Michael and I stood not particularly close together behind the wall-sized picture window of the Traveling Medicine Show. Michael was gazing out on the early birds spruced up in their ties and jackets and high heels and makeup as they headed south.
It was an early Friday morning, still hours before what would be the last day of my second week at Evelyn’s. We were speeding to the point where everything is hushed and time quits, gives up, stops shoving you. The hard white crystals melting in the brain had catapulted us headlong into a Faustian dream where we hovered beyond mortality. We had escaped hunger, thirst, exhaustion, anxiety, frustration, sadness of all kinds. I felt cool and shameless, as numb as ancient sand blowing in the desert wind. Freed from the struggle. The contrast between us inside and them outside further heightened our already exalted state. We were dimensions away from the solemn taxpaying lot on the other side of the dirty windowpane.
“I never get tired of watching them go to their offices.” Michael shook his head in mock disbelief. He shivered with incomprehension, hugging himself and rubbing his muscles underneath the sleeves of his black T-shirt as if he were cold. In fact, the air-conditioning was on the blink, and the day already promised to be good and hot.
We continued to look on for a while in silence, too grateful to speak. I was feeling particularly blessed because lately I had Michael all to myself. Safe inside the dark bar, dressed in blue-jean cutoffs and a child’s T-shirt stretched taut over my flattened bosom, I imagined myself to be protected forever from ordinary life, from panty hose and hairdos. My contempt was perfect; I even found it in my heart to pray for them, that alien breed trudging along in quiet desperation, their numbers increasing with the rising sun. Why had I been spared? Just lucky, I guess.
“They look like the British raja, don’t they? Everybody buttoned up, covered from head to toe, the sweat already dripping. See how everybody ignores each other and keeps their eyes glued straight ahead. Why? And they’re always in such a big hurry, no matter what time it is. I can’t figure it out,” I finally said.
“All I want to know is how come I have everything I need, and I don’t have to do what they’re doing? God, good God...” Michael shivered again. A broad, smug smile shone on his face. “Wonder what the poor people are doing today?” he said, as if watching the nine-to-fivers were the sport of kings. Then, a moment later: “Maybe I could check out Evelyn’s sometime.”
“How do you expect to do that?”
“You know, I could pretend to be a john. I’d pay, of course, what the hell, we all gotta pay sometime. I’d just like to see what it’s like, the inside of a madam’s house. And Evelyn sounds interesting.”
“Really, Michael, you’re playing with me.”
“Nope. No, I am not.”
“But you don’t look like any john I ever saw. You’d never pass. Then she’d think we had some kind of conspiracy going, like we were casing the joint, planning to rip her off or something.”
“All righty, let’s see...I know, I could pose as your friend. How about that? Come over at the end of your shift. You’d introduce us. How about that, pretty clever, huh?”
“But honestly, you gotta believe me, there’s nothing to see down there. It’s the dreariest little setup.”
He turned his back to the window and walked over to his long table, where he sat down, put his feet up on the neighboring chair, pulled open the Village Voice, gave it a snap and disappeared behind it.
“OK, OK,” I said, following him.
I pushed the paper down below his face. He looked up then. There was a shady little smile playing on his lips.
“OK, I’d be delighted to introduce you to Evelyn. But, of course, she’s gonna assume you’re my pimp. Even if I tell her otherwise. And madams vie for ascendancy over pimps—did you know that? Well, they’re sort of competitors, aren’t they?”
“Since when do pimps wear moccasins with holes in ’em? I’m a mighty lousy pimp then,” he said.
At seven P.M. sharp the doorbell at Evelyn’s rang. I was shocked, overwhelmed. In cities, lives stretch out linearly. We show bits and pieces of ourselves, like shards of different-colored glitter on a string. Our friends very often have no use for one another. Work and home rarely intersect. Our past is discarded, detached like empty boxcars. We live in discrete worlds that we imagine are mutually exclusive. When two of these seemingly incompatible worlds combine, it feels as though two broken parts of the self were coming together.
