In the Drink (25 page)

A lithe bewigged sapling in a red strapless evening dress and long black gloves, carrying a basket of flowers, sashayed in from stage left while the chorus line sank to its knees and hummed. The spotlight picked “her” out and sent the chorus into semi-darkness, where their teeth and white trousers glowed. She struck a pose, hand on jutting hip, and pouted at the audience as the key shifted to a brighter mode, “Winter kept us warm,” petulantly, as if she found the whole thing just
too annoying for words, “covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding a little life with dried tubers,” toss of the head and roll of the eyes at the audience, who laughed in a self-conscious ripple. The drum machine thudded; the voices of the chorus rose on a glissando to a high wail while the Hyacinth Girl gave a mock swoon and intoned with as much limp suburban jadedness as if she were recounting her latest junket to Miami: “I read, much of the night”—drumroll—“and go south in the winter.” She was finished, thank God: applause all around, followed by the quick pattering exit to stage left of her and her sailor-swains.

The stage went dark. The disco ball went dark. The “band” was silent. I whispered to William, “I like this part,” and he knocked his head against mine, meaning that he forgave me for being so irreverent, which caused me to swoon a little. My eyes fluttered shut, then opened to see an apparition, naked and blindfolded, walking from the rear of the stage toward us in the frank glare of one spotlight, striding with the remote casualness of a model on a runway on long, knob-kneed, spidery-coltish legs. There was a hush in the audience, silence. The figure walked surefootedly, with a calm, inward expression. A swelling of tears rose in my throat, and my heart beat a little faster: we beheld the perfect body: strong and young, lithe, curvaceous and muscular, with lovely high round breasts and a limp but shapely penis bobbing gently as she walked; she was somehow essentially female, despite her vestigial male baggage. A large, papier-mâché oyster shell opened in the footlights and she walked with grand sureness toward it, stepped into it and struck a pose. She stood for a moment as chords crashed one after another like wavelets, then as the tempo quickened and a darting little melody swam in, she stepped out of the shell and went over to the watchtower that loomed at stage left, a lifeguard’s chair draped in black cloth. She climbed the ladder and arranged
herself in the seat and turned her blindfolded face down toward the stage as if she could see everything that happened there, and would mete out judgment as she saw fit. Then the lights came up and the show continued with swirls of gold lamé and glittering platform shoes and silly tunes and sillier dance numbers, but I couldn’t take my eyes off Tiresias, sitting motionless on her throne. I was stunned by the fact of her. Even the dancing Tarot deck couldn’t distract me. What was her life like? What on earth did she do for a living? How did it feel to inhabit such a body?

At intermission, William and I stayed in our seats until most of the audience had wandered out to smoke and kibitz. “Want to go around the back?” I asked him.

“Sure,” he said. We snuck out a side door and skirted the outside of the building. The rain had stopped for now; the heavy red fog over the city gave way high overhead to a clear sky and the light of an almost-full moon. Toward the rear of the lot we stumbled on a little garden amid empty crack vials and broken glass. We wiped rainwater off wrought-iron chairs and pulled them over to a low table, sat down and put our feet up. The lights of a rapidly moving boat skimmed upriver, headed for the Bronx. The island of Manhattan lay just across the river.

“That’s pretty shocking, about Gus,” I said.

“He’s taking that multi-pill cocktail, every four hours around the clock. It’s like having a newborn infant to feed.”

“How long has he known?”

“Eight months.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone. It just slipped out.”

“He does this whole AIDS melodrama and he doesn’t want anyone to know he’s positive?”

“He thinks it would make people feel sorry for him, and he doesn’t want that to color their view of his work.”

“Ecchhh,” I said, but under my breath so he wouldn’t hear.

“I remember when Stella was still Steve,” he said. “She’s an old friend of Gus’s, I think they went to high school together or something. Gus said she was a real jock back then.”

“Tiresias is supposed to be old,” I said.

“Well, maybe Gus couldn’t find an old pre-op transsexual.” He leaned back and looked up at the sky. “Remember that time when your mother got into a fistfight with the visiting shrink?”

“Oh, God, what made you think of that?” She’d punched a red-faced, shambling bear one night after too many schnapps or whatever the hell she drank, just because he’d had the temerity to ask her if she’d like to have a drink with him in his motel room. “You think I’m as obnoxious as she is?”

“Obnoxious?” He looked startled, as if he hadn’t been thinking along these lines at all.

“She has a bug up her ass about men.”

