There Should Have Been Castles Read online

  Alan and I had our hamburgers (I paid for my own, always did). And then we went back to my place to listen to Fritz Kreisler records and put my plan of seduction to work. I was nervous but resolute, unsure just how I would do it but convinced that it would be done.

  It didn’t take all that long. Alan was ready, spurred on by my Caribbean performance earlier that afternoon. “Jesus, you were something, Ginnie.”

  “I was?”

  “You mean you didn’t know?”

  “Well, I enjoyed it, but I don’t know if I was any good.”

  “You were good.” He was sitting next to me on the floor, our arms touching as our backs leaned against the sofa.

  “Can I get you something?” I asked, suddenly willing to jump up and run down to the corner pizzeria—in Dubuque, Iowa.

  He held my arm. “No. Sit still. You did enough jumping around this afternoon.” He looked around the room, seemingly uncomfortable. “Is that the only music you have? Fiddle music?”

  “It’s Fritz Kreisler.”

  “I’m getting a little tired of it.”

  “Well, what would you like to hear?”

  “Do you have any of that Caribbean stuff?”

  “No, but I can run uptown and—”

  “What the hell you doing?” He was holding my wrist, keeping me from getting up. “Why’d you want to see me tonight? You’re acting all fucked up. What’s wrong?”

  “Well…nothing.”

  He got up. “First thing we do is give Mr. Kreisler a rest.” He removed the record. “Next thing we do is cut down on your electricity bill.” He switched off a few lights and then turned to where I was sitting—and trembling. “What’s wrong? You’re shivering.”

  “I think it’s my old malaria cropping up. Got it at Guadalcanal.”

  He laughed. “You’re afraid of me.”

  “Afraid? A-ha-ha-ha.”

  “You are.”

  “Not.”

  “Are.”

  “Not.”

  Ever so gently, he took me by the shoulders and placed me on my back, on the floor, my head at a painful angle against the leg of the sofa. His face hovered over me, seeming all magnified, and his voice, though a whisper, came at me as if through a bull horn. “Listen, Ginnie. You listening?”

  “Yes. Sir.” I was afraid. I had prodded the sleeping tiger and, sonofabitch, the cage had come open and the beast was coming out all erect—and I don’t mean on his hind legs.

  He rolled on top of me, his hands doing predictable and clumsy things. “Ginnie, you know how I feel about you.”

  “No, I don’t. Tell me.”

  “What?”

  “Tell me how you feel about me. But first—hey—can I move my head a little? It’s gonna break off.”

  I moved and he kissed me, with deadly aim. Right on the mouth. He was talking and kissing, simultaneously. “Ginnie…Ginnie, I…Ginnie? I…Ginnie…”

  “Yes? What? Alan? Hmmm?”

  He pulled back and tensed up. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  “I’m trying to tell you. My head’s in a funny position.”

  “Then move it! Move your fucking head!”

  “Yes. Thank you. I’m moving it. There.”

  He tried to recoup. “You comfortable now?”

  “Me?”

  And he flared. “Who else is in the room?”

  “Well, you never know.”

  He turned cold. “I’m not gonna wrestle with you, kid. I’m not gonna play games or let you be coy.”

  “Coy? Me? A-ha-ha-ha-ha.”

  “You know how I feel about you.”

  “Well—”

  “So it’s time to stop the shit.”

  “What time is it?”

  “I’m not even gonna honor that question with an answer.”

  He was unbuckling his belt and making so much noise that I had to say “Shhhhh.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Listen, I wanna be tender. I really do, but you’re acting very freaky. Are we going to do this or aren’t we?”

  “I don’t know.” And I didn’t.

  “To me that means yes.”

  “Yeah? To me it means ‘I don’t know.’” I was up on the backs of my forearms, like a sunbather looking at her toes.

  He pushed me down again, climbed aboard, and was wiggling all over me. “Ginnie, I hate to do it this way…”

  “Alan—I’m scared. I mean, I am goddamned terrified.”

  “I know. I know. I’ll be tender.” He was working on my clothes.

