Figures Less Than Greek

Streetcar lights filter through the treated glass of picture windows. Their bone and yellow manes trifle around the tables. We meander through them. I think the management aims to cloister its patrons this early in the evening. Ray says this is because we are only twenty years and spitting distance from the Stonewall Bar.

A brass and cinnamon horseshoe bar sits in the heart of the building. Poinsettias reach up from half-walls and sofa tables. Their suede leaves hold the aspect of open hands in wonder and praise. We are looking for seats with elbowroom. Four men sing at a piano. They look cheap and luscious like a gay pinup of a line-up in a police station. Two men at the piano stand with their body weight more amply cast on one leg. One man has his weight shifted high and thrown back. He is open and ready with song. The third man, small and square, bats his thighs in tempo. I think they look like incarnates of a 1986 erotica calendar that still hangs in the nurses’ bathroom in the AIDS treatment center, where Ray and I met three years ago, on the south wing of the fifteenth floor of Saint Vincent’s Hospital. During my job interview, Ray, the assistant head nurse, asked me in all truth, “You want to work here?”

”It’s important,” I said hesitantly.

I felt one brow begin to rise. He chortled a little to the head nurse, Peg Malady, a gritty nasal sound from the upper part of his larynx. They both knew I had worked for five years in the intensive care unit. Peg was as familiar to me as I was to her. Our orbits crossed often enough in the hospital lobby where Peg stood morning fresh in a pressed lab coat talking to administrators and I’d pass her on my way to the revolving doors. Sometimes I would stop to say a quick “He’s bathing now. See you tonight,” to Diana Landry, Alan’s wife, who often tried to sleep beneath her wool coat in a hard blue resin chair in the lobby. Alan had a private room on the AIDS floor full of boxes of magazines, wedding photos, mail-order booster-vitamins and stock portfolios. He even had his own refrigerator. I knew him from the ICU. He would arrive there with pneumonia every few weeks with an entourage of helpers who wheeled his estate with him on steel carts. I worried that I may have sounded smug answering Ray. So I considered new words, more intelligible ones like, “I’ve seen the silent hate about this epidemic,” but Ray was already out the door, if not for the kick of one leg back into the office as if he were riding a scooter.

He slid back into the office minutes later. He stood against the wall and listened calmly as Peg and I talked about Alan. Ray held two white ceramic cups of cappuccino, large as a grapefruit cut in two. When Peg finished speaking, he pushed one cup into my hands. “Bless you,” he said.

***

Ray and I clink wineglasses to the firm tushes in the barroom. Our vision has adjusted to the dimness. Our speech has adjusted to the hubbub of chatter and drinks. Ray says he can barely handle the heterosexual blinders that he faces daily. When he goes out, he cannot bring himself to spend an evening in a sports bar full of straight assumptions. He is showing me his life tonight: here in the diocese of the body over drinks, and later at the assumption of the soul. After dinner, we are going to Carnegie Hall to see the Gay Men’s Christmas Choir.

At the bar, I am eager to laugh with him. He is careful to hang close. He is too honorable to say he knows I may be construed as a fag-hag here more so than as an aboveboard friend. To me, this is no worse than being mocked by straight men in sports bars as spacey. Ray and I are both between lovers. We appreciate each other¹s company but lament it too.

”Spacious maybe,” I fuss.

”Look at you!” Ray says laughing, “And look at this” he rebuts, grinning as he reaches into the interior pocket of his denim jacket. He pulls out just the green and white box top of a disposable enema and drops it back into his pocket. I laugh. Ray still has sex between lovers while I do not. I am overly afraid of strangers to be envious. “You stole that!” I say. Through the past three years, Ray and I have developed a ritual of shocking and sanctioning each other. This binds our differences within a larger alliance. “Borrowed,” he amends, and so smiling, we size up the singers at the cherry grand piano. I like the first man who leans mostly on his leg. Ray likes the one who could walk without hesitancy into a blaze. We sample more of the house white. At 33, Ray looks especially more like a praying mantis tonight in the evergreen turtleneck he has given himself early for Christmas. I look like the 27-year-old woman who never went to her prom when British punk music was too tangled an interest for a suburban girl to still seem pretty, and ten years later she still cannot disregard it.

