Out of Orange (2 page)

I knew what was at the root of my bad health and my less-than-peppy disposition. It wasn’t the simple depression that doctors warn comes after open-heart surgery or that a pill a day could fix. My shell—which had once acted as a great barrier, a protection for my tender bits, the metaphoric device I had used for so long in the double life I had been leading for twenty years—had become a real physical entity and had gotten heavier with time. Now it was crushing me. Secrets do that.

On my way to the store to buy cigarettes, I felt so alone in the world, and exposed, like people were watching me from their homes as I drove by, saying, “There she is. It’s her!” I passed by a cop car and panicked. I was experiencing some strange kind of emotional collapse, not from the mug shot or fear. It was all about Alex Vause and a question that taunted me:
Is that who I am?

A silver-tailed fox darted out into the road in front of me and I stopped just short of hitting the cute little fellow. He hesitated, trying to decide whether to cross the road or retreat to where he had come from, then stopped in my headlights and stood his ground. He stared at me for a minute like he wanted to fight, then crossed the road and ran off into the dark. I drove on. I went to the gas station, got cigarettes and a Coke, and just started driving again. I cried, banged my hands on the steering wheel, smoked, cried some more, laughed, called my sister and left messages that probably made her worry I had lost my mind, and drove on until I got my answer: no. That wasn’t me. Aside from being tall and gorgeous, Alex didn’t have a sister and she was missing some vital ingredients: regret, contrition, faith, and hope.

Hôtel Saint-André des Arts, Paris, France
February 1993

T
HE COLD
,
FRESH AIR WOKE ME
. The bathroom door opened and Bradley stuck his head out for a moment. He looked disapprovingly over the top of his steamy eyeglasses toward the window that Henry had just opened. Then he retreated and closed the door again. I could hear a police car siren moving away from the hotel. The sirens always sounded to me like they were repeating the phrase “Uh-oh, oh-oh, uh-oh.” It usually amused me, but on this particular morning it felt like a melodic warning about my day.

On the antique mahogany desk lay Henry’s leather-bound weekly minder with his black Montblanc pen sitting atop the opened notepad. The collection of gallery cards, show invitations, and receipts that had been tossed about the hotel room in yesterday’s predeparture hissy fit were neatly stacked or reinserted into the pockets of his black leather valise. The amazing Toshiba laptop computer I wanted for myself was carefully tucked back into its case, and most of the other contents of his valise had also been restored to their meticulous order. In this way, Henry is a classic gay stereotype; the
world could be coming to an end, and as long as everything’s tidy, it’s all good. He was in the middle of the room, seated rigidly upright on a swiveling wooden stool, a mismatched accompaniment to the compact writing desk.

Henry had turned on the desk lamp and looked as though he was meditating in its warm glow, except that his dark brown eyes were wide open and staring directly at me. It was 5:45
A
.
M
. in Paris, time for me to get up and start the day.

Henry had been busy. He had already exercised, showered, shaved, manicured, and packed his bags. His dark hair was still wet and the room was chilly, though he was unaffected. I shivered a little but was glad for the invigoratingly fresh air. Henry sat quietly, breathing slowly. His tanned face was flushed red, even though he was dressed only in his travel underwear: a white silk-knit T-shirt and snug white briefs. I could smell his cologne; it mixed with the lingering odor of espresso and Gauloises cigarettes. Physically, he was not an effeminate man, but he had a grace to his movements and posture that belonged to a ballet dancer.

I was accustomed to seeing him with his hair slicked back, not hanging down over his face. Henry swiveled and turned his back to me to extract something from his suitcase. The tight T-shirt defined his angular shoulders and tiny waist. From the back, he looked like a long, sinewy woman. I noticed his dark gray Armani suit hanging on the door of the armoire as he retrieved something from his bag, then spun back around. A bottle of water and a breakfast tray sat on the table in front of him among a few other items he had set there with the same care surgeons use when arranging their instruments.

Henry turned, facing me again, but his mind was elsewhere. He took a deep breath, reached into a wrinkled brown bag, and extracted a large black capsule-like object about an inch long. He took the capsule, forced it down into the finger of a latex glove, and tied it off with a double knot. Then he gingerly cut the capsule stuffed finger of the glove free with his silver grooming scissors, leaving a little excess rubber at the end. Henry dipped the pinkie-size creation into a bowl of plain yogurt, then put it into his mouth
and swallowed it whole. I watched the lump as it moved down his throat, under his Adam’s apple, and disappeared beneath his collarbone. He took one deliberate gulp of water, straightened his back, and sat quietly again; then he repeated the entire process. He would do this until he was full. Bradley would do the same, but with just a handful of the heroin-filled breakfast bites.

