Blues for Beginners: Stories and Obsessions (3 page)

While I brooded, Rainbow cleaned up the
kitchen.

“Men are back, and they’re better than ever!”
she announced brightly, after she’d scrubbed her last pot.

Translation: she was in love again. The last
time I noticed, she was dating a stringer for one of the wire
services who had a phone in his car but no fixed address. Rainbow
called him a reporter, but he was more like a news groupie.

Before that, it was two guys named Steve.

“It’s the real thing this time,” she
said.

“Are we talking about Marty?”

“Don’t be silly, Lauren. No one who lives in
a Honda Accord is ready to make a commitment. It’s the real thing
this time. Henry’s got a big old house in Arlington with a
jacuzzi.”

“Congratulations on landing landed gentry,” I
said.

Rainbow gave me a pitying look.

“That’s not what it’s all about. Henry’s a
real man, and he knows how to make me feel like a real woman. I’d
be a fool to let this one get away, a perfect fool.”

From the low tremor in her voice, you could
tell how thrilled she was with the chance to use that perfect fool
line. Rainbow had a hope chest stuffed with bad dialog. Bette Davis
in Now Voyager, or did the Great Gatsby say it to Daisy Buchanan?
Next, I wrapped my brain around the concept of gender realness
unrelated to real estate, but got distracted by thoughts of
food.

Any kind and lots of it.

Now!

“Rainbow, what did you put in these cookies
besides ginger? Suddenly I’m starving.”

“That’s because you’ve been without a
cigarette for how many hours?”

“Four and a half,” I said.

A large, semi-transparent cigarette drifted
across my field of vision on the diagonal. I blinked and it moved
faster, followed by another. Not exactly a hallucination, more like
subliminal advertising.

ISN’T it time you had a cigarette?

Isn’t it TIME you had a cigarette?

Isn’t it time YOU had a cigarette?

Isn’t it time you had a CIGARETTE?

Rainbow returned to her favorite subject,
Henry, who filled his days with gardening and genealogical
research.

“He doesn’t need a regular job cause he’s got
a trust fund,” she said.

“You mean he doesn’t have a real job? I
thought that was what real men were all about. “

“If you’re independently wealthy you don’t
need one,’’ she explained.

“So where’d you guys meet, or is that
classified information?”

“The Georgetown pool. He asked to borrow my
Bain de Soleil.“

Trust Rainbow to meet true love at Swimming
Pool of the Doomed. When I went to the Georgetown pool I met
teenagers with bad acne and loud radios, Third World med students
with green card problems, and crazy old people who talked to
themselves. I suddenly realized Rainbow wasn’t an airhead at all,
but a fount of feminine intuition, all that stuff I’d forfeited by
going after pay equity. Maybe if I studied her ways I could learn
how to be more effective as a girl. Rule one: After thirty always
use a moisturizer. Rule two: Never let him know you don’t have a
date for Friday night. Rule three involved either sticking elbows
in grapefruit halves before a bath, or was it remembering to write
your hostess a bread and butter note three days after the visit? I
probably owed a bread and butter note to Rainbow’s folks, the
spooks.

My mind was coming unglued.

A useful rule of conduct in Washington is
never do anything you wouldn’t be able to justify in front of a
hostile Congressional Oversight Committee, and it occurred to me I
was on thin ice.

“Are there drugs in this cookie?”

“Don’t worry, it’s just reefer, not acid,”
she said with a shrug.

“So what? This stuff is illegal!”

“It’s better for you than tobacco,” she
said.

.

There was a reception for the FAF Board of
Directors, that night, and Rainbow invited me to come as her guest.
FAF stood for Friends of American Firearms. Rainbow was filling for
their regular receptionist, who was out on maternity leave. The FAF
threw frequent receptions, which gave Rainbow the chance to wear
her collection of thrift store cocktail dresses to work.

“Maybe you’ll meet someone nice,” she’d
said.

The FAF buffet was lavish, but in odd ways;
five kinds of bourbon but no vodka, and the hors d’oeuvres were
made from wild animals shot by the membership. I sampled venison
meatballs, but passed on the moose Stroganoff. Rainbow introduced
me to the FAF president, who looked like Mr. Potato Head and
smelled of Brut aftershave. Over the din of drunken small talk I
could hear the sounds of gunfire and laughter, and wandered over
its source, which turned out to be the FAF rifle range.
Tentatively, I picked up a shot gun, but when I noticed a man in a
navy blazer aim his camera at me, I put the gun down.

