Authors: Darryl Pinckney
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #United States, #African American
High Cotton (28 page)
“If Cheetah could talk she’d tell my story,” Bargetta said, and brandished a Marlboro. “I’m afraid of going cold turkey.”
“I hear you, Sister Girlfriend,” Gilles said. “My heart resembles an Etruscan vase. Broken and mended, broken and mended.”
There were shutters that looked out on other Montmartre shutters, empty flower pots, bedbugs, and fleas, but Gilles didn’t care, he was just passing through. He made enough money as a model in Milan to do nothing for months. Passive, with airbrushed magazine-cover looks, Gilles was, I had to admit, completely without vanity. He had the melancholy that never goes away, of someone who has lost a parent at an early age.
Gilles got by the door at the Safari, cadged Veuve Cliquot at the Privilege, avoided the tab at Le Drug Store, and another at the Bains-Douches. When he was having fun, he reminded me of guys in New York who picked fights with the Hell’s Angels after having silicone implanted in their cheekbones and called themselves neo-romantics.
“Cut the herbivore loose. Forget him,” Gilles said.
“I can’t. Your phone?” Gilles shrugged. Bargetta dialed her mother’s number in Memphis. “Maybe I should let her know my new number. No, I should wait until I need serious money. Mad money.” Bargetta dropped the receiver. “I’ll skip town. I’ll just book. I was once on Corfu in a heat wave. On cobblestones. It was like stepping into a pizza oven. I had to go every day to the fortress where the national guard took their swim breaks. I had errands. There was this policeman named Lazarus. He didn’t shower after the beach. He was salty. He would come to the hotel on official business and interrogate mercilessly. Am I horrible? Do I deserve to die? I can’t remember the Greek word for it. But that photograph in his wallet wasn’t his wife. That’s where we should go. You would be worshipped as a god. They would carry you through the streets.”
Bargetta said Pierre-Yves was a crucial investment. She said she was tired of being alone, tired of the loneliness that was like a mortgage she could not kill off. I couldn’t think of a time when Bargetta had ever been by herself, but she insisted that Pierre-Yves was her last stop. “If things don’t work out, I can always sell my lingerie and retire. I can take up where Miss Beane left off, right?”
“She had so much fun it killed her,” Gilles said.
Bargetta was comparing herself to the mascot of Manhattan, Dee Dee Beane. It was one of their big themes and I’d often
spent lunches picking at my plate while they went over and over poor Miss Beane’s career.
spent lunches picking at my plate while they went over and over poor Miss Beane’s career.
“Self-destructive people can make their point only if they can take a few people with them,” Gilles said.
Bargetta said it was not a good sign that she had dreamed about her three nights running. Dee Dee Beane was, for Bargetta, the outer limits. They had pretended to great indifference to each other when they both did a short stint at the same black woman’s fashion magazine in New York. Miss Beane, as Bargetta called her, to draw attention to the unmarried state of the older black woman, got the boot when she tried to put Andy Warhol in blackface on the magazine’s cover.
Miss Beane intrigued Bargetta because she was beyond disillusionment. “There she was, thinking she could inhabit her skin like a litter, raised above the mob, and she rode herself out of town on a rail.” Bargetta heard that Miss Beane had been in love, but—who would not sleep with the brave—the heir’s family hired detectives who broke up the wedding. They paid Miss Beane to take a hike. She came back when the money ran out and they threatened her. Bargetta had every sympathy for the wound that never heals.
Miss Beane’s history frightened Bargetta more than her temperament. Back when no one knew anything, Miss Beane let people think she was the first black ever to have gone to Radcliffe. Miss Beane had a first-rate, logical mind, Bargetta said, which she wasted in dissecting the faults of others. She could tear people asunder. “You had to be a man to think she was amusing,” Bargetta said. “But I had dates; she had walkers.”
Miss Beane had no respect for anyone, except for an art history professor or two back at Harvard. Nevertheless, she was cared for and watched over by the Class of ’59, who remembered her as a brilliant amanuensis, a born schoolmarm. She typed many
papers for others and improved them. But her standards were so high and what white people thought of as her self-esteem was so great that she inevitably fought with everyone. She had burned her way through many careers, from the Fogg to being a bouncer at Max’s Kansas City.
papers for others and improved them. But her standards were so high and what white people thought of as her self-esteem was so great that she inevitably fought with everyone. She had burned her way through many careers, from the Fogg to being a bouncer at Max’s Kansas City.
