Zoe shrugged. There was a lot happening everywhere. But she had some kind of business in New York. She wasn’t after fame and the victory of self-destruction like Trancas was. She wanted something else, something more like what Alice must have had after she’d gone to Wonderland and then returned to the world of gardens and schoolbooks and laundry on the line. She wanted to feel larger inside herself.
“Fine,” Momma said, and her voice took on a gratified bitterness. She loved defeat with a sour, grudging appetite, the way she loved food. “Do whatever you like.”
She went back into the house, stepping on the grass in red canvas shoes. Poppa stood over Zoe, still touching her hair with one hand and holding the flat of marigolds in the other. The smell of the flowers cascaded down, rank and sweet. Marigolds collapsed helplessly inside their own odor. They were just smell and color, no rude vegetable integrity.
“Let’s get these planted,” Poppa said tenderly. “And I’ll take you to the twelve-thirty train.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I’m sorry I go away so much.”
“It’s okay,” he told her, and she knew he was telling the truth. Susan’s absence punched a hole in the house, and Billy’s did, too. Susan took a piece of the future with her when she went; Billy took the mistakes of the past and made them permanent. Her own departure had a different kind of logic. It was part of her job to leave.
Sometimes Cassandra was in the bar. Sometimes he wasn’t. Zoe found that she waited all week for the nights she went out to the bar with Trancas, and when Cassandra wasn’t there Zoe felt dejected and diminished, as if a promise had not been kept. When Cassandra was there Zoe said hello to him with a swell of anxious hope, the way she’d speak to a boy she loved. Cassandra always said, ‘Hello, honey,’ and moved on. Zoe wasn’t in love with Cassandra but she wanted something from him. She couldn’t tell what it was.
Trancas started turning tricks to earn the money for a motorcycle. She told the first story as an accomplishment.
“I hung around in front of this theater on Forty-second,” she said to Zoe in a coffee shop on Waverly. “I was so scared, I was like, what if nobody wants me? What if nobody even knows what I’m doing?”
Trancas’s face was bright and homely, red with an exaltation that resembled rage. She dumped five spoonfuls of sugar into her coffee. She wore her gray denim jacket and a Grateful Dead T-shirt, a skeleton crowned with roses.
She said, “I told myself I’d stand there, like, fifteen minutes, and if nothing happened, I’d go home. So, like, about fourteen and a half minutes go by and suddenly this guy comes up to me, just a regular guy about fifty. He didn’t look rich but he didn’t look like a creep either, he was just all polyester, one of those guys, you know, just a guy, probably worked in an office and did something all day and then went home again. Anyway, he comes up to me and at first I thought, he’s a friend of my father’s. Then I thought, no, he’s gonna tell me something like the bus stop is down at the corner or give me some kind of Jesus pamphlet or something. But no. He walks right up to me and says, ‘Hi.’ I say hello back, and he says, ‘Can we make a deal?’ And my heart is pounding and I’m so scared but my voice comes out like I’ve done this a thousand times before, like I’m an old hand at it. I look at him a minute and then I say, ‘Maybe.’ And it was weird, Zo. It was like I knew exactly what to do and what to say and how to be. He asks, ‘What do you charge?’ and I say, ‘Depends on what you want.’ I was so cool, I don’t know where it came from.”
“What did he say?” Zoe asked. She leaned forward over the scarred, speckled surface of the table. In the kitchen of the coffee shop, a man with an accent sang, “Hang down, Sloopy, Sloopy, hang down.”
Trancas said, “He said, ‘I want to get blown, and I want a little affection.’ And you know what I said?”
“What?”
“I said, ‘A blow job costs thirty dollars, and I don’t do affection.’”
“I don’t believe you.”
“It’s true. I was cool, Zo. I was playing a part and I was perfect at it.”
“Then what happened?”