  “Alan—I’m only sixteen.”

  “I wouldn’t care if you were nine.”

  “You’re tearing my sweater!”

  “Fuck your sweater!”

  “Alan—there’s something I have to tell you.”

  “Tell me later. Jesus.”

  “I’ve never done this before.”

  “I know.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And it doesn’t matter?”

  “It did. About ten minutes ago. Now it doesn’t.” His hands were dancing under my sweater. He kept trying to stay on top while I kept trying to roll him off. All I could think of was Miss Marjorie Stokely’s turtle trying to stay on its slippery rock. His left hand went under my sweater, a diversionary action to keep me busy there. His right hand was grabbing at my belt.

  “Alan please!”

  “So you’re a virgin! So fuck it!” He was all breathy and determined and out of control.

  “Alan, I—” My hand reached down in the fight for possession of my belt buckle and came upon his penis.

  “Oh, Ginnie—”

  “Oh, pardon me.” And I let the thing go. But it quickly found its way back into my hand, obviously possessing some kind of homing instinct. I tried to shake it out of my hand but his hand was on top of mine, clamping it. “Alan, I don’t think you understand…”

  “I understand, I understand! Jesus Christ, Ginnie!”

  “You have to let me explain…”

  “No! I have to fuck you! That’s what I have to do! So, for Christ’s sake, stop the phony resistance!”

  “Yes, I’m sure, but—Alan? I can’t fuck.”

  That stopped him. “What?”

  “I’m trying to explain.” Even as I was talking, I wondered just what I was going to say, what weird fiction I was going to come up with that would save the day, the moment, and my virginity.

  He kept his penis in my hand, that silly bit of cartilage jumping all over the place like a landed ten-pound trout. But I wasn’t moving a knuckle. He would have had more action had he stuck his dopey dick into a bathtub faucet. “What the hell you talking about?” he asked.

  And it all came out, amazing even me. “It’s not a pretty story, Alan.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “I was born in China. My father was a missionary. When the war was over we had to literally walk out of China. All of us. My father, my mother, my sister and me. I wasn’t twelve years old. Alan, they raped me.”

  “What?”

  “The Chinese, the Japanese, wherever we went, just walking, east, east to the ocean.” I was marvelous. Tears came to my eyes and I tried very hard to have a few of them land on his penis, an act which brought me dangerously close to the enemy but which was worth the risk. “Alan, I’ve never been a virgin. My father had to sew me up. Six, seven, eight times—maybe ten. I’m all scar tissue, Alan. I have a very little opening. I can’t take insertion.” And I turned away, half waiting for the applause.

  He was consoling. “You poor kid.”

  “No, it’s okay. I’ve come to terms with it. There are things—exercises I do to limber myself up, but I’m not ready yet. I have no elasticity down there. My first Tampax? I practically had to hammer it in.”

  “Oh, Ginnie…” He was hugging me, rocking me. And I consoled, hugged and rocked him back.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I’ve come to terms with it.
In a year or two—maybe less—I’ll be able to—accept a man.”

  “You poor baby. What about your mother?”

  “What about her?”

  “Did they rape her, too?”

  “Oh, no. She was too old. They weren’t interested in her, just—the young stuff.”

  “Your sister?”

  “My sister? Oh—that’s another story.”

  “What?”

  “Well—she loved it.” Nothing like getting a zinger in on Mary Ann Marvelous. “She was fifteen and loved it. Fucked her way right out of China. If it weren’t for Mary Ann taking the pressure off me, I don’t know, we might still be there. In a cage in some kind of Chinese brothel.”

  “Jesus what a story.” He rolled off me and lay on his back alongside me, his penis going with him because, well, it didn’t extend all that far. “No wonder you dance like you do. It’s all sublimation. You perform sex in your dancing.”

  “Yes, Alan. As shameless as it may sound, yes. I dance the way I’d like to fuck—if I could fuck.” I was having such a good time with my melodrama. I moved to kiss him. “It’s something to look forward to, though, no?”

