Part 11 (1/2)

My group-Ronnie, Burdmoore, and I-stood under a marquee on a broad wedge of pink carpet that flopped out to the sidewalk like a tongue, creating a semi-indoors, almost domestic ambience. There were posters lining the entrance, a woman's face and bare shoulders against a black background, Behind the Green Door. It was all over town, the advertis.e.m.e.nt for that film. She looked like a nude astronaut floating in s.p.a.ce, too sensual for anything like a breathing tube. A stark, look-at-me expression, solemn possibility. I used to be a nice girl. That was required, the just recently having been one. The actress had been a laundry flakes model for a brand of soap that was extra-gentle for baby's tender bottom.

You had to look the part for such a spectacular fall. I had never looked the part. The gap between my two front teeth, as Ronnie said, spoiled my cake-box appeal. Or as Sandro put it, gave a certain impression of mischief. I never thought I looked mischievous, but I'd always been told this. I could see this kind of thing in women with slightly crossed eyes, some breach in symmetry suggesting another kind of breach, in judgment or morals. Like the actress Karen Black, one eye slightly amiss in its focus. The women in Hustler cartoons were drawn with crossed eyes like Karen Black's. The mind is off duty but the body is open. There was that movie where poor Karen Black utters the fatal question at dinner with her lover's higher-cla.s.s family: Is there any ketchup? At the end, she waits as the man goes into a service station bathroom while their gas is being pumped. A logging truck pulls up between the gas pumps and the restroom. When the man emerges from the restroom, the logging truck is there, blocking her view of him. He approaches the truck's driver. We hear only the freeway and the idle of the truck as he and the driver speak. He gets into the cab of the truck. It pulls out, climbs the highway on-ramp in low gear. The woman waits in the man's car. Gets out, looks around, waits some more. The credits roll.

”Triple X,” a man said to us, pointing toward another entrance, large photographs of women stretching upward and backward like pythons. Why did snakes rear up like that? Every moment, poised for killing.

”We got only the hardest-core rating,” the man called out. ”Trippel X.”

”Triple X isn't a rating,” Ronnie said. ”They rate themselves that. To make the movies sound better.”

Burdmoore had wandered off, and came around the corner toward us, light flas.h.i.+ng over his n.o.ble profile and matted beard. He looked like Zeus lost in a casino.

A taxi pulled up, and Sandro, his cousin, and Didier got out. I glanced at Burdmoore, whose face registered the cousin's beauty. He watched her with interest, but also caution. It was the expression of a man who had handled beautiful women and could still admire them but never wanted to handle them again.

She bounded toward us, not at all aloof, as I expected her to be. I hadn't said two words to her at the Kastles'.

”Come on! Who's coming in?” she asked. ”I want to see a show.” She turned to Ronnie.

”Not my kind of thing,” Ronnie said.

”What is your kind of thing?” she asked.

”That's a tough one,” Ronnie said.

”Why?” She sparkled her dark eyes at him. He seemed not to notice.

”Because there's no market for what I want to see.”

”Then it can't be that bad,” she said. ”For the worst things, there's a market.”

”You're probably right about that.” He looked at her as if he were making a new a.s.sessment, now that she'd said something possibly smart.

I thought of the girl in the photo in Ronnie's studio, the one on layaway. She was probably waiting for him this very moment, somewhere downtown. Checking the clock, applying lipstick, concentrating herself into an arrow pointed at Ronnie. Doing the various things women did when they had to wait for something they wanted.

Sandro was counting bulbs on the marquees. He was never waiting for someone else, he was simply in the world, doing, acting on his interests. He said that Times Square was all soft rhomboids, that this was part of the experience, the shapes of modern stamping technology reproduced here, in the shapes of signs and marquees, all rectangles with softened corners, streamlining as an att.i.tude.

”It's funny they call it Times Square,” Sandro said. ”There's a nude magazine in Italy called Le Ore. The hours.”

”Makes sense, actually,” Ronnie said. ”p.o.r.nography as a way to mark time. You dictate when and how. There's no chance in it. It's clockwork. Daily habits. Control. It's the opposite of s.e.x. Which is pure freedom, in all its horror. You never know when you're actually going to sleep with someone, and when it does happen, the character is of surprise: this is actually happening. There is no surprise in simply getting off. It's scheduled activity. Three p.m. Midnight. The morning shower. You know those marital aids, so-called? The thing about those products is they promise enhanced sensitivity, increased pleasure, and it's just numbing cream, to make you go longer. They add time. That's all they do.”

Sandro and Ronnie speculated on whether you could love p.o.r.nography simply as a cinephile, and on the unit of the quarter, because everything here was twenty-five cents. A quarter to peek through a quarter-size hole. Ronnie said the peep show was based on the Advent calendar. That it was a Christian tradition, this kind of looking, opening a window onto Jerusalem, a peek at the manger for each day of December. Sandro laughed, as if Ronnie were full of it, but also as if nothing pleased him more.

”You see it all through a hole,” Ronnie said.

”Then I'm an Adventist,” Didier replied. ”I believe in that kind of isolated viewing, the focus on parts. Metonymy. Does anybody have quarters?”

A change man heard him and moved toward Didier in his coin-dispensing belt.

”Adventist,” Ronnie said with faked wonder. ”Does that mean you believe the end of the world is . . . imminent?”

Sandro had told me that Ronnie had a long-standing grudge against Didier, something to do with a negative review Didier had once written of Ronnie's work.

