Suicide Blonde (3 page)

“On the way to get cigarettes I got lost, ended up wandering as far as Bernal Heights. There is a lovely park where homeless men cook over sterno ovens and a little old man plays his fiddle on a park bench.” He meant to sound cute, to try to evaporate tension and show that I was being possessive and martyrish. When I didn't respond he tried again. “I like your hair.” He leaned forward, tried to touch me.

I swung my head back, bumped it hard on the cabinet. “You fucker, I was worried you were dead.”

His face drew up, mouth tightened. “Bullshit. You thought I was screwing someone. If you were completely confident in me, you wouldn't even be interested. You need a love triangle, Jesse, to make you feel alive.”

I was addicted to the fear of infidelity and I believed relationships were like the trinity: there were the two human participants, one always more godlike than the other, and then there was the thing between them, the other—an aberrant philosophy, a person or a phantom like Kevin.

“I don't care what you do,” I lied and he smirked to show he recognized it as one. “But you can't just wander off.”

“I couldn't do it, if I wasn't sure you were here,” he said.

“Tough luck,” I said. He was trying to conjur up the Noble Wife. I should be proud to suffer for him. I tried to brush past him, but he grabbed my arm and said, “I need you with me.”

There was a rusty quality to his voice that implied insecurity. Bell was like this. His posturing was a sign that inside he felt tender and helpless. There were times when he asked my advice on gifts for his family, or if I thought he'd said the wrong thing at a dinner party. It reminded me of him detached from his bad behavior, how I loved him and didn't really want to leave at all. I decided not to be mean, but honest. “I'm sick of you thinking you have the right to wander off.”

“I thought you were the kind to allow me my mental infidelities.”

It was going to become a discourse on abstract freedom, he would go through his haggard points: about the individual, about how poor people think they're free because they could leave the country, could go to college or win the lottery. But it seldom happened, instead they worked like prisoners and lived in apartments barely more comfortable then cells. All he wanted, he claimed, was this—he needed to dream.

He was staring coldly at his veiny hand. Twisting his cigarette butt in our blue glass ashtray. While his head was ducked I saw his crucifix over the sink: a pale purple Jesus on a cross so white it glowed.

“It makes me feel horrible how you moon over Kevin,” I said slowly. He flinched at Kevin's name, and walked to the couch, sat sloppily, kicked at a penny on the floor. “My life was very pleasant when I knew Kevin.”

“Everyone's life is pleasant at seventeen.”

“It was more than that. Everything was new, now I'm like a junkie, I seem to need more severe doses of experience to feel anything.”

In all our arguments I wanted him to deface Kevin's memory, to say it had been perverse or that he was emotionally undeveloped, that he preferred women, that he preferred me to Kevin.

Bell was quiet. There were always these moments he receded, felt soulfully misunderstood, above domestic conflict, sullied by interaction with anyone. He crossed his legs, his gaze following the jagged tops of buildings up the hill. He was too beautiful for this world.

I told him he was the devil. I'd said this often and fondly, but now I said it again, burlesquing the way I used to. “You are the devil. I should have left you in the beginning when I saw you dancing with that black boy, putting streamers around his neck, letting him sit on your lap.”

A flush spidered into Bell's cheeks. “The minister's daughter speaks.”

Once he started insisting I was prudish, moralistic, crippled by my father, there was no use arguing. He slipped into his extremist mode, called me bourgeois, claiming he was a proletarian, ridiculed my classical education, said he was a student of the streets.

“Look,” he continued. “Everyone would align with the devil if they could.”

“And then they'll drop the bomb.”

Several seconds passed before he said with perfect dramatic timing, “Pleasure, my dear, does not always equal sin.”

When cornered I sounded wifish and conventional. I was silent.

He was getting agitated, rocking himself on the couch, he spoke with force. “Admit that either of us could go to a bar, pick up a stranger and have better sex with them than we could with each other.”

“That's because when you're in love your problems follow you into bed.”

“You've told me yourself, you fantasize about strangers, about giving pleasure to several men at once.” He looked me right in the eyes, stood slowly, puffed up, trying to make his point with his body.

“I told you because I thought you would understand. It's like thinking about murdering someone versus doing it.”

