Flesh and Blood (17 page)

No one moved. Zoe remained on the sofa, looking down at her shoes, and Mary had all she could do to keep from striding over to Zoe and screaming, What's wrong with you? What's going on?

“Come on,” Constantine said.

“Con.”

“Nothing. Not another word. Susie's waiting for us. We're on our way.”

“I've got to use the ladies' room,” Mary said.

“You okay?”

“I'm fine. Just wait for me a minute, all right?”

She crossed the living room and walked down the hallway. She passed an untidy yellow-tiled kitchen, a closed door, another closed door. She didn't need to use the bathroom; she needed to be alone, if only for a minute or two. She needed to concentrate on filling her lungs with air. When she found the bathroom she locked the door and took a pill from her purse. She swallowed the pill and stood for a while at the sink, breathing. In the sink lay a long dark hair, curled like a question mark. There was a spotted mirror; there was a ceramic cup that contained three toothbrushes, Billy's and those of his two roommates, whom she'd never met. Mary didn't know which toothbrush was Billy's. The yellow, squashed-looking one? The newer one, stubbier, bright green, with bristles stiff as a hairbrush? The clear one with a little half-moon of toothpaste stuck to its lip? None of them spoke obviously of her son, and none was unquestionably alien. She saw, suddenly, how entirely she'd lost track. Her own life, the rhythms of the house, its maintenance and upkeep, had seemed so real, so quintessential, that lives lived elsewhere, even the lives of her children, had taken place along the margins, in a realm singular and immutable as a photograph. Although she thought of Billy constantly she thought of him in faintly abstract terms, the way she'd think of a character in a television show when the show wasn't on. But here was this bathroom, with its sour mildewed smell floating under a scrim of chlorine. Here were these toothbrushes. Looking at them, she was stricken by a wave of anxiety so powerful she had to sit on the edge of the bathtub and lean forward until her forehead nearly brushed her knees. Breathe, she told herself. Relax. Let the air in. It seemed no time at all had passed before she heard Constantine knocking at the door, demanding to know if she was all right. “Fine,” she called cheerfully. She reached over and flushed the toilet. As she stood she was taken by an impulse to slip the toothbrushes, all three of them, into her handbag, so that she could examine them later and try to sort out which one belonged to her son. But that would be crazy. Everyone would know who'd done it. Constantine knocked again.

“Mary? I'm coming in.”

“Don't”
she said, too sharply. She added, in a softer voice, “I'm fine. Really.”

She took one last breath. Then, before opening the door, she took a faded pink washcloth from the towel rack and put it quickly, almost thoughtlessly, into her bag.

When Susan heard they were going to the ceremony without Billy she said, “Well, really, what's the point?” She wore a green A-line dress covered with white flowers. It was shorter than Mary would have liked, but, otherwise, Susan was impeccable. Her lips were glossily pink, her hair fell only to her shoulders. She looked straight at Constantine when she spoke. The hotel room, like Susan herself, gleamed with cleanliness and rectitude.

“We're going,” Constantine told her. “Come on.”

“That's silly,” Susan said. “If Billy's being a brat, let him be a brat. There's no reason for us to sit through commencement with a bunch of strangers.”

Mary couldn't help marveling at her elder daughter's fearless shoulders, her staunch certainty, the crispness of her dress. She knew to call Billy a brat. She knew the word that would render his bad behavior small and transitory. Mary couldn't imagine why she so often felt irritated with Susan for no reason, and why Billy, the least respectful of her children, the most destructive, inspired in her only a dull ache that seemed to arise, somehow, from her own embarrassment.

“I'm
going,” Constantine said. “The rest of you can do whatever you want.”

Susan looked at Mary, who offered a wan smile. Susan shrugged dismissively. Mary knew the gesture: Forget about Momma, she'll do whatever's easiest. Mary's face burned but she knew that if she spoke, if she said one word, she'd start crying again and this time she might not be able to stop. She hated her family, every one of them. No one had any idea what it felt like inside her skin, this tightrope sensation, the terrible hunger for air.

“All right, fine,” Susan said. “Let's go to Billy's commencement without Billy. Todd went to see an old friend of his, he's going to meet us there.”

