Authors: Elizabeth Hand
“Oh yeah? Isn’t that against the law?”
I stopped, my hands clenched at my sides, and realized that I was furious; that I was ready to pop him one. But then I looked up and saw him starting to laugh.
“Not
too
defensive, huh?” He shook his head.
“I
always thought it was romantic. I mean, nobody ever killed herself for
me.
”
“He didn’t kill himself for
me,
Dylan! He was crazy! Nowadays they’d probably have diagnosed him as some kind of latent schizophrenic. Back then we all just thought it was too much drugs.”
“Well, still, no one ever carried a torch for
me
for twenty years—”
“Nineteen, kiddo. And give ‘em time.” I sighed in exasperation, but just then a woman in a white caftan strolled down between the rows of flowers, ringing a small brass bell.
“We’re closing,” she called in a low voice. “Five o’clock, we’re closing.” And passed on, her bell sending its cool clear notes into the greenery.
Like the hidden revelers in some Shakespearean romance, figures suddenly appeared from between stands of foxgloves, from beneath staked towers of delphiniums and the fragrant clouds of roses. We followed them to the main gate, and headed down the gravel drive to R Street.
At the gate the woman with the bell stood, smiling and nodding as we all filed out. When at last Dylan and I passed through she called a final, “Good evening.” Then she pulled the gates closed. A lone guard locked the great curved iron arch. Dylan and I stood blinking in the golden sunlight of the street. I felt as though I had dreamed the entire afternoon: the honeyed light, the smell of roses and honeysuckle, Dylan himself. I yawned, rubbing my eyes. When I glanced around, all the other visitors had disappeared. We were once more alone.
“Well, I guess we could think about dinner now,” I suggested. “Or cocktails. It’s five.”
“I’m not old enough to drink.”
“But you do?”
He grinned. “On special occasions.”
“Well, consider this a
very
special occasion—”
We walked down to Wisconsin Avenue and caught a cab to Mamma Desta’s, a dinky little restaurant in a dicey part of town that had the best Ethiopian food in the city. The place was little more than a storefront with a handful of Formica tables lit by fluorescent lights, and two ceiling fans spinning dizzyingly fast overhead. We shoved into a corner table and Mamma Desta herself came out and took our orders, a tiny cheerful woman with frizzy greying hair and a bloodstained chef’s apron. We ate with our fingers, food so hot we could watch beads of sweat pop out on our cheeks.
Tibs, zilzil wat,
bits of spiced meat and vegetable and sauce sopped up by spongy thick white pancakes that looked like foam insulation. We drank
tej,
sweet honey wine served in globular glasses like alembics. I had never been able to knock back more than one or two of these—too sweet, the taste of honey too unfamiliar—but that evening it went down like water, after all that hot food and the unsettling experience of meeting Dylan.
“My mother says that in ancient Crete they embalmed their dead in honey,” he remarked, rolling a bit of
injera
between his fingers. “They’d curl up the corpses and put them into big clay jars and bury them.”
“Ugh. Thanks for sharing, Dylan.”
“And sometimes to torture a prisoner, they’d stick him in a vat of olive oil and leave him there, so eventually his flesh would just melt away. And they raised vipers, and used their venom as a hallucinogen—”
“Dylan.
I am trying to
eat.”
“I thought you were an anthropologist. I thought you’d
like
to know these things.”
“I’m an
armchair
anthropologist. I like to look at pictures of colorful peoples, I like to eat in exotic restaurants I can reach by cab from my home, I like to purchase my voodoo masks from The Artifactory and get my clothes at Banana Republic.”
“So I guess watching dawn break over the Great Pyramid at Cheops is out, huh?”
“Dylan, I don’t even have a passport. I’ve
never
had a passport. I mean, your mother—she leads the life I always wanted to lead. She’s been to all these places, she’s unearthed things in Crete and Italy and god knows where. And me, it’s hard for me to find my shoes in the morning. She has all these theories about civilization, and
I’m
a civil servant.”
I picked up my globe of
tej
and smiled bitterly. “I mean, I
wanted
to do the stuff she does, but somehow I never did. Sometimes I feel like the prince in one of those Russian fairy tales—you know, the guy whose soul is stolen by the witch, and he spends his life in a coma while Baba Yaga is out there watching dawn break at Cheops.”
