What's a Girl Gotta Do by Sparkle Hayter Page A

she’d move to more punitive action, taking a clawed
swat at the back of my leg. Louise Bryant was very
Machiavellian.
    Louise Bryant came to us, to me, late in her
life. It was like this: Burke wanted a baby, I didn’t. Some people
are meant to be parents, and some of us, those with long histories
of insanity in the family, for instance, are not. In the end it was
moot, because it turned out I was infertile. Children just weren’t
a
    realistic expectation without tens of
thousands of dollars of costly and chancy in vitro. Burke needed a
more fecund field than me (which he apparently thought he’d found
in Amy Penny). So Burke and I compromised on a cat. Actually, we’d
decided on a kitten but at the SPCA we changed our minds and took
home this ancient, battle-scarred alley cat with a taste for
restaurant dumpster food and roses, a strange fear of harmonica
music and a less strange fear of thunderstorms. After an unknown
number of years as a street cat she took to being a house cat
surprisingly well, as though she was born to luxury. But right
away, the battle of wills began between Louise Bryant and me over
her diet. She refused to eat anything from a can unless I
stir-fried it with greens and oyster sauce.
    Oddly enough, I do this every night for her.
I open a can of Hill’s Science Diet and stir-fry it in a little
olive oil with some bok choy. I do this for a cat I’m not even sure
likes me.
    As soon as I put the plate down for her, she
immediately forgot about my existence and buried her face in her
food.
    I searched through my closet for something
sort of chic and sort of bohemian to wear, something that would
qualify for Kafka’s. I hadn’t been to Kafka’s, but I’d heard of it.
It was the club of the minute, the newest mecca for young, stunning
New Yorkers, like Claire. She ran with a gang that always included
a lot of really beautiful, pseudo-bohemian actors, models, writers,
and cerebral rock musicians who seemed on the verge of huge breaks.
They all had respectable success at an early age, appearing in good
off- Broadway plays or in small art films by promising young
directors and they were very much in love with themselves. One of
their number was making a documentary about them and their
lifestyle, so whenever you’d seen them in clubs, you’d see this
cameraman and sound tech in their orbit, recording their every
pithy bon mot and existential glance into space.
    I shouldn’t be so contemptuous, because the
truth is, I’m jealous of them and their easy confidence. When I’m
around hot young people I feel kind of cold and old. I often wish I
could turn off that deep, dark neurotic part of myself at will and
be breezy and shallow when I need to be, such as when I am facing
the bouncers at some trendy club, worrying that they won’t let me
in. Fortunately, red hair is very trendy now and I have a long,
stubborn mass of it. Club bouncers, who are people I should not
want to impress but do, love it and usually wave me right in.
    But when I got to Kafka’s the two borderline
IQs at the door made no move to admit me, although I was the only
one waiting behind the red cordon.
    Housed in what was once a meat wholesaler’s
warehouse, Kafka’s was an example of seedy chic, a fashionable bar
located in New York’s meat district near the Hudson River
waterfront. Ten years before, the neighborhood was the heart of the
gay S & M district known as the Meat Rack. Since then, many of
the leather bars had gone out of business, but the transitional
transsexual prostitutes, half man half woman, the chicks with dicks
as they called themselves, still worked the area.
    While I stood waiting for the bouncers to let
me in, a car pulled up just down the street. There was a baby seat
in the back. The front door of the station wagon opened, two long
stockinged legs stretched out, and a tall, beautiful transsexual
stepped into the spotlight of a street lamp. As the car squealed
away, she slipped back into the shadows of an