People in Trouble (7 page)

Molly looked out at the water and the reddish industrial-waste sunset and thought two thoughts.
 
She watched the balloons rising toward the filthy sky and thought, They leave your hand the way they leave your life.
 
She could only really see the sea of them after losing sight of her own.
 
Then she thought, bluish carmine, velvety.

What does it mean to sing "somewhere over the rainbow" and release balloons?
 
It made her feel something very human; a kind of nostalgia with public sadness and the sharing of emotions.
 
But then what?

To a certain extent she had gotten used to hearing about people dying.

She hadn't gotten used to seeing it, but now when someone said, "I couldn't call you back because a friend of mine died," it was said calmly.

This dying had been going on for a long time already.
 
So long, in fact, that there were people alive who didn't remember life before AIDS.
 
And for Molly it had made all her relations with men more deliberate and detailed.
 
First, the men changed.

They were more vulnerable and open and needed to talk.
 
So she changed.

Passing acquaintances became friends.
 
And when her friends actually did get sick there was a lot of shopping to do, picking up laundry and looking into each other's eyes.
 
She had never held so many crying men before in her life.

Molly had recently spent three months cooking dinner for a man who was so disoriented he couldn't decide how to cut the spinach.
 
His name was on one of her balloons.
 
There were drugs that he wanted to try but the Food and Drug Administration wouldn't approve them.

"I'm dying," he said before the dementia set in.
 
"Let me take the goddamn drug."

The best he could find was a placebo program where half the men got sugar pills and the other half got experimental drugs.

No one knew who got what.

"Why do they need a comparison study?"
 
he said to everyone.
 
"They already know what happens if you don't treat it."

He didn't say that to the doctors though, because he was afraid that if he made trouble they would give him sugar instead of medicine.

He got old very fast.
 
He said the telephone was on fire.
 
His skin broke open.
 
His mother came in from Saint Louis and kissed his face when it was covered with sores.
 
He went to the hospital and then he went home.
 
Then he went to the hospital.
 
Then he went home.
 
Then he went to the hospital.
 
Then he died in the hospital.

Molly knew this man, Ronnie Lavallee 1954-1987, because his sister Cecilia was a dyke who used to work with Molly at an all-women's trucking company that delivered gay male pornography.
 
Since she had a gay brother, the two women used to stop by his place after work sometimes to drink beer and bring him free stroke books.
 
One day when Cecilia was at karate camp, Molly and Ronnie were sitting in his living room watching Paul Morrissey's Trash on his VCR.
 
They were eating Chinese food and drinking Chinese beer.
 
On the TV Joe Dallesandro was a junkie who couldn't get a hard-on but didn't really care and was still beautiful.
 
His girlfriend was Holly Woodlawn, the drag queen, and her sister and ex-lover was played by a pregnant, naked Viva.

"I love this movie," Ronnie said.
 
"It is the greatest acting in any movie except for Valerie Perrine in Lenny."

Then he said, "Molly, would you look at this?"
 
and he lifted up his shirt like a little boy asking his mommy to look at his tummy.

"What is it?"
 
he said.

"That looks like a mole to me," she said.
 
"How long have you had it?"

"Four weeks."

"Well," she said, remembering when her other friend Joseph DeCarlo 1960-1982 had his face covered with splotches.
 
"I've seen lesions and they're usually raspberry, I think.
 
I've never seen a brown one before and this is brown."

Molly sat back relieved.
 
But Ronnie had an expression on his face that she had never seen on any face before.

"What about this one?"
 
he said, pulling up his pants leg.

It was red.

Molly really wanted to say that it didn't look like a lesion, that it didn't look like Kaposi's sarcoma, that it didn't look like AIDS, but it did.

"I don't want to die," he said.

Later on in the hospital he said, "I don't intend to die."
 
He looked her in the eye.
 
"Not everyone dies.
 
Michael Callen is still alive."

But she saw doubt so she knew.

After the dementia set in he said the telephone was on fire.

He got so emaciated that Molly couldn't recognize him.
 
He got so disoriented he couldn't recognize his sister or his old boyfriend or his nurse.
 
That's when Molly stopped visiting the hospital.

When everyone felt that the vigil was over they started looking at each other and drifting into small groups for talk and comfort before walking home through the hot city in early-night light.
 
Molly felt enormous anger.
 
These were her friends.
 
These were her dead friends.

She saw their faces.
 
Were their lives worth less than the lives of heterosexuals?
 
Where was Kate?
 
She should be there at a time like this.

As she turned up the street away from the water, Molly saw two men handing out leaflets.
 
That was not the first thing she noticed about them.
 
The first thing she saw was that they were wearing black T-shirts.
 
On their chests were large pink triangles with the word justice scrawled, graffiti style.
 
She wished she had a girlfriend she could go to and hold and tell the story of the day, but she didn't, so Molly sat down instead on the hood of a parked car and watched the two men distribute their papers.

The shirts were angry but the men were smiling.
 
The older one was black.
 
