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PART ONE
Rev. 8:5 And the angel took the censer, and filled it with fire of the altar,and cast it into the earth....
Chapter 1. THE ANGEL OF EXPLANATION
After Bernie left me, I enrolled at Mount Sinai with a view to becoming a gynecologist. One of the doctors not too long ago asked me how I happened to choose this particular field. "Oh," I said, having been alerted by his hand on my thigh under the table, "no special reason. An impulse toward the wholesome in life."
"Hah! So you admit there’s something else that moves us!" My glasses slid down as his hand slid up. "I am speaking of...darker forces—" At fifty, he was himself curiously ambiguous.
"A death wish?" I asked, as ingenuously as my age allowed. "No," I said. I slapped his hand. "Why would anyone wish for what’s inevitable."
It was a rhetorical question to which I never expected an answer, much less the one I later received. I am careful now to grasp the rail whenever I descend the steps outside my door. Where once, observing life’s liaison with death, I shuddered in existential prurience, I now worry about cancer. I examine my breasts before I enter the bath.
A young man I’d known casually over the course of five years had looked me up in New York on his way home from Canada. "Do you recall," I mused, "that it was you who introduced me to Bernard I. Stein?"
"I saw him yesterday," Adrien said. "He hasn’t changed at all. You’d think anyone would have in five years."
Adrien had changed! His yellow hair hung longer, curling around his nape like an ascot. His blue Catholic eyes reflected a new interest in me.
"This is narcissism," he said. My skin rippled under his touch. "You could be my sister." He was stoned.
A curious thing had happened when we turned on. I’d seen his words flow out of his mouth, streaming through a narrow channel of air like the colored crepe ribbons my sister and I used to buy for a nickel apiece in the Triangle Book Store on our way home from James K. Polk Elementary School. But I have learned to mistrust such sentiment nearly as much as Bernie did. "That’s silly," I said. Adrien and I looked nothing alike.
"Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. If you want to be serious," he said, "come spend the summer in New Hope."
Then he got up to leave. "Aren’t you going to sleep with me?" I asked. It had been a long time since anyone did, and Adrien, I had learned, was intelligent enough for me to think he might be the man.
He laughed. "That would be stupid," he said.
I didn’t argue. In a way, I was flattered. I rang for the elevator, and while the elevator operator eavesdropped, Adrien said, "I’ll be in touch." He tightened the straps of his knapsack. From a side pocket poked the long handle of the wooden spoon which he carried everywhere, not because of any effect it might have had on taste but because in the cooking of oats it made a mystical marriage of grain with grain that purified his organic system. That’s what he told me. "Before summer comes," he added. It was absolutely amazing how like an angel he seemed, his skin all pink and white, his hair in yellow flames.
If there are readers, they will forgive that exercise in poesy. I am on the whole rather a straightforward woman, inclined, as I have said, to deal in facts. When I fall in love, which is something I do less often these days, it is invariably with a scholar. Adrien, of course, is not a scholar but a poet of French extraction, and if he brought angels to my mind, it is only because grass will usually make one more suggestible: "I believe," he’d said, delighting in my perplexity, "that at certain unpredictable moments, people act as angels do toward one another. I know I’ve been visited by an angel now and then." His language both intrigued and discomfited. In his letters, postmarked from New Hope, he wrote, "I’d like to plow you in a field of flowers," enclosing a dried violet by way of underscoring the contradiction. I had six to sixteen weeks in which to wring what definition I could out of that, before summer came. I decided to distract myself. I had had, understand, practice in the discipline of self-distraction, going (infrequently, because they confused her) to movies with my good friend Maxine, to the weekly meetings of my Women’s Lib group (alone), making lists of the women whose psychology I planned to dissect in Sexual Inmates: A Cellular Study, my longish reply to Norman Mailer’s Prisoner of Sex. Lulu, Cam, Willa Mae, Max, myself. Veronica? I had a lot of time on my hands and crossed out Lulu Carlisle and put her in again. Time gave every appearance of passing. I sold the article. In February, Maxine drove in from Long Island to bring me a tee-shirt with TRIUMPH splashed across the front in bright blue; it was her way of expressing acceptance of my affiliation with Adrien, whose big red bike had won her admiration as easily as that of the younger doormen at the Park Avenue building I was sometimes wont to pat myself on the back for living in. I continued to live there because Lulu let me, and having no money of my own beyond what I’d earned tutoring her daughter (not counting the Scholar Incentive Award and the federal loan), had spent some of that time, fall and winter, in my room, figuring how I might use the money someone would surely advance me after the bulk of the essay was completed. Since so many of the versifiers and English majors I’d gone to college with had published books, I was confident someone would take mine (which was only an article, after all, and a raunchy one at that), even if the recession continued, as it seemed bound to do. If this was literary prostitution, wasn’t sex almost always sold for a worthy cause? My tuition, I reminded myself, was a worthy cause.
Occasionally, I even studied toward this end, though certainly less often and less intensely than civilians would like to acknowledge. I was only in my second year, and no one dares ask a great deal of a second-year med student. We’ve scarcely learned how to take histories and haven’t begun to master the theory behind it, being at this point in our careers considerably more intimate with the corpse—ah, that first brave assault on the axilla (i.e., armpit)!—than with the living organism. I was taking a program in Reproductive Science Interdigitated with General Endocrinology, but the fancy name was attached to a few general platitudes about social disease and contraception and a few basics that every doctor was supposed to know about the relevant organ. There were other courses and some of them required some work—"required" is the operative word, because therewere those students who lived in the labs and the library (just as there were the ping-pong addicts who hung out in the lounge every evening and during every class break)—but except for anatomy the first year and the organic chemistry class I had had to make up the previous summer, our work was shockingly simple. My biggest problem was that people kept giving me a rough time about choosing gynecology; it was not a feminine field.
I didn’t let anyone know the real reason was that I knew I’d be a washout as a brain surgeon—unless clumsy brain surgeons were lately in demand—and didn’t mean to become a pediatrician like every other woman doctor. "You’ll change your mind," they said, "you don’t have to make up your mind yet." I said nothing.
