“I’m not saying it was all your fault, and don’t try to tell me it was all mine, because it wasn’t. It was this strange dynamic that somehow got started between us. We got turned into these sob sisters and I don’t know how it happened. I don’t know what happened to us, Susan. It was never like that in Ann Arbor.” Leisha’s round eyes were full of an unreadable emotion.
“I didn’t mind giving you support,” said Susan. “But it was always the same thing, always Eddie and you. It didn’t matter what I said, you never listened to me anyway. And if you didn’t want to talk about Eddie, you never called just to talk to me. You wouldn’t even return my calls. You even got Eddie to tell me you weren’t home when you were. He told me.”
“Oh, Susan, I was sick then, don’t you understand? I slit my wrists, remember? I was a sick, worthless piece of shit.” Her voice faltered; Susan recognized the prelude to tears.
“You weren’t a piece of shit,” mumbled Susan.
“And anyway, I feel like you’re doing the same thing to me now.”
“What?”
“All we ever talk about is you. You don’t seem interested in my relationship with Jonathan or my wedding or my therapy. Those are the things I’m doing in my life. I’m trying very hard to get well and to have a good relationship and get married.” Her voice became a tremulous squeak, tears appeared, her face crumpled delicately and she pecked at it with her napkin.
Susan scowled at her cold cup of chamomile tea. She couldn’t bring herself to say that she despised Jonathan, that she thought their relationship was a farce, that she hated traditional weddings and that she thought Leisha used therapy the same way she had used Eddie—to distract herself from her own life. A wave of classical music surged through the room, loudly enough to knock over a table, aggressively soothing the eaters of cannoli and cute cakes.
“And the way you talk about Stef all the time—”
Stef was the man Susan had met in a public rest room. “I don’t talk about Stef all the time.”
“It seems like you do. And what you say is so horrible, even if you talk about him a little it’s a lot.”
How could we have pretended to be friends for so long, Susan thought.
“Especially when you talk about him and that Italian girl, it’s so awful it makes me hurt inside. Don’t you see how they’re using you?”
“They’re not using me,” Susan said stiffly.
“Oh no, what about the time they tried to shoot you up in the bathroom at Area, or wherever the fuck you were?”
“They didn’t shoot me up.”
“They tried.”
“Not very hard, obviously. Anyway, it doesn’t matter if they’re using me, I don’t care. I’m doing this thing with them because I want to. I can take care of myself, and I’m not trying to make you a part of it.”
“But when you tell me stories like that nipple-piercing thing, you
are
making me part of it. Why do you put yourself in positions where you have to take care of yourself?”
They stared at each other with what seemed painfully close to hate. A raw feeling traveled up Susan’s throat. She was sweating.
Leisha spoke slowly and deliberately. “I think you’re involved with them because you don’t have anything else to do. I think you think it’s
interesting
.” This last word was sarcastic enough for two or three words. “And it’s not interesting at all. It is sordid and disgusting.” Her nostrils dilated.
“How dare you?” said Susan. “How dare you judge me?”
Susan opened her eyes and contemplated the maniacal outline of a feathered hat hanging on Bobby’s coatrack. In retrospect she had to admit that part of her anger had come from the element of truth in Leisha’s last accusation. But Stef and Anna
had
been interesting to her at the time; and anyway, how dare she indeed?
Susan turned over in bed. Their fantasies had changed, their tastes in props had diverged, and neither one could satisfy the other’s needs any longer. Since what they were inside didn’t matter, they separated. Susan had ended a chapter in her life, and doubtless it had felt the same to Leisha, who probably saw their friendship as a symbol of bad living and delusion. Leisha had sent Susan the engraved wedding invitation a week after their discussion. (“The honor of your presence is requested at the marriage of …”) Susan had said “How beautiful” to her empty apartment and summarily shredded the card.
Susan turned over again. Still, she wished she knew where Leisha was. She would like to talk to her. She remembered the time they had gone dancing one summer. They had danced for hours in a hot, damp place, until they collapsed in each other’s arms, Leisha’s small, sweating, palpitating chest pressed against hers. She remembered having the almost tangible sensation that they were creatures with delicate invisible feelers waving between them, sending tenderness and warmth from one to the other.
