Black Rabbit and Other Stories (4 page)

I rise from my chair, sidestepping the stupid cat licking its asshole by the chair leg. What the fuck is that? I want to say, because I've always wanted to say that to an animal licking its own ass, but I say
nothing. I'm not one hundred per cent today. This morning my mother made me a three-egg frittata when I told her I only wanted two eggs. Two eggs, Ma. Two, Jesus Christ. My mother worries about me. You need a wife, she tells me, and a family of your own. You're not getting any younger. I don't have the heart to tell her what I really need. But I ate the entire frittata anyway and she had chopped up the onions too rough or something because this massive heartburn in my chest started up, and the repeating onions, and my own breath blowing back in my face—even a mint isn't helping right now.

I find a tall glass on the steel rack by the sink and run the tap for a minute before I fill it with water. I drink some, top up the glass, and return to the table. The girl asks me how old I am. I tell her it's none of her business.

“I'm going to be eighteen this Sunday,” she says, twirling her studded tongue.

“Great,” I say. “You can vote in the next election.”

She looks at me blankly then pulls another cigarette out of her pack. She offers me one. I hesitate but accept it. Touching my hand she lights my cigarette with a pink disposable then lights her own. I take a puff and hold it in my lungs so long I start seeing spots and stars and almost pass out. The girl smiles as though she knows exactly what just happened. She knows. She's one of those people. I let my head clear before I try another puff. Then it's nice. Smoking in the kitchen with the soon-to-be eighteen-year-old girl, puffy lips and ice-blue eyes in pink.

“Why are you here again?” she asks.

I tell her it's just business.

“Whatever,” she sniffs. “Just business. Like, what does that mean? Are you opening a sub shop or something? Be real for a second, eh.” She has straight white teeth with a tilt to her smile and she knows how to lower her eyes when addressing a male.

I crush my cigarette in the ashtray and get up again despite my bad knees. I refill my glass and drink it down completely.

“I think you should leave,” she says.

“I don't think so,” I say.

“What if I call the cops?” she says.

“I don't think Eddie would appreciate that,” I say. It goes back and forth like this for a while then the girl takes a big drag of her cigarette and falls silent. The cat fucks around in the corner with a crumpled piece of aluminum foil. The kitchen could use some air. I get up and try the window but the girl says Eddie never could open it. Then I notice the thick nails riveting the frame to the sill and return to my chair. I should remove my jacket but I am vain and with my paunch well-hidden behind my leather I am a lion; without it I am not. A svelte young man like Eddie gathers girls like a squirrel gathers chestnuts, I imagine. He's suave. I once met a fellow in Acapulco who looked just like him. When I first saw Eddie I . . . why make myself feel worse than I must? In leather I impose, I know I do. I come off as a big tough man, not a fat soft man. It doesn't matter perhaps. But it does.

“You're sweating,” says the girl.

I brush drops off my forehead and force a smile.

“What was that?” she says, almost coming out of her chair. “Did you smile? Oh my God! The man smiles. For a second I thought you had no sense of humour. Like you weren't human or something. Like when Eddie was fucking me up the ass the other day he was so serious. You'd think
he
was being corn-holed! Would you like another cigarette?”

Her frankness appals and amuses me. Then it saddens me. Things being what they are. I refuse the cigarette. It's amazing how thirsty I am. But if I drink too much water then I'll have to pee. My bladder isn't what it used to be. It would be embarrassing to have to excuse myself, so I suffer.

“Are you in the Mafia?” she asks.

“Well,” I say, swallowing. “That's an outdated term. I'm contracted by an agency, and I happen to be of Sicilian heritage, but I am not a
mafioso
in the traditional sense. I'm university educated and perhaps a little more refined than my predecessors.”

“Hmm.”

A long silence follows. I've been reprimanded more than once for
venting to my superiors about some matter that concerned me, for speaking out when others thought it more prudent and life-affirming for me to swallow my tongue and sew my lips together and keep my feelings, my true nature, closeted. Well, perhaps that explains enough, or not enough, but enough for now. While I'm garrulous, I don't like to make things too clear. It softens the blow. The girl jangles her bracelets. She asks me what my favourite position is.

“I beg your pardon?” I say.

“Your favourite position, when you're fucking.”

I clear my throat, feel myself blushing. She's rather enjoying this. “When did you say Eddie was due back?” I ask.

She shakes her head.

