Kamikaze Lust (18 page)

“Hy, tell them about the hotel,” Mom said.

“Hotel shmotel,” Kiki said. “I want to hear more about your porno, Rachey.” I almost spit up the water in my mouth. But the look of horror on Mom’s face made it all worthwhile. Her saying we didn’t need to hear about
that
only sealed my victory.

Kiki went on talking. “We went to a strip place in Texas, for my niece’s bachelorette. It was a riot, all those boys with their dickies packed in little pouches, how do they get them in there? I put a few dollars in the elastic, my niece and her friends were saying, ‘Aunt Gertie, you’re crazy.’”

“Our room was right on the beach,” Mom interjected. “At night you could see all the stars, the big dipper and everything. Right Hy?”

Aunt Lorraine touched Kiki’s arm. “You should see the movies she got,” she said.

“Yeah, what channel? I got free cable, all the channels.”

“We walked in the moonlight, didn’t we?” Mom shoved Hy’s arm, but he seemed taken with the conversation at our end of the table, where Aunt Lorraine was explaining to Kiki that she would not find these movies on cable. She would have to get them from the video store or from me, because I had friends in the business.

“Like that famous boy, what’s his name again?”

“You mean Robbie Rod?” I said.

“That’s the one,” Aunt Lorraine smiled. “And talk about hanging. He’s got the biggest ever, isn’t that so hun?”

“Well technically, no. They say he’s twelve inches, but rumor has it he was never really that big, and anyway some guys are thirteen, fourteen inches…really big.” I felt naughty discussing penis size over the din of forks clashing with plates and water glasses being refilled, especially when I could tell from Mom’s face how badly I was behaving. Quite frankly, it inspired me.

“Twelve inches sounds pretty big to me, that’s like a ruler,” Kiki said.

“It is a ruler,” I said. “But the thing about Robbie Rod wasn’t just his size, he knew how to use it.”

“Is this the same Robbie Rod of the
Pleasure Squad
fame?” Evan smiled.

“The one and only,” I said. It had been the
Pleasure Squad
series that made RR famous. He played a detective.

Ellen grimaced at her husband, as if he’d just said his pants were on fire. “What?” he said. “It was years ago, I was just a kid.”

“Rachel knows him,” Aunt Lorraine said proudly.

“Well, we’ve met a few times.” My mind drifted back to the set, how RR had been breeding bad karma, because he’d backed out of the production after his fight with Claire Blue but hung around barking orders at the other actors. His money was still tied up in the movie, he argued. Alexis humored him; I started feeling sorry for him. It isn’t easy watching your career slip away. Once, just after a marathon conversation with Shade, I even fantasized taking him up on his offer to fly off to Las Vegas with him for Thanksgiving. Apparently, he had a house there.

“So what’s he like?” Evan asked.

“Actually, he’s just a regular guy,” I said.

And the questions kept coming. It was similar to the way I’d felt in that restaurant with RR and Alexis, as if the company I kept, this job I’d taken, made me more libertine than most. A sexual revolutionary by default. It didn’t matter that I was all talk, that I needed Silver Ray to help me along. I knew my coup was complete when Mom threw her napkin on her plate and took it into the kitchen. Hy followed her. The rest of us started stacking our plates and passing them around the table.

“I heard those guys aren’t allowed to have sex for weeks before a shoot,” Evan said.

“Evan!” Ellen looked at him, half-smiling, as she lifted a stack of plates to bring into the kitchen. She kidded him about any more secrets she should know before she got pregnant, and he made a crack about wearing women’s underwear and everyone laughed but me. I felt newly kindred with those of aberrant desire.

“All those porno guys got implants anyway,” Rowdy said.

“No, you putz,” Kiki said. “They use pumps. Harry used to have one, like a bicycle pump. Push, push, push, and your weenie blows up. You know those, Rachey?”

“No, but some men eat raw onions.” I said this quite pleased with my expertise, though I knew it was probably a Mark Vladimir quirk and not a trend.

“Onions?” Kiki said.

“Cross my heart, I saw it myself.”

“Blech!” Kiki said. “All this talk and I forgot I gotta pee.” She left the table just as Hy returned.