She sat up and turned on the bedside light. She could reach Leisha. She probably still had friends in Manhattan who knew where she was. After a minute’s thought, she remembered the last names of two of Leisha’s friends. Dialing information, she discovered that one of them no longer lived in the city and the other was unlisted. She called the restaurant where Leisha had worked; it was still open, but no one remembered her. The only possibility was the man they had both dated; the last Susan had heard, he was living in New York, but they hadn’t spoken for years and it was after two o’clock in the morning. She had to pace the room for fifteen minutes before she developed the courage to call. When he finally answered he was too surprised to be nasty, until she asked him if he knew where Leisha was.
“I really don’t know. I heard that they moved to Los Angeles a couple of years ago, but that might’ve been a rumor. You called me at two-thirty in the morning to ask about Leisha?”
She hung up rather gratified that she’d slighted and irritated him. She paced a bit more and then settled down in the living area,
where she stared into space. She remembered a story she’d read once in which the main character, an older woman who was pining to see a boy she’d likely never see again, found accidental solace in late-night TV, where she saw an actor who looked like an older version of her young heartthrob. Leisha had, after all, wanted to be an actress at one point. Susan found the remote-control unit and flicked on the TV. It was on the pornographic cable station. No one there resembled Leisha. Neither did anyone on
Get Smart, Love That Bob
or the Japanese horror movie. The last channel she tried revealed a nameless old Italian thing about international espionage, which had a murky, kinky sexual flavor that held her interest for several minutes. And, in fact, there was a dark, intense woman who was playing an intellectual slut. If Leisha had ever become an actress, this was probably the kind of role she’d get, but Susan doubted she had the tenacity to land roles even like this one.
She flicked off the TV. It embarrassed her to hold such a low opinion of Leisha’s ability, but it wasn’t a reflection of contempt. Leisha was simply meant to feel and be, not to do. But what an arrogant thing to close off Leisha’s possibilities like that. After all, no one who knew Susan six years before could have predicted exactly where she would wind up, and some people had been surprised.
She put her head back on the couch and closed her eyes. She imagined Leisha as an actress in a sci-fi movie, playing a tiny queen in silver lamé. She saw her as a mother in a blue-and-white checked blouse, kneeling on the floor to play a game with her child. She saw her as an aging hipster in a bar, her eyes made up in flames of black and silver, complaining about her current relationship to whoever would listen. She saw her as a bag lady. Then the images peeled away and she saw her standing in empty space, wearing the tight Capri pants she used to wear, a dreamy, half-smiling girl, her intensity momentarily muted by some inner reflection. She looked at this girl and realized that, with all the falseness and silliness between them, she had cared for her, and been cared for in return. She wanted to talk to her, and tomorrow she would try again. She sat in the living area for almost an hour thinking about what she might say to her, and what Leisha might say back.
S
TEPHANIE WASN’T A
“professional lady” exactly; tricking was just something she slipped into, once a year or so, when she was feeling particularly revolted by clerical work, or when she couldn’t pay her bills. She even liked a few of her customers, but she had never considered dating one; she kept her secret forays into prostitution neatly boxed and stored away from her real life. She was thus a little dismayed to find herself standing in high heels and underwear in front of the smeared mirror in the “Shadow Room,” handing her phone number to Bernard the lawyer. She felt she was being drawn deeper into something she had no business doing in the first place, but she had no boyfriend, she liked the lawyer and, since he was married, it seemed likely he would leave only a faint impression on her life.
