“Is it?”
He sits back jerks his head to the rest of the booths on the other side of the aisle. “All the natives want to leave these days. Everyone wants to move away.”
“Not you.”
“They’re going to bury me in this town. I want the wake right here in the diner. Two days. Open bar. I know it’s a big health code violation, but I’m an old friend of Counselor Campana. There are ways around everything, if you follow.”
Sylvia nods her unspoken understanding of the not-sosubtle back-scratching that powers City Hall.
“You’ve been down here in the Canal a long time,” she says.
“Opened the doors on September fifth, Nineteen fifty-seven. I was a goddamn youngster.”
“You’ve seen a lot of people pass through this place.”
“The famous and the not-so,” Orsi says, thrilled at the chance to bask in his own history.
“I’m more interested in the famous.”
“Another pilgrim,” he says. “I’m telling you, I’m waiting to be put on the historical register there. That has to be some kind of tax break, wouldn’t you think?”
She takes a swallow of coffee, then asks, “I’ve heard you knew Terrence Propp.”
There’s no flinch or balk. There’s no reaction at all and that’s as unsettling as if he’d exploded. He just shakes his head and says, “That’s an old rumor that just won’t die gracefully, dear. Every now and then somebody comes in here and mentions that name to me. And I’ll tell you what I tell them. I don’t even know who the hell this Propp son of a bitch is.”
“I heard you once claimed you knew him.”
Again, no anger, only, “Honey, I’ll say anything to fill this place up. I’ll tell you Jesus ate the last supper in here if it’ll sell more meatloaf and coffee.”
“But if someone really needed some information—” she starts and he shakes his head and says, “Then someone would be out of luck. Personally, I don’t even think there is a Terrence Propp. I think it’s all a kind of hoax. Another way to push some product. Nothing gets more attention. How could someone not want attention? Twenty-four hours a day we got people sticking their faces into your television and telling you more horrible crap about their lives than you ever wanted to hear. I wish I’d come up with something like this Propp idea—the Myth of Elmore Orsi. Christ sake, they’d be lined up down the block to eat the leftover chili. Put some faded picture of me on the wall, I could spend every day at the goddamn track.”
He laughs, runs both hands over his eyes, then refills her mug.
“You seem like a nice girl,” he says, somehow without sounding patronizing. “Don’t buy into this Propp nonsense. Find your own routine.”
He slides out of the booth.
“Routine?” Sylvia says, but Orsi just smiles at her and heads toward the kitchen yelling into the air, “Renata, clear table six.”
Sylvia looks up at the clock on the back wall. It’s over three hours until midnight and her meeting with Schick. She thinks about going to a movie and then catches herself and wants to laugh. Her eyes fall from the clock down to the huge cork bulletin board that fills most of the back wall. The bulletin board where she found the original ad for the Aquinas. The place where all of this began.
She gets out of the booth and walks to the rear wall. She finds the exact spot where she’d first seen the little 3 x 5 card filled with the black block letters that said PORTRAIT CAMERA. Where she’d yanked out the red pushpin that secured the card to the cork and where she’d felt that rush of delight as she pictured an Aquinas in her hands.
In that same place now is a new index card, but this is a glossy printed ad, like an oversized business card, with raised, multicolored lettering that reads
Lusty Lady Lipservice
“fulfillment is just a phone call away”
picture your dream woman & we do the rest
Calclass="underline" 555-6628 / 24 hrs a day / 7 days a week
MC/Visa/AmEx
She rips the card from the board, turns it over, turns it back. It’s her own phone number.
She pushes the card into the pocket of her slicker and walks out of the Rib Room.
The rain has faded to an occasional mist and Rimbaud Way has filled up with marching women. They’re all wearing black armbands and chanting as they parade.
Intercourse is Genocide
Castrate, Castrate
Cut with Pride
their arms shooting into the air like angry cheerleaders. They’re being led by Paige Beatty, who’s setting the pace of their cry with her red police bullhorn.
An arm reaches out and pulls Sylvia off the curbing and into the throng and the next thing she knows a woman with a hook for a hand is linking arms and yelling, “It’s everyone’s fight.”
Sylvia looks to see a hefty woman with a baby supported against her other shoulder. The child might be about a year old and it’s burrowing into its mother’s neck, clearly more interested in sleep than political ideology.
Sylvia walks along, though she doesn’t chant. She cranes her neck to see everyone carrying white candles shaped like small phalluses. And they all have a small chalkboard, about the size of a dinner plate, bouncing off their chests as they walk, hung around their necks with twine and shoestrings. The boards all have male first names written on them — Sylvia notes Harold and Dennis and Karl and Antonio.
She asks the one-handed woman what the story is and her new partner shouts, “Didn’t you get yours? You write down the name of the last bastard that abused you.”
What if he was anonymous, Sylvia wonders. What if he was a phantom?
They swing off Rimbaud and onto Main Street and there’s a group cheer at the sight of the City Hall Tower. Through the bullhorn, Paige yells, “Tell Mary and Martha to go check on the sheets,” and two women in matching sweat suits break off from the assembly and start to sprint down the middle of Main.
“What sheets?” Sylvia yells and the hook-handed mother gives her an annoyed look and yells back, “Didn’t you go to any of the planning sessions?
Up ahead, cars are being detoured out of the way by a cop with a flashlight. Clearly, Mayor Welby and Manager Kenner know how politically hot this thing could turn and they want as little confrontation as possible. Let Paige and Company vent some steam and if it means rerouting a little night traffic down Main Street, so be it.
The marchers pass unmolested down the center of the road though there are some comments about dyke bitches yelled from the doorways of the greasier bars. When they’re almost on top of City Hall, Sylvia is shocked to see the building totally surrounded by even more women. They’re spilling off the front steps, overflowing on the common and the side pavilion. The halogen spotlights that normally shine down from the Hall’s tower have apparently been knocked out and this sea of bodies is lit only by the hundreds of candles that everyone’s holding aloft. It gives the whole scene a weird, semi-religious feel and a churchlike hush falls over the crowd as Paige leads her platoon through a parting of massed spectators who simply roll back like the Red Sea and clear a path to the front stairway.
Paige climbs the stairs like some cross between a military president and a pope, someone who’s moved beyond the boundaries of ego and power and into a realm where the forces of history can be wrestled with and occasionally altered. In Sylvia’s small living room Paige gave off none of this larger-than-life quality. She seemed like a smart pragmatist, a savvy deal cutter who’d rely on lawyers and opinion polls. But here, mounting the steps of City Hall with bullhorn in one hand and flickering, penis-shaped candle in the other, she’s transformed into an icon, a definition of charisma and strength so vibrant it feels as if she could liberate every soul in earshot with the sound of her voice.