I look at her face. I notice the freckles now, on her cheeks, and her long neck. She stops smiling only when her teeth dry, then she wets them with her pink tongue and smiles again, gummy, her nostrils dilating. She's mocking me. You're mocking me, I want to say.

She shrugs. “I was going to dump Eddie today,” she says.

“You were?”

“Yeah. That's why he went out. He knew it was coming. I told him we needed to talk and that I wanted to tell him the truth about where I was the other night. He refused to hear it, so like he raged for a while and then split and I figured he'd be a couple of hours tops before the jealousy got to him and then when he got back I planned to tell him to fuck off and die, that I hated him, and that it was revenge for him fucking my best friend Patricia a month ago. She confessed it to me when we got drunk the other night. She said he came on to her at a party and then offered her coke. Well, she did the coke of course, and coke makes her crazy, so then he took her to her mother's house and banged her right in the living room. Right on the sofa. Can you believe that? She said it hurt. Eddie has a big dick.”

Mercifully, she falls silent again, her breasts heaving. Ignoring her digs and my thirst for a moment, I ogle the pistachio bowl. One would not hurt. But who am I kidding? One. Just try to eat only one pistachio. Perhaps annoyed with my lack of interest, the girl spreads her arms and asks if she has nice breasts. I tell her I think so.

“You
think
so,” she says, crossing her arms under them.

Whatever. I look at the copper plate, the hammered horses, buttocks glinting, and wonder if Eddie purchased it or if a friend gave it to him as a housewarming gift or some such thing. How long has he lived in this house? A little shabby, but in a solid neighbourhood. She asks if I want to see them, to see her breasts. Eddie paid for them but he thinks they're too big. Are they too big? Are they? No, they're not, I lie, jerking my eyes away, the balloons in question galling under the circumstances. What is the fucking cat doing? I look for it, my cheeks burning. It has leapt to the top of the counter and watches me thin-eyed, motionless, even the tail, coiled behind it like a felt rope. What? Is it going to jump at me or something? That would be embarrassing.

“How much money does he owe you?” asks the girl.

“It's not a question of money, sweetheart,” I say.

She smiles. “You just called me sweetheart. That's so nice.”

I should say something more but my mouth, too dry to open, remains shut. Not that I had anything to add—sweetheart was a manner of speaking. How awkward. When I finally think of something to continue the conversation, to be amiable despite everything, the moment is gone. The timing would have been wrong had I asked her, for instance, what she planned to do for her birthday. Her birthday. Poor girl.

“Do you like pink?” she asks, staring at her fingernails. I like pink. I like it a lot. In my aesthetics class—”

“You studied aesthetics?”

“Yes, at beauty school.”

“Oh, oh,
beauty school
.”

“I learned that pink is a colour made by mixing red and white. There are many different shades of this colour. You've heard of hot pink, eh?”

The cat reappears at my feet. It's purring. You'll live, I think, because words fail you.

“So you went to university,” the girl says.

“Yes. I studied philosophy.”

She blinks.

“I wanted to be a professor.”

“What happened?”

“Well, things, things.”

She locks her fingers together and bangs them lightly on the table. What does the gesture signify? Her fingers, quite pale and long. Her pale wrists, blue-veined, fragile. Her fingernails painted pink . . .

What's this? She doesn't have a clue. Look at her, I think. She must have been strawberry shortcake before Eddie got his greasy paws on her.

“Are you going to kill Eddie?” she asks.

I reassure her that I don't plan to kill him, exactly.

“Is there anything I can do?” she wonders, licking her lips, trying in her way, trying.

But it would have made no difference. I'll save her the indignity.

“Pink was not a colour known to Shakespeare,” I say. “It was invented in the seventeenth century to describe the light red flowers of pinks, flowering plants in the genus
Dianthus
, named pinks because the edges of their petals appear to be cut by pinking shears.”

“You're definitely not in the Mafia,” she says. “Who do you work for again?”

“That's not important,” I say, reaching for the pistachio bowl.

In snooker the pink ball counts for six points. They call blue movies pink in Japan. Pink cherry blossoms abound in anime. The Giro d'Italia leader wears a pink jersey, not a yellow one. Feminists used to decry the colour pink. In Roman Catholicism pink symbolizes joy and happiness. Years ago my mother went to Rome and brought me back a pink Versace shirt that was a size too small. I wore it anyway. My uncles laughed at me. They associated pink with homosexuals.