Instead, mimicking my old man—meaning my father, since I was just a little too dated myself to figure among those who meant somebody different by the same slang—I kept a prayer-book which no one ever saw. "Dear God," I wrote in it, "I’m thirty years old already, and if You don’t send me somebody soon, the kind of somebody that makes permanent commitments, I could die without ever having a kid, and wouldn’t that be a dumb waste!" He doesn’t mince words with me, so I didn’t see why I should mince mine with Him. But as a rule, all I got by way of answer was silence. Came the hour when I would be writing in my prayerbook, Lulu had turned off the television in her room downstairs, the incense she used to gloss over the perfume of grass was gone, sucked out into one of the quieter districts of nighttime Manhattan, and I had only the company of the pink pansies on my wallpaper to contend with. I was lonely. I thought (fleetingly) of taking to the "personal vibrator" which our housekeeper, Lulu’s housekeeper, Willa Mae Wood, had procured for me in an excess of pity for all us white women. She’d come in one day back in November, bearing a Whelan’s paper bag, her diamond earrings bobbing like yo-yo’s under the beehive wig, and said, "I ain’t goin’ to let no nigger clerk intimate me! No ma’am, noway. ‘Sonny,’ I calls him, ‘I’ll take two. I am a big woman.’ Blush? Sweet Jesus, you never seen a black’un blush so fine. Now how he goin’ to know I don’t have no pain in my neck?" She massaged her aching neck.
"He knows you don’t have two heads," I volunteered.
Willa Mae chortled. She could afford to, countering Lulu and me, as we knew very well that she, to ourdiscredit, possessed both husband and lover. "Honey," she said, parceling out the packages, "soon as I grows two heads, just you remind me so as I’ll put the extry on your needy shoulders."
I smiled. She indulged me, did Willa Mae, because I looked to her for advice and comfort. But she had made it clear that there was a limit I was better off not exceeding: Willa Mae was one of the Survivors, and as such, assumed, when all was said and done, that we all could "cope" if only we would make up our minds to. Lulu’s difficulties, for example, she attributed to the "changes of life," conceding, with a nod of condescension, that even she herself had suffered from dizzy spells in weak moments, and, once, admitting (but I was not sure I believed her) that, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, she too relegated sex to the role of a minor nuisance which intelligent middle-aged women tolerated as a fair trade in return for their "propers." Her favorite propers were diamond, so when, at dinner on the following day, Lulu gave her a butterfly with ruby-tipped antennae and a sparkler in each wing, explaining, "I haven’t any use for it, and one does get nervous having jewels around the premises," Willa Mae was being no less than logical in inquiring after the vibrator.
Lulu said she’d experienced quite a pleasant sensation as she lay on the lounge, tool in hand, watching "Gunsmoke": "Matt Dillon," she said, "reminds me of my dead father," and returned to her room, leaving us to make what we would of that.
My own father is an unbelieving religion professor with a happy knack for confusing the Heavenly Kingdom with the foot-hills outlying the city of Knoxville. While we had not discussed the subject, I felt safe in thinking he would have been more or less appalled to learn that my Women’s Lib group counseled autoeroticism as liberating. Insecure as my grasp on modern technology was, I confined the wisdom of my women friends to my prayerbook and went in search of a more primitive means of satisfaction. "Peter," I said to the only man around, an ex-lover from pre-Bernie days, "how’s about a li’l ol’ roll in de hay?" He combed his moustaches.
"Masturbation," said friend Peter, "is liberating. Haven’t your girl friends explained that to you?"
And later in the year, still hoping to get some kind of rise out of him, I told him I was waiting for Adrien and the summer to come. But he only smiled pseudopaternally and said he hoped I would be happy. Then I nearly called my father long distance to ask his advice but on second thought, bearing in mind my overwhelming—to me—phone bill, wound up detailing the situation in my prayerbook thus: "After Bernie left me," I began, "and after I enrolled at Mount Sinai, I found a job as a latter-day governess to a lovely fourteen-year-old retarded rock freak named Cammie Carlisle. We shared a community of interests. Pretty soon I was divorced from the male sex. Indeed, pretty soon I was having nightmares in which the mother, Lulu Cameron Carlisle, discharged me from my position. ‘But you can’t do that,’ I cried, ‘I love her more than you do.’ Lulu’s drugged speech evaporated into bad breath when I awoke. The dreams, though, were oddly reassuring, because Bernie, bowing out, had sworn that my longing for motherhood was altogether too feverish and sentimental to be trusted. The dreams showed it is at least deep-seated."
Following that paragraph, I knelt by my bedside. I am as superstitious as the next person, and wouldn’t be surprised if housemaid’s knee wasn’t more efficacious in praying than writer’s cramp. "Dear God," I said, "teach me not to dress up the truth to the point where reality will fail to recognize it." I tugged at the hem of my nightgown till it covered my chilly feet. I waited until my back began to ache—a kind of confirmation that I was praying, if not that my prayer was being heard—before continuing. "Teach me not to exaggerate all the time," I exaggerated. Cammie was not retarded; she limped and stuttered; and all sense of our relationship was going to be lost to That Big Shrink in the Sky if I couldn’t say, "Look here, this girl was short and stubby and had furry brown eyes and a complexion I envied and freckles I didn’t and she poked her way through this cavernous but neglected duplex like a war orphan turning over rubble with that peculiarly disinterested movement of the wrist which belies so disturbingly the bathos the cameraman has so painstakingly captured on her face." Right from the beginning, from the first day I met her, she seemed to be in possession of a degree of control I’d never dare aspire to. I’d gotten the interview on a tip from a teacher I worked with on Saturdays. "Ask for ten," he whispered; "they can afford it."
"It will be ten dollars an hour," I said into the phone, and blinked when Mrs. Carlisle said, "Yes, of course."
Of course I dressed in my best skirt and blouse, cursing the myopia that condemned me to glasses, and then tripped over the step up to the marble foyer. "My shoe," I mumbled, trusting the doormen to elaborate my excuse at their leisure. I was less eager to trust my own ability to speak in complete sentences. "Mrs. Carlisle?" I asked. One of the doormen disengaged himself from the group and called up to see if I was really wanted.
I could hardly be sure I was until Cameron led the way into her room, explaining what would be expected of me. I was to tutor her in all of her subjects. "I don’t know geography," I panicked; "I don’t know French."
"That’s all right," she said. "I don’t either."
Then she introduced me to her mother. "My father’s dead," Cam had announced earlier, stumbling over the d. "Same accident that fixed me up."
I had begun to relax. "You seem cheerful enough," I remarked.
"Every day for lunch," she said, "I eat a laughwich." When I scanned her smile for sarcasm, I found none—a dimple, yes, but nary a downturn of the lower lip.
