Flesh and Blood

  “Billy's a rebel,” Todd said. “It takes all kinds.”

  “Okay, everybody,” Constantine said. “We've got about a half hour to kill. I made our lunch reservations for one.”

  “We're going to go all the way with this, aren't we?” Susan said.

  “You want us to not eat because your brother's got a wild hair up his ass? Should we skip lunch because of that?”

  “Oh, no,” Susan said. “Absolutely not.”

  As they left the Yard, Mary touched Susan's arm and said, “Thanks for being a good sport.”

  “Don't thank me,” she said. Mary was surprised by the tone of reproach in her voice. Her daughter's hatred still surprised her, after all these years. She wanted, as always, to put her hands on Susan's shoulders and say, 'How can you dislike me, when I'm the one who suffers?'

  “I don't know what I'm going to do with these two,” she said, and she liked the lightness she was able to put into her voice, the chipper quality. Better days would come.

  “What can you do?” Susan said. “What could you possibly do?”

  “Well, nothing, I suppose. Billy will come around. Hey, is everything okay with you?”

  “Everything's fine, Momma. Everything's perfectly fine.”

  Susan walked away, said something inaudible to Todd. Mary and her family made their way toward the Square amid the knots of graduates and their parents. All around them, young men and women whooped and embraced one another as their robes flashed darkly in the simple, shadowless light of early summer. Someone opened a bottle of champagne. A half moon had risen over the library roof. When they passed through the gateway and reached the street Mary saw the boy again, getting into a car with his parents (ordinary-looking people) and a pretty blond girl in a white dress. The girl squeezed the boy's hand, and his father, one arm draped easily over the shoulders of his pink-skinned wife, said something that made the rest of them laugh. Mary watched them drive away. She couldn't help wondering where they were going, what they'd eat that night, how they'd talk to one another, where they'd go after that. Casually, as if reaching for a tissue or a mint, she slipped her hand into her bag and touched the washcloth she'd taken from Billy's apartment.

  1975/ Susan awoke one night and knew, suddenly and completely, that she and Todd would not have a baby together. It had simply refused to happen. Waiting to have the baby . had been her occupation; it had explained her. Now she would need to do something else. Todd slept beside her, one strong arm thrown over his face. She got up out of bed and went into the bathroom for a glass of water. Her flannel nightgown touched her as she moved. She was aware of herself in these dark rooms, a faint blue shape among the squat blacknesses of bed, lamp, bureau.

  She went into the bathroom, filled a glass from the tap, and took it back into the bedroom. The air was full of Todd's breathing, the sound of his easy, rhythmic little snores. Asleep, Todd reminded her of a submarine. He churned steadily through the hours of his slumber, and the sounds he made—the nasal rasp, the sporadic murmurs—implied a certain blind progress, guided by sonar waves that bounced invisibly off coral reefs and submerged mountain ranges. Even in sleep, he was going somewhere. He was moving steadily toward morning, when he would wake and rise eagerly to the resumption of his work.

  Susan sipped her water and walked to the window, parted the curtains. Behind the curtains was a layer of cold air, trapped between the glass and the fabric, and when the cold touched her face she thought, briefly, that something alive was flying out at her. The New Haven street was quiet under the thin orange haze of the streetlights. There was the world of sleep and purpose, the unlit windows of people like Todd and herself, who were having their portion of rest before the new day arrived with its endless accomplishments. She thought sometimes, with a sense of wonder, that right here on this street lived people who would help reshape the world. They'd be the scientists and politicians; they'd find the cures and draft the laws. She touched the rim of the glass to her chin. Outside, a cat slunk along the sidewalk, racing over its own shadow. She followed the cat with her eyes and when it darted under the lilac bush she thought she saw a figure standing behind the bush. He was looking up at the window, at her. He had her father's heavy shoulders, her father's wounded, pugilistic stance, and she was overcome with dread, with a conviction that everything, everything she wanted would now be taken from her. Then she blinked, and saw that it was only a trick of the bare branches, a confluence of shadows. Nothing really happened, she reminded herself. Kisses, it never went any farther than that. She closed the curtains firmly, as she would close a drawer. She waited until she felt calm again.