He took my hand, held it palm up, rubbed his fingertips over my lifeline so it tickled. “Just imagine if I were a stranger, if I saw you on the street, noticed you because your hair covered one side of your face and your hips moved in a lazy way that said fuck me.” He put his loose hand above the first one and pulled me toward him slowly as if my arm were a rope. I could feel his breath on my face. “I'd follow you down the street to the steps of your building. Watch your slender thighs beneath your dress disappearing behind the door, thinking how wet you might be, how your breasts would be full and cool to touch. Then I'd follow you up the stairs. The door would open. In the slant of light from the hallway I'd see you nude on the bed.”

He pulled me to him, grabbed a side of my ass in each hand and whispered into my ear. “I'd sit first on the chair near the bed and touch you, trace your neck bones, my fingers rounding your breasts in tiny spirals until I got to the nipple. Then I'd bow my head and suck.”

My face pressed into his hair; smoke, eucalyptus. I could feel myself getting wet and I knew I wouldn't try to stop him. Even though this was not what I wanted, it was a semblance of it. I convinced myself that him wanting sex meant he wanted me, but it seemed naive and overly hopeful, like a schoolgirl or a dreamy whore.

“I want to fuck,” Bell said, dramatically. Like everything in bed, you pretend; pretend you are inarticulate, more animal, more powerful or weaker than you are. I was flattered he would put this energy into seduction and I allowed him to maneuver me through the room then trip me down onto the bed.

The blinds were up and the tall buildings zoomed high. He moved his tongue over my eyes and into my ears. I put my hands inside his pants, the hair there was moist and his cock was stretched smooth. Bell pulled my shirt up over my head so I couldn't see. I felt his hand working my bra clasp. Would he leave me like this? I raised my arms and he pulled the shirt off, lapped at my nipples until they stood up hard like nuts. Bell rested his head on my stomach and unlatched my pants. His fingers gentle inside the folds of wet skin. I wiggled my jeans down, getting only one leg free before Bell stopped me, spread my legs, kneeled down between them, put his hands under my ass and lifted up my sex as if he was filling his hands with water to drink.

I felt the bed fall away, and the floor, and the ceiling and the walls, and I had the sensation we were floating out the window. Time lifted too and left us, because when you're fucking it is impossible to think of the next ten minutes or the next ten years. Because fucking, when it's good, seems like everything and there is pain in the pleasure when you remember things that are horrible, until you are hardly alive, and so many times good things turn bad that you decide to live the life you fear most, the ordinary one, the one that is easy and hard. But now I think of the other time he made me stand on the chair and pulled down my tights, the way I saw his fingers disappearing inside me. But I don't want to be a lover like this so my days are spent wandering, phantoms of a tongue, a cock or a finger flaring under my eyelids.

By the way he braced himself, sheets clenched in his fists, and how he tucked his pelvis, tried instinctively for an angle that would put his sperm closer to my cervix I knew he was close. I thought of what I always do . . . putting my ass high, having someone come between my breasts. Then the usual chant to push me over . . . marry me, fuck me, marry me, fuck me, marry me, fuck me. I had a momentary thought that we were feeding on each other. His cock pulsed and there was the sensation of water rising quickly, like in a flood and suddenly I was deaf and dumb with pleasure. He fell on top of me. His chest trapped air, made a sound like a horn. It was a rule between us that we never spoke afterward. He was on the side of gesture, not of words, and accused me of ruining moments by defining them.

He slipped out, rolled over. His breath loosened and I could tell that he was falling asleep. Bell became that precious thing: the sublime sleeping child. What if I didn't need to recognize all the extra static of our relationships? Maybe everything was OK, at least for now.

For a long time I couldn't sleep. I was too conscious of the different textures of the sheet and the pillowcase, the air and the sharp slants of light. The walls, too, with their grainy malevolent shapes. I felt frightened, snuggled back into the cave of Bell's chest. This is the one I've chosen. He makes meaning for me. Not by doing anything particular, but in the way he speaks and moves and how he sleeps abandonedly beside me. Quickly then my mind slipped into dislogic and I saw a random pattern of floating objects: Bell's slender fingers, my mother's face, the deflated dye bottle, the woman in the fountain. These strung together like charms on a bracelet and I let them lead me into a silky unconsciousness and then finally into sleep.

