After Claude (2 page)

—EMILY PRAGER

After Claude

To the memory of my parents

I wish to thank the management of the Hotel Chelsea for permitting me to use and describe the hotel with all the fictional liberties necessary to the characters and action of the book. The Chelsea has long been a haven for a distinguished list of creative people, since it supports and encourages artistic expression with a humanity rare in New York, or any city. It is a tribute to the Chelsea that it will not interfere with that expression, even when made its victim, and I hope the residents, past, present, and future, will forgive the narrator’s excesses regarding the celebrated New York landmark.

I
RIS
O
WENS

I
LEFT
Claude, the French rat. Six months of devotion wasted on him was more than enough. I left him as the result of an argument we had over a lousy movie, a sort of Communist version of Christ’s life, except it didn’t seem Communistic to me, whatever that is. Everyone was poor all right, and Mary didn’t sport her diamond tiara, but otherwise it was the same old religious crap about how wonderful it is to be a pauper after you’re dead. It took them a good half hour to nail Christ to this authentic cross with wooden pegs and a wooden mallet, thump thump, nice and slow so if your thing happens to be palmistry you could become the world’s leading authority on the fortunes of Jesus Christ. Then, in case we thought we were watching a routine crucifixion, the sky turned black, thunder and lightning, the Roman troops, played by Yugoslavia’s renowned soccer team, squirmed around on their picnic blankets, pondering whether to throw the dice or pack it up.

“Do you think they’ll have to call off the game?” I nudged my French boy friend, which was when I saw that the idiot was having himself a full-blown Catholic seizure.

Claude glowered at me, and in the gloom of the theater, conveniently illuminated by the flashes of divine lighting occurring on the screen, I got a strobe picture of his features: dark, intense frog eyes, abundant black curly hair foaming out of his head, and finally, his full lips, sealed in a hurt pout. Claude had two expressions: that one, which accompanied his profound moods, and the other one, sleepy eyes, mouth relaxed and puffed as if he were blowing out invisible candles, which was the face he woke up with and starred in most of the day.

He might have answered me, but all human exchange was drowned in a clout of heavenly thunder that simultaneously wiped out Christ and the critical faculties of the stunned audience. The houselights went up, and I found myself in this ward of catatonics.

“Thank God,” I said, as we staggered toward the aisle. “I thought that fag would never die.” You can’t imagine the looks I got from the shell-shock victims. Claude, who wasn’t in such great shape himself, made a dazed push for the door.

We left the theater with the rest of the zombies and filed out into the hell of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, me wondering how I had allowed Claude to con me into penetrating enemy territory for the privilege of undergoing that exquisite torture. It was hot, New York summer hot, the airless streets pressure-cooked’ into a thick layer of grease and scum, which reminded me of the best part of the movie which was that it had been cool in there. I lit my first Marlboro in three hours, since the so-called art house considered it very unartistic to smoke anywhere but in the balcony, and Claude, a non-smoker, was happy only in the third row of the orchestra. As a film connoisseur, he deemed it his duty to sit as close to the screen as his neck muscles would tolerate.

“Boy,” I said, drawing the smoke into my deprived lungs, “it’s all fixed or the guy who invented air conditioning would certainly have won the Academy Award by now.”

“Why the hell don’t you ever shut up? It’s a drag to take you anywhere.”

I gathered from Claude’s tone that I had committed a crime, but the only offense I could think of was that of retaining my sanity throughout the endless dirge.

Claude, who had learned his English in England, spoke with one of those snotty, superior accents, stuffed into a slimy French accent, the whole mess flavored with an occasional American hipsterism, making him sound like an extremely rich, self-employed spy. I forgive myself for not instantly despising him, because one: it’s not my style to pass hasty judgments on people, and two: it was my luck to meet him under circumstances that made anyone not holding a knife to my throat look appealing.

All around us, the shuffling movie patrons seemed to be snapping out of their trances, because a babble of words rose out of them, and instead of mounting into a riot, instead of rushing back into the theater and pulling up the rows. of moth-eaten seats, there was just this Greek chorus about how authentic, how beautiful their recent ordeal had been.

“Authentic,” I snorted at Claude. “What makes the director so sure Christ had rotten teeth and acne?” Because, believe me, his close-ups had been unsparing.

