Netsuke (9 page)

5

… AND ALL OF THIS on the line. Reassuring, deeply desired. Because when it is set on fire, it blazes with such intensity! When such a man stands fully clothed but for his bounding cock, which she takes with such delicacy, such tender ferocity, into her mouth, well! Then the entire castle of cards so carefully set out upon the table tumbles to the floor with unprecedented abandon! And when the man and his life have all burned down to a small heap of ashes, well then, she’ll dance upon those ashes, she will be Kali in a necklace of bone.

This is what drives David Swancourt: the burning of a world, the setting of a man on fire, a distinguished man, the man she can never be, not ever, because that chance was stolen from her during her own secret prehistory. He is the man she would have become, or so she thinks. Because she does not, cannot know, the bitter truths that rule him; she does not know, cannot know, that he, too, is in drag.

She does not, cannot possibly imagine, that her doctor is her biggest risk. Because she has come to him in deep trouble. Because a month earlier she went off with three men she picked up in a bar and was raped. Because like Kat, she drinks too much. Like Kat, she is drawn to those who will hurt her. Because she had come on to the men who had raped her. Because in some elusive country deep in her mind, she wants to be fucked into oblivion. Lovely Anna Morphosis! She wants to be fucked to death. Except it’s not that simple. She has come to see him because she wants to live.

That week he had called her to ask her her name.
Jello,
said David Swancourt.
She’s over her head, Doctor. She’s in a bad way.
And her doctor. What did he say? He said:
Together we will make her O.K.

6

JELLO CANNOT IMAGINE what a real childhood would be like. The glimpses she has had are so stunning, so sumptuous, so utterly desirous, she dares not engage them for fear of dying of unrequited longing. But sometimes she cannot help herself. Because these memories ground her. They remind her what it was like to be awestruck, to be giddy, to be joyously giddy with the world’s promise.

There dwells within her a certain fragrant weather, a certain bright knowledge, a safe place where she can, at odd moments, be devout—worshipful in other words—of the mysterious process of living among others. When such a moment seizes her, she needs to share it; she needs to talk about it. And now, at thirty-five, she fears that if she does not talk about all of it with someone she can trust, it will turn to dust; she’ll never be able to access it again.

A brass watch belonging to her father, her fascination as a little boy with watches, with small machines of all kinds. Before she became Jello, he was a mechanic. He liked to roll under cars and smell their hot, greasy underbellies. Because he was clever. Because he liked the way it felt to be close to the ground. Because when you are on the ground, flat on your back, there is no place to fall. Because when he showered down after work and dressed in pressed jeans and a clean shirt, he felt good. He spent hours wandering the mall, days even, hunting down the right shirt.

One day it wasn’t a shirt he bought, but a dress. The salesgirl liked him; maybe she was teasing him, or maybe she had a hunch. Or it was simply the fact of his beauty and she was curious; she wondered what this beautiful boy would look like in a beautiful dress.

The changing room was hospitable. Large enough for the two of them. It was an ark infinite with possibilities. In an instant they both vanished within its mirrors.

She undressed him. She showed him how a woman undresses a man. She fondled his nipples and she wouldn’t let him kiss her. She said:
Just let me play!
She was droll, spunky, radiant. He was down to his briefs. She cupped his erection in her hand and said:
You have to behave yourself because you are about to become a lady!
When he laughed she hushed him with a kiss. He was riveted to the spot. The dress spilled over his body. After, he’d think about how they had found this little nest for themselves.

Because he was in a dress he felt he could be soft. He whispered:
Now am I your lover or your sister?
When she burst out laughing she was fired on the spot. The two of them were banished from Foley’s. The months they spent together were the happiest of his life. They became bandits, stealing dresses for themselves, shoes, perfume, makeup. He would flirt with the salesgirls as she, in the midst of superabundance, would uncover and lift the rarity.

