The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (10 page)

When I got back to Trish's place, my parents were gone. I thought of Suky, of what she must have felt when I didn't come back. Of the long, silent car ride back home. I sat down on Trish's couch, put my hands over my face, tasted the salt of my tears.

Trish put her arm around me. ‘Listen, kiddo. It's tough times. Your mom has a serious problem, okay? I'm saying it. I know no one else will. It's not your fault. I think you did right getting away. It doesn't mean it has to be forever. And it doesn't mean you can't call her and tell her you love her, either.' I started sobbing when she said that. Because I did love Suky. I loved her more than I could imagine loving anyone. I felt so bad for hurting her. Trish just kept her arms around me, saying, ‘Sssh, ssh, it's not your fault. It's not your fault …' Eventually, she laid me down under the Navajo blanket and turned on the TV.
Gilda
was playing. I remember thinking, Rita Hayworth had red hair, Suky has red hair. And then I fell asleep.

When I woke up, it was dark outside the window, and I was immediately aware of two people whispering in the kitchen. I turned and saw a tall, gangly woman with dark hair the shape of a Roman centurion's helmet tossing salad in a bowl. She looked down at me and winked. ‘Hey,' she said. Her voice was low, husky. Aunt Trish reached into the oven and took out a tray of sizzling beef patties.

I ate two hamburgers and drank a quart of milk. Kat and Aunt Trish watched me with indulgent grins on their faces. Kat had a lozenge-shaped face, a broad mouth, and eyes that slanted downward. Every now and then, she would bob her head to some song she had in her mind, humming very quietly to herself.

When I finally slowed down on the ravenous eating, Trish laid down the law. ‘Okay, Pipps. Here's the deal I made with your parents. These are your choices.' She raised her stubby thumb. ‘You go back to school here in the city.' The forefinger came up. ‘You study on your own and take the high school equivalency test.' The middle finger now. ‘You go back home.'

I opted for the test. No way was I going to negotiate another high school's social life for just one semester. It wasn't worth the stress. Kat stood up now, cleared the plates, then yawned, stretching her arms high so her concave belly showed beneath her short sweater. ‘I'm gonna go work in my room a little, before Pippa goes to bed,' she said. ‘Night, Pippa.'

‘Night,' I said. Then Kat turned to Aunt Trish, bouncing from one foot to the other.

‘See ya, baby,' she said, and bent down to kiss her. Trish moved her head so Kat had to peck her cheek, but Kat took her chin and held it, kissing her right on the mouth. All of a sudden I knew why Aunt Trish wasn't exactly a regular at family events. Kat skipped off into her room/my room. Trish looked at me and made a gesture, a that's-the-way-it-is-what-are-you-gonna-do shrug. I smiled at her encouragingly, raising my eyebrows.

‘So we're a couple of black sheep, you and me,' said Trish. Then she cracked a smile and leaked a growling, phlegmy giggle. It was the nicest, most reassuring thing anyone had ever said to me. I felt I belonged somewhere. I belonged on the outside, with Aunt Trish.

*

Kat and Trish slept under a shiny maroon bedspread. Over their bed hung a large painting of a naked woman with huge eyes and very long eyelashes. She looked both cute and lewd. Life with Trish and Kat was quiet at first. Kat's room, where I was staying, wasn't a bedroom; it was an office with a couch in it. The desk was cluttered with papers and an electric typewriter. Though she
worked as a secretary in a wholesale textile business in Chelsea, Kat was writing a novel. At six in the morning, she would glide in with a mug of tea that smelled of warm mud and start typing. I then dragged the comforter to the couch in the living room and tried to sleep until Trish stomped into the kitchen around seven. She worked in a warehouse in the meatpacking district, carried a clipboard.

Trish made me pull my weight: every day, I took out the garbage, cleaned the kitchen, mopped the floors, studied for the high school equivalency test. And looked for a job. I hadn't had much experience, aside from Oakley, and
they
weren't going to be giving me a recommendation anytime soon. Finally, I found a restaurant on the Lower East Side, El Corazón, willing to take a chance. I didn't speak Spanish and could barely make myself understood in the interview with the enormous, somber owner-chef, Señor Pardo. I couldn't see why they wanted an English-speaking girl working in the place at all till Señor Pardo pointed at a group at one table and said, ‘You serve the English-speak customers.' I looked over. Three young men and a woman in their twenties huddled in a booth, speaking English and smoking filterless cigarettes. There was a pudgy, blond fellow with flecks of paint on his hands, an elegant, tall one with very long black hair, a girl with a large nose and an amused-looking, painted mouth, and a skinny guy with puffy eyes and a poker face who was slumped in his seat. They all looked exhausted. ‘Now,' said Señor Pardo, handing me an order pad. I walked over to the group. ‘The United States loses the war in Vietnam,' the pudgy one was saying, ‘Greg Brady gets a perm.'

