Going Down Fast (24 page)

Anna sighed and Paul held his head in his hands. “Like my granddad with his Bible: that's how you interpret that piece.”

Leon's face turned sullen. “Maybe I just want her because it's something to do. My project. Ever think of that? It organizes me so I don't fly apart. Maybe. Did Dante really want Beatrice? Not that I couldn't give him a few pointers on hell.” He grinned slyly.

Paul went home to eat and change, while Leon got on the phone to his brother and yelled. Then he spent ten minutes putting on and taking off various ties she had never seen before. Finally he collected his stuff and they drove to a new building up on Schiller to borrow Sidney's Porsche.

Sidney opened the door with a grumbled peevish greeting. He was shorter than Leon and even fatter than she had remembered. His hair was brown and fine and slicked down over his face of a dyspeptic rabbit. “That's an expensive car, Leon,” he whimpered. “A delicate mechanism. I keep it in perfect order because I know how to drive it and I watch the tachometer. You'll get carried away making the engine roar and burn it out.”

He had glanced her over with sour envy, peering around Leon, but she decided he did not remember her at all. He could not distinguish faces in the swarm of women he imagined around his brother.

“Come on, I was driving cars while you were still pedaling a bike. You're getting hung up on things, Sid. A thing-miser.”

“If you don't think it's so good, why are you always after me to borrow it?”

“Not for months.”

“In September you asked for it.”

“You wouldn't give it to me, so why remember? Tonight I need it. The Buick is falling apart, no lie.”

“I told Dad you'd asked for it and he said it would be a mistake. He said not to trust you—”

“Going to listen to him? Old Divide-and-conquer. Okay, come on, Anna—”

“He always liked you better because you're older, anyhow.”

“Get off it, Sid, he hates my guts.”

“He says I don't have any.” Sid giggled. He fished the keys out of his pocket, swung them from a fat thumb. “He wants to know what you're doing. He says you'll get me into trouble. He wants to know if you're getting money from Mother.”

“What do you think?” Leon brought his face almost to Sid's.

“I think you're trying, anyhow.” Sid let Leon slide the keys off his thumb. “It's redlined at 5500, and listen to me this time, Leon, don't drive like a lunatic. Don't race it. I'm going out but I'll be back by eleven. You get it back to me by twelve, at the latest.”

“You don't drive to work, what do you care? Seeing a girl? Hey, Sid.” He prodded his brother's belly gently. “You getting any?”

“Let me alone. Listen to me, Leon, or it's all off. Don't put garbage in the jumpseat, don't shift gears as if you're a racing driver, and get that car back by twelve.”

“At twelve it turns into a VW bug, ha ha,” Leon said as they rode down in the elevator to the basement garage. They left Leon's car on the street and transferred the film into Sid's white Porsche. Grinning like a demon Leon drove her home to change. She took her clothes across to the bathroom. He prowled restlessly. When she came back he paced round her, then nodded, “Okay, okay.” But her coat made him frown. “Jesus, that won't do. Wonder if we can get something from Fern.”

“No! I won't. Besides she is two sizes smaller. Wake up, Leon, what's wrong with you? Think those people give a damn how I'm dressed?”

“Exactly,” He said. “That's all they do see. Her old mink—”

“Nothing is going to make me look that kind of respectable.”

“At least we got the Porsche.”

“You'd do better to leave Paul and me here, you know that.”

“Eh.” He shrugged. “Go up there alone? What a bore.”

Paul sat in front with Leon and they chattered about the car while she was jammed in the jumpseat with his attaché-case. My relationship with Leon, she wrote across her mind, characteristics of: ascetic, verbal, emotionally charged, manipulative (largely him of me), analytical, nutritive, flirtatious, exclusive, and commanding of loyalty. Based on a role model of brother/sister. We are not however b/s. What are we doing? Games. Feint and withdraw.

Leon was to show
Moonblood
. Imposing, flawed, selfindulgent: she felt a deep physical unease to think she must sit through it. She had tried to talk him into showing something else,
Our Lady of the Nikes
for instance, but he said she had no taste.