“He said, ‘How’s about twenty-five?’ And I just looked at him, like, stop wasting my time, jerk. And he sort of laughed, this big old haw-haw-haw with his big teeth showing, and he said okay, thirty it is. Then I thought, shit, what happens now? Am I supposed to know a hotel for us to go to? But he said to come with him, and we went, like, a few blocks over to this hotel he was staying in, the Edison or something. Yeah, the Edison. And we went up to his room and I said, ‘Before we go any farther, how about my thirty bucks?’ He did that haw-haw-haw thing again, and he gave me the money. Man. His teeth were as big as dice. He didn’t ask me any questions. He didn’t even ask how old I was. He just took his clothes off and he wasn’t a pretty sight but he wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever seen either and I took my clothes off and blew the motherfucker right there on the bed and then I put my clothes back on and got the hell out.”
“That’s it?” Zoe asked.
“That’s it. Thirty bucks.”
“You really did it?”
“Only way to get the money.”
“Weren’t you scared?”
“Zoe, I told you I was scared.”
“I mean, of him.”
“No. He was nothing to be scared of, you’d know that if you’d seen him.”
Zoe sipped her coffee, looked out the steamed window at Waverly Place. An obese man walked a gleeful-looking yellow dog he had dressed in a white blouse and a plaid skirt. There was a new world with no rules and there was the old world with too many. She didn’t know how to live in either place. Her mother was the guardian spirit of the old world. Her mother was proud and offended and she warned Zoe: Never let a boy talk you into losing control, boys want to ruin everything you prize.
Cassandra was the guardian spirit of the new world. He believed in sex but he believed in safety, too. He cautioned girls against going off with men who secretly worshipped harm.
Zoe said to Trancas, “I don’t know if you should be doing this.”
Trancas’s face held its rapt, furious light. She was already gone.
‘Thirty dollars, Zo,” she said. “For, like, twenty minutes’ work. Nine more guys, and I can get myself that Harley.”
“It’s prostitution, though.”
“Man. So is being a waitress or secretary. This just pays better.”
Zoe looked at Trancas and tried to know. Was she setting herself free, or was she beginning the long work of killing herself? How could you be sure of the difference between emancipation and suicide?
“If you’re going to keep doing it, be careful,” Zoe said.
“Right,” Trancas answered, and Zoe could see her dead. She could see her blue-white skin and the faint smile she’d wear, having beaten her mother, having gotten first to the wildest, most remote place of all. Having won.
Cassandra stood at the bar that night in an old prom dress, a chaos of emerald satin and lime-green chiffon. Zoe waited until Trancas had gone to the bathroom and went quickly up to Cassandra. Cassandra held a drink in his hand, talked to a tall black man in a velvet cloak and a canary-colored pillbox hat.
Zoe said, “Hello, Cassandra.”
Cassandra’s face was clever and squashed-looking under his pancake makeup, his lipstick and eyelashes. Cosmetics and the intricate cross-purposes of being a man and being a woman seemed to impel him forward, and he could look, at times, as if he were pressing his face against a pane of glass, speaking distinctly and a little too loud to someone on the other side.
“Why, hello, baby,” he said. “How are you?”
“I’m all right. Actually, I wondered if I could talk to you for a minute.”
“Honey, you can talk all you want. Start at the beginning and just work your way straight through to the end.”
“Maybe, alone? It will just take a minute.”
“There's nothing in this world that could possibly shock Miss Cinnamon here,” Ca
ssandra said.
“You got that right,” Miss Cinnamon said. A scrap of yellow veil quivered like insect wings over his shining brow.
Zoe paused nervously. “Well,” she said. “You know Trancas, my friend?”
“Sure I do.”
Zoe paused. She wanted to bury her face in Cassandra's gaudy dress, the slick, livid sheen of it. She wanted to sit on Cassandra's skinny lap, to whisper secrets in his ear and be told that a wicked and fabulous safety waited beyond the dangers of the ordinary world.
“Speak up, honey,” Cassandra said. His voice was hard and sure as rain in a gutter.
Zoe said, “She's started turning tricks.”
“Well, I'm sure that's very profitable.”
Miss Cinnamon put a huge hand on Zoe's arm. “Does she have herself a can of Mace, honey?”
