City of Night (50 page)

           “Not much of a wife,” Sylvia lashed, “if you have to come here to feel youre a man.” Her voice was controlled, but her face blanched.

           “If I had a queer in my family, I’d kill him!” the man spat venemously.

           Sylvia grabbed him by the shoulders. “Get out of here!” she commanded, pushing him out.

           And then, instantly, shockingly, it began.

           Like someone yearning for water—deprived of it for long hot smoldering days, Sylvia brushed past the bartender behind the bar, and she reached for a bottle of bourbon, and she poured out a glass. I could see the taut veins on her neck as she leaned her head back, welcoming the stinging amber liquid. Her hands, which had been trembling as she stared at the drunk man stumbling anxiously out of the bar, relaxed. She gulned another drink in one long thirsty swallow.

           The bartender is looking at her in helpless pity as if he knew what would happen now; as if perhaps he had witnessed it before.

           Released, Sylvia turned to face the jammed bar. Her eyes had misted, whether from the harshness of the burning liquor or from something else.

           And she held the glass out—high—in a toast to everyone here.

           I left the bar quickly, infinitely depressed. But in the other crowded bars, or on the streets, or walking through Jackson Square, I was obsessed by Sylvia’s face. And I went back to The Rocking Times.

           Intermittently, she was surrounded by the people she knew, the people whom, I was certain now, she had needfully searched out. She was laughing raucously; but her face was marked clearly by the impact of the liquor and the years-long, clawing desire to understand what everything in her, ancestrally, demanded she hate. Occasionally, someone would place a hand on her shoulder, cautioning her about the fervid, sudden drinking; someone else would coax her to let him take her home. But she pushed the hand away, rejected each suggestion that she should leave.

           “No!” she said harshly. “This is it!” Her face clouded, as if she were still sober enough not to be certain whether she wanted to go on. To indicate her instant decision, she gulned another drink. “Gonna sell this bar!” she shouted. “Leave New Orleans—never, never, never come back.”

           “Not even to see Us?” said Desdemona Duncan sadly.

           Sylvia raised a wrenched face toward her, touched the queen’s cheek tenderly, and began to cry in drunken, convulsed sobs. She slid off the stool and rushed out into the courtyard.

           I found her there, hidden in the shadows, sitting on the steps outside leading to the upper part of the building. Jocko sat next to her. The chilly night wind had dried her tears, and her face is glazed and unreal, as if a mask, worn successfully for years, had been washed away. The toughness is all gone, drained by the liquor and the tears. She covered her face, as if to shut out the vision of the bar, her bar. The cold wind brushed past us like the wing of a huge bird.

           About us in the courtyard, people milled in the light-speckled shadows.

           And we sat there on the steps with Sylvia—Jocko and I, silently.

           “Let me take you home, baby,” Jocko said.

           “Not yet,” she said. “Just stay here—both of you—just for a few minutes—with me.”

           Now she faced the courtyard, staring, listening raptly to the jumbled conversations, the shrieking of the queens rising above the sounds of the others....

           And then Kathy was standing before us, looking down sadly at Sylvia. Sylvia reached for her hand; and Kathy said, “How are you feeling, honey?”

           “Kathy,” Sylvia stuttered drunkenly, “Kathy—honey—Im sorry.”

           “Dont be sorry,” Kathy said—and she waited. And I will wonder later if she knew it had to be to her that Sylvia must speak the words she will soon say.

           “You dont understand,” Sylvia insisted.

           “I do,” Kathy said.

           “No, you
cant
understand!” Sylvia said. “Because—... because I did to him... what they did to you.” And she blurted at last:
“I threw my own son out!”

           I felt a sudden cold sadness pass over me at her words. Jocko sighed.

           “I do understand, honey,” Kathy said, and she held Sylvia’s hand more tightly.

