Queenie (20 page)

With a girl from school—one of the rich ones. She has long blonde hair almost to the top of her hundred-dollar boots, and nothing in between, except on a piece of grocer’s string around her neck one of her father’s 2000 B.C. five-thousand-dollar Luristan bronzes. And as you say, Dr. Werner—a conspicuous waste.

The two of them start to back out. But Oomph gives me a smart push, and bows them in. “Imagine you two’ll need your privacy,” she says, and closes the bathroom door on them.

I say, “What’s with you and him?”

She says, “The crew started taking a pic of us again. And he lost it. Right in front of his friends.”

I say, “That why they gang you?”

She says, “Oh, me yelling ‘Screw the revolution!’—maybe they misinterpreted.”

I say, “Wait ’til he finds out
she
can’t make it unless there’s a bidet.”

We stand there deep in thought.

Oomph is really a brilliant administrator. She turns the lock on them.

Then we scram. At the hall door, Oomph strikes her forehead in that way she has. “Wait here, huh? Gotta go back.”

She takes her time. I need to go, so I duck in the last

John I see down the hall. Which has the light on, and the door ajar.

Oh, Dr. Werner.

Spiritual revelation is enough for one evening. Without getting the facts, too…

I know it’s you at once of course. Naked though you are, I’d know you anywhere. Even with your beard un-trimmed, even with the beret. Even with the earring. Put two and two together, top and bottom, and still I get Werner. That must have been some lecture tour.

You’re still with your age group though. Before you could do it, you had to find a place for it.

And you’re still acting in good faith. What you and she are doing is rather conservative. But it isn’t science. And it certainly isn’t politics.

I know who
she
is of course. Even in the nude, five wedding bands can be very characteristic. Even with her head on your shoulder, that fifty-dollar streak job is no freshman’s. And like always when she’s comfortable, she’s kicked off those alligator pumps.

She had to be where we are; that’s her hang-up. But being an oldie, she went right to the top.

So that explains who slams the door on the two of you, Dr. Werner.

Because I hear Oomph coming back.

So with apologies, that explains why I lock it.

Serves you right, really. That was no place to bring a lady like Mrs. O.

Oh Dr. Werner. If you and I weren’t so hot for vision, we could lead a practical life!

So then I rush Oomph out. But at the elevator, I tell her to hold the button. “Forgot something. Be right back.”

In front of that door, it’s peaceful now. Woe has come and gone. All that sincerity ought to make a wonderful wallpaper, though. I decide to add a woe of mine.

Which I do very small, choosing a black marking pen and signing my full name. Then I put a buck in the collection box. Then I stand there, listening.

Plenty of finks like me have left, but some of the faithful are still grieving. And somebody should give them a hand.

I take a long breath—a penthouse childhood lets you yodel freely; mine can be heard a block away—and I let go.

On the bus we luck into, which is parked while the driver files his nails, we look back. Yes, people are streaming out of there. When the bus starts up, takes us ten blocks to catch our breath.

I say to Oomph, “What did you go back for?”

She says, “My worry beads.”

Ten blocks later, Oomph says to me, “I heard you yell. But not what.”

I say—“The fuzz!”

When we get to the dorm, Sherry is back. Cutch has absconded to Canada, then turned around and given himself up to the inquisition in Plainfield. Which he’s wired her he can do with more honor, since the local draft board there will be extra hard on him; his father is one of them. His message to us is: It’s now a question of whether his or the war’s put-on will hold out.

Sherry’s hasn’t. She’s all cleaned up to go on over there.

Mine hasn’t. “Personally,” I say, “I’m terribly tired of holding out.”

Oomph’s hasn’t. She says, “Or if you’re not sure anymore what to hold out for.”

The atmosphere in the room is triple gloomy—we are holding up the world together, but we are having trouble. And we miss Cutch’s axe.

Just then the door busts open, and in march the two cookies. They have lost their corsages, but they are carrying banners.

“We wanted you to be the first to know,” they sing out, and march off again. The banners say: “Dropping Out!”

Not that we three haven’t thought of it. But who would want to be a minority along with those two?

