Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (11 page)

So trot your ponies, honeys, and accept the tangled facts, knowing that your author would prefer to write a simple love story if it were possible. How refreshing to deal with something subjective, intuitive or, best of all, mystical! But the serious writer, like his brother the scientist, has been reduced to dealing with the mere objective.

22.

JUST AS
a piece of shell can take all the fun out of an egg salad sandwich, just as the advent of an Ice Age can poop a million garden parties, just as a disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business, so can a fit of asthma rather spoil the first date between a young woman and an Indian.

Sissy didn't know what to do. Initially, she thought Julian was reacting to the sight of her thumbs, although the Countess had sworn that he had made his watercolorist fully cognizant of Sissy's anatomical embellishments. At one time or another, folks had sniggered at her, pointed, blanched, blinked, clucked, snapped hurried snapshots, bitten their tongues and fallen off barstools, but this reaction took the cake, and the pie, too. They weren't
that
big.

Should she try to assist him, or flee?

Conveniently, from the other side of the lobby Julian's friends came to the rescue. They were two well-groomed couples, white, mid-thirtyish and middle-class. The younger of the men took charge. He broke an inhaler of epinephrine under Julian's nose. The epinephrine hormone relaxed the smooth muscles in the small bronchi of the victim's lungs, allowing air to pass more freely in and out. Within moments his breathing had improved. However, the attack was severe and Julian continued to whistle and wheeze. His chest sounded like the trombone section of the old Stan Kenton orchestra. His chest was playing “Stars Fell on Alabama.” Nobody danced.

“We'd better take you home,” the man in charge said to Julian. As it turned out, he and Julian had once been roommates, so that's why he knew how to handle the attack.

Embarrassed, and in the red of embarrassment looking more Indian than he had previously, Julian begged Sissy's pardon. In wheeze-ventilated and cough-derailed speech, he managed to tell her:

“I've been enthralled with your photographs for years. When the Countess hinted that you might like to meet me—he never explained why—I was ready to paint for him free of charge. And now I had to go and spoil it.”

It was Sissy's turn to redden. Her one-sixteenth came swimming to surface, matching Julian's full measure of uncompromised blood. Although uncomfortable, she was moved by his lament. The emotions she felt were almost counter to the ones she had imagined this talented Indian would inspire in her. Once again (as in Madame Zoe's trailer), she found herself on top of a situation that she had expected would dominate her. Through the blush, her mysterious calm smile stirred and slowly beat its wings, a seabird ascending through a spray of tomato soup.

The man who took charge was named Rupert, a salesman for a publishing house. His wife was Carla, a homemaker, as they say. The other couple broke down into Howard and Marie Barth, both copywriters for an ad agency. While Rupert helped Julian to the street, Howard hailed a cab and Carla and Marie fluttered around Sissy. “This is dreadful,” Marie said. She lowered her voice, becoming confidential. “You know, asthma attacks are brought on by emotional stress. Poor Julian is so high-strung. The excitement of meeting you—my dear, you look so stunning!—must have upset his chemical balance.” Carla nodded. “It'll be all right, dear. It isn't as serious as it sounds.” She started to pat Sissy's hand, then thought better of it.

The six of them squeezed into a taxi. Can you guess how humiliating that was for our Sissy, ushered insensitively into a vehicle that she had not snared in her net of meat and gesture? Can you appreciate that she must have felt like a hummingbird stuck in the bubblegum of pedestrianism? Would you invite Thelonius Monk to your house and not let him play your piano? Would you shove an arthritic nanny goat into the ring with El Cordobes? Lord! She sat upon that taxi upholstery in frosty revulsion, like a queen compelled to squat over a ditch latrine; and why not? For she was Sissy Hankshaw, who had carved out an identity for herself in the vast realm of personal idiosyncrasy instead of carving it out of someone else's flesh, as is normally the case; Sissy Hankshaw, who, following a suggestion from nature, had created herself and then paraded her creation before ye gods and planets that whirl above our daily routine; Sissy Hankshaw, who proved that grandiose ambition need not be Faustian, at least not for a woman in motion. Einstein had observed motion and learned that space and time are relative; Sissy had committed herself to motion and learned that one could alter reality by one's perception of it—and it was that discovery, perhaps no less a one than Einstein's, that finally allowed her to smile away humiliation just as a short while earlier she had smiled away fatigue.

