The Cosmopolitans (17 page)

“Open your mouth,” he said. Cock still hard, he ground into her, now on the bed, her pressing and pressing, slithering up and down his body, trying to rub her thing, not knowing how, and then she reached down for his.

“Oh, you are a good girl,” he said, excited. But how
was he going to get off, she didn't know how to do nothing. And he couldn't get a girl pregnant. No way.

“I want you,” she said.

Wow, what movies has she been watching?

Earl turned off the light.

“It's more romantic this way. Here baby, take it in your hand. You've never done this before, right?”

“I love you,” she said.

Oh boy
. “We'll talk about that later. There you go, hold it. See? See, I like you. That's how you know a man likes you, when his thing is strong like that. Now move your hand with mine. There you go. You must kind of squeeze, and trade up fingers and your whole hand. You'll get it.”

This was it, the biggest night of her life. The first time he had done it was heaven, but by the tenth time his mother caught him and that was it. That was the end of Earl Coleman as a loved person.

He looked at Hortense through the filter of night and her eyes were open. He closed his eyes and moved her hand up and down with his. Left her to try on her own while he played with his balls a bit. For the first time he wondered if straight people touch themselves in front of each other. And realized he had no idea how or why they did anything at all. But, she wouldn't know either.

“I want you,” she said again, pouting, opening her legs and bringing his dick right to her little bush.

“Are you sure?” He was jerking himself now, she'd abandoned ship.

“I want you.”

“Okay,” he said. “Let's do this together. Now, show
me exactly where you want me.” Really, if he'd had a flashlight he would have taken a good look at whatever it was she had down there. He knew there was some kind of hole, but she wasn't going to be any help.
Jesus Christ be my guide
.

He started poking his cock down there, looking for a way in. It was slimy and the pathway not evident. Wait, there appeared to be some kind of entryway, he tried to move forward, still poking, trying to find the road in.

There. There. He knew from being alive that a man's supposed to go slow on a girl's first time. How did he know that? Whoa, there it was. Wow, this thing of hers did not want his prick. There was no room.

“That's it,” she said.

He tried to go in slowly.

“Ouch.”

“I'm sorry, baby. Do you want me to stop?”
Do straight people use grease?
he wondered.
If they don't, they sure as hell should
.

“No, I want you to take me.”

“All right, well, let's work together.”

“Okay.”

She was a brave little soldier, that Hortense, but something had turned in the whole operation. What started out hot and horny had become some kind of job, getting his dick into this girl was the goal. He tried thrusting it in, maybe that was the way, just break it open or something.

She lurched, but he couldn't tell if it was good or bad.

“Okay?”

“It's okay,” she said, clutching his arms, seemingly more from surprise at all the discomfort than from the passion she had begun with. Her motives had shifted.

“Here we go, Hortense.”

He tried saying her name as he started pumping. Very slowly. He was afraid to go as fast as he would have liked. The apparatus just wasn't opening for him, the walls weren't moving apart the way he would have preferred.

“Hortense.” Half thrust. “Hortense.” Push forward. “Hortense, here we go baby, all the way in. There you go. We made it.”

They were lodged together, finally, having reached their goal. She wrapped her legs around him tightly, holding him inside her. But he couldn't help feeling a bit of concern that this tight grip was also intended to postpone the inevitable return to thrusting at what must be getting kind of sore. He'd had big daddies who didn't care about his ass and how much they hurt him. Earl knew what that was like. But no one was supposed to get fucked in the ass, it was a skill queens acquired with pride, through hard work and determination, and when they learned how to make it work, they deserved whatever they could get out of it. But pussy? Pussy was supposed to come naturally. Look at this mess, the girl had come into his room with a big hard-on for him, and now she was stuck with his cock inside her and no way for either of them to get off that way.

“There you go,” he said, like he had said many a day to other men taking it for the first time. “You're a brave little bo—girl. You're a beauty.”

That was his standard line,
You're a beauty
.

And slowly he pulled out of her place and started rubbing his dick, kissing her, and holding her. She seemed all right.

“Baby, you turned me on,” he said. Another classic line when he needed to jerk off after fucking.

“I did?” She was so proud.

“Did you get what you needed?” he asked, sheepishly, hoping the answer was yes, because if it was no, they were both out of luck.

“I got exactly what I needed,” she said, smiling.

“Then, this is for you.”

He closed his eyes and thought about Leon and Frankie, and the guy who he'd fucked on the pier that lonely Thanksgiving night and the boy who sucked his cock behind the parking lot, the married man with the wedding ring who jerked him off at the Paramount and that piece of street trash who'd stolen his wallet and started all this downward spiral, that punk, he was hot though, he was the last man who had fucked Earl, who had held him in this bed, a thug, and then Anthony and Anthony and Anthony and Anthony and Leon and Anthony and Anthony and
Anthony
.