C h a p t e r

T w o

I
N THE SILENCE OF THE BART TRAIN ON THE WAY TO MADAM
Pig's, I could only think of last night: how we slept curled close like petals, how at dawn Bell woke to tell me his dream—we were in a driverless taxi following a tennis ball I'd hit hard enough that it still soared above us. We chased the ball down a road surrounded with abandoned factories and tin warehouses, then made a violent turn into a subdivision of burnt-out ranch houses. The last thing he remembered was squatting at the foot of a dolmen of seared wood, the bloodied light at the horizon.

At first I thought the dream seemed a good omen, maybe even a mark of my power. But any contentment with last night wore off like the fading charm of a hit song. I realized the bombed suburbia was his idea of domesticity in general and our future specifically.

It seemed crazy that I stayed. Bell made me feel edgy and hysterical, but at least this way I was alive. Also, I suspected I was close to winning him and if I did he would become a docile and genial lover. But the myth of breaking a man was stupid, just as stupid as believing there would be any long-term good in the sexual ending we tumbled into last night.

The BART swayed toward Oakland. I thought love was about forgetting yourself, a sensation that calmed and centered you, like being pleasantly stoned, but all I felt was a speedy panic. I couldn't forget myself for one minute and it was disconcerting how Bell's life seemed superimposed over mine. Even now, Bell would be sitting at the table by the window smoking a cigarette, watching traffic, glancing occasionally at the play script he was to audition for today. He'd be drinking tea with a splash of bourbon to settle his nerves. But it seemed like my own hand poised on the teacup, my own ear listening to the water rattle into the tub for his bath.

Bell was exotic to me still. If I could learn to think of him as a normal person I could disentangle myself. I had never known anyone like him or seen a life like his. He took me to the velvety apartment of an actress who had a dozen fur coats and a voice that sounded like gin and cigarettes. When we went to the museum in Golden Gate Park Bell stared at the Caravaggio for twenty minutes. I loved how he was always on the side of life's losers and considered them more intuitive and intelligent than others. He wore secondhand suits and read obscure books in Greek. The slender volumes lay elegantly as tulips around the apartment. And when I looked inside, the indecipherable alphabet seemed like the language of dreams. After my bland suburban past this was as powerful as heroin.

From the elevated track I saw the front of the train curve ahead. Behind it, huge Trojan horses unloaded steel barrels from ocean tankers, and refinery stacks blasted blue fire. A police helicopter hovered. At the sharpest point of the curve I thought,
This is how things are beautiful now.
There were aluminum warehouses in dull shades of gray and green and, nearer the track, boarded-up houses.

The BART slid into one station after another. Maybe I had ruined my life. Everything you do matters too much and it's possible to poison your present relationship by actions made in the past. With Bell, it was his obsession with Kevin. I watched my own past work adversely on lovers, when I admitted juggling men and lying to them. Infidelity is a tricky business. There's less meaning in an infidelity than in a relationship, so I would lie to Bell. And though I wasn't now, the fact that I would lie might mean he was lying.

I wondered how Madam Pig would be feeling today? Pig was a huge woman who wore tent dresses with sparkly thread and patterns of tropical birds. Her hair was dyed strawberry blond and her face was always covered with a generous amount of make-up. She had long fingernails, always perfectly manicured and painted a shade of pink she said reminded her of Persia. Her name came from a story about her ex-husband having a pet pig that could smoke cigars and drink cans of beer. Pig was the best storyteller I'd ever encountered, specializing in adultery tales where women, hearing their husbands unexpectedly on the stairs, make their lovers hide naked on the fire escape.

There were lots of rumors about how she came into money. She said it was left to her by a contessa she once accompanied on a trip through the Middle East. Others said it was her husband's money, that he'd been heir to a jelly business in Wales, that he paid her off to live with a Parisian starlet. One woman told me Pig strangled him, buried him in the empty lot beside the house. People said she'd starred in blue movies, that she had been the madam of the most stylish bordello in New Orleans.

