Suicide Blonde (10 page)

I shook my head. “I came here to tell you that the only reason we were together was because you thought your father would have loved me.” He hardly listened.

“Oh Jesse, things are so much worse than that. I can't sleep. I feel like somebody will trick me if I do, all I can think of is my poor father. I was just remembering how I promised to take him to the theater. He came up because it was my first long-running show. We were supposed to meet at two o'clock and I got there a little early, sat across the street to wait, drank a beer in a diner. He showed up, stood out front. I watched him. He looked ridiculous with his thick arms and striped rugby shirt. I thought he was too excited and I would be embarrassed. He tried the locked theater door several times. The horrible thing is that I took pleasure in this.”

“It certainly wasn't very nice, but you can't do anything about it now,” I said. “He's dead.”

Bell shook his head. “But he was always so kind to me and I did horrible things. On Father's Day we had a special breakfast. Mom bought a coffee cake and she forced me to get a present. He was thrilled, touched my arm, then opened the box to find an old stained tie that I found in the neighbor's garbage. My father put on the tie, smiled, kissed me and finished his breakfast.”

“Bell,” I said, “stop torturing yourself.”

“I can't, I just keep thinking of incidents that make me writhe.” He looked into his gin and began to fold his napkin into smaller and smaller squares. The bartender brushed near us with a wrapped grocery-store log and placed it on the fire. It didn't give off any heat, but the flames were green and purple like a bruise.

“When he died I saw a demon, furred, batlike, crawl out of his mouth.” Bell's eyes closed and tears dripped through his lashes down his cheek.

I put my hand over his, squeezed. He opened his wet eyes and said, “You don't understand how I'm already in hell.” He stood and walked back to the bathroom.

A man at the bar stared at me. He had a full face and wore a leather jacket that tightened at his wrists with zippers. He narrowed his eyes on me. I got nervous thinking he was a customer at Carmen's. I was almost sure not. There was something appealing about him that told me he didn't pay for sex.

The man walked over. “So,” he said, and it was the humid hot house smell and his fat calloused fingers that made me realize it was the stranger from Madison's room.

Bell walked up, took his seat in the booth. “Friend of yours?” he asked.

I couldn't think of anything to say and besides all the air in the place seemed to be gone. “Please go,” I said stiffly.

“Why you working this faggot?” the stranger said.

“What?” Bell's face reddened as he looked from the man to me. The stranger took a swig from my glass. Bell rose up off the bench, but the stranger pushed him back into the booth.

“You see,” he said, “it's my job to tell little fags like you the secrets about their girlfriends.”

“What's the truth about you?” Bell asked. “That you try to get girls off the school bus, that you have herpes, that you fucked your mother?”

“You little fuck.” He grabbed Bell, pulled him from the booth, moved him over to the exposed brick wall and raised his arm. Bell's eyes bulged. The bartender's voice was loud. “No goddamn fights in the Rose.” Then he was on the stranger, pulling him back, telling him to act civilly or he'd kick his butt out onto the street.

Bell was upset, he told me he'd wait outside and walked swiftly to the door.

I watched the stranger as he glared at the bartender walking back to the bar. “Did Madison tell you I was waiting in her room?” I asked.

The stranger nodded, grabbed my wrist. “Have that door open,” he said. “I'll be coming around.”

W
HEN BELL SAW ME COME OUT OF THE BLACK ROSE HE TURNED
his head. He was waiting in a doorway, smoking a cigarette. Everything was horrible, but it had always been like that, and I felt relieved, the pressure to keep things
nice
was gone. When I came near, he dropped his cigarette and crushed it with his shoe.

“I won't be able to think of anything else but your delicate hips fucking that thing.”

Nervously, I fingered the lapel of his coat. “It's easier than thinking of us together in some sort of regular life.”

He didn't answer and we stood in dry silence. I remembered a day we'd walked to the pond with the swans in Golden Gate Park, how he'd touched my hair as the birds rose and I looked up into his face.