Scorn was Miss Beane’s empire, but she ruled over a territory depopulated by drunken scenes. Bargetta said that Miss Beane took a neutron bomb or Khmer Rouge attitude toward life in the city: empty it out, leave the buildings standing, and start over. She purged everyone she had ever known and threw away every chance she had ever had. She refused to acknowledge her own sister on the street. When she was mugged by two black men, she was elated, as if her part of a cruel bargain had been canceled.
“One night she noticed that I wasn’t white,” Gilles said. “She decided that I was socially undesirable. She hated black people. Black people were scum. She called me a two-bit whore. I got up, crossed the room, slapped her, and said ‘Sorry, Sister,’ and sat back down. What could she do? She ordered another drink. Hard stuff. None of this fine-wine business for her.”
But Bargetta was attracted to her antisocial stance. A vituperative, vitriolic, Indian-looking black woman small enough to fit into snappy children’s clothes, Miss Beane drove parties into the kitchen and when she walked into the kitchen people escaped back into the living room. At one party in the Village the host stumbled onto the terrace where Miss Beane sat alone and fell over the railing into his garden. “He left,” Miss Beane was said to have answered when his guests finally missed him.
Every night with her, Gilles said, ended with her passing out and falling off a chair. She liked being in the swing of things so much that she became a vehement example of that celebrant of metropolitan life since Juvenal—the fag hag. She called herself
“the spade of queens.” The lofts, town houses, and Southampton decks Miss Beane haunted she called the Fruit Stands. Gilles said that her sackcloth was that she tried to seduce young men who had no interest in her. The photographers, painters, museum workers, architects, lawyers, and parasites with whom she fell in love were the Forbidden Fruit and she was the Fruit Fly. She drew the line at airline stewards. She never had a crush on an airline steward, much like a drug addict who doesn’t consider himself a junkie because he doesn’t touch needles.
“the spade of queens.” The lofts, town houses, and Southampton decks Miss Beane haunted she called the Fruit Stands. Gilles said that her sackcloth was that she tried to seduce young men who had no interest in her. The photographers, painters, museum workers, architects, lawyers, and parasites with whom she fell in love were the Forbidden Fruit and she was the Fruit Fly. She drew the line at airline stewards. She never had a crush on an airline steward, much like a drug addict who doesn’t consider himself a junkie because he doesn’t touch needles.
“There was a white faggot trapped inside her black woman’s body,” Gilles said. “She hung in all the sawdust bars. She felt she had been cheated. She envied the freedom.”
“The farther you are from something,” Bargetta said, “the more wonderful it seems. You’re walking down a street in a foreign country and spot one light in a dark house and wish you could have that life. But if the window were yours you’d be plotting to break out of it.”
Gilles said booze had made Miss Beane’s generation too Freudian. The more peculiar the behavior, the more fascinating it was to them, and rather than not know or be the last to know something, they jumped to malicious conclusions about everyone.
Bargetta said she hated people who called only when they knew something or wanted to know something.
“They forgot that sex is comic and love is tragic,” Gilles said.
“Dee Dee Beane didn’t,” Bargetta said. She usually felt better after a deep-dish session about Miss Beane, but the therapy wasn’t working anymore.
I was homesick for the anxious gullibility on the other end of the wire and Bargetta slid under from something like ego disintegration. “This life isn’t mine, I’m only squatting in it.” In front of a hotel she asked some black women from Abidjan who admired her diadem if they knew of any work cleaning up.
Every generation is an enemy of its father’s and a friend of its grandfather’s, and maybe that was why, when I pontificated to myself about Bargetta, her spirit of contradiction seemed more like nostalgia for an earlier era of philistine terror about nigger lovers and honky lovers. I felt disloyal when I thought this way about her.
“He owes you,” I said.
“Only when he gives,” she said.
Elderly animals patrolled the lanes of Père-Lachaise, silent women washed the panes of Gothic-revival sepulchers. Initials sprayed inside hearts guided the way to Jim Morrison. A dozen figures with acoustic guitars or yellow ribbons for the hostages stared at the unmarked square of earth. Bottles poked through the hallowed ground. A girl began to sob, a man crouched. Incoherent poems in English adorned the surrounding stones.
