People in Trouble (3 page)

Kate had never been homeless and she had never been hopelessly hungry.

She had been mugged a number of times and raped once, years ago.
 
She felt aware of the variety of violence she had both lived and missed and honored them all by clipping resonant images from papers and magazines, then taping them to her walls.

There were black-and-whites of young Negro men being bitten by American police dogs.
 
There were colored images of acknowledged heroes lying in swamps of their own blood.
 
She searched each one for the particles of physicality that captured the fear, the pain and especially the willingness of some individual to enter into it.
 
This was one aspect of what she meant by chaos.

At times the sum of her collection drew such a repulsive conclusion that she couldn't imagine anything worse.
 
But, looking out her window at the unprotected bodies, she considered that this worse thing was somehow present there.

On the side table by the single bed in her studio, Kate propped up a twenty-five-year-old photo from Life magazine.
 
It showed a Buddhist monk who had set himself on fire in Saigon.

The photo was one frame but it was all in motion.
 
It caught the man at the point where he was so completely burned that his body crumpled over into the flame and flesh fell off his bones.

Does destroying yourself purposefully make a tangible impact?

What Kate retained from the photo of a collapsing human flame was a flash of light that put its faith in smoke and ashes.

Kate dialed Molly's number.
 
She loved that she could call ur this younger woman and the woman wanted her.
 
It was great.

"I miss you," Kate said into the phone.
 
"I want to get together soon."

Get together was her euphemism for making love.

Then Peter knocked on the door of her studio.

"I have to call you back," she said into the receiver.
 
"Some one's walking in."

Peter wanted to know what he should pick up for dinner.

"I thought I'd get some sausages," he said.

"Okay, but get them at the new Italian place."

"I was thinking about Polish sausage."

"No, too greasy," she said.
 
"Go to Rocco's, get some paste too.
 
I'll make a sauce."

"Spinach pasta?"
 
he asked.

"Or ravioli."

"I don't like ravioli," he said.
 
"I think linguini would be better."

"What do you mean you don't like ravioli?
 
You eat it all the time."

"That's true," he said.
 
"But what about linguini?"

"Okay, fine, get that."

When he left, Kate dialed the number again.

"Okay."

"Okay."

"When are you free?"
 
Kate asked, feeling flirtatious, fingering her lilacs.
 
"Peter is going to be working tomorrow afternoon, so there's time between two and four, or are you working tomorrow?"

"I'm working until three.
 
I could meet you then."

"No, Peter might stop by here at about a quarter after four."

"So, don't answer the bell, or tell him you have a date or you don't want to be disturbed.
 
Tell him you're going to see me."

"What about Friday?"

"Listen, Kate, I have to talk to you about something."
 
Kate could hear Molly straining to resist her seduction.
 
"You saw me walking down the street Thursday and you pretended you didn't know who I was.

"I had to," Kate answered very quickly.
 
"I was with Peter.

You know that."

"Peter knows what I look like.
 
I keep telling you.
 
I found him standing outside my apartment the other day."

"It's irrelevant whether he does or not," Kate said worrying about Peter.
 
"As long as he doesn't say anything about it to me, everything will be easier for all of us.
 
I can't imagine me and Peter walking down the street and stopping to chat with you.
 
It would be absurd."

"Look," Molly said, very calmly.
 
"Last week you had your face between my legs and now you want to be there again."

"Don't you?"
 
Kate said.

When she hung up the phone Kate sat quietly at the edge of her soft bed.

Of course, Molly had answered.
 
But I don't want to organize my fucking around Peter's schedule.

Kate's bed had a fluffed feather comforter and matched clean sheets.

I just don't want to hurt his feelings, Kate thought.
 
I love him.

There were dried tulip petals in a bowl surrounded by paint and fresh lilacs, so fragrant by her pillow.

What makes Peter so special is how smart he is, and how committed to his work.
 
I admire that.
 
I want to be able to have that much confidence, to believe so totally in what I am doing.

Peter was too large to sleep with her in that bed.
 
They could make love but they couldn't sleep.
 
Molly and she could sleep together quite comfortably there but they'd never had an entire night.
 
Molly had a double bed at her house but the sheets were not as soft.

Molly had successfully insinuated herself right into the middle of Kate's habit of living and had then started agitating from the inside for change.

"Look," Molly had said.
 
"If you want out, then get out now.

If you want in, get in."

Kate knew exactly what Molly was trying to pull.
 
And yet she felt surprisingly vulnerable to these frequent separations with threats of permanency.
 
They pushed her into just enough panic to clarify what would be missing from her life without a girlfriend, without Molly specifically, with only Peter again.
 
Molly had power over her.
 
Molly forced Kate into symbolic concessions like eating dinner with her instead of with Peter and then making it up to him later, or more likely, eating twice.
 
She always did give in eventually, which at first felt begrudging, but she got used to each step toward closeness and wondered if she was in over her head.
 
