After Delores (8 page)

“Too bad, it would have been terrific.”

“It will be terrific. We don't have to stop where the writer does. That is only the first step.” She sighed then. “People will help each other lie all the time. Then they call it friendship, but it's not, is it?” I searched her face for the right answer but she gave me nothing.

“Little Marianne had no respect for what she didn't understand, and I lie to Charlotte that this is an acceptable invasion into my life, but it is not. I have given up many things to be able to love this woman, but I will not give up being treated with respect. I will not compoete for attention with a schoolgirl.”

“Do you think she was killed by someone she knew or did Marianne just walk down the wrong street at the wrong moment?”

“Honestly, I haven't let myself think about it. I accept murder in general without question because the causes of such events are far greater than the individuals who carry them out. But I will tell you two things. First, people do not dump bodies of strangers in the river. They don't care enough. Strangers' bodies are left lying in doorways or in backs of lots. They are collected, half rotten, by the police and carried away in plastic bags. Then a report is filed under the title ‘Unidentified Hispanic Male 20–25, Assailant Unknown.' And that is the end of it.”

“What is the second thing?”

“The second thing,” she said, jumping up from her chair, “is that we're going to build a houseboat in here and a gangplank. The lights will be so beautiful. White and hot at noon, the way the sun falls directly on your head and dulls the water. Then in the evening it will be midnight blue, cool and cold, the breeze coming in off the sea.”

She looked right at me again, her eyes very full.

“I am not a monster. I am just a woman in all her complexities. We must be able to accommodate a wide variety of simultaneous feelings within the confines of our feminine bodies.”

I watched her skin, primarily, and the way her wrists moved. She had the manner of inner grace and intelligent beauty that women only begin to realize in their late thirties. Everything is texture and wise emotions. It was in her voice, her gestures, in every habit. A certain familiarity with obstacles. She glanced, not fleetingly from side to side, but up and down, to herself and then back to me. Her eyes were deep and tired with wrinkles from the sides like picture frames. Beatriz's veins stood away from her neck and those thin wrists, so beautiful—there I could see every sorrow and useful labor. I got excited for the first time in a long time, realizing that this was in my future as well. Not just knowing her, but myself, becoming that beautiful. It had been too long since I had such hopeful imaginings.

“In this play, Charlotte is the abandoned friend, a woman who lies to herself. When you walked in, I was planning a scene in which every line is a lie.”

“Is that the play you were rehearsing when I met you the first time?”

“Oh no. That was a silly exercise. Charlotte doesn't play naïve things. She must always be very frightening.”

“She sure scares me,” I said. “I wouldn't want to get on her bad side. She looks like she could smash a chair over your head, just like that. Like she could destroy you if it happened to occur to her or she had nothing else to do.”

“No, no, no,” Beatriz said, a bit too aggressively. “Anybody can destroy another person. Only, most people won't admit it. A good actress admits these things for us. That's why we love them so much.”

Beatriz had the voice of a reformed smoker, bluesy with a cough in her laugh. She was skinny from way too much energy.

“Charlotte and I have been together for a long, long time. We have adapted to each other's failings. Charlotte has affairs and as long as she pays attention to me, I tolerate it. I do that because I love her and want to be together with her. What is more important to me than the category or theoretical concept of the relationship is that I love Charlotte the woman.”

“Triangles are a big mess,” I said.

“No,” she answered curtly, as though I was misinformed. “Everything
can
work, but all the responsibility is on the new lover. A romance is always more exciting than a marriage, and a new lover has moments of more power than the old one because you are not so familiar with their bag of tricks. Unfortunately Marianne did not have the grace to adapt to the limitations of her role. The best newcomer is one with a great deal of respect. They have to respect me and they have to be considerate of me. Then we can all be generous and each one satisfied on some level.”

She took a large bottle of seltzer out of a paper bag and poured it into two well-worn cups. Without the sweet shot of liquor that I was used to, it tasted sickly, like gas.

“My old girlfriend, Delores, she wouldn't be generous like that to me.”

“Well, then you're lucky to be rid of her. Don't worry, she'll do the same thing to her new woman when her number comes up. Then you can rejoice. People never change their modus operandi.”

That made me angry. It started in my upper arms, they began to ache. I got jumpy like I wanted to smash everything and scream at myself in the mirror.

“She just didn't love you. It's obvious.”

I wanted her to shut up.

“You sound like you don't even care that Marianne is dead. You don't even care that someone squeezed her neck until it broke. Think about how scared she must have been. Don't you give a shit?”

“She was my rival. I have the right to be cold. Charlotte likes those young women. I can't stand them. I don't like them aesthetically. I don't like their skin. It's too easy to be gay today in New York City. I come from those times when sexual excitement could only be in hidden places. Sweet women had to put themselves in constant danger to make love to me. All my erotic life is concerned with intrigue and secrets. You can't understand that these days, not at all. Lesbians will never be that sexy again.”

I wondered if her hands were too small to have fit around Punkette's neck. And then I asked a larger question. What makes a person suddenly able to commit murder? It's easier to hate than to kill, that's for sure. But I bet the combination brings the greatest satisfaction. When you kill the woman who took love out of your life, it can be an act of honor. But if you kill a woman because you saw her go-go dance in East Newark and wanted to feel her neck snap, then you too deserve to die. I marveled at how easily I accepted the difference.

