“As fucking snow.”
“Political?”
“Not a bit. But I think she could be guided to it. Or on second thought—”
“How do you feel about her now?” Graham asked.
He obviously thought she was in love. Was she? Possibly. But just as possibly not. Shrimp had reduced her to tears; she wanted to pay her back in kind. What were feelings anyhow? Words floating through your head, or hormones in some gland. “I don’t know what I feel.”
“What is it you want us to tell you then?” Lee asked. “Whether you should see her again? Or whether you’re in love? Or if you should be? Lordie, girl!” This, with a heave of all that good-natured fat. “Go ahead. Have fun. Fuck yourself silly or cry your heart out, whatever you like. No reason not to. Just remember, if you do fall in love— keep it in a separate compartment.”
They all agreed that that was the best advice, and from her own sense of being defluttered she knew it was what she’d wanted to be told. Now they were free to go on to basics—quotas and drops and the reasons why the Revolution, though so long delayed, was the next inevitable step. Then they left the benches and for an hour just enjoyed themselves. You would never have thought, to look at them, that they were any different from any other five people on the roller rink.
5. Richard M. Williken (2024)
They would sit together in the darkroom, officially the bedroom of his son. Richard M. Williken. Jr. Richard Jr. existed for the sake of various tiles in offices about the city, though upon need a boy answering to the name could be got on loan from his wife’s cousin. Without their imaginary son the Willikens could never have held on to a two-bedroom apartment now that their real children had left home.
They might listen to whatever tapes were being copied usually since they were his specialty to Alkan or Gottschalk or Boagni. The music was the ostensible reason, among other ostensible reasons such as friendship, that she hung around. He would smoke, or doodle, or watch the second hand simplify another day. His ostensible reason was that he was working, and in the sense that he was copying tapes and taking messages and sometimes renting out, for next to nothing an hour, his fictitious son’s bed, he was working. But in the sense that counted he was not.
The phone would ring. Williken would pick it up and say. “One-five, five-six.” Shrimp would wrap herself in her thin arms and watch him until by the lowering of his eyes she knew the call wasn’t from Seattle.
When the lack of some kind of mutual acknowledgment became too raw they would have pleasant little debates about Art. Art: Shrimp loved the word (it was right up there with “epithesis,” “mystic,” and “Tiffany”), and poor Williken couldn’t leave it alone. Despite that they tried never to descend to the level of honest complaint, their separate, secret unhappinesses would find ways to poke up their heads into the long silences or to become, with a bit of camouflage, the real subjects of the little debates, as when Williken, too worn out to be anything but serious, had announced: “Art? Art’s just the opposite, true heart. It’s patchwork. It’s bits and pieces. What you think is all flow and force— ”
“And fun,” she added.
“—are an illusion. But the artist can’t share it. He knows better.”
“The way prostitutes aren’t supposed ever to have orgasms? I talked to a prostitute once, mentioning no names, who said she had orgasms all the time.”
“It doesn’t sound very professional. When an artist is being entertained his work suffers.”
“Yes. yes, that’s certainly true,” brushing the idea from her lap like crumbs, “for you. But I should think that for someone like—” she gestured toward the machinery, the four slowly revolving mandates of “From Sea to Shining Sea” “—John Herbert MacDowell, for instance. For him it must be like being in love. Except that instead of loving one person, his love spreads out in every direction.”
Williken made a face. “I’ll agree that an is like love. But that doesn’t contradict what I said before. It’s all patchwork and patience, art and love both.”
“And passion? Doesn’t that come in at all?”
“Only for the very young.” Charitably he left it for her to decide if that shoe fit.
This went on, off, and on for the better part of a month, and in all that time he indulged in only one conscious cruelty. For all his personal grubbiness—the clothes that looked like dirty bandages, the skimpy beard the smells—Williken was a great fusspot, and it was his style of fuss (in housekeeping now as it had been in art) to efface the evidences of his own undesirable presence, to wipe away the fingerprints and baffle his pursuers. Thus each object that was allowed to be visible in the room came to possess a kind of heightened significance, like so many skulls in a monk’s celclass="underline" the pink telephone. Richard Jr.’s sagging bed the speakers, the long silvery swan-neck of the water faucet, the calendar with lovers rumbling in the heavy snows of “January 2024.” His cruelty was simply not changing the month.
She never said as she might have, “Willy, it’s the tenth of May, for Christ’s sake.” Possibly she found some grueling satisfaction in whatever hurt his reminder caused her. Certainly she gnawed on it. He had no first-hand knowledge of such feelings. The whole drama of her abandonment seemed ludicrous to him. Anguish for anguish’s sake.
It might have gone on like that till summer, but then one day the calendar was gone and one of his own photographs was in its place.
“Is it yours?” she asked.
His awkwardness was sincere. He nodded.
“I noticed it the minute I walked into the room.”
A photograph of a glass half full of water resting on a wet glass shelf. A second, empty glass outside the picture cast a shadow across the white tiles of the wall.
Shrimp walked up close to it. “It’s sad, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” Williken said. He felt confused, insulted, anguished. “Usually I don’t like having my own things hanging about. They go dead on you. But I thought—”
“I like it. I do.”
6. Amparo (2024)
On her birthday, the 29th of May, she had realized that she hated her mother.
Her eleventh birthday. It was a horrible realization, but Geminis can’t deceive themselves. There was simply nothing about Mama you could admire and so much to loathe. She bullied herself and Mickey mercilessly, but what was worse were the times she’d miscalculate her stupid pills, slime off into a glorious depression and tell them sob-stories about her wasted life. It was, certainly, a wasted life but Amparo couldn’t see that she’d ever made any effort not to waste it. She didn’t know what work was. Even around the house she let poor old Grummy do everything. She just lay about, like some animal at the zoo, snuffling and scratching her smelly cunt. Amparo hated her.
Shrimp, in the way she sometimes had of seeming telepathic, said to her, before the dinner, that they had better have a talk, and she concocted a thin lie to get her out of the apartment. They went down to 15, where a Chinese lady had opened a new shop, and Shrimp bought the shampoo she was being so silly about.
Then to the roof for the inevitable lecture. The sunshine had brought half the building up on top but they found a spot almost their own. Shrimp slipped out of her blouse, and Amparo couldn’t help thinking what a difference there was between her and her mother, even though Shrimp was actually older. No sags, no wrinkles, and only a hint of graininess. Whereas Lottie, with every initial advantage on her side, had let herself become a monster of obesity. Or at least (“monster” was perhaps an exaggeration) she was heading down the road lickety-split.