Читать книгу Queen City and Other Dimensions - E.C. Wells - Страница 6

Lily is an unemployed middle-aged actor with a practical wash and dry cut. Once a natural strawberry blond, now in need of regular touching-up to keep the omnipresence of strawberry, which makes her feel better about herself, Lily is, as is V, in that middle-age agelessness that dares the hazard of guessing. To guess could lead to an existential crisis. To guess too high could be felt as an inexcusable insult; to guess too low could sound suspiciously patronizing, untruthful and definitely unnecessary. Best to never mention it.

Another life ago, when Lily played the ingenue in the French Provincial ‘B’ touring company of Andy Webber’s Ben Hur, the Musical, she was beguiled by an absolutely perfect stranger who took her into the tombs beneath Orléans. He was a hottie, twenty-ish, with the face and body of a god named Philippe le Hottie.

Philippe le Hottie waited impatiently outside the actors’ exit, chewing on the corner of his playbill, shivering in the hot summer night with anticipation and excitement to get Mademoiselle Champagne’s autograph. Philippe le Hottie spoke no English to speak of, so he mustered his courage to gain her attention by removing his shirt and showing off his abs. A streamlet of warm saltwater meandered through muscled ridges meeting, ever so briefly, where they gathered into the small pool in his navel, before pouring rivulets of sweat that wandered through the heat and humidity in the dark maze of his curly love trail.

Philippe stood glistening under the alley streetlights on that hot summer evening, catching the attention of everybody in the cast and crew as they exited from their final performance of Ben Hur, the Musical, he blessed himself and prayed to Saint Joan of Arc for the famous Mademoiselle Lilith Champagne from America to notice him. The Mademoiselle nearly fell over herself going down the three cast-iron steps outside the stage door and nearly toppled onto the cobblestone alleyway that led to the parking lot. Fortunately, with the grace of Saint Joan, Philippe le Hottie reached out to help her regain her balance. Lily grabbed onto him. He was holding the playbill for her autograph, but dropped it when she, spontaneously and uncontrollably, gave her French god an arousing, blazing French kiss. He asked Lily if she’d like to see his hung meat and cheese. That was all her Albuquerque high school French could make of it. Surely she had misunderstood, but she was helplessly enthralled as she obediently took his hand. Spontaneously, hand-in-hand they strolled the few blocks to the Viande et le Fromage Boutique, Philippe’s family business. Her wishful thinking vanished from the embarrassment of her fallacious translation. But it was, after all, heard only by herself.

Philippe and Lily pushed aside the cheeses and meats that hung in the backroom. They came to a spot where muted music came from below. Philippe opened the concealed trapdoor in the floor, uncovering a staircase that led down into the catacombs of Orléans.

The impatient lovers maneuvered through yet more cheeses and meats. As the music grew louder, projections of spiraling colors splashed across cold dank walls and spilled over human bones. It was a Happening! A hundred or more young French men and women in cowboy get-ups, under hats measured in gallons, doing a Texas line dance to the music of a fiddler with a seeing-eye dog, was a jubilant surprise. A Happeningin a tomb under Orléans with a god named Philippe le Hottie. It was a wet dream come true——actually, she never dreamt it, but she will——oftentimes.

The following morning, after Lily found herself between Philippe and a wheel of stinky cheese, they walked arm-in-arm along their way to the waiting buses that would take Lilith Champagne, along with the cast and crew of Ben Hur, the Musical, to the airport. They stopped and shopped and fondled each other like playful puppies; almost forgetting they were on their way to their final au revoir.

It was during that forgotten spree, in another life, where Lily acquired her impressive assortment of Magdalenian bone and ivory implements of unknown usage. The common consensus divided them into three possible ways in which they could have been intended: for making war, for eating, or as sex toys. Imagine the things one can find in a magasin d'aubaines à Orléans,which is something like a Salvation Army thrift store.

Lily is a hoarder. She is a dedicated saver of the useless. Lily the Packrat saved everything that tickled her fancy, utilitarian or not. She, also, enjoys window shopping; everything is free.

V discovered Lily in the Gunnysack Players’ Performing Garage in downtown Queen City. The production of The Trojan Women made Lily’s performance of a man playing a woman playing a man remarkable. Sort of like Victor/Victoriawithout Julie Andrews——and requiring far less talent.

Talthybius, the herald (Lily), made all the announcements. An important role which sometimes required adding woes to those of the Chorus: woe, woe, woe to the boy-child Astyanax, whom Lily snatched from out the hairy arms of Andromache, his mother, when soldiers in black leather tunics entered, two on motorcycles and one on a motorized bicycle, to demand the boy-child’s death. They performed hideous choreography hideously (which may have made it better), before whisking Lily off the stage sidesaddle. Then Menelaus and Helen had a little speech, but nobody paid much attention to it. Lily entered with a bundle of broken doll’s parts which were supposed to be the severed remains of Astyanax. Finally, after Hecuba rolled out a papier mâchétoilet bowl painted red, white and blue for Lily to throw the bundle of pieces of Astyanax into, to the woe, woe, woes of the Chorus who waved red streamers to signify the burning of Troy, the set cleverly folded and toppled over hitting nobody. That was really about all V could make of it.

