Slaves of New York (35 page)

I felt so upset I had to go over to the jukebox and put some Frank Sinatra on; when I came back to the table the guy got up all over again, exaggeratedly polite. "I can't tell you how glad I am to meet you," he said. "You will come to hear me play later?"

I shook my head. "Can't make it," I said. "I've got a deadline: I have to finish this painting before I go to Europe."

"And when will you be going?" Jonny said.

I wanted to take out a cord of dental floss and whip it between his teeth; God knows he would have appreciated that. Or some kind of mitering device, with which I could round off the corners of his canines: what a spiked Dracula he was. His stage makeup—or maybe he wore it all the time, I don't know —was far too heavy: black eyes, red guppy mouth. "I'm going to Italy," I said. "Roma. I'm going to get a studio there and paint."

"Amaretta tells me you are a painter?" the guy said.

"Yes," I said. "Let me have a double vodka on the rocks, will you." Jonny Jalouse took out a hand-rolled cigarette and lit it. "With hashish," he said. "Would you like some?" I shook my head.

My sister was in bad shape. Sitting next to this guy, her hair was dirty and there were pimples on her face. What she was

wearing was something like an old silk shirt, very tattered, and a leather jacket. She had the look of a person who needs a shower, much abused; by this I figured she had been taking too much cocaine. "What happened to your eye?" I said.

"I'm anemic," she said. "I walked into a cabinet door and because I'm anemic it gave me a black eye."

"That certainly seems to run in the family," I said.

"I practically put my eye out. At first I thought, Well, it's all over with me now, I'll be a blind person, and then I don't even need to worry about where I'm going to find a drunken-driving course."

"Yeah," I said. "What happened with that?"

"I had to go to this place in Trenton to take an evaluation test. I thought that these people were really going to help me. There were about forty of us, all in one big room, and they gave us a test to do. On it were questions such as, 'How often do you get drunk?' I thought I was supposed to be honest in answering. I didn't know that all around me people were putting down 'Once or twice a year.' I put down 'Four or five nights a week.' Well, really I wouldn't get drunk if I didn't take the coke. But I need something to bring me down after I get wired, and so I have a couple quarts of beer just to relax me.

"You really must stop doing this so much," Jonny said.

With that I suddenly felt a great joy in my heart for Jonny, and I nodded. "This guy knows what he's talking about, Amaretta," I said.

"Shut up. There were a lot of other questions on this test: 'Do you drive after you've been drinking?' I was completely honest. So when we all handed in our tests, it looked like I was a lunatic. Everyone else had lied. And they seemed sane, while for being honest I was now in real trouble. So they called me into this little room. They told me they couldn't help me at all, that my problem was too big for them to handle. I was supposed to seek therapy or find a program that lasted for more than four hours of classroom time: more like thirty. I wasn't going to get my license back. So I went back to the New York

State license bureau, and they said there was nothing they could do. But one guy there felt sorry for me; he agreed to let me into his class. 'You are trying to change, I think,' he said. 'Maybe I can help you. The mess you're in is your own fault, but still . . . we'll see.' Anyway, he turned out really to be my savior, a real guru. A little shrunken guy, who always dressed in black. 'Because if you can project energy wearing black, you can do anything,' he used to say."

"I'm getting bored, Amaretta," her pal said. "I'm going to play some pinball."

"Nice guy," I said, after he had left.

"Yes," she said. "He's really been great ... a real stabilizing influence on me, Marley."

"Well, did this guru help you?"

"Oh, yes," she said. "He made me go to a class called 'How to Make Money Doing Anything.' I thought this was sort of a neat idea. The other people who were enrolled in the course thought so, too; that it would be about how you could turn your hobbies into money-makers. Like knitting, for example. But as it turned out, the first class the guy spent talking about how everything that happens to you is because you want it to. 'You can live forever,' he said. 'You only die because you want to.' 'You mean to say I wanted to be mugged?' a girl said.