The taxi, having no free will, rolled downtown.

23.

NEW YORK CITY.
June 21, 1972. Eight-thirty in the evening, according to the position of two mechanical hands on an arbitrary dial. Mars is in the House of Virgo, Jupiter is in the House of Values and Venus is in the House of Pies. The weather: hot hokey puppy poopie with billows of industrial paranoia at 600 feet. Manhattan smells like the litter box for the Kitty of the World. It has twisted its body into the
dog-shit asana
. Close by but far away, in a world beyond odors, ghosts of the original inhabitants are laughing their feathers off, remembering how they'd stuck the white devils with this doomed piece of real estate for some very chic beads and a box of Dutch Masters. The Big Apple, polished with Rockefeller spit and wiped on the tight pants of a multitude of Puerto Ricans, is ready for the chomps and nibbles of Friday-nighters from everywhere. Junkies are stirring in their warrens, pizzas are primping in their ovens, Wall Street is resting its bloody butthole and the Statue of Liberty wears a frown that won't quit. As City College professors, disgruntled over martinis, talk about dropping out and farming rhubarb in Oregon, neon signs all over town rejoice because it's the shortest night of the year. Headline on the front page of the New York
Daily News
:
THE CHINK SUMS IT UP, SAYS LIFE IS HARD IF YOU THINK IT'S HARD
. New York City. In progress. Not a cowgirl in sight.

Taxi cabs are pulling up in front of restaurants and theaters, and one pulls up in front of a remodeled tenement on East Tenth Street, between Third and Second avenues, three blocks west of where young Latins have all but taken away Tompkins Square Park from old Ukrainians and winos of indeterminate age and national origin. This block of East Tenth, freshly painted, maintains some class: behind its barred windows and triple-locked doors with chains à la mode, professional people, some with a creative bent, are holding their own against the constant onslaught of soot, cockroaches and burglars. In this block Hubert Selby, Jr., wrote
Last Exit to Brooklyn
, and a famous art critic ponders hourly the problem that inherent pictorialism presents to the ongoing mainstream of modernism. The taxi has stopped in front of the building where the wheezy Julian Gitche resides. It discharges its passengers, all too slowly for the taste of Sissy Hankshaw, who holds exhaustion and revulsion at bay only with the aid of the Great Secret (which, as we've determined, is this: one has not only an ability to perceive the world but an ability to alter his perception of it; or, more simply, one can change things by the manner in which one looks at them).

As tired as she is, Sissy has a single flame-edged longing—to get on the road and hoist her thumbs in the wind. However, she is buttoned into an expensive linen dress, is hemmed in by four persuasive people and is held by fine threads of curiosity and sympathy to this
Gentleman's Quarterly
parody of an Indian who curds up with mucus every time he tries to speak to her. So she employs the Great Secret to turn her predicament into an educational, if not entertaining, experience.

Julian's apartment is second floor front. It's neat and clean, with waxed hardwood floors, a wall of exposed brick, a white piano, books and paintings everywhere. There is a blue velour sofa upon which Julian is made to lie. While Howard mixes Scotch and sodas, Rupert fills a syringe from a vial of aminophylline he has taken from its place behind a gelatin salad mold in the refrigerator. He gives Julian an injection.

“There, that ought to beat them bronchial buggers into submission,” he says to Julian. Then, to Sissy, “I was a medic in the Army. I really should have become a doctor. Sometimes, though, I feel that pushing books is a whole lot like pushing medicine. Think of books as pills. I have pills that cure ignorance and pills that cure boredom. I have pills to elevate moods and pills to open people's eyes to the awful truth: uppers and downers, as it were. I sell pills to help people find themselves and pills to help them lose themselves when they require escape from the pressures and anxieties of life in a complex society . . .”

“Too bad you don't have a pill for bullshit.” Carla smiles as if she were joking, but she'd said it tartly. Rupert glares and takes a big bite of Scotch.

“Where do you live, Miss Hankshaw,” asks Howard, trying, perhaps, to change the subject.

