Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (10 page)

Sissy dared a sip of Ripple. “If I'm not going to pose for him, why do you want me to meet him?”

“Purely personal. I believe you might enjoy one another.”

“But, Countess . . .”

“Now now. Don't get exasperated. I realize that you've always avoided all but the most rudimentary involvements with men, and, I might add, you've been wise. Heterosexual relationships seem to lead only to marriage, and for most poor dumb brainwashed women marriage is the climactic experience. For men, marriage is a matter of efficient logistics: the male gets his food, bed, laundry, TV, pussy, offspring and creature comforts all under one roof, where he doesn't have to dissipate his psychic energy thinking about them too much—then he is free to go out and fight the battles of life, which is what existence is all about. But for a woman, marriage is surrender. Marriage is when a girl gives up the fight, walks off the battlefield and from then on leaves the truly interesting and significant action to her husband, who has bargained to 'take care' of her. What a sad bum deal. Women live longer than men because they really haven't been living. Better blue-in-the-face dead of a heart attack at fifty than a healthy seventy-year-old widow who hasn't had a piece of life's action since girlhood. Shit O goodness, how I do go on.”

The Countess refilled his glass. The squirrel started across Park Avenue again but didn't make it. A uniformed chauffeur got out of a limousine and held the crushed animal up where it could be seen by the elderly woman passenger, who next week would make a twenty-five-dollar donation to the SPCA.

“But here you are, still a virgin—you
are
virginal yet, aren't you?”

“Why, yes, technically. Jack Kerouac and I came awfully close, but he was afraid of me, I think . . .”

“Yes, well, what I'm getting at is that there comes a time when it is psychologically impossible for a woman to lose her virginity. She can't wait too long, you know. Now, there's no reason why you
must
lose yours. You're so much better off than most women. You've remained on the battleground, center stage, experiencing life and, what's more important, experiencing yourself experiencing it. You haven't been reduced to a logistical strategy for somebody else's lifewar. I'm not suggesting that you capitulate. But maybe you should pause—now in your weariness is a perfect opportunity—and consider if perhaps you aren't missing something of magnitude; consider if perhaps you wouldn't want to experience a romantic relationship before, well, frankly, before it may be too late. I mean, just ponder it a bit, that's all.”

“What makes you think this watercolorist and I would develop a romantic relationship?” Sissy's brow was spaghettied.

“I can't be certain that you would. Furthermore, I can't imagine why I would want you to. I mean, you've always
smelled
so nice. Like a little sister. The irony has just killed me.” The Countess's teeth began a faster clack. “You, the Dew Girl, one of the few girls who doesn't
need
Dew. I loath the stink of females!” The clatter grew louder. “They are so sweet the way God made them; then they start fooling around with men and soon they're stinking. Like rotten mushrooms, like an excessively chlorinated swimming pool, like a tuna fish's retirement party. They
all
stink. From the Queen of England to Bonanza Jellybean, they stink.” The dental flamenco hit a delirious tempo, a
bulería
, a Gypsy flurry of too many notes too soon.

“Bonanza Jellybean?”

“What? Oh yes. Tee hee. Jellybean.” As the Countess's jaw muscles calmed down, his dentures eased into a samba. “She's a young thing who works on my ranch. Real name is Sally Jones or something wooden like that. She's cute as a hot fudge taco, and, of course, it takes verve to change one's name so charmingly. But she stinks like a slut just the same.”

“Your ranch?”

“Oh my dear yes, I bought a little ranch out West. Sort of a tribute to the women of America who have cooperated with me in eliminating their odor. A tax write-off, actually. You'll have to see it sometime. Meanwhile, back to business at hand. Why don't you consider meeting my artist? You admitted you needed a rest. I'm going out to East Hampton to gossip with Truman for a few days. You can light at my place and relax. I'll put Julian in touch with you there. Perhaps you can go out together, have some fun. Come on, Sissy love, give it a try. What have you got to lose?”

The Countess was a genius, all right. He asked the one question that Sissy could never answer: what have you got to lose?

“Well, okay. I'll try it. I don't see the point in it, but I'll try it. Just for you. It's kind of silly, actually, me going out with an artist in New York City. However . . .” (Was that old limbic telephone purring on its hook again? After all, she had
asked
for an unlisted number.)