Dylan was silent. I thought I must have angered him, talking about Angelica like that; but suddenly I didn’t care anymore. I was tired and drunk and probably had sunstroke, I was exhausted by the effort of trying to carry on a conversation with someone who not only didn’t remember the day Kennedy died, he didn’t remember the day Sid Vicious died. “I think it’s time to call it a night, kiddo,” I said, and motioned for the check.
Outside it was dusk, cars and passersby and crumbling buildings all cloaked in a blue-black haze. The sky was like one of those paintings on velvet, violet streaked with yellow and red, lurid yet also soft, and the smells of cumin and cayenne and coriander spilled out into the street with us, mingling with the putrid scents of rotting gingko fruit and stagnant water.
“We’re going to have a hard time getting a cab here,” I said, glancing down the street. “It’s not a great neighborhood—”
“I’ll
get you a cab,” Dylan said. He stepped to the curb, his effort at gallantry somewhat marred by his stumbling gait. I started to say something about walking over a few blocks, but he had already raised his arm.
As though he had summoned it from the underworld, a Yellow Cab came roaring up, its front wheel scoring the edge of the curb as Dylan and I jumped back.
“Step inside, step inside,” called a rumbling voice.
Dylan looked at me and burst out laughing. “Wow! I’ll have to try that in Rome sometime—” He yanked the cab door open and gestured extravagantly
“Λprès-toi, mademoiselle.”
I slid into the cab, the seats warm as skin, the air smelling like Pine-Sol. Dylan sat beside me, so close our thighs touched. A broad-shouldered figure turned to look back at us, his hands resting lightly on the wheel.
“Where to, my man?”
I gasped.
“Where’re we going, Sweeney?” asked Dylan. But I couldn’t say anything, only stare at the cabdriver, his license dangling from the rearview mirror.
Yellow Cab Number 393, with its neatly patched seat backs and glove compartment cracked open ever-so-slightly, so that you could just make out the gleaming barrel of a gun inside, hidden in a nest of yellowing newspaper clippings covered with shadowy images of Cassius Clay and Sugar Ray and a square-jawed young black man beautiful enough to be a movie star.
“My man?” the driver repeated gently.
It was Handsome Brown.
“Uh—the Hill, we’re going to 19 Ninth Street Northeast—”
“No
—” Dylan suddenly leaned forward. “Take us down around the Washington Monument. Just drive around for a while; I’ve never been here before.”
Handsome Brown looked at me, his eyebrows raised. “Is that what the lady wants?” he rumbled.
“Yes,” Dylan said, before I could protest. He took my hands, pulled me gently but irresistibly to him. “So you never saw the pyramids,” he said. “So we’ll go look at an obelisk.”
“Fine,” I said hoarsely.
“Very good, very good. I’ll have to charge you extra zones, my man, taking the grand tour like that.”
“Whatever you say,” said Dylan.
He took us through that warren of back streets and narrow alleys that only Handsome Brown had ever known, labyrinthine precincts of the city that I had seen years before, with Oliver dozing in the cab beside me and an unfinished bottle of Pernod in my lap. Embattled tenements behind their chain link fences; neat little row houses where old women sat fanning themselves with copies of
The Watchtower;
side streets rank with the gingko’s shattered fruit.
Then we were cruising down Embassy Row, past mansions with battlements and minarets and towers, fake Tudor facades and Moorish splendors and crepe myrtles blooming everywhere in explosive bursts of magenta and rose. Handsome Brown said nothing, only turned up the radio. It was tuned to a station that played nothing but the lushest most soul-melting ballads, Al Green and Teddy Pendergrass and Prince wailing heartbreak like the world was going to end at midnight. Every now and then Handsome Brown’s face would fill the rearview mirror as he glanced back at us, unsmiling but his eyes keen as blades.
I stared out my window, biting my lip and trying more than anything not to see him there beside me, though I could feel him and if the music died, I could hear his snores and his even breathing. There was a ghost there in the purple darkness, his long hair slipping around his shoulders like black rain and his white shirt undone at the throat, there were
two
ghosts—Oliver and myself, circling the city forever while outside the night deepened and distant laughter rose from the Tidal Basin—
The Beautiful Ones, they hurt you every time
I felt as though my heart would break, my eyes filled with tears even as I smiled bitterly—so this was what it was like to get old, you rode around in taxicabs and cried when you heard Prince on the radio …
“Sweeney,”
I heard a low voice whisper.
