Kamikaze Lust Page 13

  We were a clan of voyeurs, devouring newsreels and newspapers, musicals, movies, weekly magazines, still photographs, and yes, porno films. We fit ourselves behind the camera; in my case, I justified my voyeurism on the pages of a city tabloid. We were always watching. Only Mom with her canned performances in the living room came close to actually doing. Corny as Kansas and crazy as it was.

  Then, we were all slightly torn around the edges, especially juxtaposed with Evan and Ellen who shared a typical habit of finishing each other’s sentences. As when Ellen offered the reason they’d chosen their particular New Jersey suburb. “I want the kids to really know their grandparents,” she said.

  “And our office is just outside of Hoboken,” Evan added, reaching for a cracker to catch the sliver of brie hanging from his knife.

  A more normal couple I couldn’t have invented. They were married. Had a house. A mortgage. Plans for children not yet born. It was everything I was supposed to want, yet imagining myself in their lives I felt restrained, as I’d been earlier when Mom gripped my biceps. Besieged by a string of wet sneezes, I longed to be on the set of an Alexis Calyx film.

  I wiped my nose with a cocktail napkin and listened politely until we heard Aunt Lorraine’s friend Kiki yell: “Gang way! Look out below!”

  Everyone ran to the stairs. Aunt Lorraine sat at the top, strapped into the Baby Jane chair. She looked okay from where we stood, rather like a film director in the Yankee cap Kaminsky had given her and those tinted glasses. Yet, with her legs strapped at the calves and her bare feet poking out of her leggings, I thought if you tilted her on her back she would resemble the fallen turkey.

  Aunt Lorraine pressed a button. “We have clearance, Houston,” she said. “Geronimoooooooooh!”

  “Ain’t no stopping us now,” Kiki said, and thus commenced the buzzing of the electronic conveyor belt. The rest of us stood quietly. Evan and Ellen looked captivated but alarmed, as if they were watching firemen burst into a burning building. My fears about the chair breaking down or catapulting Aunt Lorraine forward were assuaged by Kiki walking next to her. They’d been friends since before I was born, from their days of weekend trips to the Catskills, bingo tournaments, and bottomless glasses of bourbon and ginger ale. Kiki, whose proper name was Gertrude Sapperstein, lived around the corner, again since time immemorial, and worked in the meat department at the A&P.

  “See, she loves it!” Hy said. “You love it!” Rowdy came running up with his video camera, and I thought his Docudeath would resemble something by Fellini or Almodovar. I laughed. Then I wanted to cry.

  Meanwhile, Aunt Lorraine held tightly to her patent leather pocketbook. She reminded me of a toy figure. Nothing sinister like that damn Bermuda gun, but more like a fluffy gizmo out of a battery commercial: little old lady descending a staircase. I wanted to jump in her lap and ride down with her. If only I could be her pocketbook.

  “How ya doing?” Rowdy asked.

  “I feel like a piece of luggage going round and round.”

  At the bottom of the stairs, the chair screeched to a halt and, after a few awkward seconds, everyone cheered. I kneeled to help Kiki unfasten the safety belts. “Oy, I’m still hunched, you could mop the floor with my titties,” Kiki said.

  Aunt Lorraine laughed, her face so ruddy I might have forgotten she was sick but for the shiny head beneath her baseball cap and the bandages shrouded by her favorite sweatshirt, oversized and white, with swirls of gold and silver painted around a few strategically placed rhinestones. Casual with a flair, she always said of her style. A reaction to the many weekdays of dreary dresses worn to her bureaucratic job.

  “Yo, yo, Aunt Lorraine, look here.” Rowdy zoomed in on her face. “Tell us what you feel.”

  “Not so close, please.” Aunt Lorraine flagged off the camera and rose from the chair. “I’m not one of Rachel’s porno gals.”

  “You could have been in your day,” I smiled, hoping Evan and Ellen had heard her say my name in conjunction with the word porno as they scooted around us and walked back into the living room. I wanted my outsider status confirmed for them.

  “Porno? Like on cable?” Kiki said. We each locked onto one of Aunt Lorraine’s arms and started the slow trek over the foyer and through the living room to the dining room table. “I get all the channels, Stevie hooked ’em up for nothing—now slow down, Lo, we’re not running at Belmont. Rachey, you know my brother Stevie?”