He came over to me, clearly disappointed. He
wore penny loafers, and looked chipmunk cute, like something out of
a kit, and turned out to be the official FAF photographer.

“Say, you didn’t think I was going to take
your picture so I could blackmail you just in case I found out you
worked for Teddy Kennedy? Most women like to have their pictures
taken on the range. I bet you’d be surprised to find out how at how
many women members we have. Why we even have a woman on our board
of directors. “ He pointed to a laughing gray haired woman with a
creased leather face, the only woman besides me in sensible shoes.
“She’s some feisty lady.”

His use of the word feisty was the final turn
off. It’s not a real word. The only thing worse was diminutive, a
patronizing way of saying short. Feisty, diminutive Lauren Ginsburg
shot Jake “the Snake” Meltzer with FAF shotgun, police report.
Claims temporary sanity.

.

“My name’s George,” the photographer said,
holding out his hand. “I’m not such a bad guy when you get to know
me.”

So we talked, or rather I listened.

George admired Walker Evans and Ansel Adams,
but thought his own work would be as emblematic of the eighties as
those portraits of Dust Bowl Madonnas were for the Great
Depression; George’s work being to photograph the guests at FAF
cocktail parties just in case, for instance, some one from Teddy
Kennedy’s office wandered across the shooting range.

His hand rested lightly on my arm. He beat a
gentle tattoo with his fingers. I recognized the opening bars of
the Twilight Zone theme music.

The image of Jake groping Rainbow in my
kitchen sprung to mind. I felt exceedingly vulnerable, an
old-fashioned liberal on nicotine withdrawal, but also voracious.
Maybe Rainbow’s way worked better, in which case George was not a
really a polished rodent but more like a friendly dog. He seemed
eager to please me if he could figure out what it was I wanted.
There was something Jake used to do to the back of my neck that
made me go loose at the knees. I wondered if George would get the
general idea if I tilted my head ever so slightly. As George’s lips
grazed the side of my neck, I felt the familiar thrill. I wondered
what sign he was, and hoped not Capricorn. Capricorns made lousy
lovers, according to Rainbow. Jesus Christ and Richard Nixon were
Capricorns. Your typical Capricorn was anal retentive, a real freak
for control, as opposed to Virgos, who were anal compulsive,
meaning they wash up immediately and don’t like to eat in bed. No
one in Washington understood about eating in bed except Jake. Spare
ribs, Spring rolls and the Sunday Times. Jake nibbling on my
ear.

Orca in five letters, prick in six. Ratfink.
Schmuck. Meltzer.

“You have beautiful eyes, George,” I said,
having counted at least three of them.

“My wife thinks I look like A1 Pacino.”

“You’re married? I’m so sorry. “

I worked my mouth into a pout of despair.
Time to be a cartoon.

“But let me put it like this,” he said. “We
have a little understanding, so long as no one brings home anything
contagious, if you catch my drift.”

He meant herpes. AIDS was barely a rumor,
back then.

“I’m a Libra,” I told him. “We repel social
disease.”

George turned to me. “How would you like to
take a nice shower? “ he said.

Damn, a double Virgo. We hadn’t even left the
shooting range.

“I’m going to look pretty silly with wet hair
and streaky mascara.”

“Oh come now, haven’t you ever made love in a
shower?”

It was silly for him to call what we were
about to do “making love”. Probably he thought he was appealing to
my feminine sensibilities, but I found the idea offensive that two
strangers with nothing in common but horniness could manufacture
love out of pure physical sensation.

“Could we get horizontal,” I asked. “I don’t
balance well on slippery surfaces.”

“Aw, where’s your spirit of adventure?”

Having sex with a strange man seemed
adventurous enough for me. You could slip on a bar of soap, fall
down, hit your head, and die in a shower.

“Do you have something against beds?”

“I like to push the envelope,” he said.

It was nine hours and forty-nine minutes
since that last cigarette. I was deranged. My lungs felt empty. My
lips longed to wrap themselves around something smooth and tubular.
I also had a sudden fierce desire to bite down on something. Okay,
not bite, just suck real hard.

