WAS IT THE BOURBON OR THE DYE FUMES THAT MADE THE PINK walls quiver like vaginal lips? An acidy scent ribboned the pawed tub, fingered up the shower curtain. My vision was liquid and various as a lava lamp. In the mirror I saw the scar from the blackberry bramble that had caught my chin and scratched a hairline curve to my forehead. It was hardly noticeable, but left the impression that my face was cracked. Taking another sip of bourbon, I put on the plastic gloves and began parting my hair at the roots. As the dye snaked out there was a faint sucking sound, like soil pulling water, and I wondered: if I were brave enough to slit my wrists would I bother to dye my hair?
This is what happened: all day yesterday Bell had stared out the window, smoking cigarettes. There were his usual reasons-his father, no acting jobs, that he was getting ugly and old. Plus there was Kevin to moon over. He eyed the eggshell envelope of Kevin's wedding invitation and stared out the window for hours, his face vaguely twitching as he moved from one memory to the next. His melancholy made me think he was getting sick of living with me. And this, in turn, made me want to please him, to show him I was not one of his worries. So when he went walking I put on my black teddy and arranged myself on the futon. Looking at my breasts covered in lace flowers, I thought I seemed overly anxious, like a Danish or a little excitable dog. I looked desperate… using the one thing that would keep him near. It seemed manipulative, even if it was an attempt to jerk him from his melancholy. Men are never more appealing than when they brood.
Bell came in and walked to the foot of the bed. His eyes narrowed with lusty admiration for my forwardness. He lay over me and said, "I'm in charge now." But when he didn't release his weight I asked him if he was going to take off his clothes. "You seem to want me to," he said. I blushed and asked him if he felt bullied, told him now he knew how women felt. "You take off that," he said, stretching the lace of the teddy. I rolled it down and then adamantly pulled his shirt off. There was something hard in me that wanted him, no matter how awkward it was going to be. We kissed in a distracted way. Eventually, he turned his head, as if watching a bird move across the horizon. I saw dark continents under the paint of the walls beyond his profile.
"I'm bored," he said.
I sat up on the edge of the bed, then walked to the closet. Shifting the hanging clothes, I felt my hands already beginning to shake. I dressed and went into the kitchen. There was a taste of pennies in my mouth, a fierce nausea and tinny rawness, like the moment after you break a bone.
Bell sat in the dark at the painted table by the window. Occasionally the streetlight would show a wisp of cigarette smoke, his face dissected by crossing panes of light, his eyes clear and vacant like a cat's.
"I have to get more cigarettes," he said.
He didn't sound mean, just sullen. And I couldn't tell whether he was falling clunkily out of love with me, or if, as he claimed, it was just his usual reticence. Sometimes I suspected he was stunted, not capable of predictable human emotions. Last week he had laughed at a tourist couple separated by the BART train doors. I imagined a wire grid behind the skin of his forehead and a cold metallic look in his eyes. Of course it was only my imagination, but the sensation was terrifying, like finding out your lover is a killer.
Now he'd been gone twenty-four hours. For a while I had found his habit of floating off charming, but to appreciate this suddenly seemed masochistic. I didn't want to be one of those women addicted to indifference.
I peeled down my gloves and threw them gingerly, like used condoms, into the trash. The teddy incident was terrifying because it exacerbated the sensation that my feminine power was diminishing, trickling like drops of milk from a leaky pitcher. I wrapped my hair in a towel. The way I looked reminded me of some clichéd floundering female, so I took off my robe and lay across the couch, a better spot to watch shadows gather in the fleshy green fingers of the big jade plant. He'd inherited it from the last inhabitants of the apartment, because it wouldn't fit through the door when they moved. Near the plant was a cedar wall panel with a Japanese scene. Bell's boa hung on a hook beside his film stills; blurry body gestures from a super-8 film Bell made years ago. There were lots of little things: the blue glass lamp, the leopard with eyes that glowed, empty wine bottles, brass goblets, postcards of Europe from former lovers, candles and incense on a special table with a linen cloth, along with Bell's crucifixes, saints, Hindu gods, a GI Joe doll, obsidian voodoo beads, a dog's skull and an African mask of an antelope.
