If All Else Fails (2 page)

He just kind of
folds up. Can't keep other people from killing themselves, his only flaw. Runs for cover, waits
till the blood gets dry. Always says, I told you so. He hands me the bill, six drinks, $22.50,
with cover charge. Heads out the door with his tail up, a girl's address on Twenty-sixth Street
in his pocket. Cuts a fine figure but a little too close.

I am left alone,
subdivided, and the waiter is one-half happy. Nods at me curtly, what you call a subtle hint.
He's hovering around me again, strafing the table with meaning­ful looks. Reminds me of a traffic
controller at a bordello. I pick up the bill, the not-so-subtle hint of a little bit ago. Wave it
at the waiter. He's on the way before I even touch it.

A blur where the
money changes hands, the door opens, and I am out on the street. Waiter at the door sweeping
in­visible moccasin marks from the entranceway carpet.

Ten minutes,
fifteen. I'm waiting. The girl's made out of imported china. Has vintage wine in her blood. Eats
slowly, pondering every bite through an opera-glass coating on her tongue.

She must be
finished by now, paying for the meal by
touch of hands only, maybe just a superior look. Maybe they pay her to come in and lift
the funeral off the place. Maybe.

The door glides
open and out she comes. Striding, duck­ing her head at an invisible doorman. Moves to the street,
looks for taxicabs. The wrong time of day. Two stop at once, one flipping its sign over to read
on duty. She bows gra­ciously at them both. Gets into the first one, exchanges dip­lomatic smile
with other driver, who waves back at her, hides his loss.

While she's getting
into the first one, I grab the second. I tell the cabbie, "Follow that cab."

He turns around and
gives me one hell of a look. "God­damn tourist" is what he says under his breath, and flips the
meter on. Me, I don't care how demented he thinks I am, I just want to see her house, just the
outside of the mansion. Maybe urinate on some of her landscaping. Assault the but­ler. Follow the
fox to ground. Something.

Is that girl real?
She's too perfect. Can't imagine her going to the bathroom. She just holds it, looks apologetic,
shrugs it off casually. Or hires a Frenchman to do it. I have to see where she lives like a
climber goes for Mount Everest, because it's there. Because it's there and everything sane says
I'm not supposed to be.

The cab ride is
forever, within two bucks of all the money I have. Paid the cabbie off a block behind her.
Location, an ugly brownstone building in a bad section. Am a lot puz­zled. She couldn't live
here, must be slumming.

She walked to the
front door, didn't knock, just opened and walked in. Had a kind of casual familiarity with the
place. An everyday look on her face, the kind of expression a movie queen uses playing gin rummy
between takes with two people from a cast of thousands. Slumming.

I got in front of
the house, couldn't believe she was inside. Had to follow, probably the dump was a secret hideout
of ambassadors of state. I open the door and I'm in. It's an entranceway, a long hall, and she is
just disappearing out of sight into the last room at the end. No noise anywhere. The building is
empty.

I don't know what I
am doing but I do it. This building should be condemned. Holes in the floor, plaster giving in to
gravity. I creep up the hallway, wondering exactly what I'm trying to prove.

A rat runs along
the edge of the hall. It's the kind of building rats would abandon. I move farther along down the
hallway. The door to the room she has entered is lightly ajar. It's dark in there. Nothing to
see. Time to get out of there, but then there I am, down on my haunches, pushing on the door ever
so slightly, widening the crack a tiny fraction. I hear a scratching sound.

She's lighting a
candle, a dim thing, then another and an­other. Her back is to me. The room is unfurnished,
littered with old rags and soiled newspapers, wallpaper hanging in tattering banners down the
walls. Ceiling probably held to­gether with flyspecks.

I can't see what
she's doing. Something is on the floor and she's bent over it, her shadow covers it, can't make
it out in the dark. She's in the corner, bent over awkwardly, using some kind of tool.

Hunting for buried
treasure, digging up the floor? No, there's something above the floor, can't make it out. Eyes
have to adjust. The candles are arranged around her on the floor. She raises something over her
head like a club, metal and narrow, curved, swings and there is a thud, a tearing
sound.

She is tearing at
something, jerking her arms toward her. Gouging. Working at it furiously. Something very wrong
here, in a cocktail dress. My eyes strain, fascinated. She turns around a little and I can see
over one of her shoulders.

It's a
corpse.

She moves a candle
closer and moves off to one side. I can see it clearly now. The body of a man.

The corpse is
stretched out on his back, chest slit from side to side, torn apart from chin to neck. His torn
shirt lies across his outstretched arms. There is blood and I can see how careful she is with her
dress because of it. She bends over daintily to get at him. She has a warehouseman's hook, long,
curved, and with it, she is tearing away at his entrails. Slamming the curved point of the hook
into the thorax, tear­ing out ribs and lungs, red flesh.

She croons softly,
rocking on her heels, and I am now afraid she'll see me. Time to leave but I am as fascinated by
her as she is with the corpse. A heartbeat rhythm. Stab and rip, stab and rip. There is a machine
quality, a sexual es­sence to her movements. Total concentration.

She turns around
more, her hook fouled with visceral ma­terial and I see her eyes. In them, the same preoccupation
with opera, charities, modern dance. She wipes the hook against the corpse's thigh and looks up
at the door, un­surprised.

I am startled, jerk
forward, bump against the door and it swings open with a loud creak. She stops with the hook,
poised over the body. She stares at me. I don't know what to do, when to run. She makes no move
to threaten me.

She turns and
plunges the hook into the head of the corpse, a grand, theatrical gesture. The hook bites in,
tears out an eye. She looks back at me to see if I am watching. I am. I'm too frozen to do
otherwise. The hook goes up and down, rips through the side of the man's face. She stops again,
her stare at me has changed, taken on a new mean­ing. She now expects something out of
me.

