Suicide Blonde (2 page)

Bell looked exhausted, hallowed and light, almost weightless. They sat at a far table, the little man toward me and Bell in profile. I couldn't hear what they said, but it was easy enough to see their faces, though they couldn't see mine. I read their expressions as if I were reading the ingredients of a bottle of poison I swallowed by mistake. Bell's concentration and ease made me shiver. It reminded me of our first dreamy months, when he teased me playfully without malice, when our moral structure seemed identical. But these same gestures were ominous now. And there was a growing leisure to his movements that made him seem disinterested in whatever the little man was saying. He was acting, as he always did, resistant, withholding. In bed Bell would lean his bare shoulders up against the wall, always waiting for me to come to him. The little man talked with his mouth wide open and gesticulated with his chin. After every statement he stopped and looked intensely into Bell's face.

Bell gazed off, blew long indifferent tendrils of smoke. This discourse was beginning to look like an interrogation. Bell rebuked, and I knew that then he spoke about his latest idea, that no one ever had an original idea, any notion was a confluence of news, former ideas, history, music, and you were just one of many who pulled it down out of the air. The little man was chastised, cast his eyes down, then grabbed Bell's wrist. He twisted it back and said something urgent.

Bell loosened the little man's arm, lit a cigarette and walked to the door. He looked my way though he didn't see me. I could tell by his insular expression that he thought of me and would soon be coming home.

The little man ordered another drink, he kept looking at the door and silently moving his lips. I thought of comforting him, explaining that Bell was always like that, you couldn't expect him to listen to logic, he was a surrealist. I'd tell him about the strange still lifes I sometimes woke to, a single black high heel, a brown egg, long thick nails scattered around, and how he worked out formulas. I'd seen the calculations: a smiley face plus a unicorn equaled a chainsaw, an apple and a penis equaled a heart. But I felt stupid for thinking the little man was my comrade and I left him shredding his bar napkin.

I decided to sit in the park above Bush Street. I knew Bell would try to make me feel crazy. He rearranged his experience, cut out days and nights, tried to weld a nonlinear narrative. He told me once that he refused to be terrorized by time. He lied, forgot, wandered. He often told stories, like the one about meeting a trapeze artist in a bar, that I didn't think could be true. But then in the mail there would be an envelope with a circus insignia. He thought that when he left me I froze, and when he slipped back he set my life moving again, and the thing I hated most was that lately this was true.

I walked up California Street. It was lined with large Victorians, ornate as jewelry boxes. The houses were set back with small yards and as I passed one I saw two lovers in a slender alley. They were similarly dressed, with longish hair. One was standing behind the other so I couldn't tell if they were two men or two women or one of each. At first they seemed to be gazing at the moon, but then I saw their eyes were closed and I knew that one way or another they were making love.

T
HE PARK WAS AN OASIS AMONG THE STONE BUILDINGS AND
asphalt of Nob Hill. It was arranged European-style with plots of calla lilies and fountains. There were benches with horny-toe-lizard legs and marble statues, one of young girls, bougainvillea grown over them. In the middle were reclining stone soldiers; their hard muscular demeanor reminded me of the leather monsters.

I sat in a far corner under a eucalyptus tree. The dye aroma had faded and the bourbon was just a warm sensation in my forehead. With my head in my hands, my features felt self-consciously delicate. But with my dyed hair I wasn't delicate. Now I resembled a certain kind of heartbreaking whore. She came to me: cheap handbag, lively hips and, linked to her, another picture—a makeshift suspension bridge swinging dangerously.

Bell wanted a disciple, someone who agreed that he was a new person, defining modern ways of living that had nothing to do with conventional commitment, someone capable of emotional toughness and moral vacuity. Sometimes I felt his ideas on relationships were brutal, more the outcome of a rough childhood and shaky adolescence than some inevitable futuristic truth. But other times there was a creeping anxiety that reminded me of Darwinism, made me wonder if I shouldn't listen if I wanted, as I did, to crush out the weak parts of myself.

