Topping From Below (25 page)
There are only two actors in this film, a man in his forties and a young girl. She appears to be nine or ten. My body stiffens when I realize this is an illegal video. The man takes off her clothes and the girl stands in front of the camera. This is no eighteen-year-old masquerading as a child. She has no breasts, no curving of her waist or fullness to her hips, no pubic hair. The man positions her on a table and lifts her legs back so they’re open over her head.
“I won’t watch this,” I tell him angrily, getting up to turn off the VCR. “It’s immoral. It’s offensive.”
“But it excited you.”
“No.” I walk over to his desk and sit down, cross my legs. I feel suddenly vulnerable in my nakedness.
“As soon as you saw the girl, you knew it was for real. Still, you watched it for a short while. You were mesmerized.”
“Not by desire. I was … I don’t know. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I was appalled. I won’t watch any videos like that.”
“Okay.”
His simple reply confuses me. “Did you make Franny watch it?” I ask him. He nods his head. “Did you let her turn it off?”
“No, but she could have. I didn’t physically stop her from turning off the TV.”
I get angry at his twisted version of the truth. “You didn’t have to—you used emotional blackmail on her. ‘Do what I say or I’ll leave you.’ ‘Watch it or I’ll leave.’”
“She could’ve turned it off just as you did. She had a choice.”
“No, she didn’t have a choice. She loved you. She would’ve done anything you asked. You knew that, and you took advantage of her.” I cross over to the sofa and sit back down, suddenly tired. I draw my knees up to my chest.
“Maybe I did,” he says lightly, “but what about you, Nora? You’re stronger than Franny. If you really don’t want to do something, you don’t. You do have a choice.” He smiles, a satisfied grin, and adds, “And that means that everything you’ve done with me—whether you want to believe it or not—you’ve done because you wanted to.”
“Wrong. The only reason I’m here is to learn more about Franny.”
M. gets up and rewinds the video. “Don’t kid yourself, Nora. You’re here because you want to be. And the things you do with me—and the things you haven’t done but will—you do them because you want to. You like the sex, you like the pain, you like me.”
He slips the video in its jacket and puts it away. He comes over and sits next to me, puts his hand on my knee. “So don’t hide behind Franny as an excuse. Everything you do, you choose to do.”
M. is wrong, and he knows it. My freedom of choice is only an illusion. I desire him and the strange sex he proffers—intensely so—but I’ve never had a choice. If I walk away from him, I walk away from Franny’s death—something I cannot do. I am compelled to learn the truth, and M. knows this.
He slides me all the way down on the sofa, then makes love to me almost tenderly, which I’m not prepared for. Tender love is not our
modus operandi
.
Later that afternoon, I go home. I pull my Honda into the driveway and sit there, thinking. The video of the young girl keeps playing in my mind. She couldn’t have been older than ten, most likely younger. I know these things happen, of course, but I’ve never seen it firsthand. When I hear of pornographic videos featuring children, or of children sold into prostitution, I tend to think it occurs in foreign lands, in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, not the United States. This is naive, I know. Our country, also, can be a dark place, and as long as there is a market for child porn, someone will provide it. Evilness does not respect geographical boundaries.
I think of Franny at age nine or ten. I cannot imagine her in a video such as that; it is incomprehensible, horrible beyond belief. I think of myself at age nine: still playing with dolls, earning badges for my Girl Scout uniform, worrying about what dress to wear to school—a normal childhood with normal memories, the kind of childhood the girl in the video should have had.
The cypresses edging my house sway slightly in the gentle breeze. Birds, nesting in the treetops, flit in and out between the evergreens. My house is empty, and today I don’t want to be alone. I consider my options, and discover they are limited. Ian is working, and I don’t wish to see M. I am cut off from my friends and coworkers; I have no family.
I press my hands to my forehead, remembering when Franny was just a baby. For years, I hammered at my parents for a brother or sister—preferably a sister—someone I could play with when we went on camping trips or on picnics, someone I could confide in when I thought Mom and Dad were being unfair. But when they finally did have Franny, it was too late—the ten years between us ruled her out as a playmate. What did happen, however, was far more precious. When my parents brought Franny home from the hospital, my mother told me to sit on the couch, and then she placed the baby in my arms. Franny was so tiny, so fragile. I held her, feeling a tremendous surge of love for this tiny creature who only minutes before entered my life. After that, I became a second mother to Franny, rushing home from school so I could play with her, feed her, clothe her. I put away my dolls. I had a real baby now, and I knew then that someday I’d have many of my own.
