The saskiad, p.34
The Saskiad, page 34
For some obscure reason Russell wants Jane to visit him where he works, so one night she agrees to come at the end of his shift. "Then we can go do something," Russell says.
"Like what?"
Clearly, he has no idea. 'You've spent a lot of time here, what do you do?"
She smiles gently, trying to let him down easy. "The things I like to do here, I have to do alone."
He wants her to take a taxi since the subways are so dangerous, but she tells him not to be ridiculous. So he goes out and buys her a can of Mace and describes to her how to carry it and where to aim it and how she has to remember to do this and never do that or else this happens, until she cuts him off with a reminder that she knew how to handle herself long before she met Russell Tierney.
When she goes to the address she finds a diner on a big avenue, and she sits at the counter and orders coffee from a Jo look-alike. It's near closing time, and the place is mostly empty. Looking through the open square where the waitresses hang up the orders, she can see the cook cleaning off the grill for the night, and off to the side, bobbing into view now and then, Russell stacking white dishes as thick as books. He doesn't see her, and she watches the intent hurry he brings to his task, white towel over his arm, retreating farther back to roll a tray of dishes into a hold, pull down the metal shutter and slap the button.
"More coffee, honey?" It's Jo, holding the glass bubble forward with crooked arm as though she were one big coffee pot and this her spout.
"Thank you."
"You're waiting for Russ?"
"Yeah."
"She's here, Russ!"
After Niko, the owner, flips the sign on the door, Russell fills ketchup bottles, straightens menus in their metal holders, mops the floor, all with the same seriousness and speed. "You been getting enough coffee? Holly, is there more coffee?"
Niko says, "Good enough, Russ. Go have some fun." Russell picks up a bag of leftover marble cake — "For James" — and Niko unlocks the door for them and waves them through with a smile for Jane, "Nice meeting you," even though she didn't exchange a word with him, and they set off in search of something to do.
Unfortunately, all Russell can think of is to go to a bar and have a beer, but none of them will let Jane in. The cafes, on inspection, prove to be too expensive. "Three fifty for a beer! Look at all those suckers in there."
"Why don't we just take a walk?"
They walk a few blocks up the bright avenue past the caged stores until the porn shops begin, at which point he insists they turn around. Back down the blocks, on the other side of the avenue. "Maybe we could see a movie or something," he says. But the only moviehouses on this stretch of the avenue are the porn ones, and he doesn't know where to find others.
Doesn't he ever go to movies?
To be honest, no. Ridiculously expensive. Only suckers go.
"It's probably too late to do anything," Jane says.
"No, this is the city that never sleeps. You can buy a kumquat at three a.m."
They end up in a diner not unlike the one he works in. Over his hamburger Russell talks about his job — about Niko, who "has a good head on his shoulders," who "saw an opportunity and acted on it," and about a couple of his coworkers, "bozos," who "wouldn't have the initiative to take their pants off if they were on fire." "I'd deal with those bozos in a second. I'd say, 'Hey, Jack! If you don't want to work, take a hike.' People are always trying to buck the system. You work with the system, and let it work for you. I want to learn the business."
"Dishwashing?"
"Food service."
Listening to him, Jane wonders fleetingly about his interior life — i.e., whether he has one. Does he dream at night? Or is he the source of that black hole of dreamlessness into which her own dreams are sucked? Last night she turned on the light while he slept and he lay there like a ton of bricks. "Russell," she said. Nothing. She's surprised the ice cubes woke him. Maybe his mother was just trying to get his attention.
Back in the apartment they smoke a joint in the Hole, and when the goodnight kiss comes she finds herself opening her mouth. She notes clinically that he is a better kisser than Danny Rizzuto. Soon he is mouthing her breasts. She pushes him up and unlike Danny he rises, stopping. "Don't," she says. But she has called another into existence. She can feel it against her thigh. "Do you think I'm sexy?" she asks curiously.
"Oh baby, do I."
What, exactly, is stopping her? Just another part of the body. Perfectly natural. After all this time, is she still not ready to put away childish things? Pathetic. She pulls down the front of his underwear and takes the top of it in her hand. All right, there it is. Are you satisfied now? A few days too late, a million years too late. "Oh baby."