And then the two of us found Mrs. Carlisle in her bedroom, munching Hershey bars. She had on a pink quilted robe that went nicely with her cropped red hair. "How do you do," she said, turning off the television set by remote control. "Cameron’s grades are terrible."
"You know that it will be ten dollars an hour...."
"I don’t see why not," she sighed. "It’s only a fraction of what the Black Panthers take."
At that time I was living in a renovated brownstone next door to the Broadway Hotel for Transients. Across the street was the bodega where I bought cat food for The Prune and bologna and mustard and Wonder Bread for myself, bologna sandwiches being all I ever ate, as I figured that with my luck I was going to need all the money I could save. Back before Mount Sinai, I’d applied to half-a-dozen med schools, but scholarships were suddenly tight, much tighter than they had been during the fifties; and evidently no one in this town had any crying need for a hick chick riding on one ten-year-old degree that had itself been achieved only after six transfers to five schools. Memories of that now long-gone spring dampened my first year: I reckoned Bernie (my post-collegiate roommate) had split in the nick of time and the rest of the world was on the verge of joining with him in an adverse judgment as to just how timid my intelligence was. I fed Prunella and sat in the window and read anatomy. I closed the textbook and the window and watched television with Prunella. As the evening wore on, I got drunk, wrote a suicide note, got stoned, and called my parents in Knoxville to let them know that I was moving to Majorca. "Wait a minute," my father said, "I’ll look it up in the atlas."
"He wants to see how far it is from Paris," my mother said on the extension.
My sister lives in Paris.
My father came back to the telephone. "It’s not so far," he said.
"It’s closer than Knoxville," I agreed."Do you think your mother and I might like to retire there?"
"Your father and I," my mother said, "have decided to start a new life together."
"You don’t understand!" I said.
My mother came alive instantly. "What," she said, "is it that we don’t understand."
I could hear my father coughing in the background.
Rather faintly, I pointed out that there weren’t to my knowledge many foothills in Majorca. Of course, there might be foothills I didn’t know about.
"In that case," my mother said, "we won’t go. You’d better not either. I doubt if such a backward place has medical schools."
"But I’m fed up with med school," I said.
"In that case," my father said, "hadn’t you better come home for a while?"
I was so close to doing just that that when the phone rang an hour later I jumped at the offer Mrs. Carlisle made me. "My best friend?" she asked, tentatively, urging me to wonder whether I was supposed to say yes. "Gladys Brunner? She always came with us, but this time she has to go into the hospital instead." If I had thought about it, I might have thought there was something vaguely threatening in her tone, as if to imply that Gladys Brunner, in going into the hospital, had somehow failed to do right by Lulu.
I wasn’t sure I had understood her correctly. "I don’t see how I can afford"—I stalled— to go to Jamaica for three weeks."
"I always paid for Gladys," she said, a bit plaintively, I thought. "Cameron thought it would be fun to have you along this time."
Actually, I now had at least a margin of money, although I would never have blown it all on a trip to the Caribbean. With true petit bourgeois anxiety, I was tutoring Cammie twelve hours a week, teaching Saturday mornings at a school for emotionally disturbed children, and free-lancing at whatever turned up in odd hours. My one extravagance was twice-a-week psychotherapy with a Sullivanian named Veronica, who fudged the bills on my behalf so that between us we managed to take United Equitable—for most of what I owed her. I had not told Veronica that Mount Sinai offered its own elaborate coverage to students, including free prescriptions and psychiatry: it all came under the heading of "professional courtesy." A rube right to the core, I couldn’t quite bring myself to take advantage of their services the setup was elitist; on the other hand, there was something sporting in devising new ways of ripping off big business. But I was afraid that if I explained to Veronica that what she thought was good common sense was actually compulsive hairsplitting, she might think I was—you see—sick. So I let her arrive at her own conclusions. "You’ll need your money," she rationalized, "for Mount Sinai."
"What," I asked, drinking my coffee, "do I need Mount Sinai for?" One of the pleasanter facts about Veronica, in sweet contradistinction to the authoritarian shrinks I’d submitted myself to in the past, was that her answering service rang me at six in the morning to wake me up. It was the only time of day I could fit her in, and she always had coffee ready when I got there. Today she’d gotten a strand of her hair into her cup, and was fishing it out while I went on to say, "I’m illiterate and unmethodical. Also defensive."
"That’s why," she said. "Doing something you believe in will bolster your ego."
My ego was indeed a shaky construction. "Knock, knock," I used to say, rapping on my head.
"Who’s there?"
"Me who?"
"Mimi La Boheme." I liked to think I was a tragic heroine with a hacking cough and a fine soprano. The Asian internist at the out-patient clinic that Veronica had insisted I visit soon enough squelched that fantasy. "The cough is good," he said, "very good. Now may I hear your voice." I sang "Don’t Pluck My Peaches." He had fierce black eyes and I could tell he was torn between recommending a laryngectomy and asking me out. "I was brought up strict," I warned. "My father is a religion professor."
The black faded to misty gray. "I was raised by a most beautiful young woman," he said, "who read from the Bible to me every afternoon. A beautiful young woman, she was truth to say highly partial to the story of Ruth. If I so miss her now," he asked, turning on me, "please to think how shall I miss her when I become older!"
"Sorry," I said, chastened.
"You need a rest," he said, "I know. I quite indubitably know what you are going through."
"You do."
"It enervates one’s energy. Med school." He looked tired.
"It does," I said. There would be no date.
"Depart the Saturday job," he advised me, which I did, and in August Cam, Mrs. Carlisle, and I flew Pan Am to the West Indies. At last, I thought, I was going to get laid.
When Prunella was in heat, she sprayed everything in sight, and when she finally zeroed in on my anatomy text, I decided it was time to do something about it. A sexist Japanese vet on upper Broadway fixed her for thirty bucks, five off the usual fee, and a lecture on why only male (tom) cats could be said to spray; but I, having neglected to think things through, hadn’t realized she would have to return the next week to have her stitches removed. Peter said he would take care of this for me, since I would be in Jamaica. The day before we left, I left her with him. I don’t mean to be maudlin in what follows, but one must understand that Prunella was a calico with a checkerboard face in which the minuscule nose flared and receded according to the optical play of the sly planes of color that crisscrossed it. Now she had an enormous bandage pending from her middle and meandered dopily around Peter’s place in the west 40s. "She only likes chocolate milk," I cautioned him. He smiled wanly at his dark-skinned girl friend. "Let it pass," he muttered, "let it pass."
