Our Ecstatic Days (24 page)

century before by the emperor whose people believed was God that he wasn’t

and grabs the poker from the fireplace and is coming back with it for the man who did whatever he did to her, and I say, “Oh, hey, wait,” and even Monica comes to her senses, “No no no,” she laughs, holding the Persian girl back, “no no no no,” restraining her but still laughing. Meanwhile the bodyguards outside are now banging on the front door, “What’s going on in there,” while Monica and I, we’re trying to hold back the girl with the poker and
the other women are still flailing away, beating the naked bodies of the groaning men to a rather glowing pink. The bodyguards are banging on the door and it’s clear they’re going to break it down any second. “I have to get
out
of here,” I say to Monica, grabbing the poker from the other girl’s hand and I’ve just enough presence of mind to take from my bag the keys to the handcuffs when Monica says, “This way.” Turns out the whole back wall of the house with the floor-to-ceiling windows can be moved like a sliding glass door though not any too easily, and we’re squeezing through the opening into the dark back yard where the pool is when I hear the front door come crashing down behind me. I hear the other women screaming in flight, some of them pushing at me from behind, all of us scattering out into the night and into the hills with Armand’s boys behind us.

I kick off my heels and throw the keys to the handcuffs out somewhere into the dark ’round me, and follow Monica who’s running past the leaf-covered pool to a small wooden gate you would have to know about to find. The gate doesn’t really open the whole way and we have to squeeze through like we squeezed through the sliding wall of the house, and there I am in my corset and stockings splinters catching on the lace, pushing through and feeling glad for once I’m little. Except for the fact I think she’s part cat, I don’t know how Monica gets through. Past the gate are steps down the hill, and at one point I trip and tumble down the steps and pick myself up and keep running down the path with the

God at all, and I was the agent of chaos in a way I’m only truly aware of now

steps zigzagging this way and that, and before zagging I keep bouncing off hedges at each zig. I have no idea where I’m going except it’s definitely down the hill. I’m surely not heading the way the limo came up, or toward the beach cove where I started, and I don’t know when I become aware Monica is gone or that there’s some heavy breathing behind me from one of Armand’s gorillas right on my tail. I keep thinking I’m smaller so I should be able to
outrun him but he keeps coming. It’s funny how even when you’re running in blind panic through the dark, a bit like when you’re swimming in a lake, your brain goes on furiously thinking anyway, what can I do and how can I get away from this person, what will make him stop. What will make him just give up. I just keep running down the hill toward what I know has to be—somewhere in front of me—the water, wondering where on the lake I’m going to wind up and how far I can swim. I remember how hard I swam that first night I came to the Chateau X and almost not making it, and I really don’t want to have to go back in the water again.

We reach a small glen that’s all white and lit up under the moon, me and the one still chasing me, and I know the white of my corset makes me very easy to see, a little bouncing white moonbeam. He doesn’t have a gun does he, I think to myself. I think to myself if suddenly the sound of his breathing stops then I’ll fall to the ground and into the grass of the glen because that might mean he’s stopped running long enough to take out his gun and shoot. I glance over my shoulder which is a mistake because it slows me down, and he’s still right there behind me and it’s the man who originally came out to the Chateau grotto in the powerboat and drove me up in the limo.

I’ve gotten all the way ’cross the clearing when his breathing behind me
does
stop, I don’t hear him anymore, I hear nothing except this loud crack and think oh jeez he
is
shooting!

here in the birth canal of the lake, suspended in this moment between chaos

And stupidly instead of falling in the grass like I planned I just sort of stop and turn and look, expecting to see him there on the other side of the glen aiming at me—but he’s not there, at least not that I can see at first, then there’s something lying in the grass like a big wounded buffalo or bear and it’s him, and I hear him moan. I have no idea what brought him down but I start to turn and run
into the trees to the south when a hand reaches up out of the grass and takes hold of my wrist and pulls me down.

