Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground (32 page)

I was hamming it up, dangling a slinky confection like the skin of a rainbow trout. When she failed to take the hint, I moved right along, though the pickings were getting slim, trying again with a flapper affair in gossamer and beads. But Naomi was hardly even showing any vital signs. That's when I came to the end of my patience.

“What do you think, this is my lady's chamber? You think we got all night?” Then right away, seeing how she'd been pushed close to tears, I relented. I gave her the go-ahead with my hand and told her, “Listen, I'm sorry, take your time. Take all the time you need—two, three minutes? I don't care.”

I had it in mind to back off and leave her to try on the costumes in privacy, which was anyway the gentlemanly thing to do. But before I could get clear of the cage, I stumbled over her voice in its plangent appeal: “Harry, don't leave me.”

By the time I turned around, her head had already vanished in the black web of her turtleneck. Then she peeled off the jersey, leaving her knotted scarf in place but revealing a pale pink garment to the waist. With no more ceremony than if she'd been alone, she kicked off her sandals, unlaced her slacks, and stripped down to a pair of fine-spun tap pants. After that she reached for a strap of her cotton camisole and was beginning to pull it over her shoulder. “Stop!” I shouted. “That, uh, won't be necessary,” I hastened to add, swallowing hard.

Naomi shrugged, leaving the strap to droop down her scrawny arm. Her eyes remained skittery, but in her voice, just beneath what was still mostly an appeal, I thought I detected the suggestion of a dare.

“You dress me, Harry,” she said.

My throat went dry, my tongue like something washed up on a beach. When I managed to speak, I think that I actually muttered some caution against her taking a chill, though the heat in the rear of Kaplan's couldn't have been more dense. Turning in a full circle before I was able to locate the rack, I snatched up one of the remaining frocks. It was some lavender period piece, as it happened, with an upstanding bodice scalloped in lace-trimmed brocade: Guinevere meets Little Bo-Peep.

Without inquiring whether the gown was at all to her taste, I flung it over Naomi's head the way you might throw water to douse a flame—but not before I'd taken a sneaking account of her spindle-shanked anatomy, which included, item: the furuncular knobs of her shoulders; the bumps like mosquito bites under her bow-tied camisole, which was short enough to show a navel so convex that it seemed to be coming unbuttoned; the frosting of down on her coltish legs, knock-kneed below the edges of her baggy drawers. None of it was lost on me: how she looked, my near relation, like she'd just been hatched from an egg. Only nominally human, she nevertheless gave the impression that she was on her way toward becoming something else. A word I didn't know I knew—
sylph
—popped into my head, and I wondered if I was about to come into a knowledge beyond my years.

Turning away from her again, I started to rummage through the squat iron vault. “Accessories,” I muttered; that's what I was looking for, or was it my scattered wits? In a tray containing—alongside the costume jewelry—fake eyeballs and prosthetic hooks, snake rattles and hollow fangs, wishbones, a devil doll, and a sulphur-yellow rock labeled “Philosopher's Stone,” I found a conservative strand of tiny seed pearls. I faced my cousin a little stiffly, like I was bestowing them by virtue of the power vested in me as…what?, and fastened the pearls around her meager stem of a neck.

While I was asking myself what ought to come next, Naomi read my mind. Stooping, she retrieved a drawstring leather bag from the pocket of her shucked sailor pants. This she pressed into my hands before returning to her passivity of a moment ago, only now she didn't appear to be so floored into confusion by it all. Give her a gown and some jewelry, and all of a sudden she's posing, the pitsvinik; she's above having to wait on herself. Who did she think she was, putting on airs like a princess? Who, for that matter, did
I
think she was?

Inside the leather bag I discovered a variety of cosmetics: Tangee compact cases and aromatic puffs, lipstick tubes, eyebrow pencils, swabs. These were the sort of things that required an exacting touch, the sure hand that delivers the coup de grace. “Oh no.” I was shaking my head, pleading inexperience. “What do I know from glamour?”

But in my mind I was giving testimony: I knew the show ladies at the Palace, their dressing tables crowded with toiletries like an Emerald City; I knew the ladies of the Baby Doll with their henna and hare's-foot unguents, their bezoar powder, their bleaching compounds for cutting coffee complexions with cream. What, come to think of it, didn't I know from glamour?

