A Brief History of Male Nudes in America (15 page)

Maize, my cousin, was a homewrecker. She was tall for a woman and dark haired, my wingless angel, and wherever she moved, in whatever room, to pick up a magazine or to just stand at the window, she stayed at the center of things while everything else slid to the edges. “Why would a man want salt when he could have honey?”
she would ask me and then fold her legs under herself wherever she was sitting, and for many men, it was just too much. Compulsion, obsession. Wanting what you can't have, which makes you want it more. Maize—a name she had given herself three years earlier in Portland when she found it in a
Farmer's Almanac
—said that she did not make up the rules of life, but that, thank God, she had the brains to break them.

“Now what?” I asked Maize. I had just finished a long, hot shower. I was wrapped in a big white hotel towel, and I didn't need anyone to tell me that what I had been feeling up until that point was happy. Then, while I was digging through my purse for a comb, the facts started to drift and I realized the money was probably gone—blown in the week and a half we had spent in Santa Fe.

It was the first time I had run my course and come out flat broke, scared, and older. Maize never knew any other way to live but like this: on tightropes or where she found easy passage into others' lives. Whether what she had was borrowed, stolen, or given recklessly to her in darkness or over a bottle of booze or out of some weak, twisted passion, Maize made the most of everything. She spent big and looked good. And when the money ran out, as it often did in those days because there was a cycle to it all—getting and spending and laying waste—she fell and fell hard. That time, starting with that Tuesday night in Santa Fe, she took me down with her, my beautiful milk-skinned cousin, chestnut hair, long legs ahead of her time. Her blue eyes were what I thought of then as medicine.

“O.K., Regina” she said. “Relax. Let's do a quick accounting.” But in my heart of hearts, if there is such a thing in me, I knew the money was gone. How could it not be? In room 217 of the El Dorado we had temporarily shed our former selves and assumed the lives of queens. Four hundred dollars worth of new lingerie was a reason for being. Once
a day we ordered baseball-sized steaks that melted in our mouths. Neither of us cared about jewelry, but in well-made clothes, in leisure, in the wonder of lying naked and watching late-night cable TV we thought that we felt the presence of God. We were astounded to look over and see each other in a two-hundred-dollar-a-night room. Maize would laugh and say that she remembered, but only vaguely, when I was waitressing. I reminded her that somewhere—ten or twenty lives ago—she had driven a school bus, driven it badly, watched while one kid in the back of the bus crowned another with a crescent wrench.

Maize was not easy to upset. She'd had so many ups and downs that they had all become one big movement. So standing there in the El Dorado with the threat of being broke was merely something in the passing for her, some sign that we were now in the middle of things. Maize pulled out her suitcase and tote and casually searched them. She came up with Bill Barnes's Firestone credit card, which she claimed to be an authorized signer for. She held it up, the red and gold plastic which at that moment offered no safety or comfort for me.

“Maize,” I said, “that won't buy us food.”

“Well, of course not,” she told me. “But if the fuel pump goes or a tire shreds, you might just end up thanking me. Well, thanking Bill, actually.”

Bill Barnes was an orthopedist who claimed to finally understand the finely woven fabric of his life when he met Maize. “Nice man,” Maize had said of him, “but terminal sentimentality. I've seen him cry about the beauty of bathwater.”

I looked over at my cousin who sat glamorous and rock hard in the El Dorado. She was wearing a green silk lounging robe—a short little low-cut surprise we had bought a couple of days before.

“O.K. Just let me in on the plans here, Maize,” I said, sitting next to the small storm of objects I had dumped on the bed.

From what I knew of her, she never actually thought about money. Her mind worked through parallel subjects: cars, airline tickets, good leather pumps, a nice bottle of Bordeaux that could have easily paid
my monthly rent back home in Des Moines. Somehow, she figured a way to these things. She kept her eyes open and jumped at the means made available to her. I had seen men offer their lives to Maize in airports while waiting at the luggage racks or for the rent-a-car. I had watched hotel clerks soften to her, finally writing off her entire bill, suggesting she come back in the spring when the cherries were in bloom or the festival began or the warm, blue sky turned seamless. “Aren't people just the greatest?” she would turn and say to me.

That was one difference between Maize and me. There were about four people in the world that I loved, only a handful that I could tolerate, and everyone else scared me to death. Runaway trains and drunk drivers don't faze me, but put me in a room full of people and my heart starts pounding against my ribs.

There in Santa Fe on that Tuesday night I was looking at Maize, waiting for my cousin, my thirty-eight-year-old madonna of the pick-pockets, to put our world back into place and set it spinning.

“It's not like I just snap my fingers and there it all is,” she said to me from across the room. Her green robe was half-unbuttoned. We indulged each other like that. Some pretty flesh. A ginger thigh.

“Well, I didn't expect you to,” I told her, “but we're out of money and we're in your territory now.”

