Grace had imagined that Lisa would always be around. She consoled herself by thinking that she probably wasn’t a lesbian anyway. Misquoting a line from Trash, Mark told her she wasn’t a good lesbian but, as Grace herself had once said, no one is perfect.
She wanted to forget and she threw herself into her part. Now that she’d been abandoned, her heart supposedly broken, she did feel a little tragic, or at least wounded, the way Mark said he wanted the Infanta to be, not just a monster. The creepy guy hanging around was a distraction. She didn’t imagine that she could do anything to him that would touch him or anger him or move him or move him away as she thought she’d done with Lisa, and in an odd way he was safe. At least she didn’t feel like killing herself, not for somebody else. If she ever did it, she told Mark, it would be only because of herself. Mark said that was wonderfully selfish and this mood was perfect for the Infanta. In rehearsal Grace recited her last line with real fury: “For the future let those who come to play with me have no heart.” Then she stormed off the stage, not at all like a princess, or Mark’s idea of a princess. Still, Mark was pleased that she had assumed her role. Even though she said that she didn’t like the Infanta because she didn’t do anything, and why, she asked Mark, do people write stories about people who don’t do anything. At least the Dwarf was an entertainer, not like the Infanta or the King, who didn’t have to earn anyone’s attention.
Chet Baker singing “They’re writing songs of love but not for me,” Mark decided, was the right touch for the fade-out. The Dwarf is lying dead, stage right, and the Infanta has made her final exit. The record was a gift from Bill to Grace after she’d broken his heart. Perfect, Mark thought. Perfect too was the enlarged reproduction of Holbein’s Dance of Death, which figured in the fairy tale and was part of the spare scenery, even more apparent or obvious with only the dead Dwarf, Mark himself, lying there onstage. Too bad he couldn’t see it, and though he had Grace stand in, or lie in, for him a couple of times, it wasn’t the same. They were nearly ready for opening night, as much as you could call a first night at Oscar’s an opening. And when that night came, the guy was waiting backstage, so to speak, as if he knew something that Grace didn’t, and after she spoke her last line, again in fury she defiantly walked over to him and into his waiting arms, so to speak, feeling that there was nothing to lose.
Chapter 12
Emily awoke from this dream. Someone like her is enticed into a room whose walls are deep red. Like shame, she thinks later. She is given a seat by a man smoking a cigar. Then there are many men. All of them want her, whoever she is. Want her very much. They’re willing to give her anything. Anything at all. She says she’s not interested in money, that she wants to be respected. One man spits into a silver spittoon. Her hands are bound behind her. She’s not going to get anything. She’s made a mistake of some sort and can’t correct it. One by one the men lift her dress, although she thought she was wearing pants, they lift her dress and fuck her. She is taken over and over again. She does not resist. The dream disgusts her although she thinks she has had an orgasm in her sleep. Emily wonders how women can know, if their dreams aren’t wet like men’s. One should not be fooled by the surface of things, as that surface is easily broken and disrupted. As Emily’s mother remarked to her once, “Don’t things get dirty easily?”
What Emily read she became, identifying with the hero or heroine, the protagonist or the ideas, much as she did when she watched movies and cried. To this becoming her dictionary was a map, and learning new words was like leaving home. A map picked at indiscriminately. “Pastiche…hodgepodge.” “Passionate…easily aroused to anger; capable of intense feeling; see ardent, fervid, fervent.” “Imperialism…the policy, practice, or advocacy of extending power and dominion of a nation…” Looking up words she knew or thought she knew reassured her. Finding out that she was wrong scared her. Any sort of discovery, especially of contradiction, satisfied her. Her men’s army pants had shredded at the inner thigh and, unable to sew, she took an old T-shirt, cut a swatch, and sewed it badly to the crotch and down the inner leg. It looked more like a bandage than a patch but the hole was covered. She flipped to the back of the dictionary. “Vicarious…serving instead of someone or something else; in the existence of another.” She liked that phrase. “Victualler…the keeper of a tavern.” “Violence…an exertion of physical force; outrage; fervor.” “Virago…a woman of great stature; a loud, overbearing woman.” “Virtuoso…one who excels.” Passionate, fervid; violence, fervor. She repeated fervid a few times, thought about having a fever, then looked up furtive. It seemed to her that there should have been more connection between passion and stealth, but there wasn’t. She was dissatisfied but did not feel her worst, which was reserved for those times when she felt there was nothing to say at all.
It is a strange experience for whoever regards himself as the One to be revealed to himself as otherness, alterity.
Christine told Emily she had an intelligent face and Emily answered that she could fool people with makeup, but it was difficult to keep up appearances. Emily was reading The Second Sex, and Christine, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. De Beauvoir’s discussion of narcissism, her comments on makeup, the subject of their discussion. “In a woman dressed and adorned, nature is present but under restraint by human will remolded near to man’s desire.” If you look up desire in the dictionary, Emily said, it says that it’s an impulse, a conscious one, toward something that promises satisfaction in its attainment. Christine thought that sounded too clinical. And Emily said she resented having to do anything about her appearance, that when she put on makeup she felt like she was giving in. Christine said she couldn’t stand the way she looked without makeup, and that Emily needed to be more narcissistic. When she was with a man she slept with her makeup on, she told Emily. The man’s desire. Emily asked, “Even your false eyelashes? What if one fell off in the middle of the night?” “I always get up before he does,” Christine said. At their local bar they invented the term facial imperialism, while they watched couples from a small table. They talked about school. Edith. De Beauvoir and Sartre. Emily watched herself, careful not to say the wrong thing to Christine, who she thought misinterpreted easily. She peered at Christine’s face closely. Emily squinted, causing Christine to think she was upset. She didn’t like the way Christine told her what to do when she wasn’t asked. She hated her makeup, thought it made her look like a doll. Emily told herself that if Christine wanted to look like a doll, that was her business. Christine watched Emily’s face, its blankness masking what Christine knew to be anger, based, she felt, on jealousy. Emily smiled and said, If you want me to I’ll take your books back to Forty-second Street when I go. Then they both smiled, and Emily hated herself.