I close my eyes and see, as if it were a movie in my mind, Mom sitting at the kitchen table, nursing Billy, while I’m giving Franny a bath in the porcelain sink. I want that time back again. I want to plop Franny in the kitchen sink, filled with tepid water and bubble bath, and watch her giggle and try to smash the bubbles with her short fat fingers; I want to submerge the yellow rubber duck under the bubbles, beneath the water, as if it were a submarine, and hold on to it while Franny splashes around, searching for it, and then, when she isn’t looking, I release the duck, and—surprise!—it breaks through the surface, bubble-covered, bobbing on top of the water, and Franny squeals in delight, grabbing for the duck, trying to drown it herself, while Mom looks on, smiling, with Billy at her breast. Then Dad comes home, bursting through the kitchen door with a briefcase under his arm, and tosses the newspaper on the table, adjusting his glasses. His flurry of motion stops us all, as if time has momentarily been suspended, then Franny squeals and flaps her arms, her mouth turned up in a smile so huge you’d think she hadn’t seen him for days. Dad laughs, that deep chortle of his, and sets down the briefcase, gives Mom a kiss and rubs the top of Billy’s head. Then he comes over to me and says, “How’re my other girls?” and gives me a hug and tickles Franny under her chin.
I want that time back. I want to lift Franny out of the water, being oh-so-careful not to drop her, her body pink and warm and slippery, her chubby legs kicking the air, and lay her on the towel-covered counter, wrap her with her favorite Mickey Mouse-printed terry-cloth towel, and rub her all over until she is dry and tingly; I want to sprinkle baby powder into her skin again, and kiss her tummy, her skin velvety and smelling of the pleasant, lightly scented talc, as Franny reaches for my hair, grabbing fistfuls and yanking impatiently; I want to massage talc into her tiny feet while she smiles and squirms on the towel, and then blow air on the bottoms of her feet and kiss her baby toes, each of them, and watch as she yawns and her eyelids lower; I want to put Franny in her warm fleece one-piece sleeper with the lacy white collar and hold her, almost asleep now, to my chest and smell her sweet breath, her miniature lips slightly parted; and I want to rub my cheek against Franny’s hair and kiss her head, just a gentle kiss, just one more time, while she sleeps soundly in my arms.
I open my eyes. I think of Franny at five, her kindergarten picture, smiling shyly, brown curly hair in pigtails, two plastic butterfly barrettes, one hand cupped under her chin. The photographer tried, unsuccessfully, to get Franny to lower her hand. I was fifteen then, and being a second mother had lost its allure. Franny was five, Billy four, and their sense of newness had worn off. I loved them, of course, but they were a constant irritation—following me around the house, nattering endlessly, sneaking into my room and tearing pictures of animals out of my favorite magazines, using my lipstick to paint each other’s faces. I was more interested in boys those days, and resented giving up an occasional weekend night to baby-sit so Mom and Dad could go out to a movie, for which I naturally blamed Franny and Billy. And by the time I was seventeen, I was going through my own teenage crises, much too distracted to give heed to younger siblings, and then at eighteen I was off to college. I visited occasionally, but I was busy with school, exams, a part-time job at the local newspaper, trying to build a future for myself, a new life, and my family—Billy, Franny, my parents—was part of my old life, important, yes, but relegated to a secondary position. From eighteen to twenty-four—when Franny came to live with me—I have few definite memories of her: on trips home for birthday parties, on Christmases, at Billy’s funeral where she hovered in the background, trancelike, not speaking to anyone. Vague memories, at best. The process of neglect had already begun. She needed me, but I didn’t notice.
I go inside the house, saddened that all my good memories of Franny occurred in the first few years of her life. Ian is coming over this evening, so I start dinner: baked fish, salad, and rolls. When he arrives, he walks up behind me and puts his arms around my waist, kissing me softly on the back of my neck. The air around him is fragrant and sweet-smelling, and I know that he has stopped, as he often does, at the flower stand on F Street to buy me a bouquet of blue and white lupines, foxgloves, or perhaps some yellow monkey flowers.
