Suicide Blonde (4 page)

Pig pushed her soup dish back. “Well,” she said, “there is nothing I can do if you won't listen to reason. But I do want to tell you one story. It happened to an old friend of mine. She was a conservative woman, but lovely with kitty-cat blue eyes and peanut-butter-colored hair. She was queen of the flower festival and decided at twenty, though she had her choice of many, to marry a minister. He told her that they would do good works and always have a hundred dollars in their pockets. Sometimes when they were alone she sensed something cruel in his profile, something soft and perverse around his mouth. But they married anyway, had several good years, then a slew of horrible ones. She got fat like me and started to act mean and arrogant and before she knew it he had the smell of other women on him and when she reached for him in bed he'd say, ‘Don't embarrass yourself.’ “

I felt my eyes get warm and milky. “That's my mother's story,” I said to Pig. “I told you that.”

“Oh,” she said, “no wonder in my mind it seemed to pertain to you.” She didn't look at me. Her cheeks got pink under the heavy spots of rouge. She rose awkwardly, her grand body shivering, shifting like a yacht pulling out of dock.

“Time for my bath,” she said.

I
N THE LAUNDRY ROOM OFF THE KITCHEN THE WASHER WAS A
slick erotic white. I loaded Pig's colossal slips and bras into the washing machine. Upstairs the water was still beating into the tub. I could hear the sloshing and squeezy echo of Pig settling in, her thighs relaxing heavily against the sides, her back sinking low against the porcelain. Pig's underwear, all in pastel colors and the size of office trash bags, reminded me of the style I wore in grade school. Why did fat embarrass me? Fat people couldn't hide their weakness or sorrow like most could. I used to wake at night and pull a pillow to my stomach, worrying about getting fat. But as I loaded the washer with her oversized dresses, Pig didn't seem tragic but abundant. I almost felt a comfort in her hugeness.

In the kitchen I poured dish soap into a sponge and washed the green ice-tea glasses and started on the flowered soup tureen filmed with hardened raspberries. Because of Bell and my parents I sometimes felt undermined, then other times I thought I was better off because I had gotten over a certain sentimental view of the world. I brooded on this as I ripped up several pairs of ancient boxers in order to dust, then carried the cloth fragments of a polka-dot pair to the living room. I liked dusting . . . there wasn't the strenuous arm movement of other household chores, but a kind of elegant glide that even the smartest lady would be willing to do. You could imagine Virginia Woolf dusting, but to envision her cleaning a toilet was impossible. The white couch, the clock on the mantle, the lamp with the porcelain stem; this room was not as eclectic as the others. Instead each object was like a museum piece, icy with purpose. They were like the memories that interacted or repelled to create my changing moods.

Pig called out. I stood still, worried she had slipped on the tiles, lost her breath, realized her heart was about to explode, but then her voice straightened and I heard that she was calling for more wine.

M
ADAM PIG'S WINE GLASS SAT ON THE TUB'S LEDGE. THE STEAM
thinned and her muddy features took on definition. Except for her lyrical personality, it was hard to believe she had ever been beautiful.

“Would you wash my back and make the symbols like you do,” she asked. “Don't deny it. I've felt them: stop signs, peace signs, Z's. It feels so good to absorb information through the skin.”

Her body underwater was gelatinous and rosy as a Rubens. If you didn't know what a body was supposed to look like, Madam Pig's body would be like a sloppy dream. Her breasts were buoyant and her ancient nipples bobbed at the surface. No matter how many times I saw her naked I was always surprised and a little horrified. But the philosophy of the tub, a woman and her bath, was different than the bedroom—there should be no taint of male criteria.

She spoke lazily about her aches and pains and eventually her voice mellowed into self-conscious wisdom. “When I was your age, Jesse, I'd see some gesture, like the way a strange man opened his jacket or how a girl lifted her foot to check her heel, and I wouldn't be able to lace it into my memory. Instead, the image would be stilled, it would have the awful inactivity of death and this magnified the moment around me: my heart, car tremors, clouds, people working their bodies. Very plainly then I'd see the dark silence of the end. But now that I know death is near, it's not dramatic or startling, just boring.”

“You wouldn't die,” I said, “if you went to the doctor.” She ignored me, pretended to wash her elbow. Her pubic hair reminded me of some elaborate seaweed.

