Skin (20 page)

    
But I don't want to
: the litany thought and again the brief imagining, What would it be like, to do it, to feel the sliding launch of the needle, the slippery edge of the knife in her skin, flesh parting wet and-no. Firm and visceral as the body's flinch from death:
no
. And a sigh, and Bibi's own sigh half a beat behind and the subject dropped as one abandons, with regret, a dead animal, a pet; to lie humped in the corner, stinking and dry-smiling, unconsumed and waiting for the inevitable: the slow red boon of the resurrecting touch.

    

    

    Back from the body shop, she had stayed later than she meant, deliberate last to leave; back aching in a tired new way and the walk home had been horrendous, wind cold as December through her jeans jacket, sweat still combed through her hair. Hot, and shivering, pushing inside in the early dark past Jerome's outward-bound salute: Hey, and his hasty grin, "See you," and out; banging door and the building emptier, perhaps because she knew Bibi was gone.

    Up the stairs, tired wash and the nagging unease of being at odds with Bibi; new-old habit fallen into with the discomfort of old pains; when would she come home? Maybe she wouldn't; maybe this was the end again. No. Please, not that bad and sitting at the worktable, mind like a leaf above currents, above the chum of hot air and the sound of feet on the stairs, she had not heard the door below: Jerome, or one of the others. She would send them away; no company now.

    But the key in the lock; and Bibi, slamming in: hair wet and on end, her face bleached and drank-looking; no, not drunk, enraged. Or crazy, burning crazy on fire and crossing to the worktable, to Tess, half-risen in alarm, and grabbed her hand-Bibi's own hands horribly cold, like a statue in winter, a corpse dug out of the ground-to push it hard against her crotch, against the damp black softness of her skirt.

    "It's a ring," she said. "Through my cunt."

    Tess stared, straight into pale eyes and felt against her hand the smallest hardness, it might have been a pebble, half a locket; broken heart. "It was my piercing," Bibi's voice, low as a growling dog, "it was mine, it was for me and I wanted you there. I wanted you there!" her voice cracking but she did not cry, kept grinding Tess's hand against her and suddenly with her free hand reached to wrench Tess's chin down, aiming her face to kiss her, very hard, grinding her teeth as she ground the captive hand and Tess grabbed her back, harder, arm around those shoulders tensed high and stiff as splitting bone and felt against her own breasts the soft crush of Bibi's, the frantic speed of her heart in her breathless chest and kept kissing her, dry mouth and the feel of Bibi's pierced lip, the hard dangle of the tiny ring there.

    Tess's hand free, now; she kept it where it was, touching Bibi, stroking her, soft and wet and the hardness there, too, metal and flesh and Bibi's crying eyes closed, mouthing something, over and over and Tess pulling back just the slightest to hear, "I wanted you, I want you. I love you."

    "Come here," pulling at her, Bibi almost stumbling, pulling her crying to the couch-bed past dropped bag, Tess's shucked shoes and jacket, coverlets twisted and warm. "Come here with me," into warmth, skin and metal and desire, cold hands, wet face and parted lips.

    
Because I love you, too, hedgehog; spines and blood and all, I love you, too.

    

    

    Waking, almost full dawn and Bibi's limbs clasped moist about her, sluggish sleepy smile, disengaging to go piss; on the sheets the tiniest spots of blood, small as punctuation, dry and spicy brown. When Tess got back into bed again Bibi folded about her, arms and legs, breasts and lean belly, blood and metal and wire. A soft fleshy smell at the back of her throat, rich as savored food; lying sleepless to watch the motion of Bibi's dreaming eyes beneath lightly shivering lids, turn her own body slightly to chart the areas of piercing, nose and lip and ears and now the new one, pink but seemingly unsore, small bright silver bead nestled like dripped mercury between Bibi's legs, nestled between her lips; the shaved skin seemed more irritated than the actual piercing itself. With one careful finger she parted Bibi's vulva, it was so beautiful, all of it, the pierced flesh not off-putting but arousing, erotic in an alien way; she felt like a hypocrite but true was true. And Bibi was Bibi; and Bibi was awake, maybe had been, lay looking at her with a long rare serpentine smile: "Kiss it," she said. "Kiss me."

