Bodily Harm (28 page)

Gilt-edged security, anyway, said Jake.

Is that a pun? said Rennie.

Don’t ask me, said Jake, I’m a functional illiterate and proud of it.

But up and coming, said Rennie.

As often as possible, said Jake. You think we could set this to music?

This isn’t a forties movie, said Rennie.

You could have fooled me, said Jake.

Rennie felt she was going to cry. What she couldn’t bear was the effort he was making to pretend nothing was different, the effort she was making to help him pretend. She wanted to say, I’m dying, but that would be melodrama, and anyway she probably wasn’t.

Jake began rubbing her left thigh, slowly up and then down. I feel awkward, he said. I feel you don’t want me to be doing this.

She was watching him but she didn’t know how to help him. I can’t believe, she thought. Why not? The words in her head came one at a time, as if they were being spoken by someone else. She watched them form, rise, burst. It was strong grass.

You don’t have to be perfect, he said.

He bent down and kissed her again, supporting himself with his arms so his torso didn’t touch her. He’s doing this for me, she thought. It’s not for him, he doesn’t want to.

He lifted her and slid the black satin shorts down and put his mouth on her.

I don’t want that, she said. I don’t need charity. I want you inside me.

Jake paused. He raised her arms, holding her wrists above her head. Fight me for it, he said. Tell me you want it. This was his ritual, one of them, it had once been hers too and now she could no longer perform it. She didn’t move and he let go of her. He put his face down on her shoulder; his body went limp. Shit, he said. He needed to believe she was still closed, she could still fight, play, stand up to him, he could not bear to see her vulnerable like this.

Rennie knew what it was. He was afraid of her, she had the kiss of death on her, you could see the marks. Mortality infested her, she was a carrier, it was catching. She lay there with his face against her neck, thinking of something she’d seen written in a men’s washroom once when she was doing a piece on graffiti.
Life is just another sexually transmitted social disease
. She didn’t blame him. Why should he be stuck with it? With her.

After a while he raised his head. I’m sorry, he said.

So am I, said Rennie. She waited. You’re having a thing with someone else, aren’t you?

It’s not important, said Jake.

Is that what you say about me? Rennie said. To her?

Look, said Jake, it’s either that or a warm wet washcloth. You won’t let me touch you.

Touch, said Rennie. Is that all? Does it matter that much? Isn’t there any more to it than that?

She stroked the back of his neck and thought of the soul leaving the body in the form of words, on little scrolls like the ones in medieval paintings.

Oh please
.

They walk inland, uphill. Rennie tries to think of something neutral to say. He’s carrying her camera bag and the other bag. It’s the minimum, but she shouldn’t have brought so much.

It’s about five-thirty and although the asphalt road is hot it’s not too hot, the trees cast shadows. There are little houses set back from the road, people are sitting out on their porches, the women wear print dresses, some of the older ones have hats on, and Paul nods to them, they nod back, they don’t stare but they look, taking note. A group of girls passes, going down the hill, fifteen- or sixteen-year-olds in white dresses, some with bows or flowers in their hair, which is braided and pinned up; they look oddly old-fashioned, costumed. They’re singing, three-part harmony, a hymn. Rennie wonders if they’re going to church.

“It’s up here,” Paul says. The house is concrete block like the others and only a little bigger, painted light green and raised on stilts above the rainwater tank. There’s a rock garden covering the hill, cactus and rubbery-looking plants. The shrubs at the gateway are dying though, there’s a many-stranded yellow vine covering them like a net, like hair.

“See that?” Paul says. “Around here they break pieces of that off and throw it into the gardens of the people they don’t like. It grows like crazy, it strangles everything. Love vine, they call it.”

“Are there people here who don’t like you?” Rennie says.

“Hard to believe, isn’t it?” he says, grinning at her.

Inside, the house is neat, almost blank, as if no one is actually living in it. The furniture is noncommittal, wood-frame chairs of the kind Rennie has seen in the beach bars. Beside one of the chairs there’s a telescope on a tripod.

“What do you watch through it?” says Rennie.

“The stars,” says Paul.

On the wall above the sofa there’s a map, on the wall facing it another, island after island, navigational maps with the soundings
marked. There are no pictures. The kitchen is an open counter with appliances behind it, a stove, a refrigerator, no clutter. Paul takes ice cubes from the refrigerator and fixes two drinks, rum and lime. Rennie looks at the maps; then she goes out through the double doors, there’s a porch with a hammock, and leans on the railing, looking down over the road to the tops of the trees and then the harbour. There’s a sunset, as usual.

The bed is expertly made, hospital corners firmly tucked in. Rennie wonders where he learned to do that, or maybe someone comes in to do it for him. Perhaps this is the spare bedroom, it’s empty enough. There are two pillows, though nobody lives with him. He untwists the mosquito net, spreads it over the bed. “We can go for dinner, if you like,” he says.

Rennie’s wearing a white shirt and a wrap skirt, also white. She wonders which she should take off first. What will happen? Maybe there’s no point to taking off anything, maybe she should offer to sleep in the other bed. All he said was that he had room.

Nevertheless she’s afraid, of failure. Maybe she should be fair, maybe she should warn him. What can she say? I’m not all here? There’s part of me missing? She doesn’t even have to do that, failure is easy to avoid. All you have to do is walk away.