This was so infantile. Infinite regress.

“Maybe you can help me out,” said the
stranger who seemed to be occupying my body. “I’m an oral fixate.
Would you mind very much giving up the shower for a really good
blow job?”

George led me down four flights of stairs to
a large dimly lit room that contained rows of bunk beds, each one
covered in an army blanket.

“Guess where we are,” said George.

“Summer camp?”

The friendly stink of old blankets reminded
me of being in summer camp, which led immediately back to Jake.

“ Welcome to the largest privately owned
fallout shelter in the free world,” said George.

He showed me his bunk, which was one of the
lower ones.

“Does Rainbow get one? My roommate, she’s
your temporary receptionist.”

“ You only get a bunk if the FAF thinks
you’re a valuable survival resource,” he said. “We’re saving spots
for Sinatra and Olivia Newton-John, so we can’t cover
clericals.”

Shrieks of laughter erupted from the other
side of the room. I recognized the laugh of the woman director.

“I told you she was feisty,” George said.

I saw myself facing Congressional Oversight
Committee, all proceedings televised. In the gallery I could see
Dr. Freundlicht, my counselors from progressive summer camp, and my
mother. The Chairman of the Oversight Committee addressed me with a
sneer in his voice. He bore an uncanny resemblance to Jake Meltzer
except older, balder, and fat.

“On the night of June 24, 1981, did you
perform an act of sexual intercourse that is illegal in the state
of Georgia? “

What the Hell.

I had the perfect excuse.

I would tell them all I’d just stopped
smoking.

“Give you a good deal on the bamboo planter,
Mrs. Ratner,” says Jack on the phone. To the blonde girl in baggy
clothes trying on a tight green tweed jacket he says, “Nice with
your hair but the fit’s not right in back.”

She looks up. A dormouse face, puffy cheeks
under fluffy bangs, but when she smiles it all wakes up, and Jack’s
hunch is right. No bra under her loose fitting brown jersey. The
bonus is no makeup either. Even the Georgetown students who shop
here Saturdays wear lipstick and mascara. This one’s no college
student, he can tell from the faint lines around her mouth. Long
years of sadness, but a girl still. He knows these things. The
first naked face he’s seen on an adult woman in Washington, D.C,
and he’s made her smile.

It’s a sign.

Jack, at 47, has been without wife or
girlfriend for over a year, his longest period of abstinence since
before college. There are broken teeth in his smile and he can
predict rain from the ache in his bones, but he looks dapper in his
Harris tweed sport coat and a blue-gray flannel shirt that matches
his eyes. The shirt is a gift from his ex-wife. It’s November, so
Jack’s bones ache all the time, even on a sunny day like this.

Insurance money from last year’s car accident
will surely put him back on easy street, and maybe he can get a
stipend from Georgetown University to finish his long abandoned
dissertation but for now he works part-time in Gita’s Deja Vu, a
vintage clothing and used furniture store near Friendship Heights.
He lives in a basement apartment rented from a diplomat’s widow.
There is only enough room for a sleep sofa and a kitchen table plus
it’s too dark for plants. Sometimes it gets so cold in his
apartment he has to wear gloves indoors, but when he asks his
landlady to turn up the heat she screams at him in Hungarian. She’s
entitled to scream, being lonely and deaf, and besides, her late
husband was a freedom fighter.

Gita, Jack’s boss, is good for one screaming
fit a day, but he thinks she’s inexcusable, thinks she’s a crazy
woman. She dresses up like a frontier schoolteacher except for her
red dagger fingernails, and she won’t make Jack her partner
although he knows plenty about antiques and how to make sales. Gita
wouldn’t have thought to call Mrs. Ratner back, for instance.

In addition to the bamboo planter, she wants
the horsehair settee and the pair of pink marble-topped end
tables.

“Would you set them aside for me, hon?” says
Mrs. Ratner.

“Consider it done, Mrs. R.,” he says.

“Oh, Jack?” Gita calls to him once he’s off
the phone, “Would you mind moving the maroon davenport out to the
loading dock?”

She wants him to go back down to the basement
and schlepp three hundred pounds of sofa but it comes out like
please pass the water cress sandwiches. When you pay a man $8.00 an
hour off the books don’t ask for favors. Just give him his orders.
Women do not know how to give orders.