The Meagre Tarmac (10 page)

“You've been with your Lion Queen again,” came the response from the bathroom. “Shall I bring out the Band-Aids?”

“Or would a coming-out party be redundant?”

“I for one have never been with a man,” said Sam. “You are the most exciting and beautiful woman I've ever seen. Everyone must assume we're Lesbians at least, so who cares?”

She thought, I said dyke, not Lesbian.

Unlike Sam and maybe
Ramonah!
Connie had been with many men. When she'd arrived as a 22-year-old fresh from Bombay, London had paid
Ramonah!
-like attention. Conceição da Cunha, Connie, dark beauty, brilliant and acerbic, seen in all the right clubs, mentoring an emergent community that would soon take over. She'd been involved with a string of unsuitable men, many of them married and looking for an exotic night out. But no proper man had come along. Sam had. And when Teddy's offer came, Sam was part of the package. Probably she was right. Their relationship was known, and rather ordinary for the times, and place.

“Anyway,” said Sam, “don't dykes use contraptions? Strap-on things? I could go online if you want to try.”

I just want to cuddle, thought Connie.

Back in her wild London days, there'd been a newspaper caption to one of her glamour shots, stepping from a limo.
Gentlemen of the Evening: Sophia Loren may be a reach, but there's a certain young lady nearly as shapely, who, we hear, always says yes.

Until the afternoon at Café Alsacien, prompted by the histrionic outpourings of
Ramonah!
she'd never thought of herself as belonging to any particular category. Her identity was couched in a series of nots: not a citizen, not married, not old, not young. She felt herself a big-city person, equally at ease in London, Bombay, or New York. “Unmarried” was just another line on the tax return, revisable should she encounter a literate, tolerant, adventurous and accommodating male, or if American marriage laws changed and Sam made an honest woman of her. She did not long for a man, or a woman, nor feel her life in any way unfulfilled. She couldn't muster a gut-wrenching aversion to men, or the deep sexual loathing of
Ramonah!
When
Ramonah!
spoke of ridding the world of hegemonic priapistic rapists, a world cleansed of phallic dominance, Connie merely smiled and assigned such declarations to Mbala.

It was Connie who'd actually, truly, killed a man.

It was back in Goa. She'd just completed college in Bombay, and had a scholarship to England. She'd taken a month off to say goodbye to baby-brother Ferdy and her parents. It was a warm, misty day. She'd decided to walk along the beach highway until she found some sort of kiosk selling
The Times of India
and cigarettes. The kiosk was on the far side of the highway and she stepped into her lane, which was bare except for a boy on a bicycle several meters away. When she got to the middle, she realized her mistake: four years in Bombay, navigating through unbroken walls of traffic, had induced an expectation of order. People crossed streets in Bombay all the time. They got to the middle, stood a moment behind a rough lane-divider, a concrete pylon perhaps, or a narrow, raised median, then dashed for the far side at the merest hint of a let-up in traffic. But on the beach highway in Goa, there were no dividers. Goa traffic used the entire road in each direction, flinching before oncoming traffic only at the last minute. Now she was some suicidally stupid creature, standing in the middle of a highway, who had forgotten how to cross a road. One driver, shouting at her and waving his arm, slapped on his brakes, honking and screeching and cursing, and another car skidded out of its lane and struck the young man on his bicycle.

“Run, lady, run!” the witnesses cried, and she did, knowing the summary fate of any driver, or perhaps any pedestrian, for having caused a fatal road accident. Even as she ran, she was thinking:
I am not the author. I am just the editor.
And thirty years later, at night, she could hear the hollow, watermelon crunch of a tire crushing the biker's skull. The boy's name was Leandro Hernandes, sixteen years old, a name that would hang around her neck the rest of her life.

Life is a riotous fusion. She'd always suspected that important decisions are backed into, slid into, and on occasion even stumbled over. No brave proclamation. No Mbala-style manifesto. One minute, I'm crossing the road for a pack of cigarettes, and a boy is killed. One day I'm the toast of London, the new “it” girl, and twenty-five years later I'm a pudgy Manhattan Lezzie.