They went to the commencement ceremony. They took seats toward the rear of the field of wooden chairs. Now that she was here, among the mothers in pastel dresses and the fathers in dark suits, Mary felt a sense of foolishness that turned quickly to rage. Billy had made them look like idiots. He'd humiliated them in front of all these people; these men with hearty, successful faces and these cool, talkative women with lacquered fingernails. Mary's irritation at Susan vanished and was replaced by a skittish gratitude. She felt grateful to Susan, who sat on her left, and to Todd, sitting beside Susan, handsome and grave in a suit the same inky blue as Constantine's. Mary touched her earring, shifted her weight toward Constantine, who sat in a cold fury to her right. She tried not to let her irritation turn itself on Zoe, sitting beside Constantine in her baggy muslin dress, her disordered hair, and the old-fashioned lace-up shoes she'd insisted on. Zoe had taken to dressing like a figure in a daguerreotype, one of the frizzy-haired women who stared out of old brown-and-white pictures with harsh-eyed solemnity, who looked stolid and afraid and insanely formal and who were, by now, all dead.

“I think Billy's going to show up,” Mary whispered to Susan. “I think he's bluffing.”

“Don't hold your breath,” Susan answered. “He's got all of you-know-who's stubbornness.”

Mary nodded knowingly, although she seldom thought of her husband and son as resembling each other in any respect. They inhabited different spheres of air, subscribed to different systems of logic.

“I still think he'll show up,” she said. “Why on earth would he want to miss his own graduation, after all that work?”

“Well, don't hold your breath.”

Mary wondered, briefly, with a flush of fear, whether Susan had guessed about her breathing trouble. No, it was only a figure of speech. She laid her hand, gently, on the taut stockinged curve of her daughter's knee.

The ceremony began. It was all speeches, delivered in voices rendered deep and hollow by loudspeakers mounted in the trees. Mary didn't listen. To distract herself, she picked out a boy sitting toward the front, in the students' section. He looked a little like Billy—he had the thin, broad shoulders that made Mary think of wings, and he had the wide jaw that seemed slightly too large and heavy for his thin, graceful neck. This boy's hair, though, was neatly trimmed, and he was, well, present. She wondered who his parents might be. Directly in front of her sat a man who looked too old to have a son graduating from college but who was clearly married to a much younger woman, one of those round-faced, tiny-featured women who were touted as beauties though they were not in fact particularly beautiful. They were simply the daughters of wealthy families powerful enough to demand that the concept of beauty be expanded to include them. A knot of envy and admiration formed in Mary's stomach, like wet fabric bunching up. Their son was probably the product of the old man's second marriage, and Mary thought she could imagine the embattled, aging woman (was she barren? was she poor?) who had been set aside for this gunmetal blonde with her pert chin and her fertility, her miniature nose and her trust fund. Mary looked from the couple in front of her to the boy who resembled Billy. She watched him whisper to the boy who sat beside him as a deep male voice crackled from the loudspeakers, saying something about the long but rewarding work that lay ahead.

When Mary and her family filed out with the others after the ceremony, she tried to locate the boy who resembled Billy.

“I can't believe we did that,” Susan said. “I can't believe I've just spent two hours of my life this way.”

Todd held her hand and managed to arrange his face in a way that was at once optimistic and sympathetic. Zoe moved inside her shapeless dress, thinking whatever it was she thought.

“Billy's a rebel,” Todd said. “It takes all kinds.”

“Okay, everybody,” Constantine said. “We've got about a half hour to kill. I made our lunch reservations for one.”

“We're going to go all the way with this, aren't we?” Susan said.

“You want us to not eat because your brother's got a wild hair up his ass? Should we skip lunch because of that?”

“Oh, no,” Susan said. “Absolutely not.”

As they left the Yard, Mary touched Susan's arm and said, “Thanks for being a good sport.”

“Don't thank me,” she said. Mary was surprised by the tone of reproach in her voice. Her daughter's hatred still surprised her, after all these years. She wanted, as always, to put her hands on Susan's shoulders and say, 'How can you dislike me, when I'm the one who suffers?'

“I don't know what I'm going to do with these two,” she said, and she liked the lightness she was able to put into her voice, the chipper quality. Better days would come.

“What can you do?” Susan said. “What could you possibly do?”

“Well, nothing, I suppose. Billy will come around. Hey, is everything okay with you?”

“Everything's fine, Momma. Everything's perfectly fine.”

