She was stopped on the third-floor stairs by a grinding noise, a sound produced by old or rusty plumbing. Row-house acoustics were often very tricky, so the faucet in use might be in the house next door. Frances briefly considered breakfasting on chutney; then she resumed her quest for plainer food. On the second-floor landing she tripped on the hem of her robe. She bent over to see if her toe had torn the stitching. Her sash became untied and fell away. As she grabbed for the sash, she saw two naked legs. She let her eyes rove very slowly upward. The naked legs sustained an outsized man. Clutching her robe and trying to tie the sash, she was caught at an unwelcome disadvantage, though no more so than the man in the bathroom doorway, who wore only a towel to hide his pride and shame.
Several courses of action seemed pertinent to Frances: run upstairs and hide in the closet; run downstairs and into the street; pull off his towel and throw it out the window; ask if he liked his fried eggs up or over easy. To her own surprise, and the big man’s consternation, she sat down on the bottom stair and hugged her knees. She felt like a camera buff on a bloodless safari who has spied a lion dozing in the sun, close enough to watch his whiskers twitching, but not too close to hazard being eaten. This fine mammal had a massive chest and sloping shoulders, and dead-white skin like the paintings of Spanish hermit saints. The fur on his chest and legs was thin and black, but the fur on his head and chin was thick and russet. She counted three knowledge bumps on his vast, high brow. His startled eyes were blue clouded with gray. His feet were flat but his toes were long and slim, and the second toes were longer than the others. His small hands, which were out of scale, clutched at the towel. The beast seemed bewitched by Frances’s close inspection; in that state he could have been netted or roped at will.
Frances was much too curious to prolong the silence. She rose to her feet and knotted her bathrobe sash. He stepped sideways (a smaller person would have skittered), but he did not take flight, stampede, or run amok.
“What are you doing here?” Frances broke the spell.
“Raising money,” he said, and grinned a feral grin.
At the moment he was raising more than money. She could see that there was life beneath the towel. Frances drew back, in prey to some alarm. The lion, who has many noble beauties, is also equipped with mighty teeth and claws. The lion before her had a mighty organ, which could do harm if the brute were teased or frightened. Frances named her anxiety: What if the towel should fall? Worse than fall—he might unfurl the towel and drop it, and she did not have a polished shield such as Perseus carried, or a pocket mirror, or a piece of foil or tin. She would be forced to confront the Member unreflected, and its gaze would convert her into solid stone.
“Close your mouth,” said the beast. “Unless you’re trapping flies.”
“I think you’re Paul Treat,” said Frances. “Where is Madeline?”
Paul Treat gave a sheepish smile and brushed his mustache as if he had finished a meal and was cleaning off the crumbs.
“All gone,” he said, and patted his fur-clad stomach. Frances tried to look stern. He required a sharp rebuke. She glared and frowned, but her body shook with laughter. Little Madeline would make him such a tender morsel. Dressed for the oven, she would look like a quail or a pullet, to be served up on fried toast rounds with sprigs of parsley.
“Where is she?” repeated Frances. “Is she out?”
“At the bank,” said Paul. “She’s dipping into capital.”
“No!” gasped Frances. “You ought to be ashamed.”
Paul looked down his nose. “I didn’t ask. She offered.”
Frances was very hungry, but more offended. She was only three inches taller than swindled Madeline, but she faced the naked giant with resolution. If he had been wearing lapels, she would have grabbed and shaken them.
“You promised her something. You must have. You turned her head.”
“It was easy,” said Paul. “I waved my magic wand.”
Frances blushed. She pretended she did not understand. It would take the luster off her moral indignation if she bandied coarse phrases and traded in double meanings. It was unwise to encourage allusions to his scepter, so precariously covered with a damp white towel.
“I’m paying,” said Paul. “I’m paying through the nose. She gets a cut of the gross and a hefty chunk of me.”
Frances huffed and puffed. “There must be other ways.”
Paul gave her a human look. She did not like it. He might be thinking that she was on his side. Perhaps she was. Poor Faust, stripped of his honor, pledging his pelt to guarantee his art. That midget Mephistopheles known as Madeline had never been bested in her business dealings. Her lawyers would draw up pacts that mortgaged him forever, to be signed in blood and marrow as well as ink.