Who was that little man? It would be easier if it were Kevin. Then there would be logical reasons for his growing preoccupation and moodiness. But his obsession with Kevin, his first love, was from a time ten years before, for a boy Bell admitted no longer existed. Sometimes I think I've fallen in love with Kevin along with other parts of Bell's past. What is love but a nostalgia for someone's history? Their boyhood haunts and sullen adolescence, their teenage trips cross-country and fights with their fathers and especially their old lovers? Sometimes I think I'm more interested in Bell's old lovers than I am in Bell. When I met him he was seeing a woman. And though I never said it, her description was enough like Marilyn's that I would think of her that way. Once I called her, the answering machine revealed a disembodied voice, low and secure, that made me feel stupid. But Bell only longs for Kevin, and sometimes, lately, I feel myself longing for him too.

Bell told me Kevin was dark with a tight hairless chest and a cock that was lipstick pink and slightly bowed to the left. He had intelligent eyes and a way of leaning toward you when he made a point. When I thought of Kevin he was surrounded with pale sunlight like Jesus. Sometimes he seemed to smile at me and I'd feel myself being pulled through my head into Bell's pearlish chain of memories. But once there, it was frustrating, like watching from the window as your beautiful young neighbors made love.

I thought of Bell yesterday, how he had satirized female cooing sounds, made his features dreamy, threw his head back in burlesque of a female orgasm. The mocking tone of his voice, “You take off that,” when he stretched the material of the teddy then let the elastic edge snap against my skin.
He is bad for me.
This idea startled me and for a while I watched the fountain water splash between the figurines. A strong wind juggled the eucalyptus leaves. Nature is most beautiful in its movement: wind, water, the sinking sun. And it was just then that I saw a woman striding carelessly into the park.

She leaned on the edge of the fountain, letting her long hair brush the water, dressed in a paisley mini-dress and platform shoes. Wind rattled the lilies. She unbuckled her shoes and in one practiced movement pulled her dress over her head, and stepped into the fountain. I was startled, heard my breathing change like with sex. She was nude and so pale that the marble seemed sooty in comparison. When she looked my way her eyes caught light and burned red. If she saw me, she didn't seem to care. Her wide features were set smoothly, but it could just as easily have been the calm of the insane as true tranquillity. Quickly, she washed her feet, squatted, splashed water between her legs and over her breasts. Standing, she put her head between the thighs of a marble soldier and was encased for a moment in a pillar of foaming water. Sitting on the edge of the pool, she wrung her hair out and skimmed water from her body with flat open palms. There was a frail power about her, not dangerous, but resilient, as if she'd be hard to kill. I admired her absence of fear. The woman pulled on her dress, held her wet hair back as she strapped her platform shoes, then turned toward the milky lights of the Tenderloin.

I stood and watched her descent. The water seemed to absolve her. She held her shoulders regally and didn't look back, though I wanted her to turn and see me standing small against the trees. I felt better . . . maybe it was just that I knew Bell was meandering back to our apartment, past the Bacchus Kirk and the Malaysian bar on the corner. Or maybe the woman was a talisman, one that would help me in whatever came next.

O
PENING THE APARTMENT DOOR, I THOUGHT THE LEOPARD'S
lit eyes were two cigarette tips, but then felt the empty space and knew Bell was still not home. I didn't turn on the light. Whenever he left a place it was like he had never been there. I went around the room touching things.
This is his .
. . I was trying to get on intimate terms with the room. I needed it on my side.

Where would I be when he came in? On the bed would seem like I had already acquiesced. What if I leaned against the kitchen doorway and lit a cigarette? What would that say? Indifference? I could get into the tub, force him to talk to me through the closed door—I liked the implication of that—he would be confronted with the thought of my body, the image always more powerful than the actuality. And I wouldn't have to risk anything—I'd learned my lesson from the teddy. Or I could evoke my caustic mind by moving the straight-back chair into the middle of the room. I tried it but the chair looked like a stage prop and I hated myself for so carefully marking the power in each possibility.

I always thought of love as a stressful but productive state, because you wanted to improve yourself for your lover. But this was posing, not self-improvement. I wanted to be pleasing. That's what my mother did to try and keep my father. She looked pleasing, acted pleasing, made the house pleasing, all in an effort to mollify the uncertainties and unpleasantries of the unknown.

