One languid Saturday in May I was reading and dozing on my porch, having just read the part in Tropic of Cancer where Miller goes on pat and smug, albeit sentimentally about the noble and ignoble Germaine, the “happy whore” he frequented in Paris. I smacked the book down, uncomfortable and needing to stretch, and headed out to take a run. I stopped at a CVS for a bottle of water, where I saw her. I bounced out of the store clutching my Evian bottle and a prescription for Allegra, and observed her in quiet disbelief, feigning indifference.
She stumbled out of a beaten up red Toyota and stopped in the middle of the parking lot, facing me as I stood transfixed at my car door, to curse and fumble with something in her jean-skirt pocket. As she struggled I saw a pink feather on her thigh, and before I could say to myself, “that’s funny, Mardi Gras was three months ago,” her occupation occurred to me. I was standing in a neighborhood that had proven the capacity to sport half million dollar homes and prostitutes, so I mustered in myself a measure of gravitas before proceeding to think she was, a priori, out of place.
She had bothered to find a matching pink feather for her dirty hair, and visions of Toulouse-Lautrec at the Moulin Rouge barged into my consciousness. These ladies, when I notice them, are typically plump at the middle and have incredibly thin stick-like legs. My lady had a round face and hunched shoulders that formed a hull to hide joyless breasts. She had no gentle curve at the waist, only cruel folds of skin, and stilt-like legs, though she was no more than five and a half feet tall. She was certainly not the lovely and resilient dancing girl in the hot pulse of a nineteenth century Parisian club, rendered timeless by an impression in paint. But those feathers got to me. They were familiar. I had seen them in a gutter in New Orleans, and in Paris, glowing and weightless on a canvas.
I wondered where it all went wrong for her, and wanted to approach the car and face her client with my college education and smooth skin, confront him with my clear eyes. From where I stood he seemed to be preoccupied with something in the back seat, and at second glance at his mistress of the moment, I decided that he was perhaps the one in greater peril.
I looked down at my running outfit, my pink iPod strapped to my arm like my very own feather, and I thought about how every time I ran on my favorite trail, violent thoughts flickering in the space right behind my vision. My ‘just in case’ mental imaging. My gestures were improbably swift in response to an ambush, or the odd whistle. I suspected every man I passed that looked at me twice, jogging and sweating. I knew that listening to Gwen Stefani so loud might render me unaware if someone actually came at me from behind. But her voice filled me with anger and possibility. You hear stories growing up, and certainly now, one feels suddenly vulnerable at the mention of random violence in a neighborhood rumored to be safe.
I routinely ignored this voice of reason all women have. It calmly reminded me – “it’s just a matter of time.” But I was a fierce pink ninja, ready to take on thirteen of the most serious padded-sword carrying live-action-role-players that Patapsco could render, or one very ordinary rapist. I realized suddenly that I was looking twice at this woman in the CVS lot.
Who did she think of “taking on?” I regarded the bottle of water it took thousands of miles of ocean for me to taste, and I thought what a disservice Lautrec did to prostitutes painting their rouge and cancan, posters advertising a misconception about these women that made its way so far into our collective consciousness that this poor lush thought to put a pink feather on her thigh and in her hair, making it her signal. I didn’t see Henry Miller’s happy whore in the gay burst of color. I told myself, in search of comfort, that it could also be a hallmark of defiance. Maybe she was in complete control after all. How loud would she play her music that night? I wondered, and left the encounter to go marching right onto that trail blazing a pink signal of my own.
No comments:
Post a Comment