           “No,” Sylvia sighed. “No one knows....” She looked at Jocko, then at me, again at Kathy. “He could be... you... or you... or any of these other... youngmen!” she said. “Your age—their age. Theres just two ages anyway: youngman and oldman.” As if an inner echo had accused her—had been accusing her silently for years—she protested haltingly: “It’s just—just not possible—to love too much. Too little—okay: The whole screwing world loves too little. But too much?” She paused, as if thoughts, long submerged, had begun to gnaw into the present of her mind. “But maybe it is possible—to love too much—and too blindly—and maybe I did,” she muttered, looking at me.

           The ferocious love of my mother from which I had fled leapt on my consciousness like a dark animal.

           “My only son...” Sylvia sighed. “A stranger to me; a stranger to his long... long string of fathers,” she accused herself.

           Jocko straightened up, as if her words had reminded him of something. Whatever he remembered, he seemed to have been carried into a past which had determined his own vagrant future.

           “Yeah,” Sylvia said, “I did love him too much—except—... except when he needed me.... Kathy,” she said, as if she must explain it to her, be vindicated by her, “he came to me, he started telling me—... I made him stop. I said, ‘Shut up!’ And he tried to go on, trying to tell me—... And he was crying... crying. And I said, ‘Dont you dare go on!’ I shouted, ‘
What youre trying to tell me isnt true!
’”

           She put her hands to her ears, drowning out the sounds from the bar, the courtyard; trying unsuccessfully to drown other louder, more insistent sounds from the ravenous past. When she removed her hands, tiredly, from her ears as if surrendering to this courtyard, we heard, shatteringly clearly, the high-pitched shrieking voice of a queen saying to another:

           “Sweetie, I dont give a damn what nelly queen Lily says about me. After all!—she dont pay my gay rent!”

           Sylvia laughed, hearing that: laughed in pain. And then, waving her hand in a sweeping gesture that included this courtyard and the bar, she sighed:

           “All—all, all... all... my... saintly... children. All flung out by something—or someone!—to a city like New Orleans—to a bar—like mine. Flung out guiltily. Guiltily,” she echoed herself.... Then entreatingly, to explain, to confess: “And, that day, when he wouldnt stop, I shouted to him, ‘Get out! Dont come back!’...” She covered her eyes. “And the memory of his face, that last time—his face smeared with tears as I yelled after him: ‘Youre a
man,
God damn it! Youre a... man.’ This time she whispered the last word as if it had lost all its meaning. “And you know why? You know why I couldnt face what he was trying to tell me?” she asked Kathy. “Because—...” She stopped. Then she finished harshly: “Because I felt—... guilty! Crushingly, crushingly guilty—as if—as if he were accusing
me
in making this confession to me.... And I—didnt—understand—...”

           “But you understand now,” Kathy said.

           Sylvia looked up at her, studying the beautiful woman’s face. “Understand?” she said, as if perplexed by the word itself. She shook her head. “No. Ive
tried....
But I’ll never...
understand.”
She seemed suddenly to be searching the courtyard, her eyes wide—wide with the hatred which in some strange way, through pain, had been forced to turn into something else—at least the attempt to understand.

           Kathy bent down and kissed Sylvia on the forehead, like a child kissing her mother at bedtime, forgiving her.

           And Sylvia raised her glazed unmasked face to the dark sky, and she said:

           “God damn it—I dont give a damn! Either in makeup, either like a queen—in the highest, brightest screaming drag—with sequins and beads—... Either like that—or hustling a score, trying to prove with another man, because of my... words still ringing in his ears—trying that way to prove that I was right, that he
is
a man.... Even—... even if he has to prove it by finding another man who will pay him for his... masculinity—... Even with a bloody gash on his head, proving it with violence. That way... or with another youngman, his—... lover—... Any way! Any shape! I dont give a damn!... It’s just that—
God damn it!
—I want to see him—if only once more—just once—to tell him—...” and her voice trailed off into a barely audible whimper: “—to tell him Im sorry.”

        
CITY OF NIGHT

           THOSE DAYS....

           Those New Orleans carnival days, divided for me not by clock-hours but by the many, many faces. Vicissitude of sex-locked rooms.

