Queenie (22 page)

I want him to help me make my move.

Circumstances are a great help in some situations.

EL TREN
starts taxiing, the wrong way. Toward us.

How important wrong ways are!

He doesn’t speak. I don’t.

But making your move is different.

In bed, in bed, in bed.

Terribly warming, isn’t it. Begun, middled, finished—and never ending.

Doing something means you don’t have to describe it.

But I’m talking.

“I knew I couldn’t be honest much longer,” I say. “I always knew I’d settle for somebody real.”

So here the two of us are, down in youth’s abattoir—but it’s hopeful. Two happy childhoods are better than one. And everyone knows this kind of abattoir doesn’t last long.

Nothing frivolous I have ever done has been so serious.

We are still making our moves daily, but have also branched out.

Giorgio says, “You and I were born precocious just in time.”

Because the world is getting younger every minute, he says. It’s getting ready to be born again. “In the usual clouds of fire.”

“And the usual pillars of salt,” I say. The kind that shouldn’t have looked back. “Giorgio, why are the pillars of salt always female?”

He says, “That’s the kind of question only a female can answer. Or a pillar of salt.”

When a man of action has ideas, there’s punch in them.

“Tekla taught me a lot.”

He’s terribly proud of her. Tekla’s in the ring herself now, in a ladies’ wrestling program up in Portland, Maine. Her private life is resolved too. She is now the wife of a local minister, Unitarian, in his valuable colonial cottage—a nice mild guy with a flair for investing her stocks. All she needed was to be beat up occasionally in public. So her private-public life is now in perfect balance, though on a small scale.

“That’s all people her age can afford,” he says.

But for us it will have to be different. We have to be. Young people have to be the ones to show the world how to live the public-private life.

“Queenie,” he’ll say, “we have to act like the eternal verities have stopped.”

Because, except for death, they have of course. And even it is taking new forms. The other eternal verities are all cooling off, he says. Like the world’s crust.

I don’t like to ask directly what the others are.

I say, “But older people say there’s something bigger than us.”

“Sure,” he says. “Them.”

“I wish you would speak all this in public,” I say. “Then everybody would know.” And acting it all out is so chancy. Like what we’re doing now.

“Carita, that’s shit!” he says. “Oh, excuse me.”

In private he’s getting very courtly, maybe he’s getting ready to hit me in public. For the sake of the world. We are still finding our balance.

“Once you settle down to speaking, Queenie, your power is gone.” Of course this part of his theory has great appeal for me. “In fact once you act sensible in any way—you’re a goner. So let the old do it. For them it makes sense.”

I’m beginning to know all the answers now. The revolutionary ones. And it’s beautiful really. Sensible—though I’m not telling him.

And there are some lovely Anglo-Saxon moments in between.

And I don’t have to say f——anymore.

Otherwise, since his family’s cut him off for a spell—they understand revolution when it has style, but his mother being in the ring with him sent a blush over the whole Argentine—we are having to be rather precocious about money. He won’t come into his trust fund until he’s twenty-one.

So where’s it all coming from, the stuff we spend for all these midweek investments in little island republics, which are promptly turned over to the peasants, promptly turning them into Republicans? Or for all this jet-set intellectuality on the weekends, when he says our business is to be where nobody would think. Where even
we
wouldn’t. And never to think ahead. Or phone for reservations.

Although I am learning to be a very good, good front for him.

When we walk into a hotel on his continent, I say to the desk, “I understand in this country a woman doesn’t have to be a man,” and I begin to smile.

When I walk into a European one, I say, “I am one of those stinking, warmongering Americans,” and I begin to cry.

But upstairs, if I begin to laugh and cry, all he says is: “We have a gold mine.” A weekly one.

What kind of a mine is that?

And why do we spend the middle of the week doing good deeds, and the weekend sort of undoing them?

He only smiles, and says, “That’s part of it.”

When I charge him with being some kind of a dilettante, he says sure, a revolutionary one. “Wrong world, dead cause. But in the end, its unutterable fascination always returns.”

He says I am wrong for him in the same way. In a way I am like world welfare.

