"Oui, oui, and the poison sets in, that is the best moment,"
Jonny said. "When she turns green and is in convulsions and the rest of the people are standing there saying, 'Oh, la la, what to do?'
"The king cobra is among the most poisonous of snakes," I said. "But the reason it is so interesting is that it can be trained. How did you guys get to see that film? It hasn't even opened yet."
"Anyway, Marley, you missed the end of the story," Jonny said. "Amaretta, tell him what happened."
"Oh, the next day I was downtown getting some groceries, and I saw the old dyke in the store. She came over to me, really friendly, and I was so nervous when she asked me for my phone number I gave her my real number in the city, and she's been calling me up ever since. She says she forgives me and wants to see me again, she wants to take me to Florida— Florida, for God's sake! She'll rent an apartment for me ...after what I did to her!" My sister started to giggle.
I wanted to smack her. Here I had always thought she had feelings and now she seemed worse than all the other sleazes and crummy people New York was elemented with.
"And I forgot to tell you!" my sister said with a shriek. "She wore Jockey undershorts!"
"No!" said Jonny.
"Yes!" my sister said. "I just remembered! The old dyke actually wore men's Jockey shorts! Oh, God, how awful! I said to her, 'For never did I behold one mortal like to thee, neither man nor woman: I am awed as I look upon thee. In Delos, once, hard by the altar of Apollo, I saw a young palm tree shooting up with even such a grace.' I was laughing my head off. You know, that's from The Odyssey, where Odysseus speaks to Narcissus. You know, Marley had practically the whole thing memorized when he was a kid. We used to recite different parts out loud to each other. It was like a joke to me, undressing this big quivering horse, while she moaned with pleasure. I was like a goddess mucking about with a mortal. I knew what it was like to have power, but it left a nasty taste in my mouth, coming too easily."
One of the Germans, bored, took Amaretta by the arm and they all got up to go. My sister seemed half out of her mind and didn't even say goodbye to me. I should never have let her go. But she had always looked after herself, and she would have belted me in the face if I had even tried to tell her what to do.
So there I was, alone in the Gulag. And after I had another vodka I went home to paint. But the next day, about eight in the morning, I got a call from the cops of the Fifth Precinct. They hadn't been able to track me down until then. My sister had jumped out the seventh-floor window of Jonny J.'s building. When I spoke to Jonny he said he had tried to stop her; but they were heavily coked up, and he thought she was just playing around. When he refused to give her any more coke she climbed out onto a windowsill and he screamed at her to get inside; she was standing on the window ledge and then she slipped.
Well, there aren't many more thoughts in my head. Only a few, like something quite defunct and forgotten in the closet: an old cheese sandwich, perhaps, or a half-empty bottle of root beer. Or worse still, old socks green with lichen and mold. It might have hurt me less if they hadn't published those pictures in the paper, the kind of picture that should be outlawed: my sister like a broken cup, flecked with dust and pencil shavings on the pavement.
Matches
A voice came into my head and told me I should give a party. I had always wanted to give a party while I was living with Stash; now that I was alone there was nothing preventing me except that I didn't want to do it. I was afraid.
I thought about it for a while—giving a party—and then I thanked my lucky stars: I didn't have a table or chairs. So that ruled that little whim out. No one could have a party without a place to sit. But the voice kept nagging, "You must give a party, Eleanor. It will be good for you," and finally I broke down. I found myself in a store, purchasing two chairs and a table and arranging to have them delivered.
I could see what my actions were leading to. I understood that I was at a period in my life when everything was falling apart. If I could pull off a successful party then it meant that eventually I'd be able to pull my whole life together.
I knew my room would only comfortably hold four or five people; since I hated to use the telephone, I sent out twenty invitations. The invitations read "Please Come to My Tiny Hovel for Cocktails."
I invited around fifteen men and five women. What I planned to do was introduce all the men I wasn't interested in to my three single girlfriends (the other two women were married and coming with their husbands).
Unfortunately I was certain I had probably called each girl- friend, following my various dates with the men, and given them the dish on each man's peculiar habits. My only hope was that they wouldn't remember.
The day of the party everything went wrong at once. My table arrived in a box, about fifty pieces of it; it came with instructions in inscrutable English (apparently translated from the Chinese). If I had known it wasn't going to be sent to me whole, I never would have bought it. I tried to screw the various aspects together, but after two hours I had to give up. In appearance the table resembled a table, but the top was merely balanced on the legs, and the whole thing wiggled uncontrollably.
Then I tried to cook some kind of dip (I had a recipe from Women's Day for something using cheese and jalapeno peppers) but I couldn't get the stove to work. It was an electric stove, and my electrical field had been shot to hell for a while now. After I broke up with Stash, I went to visit my mother and every time I tried to make a piece of toast the toaster caught on fire. Either that, or it shot flaming pieces of toast halfway across the room.
Nothing was working right around me. I had to replace my answering machine four times in two weeks as soon as I moved into my new apartment: it kept breaking down. Anyway, after I couldn't get the stove on I went down for a minute to retrieve the mail—a Con Ed bill for $90. I couldn't even believe it, I was certain it was a mistake, a $90 bill for one month. I was living in a studio apartment that was so small I had to buy a folding sofabed—otherwise the whole room would have been filled up with just a bed—and a folding table and folding chairs. In other words, if it didn't fold, there was no room for it. And it was early September, hot, I wasn't exactly using the stove for a lot of cooking. I had used the air conditioner for one or two nights, but not $90 worth. I could see I was going to be reduced to lighting candles at night, just to keep my bills down.
I called up the tenant who had lived here before me, and he said when he lived in my apartment if he used the air conditioner every night for a month his bill came to maybe $40. No wonder I was so jittery! I was being utilized as some kind of outlet or channel for excess electrical energy. It was pouring straight from the walls into me. My bill said that if I had any questions, I should call up a man named Albert Menendez, so I did. "Ninety dollars, Albert," I told him. "This is crazy."
"Not to Con Edison," Albert said.
But it did seem crazy. This made me think about objective reality. What a shame it was that nobody had it besides me. I realized I was working myself up into a state, and the party wasn't until eight that evening. So I went out for a walk.
I was sitting on the pier and this man came over to me. "Are you playing hooky?" he said. I thought; I am almost thirty years old. But in a way I wouldn't have been surprised to find myself arrested and shoved back into first grade. I looked at the guy. He was attractive, maybe even too handsome, in a rugged, cigarette advertisement kind of way. He had blue eyes, curly brown hair, and was wearing a plaid shirt.