‘Do you know what you want?' I asked.

‘There goes the neighborhood,' said the thin, puffy-eyed fellow. But as he looked up at me with his poker face, his gaze stayed on me for an instant too long. They all ordered margaritas. I served this group almost daily for months, I learned their names, but I never went out with them, never saw where they lived. Until later.

*

I felt elated in Kat's presence. She was glamorous, in a way, always jutting out her small breasts, swiveling her narrow hips in tight bell-bottoms, making poor old Aunt Trish seem dusty and square, her dark eyes moist with devotion to the creature she shared her bed with. Once, I asked Kat what her novel was about. She flashed Trish a sly smile.

‘Let's just say it's no work of art,' she said.

‘But what's it about?'

‘Love,' she said. ‘The mysteries of love.' Aunt Trish blushed and got up to clear the table. I wanted to read that novel.

One night, the two of them had a dinner party. They invited a few women and two men. I was invited, too. I wore a lavender sundress, even though it was frigid outside. It was the only dress I had brought with me from home. When she saw me in it, Kat whistled a long, low note that made me blush. One of the women at the party was named Shelly. She was brash, had sandy blonde hair and a big chest. She kept saying, ‘When I was in the film business,' which for some reason made everybody laugh except for Aunt Trish. She didn't laugh, she looked at her plate through her round glasses, smiling and shaking her head.

Then there was a man named Jim, small, in his forties, with yellowish skin, a handsome jawline, a cleft chin, and rotten teeth. He wore a felt fedora and an old tweed coat. He didn't drink the wine. ‘I'm sick,' he explained to me in a breathy voice. ‘So you and me will be sober, okay, and we can watch all the rest of them fall apart.' Jim was curious about me. ‘So … where do you go to school?' I explained that I had dropped out, left home; I was on my own now. ‘Very cool,' he said. ‘Very unusual. You didn't run away. You left. I like the way you put that.' His watery, green eyes were constantly focused on another part of the room as he spoke to me, which made him seem blind, though I was pretty sure he wasn't. I asked him what his sickness was. He said he had diabetes. He'd already had to have a toe amputated. He
removed his shoe, then his sock, and showed me a pale foot with a gap where the little toe was meant to be. ‘And there are other … side effects I won't go into, which render me harmless,' he said, his lips turned up in a rueful smile. He was weird, but I liked him.

As the evening progressed, the heat from the radiators became so intense that people started taking off their cardigans, socks, stockings. Jim shed his coat and hat. His hair was very black. At one point, he leaned against the wall and left a smudge on it from the back of his head. The other guests were friends of Trish's: a drab, sad-looking couple of women who lived in New Jersey, and an acne-ridden man named Eric, who made flamboyant gestures, got very drunk, and had to lie down in the office. I hoped he wouldn't throw up in there. After the Boston cream pie, Kat shot up out of her seat. She was wearing a red, sleeveless dress that clung to her slender frame. ‘I say we go out on the town,' she said, waving her long arms in the air like windmills, her cheeks flushed from the wine.

She turned to Shelly. ‘You'd know where to go,' she said, jutting one hip out.

‘I'm based in San Francisco now,' said Shelly. ‘What do I know?'

‘The city hasn't changed
that
much,' said Kat.

‘What kind of an evening do you have in mind?'

‘Insane,' Kat answered, winking at Aunt Trish.

Trish shook her head, smiling. She had work the next day; she wasn't going anyplace. She wanted to keep me home, too, but Kat insisted that I come along, with Jim as a chaperone.

‘It's always handy to have a eunuch around,' said Jim as he hung Trish's parka over my bare shoulders.

