Kamikaze Lust Page 10

  Not Shade, not anyone; not even me.

  I backed up into my dresser and scavenged my underwear drawer. Looking for a shield, a veil: the cover-up, please. I found the one black lace and silky bra I owned, a pair of shiny black underpants, and put them on along with my new platform boots that zipped up the inner calf, just like the ones Alexis wore. Prancing back and forth, I felt the power of my heels crush against the hard wood floor, the sweep of hair on my back.

  Sexy as a character from an Alexis Calyx film, she was. The moment belonged to Silver Ray as she arched her back aware of the angle that kept her stomach taut for the camera. Her hand slipped into the swatch of satin between her legs. “My cunt is so wet!” she said.

  And I laughed out loud at the ridiculous appeal of the words. Porno talk was generic, black letters on white packaging: napkins, soap, cereal, cunt. All object, no presentation. A wet cunt was what it was no matter how it got there. Last night it had been another Alexis Calyx video; today it was all me, or maybe Silver Ray, but it was for myself, or maybe for Shade, because she’d started it somehow, before everything became cloudy, except for my body in front of me.

  I was a porn star in my mirror, here with my black bra and dirty words and thoughts of Shade holding me as I let myself go. The muscles in my legs contracted, my lips shook, and I closed my eyes to the breathing and moaning and screaming…fuck me, make me come, oh yes!

  Generics. But they worked.

  I lay on my mock-Oriental rug pondering another shower, my second today. I was breathing heavily, my throat parched and muscles jellied as if I’d been training all morning to run the New York City marathon, and I felt isolated. Lonesome in the quiet time, I got to my usual wondering about the philosophical nature of orgasms. If you come and nobody’s there, did you come at all? And what if you could only come alone? Was the rest of it all rehearsal? The prelude to a life of solipsistic romance?

  Not that I ever had any answers, but the questions themselves seemed less important than ever. There must be a joke about the journalist who stopped asking questions. I couldn’t remember, I was too busy trying to forget.

  Here is a truism I learned the very next day:

  Nothing but nothing restores a girl’s memory quicker than being with her family. With them, I was transported back to the turbulent climes of childhood, at speeds faster and more far-reaching than the Concord, which after all only goes two places. I’d moved to Miami to escape this proximity to my youth. “You’ll come back, girls always do,” Aunt Lorraine had said, and even then, green-eager at twenty-three years old, I knew she was right. Like Israel, we Slivowitzes clung to visions of eternal return.

  I came back to Bay Ridge that November morning after spending more than an hour on the telephone with Mom the night before, trying to explain that yes, it was necessary for Dr. Milford P. Kaminsky to come to the house to see Aunt Lorraine and no, I hadn’t intentionally planned for him to come on the day she’d set aside to start preparing Thanksgiving dinner. The holiday was a week away.

  Yet, the moment I saw Hyman Hogan’s Cadillac in front of the house and heard him scrambling to greet me at the door, I knew I was in for a difficult visit. Mom had summoned her protector. Who would help me? Our argument had distracted me so, I hadn’t realized how afraid I was of this meeting with the good Doctor Suicide. I shivered, partially from the autumn wind, but also remembering the last time I’d seen Kaminsky. How I’d broken down like a cry baby. The girlie-girl running from her brothers.

  Hyman Hogan yanked open the front door and, eyes twinkling, said: “Hey, Ray!”

  “Hi, Hy!” I smiled and walked past him. Immediately, I noticed the hard-back chair rigged to a metal conveyor belt and attached to the banister of the staircase. The straps hanging from it made it look like an electric chair. I felt those straps tighten inside me, clamping my stomach.

  Hy grabbed me by the elbow. “Glad you’re here, Ray. Here, here, give me your coat, you can try out the chair. Rowdy had to be first already, but he scraped his hand against the wall, the moron. We got it from the magazine, the one doctors use. You should see what they got in there, it’s unreal…what, what’s the matter?”

  My face must have betrayed the sickness I experienced upon viewing this anachronistic contraption, which reminded me of the movie What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? starring Joan Crawford and Bette Davis and seemed eerily apropos given the dynamics inside this Brooklyn brownstone. If I didn’t know Hy, if I hadn’t been aware of the benign spirit behind his thinning white hair and basset-hound face, I would have thought the chair a sick joke. As it was I just felt queasy.

