“I don’t know any woman who would want to play her,” said Taña.
“Neither do I,” said Sunny. “Fellini’s done her already, huh, Lance?”
“I’m certainly not playing her,” said Nanci.
“If there’s anything I hate,” said Judy Louis, “it’s bachelor parties with girls jumping out of cakes, and stags horning around the table.”
“But she’s not a cake girl,” said Wittman. “She’s scary. What is it about her that scares you? Her size?”
“She is too a pop-up out of the cupcake,” said Judy, “and I’m not scared. Everybody else wears armor, and she’s naked.”
“But she’s bigger than they are. She’ll raise the question of how come our other beauties are bony witches.” He was describing the effect of mascara and eyeshadow and contoured cheeks and noses on the very women around him. Indeed, witch women were riding again, on boy’s bikes, which are better made and more like broomsticks than girl’s bicycles. Hair streaming behind them, they screeched at windows, “Come out. Come out.” They were retrieving old names and the past by ouija board. They’d been burned at the stake in a prior life, and were tough. You play right or else, Wittman, we’re going to get you, Monkey King. Not heeding a goddess when he was face-to-face with one, with four, he went headlong, “I won’t leave out my large lady. There’s a tradition of fatness that we have lost. All that’s left are the hippo ballerinas in Fantasia. This fat beauty heated up kung fu opera twenty years ago, and I want to see her dance again. I want to bring her back. If none of you guys want to play her, I’m going to have to go on a star search.”
“A Hong Kong actress would do it,” said Nanci, whose hair color was witch black. She looked down her pale thin nose.
“Felliniesque,” said Sunny. “Too Felliniesque.”
“Soldiers in fatigued outfits bore me to death,” said Judy. “I don’t go to movies without female leads. No glamour dresses. No romantic interest. No love music. Men dramas, no good. I see on the t.v. news, suit men meeting and discussing, I know already, up to no good business.”
“I hate movies about guys who don’t shave digging out of some stalag,” agreed Taña. “Or military guys who never change costumes inside the same submarine or foxhole for two and a half hours. I can’t sit through trial movies either, twelve guys in a jury box.”
“You don’t understand,” said Wittman. “The fat dancer has unbound feet and unbound tits and unbound hair. She busts through stereotypes. That we’re puritanical. That Han people don’t dance. That a fatty can’t hold center stage. Okay. Here’s a part you will live and die for. The drumming for the fat dance is pounded out by a noblewoman named Hoong Ngoak a.k.a. Red Jade. She led a navy to the rescue at the height of the war that you have guessed is coming up. She outfitted the crow’s nest with a big-ass taiko wardrum, and she rode that swaying crow’s nest through days and nights of sea battle. She kept alit a lantern over her head, and against the black sea and sky, she was a flying, drumming, lit inspiration. The white fur of her headdress circled her face. Her long black hair and the tails of ermines blew with the speed of the flagship. She is a loud-drumming will-o’-the-wisp faery, and she flies on a pair of wings, flags tucked into her sash, the flag of Han and the flag of her family, Leong. Leong Hoong Ngoak, her total name. In the midst of battle, in a star of light—the spot will pick her out in a top balcony or on the catwalk or on a flyup—she’s a miraculous living figurehead. She’s a target for explosives flown up to the crow’s nest by missile birds, which explode and make flare the metal discs in her headdress and in her pink silk maybe bulletproof jacket. From the fleeing ships, she appears to be a supernatural being coming after them. She whips up the drumbeat, and the wind and the waves rise. The sun comes up. We see her fleet—flats of ships, each flat larger than the one in back of it, like a fan of face cards, many ships, each one diminishing in size clear out to the horizon line on the backdrop. The ships have faces—eyes on either side of the bow, which is the nose, and there are moustaches too, and mouths—swimmers treading ocean water while talking and arguing. Lady Jade whams her club-like drumsticks, tasseled with horsehair, down and down upon the taiko for loud war. Her fleet traps the enemy in a bay—we can stage this on Lake Merritt or Lake Temescal, or in the Bay—and her sailors swashbuckle the enemy ships while she drums out victory. They burn the flags of the Gum/Gold armada, who are bearmen and wolfmen.”
Unfortunately for peace on Earth, the listening ladies were appeased, and Lance had run out of plowshare ideas. Nanci and Taña and Sunny and Judy thought that if they were allowed to play war women, they were liberated. The time of peace women, who will not roll bandages or serve coffee and doughnuts or rivet airplanes or man battleships or shoot guns at strangers, does not begin tonight.