    Warm-cheeked, half-clumsy and she bent from the waist, Bibi's cool hand stroking her bare back, reaching to pull her lower, pull her all the way down, into heat, and moisture, and the slippery feel, the metal tang of consummated love.

    Now everything was changed, heightened, everything burned with the heat Tess remembered from so long ago, forgotten days with long-gone lover Peter the sidewalk artist: but changed, charged; torqued, oh my yes. There was no one like Bibi, and to have Bibi focused this way upon her was like living beneath a glass in the sun, each day and motion in the day transformed by love. It was their first days bettered, it was being in love with your best friend.

    "I love you," Bibi said; said it often, like a challenge. In the mornings, wet in the shower, late afternoon and Tess back from the body shop; in the growing stretch of darkness, the days short and shortening still. Bundled in coverlets, "I never loved anybody before," the feel of her breath on Tess's neck, lips moving so close they shivered the skin. "Have you?"

    Her pause; she would not lie. "Yes."

    Bibi's own pause indecipherable, then: "Have you ever been with a woman?"

    "No."

    "Good," fiercely, surprising Tess who rose up on one elbow till Bibi pulled her down: "Good," again. "I'm glad I'm your first." Silence. "First and last and only."

    Bibi wanted them to be seen as a couple, she wanted everyone to know: her friends at the piercing parties, the people she knew from the clubs. Tess did not care who knew, not for secrecy's sake but sheer disinterest: her life was her own, and therefore beyond accounting; let people know, or think, whatever they liked.

    Past noon, cold in the body shop and there came Bibi, beautiful and strange as some wild creature, backlit in the doorway and calling "Tess," blowing her a kiss and the guy in the next bay grinning, ugly with surprise:
Oh I get it, she's the guy, right?
and Tess in calm motion taking off her helmet, wanting to hit him once across the face, very hard, splinter of glass from the eye shield and out in the street, breathing hard in the cold:
what business is it of theirs, anyway? and anyway what difference did it make?
And Bibi's shrug, "Who gives a fuck? Kiss me," and she did, kissed her hard and then went quietly back inside to tell the foreman she was ready to quit. She was under-the-table labor, nonunion and he was getting her for peanuts; forget it, he said, just get back to work. But if you get your ass kicked afterward it's your own tough shit.

    Nowhere else were they outwardly harassed, nowhere yet; and yet they seldom went out, Tess preferring to stay in, to work; if this chafed Bibi, she kept silent. But: cold night, true winter and Bibi had dragged her out, bright cheeks, ragged leather, to see a band; Crane's in it, that asshole, rewing the feathery choke of her dying car around streets sullen with dirty new ice, can you believe it? Holding her hand tight through split-fingered gloves, hand in hand through the heavy turnstile doors and the first person they saw was Michael, himself bundled in heavy black leather: "Hey!" with genuine pleasure, angling them past the bouncer, sweaty little corner between the bar and the dance floor. Dirty sneakers, hair cut high around his ears, dull pewter shine of an earring shaped like the free-turning blade of an ax; a little thinner, maybe, maybe more beautiful still.

    "Girls' night out, huh," brief kiss for Bibi, kissing Tess a little longer; his lips very warm, almost as if he had a fever, one hand light on her hip as he kissed her and if she was surprised Bibi was not: Bibi's fingers on Tess's chin, positioning her face for a loud, almost theatrical kiss: "My girl," she said.

    "Really? That's terrific," one-armed grab for both, hugging them now as a couple: his smile brightest it seemed for Tess and softly into her ear, his lips against her skin: "I'm so glad," and louder, "When did this happen?" Bibi said something, not soon enough and then he was insisting on buying them a drink, let's celebrate your good news. "Two tonics," Bibi said, "with lemon," and Tess hiding both her smile and her irritation; bossy child, like what I like and nothing but.

    Which extended to her deepest choices, the extreme piercings and cuttings: where before she had only listed the seven disciplines, now she must explain them all in a welter of detail Tess neither wanted nor could bear; not from squeamishness or even boredom, Bibi enthusiastic was rarely boring and some of her more outre examples, such as fishhook piercing, or the fully functional bifurcated penis-it's great, she said, he says it gets hard on both sides-were interesting in and of themselves, but the whole idea was like the Bataille quote Bibi was forever intoning: "Human life is an experience to be carried as far as possible," but to Tess this did not go far enough.
Yes, brute sensation, but I can get that from sticking my hand in a fire, so what? What does it prove, where does it lead, what does it make? Change: yes: right. Good. Change by all means. But change to accomplish, not merely to become and come on, Bibi, half of them do it just for sex reasons, you know that better than I do!