“I'll never be any good while I'm dragged by money problems,” Leon was saying. “I'd like to shoot everything that goes through my mind. But I can't afford to waste film. I have to use damn near everything I take. If I don't get what I saw, there's no way to do it over. Can't even get hold of the same people twice. Course there are strengths. The same hardness reality has. Is, is, and gone. No second chances. Forget your own preconceptions and react, really react, with what's there. Film's an aquarium where people become themselves with a difference—like Caroline.”

“You shouldn't try to get your family to finance you—even indirectly,” she said, leaning her arms on top of his seat. “It costs you more than it's worth.”

“They can afford it,” he said shortly. “They ought to help. Where else am I supposed to go? It's mine too.”

“Only if you're theirs too. You think you have a right to goodies. Maybe it's better to come from a family who couldn't help if they wanted, like I do, because there's no temptation to manipulate them.”

“I'm not interested in the bourgeois virtues.”

“But she's right,” Paul teased, “you're interested in the bourgeois comforts and toys.”

“If you want to drive this later, shut up.”

The film society met in the auditorium of a very new school. A couple of guys she had seen at Leon's were on the first half of the program, and a woman was scheduled to follow Leon with a documentary in the second half.

The audience was inert for the most part, occasionally restive through
Wet Bag Dream Soup
. She sat between Paul and Leon and their obscene muttered comments. Images of commercials and bodies, politicians and penises, the world with red paint running over. She could sense Leon's consciousness of her body in the flickering dark. Heat gathered where their arms brushed.

During the second film—sharp blinding black and white scattering shapes, screeches of glassy color, bleeps of motion, Paul put his hand over his eyes and went to sleep. At intermission he got up, posed carefully and centrally, and they let him alone. Boredom relaxed the edginess from his body and he truly did not care what happened up here any more than these men seeking out Black Belt prostitutes believed they acted in the world. The women came to him and he played his putdown role with the same joy he played their own ramshackle games.

Leon was on the make following the smell of money. He argued with society officers that they should underwrite a film he would make with them, become involved, immersed in it themselves—then they'd learn what film was. People wanted to look at her. She felt pricked with foreign eyes. Their faces caused her unease. They seemed impermeable, bland and hairless. She could imagine them attacking her like pigeons pecking up seed. She would be glad to sit down in the dark.

A night moth hovered over a flower, slowly put out its proboscis, sucked. Paul had not sat down with them. He sat with a tall rangy redhead all in beige but for a large glossy platinum wristwatch whose dial glowed in the dark nervously tapping, marking time. The huge blindseeming moth hurled against a window screen in brutal persistence. Again again again. A fine dust came from its battering wings. Again again. Caroline lay wrapped in a twisted sheet, distorted, mummified.

Caroline tied to a rock: tied with bits of rubber hose and a jumprope and nylons and two gauze curtains and a string of Christmas tree lights. A black bird pecked at her small vulnerable breasts, at her smooth belly: a bird of the shadow of a hand. Slowly her legs parted. The bird diminished into her and disappeared.

Caroline stood in what looked like a large ashtray, washing herself. She bent and straightened rhythmically, splashing water up over herself, washing at herself. Slowly the camera moved around her watching the water slide over her radiant flesh, watching a web of shadows, filmy then hardedge then filmy shadows move across her, despoiling her as she bent and rose washing at her body. Her face was shrill with fear and twisted.

The lights went on though the projector buzzed still. Anna swung around blinking. Everyone was turning. Leon muttered a curse. Two uniformed cops and a round man in a business suit were standing at the back. The projectionist was arguing. Leon got to his feet and pushed into the aisle.

Everyone was standing now and she could hardly work a path through the crowd. By the time she reached the back and got up close enough to hear, the portly man had confiscated all the films including the still unshown documentary on learning in schoolchildren. It seemed for a moment that the projector would be confiscated too, perhaps for contamination, but it turned out to be rented from the school.

“We had a complaint after the first half of your program that some of the material being shown here was questionable and lewd …”

Anna puzzled. The light and dark patterns? The first film, a soft silly homosexual fantasy? Go on!