"He said that yes, she had wanted to be mugged. Well, don't look like that: I didn't go back after the first time. I went back to my guru. He sent me to a class in how to be a whirling dervish. It's part of the Sufi religion, you know. We had to chant for hours, and a man showed us how to weave our necks into circles. We were told not to think of anything at all. This is very difficult, you know: too difficult for me, and I didn't go back to that class, either. But I'm fine now, since I've met Jonny. He's very stable and a good influence on me. ..."

As if to prove what she was saying, Jonny came back to our table with a couple of German drug dealers I had met before. They were all jabbering in French. My sister sat humming to herself at one end of the table, weaving back and forth gently, as if she were still in the whirling dervish class.

Even as a mess, my sister was beautiful: I was bereaved at how badly I had treated her most of my life. Those clear eyes, which nothing could muck up—like the color of the Caribbean in a
National Geographic
magazine photo. And that smell of raspberries she had always about her, raspberries-in a field on a hot summer day. With some bees flying about: these represented her thoughts, random to others, but making sense to herself. Even in a scruffy leather jacket she looked fine—like a great lioness after a feed, basking with a bloodstained mouth.

One of the Germans brought another drink for my sister. She drank it in one gulp: something of a gold-cream color, maybe it was sherry, but I doubted it. They were all giggling in shrill French that lapsed into German, and they were all highly decorated, in a primitive way: gold clankers and leopard-skin boots and 'gator belts. And fur coats, so I guess they were doing all right. "By the way," Amaretta said, "did I tell you of my lesbian experience?"

"No," said Jonny. "That sounds amusing ... do tell us." He had to explain something in German to one of the drug dealers: the guy didn't speak English, though he seemed to vaguely understand. So they were all quiet. I could tell they were interested.

"After my divorce papers came through I kept the summer house Rafe and I had. I was out there alone last week . . . bored out of my mind. In desperation I went to the lesbian bar in town. I had no place to go, and the evening hours to kill as usual. I had walked to the end of the pier and looked at the fishing boats tied up and tossing in the stiff winter sea . . . stout little ships, laden with ropes and nets and all the other equipment they use to catch fish, and it was suddenly like being in a different time . . . some snow was falling and the waves were very white at the crests. I was carrying my little dog ... he was shivering under my jacket. It was very cold and wild, without the little dog I would have felt quite sad, but there he was, shivering under my jacket. . . .

"I wandered back into town and saw a sign that said The Cellar, and below it a narrow flight of stone steps that led to

the place. When I opened the door it was very warm. It had been blowing outside. It was warm in there and lit with rose-colored light. Girls were talking and laughing, shouting with laughter, how happy they all seemed. But when they saw me come in, suddenly they all stopped talking at once . . . they stared at me. Only the television blared on in the background. I thought, How nice, to see a whole bar of women like this, all talking and laughing and carrying on, what a friendly place! But then they all stopped talking, and I realized, Oh, this is a lesbian bar, of course, these are all gay women! I was embarrassed . . . one of the girls let out a long, low whistle . . . but then I thought, Let's not be ridiculous, what do you care what the sexual persuasion of these women is? And why should they care about mine? It was a warm place, and I liked the look of it. . . . My little dog needed a place to get warmed up. . . . Still, I had to force myself to go in, sit at the table, put the dog down, and get a drink from the bar. I was all aquiver ... I was very nervous. You know, I enjoy those moments of nervousness; just as I think I will never feel nervous again something occurs to make me blink. As if a skin had formed over my eyes and I am able to be blasé, then something happens to . . . shock me and I feel very alive again. Perhaps that is why I went to that place by myself. Well, why am I so cynical? Why do I think of myself as such a tough cookie, and the rest of the world even worse? Too much television, perhaps . . . child of a broken home, or some other reason easily written up as a sad bit of information about our times in the daily paper—why children take drugs, or a letter to Dear Abby. There's an answer both intelligent and wise, yet solving nothing for the person with the problem."

