Gesh scraped an English muffin and said he thought he’d pass on the cookout. He’d been thinking about getting cleaned up and going downtown around six for dinner and the fireworks.
When I got back at six-thirty, Gesh was just heading out the door. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt that featured yellow parrots and blue palm trees, his hair was slicked down with water and he reeked of aftershave. “Great,” he said, too loudly. “I thought you weren’t going to show up. Listen”—he was drunk, excited, wound up about something—“can you give me a ride downtown?”
“Where to?”
He drew a crumpled bar napkin from his pocket, read off an address and then hustled me down the steps and into the car. “Listen,” he said, “I’m going to have to can the fireworks — if that’s all right.”
I shrugged, watching him. “Sure.”
It seemed that he’d wandered into a bar full of women that afternoon—“Incredible, Felix: all of them foxes and they must have outnumbered the guys three to one”—and had made a date with one of them for the evening. Her name was Yvette, she was tall and high-busted and wore a slit skirt. Gesh tapped his comb to the beat of the radio and rhapsodized about her all the way downtown. “See you later,” he said as I dropped him off, and he sauntered up the sidewalk like the romantic lead in a Broadway musical. Suddenly I felt depressed.
The fireworks went up and came down. Pop-pop. Bang. I watched them glumly, had a couple of greasy eggrolls and then drove over to the club where the Nostrils were playing. Three dollars at the door, a handstamp that showed two pig’s nostrils like a pair of bifocals, more earrings and pink hair. I picked a table near the stage, chain-drank tequila and tonic because I felt conspicuous—who is this joker sitting by himself, anyway? — and settled down to wait for the show to start.
An hour later the Nostrils stepped out on the darkened stage, tuned their instruments and blasted into a pulse-pounding version of “God Bless America” as the lights came up. Almost immediately people began slam dancing under the stage, and a couple of harried-looking waitresses in change aprons began to clear the tables out of the way. I got up, stood at the bar, and because service was slow, ordered two drinks at once.
The Nostrils were an all-girl band. The lead singer, who looked like Bela Lugosi in drag, played guitar and fronted the group, while Aorta, standing beside a co-backup vocalist so emaciated she could have stepped out of one of the photographs of Dachau, ululated weird falsetto chants over the buzzsaw guitar riffs. At the rear of the stage, huddled over their instruments like praying mantises, the bass player and drummer hammered away at tribal rhythms. The music went on, without change, for an hour. One song segued into another, and all were alike — or perhaps they were simply doing an extended version of a single song. I couldn’t tell. Then, in mid-beat, the music died so abruptly I thought the plug had been pulled, the lights faded and the dancers stopped slamming one another long enough to bellow incoherent threats through the sudden silence.
“Felix,” Aorta said, threading her way through the crowd. “Glad you could make it. Got the weekend off, huh? How’d you like us?”
I shook her hand, forever cold, and wondered how to respond to this effusive rush of communication. For Aorta, this was practically filibustering. “Gesh and I came down for the weekend,” I said.
“He here?” craning her neck to scan the crowd.
“No.” I took a sip of my drink, and then lied: “The music was hot.”
This was polite, and a neat conversational ploy as well, but Aorta didn’t have a chance to respond. A girl had appeared beside her, and through the sweat, runny mascara and streaked pancake makeup, I saw that she was the Lugosi impersonator. “Vena, this is Felix — he’s a friend of Vogelsang’s.”
Vena shot me a quick cool glance and then turned to Aorta. “You see who’s in the crowd tonight?”
Aorta, never one to let her emotions show, imperceptibly widened her eyes as Vena named a name that meant nothing to me. “Who’s that?” I said, and both women turned to look at me as if I’d just emerged from seventeen years in a Siberian gulag. From the gist of what passed between them, I gathered finally that he was a record producer.
“Let’s tear his head off,” Vena said, lighting a cigarette. “I think we ought to open with ’Burn Ward’ and then hit him with ’Pink and Dead.’“
“The music was hot the first set,” I said. “Anybody want a drink?” Elbows jostled me, voices shrieked with laughter, the ubiquitous jukebox started up with a roar. Vena was leaning into Aorta and shouting something in her ear. I tapped Aorta’s arm, and she looked up a moment to give me a glance as empty as the spaces between the star—Drink? I pantomimed. Do you want a drink? — and then she turned back to Vena. What could I say? I backed up to the bar and ordered another tequila. I don’t know what I’d expected from Aorta — sympathy, excitement, conversation, sex — but it was clear I wasn’t going to get it. Feeling sorry for myself, feeling as alone and friendless as a dieter at the feast of life, I went home to bed.
Now, buffeted by the chattering exhaust, billowing fumes and dust devils, I snuck a look at Gesh and saw that he hadn’t exactly been exhilarated and revivified by the holiday either. He was staring out the window of the car, moodily sucking at his cigarette, stolid and silent as a rock. “Some bust of a weekend,” I said, without taking my eyes from the road.
Gesh merely grunted, but there was an unfathomable depth of bitterness in that grunt, and though he hadn’t said anything about his date with Yvette, I understood that it, too, had been a bust. He morosely tossed his cigarette out the window and into a clump of grass beneath a FIRE HAZARD sign, and then turned to me. “You don’t know the half of it,” he said.
“Yvette?”
Gesh flicked off the radio. “I wasn’t going to tell you this — it’s embarrassing — but the more I think about it, it’s so pathetic it’s funny.” He paused to reach behind him and fumble through the cooler for a splinter of ice. “You know, right from the beginning I thought there was something strange about her — it was too good to be true, right? Paradise. A bar full of beautiful women and all of them hot. At first I thought she might be a hooker or something, the way she came on to me in the afternoon, but she wasn’t. We did some kissing and groping at a booth in back and she didn’t say anything so I asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else. ’I’ve got an appointment,’ she says. ’But I’m free tonight.’
“Okay. So I’m all pumped up and I go over to her apartment thinking I’ve got it made and she meets me at the door in a pair of jeans and a tube top. She looks fantastic, but there’s something about her that just doesn’t sit right. She’s big. Her shoulders are too wide. Then it hits me. But no, I think, that’s crazy, and I look at her again and she’s beautiful, stunning, like she just stepped off the cover of some women’s magazine.
“We have a drink. She starts coming on like a nymphomaniac but I’m holding back because of that funny feeling I had. I’m on top of her, I’m trying to get her top down and her hands are all over me. ’Listen,’ I say, ’I don’t know how to put this, I mean I hope you won’t be offended or anything, and this is probably insane, but could you tell me something — it’s really important to me.’