  “Of course she knows Stevie,” Aunt Lorraine said. “He was at Louie’s funeral.”

  “How do I know what she remembers?”

  “Her father’s funeral she should remember.”

  What I remember most about Dad’s funeral was wishing Mom would come back from the hospital. Then, when she finally showed up, making her grand entrance with those nurses who looked like porn stars themselves, and fainting before the ceremony ended, I wished only that they would get her out of there before people started talking. I also remember feeling comforted that Aunt Lorraine was there with me.

  At the step between the living room and dining room, Aunt Lorraine grabbed my wrist tightly. Kiki and I practically had to hoist her up, a feat that left me feeling sad and lonely, yet protective. I reminded myself that I would do anything she wanted.

  We were settling Aunt Lorraine into her customary seat at the head of the table when Mom sauntered into the living room. Iridescent in her green lamé blouse and golden brown bouffant, she pivoted in front of Hy, stopping to give his cheek a kiss and then carefully wipe off the lipstick stain. “My god,” Kiki said, “she looks like a lava lamp.”

  Mom beamed her way through the living room and headed over to us.

  “Aren’t you something,” Aunt Lorraine said.

  “Thank you, dear,” Mom smiled, then turned to me. “I need you in the kitchen.”

  Inside, she said, “I wanted Hy and me on each end of the table, it’s been a long time since we had a gentleman at the head of the table.”

  “A what?” I could barely speak. Aunt Lorraine had no hair, a hole from the catheter in her chest, and Mom was tormented over seating arrangements.

  “You should have asked.”

  “Fine, go tell her to move.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Well, don’t look at me.”

  “All I’m saying is next time ask me.” Mom opened the oven and started removing the casserole dishes. “Things are gonna be changing around here, you’ll see.”

  “Yeah, she’ll be dead.” The words tasted like acid, but I didn’t budge.

  “That’s not what I meant, you…ow! Goddinga, Hy!” Mom pulled her hand from the oven and started shaking it. The oven door bounced up with a bang.

  “Are you okay?” I said.

  “You see I’m not okay!” Mom shoved her index finger in between her lips and sucked it. Hy came running and, as if on cue, threw his arms around her.

  “I burned my finger!”

  “Here, let me see.” Hy took my mother’s hand and sat her down at the kitchen table. He patted her head, whispered in her ear as I stood awkwardly to the side.

  “Don’t just stand there, Rachel,” Mom said. “We have to cut the turkey.”

  I was so angry I’d slipped into my statuesque mode, silent and glaring. Hy jumped up. “Man’s work, Ray. I’ll take care of it.”

  A wind of spices snared me as Hy opened the oven and leaned down before the steaming bird. I looked over and for a second saw the turkey’s leg over Hy’s ear, just as Tessa what’s-her-name had enveloped Mark Vladimir with her thighs that day on the set. I was struck by a sudden need for Shade, and imagined myself crawling deep inside of her legs.

  As it was, I stayed silent while Hy, following Mom’s instructions, scooped the stuffing from the bird’s stomach. It smelled of onions and oregano and had thick chunks of bread mixed with celery and giblets and juice. My stomach growled, and I felt as if I could devour the seventeen-pound bird and all of its complements myself. I hated that Mom’s food could do th
is to me, that her turkey looked so damn delicious, its skin flecked with pepper and rosemary, and the occasional clove of garlic nestled against its torso.

  Hy pulled back the turkey’s skin with his fingertips and took a large fork and knife to it. “Gee, Mister, you sure know how to carve,” Mom said, and they laughed together.

  Pressure walled inside my face, behind my eyes. I wanted to rip the turkey to pieces with my bare hands and then pull the cloth from the dining room table so the china and crystal shattered, disrupting every sign of Thanksgiving Day propriety. Nothing had meaning. Nothing felt safe anymore…Aunt Lorraine was really dying!

  I had to get out of the kitchen. Away from my mother and her turkey-carving man. I brought the bread baskets into the dining room and took yoga breaths along the way to cap the sadness, the anger, the hatred. Mom and I avoided each other’s eyes as we passed between the kitchen and dining room. Soon the food was out and everyone took their seats. Hy ended up sitting to the left of Mom, and next to me, and Aunt Lorraine looked happy at the head of the table with Kiki on one side of her and Rowdy on the other.