    And Bibi would sulk, pulling away to lie sullen and cocooned on her side of the bed, Tess waiting it out, cold trench between them before she could reach across it and say,
Come on. Bibi, come on
; and Bibi finally turning, rolling close again to say, soft and sullen, "I wish sometimes you would just try to understand."

    "I understand you," Tess would say, one hand brushing metal, always metal somewhere: in the morning, at her worktable, metal at the body shop, everywhere its slope and sheen but never less under her control than when lying warmed in the avenue of Bibi's flesh; she could burn her way straight through solid iron but stood helpless before Bibi's burn, her own fire, the coldest heat of all.

    "Are you going to work again tonight?"

    Tess's distracted half smile, gazing up for an instant; deep now in a new piece, a smaller piece yet but more intricate than anything she had ever tried before: a figure, half beast and half machine, its lines and jutting angles more disturbing even than the slender menace of the longlegs. Perhaps it was the humanity of it, the Everyman suggestion: this could be you, warped and bitterly shaped, this could be all of you: under pressure, under torture, going deeper down.

    Bibi asked her again, more peremptory; Tess's shrug came automatic, she had been shrugging a lot lately. "There's a party at Linda Joy's, for Matty," and her own shrug more pointed, and pointed at Tess, "but I suppose that doesn't interest you, it's only a lot of people with rings through their noses, right? Just a bunch of freaks?"

    "Bibi," tiredly, "that isn't-"

    "Isn't it?" And gone. She was doing that, too, a lot.

    Head bent again to the light, tiniest bright lava from the tip of the soldering gun; one of the figure's limbs spread delicate before her like a dissected human arm. Things were splitting again; bifurcating, small sour smile like sucking on contagion. Bibi had grown bored with staying in, watching her beloved work, the pursuit of the mastery of motion in metal; a smaller scale, a more intense arena and when Bibi was pissed off she called it sterile, it's all sterile. "You hate people," she would say, finger leveled like the blade of a knife; a needle. "That's why you work in metal, it's inorganic, it's not alive. That's why you like to be alone so much, you probably wish I would leave you alone more than I do."

    And if it was not this, it was another of the arguments-Bibi was this, Tess was that, the whole like a dreary jewel with each facet more dry and painful than the last: Bibi's push for Tess to understand by doing, her forced empathy march at the end of which was the tip of the knife:
you have to try it, just once, come on.
"Just once," whispered, or stated, or wheedled or shrieked, Tess had already said
no
in more ways than she had dreamed existed; but Bibi did not seem to hear, or, hearing, understand.
Why don't you understand sometimes,
Tess staring at the sleeping face in the hours when she herself lay empty and awake,
why don't you see that what works for you won't work for me, I don't want what you want; I don't love what you love. And I shouldn't have to, to love you.

    Thinking, too, in those empty hours, ebbed resistance and the imaginings, one piercing, just once, to-
what? Prove something? Shut Bibi up?
but more forceful than ever the visceral
No
, stronger than any taboo, any hunger; stronger than love? Maybe. Yes. Heavy head on cocked wrist, watching sore-eyed over that breathing vortex, Bibi restless even in sleep:
Not even for you
.

    But as the arguments grew more frequent, the happy times more scarce as the novelty of being lovers rubbed dry and finally disappeared entirely, Tess felt she was in a tumbler of stones, turning round and round and buffeted on all sides; they were so much their work that with no shared creation between them, no obsession like a child they had produced (or worse, competing obsessions like monstrous siblings; and in dreadful fantasy Tess could almost see them, Bibi's a rag doll, voodoo doll sprouting needles and everywhere sewed black and red with scars, and Tess's made all of metal, metal teeth, dull metal eyes and toolbox hands, each finger a screwdriver, a drill bit, a grinding wheel, all in constant empty motion), the center was splintering, and could not hold. Tess tried, or thought she tried her best to listen, to be sympathetic, but Bibi seemed more militant, less willing to accept her opinions or even her right to hold them because Tess did not know, Bibi said, what she was talking about, literally could not understand without the experience itself.