Queenie (25 page)

If a girl comes up with too many, people say: “Why don’t you girls just go around fucking people? Everybody understands that.”

So do we.

Female Confessing. Recitative:

So, no more La Pasionaria for me? Tha-ats pop!

But secretly…after the first half-hour of social justice, ain’t it all shop?…

uh dress the
wound
, uh give the blood, uh lead the
blind
…and then Stop?

…Maybe after the first half-hour
everything
is pop—

andlovebetweenthelegs isonlypossible because it needn’t take that long?

—Or between any places you choose, of course.

…So here’s my song:

(seriously)       Ah tigerbaby of life, sucking your milk, seeking your vineshade, I know you! It’s me!

Getting laid. And I just want to be. I just want to be.

(naturally)       And who cares if I overslept?

I’m being kept.

(Copyright that later.)

“Rio!” he says.

Really, the best way is by parachute.

Come on down, Queenie. Cable me you’re coming down.

Floating down, like I never could over the roofgardens at home, even with the biggest rose-voices booming in my ear. In revolution or in rose gardens, who makes it alone?

“Have a diamond,” I say, just before opening my eyes. “Just happened to have it with me.”

And we’re down.

I
N BED. IN BED
. And in a Hotel Bienvenida. Who is this hijacker at my side?

He has a local newspaper. “Well, they got him,” he says.

Somebody dreamed even harder than us. And acted on it.

I’m glad it wasn’t us.

I’m sorry it wasn’t us.

“How?”

“They took a poll.”

I clop to the window in my mules, automatically watching out for scorpions.

The moon, though wounded, is still there.

And the revolution?

It seems to be happening to me.

Well, you get what you dream, I think. And you dream what you get. And I’ve got a new song.

I’m still talking, inside. But I’m not leaning on anybody. And not missing it.

I am on my own tape.

I go back to bed. But the bed leans against me.

It feels very nude here. If there is such a thing as a degree of it.

I giggle, but he doesn’t look up. He’s my refuge, of course, but he’s reading.

I’ll have to feel my own way, around myself….No innuendoes please, from the stands…

Then I have to goose myself. Because there aren’t any stands. Not on your own tape.

Well, I’m welcome here. Welcome, Queenie. Soyez le bienvenu.

Been a long road, hasn’t it. Clutch your knees to yourself and consider. How you finally got through.

I rub my eyes at him. “I’m awake.”

“You say that every morning.” But he smiles.

“Do I bore?”

Now that I’m on my own, the possibility occurs to me.

“Even under concussion, you have a certain charm.”

Do I? Wait until he meets the real me….So people actually have them!

“Want me to tell you again how you got here?”

He’s been doing that every morning for the past three weeks. But I’m awake for good now. And I’ll tell him.

“We had to get off the island, didn’t we? They did. Those two who were us.”

He understands me perfectly. “Yop, the international situation got wise.”

We
got too international.

“But before we left, did you cut one beautiful disc for yourself, Queenie! For all of us. In a kind of raga rock.”

…Oi hoi polloi, do I remember!
Hear this
. Island to island, with the whole world listening. Laughing. At the first coup d’etat on tape…

“Then the real fuzz comes, didn’t they.” Just as the tape is finishing.
Get an axe,
I say smartly. And up they come like turnips, over the shoreline.

Then I crawled once more into the baggage compartment, and got hijacked out. And into a bed.

“A bed is always
bienvenida.
”

“Hmmm?” He’s taken out an old stub of a pencil and a pad whose cover I know well.

“Concussion’s over.” But I still know how to parachute.

I clip-clop over to him and take up the second pencil. The pad has two. “It’s going to be
so
hard for her,” I say, in a scenario voice over his shoulder and waving the pencil. “To hold onto reality.”

I’m acting it out for him. My autobiography. This is how we collaborate.

“Put down how, much as she loves him, she doesn’t want to end up in his poem.”

“How do you think he feels?” he says, busily writing. “When he finds himself in the middle of one of her tapes?”

