Fucking Daphne (34 page)

The next week or so after that was kind of nice. We stayed in a lot, just the two of us, reading or playing Twister. I wondered a couple of times if Daphne was just trying to keep me hidden so I couldn't embarrass her anymore. But I figured she knew she could just order me to vanish.

Every now and then I'd glance at the window and notice the sun was out or it was raining or it was night. It was nice to be shut-ins, like little old ladies or people who were boycotting everything. I had never had a boyfriend or girlfriend in high school, so I soaked up the novelty of feeling like half of a couple. Maybe I'd finally arrived, here in this yellow one-bedroom with the lumpy futon. Crimson and clover, like Joan Jett said. Crimson and motherfucking clover.

And then Daphne wanted me to go to an orgy with her, for the first time in ages. She took me to this little hidden trapdoor in the bathroom at a particularly grimy coffee shop near 16th Street. Underneath the café was a huge dungeon that ran along Valencia Street, all the way to 24th. The basements of every boutique,
bookstore, and tapas restaurant turned out to be connected, and they were all full of people fucking or being tortured. Walking through one of the connective tunnels, we could hear people over our heads, talking about white-trash caviar, or the old-new narrative, or what kind of waist you were supposed to wear this year. But underneath, a group of women were electric-shocking each other. And there was a circle jerk in a centrifuge.

I asked what the party was for, and the Original Daphne said it was my going-away party. She tied me to a giant wheel, and I lost count of how many people spanked or nibbled or bit me, while Daphne's strap-on got bigger and bigger inside me. I felt hyperaware of everything happening to me and around me, yet I barely knew I existed. I shouted myself hoarse and kept shouting, spinning, and climaxing. When they finally stopped, I was so exhausted I fell asleep, still tied to the wheel.

I woke up in New Jersey, my dreads shaved off, wearing the denim overalls I'd worn on my first day in San Francisco. I was just a few blocks from my parents' house, so I walked home. I snuck inside, not ready to talk to Mom and Dad. I didn't hear anybody home, so I went upstairs and slumped in the shower. As I washed myself, all my tattoos peeled, leaving fresh skin underneath, a little pink. I tried to hold them in place, but they slipped through my hands. My skin blanked out. When I looked down, all my ink had pooled in the drain, in the shape of a lowercase d. I started to cry into the showerhead.

 

 

 

 

 

 

W
hen I enter a room, I am someone who wonders what it's like watching me enter the room. I am always the life of the party I've crashed. This time, the party is in a community recreation room beside a swimming pool in a nondescript condominium complex somewhere in California. I take a hit off the helium tank left behind from some kid's birthday party earlier today.

“Masturbation is just like fucking ghosts,” I say. My voice reaches the cartoon stratosphere and everyone within earshot laughs, but not because of what I said.

“Who wants to fuck ghosts?” asks Judy Partygoer, which proves at least one person is listening.

“Not real ghosts but made-up ones, ghosts that animate themselves in your memory and make you think they're real. This is what happens after people pronounce themselves dead to you, when
all they're doing is keeping on keeping on without you in their life.” As I finish my thought, my voice comes back down to earth. “They haunt you just the same. What difference is there, really, between someone leaving this life and someone leaving the room, when either way all you have are memories?”

I sound so serious, talking about death like this, that the laughter stops. I take a long drag of helium before carrying on.

“Ghosts are who you fuck when you're alone in your room.” I say this in an uptight Tiny Tim drawl, clearing the air for more laughter.

“Aw, Dig, you're just on the make,” Judy Partygoer says. “Been hard up a while now?”

“You're killing me, Judy,” I say as I leave the room. Still, I linger outside and keep my ear to the door, just in case someone says something about me. I'm not on the make, and Judy Partygoer hardly knows me. But I have a feeling she knows what's eating me. It's been almost a year, and I should be over Daphne by now.

Later, after all the guests have gone home, I end up walking around all night, looking for other parties to crash and for a place to crash myself, as I'm coming down off this helium cloud. I find neither. Nor do I shake off my desire to be with Daphne again.

Eyes closed and hands down my pants, I can still see Daphne as if it were yesterday. The way I remember it, we spent an autumn together in a basement flat, Daphne with her NEA grant and I with a far-flung notion of becoming a railroad worker. Her dreadlocks were so long, they almost reached the tops of her go-go boots. I remember the time we saw Patty Hearst walking alone on California Street and, after arguing the pros and cons, agreed not to kidnap her, which isn't to say the desire wasn't there.

I was fond of tracing with my finger each of the tattoo artists' strokes on Daphne's body. My fingers would lead the way for my hands, which would traipse along to other places. The sex was so high-flying and experimental that it would have made John Cage blush, but, looking back now, so many months since we broke up, what I remember most are the moments on the periphery: the bathroom-door confessionals and wine-soaked bedsheets, and how we pulled back the shower curtain to reveal the Wizard of Id hiding there.

And there was the time I stole her laundry. She had left me alone in the kitchen. The studs in the walls were exposed where the Sheetrock had come off. In the bathroom, her clothes dropped to her ankles as she climbed into the shower. The bathroom door left unlocked, I snuck in and took them. Later, when I meant to give them back, I couldn't remember what I had done with them.

It never made sense to me why I did it. “Something's not right in my head, I guess,” I explained to Daphne. Her look made it clear that she had suspected my guilt all along in any number of domestic larcenies—single socks vanished from the dryer, uncorked bottles of wine that tasted mysteriously like Welch's, and the disappearance of her little red book from her personal drawer.

