Dark Passions (21 page)

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Authors: Jeff Gelb

BOOK: Dark Passions
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“You're making this up,” I said.
“Am I?” He gave me an odd little tilt of the head. “By the way, I admire the way you flung in that tidbit about Red being a man, disguising it as both a joke and a question.”
I think I blushed, just a teeny bit.
“Very sneaky,” he said, signaling for a refill. “You were trying to goad me into reaffirming that I am not a homosexual myself, in order to bolster your acceptance of me. You see? People never
say what they're thinking.
”
I decided to ambush him with it. “You're not ... are you?”
“More pansexual, if you'd like a mere word,” he said, with the air of a prepared answer. “But let's consider some of our other candidates.”
I did a quick scan-and-sweep. “Boots,” I said. “Long brown hair. Standing next to the booth by the restrooms.” Niall Otheringame scrutinized her for exactly five seconds. “She knows most men in the room want her and most women in the room hate her. It's that good length of leg, heft of bosom, the aqua eyes that doom all comers, and she is aware of her armament. She puts on makeup the way killers load shotguns. She tries to present a tough exoskeleton, but inside she's a terrified aesthete, so she marginalizes all contact and tries to play the rowdy freebird by fucking bikers and car mechanics—anyone pitifully easy to control. It's child's play, literally. She's got great excuses for avoiding any real commitment and can talk anything into a fight; hence, it's simple to shuck the tough guys and maintenance fucks she accumulates, because when it comes to real conflict, they're hopelessly outclassed. She runs through enough of them to amass a backlog of anecdotal drama galore, plenty to float her to the next diversion. People are fast food to her; interchangeable protein units that burn at variant rates, in assorted seductive colors, and she couldn't work up genuine despair even if she had a manual and a how-to video. That's the tragedy of her existence. She trolls one night per week. The rest she sits at home considering methods of suicide suited to what she believes is her personality.”
“So what you're saying is ... ‘not for me' too?”
He smiled, nodded. “Most of these creatures don't have the grace or honor to just kill themselves, which is what they should really do. Save our gene pool. As for imagination, well, decanting wine from crushed marbles would be easier. You're dealing with delusional beings who've talked themselves into mock-life. Listen to them right now—you'll intercept all sorts of prattle about lifestyles, spiritual delusions, and half-baked horseshit homilies usually shoplifted from the pages of someone else's book. All kinds of reasons why they should live or dodgy justifications as to why the world at large owes them any damned thing; a menu of felicitous philosophies at lunch-special prices; discount dreams; bargain-rack, second-hand aspirations. Most were more honest when they were children: I want to be a firefighter; I want to go dinosaur-hunting. Now that's all polluted, and we're looking at children, spouting childish nonsense from adult mouths, in adult bodies governed by childish intellects. Listen to them rationalize themselves long enough, and you'll start to hear a melody in the buzz of a mosquito.”
Niall Otheringame held up a finger to emphasize his point. “I'm not trying to brag, or shock you, or redefine your boundaries, or anything like that. I'm just telling you what I know, and from your expression, you want me to keep talking. Guess that means you're not gay, right?”
I blushed, or blanched, or both, and it seemed to please him.
“Joke,” he said.
“The guy with the corporate buzz cut,” I pointed out.
“Violent,” said Niall Otheringame. “The thinnest veneer of humanity. A yeller, a hitter. Beneath his lacquer of health and fitness he conceals a sadistic need to infect women with various diseases as punishment for their being female. Chlamydia, yeast infections, urinarytract inflammation. He has this sensitive face he whips out for Phase One, but his real orgasm comes from seeing that glint of fear in the eyes of his victims when he whips out Phase Two.”
“Jesus,” I said. “This is getting a lot more complicated than
all women are crazy, all men are stupid.
”
“You want crazy? Check the guy-magnet in the corset and fishnets.” Niall Otheringame tipped his recently refilled glass to single out a dark siren with crystal green eyes, definitely dressed to threaten as a primary culling filter. She had the rapt ear of no fewer than three male candidates and could assuredly pick and choose at any time.
“What am I not seeing?” I asked him.
“That the façade is all there is,” said Niall Otheringame. “As far as relationships go, she behaves according to a very strict playbook that no one else has heard of, let alone read. The word
relationship
to her means
menu of assumptions,
which means rules, which she holds as immutable
law.
Any of these rules can be invisibly violated at any moment, to the eternal regret of the transgressor. Basically, her life is a howling void of nothingness. She wants someone to
complete
her, as the movie phrase goes. To fill the gap in her life. Unfortunately, in her case the gap is 95 percent of the life. You could pour your entire identity into hers and reap no reward save the privilege of being drowned second, after her, as she pulls you under with her. So ... who's stupid, or crazy?”
“You mentioned relationships,” I said. “I don't think that's what most of the people here are after. I mean, look at them.”
Niall Otheringame smiled as though to spare me from the chagrin of having my thin attempt at foxing him exposed again. “No? You're still just seeing the surfaces, not the clockwork. Believe me when I say nearly everyone in here radiates the need, the craving, for an architecture they mistakenly
call
a relationship. They muck through these clumsy couplings with an eye out for something better. They delude themselves they can meet their soul mate in a bar. Then, if luck prevails—they always depend on luck—the candidate must pass a previously inapplicable set of standards; what if you meet your soul mate but they don't fit the templates of position or power? What if one wants to breed and the other doesn't? If they're not the right race or the correct age, there are a hundred variables further down the ladder that all handily disqualify the potential soul mate if one can't find a realistic excuse for saying no. So they all know they're going to flush and try again, but they delude themselves and presume a mental faculty beyond their reach. They're born to wallow about but won't admit it. I'll give them this: they're willing to keep on trying. Isn't that why you came in here in the first place?”
