The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (12 page)

Here's the thing we didn't think of: one afternoon, Aunt Trish came home from work with a fever. She turned the key in the lock, heard Gladys Knight blasting out of her bedroom, hurried in, and found me manacled to the bed with the skirt of a pink crinoline gown over my head, being slapped by Shelly as Kat photographed us, shouting, ‘Great! Do that again. Freeze. Okay! Beautiful!' Aunt Trish was standing there, pale, shivering, and horrified, when I turned and saw her.

I moved out that afternoon, while Aunt Trish was sleeping off her flu, having called the police and watched the woman she loved flee her apartment. I couldn't bear to be there when she woke up; I was too ashamed.

The only person I knew in New York, aside from Aunt Trish, was Jim, the diabetic with the missing toe. His apartment was in a Brooklyn basement with a sizable garden. He stayed there rent free, because his old friend Roy, a drug dealer in his fifties, kept some of his supply stashed in Jim's broom closet and various other locations in the apartment. Jim also sold drugs for Roy on occasion. Kat had taken me to his place a few times. Jim always doled out shortbread cookies and black coffee, then handed Kat a brown paper bag as she was leaving. This sideline, along with disability checks for his diabetes, enabled Jim to live the life of an artist and man-about-town. Though well below the poverty line, he always had a bit of cash on hand, and he welcomed me to his modest home like a visiting queen.

I had the sense, as I dropped my duffel bag on Jim's shiny floor painted the color of pomegranates, that I was slipping off the edge of what I had known the world to be and floating in
dangerous space. Aunt Trish had been family. Jim was unknown territory, a new life. Suky would go crazy if she knew. My excitement was liberally spiked with guilt. I would call her soon. I would. But for now, I sat at Jim's kitchen table, sipping strong coffee brewed on a paint-spattered double burner and eating a piece of buttery shortbread. The hot coffee melted the sweet, rich cookie in my mouth. I looked out the glass of his back door, into his tiny garden, walled off by a fence of old painted doors.

Everything in the little apartment had been considered in some way, was either lovely or bizarre or instructive. The shelves were packed with books about everything from cave painting to rocket design:
Nuns' Habits Through the Ages. The Art of
Holograms Revealed
. I spent hours that first afternoon flipping through books, learning about painters, mostly, from Piero della Francesca to Bonnard, Manet to Pollock. Jim's work was stacked neatly, facing the wall. Shyly, he turned a piece around to show me. It was a collage made up of countless shreds of paper, movie tickets, newspaper clippings, warning labels, which all cohered to make a landscape. It was obsessively constructed, but the composition reminded me of the paint-by-numbers sets I used to work on when I was a kid. Until I found the little figures hidden in the rocks or the shrubbery – incongruous beer maids peeled off of beer bottles, the man on the Mr Clean bottle, a naked calendar girl. Jim would Xerox the images and shrink them, so they looked like evil elves lurking in a pleasant countryside constructed out of refuse.

Jim rarely sold his work, he had no gallery, but he was ferociously dedicated. He would wake late – eleven or twelve – then perform his elaborate toilette, which included applying a light coat of Elizabeth Arden foundation makeup to his sallow skin and covering his thinning pate with black shoe polish. Only then did he begin to work, sorting through the bins of scrap paper, bits of rag, string, hair – anything to make his landscapes thrum with color and texture. In lieu of rent, I was sent out
some mornings to look for material, and I would root around in the garbage, on the street, in magazine racks, for the perfect scarlet, the most acid cerulean.

At three in the afternoon, I went to work. I had found another restaurant, down the street, to hone my serving skills in. When I got off, at nine, Jim was just hitting his stride. I marveled at his ability to work all day, stop to make some inventive pasta dish for the two of us, then go back to his labors for another six or seven hours, finally smoking a joint and hitting the sack at dawn. He would do this for days at a time, then take a few days off and sleep. He was surprised the first night I came home from work bone tired, stood by him as he fitted a torn corner of salmon pink tissue paper onto the rectangle of board on the table, and said, ‘Can I have some?'

‘Have some what?' he asked.

‘Speed.' He looked up at me, surprised but smiling. ‘How do you know?'

‘That's the one I know about,' I said.

‘How old are you now?' he asked, crinkling his forehead.

‘Seventeen.'

‘Did you graduate from high school yet?'

‘That's what I want it for. The test is next Thursday. I have to study.'