The critics were split. Babs DeVos of The Queen City Post loved it, but she had trouble telling her readers why. She has always been appreciatively vague without actually saying anything real, or otherwise. Maybe she never learned how. Bianca Purge of Westword did not like it and she had no trouble telling her readers the depth to which Theatre had sunken that night. And, then there was Billy Butts who wrote for Out and Beyond, a monthly Queen City throwaway tabloid found mostly at the entrances to gay bars, bath houses, and just about every establishment on Capitol Hill. Butts took an unusual position on The Trojan Women by not taking a position. Instead, he wrote about how he had been to Troy, New York, his position in society and brief, but highly personal, bits of information about those who were in attendance. Being a middle-aged gadfly in the city’s society Blue Book and knowing everybody who was in it; a trust fund baby with an abundance of idle time and the means to fill it, should have made Butts a happy man, but....

On the evening V attended that dubious performance, she might have said out loud, “Even a pole vaulter couldn’t throw this shit high enough to reach the gutter.” V hoped that she hadn’t said that out loud, but if she had, “Fuck ‘em!”That was how excruciatingly awful the entire evening was.

Afterwards, a wine and cheese affair for the audience to acquaint itself with the members of the cast. Especially with one black-leathered soldier who was the playwright, director, producer and manager of the Gunnysack Players’ Performing Garage, Stanley Oliver Sugarloaf, or S.O.S. to his eclectic collection of misfits. It was there, under those circumstances, when V took notice of Ms. Champagne who later turned out to be Lily Nettles formerly of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Lily was the only person in the theater who V found sincerely interesting, who wasn’t self-absorbed, or preoccupied with keeping an eye on the door. They’ve been the closest of friends ever since.

Lily swallowed the last of a candied cherry. “You might not settle the matter for posterity at all because you’ll change your mind more times than it takes to commit yourself to it. Imagine your anxiety then,” Lily sounded with such positive conviction while remaining so matter-of-factly about this.

V stiffened, her mouth fell open, her greenish eyes widened then closed into two narrow slits that appeared quite sinister. Her ears flew back like a startled jackrabbit. V was poised to capture the spirit behind what she heard while listening to its echo. It’s not complicated; V disdained small talk. V stared blankly into the space a few inches above Lily’s head before she could any longer remain silent and uttered in what many have called, that whiskey voice of hers, “You think I cannot commit myself to my choices, do you?”

“I do,” replied Lily. “Sometimes. I sometimes wonder if those Libra scales might be the root of your anxiety?”

“I need,” began V, making certain to establish direct and wide-eyed contact with Lily, who now was mustering every ounce of her attention and carefully aiming it towards where she felt it might do the most good. “I need,” V began again, “to know that when I am dead, gone and done with...” she paused to take some slack from the tautness of the moment’s tension, sighed, wrinkled her upper lip and continued, “...that it wasn’t all for nothing!”

“It?” a cautious Lily inquired.

“My life. My goddamn life! I need to know, Lily,” V sighed before adding with fierce intensity, “I need to know something better!” It was a chilling wind that filled the sails of her rhetoric.

“Well,” said Lily, resigned, “I don’t think your life has been all for nothing.”

“Think of something better. I cannot go on and go out as though I were never here; as though I had never been.”

“Why not? People do it every day. They come and they go and who remembers them? Or cares? Nobody cares and everybody forgets sooner or later, when they are dead long enough. Hardly worth the time consumed with anxiety about the inevitable.”

None of this, of course, sounded vaguely like anything V wanted to hear and so she conjured a familiar refrain which began with, “I refuse to believe...” but was stopped short when Max appeared quite suddenly, surprising them both.

“There’s no getting into the basement. ‘Zeus refuses, Papa Max!’That’s it. All. Nothing more. Just a voice from out the lower depths, ‘Zeus refuses, Papa Max!’How dare they, Victoria?”

“You know them better than I. Did you try the coal slide?”

“Nailed. I should have sold them last year in Morocco when I had the chance. Top dollar. A man with gold teeth and a perpetual hard-on offered me two goats and a box of condoms. Essentially agricultural, you know.”

“The children?” Lily asked, incredulously.

“You needn’t playact for me, Lily. One day I shall show you outrage. Without ‘the method’! Just pure and simple outrage. I too have walked the boards once or twice, Miss Champagne. Yes, of course the children! Besides, they’re not children. Not really. Never were. Never will be. Throwbacks! Recycled genes. Objects of discordant chaos. Is that possible? Harriet hated me because...well, whatever her reason, misguided as it was, she saw herself fit to drag home from the pit of Hell the Golem and the Golemess! They’re not human. They’re not and that’s the truth! Have you noticed that they don’t age? They’ve been here, what? It feels like they’ve been here forever and they haven’t aged a day. They’re the children of the Lord of the Underworld. And that’s a fact.”

“Really, Max, how you carry on. Tea?”

“Thank you, V, but I must decline. I’m too upset.” Maxfield stood by the doorway looking nervously about. “He isn’t Zeus, you know.”

“Peter?”

