Suicide Blonde (11 page)

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T
HE PHONE WAS RINGING WHEN I GOT HOME AND I KNEW
before I answered it that it was my mother.

“Your father,” she said as soon as I said hello, “says he's not going to send my checks anymore. He says I'm a leech.”

“Maybe he doesn't have it. You can't bleed a stone.”

“That's just what he said. You're just like him. I remember the time I found those unopened letters in your dorm room. He used to not open letters from people he didn't care about.”

“Mom, we've been through this a hundred times. He's my father.”

“But he's evil, I just can't take this anymore. He leaves, you leave. It's like my family's been bombed. It's fine for the strong people, but not for people like me. I'm not very sophisticated.” She was quiet and I could tell by the way she took in air that she was trying not to cry. “Lately, I haven't wanted to live.”

I resisted her, because of her hard childhood, her alcoholic father. She was often melodramatic, always trying to convince me of an inevitable doom. “I know how you feel,” I said.

“Do you?” she said. “Do you really understand? My father was a drunk, he'd forget where he left his car at least once a week. Once he got frostbite because he passed out on the street. Jesse, I married your father because I thought I'd be assured a good life. A minister would provide for me, would be kind and honest. But he cheated and humiliated me,” she yelled. “I can't take this, stuck in this town your father dragged me to. When will he get what he deserves?”

“Mom,” I said, “I'm sorry you feel that way.”

“I don't need this.” She was furious now. “You are an accomplice, you and your father talking about poetry, taking walks, you in a little pair of shorts. I know what he was trying to do and you loved the attention. You loved stealing him from me.”

“I was a teenager.”

“You hurt me so much,” she said. I realized in a clear, more defined way how broken she was. I was angry at myself, that she had to offer me her jugular, like a submissive dog, before I felt anything for her. “God damn it,” she shrieked now. “I am so fucking lonely.” She never swore and this fact alone more than anything she said upset me. I saw how divorce just cements the patterns of a dysfunctional family, it institutionalizes and canonizes the sickness, assures it a place forever. Compassion streamed in with so much intensity I felt light-headed.

“I'll come home,” I said, “if that's what you want.”

“I'm sorry,” she said. “It's just too much for me.”

“Do you want me to come home? I will.”

“No,” she said. “What good would that do?” She started to cry and told me she had to go, she'd call back later when she was feeling better. “It's not just me, it's everyone,” she said and hung up.

I put the receiver down gently. Illuminated by the dirty street light, my room looked dull. It was bare like a hotel room and even the things that marked it—the horny blowfish, the cubist painting, the dead carnations in the vase by the bed—seemed dangerous. I lay down and felt a kind of insipid anxiety that hinted at tomorrow's depression. I closed my eyes, thought,
Jesus and Bell and Kevin.
The wedding invitation rested on the nightstand. It was traditional with raised black letters, a little envelope and small bits of tissue paper. The wedding was in Los Angeles tomorrow at five. I went to the window. A Mexican whore came out of the hotel across the street. Kevin's features came to me.

C h a p t e r

T e n

I
WALKED LIGHTLY UP THE STAIRS AND PUT MY EAR TO BELL'S
door. If his breath was even, his countenance calm, I'd tell him I was going to Kevin's wedding. The radio was on, a talk show about the chances of war. I could see words scratched into the wood. I fingered the letters, closed my eyes, thought of Bell making love to the little man. I swayed a little, bumped my head. Bell turned down the radio and said, “Who's there?” in a frightened voice.

“It's me, let me in.” I heard him go into the bathroom, open the medicine chest, pause, close it, then walk down the hall to the door. Bell pulled back the dead bolt. He smiled when he saw me.

“Why so serious, Jesse?” he asked. He was wearing the silk kimono, one arm pulled in tightly as if it were sprained. The skin around his eyes was a greasy gray from wearing mascara and removing it with vaseline.

“Well?” he asked. “Did you quit?”

When I nodded he was so relieved his face smoothed and he let out an easy breath. He led me like a child down the hall, all the time keeping his shoulder up and his arm pressed against his side. The place smelled of garlic and burning wax and I saw the big cement lawn statue of Jesus on the black table and the candles lit around it.