"Well, Prune," I said, "this is good-bye."
Prunella purred.
"This is good-bye," Peter said, shaking my hand. I smiled wanly at the dark-skinned girl friend sitting on the floor. "Live it up, kiddo," he said (too loudly and punching my arm besides).
"This time," I affirmed, "I’m going to," and meant it, not knowing beforehand that no one was going to approach me except a big black beach boy, pushing forty, who sold straw hats over the counter and ganja under. I ran in and told Mrs. Carlisle and Cameron about his amusing but, I reckoned, unrealistic proposition. It never occurred to me that Mrs. Carlisle, whom I still thought of as a distant and rather uncommunicative employer (although I had seen her pale and freckled body as I’d never seen my mother’s, gritty with sand as she removed her bathing suit), would whip out a bill and tell me to score as soon as I could decently manage it. I did as I was told. The beach boy met me at the shed where lounging chairs and blankets were stored; and after a small skirmish, he handed over the two largest joints I have ever seen. They were rolled in tobacco leaves. "I only do this," he said, "for the mostest special guests. Do not you know many rich Americans marry Jamaican boys? Oh, yes, we love you very well!" I gave him the Panther fist and strolled back to the hotel with the joints nestling in the top of my bikini, where, unfortunately, I had plenty of room.
The hotel sprawled across an unconscionably large tract of prize real estate like a pink bird with two outstretched wings so grand in conception that they kept it from ever getting off the ground. Cameron’s room was situated at the end of the left wing, overlooking the beach, and I shared the adjoining room with her mother. Each morning I garnered the breakfast orders and then called them down to room service. Mrs. Carlisle was shy and did not like to do such things. Still in our nightclothes, then, we sat on the terrace in the sparkling sun, sniffing salt from the sea and the fragrance of tropical flowers that climbed the trellis to our balcony, watching the underwear we’d washed the night before bleach to a state of pristine glister against the wrought-iron railing. For breakfast we ate watermelon, grapefruit, bananas, pancakes, and coffee. After breakfast, we went swimming; and after the swim, we showered. For lunch we ate filet mignon or lobster in the breeze of the outdoor dining room. Then we swam and showered. Dinner was roast beef or sirloin or native dishes in the indoor dining room, where every evening I silently said thanksgiving and prayed bologna sandwiches might prove a thing of the past for evermore. At ten o’clock the hotel presented a floor show in its night club, and, rousing with difficulty from the lethargy of our day, we three went. We must have seemed an imposing sort of party: we were one fiftyish redhead, still slender, shy, but given, I began to realize, to interminable complaints about the food or the water or the airconditioning; one lame teen-ager who hoped for the loss of her virginity as an alchemist hopes for the philosopher’s stone; and one governess in the throes of a belated identity crisis. I tutored Cameron throughout the vacation, seeking to maintain some semblance of authority over her even when she informed me point-blank that bras were old hat and I should throw mine away. I admitted I didn’t wear it for support. "I need it for illusion’s sake," I said.
"Be honest with me." She turned from the mirror before which she brushed her honest strawberry mane a hundred times a day and confronted me with a grimly set jawline.
"Okay," I said brightly, "if you’ll agree to do some studying."
"It’s a d-d-deal." But I had gotten the worst of it, because she went to a la-de-dada private school where all she ever had to study was poetry and painting. The academic subjects, I’d discovered, were for show. Even so, it was my place to take the best advantage of the bargain, so I conjured an anthology from my suitcase and let it fall open at random. "Here," I pointed at the page: "Memorize." It was something—this—by Robert Lowell.
On Windsor Marsh I saw the spider die
When thrown into the bowels of fierce fire:
There’s no long struggle, no desire
To get up on its feet and fly—
It stretches out its feet
And dies. This is the sinner’s last retreat;
Yes, and no strength exerted on the heat
Then sinews the abolished will, when sick
And full of burning, it will whistle on a brick.
"Jesus please us," she said, "how dumb can you get."
"Memorize," I repeated, a little less adamantly after I’d read it through myself. She bent her head over the book, two silky lengths of strawberry, draped from the center part, closing over her face like a curtain. I wished I had so handy a way of hiding from Lulu Carlisle. ... She dogged my steps, swam when I swam, read what I read, never went out alone at night, peered over my shoulder at the spiral notebook as I amused myself by writing long letters to Peter in New York and Adrien in New Hope. I gave her the issue of Harper’s in which The Prisoner of Sex had not so very long ago appeared. "I once thought I might write," she said, "or do something useful. Take care of people. Be a nurse. But it’s so tedious. Taking care of people. Especially if you don’t have any talent for it. Writing." Her complaints left little room for contradiction. Yet everything else about her was completely contradictory: her red hair, so much more definite than Cameron’s softer shade, framing a face far less established; the youthful body too tightly strung to be believed in; eyes that reflected nothing of the sensitivity her skin attested to. Whenever I looked away from her, I had trouble recalling what she looked like. Until one day I realized she looked like a flower on fire, or a rosy-tipped match waiting to be struck. She lit a cigarette, looked at the magazine open on her lap, and looked at me—or, rather, looked almost at me. Her gaze, resting lightly on the tip of my left ear, caused me to feel slightly unfocused. When I tried to move my eyes directly into her line of sight, she looked quickly away, back to the magazine, closed its pages and rolled it into a makeshift telescope through which she could pretend to view the horizon. "Norman Mailer!" she said, so that I felt a little as if the telescope had been intended for a megaphone: just one more cross-purpose contributing to my sense of dislocation. "Norman Mailer!" The bottom of my bathing suit had fused to my seat; I got up and snapped the fabric loose, letting the sea air in (in my suit). "There’s another example for you," she said. I wondered what she thought my bathing Suit stood for: Macy’s? "Even thinking," she said, "is tedious. Even when they’re about sex, ideas bore me. But I suppose I never had any talent for thinking, either." Did she mean to imply a flair for sex?"
Everyone has a right to express herself," I said, choking on the liberalism I seemed compelled to second in her presence.
"No one would want to read what I think."
I felt it would be an invasion of her privacy to ask why not, but she slapped the magazine against her knee and went on to say: "I think my father was a... male chauvinist. He once caught me in bed with Sam. Before we were married."
"Oh." I glanced up to make sure the door between our room and Cammie’s was closed.
"He wasn’t much good at it, you know—Sam wasn’t. Or at least I never enjoyed it much."