  He sighed. “Yeah. I guess so.”

  I realized he was hurting and I was sorry. I hadn’t thought about him at all, and I liked him. “I should have told you. I shouldn’t have let you go this far.”

  “Forget it.”

  “I think—if you want to—you should take care of yourself.” I, myself, wondered what I meant by that.

  “I will. When I get home. Only it’ll take a year to get there, as I’ll be doing it on my hands and knees.”

  “Do you hurt?”

  “No. I always wear my schlong in braids.”

  “Can you take care of yourself—here?” If he did, I’d leave the room, of course, being a lady.

  “With you?”

  “Well, I—”

  “Your mouth?”

  “No, that’s not exactly what I had in mind.”

  He got ugly. “Something wrong with your mouth, too? What’d they do? Rip your mouth open and force root canal work on you?”

  I reached for his penis, instinctively. Grabbing a man’s penis is like rubbing the stomach of a dog. It pacifies and temporarily defuses. Immediately disarmed by the act, Alan stopped bitching. “Alan, I don’t want you to go home angry and tense.” I sounded like a commerical for Anacin.

  “Aaaaah, shit.”

  He lay there, all rigid, as if whatever I was doing to his penis would shortly happen to the rest of him. Inside of five seconds he was taking on the dimensions of a telephone pole. “Does this make you feel better?”

  “Ginnie, that’s for kids. I can do that myself.”

  “Okay.”

  “But do it anyway.”

  “Yes, Alan.” I distinctly remember feeling no excitement at all. Holding his sex in my hand was about as thrilling as holding a Russian salami, neither of which did I ever have any intention of eating. But I liked Alan and I owed him that much. What the hell, what was the big deal? If that’s what he wanted—

  “Oh, Ginnie.”

  “Yes, dear. Just relax.” Ginnie, the expert.

  “Ginnie, I love you. Ginnie—”

  “I know. I know.” The hell he loved me. He just loved my hand. It was like the old adage: “The hand that holds the penis, rules the world.” And I held it. Like a rudder. If I twisted left, his right leg went up. If I pushed it forward, his head rolled to the side. And if I pulled down on it, his whole body trembled as if he were breaking through the sound barrier. I was Smilin’ Jack at the joystick. With the right amount of pressure I could have sent him into a fatal power dive, a terrifying tailspin. Only my grasp of things, plus a working knowledge of aerodynamics, was all that stood between Alan Braden and another kill for the Red Baroness.

  “Ginnie—”

  “Shhhhh.”

  “Ginnie—?”

  “Shhhh.”

  “Ginnie????”

  “Alan, what is it!”

  What it was was that he exploded all over my sweater and my jeans and my nice carpet. It must have made him feel terribly foolish because he immediately stood up, zipped up, and walked out, saying, “Pretty fucking humiliating, Ginnie. Thanks a lot.”

  Well, you could have fooled me. I was under the distinct impression that he had been enjoying it. As I cleaned up the mess I began to realize that sex and me were not going to be all that compatible. The idea of it was grand and I loved it, but the putting of it into practice was something else. I liked Alan, about as much as I had ever liked any boy or man, but I simply didn’t want to make love with him. I could hold him in my hand. I could relieve him. I could give him his little-boy hand job. But it was all ice cold and premeditated. I was not transported to Olympian heights by it. I was not sent skipping to my diary to giddily record my first jerk-off. I was simply aware that I had behaved stupidly and clumsily with a man I rather liked and, in the process, had set back US-Sino relations about three hundred years.

  Meantime, I quietly turned seventeen and, back at Madame Getrude’s, Annice Chatterton is slowly but surely (and very expertly) developing a group of dynamite boy and girl dancers, of whom I am one (and the only white one). I mean, there I am, all blonde and blue-eyed and screaming of Scandinavia, prancing around in the middle of a tribe of blue-black Negroes and Negresses who move with the rhythms that flowed out with them when the water broke in their various mothers’ wombs. How long would it be before Annice would up and say, “Hey, Vanilla, yo’ is discharged from the shebang.”