"Don't call me that." He is the baby, with his simple need. All he wants, and so much better if Mommy does it. And the equipment right by, the tissues like diapers and the cream like lotion for his little bottom. She takes the lotion in her hand and does it. He turns his head to mouth at her breast and she would give him milk if she had any, but she lost that long ago, when she could no longer take off her skin. Instead she has this formula bottle, which keeps slipping out of her hand. He squirms. "Shh," she says, holding him tighter. He quivers, and whimpers, the milk spills from the bottle, and she holds him until he falls asleep.
4
'Hello?" "Jo? It's me." "Where in hell are you?" "In the City."
"What the fuck are you doing there? Are you OK?' I m fine. "Who are you with? Are you in trouble?"
"I'm fine."
"Lauren is worried to death." "Yeah, sure." "Did you call Lauren?" "No."
"Well what are you talking to me for?" "I don't want to talk to Lauren, I want to talk to you." "All I want to hear from you, you little nitwit, is that you're coming home." "Forget it."
"Where are you staying? Are you in a hostel?" "I want to talk about Thomas."
"Jo? Hello?" "What about Thomas?" "You know things about him, don't you?" "Not much."
"I'm not coming home until I get some answers." "That's very melodramatic." "But true."
"You're going to have to ask Lauren." "I know he was the guru." "All right, so what, so he was the fucking guru." "Why has Lauren always lied about that?" "It's complicated."
"For pete's sake, Jo. It's my life, too. You and Lauren act as if it has nothing to do with me. He's my father!"
"Jo? ... Jo, he is my father, isn't he?"
"Yeah, he's your father."
"And he's Quentin's father, too?"
"So you know about that, too, huh?"
"No thanks to you."
"You never asked me."
"Are any of the other kids at the place his?"
"No."
"Does he have kids someplace else?"
"How should I know?"
"Did he have others at the old commune?"
"I wasn't a part of the commune."
"How did you know Thomas?"
"None of your business."
"OK, fair enough. But don't you think some of this is my business?"
"Don't you think I have a right to know a few basic facts about my own family? I mean, I do exist, don't I? Or is that something else no one has gotten around to telling me? Did I die locked up in my room and am I just a ghost? Is there a gravestone hidden out in the high grass with my name on it?"
"Don't be silly."
"Well that's what it feels like! Come on, Jo! Don't you think it's unfair? Don't you?"
"Yeah, I suppose. Life's unfair."
"So are you going to be unfair, too?"
"Like I said, you never asked me. You were always too snooty to talk to me."
"Well I'm asking now. I'm groveling."
"So what do you want to know?"
"Why did Lauren lie all those years about Thomas not being the guru?"
"Thomas told her to." "Why?"
"Look, he ended up chewing razor blades and banging his head against the wall. I don't think he was exactly proud of it." "He was too sensitive."
"Pff. That's what Lauren always said. Me, I just think he's a borderline nutcase."
"So Lauren was just doing what Thomas told her to do."
"Lauren has always done what Thomas tells her to do. Christ, when she was his favorite dish she used to wash all his clothes in the stream for him and make the fire in his prayer hut and sweep his fucking floor for him. And she had to do it while he was out of the hut, because he didn't like seeing menial work. It was fucking revolting."
"How do you know all this?"
"I've known Lauren since I was a kid."
"Yeah?"
"My mother cleaned her parents' house, if you have to know. To tell you the truth, I thought she was a real snotnose too, until I figured out she was kind of fucked up."
"Thomas said she was abused."
"You don't want to hear about it."
"I'm a big girl now."
"Unlike Thomas, I don't think it's my place to talk about it."
"So if you don't like Thomas, how come you slept with him?"
"None of your goddamn business. Look, just because you ran away doesn't mean you can be obnoxious. I can just hang up."
"I'm sorry! I just don't understand."
"Some big girl."
"OK! I'm groveling again."
"And now you're being a wiseass."
"No, I'm serious, Jo. I don't mean to be obnoxious, I really don't. There are all these things I want to know, and you're the only person who's ever told me anything. I really appreciate that."
"So what else do you want to know? Who's paying for this call? This is going to cost a bundle."
"I'm staying with a guy."
"What guy?"
"Someone I met on the bus."