Bradley emerged from the steamy little bathroom dressed, except for his shoes, socks, and suit jacket. He sat down on the edge of the bed and watched Henry’s ritual, like he was a student. But he was really just procrastinating. He couldn’t see a thing without his glasses, and he had removed them.

I was impressed with his bravery. Like me, this was his first trip. I wasn’t the only novice. Bradley had volunteered to swallow the last of the capsules so none would have to be left behind. For a few trips now other couriers had been chipping away at this last batch of capsules from a stash that needed to be transported back to the United States. That method of transport was being abandoned. Even so, I had learned that men could hold a lot more of these heroine-packed capsules than women could. Henry ate them slowly, probably because if he ate too fast, he might eat too many. If he did that, his system would painfully rebel all the way to our destination, the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago.

Bradley could easily have forgone the extra risk and taken only the heroin-stuffed suit jackets, same as me. I don’t think it was greed; he wouldn’t make much more money for swallowing this shit, not enough to make it worthwhile. Considering a leak in even one capsule would be enough heroin to kill an elephant instantly, Bradley’s motivation had to be something totally irrational. Maybe he was trying to prove to Henry or himself that he wasn’t afraid or he was a tough man or something. Maybe he had a crush on Henry. A crush might explain doing something this suicidal. If he didn’t have a crush, I decided he should, and Henry should be a model.

Bradley was adorable, too, in his own way. But he looked like a young, blond-haired Mr. Magoo at the moment. He normally wore Coke-bottle-thick glasses that made his blue eyes look much bigger
than they were. Without them, he squinted, pretending to watch Henry, still stalling.

Personally, I couldn’t have swallowed the capsules, not for all the money in the world. I wanted to gag just watching. I would have bailed like my sister had on her first trip. She hadn’t been able to get her first capsule down. In fact, she’d almost choked on it, or so I had recently been told. I would have knocked her the fuck out for even trying such a stupid thing if I had been there. Especially since it wasn’t diamonds, as I had been told originally; it was a lethal dose of heroin wrapped in the little package she had tried to swallow.

The new method for transporting and concealing the heroin being utilized made it possible for me to do it. It was now sewn into the lining of men’s suit coats. We simply packed the jackets in our luggage with our own clothes and trusted that the tailors were better at concealing the drug scent from drug-sniffing dogs than they were at sewing. The convenience of the drug-stuffed jackets we were carrying made it all too easy to ignore the little voice in my head telling me not to do it and to just keep moving forward and toward home.

Hester, Henry, and Bradley had a little spat the night before. We were clearly getting on one another’s nerves and I couldn’t wait to get back safe and sound. That discord had evaporated, though, in the morning’s tense preparations. I guessed that Hester was still asleep in her and Bradley’s room. She was still so angry at me for coming over in the first place, and she had tried every way she could to get me to leave. But I was stubborn. I wouldn’t listen to her, not after coming as far as I had already. It was my decision to do this, not anyone else’s, and that made lashing out at them pointless. She didn’t see it that way.

She had called the invitation for me to join them a betrayal. They said if she was pissed about the money, she could have it. Apparently, someone else would be paid a finder’s fee for getting me involved. It made her even angrier that they thought it was the money she was mad about. She had said she didn’t want to see me
before I left. I really wanted everything to be all right between us before I took off though. But after ranting about how insulted I was that she thought I couldn’t do this, I didn’t want her to know I was scared. Especially since it was too late to turn back now.

It was so quiet. It felt like we were all getting ready for our own funerals. I don’t know, but all the bravado from the night before was gone. We had started getting ready—Henry, Bradley, and then me—and mechanically begun our rituals to prepare for the flight. I kind of got it now, why Henry had us focus so much on rituals. It was soothing and distracting to focus on details, like is my suit wrinkle-free or is my hair just so. Better that than to focus on the stupid shit I was about to do.

Suddenly, I felt a powerful rush of fear run over me like ice water. My heart palpitated and my stomach flipped when it really sank in, exactly, what day it was. Since I had left Chicago, whenever I woke, reality was like a great, but complicated, book I had put down the night before; I had to remember where in the story I was before I could get going again from where I had left off. On a day like this one, it was tempting to leave the book unopened and go back to sleep.