Gilles went to pay his respects to “C.3.3.” Bees chased me from one sector to another. I heard the rolling vowels of the Antilles. Festively clad black women walked the road, ahead of them matrons added gifts to a mound of floral tributes. A large bust stood at the center. It was the grave of Allan Kardec, the mystic and healer who succored women from the beyond. Housewives wept like Ceres and entreated his thorax of marble. I found Bargetta, her head swathed in a blazing scarf. She towered above the profusion and raised a tentative hand. Masochists are the proudest people on earth. Unfortunately, masochists also make gifts of themselves, and the recipients are obliged to lug these gifts wherever they go, much like the old woman in the story about the dead dog in the suitcase.
Bargetta knew what she didn’t want: that the beneficiary of her fine feelings think of them as the bars of a cage. She said it was a terrible disadvantage to have the omniscience of a narrator or the audience at the theater, the prior knowledge that before the first act is over extraordinary behavior will be necessary.
“What others missed or messed up I found.” The payoff was an injection of aching goodness, but Bargetta was a purist in her mad way: never, with her, the beatific glow of the injured, just as she never referred to the helpful things she had done for others.
“What others missed or messed up I found.” The payoff was an injection of aching goodness, but Bargetta was a purist in her mad way: never, with her, the beatific glow of the injured, just as she never referred to the helpful things she had done for others.
She could have been the star at many tables; instead, she waited for Pierre-Yves’s crumbs of affection. Perhaps it is true that you fall for someone from the inside, and that when you do, you see what your friends can’t and let them think you’ve lost your mind. Like many superior girls, Bargetta had a talent for getting the man she asked for instead of the one she needed.
“Get off the stage,” a roadie once said to Bargetta at an invitation-only sound check in a lower Bowery rock club.
“She’s with me,” the star of the band said. He, her charismatic deliverer, looked down and smiled in a confident way that made a dozen girls in Bargetta’s immediate vicinity want to throttle her. But Bargetta saw the pink slip in his eyes.
“The hell I am,” she said. In those days, when she knew her own worth, Bargetta had been as elusive as an eel.
“I can’t let this man dance on my last nerve. You get the pitcher’s mound down,” Bargetta said, “and they go and juice up the ball. If they give you the hesitation then they’re throwing heat.” She never could drink. Her speech began to puree. “You don’t see it, you hear it. You hit what you think you hear. You get your front foot out, get your weight balanced, follow through, and hope it’s not a gooseball.”
“Have you ever considered going home?”
“Right? Niggers and flies, always hovering around some shit.” Bargetta sprang up and barely looked back over her jacket. A fabulous murkiness obscured the tips of landmarks, gases divided façades into worshipful colors, and I half hoped she would keep
walking. I let go and surfed until I saw Bargetta as I first knew her, when she looked up from a book as if she’d alighted from a calèche that had just flown over the steppes.
walking. I let go and surfed until I saw Bargetta as I first knew her, when she looked up from a book as if she’d alighted from a calèche that had just flown over the steppes.
Bargetta had never been driven into the ground before, but she lay around as if Gilles’s place were a preparatory tomb. She was superstitious about going out, leaving the telephone unattended, though she traced her nausea to the phenomenon that the floors of the apartment slanted. She chose carefully from her duffel bag. “I mixed this one myself. It’s called Maginot. Wear Maginot and get invaded.” She painted her mouth, allowed Gilles to move discussion to her hair, but wouldn’t report to the record company or to any of the piss-chic parties Gilles always knew about and avoided mention of to me. I didn’t know Verlan, the “in” slang of the moment. I could smile in French.
Gilles lectured on the military strategy of love, that the minute you told the Other how to treat you, the battle was lost. “But your manners won’t matter if you’re dull.” He helped Bargetta tape note cards on the wall beside the mountain of dirty sheets so that she could write down her dreams without spilling a drop. She was desperate for a sign.
Charlotte Forten came to Bargetta in her rocky sleep. Forten had left her prominent black family in Philadelphia to teach the freedmen in South Carolina after Appomattox. Dr. Rogers, a New England gentleman, read Emerson to her under the magnolias; Colonel Higginson took her riding in the lunar bloom. Bargetta believed in Forten as the patron saint of interracial dating.
“I was walking around with my dry cleaning when I fell in this big hole. Then they started burying me, up to my neck, and there was all this old newspaper hitting my face, but I couldn’t move. I saw these headlights. They were coming right at me.
Then Charlotte got out of a jeep. I heard her skirts in the dust.”
Then Charlotte got out of a jeep. I heard her skirts in the dust.”
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