No, she wasn't.
 
Kate would never grant Molly free access, not in one lump sum and not piece by piece.
 
It would never be that complete a relationship.
 
On this point, Kate was certain.

Her hair was bright orange, naturally, and cut so close to her head that the strands stood up like bristles on a scrub brush.
 
It was a buzz cut, exactly the kind Peter had worn as a little boy.

She had seen it most recently on teenage girls and liked it in the mirror.
 
Kate did not worry about being the only buzz-cut woman over forty in most public situations.

New Yorkers were not familiar with red hair.
 
They didn't know how it worked.
 
All they ever lived with was thick curly brown or straight black.
 
Everything else was exotic.
 
Red hair, blue eyes and red lips in New York made Kate a perpetual outsider except on Saint Patrick's Day.
 
Old Jewish ladies stopped talking when she walked into the room.

People always gave her directions even though she'd known where she was going for over twenty years.

Kate was a big woman with strong shoulders, sleek, and a neck of ivory.

She could wear anything that black women wore; wild African prints, canary yellow and deep turquoise.
 
Peter was her height and when they kissed they were eyeglass to eyeglass.

Molly was much shorter and had to stretch to reach her mouth.

Was that why she kissed Kate's neck so much?

"I always knew I would get to a woman eventually," she had confided to Spiros, sitting over coffee one late afternoon in the back of his gallery.
 
"But I could never picture precisely how.

I couldn't imagine growing apart from Peter or any of the horrible scenes that would have to take place to separate us."

"Are you two fighting?"
 
he asked carefully.

"No," she said.
 
"There is a silent tolerance."

"So continue with them both forever."

"If she will allow it."

"Well," Spiros said, rolling his lips back between a smile and a purse.

"Can you and this girl have a future?"

"With Molly so many things could go wrong.
 
She'd get bored or want to eat me up.
 
She wouldn't leave me any free time.
 
She'd trap me, try to turn me into a lesbian.
 
I wouldn't be able to do my artwork if I was with her."

"Why not?"

"Because .
 
. . she's not intellectual enough."

"Well then, it is clear," he said.
 
"Good to be sure about that."

"Why?"

"Because, Kate.
 
If you are going to invest in the past you'd better end up choosing the past.
 
If you give priority to the past, don't find yourself in the future.
 
Waiting for you there will be a very angry young woman."

"1 never know, Spiros, whether you are threatening me or just giving friendly advice."

"All right, I won't tell you anything more.
 
You tell me.
 
If you were going to name a sonnet after Molly, what would you call it?"

"`Six Lines of Enjoyment."" "But a sonnet has fourteen lines... oh, I understand."

Even as a teenager Kate had never spent so much time kissing on the street as she did now, leaning into Molly's mouth against a parked car.

She found her body pressed against all kinds of surfaces as these public kisses began to span seasons.
 
There were barstools and doorways, bare patches of rare grass in a few straggly parks.
 
And always a longing refuge in her lover's body.

When they couldn't meet at night they kissed in the late afternoon and made love and were outside again kissing by dusk.

Then she had to go meet Peter, usually to get to the theater.
 
Most evenings of every week she and Peter sat next to each other in an audience.
 
She was not the kind of woman who wanted to sit alone.
 
She wanted to sit with him.
 
Then they would have something to talk about at night; what they had just seen.
 
Kate would be so lonely without someone sitting next to her agreeing.

Some nights in an audience Kate felt happy because she and her lover had just embraced.
 
Sometimes that made her warm and loving toward Peter because his silence permitted her this pleasure.
 
She'd slide her arm around his and pull him closer to her knowing that any show of affection lulled him into a happy contentment.
 
Sometimes, though, she'd feel lost in Molly and indifferent to her husband, for which she'd compensate immediately with much direct attention.
 
Two relationships, she'd noticed, required the constant application of triage.
 
But mostly, the transition from Molly to Peter was natural.

Kate looked down at her toes.
 
They were clean.
 
Her toenails were trimmed.
 
The hair was red around her ankles, so light it didn't need to be shaved.
 
Her eyelashes were pale orange, like an evening sun, and long enough to dust her face.
 
She always kept the hair under her arms clipped with a small scissor hanging over the sink for that purpose.

She and Peter looked good together aesthetically.

He was sweet from the first time they met.
 
At that time he was a girl.

His face was smooth, anyway, for a man, but Kate used to dress him up in girl's clothing.
 
She'd put him in panties.

They'd laugh and he'd prance around twisting his hips like a fag.

She'd put her fingers on the lace and feel his dick underneath.

He was not afraid to dress that way.
 
He knew who he was.
 
He was a girl.

"Peter's such a girl," Kate would say to Molly every now and then.

"What do you mean?"

"He's a baby.
 
He's passive.
 
He whines and can't take care of himself.

He never carries the heaviest thing."

"That's not like a girl," Molly said, that annoyed tone in her voice.