Queenie (11 page)

Why is it, no matter what kind of mischief one man does with his organ, every other man takes solemn credit for it?

Why is a penis such a
serious
thing?

Why else except that we have to take ourselves on hearsay—for what a man makes contact with every day.

O René-Marcel, we sit to pee. Thee stands. Exposed. It’s no wonder every man is just a little queer for him self. Even Oscar.

So take it away, theology—take it from there. For every man is a little queer for himself? And God is a man?…

I am just hotting to this theory, Father, though not at all pleased with it, when I hear what I’m not hearing, in the house. Quiet. Or the sound of the house door shutting. Oscar didn’t go home. And now I’m hearing what I’m hearing. By the two-hundred-pound rhythms above my head, never heard before in that bedroom during my life time, Oscar is spending the night. Oh the darlings! They are trusting the theology of the world to me.

Cake makes me think clearly. By the time I’ve eaten the whole
Q
on it, I’m seeing certain flaws in the argument. And by the time it is calmer upstairs.

Certainly God is a man. Women can’t seem to bother with the job, I don’t yet know why. But is he really man’s ally? Is God really as queer for men as they are? Or are we women just drinking their pee?

Well—it’s almost dawn before I resolve my answer. When it comes, it’s a clincher. Envy’s like indigestion really. It makes for a very intellectual crotch. Mine hasn’t interrupted for hours. But around five, there’s a last little night music upstairs.

Sleep sweetly, my elderly darlings. Rockabye. Rock in peace. Your Queenie is back in her background. At least for the night. Envy is off beating some other poor female’s meat.

But when you get up, you two, maybe late subway time, take a yawn for yourself, and a good look at all those heads in the street down there, streaming by on Fifty-Seventh. Not head heads. Just plain heads. Heads! and tails. Take a look at the whole teeming rocking giddy-ap eye-O planet.

Me—I don’t trust God enough yet to believe in him. I don’t know what he has going for me. Personally, he may have it in for me. But until I know for sure, I’ll keep asking myself what may get to be my favorite question. For, look at all those people down there! Look at China, Africa, Japan, Levittown! Look at our old joint. Look at
yours
, Father. People, people, people, people,
PEOPLE
! All the fucking people.

How can the head of such a place be a dirty old man who digs boys?

But just in case—and just in case He plans to turn up at Alba’s—I’m bringing Schubert Fish.

The Bye-Bye Blowout

Oscar says Alba’s house is a satire on the rich.

Since the girls don’t have too much humor, they get pretty glum when they go there. They have to go, of course. If you’re pushing forty, nowhere near the Hope diamond class but never sleep lower than Park Avenue either, then you go to Alba’s to see what a girl like you can still get. Or what Alba can. Especially since the men there are all paydirt—men from the serious walks of life. At Alba’s, you find out who these are for today. “Better than reading
Fortune
,” Oscar says, “and you can eat some of the profits while learning.”

It’s her food he can’t resist; hers is the only place in the world he’s had too much grouse. And out of season. Wood mushrooms, fiddleback ferns—what she loves is something the airwaves can fly over in the wrong month for it. “It’s her diet,” Aurine says. “How else can she scarcely eat enough to keep alive?”

But when the invite comes, nobody regrets. They can tuck in enough wild boar and frangipani foo-foo for a week, if they don’t mind the hostess looking thinner than a guitar string in a little nothing made of two or three of them. And meanwhile bone up on what the Dow Jones is doing best on, in one look at the guy she’s receiving with.

Alba’s the only one of the girls who moves from man to man that much, sometimes even from day to day; she says how can she help the market’s temperament? We call all of them “the banker” out of respect for her long-term first one, who she only missed marrying through a change of pope. In return, if you ask, “How’s the banker these days?” she’ll always answer generously, like “Oh he’s in Chile for the weekend, their copper is merging with ours,” or “Xerox? I don’t see
him
anymore.” Oscar says, the air on East Sixty-Ninth Street is now so rarefied you only get the tips on where the stock tips are.

The girls would like to disapprove harder of all that instability, but too much style they want to keep up on goes with it—how can you afford not to know a girl who picks you up at Rumpelmayer’s in a Maserati, when you’re still paying for your second-hand silver Mercedes, not knowing quiet elegance is passé? And who walks through all the birds who are just beginning to wear whatever—already not wearing it.

