Felipe was looking at the sky and didn’t seem to notice, and when the song ended, the band just looked at each other, grinned, and started over again.
Y volver, volver, volver
En tus brazos otra vez
Estaría donde estés
Yo sé perder
Yo sé perder
Quiero volver
Volver, volver …
When the music finally stopped, people were whistling, cheering, and carrying on as if they were Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Was the entire crowd shitfaced? Marco had folded his arms, staring, and she staring back. I dare you. Do your worst.
Then a drunk fisherman began to weave his way across the empty floor toward her. The fisherman had lost three fingers on his right hand in a boating accident, and she later learned his nickname was El Capitán Garfio. Captain Hook to her Wendy.
Felipe held his ground as the fisherman tried to push past. Suddenly, they were grappling, then they were rolling on the dance floor. Someone tried to pull them apart, and someone else slugged him. The band struck up another ranchero number, and after the first few beats, almost in time with the music, a wave of drunken men broke over them, serenaded by screaming women.
Clamato pulled her clear while the mélée took over, yelling something in her ear when the cops showed up, four of them. Three went to break up the fight, and the other, heavy set with gray hair, and probably the senior officer, came over to Wendy and Clamato.
He was smiling as he asked her name. He wrote it down on a pad of paper, asked if she was American, and wrote down the answer to that. He asked how long she’d been there and wrote down those answers, asked where she was staying, and wrote that down, too. He was smiling the whole time.
“Entonces.” He was looking at Clamato. “Con quien anda?”
“Yo soy soltera,” Wendy said. Since arriving here, her Spanish had picked up considerably.
“Soltera pero no solterona,” the cop said. Single, but not an old maid.
“Anda conmigo,” Clamato said.
“Pues, mejor que la sacas.” He never stopped smiling.
“Gracias,” Clamato said carefully, turning to Wendy. “He wants us to get out of here.”
“No. He told you to take me out,” Wendy said, and turned to the cop. “Estamos en punto de salir.”
The other three cops had gotten Felipe back on his feet and cleared out the drunks. With a smile, one of them handed Felipe his crushed hat, which he put on. She could see he was looking their way from under the brim.
It felt like she was walking down the aisle. When she got to Felipe, she lifted her skirt and curtsied, the way she’d been taught in dancing class. Felipe doffed his hat with a perfect flourish and bowed back—she couldn’t remember ever having been bowed to before. She put out her hand, and he kissed the back of it. Marco was nowhere in sight.
Her Own Worst Enemy
I was staying with a friend from school in Easthampton a week or so after my Briarcliffe visit when Trish, my father’s secretary, called. “Peter, your mother’s been in a car accident. She’s in the hospital. Maybe you ought to come home.”
“I don’t think so. But maybe you should come anyway.”
It didn’t sound serious, but you never knew in our family. Nothing was clear with us, except the hatred that sizzled between my sister and our mother. I took the next train to New York, cabbed from Grand Central to Pennsylvania Station, and was lucky enough to catch the express. When I got to the house at eight, Hannah, the cook, said my father had gone to a dinner party but would be back early.
I called the hospital, but the nurse told me my mother was too tired to talk, didn’t want visitors, and that I should come next morning. Hannah fixed lamb chops, okra, and baby potatoes, and afterward I sat in the living room waiting for my father, looking through old family photo albums and feeling like everyone in them was a stranger. I crashed a little after midnight and didn’t get up when I heard his car in the drive.
On our way to the hospital the next morning, my father told me the details: car totaled, five broken ribs, broken collarbone, broken hip, multiple contusions. A hell of a lot more serious than I’d been led to believe. I didn’t even ask why he hadn’t called me himself. I already knew why. It was business as usual, and as usual I just sat there and took it, feeling hollower than ever.
In Rebel Without a Cause, one of my favorite movies, there’s a scene I sometimes think about when I think of my father. James Dean, the confused teenager, is on his knees, arms around his father’s waist, howling, “Please, Dad, tell me what to do.” His father is doing the dishes in a woman’s floral bibbed apron, looking completely nonplussed. He’s not a bad guy, just out of his depth.
I think about my father too when I see photos of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip. My father and the prince, consorts, kept men, were way too handsome for their own good. So they’d been collected. The queen and my mother looked very much alike into the bargain, the same regal frumpiness masking their power.
Mummy had been coming back from the country in her Saab with a load of fresh corn. There was no stoplight where her little road crossed the four-lane Westchester Pike; she picked the wrong moment to pull out and was hit squarely on the driver’s side by an eighteen-wheel car-carrier going about sixty. “The road was straight. The visibility was good. She just picked the wrong moment, that’s all.” My father sounded like a sleepwalker. “You should see the car. It’s a miracle she survived. You know, I asked what I could do for her last night and she said, ‘Nothing, just go to the dinner party and tell me about it.’ She’d been looking forward to it so much.” He sighed and looked at me as if seeing me for the first time. “She’d let me do nothing. You know, she’s always been her own worst enemy.”
