Tooth and Claw (26 page)

Helen—the new and exciting Helen with the silver-foil eyes—didn’t seem particularly impressed with my first-night exploits, which had already entered the realm of legend by the time I got to work at four the following afternoon, but she didn’t seem offended or put off in any way either. We worked together through the cocktail-hour rush and into the depths of a very busy evening, exchanging the thousand small quips and intimacies that pass between bartender and cocktail waitress in the course of an eight-hour shift, and then it was closing time and there was Jimmy Brennan, at the very hub of the same unfolding scenario that had played itself out so disastrously the night before. Had I learned my lesson? Had the two-paragraph story in the local paper crediting Fireman Samuel L. Calabrese with saving my sorry life had any effect? Or the loss of my car and the humiliation of having to drive my mother’s? Not a whit. Jimmy Brennan bought and I poured, and he went off on a long soliloquy about beef suppliers and how they weren’t competent to do a thing about the quality of the frozen lobster tails for Surf ‘n’ Turf, and I probably would have gone out and wrecked my mother’s car if it wasn’t for Helen.

She was sitting down at the end of the bar with Adele, Ski, another cocktail waitress and two waiters who’d stayed on to drink deep after we shut down the kitchen. What she was doing was smoking a cigarette and drinking a Black Russian and watching me out of those freakish eyes as if I were some kind of wonder of nature. I liked that look. I liked it a lot. And when she got up to whisper something in my ear, hot breath and expressive lips and an invitation that electrified me from my scalp to my groin, I cut Jimmy Brennan off in the middle of an aside about what he was paying per case for well-vodka and said, “Sorry, gotta go. Helen’s having car trouble and she needs a ride, isn’t that right, Helen?”

She already had her coat on, a complicated thing full of pleats and buckles that drove right down to the toes of her boots, and she shook out her hair with a sideways flip of her head before clapping a knit hat over it. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s right.”

There were no wrecks that night. We left my mother’s car in the lot out front of Brennan’s and Helen drove me to the apartment she and Adele shared on the second floor of an old frame house in Yorktown. It was dark—intensely, preternaturally dark (or maybe it was just the crust of salt, sand and frozen slush on the windshield that made it seem that way)—and when we swung into a narrow drive hemmed in by long-legged pines, the house suddenly loomed up out of nowhere like the prow of a boat anchored in the night. “This is it?” I said, just to hear the sound of my own voice, and she said something like “Home sweet home” as she cut the engine and the lights died.

The next thing I knew we were on the porch, bathed in the dull yellow glow of a superfluous bug light, locked out and freezing; she gave me a ghostly smile, dug through her purse, dropped her keys twice, then her gloves and compact, and finally announced that the house key was missing. In response, I drew her to me and kissed her, my mind skewed by vodka and the joint we’d shared in the car, our breath steaming, heavy winter coats keeping our bodies apart—and then, with a growing sense of urgency, I tried the door. It was locked, all right. But I was feeling heroic and reckless, and I put my shoulder to it—just once, but with real feeling—and the bolt gave and we were in.

Upstairs, at the end of the hallway, was Helen’s superheated lair, a place that looked pretty much the way our mutual place would look, but which was a revelation to me at the time. There was order here, femininity, floors that gave back the light, books and records arranged alphabetically on brick-and-board shelves, prints on the walls, a clean sink and a clean toilet. And there was a smell connected to and interwoven with it all, sweet and astringent at the same time. It might have been patchouli, but I didn’t know what patchouli was or how it was supposed to smell, just that it was exotic, and that was enough for me. There were cats—two of them, Siamese or some close approximation—but you can’t have everything. I was hooked. “Nice place,” I said, working at the buttons of my coat while the cats yowled for food or attention or both, and Helen fluttered around the living room, lighting candles and slipping a record on the stereo.

I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I eased my haunches down on the floor in a pile of pillows—there was no furniture in the
usual sense—and shrugged out of my coat. It was hot as a steam-bath, Helen had left the room through a set of bead curtains that were still clacking, and a beer had magically appeared in my hand. I tried to relax, but the image of what was to come and what was expected of me and how exactly to go about it without ruining everything weighed on me so heavily even the chugging of the beer had no effect. Then Helen returned in a white terrycloth robe, her hair freshly brushed and shining. “So,” she said, settling into the pillows beside me and looking suddenly as vulnerable and uncertain as I, “you want to get high?”