  Hy explained that he was always nervous watching Rowdy walk Aunt Lorraine up and down the stairs, so he thought the chair might ease her transport. “Go ahead, try it,” he said. “Don’t be scared, this thing could hold an elephant.”

  “Uh…maybe later,” I demurred, saying I really should see Aunt Lorraine.

  “She’s asleep, been down for about an hour,” he said. Our eyes met, and I knew he was about to offer an opinion. He had many opinions, most at odds with my own. I braced myself. “Say, Ray, it ain’t right with this doctor. Lorraine’s got goo-goo eyes from that lousy death movie. Why’d you do it?”

  “I didn’t do anything,” I sighed, running my hand through my hair to cover my watery eyes, my unsteady chin. This man was not a member of our immediate family, he would not be allowed entry into Aunt Lorraine’s hospital room should there be an emergency, and here he was ordering Baby Jane chairs and blaming me because Aunt Lorraine wanted to see Kaminsky. Mom had her old man brainwashed against me.

  “The man’s a bellyaching crackpot, a—”

  “Look, I’m just doing what she wants, what she asked.” My tone was as harsh as it had ever been with Hyman Hogan, and I feared becoming even more antagonistic. We stared at each other, adversaries in a war without words. I thought I smelled my breath mingling with his, breeding a new stench between us. If I tried to swallow I was afraid I might choke on it. Regurgitate the anger I was nursing.

  “I guess it’s nobody’s fault really, just a tragedy all around,” Hy said, shaking his head, though not exactly in contrition. It was more like the temporary stave of a good salesman. Before his son had taken over the family business, Hy had done his share of selling. Costume jewelry and plastic flowers. He’d been an ornamentalist.

  “Mamma’s in the kitchen, if you want to see her,” he said.

  I left him fiddling with the chair and went inside. Mom stood next to the kitchen sink. She was wearing her flowery satin housecoat, and her face was made up perfectly: blue shading beneath painted eyebrows, precise red lines on her lips, accent on the beauty mark above the left side of her mouth. I never understood the pains she took with her makeup when she had no intention of changing out of her bathrobe.

  I kissed her powdered cheek and sat down at the kitchen table. We didn’t talk, didn’t have much to say without rekindling last night’s argument, and I’d made a vow on the way out not to fight with her. She was breathing loudly, as usual, although her face looked almost serene, like a mother on television. I still kept a close watch on the knife she used to chop pecans for her Thanksgiving cranberry mold. It had always amazed me that my mother knew how to cook, a skill I was careful not to adopt by way of rebellion.

  Mom was talking about the guy across the street who’d sold his brownstone to a family of Indians from India. I tuned out, letting my attention wander from the dingy cabinets to the sickly irises next to an old transistor radio on the windowsill. Was there anything new in this house? Mom called the Indians dot-heads. I didn’t respond, just let the soft swish of the knife lull me into deep space.

  “Rachel, stop it!” she screamed. I jumped up in my seat. Apparently I’d been shoving my fingernails into the gap between the formica tabletop and its metal siding. Not my fault the glue wasn’t holding, again.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “You’ll break the table yet,” she said coolly, then turned bac
k to her cutting. “Now, you’re bringing the bread, right?”

  “Bread?”

  “Why do I bother…Thanksgiving? I’m saying it because last year the bread was a little stale, so if I were you I’d go somewhere else.” She went on about the bread as if where I bought it would decide the entire fate of the holiday. The quickening chop of her knife was beginning to scare me. “Of course, I’m doing this all myself, nobody’s coming in here helping me. You might try and help you know.”

  “I’ll help you, I always do.” I felt my pulse loosening a bit. “We have a whole week.”

  “I know, but I have to make sure everything’s in place before I leave.”

  “Leave?”

  “For Bermuda,” she said as if I should have known.

  “Bermuda?” I moved in closer to the cut and swish of her knife. “When are you going to Bermuda, why are you going to Bermuda?”

  “Oh, I didn’t tell you, we’re going for the weekend, we leave tomorrow. I need a break, you know things haven’t been easy for me lately.”