”Everything and nothing are imminent,” Didier said. He handed the change man a five-dollar bill, cupping his hands for that amount in quarters. ”This moment now? Imminent. Wait. Oh, gosh. Now, past. It all depends on how you experience time. Time is a function of pleasure, as you just crudely pointed out. The experience of it, I mean.”

His blazer pockets weighted with quarters, Didier turned to Talia Valera. ”Are you coming?” He said it somewhat insistently, as if she were obligated to go with him because he alone, among the men, was willing.

”No,” she said, glancing at Ronnie.

Didier shrugged and went up the pink tongue of carpet and into the theater.

Somehow the decision was made to leave Didier there and go down to Rudy's. We got in another cab. Talia was about to sit on Ronnie's lap when he leaned forward and flipped up the jump seat for her. It wasn't that I would have minded if she'd sat on Ronnie's lap. But I would have noticed it, while Ronnie himself would have been oblivious to the echo, me on his lap. So many women on so many nights, flirting with him and ending up in his lap. Ronnie, who always had lovers and never girlfriends and did not kiss and tell. It could have been for this reason alone that I still felt something for him. And who could say that one reason was more valid than another? Unavailability was a quality, too.

As we rode downtown he was murmuring to Talia quietly in fake Italian, taking an Italian suffix, adding it to every word, and then repeating them. ”Andiamo in un taxi-dino a Rudy-miendo's, con innuendo in un taxi-dino-”

Sandro was telling Burdmoore, who was up front, about my motorcycle crash on the salt flats, and how I'd ended up driving the land speed vehicle that his family sponsored, and I sensed he was framing the story as far-fetched, outlandish, but I could have been projecting, since there was a divide between us on the subject. Burdmoore turned around and looked at me with a certain amus.e.m.e.nt, not uns.e.xual, but not l.u.s.tful, either. The facts of the story made him a little curious, that was all. A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made men curious. They seemed to think it had something to do with them. This should have been amusing to me, the expression on Burdmoore's face as Sandro recounted the story. But I was focused on Ronnie and Talia, on the way he was making her laugh. Taxi-dino, innuendo. Pointing out a green-and-yellow Blimpie's sign, ”There! One of ours!” Her laughter penetrating his fake sincerity like carbonation.

Rudy's was packed. People were arriving in buoyant swells, pus.h.i.+ng in and talking loudly, bringing the energy from wherever they'd just been, different groups merging together like weather systems. Talia ran into two friends-girls I had seen around, at art openings, sitting at the Cafe Borgia or Graffito or Looters, an after-hours club where you had to pound and yell and hammer on the door to be let in. Neither of her friends was as pretty as Talia, which made sense. She got to be the pretty one. And the least compromised, the least dutifully feminine, with her husky voice, her karate pants, her low and complicitous ”one of the guys” laugh.

Giddle came toward us and I realized she had been at the bar all those hours since we'd left in the early evening. She shone like something wet, a piece of candy that had been in someone's mouth. Up close, I realized it was glitter, here and there on her face and arms. It must have rubbed off from someone else. She hugged me in a cloud of cuc.u.mber oil. As a rule, the later it got, the more drinks she'd had, the more cuc.u.mber oil Giddle applied. It was so cloying and dominant a scent that I'd started to smell it when she wasn't even around. I smelled it on my own clothes. Even on Sandro's clothes. It got stuck in my head the way a song might.

After hugging me, Giddle took the drink in her hand and poured its remnants over Sandro's head. I was shocked, but strangely, Sandro was not. He simply blotted his face with c.o.c.ktail napkins from the bar. I felt it was my fault for having such an eccentric friend, but Sandro didn't make a big deal out of it. ”She's drunk,” I said, watching her hug everyone we'd come in with. Ronnie was next. Then Giddle moved on to Burdmoore, seeming not to notice that Burdmoore was someone we didn't already know. She threw her arms around his neck. He didn't object. Their lips touched and kept touching. They gripped each other like two people having a reunion in the international terminal at JFK.

We all danced. Sandro, with his hand on my waist and the other on my shoulder, guiding me. ”He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss),” a mainstay on the Rudy's jukebox, filled the room.

If he didn't care for me I could have never made him mad But he hit me, and I was glad.

I responded to dips and twirls too late and felt like I was trying to sing along with a song I didn't know, mouthing each word just after hearing it sung. I didn't care. Sandro was a good dancer; it was part of his role as the older man, the teacher.

Henri-Jean wove his way around the edge of the dance crowd, carrying his striped pole, raising it high so he wouldn't hit anyone. Whenever there was any ma.s.s of people in SoHo, at Rudy's or a loft or an art opening, Henri-Jean made his scheduled appearance. ”The sentient automaton,” Ronnie called him, like Chaplin. Sandro said he was nothing like Chaplin.

Smoke collected above our heads, red-lit and infused with a bright, jangly, early sixties girl-group sound, rising toward the ceiling like an evaporating valentine. Rudy didn't always turn on the red light, softly emitting colored neon tubes arranged in an acrostic that hung from the wall, made by Stanley. Until a year ago, the red light glowed continuously during open hours, but then the bulbs for it were no longer manufactured and had to be handblown by a gla.s.smaking studio in Was.h.i.+ngton State. Now Rudy only plugged it in on occasion, but it wasn't clear what the occasions were. ”A mood on the street,” Rudy said. ”I just know.”

Burdmoore was dancing with Giddle.

”I don't like the beard!” she shouted over the music.

”Why?” he shouted back.