“Having a seance?” I asked.

Bell didn't answer. He sat at the table, rifling through a shoe box full of seeds, picking up a packet of sunflowers, then zinnias, reading the tiny instructions on the back. A Chinese newspaper was spread all over the floor and taped to the walls. There was nowhere to sit. The couch springs were uncovered. I eyed the closet and the rumpled futon.

“Ah, lovely,” Bell said, and held up a packet of blue morning glory seeds. He ripped the top off and rattled the contents into his mouth, then swigged from his pint bottle of gin. “I've decided to grow a garden in my stomach.”

“Your heart will think it's found a soulmate,” I said.

Bell smiled, looked over my head. His eyes focused on the tiny Chinese characters and his lips moved as if he could read them. His forehead wrinkled and he leaned toward me, clamping his cool hand over my wrist. The candle flames showed themselves in each of his eyes and I remembered when we used to joke that he was the devil. He motioned with his head for me to move closer and whispered, “Keep your plans secret for now.” I was startled, not sure whether to admit my rental car was waiting outside, that I was anxious to get on the road, anxious to finally meet Kevin. But he didn't continue, just looked into the street as if he might see someone that could save his life. The lamp on the floor cast him in pathetic light. Bell stood, his kimono opened and he asked me if I'd like a drink. His nude body seemed yellow and swollen, with a fine coating of sweat that smelled of juniper berries. He'd been drinking for days. I stared at the texture of his balls, their fragility had always startled me. It seemed men were hostile and mean to protect that vulnerable spot, not to celebrate their hard cocks. He went into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator. The ice cubes fell into the sink and onto the floor.

“I want you to stop all this wallowing.”

He turned suddenly and even in the shadowy kitchen I could see his face fill with pain. “I killed my father,” he said, his hurt arm tighter as if it was meant to hold him up. “He wanted a haircut. So my mother took him into town to the barbershop. He urged her to leave, he wanted to be alone with the men. When she came back he was waiting outside, shivering. The men teased him, said his son was a faggot.” He left his mouth open, raised his eyebrows, as if to say, isn't that incredible, I killed my father.

“It's still not your fault.”

“It is!” he said, squinting at me, trying to see me as a memory years from now. He wanted to be responsible for his father's death. He'd rather revel in some tragic poignancy than his regular mundane life. It reminded me of my own melancholy about my parents’ divorce. Weeks ago he might have convinced me it was noble, not now. Bell's father was dead and he hadn't seen Kevin for ten years and it was ridiculous for him to be this way. I stood, walked into the dark kitchen, put my arms loosely around his neck and tried to ease him into my body. But he pulled away, reached his hand under his stiff arm and took out a medium-size speckled egg. “I'm going to hatch it,” he said, walking to the table holding the egg down close to the candlelight. “That purple color means it won't be long now,” he said, tucking the egg back under his arm, pressing his elbow against his side. “Is there anything more delicate than an egg?” he asked smiling.

“Yeah,” I said. “Relationships.”

Bell looked at me in a blank way that made me sure it was time to leave. “We should get married,” he said. “My father would love you.”

T
HE RENTAL CAR HAD A DASHBOARD OF WARM GREEN LIGHT.
The interior smelled of the immortality of plastic. The engine was quiet and it seemed more like my mind that pushed me forward than the cylinders of exploding gasoline. The headlights made people on the street momentarily transparent and that image of a face fading away as if from memory got me thinking of Bell, and about how little one person can help another. I'd tried to convince him he wasn't responsible for his father's death and give him some possibility of a future. But the only future I was willing to work for was one together. I could only save him through his commitment to me. And Bell was gay, or at least ambivalent enough to make the idea of marriage ridiculous. But even if I were a man, as I often used to wish, I couldn't stop him from going down. It was what he wanted. I could tell by the way he held his cigarette, how when he spoke he looked coldly through my head and into the next world.

