Authors: Darcey Steinke
A car engine woke me in the deepest part of the night. I went to the window, saw the back lights of the van, the lovers curving down the bluff toward the highway. The TV had changed to bright vertical stripes. I saw my body in its light, my skin was looser than I remembered. It seemed incredible I'd been a baby, that my body could have a child, that someday I'd be old and that someday I'd be dead. I turned off the TV, remembering the sensation of being between the lovers, realized how precious two bodies were when warm and settled side by side.
I
N THE MORNING IT SEEMED CRAZY I WAS ON THIS PILGRIMAGE
and at around ten when I saw the lovers’ VW van parked on the grassy shoulder I decided to stop, parked my car, sat inside for a moment. Mounds of moss-green water moved endlessly toward the shore. When the waves rose up and thinned I could see black seaweed inside them like my glass paperweight with the rose encased inside. I walked out through the long grass, down the rocky incline to the water.
I knelt by a tidal pool. Starfish clung to the bottom, radiant in shades of purple and fuchsia. I picked one off a rock and was surprised at its fleshiness. There were sea urchins, too, and a luminescent seaweed. As I reached down to touch those slippery strains, I saw the lovers clung together. Surprised into stillness, averting my eyes, I was like a deer that hopes incomprehension and inaction will render it invisible. One time I was with a boy on a river bank when car lights flashed across the water and illuminated my body. It was a familiar female equation, abandon changed quickly to shame.
My foot slid forward several steps on the slimy rocks. She was on top with both hands on the ground, so all I saw were the man's quivering legs and her humping ass. Their intensity made me conscious of the blood moving through me and the geometry of my bones. The waves seemed far away like the ocean heard in a hand-held shell. It was creepy the way I had tracked them.
The women turned her head and saw me. Her eyes were obsidian and lips bluish and pellucid like a shell. She turned back to her lover, sunk into his chest and gave him a long openmouthed kiss. The lovers seemed a natural part of the scene. It showed me how freakish I'd become. The sensation terrified me and I ran back to the car, revved the engine, skidded onto the highway and drove toward L.A.
C h a p t e r
E l e v e n
O
N THE EDGE OF L.A. I STOPPED AT A GAS STATION, BOUGHT A
map and asked the mechanic if he would show me how to get to the church. He drew a twisty blue snake that curved as I did now through the canyons. To either side stood single-story homes with lots of glass, additions like robotic arms jutting from the back. The yards were neatly overgrown, voluptuous with palmettos and bougainvillea. The church stood on a cul-de-sac overlooking a highway. It was a sprawling single-story complex that contained a bowling alley and a health club. On the wall nearest me was a mosaic: L.A. Jesus, hair blown back, lips parted. The highway below hummed, and though the sky was blue, the light was dusty and brownish yellow, making the church look barren and radioactive.
I hadn't slept much last night, and the wedding was still several hours away, so I bunched up my coat and lay over the front seat. At first I thought of the lovers. Death, actual or metaphorical, was the logical conclusion to most love affairs. The only other alternative was some sort of permanent unity, that's why I had to speak with Kevin. I thought of this L.A. suburbia . . . shot in the arm with Hollywood's cash and confidence . . . the highway lulled me, sounded like water, like rain. I remembered when I was a kid, the deep hole in my backyard. There was water at the bottom and I would squat on the lip, listening to the sloshing echoes, watching the light on the water like a black mirror. I heard a car engine start down the block. My mind drifted up, floated like a piece of paper to a hill where I used to sled. I was wearing a green prom dress, one I knew from a picture of my mother with a boy named John from West Point. My mother wished she had married that boy. My grandmother told me that when he heard she was serious with someone else he came down from school and they sat on the back porch. John told her it didn't matter if they raised the kids Catholic, the kids could be Protestant, but they should get married. “It's been settled,” my mother said. “I'm going to be a minister's wife.” The taffeta chafed under my arm and I was in Dolores Park on the hill above the tennis courts. At the bottom I could see my house in Virginia, my mother in the front window, all dark except the TV's blue light showing the outline of her slip and her beefy legs folded under. I started to run, hoping the wind would pick me up. This seemed perfectly possible. The smell of grass was everywhere and wood smoke too, and the world was a ragged strip of green to either side. My feet were just lifting when I saw a pale-haired minister in a black suit and clerical collar. Instead of a Bible he was holding a
Playboy
magazine. I rose up again, heard the cars on the highway, moved my shoulder which was getting stiff. The minister spoke: “Love is a rare possession, almost inane and unnatural these days. It is associated with pleasure, but it is no stranger to pain.” His whole face caved in and I took his hand and was surprised that my own wasn't an adult hand but the babyish one of a five-year-old. He told me jealousy was really the dark twin of duty, that he was so jealous, he looked through the dirty laundry, checking his wife's underwear for sperm stains. We walked into a pine forest, the rust-colored needles snapping under our feet and the evergreens swaying like hay fields. “And forgive those who have trespassed, those who have lusted, those who have lied,” the minister said and he looked at me then. His eye sockets were empty; I could see straight through his head to the green trees. I loved the man because I knew he held a little chapel in his heart and then suddenly I was inside. The air was humid and beyond the stained glass I could see blood moving in patterns like water. At the altar was a bride and groom. Even from behind they looked familiar, it was my parents, flushed, stupidly happy. A convoy of trucks down on the highway rocked my car and I woke. There was organ music and when I lifted my head I saw the sun setting, and that I was surrounded with cars, that the bride was standing with her father just outside the open doors. She was lovely in her creamy satin gown, light glinting the beadwork on her train. Her father, a thin terse man who reminded me of a general, took her arm under his. The music rose louder and they stepped into the church. I thought of my mother's voice saying I was attracted to the same kind of bums as my father, “You'll be dumped at forty-five too.” I watched the last bit of white lace slither inside and someone's hands reach out and pull both doors shut.