  “For you, what about Aunt Lorraine?” I paced, grabbed my hair. Mom pushed another pile of pecans closer to her knife with her shiny fingernails. Calm down, I thought. It’s her life, she can go to Bermuda if she wants.

  “That’s what I’m saying, why I need some time away. For my health.”

  “You leave every weekend.”

  “Oh, some nerve you have; you, bringing death into this house. If you really wanted to help, you’d move back here and take care of Lorraine.”

  “She has a nurse, we’re paying the nurse. You can’t make me feel guilty for having a life. This isn’t Victorian England.”

  “Then I won’t feel guilty for taking a little weekend.”

  Her tempestuous chopping was making my head spin. I envisioned her slicing up her fingers then felt wicked for the thought. I counted backwards from ten, breathing deeply at the onset of each number, a technique I’d picked up in a daylong meditation workshop—two hundred bucks to learn how to count. Finally, Mom put down the knife, then brushed past me en route to the refrigerator. I turned my back and mumbled, “Go ahead, have your little weekend!”

  “What?”

  “Nothing, Mother.” I was almost out of the kitchen, still huffing to myself. “Your whole life’s been one long, little weekend.”

  “I heard that!”

  She had to have the last word. I sunk into the sofa and stared out the living room window. My heart began to slow. A couple of kids raced bicycles down the street. The sky was overcast. Gloomy with ghosts. I’ll bet the sun was shining in Bermuda. I longed for someone to whisk me away to Bermuda or back to my terrace in Miami with Shade lounging on a chaise of pink and yellow plastic in her bikini top and tight cut-off shorts. I realized my memory took a porno spin, but the day really existed.

  I wore a conservative, one-piece Speedo and next to Shade felt fat, clunky, and prudish, watching her rub coconut oil into her caramel limbs. When I asked to borrow some she laughed.

  “It’s number four, black-girl shit. You need roots deep in the deserts of Africa.”

  “My people were slaves in the land of Egypt.”

  “Hah! Slaves of the Cossacks maybe,” she smiled and pointed to her book, Crime and Punishment. She was the only person I knew—myself included—who still read serious books. They clashed with the pastel jogging suits and ice cold shopping malls. Miami was a land of recycled best-sellers. There were as many of them in the library at Grandma’s nursing home as there were in an airport kiosk, the endless soft-cover spines cracked by tiny granules of sand.

  “Who do you think crossed the Sinai?” I said. “Remember the Red Sea?”

  “I remember Charlton Heston. The fascist.”

  “My father called him Charleston Heston.”

  “I like that, it makes him sound like an old southern queen,” she said. “But you still need sunscreen, and none of that eight or fifteen nonsense, we’re into the cancer hours.”

  Had it been a fantasy, I would have nixed the cancer and we would have made love as if it were a sex film: Hot Terrace Babes. Maybe we still could. Not satisfied merely imagining myself as Silver Ray, I had begun casting sex-extra roles to those around me. Why shouldn’t my life be more like a porn film?

  The doorbell rang. Answering it, I found Dr. Milford P. Kaminsky holding two plastic shopping bags, the weight of which seemed to push his frail body to its limits, as if he might fall over if you breathed on him too hard. One look at his sunken eyes and skeletal cheeks was all it took to eclipse my own problems.

  Kaminsky handed me his tan parka, but insisted on keeping his shopping bags. I was hanging his coat in the front closet when I heard him say, “Hello.”

  I turned and saw him standing in the living room. Mom stood about fifteen feet from him at the dining room table, the knife at her side. She opened her mouth as if she were about to speak and collapsed to the floor, the metallic blade erect and glistening in her hand.

  “Good Lord!” Kaminsky said, and dropping his bags rushed over to Mom. He removed the knife from her fingers and felt her pulse. “She’s further along than—”

  “Oh no, no. That’s my mother,” I said.

  “This happens with some frequency then?”

  I nodded and ran into the kitchen for the ammonia. No matter how many times Mom fainted, no matter how certain I was she’d brought it upon herself, I couldn’t shake that initial flash of fear: What if it’s real this time, if all along she’d been right? Even that day at the airport when I was leaving for Miami with her begging me not to go, I was at first terrified. She cried, grabbing at my coat, scratching my face. “Don’t leave me!” she’d screamed.