She had been working at her current “house” for three nights when she met him. It wasn’t as posh or expensive as the other two places she’d worked, but it was comfortable and safe. She hadn’t wanted to go back to the first place because of the peculiarity of the manager, who’d read the girls’ auras daily and made them chant over anointed candles in the kitchen to “purify the space”; and she couldn’t go back to the second because it had been closed by the Mafia. She wasn’t well connected or knowledgeable enough to systematically search for the best establishment, so she had settled for this—a run-down townhouse apartment with poor ventilation and sad old smells coiling through the rooms. It was called “Christine’s” after the woman who ran it, a tiny frantic blond tyrant who rather desperately fancied her hideous paisley sitting room to be a salon and forced long minutes of excruciating conversation between
women and johns before allowing them to escape up the stairs. “We’re known for our intellectual women,” she told Stephanie during her interview. “Everybody here does something. Alana here is an artist. Suzie is a fashion designer and Beatrice is a nurse,” The three women on the couch regarded Stephanie blankly. Christine gave Stephanie the working name “Perry” and told her to wear something in which she could “meet her mother for lunch and then rendezvous with her boyfriend for cocktails.” This ridiculous pretense, teetering pathetically toward aspiration, appealed to her. She thought: It’s only for a few weeks, and showed up two days later in a tight silver minidress.
She had come downstairs, after being summoned through the intercom to “meet someone,” hurried and disheveled, one stocking badly run, having left her portly, huffing client to finish his ablutions alone. She stood before the new man, feeling slightly knock-kneed in her short black skirt, smiling goofily and thinking, for some reason, of the
I Love Lucy
show. The canned laughter mumbled as Christine folded her hands and asked, “Well, Bernard, would you like to see Perry?”
The man stood up and said, “Yes, very much.” He was about forty-five, very tall and thin, and wore an absurd bow tie with his conservative suit. He had kind eyes and an intelligent, inquisitive demeanor. She felt that something about her genuinely excited him, and she was flattered.
He followed her to the awful burgundy Shadow Room. He stripped and lay on the bed, his torso resting against a pillow, his slender naked body placidly expectant, his almost alarmingly large penis lying half-hard on his thigh. She took off her high heels and knelt beside him on the bed. He didn’t touch her or even move closer, he just lay there and looked at her as though he were waiting to be amused. The old air conditioner moaned and dripped.
“I like your hair,” he said. “It’s a becoming style.”
She self-consciously ruffled her spiky, black-dyed crew cut. “Oh, it’s fashionable now. Lots of women have this cut.”
“Yes, I know. But it suits you especially well.”
She said thank you and pulled her shirt over her head.
He glanced at her breasts with apparent approval but still made no move to touch her.
She decided with some relief that he was a talker and settled into conversation
She quickly found out that he worked for the city on the redevelopment of the Lower East Side, that he did not love his wife, though he was very fond of her, and that they rarely made love. He stayed with her because he didn’t want to be alone.
“And what about you? What do you do when you’re not at this place?”
She grimaced. “Well, I don’t know if I do anything. I’m trying to become a writer. That’s why I came to New York.” She paused, wondering if that sounded ridiculous to this man who wore suits and patronized prostitutes. “Do you think that’s stupid?”
“No, not at all. Why would I think it’s stupid?”
“Because so many girls in these houses have the desire to do something else, but it’s obvious that in most cases they don’t have any talent or are too scared, and I don’t know, it just seems sort of pathetic to me. I don’t even tell people here what I do. I say I’m a secretary or a dental technical or something.”
“But that’s silly. As it happens, I know there have been some very talented people working here. There was a whole coterie of various artists at one point. One of them was a performance artist who went off to Italy and started working with, oh, some avant-garde choreographer—I know the name but I can’t think of it. Anyway, I hear she’s doing fine.”
“How do you know?”
“I was a regular of hers, and we saw each other on the outside. She had short hair like yours, only hers was orange.” He smiled, as though this disclosed a revealing element that firmly established a relationship between Stephanie and the orange-haired girl. “As a matter of fact, she used this place to collect material for her work. She was extremely bright and very aware of all the contradictions she embodied by being here.” He smiled gently. “She could talk about it endlessly.”
She pulled off her skirt and lay down next to him, supporting
herself on one elbow. They talked about fiction in
The New Yorker
and
The Atlantic
. She ranted against the trendy writers she despised. They talked about dance performances they’d seen. He described a piece at the Dance Theater Workshop in which the dancers waved large Styrofoam animals at each other and rolled around in paint. She thought it sounded idiotic, but felt tender toward his robustly curious delight in this goofy spectacle.