Red Earth and Pouring Rain (53 page)

Meanwhile, I lived. I made a deal with her insurance company, so I could pay most of her bills without her knowing about it.
I was working almost every day —at first I made five hundred a day, then eight, then a grand, then two, then more. I became
known, and I was able to buy a house on Long Island. I filled it with books, old ones, mostly, and, for
some reason, rocks. I don’t know why, but to see an octavo of
The ecuyell of the Histories of Troy
in full limp vellum, next to a cracked and jagged piece of gneiss, gave me pleasure. I had a television for a while but finally
I had to throw it out, because watching it late at night, seeing all those beautiful people, those beer commercials and ads
for jeans in which they wafted toward each other, never quite fucking but always with a hint of it, all this gave me a quite
unbearable feeling of loneliness, I mean the kind of loneliness which makes you hate yourself and talks to you about death,
which makes your own home unfamiliar and waking up tomorrow impossible. So I threw it out. But mostly my life was ordinary
and very good. I worked, I had friends, I had lovers. I came home in the evenings and made myself a cup of hot chocolate,
and sat on my porch and read. When it grew dark I ate, usually healthy stuff, salad and artichokes and things. I invested
in General Motors, two startup agricultural products companies, a bank, and so on. I had a live-in boyfriend for a while,
for five years actually, a porno actor too, his name was George. We broke up because of the usual couple stuff, growing apart
and all that, but not jealousy as you might think. I’ve had other girlfriends and boyfriends after that, some for longer than
others, and a couple of times I’ve thought of marriage but didn’t really do it. I mean all in all my life was quite average
and almost boring, except I went and sexed people for a living, which is good. It was good. But I’ve also seen people flame
and crash, flame on some drug or some furious anger that drove them to the life, to the desperate affair with guilt and rejection
that was mostly the meaning of Joyland. I saw some flirt with the hard guys and chicks who appeared like hyenas on the edge
of the particular ghetto that I lived in, and these friends disappeared into the long black maw of justice. Some of these
appeared later on talk shows to participate in the daily circuses of guilt and victimhood, to play the preening lambs who
owned up to transgression, who bore the holy anger of America, and then returned gratefully, weeping and sometimes clutching
a book contract, to the fold of righteousness.

Meanwhile Mother puked, starved, and ate. And so we went into the eighties, and quite suddenly, one morning, Reagan was in
the White House, my once-boyfriend George was dead of AIDS, and entire battalions of wild-eyed, stiff-moving robots descended
on us, various scriptures in hand, eager to have their revenge on sex. I avoided all of the
early extravaganzas, but when my town council moved to have the local fornication emporium —Wonderland —expelled from the
body civic, I called them and told them I wanted to talk to the committee, that I’d give evidence or whatever they wanted.
When I explained who I was and what I did and why I was qualified to speak, at first the woman on the phone didn’t believe
me, she kept on saying, “You live here?” I told her to look up the tax records and hung up. So they had to let me in. On the
morning I went in, the local NBC station had a van at the council house, and the room, a big auditorium with a mural of great
American inventors (the Wright brothers, Edison, Henry Ford) on one end, was packed wall to wall. The panel was composed of
these: a Catholic priest; a mother of three (that’s how she described herself) who worked as an assistant editor in a publishing
house in Manhattan; the minister from the local Methodist congregation (which was at the time just starting a two-million-dollar
renovation on its church); a feminist writer of some repute and angry notoriety; and a couple, young and very clean and energetic,
the wife a real estate broker and power in the P.T.A., the husband a lawyer. As these people arranged themselves on the podium,
and as I waited, a reporter leaned over a pew and stage-whispered to me: “Hey, Kyrie, what about the Nero film?”

“No comment,” I said, a little sharply, because that was supposed to be a secret. The thing was that I’d been negotiating
for months with a major studio, which, with an already Oscared director, was trying to put together that elusive thing —a
mainstream fuck film, you know, big budget, cast of thousands, maybe some real stars. I’d talked to a couple of the executives,
and they were slick-haired and blown-dry, but I could tell they were desperate: their studio was dying. So they were seeing
big bucks, they were hot for the four billion dollars on the other side of the tracks in Joyland, I could see the numbers
ticking by in their eyes as they described the flames over Rome, they wanted to do decadence and lust and destruction and
the final gory death of Nero. They’d gotten a couple of major male stars interested in Nero, and they wanted me to do his
mother.

