Queenie (5 page)

If he could only have been on the roof with us all earlier that afternoon, I’m sure he’d’ve caught on to what’s happened to me; I’ve already found that if I breathed deep, crossed my thighs and closed my eyes, I can all but repeat the sensation. But never quite….I never can make it alone, Miss P. I’m just not queer for myself…

“I found out too,” I said. “What I asked you last time what it felt like. Only, not alone.” I only mean it kindly, in the interests of international knowledge…Double agents for the universe, that’s what we females are, aren’t we…? “It’s like—one of those underground explosions, isn’t it?” And when he doesn’t answer, I say, “At least it is, from the female side.” I think I hear him breathing.

“Who’s the guy?” Giorgio says.

“Oh——” He’s going to be right out of our manual from then on, but I don’t catch—it must take training so these explosions don’t muddle the brain. “It was only halfway, really.” How can I explain? “One of the art guests was around, and I—I never even got his name.”

“Why you little c——” He shops short.

But I can fill it in.

How did we two end up screaming at each other; kids who’d been so close? Simple. Only virgins can talk to each other like we’d been. Experience shuts your trap. For that matter, only virgins talk. If we don’t make out with each other from now on, it’s going to be perversion all right. So we are only keening over the end of an innocent friendship. And the language we have for it is excellent.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” I yell. “What do I care how you say things—it’s inhibiting!” He’s insulted me. Without improving my taste. “What do I care if. there’s a hundred sixty ways to refer to a twat!” Knowing them wasn’t going to change the construction of mine. Or Martyne’s. “Mint juleps!” I say. “That—” I couldn’t think of a single better word he didn’t know of “—
dope.
”

“Well anyway, I’m not one of her cousins,” says Giorgio.

In the silence I think I heard his heavy breathing; he must have thought it was me. Then he says, “We both went for it home-style, see Queenie? That’s why we’re so burned.”

And that’s why you leave home.

“How do you know how I go for it?” I say bitterly. How did I?

Right away we want to say it to them, don’t we: if you had to screw somebody, why couldn’t it’ve been me?

Maybe he hears it. “I’ll rap with you, Queenie. A guy has to lose his cherry, he takes what’s convenient, mightn’t be his choice.”

“If you could’ve screwed who you wanted——” I say, tremolo, “who would’ve you?”

“Ah—you know,” he says, after a pause. A male rapping with you is a male already half out the door.

“Woo?” I say, softer than swansdown. “Tell me, woo?”

“Well you know, natch—who wouldn’t? Is that you breathing?”

I make a sound like it is. I thought it was.

“Well natch, well okay—” he says. He’s an honest boy, remember? “Aurine.”

On which the phone itself opens up on us, like the house eunuch taking over, “
TEKLA? YOU VISH TO KNOW VARE IS YOUR BYOOTY-BOY? OOPSTAIRS, VIT DER GIRL. TALKING FOOK.”

It’s the chimp, of course, on the phone downstairs. Then pounding up them.

The three of them follow after like a flight of aging angels to the rescue, of us two of course—they’ve seen Bergman movies too. Tekla arrives first, with the adrenalin of love, then Aurine, lightly, since she runs up and down four times a day for her hamstrings’ sake. Then Oscar, puffing, but with a gesture my aunt and I are proud of; he’s got the homburg in his grasp at last.

It’s the chimp’s head. In that position or not, its explanations make everybody furious. Seems he’s a real bishop, not that Aurine cares, though she blackmarks Tekla plenty later for not knowing it. Seems he was only trying to phone his synod or something—“The Missouri Synod, Mrs. Selwyn.”

Oscar says we are not from Missouri; she says she is not Mrs. Selwyn, both on the same breath.

All this time I’ve been letting the phone dangle in front of me, for my dignity’s sake. Also to let Giorgio hear—kind of our last conversation. But now I hang up quick. Seems the chimp wants to
marry
Tekla.

She’s not used to it. She beat him up.

Later I get four cards from Giorgio, who the next week ran off to Latin America, taking up his father’s family’s offer to be the princely heir; his father never married without a settlement. One card twice a year. The first one says, “I couldn’t see myself in Rio still with my cherry, that’s why.” The next one says, “I’m letting my heredity work out for me. Down here, it’s only money.” The one after that says, “How you coming these days, Queenie?” I never answer. Not even the last one, which says, “Still think of you. See you in somebody’s bathroom, sometime.”

