Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

He took a moment to examine her. The plump mouth. The chemical blond hair. She was wearing black fishnet stockings — La Mazière could see their pattern in the dim blue light. He liked the diaphanous allure of fishnets. They were an enticement in the guise of a barrier, like a beaded curtain hung over a doorway says “come in,” not “stay out,” its beads telegraphing that what’s inside is enchanted and special. He touched her knee, and to his surprise, her skin felt slightly cool — bare and smooth. He ran his finger up her thigh carefully, as though drawing a line on dew-frosted glass. It left a skin-toned smear in the cross-hook pattern of her fishnets, which apparently were made not of thread but of ink.

“An illusion — a painting,” he said, and looked at her with a bemused smile. He had a vague memory of Parisian women wearing paint-on stockings during the war. But that was all over. This was 1952. The girl had made her own perverse style out of France’s wartime scarcity. He was impressed. And what was supposed to be an enticement, a fine membrane of netting that begged not just “remove me” but also “rip me to shreds” could not be ripped to shreds. It could be removed, of course, with water and soap, but such a ritual, without the purpose of gaining sexual access, would have no meaning. Why bother, when he could have her as she was? Her stockings were as material as the sun shadow of chain-link fence on a prison wall. He thought of Inge, the German girl with whom he’d toured the Rhineland before enlisting in the Charlemagne Division. Little Inge, who insisted he tear through her intricate cat’s cradle of garters and stays, girdle, corset, and underwear. He would burst through snaps and panels, and tug tight-fitting elasticized garments down around the German girl’s knees, dismantling underwear fortifications to penetrate the frontier of her pretend virginity. Sometimes he became impatient, pried his hand into her underwear and jerked the crotch panel to the inside of her thigh, to clear the way. The tearing sound of unforgiving fabric would cause Inge to let out a little moan, as if the fabric itself were the delicate folds of her innocence. With paint-on stockings, there was nothing to burst through. No garters, stays, or snaps. Only flesh.

Rachel K nodded, yes, that she’d painted them on. “They were perfect, too — until you marked me.” She extended her legs to survey her work. “They took me all day to finish.”

“You spent an entire day painting your legs?” he asked, amused.

“Some girls spend hours plucking their eyebrows,” she said. “Burning sugar cubes and dropping them in absinthe.”

He nodded. “And you do this instead.”

“I do lots of things.”

“I’m sure you do,” he said. “It does say ‘variety’ dancer, after all. French variety dancer, no less.” It was a style of flirting, exposing her fabrications to provoke her into new ones.

“Maybe my dance is French- style, ” she said. “But it’s more than that. My grandfather, Ferdinand K, was French.”

“K could be a number of things, mademoiselle,” La Mazière said, touching her cheek with the back of his hand. “But K is not French.”

“They said he was French.”

“‘They’?”

“Actually, my mother.”

“And she was—”

“A nothing. A stranger who left me here when I was thirteen.”

La Mazière said thirteen seemed rather young for a debut in her line of work. Not in the Tropics, Rachel K replied, where girls reach puberty at ten. She told him how the Tokio dressing room attendants had draped her in spangles, pom-poms, and gold sartouche trim. They were kind, middle-aged women with smoky voices and thick masks of makeup. They’d crimped her locks and painted her mouth in lipstick imported from Paris, a reddish-black, like blood gone dark from asphyxiation. Covered her breasts with tasseled pasties and put her onstage in the Pam-Pam Room. Voilà. Here she was.

She and her mother had ducked into the Tokio from the blinding sun of midday Havana. You’ll be better off, her mother said. Cuba was a heartless place owned by men in New York, and it made more sense to part ways than wander the streets together, pathetic urchins that no one wanted to help. It was so dark inside the club that Rachel K could barely see. They waited at the Pam-Pam Room bar until a manager appeared from a back office, trailing cigar smoke. He breathed audibly, and in his labored breath she understood that he’d taken her on. That was ten years ago. She’d been at the Tokio so long now it was a kind of mother to her. It gave her life a shape. Other girls passed through. They regarded cabaret dancing as momentary and sordid, always hoping for some politician or businessman to rescue them. Because the Tokio gave her life a shape and never sent her fretting over imagined alternatives, she was free in a way the other girls weren’t. She had longings as well, but they weren’t an illness to be cured. They were part of her.

Sometimes it seemed her entire adolescence had been lived in the dressing room mirrors of the Cabaret Tokio. She’d spent hours gazing into them, locked out and wanting to get inside, where the world was the same, but silvery and greenish, doubled and reversed. The same, but different. When she was alone in the dressing room she’d press her cheek to the silver and look sidelong into the mirror, hoping to catch a glimpse — of what? — whatever its invisible secret was. She had faith that there was some secret at the heart of invisibility, even if faith meant allowing for the possibility that there was no secret, that invisibility had no heart. If she knew the mirror’s secret, she’d know how to pass through to the other side. To a greenish-silver province that was her world, but reversed.

Now it occurred to her that she never looked at mirrors as mystery spaces anymore. Maybe she’d passed through without knowing it.

“You have friends in high places,” La Mazière said to her. “The president makes his grand entrance, with full security detail—”

“Who says they’re friends?”

“Ah. How right you are. Friendship is built on loyalty. Not services rendered by a coquette.”

“Friendliness is a service. In any case, I preferred the old president, Prio.”

“But of course. ‘Democratically elected,’ a man of the people—”

“I didn’t vote for him. He was a friend. But he’s gone, and I’m not hearing any violins.”

La Mazière smiled. “You’re too busy cavorting with his enemy.” He had his two hands clasped around her thigh, a garter belt of human fingers banding her leg. “If this was Paris, after the”—he paused and made quotes with his fingers—“‘Liberation,’ they’d shave your head, mademoiselle.” He stroked her coarse blond hair with the attention of a hairdresser assessing locks he was about to shear.

The French women who’d cavorted with Germans couldn’t hide their Nazi trysts any better than their ears, while La Mazière had woven incredible fabrications and spent his jail time in a luxury cell. His labor assignment, organizing the warden’s formal dinner parties. Until a yellow telex arrived, pardoning him after only five years.

He was grabbing locks of Rachel K’s hair and running them through his fingers, pulling firmly at her scalp.

“Friendliness is a service,” he said. “Of course. You need privacy. Ease of mobility. People get in the way, don’t they?”

They really did, she thought. Even Prio. Near the end, he came around too often, and she felt a wearying boredom in having to keep fixing herself into the same persona, something familiar and consistent he could recognize.

“Friendship,” La Mazière said, tugging her hair to angle her face toward his, “is a barbaric concept.”