“Don’t take it,” said Frances. Her voice sounded too urgent.
Paul was pressing two fingers on the pulse of his left wrist.
“You’re a towhead,” he said. “Your hair is very pretty.”
At once Frances raised her hand to smooth her bangs, as if he had said “Your hair is very messy.” She remembered she had not thought to use mascara. Without it, her eyes appeared completely lashless. Paul had plentiful lashes and curling reddish eyebrows. His lower lip was fuller than the upper. His long teeth showed when he smiled or spoke. He shifted his weight, his hand still on his wrist. He did not move, but he might move without warning.
Frances measured the second-floor landing with her eyes. Was it four and half feet wide, or only four? She cast a wild glance from one end to the other, as if the way up and down were barricaded. She did not want to have strong feelings in close quarters. Defending Madeline, she had been immune. Was she flagging in her role as Madeline’s champion? Little Daniel, like Frances, must have lost his faith, if only for a fraction of a second, when he heard the boulders rolling into place, closing him up inside the cavern with the lion.
Visions of eggs and wheat toast tempted Frances, scrambled eggs and toast with wild thyme honey, or the quince preserves that Madeline kept in stock on the top shelf of a cabinet in the pantry. There were worse things than going hungry until lunchtime. It looked like a matter of eating or being eaten. At that moment the front door opened and slammed loudly. There was a sharp report, like a box dropped on the floor. Frances fled upstairs without taking her leave. She did not look back or she would have observed Paul Treat darting like a frightened hare into the bathroom.
Frances lay low for the rest of the afternoon, except for a foray to the corner store. Skipping breakfast had given her an appetite for processed foods, especially products containing emulsifiers and sweeteners, with flavor boosters, fillers, and extenders, and coloring that was never found in nature. She lined her purchases in rows on her kitchen counter and surveyed them with a shiver of delight: marshmallows (miniature), olive loaf, false whipped cream; bars of milk chocolate, cheese-spread, frozen pound cake; ice cream with splinters of mint, and graham crackers (the only wholesome article in her hoard). She felt as wicked as if she had got them by shoplifting, when in fact she had paid a highway robber’s price. She rolled slices of olive loaf and ate them with her fingers, wondering if she should have bought pickle-and-pimento as well. After olive loaf for hors d’oeuvres, what about the main course? Cheese-spread on pound cake? Whipped topping on ice cream? Or all of them mushed together in a soup? Out of her memory came a recipe for s’mores: two grahams, with chocolate and marshmallows in between. The filling should be melted over a campfire, and the sandwich eaten while it is too hot. Frances built four s’mores and wrapped them in tinfoil. She switched on the broiler and watched the coils turn red.
Glorious s’mores. They singed the tongue and fingers. They ran down the chin and formed a brown goatee. Greedy persons like Frances inserted more marshmallows, which began to melt on contact with the heat. She finished one s’more and reached out for another. With the sandwich halfway to her mouth, she saw Paul Treat. He was peering over the banister toward her kitchen. He wavered
between advancing and withdrawing, then took one more step and reached the highest stair. The tables were turned. He had captured the advantage. She had caught him in a towel; now he caught her in clown face, with a chocolate muzzle and marshmallow stripes on her cheeks. Should she hold up a veil of tinfoil to hide her face? Or offer him a s’more and watch his face get smudgy? Before she was able to make the right decision, he had entered the kitchen and seized her by the shoulders. He held her firmly and kissed her on the mouth, taking his time, like a chocolate-loving vampire. When he finished, his mouth and whiskers were perfectly clean. Frances felt as if parts of her face had been kissed away. From somewhere downstairs Madeline started calling. She did not have to call more than once before Paul disappeared.
Frances was shocked and surprised to be alive, like a bird in the grip of a cat who drops his prey, having heard his mistress setting out his dinner or having eaten too many birds in the course of the day. She checked herself for specific erotic feelings. Was Eros making her stomach ache, or going hungry? She thought she should try to recall the kiss in detail, but found her memory balked at the assignment. In fact, she had a form of mild amnesia, like the victim of a nasty fall or motor accident.
