Queenie (4 page)

“You and I always reassure one another when we can,” he says. “Don’t we? But she doesn’t need to worry. I’m the boy without a navel.”

…Every Christmas at the tree party, Tekla tells us that circus tale of the beautiful gymnast who appears in a circus come on hard times, doing tricks without price, until an angry rival tears his vest, revealing his secret, and the Christ Child disappears again.

We kids love it—“Tekla, tell us about the no belly-button boy”—afterward doing every handstand trick we know; what child hasn’t wanted to be Jesus at least once? With or without his buttons. But I know for sure about Giorgio’s.

“Sorry,” I say, as we come out of the subway, “I’ve checked.”

He’s dark, but with a slow blond way of talking. Or did two years ago. How am I to know he’s already thinking of South America?

“
Inside
us, maybe,” he says. I can see he’s hit on an idea amuses him, but also he trusts it. Visiting cemeteries makes anybody alive feel extra strong. “
Inside
us maybe, we have none.”

We give each other the level look cradle acquaintances have to, then he punches me lightly in the chest with his rolled fist, says, “Oops, sorry, I forgot!” and I say, “Oh that’s okay, I forget about them too.” Which should explain our relationship…He’s the kind of best girl friend a totally male-oriented girl like me might be expected to have—a boy. Who isn’t even a fag. On fags the girls in the set are openly puritanical; as Martyne says over one of her juleps, “Down home, lotta my boy cousins woulda been fags oney their mothers wouldn’t let em. And I agree with that. Why should we women have rivals on both sides?” Rivals of any sort never occur to Aurine. Dykes irritate her some, the way costume jewelry does—both fakes. When one made a pass at her, on her first ocean voyage, the young Aurine kicked the lady with her first spike heels. “Between the legs. After all—a compliment.”

But the real males, once the girls are assured of it, they allow every latitude; they love the smell of a dandy. Conceit can have as many vanities as they do, if it’s a cocksman’s. The more a man knows about female luxury, from sables to art, the better he buys it. “Why shouldn’t a man sleep on silk sheets?” says Aurine, “——next to me!”

According to Freud, though, Giorgio should’ve been a fag—either on his mother’s side or his father’s. We discuss that the way we do everything, including what I ought to be; in each case this seems to have so little to do with what we are.

He says, “Guess my father dying so early for us set me free. So I can make what I want of him. Compared to the guys since, that’s a cinch….And Tekla, I’m fond of her, but I don’t especially want to hustle her—I’ve tried thinking it, just to see. Nah, I don’t even want to beat her. And the nice fags I know, I just feel sorry for what they can’t look forward to. Compared to a cherry, what’s creaming a guy, or buggering him? I think I just want to be good with women, in some of the ways that come naturally.”

We’ve studied up on those.

“I like Aurine and the girls,” I say. “But I think Oscar’s soirees have the edge. I mean I don’t think loving both of them’s made me acey-deecey. I mean I sympathize with what the girls want, but I like the men for being it. When it isn’t only dough, that is. I can’t care about the bread. You suppose I want to be free to work?”

Giorgio doubts it.

“I want to be free for something, though. I can’t think what.”

He says that’s one of the basic differences between men and women; we are compiling them. “A guy wears his balls close, his pecker on the right, goes for broke, and counts the dose later; a woman wears the rag on everything.”

I know what he means (as events proved, he went after experience, in a businesslike way, and here am I, still mulling) but it’s his language I envy most.

“It’s a kind of Esperanto. My kind.” He gets his source material from Tekla’s current hunting ground, the UN. “Austroylian rozzers, Belgian
reel
politickers and Sinka-poor samurai,” he says, his eyes sparkling. He cultivates it to destroy tutors with.

Miss P., have you ever heard “Waltzing Matilda” sung in four-letter words ending with a Japanese obscenity? Or played an old spelling game called “Ghosts,” using only what we call “body words”?—“I’m thinking of a six-letter word, female part, beginning with
s
.”

We swap what we know for what we don’t, trying not to let on which. Or we make up riddles, and synonyms: “When is a snatch not a slit? When it’s a——” Maybe it wasn’t always accurate, but it sure was rewarding to a girl who’d never heard the male part called anything but the “rector.”

“The
what
?” he says. “Sounds like a thermometer.”

