Beyond the Pale Motel (3 page)

“You asked me
what
. You always want to know. What, what, what? Okay, I told you. Are you happy?”

The ice pain in my abdomen flared to heat that spread through my whole body. My heart was pounding like I was on the Body Farm treadmill. “What the fuck? Am I what? Happy? Get the fuck out of here, Dash.”

He got up and put on his jeans. The belt, decorated with skulls, was still threaded through the belt loops, and the heavy metal buckle clanked.

He pulled on his T-shirt without looking at me. His back was huge, straining the cotton fabric as if it might tear. I realized I would never touch him again. Everything irrevocably over. One of us might as well have been killed in that instant. And it was probably me. My first death of nine. Who was the zombie now?

When I was in my early twenties, I had a dog I'd found on the street. A gentle beagle-and-pit-bull mix I called Pinkie. I walked and fed her, she slept on my bed. It was good for me, at that time, to have something to take care of, even though I couldn't care for myself. Then the seizures began. Her body hurtling against the walls, mouth lathering, shit everywhere. Afterward she wouldn't recognize me, would just growl for a long time. Once, after an episode, she looked at me without recognition. When I reached for her, she bit my hand, breaking the skin, though it wasn't that deep. The meds they gave me for her didn't work, the tumor they discovered was inoperable, and finally I decided to put her down. I was drunk. It was raining. I drove her to the vet, who told me I should leave, that it wouldn't be pleasant to watch. She was still big and strong, nothing seemed wrong to look at her. The vet walked into the back room and she followed him, trotting along, trusting. Sometimes I still dreamed of her bony head, her lopsided eyes, and long, graceful legs.

“I'm sorry,” Dash said. For the first time since I'd asked the final
what,
his voice sounded human, even kind. This made it worse. I wanted to grab him, tear him back from wherever he was. I was going to be alone. I was going to die alone like my mother. Unless I could get him to stay.

“Wait, please. Dash. Talk to me.”

He shook his head.

“Why?” I screamed. “What did I do? What happened?”

“It's not about you and me,” he said and his voice was cold again. “It's about me. And her.”

 

#2

 

I didn't find out who “her” was for a while. If I hadn't been so scared to know, I would have tried harder. I didn't want it to be real. Dash had been the center of my existence for almost as long as I'd been sober. What would happen to me if I fully acknowledged that he was gone, that he had fallen in love with someone else? That I would never have his child, or maybe anyone's child? Would I drink again? Would I perish without my husband's love to save me?

In 2002 Bree and I were newly sober and Dash spoke at a meeting. When he was up there speaking, no one could look away. His smile was a sexy grimace and his tattoos mesmerized, like a maze your eyes wanted to follow to their center. Lotus flowers and poetry in Latin curved over his biceps, Aztec symbols inked his neck, a snake slithered up his calf and disappeared inside the leg of his shorts. He told about the first drink at twelve, the first hard drugs at thirteen. Foster homes and fights and beatings. Whole periods of time forgotten. It made my childhood look pretty good in comparison. “It gets better,” he said. “It really does.” That was what I needed to hear.

Bree insisted on taking me to see his band play at Sound the next weekend. She could tell I was smitten; he was all I had talked about that week. We were both scared of going to a bar so early in our sobriety, and Bree was pregnant, but we vowed to keep an eye on each other the whole night. We parked under the stone bridge and walked along the deserted street, up the dirty stairs, across the littered pass to the club. I smelled alcohol in the air right away, but by the end of the night it wasn't Jack I wanted.

When Dash came onstage, I clung to Bree's firm, little biceps to steady myself. We were too near the speakers. My ears rang and rang; there'd be pain in the morning. I guzzled my cranberry and soda, staring at the way this man bared his teeth.

“She had a neck like a swan but her tits were fake. There was a dead body in the Sliver Lake. I said, ‘Baby, baby, I'll keep you safe.' She said, ‘Wipe that smile offa your face.'”

