach him. Anthony stood and made his way out. Edward didn’t notice. He was banging on the tabletop with the worst of them, shouting like a wild beast.

  The air in the city was never pure, but compared to the stinking filth he had been breathing, it felt clean as a country brook. He drew deep breaths into his lungs, appreciating the breeze off the East River as he marched from the Bowery. It was too late for Edward. He had already succumbed. But there were thousands of Edwards, impressionable and innocent young boys crowding into the city as Edward and he himself had in order to better themselves—and better was not what happened. It took courage and a deep sense of what was right to stand against the ubiquitous sporting culture the city offered to young men—a tribal thing, appealing to their lowest passions but making it feel as if such activities were the only way for a man to become a man. He had seen the clerks passing around the sporting papers that featured reports on the “best” whorehouses and gambling hells. He longed to be a sword in the hands of the living God to smite the corrupters. For a moment as he walked south, he felt weak and almost silly, swearing battle with everything around him. Then his resolve stiffened and he thrust back his shoulders. Edward was wrong about the way to be a man. He would go his own way, the right way, even if he lost the only friend he’d made in this wild and dangerous city.

  FIVE

  VICTORIA MET HER HUSBAND James’s train. It was the Vanderbilt line, New York Central, which she viewed as a good omen. Both her children arrived with him, Byron, her toothless idiot son, at fourteen unable even to speak, her daughter Zulu Maud, just turned seven. “I swear, you’ve grown in the three weeks since I saw you!”

  Zulu flushed with pride. Her braids hung halfway down her back. Neither of her children had inherited her looks,
but she loved them. Byron was sweet, more like a pet than a son. Zulu was fiercely loyal to her mother and would do anything to please. Victoria embraced them; then Tennie went off in a cab with them while James and Victoria collected the luggage. “Did matters go well?” James asked, taking her arm. He carried a satchel while a porter brought along his trunks.

  “We’ve made a slight connection. What happens next depends on our interview with him tomorrow.” She held up her free hand with crossed fingers.

  “It must go well.” James frowned. “Did you remember everything we studied and agreed upon?”

  They ambled along slowly, for Colonel Blood had received half a dozen war wounds during the campaigns of the Civil War, one of them in his thigh. Preferring his skill to the dangerous mercies of the camp doctors, he had dug out the bullet with his own knife. He would always have a slight limp, but he carried himself with military bearing. She had met a number of men who styled themselves Colonel; Vanderbilt himself liked to be called Commodore. But James really had been a colonel, and a heroic one. He was an attractive man, with longish dark hair, regular features, a dark beard that left his finely modeled chin bare. He was tall and lean, dashing in spite of his limp.

  Before the war, he had been a conventional man in a conventional marriage with a conventionally respectable job. He was auditor of the city of St. Louis and held the presidency of a local railroad. He had married well and lived a prosperous bourgeois life with his passive, placid wife and two daughters. But for the war, he might have continued so.

  The war had shattered his sense of human possibilities. A quiet abolitionist, he had enlisted early and fought hard. He had seen men slaughtered around him, their bodies soaking the mud red, their limbs smashed by cannonballs, their skulls broken like eggs. When he returned a hero, he could not fit back into his old life. He was haunted by the dead. He saw ghosts, who sometimes tormented him and sometimes seemed fiercely eager to communicate. He could no longer make love to his wife. He felt estranged from her and everyone he had known. When he fell in love with Victoria, he was ready to discard all he had ever cherished or worked at or owned—and he did. He ran off with her. Later, being a man of probity, he returned, paid off his debts, divorced his wife and gave her his earthly goods. There was a core of cold intellect in him that Victoria both respected and sometimes regretted, for it kept him from the sensual abandon she knew herself capable of. Still, they were well mated. He was not possessive, for the ideas he held of free love and free union were far more important to him than possession of her.

  “And how is Tennessee?”

  “Well and eager. She has plans for the Commodore.”

  Colonel Blood had agreed to take Tennessee in when she had fled the Claflin clan. Tennessee had been supporting the family for years and—sick of that life—longed for something better, so James had willingly taken her under his protection. He was not interested in Tennie the way men usually were. He was too much in love with Victoria, and he liked his women slenderer and brighter, but he understood Victoria would not rest until she had freed the sister she loved.

  “Did you bring me more books?” She squeezed his arm gently. His arm could pain him where he had been wounded in yet another battle. He had begun systematically educating her. In school, she had been an excellent student, but Roxanne and Buck were always pulling her out to be hired as a domestic servant, to care for the younger children, to front Buck’s traveling circus of patent medicines and wonder cures. She was sure her clan would show up on her doorstep as soon as Tennie and she had established themselves. Victoria took as given that she and Tennessee would always have to support the Claflin family. They had grown up in a state of siege with whatever neighbors they had at the time, always the respectable element gossiping about them, trying to get rid of them. So they stuck together, family first. She had grown up with neighbors pointing at her, whispering about her family, insulting her. They were pariahs. “You were able to raise some money?”

  “Sold off some stocks I still had. Where are you bivouacked?”

  “In a cheap boardinghouse. It won’t do. We need a decent address.”

  He slapped his waistcoat. “We can get set up quickly. I’ll work on it tomorrow. Find a flat or a brownstone.”

  “Tennie and I have made friends with the keeper of a high-toned brothel, Annie Wood. She knows how to furnish a place elegantly but cheaply. I’m going to visit her tomorrow late morning when she rises. We sometimes take coffee together in her conservatory.”

