I FOLLOWED CHARLOTTE into the theater. We were the only shadows passing under the streetlights. The whole block seemed deserted and black.
She stumbled past the chairs and threw a few switches on the lighting board. Then the stage had two eyes, one rose, the other, pale blue. She pulled me by the hand until we each sat in our own spotlight.
“Wait a minute,” Charlotte said, bringing up a soft backlight so I wasn’t alone anymore. There was enough light for each of us and between us too. I looked up into the heart of the stage light and started crying real tears. Then I knew that was how they did it.
“Are you okay?” Charlotte said.
“Okay,” I said.
“Great.”
She clapped her hands and jumped up. That was the first time I saw how tight her ass was. She looked like a pressed flower lying in a book.
“Quick, this is our scene together, coming up. Sit at an angle so it looks natural to the audience. Okay: places, lights.”
The lights were as cool as they could be, like the docks at night in a black-and-white movie. Charlotte was in character now, looking dangerous and interested. I was respectfully quiet, waiting for her to happen.
“What do you learn from examining me the way you do?”
She asked that question with a slightly British accent, as though we were guests at a turn-of-the-century garden party where the emotional dramas of the upper classes were carried out in the calmest and most naturally inquisitive manner. I could see Charlotte, parasol in hand, strolling the rolling green estate in a white afternoon frock and large hat.
“I like looking at you, Charlotte,” I said. “Because you’re beautiful and you change all the time. I like watching the changes, they make me happy.”
I said that in my usual voice and usual New York accent. It was almost magic, like I was talking to a picture show and still being myself. I could be my own character.
She waited for a minute, tightening her jaw and stooping over slightly so her chin dropped and her face got longer. It stretched as her eyes died a little bit.
“Jesus,” she said, slowly bending over an immigrant woman in Brooklyn somewhere in the days before the Big War. “Jesus, I’ve been beautiful my whole life,” she said, wringing out the clothes and hanging them on the line between her fire escape and the O’Briens’ across the alley. “I’m sick of it. People tell me I’m beautiful when they say they want something from me or they have nothing else to say.” She brushed a wilted strand of hair off her sweaty face. “Beautiful.” She was mocking now. “Beautiful as a spring flower.”
“Not a flower, Charlotte,” I said. “You’re beautiful like a building with red brick and cornerstones. It took hundreds of men to build you and now you’re solid and contain everything.”
“Stop,” she said. Then she screamed it. “Stop.”
She screamed “stop” the way you yell at someone when they’re just about to hurt you, so that when they do, your scream is embedded in their memory.
“Stop staring at me all the time, it’s boring as hell.”
For one minute I thought she might be serious and I felt so bad I wanted to say “shit” but instead I said, “Charlotte.”
“You want to look at me?” she said. “All right, all right, goddamn it, I’ll let you look. Look!” And she sat down next to me and waited.
I could smell her. She was almost rotten. I could hear her breathing and watch her chest puff up and down. I saw dirt in her ears. I saw a neck like a mountain and hands that were dangerous. They were murder weapons. Charlotte could kill me easily. It wouldn’t take a thing.
“Let me see your legs,” I said, and she lifted up her skirt. They were chimneys.
“Finished?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m finished.”
So she became Charlotte again and turned up the house lights.
“There’s that strange moment in rehearsal,” she said, “where a good actor tries something new and it looks silly. Then all her moments seem suddenly transparent as though she’s just a fake, not an artist. I love when that happens to me because then I have to start all over again.”
Fuck you, Charlotte, I thought. This is no goddamn rehearsal. This is true. But I didn’t tell her the truth. I hid it in a statement designed to contain both undying loyalty and bratty insolence.
“Beatriz knows all about you and Marianne. I didn’t tell her.”
“What did Marianne say about me?”
She watched me very carefully.
“Marianne told me that she loved you, and she really wanted things to work out. She felt lonely when she couldn’t be with you. She told me some things that you like to say.”
“Like what?”
“She told me that you said there was a palm at the end of the mind and it’s on fire.”
“Yes,” she said quietly. “It’s burning. And there’s a bird. Its fire-fangled feathers dangle down.”
“What?”
“Its fire-fangled feathers dangle down.”
“Do you know Coco Flores?”
“Who?”
“She said that same thing to me just the other day.”
“It’s a famous poem by Wallace Stevens. A lot of people know it. What else did Marianne tell you?”
“She didn’t tell me anything else. Charlotte, I don’t think I know what you think I know. I just don’t think so.”
She was sitting on her knees with her hands folded in her lap, looking like a middle-aged nun. She had knees like the man in the moon. When she knelt before me, they were as large as my face. I could lick them for an hour and still not cross all the mountains. Here’s how I would make love with Charlotte. I would dress her up in feathers and have her hold me by the ass, carrying me around the room. I’d squeeze her waist tight with my legs and bury my face into the stone of her neck.
“Beatriz does know about Marianne,” Charlotte said. “I just don’t want her to know that Marianne was on junk. That’s something Beatriz is not capable of understanding. Okay?”
“Okay.”
I knew Marianne was not on junk.
“Can I trust you?” Charlotte asked, turning her head so fast her hair flew. “No, I don’t think so.”
“I’m sorry, Charlotte,” I said, deeply ashamed. “Do you want me to go away?”
As soon as I said it, I remembered that that’s exactly what Delores used to say whenever we’d have a little spat. She’d say, “Do you want me to go away?”
And I’d say, “No, Delores. I love you. We’re just having a fight. It’s no big thing.”
I’d say that because I wanted to be able to persevere with people, to have faith in them. But I was so, so stupid. Thank you, Delores, for showing me how stupid I’ve been.
“Yes, I want you to go away,” Charlotte said, laughing, as if she could have, just as easily, asked me to stay.