So there we are, stuck with holding up the world for
them
.

Suddenly Sherry flumps out of bed and goes over to that old
WE DON’T SAVE
sign of ours, grabs out a big sheet of paper and covers the first two words, so it now reads
SAVE.
Oomph gets the idea, jumps up and shifts the paper so it reads
WE SAVE.
We start playing tic-tac-toe, adding all the variations we can think of, including
SAVE US.
In the end, I get left with the
DON’T.
Nobody says a word when I turn the thing on its side.

At about five
A.M.
for us ceiling starers, I say, “We could pray.”

They act like I’m cracking, but they grumble out of bed and down anyway, one to a bed.

Sherry says, “What do we pray for?”

I say, “The praying’s the point of it.”

Oomph says, “Now my knees have done everything.”

After that, we are stuck. There’s so much world welfare. Ours and other people’s.

Inside me, of course, I’m still talking about mine.

Oomph dear
, I’m saying, you’ll always have to do it for a reason. You’re an intellectual. But I think for me, doing it for civil rights, or for diamonds either, is out.

Aurine dear
, I’m saying, I went to the party. I went to find out my kick. And I found it. Some of those bods I saw were fine. Or would be under other circumstances. But I promise you, I won’t waste myself. I want’a young man to be fucking me, not the world.

So that’s my discovery, both of you.

Doing it for no reason must be best.

Now
can we all stop saying fuck? Because it embarrasses me. Maybe when I have the big Anglo-Saxon moment itself, I’ll feel different.

But the two of them are still waiting for me to pray, I see. I have to shut up inside for once, and start talking.

“Oh girls——” I say, “I know now what politics is. It’s when you are the victim of
other
people’s backgrounds.”

Sherry says, “But how is that going to help Cutch?”

Oomph says, “And how is helping Cutch going to help us?”

Then we see the sun is coming up. Who knows, maybe we helped it. And we get back to bed.

From her bed Sherry says, very soft, “The climate of Puerto Rico is very mild.”

From hers Oomph says, even softer, “Thank you for trying, Queenie. But I
saw
them.”

In mine, I sit straight up. I’m
talking.
“Oh, happy, happy, happy!” I yell. “I’m not happy anymore.”

HARK
!

Dead wrong of course, the next morning
.

Dead wrong now—oh

But tenderly

Heel and toe

And all night

“Dead dead wrong” sings my little banjo And in no mood to be right!

All along, bo,

To join humanity, Joe,

All you have to do is be wrong—

That’s the song, that’s the jive—
dwba, dwba—

Dead wrong but alive!

(from the musical
Queenie
—
An Old-fashioned Girl of Today
—copyright Raphael & Rey)

THE MINUTE WE WRITE
that last line, Giorgio says I must get out of bed at once, and cable it home. He says if everybody our age could just cable that, even from around the corner, their families would be satisfied. Truth is always best, he says. And they will be so glad to know that we too are stuck with it.

“Youth is our real crime,” he yawns, leaning back. “And they are in constant agony, at no longer committing it.”

So I get up and go downstairs, which in any island hotel in our part of the world is never far. Cabling home is a luxury I never tire of—how the truth must be piling up on Fifty-Seventh Street! English negligees make me feel lavish too. Italian sandals for the scorpions; a note for civilization—it’s the leather they bite. Inner cables to myself are piling up everywhere.

And in the center is my little turned American head. Which thanks to one man’s talent, plus an enormous number of what seem to be perfectly okay credit cards—someone is at last helping me turn.

So I write the cable as suggested. Adding only, “And in the Hotel Bienvenida.”

Since there are dozens of those on this continent, the clerk advises more info under “Sender.”

I add, “And in bed.”

Giorgio says you dream what you get.

Because one morning back at the college, couple months after the grieve-in, I wake up and know I am right! From the beginning. A happy childhood can be tranquilized. Personal despair is what counts. But a world-soul simply will not stick with it. And from what I suspect—in this connection unhappy childhoods are not far behind.