In the hospital, my mother was hooked up to a respirator, and her eyes were closed. An electrocardiogram showed her heartbeat in graceful green curves of light that snaked across a black screen. The nurse said she’d “taken a turn” around dawn, and that the doctor would be in shortly.
I couldn’t remember anything the doctor said while he opened one of his mother’s eyes and shone a light into it. The pupil didn’t change size. “It looks very dry,” my father said in a shaky voice, and the doctor abstractedly lubricated the eye with a few drops of water.
“Hadn’t we better call Wendy?” I asked.
My father was staring at the electrocardiogram.
“Papa?”
He turned, gave me a polite smile, and raised his eyebrows.
“Wendy,” I said. “Shouldn’t she be here?”
My father cleared his throat. The only other sound was the clicking and wheezing of the respirator. He turned back to the electrocardiogram.
“I’ll go and call her,” I said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
The nurse showed me to a pay phone, but I didn’t have enough change. I charged the call to the home number, Midway 2–0816, and heard Hannah accepting. Then the woman at Briarcliffe said my sister couldn’t come to the phone.
“What? This is an emergency! I have to talk to her.”
“Who is this, please?”
“This is her brother. Her mother has just been in a car accident. She’s—”
The woman put me on hold. After what seemed like hours a man’s voice said in a German accent: “This is Doctor Reiger.” There was a long silence after I explained what had happened. Then Reiger asked if my father was available.
“He’s at the … bedside.”
“Quite so. I’m very sorry.” Another long silence. “Under the circumstances, I don’t think it would be beneficial for your sister to hear this information now. She’s … ah … she’s in a fragile condition and in fact tomorrow she’s scheduled to be transferred.”
“To a more inclusive facility.”
“A more inclusive facility? What are you talking about?”
“A facility that is better
able to meet her needs. Your mother and I discussed this several days ago when she visited here…. These were her wishes. Your father will know the details, of course.”
“He never told me about any of this.”
Reiger didn’t say anything.
“What’s going on, anyway?” My voice suddenly cracked.
“I think you know what is going on,” Reiger said after a short time. “After all, your mother acted because of what you told her, did she not? After your own visit? Please accept my heartfelt condolences, but I must go.” The line clicked and went dead.
Because of what I told her? Numbly, I hung up the phone and marched back down the long white hall to the intensive care unit. At my mother’s bedside my father and I watched the green curves on the electrocardiogram flatten out to a straight line. I realized I’d never seen him cry before, then realized I was crying myself. How very strange and sad: one minute the line was jumping and the next it was flat. I could almost feel the fatal pressure on the accelerator against my own foot. And suddenly I knew she’d done it on purpose.
Your father will know the details, Reiger had assured me in his Dr. Strangelove accent. But now we were crying together. I thought of putting my arm around his shoulders. I wish I had, but such a gesture wasn’t in our family repertoire.
The time was never right to ask about the details. Three months after our mother’s death, our father remarried, to an old family friend. My sister came to the wedding with an attendant on a day’s leave from her new facility, wearing a loose black wool dress that seemed very similar to the one she’d chosen for me in the Sears Roebuck. She wouldn’t even look at me, much less talk. Her face was closed, and if I’d passed her on the street I might not have recognized her. She could have been anywhere from sixteen to thirty-five.
Hot Sake
And here was Ellen on the phone twenty years later, telling me in her rapid-fire New York voice that my sister’s book had just hit the stands at Barnes & Noble, a not-too-bad display on one of the front tables. So far it had only been reviewed in the trade press: a rave in Publishers Weekly and a bash in Kirkus: “Wendy Davis tries valiantly to combine Arbus and Warhol through the entire spectrum of photographed sports, including her own work. This would be difficult, perhaps impossible, even if she had the talent.”
But it was early on the stands, a good thing to be on time for the major reviews. “Thanks,” I said to Ellen. “I’ll run over and get a copy. How’s it look?”
“Well, garish. The cover is that Clay-Liston shot, you know? With Clay crouching over the body, showing his teeth? But in really, really hot pink and purple, with blue stars.”
“Catches the eye, right?”
“You don’t have to defend her. She’s not even speaking to you. How long has it been?”
“Ten years. We tried seeing a shrink together, then blooie. Anyway, she doesn’t need me to defend her. So, are we still on for tonight?”
“Unless you’ve made other plans.”
“I’ve got a new manuscript to get through. See you at the Blue Ribbon at seven?”
“Okay, my sweet.” She blew a kiss into the phone. “I’ll try to survive on my own until then. I kind of liked the cover, by the way. You know me, I’ve always liked garish.”
At lunchtime I walked from my office to Union Square and circled warily around the Barnes & Noble display tables, heart beating as if I were about to see my sister in the flesh. There she’d be, with her slight crooked smile and her wide shoulders, watching me out of my own eyes. It would be like looking into a mirror for the first time in ten years.