We smoked hash. We listened to music, very loud music—Buffalo Springfield; Blood, Sweat and Tears; the Moody Blues—and that provided an excuse for not saying much of anything beyond the occasional murmur as the pipe was passed or the lighter sprang to life. The touch of her hand as we shared the pipe set me on fire though and the music invested me with every nuance and I thought for a while I was floating about three feet above the floor. I was thinking sex, she was thinking sex, but neither of us made a move.

And then, somehow, Adele was there, compact, full-breasted Adele, with her sheenless eyes and the dark slash of her bangs obliterating her eyebrows. She was wearing a pair of black pantihose and nothing else, and she settled into the pillows on my left, languidly reaching for the pipe. She didn’t say anything for a long while—none of us did—and I don’t know what she was thinking, so natural and naked and warm, but I was suffering from sensory overload. Two women, I was thinking, and the image of my father and my sad dumpy mother floated up in my brain just as one of the cats climbed into Adele’s lap and settled itself between her breasts.

That was when I felt Helen’s hand take hold of mine. She was standing, and she pulled me to my feet with surprising force, and then she led me through the bead curtains and down a hall and into her bedroom. And the first thing she did, before I could take hold of her and let all the rest unfold, was shut the door—and lock it.

A
ND SO WE MOVED
in together, in the house that started off smelling of freeze-dried mouseshit and wound up taking on the
scent of patchouli. I was content. For the first time I was off on my own, independent, an adult, a man. I had a woman. I had a house. Two cats. Heating bills. And I came home to all that pretty religiously for the first month or two, but then, on the nights when I was working and Helen wasn’t, I started staying after closing with Jimmy Brennan and a few of the other employees. The term Quaalude speaks to me now when I think back on it, that very specific term that calls up the image of a little white pill that kicked your legs out from under you and made your voice run down like a wind-up motor in need of rewinding. Especially when you judiciously built your high around it with a selection of high-octane drinks, pot, hash, and anything else you could get your hands on.

There we were, sitting at the bar, the music on full, the lights down low, talking into the night, bullshitting, getting stoned and progressively more stoned, and Helen waiting for me in our little house at the end of the road by the frozen lake. That was the setting for the second wreck—or it wasn’t a wreck in the fundamental, literal sense of the word, because Helen’s VW bus was barely damaged, aside from some unexpected wear and tear on the left front fender and a barely noticeable little twist to the front bumper. It was four or five in the morning, the sky a big black puddle of nothing, three feet of dogshit-strewn snow piled up on either side of the road till it looked like a long snaking bobsled run. The bus fired up with a tinny rattle and I took off, but I was in a state of advanced confusion, I guess, and I went right by the turnoff for our road, the one that led to the little house by the frozen lake, and instead found myself out on the main highway, bouncing back and forth between the snow berms like a poolball that can’t decide on a pocket.

There was something in the urgency of the lights flashing behind me that got me to pull over, and then there was a cop standing there in his jackboots and wide-brimmed hat, shining a flashlight in my face. “Out of the car,” he said, and I complied, or tried to, but I missed my footing and pitched face-forward into the snow. And when I awoke this time, there were no firemen present and no flames, just an ugly pale-gray concrete-block room with graffiti scrawled over it and three or four hopeless-looking jerks sitting around on the floor.
I got shakily to my feet, glanced around me and went instinctively to the door, a heavy sliding affair with a little barred window set in the center of it at eye-level. My hands took hold of the handle and I gave the door a tug. Nothing. I tried again. Same lack of result. And then I turned round on my companions, these pathetic strangers with death masks for faces and seriously disarranged hair, and said, as if I was in a dream, “Hey, it’s locked.”

That was when one of the men on the floor stirred himself long enough to glance up at me out of blood-flecked eyes and a face that was exactly like a bucket of pus. “What the fuck you think, motherfucker,” he said. “Your ass is in jail.”