I
PASSED CARS GOING SEVENTY, BLEW MY HORN FOR NO REASON,
screamed at a man who tried to pass me. I thought of how a doctor had once suggested boric acid for my yeast infection, the same stuff I used to kill roaches in my apartment.
I got lost, drove into West Hollywood, then onto Sunset Strip. I chain-smoked cigarettes, lighting each new one off the bitter end of the last, I had a stray-dog feeling that made me want to do something loose and crazy and I was: crashing a reception, confronting the groom about his homosexual past—asking like a child about
love.
It was dark, though I could still see the studio complexes set back from the road, underlit and surrounded with a lattice of barbed-wire fences. The area outside was tacky with restaurants, gift shops and a variety of businesses that each claimed to be the home of the stars.
I zigzagged through side roads, saw men feeding sticks into a fire in a trash can. Homeboys wearing pukka beads hung out at the corners in nylon jogging suits. To join some gangs you had to kill someone and I remembered the crazy college boy who had offered to murder someone for me. He said it wouldn't be murder because the person would be sacrificed. How many times had my mother said she sacrificed her life for mine? And I had fed off her, bolstered my own self-worth in accordance with her misery. My father got strength from demeaning her, too—making rude comments about her weight, saying he was going to trade her in for two twenty-year-olds. When he said that we were all in the TV room, the smell of hamburgers and cheese was still in the air from dinner. No one gained emotional power without someone else losing some.
I found my way back onto the freeway and headed toward Beverly Hills. The red taillights made me dreamy and I thought of the glowing tip of Bell's cigarette and wondered if he was checking his egg to see if the baby bird was breaking through. Or was he in his father's gabardine shirt, hair slicked back, a hint of eyeliner, slowly smoking a clove cigarette, anticipating the back room of the White Swallow. Madison was easier. She'd be passed out, sprawled across her furry bedspread, the bartender downstairs checking the beer supply, wiping dust off the liquor bottles. Madison hears the water from the fish tanks, dreams she is a mermaid, but then there's a noise from the street and she remembers a man is coming at eight who likes to be shit on and one at nine who pretends she is his daughter. She wonders if it might be true even now, that women were made for the pleasure of others.
I
FOUND MY WAY BACK INTO BEVERLY HILLS, MERCEDES AND
Porsche dealerships stood on every corner surrounded by palm trees and flowers. Tan people in pastels were radiant in the dark. Was it the soft light? The modernistic architecture? The air itself, heavily scented with smog? What made L.A. look like a touched-up photograph, like a set with actors waiting for the director to yell
Cut?
The hotel was a cream-colored stucco building with a red tile roof. A mix of Mexican and Hollywood, the Zorro style. I parked the car on clean asphalt beside orderly flower beds. The moon was a perfect half, as if sliced with a razor. Inside the door was a fireplace with a ceramic log throwing up gas flames. I followed the signs to the back room and made my way into the reception. The wedding party wasn't here, but the room was full of men and women in suits and formal dresses sitting at round tables. A Western chandelier made from several wagon wheels hung over them. Women in black-and-white uniforms carried in silver trays of food and set them on a long table in front near the white tiered cake. The bartender poured buckets of ice into his cooler. He was thin with a capsule-shaped head and acne that resembled diaper rash. I walked over and ordered a double bourbon, listened to a couple talk: she said his brain was in his cock. I carried the drink back to my table, the white tablecloth felt stiff under my fingers and the roses in the middle were so lovely they looked fake.