Wherever the money came from, she didn't mind spending it. Pig loved having parties with giant lasagnas and champagne fountains. She lit candles and let the drag queens fight over the record player. I met several people there: a feminist trying to destroy the myth of the aesthetic canon, musicians who insisted house music was the blues of the nineties and a performance artist who covered himself with animal blood and said narrative was dead.

At the last party, I was in the kitchen helping Pig prepare an appetizer of avocado halves with cheese and shrimp when she turned to me, held her glass out for more wine and said, “Bell's beautiful, isn't he?” I didn't answer. “But couldn't you marry someone else and take him as a lover?”

I was so startled I spilled burgundy over her fingers, tried clumsily to defend myself, saying I didn't want to get married, that I appreciated his spontaneity. She stood back from the oven, her face flushed and eyes a little teary from the heat and took my hands, looked at me as my mother might. “Well . . . I've never known a beautiful girl who wasn't doomed.”

Later that night, after two young Irishmen sang a Celtic song about a ship full of sheep sinking into the sea, Pig stood woozily, holding her glass high, and began to toast. It was late, everyone lying languidly over the furniture. “To love,” she said, “that delicate egg . . . and to evil . . . which teases and tempts us as a good lover might.” Pig moved her head with great drama. “Also, to my dear departed husband . . . who was lovely to see with a day's beard stubble.” The drag queens giggled. “And most of all, to the mental and physical wasteland of the future. Finally our inner boredom and bareness will not be intimidated by a lush and healthy nature.”

There were scattered claps all around and Madam Pig blushed, turned toward the stereo. She wanted to hear the Hildegard Knef record. But before she took a single step, Pig swayed slightly, raised her hand up as if grabbing for a butterfly, then fell to her knees and rolled onto the floor.

For a moment, she lay still, then said, her face pressed into the carpet, “Could someone please take me to my room?”

Three men rushed up, took her legs and shoulders, heaved her massive body up like it was a pool table. I cradled her head, which was limp as a baby's. On the way she spoke incoherently, told the men she loved them, said we could all come and live with her. Drool ran down Pig's cheek and onto my hand. They laid her gently on the bed, stood awkwardly, instinctively folding their hands like in church. The oldest one gestured with his head that they should leave. He squeezed her hand and her eyes opened, she said, “Let them dance.” I threw a blanket over her, closed the drapes against the faint orange industrial light. She asked me in a blurry voice to come over three times a week, that she needed me now and would pay me well, because she suspected very soon she would die.

The BART stopped high above the street. Walking down the steps past the cement columns, I saw, lying in the tall weeds, two lovers pressed close, old newspapers and fast-food containers scattered all around them. The girl's hair was long, stretched out like ivy. They didn't notice me. The noise from the highway and the BART passing created a kind of negative silence around them.

This part of Oakland was barren compared to the civilized patter of San Francisco, even anemic with its tin buildings and fenced lots. In front of the station was a supermarket that sold grapes for thirty cents a pound, a variety of peppers, prickly pears and other Mexican products. Behind the market stood a row of pasty houses with dirt yards. There were empty crack vials all over the sidewalk and a dead cat in a cardboard box near the dumpster.

A man in a white Ford by the pay phones kept saying, “Hey, skinny. Hey, skinny.” I scanned him quickly. He wore a Caribbean shirt open to show his chest hairs and a slender gold chain. He whistled, but I still wouldn't turn. “Your pussy stinks,” he said as I walked away. “I can smell it from here.” He laughed like he really thought he was funny. I hurried past his headlights with decals of Jesus, past a wall of graffiti tags and a silent brick factory. Through empty window frames I could see figures sitting on mattresses spread over the floor.

