Scar Flowers (25 page)

Monday, September 18, 2:31 p.m.

“You should have agreed to see me sooner. I could put an end to
Babylon
tomorrow. And technically you lost our bet, with the extra time you needed on the set.” Paul leaned toward Leah in the bar at the Four Seasons hotel in downtown Seattle, breathed bourbon in her face.

“I understand you’re upset. But I want you to leave me alone.
Don’t come to my house anymore.”

“I left that note because you wouldn’t talk to me. You surround yourself with people who don’t care about you. Not like me.”

“Leaving threatening notes is how you show care?” Leah slipped her hand through her purse strap. “Tell me what’s so important. This is the last time we talk.”

“How can you say that to me when I love you,” Paul mumbled into his glass.

Her skin chilled. Did he really believe that? A uniformed waiter passed to visit the only other patrons, a pair of men in suits at the far end of the room.

“You wanted to talk about
Babylon
. Get to the point or I’m leaving.”

“You’re the only one who could persuade me to save the film. You know what I want from you.” He reached for her face and she eluded him.

“You’re drunk.”

Paul snatched at her hand as she stood up.

“I’m only offering to clean up your mess.” A wolfish light entered his eyes.

Leah halted. “What do you mean?”

“Mercer was so busy being your dog and porking Karen that he lost control of the picture. Gunnar blamed himself for your cliff stunt.” Paul turned his glass a quarter turn, then a half, his little finger held aloft. “Fran asks him, didn’t he know you weren’t the stuntwoman? And he says yes. She asks him why he let you endanger yourself and her insured-to-the-eyebrows star director, and he has no answer. Gunnar’s a wreck, wondering if he’s crazy. The crew’s spooked, the dailies went from bad to worse. I have a pretty good idea how it all fell apart.”

Her heart sank. If even half of this were true, it was her fault.

“Why should I care what happens to your film? I was fired, remember?” she said.

“
His
film. You care. You care about
him
. I know you’re seeing him.”

Him
.

“What is it you think I’m going to do
for you to solve someone else’s problem?”

Paul dropped his head and stared at her from under his eyebrows. “Are you going to make me beg?”

She headed for the door.

“It’s you I want,” Paul called after her.

Leah walked out, ignoring the bellhop’s “Good afternoon.” Her silk scarf had come loose and fluttered behind her as her high heels pounded the sidewalk. She turned onto University Street and passed the dry cleaner’s, with its hot rush of chemicalized air. Buses rumbled on Third Avenue belching exhaust as she angled toward Elliot Bay, and a bearded man in a Mariner’s cap who stood outside a travel agency with his hand-lettered sign,
Please Help, God Bless
, sang out, “Can’t be that bad, sweetheart. Try a smile.”

Nearby was the bus stop where she used to transfer to the Number 41 to get to her ballet class,
or duck into what used to be a Wendy’s restaurant—now a jeweler’s—to change her clothes in the bathroom, into forbidden tops that showed her collarbone or shoulder, or into skirts with a slit in the back. Clothes worn for a precious hour or so while she rode the bus and then were hidden away again in her dance bag. At home, she wore the loose, drab sweaters and long skirts that her mother bought her.

Leah tucked the end of her scarf into her collar and slowed to look at the window display for a cheap department store: picture frames, sundresses. Years ago this had been a Woolworth’s with
a lunch counter, where she bought her first bottle of Ballerina Pink nail polish amid the smells of oily popcorn and boiled coffee.

The street dipped toward
Second Avenue. Now she knew where she was going—to the Seattle Art Museum. Ahead on First Avenue sat the Lusty Lady peepshow, with its plain black store-front and cheerful marquis (“WHERE EVERY MISS IS A HIT!”). The girls inside would be yawning their way through the after-noon—there was nothing slower than a sunny day. Customers would not pay for what they could see on the beach for free, as the girls had said at Déjà Vu. She wondered if Marnie still managed the place, recalled how she winked when Leah quit: “You just turned legal a year ago, sugar. We’ll be here if you change your mind. Say hi to Baryshnikov for me.”

Her blouse gripped her wrists like Paul’s sweaty fingers, and her gossamer scarf, purchased at Barney’s New York to celebrate her first client, tightened at her throat. She popped the buttons open on her cuffs, yanked off the scarf
, and thrust it into her purse.

You care about him
. The phrase summoned up the glossy web of Simon’s scar, the buried curve of his ribs. His closed eyes as he had lain on the floor after his session at her house. After what she had done to him.
Care.
A word cold with responsibility, implications of tending an illness:
to care for
.

But it hadn’t been like that. It felt helpless in a different way, as if she were drunk: the drop of his blood on her tongue, images from his confessed fantasy in her mind. The slow, soft way
that words left his mouth, the unshakable core of him.

Leah stepped over a tan puddle in the gutter, over
-roasted coffee and candy-sweet almond. Next to it lay a sodden knit glove, missing the thumb. Was it true what Delilah had said, that she would end up a caretaker? Faith could look out for herself—though she could not be relied on to be responsible for anything else. Angel waited and obeyed and tried to please her. He came over when invited and left her alone when she asked him to. Was she supposed to discard him for that?

No. The problem was Simon. If he was going to treat her like his ticket to the underworld, she would at least make him admit
that his interest was personal. She was not some film project of his. Not like he had been . . . had been what?

S
ome experiment of
mine.

You see? It’s no more than you deserve, this mess you’ve made.

Hammering Man, a two-story black steel silhouette whose motorized arm forever pounded a piece of metal with a mallet, towered over the museum. As she crossed the street, a pair of teen-age boys on skateboards overtook her with a clacketa-clacketa-scrape-roll over the curb, their flannel shirts tied flapping around their waists. Outside the Native American gift shop, a pair of black cats dressed in Elizabethan ruffs crouched on a wooden stand, ears swiveling at the cars and pedestrians on First Avenue while their owner collected money in a tin can. Tourists carried bouquets of tulips, godetia, cosmos, and daisies from the Pike Place Market.