The window looked over Bush Street and toward the staggered roofs of Nob Hill, slanted like some Middle Eastern capital. The penthouse terraces had exotic French doors, miniature lemon trees and lacy wrought-iron furniture. On one there was a green fountain; another, on warm days, had a stand with a cockatiel. Above it all shone the neon Hotel Huntington sign, drenching our room with wavering green light.
My body was like a part of the room, a chair or a vase. I remembered the first time I saw my mother naked. She stood before a mirror, pulled at her hips, pressing her stomach, checking as I was now for signs of decay. The female body, I thought, has the capacity for such exquisiteness and such horror. I sat up to drink, but the bourbon spilled and trickled over my breasts, running all the way down to form a puddle in my navel.
Watching my body I had the sensation it was the same as Bell's. Images came fast: an expressive hand gesture, his smell-wet dirt and hand-rolled cigarettes-how his features were large and most beautiful when he was meditative, how in certain light his skin paled so that it looked blue, how he seemed at those times like a creature and I half expected to see wings appear on his shoulder blades.
In temperament Bell was not so much exotic as sophisticatedly adolescent. He had intellectualized youth's themes, perfected and lyricized them. And this core of exquisite longing was his excuse for brooding, for his erratic behavior, and the fuel for his philosophy of life's emptiness and the cult of pleasure. But Bell wasn't really immature, just trapped in some premature state, like a beetle whose back is all the more vivid because the last homogenizing stage to adulthood is never reached.
The clock ticked loud; it seemed to mock me with its pointy fingers and monotonous rhythyms. I took a swig from the bottle and realized I was drunk. My thoughts were jagged and I had the sensation that my life was exactly half over. It started with a tingle in the back of my skull that made me shiver, then spread over my head like a hood. But I've never felt any different. And I knew my memories, childhood or otherwise, were simply times I rose up into consciousness and was intensely myself. I heard the hum I always do when a memory is encasing itself and I recognized that sound as my particular and continual way of being alive.
My hair stunk up the whole apartment. I cracked the window and Bell's boa expanded with air. In the bathroom, the porcelain tub was cool to the touch. I adjusted the water, pulled the towel from my head and then got in, kneeling on all fours. My breasts swung down, reminding me of the utilitarian tits of mammals. And through the scope of cleavage I could see the hair between my thighs. The tiny black curls seemed scrawny, even obscene. Water beat on my hair. The bleach was strong. My face became prickly and warm and I realized that even though I was alone, I felt embarrassed. The acidic residue backed up, biting into my knees. I am dyeing my hair to get Bell back, I thought, and because the whole world loves a blonde. The bright light made the room stark, soap flecked into my eyes and I felt a rising frazzled sensation that always means I'm going to cry. The water ran clear down the drain. When I stood, my hair was steaming, tangled together in clumps like pale shiny snakes.
I moved, dripping through the dark apartment, to the window. The hotel sign blazing through the evening fog. Its aura occasionally flared out like a sunspot and I could feel the power spark into me through the thousand roots of my scalp, each one now flaunting a golden hair.
THE BRASS DOOR OF THE APARTMENT BUILDING SUCKED SHUT behind me. The night was balmy. I heard the bells of Grace Cathedral, thought of going there, sitting in a back pew, the bloodied light over me, heady as a red-wine buzz. Jesus would be everywhere in radiant stained glass, his face over and over like a man you loved or one you had killed. Bush Street was so steep I had to lean back slightly, which made the comforting city minutiae-the lanternish lights of Pacific Heights, the quiltlike Victorians and the sculptured bushes-seem distant. I held my arms forward to stop this sensation, then quickly let them fall, the gesture seemed crazy.
Maybe I shouldn't search for Bell, but to stay in the apartment was impossible. What did it mean that I wasn't the kind of girl who could wait, dispassionately passing time drinking wine or reading a novel? My instincts told me to leave him, it's what I always did when I sensed the first soft spot of discontent. I was the kind of girl who left men. It wasn't like me to look for Bell. And I knew searching was no different than putting on the teddy or dyeing my hair. I thought of my mother, how when my father threatened to leave her, she started to take longer to get ready and always wore a bright shade of red lipstick… suddenly she was working so hard to be loved.
