Dark Plums (12 page)

“You've got a great body.”

“Please go. I don't feel well.”

“You want me to get you anything?”

“No, no, leave me alone.”

She opened the door, and to her relief he walked out, although he was smirking.

Much later, after she had forced herself to go with several more men and had eaten a roast beef on rye at an all-night Horn & Hardart's, she went home in a taxi.

It was dark inside the loft, and Alfredo was asleep. When she put her hand on his chest—she could feel his rhythmic breathing. He stirred as she turned on the bedside lamp.

“Alfredo, Alfredo,” she murmured, stroking his hair.

“Huh? What is it?”

“Alfredo, it's me. I brought you lots of money.”

She flung the bills from her wallet onto the blanket.

He sat up and rubbed his eyes. “Huh? What happened?”

Then he counted out the bills. Two hundred and twenty-five dollars. “Not bad, baby,” he said. “Did things go okay?”

“Yes.”

He folded them up and put them underneath the lacquer box hidden behind the books.

She exulted that she had conned the world. Then suddenly fearful, she asked, “Alfredo, do you still love me?”

“Yeah, sure I do.”

“But I've been with all those men.”

“Cut the crap. You belong to me.”

Clinging to him, feeling his touch, his voice, her life again took on coherence. When she got into bed, he caressed her with extraordinary tenderness. It was worth all she had gone through tonight. If he kept on loving her, she would hustle for him for a hundred years, she thought sleepily.

Adrianne and Alfredo took a cab to a Japanese restaurant where they sipped saki and ate tidbits wrapped in seaweed, using chopsticks, while Japanese music played in the background. Adrianne felt buoyant. In the last week she had made over a thousand dollars.

Alfredo was attired in a new charcoal flannel suit, while she was wearing the chiffon dress and Italian pumps that Lucille had given her. Over the dress, she wore the black rabbit-fur coat that Alfredo had just helped her choose at Bendel's.

They clinked glasses and drank as more food was brought to their table—beef teriyaki, salad flavored with sweet vinegar, and rice. Oh this is the life, she thought hummingly. Soon he will marry me and how happy we will be in a Caribbean hacienda. Then the familiar black chasm opened in her imaginings, and she felt panic. “Do you love me?” she asked, although she knew he hated her to ask. Anguish shaped her question.

“Yes, sweetheart.”

Over there in a corner, she thought she saw a trick that she'd been with a few days ago, and she didn't give a damn. She whispered this to Alfredo. Fifteen minutes with that man over there had paid for the meal. Hilarious. Ironic. Everything swirled around and around. Even though her fur coat was warm, she shivered.

“I know you're a hundred per cent for me,” he said in a gust of exhilaration. “One of these days we'll settle down and have those babies you want. Here's to us!” He raised his glass to hers.

An anxious kind of joy flooded her. He must love her, she thought. He must trust her. Otherwise he wouldn't show her where he kept marijuana and cash hidden, wouldn't talk as he did about his work and his dreams, wouldn't reveal as much of himself as he did.

“I wish you didn't have to hustle,” he said. “As soon as people start buying my work, I'll be able to support you.”

“Alfredo, I love you so much”

He averted his eyes, and again she felt panic.

They consumed an entire bottle of saki and were both a little drunk when they left.

White walls covered with Alfredo's paintings were obscured by crowds of fashionably dressed men and women whose voices filled the air. They wandered through the Fifty-Seventh Street gallery, sipping wine and nibbling on morsels of cheese and crackers as well as hot hors d'oeuvres, which a waiter passed around on silver trays.

Voices—harsh like birds of prey, New Yorkese, Bostonian, effete, shrill—assailed Adrianne. When she peered around a woman who was wearing an enormous felt hat with a long feather, she glimpsed Alfredo's huge semi-abstract jungle painting. A few days ago she'd helped him carry all the paintings up here from the rented van. She fingered her left knee where she'd bruised it, tearing her jeans on a rough frame edge.

Snatches of conversation reached her ears.

