The air turned thick and hot, the applause grew a beard of loud voices and got all out of proportion to the quality of the miserable acts, which were almost all lip-synced. When the record got stuck or skipped, the performer would get wild-eyed, wondering how to cope, but the audience just cheered each one through these difficult moments. English’s brunette got up, snagging her fur jacket along with one hand, and was immediately lost outside the aura of the stagelights. He wanted to stay; he was having a nice time. But it turned out she was only visiting the bar behind them to get a drink. As for English, he drank nothing, because he considered himself on duty, until suddenly there was an apparition of a white-coated waiter before him, at which point he crossed the borders of sense, he couldn’t have said why, and waded out into the Scotch-and-water.
Next was a person whom English thought of as a cowboy, because by his flung-knee position, as he seated himself on a stool with his guitar, the man reminded English of nothing so much as a wrangler straddling a chair backward in the bunkhouse after a tough ride. His makeup had been washed away by sweat, and his coiffure was only a mess of hair drawn back into a ponytail by the use of a green rubber band. He was decidedly and happily masculine, but he happened to be wearing a Pop Art dress, with lightning bolts and whirling stars all over it, and black high heels, severe and schoolmarmish street shoes. This man played his guitar and sang, without benefit of a professional’s recording, a song he’d written himself about how his older sister had started dressing him up when he was a little boy. “And the prison of manhood stepped aside for me,” he sang, “and I could do all the things that only little girls could do. I could be loving. I could be soft. I could surrender and be weak.” It was a sad song. Everybody was very moved. He was a great favorite.
For English’s money, the atmosphere was better than in an actual show. The worst acts were the best, and the good ones were a relief. Just to reward each one for the feat of getting finished without expiring, the audience shouted and pounded on their small, circular tables, everyone crammed knock-kneed around these toadstools at an alcoholic tea party presided over by a steadily more and more inebriated duchess. English himself drank until he felt the floor shift. Everything was happening faster than it usually did—a cigarette seemed to last ten seconds—but the MC was taking a longer and longer time between acts now, seizing this chance to fill everybody in on most of her past accomplishments and giving them the benefit of her thinking on quite a range of issues, including the veiled meaning of their lives. “I had a man,” she remembered. “
I
had a man.” She raised her hands to put a stray lock of hair back into her bun with perfect movements, holding her elbows forward as only a woman would. “I had a man,” she sang with shyness. “But my man got drafted, and do you know, girls, he refused to tell them he was a fag?” Right, English thought, right for you, whatever I mean by that. He was feeling a great affection for all these people. Cut off by the sea from the steel mills and insurance companies who would never know them like this, they obviously felt a wholesome bond among themselves, the closeness of doomed cruisers on a sinking ship—“Do you know what I mean?” he asked one of the people he was sharing a table with, but he didn’t know at which station of his thoughts his mouth had got on. “Do you get it?” He’d lost count of his Scotch-and-waters.
The last act was going to be something special—“like I was, my dears, my dears—if you could have seen me!” the MC told them all. She wasn’t choked up with grief; she observed with humor the train of years as it left her behind. She conjured up for them her youthful self and presented this ghost as she might have presented a daughter whose loveliness even she was astonished by. “I was the sevent
eenth
-highest-paid female impersonator in the world … Europe—of course the girls in Europe might have given me a little competition. But don’t you know, it might have been the other way, too—I might have given
them
a little competition, don’t you know? But I stayed in my own country.” She looked at the audience steadily, and English remembered, from his own experience in a high-school production, that she probably couldn’t see a single face. “Because I wanted to be Miss America.”
And in the same generous spirit, tainted only a little by matronly jealousy, she presented the young person whose future, she assured the audience, was assured.
This last performer was beautiful and smoldering and sexy, in a lacy black corset and garter belt, high heels, net stockings. First she did a number that was fast and was supposed to be funny, but nobody laughed, everyone only applauded endlessly. She was a gifted dancer. For her second act and the evening’s last number, she mimed a version of “My Funny Valentine.” English was a little mixed up about his feelings as he watched her, because he felt weak in the arms with yearning. He caught sight of the subject Marla Baker, who was kissing one of her friends while around them the crowd applauded a parade of the night’s performers, and he wished them well.