11

THERE IS A
limit to what you can do for yourself. When the mess you're in is too scary and overwhelming to possibly unravel, you have the choice to call in outside help. The best candidates are smart, compassionate, and creative. That narrows it down quite a bit. They have to have some free time, and finally they have to care about you a little. When I considered all the necessary qualifications, there was only one option: Coco Flores.

If everybody's got a best friend, I guess she's mine. She's always been a good talker but she learned to listen since she started working as a beautician. We met when she was managing an all-girl punk band called Useless Phlegm. Their name accurately described both their music and their personalities. When Coco suggested changing it to Warm Spit, they fired her. Then she enrolled in beauty school and got a job working a hair salon in the strip of new stores along the waterfront where the fuck bars used to be. Coco liked to hang out outside. She knew all the street people and they knew her. She knew the first name of every person begging for money between the park and the F train.

“When someone asks you for money, you have to give it to them,” she always said. “How can you say no? Dollars are best.”

Of course, a beautician can't hand out dollars like business cards, so she developed a priority list which was topped off by two black dykes who regularly asked for cash. One worked the corner of Fourth and Second and the other stood under the scaffolding on Saint Mark's Place where construction workers had taken out a movie theater and were putting in a David's Cookies. They were definitely lesbians, Coco pointed out, and you have to take care of your own people first, so she saw them as her personal responsibility. There are more and more women in general panhandling on the street, but women asking for money usually plead. They cry or they will tell you what good reason they need the money for, like getting home to New Jersey. Not these women. They lean against buildings and talk to you real honey-like.

“Baby, can you give me a couple of dollars?”

Coco could get along with just about anybody and was, therefore, obviously unique. Somewhere in the background she was Puerto Rican on both sides, but they'd come over in the thirties so now she was more New Yorker than anything. Coco had never been a salsa queen but she did dabble in Latin punk and was always dyeing her hair a multitude of colors. But Coco's most special feature was that she could talk poetry. She could turn it on and talk beautiful words that didn't exactly belong together but worked out all right in the end. Sometimes listening to Coco's stories was like swimming. You forgot where you were until it was over and then your arms felt freer. She'd read all the time, steal words for her spiral notebooks, and then throw them into one-person conversations that others could only watch.

“Hey Coco, isn't it a beautiful day?”

“I know,” she said, flipping her chartreuse frost over her shoulder. “It's the gold-feathered bird.”

“What is?”

“The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.”

We were heading toward the Hudson River, trying to get across the highway, dodging in and out of speeding vehicles, so I didn't quite catch what she said.

“The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down,” she yelled over the traffic. “It means believe in the imagination, but it doesn't mean politically like you
should
. The words just do it by example.”

“Where did you learn that, Coco?”

“My three o'clock appointment took a course at the New School. Next year she'll take two. She told me about it waiting for her perm to take.”

In a minute we were on the dock, sunny and warm. I had a beer. Coco had an iced tea.

“Tell me a story, Coco. Tell me one of your great stories about some girl.”

“Sure.” Coco flipped her hair back and looked out over the water. It was almost pretty the way the sun brought out the blue and hid the garbage and dead fish.

“We were both up in the country at the estate of a rich faggot whose boyfriend went to beauty school with me. She was married and older but we flirted the whole weekend in front of everyone, although her husband, thank God, was absent. Finally, with big smiles, we decided to meet at midnight but forgot to say where. So I waited in bed lounging, making myself fuckable, wet, and sparkly. And, at the same moment, she was waiting for me, picking the perfect lighting and music, putting clean sheets on the bed. It got later and later, both of us waiting, wondering if the other would ever show. Finally, I decided I would not be disappointed and assumed my responsibilities as suitor by walking over to the guest house where she was staying.”

At just this point in the story, Coco took out a nail file and started doing her nails.

“So anyway, the woods were dark that night, barely one star. Still, I found the dirt paths easily and walked them without a light, since my excitement was fluorescent. I was bouncing along, feeling the night when, right then, ahead on the same road, in another direction, a single spot shined my way.

“‘Who's there?' she called out, knowing full well it was me coming to make love to her.

“‘It's me,' I said. ‘It's Coco Flores.'

“Well, let me tell you, it was fun. Everything was happening just the way it should.”

“What did she say?” I had to know.

“She laughed and said, ‘Oh, great,' and ‘You're hot, you're really hot.' She said that to me because I was on her neck and scratching her fingers with my teeth outside in the woods. She held my hand in her leather glove. We were shy walking together in the night, but happy between kisses. During them we weren't shy at all. So I put my hand on her ass like it was mine. ‘You are forward,' she said.”

“Did you do it right there in the woods?” I asked Coco and then felt bad for the crassness of the question.

“No, we made it back to my floor, and I, being taller, younger, and the lesbian, unbuttoned her shirt until one forty-year-old breast showed with a nipple as dark as the eyes of Latin women. Do you know what was the most surprising? That she was so caring and willing to desire me. I was really touched, in that sexual way that leaves waves of sweet nausea that always end in the cunt.”

Coco slurped her iced tea. She was really talking now.

“We enjoyed everything and kissed each other's mouths more than expected. ‘Your breasts are great,' she said to me. ‘Do all your girls tell you that?' When I went to her asshole, it was a cave inside a rock formation. When her fingers went inside me, they flew.”

Coco got very quiet then, like she was feeling something dreamy and romantic, like all she wanted to think about was those fingers.