The Royal Family (64 page)

The place was of a pale green color, with nothing in the halls, and two examination tables. Really it was a processing plant, Domino thought, always firm in her conviction that all authority and expertise on this earth functioned either to withhold good things from her, or else to carefully crank her into the latest meat-grinder; and when she discovered that somebody had left the toilet unflushed, her gorge rose in outrage—
this
was the sort of place to which they’d compelled her! —but on the other hand, she would soon think nothing of the Queen’s stinking lairs where cockroaches crawled on her at night and the whores’ used tampons had stiffened into rigid dark plumes as of ancient flint knives, so may we agree once and for all that such complaints on her part were almost pleasantries, which is to say that they reflected her normal intercourse with the world?

Everyone did everything together; it was one of those communist places. Everyone undressed together. There were lockers. It would be vacuum aspiration. Everyone woke up in the recovery room. An ocean of white bodies was what she thought (her mind being more pictorially descriptive in those days). No one looked pregnant. Most were with their girlfriends or with their mothers. Her girlfriend asked: Are you sure you want to go through with this, Sylvia? —Look, said Domino. Can’t you see that this is already difficult enough? —All the white bodies looked very young—soft bodies, pale and plump and well cared for. It had not been very long now since Domino had confessed to herself that she was a lesbian, so she was still ashamed to gaze openly upon all those pregnant breasts and pregnant cunts; for she and they were as strangers compressed naked in some elevator; they spoke in low voices when they spoke at all, trying in equal proportion not to look invasively at one another and not to acknowledge the unavoidable invasiveness of those others. The real reason that she was none too forward in getting her eyeful, a fact she afterward jealously regretted, was that her own body, hard and scrawny, already wore its first tattoo, its first abscesses, and that long white highway of a motorcycle wound which Tyler’s finger would trace in that Tenderloin hotel room twenty years hence. It wouldn’t be much longer before Domino adopted Tyler’s mode of self-protective skullduggery in the face of humiliations real or imagined, namely,
defiance,
but this first abortion happened long ago, when the girl, still almost a child, remained meek in her shame.

She had to pay up front, cash. Then they took her jewelry away. She owned one Apache tear, an old piece of lapis. It was an earring. She’d lost the other one two months earlier
when she’d had to run away from a married man’s house. While the other women compliantly twisted off their rings and unhooked their bracelets, Domino scowled and hid the Apache tear in her fist. She wanted something to hold. The general anesthetic wafted her down into darkness. She never heard the ringing clatter when the charm struck the green tiles beneath the table on which she lay. A nurse smiled and picked it up for her while Domino dreamed of nothing, like a thread woven into a heavy rug of darkness.

They gave her a sheet of instructions: Don’t have sex or use tampons. Do you understand? they said. —Whatever, said Domino.

A young woman enshrouded in white blankets walked by, and Domino thought: I’d like to eat her. I’d like to at least see her naked. I’d like to . . . and then the woman in white was gone.

One for our records and one for the insurance company, said the receptionist.

I don’t have a goddamned insurance company, snarled Domino.

Thank you very much, the receptionist said in a quick, low voice.

The woman in the chair behind Domino inhabited a loose striped dress. She had bare, crossed ankles, a glimpse of red hair. She shifted her legs, kicked off her shoes, hid behind the newspaper. Seeing the domed belly supporting her newspaper, Domino conceived a shocking jealousy of that baby still inside it; she wanted a baby, too. But the Queen had made her do this. And Justin had held out on her and jacked her up too many times; if she’d been able to keep that money she could have raised a baby. It was Justin’s fault. And all the men who used her, and the men who refused to use her, and the whole rotten world with its trolleycar bells and sherry-colored sunset clouds over white-and-silver San Francisco . . .

A motif in Domino’s life: the clinic. One window looked out in the outer office. After that, there were no windows. How many times will a street-whore go to the clinic in her lifetime? How many diseases, babies, false alarms, abrasions, uterine traumas, inflamations, infestations, ill odors until death?

In Vienna I once wandered inside a medical museum filled not only with such endearing oddities as the porcelain model uterus which of all things most resembled a bat, but also with ghastly things the sight of which destroyed my dispassion. I looked upon the swollen face and oozing blind eyes of a gonorrheal infant, the red sores and breast lesions of a syphilitic mother—real tissue scalpeled out of the dead, now displayed in a manner calculated to induce dread. The museum’s staff did not want me to catch syphilis. Hence they spread an atmosphere of loathsomeness and fear. To be sure, much in the place was of historical interest as well—not least the old prostheses like robot hands of black metal—but then I encountered pickled feet with what looked like bugs growing out of them—surely just some tissue deformity—and bits of tiny bones floating in the formalin, greenly meat-fuzzed. Then came pale grey ovals of other meat floating in other jars. And in one room there dwelled a black-burnt, teeth-clenched skeleton . . .