Right then the phone rang and I knew it was her. There's a telepathy between us sometimes so laserlike it frightens me. “Hi,” she said. “How are you?”

My mother used her casual voice, one that hides a heightened desperation. I answered her usual inquiries. When we speak there is a suck that makes me lean into her voice; when I'm in her presence she gets a predatory look. My mother sees me as a part of her body, something that still belongs inside, a heart or a liver that she wants back.

“You remember the bank president? The one that had the affair with his secretary? It's been very messy, his wife won't give him a divorce. They say she's gone crazy. Yesterday, she walked into the bank and threw acid in the secretary's face.” She stopped, not like the story was over, but like she was startled.

I examined the story for hidden meaning. While it could imply that my life also is in danger because I too dabble in perversity, it doesn't seem to fit the usual storyline of . . . me falling for a bad man like my father, or that even the wildest people eventually settle down. This one seemed on my side or Bell's . . . it was chaos.

She started to speak again, but I daydreamed. She was right, I didn't always listen, but it was her I was thinking of, remembering once, when I was four—I knew she was on a diet and I saw on TV something about an operation where you have part of your intestines removed to make you thinner and I told her about it, that she should have it. Her face got red, she was so angry that I felt confused, terrified, and trailed her the rest of the day trying to make it right. When I heard my father's tires on the gravel driveway I was sitting on the damp cellar stairs watching her put clothes into the washer. He walked down past me. She told him it had been a lousy day, she started to cry and said I had been rude to her. “I wasn't,” I said, so upset I was light-headed. She looked at me directly for the first time since morning and said, “You want to cut me open.”

The fabric of the memory dissolved and I heard her voice again. “How are you, honey? You know how I worry.”

“I'm O.K.,” I said, then lifted the phone away from my ear because I heard footsteps on the stairs. I told her quickly I had to go.

“O.K.,” she said rigidly. No matter if we spoke for ten minutes or two hours she never wanted to hang up. “Bye now.”

After our calls I always have an uneasy feeling. It's like that all the time with my mother. But I love her and probably most after a bad phone call: her fat upper arms, the way she talks like a baby when she's upset, those slippers with rosebuds she wears until the bottoms are flat and gray, and her sense of rigid honesty that has crippled her in this dishonest world.

Bell's steps were faint at first—then firmer, centered and serious, paced like a showdown. I ran to the kitchen, realized while he searched for his keys that it was silly for me to hide, so I swung the refrigerator door open knowing the white light would be far off and eerie in the apartment. The key was in the lock . . . there were several odd tinfoil shapes, a green pitcher of orange juice, a single jar of shrimp cocktail, a bit of browning smoked salmon and half a tomato that was losing muscle tone. The problem with being a modern woman, I thought, as the front door swung wide, is that you have to pretend to be stronger than you are.

He walked straight to me and leaned against the doorway. His hair was scruffy and his face showed stubble. His cigarette had a long ash which he knocked into his hand. He drew, the tip glowed, underlighting his face. Like a good actor, Bell's demeanor was different now than in the bar. His presence made the air in the apartment thicker. I turned on the faucet. The water beat into the sink. I drank down a full glass, then poured another. My proximity to his body made me feel unsure. Maybe I overreacted. The faucet surged. I knew when I turned it off I'd have to say something. His usual approach would be to either act more wronged than me or, by being extreme—“Do you want me to stay chained to the bed?"—make me seem unreasonable.

He would make me speak first, it was always his way. He knew silence was a reprimand, as disturbing as vomit, and in near hysteria I'd rush to fill it, clean the room, make it comfortable. I noticed the skin around his eyes was thin and gray, maybe he was exhausted, but it made him look unhinged and I always associated eyes like that with evil. I realized how my thoughts, since he'd been gone, made him a stranger to me.

“Where have you been?” I hadn't meant to start off like that, I knew it would be better to seem indifferent.

He let one hip loosen, sloshed into contrapposto and slanted his eyes. Bell probably meant to look sexy or powerful, but instead he seemed dipped in sleaze.