Queenie (23 page)

“Christ!” he says, getting up so fast the table overturns. “The way you women fuck around with thinking.”

This time he doesn’t apologize to either of us. “I don’t have an ethos, I am it.”

That’s my Giorgio. And people are looking at him. In his white suit.

To pay for the table, he gives the manager some dollars I didn’t know he had.

“Well now, I think I’ll go upstairs,” I say. “And have a few pensées. Revolutions are certainly full of them.” It’s not an invitation. I feel strange, immortal longings. I haven’t put anything on tape since I’ve been with him.

“No time,” he says. “We’re flying out. Home.”

“Home?” I say. He hasn’t said the word yet. “Is it——?”

It is.
EL TREN.

“Gotta get back,” he says. “Gotta think up another gold mine.”

I take out my blindfold.

“Uh-uh,” he says, “You’re going to be a passenger.” Seems we’re traveling middle-class legit.

Because, since the world is still in transition—and we are—we can’t always avoid the
other
legits.

“Gee, no blindfold?” I say, looking in the mirror. “This is one time I was looking forward to it.”

But it’s kind of nice, under the dark glasses I providentially had, waving good-bye to the manager—who since we didn’t have airport fare, providentially drove us—and then entering the plane just like anybody, from the front.

And sitting right up with Giorgio, though thank God he’s so flashy-looking nobody takes him for a husband. “Oh, good-bye beautiful Yugoslavia!” I say ecstatically through the window, on takeoff. “This time, I
saw
you!”

Though I don’t yet get to know what we bring.

“Better you don’t know,” Giorgio says. “But it wasn’t coals to Newcastle, I’ll tell you that.”

But on the long flight over he finally raps with me. Being a passenger is hard on him.

“Nobody goes for identity any more, see?” he is saying.

I agree. Sherry’s fake passport turned out to be made out to me.

“Nobody goes for boundaries any more, either,” he says squirming. Seats everywhere are too small for him.

I say, “Sit over on me.” I say, yes, it’s like countries still having border problems. I can see we young people have to stop having borders on our brain. “We must be very careful not to have boundaries on them.”

He says, yes, but the most important thing, your private and public life have to be continuous.

“Oh, with some people they already are,” I say, looking where he’s looking, at the couple across the aisle. We are in a large plane. And they are not exactly across the aisle; they are down in it.

But since a plane to me is like a bedroom is to him, we continue ideologically.

“Queenie, the real world is really seamless,” he says. “All the seams are man-made.”

“And all the money,” I say. “So who cares, by which man?”

He looks out the window, at that crack. “If you don’t give away your money, you’re just a liberal,” he says.

“Oh I agree,” I say enthusiastically. “And if you don’t give away other people’s. Until they get the idea themselves.”

He’s having trouble though, he says moodily. Sometimes, if a hijacked plane, or even a person, isn’t just the wanted model, there are as many objections as if the stuff came FOB Detroit.

“Gee, people,” I say sympathetically.

“Trouble with a system like mine,” he says, “you can’t shoot ’em.” His voice has real pain in it. “If I could only shoot ’em, everything would become clear.”

So, he says, the only thing young people like us can do is to confuse contemporary civilization until it collapses.

I know the answer to that one. We had it under Dr. Werner.

And I am just about to give it, when the guy end of that couple in the aisle raises his head and says it for me. “Then we’ll
know
what we
have.
” And lies down again.

“Ignore that,” Giorgio says in a cold voice. “Stay away from those ideas about starting the world up again,” he says. For a revolution, they’re poison. “Action is enough,” he says, gripping his armrests. “Goddammit, I wish
I
were flying this plane.”

“I don’t wish I was part of
that
couple,” I say.

He says a nice thing about action is, it doesn’t have to be consistent.

“Oh I agree!” I say, snuggling. “It doesn’t have to be consistent with the ideas it just doesn’t have.”

So we are just getting more cozy than revolutionary, when the stewardess comes asking for drink orders. “Sorry I can’t buy us champagne,” he says.

“Oh I can,” I say. “I have a little French money, though it’s real.”

After a while I say. “Those dollars of yours—they looked awfully real to me too.”

