Stages (17 page)

Before Mike could say anything the two drag queens had pushed over a trash barrel and were scrambling to pick up bottles and cans.

“Hey, what’s going on?” Mike said.

“We’re getting more ammunition,” Arthur said as he filled the lap of his dress with bottles. He looked like some deranged urban version of a farmer’s wife collecting eggs in her apron.

“It’s the revolution, Mary,” said the friend, grabbing an apple core.

“What?” said Mike.

“Okay, I’ve got enough,” Arthur puffed. “Back to the barricades, girl.”

And they were off and running again, stilt-legged in their heels and with their feathers flying, like a pair of rabid ostriches.

Mike ran after them.

Right into the middle of a riot.

Bottles were breaking and cans were clattering everywhere, and everywhere there was yelling and jeering. Mike saw cops ducking behind their squad cars. The lid of a trash can sailed over his head like a Frisbee. Mike saw faces he’d seen for two years, but there were expressions on these faces he’d never seen: rage, glee, madness, aggression. The crowd surged in the street like the sea in a storm, howling, hurling things into the air, overturning and smashing everything in its way.

Ducking into a doorway, Mike found himself with a middle-aged man who was crouching with his hands over his ears.

“What’s
happening
?”
Mike said.

The frightened little man uncupped one ear.

“I said
what’s happening
?”
Mike shouted.

“They raided the Stonewall” came the faint reply. “I don’t know. I just don’t know
why
they’re
doing
this. They raid the bars all the time….
”

A bottle rolled across the sidewalk.

Mike grabbed for it.

With the bottle in his hand, he moved from doorway to doorway, his eyes on the retreating cops, waiting for his chance.

31

“Most people buy cars over here, you know, on one of those European delivery plans where what you save pays for your trip,” Lauren was saying, “and there you were, right in front of Harrod’s with a
Mustang.
”

“A
Shelby
Mustang,” he corrected her. “It wouldn’t have made any sense to bring over a car that couldn’t stay in the fast lane on the autobahn.”

“You have the craziest ideas about what makes sense,” Lauren replied. “Instead of paying for part of your vacation by buying a Jag or something like that, you have to make it as expensive as possible by bringing over a Mustang.”

“Jags aren’t reliable. Mustangs are. What if I bought a Jag and broke down? In Turkey?”

“You haven’t been to Turkey.”

“No, but there are parts of Spain I was in that might as well have been Turkey. I like London. I liked Paris and Vienna and Venice, and Amsterdam for the hash. But the rest of Europe all seemed basically like Turkey to me. That’s one reason I lit up when I saw you.”

“Tell me about it. Yelling at me in the street like that, ‘Hey, you’re
American.
’ Right in front of Harrod’s.”

“Well, you were.”

“How could you have been so sure?”

“Your face. You’ve got a very American face. Most English women have faces like my mother’s Wedgwood china. Their skin’s like porcelain, skim milk. Your skin is more like the dishes in Dunkin’ Donuts.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“I meant that as a compliment. I love Dunkin’ Donuts. And I don’t like thin-skinned women. I like a woman like you, who I can toss into the sink…or the bathtub.”

“Let go of me, Jason,” Lauren squealed. “You’re going to spill this tea all over the bed.”

The tea, and the scones and jam, had been delivered to Jason’s suite on a silver tray a half hour before. They’d awakened at eleven, and he’d decided to have breakfast sent up.

Even after a month, Lauren had not grown used to the idea of simply picking up the phone and having whatever you wanted delivered to your room. Much less
this
room, which was one of the most lavish accommodations that Brown’s Hotel had to offer. She hadn’t even known that Brown’s Hotel existed, or that people like its clientele had survived in such numbers. Most of them looked like refugees from Czarist Russia who had somehow managed to get out with all their money.

She’d allowed herself to be picked up in the street by this brash twenty-one-year-old playboy from Greenwich, Connecticut, this shamelessly conspicuous consumer who was all the more obnoxious because he was so cute. Why she’d ever done such a thing, she’d never know, and she didn’t know now why she was letting it get worse with every passing day.

First, she’d called the college and told them she’d come down with a terrible cold. As the days turned into weeks, and she missed her tutorial sessions and her acting classes, falling further and further behind, the cold turned, purportedly, to the flu, and then to mono, which had her flat on her back. The back part of the story was true, at least.

This was the first experience Lauren had had of a young man’s libido. He liked playing games, offcolor versions of blind man’s bluff, and hide-and-seek, and pin the tail on the donkey, and pattycake (on her bottom). His erection was a constant. He’d take her to bed, and then maybe once every hour he’d come up for air.

Their first week together they’d driven into the countryside with a jammed Fortnum and Mason’s picnic basket and half a dozen bottles of Dom Perignon rattling around in the Mustang’s trunk. Jason had driven anywhere from sixty to a hundred miles an hour, burning up the hedgerows, while thoughts flashed through Lauren’s mind as rapidly as the landscape was passing. She’d convinced herself she was crazy, but then they’d stopped by a serene lake and had their picnic. After which Jason had fallen asleep with his head in her lap, making her unconvinced.

Before she knew it, she’d been with him ten days. And for nine of them she’d been living at Brown’s Hotel. On the eleventh day, pleading that she had to get some things and pay her landlady, Lauren returned to her flat, sat down on its little bed, looked at the tape recorder for a long minute, burst into tears, and then wrote a check to her landlady.

She made a recording, put it in a manila envelope, touched the envelope gently, with a remembered fondness, and then posted the little parcel to James. That afternoon she played cowboys and Indians with Jason, painting his cheeks and his chest with her lipstick.