“Why don't you call your daughter?” I asked.

“I haven't seen Madison for five years,” Pig said.

“So, you could call her up now.”

“I was hoping you would call her.”

“I don't even know her.”

Pig closed her eyes so long I thought she had fallen asleep. “In an effort,” Pig said, “to explain why I can never call her I will tell you how Madison came to leave. Steven left me. He had a private income and those people never really get attached to anything. Madison took it hard, stayed in her room, cut her hair short and got a nose ring. And in the same spirit she bought a wolf It was half grown and very tame, a charcoal-and-honey colored animal with dark green eyes. She named it London and fed it hamburgers, sometimes the occasional black-market squirrel. We kept it tied in the back. So many times it pulled its stake out we finally got a boy to pour a cement base. It barked a lot and whined. The neighborhood kids threw sticks over the fence to tease it. They thought it was a rabid dog. After a while Madison started asking if we could set it free in Big Sur. I was in a sick mood and liked to watch the thing suffer. Madison began threatening to leave, but I didn't believe her. One morning I woke before dawn to a horrible yelping in the backyard. The air felt like certain Good Fridays. The wolf’s chain was pulled tightly over the fence. I looked through the wood planks and saw the wolf's dead eyes and Madison's smiling face. She had called the wolf, who then tried to jump the fence in an effort to follow her.” Pig looked into the water. “It hung itself as Madison watched . . . What kind of a girl would do a thing like that?” she asked solemnly. The lilac soap slipped into the water. The plop disturbed her and she continued. “I haven't seen her since. I heard she was working in the Tenderloin and I had a detective follow her. Get the brass box.” I brought it over and she opened it and handed a slip of paper to me. “Go to her. Tell her I'm dying.”

“Why don't you go?”

“You know I never leave the house.”

I looked at the address, then at Pig. Though she looked drained, the story seemed false. But I felt sorry for her, and her expectant face reminded me of my mother's; both had the cast of women that have been left in middle age. As she pulled herself out with a great suck of water, I handed her a towel.

“I hate the vague egalitarianism of these times, it insists that there are no qualitative standards. Judge and be judged,” Pig said. “That is my saying.”

She wrapped the towel around her head like a turban and I helped with her robe. Her face was red from the bath. At the banister, Pig had to stop because she felt dizzy. She tipped way forward and I realized then, because of the hingey way her head bobbed, that she was very drunk. Pig's head dropped lower. She gagged and a long line of glittering burgundy ribboned down the stairwell. Lifting her head sleepily, she said, “I want you to find her.” I wiped her mouth and helped her down the hall to her room.

The green curtains were shut and the single candle looked fuzzy, like a dandelion. It was mid-afternoon, though inside the room it always seemed like midnight. She clutched my arm and asked if I'd get her a cardboard box from the bookshelf. Inside were photographs, large black-and-whites on thin paper: Pig's husband leaning against the door of his race car. He wore sunglasses and there was something in the firm set of his mouth that told me Pig had had a very hard time. There were others, a lovely woman, who I figured was his sister, in a blouse with a Peter Pan collar, her dark hair tied back with a scarf.

“Who's that?” I asked.

Pig did not open her eyes, did not answer.

“You were beautiful,” I said, feeling embarrassed. I shuffled the photos together and handed them to her.

“I was.” She grabbed my wrist hard. “You don't want to end up like me.”

I wanted to yell at Pig that there was no more poignancy in the aging of a beautiful woman than a plain one. If beautiful girls had higher expectations it was only because of vanity, not that they were better people or more blessed. And besides, it didn't seem possible I could end up like Pig. She let her nails dig into the soft part of my arm and with the pain I thought,
Once she was like me.

She must have noticed my look of recognition because she released me and I walked over to the window, held the curtain back. There was a milky lavender rising beyond the power lines.

“You can go now,” she said softly. “I'll be all right.”

I blew out the candle and walked to the door. Pig sat up into the crack of hall light.

“Remember, Jesse,” she said, “there is no black angel but love.”