At first the nights were cozy, I'd make soup and we'd lounge on the bed reading the paper, the radiator crackling. The night was distinctly outside and we were safe in its center. Now, the night is like poisonous gas and infiltrates every room. And Bell, like a whore or a junkie, has changed day into night. My love has splintered, so I saw him everywhere. Inside storefronts and bars, in the shiny elongated cars, even in the eyes of a big-assed woman in pink pants, and a tall thin man with a shaggy mustache like a Texas cowboy. The bourbon exacerbated Polk Street's seedy carnival ambience.
The Motherlode was much like other gay bars on the block, filled with men in casual clothes. The disco music was so loud it shivered the glass. Most watched the large video screen showing a man on all fours on top of a bar, a leather monster, with a little chauffeur's cap and a black leather vest. His pants were around his knees. An identical man was jerking his fist into the first man's anus. The crowd watched, but no one seemed particularly interested. Instead of arousing the men, it seemed to make them shy, and together with the bar's decoration-crepe paper and silver stars-the place had the atmosphere of prom night.
On the corner, a covey of young men waited between windows filled with vinyl shower curtains, sensuous as tongues. All were thin as eels and there was one peroxide blond with a complexion so puckered it resembled the surface of the moon.
His hips were pressed forward and he wore a leather belt with straps circling his thighs. I couldn't help staring, there was something puffed up and trembling about him. He caught me looking and said, "I wouldn't sleep with that," and flipped his chin toward me. There was a riff of laughter from the others. I tried to avoid them, but the blond stepped forward and nudged me, startled me enough so I lost my balance and stumbled toward the glittery cement. When I tried to stand he thrust his hips into my face. My lips brushed the grainy texture of his jeans. He laughed, his head haloed by the moon.
I stood, ran. My face burned and I yelled, "Assholes!" and the blond camped back, "For sale!"
My teeth clenched and there was that shifting and shaky feeling again. I was terrified that Bell was going back to the boys.
* * *
THE BLACK ROSE HAD A POSTAPOCALYPTIC FEEL, AS IF BURNT out and only marginally re-established. The interior was black with low ceilings and any light was random and murky. I noticed particularly the metal cone fireplace and how the bartender stoked and tended the fire diligently, as if his were the last embers on earth. It wasn't a gay bar like most of the places off Polk Street, but there was a smattering of queens among the punks with nose rings and ruddy-cheeked old-timers at the bar. All of them, as well as the people in the deep booths and at the carved tables in back, came for the cheap beer. A screamy song blasted from the jukebox. And though I came to wait for Bell, because he had a drink at the Black Rose every night, I was relieved he wasn't here. What would I say? I felt strange for pursuing such an awkward situation. I thought of crazy things: I would walk up to him and tell him my mother died, I would say an old boyfriend called, tell him a magazine wanted my photographs or maybe go all the way and pretend to be pregnant.
But I hated myself for thinking like that. Why should I need anything interesting or provocative to say? It reminded me of the sudden and forced interest my mother took in my father's middle-aged hobbies after he threatened to leave, of how once in the car searching for the church softball game she almost started to cry because we couldn't find the playing field.
I ordered a bourbon and sat in the back. Scribbling on my napkin I wrote, Just give me back this one, then Love is not based on worth and No one is dying from this. I wrote and rewrote that, and because it was true I felt overly dramatic, even stupid. I realized I was writing phrases with a vague thought that Bell would see them. The idea that everything I did was generated by him made me feel dismal.
Why was Bell so dissolute? When I confronted him on his wanderings, he would say I was selfish to think I was responsible. It had to do with his father, he'd say, how motionless his face had been the moment he died, how the slack skin around his chin reminded Bell of his own loosening flesh. "Do you know how terrible it is to wear the skin of a dead man?" he would say.
Bell came in then, followed by a young man. I knew I wouldn't speak to him. He was intimidating, even stellar. At first I thought the young man was Kevin, but he was one of Bell's old lovers. Kevin was older now, and besides he lived in Los Angeles and was getting married soon. On closer look, the man was tiny, not young. He had red hair and a quick satyric way of moving.