“… more concrete than Motherwell …”

“… paranoid awareness …”

“… picked a fight at the White Horse…”

As she watched them talk, his canvases treated as no more than a backdrop to their thoughts and voices and egos, she could understand why Alfredo despised these people and how he despaired of getting through to them.

Among all these people, she alone knew Alfredo. Only she knew this man whose work they were judging. She alone slept with him and knew the feel of his flesh, knew how he tossed in his sleep when oppressed by nightmares.

She knew the secrets of so many men, their whispered confessions, as though she were a priest or psychiatrist. Confessions of failures in intimacy, confessions about erotic dreams, guilts, and regrets.

Why then did people despise prostitutes, who gave far more of themselves than priests or psychiatrists ever did? Why was prostitution against the law? Alfredo would say it was because New York was like a gigantic psycho ward.

Now he came up to her, accompanied by a balding man who wore a bright red tie. “Adrianne, I'd like you to meet the man who
owns this gallery. Harris, this is my girl.” Alfredo's tweed jacket felt rough against her bare arm.

“Hello, Harris,” she said.

“She has an extraordinary face,” said Harris, appraising Adrianne as if she were a piece of sculpture. His voice had an effeminate tinge. “We've got quite a crowd. A reviewer from
The Times
stopped by a little while ago. That man in the turtleneck over there next to “Woman with Wolf's Head”—that's Gus Liebowitz, a big collector. Come over and meet him. Adrianne, you're charming,” he said by way of farewell.

“Hi. Are you with Alfredo?” asked a soft voice. Adrianne turned around and gazed into the face of a beautiful mulatto girl, perhaps eighteen or nineteen, who was slender but full-bosomed. She wore a beige angora dress and pearls. “I've heard about you from Alfredo,” she said. Gently, she embraced Adrianne.

“Who are you?”

“My name's Sonya. I'm a friend of his.” Sonya laughed at Adrianne's questioning look. “Don't worry, there's nothing between us. We're old friends, and a few weeks ago we ran into each other again.”

Adrianne had a fleeting vision of nestling against Sonya's soft breasts and belly, of lying for hours with the healing tenderness promised by Sonya's touch, so different from the male harshness of the streets.

“Adrianne, this is Dominic.” Sonya introduced a slender man with dark hair in an Italian silk suit whose harsh face was pitted with acne scars. “Dominic is going to buy one of Alfredo's paintings.” Sonya cuddled against him.

“So, you're Alfredo's girl,” said Dominic. His voice was abrasive, and Adrianne immediately distrusted him. She wondered what connected Sonya and Dominic, because they seemed so different from each other. Dominic took hold of Adrianne's arm with a familiar gesture. “I understand you're in a rough line of work,” he said. “Maybe I can set you up in a better situation.”

“What do you mean?” She felt as if he had hit her in the pit of her stomach. How did he know what she was doing?

“We'll talk later,” he said.

Then he and Sonya wandered off.

After a moment, she realized that the crowd was thinning. Someone had turned on a Vivaldi record. She found a chair to sit on, and her visual awareness of things dimmed as she descended into the Baroque music, which was almost unbearably sad but beautiful. Alfredo must have told them she was hustling. Who else had he told? She felt betrayed. Then she let the music take hold of her senses, trying to grasp each note as if this could give her clarity and heal the anguish inside her.

“Not one review,” said Alfredo. He lay sprawled across their mattress with its new satin sheets and purple quilt. Beneath him lay the crumpled Sunday papers.

“That opening wasn't worth shit.” He flicked cigarette ash onto the floor.

“What do you mean?”

“Don't act so fucking stupid!” The violence in his voice sent a tremor through Adrianne. She lay a hand on her belly, feeling the silky texture of the beautiful pale-pink negligee she had recently bought. At Elizabeth Arden's, she'd had a facial, her hair styled, and her hands and feet manicured. However, she wanted to look beautiful for Alfredo alone, without there being other men.

Alfredo got up. She heard him piss in the bathroom, then go into the kitchen. He came back with a bottle of beer. Lately he'd begun drinking early in the day.