She regretted eating the second helping of shepherd's pie but it was her favourite and she rarely got home for dinner anymore. She spent most of her time after school and on weekends with her boyfriend, Joe. Her mom disapproved of Joe because he was twenty years old and Alicia was only fifteen, but she could do nothing about it. The age of consent was fourteen. Alicia knew her rights. As long as she didn't get kicked out of school and didn't catch anything or get pregnant, her mother had no say in the matter.

Alicia looked at herself in the full-length mirror in the hall and thought the red and white striped sweater she had borrowed—without asking her sister Mattie—made her look fat. Her belly bulged even when she sucked it in and stood up as straight as she could. But it didn't bug her that much, being fat. She had a pretty face and big breasts and this helped. Guys at school said she was hot. Joe said he liked his girlfriends with some meat on their bones.

She couldn't wait to see him. She planned to be nice no matter what. They'd been arguing a lot lately. She tugged at the sweater but this didn't help. Mattie would kill her if she saw her doing that; she spent a lot of money on her clothes. Alicia wondered if she had left for work yet. She stripped at a club in Niagara Falls. Their mother didn't care. Mattie was eighteen, old enough to make her own decisions. Not to mention the fact she pulled in over a grand a week. It was crazy money. Alicia thought she might want to strip some day. She was a good dancer and it wasn't as if you had to sleep with all those bozos.
Mattie said they'd never hire a butterball like her, but maybe she'd thin out by the time she turned eighteen.

In the bathroom she argued with her younger sister Jen about the broken blow-dryer. Jen insisted the thing just blew up in her hand; Alicia suspected she had tampered with it. Jen had a reputation for fucking with things. She got away with a lot of shit because she was only twelve and the baby of the family. She took medication for a mood disorder but that didn't help her much. Jen raged whenever it suited her. She grabbed a fistful of Alicia's hair and yanked her out of the bathroom.

As they scuffled at the top the stairs their mom didn't intervene; she knew better than to get between the sisters when they locked horns. Alicia freed herself and almost knocked her sister down the stairs, catching her at the last moment and then regretting it when Jen took a final whack at her and fled to her bedroom, the little bitch. Alicia returned to the bathroom and combed out her tangled blonde hair. Scratch-marks striped her neck. She covered them with foundation. She tugged the comb through her hair. The blonde came from a box, but it suited her ice-blue eyes and fair complexion. She looked ordinary with brown hair. She applied makeup to her face, blue eye shadow, and a dark red lipstick that Joe said turned him on.

In her bedroom she called Joe but got his answering machine. It was the end of the month; welfare cheques were cashed. He was probably still out hooking people up with smoke or coke or whatever else they needed. He made a lot of money dealing drugs but Alicia worried about him getting busted. She said she'd wait for him if he ever went inside, but in her heart of hearts she wasn't so sure about that. Joe wasn't always nice to her. Back in August, on her fifteenth birthday, he didn't buy her a present; he said it slipped his mind and promised he'd make it up to her. He never did make it up to her, though she never reminded him, fearing his reaction. He could be pretty touchy.

Downstairs her mother and Mattie sat on the chesterfield, smoking a joint, Mattie in her red coat having one for the road. Their mother, a pothead, said she'd rather see her girls smoking dope than
doing harder drugs or drinking. Their alcoholic father nearly killed her, so booze was as bad as crack in her eyes. Alicia didn't like drugs, not even pot. It made her sleepy. She liked drinking. Joe liked drinking too, but he smoked pot from morning to night and liked doing lines now and then. He let her do coke with him once but it made her nostrils burn and her throat hurt and when he rubbed some on his penis and told her to suck it, she almost puked because with her throat numbed she took too much of him down. He had a big penis, with a purple head. It smelled sometimes. Whenever she sucked him off she thought she was going to puke. She didn't like the taste of his cum, it was bitter. She had sucked off a few boys before and almost always refused to swallow. She didn't see the point of it. One time she swallowed her ex-boyfriend Tony's cum and it tasted lemony. Mattie yelled something at her about the sweater. Their toothless mother laughed; without her dentures her mouth looked like a black hole with smoke spewing out of it. Alicia peeled off the sweater and whipped it at Mattie. Then, wearing just her black bra, she put on her bomber jacket. Her mother laughed so hard she started coughing, hurling phlegm. Mattie kept yelling at her even as she went out the front door.