When I dare quote my only new sources, the old wheezes I overhear in my waning knee-life——“Sam Newber says a wife is last year’s mistress, with horns,” he says: “Yeah, I saw his plays too, remember? All those actors in dinner jackets, tiptoeing like their dongs were full of soda water.”

Sometimes I find a word in the fancy Victorian books he wouldn’t bother with. “Gamaruche, huh?” he’d say, leaning over a passage. “Yeah, that’s what it must mean. What a way to say suck you!”

Every sixteen-year-old is a pornographer, Miss Piranesi. We had to know what was open to us. But we weren’t letches yet, or not for each other. “Not more than siblings are,” he says. “Gee yes,” I say, “incest sideways. What a drag!”

We aren’t even dirtymouths, really. We’re just trying to get out from under the old-fashioned background that links us away from other kids, and from the modern world. We are just holding down our franchise to youth. Or I am. I’m still just uncrooking my tongue. He’s all ready to uncrook his life.

Comes a time, though, a few months after Woodlawn and just before my rooftop adventure, when we’re speaking only by phone; it’s somehow embarrassing to meet. In-the-flesh has begun to have a meaning. When I ask him, last time we met, to describe a male orgasm—what I actually say is “pulling your pudding”—he says “Only a girl would want to talk about it.”

I say, “Why, young massa, you sho nuf on yo way to beun a man!”

He softens. “Queenie, you need to talk to another girl.” But he knows she won’t have our frame of reference. “Too bad there’s nobody in our crowd except the impossibles.”

Our word for them! It’s going to be lonely. “You mean you just want to talk to another boy—man.”

And he says, in a voice I’ll never forget, “I just don’t want to talk anymore.”

We don’t need a manual on the basic differences any longer; we can just stand by and watch the action.

“Giorgio——” I can see by his face the deep water I’m in. I’m being a bore, and going on with it. When you feel
free
to be a bore, Aurine says, then it’s over—you’re a wife. And I haven’t even been a mistress, yet. So I shrug myself out of that one, or try. “Well—we could always go back to the bathroom.” We haven’t done that, or anything, since we were nine.

“Uh-uh,” he said. “Once a guy can’t get it up with a girl he’s washed up with her.” I have to laugh. He has to. But I know I’m going to miss that frame of reference…

And how I do miss it, that night sur les toits de Meedtown Neuve York—looking out my cubbyhole, but still flying, flying in that beeline my body sends me on! I want to tell someone—that I’ve at least embarked. Not Oscar and Aurine, not because of who they are to me, or to the world, but for the same reason no young person ought to tell older people. They’d look at my secret life
professionally
.

My private movie, I think, leaning out to see the audience massing in front of Carnegie in the black-and-gold evening. Adults think of it
all
as show biz. That’s what they say makes them adults. But could even a priest see much in what has happened to me? Like those saints who get raped while at prayer, it took even me by surprise…Besides, I always got absolved too quick for conversation. Most of the girls at school were miles ahead of me, and the boys with them; for them what I could tell them simply wasn’t enough. Mr. Freud might’ve been mildly interested in my debut, but not for long…And for the same reason I can’t expect the world to take me seriously. I’m not having trouble; I’m having fun…

Then, down in the house below, I hear Tekla arriving. With chimp. So—still unbloodied. Until the door opens on her, we never know. Earliest among my memories is Tekla and a chimp helping with canapés in the kitchen; she says, “Close the cracker box, dear,” and sallies out with the tray.

In our house, from woman to man, a traumatic statement. The admonitions must all come to us. Or seem to.

Behind her, Aurine says, “I give it six months.” As usual, she’s generously unaware the other girls haven’t her talents. Gran barks out “One.”

…And one it is—as well as the first time I see Giorgio leading in the bandaged Tekla, her both eyes blotto. With Oscar saying irritably, like to a client who can’t handle himself, “Always the eyes, Tekla, that’s dangerous! You ought to have lessons.” And sometime later, “By God she did—she’s learned
some
thing!”

Whereupon Aurine says no, it’s just that the chimp has changed.

And Gran points out how Tekla never wives them exactly the same. “I’ve seen her carry that little rajah upstairs—for his heart. And make that baby prizefighter carry
her
up. So why shouldn’t the way they knock her down them be different?”