"For sweet Jesus' sake! He's probably a pimp!"
"Russell? I don't think so."
"I saw something on TV about this. They hang around the bus station looking for runaways."
"No, I met him before that, on the bus, I already told you."
"Are there other girls there?"
"Not that I've noticed."
"If he tries to hook you on drugs, you get out of there."
"Sure thing. Can we talk about Thomas now?"
"Why don't you come home. I'll tell you everything you want to know when you get home."
"No way, Renee. If Thomas was the guru, who was Raymond?"
"He was just one of the disciples. I think he was the favorite for a while. Maybe when Thomas was staring at his navel up in the tower."
"So there were several favorites?"
"Oh, yeah."
"Lauren was just the first."
"No, there was some skinny chick, I forget her name."
"But then why did the commune start right off at Lauren's place?"
"Every commune needs a rich girl. For the land."
"And Raymond killed himself?"
"Did he?"
"I'm asking."
"As far as I know, he's still living in Ithaca. He got rich making tofu."
"Thomas said he killed himself."
"That doesn't mean a thing."
"No more questions?"
"So the ambulance took Thomas away because he was chewing on razor blades?" "No." "What, then?"
"Please tell me, Jo?"
"If you really must know, there was some Jap nutcase writer who committed harry-carry —" "Hara-kiri."
"Where I come from, we say harry-carry, we don't know any better." "Sorry."
"So this Jap nutcase did it, and Thomas got, you know, obsessed with the guy."
"Thomas committed hara-kiri?"
"He tried to. I mean, this isn't my specialty, but I think you're supposed to have your disciples around you and they're supposed to finish you off. You know, cut off your head."
"You're kidding."
"No, those were wild times, life's been kinda boring since then. But instead, they called an ambulance. He was fucking pissed. Lauren still feels guilty about it."
"Let me get this straight. Lauren feels guilty because she didn't chop Thomas's head off?"
"It sounds pretty funny, doesn't it?"
"Lauren is my mother, isn't she?"
"Of course."
"She doesn't have any other kids?"
"Not that I know of."
"So why does she hate me?"
"She doesn't hate you. Look, Lauren's not. . . You know .. . What am I trying to say . . . Lauren's not exactly .. ."
"Gee, that explains everything."
"That's your whole fucking problem. You want everything explained."
"Yeah."
"Well it doesn't work that way, kid."
"Yeah, well, I gotta go."
"So are you coming home?"
"No."
"Look ... You know, you can call collect if you need to. Don't run out of money! You start running out of money, you get the fuck home. Before the pimps get you."
"Rightio, Jo."
Simple and trivial. Appalling to contemplate how long she was a scaredy-cat regarding this utterly mechanical operation. Every night it's the same: they kiss, she removes his underwear, he groans and quivers, she wipes up the spilled milk. Somehow, ages ago, she got the idea that learning to do the Deed was a descent only to the first circle, only one step on the way to more personal horrors which would culminate in something that, by necessity, involved a boy. What a childish conception! With Russell she remains light-years away from the state of surrender required by the Deed. "What about you?" he asks. "Don't you want anything?"
"No, nothing."
Of course, there is the intercourse issue. "Are you a virgin?" he asks tentatively.
She gives him a withering look. "Of course not."
"Then why can't we?"
"It's not enough for you that I don't want to?"
"No, of course. If you don't want to —"
"You seem to enjoy what we do."
"Of course, it's great—"
"Have you heard of Artemis Syndrome?"
"No."
"It's a medical condition. It means sex is intensely painful for me."
"That's terrible!"
"Not if I don't have sex."
"Is there a cure?"
"Not yet. But I'll find one. That's why I'm going to go to medical school. As soon as I cure it I'm going to fuck everything in sight." She enjoys watching the deep chagrin that steals over his face when she says things like this. "Let's get to work," she says, taking hold of it, calling it into existence for its brief strut upon the stage.
Yes, appalling, how trivial. Now she can even look at it while she does it, she can even say to herself the words: I, Jane Dark, am holding a penis in my hand. Which shows how fatally childish she has been in shying away not only from doing but even thinking about certain things. Like the sounds from Thomas's tent when they were on the hike. She told herself he was polishing his stove! God! How screamingly funny! If she had been less of a blind baby she would have sent that other Jane over much earlier, and Thomas would have gotten tired of her and dumped her long before they returned to Novamundus, and she wouldn't have ruined everything.
