Suicide Blonde (6 page)

“You know it's not that. Tell me,” I spoke slowly, because I was angry and didn't want to slur my words, “that I am the last thing between you and the total homosexual life you fear.”

“I can't believe you're saying this!” He brushed by me and went into the bathroom, locked the door behind him.

I stood very still, heard Bell run water into the sink. I knew he was running cold water over his wrists, he was convinced this calmed him. I went into the kitchen and got a shopping bag from under the counter, noticed the metallic container of Ajax, the mousetrap still baited with an old piece of Brie and the flowerpot full of white granite that Bell had used to force narcissus bulbs last winter. The morning light seemed suddenly bright and the paper cracked loudly as I loaded underwear from the shoebox I kept at the top of my closet. I took T-shirts and a sweater. I went to the alcove, to the little marble-top table where I left my keys, I heard Bell fidgeting behind the bathroom door.

“I'm breaking up,” he said, “and no one cares.”

I thought,
Even love has its limits
, and I couldn't believe this hadn't occurred to him. Hadn't he learned anything from his parents? Lovers? Even friends? You had to act a prescribed way to be loved. I heard him shift his body weight and the water stop. Putting my lips to the cool paint of the door I whispered, “You can't have two lives, Bell. You'll ruin everything and we'll both be left with nothing.”

I
LIT SEVERAL PRAYER CANDLES IN GRACE CATHEDRAL. ONE FOR
Bell, one for my mother, my father, his wife, her kids, one for Madison, one for Pig, one for myself as a little girl. Then I lit a few for abstractions: courage, honesty, sanity and kindness. The flames rose from gold glass cups. I emptied my pockets of change, let the coins plunk into the tin box. I thought of all the other places candles burned, in Hindu temples, little Chinese dens, the formal gardens of Japan, satanic churches in the California hills. I thought of apartment fires where the dead are laid out on the sidewalk and of the blue gas crown on the oven at Bell's.

I knelt at a side chapel, the lushest one with a purple fairlane, rosette windows and a life-size crucifix. There was incense and a big vase of roses and violets. The stone walls were draped with tapestries, biblical scenes: the raising of Lazarus, and Rachel by the well. The miserable Jesus looked like Bell, though there was something knowing around the eyes I attributed to my father. Maybe it was because he was a minister and, like dogs and their owners, they had begun to resemble one another.

My knees were mashed into the burgundy cushion. I looked up at the figures of saints. Some of the women's expressions, an ecstatic submission, reminded me of the expressions on posters outside X-rated theaters. I remembered the story of one saint, a virgin, who cut off her breasts rather then succumb to a rapist. I made myself think
God is dead
, but it seemed dangerous. Then I thought,
my pussy is the same color as the carpet.
This comforted me somehow. I relaxed a little, saw how the sepia light from the window shone on Jesus's face. I knew that it was comforting to have someone around who knew all the bad things about you, the horrible things in your past . . . like a lover or a close friend, and I knew this was the purpose and place of Jesus. I took down the cord and walked to the altar. I stared into Jesus's raised eyes, then pushed my hips into his pelvis so it rubbed on the carved girth of cloth. A tightness came. I kissed his forehead, his upturned eyes, his open mouth. My tongue wiggled between his parted lips, I pushed against him and the cross rocked. Inside my tongue scraped the rough unlaquered wood. I tasted blood and sprang back, saw, like the momentary confluence of stars, how everything was connected . . . my father fucking around, my embittered mother, Bell fucking boys, me fucking the stranger, my own phantom longing . . .

C
ARMEN'S WAS DARK. I HAD TO STAND BY THE DOOR, LETTING
my eyes adjust to its shimmery walls. The bartender mixed drinks in two silver cups. There was no music, just the continuous white noise from several televisions. I ordered a shot with a beer back, then asked the bartender, an older woman with spiky hair, what she knew about Madison.

“She's a girl like anyone else.” She shrugged while drying a highball glass. The place seemed less exotic than last time. I drank fast and scanned the black-light murals. The nearest one was of an alligator leering at a nude woman. I ordered another shot, watched a drunken couple make out at the end of the bar. The man squeezed his fingers between her legs, then smiled like an idiot. The woman's hair was dirty, strains separated in shiny red cords down her back. Each time they pulled apart, they drank quickly and seemed ridiculously shy.