Frances inspected the three uneaten cookies. They were past their prime. The filling had congealed. She wiped her mouth, which was still on her face, with the corner of a dishtowel. She felt glum and a little cheated, but whether of Paul or her feast she could not make out. She wondered if he had come upstairs to see her, or if he was only exploring Madeline’s house. She was not sure she liked the idea of his roaming free. Would it be wiser to spend the night at the nearest hotel? She would have admitted, if she had chosen to question her feelings, that she liked even less the idea that his visit was casual.
In the days that followed the chocolate-marshmallow kiss, Paul Treat began to trouble Frances’s sleep, causing dreams of falling, flying, capsizing, and drowning; one nightmare in which she was bandaging his feet; and another, in the small hours of the morning, in which Madeline was flattened outside the window like a moth. In the clearest dream of all, if it was a dream, she woke up, or believed she was awake, to see the door of her bedroom closing, but not latched. She remembered, or dreamed she remembered, closing her door, and thinking of propping a chair underneath the doorknob. When she got up that morning, she forgot her dream or vision, until she noticed that the bedroom door was still ajar. She ascribed her restless night to a new neurosis: Fear of the Taboo Paul.
Taboo, but underfoot, to her discomfort. Madeline’s house had become a rehearsal hall. Actors and actresses sat in a queue on the staircase, waiting to read for parts in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. By day Paul held auditions in the living room; by night he conferred with designers and engineers. From the hall Frances caught a glimpse of Paul presiding. He sat on a high-backed chair, a king at court. Madeline sat by his side, cross-legged on a hassock, swaying with importance like the caterpillar in Alice. Paul clasped his right wrist with his left hand and jiggled one knee. He held on to his wrist while he gestured or scratched his beard. Frances had also seen him at the telephone, dialing with his wrist clasped. She thought perhaps he had a nervous tic. Paul clung to his wrist like a lifeline. Every pair of eyes in the room was riveted to his wrist. When he tried to unbutton his jacket with one hand, Frances heard an intake of breath in every throat. The actor who was reading for Puck stopped in midsentence. Paul tried to yank one sleeve down without letting go. Then he snatched his hand away from his wrist and tore off his jacket. Twelve people, along with bystanders in the hallway, exhaled in chorus.
The house was full of motley people and strange behaviors. Frances felt like a visitor from a backward nation, hailing as she did from Cincinnati and the Harwood Press. In her parent cultures, men did not set their hair in curlers, and women never wore tights and leotards on the street. At home or at Harwood, men did not greet women with a tweak of the nipple, and no one kept the door to the bathroom open in order to pursue a conversation with the other sex. Frances was used to writers and their ilk; she had never seen theatre people at close hand. Writers were shy and mannerly, unless in liquor. They looked and acted like poor relations, hoping for acceptance. Writers wore old clothes, since they did not go to work, but you could see that their shabby garments had once passed muster. Theatre people did not hover at the edges of polite society; they camped on the untracked wilds outside its gates.
Camping is what they were doing in Madeline’s kitchen, in Madeline’s hallway, and eventually in rooms upstairs. They took naps on the carpet and ate sandwiches carried in knapsacks. They changed clothes in the open and didn’t take cover for kissing, although some of the kissing would have melted the wax on the floors. They prowled around muttering audibly or under their breath, trying to learn long passages by heart. One young man was delivering his lines to the full-length mirror. A redheaded girl had concocted a tunic with the kitchen curtains. Like patients in mental wards or toddlers in play groups, they did not seem to know they were in a public setting.