“Well, from what I’ve heard about your father, she had good reason. Charles Kirby. Isn’t a kirby a miniature cucumber?”

“What do you have against my father?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I should talk.”

“You honestly think I’m like my mother? Please say no.”

“Actually, no. In fact—” He cleared his throat, paused a moment while I waited in agony, then said, “She’s pretty bitter, isn’t she? And you’re—”

“Say it.”

“I’ve always thought of you as essentially untouched. Even though you’ve slutted yourself around the block three or four times—”

“William!”

“—you haven’t lost that quality that you’ve had ever since you were a kid.”

“What quality?”

“I can’t explain it.”

“Try,” I said urgently.

“You haven’t been scarred yet. You’re unmarked in a way. You’re still kind of wholesome.” He wasn’t kidding around, or trying to get a rise out of me. He said it reluctantly but precisely, as if he had reached these conclusions after observation and reflection.

“Wholesome?” I said scathingly, and made a face. “I’m not wholesome. I think it’s just that you’ve known me since I was five and you don’t see the ill change that life hast wrought in me, who laugh no more nor lift my throat to sing.”

William was the only person I ever quoted poetry around; I suppose I hoped to impress him, but he usually treated me like a zealot championing a pointless cause. “Which second-rate Victorian said that?” he asked.

“Edna Millay was Edwardian,” I said, “if Americans can be called Edwardian. Do you mean wholesome as in spinsters and nuns and schoolmarms?”

“How did we get on this subject? All I intended to say was that I’ve always liked the fact that your mother punched that guy and I thought of it just now for some reason that might have had nothing to do with you at all.”

“Whatever,” I said, my voice prickly and cool. “I’m sorry about Gus.”

“So am I,” he said.

We were quiet for a few minutes. I could hear laughter and voices, the smooth near-silent pulsing of the river at our feet. Reflected city lights hung below the island like roots or icicles, glowing squiggles that moved outward toward us with the tide. The reflected city was more alluring than the real one, which
looked dim and almost unremarkable in comparison. The moon’s reflection lay in the eddies near the bank where we sat, its white light diffuse and messy as an oil slick. I didn’t want to bear the rough, unwieldy burden of these hurt feelings. I wanted to scrape them off and throw them away from me like scales from a fish.

“William,” I said, “you can’t possibly think this show is good. You’re just being nice.”

He laughed. “If you’d lighten up about it, you might actually let yourself be entertained.”

“Let’s go in,” I said, and sighed.

The second half of the show began with a solo from Tiresias. Her voice was cracked and plain, occasionally off-pitch, but she sang unaffectedly, almost as if she were speaking, so that the words stood out clearly and the melody seemed incidental, which it was: “I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see at the violet hour, the evening hour that strives homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea …” The lights came up on the lonely typist, awaiting her “young man carbuncular”: “I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs perceived the scene, and foretold the rest—I too awaited the expected guest.”

I slumped in my chair, bathed in a persistent cold turmoil as I suffered through various would-be showstoppers, the Hanged Man singing his number upside down while dangling by the feet from a scaffolding, the drowned Phoenician Sailor rising white-faced and motionless from a tank of water to intone in a hollow, watery, prerecorded voice, Thunder swooping down at us from the ceiling on wires, throwing lightning bolts, his voice reverberating through special effects.

At the end an old man sat fishing on the banks of a river, wearing a bloody Gandhi-like diaper, singing “London Bridge is falling down” in a plaintive drone. I recognized him from
Wolfram von Eschenbach’s
Parzival
, which I’d written a paper on in college—he was the Fisher King, whose crotch had been pierced by a spear for some weird medieval reason. The ignorant bumpkin Parzival finally asked him, “Father, what ails thee?” and won the kingdom, the message being that compassion was important. I’d received an A even though I hadn’t fully understood, being only nineteen at the time. And I still didn’t, entirely, now that I thought about it.

For the grand finale, the entire cast stood in a semicircle holding their hands together in prayer, chanting “Shantih Shantih Shantih,” bathed in the swirling lights of the disco ball. As the music and chanting finally faded away, Tiresias stood up on the seat of the lifeguard chair and took off her blindfold, lifted her arms and stared into the spotlight, and then the lights went out.

“Want to go backstage with me and congratulate Gus?” William asked when the lights came up in the audience.

“See you around,” I said. “I have to go.”

“You’re mad,” he said. He sounded surprised. “Because I said you were wholesome?”

“I’ll get over it.”

“No, let me buy you a drink, I just want to tell Gus—”

“That’s okay,” I said, “another time.”

