COCO’S STORIES HELPED me think through things. They were like therapy or hypnosis probably are. But as soon as I got home and was alone again, it was back into the real self. I couldn’t get away from the sprit of Delores that haunted my apartment and clawed its way back into my mind. Every time I sat in that place, the demon took hold. The only thing that led me away from my pain was to think about Charlotte. Then I could forget who I was.
I finally decided that the thing to do was to ask Charlotte if she honestly thought that Beatriz could have had anything to do with Punkette’s death. If she was guilty, I wonder how long it took her to plan the murder. What was the final blow that made her decide, “Yes, I will take this step now”? If I killed Sunshine, I wonder what would happen next? I’d probably just sit in the apartment waiting for the police to come. There’d be no need to run away. Where would I go? Why? They’d come and take me to one of the women’s prisons and I’d have to wear green smocks, trade cigarettes, and learn how to play cards all day long with the other girls. When they bring you into court, is the press really waiting in a sea of flashbulbs, or does nobody notice, so you end up spending fifteen years in Bedford Hills taking Thorazine? Or, do you ever get away with it? Did Beatriz?
“You get used to the handcuffs,” this customer told me.
She had been in Bedford for passing bad checks.
“’Cause handcuffs means you’re going somewhere and somewhere is better than here. It’s like a dog jumping around happy when he sees the leash.”
I met her when she ordered an orange soda at Herbie’s and sat there for an hour sipping it.
“All the girls don’t feel the same about it. That’s just my way of looking at things.”
She had tattoos on her arm made from a blue pen and a pin.
“It gets pretty boring, so you look for little things to do.”
They were straggly and uneven. One tattoo said “Danger” inside a heart. That was her lover’s name, she said. Danger got out first but they never did try to meet on the outside. She told me that women who were there for murder, some of them, told her that right after you kill someone who really deserved it, you feel great. But right away you have to pay for setting things so right.
The couch was getting pretty dirty from me sacking out there every night, but I could not bring myself to walk into the bedroom because as soon as I stepped into the doorway, all of Delores’s lies came back to me.
“I love you so much,” she said. “You’re my family.”
Sometimes it got so bad that all I could do was lie there on the couch and watch the sky. If I had money I would have gone to a decent psychiatric hospital, but instead I was just another pathetic person on the Lower East Side. Charlotte and Beatriz were really my only happy thought. I hoped Beatriz didn’t do it. Some people’s passions are so unique that reality doesn’t have the right to invade. That’s how I felt about her and Charlotte in general—that they couldn’t be measured by regular standards. They were exceptional. They’d staked out a means of survival on their own terms, working together to take care of things. I’d rather think of them that way, then there was something for me to learn that was positive, instead of growing into another dimension of anger.
There were bars on my windows and outside them there were trees. I could hear radios from the street and at night, the moon peeked out from behind the projects. Sometimes I got so angry I thought my teeth would break. The only other thing I could think of to do was go find Charlotte. So I washed out Delores’s shirt and put it on again. It hadn’t totally dried and was starting to look a little tired.
Being out on the street felt better for a minute because everything was interesting there and I saw different levels of pain and possibility in a combination that was somehow palatable, or at least diverting. It’s only when you’re open that the harshest thoughts pop right in. Delores and I, we had our honeymoon and then we had our crisis. That’s when everything stops dead and you find out what the other person really thinks. It was that mundane. But all along I thought that if we could have stayed together through our little war, it would have been an opportunity to love each other in the most honest way. When you get informed, that’s when the real loving starts. Now I’d have to explain myself to someone all over again. And, truthfully, there’s so much confusion that the explanation seems to be an impossible task.
When I knocked on Charlotte’s door, it was Beatriz who answered.
“Is Charlotte around?”
Beatriz stood there relaxed, wearing her little black stretch pants and red everything else.
“No, she’s at her place.”
I wasn’t in the mood for any more surprises.
“Oh, I thought this was Charlotte’s place.”
“No.”
“Oh.”
“Do you want to come in?”
I stood in the dark hallway for one second too long.
“You mean this is your place?”
“That’s right. Charlotte has a place uptown. Are you hungry? I’m just about to make some eggs. Is something wrong?”
“Nothing. I lost my breath coming up the stairs. Sure. Do you … uh, mind if I look around?”
Everything was just the way I remembered it. There was one chair in the living room. The one I shivered on while Punkette danced. The tumor record was still on the stereo.
“Where did you get this album” I asked, holding up the jacket cover. It was a black-and-white photo of a French clone trying to look like a forties American movie imitating a thirties French movie.
