The Mammoth Book of Short Erotic Novels (34 page)

Pell had already taken too many risks that night. She already felt like she’d stepped off the edge and had yet to hit the hard reality of the ground. Traps and tigers: beasts and pitfalls
for the unwary loomed all around Pell. She moved through her days with a careful-footstep caution, delicately testing the ice in front of her – wary of almost-invisible, cloudy lines of
fault. She knew they were there; she’d felt the sudden falling of knowing that she’d stepped too far, moved too quickly, over something that had proven, by intent or accident, not to be
there. Pell didn’t push on the surface, didn’t put all her weight, or herself, on anything.

But then everything changed – she’d seen Arc and her eye.

The plastic chimed once, then collapsed in on itself. Turning first into a squashed oval, the glass cracked, splintered, then folded – the white seams of stress turning into sharp fissures
of breakage. The red, freed of its cheap plastic prison, tumbled, cascaded out and down onto her.

Pell had worn something that she knew wouldn’t fit with the rest of the crowd. The official color of San Francisco, she knew, would fill the place with charcoal and soot, midnight and
ebony. White, she’d decided, would pull some of their eyes to her, make her stand out – absence of color being alone in a room full of people dressed in all colors, combined.

“Looks good on you.”

The shock of the wine on her white blouse tumbled through Pell with a avalanche of warmth to her face. The decision to wear cream had come from a different part of herself – a part that
had surprised her. She’d relented – abandoning safety for one night in the risky endeavor of wearing something that the rest of the crowd in the tiny gallery wouldn’t. She was
furiously chastizing that tiny voice, that fashion terrorist that had chosen the blouse over other, blacker ones, when it decided to have a last say, a last statement.

And so Pell responded, “Not as good as you would” to the tall, leggy, broad-shouldered girl with the artificial eye. Which was beautiful, but not as beautiful as the rest of her.

Pell’s reason was Jare. While secretly she could never wrap her perceptions around the gaunt boy’s paintings, she still came when he asked. Jare, Pell, Fallon, Rasp
and Jest. They weren’t close – but then foxhole buddies aren’t always. They weren’t in combat, but they could be. All it would take would be one computer talking to another
– no stable job history, thus conscription.

All it took were two computers, passing pieces of information back and forth. Till that happened, they hid and watched the possibility of a real foxhole death in a hot, sweaty part of Central
America fly by.

Foxhole buddies. It was Jare’s term – some fleck of trivia that’d hung around him. They didn’t have an official name for their tiny society of slowly (and in some cases
not too slowly) starving artists, but if they did then Pell was sure that Jare would smile at his trivial term being immortalized among a band of too-mortal kids.

That was Jare. While the rest of them tried to focus on pulling their paintings (Pell, Jare, and Rasp), music (Jest), and sculpture (Fallon) as high as they could, there was something else about
Jare – something, like his paintings, that refused to be understood. His techniques were simple enough, broad strokes of brilliant color on soot-black canvas, but his reasons were more
convoluted.

Or maybe, Pell had thought earlier that evening – before turning a beige blouse red and seeing the woman with the artificial eye for the first time – they both are simple: like his
works, broad, bold statements designed to do nothing but catch attention. He was like his paintings, a grab for any kind of attention – an explanation too simple to be easily seen.

In the tiny bathroom, Pell tried to get the wine out of her blouse. Contradictory old wives’ tales: first she tried cold, then hot water. The sink ran pink and so, soon, did her
blouse.

The woman with the eye stood outside the door, a surprisingly subtle smile on her large mouth. Every once and a while she’d say something, as if throwing a bantering line to the shy girl
inside to keep her from drowning in embarrassment.

“Who’s he foolin’? I can do better crap than this with a brush up my ass.

“You should see this chick’s dress. Looks like her momma’s – and momma didn’t know how to dress, either.

“Too many earrings, faggot. What year do you think this is?

“Hey, girl. Get out here with that shirt – better-looking than this fucking stuff on the walls.”

Cold water on her hands, wine spiraling down the sink. Distantly, Pell was aware that her nipples were hard and tight – and not from the chill water; that down deep and inside, she was
wet. It was a basic kind of primal moisture – one that comes even in the burning heat of humiliation. Finally, the blouse was less red than before. Planning to run to where she’d
dropped her old leather coat to hide the stigmata of her clumsiness, her excitement in two hard brown points, she opened the door.

