The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats (13 page)

When I walked in the door to my apartment there was a visitor.

In reality, I surprised Celeste more than she surprised me: As deeply asleep as she was beautifully disheveled on the mattress on the floor, when I switched on the light she leapt a foot in the air, then rubbed her eyes like a child. “Oh,” she whispered, hoarse with slumber. “You.”

“Yeah, well, I do pay the rent,” I said. “Tell me, is your whole family going to show up every time I come home, Celeste? Because if so I’m going to stop coming home. And I want my key.” For some reason—aside from what was turning my pants into a tent—I was not unhappy to see her. It had been a week since I had as much as been close to a woman, not including Terri Cats, who had declared herself exempt, and the idea of getting into a warm bed with a hot woman was hardly objectionable. That was normal. To a man, especially a young man, sex trumps propriety. What was odd is that I didn’t blame her for what happened. Maybe it was Shushan’s sympathetic understanding of Celeste’s part in the drama that had occurred in this very room only a week before, or maybe it was indeed lust, or maybe drink, or maybe I was coming to an appreciation of human frailty that was based not on morality but on empathy: in her place I would have been pissed off at me too. “You going to be pissed off again when I don’t want to see you anymore?” I said with the formality of the tipsy as I bent to hold her in my arms on the low mattress. “I don’t want to have this thing with the three Callinan brothers again. I’m running out of ribs.”

“There’s a fourth,” she said. “But he’s in Vietnam.”

“Excellent,” I said. “Did you give him a rain-check? Can I expect to see him too?
Hi, Russell. You don’t know me. I’m another one of Celeste’s foaming-at-the-mouth siblings. I missed the first go-round, so I hope you don’t mind if I beat the shit out of you six months late
.”

“I gave them hell, Russ,” she said, her breath sweetly pungent with sleep, the must of wet flannel, a hint of cinnamon. “I told Billy was all—a priest isn’t supposed to snitch—and then he got them riled up. It wasn’t my idea.”

“But you laughed when you heard the news?”

“I did not,” she said. “Maybe smiled. But I didn’t know how bad it was, not at first. Then they told me. Russ, if I can’t have you the one way I don’t want you the other.”

It occurred to me Father Bill might turn up with his brothers yet again to weigh in with another opinion, to say nothing of their fists, but I wasn’t going to spoil the moment, or the hour if I could stay awake. “You always feel so good,” I heard myself murmur. This in itself was strange. Celeste was mostly bones. When I mounted her her hips used to gouge me like adzes, and there was precious little padding above the waist as well. She was one of those women who believed the abominable homosexual lie, then just getting started, that equates undernourishment with beauty—no man who actually has physical sex with women wants one who doesn’t have a certain softness about her, a nice round ass that raises her center up like a proffered blossom, and soft breasts to rest his head on afterward. Celeste had none of that. She was in fact an Irish-American prequivalent of Twiggy, the anorexic British model who soon would be on all the magazine covers. Celeste’s was the coming look: both sensual and androgynous, eyes staring straight at you, and always the suggestion that there was not a great deal of washing going on. This was not because there wasn’t. Celeste had the natural strong musk common to Irish redheads—it suffused a room when she was aroused, electric red hair that fell around her shoulders like a shimmering cape, and curiously thin lips she could hinge open like a python’s to swallow mine. Also she was insatiable. Maybe by the time I was Shushan’s age, which I made out to be closing on forty, I would slow down enough to be thankful for a respite now and then—so far I had never seen Shushan with a female aside from his sister and his mother’s corpse—but for the moment I was grateful for a woman who could keep up with me, who wasn’t a universal recipient, ever ready to be sung to but unwilling or too unsure to be part of a duet. But I was getting ahead of myself: within minutes, maybe seconds, I was asleep on her neck, her thick hair tickling my nose as I snuggled against her—for a bag of bones she was surprisingly flexible—and it wasn’t until early morning, five-o-five by the loud-ticking Big Ben alarm clock on the floor, that I woke to find her astride me, which is just what I’d been dreaming. The position was natural for her, because she was almost as tall as I, with long thighs that allowed her to slide up and down the length of my cock like a violinist at full bow. This she did with real precision, because like the woman Lady Chatterley’s lover complains about, who uses a man as a conveniently warm dildo, Celeste was able to bring herself off repeatedly simply by stroking and bearing down. But unlike DH Lawrence’s example, Celeste was as generous about my pleasure as she was of hers. In fact, I rather doubted she could make the distinction. With her mouth sucking my lips and her hands pinning mine—a hold more erotic than real; I doubt she weighed much more than a hundred-ten—Celeste worked herself over me like a piston and each time she reached a crescendo would bite my lips with such savagery that after an hour they would have that bee-stung look of the well and aggressively kissed. But now, for the first time, while she fucked me I seemed to have flown out of myself, risen to the cracked and yellowed ceiling, and was watching and wondering what it was she felt about me that I hardly felt at all.