“That’s Daniel, my son. He thinks he’s white these days and spends his money on these atrocities. Have you ever listened to this music?”
“Once.”
“So you know it’s terrible. I said to him, ‘Daniel, this is bad music. It is worse than what you hear on the elevators in department stores.’ But all he can say is, ‘It’s wry, Ma. It’s pretending to be stupid. You’ll get it someday, leave me alone.’”
Beatriz had a huge personality in that tiny body, and the difference between the two was quite clear. One was sharp and dangerous, the other, simply adorable. Like you could cuddle her until she got completely bored and bit your head off.
“The Gambino family opened a punk club down the block and he’s been wasting his mind hanging around there with the moneyed youth. He is sixteen now and totally beyond my influence. Last year he thought he was Puerto Rican. Even refugees from Argentina think they are better than all other Latins. Especially Puerto Ricans. Did you know that?”
“No, I didn’t. Is that how you feel?”
“Not here in New York City, the great equalizer, where we all become spics. Besides, I’ve never been a nationalist. Argentines are like Americans, master barbarians.”
Beatriz started cooking up onions and scrambling eggs. She kept talking with her back turned, so I could choose between looking at her body or looking around the apartment and she wouldn’t know the difference. I kept my hands in my pockets and tried to see everything, looking for remnants of Punkette. I was so uncomfortable and tense, I felt out of control and needed to do something that made an impact. Just so I could be sure I wouldn’t disappear. I walked around a bit in the tiny kitchen looking for something to hold on to when, on a whim, I stopped by the front door and quietly snatched the matchbook cover off the peephole. Then I had a secret too.
“My son is ugly to me these days.”
The onions were sizzling on the broken stove.
“The more manly he becomes, the more I find him so … unattractive. His face is too long. His skin is bad, like mine. He has no grace. The girls his age are so much more alive and brilliant. That’s when I was the smartest, age sixteen. I knew everything I know now, but I didn’t believe myself.”
She could tell me anything. It didn’t matter to her at all. I glanced, sideways, at the exposed peephole; it was huge. Beatriz was sort of humming and then she started laughing to herself. I was feeling nervous, sweating. She’d surely notice the hole in the door, then what would I say? She started to set the table, still laughing. What was she laughing about when everything was so serious? She looked up, suddenly, and caught me panicking. Then the door slammed.
I turned around expecting Charlotte’s black eyes, demanding to know what had happened to the peephole. But instead, it was an overgrown teenaged boy.
“Daniel, why do you slam the door?” Beatriz said, knowing he was already in the next room.
Her son was homely and brash, filled with an authentic street cool of his own invention. His Nikes were laced, not tied, his cap was on backward. He had suspenders and wore his belt invitingly unbuckled. His style was too new and homemade to appear in any magazine. In two years it would all be mass-produced for white kids to wear, but for the moment Daniel was a happening young man. He was chill. He was fresh.
“Daniel, did you get the lock I asked you for?”
“I forgot.”
“Well, don’t forget again.”
“All right, Ma, all right.”
He was filled with an energy that could as easily become brutality as anything, and had inherited his mother’s masculine nature, a woman’s masculinity that is too delicately defined to transfer well to sons. He smelled of the future and that future was frightening to me because I couldn’t imagine ever being ready for it. There was too much in the present that I didn’t understand. He kept going in and out of the bedroom, looking at me in the eye once in a while. I noticed his huge feet as he was out the door again, back to the things that were really important: matters of power and honor.
Beatriz was quiet for three heartbeats and then resumed her faint humming. I looked for something to say.
“How do you like living on this block?”
“Too many junkies. They’re even stoned when they rip you off. We got broken into but they left the stereo and took a cheap answering machine. Too stoned to steal properly. Can you imagine? Then, after a bit of time, they die. Probably only got ten dollars for it. Junkies sell everything for ten dollars.”
Beatriz pointed to a dusty square on the side table where something had once been, something that was now sitting comfortably but underused in my living room. So Punkette needed small change and she needed it right away—or just wanted it, that might be more like her.
We sat down together at the table. Beatriz poured water from a clay pitcher and offered me good bread. She tore her piece in half and put it by the side of her plate.
“This neighborhood is a prison between C and D, Coke and Dope. You stay young in prison, did you know that?”
“No.”
“In my country, I remember a famous criminal who had been sentenced when he was twenty and when he came out he was sixty. People gasped on the street when they saw his photograph in the newspaper because he stayed young while they’d all become old.”