Yet when we broke up, it was not over her growing mistrust; it was over dolphins. I told her that I wanted us to go down to Mexico, where they have swimming tanks for tourists to swim with dolphins. I told her I wanted to have sex with her in one of those tanks.

“With dolphins?”

“Not with dolphins, with each other. We'd pretend we're dolphins.”

“Where are the dolphins during this?”

“Just swimming around,” I said. I didn't bother to look up to meet her eyes. I knew I'd lost her.

It was all too much for Daphne. It had become more erratic than erotic, our fun giving way to blue funk. She had other inclinations, and couldn't have left me any faster if she'd been wearing rocket-powered roller skates.

Hard times fell on me after that. It was a colder-than-usual January in the months after Daphne left. Subzero gusts froze migrating seabirds midflight and dropped them from the sky like stones. Bundled-up children braved the elements and wandered the near-empty streets of San Francisco with baseball mitts, hoping to catch a falling bird. Every time I went out, I heard the deep, whistling buzz of one of them plummeting, on a crash course with my head. I would duck just in time.

Spring found me worse off than winter had. By April, the daphne bushes that survived the cold snap had stopped blooming, and I still had made no connection with Daphne herself. My mood in freefall, I took to only wearing clothes I found in the street. They were other people's garbage and never washed all the way clean. I looked like Frankenstein's monster, my body held together by the seedy clothing that used to rub against the skin of other people. Daphne wouldn't have recognized me on the street.

My ability to cope gone, I turned to helium. Before I knew it, I developed a dependence. It didn't affect my health, but my voice became so elflike and ridiculous that no one would take me seriously anymore. “C'mon people, it's helium, not laughing gas,” I'd defend myself to the few friends I had left, but they'd laugh just the same.

I suppose it's inevitable, something I've been waiting for but not actively seeking out. I bump into Daphne. As I'm waiting for my laundry to dry, she pulls up at the Laundromat in her Veg-o-Matic car, with its broken grille that makes it look like a hammerhead shark with dark lipstick.

“Hello, stranger!” I call out, all sotto voce, as I'm between helium fixes.

“Dig,” she says, like someone who doesn't recognize me but says my name. I know from the way she says it that things are still over between us. For the umpteenth time it sets in: I am dead to her. This moment feels like the time I cut myself on the arm after a helium bender. I heard a hissing sound and felt like I was beginning to deflate.

Daphne says nothing more. Maybe it's the sight of me in my suspenders and woolen duck trousers covered in holes from someone else's cigarette burns, my hair a mop of black spaghetti, my shirtless torso, my shoeless and filthy feet. My degeneration may have startled her for an instant, but she recovers quickly. She leaves the car running while she heads inside to start a load. Back outside, she's on her way without another word, revving away in her four-wheeled eggbeater.

After taking a moment to dry-heave, I walk back into the Laundromat. My load tumbles and tumbles without drying, but I don't move it to a working dryer. A few feet away, Daphne's clothes start their rinse cycle. The thought of stealing them won't let go of me. I could steal them for old times' sake. I could steal them and extract her essence from them. If I can't have Daphne back, I can take this part of her with me. I could wear her clothes instead of
my own. I could leave my garbage clothes here for the next clown who came along; that is, if they ever dry and stop tumbling. Night's falling. I need to act now.

Fucking someone's clothes when she's not wearing them is the next best thing to fucking that person when she's not wearing them. After dark, I take Daphne's clothes to the only place where I can have any privacy: that poolside community recreation room where I was just yesterday. Rummaging around, I find coat hangers, a stash of birthday-cake candles, and, in a drawer full of games, a Ouija board. I put Daphne's clothes on hangers and hang them from the rafters, alongside the streamers left over from another kid's party. Following the directions in the little red book I stole from Daphne's drawer a long time ago, I fold myself into the lotus position, holding a burning birthday candle in one hand and the Ouija planchette in the other. I call forth the spirit of Daphne to engage with me in the astral delights, the erotical erotic, all the sex positions from our heady past: the Heaven 360, the Ice Maker, the Rock 'n' Roll Suicide, the Orange Julius, the Tin Pan Alley, the Triple Gainer, the Triple Sec, the Dust-Swept Windbag, the Winnebago Back Seater, the Buckminster Fuller, the Otis Birdsong, the Monaco Marriott, the Panky Curl, and many others with names less indicative of what the position involves.

Daphne's ghost doesn't come.

The only way to find her will be to go to her. I open the closet door, where the helium tank is stored. I hold my mouth to the nozzle of the tank and draw in a deep breath of the gas. I close my eyes. Then I'm off. I can feel my balloon-fueled soul loosening itself from my body and bobbing along the ceiling without clothing. Looking
down, I see my body, still in the lotus position, with candle wax dripping down its fingers. It's a pathetic sight.

Caught by a breeze, my soul whisks its way out an open window, slowing as it passes the window of a condominium resident. She is naked, posing in front of her window for no one other than herself. She is all arms and legs, and it's hard to see anything other than her red hair, which she wears up, as if to keep it off her skin. She's not Daphne and nothing like Daphne. I remember her from somewhere, but her skin and limbs, every mole and freckle on her arms and shoulders, the dimple on her thigh that she is rubbing with her thumb, are new to me.

Suddenly I know who she is: She's Judy Partygoer from yesterday. She opens the window and invites me in. I'm game, at least until the helium wears off.

“I've been thinking about what you said, and you were wrong,” she says.

“Wrong about what?”

“Masturbation is not like fucking ghosts,” she says.

“What is it, then?”

“It's like fucking a placebo.”