Skin (4 page)

    Silence. Bibi's fierce breathing.

    And then everyone relaxed, Paul pushing up, seemingly unhurt but groaning, a little, Sandrine bending to help him stand upright. Bibi took one last big breath, let it out, and then turned expectantly to Ifess.

    "Well?"

    Raelynne in pirouette-"I can tell it's good, our director would've hated it"-and to Paul Tess said, "How in God's name did you make that sound?" to the brief endlessness of his silence, deliberately turning his back and Bibi's narrowing stare: "Oh, Paul can do all kinds of stuff, he used to be an actor."

    Paul's body tightening as if being beaten again, this time with weapons more shameful and Bibi, loud cruel cheer, "Yeah, Paul used to do dinner theater, Kiss Me Kate revivals. The Music Man. Didn't you, Paul?" and then swiveling in dismissal, back to the others who stood passing the water bottle: their fast dancer's argot meant nothing to Tess who instead was watching Paul, very busy now by the tape player; rewind, fastforward, rewind, useless busywork so he would not have to turn around.

    Bibi clapping, "Okay, okay, listen you guys, once more," and, incredibly, again: the same keening, beating, the same hideous infant-cry but this time Tess held herself on the outskirts of drama, watched each, component and individual: Raelynne's back muscles taut as pulleys, Sandrine's thin lips twisted crooked in a snarl unconscious, the deliberate closed-eyed concentration of the slack and beaten Paul. And Bibi, more dervish than ever, eyes so wide and white all around, the enormous energy of each action, the perfect structural economy, her moving body precise and precisely there in each motion as the picture lies entire in each splinter of a sundered hologram. At this ending Tess applauded instantly and hard, Bibi's little chorine highkick and bouncing to a stop before her. "You want to go get a drink with us?"

    "Are you-is it over?"

    "For tonight, yeah." Wiping her sweaty face with the hem of her T-shirt, hair stuck straight up in corona above her wet forehead as if even at rest she continued to move. "Hey," louder, "you guys coming?"

    "Bar H?" and at Bibi's nod Raelynne nodded back, yeah, she was coming. "Gotta go easy though," sitting to pull on her shoes, unraveling hightops that had once been red. "I have to work tomorrow."

    Sandrine off to meet her boyfriend and Paul said nothing, gathering up tapes and tape player, pulling on a black mesh muscle shirt that enhanced rather than hid his tattoo. All at once fast toward the exit, Raelynne calling out to him but Bibi raised a warding hand, shook her head.

    "Leave him," she said. "If he wants to be an asshole let him go. He'll probably show up there later anyway," and they were walking past bags and the dry scatter of soap, crashbar bang and outside the day's heat gone at last into night's fetid humidity, street moist and Bibi had to open the car door for her, battered blue subcompact with the passenger side bashed in. Tess watched her drive, greased bearing roll of her ankles, the way she toed the brake. Looking up to the slam of physics, forward and back abrupt against the seat and Bibi saying, "Here we are," bar hernandez in ice blue, graffitied brick and the whole building smaller than the cleared area in which they had danced: twenty tables, dry smoke and scuffed linoleum a bare square yard for jukebox dancing. Raelynne instantly feeding change and Bibi at the bar, asking in pantomime
What do you want?

    "Any beer," and finding miraculous a table, man and woman bickering their way to the door, spilled drink and one soggy lime wedge speared on a tiny red plastic pirate's sword. Bibi back, one beer, one shot of sour mash, one clear lime-wedged glass: Tess guessing vodka, Bibi shaking her head.

    "Tonic water," and Raelynne's solemn drawl, "That's a fact. She doesn't need no mood-altering substances 'cause she is one."

    "Fuck that altered-mood shit. I have a good enough time on my own," and nodding toward the door, "See? Didn't I tell you?": a dispirited Paul, yelling his order as one of Raelynne's selections came on and she out of her seat at once, dancing alone on the dirty linoleum. Bibi took a drink, Paul forgotten, and said, "Well? What did you think of us?"

    "I liked it." The beer strangely sweet in her mouth. "I don't really know enough about dance to-what?" to Bibi's vigorous headshake, bright eyes rolling,
no no no
.

    "Don't give me that. You have eyes. Tell me what you saw."

    "I- all right. All right," and what had she seen? Not even grace, first, but action, motion, the pure violence of a body through space subsuming the lesser, more showy violence of the beating, the aural violence of the keening and the shrieks and the tempoless drum, the whole not even testament but document, one moment enacted with rigor and pain. And Bibi's judicial nod, so.