Let’s say that a woman becomes pregnant, and the doctor sends her home with “
information.” She learns that if she is thirty-five years old, she has one chance in three hundred and eighty-four in giving birth to a child afflicted with Down’s syndrome. At thirty-six, it will be one chance in three hundred and seven. At forty, it will be one chance in a hundred and twelve. Research bears all this out. (We see the cross-section of a vagina, sliced and brown. Inside a spherical paperweight, we find lumps of gristle studded with sores.) The fetus grows into danger. In the medical museum in Vienna we see a tiny white thing, half baby, half shrimp, floating in a jar of death. Another fetus grows into another sort of death. Eighty or a hundred years from conception, it will all be over. Perhaps forty years from now the fetus will have become a middle-aged hooker in black, with high heels and a run in her stocking, a tired woman burdened by a heavy black leather purse.

Her fourth time, the degradation was the nurse pumping her for dollars. Domino had to hide the degradation. She had to hide how she felt. No painting offended the plain white walls. There were no magazines in the waiting room. On her first visit to the place, the nurse held her hand. The second time the nurse was more businesslike. That was when the requests for a tip began worming their way into Domino’s sweaty ears. All she had was a twenty she’d stolen from an old barfly . . . The doctor had a round face. He was balding, professional, courteous in an old-fashioned way. He called her Miss. Domino liked that. He had no name. Domino had no name. The nurse had no name. —There, that’s it, the doctor said. If you bleed more than two days, give me a call. Later she would remember coming out into blue sky and old buildings—gracious props of God—and she remembered massaging her belly which had already begun to ache. In the middle of that night, when she was fucking a man for money, she hemorrhaged. The man drove her to the emergency room. Later they told her that she had almost died.

Things happen, Chocolate said. I got friends, they been trying to conceive a child for years and can’t do it and others get one right away. There must be a reason. You know what I’m saying, Dom? A divine reason.

Oh, fuck that, said Domino.

She hadn’t told the others when she got the abortion. It was nobody’s business but hers. Later on, though, she’d started feeling sorry for the dead baby. She got so she couldn’t stop thinking about it. The dead baby came swimming through her heart’s windows at night, making her heart’s cat hiss, spreading its unformed flipper-arms wide like a torpedo’s fins to explode inside her with dead and bloody grief; she bit her lip and the tendons stuck out in her neck like tree-roots; the dead baby sucked the blood from her heart and then tumbled down to the empty place inside her where it had died.

I know how you feel, Chocolate said while within the crack pipe, smoke like white San Francisco fog roiled into her mouth, then into Domino’s mouth, which was framed by white scars from the broken glass which had penetrated her body in numberless accidents.

You ever had an abortion? the blonde suddenly said in a low anxious voice.

Uh huh, said Chocolate. ’Course I did. We all gotta have those.

I feel a little strange, Domino said. You know. In my tummy.

Oh, everybody start to feel that. Never mind about that, Dom.

I just kind of sat there empty afterward, Chocolate. Know what I mean? I felt so bad. And this was my ninth time.

Uh huh. Hey, Dom, let’s go score some rock. I know a trick who—

Chocolate?

What?

What’s your real name?

Why the fuck you want to know?

Because.

Brenda.

Brenda, huh? Well, I guess Chocolate will work. Brenda’s some stupid twat’s name.

What the
fuck
you ask me for if you gonna insult me?

Then I woke up with a pinching cramp this morning, Chocolate, and I felt kind of scared . . .

You’re gonna bleed for a couple of days, Dom. Don’t have a heart attack. For Jesus sake. Stupid twat name she tells me. Dom, you anybody else I cut your face.

I feel, you know, neutral.

About callin’ me a twat?

About what I did. To my . . .

Well, you got to. I always felt neutral about it.

Always?

I felt, well, weird but okay. Even that first time I never told the daddy, and back then when I just turn sixteen I actually got a pretty goddamned good idea who that daddy might be . . .

Brenda? said the blonde, longing just then to be as jaunty as miniskirted Chocolate with her headphones on and her wrinkled fist jammed firmly against her hip and her lips parted in a heroin smile with darkness deep inside as she raised knee and showed leg.

What?

Brenda, my tummy hurts.