***

I discovered the gay pinup in the bathroom on my first night of work at the treatment center. “Ladies first,” Ray said to me, shutting me out of the single unisex toilet. I stood in the hallway eager for my turn to pee. In room 20 my patient rested on his bed waiting for me with a white towel draped lengthwise from his nipples to thighs. Through the bathroom door, I heard Ray sing “My Funny Valentine” from start to finish to the row of men on the calendar. He was testing me, to see if I had tenacity, a characteristic of nurses who proved to be proficient. I squatted against the wall in my scrub pants until the fluorescent bathroom light suddenly caught me crouching, my hands squeezing my hamstrings as one might do playing dodgeball. Ray hung there in the light, singing to his pointer finger, turning the finger to each of the male models for October. “You’re my favorite work of art,” he crooned to the shirtless one in jeans. He bowed slowly from the center of the light to a phantom audience. He bowed as if the north and south of a faint hallway of a hospital floor at midnight were really eaves painted by a stage crew, as if the art of a nurse was really theater. As if he provided a chance for all the men in towels to take flight while their nurses left them. I said, “You dick” and ducked under his crescendo.

And so we are friends. We took tonight off to paint the town pink. “I have never been to the Gay Men¹s Choir,” I say at the bar, into my sleeve nearest Ray. Down to his maroon duck shoes he believes I need to find my inner child. I smirk at him as I light a cigarette. He closes his eyes. Again he is disgusted by the thought of my inexperienced self who, concisely, just after nursing school, became a Dead head. You are so sad, his face says. “I was nineteen,” I vouch coolly, turning my cigarette on the lip of the square glass ashtray. Ray pats my perm feigning hopelessness. Not long ago, Ray had his heart dismembered by a doctor. I look right back at him about the inexperienced wit of this and roll my eyes. The wine glasses overhead, the brass import taps, the steel domestic taps, the mirrors behind the matronly hips of liqueur bottles, the bills and coins on the sticky bar disappear. I have known a room to go away like this when I have set a needle into winter-thin flesh. I am the princess of ambivalence lately.

I come back around and say, “Let’s play illness.”

***

Two men stand across from us. One man eyes the lemons and cherries in the condiment tray. The other man¹s hands shake against a brandy glass. He wears a blue pinpoint shirt that is too big for him. One sleeve is spotted with a patch of soft threads matted neatly with iron-on tape. His face is easy though he shakes. He seems relieved by distraction, glad indeed to cradle a festive glass of young, amber wine and grateful just now to be swallowed by waves of mirth that cascade down the bar from the glee of three transsexuals in reunion.

I want to transform our out-of-the-blue unwillingness.

”Girl?” Ray says. He slips down from the red wood barstool to do a body shimmy. Ray thinks we can forget ourselves. Ray pretends to be a cliché in order to forget. I pardon him, and me, and the public, and the entire anonymous carnival around us‹a relief we are, a testimony to our humanness that we are all so imperfect, though I worry about how we pitch around bodies of words carelessly. Most days, I think we cannot help ourselves. When I am tired, I think too few of us feel accountable to try to clean ourselves up. Most nights though, Ray and I choose to clean it up, soak it up, our wide human failing of compassion, wipe it down with soap or bleach it clean. Sometimes we even revive a heart, but thereafter we toss and turn our words like restless bodies to lampoon it.