Ellen helped Mom transport the dirty dishes and platters into the kitchen, making me feel guilty for sitting. The women always cleared, while the men sat smoking cigarettes with their belts unbuckled. But Mom had banned cigarettes from the house, so Rowdy went outside to smoke, leaving me at the table with Hy, Evan, and Aunt Lorraine, whose sickness had given her a gender dispensation of sorts. But I felt that way, too. Different from the rest of them. A woman who travels to porn sets. A woman who masturbates. A woman who kisses other women.

I could hear the coffee pot gurgling in the kitchen as I talked to Evan. Like many people I found myself talking to in New York, he confessed that he’d always wanted to be a writer himself; someday he would take off a few months and write that book he had in him. I said someday I would find a family business to go into. Rowdy ambled in with his video camera. Kiki followed him shaking sprinkles of water from her fingers. Ellen and Mom brought out dessert: a pecan pie, Hy’s favorite, a marble pound cake, fruit salad, and an assortment of colorful cookies from the bakery. Watching my mother walk in and out, conducting the rest of them with her burned index finger now covered in gauze, I felt guilty and wanted to make up with her. “Everything looks great,” I said. But she ignored me.

“Yeah, doesn’t it?” Hy said. He picked up his coffee cup. “A toast to my beautiful Stella. What a meal, doll. What a day!”

We all went to sip from our coffee cups, but Mom stopped us. “What? Why’d you stop?” she said. “Tell them the rest.”

“No, Stella, I told you not yet.”

“I’m tired of waiting, they’re gonna find out sooner or later.”

“It’s not the right time, Stella.”

“What?” Evan turned from Hy to Mom. “What’s going on?”

“We’re engaged, we’re getting married next fall!”

“Hey congrats, man!” Rowdy put down his camera and started clapping his hands. When nobody joined in, he stopped.

“You’re what?” Ellen said.

“We’re getting married,” Mom said.

“I can’t believe this,” Evan said. “You hardly know each other.”

“I wanted to tell you, but—”

“Mom hasn’t been dead six months!”

“Six months?” I said and felt Kiki kick me underneath the table. Hy had been coming around for at least a year, and this was the first we’d heard about his wife. We all assumed she was long dead.

“Wait a minute, you were seeing her when…with Mom.…” Evan’s voice shook. Hy buried his head in his hands. Evan stared at him for a second, then put down his coffee cup and bolted from the table. Ellen stood up to follow him, but Hy grabbed her arm. “Come on, Ellie? You gotta understand,” he pleaded. The sacks beneath his eyes sunk lower and lower. Ellen shook him off and ran out the front door with Rowdy trailing after her with his video camera.

“Let them go, Hy,” Mom said.

“Oh, babydoll, why?” Hy whined, reduced to shambles. I thought he might cry and, at that moment, saw he was everything Dad wasn’t. My father would have beaten the crap out of his son before letting him run away from the dinner table. Then he would have called Mom names as their screaming began, a match of twitching jugular veins and flicking wrists, pink blotches on white skin.

Not Hy, he called her babydoll and stroked her arm. I felt sorry for him, caught between her and his family, but weighing the facts as I knew them, my sympathy had its limits. Even Dad, I believe, wouldn’t have cheated on his dying wife.

“I’ll be right back,” Hy said softly and went to catch his family. The rest of us were silent; Kiki, Aunt Lorraine, and I huddled on one side of the table, Mom on the other.

“Stop it! Stop staring at me!” Mom slammed her chair into the table and rose defiantly as if she herself hadn’t smashed the evening to pieces.

“Nobody’s staring,” I said, afraid she might faint, or at least try it, but she’d already sent people running from the table. Fainting would be redundant.

“Six months!” She imitated me, her nose scrunched up and eyes glaring. “You just can’t let me have any happiness, can you? All of you. Jealous bitches!”

She walked off screaming Hy’s name until the front door slammed behind her.

“She is totally nuts,” I said.

“No, just sad,” Aunt Lorraine nodded. “She could have had some life, but nothing was ever enough, just like your father. They were too much alike.”

“Louie was lucky,” Kiki said. “He saw it coming and got out.”

“You’re giving him too much credit,” I said, thinking of all the times Dad had come from work smelling like scotch, how the union local had called that day.
Louie’s in the hospital, a metal beam whacked him in the kisser.
If they knew he was drunk, they didn’t say anything, allowing him and, later, Mom to collect disability.