Jane Dark takes a long hot shower every morning. But Russell goes for days without changing his underwear. James lets his hair get so greasy that a dark spot on the wall above his bed marks the place where he rests his head when he lounges in his dirty bathrobe and lubes himself. (Yes, he does it too, behind his closed door, she is sure of it. Don't they all?) She smokes at the kitchen table and contemplates, clinically, her disappointment with boys, or men, or whatever. Males. She has a vague memory that Thomas made a prediction about this. Or did she dream it? Thank God for hearts-ease. No tear rolls down your face even as you mull over your "boyfriend." Because that's what Russell is, isn't he? Say it: Russell is her boyfriend.
No wonder he and James can't get any girls. No wonder he resorts to picking up runaways on buses and is absurdly, slavishly grateful when they give him hand jobs. The photo in James's drawer is no doubt of some girl he got fixated on in high school, and he probably pestered her, never taking no for an answer. No wonder Russell and James resort to looking through their telescope into a curtainless window across the street where a buxom black-haired woman nightly undresses for bed.
"Oh baby, come on."
"All right!"
"Boomba-boomba."
"Oh man."
Jane finds herself strangely comforted by her disgust, since it proves she is only here by accident, she could as easily be with some pimp or, who knows, some jaded Park Avenue couple who both want her for their degenerate games. She simply went home with the first person she met, and here she is, and this revolting display only confirms what she already knew about boys, or men, or males, or whatever. So she encourages them, for the comfort it gives her. Having overheard the telescope talk through James's closed door, she later said, "So what's that woman doing tonight?" and while Russell and James traded a glance she swiveled the scope until she found the window and lo, the raven beauty was there. Now the boys crow and slaver while she looks on, feeling proprietary, a vegetarian throwing meat to her dogs.
Boys will be boys! Before she came they hardly knew how to feed themselves: James with his frozen fish sticks and waffles, Russell with the burger, fries, and six-pack he picks up on his way home from work. Jane has brought a little variety into their constricted culinary lives. She bakes them butter cookies, cream pies, cakes with thick sugar frostings — the classic White Work. She pours cup after cup of pure white sugar into the mixing bowl. Come and get it, boys! She steals just a taste of the finished product, a gob of frosting on her finger, or the coconut filling of a frosted eclair, and declares, "It really is sickeningly sweet, isn't it?" or "I really overdid it this time, didn't I?" while the boys shovel it in.
For dessert she brings out the hearts-ease, generous with her provisions, and time floats by on dreamless sleep and tearless waking. Lotus eaters, forgetful of their returning, they lie cradled in the web of the done. While the boys work in the evenings she wanders out and lets the web carry her along, turning her down avenues and even those streets about which Russell worries so pointlessly because, of course, nothing happens. No longer able to take a vow of chastity, she can at least go into silence, as Thomas did, and she walks taking no notice of those around her, and when the occasional nutcase or molester speaks to her she doesn't answer. Even her thoughts are webbed, every random image tugging with it strands of other images that return, return. Thomas went into silence and tried to tear out his own heart and hand it to someone else on a platter. How Christ-like can you get? Or perhaps Antichrist-like. Because it was the wrong path, he said later, which is why he told Lauren not to talk of it, to turn from it, to let it go. He learned his lesson. But poor Lauren! She didn't. First too weak to chop off his head and then too weak to see that the guru-disciple relationship is inherently unhealthy. She stayed her hand, but for the wrong reasons. He could have guided her hand but he didn't, instead he gnashed his teeth and left, disappointed in her. And the others? The skinny chick, the Young Things? Did they all disappoint him, or did he take some with him? Where are they now? Where are his other children? How many are there? Were his postcards so brief because every time he sat down to write he had to reel off dozens? "Corine and my Ian"; "Claudia and my Erika"; "Liz and my Liam." Do any of this race of half-siblings live near Ithaca? Has Jane seen any short, moon-faced, thin-haired kids haunting the stacks of the Ithacan library, or speaking several languages at the Farmers' Market?