Besides, it didn't take a genius to apply a little lipstick. I'll admit I was worried at first that I might be hurting her, the way her mouth got so inflamed and her lips tightened to a slit. But when she released them in a slow impression of scarlet petals unfolding, I relaxed. Next came the eyes, which I caught on to pretty quick. If you stirred the little brush in the palette of shadow, then gently etched her quivering eyelids in soft greens and blues, you could create all kinds of effects. You could give her startled eyes a deep sadness or, with a deft stroke at the corners, a touch of boldness or even ferocity. You could turn them from the eyes of a girl to those of a tigress, then soften them with your fingertips until the frightened doe peeped through. You could make them fathomless and full of mystery.

Next it seemed that a little face powder might be in order. So I took up a puff and proceeded to raise a storm of fine white dust, from which Naomi emerged with an unearthly pallor. In a hurry to restore her vitality, I dipped my fingers in a tiny paint pot and daubed her with an excess of rouge. By rubbing circles over her cheeks, however, I was able to reduce the garish clown splotches to the merest phantoms of a blush. After that I closed an eye to peer at my cousin over the top of my upraised thumb, and judged that the results were perfection.

I even liked the way the tight black babushka, which still hid her hair, brought out the dramatic features of her face. I liked the way it contrasted with her lavish gown. Still, I knew what was missing. Beginning to shuffle among the bonnets and ruglike toupees on top of the costume rack, I brought down a couple of faceless wooden heads wearing wigs. The wig I chose was a high-piled, blond-ringleted concoction, more of a tawdry Madame du Barry than a Queen Marva June, but it was close enough and so roomy that you could pull it conveniently over Naomi's scarf.

When I looked, however, I saw that my cousin had already whipped off the scarf and was in the process of shaking out her hair. And now that the secret was out, it looked to me like it might be a job to cover it up again. For one thing, she seemed to have more hair than I remembered, or was it just that she'd washed it for a change? In any case, taking a silver-spined brush out of her bag, she began to stroke the shock of it into a dark and static-crackling tawniness. With every brush stroke her hair seemed more abundant, acquiring a kind of corona from the overhead light, which gave me another idea. I tossed aside the dusty wig and went casting about in the vault again, this time coming up with a delicate rhinestone coronet. Using it as a comb to sweep back her veil of bangs, I positioned it in Naomi's hair. Then I stepped away to watch its blue-black sheen catch the fire of those winking and shooting stones.

I gave a nod, turned again, and began rooting around under the costumes, searching for a suitable pair of shoes. I didn't look over my shoulder when I heard her in motion again; I didn't need to. The whispered susurrus alone was enough to carry me back to that sidetracked afikomen hunt on a distant Passover evening, so I knew that Naomi was pulling on a pair of silk stockings (in dark indigo, I imagined, or smoke), hoisting them over her azure-veined thighs.

Taking a deep breath, letting it out, I kept my mind on the matter at hand. From among a mismatched assortment of galoshes and clogs, elevators and carpet slippers with upcurling toes, brogans caked in the mud of Verdun, I selected a pair of blue satin dancing pumps. Hoping they would fit, I swiveled around on my knees to help Naomi try them on. She obliged me by steadying herself, placing a hand benediction-style on the top of my head. With her other she lifted the rustling organdy of her gown, raising it as far as her ankle. This was a perfectly functional action on her part, nothing you would call especially Cinderella. So why did a certain organ in my chest choose that moment to do its impersonation of a landed fish?

When I stood up to get the full effect of my labors, I found I didn't quite know how to look at her anymore. I averted my eyes and said I supposed that she wanted to get a load of herself. “Don't go away,” I told her, which struck me as funny, as if I'd said it to a manikin instead of a living girl.

I flung about outside the cage for another minute or two. Eventually I turned up what I was looking for, wrapped in a bullet-riddled flag: a cloudy oval mirror in its burnished frame. I went back and held it in front of my cousin's face. I stood just behind her, holding up the mirror, kibbitzing her reflection over her shoulder—so that together we seemed to be gazing at the portrait of one shayne fair lady. In this way I was able to make an objective assessment of my handiwork.