“I made you do that?” came the little squeak from the other side of the bed.

“Oh yeah, baby, you're the best.”

It was over.

He was exhausted. He had to go to work. Shit, now what?

Earl turned on the light. She was smiling, she was sweating. She looked pretty enough. She was happy. He'd made her happy and she didn't even get anything, whatever it was that women get.

“I'm so excited about my new dance class,” she said.

Oh no, she wants to talk
.

“It's about movement in space and architecture of the body. New movement for a new era.”

“Wow,” Earl said. “That's so interesting.” He put on an exceedingly soft and gentle tone. “I think you'd better go home now,” he said.

“I love you,” she said. And they kissed. “You're a great actor, Earl. I know I can learn so much from you.”

“Thank you,” he said, truly touched. No one had ever said that to him before.

“You're a great artist.”

Earl was so exhausted he could barely see her to the door. But he did manage to turn the knob, pat her ass, and lock it tightly behind her.

She's not the worst I've ever had
, he thought.
She's smart and she's got money and I could help her with a lot of things
. And most importantly, she wouldn't have his number. Not for a long, long time.

Earl knew that there was no God, but there was fate, and it worked in very strange ways. There was no way that he'd sought this out. Fate put it in his lap. He had nothing else going on. Nothing else at all. No one cared about him. No one was watching. He wasn't going any other place. He wasn't going any other place at all.

Strangely, instead of falling asleep, Earl just lay there for a while, kind of blank. He was wide awake, everything swirling around him. Finally he jumped from the bed to the dusty bottom drawer of his bureau. There he found a pencil and a pad of paper and a small pile of envelopes he'd kept for years for special occasions that never seemed to arise.

Dear Lynette
,

I owe you an apology and an explanation. I am a homosexual and I did not have the grace to tell you so. You will make a great wife for a great man who can appreciate your gifts. I am very sorry for the pain I have caused
.

Yours sincerely
,

Earl

Chapter 17

T
he next day was the day that Earl drank “a glass of wine and a bottle of wine,” coming home with two more bottles of Chianti to get him through the evening. That was the day that Hortense made a marshmallow cake and the night that she showed her modern dance, and then Hortense and Earl came clean to Bette. And that night they slept together again in Earl's apartment. Spending more time talking and analyzing, planning and scrambling, than making love, although there was another somewhat similar—but less surprising—penetration. Earl expected her to be more open now that she'd been broken. Like a rock through a plate glass window. But they were both bewildered to learn that it didn't seem to work that way, it wasn't automatic. Apparently this accommodation took time. Who knew? They decided that she would go see a doctor, or whomever women talked to about that sort of thing as well as pregnancy. Or perhaps he would try to use rubbers. He nodded
of course
, like they were a lifetime
habit, although Earl had significant doubts that he could get used to them at this stage of the game. For something that was supposed to be “natural,” this sex between men and women was sure a whole lot of trouble.

When the morning light came in through the window, all appeared to be right in Gotham City. The milkman's metal cage rattled its glass bottles. This milkman's father had also been a milkman, but with a horse-drawn wooden cart not a white truck and cute white uniform. Son loved that uniform as much as he had loved his father's horse, named King, but his father hated it. He hated being told what to wear. To be completely truthful, Father
somewhat
admired the crisp cap that came with the pleated white trousers and the embroidered nameplate on the white button-down shirt. But Father also saw the conformity this created—although he did not know the word
conformity
—and longed for the old days when he ran his own business and hadn't had to sell out to Borden's.

Like other mornings, the bus groaned its approach and spat exhaust. Romanoff started a pot of Maxwell House Coffee for the first arrivals at his pharmacy's soda fountain. Joe drove up with the day's haul from Fulton Fish Market and parked the truck right in front of his shop. Piles of the day's
Sun, Herald Tribune, World Telegram, Mirror, Post
and
Times
sat bundled before Readers Stationery Store. Salvatore was reading a Superman comic book in bed before his mother woke him to go to school. Margaret O'Reilly was lying awake, staring at the ceiling, wondering when her father was coming home. Her mother hadn't gotten out
of bed in three days, and Margaret hadn't even tried to get to school. She knew she wasn't allowed to go by herself. But now that every scrap in the house had been eaten, her stomach was growling and she had started to think about a solution. Trying to avoid using the toilet because of the filth of her mother's vomit on the tiled floor.