Certainly it was not the first time I was the object of love or at least specific lust. For all that I was young, handsome and virile, I knew that I would win no prizes as a lover. Maybe I was too handsome and certainly too young, and in an era where women had learned to become as aggressive about their sexuality as about their politics—the two already having become terminally confused—all I had to do, at base, was show up. I never chased women, merely accepted or rejected them when they chased me. I had early on come to see women as interchangeable parts, so that when I was tired of one another could be brought in like a relief pitcher, like an endless bullpen of pitchers warming up. One girl I knew complained that I was the most relaxed lover she had known—that it was almost as if I didn’t care. I didn’t. But now, somehow, I did. Yet this was not someone I cared for.

Celeste was just another girl. In time she would be memorable less for who she was than for what her brothers had done to me. There was nothing about her that inspired love, a fact that may or may not have had to do with what Shushan seemed to have picked up: I did not do love. I did sex. I did like. I did desire, passion, amusement, vanity, pleasure. But love was something then so far beyond me that it might as well have been another language, another culture, another species. If I cared anything about Celeste it was because she was here now, pumping me like a lubricated well-handle, writhing and moaning as if to tell me I was the one, the only one, the great and all-powerful one—but all I heard beyond the sound of her moans, my moans and air being expelled from the bellows of her cunt as she squeezed down on me was that I was the convenient one, the present one, the current one. In seeing Celeste I saw myself.

Yet Celeste had done something I would never have done: cared enough for me to try to hurt me, to get back at me, to satisfy in hate what she could not satisfy in love. Celeste was better than me: she felt. The only thing I could feel as Celeste’s sweat-drenched hair leapt about her freckled bony shoulders and her eyes focused on mine as though she knew the truth but no longer cared, was that for the first time I knew something of the truth about myself: I was the invalid here, I was the wounded, the messed up, the fucked up, the heartless, the frigid, the nearly dead. And yet here she was, clutching me to her, screwing me into her as she gasped and bit and came one final time in a paroxysm that set me off, but for me the sensation was merely release, not pleasure, a kind of constricted pain, and even as she kissed my face, licking the salt off me and murmuring, I felt sickened by myself, by my unwillingness to reach out to this woman who reached out to me. But instead I said only, “First your brothers and now you.”

“What,” she said.

“Trying to kill me.”

“I was trying to love you.”

“Oh yeah.”

“Norman Mailer says it’s the same,” she said.

She may have said more, probably did, but I was passed out under her even as she slipped off to lay beside me caressing my cheek with her freckled hands, and I didn’t wake up until I dreamt someone was trying to break down the door, and woke to discover it was no dream.

As in many New York apartments in the nineteen-sixties, the door to this one was reinforced with an iron bar braced from a hole in the floor. The rule was simple: if you lived in a place where you had to worry about making the rent every month, you needed a steel bar for the door. You lived by definition in a high-crime area. Aside from Shushan, who could afford to leave a new Cadillac with a twenty-dollar bill tucked under the windshield-wiper blade in Chinatown, everyone I knew had a barred door, a steel grill on any windows fronting a fire escape—which made escaping a fire less than likely—and a baseball bat in the entry-hall closet. I had the bat in my hand when I went to answer the door.

“It’s not going to happen twice, fuckers!” I shouted. “First one who gets in is the first one in intensive care. Come on! Come on, you two-bit Irish—”

“Federal Bureau of Investigation,” a loud, distinct and surprisingly androgynous voice came from the other side of the door. “FBI. Open the door, please, Mr. Newhouse. We need to talk to you.”

I tiptoed away from the door and to the window. There, one floor below, was a black four-door Chevrolet with some sort of gold-colored seal on the side. “What does the FBI want with me?” I said to the door.

