The Whiteness of Bones (29 page)

“That’s baby with a small
b?
” She came into the sitting room with two Mai Tais. Claire now kept the drinks in glasses in the refrigerator, so that no time would be lost with the blender or cutting pineapples and oranges.

He held up the handcuffs, still fiddling intently with the lock.

“They must be my sister’s.” She blushed.

She knew that while Alder was not averse to the endless physical manifestations of love, he had a rather formal view of sexuality, including his own infidelity. He’d told Mamie that it had always been rather difficult to cheat on his wife when they were in the same city. Mamie had laughed at him. It was not unlike his opinion that men did not divorce their wives. He thought, in both instances, that he was being cavalier. Mamie thought he was being dishonest. Nonetheless, she did not think that Alder was ready, at this point in their romance, to come up against her sister’s philosophy of the free spirit. Alder, she suspected, would not readily accept Claire’s notion that it did not matter what you did, so long as it didn’t hurt anyone. It was a little too simple for him. Besides, he tended to enjoy the possibilities of risk.

Mamie herself had only just begun to understand what it was that was false in Claire’s philosophy. The assumption that there would be no harm done was reckless, especially as Claire was attracted to men who spent their time taking photographs of the erect penises of animals. That Claire seemed to have more fun than Mamie, a truth that had bothered Mamie, did not trouble her as much as it once had done, and after meeting Alder, she had not worried about it at all. She was happy that they were alone in the apartment.

He tossed the handcuffs to her and went into the kitchen to look in the refrigerator. He stood there like a teenager, bent
at the waist, not bothering with anything that was wrapped in aluminum foil or stored in a plastic box.

“Everything in here is from a fucking island. Coconut milk, very practical; pickled kim shee? kim chee? looks disgusting; pineapples, of course; cold rice; oh, good, just what I wanted, dried squid …”

“Don’t open it!” she yelled, running into the kitchen. She grabbed the package from him.

“Gertrude sends it to me. It smells bad.”

“What smells bad?” a voice said behind them.

They turned around, startled.

It was Claire.

Her eyes were so dilated they had lost their color. Her lips were white and split with tiny cracks that she kept licking. She took Mamie’s Mai Tai from her and drank it down.

“Hi, Alder,” she said. Mamie noticed red welts around Claire’s wrists.

They followed Claire into the living room. Alder sat on the piano bench and watched Claire curiously as she ran her fingers, over and over again, through her hair. She jumped up to put on a Fred Astaire record.

“Mamie, I hate to worry you about these things, but I have a date with Sean tonight and I just turned over all the money you loaned me to a man sleeping in a tunnel in the park …”

Alder put his hand in his pocket.

Mamie said, “Here, here it is,” and she quickly gave her sister the loose dollars that were in her handbag. She didn’t want Alder to give Claire money and she minded that Claire had asked for it in front of him.

“Are you coming to Mamie’s birthday?” Claire asked him. “I’ve found this, well, really Brooke found it, great nightclub that Mamie will love. I can’t tell you the name because I want to surprise her.”

The bright, romantic music—“Every night at seven, you walk in as fresh as clover and I begin to sigh all over again”—was making Mamie brittle with irritability.

Claire shouted, “I WANT TO SURPRISE HER!” because Alder had been unable to hear her.

Claire was not herself. Mamie realized that Alder had seen it immediately. Claire let the last drops of Mamie’s Mai Tai roll into her mouth. She went into the kitchen.

“We’re running low,” she called. “I told you, Mamie, if you drink them, make new ones to replace them!”

She came back with a drink for herself and one for Mamie. “Why don’t you guys come tonight? You’d really like Sean. He’s incredibly unpretentious. You’d like him just for that, Mamie. I said someone was neurasthenic this morning and he got really mad and said, ‘Don’t ever use big words around me again.’ ”

“Neurasthenic?”