“… what we saw ourselves is certainly not the sort of thing allowed in our community. I'm surprised at your bringing this sort of thing in, people like yourselves.”

“We didn't know what it was going to be like,” the club secretary said. “But it's not right to interrupt—”

“You're on taxpayers' property. How would you like the schoolchildren to find out what goes on here? As long as I'm captain I'll make it my business to keep smut out of our city.”

The members made their way out with all possible speed, and Leon was left to argue with the society president for his promised fee.

“We're in enough trouble because of your film. You didn't tell us you were bringing something obscene.”

“You're the obscenity, you and your fucking town. I want my print of
Moonblood
back and I want my money. You think I got extra goods to donate to the policeman's ball?”

Threatening to sue Leon stomped out. Paul appeared at his elbow near the door. “Want company back? Or don't you care?”

Leon paused, his face gone blank. Then he cracked Paul on the biceps. “Follow your own scene. My mind's blown tonight. I just want out of here.”

She barely got her door shut before he started—not in the direction of the city but north to the tollroad.

“Bastards, bastards,” he sang in his throat. “Turn your skull inside out and all they got to say is, dirty-dirty! What do they think's inside their own? Shit, that thing's beautiful. Blind hedgehogs. Touch them on their bellies and they curl up.”

The moon was halved but ice-bright in the cold blue night sky. After they got out of the traffic of the northern suburbs the road was empty except for an occasional truck. Even with the top up and heater on the car was cold. Nestling into her bucket seat she almost wished for Fern's old fur. He pushed his foot on the gas and the line crept toward her, 70, 80, 85, 90, she watched it come 95, 100. He sat as if in a trance with the lips drawn back leaving the teeth a little exposed, but his eyes flicked from the speedometer to the road and back again. High whine of the engine. The night was a narrowing funnel. She felt numb. They would be smashed to bits against a bridge and she did not care. She was too exhausted. The line inched toward her, 105, 110, 115. For an instant it rose higher, 117, 118, and then sank back to 115. Slowly Leon eased his foot on the gas and gradually the car slowed. At seventy they seemed scarcely to move past the blurred embankments. He laughed. “We won't mention that to Sid.”

“All we needed was to get the state cops on our necks.”

“You were right, I should have brought
Our Lady
. That would show them who's obscene. God, that they dare use that word. That guy Mel who runs the society, he evaluates weapons systems all day—efficiency in megadeaths. Obscene?”

“You've never wanted to use me in a film.”

“Nah.” A couple of moments later he blew out snorts of laughter.

“That's so funny?” She made her voice grate.

“I was picturing you in that washing scene. You wouldn't look guilty or fearhaunted or pathetic. No, you'd look like a
balabosta
giving herself a good scrub in a poorly lit bathroom.”

She would look worse than that: she was too fleshy to photograph well. Embarrassing vision.

“Could've picked up something myself better than what Paul got. Couple of those girls—nice ginch.”

“So sorry. Wasn't my idea to go along, remember?”

“You could've picked somebody up. Think I'd stop you?”

No, just make life miserable the next day. “Idiot, I'm not looking for
ginch
. If I want anything, it's a relationship.”

“Aha.” He turned off at the exit for Wedge's Corners and headed into the Fox Lake region near the Wisconsin border. “Looking for one with me?”

“I don't have to look every moment.” She could feel herself being manipulated, but could not tell if he was pushing toward or only playing one of his late night games of hide-and-seek.

“I don't think you know what you want from me.”

He turned off the highway onto sideroads. After the tollroad the pavement seemed to twist and barely dodge among the trees. Though he drove more slowly the speed felt greater because of the trunks flying past, the crests and dips. She felt the road in her feet and buttocks. The night was crisp, clear: the air stood frozen up to the frozen stars, up to the frosted smear of galaxies. Lake was hard to tell from meadow except for the cottages outlining the shores. On one bigger lake the ice had been partly cleared and shanties for ice fishermen huddled out on the bare expanse. She felt occupied, crowded with lostness, speed, images, dark, cold, him. “I suppose I want … what happens.”