I watched a pair of young women in silk dresses and soft leather shoes move along the hors d'oeuvres table. They laughed, confident that this whole ritual would be repeated for them. Their natural inclusion made me feel like the witch at the christening in Sleeping Beauty. But I couldn't leave. The thought of the suspended blowfish at Madison's spinning slowly in the street light, and of Bell passed out across the bed, and of the lovers too, the pink crevice of her rear, the muscles flexing in the man's hairy thighs . . . My hand shook. I thought of talking to Kevin, the one person who could save Bell. But even if Kevin did agree to come, he wouldn't—I couldn't even ask—what good would it do? Maybe at first Bell would be hopeful, but Kevin would eventually leave and Bell would be alone again and worse off because, like Pig, his center memory would be skewed.
I went back to the bar. It was more crowded; standing in back of a man in a pinstripe suit I smelled his lime aftershave, his stale smell of cigarettes. Men smell of the world, the street. Women smell domesticated, of the garden, spice. The wilder ones of animal musk or opium. When it was my turn, I ordered two double bourbons. The bartender looked up, I told him one was for a friend. On the walk back, I watched the bourbon eat the ice cubes. My vision was fuzzy near the edge. I sat down; an older couple was seated across from me. The plump woman pushed her chest out toward her tiny husband who reminded me of dehydrated food. I picked a rose from the centerpiece and put it in my hair. The woman watched me, suspicious of my jeans and high-top tennis shoes, but I didn't care. Everything was easing, seemed funny and right. The ceiling fans had something to do with the meaning of life. A murmur ran through the crowd, then scattered applause. The bride walked in holding her dress up with both hands. She stopped at a table of blue-haired ladies. Kevin was behind her, there was no mistaking those eyes, the same winter-sky blue as Bell's and his light brown hair hung at his shoulders and was very clean like a girl's. Kevin went to a table of young men in well-cut suits and colorful ties. One said something about a ball and chain and they all laughed. I rose off my seat, tried to motion to him, but there was the old lady's eyes and I realized it was a drunken move. I felt suddenly shy. What could it be like to be so loved? They moved together up to their table, groomsmen and bridesmaids behind them and with much joking and laughing they all took their seats. A man, similar to Kevin, maybe a brother, opened a bottle of champagne.
The women carried in deeper trays of food and set them over sterno burners. The band picked up a little, played “String of Pearls.” The general came and asked his daughter to dance. Kevin went and got his mother-in-law. Others from the wedding party joined in. It was all a blur of satin and silk. I stood, walked to the bar to get another drink. The ceiling seemed too low and it was more difficult than I remembered to get by the chairs. The boy poured me another and I carried it to the dance floor, stood on the edge watching Kevin dance with a bridesmaid. Her purple chiffon skirt swayed out. I imagined him and Bell, the afternoon they'd both put on make-up and listened to “Satellite of Love.” Bell worshiped Kevin, his prophetic-youthful insights, his teenage body. And through me, Bell's desire was still strong. I waited until he was at arm's length, slugged my drink back, dropped the plastic cup on the floor and tapped the bridesmaid's shoulder. She smiled, stepped away. Kevin put a hand to my waist and moved me forward with the music. He squinted his eyes as if reading in bad light, but he couldn't place me and asked if I'd gotten in late and was I a friend of Maria's from college.
“I'm Jesse,” I said.
He stopped.
“He still loves you.”
Kevin looked sheepishly to either side, then tucked his head and whispered that I should meet him in a few minutes in Suite 33. He pulled away from me, walked out tersely, head down, obviously shaken. I stood for a dazed moment on the dance floor, then walked back to my table. I tried to decide what I'd say, but it was too hot and my mind wandered. It was a relief to leave the stuffy room and stand in the cooler cowboy-style lobby. The elevator door opened and I got in. In the mirror that covered the walls my face looked like a murderer's, pale with evil resignation. I realized I was supposed to have a gun, that it was stupid to talk to Kevin, that I'd come to kill him. At three I got out and walked the beige-carpeted hallway and knocked on 33. The door opened, Kevin grabbed my wrist and pulled me inside. “This is crazy,” he said.
I sat on one of the double beds. The spreads were deep blue and there was a vase of white roses and a basket of wax fruit on the night table. He was voluptuous with his puffy lips and long thick hair.
“He's obsessed with you still,” I said to Kevin who watched me uneasily, rolling up his sleeves, rattling his cufflinks like dice.
“Bell loves to spend all his time desiring things. It gives him an excuse whenever he fails.” He looked like he might go on, but he shook his head. “I can't have you here,” he said. “It makes me nervous.”
“I'm no threat to you,” I said.
“Are you kidding?” Kevin said, running his hand through his hair.
“I came here to ask you about love.” It sounded so stupid, I looked down while I said it.
“Like I'm some sort of expert?” He shook his head. We were small and ghostly on the TV screen.
“You just married a woman, you must be in love.”
“Bell's ideas poison everything,” he said. “You have to forget you met him. Don't you see how he's miserable, how he wants you to be miserable too?”
I was startled. “How can you say that?”
Kevin walked over to me and sat at the edge of the bed. “You gotta fall into the river. Know what I mean?”