The Sea Came in at Midnight (13 page)

She was perfectly content to stay on a while, in fact, until a nurse told her that the hospital had been trying to notify her parents. Please not my father, Angie begged; there was no way of fully explaining the overwhelming oppression of his disapproval, the unbearable burden of his disappointment. He hangs a sign on my door that says
FAILURE
, she tried to explain. The doctors and nurses and hospital administrators seemed more confounded than sympathetic. You don’t understand, she finally cried when all her pleas had fallen on deaf ears,
he named me after a nuclear holocaust.
Next thing they knew, they turned around and her bed was empty and, except for the bear, she had left behind all the last remnants of Saki. By the end of her first week in New York, she was Angie through and through, hitting the strip clubs of Times Square where the owners took one look at her and saw she was a bad dancer and that it didn’t matter, and didn’t ask too many suspicious questions about how old she really was.

She went to work in a place at Forty-sixth and Broadway, where the owner was willing to advance her a hundred bucks, and one of the other women, who called herself Maxxi Maraschino, put her up for a while. Maxxi, brushing up against one side or the other of thirty, was a Bardot-look-alike blonde who also sang in a punk club downtown. At night in Maxxi’s flat at Second and Second, known to the punk scene as Depravity Central, where someone or another was always slumped in the corner, Angie slept on the couch while Maxxi explained the situation: here’s how it works. The club doesn’t pay you, you pay the club—a percentage of your tips for the high honor of getting to take your clothes off there. Not every guy is the kind who will go into a strip club, Maxxi went on, but the same hunger that makes some guys go into strip clubs exists in every guy. Some guys have suppressed it, some are threatened by it, some feel bad about it, some like to think they’ve outgrown or civilized it, but they’ve all got it. There’s the weirdo so incapable of relating to a woman that his interest in that little bit of tissue between your legs is virtually gynecological. He’s too pathetic to think about, like worrying about a gnat watching you undress. There’s the loudmouth who’s there to convince himself he exists, there’s the quiet one who’s there to convince himself he doesn’t exist. There’s the tourist whose whole life is a tour. There’s your bread and butter, the obsessed romantic—he starts coming just to see you. He’s your best opportunity and your biggest problem, because somehow he’s got it in his head he’s going to fuck you, or rescue you, or maybe even marry you, except if you ever did marry him, neither of you would ever be able to forget for a minute what it was you used to do for a living.

The whole thing about a strip club, Maxxi went on, is that it’s set up as though the guy’s in control, when anyone can see that the guy is the only one in the situation who’s
not
in control. Anyone with a tenth of a brain is going to figure out he’s never going to lay a finger on you, let alone put any part of him inside you. He’s never going to know your name, he’s never going to have anything to do with you whatsoever except to keep giving you his money, again and again and again. You’re in the lights and he thinks you’re exposed, he’s in the dark and he thinks he’s hidden. But he’s not hidden, he’s dead, and you’re not exposed, you’re alive.

After a month Maxxi told Angie about a photo session for a magazine layout, which led to another magazine session, which led to a movie in which Angie had sex for the third time in her life, a fact she protected as carefully as her date of birth. The seduction of making these movies was unmistakable and nearly irresistible; whatever was happening in front of the camera could almost seem vindicated by the very glamour of the process, even if it was a distinctly seedy version of glamour. More than this it offered Angie an identity that was tangible and attainable, in terms that, for better or worse, were completely her own and no one else’s. Being fucked by several men on film, she didn’t say to herself or to her father or to anyone else “Shame,” in the way her father had taught her to proclaim “Failure,” reducing everything she felt to a defeated emotional monogram. Rather, for the moment her shamelessness so demolished any last possibility of shame she was almost euphoric. Shame wasn’t just a foreign concept, it was beyond the given psychological physics of the universe she lived in.

It became clear to Angie from the beginning that there was a choice to be made. Many of the girls in these films were aspiring actresses hoping to go legit sooner or later, but as one told Angie on her second shoot, “There’s no doing both. You can’t do this”—waving her hand at the bed a few feet away—“
and
do legit too, it’s one or the other,” and for a while Angie fell in with this tribe of actresses and directors and cameramen, moving out of Maxxi’s place and staying with one or another of the other girls. Though she had no particular interest in being an actress, it seemed to her one also couldn’t live in both the world of shame and the world of shamelessness, it was one or the other, and she might well have chosen the world of shamelessness if, five films into her new career, someone didn’t finally get more inquisitive about her age. When it got out she was barely seventeen, the films she made had to be pulled from circulation by a distributor so enraged—and with enough underworld connections—that Maxxi Maraschino strongly suggested Angie lie low for a while.