C h a p t e r

T h r e e

O
UTSIDE THE MARKET STREET BART STATION, PAVEMENT PUD
dles reflected bits of clouds, pigeons balanced on the Woolworth's sign and punks panhandled the tourists in line for the cable cars. Across the street an abandoned porno theater still showed posters of women in garters and push-up bras. The prospect of a search gave the streets a tingly importance. I decided to go see Bell at the costume shop he worked at on Eddy. As I passed the Golden Nugget on the corner, drinkers raised their heads, men and women who looked alike, as if booze had an androgynous physical ideal.

The shop was called Ozymandias. There was a Jesus costume in the window complete with stigmata paste-ons and a crown of thorns. Waiting to cross the street I picked out Bell moving among the carrels of magic tricks, the familiar motion of him pulling his jacket up over his stooped shoulders. The owner, a tiny unsmiling man in a baseball cap, dead-bolted the door behind them.

Bell turned up Jones and I realized he was walking toward the theater for his audition. I followed. He didn't seem particularly nervous or troubled, though on Sutter and Jones he stopped for a moment, sunk his hands into his pockets, leaned back against a brick wall and looked up into the sky. His leisurely motions reminded me of dreams . . . watching your lover speak in hushed tones with someone else. Bell put his flattened hand against his chest. Could he be thinking of the morning his father died? How he had woken from a one-night stand in a strange house, in a neighborhood he didn't recognize, how he walked to the nearest bus stop and shyly asked the driver how to get home? Maybe he was thinking of how Kevin would drift into a café with an atlas under his arm and order a glass of red wine? How his nostalgic yearning for his teenage lover was about to be derailed by a heterosexual reality: Kevin's marriage.

I
FOLLOWED HIM, AT A SAFE DISTANCE, INTO THE THEATER AND
sat in the back row. It was a small place with abodons and other dark angels smiling down from the cornices. The stage was lit for a moody dream sequence, so dim it took a minute to see the green couch, the kitchen table and the single wooden folding chair.

People were scattered in the front rows where Bell had already taken a place. To one side an older man with a thick waist held a clipboard. Beside him stood a very thin woman in jeans. Their heads were ducked in consultation. The woman shrugged her shoulders, put her hand on her hip and lit a cigarette. Blue smoke rose above her short brown hair. The man called a name and a stocky young man rose and headed for the stage.

“You got it? Your wife is sleeping around,” she said. “And forget your lines. We're looking for something fresh.”

He didn't look old enough to have a wife and I could tell by the way he took the stage that he was uncomfortable. His face compressed with seriousness. He sat stiffly on the couch like it belonged in his old aunt's parlor. After a minute he jumped up and began to pace.

“You dirty cow.” His words echoed. “If I had a gun I'd shoot you. You're like a myna bird, you see something pretty and you just pick it up,” he ranted. Even from where I sat I saw his face was red. “It's not that you're fucking someone else, it's that you've had someone else's cock and didn't give me a chance to decide whether I wanted mine there, too.” He went back to the couch, sat back, crossed his arms over his chest and said, as if to himself and more slowly, “God knows I could never touch you now.”

I was moved by his naive delivery, his seriousness. Maybe he reminded me of my first lover? I could be kind to him, like a lover on a one-night stand, because I knew he didn't have a chance. He went over to the woman and she patted him on the back, speaking to him in an insider's whisper.

I remembered again why I hated theater: the melodramatic idea that a person could wake up over toast or driving to the gynecologist and see they'd ruined their life. And I don't like feeling responsible for humans on stage. It reminded me, with its confrontational emotionality, of the homeless men on the street who told you their sad life stories, then asked for change.

She must have admitted he wasn't right for the part because he grabbed his raincoat from the backseat and walked noisily past me, out the door. The man and woman spoke together softly, until the others waiting began to grumble. From his clipboard the man called Bell.

“Same thing,” he said. Bell nodded, walked toward the stage. He hadn't worked much since I'd known him, so it was odd to watch his attempt at professional composure. In our own conversations there were moments he would perform, his turn of phrase or the graceful way he raised his glass.

To watch him reminded me of my photographs, snapshots of shirtless boys in the Mission and Mexican girls in first communion dresses. I quit because they seemed voyeuristic. I started thinking in terms of the single frame. My brain felt dry, lacking the fluid it takes to link images into confluence. I think of going back to photography sometimes because people become intimate when you have a camera. Everyone has one expression that they believe is attractive or profound. Faces reveal a frightening self-deception.