“He had a good heart, until it stopped working,” Aunt Lorraine said. She smiled beneath her Yankee cap, and though her rheumy eyes were trimmed with yellow spots and broken blood vessels, she seemed more alive than ever. I remembered how she and Dad had always clung to each other, how they sat together so many evenings listening to the saddest music I’d ever heard, tango music. Songs about love and longing and war. Songs that made my father cry. Aunt Lorraine was the only one who understood his tears, the only one he never hit or berated. Aside from me.

“Mind you, I’m not making any excuses,” she said. “People pay for their lives.”

“Not in Brooklyn, they don’t,” Kiki said. She stuck her fork in the middle of the pecan pie and shoved a huge chunk in her mouth.

Aunt Lorraine and I dipped our forks into the dish. I shook the can of whipped cream but stopped at the sudden flash on Aunt Lorraine’s face. She wasn’t supposed to have any sugar.

“What are you waiting for?” she said. We shared a quick second of recognition: yes, honey, we both know what’s going on, and I still want the whipped cream. All of my life I feared doing the wrong thing. I was terrified of, say, not following doctors orders or not clearing my credit card balance the day I received the bill. But I had been to the porn set and back, I’d made a pass at Shade the other night, I wasn’t even reading newspapers anymore, and the world went on just the same.

So I shot a stream of whipped cream on each of our forks and then built a sculpture like the Colosseum in the middle of the pie. The three of us sat swallowing whipped cream and laughing, and I was happy in the sick sweetness, happy until I spotted Rowdy standing against the wall, his spindly fingers hugging the video camera to his chest, with his shoulders jerking and tears streaming down his cheeks.

BANG, BANG, YOU’RE…

First the shot went off. One long echoed bang, as if a fleet of trucks had backfired simultaneously. My ears rang, dazed as eyes navigating the aftermath of a photographer’s flash. Then I heard the man scream.

Heads ducked down; fear crept up my back. People dropped their signs, rushing back and forth in every direction like a scene from an old Japanese monster movie.

Shade squeezed my arm. “You okay?”

I took a deep breath, and my lips shook. “Yeah, you?”

She nodded, clasped her hand tightly around mine, and together we elbowed our way out of the police barricades, which the union leaders had decorated with colorful Christmas lights. We spotted Tony standing by the coffee shop. Shade let go of my hand, and I wished we were back in the crowd, our fingers locked as we bounced like electrons between the bodies of strangers.

We joined Tony and asked him what happened.

“Some idiot machinist was packing a forty-five and the thing went off. Got’im in the foot.”

“His own foot?” Shade said.

“He was carrying a gun?”

“Yes, he shot himself, and yes, he had a gun. That’s kind of a no-brainer.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out a pouch of tobacco, and started rolling a cigarette.

“A gun! What was he doing with a gun?” I had to scream above the bedlam. The horns and megaphones. People shouting. The ominous wailing of police cars and an emergency rescue van.

A few reporters mingled amid the crowd scribbling on pads and flicking their cell phones. The three of us noticed them simultaneously. Shade zipped up her olive green leather jacket and turned her back to them. Bloated clouds wrestled with the wind above. Tony kicked the ground and leaned back against a parked car, almost too casually. I wondered if he’d heard my question about the gun. He bit a string of tobacco from the end of his cigarette and spit it into the gutter. “I can’t even afford real cigarettes.”

“You never could,” Shade said.

“No, I used to be able to, I just didn’t want to. There’s a big difference.” He exhaled, looking defeated, angry, as if pushed the wrong way he might explode. A lot of people out here looked that way. Striker’s pose.

“Are you still editing?” Shade asked Tony, and again I couldn’t believe they weren’t talking about the shooting. As if it were innocuous, like the crack of my toy gun from Bermuda.

“Yeah, I had a couple of days at
EgoEast
this week. Magazines are so funny. Nobody works. They all come in at ten, dressed like models. Then they go to lunch.”

“Wait a minute, what’s going on here?” I interjected. “Am I hallucinating or did some guy just shoot himself?”

They both laughed, looked at me as if I were a kid asking where babies come from. I felt like an idiot. “Where have you been, Rachel?” Tony dropped his cigarette and crushed it with his dirty sneakers.

Shade and I crossed stares. She winked at me, as if to say my secret was safe with her. I wondered which secret we were protecting: the job, the porno, our kiss. “She’s been hiding out in Brooklyn.”

“You don’t have TV there?” Tony said. “They’ve been tipping delivery trucks and dumping papers in the Hudson like crazy. The other night they pummeled a driver so badly he wound up in the hospital.”