Angie got a job with an escort service and moved out of Depravity Central and into her own place near Seventy-fourth and Third. The afternoon she went back to Maxxi’s to finally get the few things she had left behind, Maxxi was gone and the place was empty, no rock stars or groupies or junkies laid out on the floor, no signs of any life at all except in the back bedroom, where she herself had slept a couple of times: now, written on the door in the kind of black marker ink her father had used, was the word
OCCUPIED
. From behind the door, she thought she could hear a strange sound like the echo of a distant, cavernous roar. She went over to the door and stood for a while, her ear pressed against it, until she finally called out. She thought she heard someone moving around inside the room, and maybe someone answer, though she couldn’t be sure, and so she called out again, “Hello?” and now someone distinctly answered from behind the door, Yes. It was such an emphatic yes it frightened her, and she stood back from the door, again reading the word written on it in black ink. She was afraid to open the door and let out whatever was behind it. Then whatever was behind it began beating on the door furiously, and that frightened her even more, and she backed away, and turned and looked around the flat again to see if anyone else was there. She had to use the toilet. When she came back out of the toilet the flat was still empty, and the sounds from the back room, including the beating on the door, had stopped. She crept back to the door and listened for a while, and though not at all confident of her intuition, she unlocked the dead bolt as quietly as possible and left as quickly as possible.

Though no one yet knew it, she was living in the dawn of the moment when chaos would kiss love with a new malevolence. Waiting for this fatal unforeseen future, the women of the age writhed in their beds, veins flooded with the recognition of their desires, the air of the dying Seventies full of a sex both voluptuous and revolted, with the membrane between the two soon in tatters. During these months Angie’s only romance was a brief one with an aspiring playwright in his mid-twenties named Carl, whose day job was as map master for the city of Manhattan. Carl had a hundred maps at his disposal, maps of streets and maps of bridges, maps of sewers and maps of subways, maps of power grids and maps of water ducts, maps of sound currents and maps of wind tunnels; on the walls of his tiny St. Marks apartment he had maps of his entire life, coordinates for where he first got drunk, where he first had sex, where he had begun writing his first play, where he had gotten stuck on the third act. It was during the third act, one morning while he was sitting in his usual Village café drinking his usual morning espresso, writing his play by hand on a large pad of paper, that Carl had begun his first map: a character had just walked onstage, opened his mouth, and nothing came out. Stumped for the right bit of dialogue, Carl sat staring at the espresso and pad of paper for an hour, and began to draw a map of the play, which he hoped would reveal to him what the character wanted to say. That led to another map and then another. “You’re obsessed,” Angie said simply, the first time she saw all the maps.

“Not at all,” Carl answered, and she had to confess he didn’t seem the obsessed sort Maxxi had told her about. “I’m not obsessed with my maps”—he smiled—“my maps are obsessed with me.”

“Are they really.”

“I have faith,” he explained, “and faith transcends obsession.”

“Mystification,” Angie replied, “envy, too.” A lapsed Jew, Carl freely admitted that perhaps he put his faith in faith itself, also suggesting, however, that at bottom faith itself was the only thing anyone ever really had faith in. He was more idealistic about his desire than any man she had ever met, or would meet; forty years later, living in the penthouse of an abandoned old hotel in San Francisco, he would remember her telling him so. He rhapsodized about her smile more than her body, and seemed to mean it, and she was still too young to understand that men always love a woman’s smile more than her body, even if they neither confess nor know it. Carl planned to retire someday to Provence and work in a vineyard—he had spent a couple of college years in Europe, and maps on the walls memorialized the autumn in London, the winter in Paris, the trip to Toulouse, the train to Vienna—and Angie had the feeling that, in his mind, he saw her working there in that vineyard with him.