He scrutinized her and, appearing to pick up her thoughts, said, “You've made yourself look pretty sharp with your new clothes and the help of Elizabeth Arden.” He paused for a moment. “Remember Dominic? You met him at the opening.”

“Alfredo, why did you tell him about me?”

He pulled her head back and looked down into her eyes. “Dominic runs a house. His girls make a lot more than you do. You'd be safer there than you are on the streets.”

“I don't want to work in a house.”

“You're crazy.” He yanked her hair so hard that she cried out with pain, but he kept right on pulling her back until she was afraid her neck would snap. At last he released her. She screamed, then burst into tears. This was not the Alfredo she knew.

“Now, baby,” he said, his voice softening as if he realized he was going too far. “I love you, and I don't want you getting messed up on the streets. It's dangerous out there.”

“Do you really care for me?”

“Of course I do, sweetheart.”

“How did you meet Dominic?” she asked.

“Through Sonya.”

“How do you know her?”

He arched his brows and gave a half-smile, drank some beer, then offered her the bottle. But she shook her head. “I meet lots of people,” he said. “She wandered into the bar a while back, just like you did, and we began talking.”

“Did you ever make love to her?”

“No. We're just friends. She's a nice person.”

“Does she work for Dominic?”

He swallowed more beer. “Yes, she does, and she can teach you a lot because you're still rough at the edges.”

She pondered this. The idea of becoming more polished appealed to her. On the other hand, his talk about the call girls just now jabbed her in the heart. She had been hoping that any day now, as soon as enough of his paintings sold, he would tell her to stop hustling.

Again she felt her belly. It was nearly flat because she had lost so much weight. If she were pregnant with Alfredo's child, her belly would swell again. Their unborn child, laughing, dark-skinned, with brilliant eyes, floated away in an invisible wind. Poor child. Will you ever get born? As for that other infant conceived back in Texas, just now she could hear it crying. A girl, they said. Carcass rotting in a trash heap somewhere.

Turning over on her side, she moved against his ribs. “Alfredo?”

“What?”

“I want to stop hustling.”

“Soon you will, baby.” He kissed her on the forehead, lit another cigarette, and took another sip from the bottle that lay on the floor beside him.

“The critics play fucking skull games,” he said, going back to his former line of thought. “They don't really
see
a painting. They see a name, or they see a style that's ‘in.”‘

“Your work is powerful.”

“Shit. I can spend my time better at the track.”

“Alfredo! This doesn't sound like you.”

He leaned over her, his face twisted with pain. “Stop bullshitting me. Nobody
knows
Alfredo Montalvo.”

Tears welled up in her eyes and a lump came into her throat. What was causing him to change into a stranger? Anger surrounded him in flaming, invisible clouds which frightened her, so that she wanted to get away from him this very minute. “I'm going to shower and go out for a walk,” she said. She rose and walked across the room. Just as she was going through the door, he threw one of her slippers at her.

“Cunt!
Puta loca
!”

Sobbing and jittery, she ran water over herself with a shower hose while she stood in the rusty tub Alfredo had picked up in a Brooklyn junkyard. For two months now she had denied herself food and kept herself going on the diet pills. Pain was something she had learned to live with: aching hunger, pain from her high heels jabbing into her as she waited long hours on street corners. Now the pain from Alfredo's contempt and fury was too much for her to bear. “He's hurting a lot. He's upset over the show. I need to be patient. He loves me. He loves me. He must love me. I know he loves me,” she kept reassuring herself.

As Adrianne was drying herself off with a huge new rose-colored towel, Alfredo stalked naked into the bathroom. He snatched the towel from her grip and held her close.

“Baby, you know I care about you. If I act crazy sometimes, it's because this city is driving me out of my mind. That art gallery was full of phonies. Maybe Dominic and Sonya—a Mafia man and a hooker—were the only honest people there.”

He sat down on the toilet seat, pulled her onto his lap, and suckled at her breasts. “
Melones
. Your breasts are beautiful melons. I ought to paint them all by themselves,” he said after he came up for air. Tenderly, he caressed her full breasts. How handsome he was, with his smooth, olive skin, his sensitive face. She rubbed her hand against his forehead.