After Claude (8 page)

She then made me a fabulous promise. “I’ll call you as soon as I get back from Lenny’s yacht and tell you all about it.”

“Who the hell is this Lenny you keep harping about?”

Before closing the door on her bursting hip-huggers, I spotted the bright-pink package of moisturizer that the jealous harridan had left on the coffee table. I scooped it up, ran into the hall, and heaved the vial of venom after the descending pygmy.

A
FTER THAT
stimulating invasion of privacy, you can imagine how eager I was to join Claude and his gang for dinner. In spite of knowing that the only thrill in Maxine’s life was to have a heart-to-heart chat that left her victim prostrate, gasping for breath, I had, out of courtesy, allowed her in, so now she could march straight down to Rhoda-Regina’s apartment and continue having a perfect afternoon. It felt as though I could press my ear against the floorboards and hear Maxine relieve R.-R.’s suffering by informing her of my impending rift with Claude. Why was Rhoda-Regina suffering? A good question, and the only answer I’ve ever arrived at is that she was suffering because she could not stop comparing herself with normal people. I had warned her.

“Rhoda,” I said, “don’t torture yourself with comparisons. Five years in Europe have completely transformed me, while you, except for the addition of a few pounds, are exactly the same Boy Scout.”

I always kidded Rhoda, because when we first met, at the tender age of six or seven, residing as we did in semidetached villas in Brooklyn, she wore only boy’s clothes. That came about because she had three older brothers and her father was a tailor. The rest was just plain Jewish common sense. What were they supposed to do with the pants when the youngest son outgrew them? Make stuffed derma? It’s true that in our childish ways, we all poked good-natured fun at Rhoda-Regina, but from the way she carried on with her ten uninterrupted years of analysis, you’d think if not for those outfits she would currently be the widow of Aristotle Onassis. That she had also inherited her father’s musculature never occurred to her as an obstacle to feminine perfection. And furthermore, if the ideal female automatically lived in a Zelda Fitzgerald paradise, why wasn’t my life one delirious fandango? However, she couldn’t spare one second from her incessant brooding to reflect on anyone else’s destiny. No matter how normal or relaxed she seemed, all you had to do was wink at her and say, “Clothes make the man,” and you had a volcanic eruption on your hands. Rhoda-Regina had been my oldest and best friend. I’d known her almost as long as I’d known myself. We’d gone through school together, except that she, being insecure as a female, had gone on to collecting degrees. We’d sailed to Europe together, me to stay for five crucial years, during which I’d grown out of my Brooklyn chrysalis into a creature of indeterminate origins, while Rhoda-Regina had barely lasted through the summer, rushing back to her beloved highway-robber analyst like Dracula making dawn tracks to his coffin.

A word to the wise. If you happen to be an American citizen, born and bred, and you come upon hard times abroad, go directly to the Ethiopian Embassy. I kid you not. When I appealed to the American Consul for help, he hustled me on a plane to New York so fast I had no time to say goodbye to my great love, MacDonald. For all he knows, I’m still in the American Hospital recuperating from a bout of mononucleosis. The thugs were taking no chances with letting a free spirit slip through their black-leather gloves. They even kept my passport, which is no doubt currently in the possession of Mr. Martin Bormann.

Once officialdom had finished with me, there was no one to turn to but Rhoda-Regina. My adoptive parents had moved their act to Los Angeles; Elizabeth and Richard were incommunicado on their yacht; Jackie and Ari were feuding again; Maxine hung up on me. Desperate, I dragged myself to R.-R.’s door and rang her bell. I tried to conceal how shocked I was at Rhoda-Regina’s enlarged appearance. R.-R. looked like a massive version of the Statue of Liberty after some vandals had knocked the torch out of her hand.

“Surprise,” I said, “it’s me, Harriet.”

“Harriet?” the sleepwalker mumbled. In a certain unselfish sense, I had arrived in the nick of time.

