I left the sadomasochist dump with a girl from the south of France named Simone. She was wearing a tight blue dress with red wine spilled down the front of it. She was so drunk, she didn’t care. “Fuck it,” she kept saying in English, “you know?” The tattooed doorman called out an endearment to us as we emerged from his cave. “Fuck it!” she yelled. The club was on a tiny alley that smelled of interesting piss, but one block over, glamorous traffic ran biliously. Papillon, pee, pee, pee. We linked arms and walked. Simone was talking about her new boyfriend, but I didn’t listen. I was thinking about Lisa’s shame at Naxos, trying to gloat. But Alex was right: Even a young girl’s shame can be beautiful. The naked man in the club crawled on the floor, looking for his shame, starving for it. Locked out of life and trying to crawl back through a tunnel made of shame. Yanking his dead dick in reverence for a life he couldn’t have. I looked up at the sky. Gnats sparkled in the flickering light of a broken street lamp. Plunged into dark, then dancing for joy, over and over again. Alain hadn’t even looked at me. Just flicked the ice in my face.
Simone raised her arm and stopped a taxi. The driver had
a great bony jaw and hairy brows and lightning coming out of his forehead. Simone gave the address of a nightclub and he drove like a charioteer, war arm manning the wheel. I sank back in the dark seat.
By spring, my father and I had succeeded; we had made an open space. I got S’s and even A’s. I spent more of my French money to take a class in the spring semester. I made friends with kids who liked it that I seemed stuck-up. They liked it even better that I was an ex-model who’d gotten kicked in the ass. “Models are stupid cows,” said a girl named Denise, and I said, “Yeah, they are.” She blinked her big heavy eyes and looked at me curiously.
Denise was even taller and thinner than I was. Her round face and huge frantic hair sat atop her fleshless body like a large flower on a drooping stalk. She acted like she was too good for everything. She acted like everything had hurt her and used her, and that this made her superior. But she was nice. She was the kind of person who’d hold your head while you were puking and not mention it later. She almost made me believe in living like music again, just because of the way she’d hunch and rock herself and slowly bring her cigarette hand from knee to lip and back; it was like acoustic guitar on a scratchy record. Her boyfriend, Jeff, was also slim and slouching with a friendly pouchy face and sweet litde lips that he pursed and nervously bit. Then there was Sheila, small and royal, with lush bags under her bitter eyes, narrow hips, and tiny breasts. And huge square-shaped Ed, who’d first invited me to share a joint with them behind the Student Union.
Behind the Student Union were a field of blue weeds and a half-built playground made of a swingless swing set, a rotted little merry-go-round, and a plastic red cube with half the red worn off. Water flashed from a rusted pipe in a little ditch. There were fireflies in the deepening sky. The traffic droned in the distance. It was a place of effaced sweetness, and we went to it every day to smoke and talk. After dark, Ed drove me home in his rattling car with its mad turn signal and tape deck full of surly love. His tape sang about a bridge of sighs like a drunk giant pushing a boulder up a mountain. A weird thunder of bells rumbled in the valley. Clouds flew by. I sank back in the dark. In Paris, the taxi dodged cars, ran up over the curb, over the walls of buildings, through apartments, out the windows, up over the sky. A woman’s voice unscrolled and made a road in the sky for us to ride on. It was La Traviata on my father’s record player, flying across the sea to carry me.
A dark blur sails over thought. Veronica emerges. Is she here simply because now I am sick and alone? Yes—no. Candles burn behind her. A small plate of half-eaten cake sits before her. Rigoletto is playing. “He wasn’t a cunt,” she says. “He was a Ganymede. A beautiful boy, a jester.” Duncan bends over, reaching back with both hands to show his butt hole, naked except for little belled slippers and a striped belled hat. He grins over one shoulder. “The ‘Caro nome,
3
” says Veronica. Tears run down her face.
kissed Ed on the cheek and got out of the car. In the house sat
my father, drinking beer and waiting for dinner. La Traviata was
on the record player. I said hi and walked through the room. Sara was in the dining room, crouching an inch away from the Ty straining to hear over the music. My mother was in the kitchen, stirring a fragrant pot. How I loved her. How I didn’t know. La, Traviata filled the house with woman’s love. My tiny father sat in his tiny chair while the singer’s giant voice took
over his house. She sang of suffering and abasement. She sang of strength and love. Her voice made these feelings into great complex waves that opposed, then joined, then opposed one another again with a force that would’ve torn a lesser voice to pieces. My father’s eyes were glazed with concentration and his jaw moved rhythmically from side to side as his mind rose up the crest of one wave, then down the other, then back up, riding their impossible heights until they met in a crescendo of passionate joining. I padded indifferently through the room, on my way to the kitchen for something to eat.