Bell looked exhausted, hallowed and light, almost weightless. They sat at a far table, the little man toward me and Bell in profile. I couldn't hear what they said, but it was easy enough to see their faces, though they couldn't see mine. I read their expressions as if I were reading the ingredients of a bottle of poison I swallowed by mistake. Bell's concentration and ease made me shiver. It reminded me of our first dreamy months, when he teased me playfully without malice, when our moral structure seemed identical. But these same gestures were ominous now. And there was a growing leisure to his movements that made him seem disinterested in whatever the little man was saying. He was acting, as he always did, resistant, withholding. In bed Bell would lean his bare shoulders up against the wall, always waiting for me to come to him. The little man talked with his mouth wide open and gesticulated with his chin. After every statement he stopped and looked intensely into Bell's face.
Bell gazed off, blew long indifferent tendrils of smoke. This discourse was beginning to look like an interrogation. Bell rebuked, and I knew that then he spoke about his latest idea, that no one ever had an original idea, any notion was a confluence of news, former ideas, history, music, and you were just one of many who pulled it down out of the air. The little man was chastised, cast his eyes down, then grabbed Bell's wrist. He twisted it back and said something urgent.
Bell loosened the little man's arm, lit a cigarette and walked to the door. He looked my way though he didn't see me. I could tell by his insular expression that he thought of me and would soon be coming home.
The little man ordered another drink, he kept looking at the door and silently moving his lips. I thought of comforting him, explaining that Bell was always like that, you couldn't expect him to listen to logic, he was a surrealist. I'd tell him about the strange still lifes I sometimes woke to, a single black high heel, a brown egg, long thick nails scattered around, and how he worked out formulas. I'd seen the calculations: a smiley face plus a unicorn equaled a chainsaw, an apple and a penis equaled a heart. But I felt stupid for thinking the little man was my comrade and I left him shredding his bar napkin.
I decided to sit in the park above Bush Street. I knew Bell would try to make me feel crazy. He rearranged his experience, cut out days and nights, tried to weld a nonlinear narrative. He told me once that he refused to be terrorized by time. He lied, forgot, wandered. He often told stories, like the one about meeting a trapeze artist in a bar, that I didn't think could be true. But then in the mail there would be an envelope with a circus insignia. He thought that when he left me I froze, and when he slipped back he set my life moving again, and the thing I hated most was that lately this was true.
I walked up California Street. It was lined with large Victorians, ornate as jewelry boxes. The houses were set back with small yards and as I passed one I saw two lovers in a slender alley. They were similarly dressed, with longish hair. One was standing behind the other so I couldn't tell if they were two men or two women or one of each. At first they seemed to be gazing at the moon, but then I saw their eyes were closed and I knew that one way or another they were making love.
THE PARK WAS AN OASIS AMONG THE STONE BUILDINGS AND asphalt of Nob Hill. It was arranged European-style with plots of calla lilies and fountains. There were benches with horny-toe-lizard legs and marble statues, one of young girls, bougainvillea grown over them. In the middle were reclining stone soldiers; their hard muscular demeanor reminded me of the leather monsters.
I sat in a far corner under a eucalyptus tree. The dye aroma had faded and the bourbon was just a warm sensation in my forehead. With my head in my hands, my features felt self-consciously delicate. But with my dyed hair I wasn't delicate. Now I resembled a certain kind of heartbreaking whore. She came to me: cheap handbag, lively hips and, linked to her, another picture-a makeshift suspension bridge swinging dangerously.
Bell wanted a disciple, someone who agreed that he was a new person, defining modern ways of living that had nothing to do with conventional commitment, someone capable of emotional toughness and moral vacuity. Sometimes I felt his ideas on relationships were brutal, more the outcome of a rough childhood and shaky adolescence than some inevitable futuristic truth. But other times there was a creeping anxiety that reminded me of Darwinism, made me wonder if I shouldn't listen if I wanted, as I did, to crush out the weak parts of myself.