“Good, good, good,” the Countess cooed. “You'll enjoy it, you'll see. Julian is a gentleman.”

Suddenly, the Countess swiveled in his desk chair and leaned forward. Lowering his wine glass, he focused directly, intensely into Sissy's blue eyes. His rip of a smile widened until it was a job for a body-and-fender shop. He had been waiting for this moment.

“By the way, Sissy,” he said very slowly, accentuating every syllable, clacking one beat at a time. “By the way. He's a full-blooded Indian.”

21.

SHE HAD MADE
Mack trucks rear back on their axles, caused Mercedes-Benzes to forget about Wagner, stopped Cadillacs as cold as a snowman's heart attack. Torpedoes changed their courses for her, planes dived, submarines surfaced, Lincoln Continentals straightened their neckties. Wherever traffic flowed she had fished its waters, hooking Barracuda and Stingrays, throwing back Honda minibikes and garden tractors. At her signal, Jeeps and Chryslers fell over one another, Mercurys and Ramblers went into trance, VW's halted with a Prussian exactitude, Chevies executed the shim sham shimmy and toddlers begged to pull her to San Francisco in their little red wagons. Once she made a Rolls-Royce brake so abruptly they had to fly a man in from the factory to scrape up the rubber. While stickers peeled off bumpers, Confederate flags wrapped themselves around radio aerials and exhaust pipes farted the overture from “My Fair Lady,” she had commandeered every vehicle manufactured by man in his manic horsepowerphilia, from a Stutz Bearcat to a Katz Pajama—but she could not seem to attract an elevator.

“Maybe you have to call on the phone to get an elevator to come up to the penthouse. Maybe the buzzer is broken. Maybe I'm doing something wrong.”

Sissy had been waiting ten minutes. She felt trapped. Where was the elevator? Why wouldn't it respond? Teardrops were poking their bald heads out of her ducts.

It was more than just the elevator. Three days before, the Countess had procured a dress and buttoned her into it. She had agreed that it looked very nice. Then he went off—monocle, cigarette holder and everything—to Long Island, leaving her alone. The first evening, the watercolorist hadn't phoned. Sissy couldn't unbutton the dress, and to sleep in it would have left it geriatrically wrinkled. So she had sat up all night. She had watched TV, sipped red Ripple (the only beverage her host had in supply), read the
New York Times
and chanced pleased looks in the mirror. Alone on a June night in a seven-room penthouse. It had been strange.

At approximately ten in the morning the telephone rang. A voice that might have belonged to a Grecian urn, so soft and round and cultured it sounded, identified itself as belonging, instead, to Julian Gitche. Would Sissy Hankshaw please have dinner with Julian Gitche and friends on Friday next? Yes, Sissy Hankshaw would. The Countess's phone (a Princess—royalty sticks together) and, presumably, Julian Gitche's, had been replaced in the cradle. Dinner on Friday. It was then Wednesday.

As through the second TV-humming night she sat upright in the yoga position known as the
dress-protecting asana
, she reminded herself of Betty Clanton and the other girls of South Richmond High, setting their hair, combing it out, painting their lips, rouging their cheeks, washing their sweaters, pressing their skirts, primping away the hours and days of their youth in the peahen hope that for one blushing moment they could distract a boy from football. Nature had spared Sissy that as a teen-ager—but, mama, look at her now! Every hour or so, she became angry at herself, sprang up and announced to whatever television personality happened to be facing her that she was going to bed. She did not.

Thursday night was much the same, except that she was sleepier, angrier, more nervous. Newspapers, with their quaint accounts of politics and economics, TV, with its heroic policemen, could no longer amuse her. Red Ripple in hand, she fled to the balcony. She had passed the point where fresh air was of much use in reviving her, but she felt less confined pacing a patio in the New York sky.

“This is stupid, really dumb,” she told herself. “But if I'm going to do it I might as well do it right. I can't go to dinner in a good New York restaurant wearing a wrinkled sack. I'm used to skipping sleep on the road. I can make it.” Serenity once again illuminated the corners of her mouth, although her eyes, over which the lids drooped like detectives' bellies, failed to notice.