“I would have written,” I explained, “but it turned out I could get here faster than a letter. Ha, ha. Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

With that discreet hello, my Calvary began. At first Rhoda-Regina was genuinely grateful for my company, but it soon became clear to me that she wanted all the advantages of my stimulating personality with none of the inevitable dues. After all, when two individuals live together, regardless of sex, they must consider the differences in taste, or those two persons will begin to feel like a Calcutta family of fifteen packed into a drainage pipe. It was as if Rhoda was refusing to acknowledge my corporeal existence. I am not a genie. I do not vanish into a bottle upon solving my master’s problems. Just because I happen to have uncanny insight does not mean that I am other than a flesh-and-blood woman with normal appetites. I admit right now, a confession to all the world, I need a place to sleep, a quiet, private place, not a mattress in some crank’s studio. I never could communicate this simple truth to Rhoda-Regina. For a one hundred percent revolutionary, which she claims to be, defender of women’s rights, black rights, prisoners’ rights, Puerto Rican, gay, and Vietnamese rights, when it came to my rights, the good old capitalist line was drawn. In short, Rhoda-Regina refused to give up the bedroom, the only logical division of space, since she expected me to remove myself from her studio whenever she felt the slightest urge to create more of those ridiculous plastic torsos. I am not a machine. I am not an automaton. I cannot be turned on and off. Excuse me. I’m only human. I’m affected by my physical and mental state.

I admit I needed a great deal of sleep upon my return to America. It also happened, due to five years spent in another time zone, plus jet lag, which is an established scientific fact, that I slept at unpredictable hours. Shoot me, or, better yet, give me the bedroom and ignore me.

It was not as though she needed her bedroom for romantic purposes. Never. You could conclude, as R.-R.’s houseguest, that the entire white male population had been wiped out by infectious hepatitis.

Rhoda’s so-called sculpture made sleeping in the studio a wide-eyed nightmare of being laid to rest in a communal grave. As I may have mentioned, she called herself an artist. Why not? Old maid was never anyone’s most flattering self-image. Being a Boy Scout, she couldn’t simply call herself an artist. Oh, no, she felt obligated to make things in order to merit the title. What she made were these plastic body fragments. Thumbs five feet tall. Lips you could walk through. Ears you could swim in, and then, tipping the other side of the scale, full figures four inches tall, legs you could wear on a thin gold chain, microscopic hands you could sit on the head of a pin. These plastic amputations filled the room, because needless to say, crowds were not rushing to her door to snatch up her productions. You didn’t exactly have to be Sigmund Freud to figure out her size fixation. A person of Rhoda-Regina’s proportions must have fluctuated between feeling she was a captive in the land of pygmies or a giant who could hang us all from her charm bracelet. How often I used to tell her, “Rhoda, stop brooding about your size. Having a perfect figure may be a blessing, but believe me, it’s not the only thing in life. A saint may come along who is not primarily concerned with proportions, but when he does, if you drag him in here, be prepared to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.”

That great liberal wanted me awake, alert, available, job hunting, shopping, cleaning at all times, except—important exception—at mealtimes. Then, she wished me dead. From the way she carried on, you would think that throwing an extra cup of water in the soup was going to make Rhoda-Regina a pauper. Truly it hurts me to make petty accusations. Mine is a large, a generous nature, and it’s therefore not like me to notice how base practically everyone is. My God, you would think we were lost in a lifeboat from the way she rationed the food. As a defender of women’s rights, she consistently boasted that she hated to cook. I, being practically European, love to cook, but not when I’m expected to rub two potatoes together and produce a banquet. Furthermore, everything they say about two women in a kitchen is true, which may be, women’s lib or no women’s lib, why all great chefs are men.

So Rhoda did the cooking, and the shopping, since I’m no mind reader, and she would invariably try to squeeze a week’s dinner out of a barely adequate two-course meal. Since my sleeping habits were, by her standards, irregular, it follows that my eating habits were equally reprehensible. I admit right now, let me volunteer the information, I am not one of Pavlov’s dogs. I get hungry when I get hungry, not when someone rings a bell at me. True, I’ll eat just to be sociable, but acute low blood sugar is another matter. I dared to need nourishment when, according to Rhoda-Regina’s lights, I should have been out demonstrating, marching, protesting, anything, but not eating.

Rhoda-Regina returned late one evening from her teaching sinecure, a cushy little setup where, for thirty-eight dollars of taxpayers’ money per day, she imparts to minority children the mysteries of the plastic ear lobe, information which undoubtedly propels them directly out of the ghetto into public office.