What can I answer, with a time lag like I’ve got? Sixteen, seventeen and still
asking
. One thing he and I don’t need to ask; we’ve learned it together. Pornography, it’s just recipes. That you never get to taste. Maybe I’ll send him a friendly card though, when I leave here. Saying “Who can learn to be outrageous at home?”

But if you’re a girl—and of a certain breeding, Miss P.—where do you go?

…Once it was simple, wasn’t it? Poor girls, provincial girls, perverted ones—Oscar says they all raise hell much the same way. But the poor can go into politics now. And where are the provinces? And if you’re a nymphy—who’s looking? And where are all the better men anyway? Not paying. So what bright girl would want to be an old-fashioned whore? On the street or in a house, or even on the telephone? It’s a suburban thing now, for your afternoon kicks.

Also, my background for it is especially unfortunate. Aurine, Tekla, all of them, even Martyne—I could never face the girls…

So, in a few minutes, I’ll get up, step through the French window over to where I hear Oscar and Aurine at their tea-murmuring, and ask a question or two. Foster or real, they keep up the pretense parents do—that they’re my elders. Which means they’ll try to answer anything. A child’s role, as any kid knows, is to keep asking, for the impossible explanation; I’ve played it long enough. Not to deceive them, only not to trouble them. With what won’t excite them like it does me. The plain fact is—I’m no longer that young.

I’ve caught on that asking can be a way of telling. “Where else better can I go,” I’ll say to Aurine, “to learn to be outrageous
individually
?” And to Oscar, “How can I bear to leave either of you?” Meaning—I’ve left.

…So, here it is, Miss P., all my background. When you’re talking about yourself, don’t you have to tell everything, especially when it will affect your whole life? Except of course in a love situation. But even there, it’s better if women confide only to women. Where it doesn’t really matter in the end, Aurine says, since all women on the subject of men say the same thing.

So, I’m making up a letter to be sent to a woman’s college only. In fact only to you, Miss Piranesi. In fact your college is my first choice because of you.

“…Just these forms,” you said, handing me them. “And a personal letter.” You couldn’t have known the impression you made—nonsense, of course you do. A college that can have you for admissions head—in pants, false eyelashes and a Courrèges belt—must be something. You’ve made the best of yourself, and with the material you had to work with, that didn’t take much doing.

“Personal?” I say. “How do you mean?”

“However
you
mean it,” you say with a smile. Orthidonture, you’ve had it. From God, and from the Italians. “What you want to study, and why maybe. And of course, why you want to do it here.”

Then you have to talk on the phone; those three rings on your left hand might mean anything. I think you’re probably capable of anything, but will choose with care. That’s my aim, Miss Piranesi, too.

“Short or long?” I say when you hang up. “The letter.” You get up then, with a patient smile, and I see you really havn’t seen me yet. You see so many. So my mettle is up; usually people see me when I want them to.

“In good or bad faith?” I say—a catchword of Oscar’s.

That stops her. Maybe she notices my Dior scarf, I made it myself. “Lies or truth?” she says. I nod with my eyelids only, like her. I’m a quick study. She sees that. Is the ring she twiddles a wedding one, or only antique?…Anyway, you were interested, weren’t you. “People generally lie,” you said….

But I’m not people, Miss P. I’m not even the younger generation, and I don’t know anybody my age who thinks he is. Down to the kids just born, there’s always somebody younger. Maybe
you’re
it, Miss P.—about thirty-six, I’d say, looking ten years less. You’d do well in the profession, Miss P., maybe just a leetle more lemon juice on the elbows. And I know your name isn’t Piranesi, just my joke. Any letter I’ll send to the real name of course, with some high-class fudgeroo answers to “Describe your background, your aims, and what you expect to get from your study at this institution.” You can hang it on the wall, to cool trustees with. But to you—this is personal:

Who I began as doesn’t bother me—it’s what am I going to be? What I am now, I already like; I can’t help liking—some parts of a happy childhood you can’t escape. But how do I make it from here? It’s like what every girl wants to know about her rear, is it shaped like a
poire
or a
pomme;
I don’t want to have to wait until I’m twenty-something, to look back and find out.
Somebody’s got to tell me now.

“Queenie has a question,” Oscar always says.

Queenie has. Like: Do I have to go on protecting Oscar and Aurine from the way the world is now—or do I break in and tell them? Like: Shall I join the profession while I still can with a very big bang, being a virgin? Or just fuck my way around for the experience? Like: Don’t you really get to know where you’re going by going there?