I went to the door. Michael’s black hair was clean and pulled back in a ponytail. His blue jeans were the newest pair he owned, and he was wearing my favorite scarlet corduroy shirt, the one that threw his pale blue eyes in relief.
“Michael, meet Evelyn,” I said, leading him straight into the living room.
Evelyn kept her seat on the sofa. She was wearing skintight toreador pants, a half-unbuttoned black cotton shirt, and red high heels. The cleavage poured out; her long brown hair hung against her smooth white skin.
Michael approached and she put out her hand. I thought for a minute he was going to kiss it, but he shook it. Then he sat down in the armchair where the johns ordinarily sat.
“Janet likes it here,” he said.
“She’s a very good worker. Too bad business has been so slow,” Evelyn said.
Even though it was true, the reason she made a point of saying business was slow was because she wanted to back me up. If Michael were my pimp, it would figure I told him business was really slow so I could keep some extra for myself. She was assuming like a good whore I had lied, and this assumption was based on the original wrong one that he was my pimp. In other words, Evelyn was acting in some other scene entirely.
Meanwhile, Michael had assumed I never told Evelyn I was new at this, because that’s the way he would have handled my situation. He thought an admission of inexperience was the kind of tenderfoot confession that would automatically be exploited. When he told Evelyn I liked it here, he put the emphasis on “here,” as if there were other whorehouses to compare it with.
They were both wary and streetwise, and they were trying to look out for me, each in his or her way.
Sitting back in the armchair, Michael said he was comfortable. I realized I had never seen him sit with his feet on the floor before—come to think of it, I had never seen him in anything as bourgeois as an upholstered chair either. It was like letting in the outdoor cat for the first time and watching it make a beeline for the fire, where it curls up familiarly on the softest cushion.
Michael looked around at the brown-laminated living room. He nodded. “To the point.”
Evelyn offered him a drink.
“I drink rum,” he said apologetically.
“Not a problem,” Evelyn said, all of a sudden eager to please (no different from the rest of us poor fools as far as I could tell). She took coy little steps in her red high heels over to the small bookshelf-turned-bar, and it occurred to me that I was getting a first-time look at a whole other side of her. Evelyn the lady: no slang, no curses, no acid wisdom. As she mixed our drinks, she spoke deliberately and with an arch politeness. Not even the johns got this treatment.
After she had delivered the alcohol—a rum and Coke, a Dewar’s, and a Finlandia on the rocks—Evelyn rejoined me on the sofa, where we sat facing Michael. Following her lead, I crossed my ankles in an attempt to appear demure, but I doubt I pulled it off. I was dressed in one of my working outfits: black satin hot pants, granny boots, a tiny, puff-sleeved pink angora child’s sweater stretched across my bosom. Michael leered at me politely.
We let a moment of silence pass while we savored our drinks. Twilight slipped into darkness; longtime foes of the sun, the three of us heaved sighs of relief. No one thought to turn on a light for quite a while. Finally, Evelyn reached to her left, where an early example of Lucite supported the three-tiered plastic lamp. She lit the top bulb and turned it away. Still no one spoke. Michael and I would have sat drinking without saying a word until the stars came out, until the liquor had hit, as we often did when left alone, but Evelyn was better socialized. Eventually she more or less announced to the shadows against the wall in front of her that soon she would hop into her old Mustang and take off for City Island, where her daughter would be finishing up dinner, washing the dishes.
I pictured a raw domestic scene too brightly lit and needlessly busy. It was depressing, repugnant even: the tart smell of tomato sauce hanging in the air, the daughter squabbling with her brother and a mutt yapping at somebody’s heels, the TV playing a sitcom rerun, its canned laughter numbing the senses like a tab of Thorazine, drowning out the sweet chorus of late-summer crickets. But obviously, Evelyn looked forward to it.
“Eddie might be home. It’s too early for him to go out yet. Sometimes he just hangs out at Rocky’s on the corner. Sometimes he goes who the hell knows where. Never mind, I don’t worry about him anymore; it’s the street I’m worried about with him on it, if you want to know the truth.”
A few sips of vodka and she was beginning to sound more like her usual self.