I felt guilty. If I'd ever really loved him, I should have stayed nearby. But I couldn't decide whether it was stronger to leave him or to stay and help. I remembered my mother's face, puffy from crying after Dad left. She took both my hands into hers and said, “Promise me that if you are ever treated badly you will leave.” I only wish all her crazy oaths and advice wouldn't rise so often in my mind. But it was more than that, I was sick of Bell and Madison and Pig and all of San Francisco, sick of being nice, being nurturing, being a good sport, of appeasing people. I started to think of maggots festering in a wound. I thought of betraying people who loved me, of piss and shit mixed foully in a backed-up toilet. I figured if I knew exactly what I wanted then maybe I'd stop being so polite and that's why I had to speak with Kevin. But what did he know about my crazy ideas of love and family—intensified by my parents’ divorce and my own faithless life? I thought about the story my mother often told of reaching for my father in bed and him saying, “Don't embarrass yourself.” Could I blame this whole thing on them, on their divorce? Even as a child I was insecure and sneaky. I always needed a huge amount of attention and I often pretended to be sick or stupid to get it. I'd been the little actress and had not lived the right life from the start.

I grabbed the wheel so hard my knuckles whitened and a pain shot into my palm. I accelerated, mesmerized by the red taillights. I understood in an atavistic way the idea of murder, how frustration, fury and pain could be catharted momentarily by doing something horrible. I turned my signal on, eased into the middle lane, the tick and blink hypnotized me. I wondered if I was going to L.A. to kill Kevin.

I felt his long fingers reaching into my skull. The equation went like this: Bell + Kevin and Jesse + Bell = Jesse vs. Kevin. To think of him leaning toward me, that first deep smell of his body. I imagined him slipping away from his reception to meet me at a hotel, a champagne bottle under his tux jacket, a piece of his wedding cake stuffed into my mouth. As he pulled down my panties he'd say he liked the idea of betraying his wife on their wedding day, that it was poignant and true. I tried to think of when Kevin and Bell were together in Chinatown for the new year: lanterns, the long paper dragon zigzagging over the street, the firecrackers. Bell told me that afterward they'd gone for a drink to a gay bar. He'd brushed his hand against Kevin's cock, both of them laughing and flushed like children.

The road narrowed past Half Moon Bay, and the regularity of houses diminished. The sea was black and the mountains blue in the moonlight. Occasionally I'd see a low California-style ranch, dark except for the glow of a blue TV. America is America, I thought, because of the things we do together. The road soothed me, the water gently shifting, like someone stroking my hair. I turned on the radio but all I could find were men talking about the probability of war and a religious talk show. A man and a woman talked about AIDS education, how the literature was a how-to manual for homosexuality, how celibacy was the only answer now.

I thought of the Pacific, of the crabs and fish that lived underneath the surface. The Atlantic seemed dirty, even scrawny in comparison. When I first came to California, it seemed a clichéd utopia where people took endless vitamins, spoke with gurus, spiritual healers, herbalists, accepted karma as a reality. I resented their spiritual superiority and didn't care much whether Nostradamus was right and that an earthquake might send the hippies, surfers, movie stars, right-wingers toppling into the sea. I imagined the wreckage washed up on the Nevada coast: crocheted hats, tie-dye, skateboards, love beads. But out here, closer to the land, I realized how the West Coast balanced the East.

J
UST BEFORE MONTEREY MY HEADLIGHTS ILLUMINATED A GIRL
walking quickly down the soft shoulder. She was wearing tight jeans and a T-shirt and was rubbing her hands over her bare arms. She was so young, I wondered why she was out so late. I slowed but she didn't look up. She seemed upset, like after a fight with a boyfriend. There were headlights in my rearview mirror so I sped ahead. Her short hair and sullen sexy walk reminded me of the girls I'd admired in high school, the ones who did everything first. In the rearview mirror I watched the car stop, the driver was an older man. When she got in there was a pouting curve to her hips that told me he was not her father. They passed me easily. She leaned into him, her hair caught in the wind.

The highway into Monterey degenerated into a strip. It was too late for anything to be open. On the main stretch were gift shops, the slightly upscale kind, that sold driftwood art and watercolor paintings. Down the road was the aquarium, and all that was left of Cannery Row. There were lots of T-shirt places, a few antique stores, a place that sold kites, one for wind chimes. There was a McDonald's and a Taco Bell and a restaurant called the Grapes of Wrath . . . like everywhere else in America that was special, it had been spoiled by gentrification.