I couldn't leave,
couldn't turn away until I gave it to her. She had some kind of hold over me. Some power. The
hook bites the other eye, rips it out. And then I know. I know what she wants, what she asks of
me.

I can understand
her well enough now to be no longer fascinated by it. I had seen the carefully planned woman, a
woman made, not born. The bone-china lady, the society bird of the carefully planned dress. She
expected no more out of me than she expected out of the corpse.

I stood up slowly,
straightening the knees for easy flight. I knew then, even before she smiled
graciously.

I put my hands
together and applauded.

I wanted to write
this letter and mail it to you because you don't live here anymore. I wanted to tell you that it
was the wind, that kind of wind between men and women that drives the fishbones out of fish. The
angry skeleton falls out and the fish won't swim anymore. It was that kind of wind. This is that
kind of letter. The wind will mail it for me.

We met at the
museum. I was ethnic art; you were ab­straction. I was a stranger to you but I had seen you many
times before. I had seen you posed in every possible camera angle in every foreign film that ever
played. Cameras ex­plored your face; you were a blond-haired planet, no, a sun and all the world
revolved around you. You were the enor­mous cosmic empty bottle into which the teeming masses
would empty themselves trying to fill you. Your eyes were blue and I walked over to you. I told
you I thought your forehead was paradise between two light bulbs. You smiled and nodded weary
agreement. You had heard it all before.

You were dressed in
peaches, halved with light syrup, and I wore my penitentiary suit. My suit was made of license
plates with the name of the state misspelled. I was naked. Naked but I wore a hat, that argued a
personal style.

Your artwork hung
next to me in the art gallery. I was my own artwork. Your exhibit consisted of green canvasses
painted blue and blue canvasses painted green. You had studied in France, Paris, and I had
studied in Quentin, San.

The art competition
was fierce. The judges lingered at your exhibit long enough to raise your expectations. Had you
painted a blue canvas blue and a green one green, you might have won. That's what the judges said
as they passed you by.

I didn't win
either. My exhibit consisted of me walking barefoot through broken glass attired only in a somber
black hat. The bright red splashes of blood on the floor excited the judges. I might have won but
like a fool, when one of the judges asked me what were the chances of my bleeding to death, I
admitted that the possibility was slight. The judges walked away muttering about artistic
insincerity.

You sought me out,
feeling that the trip to Paris had somehow been wasted, and had a good cry on my shoulder. I
wheezed sympathetically and played a cello in my throat. I held you in one hand and got dressed
with the other-While you helped me wrap up my bleeding feet, you fell in love with me. It
happened very suddenly. I took off my hat and my braids tumbled past my shoulders. Your blue eyes
made slot-machine motions. I slipped the shirt over my shoulders and put the hat back on. During
that movement you fell in love with me. I, in turn, let you pay the rent.

You loved the color
of my skin and the eagles in my eyes. Together our bodies played off-Broadway, and like cars that
crouched in the soft tar of your highways, our hearts ex­ploded metallically in your furnished
room, eighty-five dol­lars a month, no pets. We held hands and sat bumper to bumper in the
dark.

You teased me with
your camera-perfect face. You made my heart explode like the slugs in slots between coin-operated
buildings. You dispensed tender moments in meas­ured portions. You were experienced in delight.
You had slept with policemen.

You gave me the New
York City tour and you made talk­ing through your nose sound sophisticated. You paraded me
before your friends. They harvested me, they
touched my bow hand, they scooped me up with broken glass. I had to endlessly explain wigwams and
how to fall off horses. I felt the hum of their social motors making expeditions through the
reservation of my heart.

We went to all the
parties. We played charades. I always took the parts that no one could guess. I pretended to be
the inside of a concentration camp. At masquerades, I went dis­guised as a human being. Once I
won a prize for best costume. I was dressed as the INVISIBLE MAN.

We went to a party
on Halloween night. You spent the entire evening trying to seduce a black football player. He
passed out drunk in front of you like a period at the end of a sentence. You were enraged. Your
roommate in college, Syl­via something or other, had slept with one once. I couldn't remember if
you wanted to try it because Sylvia had liked it or because she hadn't.

I spent a lot of
time in a corner, trying not to get cor­nered. One of your friends tried to engage me in
conver­sation. She said, "My television said something interesting yesterday."

"I don't want to
tell you any jokes, but the word antelope loses its meaning when clothed in a tuxedo," I said,
hoping to end the conversation.

Your friend began
an elaborate set of gestures, com­municating a comic strip. She touched her teeth with her
painted nails. It reminded me of my grandfather who al­ways advised, Look for signs and omens. It
reminded me of my grandfather who died humming all the songs he had kept silent because there was
no one left to sing them to. We buried him in the ground like a dead bee in a window
box.

Your friend began
another conversation with the rest of her body. "I'm afraid my shoes are awfully late," she
confided, 'Taut I'm sure you'll forgive me if I lean against
your body. The wind may push me over on top of you any minute. Incidentally,
have you been to the theater and did I take your ticket?"

She stood so close
to me, her body almost hid the room. Through the angles under her arms, I saw a line forming
behind her. I sensed a system of sisterhood. She recognized me from somewhere. As if she had
known me, as if I had been her lover once in the dark and had brought her seda­tives.

Then you came back
and reclaimed me from the sandbar where they served eggrolls along the conversational river. All
your friends kissed me good-bye. They said they were sorry to hear that my arms could not be cut
off for souve­nirs. You whirled me out the door and we walked away from the party.

As we strolled past
the antiwoodpecker factories of New York, you were beginning to think of me in artistic terms. I
could see it in your face. You were planning my next exhibit and I could see it take shape along
the cliff of your face, spreading upward like a glacier to your eyes.