The chimp then is a terrifying seven-foot-by-six-inch Swede they called “the bishop,” because he dresses in what Tekla proudly calls “liturgical black.” You can only hope the bones under it have meat on them. Strawberry hair pasted, unbreakable bifocal eyes, he’s the kind Ingmar Bergman’s camera creeps up on. Close-up: Hysteria. The strain of waiting’s awful, for everybody except Tekla. I hear her sing out with, “We’ve had dinner invitations every night this week!”—she never sees why. The only thing the girls can do for her is to see she gets beat up in the company of friends…

Down below outside, the Carnegie crowd is going in; taking up my binoculars, among them I see a woman, one of the new tenants, who I once hear call Aurine “that outrageous person.” Envy, Oscar said, of the popular ideal. “If I could find enough like that willing to book, Queenie, we three could spend the winter in Palm Beach.”

But to Aurine it comes naturally. And to Tekla.

Oscar mistakes my expression, I’m not always sure of what it is myself. “Outrageousness is a quality like genius, Queenie.
Often
inherited.”

He’s reassuring me, this kind man who has the territorial rights in our house. Who I sometimes think is my father; who sometimes thinks he is. I don’t look like him, but who could say for sure?—he’s all loops; though he’s a trifle thinner just now, his watch still hangs over his vest like a Dali. He’s been the last to agree that the “moo-mies,” as he calls them, are an art form. Which is why he’s slipped, Giorgio says—an impresario has to believe in everything. “But I built my life on tangibility,” Oscar says to Aurine, “I can’t desert it now;”

So she says nothing further, and pawns her diamonds for him at Kaskel’s, which is just down the street. Also, charming one of the brokers there to let her slip them out on a party night, if needed. Whenever we’re rich again, meaning solvent, she socks them in our own bank vault and never wears them, sighing to me over this mystery herself.

“Will you wear them at Palm Beach?”

She widens her eyes at me. “Old women with face lifts, riding on tricycles—who would want to go there?”!

Why deceive ourselves, Miss P., there’s enough self-deception around to keep everybody happy, if we’ll only give in.

But at nearly sixteen, I’ve already found out a part of my part of it. Leaning over my windowsill to see the last Carnegie-ite piped inside—what if like Hamlin, they never come out again?—I listen to my own music box down between me, still whanging out a tune from that other little tongue I’ve never yet dared touch. The truth about a girl’s secret life isn’t that she isn’t a man. The truth is, she’s not always sure of her expression inside.

Lucky the girl who hasn’t a man at hand to tell that to. Not that I want to make it with anyone yet; I want a while to dwell on it. A time lag Giorgio says men don’t suffer from. But we each have the same energetic background to deal with. We know we have to learn how to be outrageous in our own way.

Better to try it though, in a house without an extension telephone.

He comes on the wire quick enough at our signal: three rings, then hang up; repeat. Why bother? Because at sixteen you are still a pair of international spies reporting on what humanity has got you into, that’s why. But usually he takes his time about calling me back.

When he speaks, it’s kind of cautious, “Hello.” That should have warned me; our usual game was to step right in and lead with the latest. Lucky or not, I always have a few saved up, not having his connections. This one is from school, via a bookshop on Forty-Second Street.

I say, “What’s a dildo?”

He snaps it right back. “A false front.” And then, in a molto snotty way he’s never been before. “For a girl.”

“Fags pad,” I say, hurt. Up to now he’s never pulled rank on me.

“You wanna watch these perversions, Queenie,” says Giorgio.

I’m so slow getting it. “Know what Sam Newber says perversion is?” I giggle. “Afterthoughts.” And when I told Aurine, she says poor Sam, maybe he doesn’t know some men can think the same thing twice. But I never get to tell that to Giorgio.

“You wanna watch Sam Newber,” he says. “Ever hear about that kid wanted to be a fag, only Mumma wouldn’t let him?”

So then I get it, of course. Martyne would be the one. She claims only twenty-eight even now, and fourteen years since she came to New York with the retiring president of Texas Wesleyan; she’s precocious. That’s what men past their prime like her for. I put down the phone. I know what he wants me to say of course: We
heard
you stayed out last night. I can’t. I feel like his mother. Women have this time lag. Tears even come to my eyes. We’ve been together so long, peering over the side, with our hard-ons. But he’s into hard-core life.

“Are you there?” he says. “Queenie? I thought I heard a click.”