For a while, staring at my paper bag of clothes, my freaked-out eyes in the mirror behind the bar, I convinced myself I would go back to Bell. He was the only man that ever made me feel in life instead of just a spectator, and if he did that by fear and pain, it was still better than when I looked numbly at some man on the couch thinking, I will leave you soon. I got another beer and thought of Bell and me in a big apartment on Nob Hill, how we would have dark paintings and beautiful wooden bowls. Bell would have a job producing movies and I'd be a photographer and we'd eat tabouli and make our own Christmas cards and name our baby India. Our bed would be thick with patterned blankets, quilts and cranberry satin pillows. But the dream place bled into a starker room, Bell asleep on the futon, me awake at the window—our life as raw and painful as a bloody bone.

I was still angry about Bell's reference to my biological clock. To think of it was ridiculous—an old-fashioned alarm, that seemed a cartoon of the real angst . . . a vague sense that it was time to change. It began with noticing babies on the street, their funky sweaters and adorable little shoes. I noticed pregnant women too, how they seemed so positively preoccupied. And after so many lovers, the purity of the mother-child relationship became so appealing; there was no doubt your baby loved you. There was embarrassment too, at still being a maiden, because there were women in the beginning of that stage, fresher, more energetic and better at it than me. This sometimes made me feel ridiculously jealous. The biological clock was a feeling that it was time to move from one phase to the next, more advanced one. It was a positive and mature thing really, though men made it sound like a nervous disease.

But what had I done to stabilize myself? I had begun a relationship with a bisexual man, and as far as economics I hadn't done much in the last year except take some photos, sew the occasional hat or vest. Instead, I hung out in the cafés on 16th Street, pretending to read
Flowers of Evil.
The Mission seemed like the last bohemia in America, moved in the sixties from North Beach to Haight-Ashbury, both of which were overrun now with tourists looking for Kerouac and Cassady in City Lights and the Grateful Dead and the Drug Store in the Haight. The Mission was dirty, you could still get a two-dollar burrito, sit in the Albion or the Uptown, watch leftist documentaries at the Roxie. Used-clothing stores were not vintage and there was a host of prophetic street people who drank coffee and wrote manifestos in the cafés. One, a thin man named Spoons, sat in the Piccaro Café, distributing to everyone xeroxes that demanded life-time driver's permits, converting all the storefronts to squats and allowing girls to marry as early as ten. He also insisted that every light bulb had a tiny camera inside and that it was a CIA plot that he never got any mail. The Piccaro with its headless-Barbie-doll art, people in oversized sweaters scribbling into notebooks, reading, playing chess. It seemed authentic, but I couldn't decide whether they were posing or if I was. This scene and every other seemed hopelessly self-conscious to me. I felt as suspicious about bohemians as I did about professionals in upscale restaurants or suburbanites who catatonically roamed the malls of Palo Alto. I had come here to be different with all the others, but it wasn't working. Maybe it had to do with sheer numbers. It was easy to convince myself in Virginia that I was an interesting person, but here I was no different than other women. I couldn't help thinking that thirty years earlier we'd be married, cooking, knitting, arranging furniture—raising a family. Don't misunderstand me, there are obsessed and brilliant women artists in San Francisco. It was just that coming here made me realize I wasn't one of them.

Where would I go now? My mother would buy me a ticket home. When I got there she'd load blankets on my bed and bring me juice. I could masturbate while listening to suburban husbands mowing their lawns. I could go back to Pig. I smiled at the thought of them as my only alternatives. I thought of things I could do in San Francisco; cafés, museums, the park. Then I thought about where I would go if I could drive. I thought about all the towns I had lived in and what I did in each of them. But nothing would satisfy me, there was nothing on this earth that could settle me now.

Madison came down the side steps. There was a silver tear pasted near one black eyelined eye and she wore hiphuggers and a studded belt as wide as a fist. She didn't see me, which I found hard to believe as I was conspicuous as a cow in this robotic place. I yelled her name as the door sucked shut behind her, then jumped up and followed her out onto the wet street. She bent over, unlocking her car door.

“Why didn't you come?” I said to her back. She turned, slacked back against the car sardonically. Her eyes frightened me a little. And I noticed, too, how her biceps were full and rounded. She had the twilling vibrancy of people in good shape.

“Did Pig tell you she wasn't my mother?”

I nodded, realized how stupid I must seem to her and felt embarrassed by my dirty jeans and black high-tops.

“I came to ask you something.” I took a step closer. She was like a cobra and I felt if I could get close enough to stare into those horrible eyes I could charm her.