Her voice was soft and girlish, sharing confidences, a little eager. I said, "Oh."
"Of course, nowadays things are different. Nowadays you can look around until you find one who is. Good at it."
"I guess you can."
"Oh, not me," she said, "but I hope Cameron looks around a bit before she settles on one."
"I guess you don’t have to worry about that yet," I said, helpfully.
"She’s fourteen!" she said, as if time were slipping by far too fast.
I didn’t say anything.
"Now if I were to have an affair"—she jabbed her cigarette in my direction as if she were asking me to light her fire—"don’t get me wrong, I’d never marry again, of course, but if I had an affair, it would be with a black man. They’re a lot handsomer." She thought for a moment. "On the whole."
I scarce knew how I was expected to reply, whether she was baiting me or being candid. I used to lie awake nights thinking of things I could say to her, conversations we might carry on the next day, but there was no way to divert the course of her ideas without exposing my own emotions, and she was not overly interested in what I felt about things. She’d ask me a question, and two nights later, she’d ask the same question again. At the same time, the way I felt about things was, I wasn’t ready myself to get too deeply embroiled: you meet someone and live with him and then he splits; you find a friend and then the friend marries; you make up your mind to do something useful and trailblazing, such as be a gynecologist, and no one really wants to take you seriously. I’d grown cautious, and keeping an eye out for trouble whenever I began to invest in somebody, I would refer to a scrap of paper Max had kindly made pertinent notes on. It was torn from a Stuart memo pad, headed at the top with their product’s description: Dialose, dioctyl sodium sulfosuccinate 100 mg. and sodium carboxymethylcellulose 400 mg. "You have a lot of constipation on Long Island?" I had asked her. Ignoring me, she had in laborious longhand headlined: "One-to-One Relationships."
"They’re the best kind," I had said, but she went on stolidly drawing up her list
"(I) Symbiosis—Mutually beneficial; (2) Commensalism—Though only one benefits, neither organism is significantly harmed, as in the case between the shark and the remora; (3) Parasitism—The parasite gives nothing in return to the host, with the result that the latter ultimately is injured or even destroyed by the former. Remember Bessie Smith."
I was unsure what Bessie Smith’s fate had been. In fact, reading over the list, I decided it confused me more than it did anything else. The only conclusion I could draw was that I definitely felt safer keeping a certain distance between Mrs. Carlisle and me. "Call me Lulu," she yelled from the back of the bay in front of me; "Mrs. Carlisle makes me feel so old," and I felt I had to, but resented the encroachment just the same.
"Lulu," I hollered, "this horse is killing me." We were riding in the middle of the afternoon, Cameron up front with the guide, Lulu in line behind Cameron, while I struggled (valiantly, I thought) to bring up the rear. Tennessee might be my nickname, but I’d been nurtured in academia, nowhere near bluegrass country, and this was my first time on horseback. I hoped it was my last. Gallumping along, trying to keep within my line of sight those two thoroughbreds and their guide sitting tall in the saddle, listening to the clop-clop-clop my reluctant pony made come to an emphatic stop every three feet in silence, waiting for the guide to turn around and start me up again, lurching forward and back as the pony and I repeated our clop-clop-clop-thud-stop, I knew it had been sheer malevolence which had prompted Lulu to say to him, "Give her an easy one, she hasn’t ridden before."
"Let’s go back," I whined.
But Lulu’s saucer of hair spilled over her face with glee—this was one thing she’d learned to do at finishing school and still did well. She dug her heels into the bay and charged off, skimming past the shanties that lined the hot road, past the women with baskets on their heads, the boys with donkeys on their ropes. That evening I told her I’d had enough of sport. "Let’s see the tourist attractions," I said, so in the morning we were off to the famous grotto.
"It’s damp," she said."Caves are damp," I said.
"Why ever did you drag us to a cave," she said, launching into a series of complaints that continued long after we were back in the hotel. She turned the air conditioning up. "It was so hot in there," she said.
Cameron came into our room, sat down, and took off her left shoe. Her heel was bleeding. "You should have said something!" I said, recalling all at once her mother’s gripes of that morning and mine from the afternoon before. I had held Cam’s arm while we hiked through the grotto but she had said nothing about her foot, that it hurt or was being rubbed raw. I went to the hotel drugstore for iodine. Returning the length of the long hallway, I reflected that though she made her likes and dislikes known and was never to be bullied out of an opinion she held, she very carefully refrained from infringing on anyone else’s personality, particularly her mother’s. It was unnatural. "Let’s see," I said.
She thrust her foot in my face.
"You’ll survive," Lulu said, as I applied the iodine. Cameron’s foot twitched and I told her to hold it steady.
"This time," I told her, "it’s your turn to decide what we’ll do."
She laughed and said she felt like turning on.
I laughed to humor her, and was going to say it was time to dress for dinner, but Lulu had already lit the first one herself, inhaling with the expertise of a woman who has smoked more cigarettes and drunk more drinks than the bags under her eyes could easily forgive. The skin on her face looked soft and deep and warm, like a thick towel, and might have been wholly attractive were it not for the few places, beneath the eyes and around the mouth, where it folded over as if to conceal some small indecency. She passed the stick to Cammie, who, I was then informed, had been smoking in school for several years; and Cammie passed it on to me. The smoke was harsh. I pretended to take a heavier drag than in fact I did. We went around like that for quite some time, until the air in the room grew uncomfortably thick. Lulu threw open the door to the terrace. "Somebody will smell it," I objected, thinking of the watchman who patrolled the hotel grounds at night.
"Nonsense," Lulu said. She was swaying back and forth in her red slip like a Chinese lantern.
"I wish we had some music," Cameron said. "I wish we had some boys."
Lulu danced.
I was amazed by her strange behavior. I was glad I had not gotten stoned with her and Cameron.
Cameron stood up. "I’m going to recite a poem," she announced, and proceeded to fling herself down on the rug, acting the part:
There’s no long struggle, no desire
To get up on its feet and fly—
It stretches out its feet...
She stretched her legs, the bruised and painted heel glowing red as if in reflection from her mother’s bright slip. Dying, she lay immobile, soundless, for what seemed like hours. "Cammie?" I asked. "Cam?"
"For a governess," she said, "you’re pretty dumb." She giggled. "You must be crazy, talking to a dead spider!" I reached out my hand and hauled her up. Lulu went on with her private dance. "I wish," Cam said, "I wish I had a boy friend."