It clasps my mouth and I don’t make a sound. I’m not sure when I know it’s him, whether it’s when I turn and actually see him or if something just tells me. But I swear something in Kale’s eyes, they light up like I’ve never seen in any person—in the night you think they’re fireflies darting above the grass. We’re hunkered down in the grass and his head moves slowly from side to side while the rest of him doesn’t move at all, almost like his head sort of swivels on his neck and then it stops and his ears pick up the sound of something.

I can’t hear anything. “Heart beat,” he says.

I can’t hear anything. I can’t see anything. He still holds my wrist in his hand and I don’t move at all. And then out of the trees on the northern side of the clearing where I’ve just come from are two more of Armand’s boys, stopping long enough to check out their fallen pal and then turn our direction.

I look at my wrist. It’s free, though I never felt him let me go. He’s gone from where he was right next to me in the grass, and I think I hear something move through the night before me but it’s the sound of the wind, I think it’s the sound of the wind. I don’t know what it’s the sound of. But Armand’s other henchmen are heading toward me in the grass when there’s another loud crack like I heard just a few moments ago, and then one goes down like the first one and then another crack and then the other

and God, a point-misser on this matter I must admit, arriving in Tokyo already

one. There are two more cracks and then no movement in the grass at all, the three men just lying there when I finally stick my head up to look ’cross the glen in the moonlight. I look and there are just the three of them lying there motionless in the grass—and then right in front of me there’s the momentary glow of those eyes like fireflies in the grass and Kale, almost like he’s taken form out of nothing, he comes to me as though gliding, not making a sound,
not the rustling of grass or anything. With one hand he’s holding one of the oars from his boat, none the worse for wear for having leveled three men as far as I can see, with the other hand he pulls me to follow.

I follow him down through the trees of the hillside beneath us and to a cove different from the one where he left me off a few hours ago. I don’t recognize it at all, I have no idea where we are—it will turn out we’re about five miles of shoreline west of where I last saw either Kale or the lake. “Talk about being in the right place at the right time,” I say stupidly when I see the boat in the water. As though, you know, it’s a complete coincidence he happens to be there. As though it’s a complete accident that, at this moment, he happens to be in this one cove out of a thousand. As though some instinct I’ll never understand hasn’t led him here, as though he’s not followed the sound of my heart from the moment I left him.

I’m freezing out on the lake as he rows us south and then east. I want to go back to the Chateau but he’s not taking me there and I don’t argue. I freeze all the way out to the island where he takes me, the top of one of those old West Hollywood hotels rising from the water where he’s set up a little nook between the stairs and a rooftop storeroom of dead telephone lines and elevator cables. There are some mattresses and blankets that have been lying ’round more years than I want to think about, and a little place where someone built a fire once. “I get the feeling you’ve

pregnant but not yet knowing I carried inside me a question that I asked once

done this before,” I finally say about half an hour into thawing out. To the northeast I can see lights I’m pretty sure are the Chateau. I worry about the Mistress, I don’t like having left her alone. I’m angry at myself about the whole evening.

He sleeps next to me. If he had wanted to get in under the blankets with me I would have let him, as long as he kept his hands to himself. I think he doesn’t want to put me in the position of
saying yes or no, you see? He wants to take the decision out of my hands, into his, so there will be no question of the night being anything other than what it is. And I’m relieved and looking back perhaps I should have told him it was all right to get under the blankets with me, but I don’t because I’m not sure he’ll take it the right way and I’m too tired to want to think about it—but you see I think he knows that too so that’s why he doesn’t ask. And it moves me about him, that he wants to spare me having to be in control of anything for that moment when I don’t want to be in control of anything, I want to give up all control and be able to trust it’s going to be all right, I want to be able to trust him, to trust the night will pass without event or misunderstanding and I’ll wake the next morning and he’ll already be awake walking ’round the edge of the island looking out at whatever, and I get up and start looking ’round too, wrapping the blanket ’round me because there I am still in my corset and stockings which are pretty trashed from the night before, but there’s nothing else to wear till I get back to the Chateau. I’m stumbling ’round the rooftop in the gray morning sun checking it out and trying to get warm, and there I have another distinct memory of something from before: of sleeping on another rooftop somewhere like this one, beneath an enormous sky.