He says, “They were. What d’ye think we are, a gang of cheap counterfeiters?” He says imaginary money has to have a standard too. To back it up. “What you do with dollars——” he says, “——you get them
out.
”

So that’s what we brought to Belgrade.

I say, “But is that confusing
enough
?”

I’m no economist. But love scenes with money?—I was built on them.

“You know——?” he says after a while. “You’re not as tough as you talk.”

I snuggle deeper. “As you once
made
me talk.”

…Always a lot of italics in these scenes. And there’s a real Aristotle reality about a love scene in a plane. The time, the place, the loved one, all together. He can’t get out. And you are not in the baggage compartment…

“Yes, I
formed
you,” he’s saying. His voice is holy.

I try to say mmmm-hmmm, but it sticks in my craw. So instead I kind of flutter deeper into his protection, twisting his lapels, poking his pockets as if maybe he’s brought me a stock split, going all over him like the pretty kitten I am—but keeping it all above the waist.

Then I hear above my head, “You’re not as coy as you act, either.” I look up and there he’s grinning that wicked bygone grin of his. So we’re equal again.

“No, my superego always gets the better of it,” I say sourlike. “Or yours does.”

Just then, my fingers touched a round metal object in a pocket. I slide it out. Jesus, do I remember rooftops! “I didn’t know you wore a Piaget watch.”

He doesn’t always. It’s just that for hijacking, it’s more accurate.

After a while he says, “Think it’s funny a revolutionary wears a vest?”

Does the whole balance between us hang in the balance? Do I answer in good or bad faith?

I take a deep swallow. Those eyebrows bearing down on me are extremely beetly for only nineteen.

I say, “Yes.”

He says, “Oh, thank God, Queenie, so do I.”

He’s misunderstood himself! He’s in the wrong end of the revolutionary field.

Which he says can happen, these days, in the same way a lot of the bourgeoisie are going in for creativity when they ought to be in a bank.

“It’s my muscles misled me. And that money. Giorgio Goodfellow—natch.”

What he really wants to do is hang out in some dark-sweet, sad corner of the world, maybe even without any palm trees, wear what he chooses, regardless of the social implications
either way
—and write poetry. With muscle in it.

“Oh Giorgio,” I say, looking at the empyrean—which just now out the plane window is so stunning—and meanwhile all choked up with happiness because I know the college word for sky. “Oh Giorgio—and now and then I help you with a pensée! And forty years later—we win the Nobel prize.”

He clasps my hand in his, and we ride four hundred miles or so in a minute of strong dedication.

Then he says, “Don’t know whether they award that thing to
couples
.”

…You dream what you get. But who do you tell it to, afterward?

Not the one you’re getting it with. That’s unnatural…

“Well, I’m for quitting hijacking,” he says. “But in a burst of flame.”

“Violence?” I whisper.

He says no. Something nameworthy. But in the field of international repute.

I say what I love about revolutionaries is they are always so international.

“Okay, you,” he says. “Hear this.”

It will happen during the next presidential election. He will have to borrow all the money for it on his expectations, since Americans will not take counterfeit bribes. In fact, we may have to use up all his prospects—which will make us poor enough for poetry.

Because just at election time, he says, when even the old roués turn puritan enough to go to the polls, when all the babies have been kissed politically so they won’t grow up to be revolutionaries—even on the very morning, maybe, when all is ideologically at a standstill in North America, and only the sound of the gumchewers is heard in the land——

…And which also happens to be one Giorgio Rey’s twenty-first birthday…

We are going to coup d’etat the most important candidate of all—to
El Tren.

I bow my head. When it gets to me. What is going to be my role.

O love, O life, O sky—no, it’s dark now.

But I have a role.

My luck, it would be one of those daytime television ones: like “The guy has the ambition. Who’s to humanize it? The girl.”

Who if she is me though, is full of wild surmise. And even grateful. That she is not riding in back.

Because, O my interlocutor, I have found you I There you were, staring me in the face, all the time. There you are, staring us all in the face, from the newspapers to the telly, from the walls of our Capitol all the way up to a goddam plaque in the empyrean!