“He’s the opposite of Alysse and her friends and even Mother’s friends at home with their depressed good manners. God!” She pushed her fingers exultantly along her scalp. “He asked me one night in a Mexican restaurant what the green stuff was called.” She laughed. “You know what I was thinking, Mamie, because we got a package from Gertrude with
see-moi
and
limu
and some mountain apple bark, just in case, you know, we need it—that Gertrude is like a Garden Isle version of Alysse. Not as mean and not as selfish, of course, but just as practical …” She lost interest in her own thought.

“I think I’ve figured something else out, too,” Mamie said angrily, “if you’re interested in hearing. Alysse and Apollonia and Bones Washburn and all of those women have become men. Maybe it was their only chance, the only way they could survive, but it’s what they’ve become. Worse, they’ve become
their
version of men. The men they know and despise.”

She turned off the music. She felt as if she were about to burst with bad temper. She wanted Alder to say something, but at the same time she was grateful for his tolerant silence. He turned around on the piano bench so that he was facing the keys. He played the first sixteen bars of “Satin Doll.”

“Just like Duke Ellington,” Claire said, leaping up and clapping her hands.

“I had Mr. de Beaupré teach me this one song. When I was at Harvard, I would reluctantly sit at the piano to play it, then refuse to continue out of modesty and shyness. Everyone thought I was this brilliant jazz pianist. Which, of course, I wasn’t.”

“How great,” Claire said flirtatiously.

“Not great,” Mamie said.

Mamie was suddenly tired of both of them. Alder closed the piano and stood up, his hands in his pockets. There was no air-conditioning and the small room smelled of black rum and pine disinfectant and lilac.

“I think I’ll have a shower,” Claire said brightly, her swollen face twitching and winking. Mamie looked at her, and her anger flooded from her in a long, silent draining and she wanted only to go to Claire to take her bruised, trembling body in her safe embrace to comfort her and calm her.

As Claire stooped to gather her sunglasses and her shoes, she farted loudly.

She stood up quickly. “Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I just got fucked in the ass.” She gave them a satisfied, insolent smile and went to her room.

Mamie stood very still in the center of the room.

Alder said, “Perhaps I should go.”

She wanted him to go. She wanted him to stay. It didn’t matter if he stayed. She knew very well that if she followed
Claire to her bedroom, Claire would only say, “What would you prefer? Anus?” and laugh at her.

“Perhaps you should,” she said.

“When is your birthday?”

“Oh, soon. A few days.”

“Maybe we should go away,” he said again. “I have a little house in Positano.”

“Maybe.”

“I’ll be at my grandmother’s tonight.” He kissed her on the cheek and she let him out. She stood in the hall, waiting until she heard the tin hum of the water in the shower, before she let herself breathe again.

He came back that evening. Claire had hurried out in a rush, unable really to talk to Mamie, she was going to be so late in meeting Sean. She did pause long enough, however, to ask Mamie for more money, and then she was gone.

Mamie, when the doorman called up, was in the unfortunate position of having handcuffed herself to a copy of a Mackintosh chair, out of curiosity, so she had to drag herself and the tall chair to the intercom, and in her nervousness at hearing that Alder was on his way upstairs, she was unable to work the little key in the lock. She opened the door still handcuffed to the chair.

“I’m so glad I came back,” he said, looking at the handcuffs. He kissed her, aroused. “You sure you want to take them off?”

“I think so,” she said into his chest.

“Do you mind if I keep them?”

She smiled, despite herself, and he opened the lock on the handcuffs and released her. He put the handcuffs in his pocket and they went, very happy, to the movies.

The Japanese pagoda trees were blooming on West Sixty-seventh Street and Mamie took in their strange, voluptuary scent, as it made its way through the tremendous reflected heat of the city, up the streaming walls of the building, and rolled through the window. She was waiting for Claire. She had tried to read the Anthony Powell book that Alder had given her, but she had read the same paragraph eight times and had finally put the book aside.

