Queenie (12 page)

They all look as if they’re posing for
Elle
, and of course they are.

Schubert is struck,

“They’re not precocious,” I say. “They’re all twenty-nine.”

“Mamma dear——” Dulcy says to me, leaning over the bar to him, “kin I touch?”

Schu says “What?”

Passing on, he explains he’s not nervous with women; it’s just he’s still so germ-free he has to watch his immunity.

Outside the birdcage room, my favorite, I say “Go on in and tell me is it still there.”

He calls out it is, canaries and all.

“No parrots, see,” I say. “So no psittacosis.”

After we kiss, tongues and all, he says, “I’ve never even had a
cold.
”

Outside, we bump into Martyne, who cases us quick. “Y’all heard where Tekla is? Flew down to see your old friend Giorgio. She’s gonna handle him, his first fight.”

I say “Giorgio is a postcard friend.” No special germs in that.

But while Martyne puts out for Schubert and I let her, I’m sad. Not for Giorgio. I trust that bo. If his motive is to ruin his beauty, which I think it is, even with a mother like Tekla in the ring, he’ll manage it.

I feel sad to find I’m the kind of person who feels sad. But in a happy person today, isn’t that encouraging?

On the general level, that’s how I analyze it. On the personal level, I can hear Sam Newber’s crack—“Half a woman wants to get laid; the other half only wants to talk about it.” But shouldn’t that be afterward, not before?

With Sam of course, it would probably have to be during.

Meanwhile I see Schubert thinks Martyne, in white pants and her hair in a baby’s barrette, is very clean. She has the smallest tits that can still be waggled up at a man. She’s saying she knows his name, she’s musical.

I say, “Uh-huh. Next time I’ll bring Jack.”

“Who’s he?”

All those old men make her gullible, in the end.

I say, “How’s Nym.”

She’s a sport though. She grins at me. “Oh, she flit. And I do mean flit. The rajah had a hurry call.” Then she catches sight of little Rudolph. “Pore old thing, he’s heading for the throne room again. Y’all looking for your aunt and uncle, that’s where everybody is. It’s those eats.”

I see germs have come up in Schubert again; I’m getting to know that look. And that faddists will always tell you what causes it. He admits the throne is what the toilet is called—diet does it—chez Fish.

“Oh no, it’s a real throne,” I say. “A present from Thailand. From a member of the World Bank.”

And suddenly I’m happy, happy again. Any little bit of life takes me so far. Think what college will do! Talk or no talk, I mean to confess myself to myself all the way. Who else is laughing?

In the throne room, Oscar’s sitting on it; he adores any chair can really carry his weight. Aurine’s nearby, flirting with a guy just enough to show she’s besieged, but standing. When we two come up, the guy fades, but since it’s Deirdre’s lord, first bowing deep to my aunt. And even deeper to Oscar, who gives a gloomy wave.

This is because he’s eaten, and knows he will soon eat again. I would like to tell him he looks like Henry the Eighth just about to toss the chicken bone over his shoulder in the bit from that old movie. But to Oscar one only quotes legit. So I say, “Your Highness, may I present Schubert Fish?”

Sure enough, Oscar and Aurine both
look
. So before the amenities can take a real grab at everybody, I drag him away again. To the table. On which God, moving mysterious his pinkie at Alba’s caterer, has caused to be placed in front of Schubert the forbidden fruit from maybe three fast airliners—including caviar in a swan carved of ice.

And all around us is the lovely throng. They’re busy; they’re not looking at us. People are loyal to youth though; they’ll remember us in a minute, if we make a move.

“This is some do,” Schubert says. “Just to send somebody off to college.”

“Oh, I know,” I say absently. “It’s just that none of us have ever gone to college before.”

I’m feeling sentimental. I know all along, you see, that these parties aren’t really for me. On the girls’ side, they’re all the weddings our crowd won’t be having, rolled up in a ball with some leftover christenings, or some that got stopped cold at the abortionist’s—it’s too late here for the pill. Or the girls were too early. Bye-bye, bye-bye, Background!

Schubert’s saying, “My father has a margravine looks a lot like your aunt.”

“What’s a margravine?”

“A countess of the Holy Roman Empire.”

“Where does he keep her?”

“Why—on the wall.”

To my mind, exactly the sort of girl a man whose wife’s trying to be a Buddha would have. Particularly if all he eats is infertile eggs.

And isn’t Schubert exactly the son?