‘You can have a little,' he said. ‘But don't overdo it. By Thursday you'll be insane.' So he gave me a round, white pill that he kept in a misshapen ceramic pinch pot on a shelf next to the sea salt. I swallowed it. The speed hit me hard, like the smell of ammonia. Everything in the room snapped into extreme focus; it all seemed extra clean, and bright. I hadn't felt so awake, so cheerful, so filled with purpose since the day I swallowed ten of Suky's finest back in junior high. ‘One thing you can't do,' Jim said, ‘is start talking. You start talking on this stuff, you never stop.' I retreated to my makeshift bedroom – a daybed blocked from the rest of the room by a swath of old
pink silk – and read two entire books, one on history, one on math. Hitherto ungraspable concepts glided into my mind like melted butter into pancake batter.

I emerged from my lair to tell Jim how incredibly smart I had become, he said something in response, and we were off. We talked for six hours straight, said things so perceptive and profound that it amazed us no one in the history of the world had yet come up with them. Jim even took notes, our ideas were so brilliant. Finally, we crashed. When we woke, hours later, to read the scrawled notes he had written during our jam session, and found that they contained pearls of wisdom such as ‘flounder are bottom-feeders, hence should never be eaten with carrots or other vegetables which grow underground or you are liable to develop depressions, NUTRITION IS EVERYTHING,' I was dumbfounded, but Jim just nodded his head with a rueful smile. When I opened the history and math books that I had wolfed down, I recognized next to nothing, except what I had already gone over the old-fashioned, nondrug-induced way, so I went back to my old method of studying. I passed the high school equivalency test.

Surprisingly, Jim had a girlfriend: a Swedish woman named Olla. She was around forty, an artist, very kind to Jim, and she didn't seem to mind me hanging around. We would go out sometimes, the three of us, to museums or movies. Jim and Olla taught me about painting, the history of it and the point of it. I came to recognize different periods, different artists. I went to the galleries and even started forming my own opinions about the new art.

Jim had reminded me how harmless he was so many times that I figured sex was not a part of his life anymore. He would lounge around the apartment with his socks off, feet up. The smooth gap left by his missing pinkie toe made him seem curiously unreal, like an imperfect doll. But Olla was always kissing him, making much of him, and guiding him gently into his
bedroom for an hour or so at a time while I sat in the garden, or did the dishes, or went out on a walk. I liked Olla, and I was determined to seem as nonthreatening as possible. After Mr Brown and Aunt Trish, I didn't want to wreck anyone's life, and I didn't want to end up on the street, either.

I still don't know the reason for what happened next. I don't understand it. I mean, I was doing relatively well. I had a job, a place to live, friends, I had finished school.

It started with a normal dose of speed one night. We were all going out dancing: me, Jim, Olla, and a bunch of their friends, hard-core bohemians in their forties, missing the occasional tooth. I hardly ever went out anywhere, so it was a big night for me; I didn't want to drag around exhausted from work. I danced all night, and in the morning I just couldn't bear the idea of going to bed and waking up with my head raw and jangled, my thoughts morose. So I swallowed some more, to keep up the happiness. Jim didn't know. He wasn't counting his stash. I went to work high and slapped those plates of eggs Florentine and Belgian waffles onto the tables so quick that whipped cream and hollandaise sauce spattered all over my arms. A few customers needed sponging down, but at least they got fast service.

That night, I decided to go out on my own and see what happened. Before I left, I got up on my tiptoes and reached into the clumsy clay speed pot like a kid filching M&M's. By now I had been levitating for forty-eight hours. I was starting to feel omnipotent. I took the 2 Train into Manhattan with no idea of where I was going, jumped out of my seat at Fourteenth Street. Hot air laced with feces swirled around the platform as I hurried out of the train. There was a sound in my head, a high, metallic whistle. My movements were fluid, precise, like those of a perfect machine. My mind felt spotless, sterilized, my thoughts gleamed like stainless steel. The people and cars around me, by contrast, were pulsing in a staggered, irregular pattern, freezing one moment,
then oozing by in slow motion the next, as though time had become as elastic as toffee. A gleaming scenario played and replayed itself in my head with razorlike precision; I was going to find that pregnant girl with the flaxen hair who was holding on to her own leash, the one I had seen the time I came to the club with Kat and Shelly, and I was going to save her life. I would track her down in her filthy squat and swoop in like a commando, excise her from her perverted existence, buy her a square meal, take her home to Olla and Jim. We would all live together, the five of us, a family. Her child would be fair, with violet eyes and a saintly disposition.