She headed straight for the refrigerator like a dog obeying a supersonic whistle. At first I thought she was having an apoplectic fit because I hadn’t found the time to wash the bowl; inmates were expected to keep their utensils clean. It gradually dawned on me that she was flipping over a modest snack I had downed to combat protein starvation.

“You have to be kidding, Rhoda,” I defended myself. I was reluctant to antagonize her, but just because someone is putting you up for a couple of days is no reason to become her whipping boy. I have learned the hard way when it’s appropriate to apologize. If it ever comes to pass that my behavior inconveniences anyone, I will be the first to say sorry, but I refuse to go around excusing myself for exercising normal functions. I include stemming severe malnutrition among the norms.

“Have you no consideration at all?” She nestled the empty bowl against her broad, flat chest. “Couldn’t you leave a piece of the pot roast for me?”

Now I employed what might seem a very strange, even dishonest tactic to anyone who was not looking into Rhoda-Regina’s severe eyes. I said, “What pot roast?”

She gasped and loosened her grip on the bowl, causing me at first to believe she had broken it, until I identified the blood smeared over the front of her white crocheted shawl as good old American ketchup. Rhoda-Regina favored ponchos, shawls, capes, and bulky peon skirts, Communist disguises which she foolishly imagined minimized her bulk.

“The pot roast that was in this bowl, pig.” Rhoda-Regina was someone who couldn’t afford, cosmetically speaking, to get angry. Her coloring went from cooked to raw, and her round, brown, doggie eyes, under heavy black brows, shriveled into burned meatballs.

Rhoda-Regina looked down at her stained shawl. “Ketchup.” The word hissed out of her cooked head. “Where the hell did ketchup come from?” Needless to say, it came from the Heinz factory, but I didn’t think she was in the mood for lighthearted banter.

“Oh, of course,” I solved the mystery, “Sidney drowns everything in ketchup.”

“Sidney?” Her face resumed a more normal color, for her, that is. I had snapped the spine of her seizure.

“He came by to see you this afternoon.” I continued to administer the successful treatment.

She smelled a rat. “Sidney knows I work Tuesdays.” Oh, God, that madly jealous mind of hers was busy thinking the worst. In solving one crisis I had created another. As if I would touch that black pudding with a ten-foot fork. It never occurs to these absurdly competitive females that it is the prerogative of a highly desirable sex object to pick and choose.

“Please, Rhoda,” I said, “control that suspicious mind of yours. I have no designs on Sidney, regardless of what he may feel for me.”

“Sidney wasn’t here,” the desperate thing insisted. “You just made that up. You ate the pot roast.”

“Who ate the pot roast,” I sang, “a new musical review by the Muslim Minstrels.”

Need I observe, Miss Stonehenge didn’t crack a smile. Sidney! Only Rhoda-Regina could get unhinged over that black imitation of a rape fantasy. Some hot relationship they had. Sidney would saunter over in his ridiculous black-leather get-up which, I suppose, was intended to shriek sex symbol but made me think deep-sea diver. You practically had to assist the leather mummy in and out of chairs so he could go creaking to the bathroom. As I said to Rhoda-Regina, “Thank God, he doesn’t wear the headgear or we’d need a derrick.”

Those two immovable objects would curl up in front of the fireplace in my quarters, forcing me, from my thin pallet, to participate in their tender romance. On those nights Rhoda-Regina was willing to relocate me in the precious bedroom, but no thanks. I am not a pawn on a chessboard.

Until the wee hours of the morning, the two injustice collectors would snuggle up to each other, comparing the trials and tribulations of being a misfit. They actually convinced each other that a change in government would make them more desirable. Comes that revolution, please seal me in a vacant cement bunker.

“Listen,” I called from my mattress one night, “I couldn’t help but overhear your political debate, and frankly, if you want my opinion…”

“We don’t,” the lady of the team grunted. But Sidney, who rarely had the opportunity to converse with a white woman of my caliber, shut her up.

“Nonsense, Regina,” he said, in a silky voice that, if you happened to hear it over the radio, would conjure up images of a suave playboy assisting you into his Rolls-Royce.

“Let’s have your frank opinion, Harriet.” Sidney told you your name every time he spoke to you, a little nicety he picked up from a mail-order charm school. Because of a nail, as they say, and that was the first nail in my and Rhoda-Regina’s domestic casket.