Just then, inching me toward the table, he jostles Candido, in apache drag as usual, who swivels round at once, not even looking at him, and snarls, “Wanna fight?”

Schubert has his arm on me, but his eye on the swan. “No.”

Baby, do you have to be radical, to say it like that!

“Neither do I,” says Candido. “That doctor is turning me fag.”

When he slinks off, Schubert leans down to me. “Who’s he really?”

I speak the truth, which is seldom a help. “Alba’s bodyguard.”

He says he saw at once she has the imperial full lower lip. “I see you do too.”

He’s his father’s boy, if that’s all he sees. With what I’m wearing. But I’m looking at my aunt and uncle, who Rudolph is now taking a picture of, squeezed together in that chair.

I know that chair from childhood; it’s a religious article, so never got thrown away. It’s an Oriental gilt one, the kind made of mixed monsters. You sit in the coil of the snake. A boa constrictor, whose head hangs intimately over the occupants.

They look beautiful there. Sad. That’s a dragon’s arm dear Aurine is leaning on. The jaw an inch from dear Oscar’s neck is a crocodile’s. Oh bye-bye.
Bye
.

And Schubert says in my ear, through what smells like his first spoon of caviar, “Just where are you people in exile
from
?”

I mean to turn on him savagely, how dare this snot laugh? Instead I choke up.

Parents! Or aunts and uncles, Father. How can we tell them they’re all in exile forever, from us? “Parents,” I say. “You know how they are. They still have to think they’re royalty.”

After a while, he says, “See why they call you Queenie.” I never give it a thought.

What I must, must remember from now on is that
not everybody
LAUGHS.

I stand there myself, eyes misty, for I don’t know how long. I’m watching the uncles, a gamut from chimps all the way to Oscar, from the Champs Elysées to the Ginza, and never forgetting the Avenidas of the Americas, including Wall. For them this is still solid glamor, hip to thigh. And the kind you can’t take home to Mary. It’s true, I think, nibbling a swizzle stick. We just know a lot of people who always look good.

As the glittering gowns pass Schubert in gobs of perfume, and the scantie-pantie ones, I can see he thinks so too. Faddists show excitement like anybody else, Oscar says later. “In terms of the original sin.” And Schubert is tucking in. Pheasant pâté, quail eggs, bear borscht, glog with goat cheese, and those Bath Oliver biscuits. But it’s me he’s looking at.

I’m not eating much; I’m feeling too grateful again. And though I’m too old now to have orgasms standing up in crowds, Father, it’s still dangerous. Unless I want to stand up with Schubert…

I can see everybody’s wondering if he’s it, and resting their opinion.

He keeps me identifying the food for him.

I have to admire him, he only founders once. “What’s
this
I’ve got?”

I haven’t the heart to tell him. Not directly.

“Aren’t you eating anything?” he asks, not really caring. He has a small, macrobiotic mouth.

“No, I feel kind of funny,” I say, watching what’s going down it. Alba gets them from Japan. “Like a bumblebee in chocolate.”

I do rather. A live one, ready to zoom out of there. Will I let him swallow me—am I that desperate? Every time I think of it, my boundaries come up in me strong. Can’t I go to college the way I am?

At last Schubert dabs his mouth with a napkin and stares at me. His nails are still clean, but those eyes are actually half-closed. He smiles at me, a bit of bee still sticking to his teeth. A piney-winey voice comes from them, the kind that comes off the soundtrack when maybe after five thousand frames of film the two of them in bed up there have finally had it. “I never knew caviar was
gray
.”

But it’s my little beaded breastplates he’s looking at. I suppose some of those beads
are
gray.

Father, if you had to pick one pure-girl sentence, what a man would never, what would you?

I say, “Excuse me, I have to go to the John.”

But I can’t lose him. He insists on waiting for me in the canary room, which he claims is right next to it. Turns out it is, though I miss one or two other rooms along our way.

“I have a sense of direction like an
animal
,” Schubert says at the door. “Comes of a pure bowel. And a natural-foods fed heart.” Then he gives my beads a shake, and says “Hurry up, my little Hapsburg! I expect to lose all three of them tonight.”

Lying back on the sofa with his eyes closed, where I leave him, he looks quite marvelous. And as if he knows it. All along, is he kidding me? I don’t deny the possibility, even now. I just don’t intend to explore it. Is he that experienced boy the grocers and the girls are always looking for? Or strictly pop-eye? It’s enough that what the moving forefinger will shortly point out to me—goes for both.