Back in the little gutted room with the elevator cables I turn and he’s standing there in the doorway blocking it. For a second all my defenses go up the way they do when a woman is cornered

as a little girl, running one afternoon into my uncle’s bar and crying out

and a man is blocking her way out. All my defenses go up and suddenly he looks crestfallen, he’s seen it in my face, seen the way I got a bit afraid of him, the way I hate him just a bit after everything he’s done, after the way he’s slept next to me and hasn’t even tried to get under the blanket with me; for me to suddenly get wary and afraid of him, well, I can see how it hurts him. As though he would ever do anything to me. As though he
would ever threaten me in any way. He’s hurt by my collapse of trust in this moment and something else, I know there’s something else, I knew from the first night he came to me. “Sorry,” I half murmur, half snap, and that comes off a bit defensive too.

He nods. He backs out of the doorway to let me by.

In the doorway I take his face between my hands. “I’m sorry,” I say again, gentler.

He nods again.

“Jeez,” I say, “what is it Kale. Are you in love with me, is that it? Do you just want to fuck me, is that all this is about?”

“Those are two different questions,” he answers.

“Why,” taken aback, “that’s the most complicated thing I’ve ever heard you say.” I take his hand and pull him down in the doorway and we sit together our legs entwined. I reach out from beneath my blanket and take his hands in mine and hold them. It’s not like that with me and boys, I try to explain. I know a man always thinks he can change a girl like me if he only gets the chance but that’s not going to happen. Really, at this moment I’m not trying to be a bitch, if anything I’m sort of begging him to understand. You’re pretty though, I’ll give you that, I say to him looking at his water-green eyes that light up in the night and putting my hand in his brown feathery hair that smells like tall dry grass—but it’s more than that. Somehow I feel it’s more than that. Later, back at the Chateau and lying in my own bed, I think about how it’s more than that. Part of me thinks well I can’t see

What’s missing from the world? and years later from L.A. to Tokyo there

him any more, because it just torments him, but the other part of me isn’t sure I can stay away, because there’s a connection for sure. Not like we’re lovers but … something else.

Over the next couple of weeks I go out with him again to the island called the Hamblin because it’s truly mega out there even if there’s no blue anymore, even under the gray sky and looking out over the gray water, and also because of that
connection. Because I can’t help wanting to spend time with him. But after a few times I know I can’t anymore, that it means too much to him to be with me and it hurts him too much not to make love to me. Like the first night out on the Hamblin he never imposes himself on me in any way except one time standing next to him looking out at the lake I put my arm in his as the wind comes up and then he puts his arm ’round me and his fingers brush my breast ever so slightly like it’s an accident—boys will be boys, eh? One night he comes to the Chateau with some food and money to be my slave again but we’re somehow too far past that scene anymore, and there in the Lair before the fire he tries to tell me, I know what he’s trying to say and I’m thinking oh no don’t, don’t say it, and he can’t, it catches in his throat or he can’t come up with the words or something, and he starts talking with his hands. His eyes coming at me fixed, relentless, he starts talking in this sort of sign language, his hands making these urgent elaborate pictures in the air, and he becomes more and more frustrated, his eyes closed tight, hands darting in front of him faster and faster till finally I just take them in my own, “Hey, hey,” to try and calm him. He relaxes and his hands rest in mine and he opens his eyes and just looks at me.

I wait for Armand and his boys to show up. I figure it’s a matter of time, that they’re not going to let that night go unanswered for, so I gather up all the cash they paid me and keep it handy on the off-chance that somehow returning the money will

inside me that question was beginning to grow into its own answer, What was

satisfy them though I don’t believe that at all. My only concern now is that no harm comes to the Mistress. I’ve almost convinced myself it’s all been forgotten when yesterday afternoon I finally hear the approaching sound of the motor of the powerboat, and get the money and go out the back, down the stone steps into the grotto. The boat approaches and it’s my friend who drove me
in the limo and chased me into the glen—on his forehead he has the scar of a pretty good gash where Kale leveled him with the oar.