Augusta Played (17 page)

“What?” she asked, wiping the sweat off her brow as she dropped onto the sofa beside him.

He couldn't say boobs. He said knees.

“Thank you. I'm glad you think so. Knees are very important to a dancer. After all, they are an integral part of the leg, aren't they? Well, do you think I'm good?”

“I think you're
swell
, Birdie. Just swell.”

“I mean, as a dancer?”

“Absolutely. You can take my word for it.”

“As a professional musician?”

“Why not?”

“Will you advance my career?”

“Will I what?”

“You know. Give me a leg up. You're bound to have connections. Conductors are very sort of chic. Radical chic. I read about it. You move around in all the right circles, don't you?”

“I don't know,” he said. “I guess so. Elaine does.”

“Who is Elaine?”

“A relative.”

“Richard,” Birdie said, sucking her right middle finger, “I want to make a clean breast.”

“Go right ahead, Birdie, by all means.” He was ecstatic.

“It just so happens that you have met me at a very fateful point in my life. I have reached a crossroads. I need to take a giant leap forward. It's now or never. Will you help me?”

“I'd like to if I could, Birdie, but what are we talking about?”

“I know we've only met, but already I feel as if I've known you all my life. You don't have to pretend you don't know what we're talking about. I can look into your eyes and see that you read me like a pamphlet. In your heart of hearts, is this not true, Richard?” She had taken off his tie and had done it up around her own neck, and now she was undoing his shirt.

“Miss Mickle,” he said, “I mean Birdie. I appreciate your interest”—he movèd her hands away—“but you have to understand that I don't make trades like this. Good God, I'm much too worldly to make a promise like that simply in order to get a little—”

“What?”

She was looking at him with utter earnestness.

“You know.”

“Oh,” she said,
“that
. I was going to give you some of that anyway.”

“What about Sidney?”

“He won't mind,” she said, “because he won't know about it. Besides, Sidney likes for me to enjoy myself. But only,” she warned, “if you take me seriously. As an artist.”

“I do,” he said, “I do, I do. And I'll tell you something else. I'm not really very worldly.”

“I can't stand worldly men,” Birdie said. “They're so…worldly.”

“I couldn't have put it better myself.” He flicked one of her feathers the way she had done in The Joint and watched it spin like a pinwheel.

“I can dance with my twat,” she said, in the same clear, straightforward, chiming voice.

“Oh my God,” he said, “I don't believe it, I don't believe it.”

“I wouldn't say it if it wasn't true. Here, I have to take my wig off first. You help me.”

“Anything, I'll do anything.”

She turned around and started pulling bobby pins from her wig; when she finished, he was holding it. “Will you get me a big stage engagement?”

“Anything,” he repeated, helplessly.

“Good,” she said, taking the wig from his hands and walking out with it. She kept her wigs on polyethylene heads in her dressing room.

Richard started to ask her why she wore a platinum wig over her platinum hair, but then he thought better of it.

He watched her go—the buttocks shaking like a pair of maracas. He watched her come—the blind breasts staring at him (she had left the feathers with the wig, not wanting them to get crumpled). With his mouth on one of the pink eyes and his hand wandering toward the balletic twat, Richard suddenly registered something, a piece of information he had been processing in the back of his brain. “Did you tell me,” he asked, “that Gussie's husband was blackmailing his own father?”

“Yes, but I explained, it's all for the best. Do you want to see me dance or not?”

“But I did.”

“Not this way.” Ravel was still playing in the background. “Get away.” She pushed him off. “Now watch.”

“Oh God, Miss Mickle,” he said, “you really are an
artiste
of the highest caliber!”

29

B
IRDIE
ADMITTED
to herself that Richard was very handsome, but she had never allowed mere looks to sway her. Deep inside, no one was more beautiful than Sidney.

Poor Sidney. Birdie hated pain herself, and she knew it could be no fun for him, having to go all the time and then having it burn like that when he went. If she could have gone in his place, she would have, but there were some things you couldn't do for another person no matter how much you wanted to.