Now Marla Baker was caught in a staring contest with—was it black-haired Leanna, the woman he’d talked with at Mass? —the two of them confessing everything with their eyes, tears streaming down their faces, in a moment of such intensity they seemed to have surfaced into sunlight and been frozen there …
Singing the Miss America song, the recorded voice of Bert Parks whispered under the cheering. The Leanna woman had disappeared. English headed for the facilities, seeing that Marla Baker, gazing off now with shiny eyes and not listening to the talk of her companions, still had a drink to finish on the table in front of her.
Three or four men waited to use the john, but they were all so intoxicated, talking about nothing and struggling to make it clear, that he just went in ahead of them. The walls inside were completely papered over with magazine photos of naked boys, thousands of them striking every possible attitude and conveying intentions that, for all their being only photographs, made him uncomfortable. He went into the stall and leaned against the side of it, while his cigarette burned away rapidly like a fuse. Then he was trying to light another one, but the matchbook danced in his fingers and floated off, and the stall pitched forward and knocked him on the back of the head. He washed his hands, which felt as if they were dressed in big fat rubber gloves. His face in the mirror, ringed by dozens of photographed penises, seemed to be still in the process of forming. Over and over again he splashed his eyes with cold water.
When he got out, the sleeves of his sweater were all wet. He’d lost Marla Baker.
There were only a few people left in the place. There was a man trying to write a check at the bar, squinting at the mystery of his checkbook, two young fellows waiting for the man and both of them drumming their fingers with exasperation, there were two women across from one another at one of the little round tables, alone in a sea of little round tables, a bartender smoking a cigarette with a distant look of pleasure on his face, and out beyond the area of light, a waiter circling through vagueness with a dim white rag, as if he were surrendering.
English had no idea what to do. He had a feeling it didn’t matter.
As he left the Beginner’s he said hello to a young man and a young woman who clung to one another just inside the entrance, and the young man sobbed, “I don’t want to die! I want to
live
!”
English would ask people—tomorrow. He would find out where Marla Baker lived just by asking people—tomorrow, not tonight. Tonight he was having trouble carrying out his first assignment, and some difficulty delivering his head out beyond the doors.
O
ver the next few weeks the several squads of tourists in evidence on his arrival just disappeared. In the whole town only two or three restaurants stayed open for business, their windowpanes filmed with steam and bordered by grimy snow. Brief thaws came often, but Provincetown seemed, in general, arctic and bereft.
His two jobs kept him busy enough, but in the evenings English didn’t know what to do with himself. He felt the fires of a deadly boredom. When he didn’t have night work he stayed late in the bars with the people whose malfunctioning faces floated above their beers, turning from his own image in the mirror to another one of him in the black window. By this time there were only a few taverns open, and he kept seeing the same terrible people over and over. In the cafés where he ate breakfast, the local fishermen drank coffee and argued about certain financial realities of the industry over which they had no control and about which, it seemed to English, they weren’t entitled to have any opinions, or anyway, it began to seem to him, not such stupid ones; and they traded lies and passed judgment on their colleagues and rivals endlessly, until he believed he would get up and go over and tip someone’s eggs into his lap, just to see.
He was getting to be a creature of the night, spying till the zero hour, and then on Tuesdays and Thursdays working a shift at WPRD from two until six in the morning. His employment wasn’t going all that happily. At the station they had only those two four-hour shifts for him, and he’d been doing next to nothing as Ray Sands’s assistant investigator. His one investigation, in fact, still involved tracking Marla Baker—who turned out to be older than she’d looked at first, a middle-aged divorcee—from her apartment to her lover’s house and back again, several times a week.
On these occasions the lovers had dinner together, and English recorded their conversations with a mike taped to the window glass. They lay together on the living-room couch till midnight or so, these two bland middle-aged women, and talked, and embraced, and massaged one another with scented oils, and he recorded all this, too, with the same mike taped to the glass of a different window. It was the kind of thing he’d sworn never to be reduced to, but he couldn’t remember when, exactly, this oath had been pledged. Everything was softened in the candlelight of their romance, and unknown to them, he skulked outside with the clouds of his breath, adjusting the volume knob with frozen fingers. His ski mittens dangled by little clips from the sleeves of his black leather jacket, two limp, flabby hands that wrung themselves helplessly while their owner went around doing things he disapproved of.
One night Marla Baker and her lover, whose name was Carol, had a visitor. It was the woman he’d spoken to in church his first day in this town and then pitifully invited to dinner—Leanna.