It’s home where she busts out. Which Oscar says is just what any shoeless girl from the banks of the Tiber, and with a nostril and an arch like hers would do: “There’s an emperor’s by-blow in
her
, somewhere.”

Only where some of her imperial ancestors vomited dinner so they could eat again, Alba vomits rooms. And has them redone overnight apparently, since though my aunt and uncle often come back saying the dining room’s migrated again, or turned purple according to the latest principles, or an Aubrey Beardsley corner is now where the
trompe-l’oeil
umbrella stand was, there’s never any mess. Alba claims it’s all done because the old mansion the first banker gave her is plumbing prone—to leaks. She connects this with the house being in exchange for her virginity. When Tekla hooted, “
What
virginity?” Alba replied with great dignity, “My American one.” Aurine says “Alba’s very domestic. She’s feathering her nest. And that decorator gives her a cut.”

As a kid, they tease me the place is a carousel that turns around between visits; I keep looking for the brass rings, hoping Alba will let me have one for being her godchild. Most of the by-blows in the girls’ crowd are; she only shows us in public until we’re five. After that, if we’re ever underfoot when a banker crashes—paying Alba’s expenses doesn’t mean he has the run of the place—we know enough to stand very stiff while she straightens our school uniform and says, “This little dear, her mother’s been like a mother to me.”

He has to stand there, holding the little box from Cartier or the big fur one from Kaplan, and be glad we’re not the monsignor. Who Alba keeps an afternoon for. Giorgio, the oldest of us by-blows, used to say, “Alba lives her whole life in a state of qualm.” Which she is always overcoming.

We godchildren tend to loathe each other in a tied sort of way. We’re too much alike. We stand united though, on not letting that out to the girls. Or to the uncles, who are even more conservative.

Nila’s kid, the Nose, now eleven, sums it up neat enough last Christmas. His crowd of boys, which runs from ten to fourteen, is the most depraved I guess, from being all word-of-mouth—when you can really get it up, you graduate. Little girls their own age won’t notice them anyway; as soon as
they
fall off, Father, they’re after the older boys. And as soon as they can borrow or steal the pill.

“Listen,” Nosey says, “it’s the girls’ livelihood. Why break it to them the style now is give it for free?”

Carolyn, who goes to Little Red, says “And it’s our livelihood, you mean, don’t you, punk?”

It’s not going to be hers, I think.

“Just you wait for socialism!” she says. “Bet you won’t get it free though, even then.”

I think Carolyn will someday be going to college too.

Nosey makes a noise at her. He wants to be an anthropologist; his term project at Walden is a study of how our national life ignores belches and farts. But I’m betting he goes in business with his uncle, who’s a bookie; he’s going to be one of those small men who have a fix on livelihoods. “Queenie-so-quiet,” he says, “tell us something. Why did so many of the girls have
girls
?”

It’s a fact I think some Nobel scientist should get interested in.

Carolyn perts out quick, “If we’d a seen you first, we’d’ve abort.”

Maybe she’ll be the Nobel scientist.

Meanwhile she’s in love with Nosey, kid style. And Nosey is in love with me. Our tie being also that we both miss Giorgio, the only other boy in our crowd being Tatiana’s Nicky, who is already at Exeter, in his uncle’s footsteps. Or partly.

The finalist is Deirdre, Sheelagh’s kid, whose uncle in the British Embassy sends her to Spence. And whose uncle’s wife was presented at Court. No relation of course, but still an influence. “
Les girls
are simply marvellous, don’t you think? With the world situation the way it is. Sim-pully muh-haw-v’lus.”

Are we a lost generation? I think we’ll all get married out of spite.

So does Schubert Fish. Who says he might be willing to marry me for it. I bring him to Alba’s party not because he’s as handsome in his way as any of us, and probably as rich as the richest uncle, but because he’s impossible. Like that whole shebang when it’s really rolling is likely to be. And because I haven’t altogether forgotten about God.

Schu’s at my school, my same age, and our bond is that he too comes from doctrinarians—rich radicals. His parents got married under protest, and have continued it. Schubert has never been baptized, or inoculated for anything; he’s eaten health foods all over the world, following his father’s art collecting and his mother’s swamis, but has never had a cup of coffee. In all civic respects, he’s a kind of Jehovah’s Witness. Though the Fish family don’t believe the world will end until the family deadline—which Schu says will be when he’s had a hundred women, his mother has attained all a woman can in Mahayana, and his father’s found a lost four-by-six canvas of a very scarce painter called Bonington. Schubert has also never been registered for the census, or pledged allegiance to the flag. They never touch money; you have to pick his cab fare out of a pocket the valet puts it in. Schubert has a custom-made pocket in a peculiar neighborhood, just for the girls. I think he’ll make his deadline quicker than the others. His middle name is Hegel, and if he goes out of the country again he’ll have to sneak back; he’s never been vaccinated.