The worms go in, the worms go out. Lisa had no voice, and she was not an artist. But she had done it, too. Alex had pried her open and bullied her, and somehow, she had caught the force of his bullying and joined it to her own force. She caught it at just the right moment, made it into something sexual. And she didn’t even know what she’d done. This is what Alex meant when he called her a “lady.” This is what Alain meant when he called me “cold.” I couldn’t do what Lisa had done. I was too hard. I walked through the room, glanced at my father’s music, glanced away. It wasn’t that I was stupid. I could hear what it meant. But I would not let it in. I would not let myself be broken.
“You’re different now,” said Sara. “You walk through the house like you’re alone on a beach. Like nobody’s there but you.”
Simone yelled, “Arrete!” and we spilled out in front of the club. La Traviata vanished into the dark. A regal woman with a fierce dog face held off the crowd. Simone dug in her purse for the cab fare. Two dirty young boys sauntered past. They slowed down, looking at the crowd. They had craning necks and rubbery faces full of gawking scorn. Something in me lighted up at the sight of them; they were like New Jersey boys. The regal
dog at the door glowered at them and one of them laughed and shouted, “Kalaxonez ton con!” Somebody laughed. “What did he say?” I asked Simone. The kid yelled again, “Petez des flames!”
She said, “ ‘Go honk your pussy.’ And ‘Go fart flames.’ ” The fierce dog waved to us and let us in.
At night, I went to strip-mall bars and apartment parties with my new friends. People crowded in, ready for anything. They yelled and drank and sang. Sheila turned into an imp, talking out the side of its mouth, her words a buzzing cloud that hovered above her like smoke. Jeff sat on the floor rolling joints and grinning and generally giving the impression that he was melting into a puddle of goo. Denise became the ringmistress, sitting spread-legged on the edge of the couch, cutting lines of coke with military precision. We drank and snorted until we turned into robots and root vegetables dancing and singing in litde pointed boots. Back from suffragette city! A guy with the face of a bloated sweet potato sang, “Hey, don’t lean on me, man,” and leaned into me hard. “Want to dance?” he slurred, and I shrank away so stiffly that he almost fell. You can’t afford the ticket, I thought, but he heard it like I’d yelled and he yelled back—“Oh pardonez bitch-ez!” Hoo ha! “With her lips that she’s always kissing at people, and her hair that she cream rinses!”—until Ed punched him in the face. The guy fell with one foot twisted under his skinny calf. Denise stood up so fast, she knocked down a bowl of goldfish. People roared with pleasure. The punched guy stood and ground a little dancing fish into the floor. He rubbed his face. “I’m sorry, man,” he said. “I just wanted to dance with her.” “Shut up,” said Ed. He turned to me. His dulled eyes and slack mouth came close. Beyond him was the body of the little fish, mashed except for its poor staring head. A girl walked by with a set mouth and fierce staring eyes with litde wet blobs of makeup underneath. Was this where I belonged? “I love you,” whispered Ed.
Go honk your pussy. I looked at the beautiful nightclub crowd, the smart French businesswomen with matching gold
jewelry, the models, the slouching playboys, the pretty boys and girls darting like minnows, and that’s what I thought. I thought it all night. I thought it at myself when I went to use the bathroom and saw my reflection in a mirror filled with female face* eyes made up smartly, but stupid with drunkenness, though sometimes shining nonetheless with intelligence at the very center. Lush fruits jumping down off a branch in human form and sauntering off.
Because it was hot and crowded in the apartment, Ed and I took some couch cushions and a sheet out onto the fire escape. I woke with the sun warming my eyeballs through the lids. The inside of my mouth was sore and sweet with alcohol. Compared to Alain or Jean-Paul, Ed was a very clumsy boy. He said he loved me, and all I could think of was the one who called me “bitch-ez.” But I said, “I love you, too.” Below us, beyond us, all around us, traffic ran.