C h a p t e r

N i n e

I
PASSED THE TATTOO MUSEUM, SEXPLOSION AND THE LUSTY
Lady. On the corner of Eddy and Taylor a man in a wheel-chair was peddling paper roses that lit up in the middle. And a little farther up a man in a jogging suit, holding a baby on his shoulders, tried to sell me a bus transfer. The strong wind blew trash around the street and there was a skinny junkie in corduroy bell-bottoms smoking crack in a doorway. I ducked into an Arabian deli and bought a quart of beer, stood in front of the porno-video shop looking at the blue lava lamps in Carmen's upper windows. I drank recklessly thinking it would excite the men talking out front. It felt right drinking beer, one eye on the lava lamps and the other on the soft-porn movie playing on the screen in the window. I looked for my reflection, but there wasn't any. Chilly, I pulled my shirt-sleeves over my wrists. It didn't really surprise me that Madison had the stranger fuck me. She didn't believe in equality, she manipulated me like a slave. Her philosophy was seductively dangerous.

I'd taken my parents too literally, because it was clear now I wasn't a princess. My emotions were complicated, but no better than the whores’ at Carmen's. Liars attracted me because I was one myself. I was like all women who have great fidelity to their memories and delusions.

The empty quart made a hollow scratchy sound as I set it against the brick wall. I went in the back door of Carmen's, up the dim stairway. The fishtanks seemed louder than usual and the black light made the white shag purple. Between blasts of strobe light Susan danced in her window. I walked straight up the spiral steps into Madison's room. She sat at her dressing table with her head tipped forward. At first I thought she was praying, but then I saw the syringe and rubber tube behind her. She was asleep and I walked closer, saw that the roots of her splayed hair were dirty blond and how the veins of her arm were bruised. She lifted her head and I stepped back.

“I can always tell when someone is watching me,” she said.

“I ran into the guy you sent over to fuck me.”

“And?” Madison sat up, laughed awkwardly.

“Fuck you, Madison! You might as well have raped me yourself.”

“What's the big deal? You're already past your prime, every man you fuck has and is going to fuck someone else.”

It took all my willpower not to hit her. “I can't believe you think being a whore helps.”

“It helps me,” she said, flopping onto the bed.

“You're sick,” I said.

“Meaningful relationships flutter between two things, convention and sentimentality.”

“Some stranger can't mean more than a lover or someone in your family.”

“That's the point . . . they do to
God
and they do to me . . . This is silly,” she said. “Come over here. Do you want me to say you
mean
something to me?”

When I didn't answer she said, “You're so predictable.” She unbuttoned her shirt, showed me her pale cleavage, her hard pierced nipples. “I'll touch you with an incident from my sad sad childhood, how my father raped me, how my mother was murdered . . . then maybe you'll kiss me.” She pulled her blouse off one shoulder and her breasts goose-pimpled. “You want your life to be like a movie,” she said. “That's why you won't come to me . . . because it's not perfect enough. For you, everything is ruined before it even begins. Do you want me to tell you I love you?” she said.

I still wouldn't come to her and this made her angry, she clicked her jaw.

“You'll see,” she said. “Relationships are like wallpaper patterns, you think you're moving forward but you're always caught in your own obsessions.”

“You are already dead,” I said to her. It hadn't been what I intended to say, but it seemed true enough.

She jumped up from the bed and flew at me, chased me down the stairs. “I know what you're thinking!” she screamed. “Get out of here with all your true-love bullshit!”

P
IG SAT IN THE LIVING ROOM ON THE CRIMSON VICTORIAN,
tarot cards spread out over the marble coffee table. She looked very put together in her huge gabardine suit and pinkish wig. Her bracelets jingled.

“I absolutely knew in my heart of hearts you'd return.” She patted the sofa near her signaling for me to sit down. Pig's body heat was like a radiator. I leaned into her and she put her arm around me. “You just can't wear your heart on your sleeve dear,” Pig said, “unless you have big teeth. Not everyone is as good as you at falling in love.” She pressed my head into her breast and smoothed down my hair. “I knew a man once, met him in a café reading working-class poetry. He had these dreamy bedroom eyes. He told me right away that his mother had died lately of a heart attack, that he'd once accidentally killed a man with his car and that his girlfriend was a whore. His pupils were dilated and I saw the raised keloid scars on his wrists. He carried his red wine over to my table and told me that a little boy had found a dead baby in the woods. The boy thought it was an angel because clenched in its stiff blue hand was a white feather. What I'm saying,” Pig said, “is that horror is everywhere, it's the rule, not the exception. Life is a disease.” Pig paused, her breath smelled of wintergreen, she swung her fat leg gently but it knocked the coffee table. “After so many broken hearts, the really bloody kind—I've decided it's better to rely on memories. I sift mine, refine them, till they are like jewels in a black velvet bag.”