I searched the streets around there, trying to find the club Shelly had taken us to. All I could remember was five steps down, a metal door. At last, I found it. The sweaty, sharp-eyed woman behind the Plexiglas booth looked up from her book. She didn't know anything about the pregnant girl. She told me this was her first night of work here, and she couldn't stand the fucking heat.

I pushed the heavy plastic fringe aside, ducking my head, and emerged into the windowless library. The ceiling was very low. There was no music on. Purple and red lights flashed mutely. As I walked in, the few souls wandering around the room eyed me hungrily, like bored guests at a failing party, sizing up a new arrival. I wondered whether I was moving strangely. Music came on – a rigid beat. I walked into the back room, a kind of cave, also lined with paperbacks, and pierced with tiny cubicles. On a narrow stage, a middle-aged woman in a leather corset danced for a middle-aged man. The door of one of the cubicles swung open; a male figure emerged and walked away fast, head down. A light-haired, slender girl remained in the cubicle, her back to me, buttoning her blouse. I stood, waiting. She swiveled around and looked at me expectantly. She was young, but her face was puffy and slack. ‘I thought you might be someone else,' I said, turning.

Back in the main room, Lisa and Stan were setting up their act. Maybe the pregnant girl would be coming in later. She had
loved Stan and Lisa. Remember how she had stood, transfixed, her wide eyes unblinking, her small hand grasping the handle of her leash, as though her owner had abandoned her? A spotlight came on, illuminating the pair. I walked up to them and stood just inside that pool of light, exactly where I had seen the pregnant girl standing. I was almost close enough to touch them. Others gathered around them, too, waiting for the performance to begin, eyes glazed, hungry and vacant.

Lisa lay on the low bed. She was blindfolded with a band of black leather. Her bare belly was pale and flaccid, a concave hammock of flesh hung between two wide-set, mountainous hip bones. Her large breasts spread out across her chest. The skin around the nipples was crowded with marks. Some of them looked like cat scratches. Others were raised, like burns, or white, old scars. Stan tipped a metal beaker of molten wax, letting a fine thread of it dribble onto her skin, precise as an alchemist. As the wax hit her skin, Lisa flinched and turned her head to the side. I gawked with the others as the pool of wax turned white and hard. Later, when Stan knelt to untie her blindfold, Lisa looked up at him adoringly with unfocused sapphire eyes and mouthed, ‘I love you.' I felt embarrassed to witness this sudden moment of intimacy. The other observers had melted away. I stood fast, unable to budge, flashing lights throbbing in my peripheral vision. Lisa sat up as if alone, heels together, legs flopping open, and started peeling dried wax off her tits. Stan looked up me curiously, then bent to unplug his hot plate.

A man approached me then. He was narrow hipped, effeminate, with full lips and a halo of dark curls. The first three buttons of his tight, silky shirt were open and revealed a tawny, hairless chest.

‘Hey, you all right?' he asked. I told him I was looking for someone. He had never seen the pregnant girl. I smiled and talked to him, feeling so charming as I moved really fast and jerked my arms around. All I can remember of our conversation is the effeminate man saying most people thought he was
gay, but he was straight –
with a twist
. He said that several times. His name was Mandy. I don't remember how it happened that I asked him to drive me to Connecticut, but there we were, at dawn, on Route 84 heading toward Danbury in his tangerine Camaro. Mandy told me about his life – how he was in auto sales with his father, how he had appeared in seven of his father's commercials, starting from the age of three. I was barely listening. I was scared to see Suky.

We stopped for a pee at a truck stop on the outskirts of Danbury. He took a little Chinese purse embroidered with a dragon out of his glove compartment, unzipped it, and held it open so I could see: white powder in a plastic bag. Feeling myself coming down slightly, I snorted a staggered white zigzag of powder off a glossy car sales brochure. As I sniffed the line through a dollar bill, felt the acidic, chemical kick in the back of my throat, I read: ‘200 dollars cash back with every new Nissan truck purchased!'

There was a picture of a stocky man on the brochure. He was standing beside a red truck. He had a mustache, and Mandy's full lips. Mandy's dad, no doubt, smiling up at me. I felt a little sorry for the guy, given what I was using his face for. I knew the cocaine was a mistake as I snorted it. Combined with all the amphetamines I had taken in the last two days, it clamped down on my mind like a set of iron teeth. Every noise sounded like danger to me. My chauffeur's profile, with its aquiline nose and plump mouth, seemed malign. I imagined him cutting me into lamb-chop-size chunks and tossing them gaily out the window all the way to Suky's house. At every stoplight I imagined opening the door and escaping.