It’s just my time lag I didn’t think of you sooner.

But now I know what my tapes are for.

Oh—Mr. Pr——t!

The Automatic Pilot

So now, today is the day Giorgio is twenty-one. We’re in business. And you, Mr. Pr——t, are like in the empyrean with us, riding high. Listening to my tapes.

Which have been suitably abridged and cleaned up a bit—Giorgio said, “Have a heart, Queenie, the man has daughters your age!”—and along with time out for a few Anglo-Saxon moments on our part, now give us a playing time of some five hours and thirty-five minutes, with a safety margin for any extra pensées at the end. Which along with some meditative circling in mid-ocean, or a little high altitude tumbling—we are informed your private plane is very versatile—is just about the time it would take us to get you to El Tren….Though plans have changed a little.

Old-fashioned coups were only
action
, Giorgio says. It’s
ideas
will prevail.

Takes some doing, either way.

When I first let Giorgio in on the tapes, he is numb-struck. I am meantime sitting there all preeny—butter wouldn’t melt in my upturned mouth—waiting for him to sigh over all the lovely quirks of my hidden personality. Which is now being played back.

He says: “Queenie—we have a gold mine!”

I see myself: a personality cult. Briefly.

He sees tapes being sold at Sam Goody’s, record contracts, television excerpts, audio-textbooks—“What department?” I say sharply—maybe even Carnegie Recital Hall with guest artists, he says.

“Queenie, you are going to help youth explain itself to the world!”

“Explain who?” I say.

He says, “Us.”

Because it seems we are almost out of real money anyway. Second, he has always wanted to write a musical. He sees no reason why poets should have to write advertising jingles to cover expenses, or lecture at the Library of Congress, or be hijackers after the impulse has waned. And he wants to write like one of those modern ones, which are not so comic but plenty musical. He sees me as a cross between light operetta, “Dangerously near Victor Herbert in your early years, Queenie—or even Floradora,” and broad
opéra buffe.

“Buffet,” I say. “The restaurant scene.” But my narcissism is kindling to it.

I agree because he says the end of me is serious.

His idea is to produce out of Rio and come into New York billing ourselves as from over the border, from the half of the continent which is going to be important from now on. And we’ll do it in waltz-rock. We may have to go to Paris, for a couple of violent, vivid rearguard arrangers he knows. “Because you are avant-garde enough in your sweet way, Queenie.” And the combo will sell.

Then at last he grabs me for myself. And maybe him. “Oh Queenie,” he says. “Those tapes! Aren’t we lucky you didn’t go around just fucking people?”

“I had time for the ethos of it,” I say. “And I have overtime now.”

So for a while the abattoir side of my life is neglected. In favor of the libretto. Which I may be the last modern girl in the world to prefer.

I fly to Paris, bringing back two brilliant, blindfolded arrangers—and my bras. The two of them take to revising my memoirs with zest; when they don’t, I do the work myself.

Giorgio finds an audience for our stuff on the double, through one of the revolutionary marketing services that maintain connections with art.

Which will buy all our output, if we keep to the middle of the road on melody.

So soon the island resounds with arias like, “In the Studio of My Heart”—didn’t that reach Constitution Avenue?—and that cello quartet for two old girls, and two basso partisans, “Memories of Midtown.”

…I am not too keen on the partisans. In real life, they never were there…

Meanwhile, I’m privately cutting a funky recitative called, “Female Confessing.”

I am worried about my role. Personally
and
internationally.

“Giorgio,” I say, “am I stretching my boundaries enough?” Are we?

He says we’re doing what we please. “In the time that’s left to us.” He has a time sense too. But it’s short.

Meanwhile he’s whizzing around the world bringing back bits of countries to each other, and for the first time commercially. Our loan comes in, but of course not in dollars, so we are hit by the rate of exchange.

…The song money? That’s going straight into production, Mr. P. To the Pentagon, for help with your part in it. Giorgio says, “One good young revolutionary apple, that’s all it should take. In a barrel of young rotten ones.”

Because that’s where you come in, Mr. Pr——t.

You are to be his burst of flame…