Claire had not come home the night before. Mamie, despite Alder’s suggestion that they go away, knew that she and Claire were in trouble. They had no work and, in a few weeks, they would have no place to live. That Mamie would be able to find work that would be interesting to her was a hope she had abandoned. With all of her diligence and imagination, she might be back selling bedroom slippers. She would try, at the very least, to work in a bookstore.

But Claire, that tireless and inventive tormentor, what was to become of her? Perhaps we should go home, Mamie thought. At least, there are boundaries there—the Pacific Ocean, for example—and the chances of Claire harming herself might be less. Or of dying. Claire is trying to die.

With her need to be comforted and her resolve not to be comforted, Claire may have already been beyond the reach of Mamie’s care, beyond the encircling, protective arms that had taken her in so many years before, but Mamie, feeling fierce and determined, was not yet ready to abandon her.

Claire came in noisily. Her face was less swollen, and the lovely flower-color had faded from her bruise. She was happy to see Mamie, and Mamie realized that Claire did not regret her behavior of the day before. It had not even occurred to her that she might have embarrassed Mamie in front of Alder.

“I have a present for you.” She handed her a book of the paintings of Watteau. Perhaps she is sorry, thought Mamie, and then she felt ashamed because she suspected that Claire might have stolen the beautiful book. She looked at Claire.

“Where did you get it?”

“I didn’t steal it, if that’s what you mean. Brooke has this friend who owns an art gallery downtown and he gave it to me.” She sat down. “He sells bad paintings and good drugs to rich people.”

Mamie didn’t know if she was telling the truth but she decided, with both resignation and relief, that it was of little importance how Claire came to have the book.

“Did I tell you I quit the lifesaving class? He kept bandaging my tits. I think it was love.”

“Yes, you told me.”

Claire was exhausted and restless at the same time. “Brooke is auditioning for a soca band from Trinidad today.”

“What about you?”

“Me?” She sounded surprised.

“You have to work.
I
have to work.”

“Oh. That. The guy who has the gallery said he might need an assistant, well, a receptionist really, someone to answer the phones, I guess …” She was distracted. “I thought you liked Watteau. Courtly love and all that …” She lay her head back on the chair and stared at the ceiling. “Are you going to Sicily or wherever it is he wants to go?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Mamie heard in Claire’s tone that she didn’t much care whether Mamie went away or not.

“Because I don’t want to leave you, for one thing.”

“Oh, please,” said Claire. She jumped up, knocking the
heavy Watteau book off the arm of the chair as she went to put on a record.

It was Frank Sinatra, and when he sang “Violets for Your Furs,” the music instantly filled Mamie with longing for a different kind of New York. It was the New York she had seen, over and over again, in faded prints of Suzy Parker movies at the mill theater. She had seen
The Best of Everything
five Saturday mornings in a row.

“Don’t use me as an excuse,” Claire said.

It was so cruel of her, so gratuitous, that it was as if she had hit Mamie in the face. It was another example, a bitter one, of Mamie’s lovely notion that memory was so individualistic as to make it unreliable.

“You mean, then,” Mamie said slowly, “that it’s all been for nothing?”

“Oh, Christ, should we make up a bill? Twenty dollars for gym shoes in tenth grade; Mamie writes Claire’s book reports, another twenty; abortion, seven hundred.” She sat heavily in the chair, as if her calculations had exasperated and tired her.

“I never thought of it like that.”

Claire looked at her lazily. “Gosh, Mamie, this isn’t like you.”

“You’re in trouble,” Mamie said quietly. The violence of her feelings had caused her to calm herself. “You’ve been in trouble for some time. Can’t you see it, Claire? Who is this asshole who’s never seen guacamole? And Brooke, who could be more pathetic? What do you think you’re doing? This absurd health-food idea that none of it matters as long as you stay stoned and happy—just who says you aren’t hurt? What would you look like if he hurt you?”