  We ate quickly and quietly, as was our habit. Away from the family, I had to check myself so I wouldn’t finish first, but here there was always someone with greasy fingers beating me to the serving spoon for seconds. Usually it was Rowdy, who stacked his plate so high he barely had room to cut his meat. He was a lefty, too. Poor Ellen kept bumping up against his wandering elbow as Aunt Lorraine asked her the story of her life this time.

  Rowdy reached into the turkey platter, pitching his fork in one piece after another, looking dismayed.

  “What is the matter with you?” Mom asked him.

  “There’s no ass,” he said. “How can you have no ass?”

  “I see an ass,” Kiki stared at him.

  “I got it this year,” Aunt Lorraine smiled.

  “Oh man,” Rowdy said. “That’s my favorite part.”

  “Just like your father,” Kiki said. “Louie used to love the ass. And turtles, too. Remember that guy who sold the turtles out of a plastic bag? Only Louie would eat them.”

  “Down in Bermuda, we ate little hens,” Mom said. Her face, like the rest of ours, was red from food and wine. We were so pink, so precious; skin so thin you could see the blood running through our veins. “Hy, tell them about the hens.”

  “It was unreal.” Hy shoveled a fork full of string beans into his mouth. “You’da thought they were pigeons or something.”

  “The chinks eat pigeons,” Rowdy said.

  “They do not,” Hy said. “Who told you that?”

  “Nobody, it’s one of those things everyone knows.”

  “Hy, tell them about the hotel,” Mom said.

  “Hotel shmotel,” Kiki said. “I want to hear more about your porno, Rachey.” I almost spit up the water in my mouth. But the look of horror on Mom’s face made it all worthwhile. Her saying we didn’t need to hear about that only sealed my victory.

  Kiki went on talking. “We went to a strip place in Texas, for my niece’s bachelorette. It was a riot, all those boys with their dickies packed in little pouches, how do they get them in there? I put a few dollars in the elastic, my niece and her friends were saying, ‘Aunt Gertie, you’re crazy.’”

  “Our room was right on the beach,” Mom interjected. “At night you could see all the stars, the big dipper and everything. Right Hy?”

  Aunt Lorraine touched Kiki’s arm. “You should see the movies she got,” she said.

  “Yeah, what channel? I got free cable, all the channels.”

  “We walked in the moonlight, didn’t we?” Mom shoved Hy’s arm, but he seemed taken with the conversation at our end of the table, where Aunt Lorraine was explaining to Kiki that she would not find these movies on cable. She would have to get them from the video store or from me, because I had friends in the business.

  “Like that famous boy, what’s his name again?”

  “You mean Robbie Rod?” I said.

  “That’s the one,” Aunt Lorraine smiled. “And talk about hanging. He’s got the biggest ever, isn’t that so hun?”

  “Well technically, no. They say he’s twelve inches, but rumor has it he was never really that big, and anyway some guys are thirteen, fourteen inches…really big.” I felt naughty discussing penis size over the din of forks clashing with plates and water glasses being refilled, especially when I could tell from Mom’s face how badly I was behaving. Quite frankly, it inspired me.

  “Twelve inches sounds pretty big to me, that’s like a ruler,” Kiki said.

  “It is a ruler,” I said. “But the thing about Robbie Rod wasn’t just his size, he knew how to use it.”

  “Is this the same Robbie Rod of the Pleasure Squad fame?” Evan smiled.

  “The one and only,” I said. It had been the Pleasure Squad series that made RR famous. He played a detective.

  Ellen grimaced at her husband, as if he’d just said his pants were on fire. “What?” he said. “It was years ago, I was just a kid.”

  “Rachel knows him,” Aunt Lorraine said proudly.

  “Well, we’ve met a few times.” My mind drifted back to the set, how RR had been breeding bad karma, because he’d backed out of the production after his fight with Claire Blue but hung around barking orders at the other actors. His money was still tied up in the movie, he argued. Alexis humored him; I started feeling sorry for him. It isn’t easy watching your career slip away. Once, just after a marathon conversation with Shade, I even fantasized taking him up on his offer to fly off to Las Vegas with him for Thanksgiving. Apparently, he had a house there.

