One to Count Cadence (32 page)

Back to the guitar and the bottle for a couple of months, then the music became enough. He sang professionally now, four thirty-minute sets six nights a week in a small sometimes coffee house sometimes bar, Harps on the Willows. He had never been better. More faithful to the box he played than the one he slept with, he barely noticed when she drove her small sports car back to Boston. But people were noticing him, and Morning never denied liking that. He played student gatherings on off-nights, then an occasional party at an English professor’s house. He grew a beard to go with his long hair, and was soon a minor rage among new rich, pseudo liberal, culture vultures in Phoenix, even out in simple, suburban Scottsdale, and there he met his fear face to mask, Linda Charles.

* * *

The party was at a large, rambling house on three acres of clipped, watered grass. It was an engineer’s house, filled with electrical gadgets, a button to flush, a button to roll off a neat amount of paper, ice makers, drink makers, and wired from asshole to elbow with sweet stereo. The floors were laid in rugs as thick as bear skin, and peopled with people fighting the way they made their money, the hesitantly liberal, the casual un-Godly who occasionally would quietly say “fuck” for special emphasis and quietly slap a fist into the other hand, and the women very careful not to blush. Morning came here, his credentials not much better than these who received him, came in a buckskin shirt stained with someone else’s sweat, scuffed cowboy boots, and faded, frayed Levi’s. He sang the soft protests, a few old English ballads (he could make me cry with even old hat “Barbara Allen”), then some wild bawdy Scotch songs, some popular comic snatches, then the dirtiest Irish roar he knew, and came on in the finale leading the group in “We Shall Overcome” like an intellectual cheerleader. He knew his audience. After him came the Twist as the crew-cuts and drizzle-heads paired off. He worked two sets, then a little mixing with the crowd, a few casual references to the Movement, and a crisp fifty from the hostess whom he had screwed in the English professor’s bathroom four times before she hired him. Out here, though, he made gentle verbal passes at all the pretty women, flowers caught in plastic paperweights, but he never followed them through. He knew his audience.

But this particular night the Movement was moved out by a wonderful bit of risqué humor and singing by the hostess’ personal friend, the famous female impersonator, one Linda Charles.

He remembered her (he couldn’t keep himself from thinking her instead of him) and saw her across the room, prim in a high-collared sleeveless black dress, sitting on a white sofa, alone because the men were afraid; and the women, either envious or unconcerned, stayed away too. The hostess led Morning across to her, introduced them, then fled. Morning shook her hand, trying not to examine it for any trace of male hardness, but finding none in spite of his failure. She said hello very softly, offered the seat next to her with a slim white arm. Morning hesitated, but she said, “Oh, hell, sit down. I may have balls but I don’t bite.” She laughed with such a sense of her own vanity and foolishness, such an ease, that Morning did sit, feeling it would be square not to, sat in the seat next to her, and all that was to come, with open innocent eyes.

“You’re pretty good,” she said, “a professional, shall we say, phony. You didn’t get those hands as a passive resister, jack.”

“I beg your pardon,” he answered, stupidly, not knowing what to say.

“I beg your pardon,” she mocked, tilting her head with a musical hit to her voice. “You are a straight arrow square, aren’t you?”

“I just didn’t know what you meant.”

“You’re as much a fake as I am. Those old clothes, sweat stains, scuffs, and holes. I’ll bet you bathe every day and would rather die than wear dirty shorts. Your beard’s too neatly trimmed, too,” she said, but smiled quietly as if they were conspirators in the same plot. “You’re obviously as hip as Richard Nixon, but you’re good enough to fool these johns out here. Your father is probably an accountant and your mother sings in a church choir, and that’s where you learned to sing, in a damned church choir.”

“Yeah,” he answered, “you’re right, but you’ve been talking to old bumble butt about me,” he said, pointing a thumb at the hostess.

“Need to know what my competition is up to.”

“You, too?” Morning said, amazement clear on his face.

“She’s the kind of broad who says, ‘I want to experience everything in this world at least once before I die,’ never knowing she was stillborn. Of course me too. What do you think I’m doing here? Don’t be square forever.”

“Well, I’m learning every minute,” Morning said, lighting her cigarette.

“Really,” she said, leaning back on the couch and raising a delicate eyebrow behind a stream of smoke. “Then be a good boy and run get me a drink.”