Susan walked away, said something inaudible to Todd. Mary and her family made their way toward the Square amid the knots of graduates and their parents. All around them, young men and women whooped and embraced one another as their robes flashed darkly in the simple, shadowless light of early summer. Someone opened a bottle of champagne. A half moon had risen over the library roof. When they passed through the gateway and reached the street Mary saw the boy again, getting into a car with his parents (ordinary-looking people) and a pretty blond girl in a white dress. The girl squeezed the boy's hand, and his father, one arm draped easily over the shoulders of his pink-skinned wife, said something that made the rest of them laugh. Mary watched them drive away. She couldn't help wondering where they were going, what they'd eat that night, how they'd talk to one another, where they'd go after that. Casually, as if reaching for a tissue or a mint, she slipped her hand into her bag and touched the washcloth she'd taken from Billy's apartment.

1975/
Susan awoke one night and knew, suddenly and completely, that she and Todd would not have a baby together. It had simply refused to happen. Waiting to have the baby . had been her occupation; it had explained her. Now she would need to do something else. Todd slept beside her, one strong arm thrown over his face. She got up out of bed and went into the bathroom for a glass of water. Her flannel nightgown touched her as she moved. She was aware of herself in these dark rooms, a faint blue shape among the squat blacknesses of bed, lamp, bureau.

She went into the bathroom, filled a glass from the tap, and took it back into the bedroom. The air was full of Todd's breathing, the sound of his easy, rhythmic little snores. Asleep, Todd reminded her of a submarine. He churned steadily through the hours of his slumber, and the sounds he made—the nasal rasp, the sporadic murmurs—implied a certain blind progress, guided by sonar waves that bounced invisibly off coral reefs and submerged mountain ranges. Even in sleep, he was going somewhere. He was moving steadily toward morning, when he would wake and rise eagerly to the resumption of his work.

Susan sipped her water and walked to the window, parted the curtains. Behind the curtains was a layer of cold air, trapped between the glass and the fabric, and when the cold touched her face she thought, briefly, that something alive was flying out at her. The New Haven street was quiet under the thin orange haze of the streetlights. There was the world of sleep and purpose, the unlit windows of people like Todd and herself, who were having their portion of rest before the new day arrived with its endless accomplishments. She thought sometimes, with a sense of wonder, that right here on this street lived people who would help reshape the world. They'd be the scientists and politicians; they'd find the cures and draft the laws. She touched the rim of the glass to her chin. Outside, a cat slunk along the sidewalk, racing over its own shadow. She followed the cat with her eyes and when it darted under the lilac bush she thought she saw a figure standing behind the bush. He was looking up at the window, at her. He had her father's heavy shoulders, her father's wounded, pugilistic stance, and she was overcome with dread, with a conviction that everything, everything she wanted would now be taken from her. Then she blinked, and saw that it was only a trick of the bare branches, a confluence of shadows. Nothing really happened, she reminded herself. Kisses, it never went any farther than that. She closed the curtains firmly, as she would close a drawer. She waited until she felt calm again.

1976/
Cassandra called her her daughter. Cassandra had business of her own but she kept track the way a mother does. Zoe had other friends, an apartment, a job that more or less covered the rent. She had lovers. Her life was full of facts and they all commanded her daily attention with more weight and urgency than Cassandra exerted from her cynical private religion based on clothes and men and on the love of surprise and the conviction that surprise was impossible. Cassandra lived in the mirror. She lived in bars (Zoe had learned to think of Cassandra as “she”)- Still, she claimed she had adopted Zoe. She performed a mother's rituals of praise and complaint. At the bar, she picked out men for Zoe. “That one there, honey,” she'd whisper, pointing a long finger. “He says he's gay but he's been known to do a girl or two and I have it on the best authority that he's got the dick of death between those scrawny legs.”

Cassandra instructed Zoe on the particulars of giving blow jobs. She sewed clothes for her, urged her to tame her hair.

“Wild is one thing,” she said. “Medusa is something else. You're scaring men off with that jungle do. Why don't you let me give it a cream rinse and a little trim, just to see if we can get it to move in a windstorm?”

But Zoe didn't want her hair to change. Something resided there, something heavy and tangled she wanted to keep.