Bell sat on the chair by the table, which strangely resembled the black table at home, hands folded in his lap, his face set toward the seats. It took me a minute to realize he was pretending. He let his shoulders fall slightly and was quiet so long one man coughed and another let out a long fed-up sigh. Without changing his expression, Bell said, “You should have told me, Jesse.” The stage light became as hazy as a million suns.

“Not that I didn't suspect it, coming home late with your legs clamped and the nape of your neck smelling like whiskey.” He stood and walked over to the couch. Even from where I sat I could see him snarl. “But it doesn't matter if you're fucking Kevin as long as you know now I will too.”

His voice continued, but I didn't hear anything. My head was full; sloshing water, heat spots, beating wings. I felt sick and fumbled out of my seat. The raw street light was brutal, so I stepped into a Moroccan deli, stared at the tubed meats, the squares of cheese in wedding-dress shades. It wasn't that he had used my name or mixed it up with Kevin's, but that I would never know whether Bell was acting or not.

M
ADISON WORKED AT A BAR CALLED CARMEN'S SNUGGLED BE
tween the Fallen Angel and a brightly lit Chinese cafeteria. The block was mostly boarded-up storefronts. But there were a few older pubs designated by the San Francisco symbol for bar, a pink neon martini glass. Across the street was a massage parlor called the China Girl. I wandered into the Lusty Lady, a few doors down, hoping to calm myself a little before I approached Madison.

Inside, I saw a row of numbered doors and disks of refracted light from the glass ball in the foyer. A Japanese woman in high heels replaced my dollars with pentagon-shaped coins, nude girls on either side. The booth reeked of cleaning fluid, and disco music pounded through the wall. I slipped a token into its slot and a panel rose like a suburban garage door. Behind the plastic window, a forty-year-old woman danced in an otherwise empty room. Empty, I thought, so men could unobstructedly ease the woman into memory, take her home and into bed. As the door opened, her feet were revealed first. She seemed huge, big-boned with shaggy hair dyed black, more vulgar than sexy. She had a bored, tattered look that reminded me of a zoo animal. The woman that serviced the other angle was younger and slender with a pixie cut. They never talked or looked at the leering men in the windows as they swung their butts and opened their pelvises. I felt a tightening between my legs. Did I want the woman that rubbed her nipples and grabbed her crotch or was my desire elicited by the massive lust emanating from the other booths? I left quickly wondering if being wanted so intensely could make a woman feel strong.

Down the block, in Carmen's storefront window, a TV on a Doric column showed the horizontal chaos of static. Inside, the walls were sheet metal. Reflected shards of purple light gave the bartender's silver eye make-up and angular hairdo a futuristic glow. The waitresses wore see-through tops and glitter in their hair. Computerized devices sent out bands of fractured light like the flames glowing around a sacred heart. Black lights illuminated the white collars and cuffs of the businessmen gathered at the bar. Carmen's wasn't worn and melancholy like the Black Rose, but brutal and energized like an operating room. A hundred TVs covered the walls, showing continuous car-crash footage—splatters of glass, a panicked eye, puddling blood.

People slowly packed in, squat rockers with skull rings and men in blue pants with the musty smell of work. There were a couple of skinheads in boots and flight jackets, their skulls buffed up to an evil gleam. And scattered women: full-time drinkers with bland sheepish faces and pale rocker chicks with black lipstick and deep circles under their eyes. Everyone looked uncomfortable and eyed each other suspiciously.

I ordered a vodka, thinking of it as a companion, wondering if Bell had passed his audition and if the women in the Lusty Lady enjoyed their work. The music was distracting. The beat doubled my heart's and the melodies were woven with sirens and sound bytes of political speeches. I couldn't think coherently, but that was O.K. because I wanted to quit processing. I wanted to try and let things build up around me, encase me like an exoskeleton.

The music changed abruptly to an Indian sitar, and a test tube of green light appeared on the elevated stage. A woman rose from beneath through a trapdoor, dancing languidly toward the light, testing it as if it were water, first a pinkish hand and then a pale leg. She was tall and slender with shoulder-length blond hair. The TVs miniaturized and multiplied her. Through her dark reptilian make-up, there was some sense of the young girl in the portraits at Pig's and, more amazingly, of the woman I had seen bathe in the fountain. Madison moved her torso smoothly, twisting her arms at right angles, like a soldier. Her belly vibrated as she spread her legs before the crowd. The black light made her skin seem rich and flawless and emblazoned her white lipstick and the wide eyes painted surrealistically over the material of her top. She was a psychedelic dream.