“I’ll love you next time. I promise.”
And silently I wept. Because of course there would never be a next time. There had never even been a first time; and I moved closer to the window so that Dylan wouldn’t see me crying.
After a minute or two I stopped. I wiped my eyes and hoped there wasn’t mascara all over my face. We were downtown. Cab 393 slipped between the other cabs flowing past the White House, like caravels around a royal barge, then headed for the Mall.
“It’s so beautiful,” Dylan said softly. “And it’s so
small.
Even the worst parts of it only go on for a few blocks.”
“It’s worse now than it used to be—now you’ve got all these crack houses, and gangs, people getting shot everywhere. It’s just different now.” I sighed. “I guess everything is different now.”
The cab moved smoothly past the Monument, the museums in the distance and above all of it the Capitol, the City on the Hill. I could feel Dylan beside me, his warmth and the sweet soapy smell of his sweat. I stared resolutely out the window, pretending interest in the tourists in front of the Lincoln Memorial, gazing at the great sad giant entombed within.
“Maybe it’s good that it’s different,” Dylan whispered. “Maybe it’s better …”
He put his hand on my shoulder and gently turned me to him. For an instant I tried to resist, then gave up. I was staring into his sea blue eyes, his sunburned face spangled with green and crimson from the traffic lights outside. He wasn’t smiling, there was nothing mocking in his gaze, nothing playful at all. He was staring at me as though he had never seen me before; he was looking at me as I imagined Angelica had looked upon Keftiu so long ago. As though he saw something in me long dreamed of, something he had hardly dared hope to find. I could feel his other hand on my thigh, his fingers burning through the coarse linen, his fingers trembling as they pulled the fabric taut, and then he drew me to him and I was gone. My fingers tangled in his long hair and I could feel him all around me, his arms pulling me close until I could hear the roaring of his heart as he kissed me and I wasn’t thinking of Oliver anymore, I wasn’t thinking how different we both were, how young he was or who his mother had been, I wasn’t thinking of anything at all except for Dylan, Dylan, and how I would have waited another twenty years for him, a hundred, a thousand. I would wait forever for him, now that I knew he was there.
B
ABY JOE MET HER
in a Manhattan bar called Chumley Peckerwood’s, a garishly lit franchised strip club where a visiting executive on an expense account could drop a grand for a steak and a few margaritas and a blond lap dancer from Massapequa named Tiffany Gayle.
“Hey, Annie,” Baby Joe murmured, hugging her. “God, you feel good.”
“Baby Joe …” She was surprised at how quickly the tears came; just as quickly she blinked them back. “I’m—I’m so sorry I missed Hasel’s funeral. I was touring and I couldn’t take off—I’m not big enough that I can get away with that—”
He made a dismissive gesture, slid into the booth, and sniffed her club soda. “Ugh.” Grimacing, he beckoned a waitress. “Double vodka martini. And bring her one too.”
Annie started to protest but he waved her off. “It’ll put some hair on your head. So. Angie’s found you.”
Annie felt her chest contract. “How did you know?” She sank into her corner of the booth, shrinking like Alice into burgundy leather.
‘“Cause you wouldn’t be caught dead in a place like this, unless you were drunk or crazy or in very deep shit.” He took his drink from the waitress, cast her an appraising look as she handed Annie her martini, then downed his in two gulps. “And I know you don’t drink, and you didn’t used to be crazy. So it’s got to be mondo poo-poo. And I’m thinking it’s got to be Angie.”
Baby Joe slid his empty glass back onto the tray and glanced at the waitress. “Two more.” He turned back to Annie. “I’m waiting.”
“We-ell.”
She took a deep breath. Every few months Baby Joe called her, but Annie hadn’t actually
seen
him in years. He’d grown into an imposing figure: big and broad-shouldered, with a body that should have run to fat but so far had not. His hair hung to his shoulders, straight and very, very black. His deconstructed suit jacket was black, too, except for where the lining showed, as were his trousers and the T-shirt that read
JELLY BISHOPS
in tiny white letters. A pair of cheap plastic sunglasses was shoved into the thick hair above his forehead. He looked like a bellicose young
capo
in whatever the Filipino analog of the Mafia might be; though there was a weariness to his gaze she didn’t recall, a sorrow she could see mapped in the lines around his dark eyes and mouth.