"Good lord," I answered her, "you’re much too young."
"You only say that because you’re afraid you’re getting too old." I would have let her have it for that, except it was said very simply, and might be true. I would have to think about it. "Mama too," she said.
"It’s not what it’s cracked up to be," Lulu said.
Cameron lay down on her mother’s bed. "I’d like," she said, wistfully, "to find out for myself."
"Now look what you’ve done!" Lulu was standing over her. They seemed to be moving about at a great speed. "If you have to lie down, why don’t you lie down in your own bed instead of mussing mine up?"
Suddenly the room was charged with electricity. I tried to defuse the situation. "Why don’t we play cards?" I asked.
Lulu stared at me; Cam turned her face in my direction; but I had the feeling that neither mother nor daughter saw me. I brought out the deck of cards and began to deal them out.
"I never win," Lulu said. "Unlucky at cards and unlucky at love too."
I held my tongue. The plaintive wail of her grievances against the world—"It’s unfair, no one loves me, I do all the work, write all the checks, I have nothing to do with myself on these unending days that I am made to suffer for the sake of a child who thinks I’m passe to begin with"—wearied me beyond telling. If they flowed forth in so continuous a stream, they could be stopped, I thought, only at their source. I admitted to myself that I was curious about the source of her complaints.
"Must you deal so slowly," she muttered.
"It’s not me, it’s the dope."
"Well, it seems as if you’re dealing very slowly."
Cameron said, "Time is an illusion, Mama."
"My little girl," Lulu said to me, "thinks she’s a Hindu."
"I was, once." There was sweat on Cammie’s face from the attempt to be taken seriously. "Do you ever meditate?" she asked me.
"No," I said. "My mind wanders."
Lulu laid down her hand. "Cameron can read fortunes with these," she said, the note of pride sounding discordant in the atmosphere.
Cameron reshuffled the deck and arranged the cards face up in six-by-seven lines. I fell silent. "Well, come on," Lulu said.
"I never finished my poem." She scooped up the cards.
"You’re trying to psych us," I said, prepared to chew her out for playing on our nerves when everyone was already keyed up. Lulu interrupted me.
"Did I hear the telephone ring?" She looked first at Cameron, then at me, as if one or the other of us could tell her what she had heard.
There was no one in the whole of Jamaica who knew us, or knew our room number. We waited. Then the telephone was ringing, and I lifted the receiver to my ear, and the other party hung up. "They hung up," I said, listening now to my own voice in the silence of the room. The sketchiest of breezes had stolen into the room through the sliding glass door that opened onto the terrace. Now I knew we were in for trouble, that this extraordinary decadence I’d been dallying with, dope and the full moon and two women I pitied perhaps but didn’t even know well enough to like or dislike, who supported me in a style to which I was not accustomed and for reasons which I couldn’t pinpoint ... that this romance had to be paid for as dearly as any circumvention of the reality principle. I knew there was no hope of explaining all this to them. So I said, "I’m scared."
"Tennessee’s afraid of the bogeyman," Lulu taunted. She re placed the cards in her nightstand drawer. "You’d both live in pigsties if you could."
"I can feel how afraid she is!" Cam said, pointing at me. "I can see the vibrations."
Lulu looked at me, reaching out her arm spontaneously as though she meant in fact to feel my fear, but then she let it drop. "She’s probably afraid," she said, "that the beach boy is going to come get her. I don’t believe anyone ever rises above their origins."
I remember that I got up then, ready to defend the Southland at last, and don’t remember anything after that until Cameron confronted me in the bathroom, where I was crouching beside the toilet, and I saw her unlined face approaching mine with amusement and not a little dismay. "This," I said, "is the sinner’s last retreat." She laughed. She seemed incredibly young and I was pleased I had made her laugh. I didn’t want to alarm her, didn’t want her to know yet all the possibilities for evil that existed. And I too laughed aloud, peering, from my vantage point, at the peculiar world that now insisted upon revealing itself to me: the porcelain and tile, shiny and slick as the armor secreted by some mean, self-preserving creature uncommitted to land or sea; Cameron’s face, virginal, as open to suggestion as I wished I still was; the frosted Plexiglas so-called shower curtain climbing from the rim of the tub to the stucco ceiling like a miraculously convenient blank screen upon which I might project all the odds and ends of my memory bank.
It was Maxine who had gone with me on a Saturday night to Ninety-seventh Street to see what we had thought was to be a wonderfully lush and weepy expose of life among the rich and shady. We were munching popcorn, the bags propped against our chests, our legs propped against the seatbacks in front of us, chagrined at the utter absence of nudity, annoyed at being duped for two-fifty per. The teen-age heroine was as wholesome as Young America and the sunshine boys surrounding her looked like frat-party freaks. Only one was at all interesting, a Caligulan sort of fag, and our fantasies about him were necessarily going to be cut short. Caligula swished across the Riviera’s wide screen, breathing to his male costars suggestions that were plausible enough, hinting to the heroine at possibilities Max and I were surprised she didn’t simply laugh at. Then Caligula decided to throw a little party, by way of pepping things up. They took a few drinks and popped a few ampules. Their spirits rose; our spirits rose. But just as he’d bound his lantern-jawed musclebound blond counterfoil in chains, Max leaned over to me and went into a little number of her own: "I’ll tell you," she whispered, uninvited, "why perversion is so dull. It’s a mask for lassitude. When you get right down to it, nitty-gritty-wise, perversion is effete, ‘cause real sex—real sex—requires one helluva lot of energy. Can you dig it?" Caligula had swiped a sword from the suit of mail in his baroque bedroom and was brandishing it about like a child with a toy gun, and I was digging Maxine’s speech, when then he abruptly and most inconsiderately severed his lover’s head. Max had spent the greater number of her twenty years fighting her way out of communes and jazz cellars and mental hospitals and had learned to hold the enemy at bay by erecting what I had thought was an admirably firm fortress around certain areas of her brain. "Oh no," she said, "that’s sneaky, that’s unfair." Leaning forward, she spilled her popcorn on the floor of the auditorium: it rolled down the slant. When she brought her feet down, the little balls crunched underneath. There was blood spurting all over the screen. Caligula, crazed by some unspecified drug, was now murdering everyone in his unhappy mansion, by knife, by gun. "By god," I said, "we’re going to walk out on this." Max was crying. I nudged her and then her eyes blazed and she said: "Boy-oh-boy, the pigs who shot this flick, they should drop dead already." Two old women behind us leaned over and asked us please to lower our voices. "Or we’ll have to call the usher," they said. I left and Max followed, ranting up the aisle, ranting all the way up upper Broadway. I knew she had to talk and listened, but the more she talked, the sadder I felt. "Okay," I said.