She was a dream, the one in the mirror. She had a comeliness that could have presided over pageants, be they in the city of Memphis or the palace of Belshazzar. She was the type that could tease a dozen suitors, playing each against the other, while behind her fan she exposed the wickedness of his most trusted adviser to the king. She was a corker, all right; she could have fooled anybody. She could have fooled her own father. She could have fooled blithering Michael, shimmering into his field of vision like a lavender-blue flame—a flame composed of all the careless sparks that had flown from his mouth in the course of his long delirium. In fact, she could have fooled me.

As I craned my neck to peer into the mirror, I could no longer see past her radiance to the original shrimp underneath. The difficulty was possibly due to the murkiness of the glass, which I promptly put aside. But when I took her by the arm to turn her around, gingerly, as if she might break, it was even worse. She was beautiful. The thought came to me then that I was seeing my cousin for the first time as she truly was—which was ridiculous. After all, wasn't I the author of her transformation? I was the one responsible for having just made her up, and I knew what was real. Still the thought persisted like an itch that you're embarrassed to scratch in public. So who was in public?

“Naomi?” I said, the way you'd ask, Is anybody home? I resisted an impulse to tap on her forehead. Then she had to give me this smile. It was a close-mouthed smile, gentle and self possessed but nonetheless cruel. A smile by way of informing her cousin that she refused to be so kind as to disillusion him.

That was all it took. Suddenly I had a dilemma on my hands. Which was the greater crime, I asked myself: to run out on the twins in their hour of dreadful need or to come to their aid by handing over my cousin for them to do with as they pleased? Because that's what it boiled down to, didn't it? I could either forsake my colored acquaintances—since to turn up empty-handed now would be as good as forsaking them—or give them the tender, night-blooming Naomi at the risk of her health and well-being, not to mention her honor. There was nothing in between.

Of course I couldn't leave my old pal Lucifer in the lurch. Weren't we practically blood brothers under the skin and all that? Didn't I owe him for all the adventure I'd ever known? To abandon him at such a time would make me the lowliest kind of traitor, a rat and a worm. It was unthinkable. On the other hand, how could I place my defenseless cousin, this knockout darling in her party attire, in such uncertain peril? How could I lead her into all that shvartzer chaos on the notorious side of an unnatural body of water that stunk enough to stain the very air?

Then it was funny that the scheme didn't seem so farfetched anymore; clearly it had been a brilliant strategy all along. She was perfect for the part, Naomi, just what the doctor ordered to bring this whole cockamamy situation to a head. Like a living poultice, she could have drawn out the infection of moonstruck yearning from the sick kid's system. The septic boil that his heart had become (which he might have done better to wear on his dusky behind) would have burst in a spray of fleeing demons at the sight of her; it would have survived, Michael's heart, exquisitely seared but knitted whole again by the cautery of her touch. She could have done that—what couldn't she do, the angel? But she was mine.

So I told her it was all a joke.

“Naomi,” I said, “I got a confession to make. You know all that stuff about the colored twins? Well, it was all just a load of bunk.” It was, I told her, just a line to get her to come down to the pawnshop after hours. “And why, you might ask, would I want to do that?” This was a very good question indeed, and one for which I had no ready answer.

Stumped, I looked to Naomi, hoping unreasonably that she might provide an answer herself.
You wanted to see how far I would go for your sake
, she might have suggested, and I'd have wagged my head idiotically and said, “Bingo.” But as no help was forthcoming from her quarter, I blundered on.

“I was curious to find out how, I dunno, gullible you were. It was kind of an experiment,” I submitted, which didn't even make good sense. Aware that I was probably hanging myself with every word, I nevertheless seemed unable to curb my tongue. “I guess you're pretty gullible, aren't you? I mean, just imagine trying to pass you off as the queen of the Cotton Carnival.” Here I filled the air with bogus laughter.

Throughout my foot-in-mouth performance, Naomi had yet to give anything away. A little pity or even righteous anger would have been a relief, but no such luck. If her limpid eyes betrayed anything, it was, Look at what you've done to me, Harry. I hope you're satisfied.