Death of the Black-Haired Girl

12

MAUD ENDED UP in some mobbed-up club in the Meatpacking, thin film of blow on the bar, practically, more of it on the ladies’ room fixtures. The guy said he was on Wall Street. Well, his brokerage house was in Jersey but he lived downtown. Not far from Ground Zero.

“Really, my father was at Ground Zero for about half a minute.” She let that go. “My old man don’t work, he’s a cop in Queens.” The place she woke up in was a filthy apartment that smelled of asbestos and lead and dead people and guys making free telephone calls to Poland. He was gone but she didn’t steal anymore or fuck up assholes’ apartments for revenge. She might have done it once. She tried drinking his bargain scotch and could barely keep it down. The guy had left a condom floating in the toilet, which was kind of reassuring in its disgusting way. No shower, just a crummy bathtub with feet. That at least, she thought. It was a sort of date rape, but she thought the hell with it. She wasn’t sure but he hadn’t seemed to get it on. Maybe, she thought, he put the condom in the john to impress her. To induce happy false memories. Anyway, she got out of there, went home and cleaned up properly.

She slept again, but when she woke up her thoughts were about Brookman and she could not bring them to order. She tried to bring Brookman’s wife into the focus of her memory. It was ridiculous, so ridiculous — the Brookmans — that in the midst of her pain and distraction, she had a vision of the absurdity of her own grief and loss.

Female students often discreetly observed Brookman’s wife. Smiley face, big teeth, whitey blond hair in a ponytail, you could hardly tell if she was getting gray. Her eyes were a little close together and wild blue. She wore big horn-rimmed glasses. Some of them called her a dog. But with big tits. She had a big ass, oh yeah, some said her ass was humongous. But that was only because she had one and some of them didn’t. Her neck was wrinkly, her face too, from the sun. She dressed badly. She looked like one of the women on the PBS nature shorts you saw when you were a kid. Oh, Maud thought, there were a million happy-go-lucky women wearing khaki shirts being smart in nature shorts and sticking their fingers in wombats’ ears but there was only one Brookman. And only one me. Maybe on the next canoe trip she can wander into quicksand and they’ll find her horn-rims on the top and the rest of her thirty million years later. Laughing and crying, she spun around in her smoke-filled room until she sank to her knees by the bed, pressing her face into her forearm.

She burst out of her room to look downstairs and saw her father reading the day’s mail with a copy of the Gazette beside him. He looked up at her gravely.

“I owe you a bottle of whiskey,” she said. And she wanted to say don’t look so pathetic, and there were so many other things she wanted to say.

“Forget it,” he said coldly.

“No, I’ll get you one right now. I’ll go out. I’m really sorry. I’ve been out of my head.”

“Yeah. So forget it.”

She breezed past his chair to get a glass of cold milk. He followed her into the kitchen.

“Hey, Maud,” he said. He held up the college paper. “What’s this?”

“That’s my contribution to the Gazette, Dad.”

“Don’t they have a thing called hate speech?”

“It is not hate speech,” she shouted at him. “It’s the advocacy of the rights of women to access and control their own lives. And not have them controlled by — you know who I mean, don’t you, Dad? Controlled by hypocrites. You were the one who told me Grandpa’s stories of Fat Frank Spellman in New York.”

“Never mind Fat Frank Spellman,” Stack said. He ran out of breath and sat down next to his oxygen machine, though he did not pick up the tube. “Oh, Maudie, you don’t understand it at all. You don’t get it. You put yourself in danger. You think the whole world is that college?”

“If I want to speak out, Dad—”

“Oh, shit,” Stack said. “Speak out! Speak out! Stand tall! ‘Lift every voice and sing, till earth and heaven ring.’ Victory to the Vietcong! Those people don’t come from where you come from. Not in any way, get it? You’ll be the one that pays from riling up the religious fanatics and shitheads. It’ll be you that pays! Whaddaya bet? Not some rich kid. Not one of these professors. You.”

“Oh, thanks, Dad. Thanks for wishing me well.”

“I mean, if they wanted to do that, how come they got a Catholic girl to do it?”

“Me? I’m not a Catholic girl.”

“Sure, baby. Whatever you say. And speaking of professors, how come your adviser there, that guy Brookman, he’s your adviser, he should have known if he has your interests at heart. Where was the advice? How come he let you?”

“Steve Brookman never saw it.”

“Then he’s not much of an adviser.”

“I guess not,” she said.

Stack picked up the tube of his oxygen tank, pressed the On button, inhaled and looked up at her. Not a kid anymore, he thinks. Not anyone’s child. “He’s your lover, isn’t he? C’mon, Maudie, I don’t get to see you much but I can tell by how you talk about him.”

“You don’t read my e-mail, do you?”

“Never mind. Listen,” he said, “I want to tell you something. People’s religion — it’s not like opium. It don’t work that way. It’s their mother, you understand. They may not understand their mother at all. They may hate their mother. Maybe they’re ashamed of their mother. Sometimes a mother makes someone hate other people. Any thing can drive such people to anything.” He thought back for a moment and laughed a little. “When I started swinging a stick they told me: Put ’em in their place, tell ’em what shits they are, but for God’s sake don’t mention their mother.”

“I don’t care,” she said. “I’m proud of what I wrote.”

She thought: I can’t stay here. He will be hurt and upset but I can’t stay here.

So later that day, when he was out to a meeting or taking his walk, she packed her duffel bag and put on Shell’s coat and went to Manhattan, where she knew some girls. When Stack returned he saw that she had gone. He was afraid and disappointed because he had thought she would stay over the holiday. At least he had thought that before the brouhaha over the article. Dizzy, he stayed on his feet.

“Barbara!” he called. Of course, every time Stack needed his wife, she was dead.