She was a New Yorker because twelve years ago she'd received an invitation from Teddy Jenkins to leave London and become a senior editor at America's most prestigious publisher. And when she'd boarded the plane at Heathrow, strapped in business class for the seven-hour flight, and she'd inserted her customary take-off cigarette, flight attendants surrounded her, flapping their arms, “No smoking! No smoking!”

“I'll go into the bathroom, then,” she'd said. They said that would not be acceptable. But that meant she would have to fly all the way to New York without a cigarette, and she hadn't been deprived of a smoke for more than an hour anytime in the past twenty years. Every cigarette carried with it the residual pleasures of warmth and love, the soft, tropical dark and the mysterious beauty of languages.

She'd made a spectacle of herself, running up and down the aisles, pleading and crying, then threatening, offering money for a suspension of the rules, until the captain was called and the
FBI
alerted on the landing end. She was warned that she'd be placed on a no-fly list and she'd never be allowed to fly on any airliner again. She was suddenly a prisoner, exile and criminal. After the bombings in New York, she was automatically transferred to a terrorist list.

Her parents were dead, her brothers well-settled. She had no one to answer to, no reasons for apology or subterfuge. All she had was a shelf of books she'd edited, a wall of professional plaques, photos and awards, a tobacco addiction, and Sam. All she asked was, let me smoke, let me drink, let me shuffle, not jog, from Central Park West and Seventy-Sixth to my office on East Fifty-Second.

Life's a spectrum, and I've never moved more than a step or two from the middle.

Another day, outside the brass-framed doors, smoking, Teddy mentioned there were rumours around. That's what the book business is — the packaging and repackaging of rumours. Only these might be true.

She and Teddy Jenkins met for their breaks ten minutes at the top of every hour. The fresh air, hot or cold, relief from fine print, was welcome. Connie was still waiting for the quintessential modern romantic comedy based on cigarette-breaks: young people standing in the cold, appealingly ashamed of their addiction, a little brazen about their risk-taking. But people who smoke can't be funny or loveable or even admirable in modern America.

Teddy held his cigarette high, right elbow propped on left wrist,
so Joan Crawford
, Connie thought. He tapped the ash over his right shoulder. She cupped hers, a furtive habit begun in her Catholic girls' college in Bombay. She smoked like the shadowy limo drivers lining the block: cigarettes cupped, polishing a fender, waiting for their clients.

“There's a buzz building. Your African Queen book.”

“A-wim-a-way, a-wim-a-way,” Connie hummed.

“Ah, the jungle, the mighty jungle. Publicity's all over me. They don't know what to make of this
Ramonah!
thing. How do we present it? Memoir? Travel? Race? God help us, Gay Lit?”

“It's a Third World narrative,” said Connie. “It's my autobiography with African names.”

“Ah, the madly popular Third World autobiography. Did I tell you about the bidding war for Kofi Annan's memoirs? No?”

It was Connie's belief that even a drop of immigrant blood from any of the world's inhospitable corners held more storylines than any famous American book ever written. The exceptions proved it:
Moby-Dick, Absalom, Absalom! Beloved, Invisible Man.

“When we're finished with your African Queen, we'll start work on Jimmie. That will be a blockbuster.”

Teddy Jenkins and Jimmie Dos Santos were a Page Six couple.
Ramonah!
called Teddy a male-dyke, a great compliment, but Jimmie Dos Santos was Queer. Jimmie had crossed to Manhattan from Queens, a beautiful boy with chorus-boy ambitions, a high school dropout shunned by his Brazilian immigrant family. He'd started out in Manhattan as a countertenor in the Gay Men's Chorus. He wrote and performed “I Sing of Myself,” one of the greatest romantic duets ever, a duet of one, his rich baritone seducing his aerial alto. He danced and sang and acted and wrote and directed and produced his way to stardom and homes on three continents. And he owed it all to sex (“Oh, for God's sake, Conceição, wipe that disapproving Catholic schoolgirl frown right off your face!”), to something Greek or maybe Renaissance in its fluted perfection. Exuberant but contained, flared but folded, more Cellini than Michelangelo. An early critic had called him a Fabergé Egg, “decorative, but hollow,” and lived to regret it.