Who was that little man? It would be easier if it were Kevin. Then there would be logical reasons for his growing preoccupation and moodiness. But his obsession with Kevin, his first love, was from a time ten years before, for a boy Bell admitted no longer existed. Sometimes I think I've fallen in love with Kevin along with other parts of Bell's past. What is love but a nostalgia for someone's history? Their boyhood haunts and sullen adolescence, their teenage trips cross-country and fights with their fathers and especially their old lovers? Sometimes I think I'm more interested in Bell's old lovers than I am in Bell. When I met him he was seeing a woman. And though I never said it, her description was enough like Marilyn's that I would think of her that way. Once I called her, the answering machine revealed a disembodied voice, low and secure, that made me feel stupid. But Bell only longs for Kevin, and sometimes, lately, I feel myself longing for him too.
Bell told me Kevin was dark with a tight hairless chest and a cock that was lipstick pink and slightly bowed to the left. He had intelligent eyes and a way of leaning toward you when he made a point. When I thought of Kevin he was surrounded with pale sunlight like Jesus. Sometimes he seemed to smile at me and I'd feel myself being pulled through my head into Bell's pearlish chain of memories. But once there, it was frustrating, like watching from the window as your beautiful young neighbors made love.
I thought of Bell yesterday, how he had satirized female cooing sounds, made his features dreamy, threw his head back in burlesque of a female orgasm. The mocking tone of his voice, "You take off that," when he stretched the material of the teddy then let the elastic edge snap against my skin. He is bad for me. This idea startled me and for a while I watched the fountain water splash between the figurines. A strong wind juggled the eucalyptus leaves. Nature is most beautiful in its movement: wind, water, the sinking sun. And it was just then that I saw a woman striding carelessly into the park.
She leaned on the edge of the fountain, letting her long hair brush the water, dressed in a paisley mini-dress and platform shoes. Wind rattled the lilies. She unbuckled her shoes and in one practiced movement pulled her dress over her head, and stepped into the fountain. I was startled, heard my breathing change like with sex. She was nude and so pale that the marble seemed sooty in comparison. When she looked my way her eyes caught light and burned red. If she saw me, she didn't seem to care. Her wide features were set smoothly, but it could just as easily have been the calm of the insane as true tranquillity. Quickly, she washed her feet, squatted, splashed water between her legs and over her breasts. Standing, she put her head between the thighs of a marble soldier and was encased for a moment in a pillar of foaming water. Sitting on the edge of the pool, she wrung her hair out and skimmed water from her body with flat open palms. There was a frail power about her, not dangerous, but resilient, as if she'd be hard to kill. I admired her absence of fear. The woman pulled on her dress, held her wet hair back as she strapped her platform shoes, then turned toward the milky lights of the Tenderloin.
I stood and watched her descent. The water seemed to absolve her. She held her shoulders regally and didn't look back, though I wanted her to turn and see me standing small against the trees. I felt better… maybe it was just that I knew Bell was meandering back to our apartment, past the Bacchus Kirk and the Malaysian bar on the corner. Or maybe the woman was a talisman, one that would help me in whatever came next.
OPENING THE APARTMENT DOOR, I THOUGHT THE LEOPARD'S lit eyes were two cigarette tips, but then felt the empty space and knew Bell was still not home. I didn't turn on the light. Whenever he left a place it was like he had never been there. I went around the room touching things. This is his… I was trying to get on intimate terms with the room. I needed it on my side.
Where would I be when he came in? On the bed would seem like I had already acquiesced. What if I leaned against the kitchen doorway and lit a cigarette? What would that say? Indifference? I could get into the tub, force him to talk to me through the closed door-I liked the implication of that-he would be confronted with the thought of my body, the image always more powerful than the actuality. And I wouldn't have to risk anything-I'd learned my lesson from the teddy. Or I could evoke my caustic mind by moving the straight-back chair into the middle of the room. I tried it but the chair looked like a stage prop and I hated myself for so carefully marking the power in each possibility.
I always thought of love as a stressful but productive state, because you wanted to improve yourself for your lover. But this was posing, not self-improvement. I wanted to be pleasing. That's what my mother did to try and keep my father. She looked pleasing, acted pleasing, made the house pleasing, all in an effort to mollify the uncertainties and unpleasantries of the unknown.