Then she realizes she doesn’t care. She doesn’t care what he thinks of her, she never has to see this man again if she doesn’t want to. She never has to see anyone again if she doesn’t want to. She’s been hoping for some dope, he’s in the business, he must have some; it would help, she thought, she’d be able to relax. But she doesn’t need it; already she feels light, insubstantial, as if she’s died and gone to heaven and come back minus a body. There’s nothing to worry about, nothing can touch her. She’s a tourist. She’s exempt.

He’s standing in front of her, in the half-light, smiling a little, watching her to see what she’ll do.

“I thought you didn’t want that,” he says.

He doesn’t touch her. She undoes the buttons on the blouse, he’s watching. He notes the scar, the missing piece, the place where death kissed her lightly, a preliminary kiss. He doesn’t look away or down, he’s seen people a lot deader than her.

“I was lucky,” she says.

He reaches out his hands and Rennie can’t remember ever having been touched before. Nobody lives forever, who said you could? This much will have to do, this much is enough. She’s open now, she’s been opened, she’s being drawn back down, she enters her body again and there’s a moment of pain, incarnation, this may be only the body’s desperation, a flareup, a last clutch at the world before the long slide into final illness and death; but meanwhile she’s solid after all, she’s still here on the earth, she’s grateful, he’s touching her, she can still be touched.

J
ake liked to pin her hands down, he liked to hold her so she couldn’t move. He liked that, he liked thinking of sex as something he could win at. Sometimes he really hurt her, once he put his arm across her throat and she really did stop breathing. Danger turns you on, he said. Admit it. It was a game, they both knew that. He would never do it if it was real, if she really was a beautiful stranger or a slave girl or whatever it was he wanted her to pretend. So she didn’t have to be afraid of him.

A month before the operation Rennie had a phone call from
Visor
. Keith, the managing editor, thought it would be sort of fun to do a piece on pornography as an art form. There had already been a number of anti-porno pieces in the more radical women’s magazines, but Keith thought they were kind of heavy and humourless. They missed the element of playfulness, he said. He wanted a woman to write it because he thought they’d crack the nuts of any guy who tried to do it. Rennie tried to find out who he meant by “they,” but he was vague. Tie it in with women’s fantasy lives, if you can, he said. Keep it light. Rennie said she thought the subject might
have more to do with men’s fantasy lives, but Keith said he wanted the woman’s angle.

Keith fixed it up for her to interview an artist who lived and worked in a warehouse down off King Street West and did sculptures using life-sized mannequins. He was making tables and chairs from the mannequins, which were like store mannequins except that the joints had been filled in and plastered over to make them smooth. The women were dressed in half-cup bras and G-string panties, set on their hands and knees for the tables, locked into a sitting position for the chairs. One of the chairs was a woman on her knees, her back arched, her wrists tied to her thighs. The ropes and arms were the arms of the chair, her bum was the seat.

It’s a visual pun, said the artist, whose first name was Frank. He had one woman harnessed to a dogsled, with a muzzle on. It was called
Nationalism is Dangerous
. There was another one with a naked mannequin on her knees, chained to a toilet, with a Handy Andy between her teeth like a rose. It was called
Task Sharing
, said Frank.

If a woman did that, said Rennie, they’d call it strident feminism.

That’s the breaks, said Frank. Anyway, I don’t just do women. He showed her a male figure sitting in a swivel chair with a classic blue pinstripe business suit on. Frank had glued nine or ten plastic dildoes to the top of his head, where they stood out like pigtails or the rays of a halo.
Erogenous Zone Clone Bone
, it was called.

You’re going to find this boring, said Rennie, but your work doesn’t exactly turn me on.

It’s not supposed to turn you on, said Frank, not offended. Art is for contemplation. What art does is, it takes what society deals out and makes it visible, right? So you can see it. I mean, there’s the themes and then there’s the variations. If they want flower paintings they can go to Eaton’s.

Rennie remembered having read these opinions already, in the file on Frank given to her by
Visor
. I guess I see your point, she said.

I mean, said Frank, what’s the difference between me and Salvador Dali, when you come right down to it?

I’m not sure, Rennie said.

If you don’t like my stuff, you should see the raw material, he said.

That was the other part of Keith’s plan, the raw material. The Metro Police had a collection of seized objects, Keith said; it was called Project P., P for pornography, and it was open to the public. Rennie took Jocasta with her, not because she didn’t think she could get through it on her own, she felt she was up to almost anything. Still, it didn’t seem like the kind of thing you would do by yourself if you could help it. Someone might see you coming out and get the wrong idea. Besides, it was Jocasta’s kind of thing. Bizarre. Human ingenuity, that’s what you should stress, said Keith. Infinite variety and that.

The collection was housed in two ordinary rooms at the main police building, and this was the first thing that struck Rennie: the ordinariness of the rooms. They were rectangular, featureless, painted government grey; they could have been in a post office. The policeman who showed them around was young, fresh-faced, still eager. He kept saying, Now why do you think anyone would want to do
that?
Now what do you think
that
could be for?

Rennie made it through the whips and the rubber appliances without a qualm. She took notes. How do you spell the plural of
dildo?
she asked the policeman. With or without an
e?
The policeman said he didn’t know. Probably like
tomatoes
, Rennie thought. Jocasta said it all looked very medical to her and she understood that in England it was the truss shops that used to sell under-the-cover bondage magazines, before sex supermarkets came in. The policeman said he wouldn’t really know about that. He opened a cupboard and took out something even the police hadn’t been able to figure
out. It was a machine like a child’s floor polisher, with an ordinary-looking dildo on the handle. He plugged it into a wall socket and the whole machine scooted around the floor, with the handle plunging wildly up and down.