I was happy to be going out for once, but I felt bad for Aunt Trish. She seemed so nervous. But she couldn't say no to Kat, not about anything. So we all tromped down the freezing street with our arms up, trying to flag down a cab. At last, two of them stopped for us and we divided ourselves up. The dreary women
from New Jersey decided to get back on the PATH train, and the flamboyant man weaved his way uptown on foot. So I got into one cab with Jim, Kat, and Shelly. Shelly sat in the front. As we bounced downtown on no suspension, the chassis slamming the pavement with every pothole, Kat kept bursting into dance songs, punching her arms in the air like a boxer. Jim called out a few points of interest to me as we passed them: Fifth Avenue, the Flatiron Building, Union Square. We stopped on West Fourteenth Street, near the river. The street was deserted. The worn cobblestones shone with the light from a lone streetlamp. There was no sign of a club of any kind.

As if remembering something, Shelly turned to look at me, then started rummaging through her purse and took out a lipstick. ‘We'll have to age her up,' she said, twisting up the shiny, red tube and applying some onto my mouth. Then she dragged my hair from its ponytail and ruffled it so it half-hid my face. ‘Look,' she said to Kat. ‘It's Veronica fuckin' Lake.' I felt Kat's eyes on me then, and I stood still for an extra second, my eyes averted, so she could see me as this Veronica Lake whom I had not heard of but I knew was beautiful. She had to be, with a name like that. Shelly beckoned to us. We followed her down a short, dark stairway, through a graffiti-scrawled metal door, to a ticket booth. The man behind the fingerprint-dappled Plexiglas seemed happy to see Shelly. His gray hair was greased back into a neat ducktail, his pockmarked skin the color of putty.

‘Oh hi, Suzanne, where have you been?' he asked her in a nasal baritone.

‘I'm based in San Francisco,' said Shelly.

‘Welcome home. It's Ladies' Night! You've got one guy between the three of yous tonight? Ten dollars.' Jim reached for his wallet, but Shelly slid a crisp folded bill under the window. To our right was a fringed plastic sheet, like the kind in car washes. Hazy purple light shone behind it. Loud music throbbed. We ducked our heads and passed through this fringed hymen. Upon emerging,
I was amazed to see a middle-aged man wearing a fawn-colored turtleneck and glasses, naked from the waist down but for socks and running shoes. He had a drink in one hand, his half-risen penis in the other, and was masturbating halfheartedly, a bored expression on his face, while wandering around. ‘Keep your back to the wall,' Jim suggested helpfully.

Sidling toward the edge of the room, I saw that it was lined with books. I moved closer to glance at the titles. They were all pornographic:
I Was a Teenage Sex Slave, Seven Amazing Fantasies
Come True
. Several people were clustered around the spotlit center of the room, watching a man with a bushy mustache pour hot wax on a bound, pale woman's naked breasts. Her skin glowed in the light. A small, muscular fellow with a saddle strapped to his back trotted up to Shelly and greeted her effusively as Suzanne. Hand on hip, one leg thrust out, he asked her about a mutual friend, the leather of his tack creaking behind him. Shelly answered him with a slightly pompous affability; she was clearly a star of some kind in this netherworld. Meanwhile, Kat did a little solipsistic dance to the constant beat, occasionally throwing a few shadow punches. I tripped and fell, realizing too late that the bundle of dirty laundry I'd landed on was a scantily clad man chained to a metal pole. Jim hoisted me up with trembling arms as I apologized effusively. Just then, a petite woman being led on a leash by a skinny guy in a striped shirt came tottering up to Shelly, arms outstretched. We were all introduced. The girl had iron cuffs on her wrists, joined by a long chain. Her name was Renee; her boyfriend was Miles. Miles had a moist, boneless handshake. ‘Sit,' he said to Renee. Renee sat down beside Shelly.

‘How have you been?' she asked Shelly. ‘The last time I saw you was in Chicago, at the leather conference.'

‘Oh, God, that was wild.'

‘I don't think we're going this year,' said Renee, widening her round, brown eyes and looking up at Miles complacently. ‘Miles has a new baby nephew and he's being christened, so …' She
crossed her legs. I realized then that her ankles were also shackled. Renee looked up at Miles again. ‘Honey, could you get me a pop?'

‘Sure,' said Miles. ‘Anyone else want anything?' We shook our heads. He hesitated, holding the end of Renee's leash, unsure of whom to entrust it to. Finally, he settled on Jim.

‘Will you hold this till I get back?'

‘No problem,' said Jim, his serious face filled with submerged amusement.