Morning started to rise, then slouched back and said, “Screw you, jack,” but said it with a grin.

“Save your strength for bumble butt,” Linda said, smiling too. “I guess you are learning. Let’s go back to Phoenix and I’ll buy you a real drink to kill the taste of this cheap punch bumble butt calls booze.”

Morning had just noticed fifteen or twenty heads turned in his direction, heads which turned back when he faced them, trying to conceal looks and smirks puckered in oatmeal faces. “What?” he said, turning back to Linda.

“Don’t sweat it. If you read your Kinsey, or Ellis, or whoever, you know that true transvestites aren’t queer. I got problems, but not that one, man.” She spoke without hardness, without pushing, and a small verticle line pinched between her wide green eyes made her look discriminated against, told of being mistaken by narrow minds. “Besides,” she continued, a sad touch of a grin at her mouth, “it will be good paper for you. Raise your fee from what, fifty, to one bill for sure.”

“For sure,” he said. “Let’s split.”

“I know I’m lovely, but I’m not built that way, really,” she said, white teeth holding her lower lip off a smile.

Morning laughed, then as he stood, he involuntarily offered his hand. She looked at it, her head cocked to the side like a puzzled puppy, he looked at it, then they chuckled together.

“That’s all right,” she said. “Sometimes I forget too.” She rose without his help, then walked toward the door, movements neat, trim, fluid, hip motion not exaggerated but terribly feminine.

The son of a bitch practices, Morning thought, Jesus.

Outside she offered to let him drive her XK-E. When he whistled at the metallic blue car gleaming under the desert moon, she said, “There are lots of burly chaps who are quite happy to pay a ten buck minimum to see some crazy cat in drag. Plus my mother left me about two hundred fifty thousand dollars, bless her drunken hide.”

As he drove, Morning told her about his fight with the huge queer in San Francisco.

“What a flaming queen he is, honey. He makes Mardi Gras every year so he can go in drag. What a riot. Smokey the Bear in hose and heels. Too much,” she said.

They stopped at a quiet expensive lounge and drank at the leather covered bar for several hours, sipping slow Scotches, each seeming to wait for the other to get drunk. They discovered a mutual affection for Faulkner, then Sartre and Gide, particularly
The Counterfeiters,
then with wild laughter discovered that they were members in bad standing of the same national fraternity.

“I’ve got this friend,” Morning said, thinking of Jack, “who’d love to meet you.” He laughed, then told her the long story about Jack.

When Linda drove him home, they were laughing together like old buddies who had forgiven each other in advance, and when she drove away, her exhausts hammering the pavement as exhausts will, Morning chuckled with great relief. He had braved the darkness in its most attractive shape, for if she was nothing else, Linda Charles was a lovely woman with a wide handsome mouth and a clean laugh and the carriage and poise a woman needs, plus that touch of sad melodrama women break hearts with. And Morning had braved it, conquered it, and tonight he owned the world. He slept without dreams, woke without guilt, then in the middle of a yawn, remembered that he had left his guitar in Scottsdale.

* * *

He didn’t see Linda again for nearly a week, and then he didn’t talk to her. She came in the Harps with a group of white waving hands and flitting voices. Morning was in the middle of a set, and she nodded to him, then turned up her nose at her friends, laughing. Another time she came in alone, seemingly depressed, so Morning had a drink with her between sets. He made a few bad jokes which seemed to cheer her up, not from mirth, but from the effort. Then she came by his apartment one afternoon, her hair up, wearing a flashy red dress, looking like an expensive whore, and asked him to have a drink or two with her before he went to work. They went to the same lounge as the first night, sat at the back of the bar, and swilled Scotches like sailors. Within the hour they were quite drunk.

“You know,” Morning said, grinning, “That’s the only thing you do like a man.”

“What’s that?” She didn’t seem worried that she did anything like a man.

“Drink. That’s all. You even move like a woman. Christ. Sometimes I wonder if you’re not a chick with a strange hang-up who likes to say she’s a man.”

“No, man,” she said. “You ought to pay one month’s hormone bill, then you’d know I’m a man. But I know what you mean. Maybe I should’ve been a woman. Shit, I even had a breast tumor removed. They cut my little bitty nipple right out. But this way… Crap, I can’t lift anything heavier than a beer glass, I can’t go out in the sunlight, can’t even get drunk more than once or twice a month or my face starts getting hard.” She paused, circling the water ring on the bar with a perfectly done fingernail, then looked up and smiled a smile which, if it had come from a woman, would have broken a man’s heart. “Drag is a drag, man, more often than not.”