Just outside the village it started to rain, so I decided to stop at a little hotel I saw on the bluff to my left. I drove up, parked my car beside a VW van—the only other car in the lot. The rain was harder now, beating on the pavement and on me as I dashed into the office. The fluorescent lights buzzed and the muted sound of rain was cozy, made me glad I'd stopped. The place had the intimate aroma of sweat and curry and was shabby, with cracked leather couches and a bucket near the desk catching a melody of drips from the stained ceiling. There was a noise in the back room and simultaneously an Indian man pulled back the beaded curtains that separated the back room from this one. He looked sleepy and his shiny hair stuck up in the back like a bird. He was barefoot and his brown pants and white T-shirt were wrinkled. I saw his wife in the slit of the curtain, curled on the bed, her long hair spread out over the pillow. She wore a red dot on her forehead and I imagined her in a golden sari, on a blue California day, straining leaves with a long pole from the pool outside. The man pointed at a handwritten sign under the glass of the counter. I handed him twenty dollars and he gave me a room key.

Outside, I stood under the awning, the clouds gave the sky a grayish purple tone and rain blew across my face. It was chilly and I walked toward my room. The curtain of Room 8 was slightly parted and the TV was on. I could see a man and a woman in one of the two double beds. A pattern of light and shadow showed the woman's head nuzzled into the man's hair, his arm thrown back to touch her waist. The curtain of my room was closed, but I could see through that the TV was on. This scared me and I started back toward the office, but the light was off and I knew the man was back in bed with his wife.

I opened my door quickly, checked under each bed and behind the shower curtain. The linoleum in the bathroom was rolling up in the corners and the tub had a greasy film. The carpet in the main room was bright red and riddled with a constellation of cigarette burns. There was no window in the back, just an old air conditioner jutting from the paneled walls. There were paintings over the beds of ghost ships, and near the TV was a pressed-wood table and a dresser that matched. The sound was off on the TV. The place reminded me of a porno movie with the red bed and creepy light. The anxious face of the TV announcer spoke emphatically, then the picture switched to footage of a mother helping her children put on gas masks. I flung myself down on the bed, and with my fingertips rubbed at the tense muscles in my neck. The woman on TV sealed the door shut with electrical tape and put a plastic cover over her baby's crib. The announcer spoke silently and then they showed the enemy capital, bombs bursting over its domes and onion-shaped towers. I made myself imagine the people there who were dying, the way their bodies would be twisted, the sounds in the streets. The horror. The TV flashed black planes and white missiles and grainy footage of a bomb hitting its target like a video game. A cat outside started to cry. I closed my eyes, but all I could see were the headlights from my rearview mirror. I pulled the bedspread back, pulled off my shirt, unlatched my bra, but left my pants on, and pulled the covers over me. I kissed my pillow and pulled it into my chest like a lover.

I couldn't sleep and ended up thinking back on all my men. I hadn't been a nice girl, but it didn't have anything to do with sex, more to do with lying. With each man I acted identically, like a ritual. I started by alluding to our life a few years ahead, then ten, then twenty. I'd joke about our children's names, tell him what a feisty old guy he'd be at eighty. It would escalate, we'd speak of buying houses together, joining bank accounts. When I got pregnant once, I'd kept it secret, then aborted. Sometimes someone new would lead me to break it off so quickly and absolutely the guy would be dazed, even shocked, as if I were insane. One man broke into my apartment and read my journals, ripped the crotch out of all my panties. Another followed me across the country, appeared with flowers and a new car begging me to run away. But I had already started up with someone new, was telling him my sad childhood stories. Saying, We wouldn't raise our baby that way. For me a relationship has never been possible unless it was going to end in marriage and children and forever. My heart beat furiously, I cupped my tit, pressed my fingers against my breastbone so I could feel my heart heaving up into my palm. The woman in the next room was talking and I imagined myself snuggled between the lovers in that spot between his warm belly and her smooth back, the lattice of her spine. It was so comfortable there that I soon fell asleep.