“We’d just like to talk with you, Mr. Newhouse.”

“Well, I just don’t want to talk with you. Go away.” I turned back to look at the mattress on the floor. In the excitement I had not seen Celeste leave the bed. Now, as I heard the sound of the shower, I realized I was naked. Whatever it was at the door I considered it might be better addressed with something other than a morning erection. “Give me a minute,” I said, throwing on clothes as though I were Cinderella and the coach was leaving in seconds. I slipped my feet, sockless, into my shoes.

FBI maybe, but an unlikely pair.

The woman was about thirty, medium height, wearing the kind of outfit that would be increasingly seen as females moved into the white-collar labor force, a barely feminized take on male business attire that served the same purpose—diminishing the possibility of sartorial error by reducing all possibility of originality: white blouse, gray skirt (trousers on women were just coming to be acceptable as non-casual attire) and a double-breasted blue blazer replete with brass buttons that was not quite butch enough to conceal a solidly three-dimensional front porch. Or maybe a pair of shoulder holsters. That would make sense. An FBI agent fumbling in her purse for her gun just did not seem right, and unlike males there was no way to tuck a back-up piece in an ankle rig. No makeup, large gray eyes, and short brown hair shot prematurely with silver in a pageboy that all but concealed a deep forehead, severely cut bangs pointing down to an almost non-existent nose and a mouth that got no lipstick and hardly needed any: it was a mouth made for kissing—Jeanne Moreau’s mouth in Truffaut’s
Jules et Jim
, which I had just seen at the Eighth Street Cinema in the Village, broad lips, flattened as if by pressure from a lover’s kiss, nothing of a smile other than availability.

These ridiculous thoughts were immediately followed by the realization that no one was about to be kissed, especially with the other fed standing right behind the first and towering over her. He must have been six-five, a bit taller than Ira-Myra’s, but stick-thin, and taller and thinner for his hat, a blue felt porkpie that looked like nothing less than a continuation skyward of his angular face. His mouth was little more than a pucker. Even his tie was narrow. Only a pair of thick black glasses and a thin blond mustache broke the vertical thrust.

A woman and a scarecrow were hardly what I would have expected from America’s national police force, but maybe I wasn’t worth more than these.

“May we come in?” the woman said. “Just take a minute.”

It was one of those questions that barely qualify as rhetorical. A rhetorical question speaks its own answer. This one did not require one. The two brushed by me as if I weren’t there.

“Special Agent Quinones,” she said, producing a leather flap from her purse that displayed the kind of badge they used to sell in every Woolworth’s in America before Woolworth’s ceased to exist.

“Can I
see
that?”

“You can see this,” the scarecrow said, sticking his badge so close in front of my eyes I could barely focus. I eased his hand back gently. The truth is I knew as little of what an authentic FBI badge looked like as I did about why these two were here. “Special Agent Mink,” he said.

“I always wanted to know,” I said. “What makes you guys so special—are there regular agents and you’re the special ones? Or is every one of you special? But that wouldn’t make you particularly special, would—”

“We’re all special, Mr. Newhouse,” Quinones said. With her name came the recognition that she was some sort of westerner, New Mexico maybe, or Arizona. Possibly rural California. And there was just the hint of a Mexican accent in her voice, a kind of upswing at the end of each phrase. “And you’re special too.”

Celeste took this occasion to walk slowly and determinedly from the bathroom wrapped in two towels, one barely covering her from chest to pubic hair and the other making up a huge turban on her head, its end trailing down her glistening backbone like the tail on a coonskin cap. When I was about nine Walt Disney had broadcast a television saga on Davy Crockett, and a whole generation of boys who had grown up in the fifties had owned polyester copies. I never had one. My friends did. But I could do a mean imitation of Fess Parker, the actor who played the so-called king of the wild frontier: “I’m half-horse, half-alligator and a little attached with snapping turtle. I’ve got the fastest horse, the prettiest sister, the surest rifle and the ugliest dog in Texas. My father can lick any man in Kentucky... and I can lick my father!” I had to keep myself from doing it now. Celeste stooped silently to the floor at the foot of the bed, gathered up her clothes and then turned demurely back to the bathroom, her eyes unwaveringly straight ahead.