Right then the phone rang and I knew it was her. There's a telepathy between us sometimes so laserlike it frightens me. "Hi," she said. "How are you?"
My mother used her casual voice, one that hides a heightened desperation. I answered her usual inquiries. When we speak there is a suck that makes me lean into her voice; when I'm in her presence she gets a predatory look. My mother sees me as a part of her body, something that still belongs inside, a heart or a liver that she wants back.
"You remember the bank president? The one that had the affair with his secretary? It's been very messy, his wife won't give him a divorce. They say she's gone crazy. Yesterday, she walked into the bank and threw acid in the secretary's face." She stopped, not like the story was over, but like she was startled.
I examined the story for hidden meaning. While it could imply that my life also is in danger because I too dabble in perversity, it doesn't seem to fit the usual storyline of… me falling for a bad man like my father, or that even the wildest people eventually settle down. This one seemed on my side or Bell's… it was chaos.
She started to speak again, but I daydreamed. She was right, I didn't always listen, but it was her I was thinking of, remembering once, when I was four-I knew she was on a diet and I saw on TV something about an operation where you have part of your intestines removed to make you thinner and I told her about it, that she should have it. Her face got red, she was so angry that I felt confused, terrified, and trailed her the rest of the day trying to make it right. When I heard my father's tires on the gravel driveway I was sitting on the damp cellar stairs watching her put clothes into the washer. He walked down past me. She told him it had been a lousy day, she started to cry and said I had been rude to her. "I wasn't," I said, so upset I was light-headed. She looked at me directly for the first time since morning and said, "You want to cut me open."
The fabric of the memory dissolved and I heard her voice again. "How are you, honey? You know how I worry."
"I'm O.K.," I said, then lifted the phone away from my ear because I heard footsteps on the stairs. I told her quickly I had to go.
"O.K.," she said rigidly. No matter if we spoke for ten minutes or two hours she never wanted to hang up. "Bye now."
After our calls I always have an uneasy feeling. It's like that all the time with my mother. But I love her and probably most after a bad phone call: her fat upper arms, the way she talks like a baby when she's upset, those slippers with rosebuds she wears until the bottoms are flat and gray, and her sense of rigid honesty that has crippled her in this dishonest world.
Bell's steps were faint at first-then firmer, centered and serious, paced like a showdown. I ran to the kitchen, realized while he searched for his keys that it was silly for me to hide, so I swung the refrigerator door open knowing the white light would be far off and eerie in the apartment. The key was in the lock… there were several odd tinfoil shapes, a green pitcher of orange juice, a single jar of shrimp cocktail, a bit of browning smoked salmon and half a tomato that was losing muscle tone. The problem with being a modern woman, I thought, as the front door swung wide, is that you have to pretend to be stronger than you are.
He walked straight to me and leaned against the doorway. His hair was scruffy and his face showed stubble. His cigarette had a long ash which he knocked into his hand. He drew, the tip glowed, underlighting his face. Like a good actor, Bell's demeanor was different now than in the bar. His presence made the air in the apartment thicker. I turned on the faucet. The water beat into the sink. I drank down a full glass, then poured another. My proximity to his body made me feel unsure. Maybe I overreacted. The faucet surged. I knew when I turned it off I'd have to say something. His usual approach would be to either act more wronged than me or, by being extreme-"Do you want me to stay chained to the bed?"-make me seem unreasonable.
He would make me speak first, it was always his way. He knew silence was a reprimand, as disturbing as vomit, and in near hysteria I'd rush to fill it, clean the room, make it comfortable. I noticed the skin around his eyes was thin and gray, maybe he was exhausted, but it made him look unhinged and I always associated eyes like that with evil. I realized how my thoughts, since he'd been gone, made him a stranger to me.
"Where have you been?" I hadn't meant to start off like that, I knew it would be better to seem indifferent.
He let one hip loosen, sloshed into contrapposto and slanted his eyes. Bell probably meant to look sexy or powerful, but instead he seemed dipped in sleaze.