“Shut up. Stop attracting attention. It’s embarrassing to take you anywhere.”

“What is it with you, Claude? Can’t we go to a crummy movie without you getting hysterical about the impression I’m making?”

Claude marched smartly ahead of me, and I was practically running, as well as shouting, to keep in touch with him. In a normal neighborhood, we might have aroused suspicion, but up there, it just passed as a harmless purse snatching.

“Slow up,” I yelled, when he reached the corner of Broadway and Ninety-fifth Street, because it’s not one of my favorite fantasies to be abducted by six muscular militants to go play White Goddess in the back room of guerrilla headquarters. Claude waited, but not necessarily for me. He was searching nervously up and down the hostile streets. I knew he was having a crisis about whether to spend three dollars plus on a taxi ride down to the Village or to risk a knifing/ mugging expedition on the IRT, a soul-searching choice for a Frenchman to make.

“Decide, sweetheart,” I said, when I caught up to him. “Your money or your life?”

Claude pretended not to hear me, an act of male intelligence that never fails to impress me, and waved at a cab with a glowing off-duty sign. Since we were obviously desirable tenants, uncluttered by kids, pets, or luggage, the taxi came to a screeching halt at the corner. Any halfwit knows that New York taxis don’t back up, so we did the hundred-yard dash like two grateful hitchhikers. There followed a brief but searching interview which established that we were all going in the same general direction. The sullen driver unlocked the back door, and Claude shoved me inside and proceeded to give the most detailed directions to our residence on Morton Street, all in his greasy headwaiter’s accent, lest, God forbid, the bandit employ his own initiative and take us down the cool, quick extravagance of the West Side Highway. One additional dime spent in a taxi was Claude’s idea of death by fire. The driver, hate in his heart, went careening down Broadway as if he were rushing plasma to a beheading.

What with the drenching heat, the harrowing race, and the agony of the meter ticking away Claude’s lifeblood, our night might have had a peaceful dissolve into grief and silence, but being as I am the plaything of an infantile god, I found myself not in the usual filthy junk heap but in a portable crypt. Our driver, a full fanatic, had festooned the dashboard and windshield with thorned Christs, weeping Marys, pierced dripping hearts, and a display of blue wax flowers that you wouldn’t want to put on your mother’s grave. Scattered amidst the gore was the family album. Framed photographs of assorted mental defectives, smiling cripples, consumptives, and proudly uniformed degenerates, all looking straight ahead with the fixed stares of hostages facing a firing squad.

Since I am essentially a lighthearted person who tries to see the humor in this freak show called life, I jabbed Claude in the ribs and said, “Who do you suppose he has buried under the seat?”

“That’s not funny,” Claude answered, holding himself grimly in the throes of his recent religious exaltation. Claude kept his classic profile, which he tended to think of as a work of art transported across the ocean for the elevation of American females, turned away from me. He stared out the window, his heavy lids dropped over his dark eyes, the streetlights and headlights fleetingly reflected in the narrow slits between his long eyelashes.

“I didn’t intend it to be funny. I intended it to be deep and tragic, like that deep and tragic movie that’s destroyed your mind.”

It appeared that we weren’t going to embark on a stimulating discussion of why certain directors should be shot, so I leaned back on the cracked plastic cushions and lit a Marlboro. God knows you’re not allowed to smoke in a hearse. At the first hint of smoke, the driver whirled around and fixed his mean, crazy little eyes on me.

“Lady, can’t you read signs?”

The fact is I can’t, but even if I could, it would have taken an Indian scout to spot a sign in his jungle of relics. He helped me out by pointing to a small printed announcement stapled to his sunvisor which dealt, in essence, with the driver’s medical condition and the diagnosis that he would die from the cigarette you smoked. However, what really influenced me was a tattoo on his thick, hairy forearm that I had somehow overlooked. It was a blue tombstone floating in a red cross, inscribed, “In Memory of My Dear Mother,” and under that the precise date on which he had killed her. Needless to say, I didn’t wish to offend anyone in such perpetual mourning, so I flipped the cigarette out the window.

“Good,” Claude said, with a short, nasty laugh.