I can’t ask the girls for sure, because morning is actually four o’clock though sunny, and they’ve already gone.

Oomph to Delaware, to one of her father’s weddings.

Sherry to stay with Cutch’s parents and meanwhile organizing committees for compassionate visiting, until she can get into prison herself.

It’s Easter and everybody except the housemaids has gone. Christ has risen, and they are cleaning the dorm. With fumigants and vacuum pumps.

…I can hear Oomph last week, wondering if what she has found in her pants is one of the ichneumonidae. She was in my zoo class and assimilated very quickly. I can still hear Sherry scratch…

I am alone with my ghosts. And I wonder if we three will ever meet again in our lifetime. I have a premonition. Maybe it has all gone bust and I am educated? Too soon. And with nobody around worth a damn to tell it to.

But if I don’t want to die a louse’s death, I better hike on home.

So I shoulder my strap-bag, and start walking. Because the bag hasn’t a cent in it.

Oomph borrows. I lend. Sherry takes.

Usually she leaves me a token. But I bear no umbrage. We’re a commune—in a pinch they would do the same for me, again. With us, giving is taking.

And taking is giving. If you don’t understand that about us, you don’t understand anything.

I walk purposely slow. I’m going home in reverse. To seek my fortune there. And breaking in Oomph’s fifty-dollar, bought-for-the-wedding shoes. She looked under the bed, but not under the covers, where I was wearing them.

In my bag is a critique on me from the Registrar.

Confidential, and not to me. But in the spring, when the establishment starts mumbling to itself, we all feel an obligation to ransack the files.

“Miss Raphael is a precocious young woman”—I’ll say, straight A’s, B’s and C’s without working!—“who has not yet adjusted to college life.” Who they are talking to, we have never yet found out.

But Sherry’s comment is a comfort to me. “In that position college is only an adjective. The noun is life.”

So at about 110th Street, I drop a tear for her, into my own handkerchief. Which is wrapped around her new passport I already feel she gave me. She won’t be needing it in prison. Besides, the name on it is fake. She looked everywhere for it except inside Oomph’s shoes.

So, penniless and anonymous, I find myself at the north entrance of the park.

I’m the perfect candidate for suicide, but to my temperament that type of despair is not personal enough.

I’m also the perfect murderee. That isn’t me, that’s American parks.

So I decide to play Russian roulette with myself, and walk through. On a strictly fair bet with the cosmos, already checked out with the I Ching.

If attempt is made, I plan to offer up the diamond I happen to have concealed in a Tampax. Hoping to be quick enough on the draw so my attacker won’t think it’s a bomb.

Ordinarily, that kind of stash is safe enough in your bag. But I had a feeling last night those girls were desperate.

My bargain with myself is: If I’m murdered, I will never confess again. That’s what the I Ching says too.

But if I come out safe on the park’s south border, it will be a sign the stars think I should take my habit abroad.

Because what’s really bugging me is that I’ve run out of interlocutors…

People to report to, imaginary or otherwise. Life enhancers! Father-images who can’t talk back, even to the most original sin…

So from Ninety-Seventh Street, and way deep into the Ramble, I am very preoccupied.

First off, I am practicing my draw. Only in mime, of course. Each time adding a quick kneel-and-plea-for-mercy routine from my old acting class at Deforming.

Going along, I work up quite a little improvisation. Those are probably the most Phaedre-like gestures ever to be produced in a park.

Meanwhile, I’m progressing southward steadily. And though by now I’m deep in muggerland, and prospective knife artists and rapesters flit by, not a one draws near me.

Because all the time, up hill and down dale—I am also interviewing interlocutors. For the purpose of speaking boldly to the empty air in full Stanislavsky scope, the bird sanctuary is really beautiful.

…I try out Mao, Tito, the Shah of Iran, even a few female personalities in case a member of the Mayor’s antidiscrimination committee is walking her wolfhounds—all of them on the principle that now I’ve been through the deity, the church and university, the only interlocutors left to me are in public life. But I get all the way to the Children’s Zoo, which is still pretty safe even if you’re unaccompanied by one, and not a single notable works out…