She had rented an apartment with Trancas when they graduated from high school but now Trancas was gone and Zoe lived with her friends Ford and Sharon in a fourth-floor walk-up on East Third Street, across from the Hell's Angels' headquarters. Trancas was in Oregon, in love with three women at once. Zoe worked in a secondhand clothing store on MacDougal Street. She smoked joints in the cramped little office at the back of the store, helped strangers decide whether or not to buy old party dresses, silk shawls, Hawaiian shirts. The musk of the used clothes seeped into her skin and she took hot baths at night, dabbed herself with grass oil in an effort to feel new again. At home she smoked more joints and drank wine with Sharon, who worked as a waitress, and Ford, who played guitar on the streets. She hung bad portraits of strangers on the walls of her bedroom, covered the lamp with colored scarves. She lived in New York like Alice, thinking someday she'd go back to the other world. Gardens, schoolbooks, wash on a line. For now there were her sweet-tempered friends and her undemanding job, cash paid off the books. There was sex with men who could turn out to be anybody. There was acid in Central Park; there were syringes full of crystal meth that made her slip through the hours like thread slipping through the eye of a needle. She'd learn what she could. As a young girl she'd lived in her parents' house and watched the daughters and sons of the old era dancing on television, dressed in discarded clothes and pieces of the flag, with flowers twisted into their hair. By the time she was grown a kind of promise had already faded, a lost, light-headed belief that humans could live innocently among the animals. Zoe mourned and did not mourn the passing of the old future. She had too much desire in her, too many electrical circuits snapping, to want a life growing dope and feeding chickens and goats. She wanted the true dangers of the forest; pastures and barnyards were too much like houses.

Cassandra called when she thought about it. Sometimes she came over. She didn't do drag in daylight. She came in her ordinary skinniness, her thin red hair. She wore loose khaki pants, big shirts, sometimes a bracelet or two.

“So, what's the dish, honey?” she said, sipping coffee at the kitchen table. In men's clothes she looked more feminine. In dresses and wigs she looked like a man in a dress and a wig.

“I met somebody new,” Zoe said. She tried always to have a story or two.

“Do tell.” Cassandra sat with her sharp elbows on the tabletop, looking over the rim of her coffee cup like somebody's shrewd wife.

“Well, I met him in Tompkins Square Park,” Zoe said. “I was smoking a little hash by the band shell, and he was throwing a Frisbee to a dog.”

“Men with dogs,” Cassandra said, “are generally trustworthy, but no great shakes in bed.”

“The dog came up to me, she was a nice dog, just a mutt, and I petted her and this guy and I started talking.”

“And what was he like?”

“Sweet. Sort of untouched. He said 'Wow.' ”

“Only that?”

“No. He said things like, 'Wow, are you smoking hash right out here in the open?' and 'Wow, that's a cool necklace you're wearing.' He was like a ten-year-old boy who'd turned twenty-five, you know what I mean?”

“Oh, I recognize the type from a distance. They don't come within fifty yards of nasty old drag queens.”

“We smoked what was in the pipe, and then we both started throwing the Frisbee for the dog.”

“Better go straight to the sex, this is getting boring.”

“We got all sweaty, he took off his shirt.”

“And revealed what?” Cassandra said.

“A nice body. Skinny. Sort of a boy's body, with tiny little nipples. But I liked it. I don't need muscles.”

“You straight girls are a marvel. No wonder you all get married. It's only
men
who disappear up their own assholes searching for perfection, isn't it?”

“I don't know,” Zoe said. “I wouldn't marry this guy.”

“Never mind about that. Did you bring him home?”

“Mm-hm. I told him I lived right around the corner, he could take a shower at my place if he wanted to.”

“Good girl,” Cassandra said, “Like a lion bringing down a gazelle.”

“I'm a slut,” Zoe said. “What can I say?”

“So you got him home.”

“Mm-hm. And he took a shower, and you know. There we were.”

“What did he do with the
dog,
for god's sake?”

“I gave her a bowl of water, and she just lay down in the living room. She was a good dog.”

“And how was the sex?” Cassandra said. “Tell Momma.”

“Nice. Well, he was fast. He was too fast for me. But sweet. He fell right to sleep after, he rolled off of me and I think he was asleep before he hit the mattress.”

“Just as I told you,” Cassandra said. “Men with dogs.”