The Germans were getting restless and my sister seemed to sense this and got back to her story.

"Nobody would speak to me at first. The girls, for the most part, didn't appear any older than eighteen . . . chopped-off hair, leather jackets, sulky expressions. At first none of the women spoke to me: I must admit I was relieved. For a long time I sat and listened to their talk, memorizing all their names

. . . Betty, a woman who had waited on my table earlier that evening when I went out to dinner, came in shivering from the sea breeze, her hair flecked with snow that quickly melted. When she came in she didn't acknowledge me, but went to watch a television show. . . . When she wasn't laughing at the TV she was petting Amy, her little friend who sat mouselike at the bar while Betty stroked her and kissed her neck, but only during the commercials. I thought, How funny that I like to sit in this place . . . there was a moment, the first second I came in, that it seemed so inviting. But now it seemed rather sad, as if to make friends with anyone there I had to have the same sexual orientation. Though to be honest, it seems as if to make friends there must be something rather symbiotic between the two partners in a friendship. I have a rather sarcastic view of friendship: I believe friendship is based on human beings using one another. To look at it my way, two girls get to be friends because they need someone to confide in ... or they have the same job and need someone to eat lunch with. Or, quite often, they each would like to meet men, but don't want to venture out alone. Well, a genuine friendship is a rare thing . . . people are quite disposable; if one friend moves away an attempt to correspond is made at first . . . then a few long-distance phone calls, a postcard from a vacation retreat . . . then broken promises to visit. . . .

"Billy, the bartender, was dressed like a man. . . . She would have been attractive if perhaps she let her hair grow a little longer, in a way that was more flattering to her plump face . . . and did not find it so necessary to pose like a man. Perhaps when she first learned she was gay she needed to announce this fact. But by now her butch act had become something else. She was hardened, there was no longer anything in her that could be touched by another human being, so she had given up. . . .

"And I thought, What is the worst that can happen to me? I'll wake up to find a woman's face in my cunt instead of a man's. Big deal. But still that didn't get rid of the ominous

feeling for me. I was familiar with the hungry looks of men. but in a crowd of women the feeling was something quite different. They all seemed to be in disguise, hard little mugs . . . most of them looked alike. Out here in the sticks they were not the choicest group of lesbians. They were sort of working class. Maybe they had summer jobs as waitresses and stayed out over the winter, I don't know.

"Damn! I felt like a young chicken in a group of foxes. About ten, twelve of them. . . . They all had short hair of a neutral color, and most of them were wearing black vests, men's vests. Funny, because if I were going to be attracted to another woman, I would want one who was very pretty, with a big mouth and long curly hair . . . wearing something like an old Victorian nightgown. I guess I'm saying I'd be more attracted to a woman who looked like me: narcissistic, I guess. I myself am envied by many of my friends, though I freely admit I am unhappy . . . but I like my littleness, I am little, my bones are light, I once had a boyfriend who clasped my wrist in amazement and said, 'But, Amaretta, your wrist is so little I could snap it with my fingers!' My hair is peach-colored, peach and amber (my little dog is the same shade; I chose him because he matched), and my skin used to be clear, very clear . . . when I walk out in the cold my cheeks get very red . . . with tiny teeth, I have tiny square teeth that I floss each night and brush until they absolutely gleam . . . my hands are very long and thin . . . once, in a jewelry store, where I was trying on rings just to kill some time, the jeweler said, 'Ah, what fine hands you have, you should be a pianist!' But I do not have that sort of creativity. Though I might have been a dancer . . . my little dog dances when I fling my clothes about and parade naked before the mirror! He enjoys that, he likes to prance, too. . . .

"But even the women who didn't have short hair and a man's vest had something hard about them: plucked eyebrows. Strange, because why pluck out your eyebrows if at the same time you are trying somehow to look masculine, or at least

androgynous? I can't stand plucked eyebrows . . . they take all the expression off a person's face, and made the girls look very hard.