"Wanna Eyetalian ice?" she asked, switching horses in mid-stream. Her working acquaintance with madness made her unusually receptive to any disturbance in wavelength. But I knew only the ordinary neuroses that everyone in New York knew, and, unwilling to acknowledge in public my own puny phobias, hadn’t learned to wall them off with words the way she did. I was stuck with the visions in my closed-circuit skull, and couldn’t stop seeing that blond, startled head dangling from Caligula’s prissy grasp, or the great wound its vacation had rendered, like a second mouth crying "Come back! Come back!"
"Hush, little girl," Cameron said, immensely pleased, I could tell, with the turnabout. "You can come back into the room with us now. There’s nothing to be scared of."
"Nothing! I can think of at least four," I shouted, ever ready to fulfill my duties as a tutor. "How about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse?"
"What’s the Apocalypse?"
It felt good to know more than someone else in the world did, especially then it felt fine, and a warm content suffused my arms and legs, which had begun to cramp in their awkward position next to the toilet. I said to Cam, "I’ll be all right now," and followed her lead back to the bedroom, where I remembered the terrace door had been left open, and shut the door."
You must keep a dozen locks on your door in New York," Lulu said. "Are you hoping we’ll keel over from the heat in here?" Then, reverting to the locks, she said: "Unless you have a... roommate?"
Cam was still reciting her poem:
I saw the spider die
When thrown into the bowels of fierce fire...
"I wish I’d never told you to memorize that," I said. She was still high, pointing at her mother as she giggled and stuttered through the final line:
This is the Black Widow, Death.
Only the way she said it was, "This is the Black Widow, D-D-D-Death." Lulu’s face, paling, seemed even paler by virtue of the red slip beneath it. I was sympathetic to others who suffered from superstition as I did and made an effort to redirect her thoughts.
"No," I said, "I don’t have a roommate."
"Do you get lonely?" Cam asked.
But Lulu said, "Who doesn’t?"
"Then why doesn’t she move in with us? She could have the room upstairs that Gladys used to live in." Cameron and her mother had a way of referring to me in the third person, as if I weren’t quite all there, as indeed I may not have been. "Please! Mama?
"I’d have guessed that Lulu Carlisle would find some way out of what seemed on first thought to be an impossible situation; but then, I didn’t know her. "Why don’t you?" she asked.
"Well, I—"
"You’re there a good part of the time anyway. It’s closer to Mount Sinai." And then, the coup de grace: "And Lindsay has asked everyone to make use of all available space, the apartment situation is so impossible."
"Well, I—"
"Please," Cameron said, and I, nearly as stoned as my poor misguided Caligula had been, consented, considering her, her wide eyes and hopeful tone, the bread I’d save, and the nights I’d lain awake wondering whether the footsteps and scratchings I heard originated from the roach-infested hallway outside my door or were confined safely within the Broadway Hotel for Transients where they belonged. I trusted this would bring the evening to an end. It did. Cameron retired to her room; Lulu swallowed a sleeping pill and fell asleep in her bed with a cigarette in her hand. I took the butt from her hand and put it out and stayed up reading until the grass wore off and I could go to sleep without bad dreams.
It was a hot, sticky day. I sat by the truck Roosevelt Jones had rented with my money, reading, swilling water from his canteen, while he and the kid he’d roped into this moved my things down-stairs. "Good girl," he said, when I gave him the rum I’d brought back from Jamaica for him. Rosie was a window-washer by trade, and in his leisure time, a frequenter of the bar old Peter used to hang out in. The bar was the Recovery Room, a watering spot for doctors, med students, and—as Rosie and Peter had each in his own time discovered—nurses. I’d known Rosie off-and-on for quite some time. It was through him that Peter had met his current girl friend, and through Peter that I had met him. I used to believe there were really only about two hundred people in New York and Rosie knew all of them. I myself knew fewer black people in the city than I had down home, but the ones I did know, Willa Mae and Rosie, frankly enjoyed taking me under their wing in a sociological reversal that no white Northerner would recognize but which every Southerner is familiar with and not ungrateful for. Rosie was a kindhearted soul, a stocky, broad-beamed, middleaged, hard-working soft touch, who, drunk, collapsed into the kind of nostalgia for the South that I had to beware of in myself. That didn’t stop him from taking full advantage of the privileges of the North. When we’d made our way crosstown to Park Avenue, I introduced him to Lulu. "I could go for that chick," he said after she showed us to my room and left. I blinked but chose to ignore him.
"What’s eating you?" he asked. "Why so glum and silent?"
"Nothing," I said. "I feel funny without Prunella."
"Well, lookit... ." The Carlisles’ two dogs tore by, chasing the family cat up the stairs to the Sun Room and terrace that took up the opposite half of the floor I was to live on. "Speaking of cats, here’s a cat. And dogs. And it’s a doggone penthouse. Cheer up, for crying out loud."
But The Prune was gone for good. "She vamoosed the first day she was here," Peter had explained, tugging on his ear with embarrassment "It must have been the drugs. She was woozy, remember? All I did was turn around and she was missing. I didn’t mean to leave the window open!"
"Sure, Peter, I know that. Curiosity killed the cat. It wasn’t your fault." I knew he felt guilty enough. But he couldn’t know I felt guilty too: I had abandoned her when she needed me most, and in the back of my mind, I had realized life with the Carlisles would be simplified if I didn’t have to introduce my cat to theirs. I set my typewriter and textbooks out on the table, studied the flowered wallpaper with something akin to despair, and experimented with shutting the door. It was going to be all right. When the door was shut, I might have been miles away from anyone. "You’re a dum-dum, Tennessee," I told myself. I’d gotten into the habit of talking aloud to myself when I was alone, it made for company of a sort. "You always worry about how the lilies of the field are going to make out, and now here you are on Park Avenue." I put things in order, and late in the day, opened the door. I heard a low wail climb the staircase. It was a cat, it wasn’t Prunella, it was Clio. But it wasn’t Clio the cat, it was Cameron. I ran downstairs. She was in her room, crumpled on the sofa bed, her mother standing by the door. Inanely, I asked if there was anything wrong.
