Queenie (2 page)

“Oh, don’t go,” I say. “You couldn’t know the rules.” I who never speak up in company, and am not much spoken to! Even if Aurine comes from Ninth Avenue, she is French.

And just then a pigeon shit on him. My aunt runs for a cloth. Oscar paws the air like always when he’s upset; when we were asked for observed gestures in acting class, I gave it as his characteristic one, though I didn’t explain it. He’s smoothing his homburg, if anyone really wants to know.

“That bird thinks it’s an eagle,” says our art guest, wiping his head. We all laugh back at him, in trio, as we do at our best.

I remember it all—how we all stand there, helpfully, and in the pleasance of somebody and something tidied, at half past five of an evening just like now, daylight time not gone yet but not bikini season anymore, in the dark cool of a brilliant storm holding off, olive and orange in the west, to the northeast the whole misty moisty town, and between them the park that tells us our weather, our inland sea. We’re a strange place if you could see us, Miss Piranesi, and I suppose a strange family, in our cottage set in the skyscraper mountains, me with a mother who is my aunt, and a father who’s my uncle they say, and doesn’t live with us, quite.

All loving and loved—why, that’s nothing to be that, not in my aunt’s métier! Which is so comfortably padded for a child to grow up in, in with all the other pretty ladies, Aurine’s card crowd, and their by-blows. Not many ugly ducklings among us, we are all pre-selected, on the mother’s side. Pains-in-the-ass some of those kids, of course, but still Saturday afternoon company, with all the women discussing our points above our heads and all our history known to them. All the way from the real lace on my confirmation pants (they know the very dress of Aurine’s it has migrated from) to chuckles over what Tekla’s son Giorgio and I had done in the bathroom or been prevented from. Right down to some hard talk about real importances—shall the mole near my left lip be let stay for a beauty mole? Only yesterday, Aurine reported slyly that Giorgio, whom we hadn’t seen much of lately, had stayed out all night.

…Sometimes there were uncle troubles. Or business ones. Or well-known combinations of these. But then the presents erupted again, and what fancies they were—diamonds from Van Cleef, under whose weight a girl could scarcely lift a finger to trump her partner’s ace, or those enamel-encrusted icons from La Vieille Russie, bought on Tekla’s hint to Oscar, that lit up a whole corner of our sitting room. The girls all gave advice to each other’s protectors, and helped form each other’s taste—which by now, in their forties, is very high on the Parke Bernet department. And doesn’t do badly on stocks…

But two years ago, back on this same rooftop, under almost the same sky, I don’t think any of this, I only know, suddenly, my happiness and luck. I’m never dizzy up here, anymore than an antelope would be on Chamonix, but that day I feel dangerously able to fly. Or if I reach out and catch a bird and throw it, all of which seems perfectly possible in the rose-yellow silence falling now on our four faces, it would come back to my hand to nestle there vocalizing, a cuckoo boomerang. The house itself, dimming and rising in the dusk, ready to soar off into the Hudson sun set with all its buttertub flowers like a bouquet for Jersey, is still solid under my feet—I know it’s only my vision, my vertigo, that’s performing here. It wasn’t the man at my side—though I’ll always remember him nicely. Or the twilight hush into which he tells us he’s going abroad, and where—even that word stretches the beautiful horizons far.

…It’s what is called a concatenation of events. Or, in my old Latin book,
natura naturans
, nature naturing. It was all of a parcel. That is, I am. The storm has passed over and I feel its salt like a whistle in my trembling teeth, and in my shaken ear a magical chord, “—Switz-er-land.”

How can one all but faint away in the blessedness of all things come together in colors, in aunts, uncles, landscape and weather—and not have people pay the least attention to you?

When I come to, Aurine is giving him her hand, much more friendly, telling him her ancestors came from there, and he is kissing it. And Oscar doesn’t look at me much. Or, since I’ve grown breasts, tries not to. So there I am, hot and cold on my own two feet, with not a prayer of what has happened to me…

It’s nothing really—as a British client of Oscar’s once said on television, after the emcee asked him to describe how it felt to land the gondola of his transatlantic balloon when it began losing gas 14,000 feet up over the sea below. He was never asked on television again. But I hope to have my experience over and over, maybe in other company. For it was nothing really, except the beginning of everything. It was just that I’d never had an orgasm before…

So then of course, I feel so grateful and open—the famous female feeling, Miss Piranesi—and have to put my gratitude somewhere, and by instinct, or more likely training having its effect at last, turn to thank the nearest man for it—not beyond noting either that he wears a Piaget watch—and say to him what everybody does remember: “Oh—the best view’s from my bedroom on the other side. Would you like to go upstairs and see it from there?”