  “So what’s he like?” Evan asked.

  “Actually, he’s just a regular guy,” I said.

  And the questions kept coming. It was similar to the way I’d felt in that restaurant with RR and Alexis, as if the company I kept, this job I’d taken, made me more libertine than most. A sexual revolutionary by default. It didn’t matter that I was all talk, that I needed Silver Ray to help me along. I knew my coup was complete when Mom threw her napkin on her plate and took it into the kitchen. Hy followed her. The rest of us started stacking our plates and passing them around the table.

  “I heard those guys aren’t allowed to have sex for weeks before a shoot,” Evan said.

  “Evan!” Ellen looked at him, half-smiling, as she lifted a stack of plates to bring into the kitchen. She kidded him about any more secrets she should know before she got pregnant, and he made a crack about wearing women’s underwear and everyone laughed but me. I felt newly kindred with those of aberrant desire.

  “All those porno guys got implants anyway,” Rowdy said.

  “No, you putz,” Kiki said. “They use pumps. Harry used to have one, like a bicycle pump. Push, push, push, and your weenie blows up. You know those, Rachey?”

  “No, but some men eat raw onions.” I said this quite pleased with my expertise, though I knew it was probably a Mark Vladimir quirk and not a trend.

  “Onions?” Kiki said.

  “Cross my heart, I saw it myself.”

  “Blech!” Kiki said. “All this talk and I forgot I gotta pee.” She left the table just as Hy returned.

  Ellen helped Mom transport the dirty dishes and platters into the kitchen, making me feel guilty for sitting. The women always cleared, while the men sat smoking cigarettes with their belts unbuckled. But Mom had banned cigarettes from the house, so Rowdy went outside to smoke, leaving me at the table with Hy, Evan, and Aunt Lorraine, whose sickness had given her a gender dispensation of sorts. But I felt that way, too. Different from the rest of them. A woman who travels to porn sets. A woman who masturbates. A woman who kisses other women.

  I could hear the coffee pot gurgling in the kitchen as I talked to Evan. Like many people I found myself talking to in New York, he confessed that he’d always wanted to be a writer himself; someday he would take off a few months and write that book he had in him. I said someday I would find a family business to go into. Rowdy ambled
in with his video camera. Kiki followed him shaking sprinkles of water from her fingers. Ellen and Mom brought out dessert: a pecan pie, Hy’s favorite, a marble pound cake, fruit salad, and an assortment of colorful cookies from the bakery. Watching my mother walk in and out, conducting the rest of them with her burned index finger now covered in gauze, I felt guilty and wanted to make up with her. “Everything looks great,” I said. But she ignored me.

  “Yeah, doesn’t it?” Hy said. He picked up his coffee cup. “A toast to my beautiful Stella. What a meal, doll. What a day!”

  We all went to sip from our coffee cups, but Mom stopped us. “What? Why’d you stop?” she said. “Tell them the rest.”

  “No, Stella, I told you not yet.”

  “I’m tired of waiting, they’re gonna find out sooner or later.”

  “It’s not the right time, Stella.”

  “What?” Evan turned from Hy to Mom. “What’s going on?”

  “We’re engaged, we’re getting married next fall!”

  “Hey congrats, man!” Rowdy put down his camera and started clapping his hands. When nobody joined in, he stopped.

  “You’re what?” Ellen said.

  “We’re getting married,” Mom said.

  “I can’t believe this,” Evan said. “You hardly know each other.”

  “I wanted to tell you, but—”

  “Mom hasn’t been dead six months!”

  “Six months?” I said and felt Kiki kick me underneath the table. Hy had been coming around for at least a year, and this was the first we’d heard about his wife. We all assumed she was long dead.

  “Wait a minute, you were seeing her when…with Mom.…” Evan’s voice shook. Hy buried his head in his hands. Evan stared at him for a second, then put down his coffee cup and bolted from the table. Ellen stood up to follow him, but Hy grabbed her arm. “Come on, Ellie? You gotta understand,” he pleaded. The sacks beneath his eyes sunk lower and lower. Ellen shook him off and ran out the front door with Rowdy trailing after her with his video camera.