"Gladys Brunner died," Lulu explained. "In the hospital. To-day."
"It’s not fair, it’s not fair." I’d never seen Cammie like this. Her mother left the room. I excused her, thinking her grief must go even deeper. But that left me with the task of consoling her daughter. I went to the bed, put my hand on her back, and wished almost bitterly that I wasn’t so self-conscious or so timid about touching people. "Hey," I said. "It happens, you know."
"I warned her against eating that ... Sugar and instant rice and soda and shit."
"What are you talking about?" I had visions of botulism. Ruptured gallbladders. Emaciation.
"It was cancer! Cancer, you dodo." She was fairly screaming.
"That’s out of date," I said. "Try dum-dum."
"Well, dum-dum—" She was sitting up now, glaring at me with eyes bloodshot from tears, and in the light of the sun setting over Central Park, I saw her as she might look twenty or thirty years hence: weak and worn out from struggling to swing with one bum leg and a talent for empathy that couldn’t prove much use or afford much pleasure in the world she lived in. "You should know, being a tutor and all, that you get cancer if you d-d-don’t eat right."
"I noticed you ate plenty on our trip. Five pounds’ worth, at least." If it was cancer, Lulu Carlisle must have known Gladys Brunner was dying before we had ever left for the West Indies.
"It’s not how much, it’s what, and you have to eat certain kinds of things in moderation." Her patience was infinite. "You just have to be careful, you don’t have to be a nut."
That was before we had all heard about DES in beef and preservatives in bacon, and I thought maybe you did have to be a nut. But I grasped her meaning more clearly that night at dinner. The Jamaican feast was over. Willa Mae served raw hamburger patties, brown rice, lima beans, and tap water. Afterward, I went upstairs to the room the dead Gladys had apparently occupied at some point in her life. Although my desk at the hospital would be waiting for me, registration was still a way off; and even if some of my classmates should happen to be there already, the probability of my having to walk back by myself to an apartment which, while safer (I thought) than the one crosstown on the Upper West Side, was in a neighborhood both darker and less friendly—so unnerved me that I planned on doing most of my studying throughout the year in my room. I sat at my table for a fruitless hour, reading all about hormones whenever I wasn’t veering off into recollections of my father’s homiletics. "Life and death," he liked to say, "are two sides of the same coin." Gladys had tossed and lost; but I had won, and here I was in the penthouse she had walked away from (why?). First, I worried that if I was filling her shoes, I might take the direction she had gone. Then I thought I could feel her presence in the room, the presence of death; I thought I could smell it and that it smelled ever so faintly like the pathology lab. The room was hot, it was as still as a tomb. First I felt trapped; then I thought it might be the other way around, that I had pushed her out of here and into her grave the way I had elbowed Prunella out of my life. I thought of Prunella wandering in a drug-induced daze out onto the fierce streets where some mean-spirited kid kicked her in the belly and opened her wound until the blood gushed onto the sidewalk and she couldn’t meow any more. The room was silent, too silent. I could hear nothing except the jagged edges of soft music as it scraped itself sneaking under the crack of the second door to my room, the one that led out the back down the stairs to the lobby nineteen floors below. The music was getting on my nerves. I had to talk with someone, so I called Dial-A-Prayer.
"Hello," it said. "Thank you for calling the Dial-A-Prayer Fifth Avenue Church. Let us pray. 0 Lord, help me to overcome my loneliness, my sense of alienation. Help me to open myself to others, seeking Your Presence in meaningful relationships with others, that the work of Your Son, Jesus Christ, may be renewed and made meaningful by our encounters on Earth. Sometimes, living in this great city, this busy, bustling city, I feel... left out, I feel, for I know I can speak frankly to You, just a little bit insignificant I feel, well, as small as a... sparrow. Help me to know that You are watching my fall. Help me to know that You are there to catch me. Help us, 0 Lord, to reach out with Your Word, so that all of God’s creatures in the Greater Metropolitan Area may straighten out and fly right. Help us to just, well, chirp that hymn of praise that in our hearts we hear. In Christ’s name, we ask this. Amen. Do you sometimes feel lonely? I do! Why not call the Hot Line at CIrcle 6-4200 and let’s us rap about it together. ‘Bye now!" What I most enjoyed was the way the voice ran—scurried—up and down the scale, encompassing octaves in a vain attempt to sound spontaneous. There was no hope for anyone, not even ministers. I grabbed the Harvard bookbag I used as a purse—I’d bought it in the Hunter College Book Store, though Hunter and Harvard shared the distinction of being among the few places where I’d never taken an undergraduate class—and pressed the button to the upstairs elevator entrance in the Sun Room, said thank-you’s at the top and at the bottom, and hailed a cab downtown to Peter’s place. "You must be maybe eighteen," the driver said, his voice thick with an accent I was at a loss to classify. "I have a niece—she’s, oh, eighteen too—very pretty. Not see her, oh, uh, ten, twelve years."
I asked him where she was.
"Algeria. All my family, Algeria. Oh, yes, is a pretty country. You think it is hot? But is very nice, is on same, you know, line of New York."
"Really?"
"Really, I do not kid. You are eighteen?"
I thought he was being fresh. "No," I said. "Thirty."
"Oh, I’m sorry to hear—I am very sorry, how could I know."
"It’s not the end of the world."
"But thirty—Have you a husband?"
"No." It didn’t seem right, given Dial-A-Prayer’s prayer, to cut him off altogether.
"Oh, I’m very, very sorry. Well, I shall give you my advice. Just a little. Not too much advice!"
"Right on."
"When I was a young man, my friends and I, we wanted to have a, you know, social life? So each weekend we give a party. And each weekend we ask lots of people. Then when all the people came, if they use drugs or drink too much, we take their names, and make a list, and don’t ask no more. Pretty soon only nice people come to the party, and each weekend we have a satisfactory time indeed."
"That’s nice."
"One man, he was my friend, he was Italian, he was fifty years old already and still no wife. Well, at the party he meet a nice, very nice girl, and now they live in New Jersey, and are very happy. Oh, no big money, no big house, but a little money, a little house, and bi-i-g happiness."
"It’s a regular fairy tale," I said.
He’d pulled the cab to a stop in front of Peter’s building. Now he turned around to face me. "You think I’m kidding you? You take my advice. Find a good man. No drugs. No whisky. Then you and he, you fit one another, you make like the, you know, the mountain and the valley. Is no good," he said, "a woman alone."
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