He goes along with his birthright he says, like anybody—until it begins to itch. “Then I told them—send me to school like other kids. Or I’ll drop out of here. That did it. Dropping out is
their
bag.”

Only it’s supposed to keep him and them more in than any of us.

And it’s with him I make a real feminist mistake. I tell him my recent thoughts about God. He then makes a male chauvinist one. When I talk about God—he thinks I’m talking about him.

All I see at the moment is our field trips for film class begin to involve a lot of transport. “No, I’ve seen that,” he’ll say. “Let’s hop on down to Eighth Street.” So when I decide to take him along to Alba’s, all I have to say is, “Someone’s giving me a party. Wanna hop a cab?”

Up to now, Alba’s front door was dependable. It stayed oak. But tonight it’s port-wine color; the whole house-front is pale green wash, with a line of potted pink hyacinth straight across. Live ones, and fresh. I say, “Alba’s cut from the florist will feed us all.”

Schubert’s never been home with me. I never bring young guys there; Oscar and Aurine always
look
at them.

And outside the home, none of us talk family, no matter what the family thinks. After puberty, you’re not even ashamed of them.

But anybody coming plonk into Alba’s will need some commentary. In good faith. So I say, “She never changed the door before; it must be that psychiatrist. Candido’s. He and Alba took the banker’s check for it. But Candido finked out and went.”

Schubert’s too smooth to ask who Candido is; he’s got a good background. Once inside the vestibule though, he studies that framed birth certificate. When I point out Alba, who is gliding among her guests in a little piece of silk tied in a sailor’s knot, he only says, “If I went and got myself one, suppose she’d like a copy of it?”

When Alba mermaids up to us in that legless way she has, I see at once she’s pleased with him. Schubert’s a lanky redhead with a high-minded profile, like he’s studying to be a chaplain who won’t go to war. Front-face, he’s even fanatical. Meaning pop-eye. But he does a fair job of convincing himself they’re concentrating on you.

What else Alba sees is obvious, to a hand like her. The Fish clothes are just as funky as they’re supposed to be. Nobody’s been allowed to polish the Fish boots. Still, the Fish himself has a certain kind of wan charisma. Maybe it’s because his nails are so clean of dollar dirt. Or that he looks hungry and thin in the smart way only money can. Like if somebody told you his people don’t want him to go to college but to help crew their yacht to the lower Antilles with a load of forty guests and a macrobiotic chef—you wouldn’t be surprised.

Alba isn’t. She says, “Don’t I know your father, Mr. Fish?”

He says politely, if his father didn’t only collect early-nineteenth-century, she sure would.

And we pass on to the brats. My godsisters and brother are in the first room to the left, which is kept strictly mansion-style for changing bankers in, so never alters much.

Carolyn nails Schubert at once, for socialism, and he takes her phone number.

I say, “The revolution’ll take a while. She’s only ten.”

He says we’re all precocious here, aren’t we, he’s noticed that.

I say bastards usually are.

“So many of you?” he says. “All?”

And we pass on.

Passing on seems to be what Schubert does well; he’s what Deirdre’s mother’s lord keeps telling the papers the British nation is: unflappable. What you have to watch is when this sort flaps, but I don’t know this yet. I’m beginning to like him for it—that chipped Vermont granite is really pretty pretty from the sideburns side—and to wonder if this,
hélas
, is
it
. Deciding if it is, I’ll get it to close its eyes. Or close mine.

By now we’re at what was called the pumproom the year Alba bought cherubs, and still has a ceiling of them, but is the soda fountain this year. Meant for the brats, who of course won’t touch it. But the European-style girls love it, some even dress for it. Petine Esterhazy, Carolyn’s mother, is drawn up to the bar in gigolo-check bicycle pants, and a blonde wig with braids. Nosey’s mother’s headdress is the same, but she’s still a natty size six, in something made of plastic funballs, and inner space. I’m surprised at Dulcy, until I recall she gave up Potto after our last blast, for Somebody Southern at the Pentagon. She’s in a see-through Mother Hubbard, tending bar.