Understand that they were not ruled by greed, but by the need to be transformed. And of course, the need to risk the freedom they had just claimed for themselves. Nevertheless, they were overturning the chaos that had from the start been an infliction. They transformed his tiny apartment into a clandestine backstage dressing room. They bought an outsized vanity from the 1950s, its mirror intact, and filled the drawers with makeup. They experimented with wigs. They might have gone on this way forever except that he fell in love with a man. For a few days they wept in one another’s arms. Then it was over, and David Swancourt was on his own.

Jello changes her colors often. She shimmers. She does not want to be recognized, seized upon, locked up, and shut down. Her colors are lime, lemon, strawberry, blueberry, black cherry. She does not want to be harmed. She wants to flicker like the Aurora Borealis. She wants to be harmed. She wants to bleed like a severed aorta. She wants to be safe. She wants to be safe. She never wants to bleed again.

She goes to him because he is known to like trannies. He’s seen scoping out the Crucible. He’s intrigued more than he realizes. He once talked a he/she out of a sex change. He said:
The knife is just another way to flee pleasure.

Ever since the rape she feels as though a grenade is about to go off in her head. She’s badly boxed in. And what she recognizes about the doctor at once is that he is himself boxed in. Maybe she forgets why she is there. She decides to unbox him. He will be her jack-in-the-box. She will find the mechanism that will release him.

7

THE THIRD FRIDAY wheels into his life. It seems miraculous when Jello appears. She burns her way into the downtown Spells like an arsonist. When she enters the room, he rises, stunned by the extravagance, the totality of David Swancourt’s transformation. Jello is absolutely gorgeous. He thinks that if chaos spins at the heart of things, David in his dress really puts a finger on it.

His astonishment is so evident, so transparent, Jello laughs, the illusion simultaneously shattered and intensified by the fact of David Swancourt’s laughter. It’s like the world’s most fascinating shell game.

David Swancourt’s laughter releases his own. He discovers there is nothing funnier than an extravagantly eroticized woman laughing like a man. Under the impact of this laughter, the world turns upside down and convulses.

She takes a step toward him. He meets her halfway between worlds. When they embrace a season passes, then another. Another season, another cataclysm. Neither of them expected this. They sleep, then awaken. The new Spells is deep in shadow. She grabs her things, she turns, says:
Hey.
And is gone. An act of devastating magic has taken place, and it is too damned late to do anything about it.

He is dizzy with a kind of murderous fury in the face of his own banality, the impossibility of the task ahead: to return home for dinner. He reeks of perfume, sperm, sweat; he showers like a maniac and changes clothes.

He likes what he sees in the mirror. He can pull this off.

He has this brutality in him that cannot always be masked. But it can never be measured, also, because it is mutable, in constant flux. Now seemingly playful, tender. Now an infection, dismay. His brutality is a source of joy and confusion, provocative, always. It resides in his marrow. When he is merely mischievous, well, it is a blessing.

His brutality is both fearlessly naked, triumphantly so, and at the same time deeply ashamed of this nakedness.

He calls Akiko to say he’ll be at least twenty minutes late. She has invited friends for dinner, and this is far more than he is capable of. He offers to pick up some wine to buy himself some extra time.

“A Mascara would be great, actually,” she says. “I’m making a tagine.”

8

ON THE DRIVE HOME he decides that Akiko’s ordered life is anomalous. He thinks:
I carry the tower within me.
An old story. An ancient story. A story inscribed in the Book of Nature from the start. The world was born in confusion, in confusion it proceeds, in confusion it will fall.

At dinner he is mostly silent. His wife’s friends are artists—a photographer and a painter. The painter is clearly irritated by her lover’s drinking, yet the drinker’s insolence is amusing, and he is grateful he takes up so much room.

“This will lead to oblivion, if not a row,” the painter warns.

Akiko laughs: “I hope he intends both for later.”

“All heroes have their weaknesses,” the drinker grins at his host and winks.

“What do you know of weakness?” he asks him. It is his first unsolicited sentence of the evening.

“Everything!”
the drinker brags. “I collect vices as others do stamps.”

“Such as?” The mood is changing. He can tell he is bringing an unexpected edge into all of this.

“Wine,” he says, lifting his glass toward Akiko, who fills it. “Women.” He nods first at Akiko and then at his mistress. “Song. But … I do not intend to sing.”