“Wow,” I said. “Busted, I guess.”
“Look at that bubbly, effervescent one, the woman just coming through the door,” he said. “Attractive, yes?”
My tongue got thick in my mouth. “Yes, indeed.”
“You want to run as fast as you can in the opposite direction,” Niall Otheringame said. “She got so preoccupied with the idea that men only wanted her for her sex that she actually stabbed herself in the vagina with a coring knife, the custom kind that costs nearly a hundred bucks at Williams-Sonoma and is made from Japanese stainless steel? Out, damned G-spot! She wound up in the hospital and had to indulge a bit of plastic surgery. Now she has a shopping list of “special needs” she inflicts on anyone unlucky enough to get her clothes off. It's designed to drive lovers away, their horror proving their unworthiness and justifying her own self-mutilation. Her identity had localized to between her legs, and when she cut that up, she found that there was not a lot else to recommend her to the world at large, so it became self-prophecy fulfilled, in a sense.”
“Now you're
definitely
making this up,” I said.
“If you say so.”
That was an alarm phrase; it meant
Oops, I've succeeded in scaring you off.
The kind of thing you say as a verbal prybar to begin the process of working free and scooting out the door.
Niall Otheringame merely smiled again, as if he had just reached some sort of satisfactory decision or conclusion. He excused himself and headed for the restroom. I thought perhaps I should stop trying to read everything he did for deeper motive. He had me thoroughly swoggled.
Always remember that past a certain point, a smile is just teeth.
Not long after that, a woman came barside to introduce herself as Clarity. She had very long, dark hair and violet eyes. She looked to be in her mid-thirties. Young enough to know; old enough to know better. Her hands had long-pianist fingers, and everything about her seemed precise. But she was the sort of beauty that defied pinpointing. You could focus on details, but they were insufficient to paint the whole picture—that kind of latent mystery. The first thing she said to me was: “So, what do you make of Niall? According to him, each person in here has enough neuroses for six.”
“I just knew somebody like that couldn't have come here stag,” I said, a little too flippantly.
“He likes you,” Clarity said. “He usually doesn't talk that long to anybody.”
“He was frighteningly perceptive.”
“He wants me to kiss you. How do you feel about that?”
Clarity had an inviting mouth. Above that, a saucy frankness to her gaze, as though we already shared a secret. The timing was impeccable. I was just about to blurt something about needing to make contact, to participate instead of just languidly observing.
“Is he watching us?” I said.
“What do you think?” Her mouth was already on approach, homing in.
And I thought, to hell with it, let's give ole Niall a show.
Her kiss was a powerful flood of resurgent memory, the kiss you fantasize when you're a teenager, loaded with portent and hot with hormonal flood. The kiss you crave before the grown-up world scotches your dreams. The kiss you see as your hope for redemption once the world stomps on you. The kiss that ruins you for all other kissers.
Plus, something extra: an amorphous weight, a kind of sliding heaviness that caused my heart to take on gravity. It came from her and settled into me; that's the best way to describe it.
Clarity smiled again. Teeth. “That was very pleasant,” she said, indicating no desire to continue. She collected herself as though her task was done. “By the way, that was really a corker, your story about the silverware.”
Bang, adrenaline; a rush that screwed up my breathing.
As she made ready to excuse herself, her expression said,
You should see your face.
Either: Women are crazy, and Clarity had done something crazy to me. Or men are stupid, and I was so stupid I did not twig.
They're the same, I thought. Niall Otheringame and Clarity are the same person. Niall ducks out and Clarity appears. I would kiss a woman who looked that good, but not a man. Somehow, Niall had slipped undercover, changed skins, and renewed his assault on me as a lady. It was the trick ending, the disposable scare, easily predictable. You probably guessed they were the masculine/feminine flipsides of the same coin. But I also think that Niall Otheringame read my psyche from the moment we were introduced and somehow conformed Clarity to reflect my inmost desires. So I would kiss her back. The supernatural snap in the tail, story over, my, wasn't
that
fun?
The part Niall omitted was what he saw when he looked at me. What I saw when I looked at myself in the mirror, just a few moments ago.
Don't ask me about the crippled and terrified monsters in here. From where we stand I can see a man who murdered a woman and got away with it. Tonight he's using a little pick-me-up called D10, short for D4B toxin 10, discovered at Stanford, a quantum leap over roofies. It has bee venom among its constituents. It mildly intoxicates while amping the female reproductive urge. The morning after, she'll apologize instead of filing a lawsuit. If she survives.
That trio of women I noticed earlier? They're topskim hookers who work the Plaza, having a day-off night out. They'd rather be fucking each other, and they came here to mock the amateurs and destroy egos the way you'd toss back a cocktail.
I say all this, yet I know a little less than nothing about prostitute psychology or metabolic chemistry. I know it the way I now know that stud over there has calf implants and a face full of botox.
That
one, the one being seduced by the woman who scratches herself to let the pheromones out. You can virtually smell her lubricating from here.
You think this is all risque patter: man-ramble as preamble. Then you'll say you don't see the relevance; you thought I was going to tell you a horror story.
You haven't been listening.
Loneliness?
What I was really thinking, before you stopped me at the door, was
don't even speak to me.
Don't risk it. I met some lifeform to whom our inner selves are a naked, open book, and somehow the son of a bitch infected me with the same perception, and what I see makes me want to kill myself to stop the pain. But I can't even escape, not now. Especially not by just running out a door. Because I already know what you're going to say. Because I look at you, and all I can think of is cutlery—knives, forks, spoons. Nevertheless, I linger.

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