I pulled away from her. “That makes them lies.”

Pig was creepy. Her emotional reflexes were mild, unfocused, so she relied on emotions of the past.

Pig looked up at me, startled. “You think I'm a liar?” There was a long silence, the kind when you run out of things to say or get caught off guard. When she did speak it was slow, and she didn't look at me. “Pity is such a strange emotion. Once felt, disgust is never far off and then too a certain need to make it perfectly clear the pitied is completely separate from the pitier. This is done mostly with moralistic accusations of the sort you just used on me. This pedanticism,” she said loudly and stamped her foot. “I'll tell you something. I stayed with a man in my mother's summer house and never changed the sheets. To my mother it meant I didn't love her, and that my men were more important than her.” Pig sipped her wine. “Of course, she was right. Sex is a kind of alchemy. It's the one thing other than death that if used properly can change everything, like that first night with Madison, it's all in my head like a beautiful dream. I remember her skin. Its texture made me believe I'd never die.” She looked out the window over the mud range behind the house.

I had no sympathy for Pig's rambling lyricism, because I felt like a rat in a garbage can. There would never be peace. My father, in leaving my mother, poisoned my memories of childhood. That's why Madison's idea that family members had no ordained purpose one to another appealed to me. My family splintered as if they'd been together for the shooting of a movie.

I was glad I'd pitched my polluted self into Bell's memory, because he confused his urge to please his dying father with passion for me. Our relationship, like all romantic ones, had been fodder for the family.

“Madison is a whore,” I said. “And so am I.”

The color drained from Pig's face. “So,” she nodded. Her face falling in on itself.

“Did you expect she was married with a baby in some split-level ranch?”

She looked into my eyes, at my hands, the set of my shoulders, tried to figure out why I'd sabotaged her memory of Madison. Pig shook her monstrous legs and leaned forward to rise.

“Get me my coat,” she said. “We are going out.”

I
N THE TAXI PIG PRETENDED NOT TO BE SURPRISED BY THE LACK
of neighboring houses, by the mud lots stretching all the way to the water. Though I saw her flinch as we passed a man in a gray hooded sweatshirt laid out on a dirty mattress. Closer to Carmen's the skyscrapers pressing up to the cab and the taxis’ hectic movements seemed to frighten Pig. She tried to make small talk with the cabbie: Latin music, how seductive it was, how flamenco was the most sensuous of dances. But he just nodded and looked into his rearview mirror as if he didn't understand English. On Polk Street Pig pointed out the window, her mouth open. “Isn't that Bell?”

It was him, standing near the Black Rose in his dirty overcoat talking to a strange young man.

“Who's that with him?” She touched my arm.

“I don't know,” I said and twisted my body toward the door: I did not want to talk about Bell.

At Carmen's I paid and helped Pig out of the backseat. Her eyes still hadn't adjusted to outside light and she was unsure of her footing and squinted as we walked to the door. Inside, she seemed to relax immediately: the darkness, the rows and rows of booze. We took stools at the bar. It was early so the place was empty. The lap dancers drank at the other end and the disco music was superfluous like Christmas decorations after the new year. We ordered red wine and she smiled when she saw the tall thin glass. We didn't speak for a while, she was busy absorbing the decor: black-light murals, the metal bar. I was preoccupied too, trying to decide why I'd agreed to take her here. Wouldn't it only hurt Pig more? Was it evil? I hoped Pig and Madison would turn into me and my mother, that they would say true things to one another. Whenever the front door opened she got edgy.

“What will you say to her?” I asked.