“I'm worried about her,” Zoe said.
“She should carry Mace and a knife,” Miss Cinnamon said. “She can get herself a cute little knife, it doesn't have to be any big old thing. She can slip it right down inside her boot.”
“Why are you worried?” Cassandra asked.
“I'm afraid she'll get hurt.”
“That's why you need Mace and a knife, honey. Listen to what I'm telling you,”
“People do get hurt,” Cassandra said. “Terrible things happen.”
“I know,” Zoe said.
“You girls are so young. Don't you have parents, or something? Who takes care of you?”
“Trancas and her mother live here in the city. I come up on weekends, I live with my family out on Long Island.”
“Another planet,” Cassandra said.
“Terrible things happen there, too,” Zoe told her.
“Honey, I can imagine. Oh, look, here comes your friend.”
Trancas was back from the bathroom. She saw Zoe talking to Cassandra and came over, full of her own greedy happiness, her love of trials and ruin. Zoe thought of her folding money into her pocket before sucking off a man with teeth the size of dice.
“Hey, Cassandra,” Trancas said in her big-voiced, ranch-hand style. To Miss Cinnamon she added, “Great hat.”
“Thank you, baby,” Miss Cinnamon said demurely. Zoe saw that Miss Cinnamon had once been a little boy going to church with his mother. He had sat before an altar, under the suffering wooden eyes of Christ, as a chorus of velvets and brocades and crinolines sighed around him.
Cassandra said, “We were just discussing the ins and outs of the business.”
Trancas glanced at Zoe. Trancas's face was clouded with embarrassment and a defiant anger that resembled pride but was not pride.
“Right,” she said. “The business.”
“My only advice to you, dear,” Cassandra said, “is don't undersell. Not at your age. You could get twenty dollars for taking off your shirt, don't suck cock for less than fifty. If somebody tries to tell you he can get a blow job for half that much up the block, he's talking about getting it from some tired old thing who can barely walk unassisted and who needs her glasses to find a hard-on. Tell him to go right ahead and get himself a bargain, if that's what he's after. Now, if you're willing to fuck 'em, charge a hundred, at least. Don't flinch when you name your price. Don't bargain. And if you do fuck, make them all wear condoms. You don't know where some of those cocks have been.”
“Okay,” Trancas said.
“And, baby,” Miss Cinnamon said, “I was telling your friend here, carry protection. You get yourself some Mace, and a pretty little knife you can slip down in your boot.”
“Right,” Trancas said.
“We're the voices of experience, dear,” Cassandra said. “Listen to your aunts.”
“Okay,” Trancas said, and her face briefly shed its habitual expression of ardent mistrust.
They stood for a moment in silence, the four of them. Zoe was filled with a queasy mixture of love and fear unlike any emotion she could remember. She felt herself leaving her old life, the dinners and furniture, the calm green emptiness of the back yard. As a little girl she'd imagined living in the woods, but she knew she couldn't do that, not really. She couldn't build a nest in a tree, eat mushrooms and berries. Even if she'd had the courage to try it, someone would have come for her. She'd have been sent to one of the places that received girls who believed they could escape a life of rooms, and kept there until she'd renounced her wishes.
These were woods no one could stop her from living in. This was a destiny a girl was allowed to make for herself, this immense promiscuous city that harbored the strangest children.
She said to Cassandra, “Could I take you to tea sometime?”
Cassandra blinked, started to smile. “Excuse me? Tea?”
“Or, you know. A cup of coffee. I'd just like to talk to you. You're my aunt, right?”
Cassandra paused, considering. She smiled at Miss Cinnamon. Zoe felt as if she were talking to two wealthy, celebrated women. They had that private entitlement. They had that lofty, sneering grace.
“Tea,” he said to Miss Cinnamon, and he pronounced the word as if it was both funny and frightening. Then he got a pen from the bartender and wrote his number on a napkin.
“You should know,” he said as he handed the napkin to Zoe, “that your Aunt Cassandra will kill you if you ever, under any circumstances, call this number before three in the afternoon. Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” Zoe said. “I understand.”