The unfamiliar light of Saturday morning—daybreak. A wind from the Valley blew the dawn in clouds up and over the Altamont and down into Oakland.
Sky poured pink through the windows. Everyone floated in pink air—spun sugar, spun glass, angel’s hair, champagne. The friends moved toward the windows to see where this rose was coming from, and saw everything, the water of the Bay, the glass of houses and buildings, the sky, the dew on the grass, rose-blessed. Is the sun like this every morning if we but wake early enough to catch it? Is it a time of year—a season of rose air? The crew in the lightbooth has flipped on the pink gels, and tinted all the stage and the men’s and women’s faces. It seemed as if you could float out the window on the strange atmosphere. There are Chinese people who would explain that Gwan Goong was paying us a visit; the color was emanating from a building in downtown Oakland, where you could have seen Gwan Goong’s good red face, or its reflection, upon ten stories of brick wall. You could have asked for any wish, and Gwan Goong would have granted it. You could have been a millionaire. As it turned out, nobody in this gathering of friends was ever again afraid when flying in an airplane. And later one or another of them in danger felt that there was someone protective beside or just ahead of him or her, making a way. They didn’t discuss the rose air, didn’t compare one’s sensing of it with what anyone else was seeing, if anything, until years later when two happened to meet, and somebody said, “Do you remember that morning seeing the air—the air before your eyes and on your hands—pink and rose?” And then they wondered that they had not exclaimed over it at the time. (Could it have been a waft of nuclear testing gone astray from the South Pacific?)
A feeling went through Wittman that nothing wrong could ever happen again—or had ever happened. It’s very good sitting here, among friends, coffee cup warm in hands, cigarette. Together we fall silent as the sun shows its full face. The new day. Good show, gods. Why don’t I, from now on, get up for every dawn? My life would be different. I would no longer be fucked up. I set out on more life’s adventure with these companions, the people with whom I have seen dawn. My chosen family. We’re about to change the world for the better.
Sunny walked about her house with a brown paper bag picking up paper plates and beer bottles and plastic wineglasses, dumping ashtrays, wiping food up off the floor. “Come on, people, either keep it in your mouth or on your plate,” she said. She was a full-time housewife, which she had to be in order to keep the trompes-l’oeil functioning. She was returning what she had put away that needed protection from the party. Half of a round glass table went against one side of the wall, and the other diameter on the other side, the found bottles on top filled to elegant waterlines. Where there had been dancing, she lowered a board hung on chains back down to its height as a table, découpaged with the pages of Beardsley’s Savoy book. Salomé’s big lips kissing John the Baptist’s head, blood looping in designs like her long sleeves. On top of that, pillboxes and a vase of fake lilies, and green bananas ripening to go with the rug. She had painted the gold and black rays of Art Deco shooting out of doorframes. Lance handed out hot towels for faces and hands. O comfort.
“We’ve only started,” said Wittman, out the door and across the por
ch and down the stairs and through the yard. “This play is immense. Epic. Our story won’t fit a one-act on a unit set of crates and burlap bags. I’m going to bring back to theater the long and continuous play that goes on for a week without repeating itself. Because life is long and continuous. The way theater was in the old days. I mean the old days in this country. The audience comes back every night for the continuation. They live with us. The thing will not fit between dinner at the Tivoli and the after-theater snack at Martha Jean, Inc. or the New Shanghai Café.” His friends agreed that he should work some more on the play; they would act in it, and they would be on the lookout for more actors and a venue. Then Wittman was again out on the streets, but this time with Taña.
Dew sparked on the lawns and parked cars. A church bell rang a few iambs. Brother Antoninus, are you waking up at St. Albert’s? A black-and-white cop car and a black-and-white cab cruised past each other. We’re in a good part of Oakland, which used to be restricted. “No person of African or of Japanese, Chinese, or any Mongolian descent will ever be allowed to purchase, own, or even rent a lot in Rockridge or live in any house that may be built there except in the capacity of domestic servants of the occupant thereof.” Lance was living there in an integrated marriage, and Wittman was walking there. Oakland Tech ought to be teaching this localest history.