  1976/ Cassandra called her her daughter. Cassandra had business of her own but she kept track the way a mother does. Zoe had other friends, an apartment, a job that more or less covered the rent. She had lovers. Her life was full of facts and they all commanded her daily attention with more weight and urgency than Cassandra exerted from her cynical private religion based on clothes and men and on the love of surprise and the conviction that surprise was impossible. Cassandra lived in the mirror. She lived in bars (Zoe had learned to think of Cassandra as “she”)- Still, she claimed she had adopted Zoe. She performed a mother's rituals of praise and complaint. At the bar, she picked out men for Zoe. “That one there, honey,” she'd whisper, pointing a long finger. “He says he's gay but he's been known to do a girl or two and I have it on the best authority that he's got the dick of death between those scrawny legs.”

  Cassandra instructed Zoe on the particulars of giving blow jobs. She sewed clothes for her, urged her to tame her hair.

  “Wild is one thing,” she said. “Medusa is something else. You're scaring men off with that jungle do. Why don't you let me give it a cream rinse and a little trim, just to see if we can get it to move in a windstorm?”

  But Zoe didn't want her hair to change. Something resided there, something heavy and tangled she wanted to keep.

  She had rented an apartment with Trancas when they graduated from high school but now Trancas was gone and Zoe lived with her friends Ford and Sharon in a fourth-floor walk-up on East Third Street, across from the Hell's Angels' headquarters. Trancas was in Oregon, in love with three women at once. Zoe worked in a secondhand clothing store on MacDougal Street. She smoked joints in the cramped little office at the back of the store, helped strangers decide whether or not to buy old party dresses, silk shawls, Hawaiian shirts. The musk of the used clothes seeped into her skin and she took hot baths at night, dabbed herself with grass oil in an effort to feel new again. At home she smoked more joints and drank wine with Sharon, who worked as a waitress, and Ford, who played guitar on the streets. She hung bad portraits of strangers on the walls of her bedroom, covered the lamp with colored scarves. She lived in New York like Alice, thinking someday she'd go back to the other world. Gardens, schoolbooks, wash on a line. For now there were her sweet-tempered friends and her undemanding job, cash paid off the books. There was sex with men who could turn out to be anybody. There was acid in Central Park; there were syringes full of crystal meth that made her slip through the hours like thread slipping through the eye of a needle. She'd learn what she could. As a young girl she'd lived in her parents' house and watched the daughters and sons of the old era dancing on television, dressed in discarded clothes and pieces of the flag, with flowers twisted into their hair. By the time she was grown a kind of promise had already faded, a lost, light-headed belief that humans could live innocently among the animals. Zoe mourned and did not mourn the passing of the old future. She had too much desire in her, too many electrical circuits snapping, to want a life growing dope and feeding chickens and goats. She wanted the true dangers of the forest; pastures and barnyards were too much like houses.

  Cassandra called when she thought about it. Sometimes she came over. She didn't do drag in daylight. She came in her ordinary skinniness, her thin red hair. She wore loose khaki pants, big shirts, sometimes a bracelet or two.

  “So, what's the dish, ho
ney?” she said, sipping coffee at the kitchen table. In men's clothes she looked more feminine. In dresses and wigs she looked like a man in a dress and a wig.

  “I met somebody new,” Zoe said. She tried always to have a story or two.

  “Do tell.” Cassandra sat with her sharp elbows on the tabletop, looking over the rim of her coffee cup like somebody's shrewd wife.

  “Well, I met him in Tompkins Square Park,” Zoe said. “I was smoking a little hash by the band shell, and he was throwing a Frisbee to a dog.”

  “Men with dogs,” Cassandra said, “are generally trustworthy, but no great shakes in bed.”

  “The dog came up to me, she was a nice dog, just a mutt, and I petted her and this guy and I started talking.”

  “And what was he like?”

  “Sweet. Sort of untouched. He said 'Wow.' ”

  “Only that?”

  “No. He said things like, 'Wow, are you smoking hash right out here in the open?' and 'Wow, that's a cool necklace you're wearing.' He was like a ten-year-old boy who'd turned twenty-five, you know what I mean?”

  “Oh, I recognize the type from a distance. They don't come within fifty yards of nasty old drag queens.”

  “We smoked what was in the pipe, and then we both started throwing the Frisbee for the dog.”