I want to go to a college where I can get the answers to questions like this! And I’ll pursue any course of study recommended. The world’s got us girls coming and going, Miss P. Question is: Which ought to be first? Or can they ever be simultaneous? I know I’m old-fashioned; I was brought up to believe love isn’t everything. And to use every wit I have, which frankly is considerable. But natch, that isn’t intellect. On the admissions curve, where does that get me?

Please let me in, Miss Piranesi. I know rapping about what
I
want isn’t the aim requested. But I’ve got one the college should be interested in; I don’t want to drop out of things; I want to drop
up
. Far and wide. Meanwhile, here I am signaling. Letting me in will be letting me out. And of course I wanna meet men, the kind who don’t know Oscar, and Aurine wouldn’t want me to. I hear a lot of men go to college who can’t pay. This is Queenie coming and going. This is me—in good and bad faith. Personally, I don’t see any harm in not lying.

Oh happy, happy, happy! In the end, don’t be surprised if I do everything.

W
ELL, I GET THERE
, Father. And thank you for your note. But does any other nice New York girl of today, wanting to go where I do, ever have such a thing with her folks over it?—like I’m a Gibson girl wanting out to a bordello, from the Newport château. Or have to go through the social occasions I have? Once my aunt and uncle decide to do anything, they do it in style.

First, a soiree at Uncle Oscar’s, as not only the man who’s kept my Aunt Aurine and me for the last twenty years in the style she’s accustomed him to, but also as my legal guardian.

Then a staff party, in the ancestral Ninth Avenue restaurant that Aurine herself is a bastard daughter of, and that Oscar and I secretly think she still owns.

And finally, a blowout from all the crowd who’ve known me since my cradle, which is in fact the two-hundred-dollar lace-flounced bassinet they gave me. All Aurine’s girl friends of her youth, plus the men who keep them.

But first I have to get Aurine and Oscar to agree to let me go. Oh, we all three know I’ll go anyway, if I have to. But that is not the style of our house. Whose philosophy of love, and i the love life, I’ve never yet quarreled with. And may never—I just have to find out for myself. We’re a loving trio; our only differences began at my birth. For no matter who I was born to, sixteen years ago, Aurine and Oscar couldn’t help already being respectively twenty-something and forty-something at the time.

So are they ahead of me or behind; who’s in whose backyard? None of us knows the answer. But we all go at it like soldiers—the business of working the two of them round so as they can pretend to see eye to eye with me. And, in the end, it’s like they’re only cutting the scarlet ribbons, smashing a bottle of Piper Heidsieck over my bows—no, there’s a small château brand that’s even better, said Oscar—and by the dawn’s early light over Fifty-Seventh-and-penthouse-Seventh Avenue, putting me out to sea. Seaworthy and beautiful as they can make me.

But like with any two unmarried persons who’ve reared their girl according to principle, it’s maybe a toss-up whether college isn’t the worst that can happen to me. Worse than a bordello, in one way. They’re afraid of my getting married, of course.

That is, my aunt is passionately against all the things marriage doesn’t do for a beautiful girl—to keep her beautiful, and a girl. Dear Oscar, like any uncle who just possibly may be the girl’s father, is beginning to get pompous about it. Once upon a time, he gave my mother, Aurine’s dead twin, a diamond so notable it’s been left in a vault under my name through all our vicissitudes, and in the first flush years after, he also gave my aunt hunks of her own that she is free to hock at any time. Plus besides his friend Sam Newber says, “Years of morganatic devotion to a queen who won’t make a king of him.” But Aurine says Oscar’s only like any smart man who knows the legalized evil in the hearts of men. And won’t acknowledge what a smart woman can do about it.

He’s beginning to think any daughter of his shouldn’t be kept.

…I’m meanwhile remembering that time I was eight, hearing old Billy Batong, dead now, purchaser of that year’s finest filly at the Saratoga auctions, mourning to Oscar that the era of great ladies of beauty is gone by. With each new horse, Billy used to acquire a new mistress. “War’s ended women like that; men are putting their money into
wives
.” And how I run wailing out to Oscar’s apartment and upstairs to the penthouse he keeps my aunt and me in, bearing the dread news, with a question which has since become a family joke: “Oh Aurine, why do there have to be wars!” I remember every time since, that I’ve asked it. And each of her answers. Which are never quite to the point, yet are.