I guess it had something to do with an illusion of safety. As if no one would mess with me if I were his. In middle school I'd been bullied by the mean boys more than the girls, who pretty much ignored me. I was like a magnet for the boys' comments. “Fat ass.” “Zit face.” Sometimes I wondered if the hypersexuality I tried to hide from the world was showing through, so awkward and ashamed of itself that it drew taunts. I touched myself to fall asleep every night and daydreamed about sex in the light. Or maybe it was that those mean boys smelled my fear like dogs do. I hung my head when I walked past them, wondering if they knew my secrets.

When I lost some weight and my skin cleared up, when I learned how to do my hair and makeup, and dress to flatter my cleavage and calf muscles, I still half expected a surprise attack at every turn. The drinking helped. But now it was gone. Now I needed a mean boy in the body of a 250-pound man more than ever.

But of course mean boys are just that.

Once a week we went out for Thai food at one of the late-night places on Santa Monica Boulevard or shopped at the Hollywood farmers market and I made him dinner. Then we had great, famished sex. I wondered why we didn't see each other more, but he told me he had to rehearse a lot so I left it at that. After a few months we came home for dinner and he was tugging at the button of my blouse when I stopped him.

“I'd really like to see you more often.” I had been working up to this for weeks, with Bree's coaching. “I feel like it's hard to get to know someone just once a week.”

He dropped to the couch, kneading his fingers, squinting up at me. Sasha sat watching us from behind the door with her psychic green eyes. She still didn't trust Dash.

“It's not like I'm seeing anyone else,” he said. “I rehearse a lot. And I go to meetings.”

“Maybe we could go to one together sometime,” I ventured. My body had already attached to him and didn't want to let go so soon. I knew that I'd back down and continue to see him on his terms if I had to.

“I go to SLAA. You know what that is?”

“Sex and Love Addicts?”

He nodded. Sasha sat there, still watching. “Yeah. I've been going for six months. It really helps.”

“Like, what?” I asked, my heart pounding through my thin shirt. “Porn or prostitutes or…”

“I haven't been active in six months,” he said. “I think it's better if we don't talk about it too much.”

I looked down at my hands, wishing I'd gotten a manicure. The black polish was chipped, the skin was dry.

“Okay,” I said.

“Are you okay?”

I didn't know.

“Maybe I should go?”

“Yeah.”

That night I cried when he left, imagining that even if we got through this, he would cheat on me with groupies or, at the very least, fantasize about porn stars when we fucked.

The problem was that I couldn't stop thinking about him. I began to imagine him with other women—girls with giant breasts, tiny waists, tan, shaven skin, shiny hair reaching to asses that could almost fit in his hand. These thoughts made me come hard, but I always dissolved into tears with the last clenchings, humiliated by my own mind.

A few weeks later he called me, we went out for dinner, he said, “You're the one I want to see now, babe.” It didn't take much.

While he was inside me, I saw him in my mind with a goddess girl covered in tattoos. Dense, richly colored peonies and butterflies on her arms, a tiger's face on her ass, the cleft of its mouth inked along her crack. In my mind I sat chained to a chair, naked, legs spread. I was watching them, unable to touch myself.

I think we finally got married because he needed someone to care for him and I needed someone to feed, which was its own kind of hunger.

*   *   *

Two weeks had passed since Dash had left with only a small bag of his things. The drapes in the bungalow caught on fire and continued to burn steadily. Daggers shot out of the showerhead. Spiders nested in my hair and formed a web over my mouth and eyes. Sasha lay on my stomach, batting at the web, trying to make things better. On the TV, toddlers seemed to be continually falling out of the sky, caught, if they were lucky, in the arms of strangers who happened to be passing by. Pomegranate seeds were infecting people with hepatitis. In a crime drama a serial killer with dashing cheekbones prepared gourmet meals with human meat. I wondered if the Hollywood Serial Killer looked like a Hollywood actor; how else had he been able to lure Mandy Merrill and Adrienne Banks? My mala sat by the bed untouched, even though it would probably have helped me to meditate; Dash had taken his beads with him. The only thing that got me out of the house was Bree, who told me I had to use work to get my mind off Dash, and Scott, who told me I had to sweat for the same reason.

Being at both Head Hunter and Body Farm was awful though. Since Dash had left, men that made me uncomfortable before now made my skin slither, and Big Bob, with his vapid eyes and too-bleached teeth, and Stu, salivating like a necrophiliac over pretty murder victims on TV, made my skin want to crawl off my bones.