“Why don't you just leave me alone?” Madison said. I was startled at the thin exhausted quality of her voice.

“I need some advice,” I said.

She squinted at me. “Why do you think I could help you?” She asked like it was an impossible and crazy thing.

“I don't have any place to stay.” It wasn't what I expected to say, but I realized now it was the reason I had come down to Carmen's.

She smiled. At first it reassured me, but then her lips spread in an expression I imagined a man might use on a young girl.

“You just don't get it, do you?” she said. But she seemed pleased. “You want to stay awhile, with me!”

I nodded. She got in and motioned for me to get in on the other side. It was a strange car with large rhinestones pasted all over the dashboard and a voodoo doll hanging from the rearview mirror. She turned the key in the ignition, her jewels caught light like broken glass and the radio played the same white noise as in Carmen's. Madison seemed to like it, she pushed the car lighter in, rifled through her purse, found her cigarettes, knocked two out, offering one to me. I bent toward her hand as she lit mine first, then hers off the fading coils of the car lighter. “You'll see,” she said, absently plugging the light back in, “there are a million ways to kill off the soft parts of yourself.”

C h a p t e r

F i v e

I
WENT HOME LATE IN THE MORNING BECAUSE I KNEW BELL WAS
at work. I had slept badly at Madison's. A dream of cockroaches crawling into my mouth haunted me and I was worried the stranger would be suddenly beside me, his thick cock nudging my ass. At dawn the couple upstairs started fucking. The woman made a sudden bark of discomfort, but the man coached her into pleasure saying, “Like this. Just like this.”

The apartment wasn't much different than when I'd left yesterday. There were still dirty glasses in the sink and a warm smell of eggs mixed with the clove cigarettes Bell lately favored. The ashtray was filled with butts smoked super low the way poor men do. But the place was already bizarre, the Bible opened to the Easter story and a mazelike drawing tacked up over the bed. The sheets on the futon were tangled. I hoped it meant Bell had slept badly, but to me they implied passion as well. With Bell there was always this OTHER. We never spoke of it, but I knew he was more excited with me after he saw someone dancing at a club or when he saw a man or a woman on the street he admired. And when he encouraged me to wear lingerie or get my hair cut short like a boy's it really wasn't so I would look sexy, but so I would resemble this other, an erotic abstraction in his head.

I broke the seal of the pint I had bought across the street and drank. There was something sustaining about the cold glass lip and the hot taste of bourbon. It was harder to break down the apartment than it had been to leave, there was something torturous about initiating the ritual of
MINE
and
YOURS
. I got the packing tape from the odds-and-ends drawer in the kitchen and put together the boxes. Loading quickly, I packed my shoes, several ratty sweaters and a blanket. I got the tiny wooden treasure chest my grandfather had made me and the paperweight with the white rose inside. I took my lithograph of the angel, my old felt hat and the tea strainer from the kitchen. Sorting through the silverware drawer for my favorite spoon I felt my heart beating hysterically. I got in the closet, sat against the far wall looking out into the room. Remembered how Bell had once lured me out of here, from what he called my poodle bed, by putting a cream puff on a plate on the floor. And how my parents had divided their belongings: my father left first, then asked my mother formally in letters to send a certain photo, his suit with the cuffed pants, his old jazz records. Sitting in Bell's aroma, rubbing his materials against my cheek, I decided that all this was my fault because I was the worst kind of person; a pretty girl with high expectations who wanted more, but couldn't define more and prayed it wasn't just a matter of marrying money. I heard the incessant traffic on Bush Street, thought of heroines in novels. They were always optimistic and naive whether they were old women or whores. They were always beautiful, as if only the lovely had courage enough to go out into the world. They were smart in a dumb way, that inarticulate intelligence men seemed to like. They did crazy things because of love and in the end always realized something stupid that was obvious all along.

I skimmed every inch of the twisted sheets for sperm stains, worried that Bell had already taken a lover. Was it true that a man who really loved you would wait before he took new lovers? Or would the more desperate man seek a new lover immediately? Lately, I didn't trust the typical maxims of love, I know I sometimes loved men I cheated on more than ones I'd been true to. And besides, what did it mean that I didn't want him sleeping with anyone. It seemed territorial, had more to do with my will than any feeling for him. But that's the way it was with Bell from the beginning. It was his old girlfriend that started my obsession. I decided I wanted him once I'd heard about her: that she was five years older, had bleached blond hair, could speak French, that her father beat her and probably, most importantly, that she still wanted Bell. It was around these ridiculous facts my obsession with him flowered. But that wasn't really true, because when I thought of his lovely genitals, his narrow face, how he smiled with pleasure when I talked, how his body was warm, how it seemed to love me, I knew that I loved Bell, not only the mystery that surrounded him.