Miss Cinnamon said, “There is nothing more evil than a drag queen getting woken up before she's ready. Believe me, baby, you don't want to mess with that.”
1972/ Will and Inez and Charlotte dropped acid together one last time, declared their devotion, and all went back to their parents' houses for the summer. When Will's parents picked him up at the train station in Garden City and took him home, he was surprised to see that the town looked both ridiculous and deeply familiar, familiar in an almost otherworldly sense. He might have been a hypnotist's subject on the verge of remembering a past life. He might have been traveling in another country where he knew supernaturally that the driver would take the next left turn, and that a gabled yellow house would appear from behind the scrubby blackness of a mulberry tree. He'd been prepared for his feeling of bored irritation at the sight of the unaltered lawns and the prim, prosperous houses. He'd imagined exactly his own sense of weighdessness as his father drove with both hands on the wheel and his mother talked about the new swimming trunks she'd bought for him on sale. What he hadn't expected was the sense of comfort, of almost surreal location. He'd never expected to feel, as his father's Buick turned the familiar corner, that he had in any sense come home. When he got out of the car he stood on the lawn staring at the house his father's money had built, grand in its suburban way, a big rambling folly with mansard roofs and bay windows, clean as bone in the summer light. There were no books inside, except the paperback bestsellers his mother read on summer vacations. There was no object, no dish or furnishing, older than Will. But there was familiar food. There was sanctuary. His father commanded the house from a position of profound and eternal ownership, and Will remained his father's servant in some way that was all the more powerful for being nameless.
“Penny for your thoughts,” his mother said.
“Huh? Oh, sorry.”
“I made chicken salad. Are you hungry?”
“I guess so. Sure.”
“Come on in, then. It's so good to have you home.”
He stayed less than two days. His flight was decided the first night. His father asked over dinner, “So, what do you think about a major?”
“I think I want to teach,” Will said.
It was a lie. He was surprised to hear himself telling it. He didn't want to teach. Teaching was monotonous, thankless, underpaid. He wanted to study architecture. He wanted to build.
His mother, thinner and more prone to smiling silences than he remembered, ran her fingernail along the rim of her plate. Iridescent flecks, hard little rainbows of electric light, flashe
d and faded in the prismed chandelier.
“Teach,” his father said. He pronounced the word with disdainful neutrality. He made a little brick of sound. Will's father had grown larger. His flesh had the puffed, padded quality of fat loaded onto a man born to be thin. Will suspected his father had gained precisely the amount of weight his mother had lost.
“Yeah. Teach.”
Zoe sat across from Will in her carnival colors, her patchy hobo-girl clothes and her tinkling gypsy jewelry. She smiled helplessly at him.
“Teach what?” his father asked.
“Kids,” Will said. Everything he said surprised him. He'd declared English literature originally, then switched to linguistics, and had now more or less settled on taking the courses he would need to apply to architecture schools after he graduated. He'd signed up to study Palladio and Frank Lloyd Wright in the fall. He'd be learning about the conduction of electricity through a room. But he needed a different life to show his father. He needed a self that didn't touch him.
He said, “I think I'd like to teach the kids everybody's written off. Like, maybe work with Head Start.”
“I think you'd be very good with children,” his mother said. “You'd be a wonderful teacher.”
“You need to go to Harvard for that?” his father said. “You could teach pickaninnies with two years of junior college.”
“Don't use a word like that when I'm here,” Will told him.
“Sorry. Nee-groes. Colored children. I don't get it. Where does the fancy education come in?”
“No, you answer one for me, Dad. Where does all this hate come from? What's the point? What does it get you?”
“Now, don't start, you two,” his mother said. Her fingernail made its faint scratching, a clean dry sound, on the china.
“What hate?” his father said. “I don't hate anybody, unless they give me a reason to. What I want to know is, why are you going to Harvard, to goddamn Harvard, if all you want to do is teach Neee-gro children?”
“That's it,” Will said. He took his napkin from his lap and threw it onto his plate. “Mom, dinner was delicious.”