We drove up to the Delton Green at twenty to seven. ‘I've done a lot of crazy things,' said Mandy. ‘But this takes the cake. You said your father is a minister?' I nodded. ‘Yup. This takes the fuckin' cake.' He made ready to get out. ‘Oh,' I said. ‘Do you mind waiting for a little, um, and then I'll … come get you … if …' He turned up the radio and sank down in the seat, nodding
with a louche expression. Wondering what I had promised him, I walked to the side door of the house. The first birds were singing. The air smelled sweet and clean. I picked up the hollow plastic rock beside the welcome mat, ripped the silver key off its Velcro square, turned it in the lock.

The house was quiet and warm. I walked into the kitchen. The clock was ticking. It sounded so loud. The house smelled yeasty, sugary, as it always had. I was suddenly very hungry. I looked in the bread bin. There were three cinnamon donuts in there. I took one and bit into it, crunched the sandy sugar between my teeth. It felt so good to be home. Such a relief. I heard a sound on the stairs. I turned. The decline in her appearance was shocking. Her pale skin was luminous, almost translucent, the skin around her eyes dark, her red hair lank and stringy. She had lost weight. She started to scream, then she put her hand to her mouth and wept.

‘Thank God,' she said.

‘I'm a high school graduate, Mommy,' I said. My voice sounded completely foreign to me. I must have been talking very loud. ‘Ssh,' she said. ‘Your father.' I whispered now, expanding on how well I had done on the test, exaggerating my results, believing myself instantly. She hugged me. I just let her, at first, my arms dangling at my sides. After a while, though, I put my arms around her and pressed her to me. She felt so fragile, like a bird.

We embraced for a long time. Then I made her put her feet on my feet. She was sort of giggling, embarrassed, but I insisted she do it, just the way I had put my feet over hers when I was little. And we danced. Her face was so close to mine. I could see the new wrinkles around her eyes. The flesh over her eye sockets was sinking. Her breath was minty. She was looking up at me with deep affection – our old intimacy, as if we were the only two people in the world, as if we were newlyweds. I glanced at the clock. A few seconds to seven. Almost time for her first dose. She never missed it. The minute hand thumped into place beneath the twelve. Seven o'clock. She gently began to release her hold
on me. A spike of anger went through me then. I held my arms rigid. She put her hand on my forearm, pushing me away a little. ‘Okay, honey,' she said.

‘You have an appointment?' I asked. She must have seen murder in my face, because she looked frightened.

‘Let me go,' she said in her squeaky drawl.

Then I put my face close to hers. ‘Look in my eyes,' I said. ‘You see anything?' She was struggling to get out of my grip now; I had her by the shoulders, I was moving her to the wall, I didn't know what I was going to do to her, but I hated her so much, I wanted to kill her. ‘I'm like you now, Suky, see? I'm fucking high like you wish you were right now, you little junkie!'

Her face twisted into a grimace of rage and indignation. She bared her teeth, spit formed on the edges of her mouth, her eyes narrowed, she called me a liar, a runaway, an addict. She actually looked like she was turning into an animal. It was terrifying. She wanted her dose. I had her pinned to the wall. She was hissing, ‘Get out get out get out get out!' Her bones felt so flimsy I could have snapped them. I took a fistful of her hair, held her head back. Her eyes widened, scared, expectant. I had no idea what to do next. So I kissed her, on the mouth. Passed my hand over her nipples. I felt like I was slashing her throat with a knife. Looking back on it, it seems overdramatic, but at seventeen, a blizzard of coke and speed racing through my head, I thought I was saying it all: I was telling my mother that she had treated me like a lover and a baby, a possession, but not a person, never a person. I think she got the message. Anyway, she started screaming. She was just screaming and screaming, and Des thundered downstairs in his brown robe, growling like a grizzly. That was my signal. I ran straight into Mandy's Camaro, tears streaming down my face, wiping my mouth like there was shit on it.

By the time we got back to New York, I was curled up in a ball, staring out the window. Understandably, Mandy was sick of me. He dropped me at the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, saying,
‘You're a downer, man,' and he was off to Jersey, where the girls are sunny. I walked to the subway and got back to Jim's apartment just as he and Olla were getting up. They were relieved to see me. They asked no questions. We all had coffee and shortbread cookies, and Olla tenderly laid out one of her pretty sundresses for me to wear when I woke. She put it out on a chair, where I could see it, to cheer me up. I lay my head on her lap as she stroked my forehead. I could feel the soft pillow of her bosom on my ear. I slept and slept, and when I opened my eyes, it seems to me now, it was three years later, I was twenty and living on Orchard Street.