My husband had left me feeling dismembered, but Mandy Merrill and Adrienne Banks actually had been.

“They were both so hot,” Stu said at Head Hunter, while he pawed through a gossip magazine featuring the Hollywood Serial Killings.

“Can you stop talking about those murders, Stu,” said Bree as she buzzed his head. “We don't need to hear it.”

“So many women come here to get famous, and they have a better chance of doing it by getting killed and chopped into pieces.”

Bree and I exchanged a glance in the mirror above his head.

Shut the fuck up, Stu.

If he wasn't Bree's most regular client, I was pretty sure she'd have thrown him out right then. I was ready to do it myself if he said another word.

The only thing that really got my mind off things was Skylar.

The first time Bree brought him into Head Hunter after Dash left, Sky hugged me for a longer time than usual. “You're going to take me to baseball tryouts next Saturday, right?”

“Of course. It's on the calendar. There's nothing I'd rather do.”

“And what about Honey's birthday party this Sunday?”

I looked at Bree, who nodded. “Of course,” I said.

*   *   *

Sky's birthday parties had been train-themed since he was two, with the train growing in size, along with him, each year. At the first party he spent the whole time squatting on the floor over his wooden train set with his friend Honey. To get to the other side of the track he'd remain in a squat and hop like a frog. By the time the birthday cake, shaped like a train, of course, was served, he had fallen asleep, and I took a photograph of him lying on his back with his arms flung out, the cake on the bed beside him. When he was three, we hired a guy in a conductor's uniform to bring a kid-size track and train in which Skylar and Honey rode around and around, wearing blue-and-white-striped conductor's hats, with placid expressions on their faces, until he fell asleep again. His fourth and fifth birthdays included more children and took place at the outdoor train museum in Griffith Park. This time the train ride was big enough to hold the grown-ups, too, and after we'd ridden on that, we explored the real trains in the yard. They seemed mildly, hollowly haunted, metal walls echoing with the laughter of children. Sky did not fall asleep on either of these occasions. On his sixth birthday Bree and I took Skylar and Honey on the metro downtown to Olvera Street. After that Skylar outgrew his obsession with trains, which was a good thing, since I didn't know if there was any place where we could easily find a bigger one.

I was taking Sky to Honey's eleventh birthday in Griffith Park but no trains were involved; her mom, Joy, was having a picnic on a hillside. On our way up the hill bikers on their way to a Harley convention zoomed past my car—guys with women on the back, flesh exposed where their shirts rode up, their arms around the dudes, many of whom were built like Dash. There was something so intimate about riding on a motorcycle, holding on with that humming between your legs.

I turned my attention back to Skylar. “When's the last time you saw Honey?”

“My birthday last year,” he said. “But we're still on Instagram.”

At one point a few months earlier I'd seen Skylar smiling shyly at his iPod Touch and I'd asked what he was doing.

“Messaging Honey.”

“What's that smile about?”

He blushed. “We're sort of boyfriend-girlfriend.”

“What does that mean?”

“It's complicated.”

I'd been concerned until I learned that “it's complicated” meant she had informed him of this new status via Instagram on his iPod—he hadn't actually had much to do with the decision—and that being “sort of boyfriend-girlfriend” consisted of saying you were “going out” and messaging each other all day and at least once before bed.

A few weeks later I asked if she was still his girlfriend and he said, “No. She dumped me.”

“Are you okay?”

“I'm too young for a relationship anyway.” He had that peaceful Buddha baby look on his face and I found myself wishing I could be more like that about Dash leaving.

After Honey had blocked Skylar for one day on Instagram, they were back to following each other and “still friends.”

The Sunday of Honey's eleventh birthday I was feeling relieved to be with Sky, finally, for a whole day, but I didn't look forward to having to answer the adults' questions about me. As Sky ran off to join the kids, Honey's mom, Joy, danced up to me, wearing a long Indian gauze skirt and lots of bangles, her hair wafting around her, her baby, Boston, in a sling. Of course she had to ask about Dash. I just shook my head.