The tall woman smiled down at her, hot and strong. In one quick sweep of her eyes, Pell drank her tall length, strong shoulders, columnar legs. She was trapped, held fast between the hot eyes
she knew must have been staring at her, pinning her straight to her embarrassment, and the presence of the woman.

Her eye,
the
eye, clicked a quick chime of precision – as if expanding its limits to encompass the totality of Pell. Pell did not mind her intense examination. It added, with a rush
of feelings, to the quaking in her belly, the weakness in her knees.

“Gotta splash. Wait right here.”

Of course she waited.

After a few hammering heartbeats, the door opened and she came out – butchly tucking her T-shirt back into her jeans – and Pell was again at the focus of her meticulously designed
sight.

“You live anywhere close? I’m tired of this shit. You?”

“Down the block. Just on the corner,” Pell said, trying hard not to smile too much.

The woman downed the small sample of red in her glass and, looking for a place to put it down, and not finding any, just dropped it with a sharp plastic clatter on the floor. “Show me. It
can’t be worse than here. Too many fucking artists.”

“Arc. Named myself: didn’t like the one the old man stuck me with,” she said as they walked out the front door.

Pell wanted to paint her. She refused herself.

Naturally she resisted after Arc had frowned and snorted at the gallery, at Jare’s streaks of black on red. But she resisted for other reasons – the same reason
that she didn’t allow herself to imagine what Arc might look like under flickering candlelight or reflective with a gleam of post- or pre-passion. Pell kept thoughts of her lips on the tall
woman or putting her hard beauty, her street wise elegance down on rough sketch paper because she felt the night crystal . . . no,
glass
around her. Fragile magic was whipping around them as
they walked the short walk from Jare’s too crowded, too noisy, too artistic space to Pell’s tiny flat. She doubted Arc could feel it, but for Pell it was a chandelier hovering around
her, clear and invisible, but sharp and precarious – one wrong move and it would break and she would be standing on a too busy San Francisco boulevard all by herself.

The apartment was a score. Expensive, yes – too expensive to really live in, but it was still a prize in a city that tried to hide the fact that one out of ten people slept in a doorway or
in an abandoned car. A friend of a friend of one of her Foxhole Buddies had scored it – a happenstance of urban mythology: an apartment for rent. The toilet barely worked, the shower
didn’t (she’d taken to sponging herself in the cold, slightly brown, almost yellow water from the sink) and the only furniture she could afford was old, broken, or too ugly for even the
hungry-eyed scavengers: her mattress was on the floor, her dishes were all chipped, her only chair wobbled like it sat on a ship at sea.

Key in lock. The same sticking door frame that forced her to lift and push. Frantic jangling thoughts of whether she’d cleaned recently, just how many dirty dishes were in the sink, and if
she’d left her usual panties on the floor.

If the dishes in the sink had grown a brilliant fungus, or a pair of wadded underwear stained weak colors of dirt were underfoot, her guest didn’t notice or say. What she did, flopping
hard on Pell’s bed, was smile an arc of teeth and say, “Hungry?”

Food was not on Pell’s mind. Nothing much was, actually. The only thing that seemed to be living between her ears was an ache to pick up a pen, pencil, or brush and trap this woman –
hold her on a piece of paper, on something she could frame on her wall.

She nodded absently as the woman reached for Pell’s phone, dialed a number. After a moment, she passed the phone over, saying, “Give them your cash number. I’m tapped right
now.”

The fastfood guy spoke so fast as to be all but unintelligible. The image of zits and splattering grease was strong in Pell’s mind as she rattled off her numbers and confirmed the
purchase.

When she hung up, Arc was sprawled out on her bed, staring at the ceiling. “What a crock of shit.”

Pell didn’t know what to say. All thoughts of art left her as she stared at the woman’s soft tummy peering out like a pale, toothless smile between jeans and T-shirt.