I ducked out of the crowd the same way I’d ducked in, with my head down, avoiding everyone’s eyes. I walked through dark streets toward Bedford Avenue, muttering under my breath as I walked to the trudging rhythm of my footsteps, “Here is no water but only rock, rock and no water and the sa-handy road.” I began to look forward to watching people and thinking my solitary thoughts on the train ride home. But on the subway platform, I ran into Jane Herman.

“You took my advice, I see,” she said, kissing both my cheeks. “Great haircut! You look incredible.”

“Thanks,” I said.

The train roared into the station. She leaned against me and said into my ear, “I wanted to tell you about the other night.”

I didn’t want to hear about the other night, which I assumed meant whatever had transpired between her and William after his party, but I followed her onto the train and leaned against the door next to her.

“Anyway,” said Jane, her whole body turned to me, slouching and hunching her shoulders so we were about the same height, “I was sorry you left so early.”

“You seemed to be in good hands when I left.”

Her mouth had a vulpine quality when she laughed, a calculated, toothy greediness; why hadn’t I noticed that before? And there was something pushy and controlling in the way she’d commandeered me and pinned me against the subway-car door, forcing me to listen to this story I didn’t in the least want to hear, or rather, wanted to hear only in a masochistic, self-loathing kind of way.

“Where was William tonight?” she asked then. “He said he was going to be there.”

“I sat with him. He went backstage afterwards.”

“Oh,” she said, momentarily at a loss. “Well, anyway. So we ended up on the couch; things heated up, some clothes came off, the question of a condom arose, I just happened to have one, lucky me.”

I felt faint. She didn’t seem to notice.

“Then in the middle of everything, he got up and started pacing around the room. He went off on a tirade. He said he couldn’t do this, it wasn’t good for him, and I was like, ‘Do what? Have sex?’ He said I didn’t know anything about him and it was probably better for both of us if we left it that way. So I got dressed and went home.”

My knees buckled with joy. He’d extricated himself from her octopus grip and sent her packing. “Weird,” I said.

“Claudia,” she said, her face very close to mine, “what was he talking about?”

“I have no idea.”

“Come on,” she urged. “No idea at all?”

“Girl Scouts’ honor.”

“Maybe he’s gay. Maybe he doesn’t even like girls.”

“He likes girls, Jane. He never shuts up about them.” Something of what I felt leaked into my tone. Jane and I exchanged a frankly rivalrous look. The doors slid open; we were at First Avenue. “This is my stop,” I said. “Good night, see you around.”

Jane took my face in her hands without warning and kissed me on the lips, a real smackeroo. “He’s all yours, darling,” she said warmly, and smiled at me. “Good luck.”

I stared mutely at her, obscurely grateful (he was all mine?), then left the train and watched it trundle off down the tracks until it was nothing but a vanishing point of red light. I sat on a bench in the paper-strewn, pee-smelling station and watched the furry, humped backs of rats scurrying over the tracks, foraging for their supper. I discovered that I was singing under my breath; the song had continued running through my mind, keeping its own time. “Here is no water but oh-honely rock, rock and no water and the sa-handy road.”

When the next L train appeared, finally, I watched it come without the slightest urge to throw myself under its wheels. I climbed on and sat down and read the shiny Scotch ads that filled the whole car from one end to the other, pictures of young professionals in their twenties with their first real apartments, their first real girlfriends and boyfriends, wondering which drink went with their new adult lifestyle. Lucky for me, I’d never had any problem with that particular equation, but no
matter; I stared in curious fascination at all the post-collegiate up-and-comers with their snappy Scotch-and-sodas. They were hopeful and spruce and brave, as industrious and clear-sighted as little chipmunks. They wore suits all day, sitting at computer terminals in offices as artificially self-contained as space stations, all beige laminated surfaces and subfusc low-pile carpet and fluorescent cubes recessed into miles of fiberglass ceiling tiles. Any potted ficus tree who drooped or shed its leaves would be hustled away in the night and replaced with a better-adjusted one. The dress code was as sexless and absurd and unrelated to natural activity as the uniforms they wore on
Star Trek
. How did William do it? How did anyone? I would never have been able to take any of it seriously, all the conference calls and policy-making and hush-hush deals and promo packages and press releases and company letterhead and global offices and outside counsel and managers’ meetings and damage control. It seemed indecorous somehow, profane even, here at the wormy, carious butt-end of the millennium, to evince such naked fervor for progress, to believe so blatantly in further despoliation; didn’t we all know better by now?