Colleen O'Brien
Artiste
I was six drinks into a very good night, and the next morning would wake up pretty sure and mortally afraid that in the cab with Michael I’d suggested going to a motel—he was married, I was married—and I’d sit on the floor of my kitchen, between the cupboards and the table legs and weigh my suicide options. But none of this mattered yet. I said yes to a seventh Hammerhead (I’d given up hard liquor) and gave the waitress my credit card with strict instructions not to open a tab because that one was almost maxed. We had a moment, the waitress and I. She looked like an artist too and like she understood about unruly finances. She brought the little yellow-and-white receipt for $4.95 and I added a five dollar tip. We had another moment after I signed, she winked at me, but then on my way to the bathroom I wished I hadn’t tipped with such an eager face. What kind of a supercilious asshole was I to think my five dollars was making or breaking anyone, and I had already knocked the ashtray not just off the table but clear across the room.
She probably wasn’t an artist, I thought as I peed. She was just a cool person, someone who didn’t need an excuse to take herself out of the mainstream. Probably—I traced my fingers along a graffito carved in the stall wall, spiky letters of the name “Curt”—probably the waitress didn’t have to think about some paper tiger of a mainstream, have to set herself in opposition to some dreamed up caste system Gestapo or the evility of the banal. Those letters said “cunt,” not “Curt,” I realized as I traced the t, and laughed and thought that might be the symbol around which the night, the year, my life up to now, clumped like iron shavings to a magnet pen, or better, fanned when you used the south end of the magnet, or wait, were they magnet shavings and an iron pen? Did magnets work on iron? I was grinning at “cunt” and then thought I better get off this toilet before syphilis started crawling up mine.
I made a deal with myself that I would not look in the mirror when I washed my hands, but if I caught a faint glimpse in the natural course of washing—looking for the soap dispenser, the towel dispenser, moving in a way the mirror would have to catch and my peripheral vision would have to register—that didn’t count. For Pieta’s sake you needed sharp senses, no need to Catholic guilt yourself out of the faculties God bestowed to help you not get eaten by lions and shit. Lions’n’shit. But no staring at my own face. Not even to think of its strangeness, or the mirror’s strangeness, the way the mouth in the mirror could open and close just like the mouth on the head and the eyes in the mirror pop and the forehead corrugate at my command. I had an unhealthy relationship with mirrors. Vanity was inherited, on top of being learned. When it oozed from both primary caregivers, the mother and the television, when twenty-eight years were spent with external reality predicated on one’s pretty face being one’s pretty fortune, in the cookie sense and the pirate-treasure sense, when more than one childhood memory was of wishing to become a department-store mannequin, then: one resorted to Stalinist reprogramming tactics. Black out the mirrors, obliterate the body. But one can’t fault oneself for knowing what exists beyond the borders of the form one imposes for the sake of—ha! For the sake of! The best of all incomplete sentences! One will always catch glimpses. Meta, meta, meta.
“You know Magnadoodle?” I said when I got back to the table.
“No,” Michael said. “We are not talking about childhood toys tonight. I refuse.”
“Whoa,” I said. “Pricktastic.”
Nora and Damien looked up from their conversation.
“What’d you do to Angela, Pricktastic?” Damien asked. “It looks like someone unplugged her face.”
“Please, Angela, I’m begging you,” Michael said. He pushed back his chair and got on his knees on the floor. The din of the bar didn’t change but the people at the next table quit talking and looked, except the guy with his back to us whom I heard say, “immunizations in Africa.” Michael clasped his hands like a charismatic Christian and pressed them to his forehead. He didn’t wear a wedding ring anymore but had a white line where it used to be. “Please can we not talk about childhood toys?”
The waitress was back with beers for Nora and Damien. She made a face at Michael.
“If you buy me a beer,” I said.
“Done!” Michael pounded the seat of his chair with his clasped hands. Then he followed my eyes up to the waitress’s face and for a frightened moment I thought he was going to embrace her legs. He ogled her knees but then scrambled back into his seat. We’d been kicked out of this bar before. Not by her, but still. “Two more Hammerheads,” he said, “on my tab please.”