She left Carl when she could bear to neither tell him her secrets nor keep them from him. She left when she suspected that a new pair of coordinates designated on his Manhattan map, right above the sink, marked where he had begun falling in love with her. She had come to fear her place on the one map that she found most fascinating, the Map of Mad Women, with its pins representing a series of deranged females, from a bartender in Dublin to a photographer in Brussels to a travel agent in Athens to a kibbutz counselor in Tel Aviv to a beautiful girl he saw in Madrid wearing nothing but the chaos in her eyes and a cocked red beret with a little red Soviet star stuck in it, standing in a plaza openly touching herself until the last vestiges of Franco’s secret guard pulled up in a black car and took her away.

Angie couldn’t stand the idea of becoming the small pin on the Map of Mad Women marked New York. She didn’t really believe she deserved anyone’s openheartedness, she didn’t really believe she could accept anyone’s emotional generosity under anything but false pretenses. Biting her nails, she called Carl from a pay phone on Forty-sixth one night several hours after standing him up, with the sound of the club where she used to dance right behind her; it was for this soundtrack in particular she had chosen this phone, as though the noise of the club in the background might explain everything to him. “Believe me, Carl, I’m doing you a favor,” she told his uncomprehending silence on the other end, with as much conviction and as little melodrama as anyone had ever said it. “Unworthy,” she summed it all up to herself, and to him, but only after hanging up the phone.

U
PON TURNING EIGHTEEN, ANGIE
got a job at a better escort service on the Upper East Side. Her first night one of the other girls, a young strawberry blonde, said to her, I’m the third of October 1980, the bombing of a synagogue in Paris killing four.

A lithe redhead, coolly blowing on her cigarette, said, I’m all music banned in Iran on 23 July 1979. When a voluptuous brunette took Angie under her wing, she introduced herself as the seventeenth of April 1979, the ordered execution of one hundred children for no reason whatsoever by the emperor of Bangui. Every gentleman who frequented the service had his pleasure, from the lawyer who loved to be dominated by the third of December 1979 (eleven teenagers crushed to death at a rock concert in Cincinnati) to the impotent oil executive who preferred a threesome—just so he could watch—with the cute little twins April 1 (seven hundred Jewish graves vandalized on Staten Island) and April 2 (one hundred Vietnamese boat refugees drowned off the coast of Malaysia). There was the shy raven-haired 3 August 1979 (two and a half million peasants starved to death in Cambodia), the giddy platinum 20 September 1980 (twenty women dead from toxic shock related to tampons), and the service’s sad kind veteran who offered comfort to sad tired men, purring into their ears the partial meltdown of a Pennsylvania nuclear reactor on 28 March 1979. There was the most beautiful and exclusive prize whom every man wanted but few could afford: the exquisite and elegant eighth of December 1980, the murder by a crazed fan of one of the greatest songwriters of the century.

Angie’s own place on the Apocalyptic Calendar came the third of October 1981, three years after first arriving in New York. By now she didn’t spend a lot of time mourning the person she once had been, or her lost innocence; precocious in all matters except stuffed bears, she was precocious in her moral sense as well, refusing to see herself as either villain or victim. The only apparent casualty of her actions, besides her dreams, was a million detonated nerve endings in a thousand anonymous men, the vast majority of whom had only looked at her, she tried to reassure herself, only a few of whom had actually touched her. And if some part of her was mortified by what she had become, she wasn’t on speaking terms with that part, but made a point of knowing its whereabouts at all times, and keeping it at arm’s length; she didn’t allow it to judge her. She did well enough with the service that she got by working three nights a week, and she had come to foresee a time she might be able to give it all up for something else, though by now she suspected a future as a Carnegie Hall pianist was probably not in the cards.

The furor within the industry over her underage film career had begun to die down when she decided that one or two more movies under her belt—so to speak—might make her enough money to break free for good. The going rate was $200 a scene, sometimes more; filming two scenes in the morning and two more in the afternoon, she could pull in eight hundred dollars a day, almost twenty-five hundred for a three-day gig. It was also true, as Maxxi Maraschino pointed out to her one night over beers in the now deserted club where she sang, that the business had gotten much stranger since Angie worked in it only a couple of years before, every sensation trying to trump the last in pursuit of some unspeakable ultimate; and when the downtown shoot that Angie had lined up for the next afternoon came up in conversation, even in the shadows of the bar Maxxi appeared to turn a little pale. The two women got into a fight. “If these are the guys I think they are,” Maxxi told Angie, “you don’t want to have anything to do with them.”