  “Better go straight to the sex, this is getting boring.”

  “We got all sweaty, he took off his shirt.”

  “And revealed what?” Cassandra said.

  “A nice body. Skinny. Sort of a boy's body, with tiny little nipples. But I liked it. I don't need muscles.”

  “You straight girls are a marvel. No wonder you all get married. It's only men who disappear up their own assholes searching for perfection, isn't it?”

  “I don't know,” Zoe said. “I wouldn't marry this guy.”

  “Never mind about that. Did you bring him home?”

  “Mm-hm. I told him I lived right around the corner, he could take a shower at my place if he wanted to.”

  “Good girl,” Cassandra said, “Like a lion bringing down a gazelle.”

  “I'm a slut,” Zoe said. “What can I say?”

  “So you got him home.”

  “Mm-hm. And he took a shower, and you know. There we were.”

  “What did he do with the dog, for god's sake?”

  “I gave her a bowl of water, and she just lay down in the living room. She was a good dog.”

  “And how was the sex?” Cassandra said. “Tell Momma.”

  “Nice. Well, he was fast. He was too fast for me. But sweet. He fell right to sleep after, he rolled off of me and I think he was asleep before he hit the mattress.”

  “Just as I told you,” Cassandra said. “Men with dogs.”

  Cassandra worked as a seamstress, and she performed in plays put on in basement clubs. She wasn't the star. She played handmaidens and slave girls, or the heroine's best friend. Zoe always went to see her. In Bluebeard Cassandra played the doomed wife, standing outside a painted cardboard door and saying, “Oh, my master hath warned me never to trespass upon the sanctity and privation of this, his most inner chamber, but I've just got to know what's in there.” In Anna Karenina, or, Night Train she was part of a chorus that sang “Can't Stop Loving That Man of Mine.” In Secrets of the Chun King Empire she entered in a kimono and said, “The emperor has chosen Wing Li to be his concubine and the mother of his heir, to ascend with him to the realm of tranquillity that lies beyond the Blue Mountains, so all the rest of you girls can just get your butts on out of here.”

  Zoe always applauded with pride and a lurking, stinging embarrassment. She loved Cassandra. She was vaguely burdened by her. She felt herself to be increased and diminished because Cassandra carried around the idea of her, Zoe, a girl who had set herself free. A girl who wasn't nice or ordinary. Sometimes she could be that girl. Sometimes she wanted only to sleep in a small white bedroom while Cassandra and the other Zoe walked through the streets glittering with all they wanted.

  After her performances Cassandra would come out and have a drink with Zoe. The clubs were black as ice, full of ancient smells, a rot Zoe recognized from the bins of unwashed clothes kept at the back of the store. Cassandra introduced Zoe around. “This is my girl here, yes, ladies, the one hundred percent real thing. She's my protegee, isn't she gorgeous?”

  People agreed that she was gorgeous. Who knew what they thought? Zoe sat on a barstool in her dark clothes, the black distance of the kohl she'd started wearing on her eyes. She sipped a beer and listened to them talk. The men in dresses didn't need conversation. They were a performance, they only needed her to watch.

  “You know what I envy? Those little feet. Imagine being able to walk into a store and just buy any pair of shoes that caught your fancy.”

  “Frankly, darling, I can think of nothing more depressing. It's so easy, any fool can walk into a store. What I love is the challenge. Finding a pair of pretty pumps in a size thirteen, now that's an accomplishment a girl can take pride in.”

  “Uh-huh. Didn't I see that pair you got on hanging from a pole over the shoe-repair shop last week?”

  “Look who's talking. Honey, the police are still trying to figure out who took that pair of canoes out of the lake in Central Park, but my lips are sealed.”

  Cassandra and her friends didn't need Zoe for long. She said good night, left them talking and laughing together at the bar. Cassandra usually walked her to the door.

  “Thanks for coming, angel.”

  “It was a good show, Cassandra.”

  “Well, there's a reason they call it the big time, and there's a reason most people aren't in it. Call me.”

  “All right.”

  “Not too early.”

  “Never.”

  When Cassandra came in the afternoons, in pants and a T-shirt, she sat at Zoe's kitchen table picking up crumbs with her fingertip. She said, “You kids should clean up a little more, you'll have this place crawling with roaches.”

