Mark was peculiar about her relationship with Lisa and Lisa said it was because he couldn’t enter into it the way he could when Grace fucked some guy. Then he could be the guy she was fucking or Grace. And everyone wants to know how women do it. She told Mark what Lisa said and that he seemed upset at her bisexuality. He said he wasn’t, that bisexuals were failed homosexuals and he told her she was too young to fail. What was failure, she wanted to know. Finally he relented and announced that this was her grace period but after a while she’d have to make up her mind. He said he didn’t mean just sex.
Make up her mind, her face. Dress it up, rearrange the pieces, move the furniture, change the decor. The design. I’d like a few more angles on that part of my mind. Remove the frills. She felt she was up for grabs, even to herself. It was as difficult to know what to fill her days with as her body, or mind. It wasn’t like learning the alphabet; it was more like unlearning it, not taking it in and not spitting it out. I know it by heart, she thought about a movie she had seen a million times. There was something reassuring in having the same responses to a movie she knew inside out. Repetition was like a visit to her family, except she never went home. Repetition like living at home. Her visits to already seen films produced familiar sights, cries, rushes of blood, melancholy. It was always the same. A home away from home, these responses. Automatic responses. Like moving her hand to Lisa’s breast. Or had she learned that in the movies, or at her mother’s breast. Except she’d always hated her mother’s body. When Ruth took off her longline bra, and her breasts fell from those white cotton cups, flat and sagging, like her life, Grace thought, exactly the life she didn’t want, contained in that body. Always the white cotton full slip under her clothes. And the girdle that mercilessly controlled her figure, which, after two children, had spread and about which she didn’t do anything. Her mother’s heavy arms extending from a serviceable housedress. And when she took it off she turned from her daughter, as if ashamed or embarrassed. Grace had never seen her mother’s cunt, that part of her mother’s body was entirely forbidden from her view, and it was that part she wanted revealed. It seemed impossible that she hadn’t seen it, but she couldn’t remember it, the way she did remember her mother’s breasts, as if the upper part of a woman was all right to show, but not the lower part, and later when Grace stole girlie magazines from candy stores, there too only the breasts were exposed, but those breasts were bouncy and taut, not at all like her mother’s, and maybe that’s why her mother was ashamed in front of her. Or that’s what Grace thought sitting in suspense at the edge of her mother’s bed, waiting for her mother to show herself to her only daughter, her baby, as she called Grace when they were alone together.
Lisa called her baby too, but Lisa and her mother were worlds apart. Lisa was always aware of the audience, and her effect on it, and Grace liked to watch her work the crowd, as Lisa put it, her long thin arms dangling at her sides or moving fast with the music. Mark made some more cynical comments about love between women and Grace said his true colors were showing, to which he replied that at least he had true colors, as if Grace didn’t. Another murder had been committed the night before and Grace couldn’t sleep, wondering if evil really did exist. Lisa had told her that she flirted with danger but wouldn’t know evil if it came up and shook her. Grace said that was because it didn’t exist except as absence, and Lisa laughed and said something about lapsed Catholics being all the same. Later Grace remembered also asking her mother if evil existed and getting the answer she’d given to Lisa. She had problems, she complained to Mark, who complained to her that the play had its problems too, although it takes a kind of leap in perspective to anthropomorphize art like that. It was as if the play were already there, and all he had to do was find it.
Mark might have the Infanta dress like her dead mother, but first he had to establish the mother’s costume and appearance, and that meant a portrait, or something or someone in the open coffin on display while the play went on. Also he wanted the Infanta to show, in some way, that she too was wounded, damaged, and that even though beautiful, she like the Dwarf was imperfect. Grace refused to plead for the King’s love, saying it was out of character and Mark countered that it was more out of character for Grace than the Infanta, and the two of them fought again, Mark bringing it to a close by suggesting that they were both tired and Grace was, after all, his star.
There were no stars out that night as Grace wrote Celia that she was having an affair with a woman, but still sleeping with men, to which Celia replied in her next letter that Grace might be having the best of all possible worlds. Grace answered, finally, that she didn’t think there was a best and she told Celia that she didn’t want to feel responsible to anybody. She felt that Lisa was getting more involved with her, and Grace wasn’t sure what she wanted, although she liked Lisa a lot. “I’m not getting married to anyone,” she wrote Celia, “whatever Mark thinks about my natural urges.”
Mark had taken to dressing like Wilde during rehearsals, and had just read De Profundis, which caused him to cry and exclaim that at least they wouldn’t go to jail for their unnatural acts, and that Wilde had died for their sins, and Grace told him he was making her sick. She grabbed a bunch of her hair, looked at it, with its split ends, and thought she should go visit Ellen soon or sometime because it nagged at her, Ellen sitting forever in that bin, with no possible future. She split each hair from one end to the other, staring at the strand of hair with terrific concentration, her lips pursed, her eyes nearly crossed. She sat like that for hours rerunning the day’s events. She thought Lisa was acting weird. Maybe she was tired of her, or maybe she was just tired, or maybe Grace herself was tired, or didn’t know Lisa well enough to be able to tell. If you ever could tell those things about someone else. Where did her thoughts leave off and Lisa’s begin anyway? Love is like that Mark would say if he were sitting on the edge of her bed consoling her or cajoling her, both somewhat the same to her these days. But she wasn’t sure she was in love with Lisa, whatever that was. She didn’t expect it, encourage it, or even, she was sure, really want it. Not yet. Love could wait. She’d grow into it like a pair of pants a size too big. Grace thought her time in bars would lead to something, but Lisa said she shouldn’t expect anything to lead to anything. And she told Grace she didn’t want to be her baby-sitter. Grace ignored Lisa for the rest of the night, but now she reviewed the conversation along her split ends.
Grace told Mark that she hadn’t slept at all and that she felt she was filling up, and one day she might spill over. She was as a story. There was hers, Mark’s, Lisa’s, the play, people at the bar, hundreds of stories. Mark asked her to concentrate on her role, forget everything but it for just a few days, until D-Day, then he said he could talk to her about how she was in a story and so was he. Not in one, she said, we are them.
Her role: innocent and evil, physically beautiful and spiritually ugly, powerful and powerless. Grace told him she’d act the lines, but if he expected her to know how to be all that, he was crazy. “I am crazy,” he answered, “and so are you.” On the night of the run-through that guy was in the audience, the one who gave Grace the creeps and at the same time was fascinating, like a horror movie. Lisa watched, watched Grace’s eyes find his, and didn’t think she wanted to live through another of Grace’s adventures. Especially this one. Lisa told Grace she was going out of town for a while, the gig bored her, and she’d return after both of them had put enough between them that neither would mind just being friends. Grace was indignant, as Lisa thought she’d be, told her she didn’t want to be friends with her, and that she really didn’t care anyway. Grace knew that Lisa would expect her to get over it. Pretty fast and probably in the arms of another. Probably a man. And if it was going to be that creep, Lisa had told Grace, she didn’t want to see it. She’d seen enough already. Straight women were a pain in the ass. Or like quicksand was how she put it to Grace. Lisa liked being the one to go, to move on, to get back on the road.