Dark Plums (18 page)

When she heard his footsteps again, she trembled.

“Don't be afraid!” He came up from behind and slipped his arms around her waist. “Come on, baby, let's take a look at you.” His face was somber. “Let's get some ice.”

He led her into the kitchen where he wrapped a lump of ice in a dish towel and had her hold it beneath her eye. Then he led her to bed where he undressed her tenderly. After a while, overwhelmed with shock and pain and confusion, she fell asleep beneath the soothing power of his hands.

When she woke up it was late afternoon, and she realized that the apartment was empty. Wrapping the quilt around her, she got up and went into the bathroom to pee.

In the kitchen, she fixed herself tea and toast. Her stomach felt queasy. She returned to bed and turned the radio to some classical music, which soothed her. Then she dozed off again until Alfredo awakened her by gently shaking her shoulders.

“What is it?”

“Don't cry, Adrianne. I love you.”

“How can you treat me this way?”

“I do it because I love you,” he said. “You need a firm hand.”

“No, no, no,” she sobbed, afraid to speak freely. How unfair he was. She would leave him, yes, she would when she got well, but for now she would say nothing about it.

“I've got something for you.” He took a small white box out of his jacket pocket. “Open it.”

The box had a Tiffany label. Inside were two perfect pearls wreathed with tiny diamonds. “For the woman I love,” he said.

She fingered the earrings. “They're beautiful.”

“Let's see how they look.” He helped her put them through her ears, then he put his maroon robe around her and led her to the bathroom so she could see herself. The bruise beneath her eye had darkened, but the earrings gleamed. He stood behind her in the mirror, half-a-head taller. There was something scornful in his expression.

“You stay out all night. Why can't I?”

“That's how it is,” he said, fixing her with his eyes. “We'll put some makeup on over those bruises so you can work tonight.”

“I can't go out like this. My ribs hurt. Maybe you broke them.”

He felt her body. “Nothing's broken,” he said. “Tonight you work.”

“I hate hustling.”

“It's only for a short time, so be patient. You and I are going on to better things, but we need to save up some money first.”

He lit a cigarette, offered her one, then blew out the smoke and took a deep breath. “I don't want you getting upset about what I'm going to say.
Preciosa
, you know I love you. You're my woman,
verdad
?”

“Yes.”

“We're in a tight spot just now. Michelle is moving in. She can help us out with expenses.”

“What?”

“Now don't get excited.” He put his arm around her. “She's just moving in temporarily. She has to move out of her apartment by the end of the month.”

“I'll move out!” She stubbed out her cigarette, clutched the robe tighter around her waist, and walked over to a window where she looked down at the moving cars and people. She could throw herself out onto the street below. She could leave him tonight. She could go back to stay with Tina.

She would pack her suitcase and get out of here. But then what? She had visions of standing alone on Times Square with frozen icicle tears on her cheeks, feeling as if she were flying apart. He was like a slippery eel, like the god Proteus in an ancient legend she'd read about in high school. You had to hang onto him to keep him from changing shapes. She had to hang onto him or she would drown. If she only hung on long enough, something good would come of it.

“What happens to all the money I bring in? Where's it all going?”

“We've got the Cadillac. The hi-fi. Your fox coat,” he uttered his usual excuses. “Your black rabbit. Those earrings set me back three-hundred dollars.”

“How much have you lost at Belmont?”

His eyes clouded with anger and he tilted her chin up. “If you don't trust me, you can pack right now and leave!”

“I don't want Michelle to move in. It hurts me that you want her here!”

“We need the money.”

“Bullshit!” she cried out in a burst of bravery. “It's bullshit that we need the money. You want to screw her.”

“Watch your mouth, bitch!”

Furious, she swallowed her anger and went into the kitchen. He followed her.

“I love you,” he said softly. “I want you to be all that you can be. Just remember that whatever happens, I love you.” He began caressing her beneath the robe. “You're a slave,” he murmured as he stroked her. She put her hand out to steady herself against the stove. He caressed her breasts, her belly, her buttocks. “You've got a beautiful ass. You'll keep right on being a slave, baby, until you understand what it's all about.”

“Then what?”

“Then you'll be dynamite. I love you, and I'm going to make you into a dynamite woman.”

“So you make me suffer because you love me?”

“Yes.”

“That's crazy.”

He didn't seem to hear her. Letting her go, he reached for a half-empty bottle of rum on the kitchen counter and drank from it. Then he walked out of the kitchen.

She would leave him. Yes, she would leave, she decided.

She stood motionless, staring as if in a trance at the stove, then at the bottles and jars crowded on the counter.

A few minutes later she walked back into the bedroom. He was smoking a joint and he passed it to her. “This will take away your pain,” he said. “It will make it easier to work tonight.” He put some Miles Davis on the hi-fi. Then they lay down and smoked. The marijuana relaxed her. He opened the maroon silk robe and tenderly kissed her breasts, her ear-lobes, her neck, and finally her mouth. “Soon we'll leave the country. We'll get married in Havana.”

If only she could believe him.

She inhaled, held the smoke, let it out. Let out all the doubts. Let her mind go black. Higher. Get higher. But he was wrong about the grass. It wasn't easier to work after you'd smoked. It was a lot harder when you came down again.

He made love to her slowly, with the music playing in the background, and afterwards she lay quietly and felt as if the molecules in her body were subtly changing. A new kind of power was surging through her, even though her ribs still ached. In her altered state, things seemed easy. Easy as pie. By and by she would lay all those men until she reached the sky and touched them with her gigantic fingers. She and Alfredo were floating on top of the world.