She winked at me again. I loved her more than I had loved my second-grade teacher, Miss McGinn, with the big brown eyes and big boobs. If I went back to the waitress’s apartment tonight, all my favorite things would be there, stained glass and a stereo receiver from the seventies, wheat bread, butter, and honey, ingredients for toddies, white flannel pajamas I could borrow, Madeleine L’Engle books I could borrow. We could braid each other’s hair. I gulped my beer so it wouldn’t still be full when she came back with the new one.
“You know Magnadoodle?” I asked.
Michael’s mouth fell open. He looked at me like he wanted to fuck me.
“Just kidding,” I said.
Michael did want to fuck me. He had an unstable ego and it came with urges, same as the ones that were now causing him to melt the cellophane off his cigarette pack with the flame from his lighter, over the ashtray. Damien grabbed the lighter, using some jujitsu move that left Michael blinking at his hands.
“What are you, twelve?” Damien asked.
“Nora, do you like me?” Michael asked. “Somebody at this table has to like me.”
“I love you, baby,” Nora said. She had this Southern thing she did. This year she’d gotten a really good residency and it had rounded off some of the strung-out skinniness in her face and neck and even her chest looked fuller, her shoulders soft and freckled, like somebody who could nurse a baby if it really came down to it. She had a dimple, mother of heaven. Nora was so talented nobody cared what she looked like.
“Where are you going now?” Michael grabbed my hand when I stood up and my nerves went—zing!—up my arm to my brain and—zong!—down my spine to my crotch. I giggled and Michael hammed and crunched my fingers in his fist and whined, “No, no, no, you just left. Stay here.”
“I have to call my husband, ” I said, but lingered there with Michael holding my hand. A little sex fix was the cherry on top of everything. “Je suis . . .” I said. “Hey, Dame, is it je suis artiste, or je suis une artiste?
“Either,” Damien said. “Except one makes you sound like an idiot.”
“Maybe both,” I said. “I have to call my husband.”
I got in the phone booth. Rickety vintage thing and a hassle to fold the doors closed behind me. Through the greasy glass I could see into the bar, Nora’s white face glowing under the hanging lamp, back of Michael’s head. There was a condom stretched over the phone’s mouthpiece. “That’s good,” I said. “At least you’re safe.” I held it away from my face and put my quarters in and dialed Paul at home.
“Hey,” I said, and smiled to get my voice sexy-smiley like a good wife.
“Ange?”
“Whatcha doin’?”
“Ange?”
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“Babe, I can hardly hear you.”
“Oh. There’s a condom on the phone.”
“What?”
“Wait.” And I laughed so Paul could hear me and picked the condom off the phone. It turned from tight white drum to sad dead yellow bag. I held it above the box part of the phone and lowered it slowly. Neat little pile. My fingers were oily now and the phone smelled.
“There was condom on the phone,” I said. “Like literally on the phone.”
“You’re at the Six Arms?”
“How’d you guess?”
“Caller ID.”
“Oh, the payphone’s connected to the bar? It says Six Arms when I call?”
“Did you eat dinner?”
I thought about it. How there was this Edward Hopper thing happening with the shimmering metal on the front of the phone. Colors and melted pictures and light reflecting brighter than you’d think in real life. If you unscrewed that plate, that little piece of armor, you’d have a twelve-grid of square holes and could press it on something soft and firm that would give but not ooze like a balloon or thigh and instead of phone buttons you’d have rubber bubble buttons or flesh buttons and that could be your title. Flesh buttons. By Angela. Except that would suck.
“I do not think I ate dinner,” I said.
“It’s only nine,” Paul said. “Why don’t you come home and I’ll heat up some pasta?”
“That sounds good,” I said. All of a sudden I was almost crying.
“Jump in a cab,” he said. “Just tell them our address. I have cash.”
“You are so nice to me.”
“I love you, Ange. You’re beautiful.”
“You’re just saying that.”
“I’m not. It’s true.”
“You just know that’s my big gaping hole problem so you say things like that.”
“Come home.”
I straightened my back and stood perfectly straight in the phone booth like there were rusty nails poking through the walls. Under me my feet were fine. My knees were fine. All of me could stand up just fine.
“I need to eat something.”
“Jump in a cab. I’ll pay for it when you get here.”
“OK,” I said. “See you soon.”
Nora came and got me out of the phone booth.
“Pumpkin,” she said. “It is nasty down there.”
I was sitting on the floor of the booth, on some damp scattered pages of the Stranger. I held out my hands to Nora and she grabbed them and pulled.