I pressed to the front of the crowd. Dancing in a slow introspective way I thought might attract her. This is the first thing, I thought, doing whatever is necessary to attract someone. Sweat soaked the material over her breasts and they slowly became visible, each nipple pierced with a slender gold ring. Her pants became translucent and I could see the dark ringlets of her pussy. My palms were wet and I found myself staring at her stomach. I wasn't sure if I wanted her or wanted to be her. The music broke down and she swung her hair. She never looked at me, just danced harder until the music ended with a sound like a bomb exploding. She fell to her knees and threw her arms back, lifting her torso in offering to some huge tongue. The light extinguished on a rising cloud of smoke and she disappeared. The industrial dance music began again and the crowd loosened, returned to conversations. I felt light-headed, disoriented, because I felt attraction for Madison instead of the pity I had anticipated.

She appeared at the bar about ten minutes later with a fresh layer of white lipstick and without the dark eye make-up. Her body was fragrant and delicately flushed. She wore a sleeveless silver mini-dress and white go-go boots that laced up the front. I felt giddy to be so close. I watched her neck pulse as she drank from the slender cocktail glass. She caught me staring and smiled, placed her drink firmly on the bar.

For a moment I forgot why I came and cast my eyes stupidly down. Her hands were puffy like Pig's.

“I know your mother,” I said. She flinched and I realized I should have started slowly, told her I liked the performance, asked her name.

She smiled, but all her emotive energy cut off, black screens went down in her eyes and she turned back to the bar. It took me a second to realize she wasn't going to speak to me. Bar noises grew louder; copulating voices, driving disco, the sound of breaking glass. I pressed my side against her, felt my nipple harden but still she didn't turn, so I bent and whispered, “She sent me.”

“Are you her new girlfriend?” Madison looked over her shoulder as if something about me physically might explain why I had come.

“I do some shopping for her, a few chores around the house.”

“I bet,” Madison said, smiling at the bartender.

“She's your mother. She wants to see you.” I didn't like my earnest whiney tone of voice.

“That's really what she told you?”

I nodded.

“My mother is dead, both my parents died in a plane crash.” She spoke so blankly it was impossible to tell if it were true.

My eyes welled, not because I felt sorry for Madison, or that she was being cruel by playing with me, but because it seemed the facts I trusted were lies. I felt awkward, stupid, tears came and I saw Madison realize this and reach for her silver bag.

“Go to my apartment,” she said quickly. “Here's the key. You can tell me what's wrong with Pig later.” She got a pen and wrote her address on a bar napkin.

H
ER APARTMENT WAS ON THE THIRD FLOOR OF A MASON STREET
building. Her door grimy, patched with a square of raw wood. I knocked. No answer, just the faint rush of cars from the front window. The door next to Madison's opened and a fat woman in sweatpants came out, her hair pulled back tightly. She smelled of yogurt, and her face might have been pretty if it hadn't been so fat.

“She's hardly ever here,” the lady said. “If you want to come in I'll write down where she works.”

Over her shoulder I saw the inside of her apartment, posters of wrestlers and football players, mostly black. “I've already been there,” I said. “I'm a friend spending the night.”

She lumbered closer to me. “It's a sleazy place, isn't it?” She seemed excited. “Madison's a lap dancer isn't she? Not that I care, I'm moving soon. I don't want any of that AIDS shit.”

When I tried to answer, the woman frowned, she had already decided what to say next. I was uncomfortable and stared at the crossroads where the woman's big belly and crotch met to make a T. This was how she got her thrills, I thought; trying to shock people gave her intimacy with them. She looked at me sternly, deciding I needed to be converted, that I was a physical and careless person. The way she hesitated, I knew, too, that she was lonely, that she hoped we would talk forever. Sweat broke out on her upper lip, beaded on her forehead. I felt an instinctual disgust for the woman, and that repulsion must have passed over my face because she tipped her chin in like a child who is shy, then said, “Good-bye,” stepped back into the forest of poster men and slammed the door.