  Well, the hell. I didn’t care. I just didn’t. I was simply determined to keep on showing up, sweating with the rest of them, doing interpretively what came to them anthropologically. Besides, damn it, not only did I enjoy it, I was good at it. If I was going to be hustled off the floor it would have to be as the result of pure, head-on bigotry, and they’d know it. And if they didn’t, I’d goddamn tell ’em.

  One Sunday, one of the boys (not a professional dancer; matter of fact, he never danced at all, just hung around and took notes) took me aside and asked if I’d have a Coke with him. His name was Roland Jessup and it didn’t take me long to realize that he wasn’t just another silly dancer. Rather, he was bright, well-spoken, mature, and worked in the advertising department of 20th Century-Fox somewhere uptown—so far uptown it could just as well have been Canada.

  Roland told me what I had already begun to suspect. Annice Chatterton was gathering a troupe of dancers for a review that would open in some posh uptown club. Catherine Dunham had done it in Café Society, and now it was time for someone to do it again.

  Roland went on to say that, though he worked full time at his job, he often dabbled in private ventures and was very much involved in the organization and coordinating of the Annice Chatterton Dancers. The selection of the dancers was up to Annice, of course, but the negotiating and contracting—all the logistical work—was solely his responsibility.

  Well, to get right to it, Annice wanted me in the troupe but wasn’t too sure but that the black kids might resent the hell out of me. Also, would the paying public find it destructively gratuitous? Wouldn’t she be better advised to settle for a lesser dancer and keep the whole show black?

  Apparently, Annice was ready to go the all-black route but Roland wasn’t certain it was the right move. After all, wasn’t the idea to get the best dancers and not the best black dancers? Annice had given Roland her proxy. If Roland wanted to sound me out on the subject, and if I found the idea to my liking, fine. But it would then be Roland’s job to acquaint me with the possible side effects of joining the group.

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Like having a dozen black girls not talk to you.”

  “They don’t talk to me now.”

  “Like having them make you miserable by letting you know that, if you woke up dead, they might just jump for joy.”

  “I don’t care what people do after I’m dead.”

  “You ha
ve to give it serious thought.” His voice was deep, a Paul Robeson voice but with a flip on it, always accentuating words, emphasizing them as if he were an effeminate school teacher.

  “Okay. I thought about it. I want to do it.”

  “I’m not asking for a decision this very moment, Virginia.”

  “I know. But you got it.”

  “You must understand. If the group does well at The Blue Angel, we may want to tour it. You’ll be living with black girls.”

  “I don’t do windows or any heavy work.”

  He laughed so hard his cigarette-holder fell out of the space between his teeth. “You are a fantastic dancer, but you’re going to look like an oddity, as though we put you in to shake things up. For you to survive, you’re going to have to be ten times the dancer the other kids are. Otherwise, the critics and the audiences are going to crucify you. You’re going to have to be better than Jackie Robinson.”

  “I can’t move to my left.”

  He smiled. “How old are you?”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “We’ll have to get you a union card. AGVA. If you’re a minor, one of your parents’ll have to go with you.”

  “What if I have no parents?”

  “Your guardian.”

  “Forget it.”

  “We’ll work something out. Pay is sixty dollars a week.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  “—for which you will work so hard—”

  “It’s okay.”

  “You’ll rehearse all day. Two shows every night.”

  “Okay.”

  “And if the show goes on the road, darling, you’ll be living with black people.”

  “That’s their problem.”

  “Once you leave New York, I can’t help you.”

  “Who’s asking you to.”

  He sat back, puffing his strange-smelling cigarette. “Well, Joan of Arc was sixteen.”

  “Was she black?”

  “At the end, baby, she was charred.”

  I got my union card but don’t ask me how. Roland and a black girl went with me and told the man at the desk that I was black, and the man just didn’t want to fight it. I had my card, I had my contract. And I had a share of a very successful restaurant. Things were good. Alan called a couple of times but was so belligerent I just had to hang up on him.