“Alexandra Dauphine!”

But the mole at the corner of my aunt’s lip—a beauty mark no one disputes—is lifting. Also, maybe she too has seen that the portfolio under our guest’s arm is that costly, turd-colored calf which comes only from Hermès. But Oscar too is beaming, and he never knows things like that. I’m their darling, that’s all—oh, happy noose! Why is the love you’re sure of so much more troubling than the kind you’re waiting for?

The stranger is giving me the once-over, my first. Or the first I know about, from a man like that. Under that eye (all I can see now is that it was hazel) the skin on my left ribcage twitches—a little muscle I’ll come to know well in the next four years. And the belly around my navel is blushing, reaching; like a kid, I look down to see. Finding only the brass buckle on my hip huggers, which I’ve cut off at the thighs, to show body jewelry pasted all over them. A juvenile mistake; good legs never make me feel amorous even when they’re my own, and a girl should push only the parts of her body that do. Half the pushing is for yourself, isn’t it?

This man doesn’t look at my legs. Not to begin with. The truth of one of Aurine’s countless adages hits me. “The best ones never do begin there.”

…Dear Aunt, they all come true, your adages, your men. I’ve been watching. Why else must I leave you? I can scarcely bear to have you open your mouth these days; my future’s in it.

That’s why I wish I could lift my own eyes—in the violet glance you say any dark ones can acquire—and scrutinize that stranger again, giving him the eye from top to toe. In a way I can, turning out his pockets, zipping open that
objet
from Hermès, warming his watch in my palm, and breathing softly over the gray behind his ear—going all over him, like the expensive little kitten, scratchless for him, that I am being trained up to be.

But I can’t see him himself, and I’ll never know his face or name. I don’t need to. I’ll know him, whenever I meet him, by all the other stuff I did see—and to hell with the brand of watch. He’s not an important memory; he’s a fact. He’s around, all right.

He’s the man Aurine and Oscar will be bringing me. Innocent dears, maybe they don’t even know they were doing it that day.

He’s the man who the world that bore you tries to bring you, no matter who you are.

What kind of household you start in doesn’t matter; though Aurine and Oscar’s way of life mightn’t go down at St. Bartholomew’s, a man like him is brought in there every other wedding day. He looks different in church, younger maybe. But settled, wherever he is, rich or poor. Our druggist’s daughter married him yesterday—the druggist means his best for her. And she’ll get it of course. Like me. Though I’d have a hard time explaining the similarity. Which way is more sinful let the druggist’s wife and Aurine decide.

For of course the man I’m intended for isn’t expected to last for life. He’ll come by the half-dozen, maybe, all bearing a resemblance. I won’t be asked to marry him. I’ll be expected not to. But in every other respect, he’s the same as in any village. He’s the man the parents bring you, whoever you are. Or your aunt and uncle do, if you’re me. He’s the one who’s enough like them.

So how can I tell them that even in memory, or present dreams, I never go to bed with him?…

Back there, maybe he saw that destiny. For he left, didn’t he, on his own? Smarter than some others have been since. And with a bow to Aurine. “See why you call her Queenie.”

Poor me, I’m still feeling grateful. So I follow him out to the little foyer we have, three marble steps down and a gold wicker basket to put mail in, and stand there, arms crossed over my bodyshirt, which is maybe the way he remembers me. “Thanks for the village,” I said.

Aurine comes out after me; maybe she thinks we’re making an assignation. She wouldn’t mind that—“If it’s time it’s time, and you’re
tall
” she’d say, she’d just want to know about it. But I was already alone, with what I’d never been alone with before. And haven’t yet got a question for. Maybe it’s nameless.

“Q’est-ce-que tu a?”
she says, almost sadly. So I suppose she knows what I have the matter with me. “And where are you going?”