You gonna be fine, Dom. You want me to get the Queen?

Shit, no. What’s the use of bothering her? She never—

I don’t wanna hear you badmouth her, Dom. But if you wanna smoke some weed, that gonna take your cramps away, I guarantee . . .

Brenda? repeated the blonde, her eyes as slow and bleary as a car’s yellow eyes creeping down a hooker avenue.

Call me Chocolate. Brenda just some stupid twat name.

Brenda, my—

Lemme guess. Your tummy hurts.

Oh, fuck off.

Well, you did it. Nobody did it to you. You said you didn’t want no baby, so . . .

You think I’m trash? You think I’m not good enough to have a baby? Is that what you think?

Hey, honey, lots of women like us got other goals. We’re
professional
women. We never got any appropriate time until we
make
a time and that’s not how life works.

So you’re saying I should have kept my baby. You’re saying I’m a fucking murderess.

I’m saying I love you, Domino. Domino, you’re my sweetheart.

And you probably think I’ll burn in hell, don’t you, you Bible-thumping tattooed negroid bitch? I bet when you’re alone with the Queen you tell her,
Domino’s just dirt. Domino’s scum.
Admit it to me. Admit that you look down on me.

Domino . . .

Tell me you hate me. Tell me I’m trash, because I killed my baby.

Domino, you remember what the Queen said? She said, when you put out a thought in the universe, you gonna get something back. Girl, you better start taking responsibility for your thoughts.

Fuck off.

All right, Domino, that’s enough. Other people got problems, too.

Why, you selfish little nigger twat, don’t try to hide that hatred in your eyes. Now I know how you feel about me. You watch your back, girl, or some night you might wind up shanked. Some night you might wind up with a big old butcher knife wedged deep up your gonorrhea-infected snatch . . .

The falling out between Domino and Chocolate actually went back almost a year, to the night when Domino for pure goodness had gotten Chocolate a date (in other words, Domino saw the john first, but the john liked Chocolate’s looks better), so Chocolate agreed to let her have a third of the heroin. After the date, Chocolate wanted to wash the sperm out of her mouth with a bottle of some Thunderbird because she and Domino were standing right across the street from the liquor store on South Van Ness where at this very time of night a certain clerk might give Chocolate free booze in exchange for a little pussy because she’d managed to make him believe that she had no money—a demonstrably useful fiction to maintain, so she asked Domino if she would buy for her with the john’s twenty. In other words, Chocolate’s logic had just entirely contradicted itself, but never mind. —Sure, that’ll work, said Domino, clip-clopping into the liquor store on her silver high heels. As she was paying for the wine, a brawny black woman named Ada, of whom Domino was scared because she sold ass for Domino’s former pimp, brushed past Chocolate and asked for two dollars because she was hungry. Domino had already given Ada two dollars for food earlier that day, the Queen and Justin not being in sight to protect her. She didn’t have any more money for Ada, since the change from the twenty belonged to Chocolate. It wasn’t her money, and she told Ada so, but with a weak and sinking voice entirely uncharacteristic of her, because she felt in her soul that she was already dreaming a nightmare so terrible that self-defense must prove useless. —What do you
mean
it’s not your money? the black girl shouted.
’Course
it’s your money! Don’t you be scammin’ me,
bitch!
—Through the liquor store window Domino could see Chocolate running away; she hoped to get the tall man, who was out trying to score a perfect baggie of white girl, but Chocolate, who kept scratching at her red eyes, trying to peel the swollen orange eyelids back and scrape out the infection that grew inside, unfortunately for Domino found herself presented on the very next block with a very attractive sexual offer which she owed it to herself not to refuse, being pretty broke, and once she accepted she got not only money, but also a deep needleful of pure China white heroin which blissfully sidelined her until late the following morning, so Domino remained most friendlessly alone as Ada pursued Domino all night, breaking up her dates. Whenever a car slowed, Ada scared the driver away. Wherever Domino went, even all the way to the Tenderloin’s red-streaked night where sparks came tumbling underneath the door of a welding shop like Fourth-of-July cigarette ash, the black girl was punching her and spitting on her. She fucked up Domino’s eye. Domino didn’t want to strike back because Ada was eight months pregnant and
Domino would do major jail time if she killed her baby. She lost one of her high heels as she fled down the street, with Ada loping behind cursing. When she found Chocolate at last, it was dawn and Chocolate was lying grinning and mumbling in a doorway. Domino had been so frightened as to entirely forget her easy graceful old ways of intimidation; therefore she actually
begged
Chocolate for two dollars so Ada would leave her alone.