Across the street, Mike Mitchell of Flat Rock, North Carolina, now known as Cookie, and Archie Cantwell, of Paris, Tennessee, now known as Theresa, were staggering home from an all-night party, talking about love. Then, they found themselves locked out of the Hotel Albert for failure to pay their rent. It was inevitable, really, and yet they were surprised. Solomon Liebling, the tailor, took off his outside hat and put on his inside hat, turned on the lights, and uncovered his sewing machine. Sam, the clerk at the Hotel Albert, decided that the title of his novel would be “The Healing.” And then he was unsure. And then he thought it should be “The Haunting.” And then he thought he might name it after that Elizabeth Bishop poem and call it “The Burning Deck.” And then he considered “The Twist.” And then he looked for a title without the word
the
in it. He liked the title “Cookie,” but none of his characters were named Cookie.

A painter slept happily with his arms around his lover. A painter slept happily with his arms around his wife. A painter slept happily alone. A painter barely slept for a broken heart. A painter slept. A sculptor slept in dirty sheets. A sculptor was up all night with a terrible cough. Salvatore's mother was already cooking. His father was shaving, dreaming of the beautiful
painter girl down the block whose boyfriend beat the hell out of her. He wanted to save the girl and have her save him. Señora Colón read her Bible. Her son, José, studied his medical textbooks. Mrs. Shallowitz snored obliviously. The new residents of the townhouse in the middle of the block were a collective of painters opening a club for exhibitions and conversations. Six of them would sleep upstairs. The lawyer brother of one of the artists had signed the deed as a favor. If the kids couldn't keep up the payments, he'd just buy them out at cost. Yes, everything was as it was, as it had to be, and as it could only be. All except for apartment 2E. There, something had gone terribly, terribly wrong.

By sunrise, Bette was still sitting in her chair. Her napkin was still on her lap. The dishes were unmoved. She was still thinking about how much she hated Hortense.

An hour later there was a knock at the door.

“Bette?”

She ran to that voice. It was where she belonged.

“Why do you knock?” she cried. That knock assaulted her, it intensified her grieving, having to talk through a sheet of wood. “Why do you knock?”

“I can't just walk in anymore.”

She pulled open the door so hard it rattled the wall. Bette saw her friend before her. She was so happy to see him. She wanted to see him, to see his face. This is where she belonged. Face to face with Earl.

“I want you to let yourself in,” she said, gathering herself with care. “As you always do.”

There
. She felt human again. Here he was, asking for a kind of forgiveness, and she would grant it without question.

“I can't.” He lingered awkwardly in the doorway.

“Of course you can.” She showed her love.

Bette, of course, had not known anything that had transpired. Nor had she been privy to the inner workings of Earl's heart ever since the day he was beaten by that predator. She did not know about Lynette, about married George, about the smiling glance from Leon. About the confrontation with Frank or that Earl stood back from Jerome and Sheila and other black people for fear. She really did not know how deep the fear. And she really did not understand what it meant to so badly, so badly,
so badly
want to feel loved. Not just as a friend, as Bette loved him, but by someone with affection, who thought he was the best. To need that physical closeness, that contact. How devastating it was to him that he was not going to have a boyfriend. Not anymore. She really could never know him, after all. She could never understand how sad he was that no man wanted him. She could not know.

“Of course you can. Do it. Do it now. Make it well.” Smiling at last, she gently pressed him back into the hall and closed the door. She returned to her seat and waited. It could all be undone. He could take out his key and turn the lock. Then the pain would be healed.

The next bus pulled up to its stop on the corner. It had the usual low rumble. She could feel the bus rock as it waited for customers to board. Listening, she recalled the cradling feeling of riding that bus. The safety of all those people together, shoulder to shoulder, keeping each other warm. She waited. Earl was taking too long. Had he gone back to get the key?

One of the things that hurt Bette was how unacknowledging Earl was being. What was wrong with
him? It was a basic principle of human understanding: When you do something hurtful, you have to allow the other person to be hurt. To feel hurt and to act hurt and to say and show that they are hurt. You have to give them their moment. The recognition. People can't live without it. He had to give her something. Bette felt fear. How long would he make her wait?

Then, she heard the key turn in her lock. At that sound, her courage returned. Someone else knew, for a fact, that she was a person.

“See,” she said out loud. Bette felt happy. The right thing is so small and easy to do. Just choose it. Let the good return. Choose the kind act of recognition. It makes everything whole.

“Bette . . .”