The three of them held a kind of conference in the kitchen. All English witnessed, through a slim parting of the living-room curtain that gave him a view of the archway to the kitchen, were the stove, which slowly developed a face out of its dials and seams, and the torso of Marla Baker, with sweater sleeves pushed back to her elbows. He saw her hands put an orange kettle on the flame and then saw them take it away when it steamed. Under his blue knit watch cap he wore small Walkman earphones, and he heard everything they said. But it was the length of the silences, those clutching lulls in talk, that spoke the clearest.
English had never realized, until he’d listened to recorded conversations, how much time people spend saying nothing, thinking about what they’ve heard and preparing what they have to say. But in this little gathering, made excruciating by Leanna’s presence in a way never quite specified, these three women started and stopped a lot more than usual, agonized through their remarks about the tea, and choked up when they talked about the weather, as if they were making terrible confessions. English pressed his palms against the window to quell miscellaneous distorting vibrations.
After that night, Marla Baker and Leanna started sleeping together occasionally at Marla’s apartment. The first time it happened, English climbed a tree and put the mike on a fishing pole, nudging it close to Marla’s bedroom window, and he listened. The two women undressed after a while and went to bed. They slept together as sisters might have, giving one another not so much pleasure as comfort. Marla and Leanna, Marla and Leanna—it had a nice sound to it. They’d been lovers once, but it hadn’t worked out the way they’d planned. They certainly knew how to let themselves weep.
English spent that evening straddling a branch, the tendons in his thighs at first uncomfortable and then, after a while, really on fire, wondering who was paying for this service, who was ultimately listening to these tapes, to what use was he or she putting them, what was this person like? Later he’d tell himself that if there was a beginning to his troubles, that was it: wondering.
It was almost 3 a.m. He couldn’t believe he was sitting in a tree with these items, which it would be impossible to explain if anybody asked: much worse stuff than, there was no comparison with, really, the medical implements he’d been convinced were soiling him a couple of years ago. Hadn’t his experience as his own unsuccessful hangman turned his life around? At what point had he gotten this corrupt?
English marked no thread of occurrences leading up to his halfhearted suicide attempt, no clear trail of his own footprints, but he did feel pretty certain that the finish of his employment in the medical world had begun with his introduction to the new surgical stapler Minotaur Systems had developed. This item was supposed to replace the old-fashioned sutures. Basically it was the same thing used around any office, but it was large and elaborate and wouldn’t have looked out of place in the hands of an astronaut walking on the moon. English had looked forward to learning all about it at a big sales conference in Chicago. But what should have been a fun and diverting trip to a medical lab near the city had soured very shortly after his cab let him off at the gate at the appointed hour. The laboratory, an offspring or cousin of the Minotaur corporate family, was out by O’Hare Airport in a sea of grass and corn bridged here and there by tiny cloverleaves of Interstate 90. There was desolation in the scouring sound made by distant jets that knew nothing about this place and in the whistling of the wind through the chain-link fence, a wind that also brought him the stink of urine and dog shit and the berserk exclamations of laboratory animals housed right there under the sky. Nobody had told him about this. Dogs running up and down their cages, kittens shivering in concrete corners, stunned rabbits, goats dangling wires from their ears, even a couple of blind sheep standing around in the straw, their eye sockets covered by bandages. English was still trying to swallow the shock of his own presence in a place like this as he was ushered into a room, in the laboratory proper, filled with whimpering, tranquillized dogs on small operating tables. There he was handed a smock and a scalpel and one of the new surgical stapling devices. The tiled floor was full of drains. As a child, he’d been bothered by certain noises in his bedroom closet. Now the closet was opened, and everything he’d imagined inside it came out and revealed itself to be his employer. He waited for somebody to point out how horrible this was. As soon as someone spoke up, he would, too. But nobody said a word. Under the direction of the laboratory’s supervisor he took his place before one of the several dozen tables and put on the green operating cap, shower-curtain booties, and translucent surgical gloves that lay beside the drooling head of a fawn-colored dachshund, and, in the midst of fifty other green-garbed members of the Minotaur Systems sales force, he began tearing at this dog’s belly with his scalpel, heaving out intestines and other organs and cutting into them and, from time to time, when directed, laying down the scalpel, picking up the surgical stapler, and learning about the variety of its uses.