“Up to my room.”

“I’ll send up your supper?” This is standard. Tekla and her current man are coming to dinner, and like all her men before or since, he’s a rough one for our crowd. They have him out of loyalty to her, and are always preparing to help her get rid of him. They have many kinds of dinners I don’t share. Though I hear in Aurine’s voice an uncertainty. Standards are changing.

But the little staircase to my room is just the same.

Up there, I go to the tiny window, an attic one between lumpy dormers, much repaired, which hold you like clumsy arms. And in the pane’s center is the brown campanile of Carnegie Hall. Yes, my village, and a fine one for any girl to come from, no matter where she’s going to! Sur les toits de Meedtown Neuve York.

All the rest of the crowd, which means Aurine’s women friends and their men, live over on the East Side, upper of course, in a number of typical residences—art deco, art nouveau or art bourgeois, Oscar says—whose probable incomes, passions and stability I could recognize before I could read. And like Aurine, the men don’t really live with them. I always think of them as the real girls; those my age are just a sample lot for the production line.

Sometimes they do keep shops too, often only because the day is long. Which is responsible, my uncle says, for God knows how many misguided boutiques. Aurine wouldn’t bother with that; she’s a great business woman on a different scale, Oscar and I are sure of it, with many little nest eggs she won’t let on about. We live on the West Side, and on Seventh and Fifty-Seventh, because as the daughter of the mistress of a certain restaurateur of the 1930s, what better way can Aurine show Fifty-Fourth Street and Ninth Avenue and that same restaurant, how far she’s come? Only a few blocks away, she still has her village, which she goes to by choice on her own well-shod feet, never by cab. But in every other way, it is made to know.

Once a week, we dine at the restaurant
en famille
, and once a month or more with all the beauties and their men. Long before Granny, who was Aurine’s and my mother’s mother, died, the place has a new management, but Oscar and I’ve begun to think Aurine has a piece of it. We see more than village respect for her life with Oscar, or even for the jewels she shows there and in the French Church at Christmas, in the way the staff says “Madame.”

They say it even more so at the yearly party Madame gives them in her house, built on top of the old joint by a gambler of the twenties, whose aging girl sold it to Aurine. Thereby, Oscar says, keeping up the traditions of the original building, which belongs to the belle epoque.

And we sit on it, he adds, like the cream puff on the dowager. And on a lot of the tenants as well, for the newer they are, the more respectable. The rest of us are in the tradition; we might be anything and usually are.

Meanwhile, the weekly offers treble—to which Aurine says sweetly loud on the phone, “Our fun-nee ramshackle house, Mr. Mavrodopoulos, why it wouldn’t be near enough good for you,” then hisses over her shoulder, “They’re trying to get together a package for an office tower, you can be sure of it!” Even when that time comes, she mayn’t be on the selling side, for a reason I don’t like to think about. And if I leave, won’t have to. Girls like me don’t get dowries; we are them. So call it professional backing for the pretty package that will be me. A family estate. Meanwhile all Aurine’s satisfactions work out with hurt to nobody. And we adore her for it. Truly. I just don’t want to be one of them.

Oscar’s case is different. Though he was around Aurine before I was—from before my mother, her twin, died of me—there was of course a time in Aurine’s youth when he wasn’t around her exclusively and other men were; now and then he’s made to remember it. Among the girls, this is called “keeping them up to the mark” and with either a weak protector or a strong one, I myself can see it has to be done. Their recipes for living the life of love have been dinned into my ears since forever; this is the basic one. And the main way it’s done is the simplest. Oscar doesn’t live here. You never really go to live with them. But if you are Aurine, you keep them a few flights down.

His flat’s much larger than our house—nine rooms for a single man through thick and thin, and he’s had a lot of thin lately. But Aurine won’t hear of his changing; he doesn’t know she’s keeping up his dignity for him. When she goes in for doing that, she does it all the way.

“Never do like the wives do, Queenie, bolstering up a man for worldly purposes, and slapping him down for their own!”

She’s been keeping up his dignity for years now. And hers as well. Not ever letting
yourself
fall in love with them, that’s keeping yourself up to the mark. How much love is involved in this house is something I try not to think about! There’s more than enough virtue around here as it is, to keep me from getting out.