Today Teddy said, “I often wonder what might happen if I lay my head on your naked bosom. What would I hear?”

In her pert London years, she might have said
these boobs are made for gawking
. “We could see. I'm free at three.”

“Connie, you know I love it when you channel Dr. Seuss. But I've got meetings at three and four.”

“My bosom waits for no man.”

“So I hear,” said Teddy.

“You said two rumours?” she asked. He dropped his voice to executive depth. “This one is less fun. It seems we're going to be bought out by a Liechtenstein-based consortium.”

“I didn't know Liechtenstein did publishing.”

“Our new mystery-owners made their fortune in surgical glues and Spanish condominia.”

“Glues, plural? Like the Glues Brothers? The things one learns. And condominia, that's good.”

“I have enough self-respect not say consortium and condomin ium in the same sentence. Glues Brothers: a joke, like the old days. It would be funny if it weren't so terribly, terribly sad. Connie,” he added, and his voice dropped with funereal gravity, “the party's over. The dream, the privilege, bringing you over from London, the lunches, the great books we managed to publish while having so much fun, even the silliness ... it's gone. These things never happen overnight. I think we're operating as usual until ... maybe Monday. Jimmie and I are legends, so we can retire to one of his legendary palaces. I'm thinking of Vieques. You and Sam can stay there as long as you like, and when you get bored, he's got ten more places, all of them staffed and furnished. I wish I could have looked after you better. I thought literature was forever. What a fool I was.”

Connie thought:
Breastwords
will be our last major success. Maybe we deserve to die.

Maybe the time has come to be the author, not the editor of my life.

It's amazing how rapidly things can move in modern America. One day you're a senior editor of a publishing house with a hundred and fifty year history of bringing out nearly every significant book in the American canon, and nearly every European Nobel Prize winner, and the new Asians and Africans and Caribbeans, and the next day moving vans have lined the block, your locks are changed, and you and Teddy Jenkins can be found (on the evening news) throwing yourselves over stuffed boxes and lying down in front of handcarts loaded with desks and books and pictures and filing cabinets. “Doesn't anyone care?” you scream. To a contingent of burly, blankfaced office-cleaners, Teddy Jenkins — lately the darling of Page Six — cries out, “Sinclair Lewis is in that box! He won the Nobel!”

By nightfall, the files and correspondences had been shifted to a landfill in New Jersey. An injunction to halt the “Slaughter on Fiftya connie da cunha book 111 Second Street” arrived too late. The Glues Brothers had not investigated the possibility of museums and universities bidding on a collection, or the absurdity of private citizens paying serious money for scraps of ancient paper. They'd seen a mid-town tower, a crumbling dollar, the soaring Euro and a teetering major tenant. A steal, just waiting to be brought up to code and converted to mixed use.

The Glues Brothers — whose names and country of origin re - mained matters of conjecture — allowed her six months' severance and rent on her apartment. After that, she and Sam, their furniture, books, plaques and awards, would be out on the sidewalk, and a few months later, the old rent-controlled apartment, the last in the building, would be remodeled, condo-ized and put on the market for three point five million. She of course would be allowed to bid.

Scanning the Internet for specialized sites, Sam came across an ad for “LavendAir”, a welcoming carrier for “Smokin' Hot Dykes”. It was the world's first all-Queer airline, for “smokers and gropers”, and in-air weddings. As Jimmie Dos Santos said, “get eighty of your closest friends together and charter it for anywhere. Eighty dykes dropping in on Goa? No problem.” She and Sam were married somewhere in legal airspace over Canada.

They were headed to Goa to stay in a house in a “colony” of forty modern sea-facing cottages built by her little brother, Ferdy. Where else could she go, an unemployed fifty-something with a dwindling retirement account? She hadn't seen Ferdy in over thirty years, since the week she'd spent in Goa before going off to Britain. The week she'd failed to cross the road. Leandro Hernandes.

“I'll be bringing my wife,” she'd said on the phone.

“Great,” said Ferdy, “we get lots of Europeans.”

Indeed they did, half of the men of Germany, from what she could see from the verandah where she'd set up her computer, a drink, and cigarettes. They were out there on the pathways, walruslike, in flesh-coloured thongs.