"I hope you told him that with a hole he was now the woman," Gabriele interjected. Rita began laughing so hard that she choked on her saliva. "You know, all of us have to be cautious — not just with men and sex (both of which are confusing and should be off limits TO YOU) but everything and everybody. You have to realize that in everything people use each other even though it isn't altogether bad. Think of it this way: if they don't use each other they would have no use of them. You just need to define if that person's use in yourself is your use in him, her, them, whatever. If they are the same, a relationship can ensue. That's my idea."
"Oh, you're so smart. I wish I was smart like that. Do you need to use me?" asked Rita/Lily with hopeful childish innocence.
Gabriele could not think of a use for her. Simple compassion had plagued her here. She wanted to be home "Sure," she lied. "Something like that. Of course you are one of my few friendly people." She looked at her watch. "My customer will come in another hour, Lilian." Names shifted like tectonic plates. "I really should leave and put Adagio to bed." She knew that Rita was still wondering to herself why Gabriele did not teach her these German shoulder massage and acupuncture techniques so that she could have her own customers. She knew that Rita yearned for a vocation and a bit of pocket money. Rita/Lily's thoughts could be read easily from her eyes. She was so ingenuous and without guile or calculation except when men made her nervous. It was for this that Gabriele actually liked her.
Rita picked up the pacifier that had just flown out of the screaming child and handed it to Gabriele. "I'll make some hot coffee before you and Baby Nathaniel go out into the cold."
"Oh, all right," said Gabriele. She was not capitulating to outside pressure but only to the sense that she could not entirely part from the discomfort of compassion, which was the only good trait of man outside his creativity and intelligence. Compassion was half rational. The rest of its composition was that other version of love, the highest of all primordial feelings. Compassion, according to Gabriele, "flared up at the damnedest of times," and as inconvenient as it was to have it, she knew better than to forsake it. She had her distasteful coffee in a soapy cup, and once it was drunk she was pleased that by her compassionate act she had made herself into a better creature; but she knew that enough was enough. She needed to treat herself to compassion by "getting out of Dodge".
In the trailer she took a shower to prepare herself for relieving a customer; finished her session with him; laughed uncontrollably at his angry grievance over the fact that in zipping up his pants with one hand and reaching the other hand over to play with the little boy's fingers, the baby had bit him; and then she had another shower. In the second shower she kept remembering his words, "You'd better put that kid ina cage if you want any men to step over'ere. I'd better get me a tetanus shot." Her own laughter was so inordinate that it soon gave her a headache. After swallowing some aspirin, she began her other job. She preferred making a living on weekends to the rest of the week since it was so much shorter. Outside a little physical prostitution, on weekends she would freelance her "bull shit sketches"(her "mental prostitution) that went with the little "asinine" sentiments that Hallmark Greeting Cards sent to her; and then the week's work would be, for the most part, over. At least she terminated the workweek after Sunday. She loathed "prostituting" herself "to assholes" but the way she looked at it, everything was a form of prostitution from the time that one washed and blow-dried her hair that was cut in such a way that was aesthetically pleasing to "Western farts controlling economic institutions" to rolls that bound human thoughts in its limited pages, the social interaction one engaged in to stay sane, and the tricks one did to get one's little bowl of Alpo dog food. It was her belief that physical prostitution was less of a deleterious moral injustice to oneself than any other kind. Done with a condom, its physical discomfort was also fairly safe and brief. Done enough times with strangers one did not care for, it serendipitously shaped her into a regular Buddha reducing her desires and appetites.
She cut the list of maudlin mottoes into myriad strips; put paper clips around each strip, and then attached each one around a tarot card. She lit the four or five candles that were on the kitchen table; shuffled the deck; drank four cans of beer quickly; and then mumbled a bitching mumble about having to prostitute herself. With her visual perception more mobile and her brain in a buzz, she unevenly laid out the whole of this partial motto-mottled deck in a larger than Celtic layout beginning with the cards patterned out as a cross; meditated on each motto; and then drew her designs. The first motto that she encountered was "Happy Birthday To A Grandson Who Has A Wonderful Personality, Good Looks And A Fine Character. I Guess There Are Some Things That Are Just Hereditary." Suddenly an image flashed through her mind and she began to draw. For a moment she was completely stunned by what she was drawing, and completely incredulous that this was coming from her mind.
As she became aware of bearing this unique, full, and outrageous creation so effortlessly, she fell into hysterical laughter at the sketch of an old woman in a party hat, who smiles on sweetly as her grandson, abandoning all of the packages surrounding him, lifts her skirt curiously. But then for the non-pornographic version she made a young man with a girlfriend bound hand-in-hand and a second hand reaching out to his grandmother who stands near the birthday cake. By drawing this second version she was providing Hallmark with sentimental froth for those who did not see that humans were replaceable in one's own life and that the whole of a life, itself, was more froth splashed up in the washing of time. On a deeper albeit subliminal level she was stating that one could go forward in time and still retain childish affections. She knew it was not so. Only minds like Parmenides and Plato (a mind that she had) could conceptualize changeless eternity within the entity. Such unique individuals did not need to reminisce about the past. She never kept a photograph album apart from her corpus of sketches. She didn't want to be one of the masses. They were like school children trying to find their loose-leaf homework that had been taken from their hands by the winds and scattered behind them.
After she picked up the twentieth Tarot card to begin another preliminary sketch, she became aware of the fact that the flickering candles were making her extremely tired. She knew that being tired all the time was more from the monotony of being a single parent and had little to do with a full night of prostitution that she hadn't even yet begun to complete. For a moment she blamed a woman's susceptibility to become a mother for her blas? existence but it had been her choice to remain pregnant and it was her choice to raise this being whom she could have easily given away for adoption. Likewise, it was her choice to not seek employment. She had striven for isolation; but she hadn't done it with absolute perfection. She had given birth to a child and driven him into her shadows although she might have done it all alone. She knew that she had that capacity. Human society was for her a boring fair ground with the same quick-thrill rides and the same clones in freak shows. The war of the "Kuwaiti theatre" and Saddam Hussein were freak shows that Americans entertained themselves with from their television shows. These freak shows bored and sickened her and yet she listened to war broadcasts from her radio with the gluttony of other news junkies. She liked radio. She could imagine news more accurately without the visual images.
Apart from what important minds could vaguely construe to be permanent truth, human society was bereft of ontological meaning; the West was on a collision path with the environment and Islamic extremists; more and more societies possessed weapons of mass destruction that had the potential force that was beyond her imagination to conceive; and all societies were full of lies and manipulating fables disguised as truths-their own Moseses parting their own Red Seas. To be God's appointed bully of world events and His proponent of capitalism and democratic tyranny was the American myth. She often asked herself how she could even take on a janitorial job and sweep away the dirt of a capitalistic institution. How could she do functions that would keep it nice and operative looking? How could she empty its trash, and change its burnt out light bulbs when that institution was one of a billion which would bring about the destruction of the environment, the vitiation of curiosity and innovation among pampered capitalists, and often exploited third world workers. How could she contribute to society when she did not believe in it?