Passing St. Albert’s, Taña and Wittman learned that they had something in common. On dates, each with another, they had followed the sound of men’s voices chanting, carrying far without electric amplification. Hiding in the bushes outside the gate, they had seen monks in procession around the grass. Breath issued from cowl hoods. Which one of those figures was Brother Antoninus himself? Hands from angel sleeves held and shielded candles. How is it that rows of lit candles stir you so? It’s automatic. The candles at the Big Game rally at the Greek Theater the night before the Cal-Stanford game get to you too, religiously. Birthday children become arsonists because if little candles on a cake can make me feel this religious, what if I set fire to a building, why don’t I blow up a country? Knowing some Latin from high school, Wittman had felt on the verge of understanding the songs. “Compline,” said Taña, “the last prayer at night.” The compline had been so wonderful, Wittman admitted that he’d wanted to join up but for his vow against missionary religions. This time of the morning all was still, no people on the grounds, and no lights in the buildings.
Taña had taken off her sandals with the tire treads for a long, barefoot walk around the dog shit of Oakland. She held her shoes in one hand and Wittman’s fingers by the other. He sang to her, “Tiptoe through the tulips, through the tulips with me.” A bearded man, holding his head with care, climbed some front steps, and before going inside, turned and gave them a wave. Fellow tripper come through the night, come home. Not every last one of us who trips out of a Friday night makes it back home. Across the street, a couple with arms around each other hurried along, then stood to talk, then hurried on. A raven had darted a feather into her hair. He carried a black cape folded over his arm. Yes, all over town, batwings were closing. May the minds that shot off to other planets and dimensions settle gently adown to the ground of our Earth.
A single sheet of newspaper flared up into the air and flew, gliding and opening, and sailed over their heads. Like a blank piece of paper, I drifted along past the houses, up the boulevard again. Wittman ran after it, pulling Taña along. Please be the girl that I’m in love with.
Her sandals under her armpits, she held on to his hand with both of hers and dragged him to a stop, and up some side stairs of the California School of Arts and Crafts. She led him to a courtyard, and where she leaned back on a wall soft with moss. He leaned above her, like his elbow against her high-school locker. “Hey, wanta make out?”
She didn’t laugh, but looked gravely into his eyes for quite a while. “Yeah. Let’s make out.”
“Let’s swap spit,” he said, but giggled his Chinese giggle. He had lost his previous cool. He firmed up his face. Took her face between his hands, blonde hair between his fingers. Gave her a hard kiss. Pulled back to look at her, to see how she liked it.
She looked big eyes back at him. Held his gaze. He loved the way her eyebrows frowned; she was troubled. He was getting to her. He took another kiss, longer. This time when he looked, her eyes were closed.
“Hey, Taña,” he said. “Taña. Wake up. Talk to me.”
She put her mouth up to his ear, and said, “You want it hot, I’ll make it hot for you.”
He held her chin, led her mouth away from his ear, back to his own mouth. Lips barely rubbing, he slid past her mouth and attacked her ear. “Hey, tell me. Are you blonde all over? Huh? Are you? Are you blonde everywhere? Blonde body hair? Where else are you blonde?”
“My armpits. My armpit hair comes in blonde. Why? Are you queer for blonde pubic hair?”
Shit. A queer for blondes. If she had brown hair, would he have said, “Are you brown everywhere? Do you have brown pubic hair?” “Blonde chick. White girl,” he said, calling her names. “Are you a loose white girl? Where do you live, loose white girl? I want to take you home. And I want you to invite me in.”
She ought to have slapped his hands away, and dumped him for acting racist. If you have principles, you do not like him anymore when you find out somebody’s a racist or a Green Beret or a Republican or a narc. You ought to be able to sense such a defect, and the obstinacy of it, and run.
“Did you go to ‘America Needs Indians’?” Taña asked. Yes, the first multi-media event in the world. There had been movies and slides, color, and black and white, projected against these four walls, the sky with moon and clouds overhead, and music and wise Indian voices chanting like Gregorian, like Sanskrit Buddhist. The crowds turned around and around to see everything, and their juxtapositions. A herd of buffalo charged from one side, and mustangs from the other. Indians riding across Monument Valley, and, simultaneously, close-ups of their faces. The art students had painted one another’s faces with Day-Glo. People kept saying, “The tribes are gathering again,” which sounded new and old. An airplane or a flying saucer—come for us—would look down and see a square flashing in marvelous light show. Now the walls were dark and no vibes. “Because it wasn’t here,” said Taña. “It was at the Art Institute.” Wittman took her word for it, having been too ripped, and also, Chinese having no sense of direction. (That’s why the Long March took so long.) Wittman and Taña might have met each other at “America Needs Indians.” “What hours were you there?” “What were you wearing?” “Who were you with?” “Who were you?” “I sort of remember somebody who might have been you. Did you wear braids with a headband?” More and more in common. She can be my continuity- and direction-finder.