After a few days of passing among them without incident, Frances no longer feared that her nipple might be pinched. They smiled at her and seemed to take her for granted; and one older woman, a candidate for Hippolyta, asked Frances if she could spare some time to cue her. Frances began to bring home bags of apples, which she piled in a bowl on the table in the hall. Actors waited long hours and neglected their nutrition, and some of them went without food to pay for coaching. When one of them got a paycheck, it was cause for a party. The paid person treated the others, including Frances, who often had supper on the rug or on the staircase, eating cold cuts and three-bean salad with her fingers. None of the cast knew her name, and no one asked it. They offered her food without needing to classify or place her. She thought the world of the theatre might be an ideal democracy, unlike Harwood, where rank was played down but understood. The world outside, with its governments and newspapers, bore no reference to this community of players, just as memories of the home port grow dim for passengers on a cruise ship. When the cruise is over, and the play has had its run, its members make vows to meet but never do so. This analogy gratified Frances, for whom most friendships were tethers to selves she wished she had discarded. Here she was friendly with everyone but close to no one. She was as new to herself as she was to her newfound friends.
More and more, Frances stayed downstairs until quite late. She played poker with Mustardseed, Peaseblossom, Cobweb, and Moth. Hippolyta and Hermia taught her to use eye shadow. Bottom, who was Japanese, told her fortune with rice. When the actors were dismissed, Frances crept into the privy council, where Paul passed judgment on costume designs and sets. One night she watched Puck, who had been asked to stay after rehearsal, standing on a ground cloth wearing brief yellow underpants. Paul, who was dressed in a pin-striped banker’s suit, pushed back his cuffs and picked up a house painter’s brush. He painted a yellow band around Puck’s middle, brushing yellow on the tops of his thighs and on his forearms. Then he found a clean brush and a new can of body paint, and striped Puck’s chest and his upper arms in orange. The costume designer twisted his hair in a bun, seized a fresh brush, and slapped green on Puck’s legs and feet. The makeup girl smeared red on Puck’s face, neck, and shoulders. By the end of the painting session Puck was a rainbow. Paul wanted to shave his head; Puck preferred a red wig.
The next night, Lysander and Demetrius modeled flashing codpieces. Paul himself sewed the little light bulbs on the pouches. The bulbs were attached by wires to dry-cell batteries, mounted with tape on the actors’ upper thighs. Lysander, whose thighs were sweaty, made nervous jokes about electrocution. Paul showed him the switch on the battery, and told him to recite part of a love scene, pushing the switch when a verse expressed secret lechery. At first he flashed without regard to meaning (“Hear me, Hermia, I have a widow aunt”); then he lit up like fireflies in July, allowing the urgent words no tender shadings. “Less is more!” shouted Paul, and ran him through his paces unti
l he could flash and speak with some proportion. Then Paul read the woman’s part without a script and taught Demetrius how to work his codpiece. It grew late and Frances had to go to bed, so she never heard the outcome of a quarrel over whether the wires and batteries should show, or whether they should be discreetly hidden.
Frances was keeping unaccustomed hours. She walked through the day in a blue haze of fatigue. The fall catalogue was due and she owed it thirteen entries. She broke lunch dates and tried to nap on her office sofa, which had wooden arms and a pillow that had lost its stuffing. Every evening she swore she would march herself upstairs, and each time she broke her vow and stayed below. If she had yielded to a mortal appetite for sleep, she might have missed Puck in his skin of many colors.
The night after the flashing britches, Paul was absent. She thought his bag of tricks must be depleted. Before she collected her purse and her file of papers, she glanced into the living room with blurred, myopic eyes. The director’s chair was occupied. She blinked. If Paul had come in, she would have seen or sensed him. She took a step forward. The occupant was not Paul, unless he had fallen into a vat of lime or acid. Sitting erect, with both feet on the floor, was a skeleton wearing a microphone like a pendant. She looked more closely. No dirt clung to the bones, which were brownish, not white, the color of darkened varnish. Frances was relieved. Theatre folk could be ruthless in the name of production values; she did not think their zeal would extend to robbing graves. These old bones must have starred in many anatomy lessons, copied and handled by budding docs or artists. The skeleton was being groomed for another lead. The costume designer covered him with black velvet, draping his skull so his noseless face was hooded. The technical director fixed the wires from the microphone to a standing mike plugged in across the room. Oberon, a stocky actor with chapped red cheeks, tested the system, reciting random lines: “Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania.” … “Hie therefore, Robin, overcast the night.” The skeleton echoed his ventriloquist in hollow tones.
Group Sex Page 3