That was love, she said to herself, sighing, but it showed you that even love wasn't enough. Take Sidney. He loved her, and yet lately he didn't feel up to doing much about it, did he?

Sidney, Sidney. Sidney was the only man Birdie would ever have consented to marry. This was because with Sidney she felt exactly the same as she did by herself. No better, no worse, and no different. Other people might think this was a funny definition of love, but what did other people ever know about anything?

Birdie knew, for example, that some people would say her style was out of date, but so what? Most men lived their pro-foundest emotions in a psychic recess where time barely moved; time there inched along so slowly that clocks or calendars marking “real time” might be said to be to such felt time as Olympic hundred-yard-dashers are to joggers.

What Birdie knew was that she recovered for men an image of femininity lost since 1952—but now by this emotional up-pulling restored—an image lodged deep in their consciousness somewhere between the first two-wheeler and a best-loved catcher's mitt, an image last seen at the Sadie Hawkins Sock Hop.

It was an image shinily shellacked like Birdie herself, with nostalgia, but Birdie herself never would long for the past or her youth. When Birdie was a little girl, even when she was older, she had had to hide in the closet from her father, because he would try to beat her up when he came home drunk. As she grew up, being clever, she learned another way of hiding, by taking her clothes off. The miracle about Sidney was that with him Birdie could keep her clothes on. However, sometimes she liked to take them off, and if Sidney wasn't interested, why not Richard? If Sidney knew, he would tell her to go ahead. Sidney would never stand in the way of her career.

As for Richard, she liked him a lot, anyway—he was a little dopey, in an egghead sort of way, but good-humored. On the other hand, she would never dream of marrying him. He naturally would not imagine that he might ask her, but men knew nothing about stuff like that. Men almost never knew in advance when they were going to ask a woman to marry them. Most men went into deep shock when they discovered what they had done. However, Richard need not worry about this. Birdie knew when a relative was a wife, and furthermore, she for one was not about to give up all her nights. A girl needed some time alone. Many nights, Birdie took off her makeup and wig and put on an original creation from Frederick's of Hollywood and went to bed by herself, slipping between the satin sheets. She made a little cave in the satin pillows for her head and slept on her right side. Obviously, she couldn't very well sleep on her stomach. She felt like a princess in a fairy tale, her soft cheek, defenselessly naked without its beauty spot, warm against the cool, floating satin.

30

N
EWARK
BURNED
in July, and to Norman it seemed as though some kind of ash-cover lingered in the sky, a flake-fine silt falling on the television antennae and cables. He caught a whiff of something combustible in his own soul. Cooler weather brought some relief.

In October, he saw Phil Fleischman off on the march to the Pentagon. He would have liked to go himself, but he felt that his first duty was to his dissertation, which occupied him increasingly. He worked long hours in the library, taking notes, outlining, tracing his way through historical periods tentatively, backing off from dead ends, seeking new approaches, looking for the one way through that would appear, from the far end of the tunnel, inevitable, but which was uncoverable only by the most exhaustive, probing scholarship. Derivative! It still ate on him. What wasn't derivative, when you got down to it? The pieces were always the same. Certainly, there were minor modifications—extinct species, manmade elements—but the essentials stayed the same. The important thing was to put them together in a new way. God was, among other things no doubt, a toymaker, and he had designed the universe like an infinite jigsaw puzzle. Depending on how you fitted the pieces together, you came up with quantum mechanics, the social contract, or the
Grosse Fuge
.