“You should tell your daughter and Eddie, too, to come into the city and stop by my saloon.” Michael was fondling his glass, making the ice tinkle. Now he seemed restless and eager, talking about the bar, the home he so rarely left. “There’s free music most weeknights. We have a lot of good musicians who showcase their material there, like Tommy Shelter and Lionel Pike and, let’s see, Max Ghostly... Freddie Bombay played there last night...Omega’s going to be around this week. Remember her?”
“Lots of famous people.” Evelyn nodded politely.
“They like to try out new stuff. It’s on Seventy-Sixth and Second. The Traveling Medicine Show. Come by with Janet. Have a few cocktails on me,” Michael said.
“Eddie would like it. He’s into music, plays the guitar. I don’t hang out much anymore. Got other things to do at home. I never told you this, Janet, but I live with someone. A good man. He does hate to leave the island, though. Can’t drag him into Manhattan. But he keeps busy. Any kind of work out there he can get. He can do everything: carpentry, painting, even a little plumbing.”
“What’s his name?”
“Danny. Mr. Fix It. Local fellow.” Evelyn swallowed more vodka and started smiling over the rim of her glass. She was musing. “He’s simple in some ways, at least that’s what people think, but really he’s very wise. He’s taught me everything I know about plants, their names and when they grow and where, too. I never figured there were so many varieties of wildflowers right on City Island. Well, you’ll meet him, Janet, when you visit this Sunday.
“Michael, why don’t you come along? Plenty to eat. Nice view of the bay and the city. We get these really intense red sunsets out there on account of the pollution.”
For one instant, an entire dream blazed in my mind. Michael and me going somewhere together as a couple. Then, sure enough, he started to squirm a little and crossed an ankle over his knee. He hung on to his crossed leg as if he were trying to pull himself away.
“Sorry, gotta work.”
Michael never had to work, mainly because Michael didn’t do anything.
“Michael’s like those rare Beaujolais that don’t travel well,” I said.
“You mean we’re not going to be able to import him to City Island?”
We all laughed. Michael tilted his head and smiled at Evelyn as if he were seeing her just then for the first time. He uncrossed his leg, letting his foot drop to the floor. Usually he was not only shy, not just wary, but, truthfully, a touch paranoid as well, because he was always slightly psychotic from the methedrine. But he seemed to relax now.
When I came across someone I thought was worthy of Michael, I would make a case for that person, and I had devoted a good deal of time over the last few weeks to descriptions of Evelyn. Michael and I were both fiercely sentimental about our friends. For instance, there was 4-H Jimmy, the bartender from Indiana. Michael had regaled me one almost garrulous night with descriptions of Jimmy’s first studio apartment in the city: matching flour and sugar canisters in the kitchen, felt flags from Indiana State’s football team pinned to his wall. Jimmy used to wear madras Bermuda shorts on his day off back then. He was in such earnest then, breezing into the Traveling Medicine Show for a few cocktails before he went to work as a maître d’ at his clip joint on Third Avenue. Four-H Jimmy was so guileless it broke Michael’s heart. He made me appreciate his protégé. “Don’t be a snob,” he said.
The truth is I had very much wanted my madam and my Svengali to meet, and when Michael’s curiosity finally got the better of his fear, if I demurred at first it was because I felt I had a lot at stake. I wanted Michael and Evelyn to approve of each other. Now, I sat gloating between the two of them like an indulged only child.
He casually asked if he could check out the bedroom. “I’m curious,” he said.
“Hate to disappoint you, fella, but there’s nothing to see. Of course, you’re welcome to look. That much is on the house,” Evelyn said.
He went out into the hall and turned to his left. Facing the bedroom, he pushed open the beaded curtain with both hands and stuck his head inside. We got up and followed him as far as the edge of the living room.
“You can walk right in. No one’s gonna grab you and ravage you,” Evelyn called out to him.
“More’s the pity,” he said, but he didn’t go inside.
I shrugged my shoulders. “He told me he wanted to check it out, where I work. I told him there was nothing to see. I think mostly he just wanted to meet you.” I spoke softly so he wouldn’t hear.
“Handsome, that one,” Evelyn said.