In the harem that Alba’s main powder room always is, most of our inner circle is there, and not just because of the beauty aids which are lined up between the Roman bath and the sauna, in gold wall spouts Alba lets the manufacturers stock for free. This is the time of evening the girls gather to swap stuff like, “I told her, ‘your only room pleases me is the boisserie one,’ and she says, ‘Which is that?’” Or how they miss the bowling alley, and those boys from Notre Dame Alba used to hire to set ’em up. If you stay long enough, you can piece the whole house together, present and past. But not at the moment. Because our hostess is there. That single knot of hers has come undone, and my aunt and a bevy of helpers are retying it.

“No, not there!” says Alba. “I’m expecting somebody to drop by who is very conservative.”

I see the stockholders among us shift their chignons.

Aurine says mildly, “Wear an apron then. Or a bib.”

Then it’s done—a compromise—and they crowd around me, congratulating. Cautious on Schubert, hoopla for the outfit.

I see Aurine is very proud of me coming out of hiding.

“Beautiful, beautiful,” says Alba. “Look at her. Nothing but skin and bones.”

I say, “Yeah, it’s real funky. Truly rotten, isn’t it?” I don’t talk teenybopper usually. But all this is getting to me; if this is what’s riding first class, should I hop a freight? I have this urge not to communicate.

But Alba wants to. Like all the girls over forty who still wear size eight, if they can’t kill us they want to join us.

She puts an arm around my shoulders, since there’s nothing else there. “I don’t care how they say it these days, cara mia. Girls, I want to tell you here is one child who goes with God.” She gets all wound up about it. Aurine doesn’t tell me till later, Candido’s doctor is a papal count. “Remember, Aurine? How her first communion I give her a holy medal, saying ‘Kiss God, honey, kiss God.’ And how she says ‘Will he kiss back?’”

“Well, will he?” I hate childhood quotes. “You never said.”

Martyne snorts—she’s a hard-shell fundamentalist.

Alba turns on her. “I come to this country, with that prize-fighter Pippo, what am I? A fat wop, in curls and fur. I’m not complaining—that’s only God for me in Italy. And now look at me.” She smoothes down the sailor knot. “
And
—a Rolls-Royce.”

Everybody stiffens. This
is
news.

“Ah-huh,” she says. “And which I already know enough just to call it ‘the Rolls’!” Then she turns to me. “Queenie, with God like he is in America, you have the best chance of all.”

Another snort from Martyne; Oscar says that sooner or later, these pugnose baby dolls always turn pekinese. “What this foreigner means, Queenie, is underplay it, underdress it. Keep the guy with the purse strings on peanuts. And take a daily workout with a thug.”

Aurine shifts in her chair. She’s as patriotic as any of them. But she doesn’t like fights.

“Never mind, Aurine,” Alba breaks in. “For once in Holy Church, this Baptist gravesnatcher is right….Girls, I made special confession today…about Candido.”

It always fascinates me, how the girls move in waves. Or things move them.

“Girls,” Alba says, breathing hard. “Candido is not my brother.”

Will they hit her? Not at all. I see they have faith in her. Which, as her godchild, I share.

“So I
been
to the monsignor,” says Alba. “On very conservative advice. Which he don’t answer me right, could make it hot for him.” When her bosom rises I see she has more of it than I thought. “I’m gonna adopt.”

Aurine breaks the admiring silence. “Watch that knot.”

Stupid Nila, who’s always on mark, says “So your gentleman farmer, that charley from Maryland, got his, huh? I knew it—the minute the tackroom is gone! Gee—all those lovely ducks.”

So that’s the room I missed. Well, she still has the canaries. And I have Schubert. Who is either waiting, like men do, or having a second helping. Like men do.

Alba says softly, “Shut up, Nila.” Then louder, for me and maybe for the Trinity, “I figure if Candy is willing—God ought to be.”

She is really so radiant, so faithful, that we don’t know what! In which moment she taps the gold wall behind her and a drawer shoots out. I only have time to think maybe for a holy relic, if so too small for a thighbone, maybe a tooth—when I see a little box is being held out to me.

“That old medal, it’s too weak for your situation,” Alba says shyly. “Here’s one carries the blessing of His Holiness himself, not this one but the one in heaven, it makes a difference. And the chain, it’s from Cartier’s.”