At the edge of her consciousness Miles Davis' trumpet sounded. The music sounded so beautiful when she was high. The intervals were longer between the notes. Time was expanding. She could forgive Alfredo because she, too, was expanding.

However, when she looked closely at his face, she saw that it was tinged with a brutality that had not been there when they first met. “He is growing weak through his brutality to me, and I am growing strong. When the time comes, I will leave. Then I will be the strong one,” Adrianne said to herself. The balance between them was shifting. Maybe the beating this morning, horrible though it was, awakened something in her that had been paralyzed.

After a while Alfredo got out of bed. He went into the kitchen and brought Adrianne a plate with cold steak, salsa, potato chips, and a mug of coffee. “It's late,” he said. “Come on. I'll drive you uptown.”

An hour later she was back at the Flamingo Bar on Eighth Avenue, sipping Courvoisier for her throat, which felt a little sore. A middle-aged man with a goatee who was sitting three bar stools away said, “Have one on me.”

“Thanks.”

The man moved closer.

She smiled at the bartender and slipped him a bill for his part of the take.

Michelle moved in. In order to squeeze out some closet space for her belongings, Alfredo packed some of his own clothes into a duffel bag. Adrianne experienced the other girl's presence as a slow-motion nightmare. Sometimes it was all she could do to keep herself from attacking them both with her fists and screaming.

A few days later, Michelle started working the upper East-side hotels and bars. “Why don't you come with me, Adrianne?” she suggested.

Adrianne refused.

At times she would picture Michelle with a knife sticking out of her chest and blood all over, or she'd imagine Michelle's fingernails being torn out with pincers.

Some nights long after Michelle was asleep, Adrianne would clutch Alfredo, and if he were in the right mood he might make love to her tenderly and quietly. As they rocked against each other, she would feel that a deep bond like a subterranean river connected the two of them.

She and Michelle usually both woke up around midday. Often, Alfredo would have gone out. Then she and Michelle might play with each other's bodies, caressing and kissing. At such moments Adrianne felt the sense of power that she imagined a man would feel with a woman. However, at times Adrianne felt that she and Michelle were secretly measuring each other, like opposing warriors. She observed Michelle's smallest gestures as she tried to master the secrets of Michelle's charm.

She tormented herself with the fear that Alfredo cared more for Michelle. Were they planning to abandon her, in spite of Alfredo's whispered promises? Some nights the other two did not come home until nearly dawn, and then they would come in laughing, high on marijuana or some other drug, and Adrianne would question the setup all the more.

Generally, Michelle was friendly but reserved. Her self-containment unnerved Adrianne. But there were moments when the
other girl's green eyes were full of pain.

“Do you love Alfredo?” Adrianne asked one morning while they were drinking coffee.

“I'm not in love with him.”

“Why did you move in here?”

“I had nowhere else to stay. Besides, I'm a Gemini, and Gemini's are curious.”

“About what?” Adrianne wound a tendril of hair around her finger. Michelle looked particularly frail as she sat there in her translucent nightgown. At that moment Adrianne felt she could stick a knife through one of those taut breasts, straight into Michelle's heart.

“I wondered what it would be like to live with a man and a woman.”

“How do you feel when he fucks me?”

“It's beautiful. I float with it.”

“Why don't you get your own man?”

“What makes you think he's yours?”

Seeing the disturbed look on Adrianne's face, Michelle said, “I'm sorry. He is your man, after all. Don't be afraid, because I won't be around for long.” Michelle grew more serious. “I was married once, but it didn't work out. I don't want to be involved like that again. I want to float … split when the going gets heavy or when I get bored, whichever comes first. You see, I don't
want
Alfredo. I don't want you to walk out and leave me here alone with him.” She cluched her cup more tightly between her hands as she looked directly into Adrianne's eyes.

During the next few days, illusion curled its soft petals through Adrianne as seductively as a drug. She persuaded herself that Alfredo loved her. Alfredo loved her so much that the two of them would only be more strongly mated as a result of their shared experience with Michelle.

“You need a girl around,” Alfredo said. “You need the softness of another girl.” He would sketch Michelle and Adrianne in bed together in amorous poses.

“Doesn't it upset you to see us like that?” she asked.

“No, baby,” Alfredo said. “It turns me on.”

For her part, the only way she could endure it when Michelle and Alfredo made love was to detach herself, as if she were in a dream or nightmare.

The tension inside her built.

One morning when Alfredo was out and there was no toilet paper in the bathroom, Adrianne shrieked at Michelle for never buying any. Afterwards, she was ashamed of herself. She had sounded like her mother, Elena, in the early days after Julio's death.

She tried to anesthetize herself so that she felt nothing. She tried to numb herself to the tricks and to the sordidness of her working life. However, she became irritable despite her efforts at self-control. All her antennae were opening up. She'd stepped up the diet pills to prevent herself from eating too much. Now she ran on nervous energy, and a curious lightness filled her.

She found herself psyching out the tricks in rich detail, trying to pick up their fantasies, thoughts, and fears while she went through her physical contortions. This helped her to feel more in control. She felt as if she were drawing on a deep source of vitality. However, it also exhausted her, and she needed twelve to fourteen hours sleep a night.

Why, she asked herself, when she could penetrate the minds of strangers (even as they penetrated her body), couldn't she understand Alfredo? Why did she need him so much?