”Here’s to the black leather ass third from left,” Ray emends with silly hand gestures. Ray has down the tragedy of a comedian, the moves of an artisan who trembles beneath his merriment. I think I know what he means. We drink because the world cannot help itself. Silently. Like this, in a bar of gay men, some of whom pretend a jubilation for singing with friends, some of whom carol out of fantasy, willingly, still young enough to hook their hopes on naiveté. One blond boy, barely of age, sings with the full trust of this prophecy, as a vessel for this carol about a girl named after a snowflake who gets to wear an evening gown. Do straight girls learn this lesson earlier than gay boys, I wonder? When Ray sees me, he says, “Oh honey, let me teach you a thing or two about men.”

***

Playing illness is like playing scavenger hunt, except you cannot appear to be looking for anything. Ray and I do this so we can pretend we’re careless. “Rosie, weight loss to the left,” he says. I look left. Ray is right. A cadaver arm leans down on the bar next to a highball glass of orange juice and ice. The too-thin man is wearing a black wool vest over a long-sleeved thermal undershirt that willows in the air. “One for Ray,” I say, though Rosie is not my name. I lift off the stool, raise my left hand deep into the evening, near the inverted wineglasses. I scratch a single line up and down. Ray knows that I will keep a fair tally. Behind the lime poinsettia a heavyset man wears gold cufflinks, each one a cube carved into the head of a panther, each panther with fangs and one ruby eye. With a diamond-shaped monogram stitched on his breast pocket that rises and falls with his sandbag chest, but his nail beds are chalky and opaque. He is lonely, sick and rich, and I am taken with his quandary. I blow smoke down by the legs of my stool. I harness my curls and drop them. I adjust the weight of my hair in order to right my back so that I can say under my breath, “Nail rot. Primary symptom.”

Ray is beautifully suburban as he looks over to the right side of the room. Hale, but not vain. His hair, a horseshoe of stubble, is velvet-short and very brown. His arms are not too hard and not too soft because our work is so physical. I love that Ray is always prepared for the weather.

”I win,” I say. We lock eyes and look down. I shut mine to make the room turn black until my queen says, “You win” and pushes me. I grab for my cigarettes before opening my eyes. I flash my straight teeth into the blackness until I see the likes of a bar again. Ray is pinching the roll of extra belly that hangs like Saturn’s ring at the waistline of my jeans.

”Jump a little lighter Rosie,” he says, and I know he is right so I say, “Okay, okay, you win.”

***

An elderly woman holds a yellow umbrella by its pleated trunk as she stands by the curb of Greenwich Avenue in a vintage car coat. She waggles the umbrella at the night. The ribbon and snap hop up and down. They fasten to her gloved fingers. A taxi hooks over to her from the center lane. The air is brisk and dry. We are happy again, chewing gum and consciously famished. A scaffold runs the length of the block. Ply-boards on the building are pasted with fliers, scuffed by shoes and boots, dusty with bus exhaust. A newspaper puffs out of the mesh trash can. A few pages hold in the crease between the sidewalk and the boards. A younger woman coaches a beagle to relieve itself on a sheet of newspaper. Overcome, it cowers and begins to cough like a goose.

We are walking up nine streets to La Mer. I wave one finger in circles at a sky blue flier on the plywood. I touch my finger to the titties of Sheila Alexander, a female impersonator and cabaret singer. “Too hot honey!” I say and blow on my finger as if it were a match. I take Ray’s wool derby and put it on my head, crudely tucking my hair beneath it. Ray tells me Sheila wears chandelier crystals from her pierced nipples. I become myself immediately, occupied that he is familiar with her. I cross my brow. My hair begins to fall down like snakes from beneath his hat. I say, “That would hurt.” To which Ray says impatiently, “So? They swing slower.” I have a pair of black stone earrings that look like licorice teardrops. I say to Ray that they swing heavy too and must be why I like to wear them when I am in love. Ray pats me on top of the hat. I do not smile and give him back his hat. We begin to walk briskly in step, and silence, to the restaurant. I am unsure about feeling irritated with him. I am aware of how my Irish can rise up when I have been drinking.