“I'm staying with the Countess.”

“I know,” says Howard, “but where do you reside when you aren't visiting New York?”

“I don't.”

“You
don't?
”

“Well, no, I don't reside anywhere in particular. I just keep moving.”

Everyone looks a bit astonished, including the recumbent Julian.

“A traveler, eh?” says Howard.

“You might say that,” says Sissy, “although I don't think of it as traveling.”

“How
do
you think of it?” asks Carla.

“As moving.”

“Oh,” says Carla.

“How . . . unusual,” says Marie.

“Mmmmm,” mumbles Howard.

Rupert bites into his Scotch again. Julian issues a watery wheeze.

The silence that follows is soon broken by Carla. “Rupert, before you get too engrossed in your research on Scotch as a cure for aging, don't you think you'd better phone Elaine's and cancel our dinner reservations? We'll never get in again if we just don't show up.”

“What would we do without you, Carla? Without our little efficiency expert, Carla, everything would just go to hell. Carla is thinking about running for mayor next year, aren't you Carla?”

“Up yours, Herr Doktor Book Salesman. Will the demands of your medical practice allow you to call Elaine's or shall I?”

“Oh let me do it,” pipes Marie. The short, vivacious brunette lifts herself out of her platform shoes and glides in stocking feet to the telephone.

“Speaking of running for office,” says Howard pleasantly. “Does anybody think McGovern has a chance?”

“Do you mean a chance to be canonized or a chance to be assassinated?” asks Rupert.

“If Rupert needs a bullshit pill then Hubert Humphrey needs two,” says Carla. “And that might be McGovern's role. If he can turn off Humphrey's fountain of corn then McGovern has done the sensibility of America a great favor, even if he forces his party to nominate a jingoist creep like Scoop Jackson in Miami Beach.”

Like many of their liberal counterparts, the friends of Julian Gitche are disillusioned with politics, but also like their counterparts they have failed to discover an alternative to politics in which to place their faith, channel their humanism or indulge their penchant for conflict and speculation. Thus, the conversation around the red patient on the blue sofa drifts to the upcoming national political conventions. When Marie returns from phoning the restaurant, she joins in.

Sissy leaves her chair and wanders about the apartment. Its full bookshelves remind her of public libraries in which she has napped. Wandering, she holds her thumbs close to her side, lest she nudge an antique, totter an objet d'art, smear a picture glass or agitate the pet poodle. She is intrigued but suffers no illusions; she knows she is in an alien environment.

Eventually her explorations lead her into the bedroom, where there is a covered birdcage of Florentine design. She wishes its inhabitants were not sleeping, for she “has a way” with birds. She recalls Boy, the runaway parakeet who for a time was the sole exception to her rule to go always alone. Boy's owners had clipped his wings, but once Sissy taught him how, he hitchhiked as well as some birds fly. That Boy is a cinch to go down in the Parakeet Hall of Fame.

Hoping to hear a cheep that might indicate insomnia in the cage, Sissy sits upon the double bed. Gradually, she reclines. “No Indian blankets,” she notes. “No Indian blankets.” And that is the last thought she has before she blacks out.

Two hours pass before she is awakened—by a sound softer than a cheep. It is the sound of buttons passing through buttonholes. Buttons that have not breathed freely in three days are sighing with relief, their yokes lifted, their nooses loosened. One by one, button necks are freed from the trap that is the fate of most buttons the way that compromises are the fate of most men. Soon Sissy cannot only hear button liberation; she can feel it.

Someone is undressing her.

And it is not Julian Gitche.

24.

"WHERE ARE THE OTHERS?"
asked Sissy, in a voice webby with sleep.

“Oh, Rupert and Carla had a little hassle and went home,” said Howard.

“Julian fell asleep on the couch; we covered him up,” said Marie.

“We thought that we should make you comfortable, too,” said Howard.

“Yes, dear,” said Marie. “We've been watching you here sleeping and you looked so sweet. We thought we should help you get comfy for the night.”

Sissy thought that quite considerate of the Barths. They were a couple as amicable as they were handsome. She did wonder, however, why they were both in their underwear.

Between the two of them, they had her out of her dress in no time.

“There, isn't that better?” inquired Marie.