    "Have you ever heard," big pale eyes bright, bubbles in her drink in tiny upward formation, minuscule spheres like drops of blown glass, "of kinetic theory? Kinetic theory states that the particles of all matter are in constant motion. All matter. Did you know that the origin of the word kinetic is kinetikos, Greek for ‘putting in motion'? Did you know that when I was ten years old I wanted to be a ballet dancer, but the skin of my toes wouldn't harden, it was constantly bleeding, and my father said no more lessons? And I heard him, and I sat down on the back steps with a kitchen knife and cut off the tip of my right big toe and I carried it back inside and threw it on his dinner plate, right when he was eating and I said if he cut off my lessons I would cut off my toes. One by one."

    For a moment Tess was silent, knuckles light against her lips as if to silence spoken thought, Bibi half-smiling as though at a pleasant memory. "Well?" and irrepressible, strange dry smile welling up, "then what happened?"

    "Nothing. He kept on paying for the lessons. I didn't really have an aptitude for ballet, though; I quit the next year. -What's so funny?"

    "Nothing," shaking her head; picturing Bibi, bloody blackmail knife in one hand, knob of flesh in the other. Quitting ballet the next year. "Then what?"

    Then modern dance, "whatever that is," two years of it before a move to Seattle with friends of the family-"it was beautiful there, but I got really tired of the rain"-and a long time spent in the South, New Orleans, Nashville, slowly moving upward like mercury in the heat. Dancing, always, or performing in some way: "I used to do street theater, like acting out people's poems at art fairs, or just improve, playing off what people were doing or saying." Guerrilla theater for a while, but that proved too harsh for too little return: "People used to stone us, can you believe it? And plus most of the stuff we did was shitty, just rants, how can you perform a rant?" North again, living with a loose shifting partnership of friends and sometimes-lovers, a particle in random motion and now, for the past two years, here. In a loft for a while with Crane, who had swiftly become very boring-"Do you know what it's like to live with someone who uses himself as his only frame of reference? All the time? Plus he can't cook"-and dancing now with this larger troupe for rent and gas money while time-off rehearsing with Paul and Sandrine and Raelynne.

    Who plopped down, legs stretched sweaty and "Whoo! You'd think I'd get enough dancing, wouldn't you, with the Marquis of Queensberry here? Shit, I got to get another drink," pushing as if to rise and Bibi motioning her back, "Same again?" and Raelynne nodded; Bibi out of earshot and Raelynne turning at once to Tess: "You smoke?"

    "No," and Raelynne sighing, "Shit. I love to smoke, but Bibi throws a fit when I do, says it cuts my wind. Which it does. Smart bitch," with obvious affection, sipping a little of Bibi's tonic water. "She's really something, isn't she? Have you known her for long?"

    "We met yesterday."

    Raelynne's pleased nod, a notion confirmed. "I thought she was showin' off a little tonight. Must be for you," and waving a finger, no no to Tess's protests, she doesn't chew that much ass usually, "especially not on a night this hot. Shit, I'm from Tennessee and even I can't stand it," and

    Bibi back again, Jack Daniel's and water and another beer for Tess who was beginning to feel the first and Bibi telling Raelynne about Tess's sculpture, saying they ought to have a show around it and a thought in Tess's head, inarticulate, trying to swim for it through the twisty maze of beer and heat and no dinner, saying something half-aloud and Bibi's voice, "-incredible textures. You ought to go down to the Isis, see her piece there. Actually you ought to go to her place, she lives in a rathole, too," showing those little teeth, "all this sculpture crammed into a tiny little space like half your place, Rae."

    "She can have my place," drinking down her drink. "I'm movin' next week, I can't stand those dogs anymore,
yap yap yap
all the time."

    The idea in motion, eluding her still: something about Bibi, the image of her violence, swath of metal like the endless edge of a knife. Posturing steel, the notion of her last piece in secret dance: something there. What? With it under her hands she could tell, or grow at least closer to the knowing.

    "Listen, excuse me," pushing away from the table, "I have to get back. No, no," as Bibi rose, "you stay, I'll just grab the bus or something."

    "Buses've already quit running." Keys out, moving through the puzzle of tables, past the bar and Tess watched Paul's head turn, tracking, staring at Bibi with a look so bare she felt shamed in the seeing; Bibi did not see, was already pushing outside. A rain as fine as pure humidity, distilled on cars and skin and the sullen lights so dim the insects would not dance in their weak lumination. Dancing insects, Bibi dancing. The sculpture in motion. What?