The maitre d’ at La Mer seats us in the galley. A kerosene lamp casts shadows that jump across the white linen tablecloth in the booth against a wall of wainscoting. The restaurant smells of fish and garlic. We order wine before we are seated. A rope net drapes down from the ceiling. Without a word, I duck exaggeratedly beneath it. He taps me on the arm and has his cheeks sucked in. His mouth is a pucker. He flaps his hands by his ears like fins. We take off our coats and settle in.

***

A platter of paella is lowered on the table by two hands that place it down, tipping one end to touch the table then easing the other end to meets its plane. There is no noise or spill. The yellow rice is specked with orange threads, saffron surely, and the seafood medley is motley. Red and white lobster meat, pearly scallops and nearly candy cane shrimp, but in the flickering light, the blue mussels appear to be moving. Silverware clinks on plates. Roy Orbison sings for the lonely. We drink and talk shop.

Ray continues, “It was the saddest fucking one, Rosie.” When Ray is sad he speaks barely above a whisper. The waiters, like sea-divers, run coolness over us as they swim past our table. Our sentences diffuse in the current. We cast words back and forth across the table. Everything moves slower under water.

”Jesus,” I say, sad for Ray, and he continues, “Howard was standing at the foot of the bed holding him by the ankles. When I shut off the machine, Howard made a noise that was not human.” Ray is being sincere. I am a little nervous. We eat the bread and rice.

”It scared me,” he admits.

”The way he cried?” I ask.

”The way he howled, Rosie,” he corrects me. He corrects himself, “It was the saddest fucking one.” I toss back what is left in my glass because I cannot stand it. I stand accused for talking shop when there is no reason for it. We do this kind of work almost every night. Who else is going to help us? I light a cigarette from the flame of the kerosene lamp.

***

Carnegie Hall is all gold and red velvet. I push my back against the grain of the velvet on my regal chair. The whimsy of the caroling makes me feel lighter. On the rim in front of the right stage box is where Ray leans. His hands are perched on the ledge. His head is well over his arms. He may swan dive right down to the five tiers of risers. The chorus sings a third encore. Ray leans happy-go-lucky over them. Eight of the singers sit on stools. Frail from disease, they cannot stand for the length of a song. They move their knees in little circles keeping time. Ray looks weightless as he tilts into the cathedral space before us.

I reach and hold the back flap of his wool sport coat. I sit back and close my eyes. I believe I am wearing diamonds and that I am a politician’s wife.

***

The cabbie yells at me to come back in from the open window. Cars hedge and stop. The vehicular staccato and the pedestrians walking make a wealth of noise. Ray holds the back of my green loden coat. I am playing air guitar to the southbound cars on Broadway. I am overcome with Bruce Springsteen. That is why Ray calls me Rosie. “I broke a string,” I yell back to Ray, over my shoulder, who leans heavy on me by the window. I think I point a black and silver Stratocaster at each driver who will look at me, and almost every driver will. I look at a blonde woman driving her Jaguar. My ringlets fly in the wind. Some fly into my mouth. She rolls down her dark blue window and looks at me.

”You have the power to lower the night sky,” I yell at her. Ray pulls harder on my coattails. He knows that I might scare her. Ray’s free hand comes out the window of the cab. He pats my face with a handkerchief. He is trying to put it in my mouth. As our yellow cab proceeds, Ray and I jerk forward. We fall against the casing of the passenger door. His handkerchief tangles with my hair and I rise up through the open window. He holds on. There is no one else accountable on these streets. A woman walks alone wrapped in a cape. A grocery worker drapes a blanket on plastic bottles of cider. I point the neck of my guitar to the North Star, the only heavenly body evident to me from here, and sing a fierce song about desire.

While working as a registered nurse, MaryJo Mahoney earned her M.F.A. in
creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and a Ph.D. in literature and
creative writing from the University of Houston. Her work has been published
or is forthcoming in The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, as well as The
Nation and many other publications.