The red sports car from Simon’s fantasy skidded into her thoughts each day. She could not resist the urge to look inside, to see who was driving. Sometimes she was. Sometimes his hands were on the wheel. Always, the car moved too recklessly. She had tried to be safe when he came to her for that session, but he drew her in, swept her away.

If she lost herself with him this way, as she had wandered off the path with Paul, had she ever been in control, or had her work been one long careen off the rails?

Leah entered
the museum. White marble inside with high ceilings, like a temple or the public baths in some ancient city. She showed her membership card at the front desk and climbed the wide, shallow steps of the echoing atrium past the couchant white stone dromedaries. Two small children scrambled around the statues, one of them perched between the humps, while their mother watched from the café, her foot propped on an empty blue stroller, paperback novel in hand.

As Leah climbed to the second floor,
her footsteps echoed in her head as
forget, forget, forget
. Worrying did no good. Paul was bluffing, or else he knew that Fran had already decided
Babylon
’s fate. He had to be lying, because if he was not, then she had doomed Simon’s film. Without her, Paul would have nothing to be jealous of. He would be fighting to get the movie released, to get his precious producer’s credit on the posters.

Even without that, she had treated Simon’s work as if it were her private game. He had trusted her, and she had only asked herself what she wanted from him. “Ask yourself what you really want,” she had whispered when she hypnotized him the second time. Was that why he
had broken up with Karen?

Here on this floor of the museum loomed paintings, African statues pierced with nails, Chinese pottery, Native American masks: Raven, Bear, and Otter, carved from cedar and hung with dried grass and horse’s hair.
Mounted on poles, with hollow mouths and beaks and fangs poised to whisper more history, more lies. How had she ever thought she could leave this city, this life? She was sealed here, lacquered like an insect in amber or a layer in an oil painting.

Leah took a breath and let it out. No, she was not responsible. Paul did not have the power to decide whether the film was released.

And if she were wrong about that? She would have destroyed Simon’s work. She stood to lose Delilah and all her friends, to lose Faith and Angel, her clients. And without them, what would she do? What other skills did she have?

With its white ceiling and floor, its dim lighting, the museum
’s video room could fit a dozen people, but it was empty now. Two of the four walls were stacked with individual monitors, synchronized to each display one part of a larger image. From the screens on opposite walls, a boy and girl spoke as if to each other: “I don’t know why.” “Yes, it hurts, but it lets the pain out.” “Sometimes I let them heal, and sometimes I can’t . . . I try to cut where it won’t show.”

Abstract images flowed by—
an arctic plain of textures, alternately ribbed and smooth, slowly panned back from so that shadowy curving wands of what looked like out-of-focus marsh grass appeared, then resolved into hairs, into skin, the curve of an arm, the breast of a boy’s skinny chest, into a fingernail tracing the front of a naked thigh, latticed with healed cuts. A mural of scars. Some were mute, knitted shut and melting into the surrounding flesh; some were raised or throbbing pink; some had been freshly plowed through a field of freckles, across a tattoo of a name inside a heart. Several were cigarette burns, deep white circles stained ash-gray in the center, closing over.

Then came closeups of a giant thumb and index finger that clenched a razorblade. Hands that held a sewing needle
or wielded a pair of nail scissors, a kitchen knife, the jagged-edged lid from a tin can, a lit cigarette.

More shapes: something wide and silver-
gray met a pale surface, pressed down into it, and collected a line of crimson along its edge.

A blade biting skin. That must be what she
saw, but she felt only wonder at the colors and textures.

The scene switched to nighttime at a drive-through burger stand.
The teenage girl was there, sitting at an orange plastic table. Nervous, thin. Kicking one foot back and forth as she spoke in a New Jersey accent.

“
Why? ‘Cause it’s a beautiful color. I dunno. Fire trucks, flowers. You know, roses, poppies—they’re red. ‘Cause it makes you forget. It’s not soothin’ when I think back on it, but when I’m doin’ it, then it’s soothin’.”

Roses
. . . poppies . . . forget . . . scar flowers. Dreams.

An off-camera voice asked her something, and
the girl shook her head, swirled the ice in her paper cup of soda, poked it with her straw. Then she asked her interviewer, “You never answer me. All you do is sit and watch. Why’d
you
go an’ do it? Cut your-self? Show your marks! G’wan!”

She laughed and shook her bangs down over her eyes, folded her
long arms with their sharp elbows over her skinny chest. Beautiful, though she did not know it. Mobile features and blem-ishes that would soon be gone.

“
I’m filming you talking about it,” replied a young man’s voice—the interviewer. Simon.

I can’t escape him. It’s no use
trying.

Simon’s voice sounded different coming through speakers.
He tilted the lens down to show his arm and rolled back his sleeve, which was striped with healing cuts. His jeans-clad knee, the faded denim scribbled on with black ink, edged into the lower corner of the frame for a moment. “I want to know what it feels like for you.”

Was he taunting
the girl? He spoke slowly, after a long pause. A soft voice, deep. Like rubbing your cheek against silky black fur.

Breaking the stance of a documentarian’s supposed
objectivity:
what it feels like for you.
I want to know.

Leah backed away, wrist to her mouth, into a wall of monitors. Her hair crackled with static, fanned across the bulging screens as she stepped sideways toward the exit. A plaque on the video room wall displayed a list of details on the installation, but she did not have to read it to know what it said:
Poppies Are Red
, a documentary on self-mutilation that had won two independent filmmakers’ awards. Made by Simon Mercer thirteen years ago, when he was twenty years old.