She wasn’t – Pell realized, sitting down in a moment of heart-hammering bravery on the side of the bed next to her – really all that pretty. But then Pell never really found
“beauty” to hold up. Beauty, she thought to herself, was fragile and temporary. Like the weather – rain following sun following snow. Arc’s forehead was high, her thin brown
hair pulled back into a thin severe ponytail – so severe as to make her look as if her skull was simply painted the color of bleached earth. Her face was luckily saved from the shallowness
that Pell had seen too many times. Her cheekbones were broad commas under her eyes. She lived on the street – Pell knew that without asking – but she hadn’t been run over, run
down. She had stolen some of the street, used it to keep herself strong. While it was her left eye that had caught Pell, snapped her attention to its elegantly constructed utility, its artistic
function, it was her right eye that kept her staring, looking at the bow-string and hardwood woman. Her right was pure gray, a kind that comes from raw iron behind heated by hard years, then
suffused with air – a wind developed from a pure determination not to let the ground, the pavement, streets and sidewalks win. Her left eye was technological brilliance. Her right was steel:
hard and reflective.

Her body was long and lean, her legs being her best feature. They had the strength good legs have from walking everywhere. Under her T-shirt her breasts were small and conical, with a kind of
gravity-defying shape that instantly had Pell dreaming of their color, the way they moved; her nipples were twin dark points, crinkled areolae visible even through the thick cotton of the
T-shirt.

“You know that guy?” Arc said, still on her back, still staring at the ceiling. Like the rest of the tiny apartment, the ceiling was bare, empty save for a thin yellow water stain.
Her eye click-click-clicked as she looked up at the ceiling. Pell wondered what she found so fascinating. It took her a while for the woman’s words to pass through her mind, layers of
puzzling till she knew she’d meant Jare, Jare’s show.

“Sort of. He’s a painter. Not really a friend of mine, but I help him and he helps me sometimes.”

“Cocksucker,” Arc said, bringing herself up onto her elbows. “He owes me. Told me to come and just hang out. He said he’d credit me. Not a lot but enough, you know? I can
make better for doing a lot more but this sounded easy, so I said ‘sure’. Asshole. Didn’t pay me up front, then says that he was only going to shell out if he got enough people.
Then only if someone bought one of his fucking paintings. Fuck him.”

“He’s like that,” Pell said, seeing a quick montage of Jare approaching Arc on the street – seeing a chance for her hard presence, her burning will. The shallow people
he’d invited to the show might not remember his paintings, his red streaks on soft black, but they might remember her, Arc’s style and strength, and thus
him
.

“You like him?” Both the steel and the steel gray eye looked at Pell.

She shook her head. “Not really,” Pell said, finally answering her question. Her face had gotten hot under Arc’s intense perception. Click-click-click. Cannon barrels of
perception. Click-click-click. Pell wondered what she found fascinating in her. Like her apartment, Pell was simple and plain. She knew that and often relished in her plainness – it was a
carefully constructed ring around herself, a barrier of mediocrity. She knew her hair was dull and flat, black but spared a kind of style. Her face, she knew, was soft and full – a dull moon.
She knew her nose was too small and her eyes too big. Her teeth were good, at least, but they were like a child’s – delicate and fine. Her body was sturdy and that’s how she used
it. Wide hips and fat tits. She also walked everywhere but with Pell the softness stayed, locked her down to her suburban heritage – marked her for what she was: a tourist in the city. She
had come to see it, not become a part of it.

“Good,” Arc said, leaning back onto the bed again. “Just wanted to make sure.”

Pell didn’t know what to say, so didn’t say anything. Half-formed words and sentences tumbled through her mind but couldn’t congeal enough to be spoken. So they sat together
– quiet, clumsy – till the food arrived: a big black man wearing Kevlar body armor and carrying a huge foam container marked with the bold red swatches of Chinese characters. The food
was food, and they filled the silence with quick eating.

When the food was gone, Arc yawned: “Fuck, I’m tired.” She pulled off her shirt, showing breasts pale and white, beautifully shaped sculptures of pale skin. Areolae like rough
brown coins, nipples like dark finger-tips. “Shitty day. Good night,” she said, crawling into Pell’s bed and fumbling for the line switch to her broken lamp.

Pell didn’t move. Frozen, she watched her hunt.