He’s a sweetie. Dead wrong, but alive.

But the worst of it is, when he does come into his trust fund, he’s going to put it right back in trust again, until he’s forty-five. “As a declaration of belief in the continuity of the universe.”

“And of you,” I say.

He says I’ll never be a saint, but if we’re still together by then, he may be, and he wouldn’t want to be caught short.

“If I’m fool enough to want the stuff by then, I’ll de serve it.” Then he stares at me. “Why are you always sewing those f——g—excuse me—those attractive brassieres?”

“Because the two I brought with me are worn out.”

“But we were in Paris yesterday.”

“I know.” I left an order for some with Alba’s
lingère
. But will I ever get back to pick it up? We are in Paraguay for the morning. He says he is working on this week’s gold mine. In other words, I think, our grubstake.

“Well, it’s an attention-getting device. What say we go inside the outside?”

We specialize in places with verandahs. Copulating in a bedroom makes him nervous. “My father died in one. In the middle of things.” The penicillin cause-of-decease being a gag put out by his father’s wife, because she wasn’t there.

Sometimes, I think I’m going down the drain of
his
history. But it’s fun.

So later he’s standing there, thumb hooked in his belt, nursing his navel. A characteristic gesture, especially afterward. Which I point out.

He says, “Oh I feel as if I’ve got one now; I’m earning it.”

“Hmm?”

“Oh, not with you.”

Hmm.

“Don’t you feel we’re all placed in the position of earning our right to be born?” he says. “We aren’t born into the human race, when you come to think of it, we’re only drafted for it.”

Ideas like this are characteristic afterward too.

“I’m dazzled,” I often say. “Someday I hope to believe it all. On alternate weekends. Or when we stop traveling. What date is this country anyhow?”

In spite of all he can do, I still have my time sense.

“I’ll do the thinking,” he’ll say. “Your turn to act.” So off we go again, for another Anglo-Saxon moment, which can also be referred to in Latin, ancient and modern, or even classical Greek. Anything printable. Down here, revolution and the bod are kept separate, at least in conversation. Political f——g is out.

I learn all this the first week. But nothing else.

“Giorgio,” I say, one night, “just what is our gold mine?”

He’s putting a bougainvillea, it looks like, in his buttonhole. Two nights ago it was edelweiss. “Why is it the U.S. always wants to know right away what a man does? We Latins, we might stab you one day for what we think you’re doing. But we let you keep it to yourself.”

“Then let me guess,” I say. “Is it poetry?”

He stares at me. “Christ, no!—excuse me.” Politeness to women and Jesus go hand in hand here. “Poetry is
public
, with us.”

That’s why I thought there might be income in it.

But who are “us”? I can’t believe it’s just us.

So I go along another day, thinking about it. Where does all this money come from that we spend like water—no, like aquavit, like Château-Neuf du Pape, like pulque, like tequila. Sometimes even like Coca-Cola—always depending where we are. And why do we always have to get rid of the grubstake by the end of the week?

Finally, I decide how to find out. I get him, one beautiful evening near Belgrade, after a long drive out over the Danube, and the moon coming up like it had never been profaned. Or been lucky enough to have a president’s name put on it.

…Giorgio’s very bitter about that. He says, up to now, living in a Latin American perspective like he has, it looked to him like at home people our age wasted half their time hating presidents. Father-images, like the papers say. But he doesn’t hate Tekla, who is the only father-image he’s got. “Besides, for politics, Tekla somehow isn’t transferable.”

But since the moon walk, he agrees something will have to be done. He says, given the history of the world, he can see some clunk claiming the moon for the masses. Or for the nation. “But what kind of cosmological cretin goes and puts his own
name
on it?”

“There was a campaign picture in his Fifth Avenue apartment,” I say dreamily. “Their taste in lamps is terrible…”

The poor, wounded moon is meanwhile looking rueful, like it always has. Even in all this pure socialist air, it doesn’t look any better pleased. Maybe it always knew what was going to happen to it.