But now the loudspeakers crackled in the hall, and we were ready to start. I sat in front of the podium and faced them over
a battery of microphones, and the scene had that strange flat look that comes from too many video lights. I’d worn a gray
suit and pulled back my hair, so
that I looked more like a mid-level executive than the wild half-broken slut they wanted, but soon they got over their slight
confusion and the questions came hard and fast.

• Sex is a private act. It is a beautiful thing between two people. It is secret. Why do you degrade yourself and the holy gift
  of love by doing it like animals in front of the whole world?
  
• What you do dehumanizes human beings. What happens between two people is complex, mysterious. What you put on the screen is
  a caricature of human relations, and encourages people to treat each others like caricatures. Why do you do it?
  
• To any sane person this obsession with the nuts and bolts of the act, this unredeemed and unredeeming gaze at the mere body,
  this filth is sickening. The sexual act is a gift of God, to be engaged in with all seriousness and humbleness and spiritual
  consciousness. Don’t you understand that what you are doing is sinful, that it is the enshrinement of sin?
  
• Pornography is violence against women. It is the colonization of their souls and bodies. It is enslavement. Don’t you agree?
  How can you be a woman and not agree?
  
• Can’t men and women just be friends?
  

I answered as best I could. I walked out of there weary, and was chased by cameras out of the building and to my car. At home,
the phone was buzzing as I opened the door.

“Hi, babe. You were sensational.” It was one of my executives from the coast. “Just keep on doing it. Every minute on the
air is ten thousand tickets in the door. So here’s the deal —I’ve been talking to the money people and it’s a go situation.
Almost.”

“So what’s the hitch?” I said.

“They’re very impressed with the names we’ve mentioned for Nero, and they see you as the big Mama, I mean they can completely
see you, you are her. Specially after your appearance on the tube today. But one thing. See, when you’re talking Agrippina,
you’re talking a complete full-blown woman. You’re seeing, I don’t know, you get it, a luxurious woman, almost
zaftig
.”

“What am I, a matchstick? I mean, am I bones?”

“No, no, you’re it. Put you in a toga and you’re it. All except for one thing. Or maybe two.”

“A tit job! A greedy slimy Hollywood tit job. You want me to have a tit job.”

“Why’re you so mad? Everyone has one, you know.”

So I hung up on him, and he was smart enough not to call right back. I sat by the phone holding my boobs, comfortable friends
in my hands, not of spectacular DeMille proportions, but there and a little saggy and beautiful. I’d seen friends who’d done
it, and I recalled the black bruises, the aching tenderness that held their arms tight to their sides, the bright purple flush
of blood around the teats, the whole chest looking as if some maniac had swung a two-by-four to land smack across it, and
as I remembered I twinged all the way from my nipples to the base of my spine. I sat there awhile, and then tried to eat,
but my throat was tight and fear made my heart bigger and painful in me, so finally I sat down to a bottle of wine.

The phone brought me out of a fuzzy, drunken sleep, and for a few seconds I blinked, forgetting completely where I was.

“You’d better come,” the voice said, and for one strange moment, in my dizzy state, it sounded not at all human, but as if
it came out of the wires themselves, out of the huge network of coils and transistors and dishes and cables. The ground was
icy and hard and in the hospital lot my boots rang on it like hammers. They had Mother laid out on this bed with railings
around it, covered with a white sheet. The sheet went all the way up to her neck, and what surprised me was that her hair
had turned an iron gray. I was afraid to lift the sheet away, but a doctor stood behind me and very softly began to tell me
what had happened. He said that her eating disorder had been under control, it seemed to them, and she had appeared even more
calm than usual lately. So all was going well, but that day the nurse found the bathroom door locked, and when they beat it
down they found Mother in the tub. The skin around her stomach and her ankles was covered with small cuts, deep and deliberately
made with a carpet knife, which she was still holding in her right hand. There was a fresh cut on her right ankle, and she
had the foot propped up under the hot water tap. The insides of the drain were caked black —it looked like she’d been doing
it for weeks, the doctor
said, like she’d been trying to drain all the blood from her body. I don’t know, why didn’t she do it all at once, the doctor
said, I can’t figure it, but I don’t think she wanted to, you know, go, she had a piece of chocolate cake on a plate by the
tub, it was just the blood, I think she thought she could live without it.