"On the way to get cigarettes I got lost, ended up wandering as far as Bernal Heights. There is a lovely park where homeless men cook over sterno ovens and a little old man plays his fiddle on a park bench." He meant to sound cute, to try to evaporate tension and show that I was being possessive and martyrish. When I didn't respond he tried again. "I like your hair." He leaned forward, tried to touch me.
I swung my head back, bumped it hard on the cabinet. "You fucker, I was worried you were dead."
His face drew up, mouth tightened. "Bullshit. You thought I was screwing someone. If you were completely confident in me, you wouldn't even be interested. You need a love triangle, Jesse, to make you feel alive."
I was addicted to the fear of infidelity and I believed relationships were like the trinity: there were the two human participants, one always more godlike than the other, and then there was the thing between them, the other-an aberrant philosophy, a person or a phantom like Kevin.
"I don't care what you do," I lied and he smirked to show he recognized it as one. "But you can't just wander off."
"I couldn't do it, if I wasn't sure you were here," he said.
"Tough luck," I said. He was trying to conjur up the Noble Wife. I should be proud to suffer for him. I tried to brush past him, but he grabbed my arm and said, "I need you with me."
There was a rusty quality to his voice that implied insecurity. Bell was like this. His posturing was a sign that inside he felt tender and helpless. There were times when he asked my advice on gifts for his family, or if I thought he'd said the wrong thing at a dinner party. It reminded me of him detached from his bad behavior, how I loved him and didn't really want to leave at all. I decided not to be mean, but honest. "I'm sick of you thinking you have the right to wander off."
"I thought you were the kind to allow me my mental infidelities."
It was going to become a discourse on abstract freedom, he would go through his haggard points: about the individual, about how poor people think they're free because they could leave the country, could go to college or win the lottery. But it seldom happened, instead they worked like prisoners and lived in apartments barely more comfortable then cells. All he wanted, he claimed, was this-he needed to dream.
He was staring coldly at his veiny hand. Twisting his cigarette butt in our blue glass ashtray. While his head was ducked I saw his crucifix over the sink: a pale purple Jesus on a cross so white it glowed.
"It makes me feel horrible how you moon over Kevin," I said slowly. He flinched at Kevin's name, and walked to the couch, sat sloppily, kicked at a penny on the floor. "My life was very pleasant when I knew Kevin."
"Everyone's life is pleasant at seventeen."
"It was more than that. Everything was new, now I'm like a junkie, I seem to need more severe doses of experience to feel anything."
In all our arguments I wanted him to deface Kevin's memory, to say it had been perverse or that he was emotionally undeveloped, that he preferred women, that he preferred me to Kevin.
Bell was quiet. There were always these moments he receded, felt soulfully misunderstood, above domestic conflict, sullied by interaction with anyone. He crossed his legs, his gaze following the jagged tops of buildings up the hill. He was too beautiful for this world.
I told him he was the devil. I'd said this often and fondly, but now I said it again, burlesquing the way I used to. "You are the devil. I should have left you in the beginning when I saw you dancing with that black boy, putting streamers around his neck, letting him sit on your lap."
A flush spidered into Bell's cheeks. "The minister's daughter speaks."
Once he started insisting I was prudish, moralistic, crippled by my father, there was no use arguing. He slipped into his extremist mode, called me bourgeois, claiming he was a proletarian, ridiculed my classical education, said he was a student of the streets.
"Look," he continued. "Everyone would align with the devil if they could."
"And then they'll drop the bomb."
Several seconds passed before he said with perfect dramatic timing, "Pleasure, my dear, does not always equal sin."
When cornered I sounded wifish and conventional. I was silent.
He was getting agitated, rocking himself on the couch, he spoke with force. "Admit that either of us could go to a bar, pick up a stranger and have better sex with them than we could with each other."
"That's because when you're in love your problems follow you into bed."
"You've told me yourself, you fantasize about strangers, about giving pleasure to several men at once." He looked me right in the eyes, stood slowly, puffed up, trying to make his point with his body.
"I told you because I thought you would understand. It's like thinking about murdering someone versus doing it."