I spotted Kevin's wedding invitation lying under the table and crawled out of the closet. The envelope was worn fuzzy along the opening. I found a picture of Bell I liked and stuck both into my cardboard box. The two boxes and a green trash bag were all I had. It pleased me, I was like a monk or a disciple, I didn't need but a few bits of clothing. But staring at the sheen of the plastic I felt miserable. I was twenty-nine, and if I accumulated things at the same rate until I was ninety I would only have six boxes and three trash bags. But what did it matter? I wanted to stop thinking that accumulating things—people, houses, cars—could comfort or save me. But the thought of having nothing scared me, it was too much like being dead.

I dragged the bag to the lobby, then carried down the boxes, thought of sliding the key under the door, but decided to keep it. I might feel like spying on Bell or things could get desperate and I might need to sell my books or my radio. It was damp on the front steps. I sat there in a stupor trying to decide if I should flag a yellow cab or go back up and call the gypsy car service.

A cab came around the corner and I stood, motioned for it to stop. The driver pulled over, he was a congenial Arab who helped me load my things into the trunk. In the shadow of the cab I could see the I.D. card with his photo and his name—Amud. His smile was well practiced as he asked about the framed photo I carried on my lap.

“It's my mother,” I said. “She was Miss America and later became a doctor.” The cabbie looked at me through the rearview mirror, first with lifted eyebrows in an expression of sudden interest. But when he saw how my mouth was loose from drinking and the crazy glaze covering my eyes he hunched his shoulders and drove faster. I often lied about my mother, as if saying what she might have been could somehow help her. Bolstering my mother was like pretending your boyfriend loved you. I leaned my head against the window frame, letting the cool air dry the perspiration on my face. This upset the cabbie.

“Your father, he helps you?” The cabbie turned toward me very slowly, trying to see if he could sense the refinement that was usually under the hippie clothes of young San Francisco women.

“I'm on my own,” I said. This seemed to bother him. He pressed the gas, shook his head.

“A girl should not be like you are.” I wanted to answer but couldn't think of anything to say, and the cabbie didn't look at me again. He turned on the radio to a channel with scratchy Arabian music and drove anxiously, revving the engine and edging forward at the lights. At Madison's he helped me unload my stuff, shaking the trash bag to see if I was crazy enough to move garbage. He took my money and drove off toward Market Street.

Upstairs I could tell Madison had been there. She had left a portable TV and some sprayed carnations in a milky vase. The flowers were ugly and when I turned on the TV there was only aggressive static like the TV sets at Carmen's. These things frightened me and made me wonder if Madison had really meant to make me feel welcome.

I placed my grandfather's chest on the TV, tacked my Kandinsky postcards over the nightstand, draped a scarf over the headboard and leaned my mother's photo against the wall. It's amazing how a well-placed scarf and a photograph can transform a cement-block hotel room or a studio like this from any place into some place familiar. I dumped out the trash bag, folded my clothes into the drawers. The room still seemed creepy with the fake wood dresser and the metal institutional bed. Even the cubist poster was angular and soulless like a machine. There were distant sounds of activity in the building. It conjured up the last person who lived here, a little man with bad teeth who ate sardines and read cheap pornography. He had a heart attack in the tub jacking off. “There is nothing so lovely,” he thought, “as a very young girl.”

I crushed the boxes with my foot and stored them in the closet, certain this was only transitional. Madison's closet was spectacular, like a rack of costumes in an actor's dressing room. There were beads and belts—one nail alone for crosses and rosaries. There were no current-style clothes, which made me wonder if Madison might be older than I thought or maybe ageless like a vampire. I fingered the rich wine-colored velvet, smooth white satin, her colored vinyl, decided to try some on. First a sleeveless mini-dress. When I stepped into my reflection I thought I was my mother. This was the style I remembered her in, or maybe it was this scenario, because I used to go through her clothes, smell her perfumed bras and slips—lie on her bed thinking of her body with my father's. But I looked more like Madison than my mother and I thought how malleable women are, with clothes they can look like virgins or whores or housewives. Their earrings give information, hemlines speak, eye shadows imply. I remember how Bell sometimes ridiculed my big sweaters and jeans, said I looked like a student. He'd point out women he thought were fashionable, usually ones in well-tailored black clothes. Sometimes I wanted new clothes, but when I stepped into little gray dressing rooms with the hooks on one side and mirrors on the other, the store's fluorescent light blaring underneath the door, I felt vulnerable and stupid and it was impossible to decide on anything.