As I had at the precipice of every frightening moment in my life since I was a teenager, I made a mental connection between the fear at hand and a fear I had a lot of practice at calming. I was horribly afraid of heights. My best friend as a kid had been a diver; so in order to share the same summer, I had become a diver too. While some people may be able to obliterate their phobias by facing them once or twice, this didn’t work for me. I faced my fear again and again, by diving competitively, but I remained as afraid of heights on my last dive as I was on my first. Instead, I developed into what someone once described as a peevish imp. That is, a person with the compulsion to throw herself off whatever lofty place I approached. Great for diving, not so useful on escalators, Ferris wheels, or mountaintops.

I told myself this was just another controlled and deliberate dive. I would be fine, but not if I freaked out. I took a deep breath. There
was a lot I could do to ensure a smooth entry, and focusing on that calmed my racing heart long enough for me to begin the day. I lifted my cozy blanket, sat up, and opened the book again.

For the first time in weeks, the sight of Henry comforted me. Aside from being an experienced drug smuggler, extraordinarily handsome, organized, and tidy, Henry was a control freak. His control over me had begun to feel like a spiked choke chain, but today it felt like a parachute’s harness. He was so calm. All I had to do was follow his lead.

I wasn’t quite ready for that yet though. I pressed pause, lay back down in the bed, and stared at the ceiling. I started breathing slowly and, one by one, let my imagination eliminate each of the obstacles that might appear in my path that day. I could see myself walking through the airport exit in Chicago without a hitch: nobody overdosing on the plane because the capsules burst in his stomach, no long interrogation with Customs officials doubting my cover story, no delays, no screwups, and everyone getting through—everyone. The end.

I would walk away with the money—ten thousand dollars—enough to fix everything. I would look back on this ridiculous stunt with Hester and we would laugh someday. Who knows? It could end up being a real turning point for me, a new twist on being scared straight. The notion of going home to my parents to regroup and going back to school actually appealed to me at that moment. Shit, joining a convent appealed to me at that moment.

My stomach turned over again at the thought of leaving my little sister behind. Hester was on a later flight, three hours behind ours. Sisters couldn’t pretend not to know each other. She would be alone for three hours in Paris, and she wouldn’t know my fate till she got to Chicago, to the hotel. Somewhere along the way, Hester had grown up. She was a gorgeous woman now, with auburn colored hair, green eyes, and her own rich history delicately carved into her beauty. But to me, she would always be the little five-year-old with long curly blond hair, crying at the bus stop because I had to abandon her and go to school. The notion of abandoning her
in Paris, even for a few hours, tortured me more than the fear of failure.

I chased that image away. I closed my eyes and imagined myself on Main Street in Northampton. I hadn’t talked to anyone from there in two months. I knew by now Phillip, my best friend, would be insane with worry and curiosity, but it would all be over this afternoon. By this time tomorrow I would be on my way back east, my sister would be safely deposited at her house in Chicago, and this would all be behind me. What a party it would be, and ten thousand dollars in cash. What did that even look like? Alajeh would be in Africa, where we had left him, and we would be in America, where he would not come. Henry would be gone soon enough too, as soon as he paid me. I would be on the verge of a new life, whatever it was.

I pushed back the suffocating blankets, sat up, and got out of bed. I looked at the manner in which I had packed my nifty little shower bag. The night before, I had cleaned each and every container of lotion and balm that came in the set of skin care products from Madame Calignion. She was the exquisitely refined, middle-aged French beautician at the salon and spa I had gone to a couple of days earlier. I had needed help picking out makeup and applying it. Henry had taken me to the salon and to the madame for my final transformation from a frumpy dyke into a worldly art critic. That was who I would pretend to be that day. Apparently, in Paris you can accomplish that at a spa.

I had arranged my collection of toiletries as neatly as Henry might have. I grabbed a towel and walked to the communal showers down the hall. Our fancy room’s little bathroom would be wrecked already and it had bad ventilation. Some of the rooms in our hotel had only a toilet and sink, no shower or bath. For those residents, there was a shared bathroom. I preferred that over the sloppy whiskery mess I knew Bradley had left for me. Besides, the shared showers would be pristine, warm, and dry so early in the morning.

I noted every detail I passed and everything I touched. In the shower, I washed, recounting as many of the items I had passed in my short trip to the bathroom as I could. For each item I remembered,
I made up a very brief story about how and why it had affected my business trip abroad in some ridiculous and infinitesimal way. I was cramming my head with new images, stupid mundane facts from Paris instead of Africa, a place U.S. Customs would not know I had traveled. I had been doing this since I’d had my passport replaced in Brussels.