He took my hand, held it palm up, rubbed his fingertips over my lifeline so it tickled. "Just imagine if I were a stranger, if I saw you on the street, noticed you because your hair covered one side of your face and your hips moved in a lazy way that said fuck me." He put his loose hand above the first one and pulled me toward him slowly as if my arm were a rope. I could feel his breath on my face. "I'd follow you down the street to the steps of your building. Watch your slender thighs beneath your dress disappearing behind the door, thinking how wet you might be, how your breasts would be full and cool to touch. Then I'd follow you up the stairs. The door would open. In the slant of light from the hallway I'd see you nude on the bed."
He pulled me to him, grabbed a side of my ass in each hand and whispered into my ear. "I'd sit first on the chair near the bed and touch you, trace your neck bones, my fingers rounding your breasts in tiny spirals until I got to the nipple. Then I'd bow my head and suck."
My face pressed into his hair; smoke, eucalyptus. I could feel myself getting wet and I knew I wouldn't try to stop him. Even though this was not what I wanted, it was a semblance of it. I convinced myself that him wanting sex meant he wanted me, but it seemed naive and overly hopeful, like a schoolgirl or a dreamy whore.
"I want to fuck," Bell said, dramatically. Like everything in bed, you pretend; pretend you are inarticulate, more animal, more powerful or weaker than you are. I was flattered he would put this energy into seduction and I allowed him to maneuver me through the room then trip me down onto the bed.
The blinds were up and the tall buildings zoomed high. He moved his tongue over my eyes and into my ears. I put my hands inside his pants, the hair there was moist and his cock was stretched smooth. Bell pulled my shirt up over my head so I couldn't see. I felt his hand working my bra clasp. Would he leave me like this? I raised my arms and he pulled the shirt off, lapped at my nipples until they stood up hard like nuts. Bell rested his head on my stomach and unlatched my pants. His fingers gentle inside the folds of wet skin. I wiggled my jeans down, getting only one leg free before Bell stopped me, spread my legs, kneeled down between them, put his hands under my ass and lifted up my sex as if he was filling his hands with water to drink.
I felt the bed fall away, and the floor, and the ceiling and the walls, and I had the sensation we were floating out the window. Time lifted too and left us, because when you're fucking it is impossible to think of the next ten minutes or the next ten years. Because fucking, when it's good, seems like everything and there is pain in the pleasure when you remember things that are horrible, until you are hardly alive, and so many times good things turn bad that you decide to live the life you fear most, the ordinary one, the one that is easy and hard. But now I think of the other time he made me stand on the chair and pulled down my tights, the way I saw his fingers disappearing inside me. But I don't want to be a lover like this so my days are spent wandering, phantoms of a tongue, a cock or a finger flaring under my eyelids.
By the way he braced himself, sheets clenched in his fists, and how he tucked his pelvis, tried instinctively for an angle that would put his sperm closer to my cervix I knew he was close. I thought of what I always do… putting my ass high, having someone come between my breasts. Then the usual chant to push me over… marry me, fuck me, marry me, fuck me, marry me, fuck me. I had a momentary thought that we were feeding on each other. His cock pulsed and there was the sensation of water rising quickly, like in a flood and suddenly I was deaf and dumb with pleasure. He fell on top of me. His chest trapped air, made a sound like a horn. It was a rule between us that we never spoke afterward. He was on the side of gesture, not of words, and accused me of ruining moments by defining them.
He slipped out, rolled over. His breath loosened and I could tell that he was falling asleep. Bell became that precious thing: the sublime sleeping child. What if I didn't need to recognize all the extra static of our relationships? Maybe everything was OK, at least for now.
For a long time I couldn't sleep. I was too conscious of the different textures of the sheet and the pillowcase, the air and the sharp slants of light. The walls, too, with their grainy malevolent shapes. I felt frightened, snuggled back into the cave of Bell's chest. This is the one I've chosen. He makes meaning for me. Not by doing anything particular, but in the way he speaks and moves and how he sleeps abandonedly beside me. Quickly then my mind slipped into dislogic and I saw a random pattern of floating objects: Bell's slender fingers, my mother's face, the deflated dye bottle, the woman in the fountain. These strung together like charms on a bracelet and I let them lead me into a silky unconsciousness and then finally into sleep.