There was a scrap of newsprint with Madison's handwriting scrawled all over in the dress pocket. I wanted to read it, but heard the door rattle and a key in the dead bolt. Madison came in carrying a tube of toothpaste and a package of toilet paper. She was startled to see me in her dress but didn't say anything. Instead she went into the bathroom and ran water to brush her teeth. I quickly pulled the dress off, turned to find my clothes on the bed.

“Nice butt,” she said. “You could make a lot of money with a butt like that.” Madison laughed, flopped down on the bed, watched me pull up my jeans. “What's your story?” Madison asked.

“I'm just a girl like any other.”

Madison smiled. I could see I pleased her and I wanted deeply to do so again.

“Have you ever had an abortion?”

“Yeah,” I said, “once in college.” It seemed a strange thing for her to ask me. So quickly she reduced people to two things, their most violent experiences and their sexual desires.

“Sobering, ain't it?” she said, scanning the things I put up around the room. She fingered the blue silk scarf.

“Where are you from?” I asked.

She looked at me to show how easily I slipped into formalities. “Carson City. Aren't you going to ask me what my daddy does?” She smiled. “My mother said he was a cowboy but she's a liar. Another time she pointed to the guitarist on a video and said that was my father. My second stepfather moved us around a lot, crazy places like Spokane and some place in Mexico. He sold things: tanning beds, fire alarms. I've lost track of them now and we will never find each other.”

“That's too bad,” I said, though I knew it wasn't what she wanted me to say.

“I wish I were a lizard hatched in the desert sun.”

I sat down on the bed by her feet. “I'll only be here until I get a job.”

“You're going to work for me. Come over to the bar around one o'clock tonight.” Standing abruptly, she moved toward the door. “Did they wake you?” she asked, pointing upstairs.

“It sounded like he was hurting her.”

Madison shook her head. “She just pretends because he likes to think he's hurting her.”

After she left I listened for her footsteps on the stairs, then on the sidewalk until they mixed with others and became untraceable. I looked at the clock. There was an intolerable pain connected with time now. I thought of drinking. I thought of masturbating, of watching a man fuck me in the ass, screwing me like a dog. These fantasies scared me now. I couldn't always control the men. They did horrible things, their faces contorting in evil pleasure.

The phone rang and when I answered I could tell by the heavy breathing it was Pig. “Madison,” she said, “Madison, is that you? Don't torture me, it took a lot to call you,” she said loudly. “I want to see you. I sent a girl, but I couldn't tell her what I really wanted to say . . . I know you're there . . . could you come out here, honey? Could you?” The helpless sound of her voice made me feel cruel and I whispered, “You're a fat old fool.” When I said it I heard a sharp intake of breath and a sound like she had fallen against a table and the phone rattled onto the floor.

I felt bad, but no way could I call back to apologize. So I called my own mother. She answered on the first ring and told me excitedly that my father's cousin had died. “I always liked him so much,” she said, “so what if he left his wife for a year or two and ran off with his secretary, when that was over he came right back to her. They got married again and everything. There is something primal about first love.”

She allowed men their wanderings if they were rich or if they eventually smartened up. She wasn't exactly a situational moralist, more a financial one. I told her we had moved. She took the number and I said I had to go. She pretended I hadn't spoken, said, “The crazy thing is since I found out he died, I've been buying things. Just yesterday I bought a stereo and today these little Persian rugs for my car—I feel free.” She giggled girlishly. I told her again I had to go.

“Why do you always call me when you have so little time to talk?”

“Sometimes it makes me sad to talk to you.”

“Because you're afraid you'll turn out like me?”

That wasn't it exactly, more that her equation seemed tragic in such a trivial way . . . drunken father, no-good husband, that once she was beautiful and now she was fat, that she probably hadn't had sex in ten years, that her life had shrunk to a dollar sign. It was the only currency she felt comfortable dealing in, it was the only thing she trusted. “No,” I said. “You just remind me I'm going to die.”

“And get petty in the meantime?”

“Good-bye, Mom,” I said. As I hung up I heard her say, “You're no different than anyone else, Jesse.”