By the end of the second week with Jason, Lauren knew that she was, like a heroine in a nineteenth-century English novel, quite undone. But now it had been more than a month, and Jason had announced that he wanted to go to Germany and pass Mercedes and Porsches on the autobahn. Lauren knew that if she went with him, it would be the point of no return for her as far as the graduate program was concerned.

So she said, over the breakfast tea that he’d nearly spilled, “Jason, enough is enough.”

“What are you talking about?” he replied. “We haven’t done
anything
this morning except
eat.
” His erection was lifting the sheet.

“Jason, I’m serious,” Lauren said. “We’ve got to talk. About Germany.”

“What about it?”

“I can’t just drop everything and go to
Germany.
”

“Then don’t drop everything. Pick it up instead. Put it all in a trunk and I’ll have it shipped.”

“All of London University?”

“They have a special rate for books, don’t they? And stones go by barge.”

“Jason, listen to me. I’m over here for a reason.”

“So am I.”

“No, you’re not. You’re rich. And rich people don’t have to have a reason for anything. You can have anything you want, so you don’t know what it is to want one thing more than anything else. I want to
act,
Jason. I’ve always wanted to act. And I’ll never be an actress unless I train to be one.”

“Eh, anybody can act,” Jason said, scooping up some jam on his finger and licking it off.

“No they can
not,
” Lauren said.

“Come with me now, to Germany,” Jason said. His tone had changed abruptly.

“I want you with me,” he said. “You can act later.”

“Later can be too late.” He’d lowered his eyes. Suddenly Lauren felt terribly unsure of herself.

“I know that,” Jason said. “I know. Lauren, the fact is, I haven’t
got
that much time.”

32

Some of the days Paula spent working in the millinery shop passed so slowly that her mind would slip into daydreams. But even into her daydreams, hats intruded. One afternoon, while she was thinking about her favorite Beatle George Harrison, his image was blocked by the sight of Mr. Feldman’s fedora hanging on the bentwood rack by the door. The hat had immediately and inexplicably called up an association in Paula’s mind: with an old World War II newsreel she’d seen as a child in which American recruits had been lining up for their physicals. Except for the hats on their heads, they were naked, and they’d shuffled along, their movements made choppy perhaps by the film dragging in its sprockets, It was visitations such as that one which were making Paula wonder if hats weren’t slowly getting the best of her.

Paula knew that she had to start looking for a new job. She had no idea where to begin looking, though. Until the evening when a possible answer to her problems came home with her father. At the dinner table he mentioned that one of his lawyer friends had lost his receptionist, a divorcée who’d remarried.

“Imagine,” Paula’s mother said. “A divorced woman working for her lawyer. That’s like being a surgical assistant during your own operation.”

“I’m not sure whether Stuart handled her divorce or not,” Paula’s father replied.

“How much does a receptionist in a law firm make?” Paula asked.

“They’re a prosperous firm,” said her father. “Probably a hundred and seventy-five or two hundred a week, to start.”

Both of her parents were regarding her with freshened interest.

“So why couldn’t they use Paula?” her mother suggested.

“Maybe they could,” her father said. “Their offices are on Park, right by Grand Central. It would be a longer commute for her, of course.”

“Maybe she could get a cute little apartment for herself right in the city,” her mother added.

“So, I’ll apply,” Paula said.

Later that evening she had another identity crisis.

Out of the old toy chest at the foot of her bed she pulled a black Hopalong Cassidy hat that had been given to her when she was around eight by her cousin Myron, who was two years older. Since Myron had always had a big head, the hat still fit more or less. The strings that were supposed to tie under your chin hung by her ears in a dopey way, like thin sidelocks.

With the hat on, Paula stood in front of her mirror trying to figure out who she was.

Her nose was still too new to be familiar; it was like a perfectly shaped pink thing she’d found on the beach that had somehow attached itself to her. She pressed her nose against the glass, but didn’t hear the ocean’s roar.

The new nose had made her eyes look bigger, and it had smoothed out the whole shape of her face. The way she looked now, nothing was out of place, and even with her hair a mess, it was just a different frame for the picture her face had become. Paula looked at the mirror different ways, and saw different magazine shots. The Hopalong Cassidy hat looked like something Marilyn Monroe might have put on as a joke. Really not that dopey. Not with this face.

Ah, I must be crazy,
Paula thought.

She took off the cowboy hat and hunted in her drawer until she found a plastic rain hat. She put that on and snapped it up. Perfect. Mother Goose goes to market.

Now
this
is me,
Paula thought.
I
knew I hadn’t gone anywhere.

But that night she didn’t sleep well. Thinking that she was going to be going, going to be gone,
to New York.

Two days later, she went into Manhattan for the interview her father had arranged.

Mr. Weiss, her prospective employer, was a middle-aged man with soft brown eyes and gray hair parceled out on the sides of his head. His office was lined with books labeled like
Reader’s Digest
condensations of death and taxes, and here and there on the walls were Hogarth prints of people in knee stockings upended by a fugitive swine or a riot in a tavern.

Mr. Weiss’s conversation with Paula was measured and precise, so many words allotted for her father, so many to ask about her previous work experience, so many for salary and benefits.

Paula answered his questions carefully, although she felt awkward and nervous. She was coming from the wonderland of the hat shop, a place with its own lid on reality, whereas Mr. Weiss was a captain in the unforgiving world of business, a man who for years had smoothly navigated these shoals of books and papers, leaving no wake but the trail of his pipe smoke.

“When could you begin?” he asked Paula not a minute after the end of one half hour.