Morning, a drunk man, an indiscriminate man, a man more frightened than he knew, let his heart be touched. “Jesus Christ, man, what is a guy like you doing in a bag like this.”

“Good as any other in this stupid fucking world,” she answered, smiling slightly. “Good as any.”

“Yeah, guess so,” he said, then laughed. “Shit, yes.”

They drank silently for a few minutes, acknowledging each other’s sadness, but soon were scolding the darkened air with words again.

* * *

Later she began talking about herself, saying, “And as long as I’m careful about choosing my friends, neither too straight, nor too gay, I live the good life. The only thing,” she said, pausing, then looking directly into Morning’s eyes, “The only thing is that this is a dead-end bag. I’ve found a couple of chicks who thought they could make the permanent scene with me, but both of them finally asked me to drop out of drag, and I wouldn’t. Sometimes I even think about a family, oddly enough, but then I wonder what would happen if a kid of mine found out about me. I’m foul enough; no need to pass it on. I get enough ass off latent dikes; I’m beautiful; I’m happy.” She smiled, happiness professionally touched with sad eyes.

“That’s what counts, man,” Morning said.

They drank, talked some more, then Morning realized that it was past time for his first set. Too drunk to sing, he called his boss, who said, I know your ass is downtown drunk with that naming queen of a bastard, and Morning said, My ass is here, yours is there, shove my guitar up it and smile. Thus went his job.

When he went back to his stool, he found a slick middle-aged man who fancied himself a swinger sitting there, putting a big play out for Linda. Morning sat on the other side of her.

“Kansas City, Kansas,” the traveling man was saying. “Sales. Regional director. Electronic bookkeeping equipment.” He then thrust out a hand at Morning, an aggressive hand, saying, “Howard Tingle. Electricity in that hand, boy,” then laughed, and squeezed Morning’s hand.

Morning winced in mock pain, saying, “Hey, cat, lay off the hand, huh?”

“Young fella like you ought to keep in shape, boy,” he said, slapping his gut. “Hard as a rock, all the way down,” he smirked. “Handball twice a week at home. Swim in motels on the road, but not always in the pool.” He laughed again. “You young kids shouldn’t let yourselves go like that.”

“Yeah, man, I’ll take up toilet tilting tomorrow,” Morning said, but the salesman had already turned to Linda, whispering in her ear.

She laughed, half-turned her head to wink at Morning, then seductively poked the john in the ribs. She led him on for nearly an hour, matching Morning drink to drink. The three of them moved to another bar, a place where Linda and the salesman could dance and cuddle in a booth. The salesman tried to kiss her on the dance floor, but Linda leaned back, coy as a high school girl, and shook a finger at him. Morning had to grin drunkenly at himself. After one song, she swept by the table for her purse, then pranced, hips thumping under the tight red satin, to the rest room, whispering over her shoulder to the salesman, “Now don’t you be a bad boy and try to peek.”

“Boy, oh boy, that is some woman,” he said, sitting across from Morning. Sweat beaded his forehead and he wiped at it with a cheap handkerchief, his face slack with whiskey. “Say, I’m not messing anything up for you, huh? Hate to do that,” he chortled, unbuttoning the blue collegiate blazer he affected.

“Not a thing, man.”

“God, she’s some broad.”

“She’ll show you things you never dreamed of, man.”

“I’ll show her something she’s always dreamed of,” he said, patting the lump in his crotch.

“Go, baby, go.”

Even in the dim light from the jukebox Morning could see the heavy coat of fresh lipstick gleaming like a wound on Linda’s mouth as she walked back to the table, a smile of anticipation curving across her face.

“Let’s dance,” she commanded.

They swayed close, slowly, and Morning saw Linda place a perfect lip print on the salesman’s rolled oxford collar, then the salesman was trying for her mouth again. She avoided him, laughing, teasing, until the end of the song when she turned away then quickly spun back, grabbed the salesman’s face, and kissed him long and hard, the muscles of her neck rippling like her tongue in his mouth, but she pulled away before he could raise his startled arms, and ran giggling back to the table. Morning didn’t answer her grin; he turned his face, then ashamed, turned back with a slight smile.