He wore his hair in a large natural like Angela Davis used to do, which made him look distinctly old-fashioned.

No one wore their hair that way anymore.
 
It was either cleancut or Grace Jones or dreadlocks.
 
But this guy reminded Molly immediately of those posters of Huey P. Newton sitting on a throne holding machine guns.
 
Only this man wasn't wearing a black beret and leather jacket.

Instead he had on effeminate floralprint three-quarter pants like girls buy on Fourteenth Street.
 
He had a gold loop and a ruby stud in one ear and a feather in the other.
 
He was swish.
 
He was an older black gay man who called other men "darling" and "girlfriend."
 
On the center of each flower printed on his pants was the word love.

"Here, handsome, take this please.
 
You know I only want what's best for you."

The second man was much younger and taller and white.

He had a long ponytail and good teeth.
 
Then Molly got off the car and took a leaflet.

DO YOU THINK IT'S RIGHT?

That people are dying and the government does nothing?
 
If you do not think that this is right then do some thing about it.

The flyer went on to invite people to a weekly meeting.
 
Molly folded it four times and pushed it into her pocket.
 
She missed Kate very much.
 
She wished Kate were there.
 
Molly walked home feeling open and vulnerable and then very angry with an energy that had nowhere to go.

She hadn't heard from Molly in three weeks but the memory tapes were replaying in the waiting room.
 
Kate turned on the radio in her studio hoping for something diversionary to sing along with.
 
After flipping the dials back and forth without success she returned to her table and tore the drawing in half.
 
Then she held both pieces next to each other as though they followed in sequence instead of being two components of the same movement.
 
It was a simple pencil sketch of a woman's face.

She had seen the woman come out of the movie theater that afternoon, when Kate stood across the street watching Molly tear tickets.

This woman had huge lips.
 
She decorated them with a metallic pink like the Formica in Los Angeles kitchens.
 
She had eyes the shape of olives and straight black hair.
 
By taking her depiction of those lips and placing them next to, instead of underneath, the eyes, Kate was forced to confront the mouth first, to make a relationship with it before discovering those oil-cured black things.
 
The order changed the effect because, after seeing the obscenity in that mouth, one experienced a monstrously seductive face.
 
Then the greasy eyes came as a quiet surprise.
 
The viewer learned from this sequence that the mouth was actually all that the face had to offer.
 
If it was viewed at once in its entirety, there would have been no expectation.
 
No movement.

As she stood across the street from Molly, sketching, Kate had wondered Does she see me?

When Kate had stopped designing for theater years before and started designing for herself, it was because she had gotten tired of decorating.
 
She only wanted to confront directly.
 
She needed more control.
 
Her final stage production had been Genet's The Blacks in the early seventies.
 
After the run she and Peter had gone away to the sea for one quietly spent week.
 
There, Kate wore his sweater and sat in the evenings on a porch overlooking the water.
 
She would read, draw, sip brandy.

"I can't stand actors," she'd said, suddenly, surprised it had come out so definitively.

"That's because we're different," Peter had answered, absorbed in his work.

"Who?
 
You and me?"

"No, Katie.
 
You and me on one hand and actors on the other.

You and I go quietly into rooms, close the doors and, once all alone, begin to work.
 
When we finish there is something that exists apart from us, whether a solid object or an event.
 
But we walk away from it while others are having the experience.
 
While they're watching we can be off making something new or drinking ourselves to death, as we like.

Actors need the approval in their faces."

"Well, I'm tired of them," she had said, looking at Peter as he worked on plans.
 
His sunburnt brow was furrowed in concentration.
 
His skin was too fair for the sun.
 
No matter how much he protected himself, it always burned.
 
She had always watched him work to a secret internal rhythm, much the same way people now danced silently down the street wearing Walkmans.
 
You knew they were hearing something you didn't hear.
 
But it was hard to know exactly what.

"I'm leaving the theater," she told him then as the sea began to slide into the sunset.

Peter looked up and laughed easily like he was entertained.

Kate saw him thinking, She's so cute.
 
Kate recognized that look.

She'd used it with her own mother whenever she felt generous.

It said, You don't understand but I'll let it pass.

Now, years later in her studio Kate looked at herself in the mirror.

She was aging but it was all in her face.
 
She shifted the glass so she could see herself standing against the wall.
 
She wore a man's sleeveless white undershirt and stood demurely holding her brushes.

Kate had never painted Molly.
 
She spent a lot of time looking at her when they were together, but she didn't want to own a painting that couldn't be shared with Peter and couldn't put him through the ordeal of watching her work on it, watching her live with it.
 
He would know how recently she and Molly had been together by how quickly the work progressed.
 
But the first time she had seen Molly's vulva in the light she'd realized it was a color whose name she did not know.
 
It was the meat of a greengage plum, dusted.
 
She had gone home to her studio that day and mixed it.
 
Then she painted one side of her studio that color and ended up thinking of it as starlight.
 
Normally she painted with her head turned away from the wall, but whenever she wanted to be in starlight Kate only had to look up.