While we eat dinner, Ian tells me of his day. He stopped at his condo earlier and changed out of his suit into jeans and a red-and-gray-checked shirt, and he looks like a lumberjack, solid, big-boned, Bunyanesque in the way his large hands shrink the knife and fork he holds. Yet his voice is soft, gentle even, and as he tells me about the story he is covering at the capitol, I lean across the table and, every now and then, touch his sleeve while he talks, comforted by the soothing tone of his voice and the soft feel of his shirt, knowing that he would understand I didn’t mean to neglect Franny.
Later that night, Ian and I get ready for bed. We undress without ceremony, accustomed to each other’s nakedness, and we’re in bathrobes as we brush our teeth, floss, use the toilet. I turn back the covers on the bed, then take off my bathrobe. I see my reflection in the mirror on the closet door, my groin hairless. Soon after M. dressed me as a schoolgirl, he shaved my pubic hair. That night, when Ian saw it, he reacted suspiciously.
“Why did you shave?” he asked sharply, looking at my groin. His face was clouded over, his forehead wrinkled.
I hesitated, then said, “For you.”
He paced across the room, frowning, not saying anything for a while. Then he blurted out, “Are you seeing another man?”
“What?”
“You heard me. Are you seeing someone else?”
I stood there, not answering, wondering if he knew.
“Did you think I wouldn’t notice your absences, Nora? Half the time I want to come over, you tell me you’re busy. I call here late at night, and you’re not home.”
I felt the guilt passing through me. “Sometimes I don’t answer the phone,” I said lamely. “If I’m tired, or I don’t feel like talking, I let the answering machine pick it up.” Tentatively, I put my arms around him, feeling the tension in his body, the resentment. He backed away.
“That’s not an answer to my question.” His voice is hard, bitter, filled with suspicion.
“You’re the only man I love,” I said, meaning it. “The only man.” But not the only one I’m fucking, I thought, knowing myself for what I really was: a liar.
Ian was quiet. Finally, he said, “Are you sure?”
I nodded.
Slowly, he relaxed. “I’m sorry, Nora. I don’t know why I get like this sometimes. I try not to—it just happens.” He was silent for a while, then he added, “That’s not true. I do know why I’m like this. It was Cheryl.”
I waited for him to continue. His face had a look of torment I’ve never before seen.
Slowly, he said, “She brought something out in me that I didn’t know existed.”
“That happened with me too, when Franny died. I didn’t think I could—”
“No,” Ian said, interrupting me. “I’m not talking about Cheryl’s murder. I’m talking about … the way we were together. Our relationship was torturous.” He hesitated, then added, “She used to lie to me; she used to see other men. Not frequently, but enough to make me crazy. I thought she would change, but she never did. It got so … ugly. I didn’t know I was capable of such a passionate anger—and it terrified me. I can’t go through that again.” He held me close. Softly, he said, “Don’t ever do that to me, Nora. Don’t.”
I felt my guilt more acutely then, a thick mass of remorse.
Later that evening, after I convinced Ian I shaved expressly for him, he became wildly excited. He said none of his girlfriends had done that for him before. He couldn’t keep his hands off me, and for days afterward he would lift my dress, or pull down my jeans, just because he wanted another look. Now, however, he’s used to seeing me without pubic hair, and once, when he saw what a nuisance it was to shave, he said to let it grow back. I told him I liked having no pubic hair; I told him it turned me on. What I didn’t tell him was that M. insisted upon it.
I start to ring M.’s doorbell, but hesitate when I hear the faint sound of his piano. I try the doorknob. It isn’t locked, so I walk in, hearing the music louder now, and shut the door. Rays from the afternoon sun slant down from the skylight, brightening the foyer, and in the corner a potted weeping fig flourishes, its leaves shiny and willowlike. I listen to the music but do not recognize the piece M. is playing—something light, lyrical, romantic.
I peek inside the den, but he doesn’t look up. His back is straight, his hair slightly mussed, and he looks as if he’s a hundred miles away, totally absorbed. His hair droops over his eyes, and I want to step forward and brush it back. But I don’t dare. He looks untouchable at the moment, enraptured, lost in a different world. This sight arouses me, and I want to interrupt him anyway. I want him to fuck me on his precious piano, but then I remember my frowsy appearance—dingy gray sweatpants torn at the knee; a long blue workshirt from one of my old boyfriends, the collar and sleeves frayed; hair that hasn’t been washed for three days. I change my mind. M.’s aura is too intimidating; he’s much too sexy for me.