What I am busy thinking—as I swallow the last of a five-course, Serbian-style meal consisting entirely of sausages—is that we’ve just spent almost the last of the money again. All week, we’ve been spending it like—slivovitz. Which though I don’t usually drink, I find I adore. Giorgio says at home alcohol is a symbol of middle age, but abroad it is different.

So I lean dizzily within the crook of his arm, like the little asp I am and say “Giorgio—I know where.”

Because I figure that must be why we always have to spend it all. He feels guilty. For spending
her
money on me. Oh—heredity!

“Where what?”

“Where the money comes from.”

He does sit up. “Where?”

I take a deep breath. The only thing I haven’t figured out is when he spends any time on her. “You’re being kept.”

Wow. He’s like his father in one way. And the shiner he gives me lasts through three grubstakes.

I don’t leave him. I have my heredity too, from Aurine. I already know I’ll have terrible trouble keeping myself up to the mark.

But by breakfast time he’s told me.

…He’d’ve had to anyway. You can’t keep forever blind-folding a girl on takeoff and landing without her eventually wondering. Or keep complimenting her because she’s limber enough to ride double-jointed in with the luggage on the way to the airport or the marina or the heliport, or even once in the very vehicle—I had my first ride in a helicopter and never knew until later that it wasn’t a Pan-Am!

“Okay,” he says afterward, on the balcony of the restaurant. We had another balcony off our room of course. “Say I’m an impresario of the legit.”

“Come ahn,” I say, but tenderly. “We already know you’re
my
father-image.” We still speak the same language. When we’re not f——g, that is. Which he’s still very impressive at, for a man who’s had so much experience. Spending money in any currency you can name.

What he’s telling me now, I can scarcely take in. The landscape isn’t fit for it. We should be in like one of those tropical republics. “Last week is when you should’ve been telling me. In among the sugar cane. Under a downpour of permanent-finish blue sky.”

“Uh-uh,” he says, “why the Danube is fine for it. Like that old show we saw once—
Beverley of Graustark
? A Saturday matinee with the girls.”

He’s a slave to his memories, just like me. But he acts on them!

He’s a hijacker. Not only of planes. Of anything anywhere, even people. As long as the transfer has a social connotation that is good. And the money we are living on is fake. Made on
EL TREN,
the island we go back to one week out of three. Because if you’re anti-establishment, you can’t have an establishment of your own.

He’s an impresario of the
revolutionary
legit.

“You’ve got it!” he says, beaming at me.

I haven’t, of course. “But who
is
the revolution?”

I can’t believe it.

It
is
us.

Except for a few witty friends of his, talented lithographers, who help with the money. International colonists who can double as freight crews on occasion. Plus a few data specialists who spend their time dreaming up what are called Candidates for Transfer, and have never in their lives left the ground.

All of whom think of the revolution as
them
.

“Everybody has to be a revolutionary,” says Giorgio. “On his own. The means have to
be
the end. And they can’t be somebody else. Unless you’re willing to kill other people for it. Which I’m not.”

“Glad to know it,” I say, pressing a lump of steak Tartare to my eye.

“Sorry,” he says. “My genes.”

There are drawbacks to a mutual background.

Just then, the waiter brings me a neat little piece of meat—Tartare is rather eggy—and tactfully goes offside while I’m applying it. For which Giorgio gives him a huge tip, in dinars.

That upsets me. “That money is us too,” I say. “And it’s fake. And the Yugoslavs are so nice. That waiter—how can you do that to him? Why, he’s even a socialist!”

“Not fake, please Queenie. Imaginary,” he says, sipping his plum brandy, then mine. “Only a little more imaginative than the dollar. And Queenie, please kind of pipe down.”

Because people are looking our way. The manners in socialist countries are rather reserved. And I have on a very democratic costume. Meaning there’s not too flagrantly much of it.

When the waiter comes back with our change from our bill, Giorgio waves him away with that too. “Can’t take dinars out of Yugo anyway,” he says raising a brow at me.

It’s true, I think,
WE DON’T SAVE
. But I never dreamed how I was going to have to act on it.

The revolution is us. But is it me?

“Georgy-Porgy,” I say carefully. “Explain more to me. About our ethos.”