Or so he said. I met them on an evening when he was playing at a nearby club later that night. I didn't trust him—he had the face of a con man, sly and foreign. Besides, he was a Frenchman, and my preference has always been for the Northern Italian type. I didn't like the way he flicked ashes from his cigarette in my sister's direction, nor the way he shook her off when she tried to put her arm around his shoulders—there was a puppyish quality of despair to my sister I hadn't remembered seeing before. I got a kind of nasty feeling about him, as if whatever it was he did with her in bed gave Sis a gratification that was primarily secondary, if you undertake my meaning. He had long curly black hair and high cheekbones; he was dressed in an old sweater with little puffed shoulders. I guess it had once been a girl's sweater, it appeared too small for him. Though in it he looked awfully cute, a cunning little queen. When I looked down at the floor to pick up a dollar I had dropped, I saw he was wearing long winter underwear, flannel, with four or five pairs of socks on over it; each sock with holes in various places, exposing the pair beneath, and a pair of tattered cowboy boots. When he rose to shake my hand I couldn't help but be amused at how the flannel underwear, with nothing on over it except the girl's sweater, gave him a kind of Robin Hood appearance; he should have been wearing a codpiece, egads.
He didn't appear to have evolved much from the sixties. Which was all right with me: I had just gone back to wearing a ponytail myself. "You do look like John Paul Jones with your ponytail," my sister said, rising to kiss me.
"Yes," said Jonny Jalouse, "or like—what was his name? Paul Revere and the Raiders." He spoke with a little lisp, and a lilting French accent. There were many of these lizardy guys crawling around all the time at the Gulag—this one was prettier than most, and if my sister had picked him up he must have had something going for him. He wasn't a bad musician. It was his mouth that interested me: as if a kiss had been planted on his face in the womb, and this later grew into a mouth.
He chain-smoked Gauloises; really, I shouldn't have been disturbed by him. In a different place I might have been reminded of my pal Sherman, a gentle soul. But my sister did have a black eye, and I didn't want to ask about it. When this character smiled he revealed two black stubs of teeth.
I felt so upset I had to go over to the jukebox and put some Frank Sinatra on; when I came back to the table the guy got up all over again, exaggeratedly polite. "I can't tell you how glad I am to meet you," he said. "You will come to hear me play later?"
I shook my head. "Can't make it," I said. "I've got a deadline: I have to finish this painting before I go to Europe."
"And when will you be going?" Jonny said.
I wanted to take out a cord of dental floss and whip it between his teeth; God knows he would have appreciated that. Or some kind of mitering device, with which I could round off the corners of his canines: what a spiked Dracula he was. His stage makeup—or maybe he wore it all the time, I don't know —was far too heavy: black eyes, red guppy mouth. "I'm going to Italy," I said. "Roma. I'm going to get a studio there and paint."
"Amaretta tells me you are a painter?" the guy said.
"Yes," I said. "Let me have a double vodka on the rocks, will you." Jonny Jalouse took out a hand-rolled cigarette and lit it. "With hashish," he said. "Would you like some?" I shook my head.
My sister was in bad shape. Sitting next to this guy, her hair was dirty and there were pimples on her face. What she was wearing was something like an old silk shirt, very tattered, and a leather jacket. She had the look of a person who needs a shower, much abused; by this I figured she had been taking too much cocaine. "What happened to your eye?" I said.
"I'm anemic," she said. "I walked into a cabinet door and because I'm anemic it gave me a black eye."
"That certainly seems to run in the family," I said.
"I practically put my eye out. At first I thought, Well, it's all over with me now, I'll be a blind person, and then I don't even need to worry about where I'm going to find a drunken-driving course."
"Yeah," I said. "What happened with that?"
"I had to go to this place in Trenton to take an evaluation test. I thought that these people were really going to help me. There were about forty of us, all in one big room, and they gave us a test to do. On it were questions such as, 'How often do you get drunk?' I thought I was supposed to be honest in answering. I didn't know that all around me people were putting down 'Once or twice a year.' I put down 'Four or five nights a week.' Well, really I wouldn't get drunk if I didn't take the coke. But I need something to bring me down after I get wired, and so I have a couple quarts of beer just to relax me.
"You really must stop doing this so much," Jonny said.
With that I suddenly felt a great joy in my heart for Jonny, and I nodded. "This guy knows what he's talking about, Amaretta," I said.
"Shut up. There were a lot of other questions on this test: 'Do you drive after you've been drinking?' I was completely honest. So when we all handed in our tests, it looked like I was a lunatic. Everyone else had lied. And they seemed sane, while for being honest I was now in real trouble. So they called me into this little room. They told me they couldn't help me at all, that my problem was too big for them to handle. I was supposed to seek therapy or find a program that lasted for more than four hours of classroom time: more like thirty. I wasn't going to get my license back. So I went back to the New York State license bureau, and they said there was nothing they could do. But one guy there felt sorry for me; he agreed to let me into his class. 'You are trying to change, I think,' he said. 'Maybe I can help you. The mess you're in is your own fault, but still ...we'll see.' Anyway, he turned out really to be my savior, a real guru. A little shrunken guy, who always dressed in black. 'Because if you can project energy wearing black, you can do anything,' he used to say."
"I'm getting bored, Amaretta," her pal said. "I'm going to play some pinball."
"Nice guy," I said, after he had left.
"Yes," she said. "He's really been great ... a real stabilizing influence on me, Marley."
"Well, did this guru help you?"
"Oh, yes," she said. "He made me go to a class called 'How to Make Money Doing Anything.' I thought this was sort of a neat idea. The other people who were enrolled in the course thought so, too; that it would be about how you could turn your hobbies into money-makers. Like knitting, for example. But as it turned out, the first class the guy spent talking about how everything that happens to you is because you want it to. 'You can live forever,' he said. 'You only die because you want to.' 'You mean to say I wanted to be mugged?' a girl said.
"He said that yes, she had wanted to be mugged. Well, don't look like that: I didn't go back after the first time. I went back to my guru. He sent me to a class in how to be a whirling dervish. It's part of the Sufi religion, you know. We had to chant for hours, and a man showed us how to weave our necks into circles. We were told not to think of anything at all. This is very difficult, you know: too difficult for me, and I didn't go back to that class, either. But I'm fine now, since I've met Jonny. He's very stable and a good influence on me. ..."
As if to prove what she was saying, Jonny came back to our table with a couple of German drug dealers I had met before. They were all jabbering in French. My sister sat humming to herself at one end of the table, weaving back and forth gently, as if she were still in the whirling dervish class.
Even as a mess, my sister was beautifuclass="underline" I was bereaved at how badly I had treated her most of my life. Those clear eyes, which nothing could muck up—like the color of the Caribbean in a National Geographic magazine photo. And that smell of raspberries she had always about her, raspberries-in a field on a hot summer day. With some bees flying about: these represented her thoughts, random to others, but making sense to herself. Even in a scruffy leather jacket she looked fine—like a great lioness after a feed, basking with a bloodstained mouth.