Norman was living in a state of high-pitched excitement, convinced that the work he was doing would eventually yield to his blandishments. He saw less and less of Gus, and he was not unaware that there was an element of self-protection in this. “Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise,” Freud wrote, in a letter to Fliess. Norman agreed completely, but he couldn't do everything at once, and thinking about Gus would have to wait until later. In the meantime, it seemed to him that they got along about as well as young couples could be expected to. Sometimes in the evenings he watched her washing dishes, the jelly glasses and ashtrays and coffee cups and spoons, with the engagement ring parked on the top of the television because she wouldn't take a chance on a cockroach crawling over it on the drainboard, and the unconscious movements of her back and shoulders under the white blouse, the soft slap and swoosh of her hands in soapy water, the bright whiteness of skin at the back of the knee, her cascading golden honey-stream hair, the vulnerable girl-ness of an indented waist—these sights and sounds visited him with a great yearning. He felt that he loved her so much that it made him sad.

These gusts of feeling would sweep over him from time to time, leaving him lonely and on edge, and to defend himself against them, he felt it was necessary to establish a certain slight distance from Gus—nothing noticeable, nothing lamentable, but a bit of breathing- and elbow-room, a psychic space in which he could concentrate on his work. It pleased him that Gus was working hard herself, and it pleased him even more that in a way he was the cause, as he had promised to pay for her debut. Occasionally, a finger of anxiety would nudge him into wondering how he was going to persuade his father to come across with another two thousand, but this was not yet the most pressing of problems. Norman's philosophy was, What is the point in frittering away your best mental energies on the mundane when one's inner life offered such highs and lows as Maria Callas could only dream of?

Yes, and when he emerged from the library on winter evenings, the dark seemed to him to be celebratory. He felt festive. The Christmas decorations swooped across the street. Santa Claus chimed his bell next to a cardboard brick chimney. The air smelled sharp and wet, there were thick, punching-bag clouds poised to snow. Fragrances of smoked chestnut, popcorn, evergreen, peppermint, and motor oil invaded his lungs and made him heady. The blind man at the corner held out his cup and Norman dropped a Kennedy half-dollar into it, although he knew this particular blind man from years of passing him on his way back and forth from Morningside Heights, and the man was no blinder than he was. Who cared? It was the right time of year to be giving your money away. “Peace,” the blind man said, with incomparable swagger. Norman answered with a restrained nod, oozing cool, but it was all for show: his heart was rising in his chest and felt so light it might just keep on ascending. Fuck being cool: he couldn't wait to get home.

Gus was out.

31

S
HE
HAD
LEFT
a note taped to the television screen: “Gone to look for a Christmas present for Tom and Cyril. Back soon.”

Norman drank a quart of eggnog from the icebox and then switched on the news.

He had not noticed it before, but the room had gotten larger since his marriage. This was the opposite of what marriage was supposed to do. While he and Gus were still engaged, Kellogg, one of his professors, had warned him that the most important thing in marriage was a two-room apartment. (Kellogg was a tall, loose-jointed man with tufts of black hair extruding from his ears and nostrils, as if he had been rather carelessly stuffed with straw.) “If you live in an efficiency, your wife gets mad and locks herself in the bathroom, and you can't get in until she comes out. This can be pure agony, if you do what the typical American husband does in such a situation.”

Norman had asked what that was.

Kellogg saluted him with his glass. “Drink,” he said.

In the event, Gus was always afraid that the ghost of the drowned mouse would somehow rise one night through the sewers of New York, climb out of the john and claim its revenge. And Norman's favorite beverage, next to nonalcoholic eggnog, was root beer. So the apartment, when Gus was not in it, seemed to Norman to have swelled to unmanageable proportions; he didn't know what to do with himself in it. He was immensely relieved when the telephone rang. He turned the news down, carrying the phone from the desk. The long, ice-blue cord trailed behind him. “Gold here,” he said.

“My name is Elaine Hacking. You don't know me,” a woman said, “but I have something that belongs to you.”

“Elaine Hacking,” Norman said. “Hacking. Hacking. I don't think we've met.”

“I've explained that you don't know me.”

“I don't understand.”

“You will,” she said, “if I can meet you somewhere.”

“Do I want to meet you?”

“If you want what's yours, you do.”

“Why don't you come here?”