But where was the book? Could Ellen have been putting me on? Only the New Discoveries table left, and of course that’s where it was, a low stack of four copies, the top one not even raised. Automatically, I removed the prop from a neighboring book and used it for one of hers. In Sport. The title in dark blue italic lettering over the hot pinks, purples, and electric blues of Clay-Liston. The standard quality coffee-table production, but slighter than most. Nervously I flipped it over to see the author photo, but there was none. As if she knew I was going to look for it. The brief bio read: Wendy Davis is a sports photographer and artist whose work has appeared in most major national sports magazines. Her art is included in the permanent collection of the San Diego Museum of Art and has been shown at the Gardos Gallery in Los Angeles, among others. She lives in Encinitas, California, and drives a 1956 Mercedes cabriolet.
In the first section, a discriminating collection of the great sports photos of the past—Babe Ruth pointing his bat, Billie Jean King at the moment of victory over Bobby Riggs, Dempsey KO-ing Firpo, Jesse Owens taking a hurdle at the Berlin Games, Toni Sailer on the grand slalom course in Kitzbühel, Bernard Moitessier at sea in the roaring forties, the 1956 Yale Olympic crew after their triumphant finish in Melbourne—retouched and augmented as in Warhol’s portraits of Jackie Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, and Chairman Mao. The subject matter was so extreme that they didn’t seem derivative. Some of them worked, some of them didn’t. But at least (I thought) they were all audacious.
The second section featured her own shots, some retouched, some natural, and my heart sank. She was trying to be the Arbus of sport—portraits of anguish, marginal characters verging on the freakish, big names caught off-balance—and she was not quite bringing it off. She hadn’t found her own way.
Leaving the propped-up copy on the table, I carried the others to the checkout line and told the girl that the stock had been sold out. It was the least I could do.
A wooden trencher of New York’s best sushi arrived, and Ellen poured our cups full of hot sake. We’d reached the stage in our relationship where she was beginning to ask about its direction. Where was it all headed? Why does it have to head anywhere, I’d answer. Aren’t we having fun with it the way it is? We weren’t living together, but sometimes I’d spend the night at her place on West 12th Street, sometimes she’d spend the night at my loft. Sex was comfortable—if it didn’t work out, she’d laugh and talk about training wheels. She loved finding new restaurants and watching obscure movies, and she’d once flown alone to Bali to see the fields because of a line in a Sting song about gazing on fields of barley. Maybe I would end up marrying her. I could think of worse things.
Before Ellen there’d been Alaia, a hippie-dippy folk singer from Vermont who sang like Lucinda Williams. Then Barbara, a raging inferno of intellect and neuroses who’d been to Yale and done graduate work in English at Berkeley. And French Céline, a high-fashion ad stylist so picky and critical I finally put her on a plane back to Paris. There were others. Sometimes I had trouble remembering them all, though I seemed to have no trouble remembering their breasts. Their nipples … the delicious range of shapes, sizes, and colors, each pair completely unique, like snowflakes. The good-byes were always dramatic, much more than the hellos. You could write a pretty good article about all the good-byes.
I lost my virginity in my junior year of college, living in a group house in a bad section of Palo Alto. It took no great effort on my part. She was the sister of one of my housemates and the former girlfriend of another, very smart and funny, overweight and Jewish. Endearingly called her bras “miracles of engineering.” Her nipples were unremarkable. We both knew it was just a fling, casual and unthreatening.
After a few weeks of sleeping with her, I visited a university counselor. “I’m kind of worried about my sex life.”
The lady counselor, somewhere in her forties, looked politely interested. How many times had she heard this line before? “And why is that? Aren’t you getting any?”
“Well, yes, but …”
“You mean, you don’t enjoy it?”
“Sure I enjoy it. But …”
The lady leaned forward with a little smile. I had her attention. “But … what?”
“It just doesn’t seem to be as great as I’d been led to believe.”
The lady laughed as if this were the funniest thing she’d ever heard. Then she gently put her h
and on my knee and said with great friendliness, “Well, join the club, Peter. You have absolutely nothing to worry about.”
I left her office feeling very confused. Losing my virginity had certainly not been my first sexual experience. But there was no way to compare it with what had gone before.
Céline and I would make love for hours. During one of these endless sessions she caught me looking at my watch and blew up. “You check the time when you’re making love with me?” she shrieked. “That’s it, it’s all over. You don’t understand what life is about. You’re nothing but a sitz-bath American.”
As my “gay bachelor years” in the Big Apple slipped slowly by, there was one feeling I couldn’t shake. Céline once called me a “black hole” (she pronounced it “owl”), typical French hyperbole, but there was a kernel of truth in it. There was an emptiness somewhere inside me, a hollow place, and as far as I knew there was only one person who could fill it.
“So I bought your sister’s book,” Ellen was saying. “Wow. Has she always been that, ah …”
I cocked my head, raised my eyebrows, and gave her my best shit-eating smile.
“Hey! I do believe you’re jealous.”
This seemed to be the time to tell Ellen about what had happened at Briarcliffe and afterward, something I’d been putting off. She looked wide-eyed over her cup of sake. “My God, Peter. She put her life in your hands. I hope you …”
I didn’t say anything. I might have looked down at my plate. I might have looked guilty, even though I wasn’t, as in the fire at school. It was all part of a syndrome. My sister had always given me the benefit of the doubt.
“Oh, Peter.” She set down the sake, open-mouthed. “How could you have?”