Cassandra worked as a seamstress, and she performed in plays put on in basement clubs. She wasn't the star. She played handmaidens and slave girls, or the heroine's best friend. Zoe always went to see her. In
Bluebeard
Cassandra played the doomed wife, standing outside a painted cardboard door and saying, “Oh, my master hath warned me never to trespass upon the sanctity and privation of this, his most inner chamber, but I've just
got
to know what's in there.” In
Anna Karenina, or, Night Train
she was part of a chorus that sang “Can't Stop Loving That Man of Mine.” In
Secrets of the Chun King Empire
she entered in a kimono and said, “The emperor has chosen Wing Li to be his concubine and the mother of his heir, to ascend with him to the realm of tranquillity that lies beyond the Blue Mountains, so all the rest of you girls can just get your butts on out of here.”

Zoe always applauded with pride and a lurking, stinging embarrassment. She loved Cassandra. She was vaguely burdened by her. She felt herself to be increased and diminished because Cassandra carried around the idea of her, Zoe, a girl who had set herself free. A girl who wasn't nice or ordinary. Sometimes she could be that girl. Sometimes she wanted only to sleep in a small white bedroom while Cassandra and the other Zoe walked through the streets glittering with all they wanted.

After her performances Cassandra would come out and have a drink with Zoe. The clubs were black as ice, full of ancient smells, a rot Zoe recognized from the bins of unwashed clothes kept at the back of the store. Cassandra introduced Zoe around. “This is my girl here, yes, ladies, the one hundred percent real thing. She's my protegee, isn't she gorgeous?”

People agreed that she was gorgeous. Who knew what they thought? Zoe sat on a barstool in her dark clothes, the black distance of the kohl she'd started wearing on her eyes. She sipped a beer and listened to them talk. The men in dresses didn't need conversation. They were a performance, they only needed her to watch.

“You know what I envy? Those little feet. Imagine being able to walk into a store and just buy any pair of shoes that caught your fancy.”

“Frankly, darling, I can think of nothing more depressing. It's so easy, any fool can walk into a store. What I love is the challenge. Finding a pair of pretty pumps in a size thirteen, now that's an accomplishment a girl can take pride in.”

“Uh-huh. Didn't I see that pair you got on hanging from a pole over the shoe-repair shop last week?”

“Look who's talking. Honey, the police are
still
trying to figure out who took that pair of canoes out of the lake in Central Park, but my lips are
sealed.”

Cassandra and her friends didn't need Zoe for long. She said good night, left them talking and laughing together at the bar. Cassandra usually walked her to the door.

“Thanks for coming, angel.”

“It was a good show, Cassandra.”

“Well, there's a reason they call it the big time, and there's a reason most people aren't in it. Call me.”

“All right.”

“Not too early.”

“Never.”

When Cassandra came in the afternoons, in pants and a T-shirt, she sat at Zoe's kitchen table picking up crumbs with her fingertip. She said, “You kids should clean up a little more, you'll have this place crawling with roaches.”

Sometimes Zoe thought she should have a plan. She should have an ambition, so that if somebody asked her, 'What are you doing?' she could have given a better answer than Tm doing opium suppositories,' or Tm doing the bass player on the fifth floor.' Her most conspicuous talent was for being, and sometimes she thought that was enough. Sometimes she thought, I'm a witness. I'm here to watch things happen.

When she turned twenty-one she quit the used-clothing store and got a better-paying job as a cocktail waitress. She fell in love with one of the bartenders, a beautiful, edgy man whose hair had been gray since childhood. She moved out of the apartment on East Third to live with him in his loft in SoHo, then moved back again after he slugged her in a transport of jealousy. She got a job in another bar, worked until until four in the morning, slept until twelve or one the following afternoon. She watched soap operas with Ford and Sharon, took up smoking and stopped again. She fell into and out of love with a firm-tempered, quiet woman named Brenda, who read tarot cards and earned her living as a lighting technician on Broadway.

Sometimes Zoe didn't hear from Cassandra for months. Sometimes Cassandra called five times a week. Sometimes—not often—she came to the apartment and stayed all afternoon.

She said, “I like knowing someone as young as you. I like it that you're not fabulous.”

“I'm fabulous enough for my own purposes,” Zoe said.

“I mean
fabulous,
honey, the kind of fabulous that can quote from every movie Ida Lupino ever made. I can dish the dirt with the rest of the girls but frankly, dear, it's a little like speaking in French. It's not my native tongue no matter how fluent I may have become. It's nice to just come over here sometimes and sit around playing Scrabble.”

Cassandra and Zoe had taken to playing Scrabble every time they were together. Cassandra always won.

“I like it, too,” Zoe said.

“My little girl, oh, the daughter I never had. Now tell me, angel, are you fucking anybody new?”