“Turn to me,” the guy at the bar said. It was the guy who told Mark he was into pussy. He was back, holding racing gloves in one hand, a drink in another. He had all his fingers and he looked dangerous, like the evil hero in a grade B movie. Grace smiled to herself. More like a character actor than a star, and he thought she was smiling at him. Mark had said if she was so into her innocence, maybe she should play the Dwarf. She kept on smiling and talking drunkenly to the stranger. Mark watched them leave. Carmen said that real girls had it much too easy. He took her to a seedy hotel next to the Greyhound Bus Station, and it was all perfect as far as Grace was concerned, except that there was something about him that she couldn’t put into words. He stayed here from time to time, he said, when he was in town. His leather jacket was worn, his black pants tight, his hands were large and rough, and he had books on the floor, the kind she wouldn’t have expected. Like Nietzsche.
The room was small, with a single electric light bulb hanging from the ceiling, a draft shaking it every once and a while. He had some Jack in the Black in his bag, and they kept on drinking. He didn’t seem to notice the place, and Grace supposed he’d seen worse. Maybe everything. When they made love his large hands moved her body around, positioning it finally on a diagonal across the bed. Her body fit into the old mattress as if into a mold. He hardly kissed her and kept repositioning her body into that same spot. Any excitement she had had fled and she went through the motions with him. Neon lights flashed on and off. The glare from crummy signs made it hard to sleep, and Grace woke, dressed fast, and left his room. He called himself Hunter, his last name, he said. She didn’t wake him.
Grace repeated this story to Lisa, the singer who worked with the band every other week. “Sounds like a pervert,” Lisa said. “A pervert,” Mark exclaimed. “Did you ever see The Naked Kiss? ‘He gave me the naked kiss, the kiss of a pervert.”’ “Women are much sweeter,” Lisa continued. “Then,” Mark went on, “there’s that line when he asks her to marry him and he says, ‘Our life will be paradise because we are both abnormal.’” Grace ignored Mark as best she could to concentrate on Lisa and the idea of sex with women, at least trying it, and not being able to shake the feeling that being with Hunter was like being with a ghost. She didn’t think he came either, not that it really mattered.
Time, actually the sundial, is taken aback by the Dwarf. But the birds like him because he used to feed them in the forest. The flowers think the birds are awful because well-bred people always stay in the same place, like themselves, they say. And the lizards are tolerant of him. Mark called them humanists. Mark wanted to make the scene in which the Dwarf remembers the forest as paradisaical as possible, given the restrictions of the bar, of course. The forest is his Eden, before his fall, his look into the mirror. That’s everyone’s fall, Grace thought. Grace and Mark couldn’t remember the first time they’d looked into mirrors, and wondered what they’d thought. Little kids see themselves for the first time and somehow figure out that that creature is themselves. The Dwarfs long walk through the palace seeking the Infanta leads him to find himself in the mirror. He finally realizes it’s himself because he’s carrying the rose she gave him after he had performed for her. But the Dwarf is too horrified by his image, just like the flowers. Was his image of himself perfect? Then he sees it’s not true. Grace said she was reminded of when her mother thought she was old enough to be left alone at night and told her that now she was her own baby-sitter. “What’s that got to do with this?” Mark asked. Grace said she didn’t know, it just came to mind.
They were at a party and Grace was thinking about ugliness, beauty, and anarchy, then found herself talking to, or listening to, an ugly guy who was telling her his life story. “I started going to therapy after I shot my best friend. We were living in California, and he was driving me crazy. It was going on for two years, so finally I shot him.” The funny thing was that the guy, his best friend, didn’t press charges, because they were best friends, and he didn’t go to jail or even court. That anyway was what Grace found most weird. The ugly guy said he had moved first to New York, then here, and didn’t think his friend would ever find him again. “Sometimes I miss him.”
He wasn’t a monster, and she didn’t feel revolted, but Grace walked away, the way you can do at parties, right after some admission has been made that’s intimate. Leave someone in mid-sentence. Or your eyes and their eyes are always revolving, scanning. You move in and out. Anyway, Grace did. A beautiful woman talked to her about decadence. She said she couldn’t afford to be decadent. She had children and people without children just couldn’t understand, and she wasn’t blaming them either, couldn’t understand what it meant. “Because I have children, I can only look at it, I can’t be it. I realized that people don’t have time to look at things, so I started shouting. Just to be heard. I want to make a path for my children, someplace in the future where they can live, so I have to shout.” It turned out that she was married to the ugly guy who had shot his best friend years ago. The woman said her husband had a tendency to exaggerate. The woman was shouting to be heard in the crowded room and Grace and she were united in their interest in a couple across the room who were commanding attention. They paced back and forth, along the edge of the room. She would stand and stare, glare, significantly in his direction, while he assumed a pose of indifference. Then she’d move away sullenly and dance back. They acted as if they didn’t know each other, and as if they didn’t know where the other stood, so that in some way they needed to find each other but were thwarted. “Exhausting, isn’t it?” said the shouting woman with children. Mark said they were like poisonous snakes, charged with current. “People like that enliven a party,” he continued, “especially such a straight one.” But Grace was watching two women dancing together, oblivious that they were the only ones dancing. Grace asked Lisa about her life and how she knew she was gay.
Lisa said she’d been best friends with this girl for a year when one afternoon it just happened. She was sitting on her lap, fooling around, and suddenly they were kissing passionately. Lisa said she had on her rosary and her girlfriend ripped it from her neck and threw it bead by bead across the room. “‘That rosary meant so much to me,” Lisa said, who had picked up all the beads from the floor and put them in an envelope, to save. Lisa said the other girl didn’t want it to go on because she already had a girlfriend, but Lisa said she didn’t care and spent weekends with her until she was totally fed up. “She told me I was too dependent, but that started me out. Men didn’t seem so necessary anymore, and the sex with women is much more beautiful. Men are abrasive, if you know what I mean.” Lisa said her parents were in the Midwest, her mother drinking up a storm, a typical suburban housewife, her father a typical businessman, except that somehow he never could earn any money. “Both of them love their afternoon martini. A little olive, a little onion, sitting on the couch. I suppose I was sheltered, except that my mother was an ugly drunk. When I went home the last time my mother called me a lesbian and slapped me in the face, and I looked at her real calmly and said, ‘You’ve seen the last of me.’ I suppose it’s sad, but I don’t have anything to say to them anyway. I think they regret having sent me to college.”
Grace flirted outrageously with Lisa, who seemed to have a lot of patience and one night patience was rewarded. Lisa took Grace home and Grace lost her virginity yet again. It was different, and Grace was at a loss. She worried that she wasn’t doing it right. Later it induced in her a state of psychic weightlessness that made her giddy with possibility. She floated on that for days. She told Mark that she didn’t know if she was gay or not, but she didn’t think she cared. A man’s mouth, a woman’s mouth, some things felt the same, other things were different. She felt like a twelve-year-old and like Mata Hari. Lisa’s body. Her own. She couldn’t explain any of it to Mark. She wished men had breasts. She told him that she was worried about the etiquette with women. Would she have to be nicer to Lisa than to the guys she slept with.