“That I love her,” she said. “That's all I want to say.” Pig was like a mother in that what she perceived as simple love carried a truckload of complications. “When you love a woman, you love yourself, and it's terrible really, how it seems perfectly possible to swallow the other. With a man you want to join, you want your ribs to connect like handcuffs. But with a woman if you swallow, she becomes you.”

“Is Madison the main one,” I asked.

“Well, yes and no, there was Claudine, a little black girl from France. She was into a kind of sophisticated drag. Once walking home from a party, she went into an alley to pee and when she walked back, all I could see was her dinner jacket floating toward me.”

The lap dancers giggled at the end of the bar. They were wondering who Pig was and why I was with her.

“Do they have children?” Pig asked, motioning to them.

“Some do.”

“I think the idea of reproduction is absurd.” She felt insecure, but was hiding it behind indignation. What exactly she was thinking I couldn't tell, but it must have pivoted around some derailed idea of motherhood. Maybe her obsession with Madison was shored by a biological yearning.

Pig ordered another glass of wine. Her cheeks flushed and her fat fingers curled around her drink. A little base make-up gathered in the ridges of her nose. “But Madison, she is like nobody else, like a wolf caught in the body of a woman. I'll never forget how once, drunk on sake, very late on a rainy night, the tenth night of hard rain, Madison said it was God beating his fist, that she couldn't take it anymore, and would confess everything to me. She told me how in Paris she'd stuffed her dead baby into a trash can, wrapped in clear plastic. It's name was Elaina and it wore a tiny emerald ring. All that night she was insane, fucked several men then spent the money on drink. Early in the morning she was walking in a quiet neighborhood. The gray stone buildings were damp, water dripped off the black grillwork. Ahead she saw an older lady in a raincoat wearing a funny little felt hat. Madison said what rose in her was a kind of blind rage. This old woman had survived, her very life condemned Madison's. She rushed her, sat on her chest and cut her throat. She stared at the woman, her skirt twisted, her throat cut crudely with a penknife. Madison said the woman's eyes were completely colorless.”

“Madison killed someone?” It shouldn't have surprised me, but it did. It was the logical end to everything I knew about Madison, but it was hard to believe, coming from Pig. True or not it tinted every idea or memory of her.

Pig nodded. “So you see, it makes her special in a way.” Pig watched the bartender bend over into the cooler. “I still have all her old love letters stored in satin boxes. It upsets me to read them.” Pig trailed off, stared past me at Madison, who'd come into the bar from the back stairs. “Honey,” Pig called to her, rising up on her stool.

Madison wasn't surprised. “Fat as ever, huh, Pig,” she said, walking over.

Pig blushed. “I'd like to speak to you about some things.”

Madison nodded O.K. and pointed outside. The intimacy between them surprised me. Madison had a certain respect for Pig. Or maybe in Carmen's Madison treated everyone like a customer. I ordered another drink, thought how people are different things to different people. Maybe this was what I resisted? It upset me that my lovers always had old lovers. I wanted a pureness in my relationships. But Bell longed for Kevin and my father has a new wife. The story of Adam and Eve has less to do with evil than the cosmic human sadness that relationships are never straightforward, never pure enough.

Out the window I could see the glittering sidewalk and Pig crossing her arms over her breasts as Madison lectured her. I thought of all the things I wanted to tell my own mother—that I loved her but wished she wasn't so needy, so depressed, so unhappy. And that I felt responsible for her unhappiness, it was suffocating. Pig put her arm on Madison's shoulder, looking at the ground while she spoke. They resembled each other in a general way as women do who have had a hard life. Madison leaned into Pig, then pulled away and said something surly. Pig shook her head. Their different positions reminded me of various relationships, mother, daughter, sisters, husband and wife. Nobody knew what went on between two people except those two. I thought of Bell and decided to leave. This place was as constant as the planets and I felt even worse knowing that.

They both looked up when the door opened and I told them I was going. Pig urged me to stay but Madison said, “Fuck her, let her go.” I turned, realized how sullen my voice sounded. I did feel left out, but it didn't matter. I would never know what was between them, what held them together, what kept them apart. It was impossible as holding a beating heart in your hands.