T
HEN IT WAS SPRING
and the ice receded from the shore of the lake to reveal a black band of dead water, the driveway turned to mud and the ditches along the blacktop road began to ululate with the orgasmic cries of the nondescript little toads known as spring peepers. The heating bill began to recede too, and to celebrate that minor miracle and the rebirth of all things green and good, I took my Alien—Helen, that is—out for dinner at Capelli’s, where all the waiters faked an Italian accent, whether they were Puerto Ricans or Swedes, and you couldn’t pick up a cigarette without one of them rushing over to light it for you. It was dark. It smelled good. Somebody’s grandmother was out in the kitchen, cooking, and we ate the usual things—canneloni, baked ziti, pasta primavera—and paid about twice what we would have paid in the usual places. I was beginning to know a little about wine, so I ordered a bottle of the second-highest-priced red on the menu, and when we finished that, I ordered another. For dessert, my balled fist presented Helen with two little white Rorer Quaaludes.

She was looking good, silver-eyed and tanned from an early-spring ski trip to Vermont with Adele and one of the other waitresses. I watched the rings glitter on her fingers as she lifted her glass to wash down the pills, and then she set the glass down and eased back into her chair under the weight of all that food and wine. “I finally met Kurt,” she said.

I was having a scotch and Drambuie as an after-dinner drink, no dessert thanks, and enjoying the scene, which was very formal and adult, old guys in suits slurping up linguine, busty wives with poodle hair and furs, people of forty and maybe beyond out here in the hinterlands living the good life. “Kurt who?” I said.

“Kurt Ramos? Adele’s ex?” She leaned forward, her elbows splayed on the tabletop. “He was bartending at this place in Stowe—he’s a Sagittarius, very creative. Funny too. He paints and writes poetry and had one of his poems almost published in the
Hudson Review
, and of course, Adele knew he was going to be there, I mean that was the whole point. He’s thirty-four, I think. Or thirty-five. You think that’s too much? Age-wise, I mean? Adele’s only twenty-four.”

“
Almost
published?” I said.

Helen shrugged. “I don’t know the details. The editor wrote him a long letter or something.”

“He is pretty old. But then so are you, and you don’t mind having a baby like me around, do you?”

“Four years, kiddo,” she said. “Three years and nine months, actually. I’m not an old lady yet. But what do you think—is he too old for her?”

I didn’t think anything. Helen was always giving these speeches about so-and-so and their sex life, who was cheating on who, the I Ching, reincarnation, cat-breeding, UFOs and the way people’s characters could be read like brownie recipes according to their astrological charts. I gave her a sly smile and put my hand on her leg. “Age is relative,” I said. “Isn’t it?”

And then the strangest thing happened, by way of coincidence, that is—there was a flurry of activity in the foyer, the bowing and scraping of waiters, the little tap dance of leather soles as coats were removed, and suddenly the maître d’ was leading Adele and the very same Kurt Ramos past our table.

Helen saw them first. “Adele!” she chirped, already rising up out of the chair with a big stoned grin on her face, and then I glanced up and saw Adele there in a sweater so tight she must have been born in it (but no, no, I had vivid proof to the contrary). Beside her, loping
along with an athletic stride, was Kurt Ramos, half-German, half–Puerto Rican, with crazily staring eyes and slick black hair that hung to his shoulders. He was wearing a tan trenchcoat, bell-bottoms and a pair of red bowling shoes he’d borrowed from a bowling alley one night. There were exclamations of surprise all around, the girls embraced as if they hadn’t seen each other in twelve years and I found myself wrapping my hand round Kurt Ramos’ in a complicated soul shake. “Good to meet you, man,” I said in my best imitation of a very hip adult, but he just stared right through me.

I
N
M
AY
, Ski Silinski quit to move up to Maine and live among goats and liberated women on a commune, leaving his wife and kid behind, and I found myself elevated to head bartender at the ripe age of twenty-three. I was making good money, getting at least a modicum of exercise rowing Helen around the defrosted lake every afternoon, and aside from the minorest of scrapes, I hadn’t really wrecked anything or anybody in a whole long string of weeks. Plus, I was ascending to the legendary status I’d sought all along, stoked by the Fireman Calabrese incident and the high drama of my unconscious dive into the hands of the state police. I’d begun dealing Quaaludes in a quiet way, I tripped and had revelatory visions and went to concerts with Helen, Adele and Kurt, and I pretty generally felt on top of things. The prevailing ethos was simple in those days—the more drugs you ingested, the hipper you were, and the hipper you were, the more people sought you out for praise, drugs and admiration. I even got to the point where I could match Jimmy Brennan drink for drink and still make it home alive—or at least partially so.