“Caligula. He is Caligula convinced he is Zeus.”

“Peter?”

“Lost. Forgot he was playing Caligula when Caligula started playing Zeus. Too much public television, if you ask me. Ah, you should have been there. Nothing like you’ll ever see on PBS, I can tell you that. Drums tom-tomming. The scent of mystery in the steamy night. The sweet taste of conch stew. The sweaty dancers writhing on the soggy soil beneath the banana trees.”

“Soggy soil? Writhing?” V gasped.

“Sweaty dancers? Banana trees?” Lily gasped.

“Public Television?” V and Lily gasped together.

“Ah! The rites of...I need a hat pin!”

“There must be a dozen or more hat pins in the attic in with Cousin Harriet’s old hats,” V offered.

“Yes. Of course. My little miss nasty sister was always big on hats. Maybe she got that from you, or you that from her. Did you know that it was the sizing used to make hats that made the hatters mad? Mercury vapors, an occupational hazard. I suspect Harriet might be the victim of a milliner. Those creatures are locked in the basement; Mad Harriet’s rejects, the children of the damned. They’re not from Earth. You do know that by now, don’t you? I know where they’re from. I’ve been there. I’m from there. Nice place. Except for them.I know you don’t believe me. You don’t happen to have a hat pin, do you?”

“I told you where to find some.”

“I don’t fit on the stairway to the attic, Victoria.”

“You’ve lost everything I’ve let you borrow, Max.” Max scornfully winced, tightened his lips and appeared as if he were holding something back that he badly wanted to say, but couldn’t. “Come and sit down, Max. You’ve been chewing on those roots again, haven’t you? I worry about you, Max. One day you’ll find yourself missing.” V exhaled.

“No. Not at all, Victoria. It’s impossible to find yourself missing. Leaves. Leaves from the Haitian highlands. First you boil them until they make a mush. Then you squeeze it all up into a tight ball. After it’s cool, of course. Then you dig it up after you’ve buried it at least two feet deep for no less than five days, then you unwrap the cheese cloth, pinch off a tiny piece the size of a pea, pop it in your mouth and chew slowly. Those Mexican shrooms don’t come close.”

“One day they’ll come and take you away,” Lily prophesied, while chewing on a candied cherry.

Max sneered, “One day pigs will seed the clouds with excrement and it won’t be right as rain.”

V blindly patted the arm of the Ravenna Bishop’s chair suggesting he sit. Instead, Max continued to stand in the doorway shifting his bearish weight from one foot to the other in a nervous and nerve-racking way. “Zeus refuses.Beelzebub! What I need is a hat pin!”

“Voodoo, Maxfield?”

“Lily, when in Rome carry a cross. In Haiti, a hat pin. Don’t wear one around your neck unless you have it encased. I’ve got to pin down a short-horned migratory locust. There’s a rare hopper for you. They eat everything in sight. Miles and miles of pastures and plains eaten to the bone. Never underestimate the appetite of things that hop.”

Startled, Lily yelped! She hadn’t noticed Max approaching, thinking him still standing in the doorway, when he mistook her finger for a candied cherry as they simultaneously reached for the last one.

“No. You go right ahead, Lily.”

Lily wasted no time and ate the last candy before inquiring, “Maxfield, how many hoppers do you suppose it takes to level a neighbor’s unkempt yard? More than a few hundred?”

“I should say so. Thousands, Lily. There are far worse things than the short-horned migratory locust,” Max magnified his factual, informative, professorial tone, which had the effect of taking his inquisitor aside and into an unuttered sense of commitment to a confidence about to be bestowed, or betrayed; one could never figure which. “Dutch elm disease for one. Caused by a fungus. Devastating. A yellowing of the foliage. Defoliation. Death. I need a hat pin!”

Lily was bothering with something to the side of her chair when she asked, “Must it be a hat pin? Will a long sewing needle do?” Lily was holding a sewing needle extracted from her pink wicker sewing basket given to her by V for Christmas several years earlier. Neither put much stock into Christmas anymore. They celebrated the Winter Solstice for a couple years with two diesel dykes, Peter O’Toole and Billy Butts. And then, traditional commemorations became “too tedious” for V. The sewing basket was a joke gift, but Lily loved it and quickly discovered that she actually did enjoy refurbishing thrift store apparel.

“Of course. Absolutely. Thank you.” Max quickly snatched the needle from Lily, leaving her with V to worry and sort through a quandary of misgivings, not the least of which is how Max disappeared through the bird’s eye maple double doors without disturbing Dionysus.

“One day they will come and take him away. It is inevitable. Mark my words,” V knowingly stated with the benefit of magical thinking and her far-reaching foresight that enabled her to see foregone conclusions.

“Maybe not.”

“Hmm...maybe not. Anyway, where were we?”

Without missing a beat, Lily answered, “Something about your goddamned life and you should know better.”

“Wow,” V exclaimed. “You are good.” Lily smiled. However V pouted, sighed and said, “So much for posterity,” feeling a pity party coming on.

Anxiety, from V’s sense of a wasted life, filled with false starts and half-baked exercises in the profundity of the useless, filled her wasted hours. It must change.