Then she grabbed my wrist and pulled up my sleeve. Her grip was like iron. Even though she was half my size, she was completely determined and in control.
“No, Beatriz, I don’t have any track marks.”
“Good. I hate junkies. They’re liars.”
“Well,” I said, still feeling her fingerprints on my wrist. “Crack’s the thing these days anyway. No needles, no marks, no AIDS.”
She went to the mirror and started combing her hair, changing her earrings, changing her scarf. Her hands and feet were very tiny and her slippers, refined.
“Don’t think that I’m afraid of death. It is the waste of time that disgusts me. In Argentina, I killed a woman, but it was a political assassination. I can say this freely, knowing it means nothing tangible to you.”
I was eating eggs with a woman who said she had killed another woman, at least one, because she had to. Claiming it was almost as good as doing it, choosing to be known as a murderer. I wanted to be repulsed, but discovered, instead, a twisted admiration. Beatriz stretched her mouth tight, waiting for lipstick.
“Now a woman is dead who would have been murdered eventually and I have survived into this life.”
I looked back at the open peephole.
“You in America don’t have this decision but everyone else in the world must choose between making love and making history. You Americans impact on the world simply by eating breakfast, with so many people working so hard so you can have it exactly the way you like it. For the rest of us, we have to fight to affect anything, or else just live our private lives of hope and sorrow. If I want power in the world, then the world must take priority, not personal habits like love. At precisely the moment when I become convinced of which direction is most necessary to me, the other presents itself. Now, theater, that can be made for love or history.”
“And now you’re making it for love?”
She smiled a tired smile. It showed the beginnings of a wrinkled face that would become increasingly exquisite with old age.
“I make theater with Charlotte. Sometimes in the early morning she is smiling, plotting in her sleep, being wild in her dreams. I brush back her hair and say, ‘Bad, sleeping beauty, bad.’ Because she is the mischievous imp in every fairy tale, and with a woman like that, all you can do is pretend. Those are the moments when I can see so clearly what we can make together. And you? What kind of family do you come from? What does your father do?”
“He’s a narc in the Dominican Republic for the CIA.”
“Oh, the intellectual type.”
And we both cracked up laughing.
We were drinking coffee by that time and I could see right through the peephole into the hallway. It completely altered the apartment. It was staring at me, like Beatriz was staring at me. I needed another question, quickly, so she wouldn’t look at me so hard.
“How did you and Charlotte meet?”
She was really solemn for the first time that afternoon, as though all this talk about murder and politics was throwaway chitchat but Charlotte was a serious matter. Beatriz’s eyes were like the nipples on Coco’s lover. Dark and sharp as swords.
“Onstage, of course. I’m not usually attracted to actors. In fact, they are my least favorite people in the theater. I could never say words I don’t believe, not for money, or approval, certainly not for the principle of being convincing on any terms. Watch out when an actor tells you, ‘I mean what I say.’ That’s the biggest lie of all. With Charlotte, the first thing I saw was her way of holding a script over her mouth so that only her eyes showed, laughing.”
She illustrated her story with a napkin at the kitchen table.
“Even though it was hidden, you could imagine the mouth and how wicked it was.”
Beatriz poured more coffee into my cup and I realized that I was beginning to slide. Maybe there was a bottle somewhere. If I kept drinking coffee, eventually it would kick in. I hoped that would be soon.
“In theater there are many moments inside of one moment, so without the precision of emotion, the play is nothing. It is slop. Charlotte and I were working together for the first time and we were developing a nuance that had to make itself understood in a matter of seconds. I tell you, she had me crying. She was wiping tears off her own face and slowly painting them on mine until they dripped down my cheek and onto my tongue. I know she’s selfish, but she can fool the magician. She fell in love with me first, though, and I’ll tell you why. It’s because I’m not beautiful.”
Yes, you are, I thought.
“Beautiful women never take beautiful women for lovers. They like elusive faces and quirky expressions. It’s because they want to be loved for themselves, but they also demand adoration. And they don’t ever want competition. Especially from the same bed. But, she unleashes me. Our first night together we had talked all evening, strolling the summer streets, with sirens and water pouring out of hydrants. Two elderly women were yelling in Spanish, their fat arms sticking out of cheap housedresses. When the time came to make love, I was sitting on my bed saying, ‘Come here,’ and Charlotte walked towards me in a moment filled with wanting and compliance. She took those steps across the dark room. She didn’t look at me, but there was volition and desire and her body coming closer with no affectation. It was a raw honesty that showed me then how much the rest of my life was lies.”