  Sometimes Zoe thought she should have a plan. She should have an ambition, so that if somebody asked her, 'What are you doing?' she could have given a better answer than Tm doing opium suppositories,' or Tm doing the bass player on the fifth floor.' Her most conspicuous talent was for being, and sometimes she thought that was enough. Sometimes she thought, I'm a witness. I'm here to watch things happen.

  When she turned twenty-one she quit the used-clothing store and got a better-paying job as a cocktail waitress. She fell in love with one of the bartenders, a beautiful, edgy man whose hair had been gray since childhood. She moved out of the apartment on East Third to live with him in his loft in SoHo, then moved back again after he slugged her in a transport of jealousy. She got a job in another bar, worked until until four in the morning, slept until twelve or one the following afternoon. She watched soap operas with Ford and Sharon, took up smoking and stopped again. She fell into and out of love with a firm-tempered, quiet woman named Brenda, who read tarot cards and earned her living as a lighting technician on Broadway.

  Sometimes Zoe didn't hear from Cassandra for months. Sometimes Cassandra called five times a week. Sometimes—not often—she came to the apartment and stayed all afternoon.

  She said, “I like knowing someone as young as you. I like it that you're not fabulous.”

  “I'm fabulous enough for my own purposes,” Zoe said.

  “I mean fabulous, honey, the kind of fabulous that can quote from every movie Ida Lupino ever made. I can dish the dirt with the rest of the girls but frankly, dear, it's a little like speaking in French. It's not my native tongue no matter how fluent I may have become. It's nice to just come over here sometimes and sit around playing Scrabble.”

  Cassandra and Zoe had taken to playing Scrabble every time they were together. Cassandra always won.

  “I like it, too,” Zoe said.

  “My little girl, oh, the daughter I never had. Now tell me, angel, are you fucking anybody new?”

  1977/ Mary knew. She kne
w by the smells he brought home with him, by the tunes he hummed. Constantine wore the woman on his face. The fact itself didn't surprise her. Men strayed, they were driven by appetites. She'd been educated as a little girl, and she'd never let sentiment pass for thought. What surprised her was not the fact but her own sense of distance and even, on certain exhausted nights, of relief. Constantine was unfaithful to her, and it made sense. She was far from a perfect wife, though she'd set out to be one. She'd suffered over the birthday cakes, cleaned everything, sewn flawless hems. But years went by and she never picked up the habit of desire. She was cool and reluctant in bed. She stole, and could not seem to stop. She failed to befriend the prominent women, to become their intimate, though she served on endless committees. If Constantine had something going, if he'd found a way to crush his yearnings the way other men stepped outside for a cigarette, it was all right with her. She knew, with rock-hard certainty, that he wasn't in love. The smug, self-satisfied limits of his affection clung to him like the woman's perfume. It was Constantine's nature to build, to acquire, and he might add a woman or two to his life but he would never voluntarily relinquish any of his holdings. He wouldn't sacrifice the prickly friendship he and Mary had found, the comforts of the home they'd built. So she went along. She disliked pretending ignorance. She could feel so stupid, so underestimated. Still, it seemed a small enough price. She couldn't live inside an arrangement. She couldn't water her ivy or try new recipes as a woman who openly consented to her husband's infidelity. But she could keep a secret.

  She kept the secret for nearly a year, and might have kept it much longer, but one day in the middle of a heat wave unprecedented since the turn of the century she stopped by Constantine's office on her way to the grocery store to drop off a contract he'd forgotten at home. She rarely went to his office. She had no business there. It was not the kind of place wives were meant to visit. It had no amenities, no magazines or comfortable chairs, and the bathroom, a communal one down the hall to which one carried the key on an oversized brass ring, was unspeakable. If Constantine and his partner were ruthless in the economies they applied to the houses they built, they were, at least, similarly severe about their own professional comforts. Their offices, on the third floor of a vaguely Tudor-style commercial building, were sheathed in Masonite paneling and furnished, haphazardly, with imitation-wood desks and green Leatherette chairs. Mary disliked entering the office at all. Its cheapness made her uneasy, and on the rare occasions when she was forced to go there she felt for some time afterward edgy and insecure, as if she'd caught a glimpse of termites browsing the foundations of her house.