“Gee, thanks.” She bit the edge of her thumbnail. She crossed her legs and tapped a bare foot on the plush, silvery carpet. “Not to worry,” she told me. “Look, we're two young, ablebodied women.”

Maize had ample practice working through her financial worries. She had stripped several people bare of their savings, cashed in gold Krugerrands, pawned dead women's jewelry, given love and sympathy in return for an almost new Audi. True to her word, she had spent the money and driven the car into the dust. She didn't know that the small red light on the dashboard was an oil warning.

And yet, this is not to say that Maize was all bad. In fact, in those days she was probably at her best—freewheeling, lively, able to carry
on a great conversation in a bar. She could talk politics or come to a convincing moment of truth about some great painting. Babbling incoherently, she could fake French or Portuguese for those listening with untrained ears. In those days—in the good days that I remember—she was a beautiful thing to watch, all kidskin and smooth moves. That was before she lost the faith and cut her hair and took a couple of steps down in the world—falling off in Memphis, shoplifting in Detroit.

But on that Tuesday night in Santa Fe, even though we had run up against and hit the wall, Maize still had the faith. She ran out to the parking lot and she spent fifteen minutes searching the car, and when she came back to the room—lo and behold—she had two rolls of nickels and a pocket of loose change.

“Well, my little Fig Newton, oh you of little faith,” she said to me, “get your clothes on. I'm taking you out.”

Nightlife with Maize. Window-shopping. Driving around with a decent radio station tuned in. A bottle of sloe gin that we pull out from under the front seat of the car, then stopping at a convenience store for lime Icees. “What do you call this drink?” I asked her.

“Sloe gin lime Icee,” she said.

“What if it's a cherry Icee?”

“Oh, that's a cherry Rowdy,” she said. “Totally different drink, Reg.

I had never been lost and out of money before, driving around in a town that I didn't know, although it was something that happened to me later many times. A seed gets planted. A taste for fine things is acquired. Maize's face and voice, as I remember them, still go straight to my quick.

We were in Bill Barnes's gunmetal blue Volvo station wagon—a nice enough vehicle with cruise control, the car's title in the glove
compartment signed right over to Maize. “Hey,” she said, “at least we're mobile.” I loved the way she held the steering wheel with the flat of her palm.

We dropped into a couple of bars and proceeded to the H Lounge. The bartenders there were shovel-nosed and all business. A few couples danced with the stiff uneasiness of eighth graders. Maize leaned against the bar and scouted. Two drinks and four dances later, a young gallery owner named Tommy Sodoma was eating honey-glazed peanuts out of Maize's hand. And some three hours after that, Tommy was lying in an alley, the rough imprint of a brick still on his forehead. He had proven a little unwieldy back there in the moonlight. When his lack of generosity became apparent, when it was clear that Tommy did not feel like making a donation to us that night, Maize picked up a brick—the only brick, she swore to God, that she ever used—and gave him some much-needed rest right along the hairline.

“Jesus, Maize. Is he dead?” I asked when we returned to the car. Somehow, I couldn't ask that standing over him. There was a thin stream of blood. There were shards of moonlight on the ground. His arms and legs spread out so that he lay big as a Norway spruce.

“Breathe easy, Regina,” she said. “He's just taking twenty winks. He's going to have a two-egg hangover tomorrow, though.”

As it turned out, Tommy didn't carry enough cash to even get us into the track, and I think Maize regretted having to use that brick. It just was not her style.

Two weeks. Three weeks. I don't know how to tell time when I'm spiraling downward. Maize had my hand and we slept in the back of the car. We washed ourselves over the sinks in dirty rest stops. We had a bar of lavender soap and two big, borrowed El Dorado towels. We took our shirts off and submitted ourselves to cold water and the aftermath.

Maize told me that it would be all right. She kept watch for her next opening, for the place where she would enter another life like a golden breeze, smelling of lavender, ordering with flawless Italian off a menu.

At night, stopped somewhere along the road, we put newspapers up to the car windows. We ate peanut butter straight out of the jar with plastic spoons while Maize told me her life story. Getting and spending and creating the waste that trailed her from Minnesota to the Gulf. “Ever lie on a beach and let the tide roll in around you?” she asked me. “Ever let those dark-skinned waiters walk down and serve you gin and tonics on the sand? Those waiters bend over you, Reg, the glass cold and slick, and it's enough to take your breath away.”

We slept a lot for those two or three weeks. Bad dreams. Long, one-way nights, and in the morning, lines of hair-trigger light at the edges of the newspaper. “It's time to get up, Regina,” Maize said each morning.

“What for?” I asked.

But Maize always had a way of getting us up and moving. She opened all the car doors and persuaded me with sunlight. She would put her hand on my face and I would recognize that which I could not have, but which I wanted all the more because of it.