“Thank God,” she said holding Earl's face in her hands. “Thank you, God!” And Bette burst into tears because she had never before needed God and then been answered. Never. She was so filled with gratitude, love, and feeling. She was human. She looked into Earl's watery eyes. “You've changed your mind,” she said to him. “My friend, my life. I forgive you. Now, let's clean up last night's supper.” She picked up a plate.

Earl did not move. He was enraged. Bette did not understand, she would never understand, and it would be a waste of his heart to try to explain it all to her. He was sick of having to explain himself. All those years of telling her everything, talking everything over. What right did she have to all that information about him? None. It had all been a big mistake, a huge, huge mistake because now she thought he owed her.
She thought she owned him. That was more the truth. She thought she could give him orders about when and how to use a key. He was a fifty-year-old man. No one ordered him around like a stable boy.

“There is nothing about me that needs forgiveness,” he said, steely as he had ever been. “I do what I want to do. I don't have to explain anything to anyone, including you.”

“All right,” she said. Bette felt, in that moment, that it was fine to give in when you love someone. “We'll never speak of it again. Once that cow goes back to where she belongs.”

“Don't tell me what I am going to speak about.”

Bette was surprised at the depth of this. He was acting in a way that guaranteed her to be wrong no matter what. It was a game.

“All right,” she said.

She would give in to him now, and later he could meet her. She would recognize what he needed now, and later he would do that for her. She would just have to wait. She could wait. She could do it.

Bette took in, right then, the degree of her own surprise. The proper thing would be for him to allow her to have her pain, then for the two of them to sit down and figure out the truth, together. But instead, she felt strangely and unfamiliarly that he was trying to control her. To stop her from speaking. Why would he do that? Perhaps Earl was embarrassed that he had been so thoughtless, that he had overlooked her humanity. Her feelings. The two should have discussed this privately. That was obvious. But, this was one of those occasions where people had to give each other multiple
chances. They had to be flexible with each other so that there could be peace.

“She's moving in with me,” he said. “No matter what you say.” He shifted menacingly, as though Bette were a stranger and Earl, endangered.

“Why are you doing this?”

He hated how much she expected him to answer.

The only choice Bette could make was to love Earl. She chose to believe that he could tell the truth.

What's wrong with her
, he thought. She felt free to ask him anything. It wasn't that way anymore. Didn't she see that? Didn't she see?

“Are you actually in love with her?”

“That's not the point.”
Dammit
, he did not have to answer her.
Stop talking
, he told himself.

“I don't understand,” she said.

Earl's face opened up like an iron mine whose heart imploded underground and suddenly the surface of the earth's crust cracks.

“Don't you want to feel loved, even once?”

She looked at him strangely. What was this?

“Regardless of how flawed or imperfect the lover is. Don't you want to feel it again in your whole fucking life?”

The pain in his voice was some kind of vindication for Bette. They still told each other the truth. He hadn't been able to deny that. Even if he was having a delusional relationship with a subordinate, his relationship with Bette was still real. That would never change. She could see that now.

“Don't you?” He was shaking. “If you had a chance to have a real life, wouldn't you . . .” He grasped and
grasped and found a phrase he had never, ever uttered. “Wouldn't you get married?”

Bette thought honestly about his question. “No.” She knew right away that her answer was true. “I believe that you and I will always find a way to help each other. I promise.”

“Really?” he snarled. It was a curled, bitter bite that she had never seen from him before. “And how would you protect me from a life of throat-slashing rent boys? Can you give me a normal life? Can you? No, you cannot. Well, she can.”

“Oh, Earl. This can't possibly end well.”

He didn't want to waste too much more time on this. It was futile. She wasn't listening. “What about my acting career?”

“I believe in you as an actor, you know that.”

“But do you believe that I can get a lead role?”

“I hope you can,” she said.

“Hortense knows that I can. She's taking classes, she sees the pulse among the young. She thinks I can do it.”

Bette sank. Was that what all this was about? He was sacrificing her because she couldn't sit around and pretend?

“I can escape from myself,” he said. “Watch me.”

“Earl.”

He was tired and he had to get to work. “You are not going to go along with this, are you?” Her time was almost up.

“Earl,” she said with all her heart. “You are not being honest. You are lying.”

“That's what I thought. You don't believe in me. You pretend that you do, but you don't. I've come to give you back your keys.”

There was a knock at the door. Both Bette and Earl feared it might be Hortense. But there was a man's voice.

“Delivery. Delivery. Hello? Delivery.”

Bette walked to the door, plate still in hand. She opened it for no reason, being unable to make decisions or even to take in what was happening around her. Two young white deliverymen in matching blue coveralls entered carrying a huge box. They glanced at each other, having caught a white woman and a black man in the middle of something going very wrong.