They left me alone with her for a while and I touched her face, and the skin was cold but soft. Finally I turned away from
her, but from the door I came back to her and lifted the sheet off. Her body lay with that opened up limpness that the dead
achieve for a bit, an absolute absence of tension, hands gently curved, knees out. Her pubic hair was white, and above it
at regular intervals, were one-inch up-and-down lines, slightly reddish. Around her ankles were rings, bracelets of the same
lines. I looked at her neck, the deep creases at its base, the curve of the ribs just under the skin, the confident thickness
of the thighs.

• A close-up. Full-color, outsized, magnified. A penis penetrating a vagina. The frame is so tight we can’t see anything else.
  The focus is so sharp we can see each wrinkle, each bump, each hair. The human genitals are not beautiful. There is something
  ugly about this. There is something very ugly about this.
  
• We as a society are a hair’s breadth away from collapse.
  
• A thick, musky light like clotted syrup; sidewalks and teenage hookers; bourbon and the tight ropy muscles of heroin addicts.
  This is the world you live in.
  

I listened to all this. The tips of my fingers grew cold and I shivered under my business gray. On the wall opposite, in the
mural, a rickety plane teetered into the sky.

• We abhor, execrate, despise.
  
• Why does it have to be the thing, why must it be the thing, it shouldn’t be this important.
  
• This is not the jungle.
  
• Just stop it.
  

So finally I shoved my chair back and stood up, and at the scrape of the wood they all looked at me, mouths open, their faces
white splashes
in the bluish light. I unbuttoned my coat, moving not hurriedly but deliberately, and shrugged it off. Nobody reacted until
I had my blouse half off, and then a huge hubbub of voices rose, somebody shouting for a stretcher, I heard the reporters
behind me scrambling over the railing, curses as a camera light crunched into somebody’s head, then my bra was off and somebody
screams, I step out of my skirt, the panties peel in a single movement, two cops are reaching over heads, I stand skin goose-bumped
by the cold, hands by my sides, I cry: “No fear, no fear,” but a woman is fighting her way through the roiling crowd, her
face is so deeply red that it looks like a kumquat, she shouts, spraying spit, I haven’t ever seen so much spit coming out
of a person’s mouth before, “Whore, whore!” and I think I know her, I’ve seen her before, an assistant D.A. or something,
one of the cops shoves her aside and she swings at him with a pocketbook, he reels holding an eye, a small spot of blood appears
on a white shirt, the cop’s partner backhands with a nightstick and blood sprays from the woman’s head, it spurts in a powerful,
jerky stream that spatters everyone and everything. For a moment the screen freezes and I run.

I don’t know how I got out of there. I remember running down a yellow hallway and into somebody’s office, finding this dress
in a closet, and then out onto the street and into a cab. I found some money at home, but I had barely finished paying the
cabbie when the TV vans began to screech around the corner. So I grabbed a handbag, threw some stuff into it and climbed over
the back wall. I caught another cab to La Guardia, and took the first plane I could get a ticket for. It dropped me off in
Burbank, and from there I found a Greyhound, then I bought a car on one of my credit cards, and here I am.

When Kyrie paused, I turned to look at her. Listening to her I had slid down in my seat until I was as nearly flat as I could
be. Now she smiled at me, her chin on her knees.

“I don’t know why I tell you this,” she said. “It isn’t even perhaps a part of the story. But for some reason it sticks in
my mind. You remember those two girls who went to the movie with Mother, the debater and the hockey player. Well, both of
them died bad deaths. Janine Alcott, in ‘seventy-four they found her dead by a highway near Pasadena, Texas. She had been
stabbed seventeen times. They never found who did it, or
even had any ideas. Carol Ann Mayberry, who got married and moved to California and got divorced, in ‘eighty-one she tried
to stab a lover with an eight-inch carving knife, and he shot her in the head. She died right there.”