  I was sweating, weighed down by too many carry-ons, which I gripped tightly as Mom clung to my left arm. Trying to shake her off, I twisted my ankle. My sunglasses slipped down my nose. I stared at Aunt Lorraine, who tried to restrain Mom’s arms with both hands. They were going to haul Mom off to Creedmore and I’d never get on that plane. The job, the apartment with the spiffy sundeck, the car I’d been waiting all my life to own would be history, and I would be stuck in Bay Ridge with my mother, who before that day had never shown so much interest in me or my life.

  Aunt Lorraine held Mom back and turned to me. Her brow creased, her lips sewn with seriousness. “Rachel, go!” she said.

  “Ungrateful, you!” Mom wailed. My eyes met Aunt Lorraine’s who kept signaling me to leave, so I turned and took a few steps forward. Mom cried about losing her baby. I wanted to run to her and hug her, but we were never touchy-feely like that, and I resented her turning my departure into a scene at La Guardia airport. I peeked over my shoulder and saw her starting to teeter. She was fighting off Aunt Lorraine with her eyes open, but not fainting. On impulse I turned and walked back to them. Mom stared at me as if she were looking into her own grave. “I’m your mother…you…you’re so selfish!” she sputtered, her face pink with frustration. I knew she was trying to faint, but couldn’t. The way I sometimes tried too hard to come. Not to be undone by the physical boundaries of the act, however, she simply placed her hands in front of her, eased her body onto the airport floor, and lay down.

  Aunt Lorraine and I hovered over her, watching dumb-foundedly as she bent her left elbow over her fluttering eyelids.

  “Come on, Mom,” I said. “This is ridiculous.”

  She didn’t budge. Just lay awake, playing at fainting as people ambled toward us one-by-one, forming a crowd. Aunt Lorraine stared at me. “Go,” she said again, and I didn’t look back.

  I found the ammonia under the sink, grabbed a roll of paper towels, and returned to Kaminsky. His fingers curled around Mom’s limp wrist. I wondered if anyone had ever fainted in front of him before, had seen in him the face of death. I folded a paper towel in quarters, wet it with Ammonia, and leaned down next to Kaminsky.

  “Here, let me,” he said.

  Handing Kaminsky the towel, I caught sight of Hy coming into the living room. He
screamed: “STELLA!”

  I bit my lip to keep from laughing, but the way he shouted her name…it wasn’t her fault she was called Stella. Besides, this was serious. Mother has fainted—again. If I didn’t get away I was certain to say something nasty. I counted backwards, as Kaminsky went about business, holding the towel to Mom’s face as if he were a paramedic on a rescue show, pumping life back into Mom through white electrodes.

  “Give me that!” Hy ripped the towel out of Kaminsky’s hands, practically shoving the doctor out of the way, and I realized he might not be as benign as I’d thought.

  “Hy!” I shouted. “Are you crazy?”

  “Stella? Come now, doll?” Hy tapped Mom’s cheek a few times with his fingers and then looked up at us. “Go away, would you?”

  I apologized, touching Kaminsky’s arm for emphasis. Mom’s body stirred beneath her housecoat. She shook her head from side-to-side and said: “Monster!”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t let him near you.” Hy continued shooing us away.

  I led Kaminsky through the living room as Mom’s screaming echoed. We came to the stairs with that damn Baby Jane chair, and I tried to pretend it was normal to have a wooden chair strapped to a dolly on the staircase by suggesting that we walk single file next to it. I started feeling slightly ghoulish myself with Kaminsky rustling his plastic bags behind me, making me think of candelabra, blood-sucking vampires, and loud, fearful screams. Like Mom’s.

  As if that weren’t enough, we found Aunt Lorraine asleep with an Alexis Calyx movie playing on her giant television set. We were so alike in temperament, my old aunt and I. I knew she’d be curious about the videos, and remembering what they’d been doing to me, I became embarrassed for her. She herself was less stressed about the subject matter, leaving those tapes running continuously like a peep-show booth.

  I shut off the TV and offered Kaminsky a chair. Either he hadn’t noticed the movie or he was pretending not to, just as he’d followed my lead with the Baby Jane chair, and with Mom. Besides, in his circles, he must have seen things stranger than a dying woman who’d developed a taste for come shots and daisy chains.