“No, you come down,” I said. “It’s nice down here.”
“I ordered you a Reuben sandwich,” she said. “It’s waiting for you on the table.”
“Which card did you use?” I asked.
“My card. My treat.”
Nora was still holding my hands loosely, and I was still down, and I put my forehead on my knees for a second, and thought of making a joke about just going to sleep right there, but Nora didn’t get jokes always. I lifted my head and smiled at her. She got this terrible worried look.
“I’m just faking,” I said. I gripped her hands and pulled myself up.
The Reuben sandwich was on the table like she said. It glowed under the hanging lamp, little shimmers of oil in the fibers of the rye bread, black swirls in the white like a birthday cake, and the pile of fries all woven like a stick heap for starting a fire. Even the little metal cup of Thousand Island looked food-styled, peaked and plumped like an icing rose.
“This is the best day of my life,” I said.
“Happy birthday,” Michael said.
“Nora said I was going to,” I said. I ate a fry.
“Going to what?” Damien said after a second.
“Hold on,” I said. “I want to eat my fries.”
Then the rule was I had to shut up and eat every single fry before I said anything else. Nora wanted me to eat and so did Damien and so did Paul, and Michael didn’t care if I ate or died because he was basically a lion as far as evolution was concerned. You don’t listen to the lions, they shut up. You might be an abused child but isn’t everyone when you get down to it an abused child, in terms of the structure of the psyche? The superego locks the child-self in the bathroom till the tub overflows and soaks the floorboards and rots them and the child has to wait to grow up to have a credit card with which to pay for new boards. Nora, Damien, and Michael were talking again and having a good time and me being quiet eating the fries seemed to be doing the trick. I interrupted Nora at an appropriate moment and very quietly asked if she would get me some water, and she hopped right up and got it from the bar.
“Thank you, mon amie,” I said. “Without you, I would be dead in a dumpster.”
“Don’t say that, Ange,” Michael said. “It makes you less attractive.”
I dipped a fry in Thousand Island and threw it at him.
“No, no, no,” Damien said. “Food fight is not an option.”
“You’re an asshole, Michael,” Nora said.
“What?” Michael said. “She said ‘dead in a dumpster.’ That’s fucked up. Am I the only one who thinks so? Then I apologize.” He picked the fry off his shirt and put it on the table. The smear of Thousand Island started to slide into his breast pocket. “Angela, please continue saying horrible things about yourself.”
“Folks, we’ve officially crossed over,” Damien said. “I’m going to head out.”
“Can I go with you?” I asked.
Damien looked at me. For a second his face was a shook-up magic eight ball and then out of the silt came, faintly but legibly, the word no.
“Of course you can,” he said. “We’ll get a cab.”
“Never mind,” I said.
“Go with Damien,” Nora said.
“Why? So you can be alone with Michael?” I peeled the top bread off my sandwich, plucked out a thick piece of corned beef, and lowered it into my mouth.
“No, baby,” she said. “I like girls.”
“Okay, kids,” Damien said. He was standing and he had his hat on. “Anyone coming?”
“What time is it?” Michael asked.
Then they were gone. I was alone at the table watching lamplight play on the scales of the corned beef. The waitress squatted down to my level and asked if I was okay, and I said yes, this was the best day of my life. She said let her know if I needed anything, a taxi or anything, and I said I would kiss her but my face was all greasy. She laughed. I said my husband would be here soon, and he didn’t like me kissing other people. Then I was alone again.
Then Michael was standing over me.
“Come on,” he said.
I held out my arms. He grabbed me under the armpits and lifted me. For a second, he had me, one hand under my butt. My legs were clasped around his hips but I was too tall and right away I started to slip and we were laughing and still holding on, sort of slow dancing and staggering away from the table. Tears were pouring out of my eyes and the buttons of his coat were hard on my face. He smelled like a terrible smoker. He put his hands on my waist and moved me back a foot so he could look at me.
“Can you walk?” he asked.
His hands on my waist felt like everything. I couldn’t remember if I was naked or not. Then he let me go and I stood there, balanced on my feet, while he dug under the table for my coat and purse.
Then I was alone on the low concrete stoop of my home, trying to figure out which key.
“Je suis,” I sang softly, “Je suis, je suis, je suis.”