“A blessing,” says his mistress.

“I’d like to hear the man sing,” he says with an implied belligerence he knows Akiko dislikes.

“Then
I will sing!”
the drinker declares, “in my host’s honor!” He stands, knocking over his chair, struggling to set it on its feet again before belting out a piece of obscenity from
Carmina Burana.
When it is over, he bows and turning his back on them, makes his way unsteadily to the bathroom.

“Don’t get lost!” his mistress calls cheerily after, retrieving crumbs of chocolate cake from her dish with her finger. He thinks:
Heavens be praised. The repast will soon be over.

“It has been said,” the drunk intones as he returns to the table, his fly unzipped, “that Dionysius manages better in the meadows and the woods than the living room.”

“He is going to fall,” his mistress decides.

“As the broads all fall for him,” the drunk declares. “Or so he likes to think.”

“Ah,” the wayward doctor says, for he cannot resist: “A man after my own heart.”

“Or cock,” Akiko mutters, to the surprise of everyone. “A little joke,” she whispers. She turns to him. “A little joke, my love. On me.”

It is an entreaty. Or perhaps a warning. He wonders:
just what does she know?

9

SATURDAY MORNING he feels such a tender longing for Jello, such an ache in every bone, that he calls her, breaking all his rules.

Sleepy, surprised by his call, he can hear a growing excitement in David’s voice. He asks if he can speak with Jello. David tells him Jello
is not there,
but he expects her back
later in the day.
He suggests they meet downtown at four.

Until now, he has always been a cautious seducer. Now this caution seems precious, adolescent, absurd. He prepares himself for the day ahead, relieved that by the time he is out of the shower, Akiko is already at work, the studio lights blazing in what is a misty fall morning, overcast, mysterious.

He thinks: I am the Prince of Saturn, on a holiday on Earth. He leaves a brief note on the kitchen table, something vague about getting the car serviced. The old Studebaker justifies many absences. What’s more, such banalities have a way of dispersing the stench of smoke. The next thing he knows, he is out and about, a leopard on the prowl. The world unfolds and time dissolves. It is ten o’clock in the morning.

He sees a cigar store where he has flirted, heavily flirted, with a woman like Lucy, not much older than a child. Impatient with fate, her dreams much bigger than her means, she has a way of revealing not only what her naked body looks like, but what she is like in bed. He cannot look at her without imagining plowing into her.

He sees her right away behind the counter. As soon as she sees him, she gives him one of her best hot looks. A customer leaves; he suggests they have lunch together, asks when she takes off for lunch. She is wide-eyed, exhilarated by this sudden outspoken interest.
Eleven,
she says. Perfect. Only an hour away. He imagines her co-worker watches this come together with envy.

He kills time with what Akiko ironically calls “domestic bliss”: the bank, the drugstore, where he buys a carton of Kleenex in handsome bronze-colored boxes for the new Spells. When he returns for her, she is already waiting on the curb. He asks her what she’s in the mood for.

She’s a fantastic little tart; she simply reaches over and squeezes his crotch. He says:
I know just the place.
She says:
So do I.
As they approach the arboretum, she unzips his fly. There is a dirt road parallel to a new public road that circles far back into the woods and ends behind an abandoned gravel pit. They fuck like high school kids in a kind of frenzy. She smells of oyster mushrooms and won’t stay still. She’s showing off, eager to impress him. At some point he goes crazy with it and forces her ass. Things are out of control now; she is crying, fearful. This all goads him on. He tells her she’s incredibly sexy, not to be afraid, but he’s almost impossible to understand. He’s thinking of Jello, of David Swancourt, both of them, the mad edge to fucking a guy. This kid, he thinks, is small, her body sweet and compact, except for her breasts, which are on the verge of unmanageable. And although he fully appreciates the ripe fruit of her, he is thinking of the length and sinew of Jello’s thighs, and David’s ass, so that somehow he is fucking David, Jello, and the kid at the same time and comes, howling, and she, the little imp, pretends to come too, hoping to save the day and with it herself.