It was all too much, and I felt my divine patience wearing thin. “What is it with you?” I demanded. “Why are you being so goddamn hostile tonight? Did I ask to come to this funeral? Or, for that matter, did I ask to go to that fag movie? Yes, fag,” I emphasized into his rigid profile.

“Get off me,” he muttered. “It’s bloody hot, and I can’t breathe with you screaming obscenities into my face.”

“Who’s screaming? Who’s being obscene? Since when did fag become obscene? Yesterday it was your favorite word.” I felt entitled to say that because, according to Claude, everyone, with the possible exception of his heroes Mick Jagger and Mao Tse-tung, was a fag.

“Ugh,” I said, “are you defending the movie? All those muscle men floating around in their bathrobes, clutching at each other, and that hairy, rough trade ape, John the Baptist, the way his insane eyes lit up when he spotted Christ coyly dipping into the Jordan? If you want my opinion, I think Christ should have flung back his ringlets and dived into John’s caveman sarong, slurp slurp, which would have made it a more gripping movie and, for my money, more authentic, too.”

Now, Claude is one of these men who think no answer is the most eloquent answer of all. Why use words is his motto, when you have eyebrows to raise, lips to tighten, and an array of Gregory Peck facial tics to express all human intelligence? It was my job to divine the precise meanings of his various spasms, which was hard work in a well-lighted living room but slavery in the confines of a darkened taxicab. Not that Claude didn’t enjoy the sound of his own voice. Don’t misunderstand me. He could talk for hours, days, but only on carefully selected topics, such as every disappointing course of his most recent meal. But discourse? Converse? Exchange ideas? Never, and certainly not with that brain damaged segment of the population called women.

“Speaking of women,” I moved in closer to facilitate face reading, “how’d you like Mary? Wasn’t she swell? So quiet, so sad, so refined. Never pushing Jesus to become a dentist, make something of himself. In fact, now that I think-of it, did she have a single line in the picture?”

Claude’s reply came through his perfect, white, clenched teeth.

“I told you to get the fuck off me.” A request which was declined, not by me but by the driver, who slammed on his brakes in order to avoid hitting a station wagon that had cravenly stopped for a red light. I was flung across Claude’s chest.

“Will you tell that maniac to slow down?”

Claude gave me his rotten smile, as if to suggest that he and the cab driver had partaken of an immortality pill, and fastidiously rubbed the front of his shirt, where my touch had contaminated him.

“Tell him yourself. What is this sudden timidity? Am I the only person you feel free to yell at and insult?” Claude, his eyes glued to the meter, was stuttering with rage.

“Who’s insulting you? That’s very interesting. You treat me like I’m a leper and tell me
I’m
insulting
you.
The only insult I’m aware of was made to J. Christ, assuming that he wasn’t a Jewish mama’s boy, willing to go to any lengths to get out from under Mary’s potato latkes. Of course he had an especially heavy problem, with her wrapping her head in blankets and swearing he was conceived in her ear. Honestly, Claude, if I were a Catholic, I’d picket the theater.”

“But you’re not Catholic, are you?” He turned a furious face to me. “You’re just Harriet, wonderful Harriet with the big Jewish mouth.” Scratch a Frenchman and find a German storm trooper.

“Jewish! Since when did my mouth become Jewish?”

If there’s one slur I resent, it’s having my personal powers, good or bad, credited to a factor over which I have no control. If my mouth is so Jewish, then pray tell me why my Jewish parents have never understood one single statement I’ve made to them? The only possible explanation is that I was stolen from the Cossacks at an impressionable age and artfully trained by my Jewish kidnappers to suffer from frequent heartburn and moronic motion pictures.

I forced myself to disregard Claude’s irrelevant attack and focus on what could really be upsetting him. I knew he was upset. I hadn’t spent six grueling months catering to Claude’s sexual appetites without having a pretty good idea of the pervert’s moods. Furthermore, he’d been having these childish tantrums for the past two weeks. Curiously enough, two weeks was the longest stretch of unbroken time that Claude and I had spent together, since his job as assistant director of a French Television news crew kept him hopping around the country. That was a clue, but what did it mean? I didn’t want to face the depressing possibility that two weeks with the same woman created a sexual and emotional threat that Claude simply could not meet. The wretched movie seemed my only available opening into Claude’s dilemma. I figured if we could come to some agreement about the film, we could go on from there to the real issues.