Pig's house was covered with vines. Hers was a stone Victorian, impressive still with the cherubic faces on every cornice. The gutter loosened and slumped, jammed now with the sharp leaves of the lemon tree. Paint chips blew off like snow in every wind. And the flower boxes of silk irises had paled in the rain. Every other house on her street had been demolished, the earth turned over, the ground pockmarked with deep filthy puddles. Beyond the mud, the houses were boarded up, adjacent lots filled with trash and sofas swollen with rats. The path to the door was marked with chunks of slate. Burrs stuck to my pants as I passed. Inside I paused to rest, picking off the burrs, letting my eyes adjust to the cooler dark air. On one side, the dining room, which always had a scent of rose petals and chamomile tea. Here was a long walnut table and strange paintings of stylized factory workers in a maze of equipment and smoke. Madam Pig had her garnet glass collection displayed, hundreds of red plates, mugs, goblets, salt shakers, candle holders, gravy dishes and ashtrays. With the curtains drawn they seemed demure. But on the nights Pig lit her candles, the glass sent candied light every which way. The living room door was shut, but I could hear the grandfather clock behind the velvet couch.

“Is that you, Jesse?” Madam Pig yelled from the kitchen.

“It's me!” I answered, walking the hall toward her voice. Along the wall hung pastel portraits of Madam Pig's only child, Madison. The girl had shell-white skin and blond hair. It might be her paleness or that there were ten portraits on each side, but they always seemed to glow and animate like a film clip.

Pig sat at the round table in the kitchen eating cold raspberry soup from a bowl and drinking red wine. She looked well today, but with her bulldog face and strange red shade of bouffant hair, she was always a spectacle. Since Pig never left the house I knew her flush could not be from exercise, but a particularly lucky application of make-up. Today her eyebrows were superbly drawn.

“I love cold soup. It goes so well on these days when I'm the last person in the world.” Pig stared into her soup as if something she lost years ago would surface any minute.

“Soup's good,” I said, never knowing if her exclamatory statements were meant to be answered.

She looked up. “Jesse,” she said quickly, “did you bring some mangoes?”

I shook my head. “But I can go look for some.” Pig looked at me like I was crazy, her eyes wide. “Why would you want to go out there?” She gestured to the window and the mud lot.

“I meant I'd go to the store to look.” It was always hard for me to know what to say to Pig. Besides, whatever I answered never seemed to pertain to her reply. “No,” she muttered, “no, no, no . . .”

I sat in an overstuffed chair. I loved this room. The wallpaper, a big bawdy pattern of magnolias drenched in hazy moonlight. Pig sat across from me at the round cherry table with mismatched chairs. At first I thought the upholstered chairs looked strange in the kitchen, until I realized the house's inner logic of abundance and how silly Madam Pig would look in a spindly chair.

I watched her elegantly spoon the soup into her mouth and flip the pages of an old magazine; there were stacks all over the table. She read them, some even twenty-five years old, like it was new information.

“You look well,” I said.

At this she raised her head, gave me a look that showed her disapproval of innocuous pleasantries, plunked her spoon into the bowl and said suspiciously, “Who told you that you have to do what you don't want?” I could tell by the set of her chin that she had been thinking of this all weekend. “Your mother?” Pig asked. “It's a shame what mothers do. What they really mean is that women get stronger by the bad things that happen to them. Not that you have to make bad things happen to you, and more importantly, pretend to like situations that you don't.”

The last phrase made my eyes well, and Madam Pig said, “Oh honey, did he leave you again?”

I nodded my head and wiped my eyes, staring at the glass bowl filled with oranges in the table's center. I told Pig how he had gone to get cigarettes and not come home all night. Then how I searched for him and spied while he had spoken with the little man.

She interrupted me to say thoughtfully that she didn't hate her former husband, “I only wish he never again treats anyone like a cow.” She had a vacant look then, like she had to go inside and think of what she said.

I felt uncomfortable in the silence and stared at her magazine, one picture of an astronaut floating unconnected to surface or spaceship—he seemed threatening with the black mask of his helmet twinkling.

When she saw me staring she said, “It's amazing what you can learn from watching someone.”

“I don't know that I learned anything from watching Bell.”

“Once you see your lover doing something you could never discuss with him then sooner or later you will leave.”

I thought how once at a bar Bell was mesmerized by a pair of drag queens in their long black wigs, go-go boots and miniskirts.

“Can't you just start up with someone else?” she asked sympathetically. “Oh I know I'm always rallying for it, but adultery is so much better when you have an ax to grind.”

I said, “Bell is the one I have chosen,” and the sound of my voice frightened me. It was firm and inarguable like a born-again Christian.