…So I guess we’re happily stuck with each other, in a realistic way…

Just then, Umberto the busboy—and the night and day clerk and the second cook—walks in as usual beaming, with the day’s armful of cables. Actually his beam is slightly at half-mast because of certain head bandages, but we pretend not to notice.

I have never listened to so many cables in my life as I have since living with Giorgio.

“The Presidential Trip——” he says, looking up pleased from the pile of them. “Why, do you know—it is deemed to have had an influence!”

“Well, we knew it was
selling
,” I say sadly.

Which up home when you want to do something flame-worthy but not violent, seems to be about the best you can hope for.

“Well, soon we can pay Umberto’s bill,” he says. Umberto owns the joint. “And get on home.”

“Gee, but money depresses me,” I say. “It always has such a direct influence.”

And home this time means
home.

He’s opening the last cable. “I was sure right to sign that trust money over to Oscar,” he says, pleased again. “Money just doesn’t stick to him.”

“Yeah,” I say gloomily, “but it sticks to Aurine. What’s she let him do with it?”

…Oh, I am being so gloomy—maybe my childhood is cured…!

“Oscar wants to back the show.” He tosses me the cable.
Pleased and proud to help bring Queenie in. To any amount.

We are rehearsing in Rio. Umberto is backing it.

“Not going to let him,” says Giorgio. “Oscar’ll have to learn to waste my money in his own way.”

“Know how he was supporting Aurine lately?” I say. “Selling off his collection of antique studs.” And suddenly I cheer up again. I can always depend on my background.

…Especially, can I depend on Aurine? That’s kind of been worrying me, right in the middle of reality. And whenever I look at Giorgio.

Right now he’s got on a scarlet T-shirt picked up from a voodoo artist in Haiti, over the last of his size shorts to be found in the Burlington Arcade. Both of them are muscle-bulged. All his angles are very intense. Since he’s stopped flying, his eyes are wider. And his jaw positively protrudes with poetry. He looks like some overdrawn comic-book hero—who God at the last minute has corrected with intelligence. And every now and then, God help me—and may Aurine give a push also—I feel like marrying him…

And every now and then, he says—in particular when he catches Umberto gooning at me, but sometimes even only when I amuse with an innocent crack or two—he feels like asking me to. To elope. “We have as much right to rebel as other people our age,” he says. “From the system that made us what we are.” And stay the hell away from verandahs, Queenie, with anybody except me.

It’s a worrying situation. No telling how long we can laugh ourselves out of it. So yesterday we send a hurry call to Aurine.

Because if we do elope, how do we explain that to the older generation we’re saddled with? “I could face Oscar,” Giorgio says thoughtfully, “but I see you could never face Aurine. Unless you do it under duress maybe. What say I force you?” But I say no, she’d want a practical reason. “How about you do it to keep up my dignity, then?” he says. I say, “Uh-uh—one look at you and she’d see you have too bloody much.” He looks at me squinty-eyed, as if he’s flying again. “Call it the call of the wild.” he says. “Toward the conventional.”

Now he’s down to the last cable, and though he doesn’t mention it, there’s still no answer to ours.

“How’re we going to bring in the show?” I say idly. “If we don’t let Oscar.” And how’re we going to get home?

“What
about
those royalties?” he says, not looking up.

From the Presidential Tape?

Up to now, we plan to hold them for charity. Meaning revolution around the world. Since we haven’t got either of them yet, that seemed only fair.

“Gee,” I say, “I don’t mind if my art has to support my life.” Like maybe plane fare to New York. “But I don’t think it ought to support my
autobiography.
” Or not on
Broadway.

Trouble is, he doesn’t think my tapes are art. He knows they’re me.

And the one that is me now, is looking at him.

He’s now crouched over the pad like a prizefighter, with all his moxie at the point of the pen. There’s a connect between money and poetry, he says, but he hasn’t made it yet. The thing about poetry is that at first it’s very pure.

“How can you write it before breakfast?” I say.

“This isn’t the masterpiece,” he says, grinning. “This is the one before….Where is that coffee?”

We stare at one another. Umberto can’t do everything at once. But I have also been very obedient about verandahs. And yesterday, I pushed him off one.