    Speaking only in directions, eyes inward in the timed swipe of the wipers and they reached her place more quickly than she knew; still thinking hard when Bibi hit the brake, swerved to the curb beside a rusted black Jeep with peeling oil decals and the motor running. Stinky gray smoke, the store's double door pushed open and two teenagers on the threshold kissing in the drift of the rain. Bibi's strong hand forcing the broken door.

    Tess through the window, half-apology and Bibi shaking her head, forget it. "Just let me see it when it's done," and smiling. And gone. Up the stairs double time, banging the door behind her and she worked till morning, till noon, burning, burning, Grace downstairs screaming up about the smoke,
you can smell it in the cooler for fuck's sake Tess!
Big new burn on her right arm, close to the old scars, hair clubbed back in a filthy knot and the heat monstrous under the mask, breathing her own sweat like some rare vapor. The new piece disassembled before her, plastic throat slashed vertical to her surgeon's fire, inserting in the running melt the corkscrewed filigree of metal strips as falsely bright as chrome. She left the throat hinged open, worked next on the Lexan eyes to ladder them blind with the broken brown glass of an empty beer quart stolen weeks before from downstairs. Now the arms. Steel sharp against the scarred palms of her gloves, the fleshy reek of burned plastic beneath pale gray smoke like the breath of ghosts, the rod in her hand burning, burning, white at the core like the beating heart of a star. The arms twisting under her assault, running, running metal, one drop on her boot burning into the leather, round black instant scar.
So hot
. Light-headed, sick-hungry;
keep going. Keep going
.

    When she was done the piece stood spraddled, rough hard bubbles of spatter from her hurried weld, flayed throat and sightless eyes, rusty steel arms rich with a menace not before possessed, not only suggestion but the active threat of motion, not only motion but violence black and pure and ultimately irresistible in its surety. Pulling off her gloves one finger at a time, slumped hard against the worktable and too tired to shower or even think of eating, too tired finally to do anything but sleep, stretched out on the couchbed, burns and boots unlaced and dry eyes closed at once to small and instant dream as outside an afternoon storm formed and broke, heavy rain on chicken wire puddling tiny on the floor amidst the other shines and slicks, the smell of wet wood and captured mist suspended ephemeral in the empty air.

    Sandrine had a pierced nipple and eight holes in her right ear and was more than happy to show them all to Tess. Cross-legged on the couchbed beside her, Bibi guiding Raelynne quiet among the pieces, Sandrine smelled like cigarette smoke, like hair mousse and damp perfume. The three of them had appeared, black cotton and beer and heavy cream pastries making grease spots on the bag, Raelynne hollering up the stairs with a voice bred to summon the Valkyries: "Hey Tess! You home?"

    

    

    Tess awake less than an hour,
pop-pop-pop
outside her window, something sharp as firecrackers or gunshots, the rimshot of a car. Shaking in the shower, hands unsteady on the soap; too long this time without eating. Hurried downstairs and out to avoid Grace, found the first kiosk still open to eat hugely, big sloppy fried-pepper sandwich and two bottles of soda, hurrying back and Grace's big-haired daughter like statuary in the wait: "My mother says," long red claw fingernails around the helpless shaft of a broom, "that you're a fucking fire hazard. Hear me? You're gonna burn the whole store down, we're gonna wake up and the whole fucking building'll-" Closing the door, taste of peppers under her tongue, in her nose like some folk medicine.

    Now, half-empty quart bottle of Kicker beer by Sandrine's bare ankle, matte pink nail polish and red hair pulled back to show each golden trinket bobbing in explanation: "This is an ankh, that's Egyptian for life, the life force. This is a cross and anchor, that's for faith and hope. My sister got it for me, she's like a Catholic or something. This is a heart, for love, and this is a heart with my birth-stone, opal, which is the moonstone. Tides, and all that," and so on, each piece had its own tiny history, its significance, sweet as charms on a charm bracelet. The nipple piercing was a delicate gold ring, a banded snake eating its tail. "That's for eternity," and Raelynne plopping down beside them, contradicting, the figure-eight is for eternity you dumbass, that's just a snake. Sandrine flicking the ring, pierced where the nipple joined the areola, her nipple quickly coming erect. "See?" she said. "It's pretty, isn't it?"