It was a cloudless night with only moderate smog. A furry northeaster was blowing in over Coney Island and Brooklyn, bringing to the upper East Side a teasing sniff of the ocean. Trembling with energy, unable to contain itself, Manhattan was popping wheelies beneath her. In every direction, her tired eyes saw flashing lights, lights that caromed off the horizons and joined with the stars in the sky. The city seemed to be inhaling Benzedrine and exhaling light; a neon-lunged Buddha chanting and vibrating in a temple of filth.

It was difficult for her to imagine that an American Indian was at home somewhere down there. Where exactly did he live, she wondered; which lights shone in his windows? What was he doing at this moment? Sleeping? (Sleep was bright on her mind.) Drinking—the way the Indians drank in LaConner, Taos, Pine Ridge, etc.? Performing a clandestine ghost dance or chanting to his private totem as prescribed in the dreamer religion? Watching “Custer” on TV? Painting watercolors? Until the dawn, she paced and pondered.

The day that followed had been a blur of boredom and misery; she was more asleep than awake. She found a loaf of Wonder Bread and wadded the soft individual slices into balls, as she had done when a kid, eating the bread balls on the balcony while watching traffic. Mostly, she sat around. (Were it not such an obvious understatement, we might say that she twiddled her thumbs.) When, however, at 7:45
P.M
., Julian Gitche called to announce that he was downstairs, her central nervous system treated itself to a double adrenalin on the rocks. She flashed into consciousness, inspected herself—wrinkle-free!—in the mirror, took a pee and headed for the elevator. She had arranged to meet him in the lobby. Somehow it had seemed inappropriate to her to receive Mr. Gitche in the Countess's penthouse, with its frilly, sloppy and decidedly un-Indian décor.

Now Sissy was waiting for an elevator. She waited with a fatigue-induced approximation of that combination of stoicism and anxiety with which people wait for the Big Event that will transform their lives, invariably missing it when it does occur since both stoicism and anxiety are blinders.

At last, as she was on the brink of weeping, she heard a ping and saw a wink of green. A door slid open with a mechanical slur, to reveal a uniformed elevator operator looking sheepish and not altogether unafraid. Having suffered the Countess's ire on previous occasions, he was on the alert for a walking stick that might be mistaking his skull for a grand promenade. Relieved at seeing Sissy alone, he expressed her to the lobby at maximum speed.

The carpet felt like meadow to her hallucinating feet. The bronze fountain sounded like a mountain creek. Her redman glided from behind a tree (so what if it was a potted palm?). He was wearing a plaid dinner jacket and a yellow cummerbund. Of medium height, his shoulders were narrow, his face babified and puddingish. Approaching her, he smiled shyly. He reached to shake her hand—and fell immediately to his knees with an asthma attack.

COWGIRL INTERLUDE (LOVE STORY)

Some of the younger ranch hands—Donna, Kym and Heather; Debbie, too—have wondered aloud why
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
couldn't be a simple love story.

Unfortunately, little darlings, there is no such thing as a simple love story. The most transitory puppy crush is complex to the extent of lying beyond the far reaches of the brain's understanding. (The brain has a dangerous habit of messing around with stuff it cannot or
will
not comprehend.)

Your author has found love to be the full trip, emotionally speaking; the grand tour: fall in love, visit both Heaven and Hell for the price of one. And that doesn't begin to cover it. If realism can be defined only as one of the fifty-seven varieties of decoration, then how can we hope for a realistic assessment of love?

No, the author has no new light to beam on the subject. After all, though people have been composing love songs for at least a thousand years, it wasn't until the late 1960s that any romantic ballad expressed a new idea. In his song “Triad” (
"Why can't we go on as three?"
), David Crosby offered the
ménage à trois
as a possible happy remedy for the triangularization that seems to be to love what hoof-and-mouth disease is to cattle (to employ an analogy that any cowgirl can understand). Bold David (Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane recorded his song) sought to transport love beyond its dualistic limits; to accept the three-sided configuration as an inevitability, perceiving it as positive, building upon it, expanding it, drawing lines in different directions (". . .
in time there may be others
"). But Crosby's Euclidean approach complicates love rather than simplifies it. And it is doubtful whether many lovers could endure further complications. As a visitor to the clockworks once heard the Chink say, “If it's sloppy, eat it over the sink.”