…There’s an end to everything, Sam Newber used to say. And credit, Queenie, is among the first to go…

“Got an idea,” I say, brightly quavering. “Gotta new song for you. How about I act it out?” And getting up out of that bed, I wave myself slowly backward and offstage.

Peering from the dressing room, I see he is still full of dignity. I am meanwhile both dressing and undressing. I feel as punchy as if I’d been in the ring with him. So here it comes, Queenie. You are not going to keep yourself up to the mark.

When I walk out again, I am wearing the
cache-nombril
.

I have a good navel cavity.

So I just stand there. No hoochee-koochee needed. In certain circumstances, a
cache-nombril
can be sufficient to itself. When you simply have to show what you’ve got.

Ordinarily, he’d of hauled off and grabbed me. But diamonds make a man polite.

“It’s real,” I say, quaking radiantly. “And it’s yours.”

“Where’d you get it?”

I consider. “From my childhood.”

“Where you been keeping it?”

I don’t answer. Because those bras long since wore out. Oh, the cavities that women have!

He stands there, grimly considering.

Then he breaks down and says what he always does, no matter what I have on.

“Take it off.”

We are almost decent again, when Umberto knocks. Since he never did that before, he must have been listening. He couldn’t have been watching, because when he sees the two of us, he almost drops the tray. Between the bandages, his beam stretches to full sun again. Then he shakes his head and goes out.

The tray has coffee on it. And a cable.

I grab for it.

“Uh-uh,” Giorgio says. “Let’s have coffee first.”

We do that.

When I grab again, he says, “First—where’s that song?”

So I think I understand, of course. Our lives are in the balance again. He has to keep himself up to the mark.

“Okay, here goes,” I say. “
Female confessing:
Recitative—”

It’s only the dream-half of it anyway. In dreams, you always hold a few
pensées
back.

When I finish, he says “Well, well. Up from under. In waltz-rock. But that’s you, Queenie.”

“Yeah, it’s me,” I say. “In good and bad faith.”

He gives me a long look. “Exactly what crossed my mind.”

And do you know, what with fooling around, we almost forget that cable?

…(
Who
am I thinking to?)…

When we remember, I say generously, “You open it.”

He says “No, you.”

But when I start to, he says “Wait. Queenie…our cable. I changed it.”

“How?”

This I would never have believed.

He’s addressed it to Dear Father and

Mother.

Inside, of course.

When I can get my breath, I say furiously, “As if I cared who they are, fink.”

When I can get it again, I say, “You

over-interpret me.”

He says, “I wanted to find out for

myself.”

He turns pink when he tells me why.

I’ve under-interpreted him.

He hasn’t seen her for years of course. But he’d rather think of her as my mother. “You mean Aurine.”

After some thought, I giggle, “Think of Oscar as my father,” I say. “That’ll be enough.”

We tear open the envelope together.

I knew I could depend on them.

It’s signed “Us.”

After that, the answer itself is scarcely in the running. As Giorgio says later—when we’re collaborating again, “Queenie has her questions. But have you noticed how the one she isn’t sure of the answer to, she seldom asks?”

What I did ask is simple enough. “
Advise whether best for by-blows to legalize them. Have less than nine months to decide.”

And had to pay for by-blow as two words.

Their answer is simpler. “Take a look at yourselves.
STOP.
Then decide.”

When we do that, we roll right over. This time only from laughs.

Because Giorgio is now wearing the cache-nombril. For safety’s sake, he says.

I am now wearing the T-shirt. For Umberto’s sake.

Navel to navel, there’s certainly more behind mine.

But Giorgio’s has a fifty-thousand-dollar diamond out front.

We are equal at last.

When we stop laughing, I say “Plus which, we’re both amusing each
other
.”

What could be more equal than that?

We send a return cable saying no to Oscar’s offer, thanks for the rest. Collect. But signing it “Us.”

So by the time Umberto has brought us up a surprise champagne supper and gone off again—he admits he opens all the cables beforehand and says he was only being sympathetic on the verandah—the moon is once more coming up.