  “I look forward to meeting her.”

  “She’s a Southerner but don’t get your back up. She has a lot of colored girls working for her, and she treats them better than most madams treat their white whores. She takes care of her girls, and she pays off the police and the politicians handsomely—two hundred dollars monthly for the police alone—and gives them a free ride once a week, so there’s no danger of any of the girls ending up in the Tombs.”

  “The tombs? You mean, dead?”

  “That’s what they call the jailhouse here. A big ugly building that looks vaguely Egyptian. May we never see the inside of it!”

  “Why should we?”

  “You know my family.”

  He grunted assent, hailing a horse cab and tipping the porter. “Where should I look for a place?”

  “I don’t want to be too far from Vanderbilt.” She lowered her voice so the cabbie would not hear. “I took a lover—a newspaperman from the Sun, Charlie St. James. Newspapermen tend to know the politics of a place and the useful gossip. I don’t want to continue the liaison—I want to turn him into a friend. So when you meet him, be uxorious, if it wouldn’t offend you.”

  “Certainly. Maybe I can befriend him.” He cleared his throat to announce a change of subject. “What have you been reading?”

  “The Orations of Demosthenes.”

  “Did you read the Suetonius?”

  “On the train.” She leaned her head on his shoulder. “What a nasty lot they were, the Roman emperors. I shouldn’t like to have caught the eye of Nero or Caligula. Anyone with that kind of power is too dangerous.”

  “Is Vanderbilt dangerous?”

  She thought for a moment. “To anyone who crosses him.” She remembered his famous letter to the men who forced him out of one of his steamship companies during the gold rush: Gentlemen, you have undertaken to cheat me. I won’t sue you, for the law is too slow. I will ruin you. Yours truly, Cornelius Vanderbilt. “He needs to win. But he’s not a brooder.”

  “Is he interested in you?”

  “Tennie is what he wants. I couldn’t do it, frankly. I can’t fake it.”

  “And Tennessee can?”

  “Sure. She faked spiritual séances for years, and before that, the gift of tongues. She’s a good actress—”

  “I bet you were a better one.”

  “My gift was rapid memorization. Tennie would have been better at acting. She has the gift of talking herself into being interested in a man if he looks like a good idea. She’s an easier person than I am. She has fewer spines.”

  “And less of a spine.”

  “Don’t underestimate her, James. She’s stronger than you think. She’s been through hell and come out unblemished.” Victoria laughed. “After all, she’s lost her virginity something like fifty times.”

  IN THE MORNING, James went out to look for suitable lodging. She told him to try Great Jones Street. She had no particular reason except that the name popped into her head, and she took it for a spirit communication. The name had a magnificent ring. In the meantime, she and Tennie prepared some products Annie might find useful.

  Victoria loved to take coffee in the conservatory with Annie. She was even growing accustomed to chicory. Today the bread was made with dates. Strawberry and quince jams, marmalade and honey in silver pots offered themselves on the silver tray. Something sweetly scented was blooming.

  Tennie spread out the products they had brought. “Vaginal sponges presoaked in vinegar. They’re prett
y good at preventing conception.”

  Annie was wearing one of her many morning robes de chambre, this one in pale lavender gusseted and trimmed with row upon row of lace. Someday soon Victoria would have such fine costumes instead of plain white cotton nightdresses. Annie was asking, “Can they be reused?”

  “Of course. You wash them after every time. The reason to presoak is that everything’s ready to go.” Tennie clapped her hands.

  Victoria took up a red bottle. “This is a preparation of cloves. It’s a bit numbing—fine for reduction of pain in the female parts. So often there’s abrasion and discomfort from so much activity. The cloves numb, but if the man penetrates, then there’s a feeling of warmth.” She would not put anything over on Annie, since she wanted her as a friend and wanted her trust. She described the items, careful not to claim too much.

  “He thinks she’s hot for him, but she actually feels less.” Annie smiled, motioning for more coffee.

  “In short, yes.”

  “Sounds good to me. What’s that?” Annie poked an elegant finger at a bottle of colorless fluid.

  “One of three colognes we produce. This is a mixture of rose and verbena.” Victoria held the bottle under Annie’s nose. “A lot cheaper than French perfume. We have one that’s muskier.”

  “I’ll try a few bottles of each. Let you know how they go over with my girls.”

  One of the colored girls in a French maid’s uniform appeared. “Miss Mansfield is here to see you, Madame.”

  “Show her in, Marguerite.” She turned back to the sisters. “I give all my colored girls French names. Josie Mansfield is Jim Fisk’s mistress. He set her up in grand style, but she still visits me. She gives me tips on the stock market.”

  Victoria frowned at the name. Fisk. He and another man, Gould, controlled the Erie Railroad. A manipulator of the market. A big spender. Vanderbilt’s enemy.

  The maid showed Josie in. Victoria hung back, not wishing to embarrass the woman by recognizing her unless Josie was willing to admit they had met. Josephine Mansfield was a full-figured woman with hair as dark as Victoria’s and fine ivory skin. She was dressed in the latest fashion, a striped silk skirt and a vivid green weskit over a lacy underblouse, a mantilla over all. Victoria thought her attire a little much for noon, but obviously Josie liked to flaunt her prosperity as well as her figure. She had large melting eyes and a pouty mouth.