Alain and Lisa walked in just as Simone and I were walking out. I looked at Lisa and instead of thinking, Go honk your pussy, I shouted it. Alain glared after me as if his face might break. “Petez des flames!” I screamed. It was two days later that I got home from a job and found he had changed the locks. Fifteen months later, I sat in Ed’s car in the A&P lot with a copy of Vogue on my lap, sobbing and clawing at it. Lisa was on the cover. She was stunning. “I hate her!” I screamed. “I hate all of them!”
Ed sneaked a hot slit-eyed look at Lisa. I screamed, tore the cover off the magazine, and threw it into the lot. A lumpy old man watched it scud across the asphalt. He gave me an irritated look. I hunched down in the seat and sobbed. Lumpy Man got in his car. Ed fiddled with his keys. “Why don’t you go to New York and be a model?” he asked. “You still could.”
“No,” I moaned. “No, never.”
“Then why don’t you go be a poet?”
“I’m not a poet, Ed.” I sat up and stopped crying. “Then why don’t you just go?”
The bus humps and huffs as it makes a labored circle around a block of discount stores and a deserted grocery. As the bus leans hard to one side, its gears make a high whinging sound, like we’re streaking through space. Looking beyond the stores, I glimpse green hills and a cross section of sidewalks with little figures toiling on them. Pieces of life packed in hard skulls with soft eyes looking out, toiling up and down, around and around. More distant green, the side of a building. The bus comes out of the turn and stops at the transfer point. It sags down with a gassy sigh. Every passenger’s ass feels its churning, bumping motor. Every ass thus connected, and moving forward with the bus. The old white lady across the aisle from me sits on her stiff haunches, eating wet green grapes from a plastic bag and peering out to see who’s getting on. The crabbed door suctions open. Teenagers stomp up through it, big kids in flapping clothes with big voices in flapping words. “Cuz like—whatcho look—you was just a—ain’t lookin’ at you!” The old lady does not look. But I can feel her taking them in. Their energy pours over her skin, into her blood, heart, spine, and brain. Watering the flowers of her brain. The bag of green grapes sits ignored on her lap. Private snack suspended for public feast of youth. She would never be so close to them except on the bus. Neither would I. For a minute, I feel sorry for rich people alone in their cars. I look down on one now, just visible through her windshield, sparkling bracelets on hard forearm, clutching the wheel, a fancy-pant thigh, a pulled-down mouth, a hairdo. Bits of light fly across her windshield. I can see her mind beating around the closed car like a bird. Locked in with privileges and pleasures, but also with pain.
Just a week before I got locked out of the apartment on rue du Temple, I saw something I still don’t understand. Without understanding, it has become the reason I can forgive Alain. It happened so early in the morning, it was still dark. I awakened to sounds from the kitchen—Alain’s night voice, plus frying butter. I got up and went down the hall. Alain was at the stove, his back to me. At the table was the man I had seen licking the floor at the sadomasochist club. He was sitting in my place. He was naked except for Alain’s coat, which was draped over him. Under the coat, he was like a skeleton with hair and dirt on it I could see the bottoms of his filthy feet and the rims of his toenails, thick and yellow as a dog’s. I stood at the door, invisible and dumb. He stared at me like he was staring into pitch-darkness. Alain turned from the stove; he held a plate with an omelette on it. He had made it with jam. He put the sweet plate gently before the skeleton. “There,” he said tenderly. “For you!” He pulled a chair out from the table and sat in it. “Go on!” he said. Alone in the dark, the creature ate, quickly and devouringly. Watching him eat was almost like watching him crawl, even though you didn’t have to see his balls or his ass. Like the German woman, he ate as if he could not taste. Lack of taste had made her indifferent to eating. It made him ravenous. It made him crawl on his hands and knees through the no taste, trying to find taste. Alain put his elbow on the table and leaned toward him, enrapt. He didn’t see or care when I turned and walked away.
Later, I called Jean-Paul to tell him what I had seen. He would know who the skeleton man was, I thought, and he might know why Alain would take him home and put him in my chair. There was so much music and laughter on his end of the line that it took a while for him to understand me.
“Ah,” he said finally. “It is hard to believe, but this man was once a very successful agent.”
“A modeling agent?”
“A long time ago, yes. I’ve heard that he was a friend of plain's father. But don’t tell him I said so, okay?”
This incident was so peculiar to me that I didn’t tell anyone about it for a long time. Veronica was the first person I told. We were working late in a conference room, wrapped in a membrane of office noise, the clicking and whirring of machines soothing and uniting like the rumbling bus.