           Those face-crammed days in which time existed in the one dimension of Now, immediately. In which I took pills indiscriminately to keep me awake—pills passed from one person to another with more abandon than a cigarette is offered. In which I made it several times a day, often only pretending to come. In which I rushed through the barcrowds crushed like communal massed lovers—as the fugitive armies, expelled shortly from the other nightcities, came daily in restless tides to join that procession before Ash Wednesday.

           And occasionally I will remember—during those teeming French Quarter days, like a startlingly recalled dream of long ago—things forgotten for long returning as phantom-memories—and suddenly I’ll remember the processions in El Paso when the people marched chanting to the top of the mountain where the statue of Christ looked down, pityingly, arms outstretched—but instead of devout-faced men and women chanting prayers, instead of the priests in bright robes, there will be, now, in New Orleans, soon, only days away, on Shrove Tuesday, the masked clowns, the twisting snakedancing revelers.... The seminude sweating bodies writhing along the streets.

           The parades....

           In one moment of sharing (as on that night, sitting with Sylvia on the steps of the courtyard of her bar: with Jocko and Kathy), the hint of a miracle can occur. But even vague miracles fade, turn inside out. Momentarily, the knowledge of Sylvia’s pain, when it had become a spoken thing, had fused with our own knowledge of ourselves, and from that knowledge of guilt, in that courtyard, we had attempted mutually to vindicate each other. But a kind of closeness that joins people too suddenly can be a fleeting thing. Accumulated for years, finally released by liquor, confessions flow out like a flood-swollen river. Then, calmed, the waters seek to return to their source, to retreat; but the memory of the turmoil, of the flooding, remains, scarring the land it washed.

           And so it was now with Sylvia. For a whole day she had stayed away from The Rocking Times. When she returned, it with again the Sylvia I had first known: sitting at the bar, drinking Seven-Up. Waiting. But now, although she spoke to me much as before, I could sense that she preferred to avoid me.

           As with Pete, those many faces away, when his discovered knowledge of himself had threatened me and we had chosen to pass like strangers on the street, the face which Sylvia turned to me now was the face of someone who, clearly, in the deep night, wishes passionately—because of that fear of vulnerability in a world in which you have to pretend at toughness—that he could erase from another’s mind the shared remembrances of what has passed between them.

           But, once, for a moment, we had been Close, and perhaps in that remembered closeness, the real miracle might occur, waiting in a chamber of the mind which could open now more readily, with others.

           Thursday.

          
The Parade of the Krewe of the Knights of Momus—the mocking spirit expelled from Olympus—will invade New Orleans tonight, four days before Mardi Gras inflames the city at midnight. Floats will sweep the dirty streets trailing gauze like ghost-wings; silverleafed reflecting the choked lights along Canal Street under the winter stars....

           Waking up wherever that may be, invariably I’ll feel a sudden apprehension, because now I will have to face the Mirror, which will stare at me lividly—and I’ll look for Someone; but I wont see whom I want to see, but see, instead, in that morning hour (the hour of waking, whether afternoon or night) a strange accusing face:... Myself. With knowing eyes that somehow dont belong: a face violent in its Knowingness, if only so to me.

           Scrutinizing that stranger’s face, of Myself in the Mirror, I hear the voice of the man Im with, saving: “Dont stare so hard; youre still a boy”—as if understanding from the searching looks that Im hunting Someone, urgently—that someone unfound in the dim past, in the parks, the moviebalconies, the bars, the streets, the sexrooms; that someone perhaps lost or evaded somewhere in the labyrinthine memories leading back to a serene window.... But despite that man’s words, of course I know—and the face knows—that I am no longer a “boy.” I appear Young, yes—but, inside, it’s as if miles of years have stretched since I left that window in El Paso.

           Turning away from the Mirror, I feel stabbingly guilty. But guilty of what? Perhaps my guilt is a wayward apology for living in a world for which I dont feel responsible.

           I walk out of that room, and the sun claws savagely at my eyes.

           It means a day has gone by.

           But what good is a day going by so easily when, suddenly, there is the devouring sun and another day, another empty stretch of time before you can hide again?—another day standing before me at attention like a private waiting to be told what to do, sir.... It’s better to wake up nights so you dont have to screw your eyes up and your Dark self adjusting to the sun.