Kamikaze Lust Read online

  Shade went to get drinks; I leaned back against the wall, watched the slippery smooth party-goers tout a plastic chic. Their privileged vitality made me want to scream. But everyone else was eating it up. Arrogant waiters delivered hors d’oeuvres of chicken kebab, beef cubes, red-pepper shrimp, tiny skewers of shitakes, tomatoes, and yellow peppers. On the buffet table were cheeses, breads, grilled vegetables, pasta salads, cold meat platters, falafel balls, humus, baba ganush, and couscous—Gulf War food. Enough to make the mouth water, the stomach bloat benefit-style, like the kids in UNICEF posters.

  I couldn’t eat anything, I felt too queasy. Shade brought me a Coke. In her other hand was a pink drink in a martini glass. “Cosmopolitan,” she said, and took a shrimp from a fashion model with a platter. She dipped the shrimp in hot butter sauce, and, navigating the strategic difficulties of balancing food and drink, shoved it in her mouth. She wiped the corners of her lips with a cocktail napkin. I wanted to kiss her.

  “Shit, there’s Hamlish, I’ll be right back.”

  “Don’t leave me!” My lower lip quivered. Shade touched my arm with her shrimp hand. “What?” she said, her lips and eyes widening simultaneously. “Are you really that socially challenged tonight? You look so beautiful.” I felt as if she’d spilled hot shrimp butter all over my body. It was warm and liberating, like peeing in my pants as a child.

  I turned away, found myself drowning in a sea of black backs with snatches of the rainbow glimmering in between. Then, like an apparition slowly materializing in the physical world, Jason appeared in front of us. I had to shift into neutral.

  “Isn’t this so very very?” he asked. Shade let go of my arm. Jason noticed. I could tell by the drift of his eyebrows, the lilt in his voice. I’d given away too much that night at Ethan’s. He knew he’d stumbled upon a little scene. I knew he knew. He knew I knew he knew and so rolled the unspoken wheels.

  “Yes, indeed, the hottest ticket in town tonight,” he said. “I had to whore my front page to get on the list. They wouldn’t even let me bring a guest.”

  “Do we get the cover this week?” I said.

  “Not you, dears, striking as you are. We only want Tannon, that is if his play isn’t the piece of royal garbage I suspect it will be.”

  “One can only hope,” Shade said. “Listen, I have to go and catch Hamlish.”

  “That rodent…why?”

  “A little thing called work.”

  Jason put his thumb and forefinger to his goatee, stared at Shade. “Miss Teesha Marie, why didn’t I think of it before? My movie editor quit last week.” They talked about what Shade might do for his magazine. I sank further into the wall. Underneath the big banner, the Mayor gesticulated pompously, a bouquet of microphones like bulbous vibrators at his lips. I resented him being here only slightly less than I resented being here myself.

  Shade’s voice soothed me somewhat, though I wished it were coming directly in my ear like our night on the phone. “You guys aren’t union right?” she said.

  “Are you joking? We thrive on maintaining utterly sadomasochistic relationships between talent and management.”

  I shifted my weight, twirled the plastic straw around my empty Coke glass. I barely realized I was stabbing my ice cubes until Tony joined us. “I think you killed one,” he said. He was wearing a tuxedo that pulled too tightly around his stomach and carrying a pink drink like Shade’s.

  “You won’t believe who I just bumped into, and I mean literally bumped into,” Tony said. “I was going down the stairs just as she was coming up. She being the one and only Kim Mathews, so I said, ‘Outta my way, TV bitch.’”

  “You didn’t?”

  “Okay, I just smiled.”

  “You should have told her that chiffon in January is a nono,” Jason said. “How can I possibly trust her news judgment now?”

  Jason kissed my cheek and announced that he was off to “do” the foyer. Tony took out his pouch and drizzled tobacco shavings into a piece of cigarette paper. “I heard she had her lumpectomy filmed,” Shade said.

  Tony eyed her quizzically. “Who?”

  “Kim Mathews. They’re going to air it during sweeps.”

  Though Shade and Tony seemed mildly shocked by this, it made sense to me after watching Rowdy with his third eye tracking Aunt Lorraine these past months. But the Mathews lump was benign, it had been all over the news; Aunt Lorraine’s was deadly. Thoughts of sickness and death seemed incongruous among the cocktail-hour liveliness. I turned my attention to Shade and Tony, who were gossiping about the rest of our colleagues, many of whom had paraded before us at some point in the last half hour. Did you hear McKneally got picked up by the Post? James was indexing textbooks. Carrie had a breakdown and went on Prozac…Listening to them, I decided my ghostwriting job was a striker’s Horatio Alger story.

  Shade sent Tony to the bar, and he returned with three pink drinks. I didn’t want mine, but thought it complemented my dress. I took a few fruity sips before the bell rang in the first curtain call.

  “You’re strikers?” a fresh-faced blond woman cut into our circle. She was about my height, had her hair pinned on top of her head with a glittery bar, and wore an expensive-looking business suit. I noticed the reporter’s notebook sticking out of her jacket pocket.

  “Gerri Michner,” she said. “From the Post, I just wanted to get—”

  “The quote du jour,” Shade said. “Here goes: we’re mad as hell and we’re taking it up the wazoo. You can have that word for word, it’s Teesha Marie Simpson. S-I-M-P-S-O-N.”

  “I know who you are.”

  “Now, now,” Tony interjected. “It’s been a distressing time for all of us, not knowing where we stand, who to trust, so I have to say it’s pretty cool that everyone’s come out to support us.”

  “And don’t forget Mark Tannon,” Shade said. “Bringing the experience of TV journalists to Broadway, it’s so Ben Hecht.”

  Gerri Michner looked confused, made a few scratches in her notebook. I imagined her writing down the name Ben Hecht with a big question mark next to it. It was what I would have done. She looked up and caught me eavesdropping.

  I was transfixed by her, so green and aggressive, the way I’d once been. A part of me longed to be back there with her, to be a reporter again and not the subject, to believe I was on the side of truth and not a cause celebre. I felt a cramp of nostalgia that made me angrier than anything I’d seen tonight.

  “How old are you?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “I bet you just graduated from some fancy journalism school?”

  “In June. I got the internship at the Post and they hired me, like right after the summer.”

  “You really want to be part of this gossip mill?” I said, thinking of Aunt Lorraine and her gauzed lymph nodes, the orange stains on her nightgown, how easily the energy drains. “Look at them, all the nice clothes and three-hundred-dollar haircuts, they’re all so self-serving. Why don’t you go and follow some insurgent rebels? Do something on health care.”

  “Not everyone’s a truth-seeker,” Tony said.

  “I cover the media.” Gerri Michner glared at me. “You of all people should know this is news, unless you’ve forgotten what that is.”

  The nerve of that grasshopper, so smug, so active. “What exactly are you saying?”

  “Just that you’re not working.”

  “Looks like you need to brush up on your research skills, I happen to have work.”

  “Oh, yeah, what?”

  Shade put down her empty glass, tugged at my arm. “I think it’s time to go inside.”

  “I’m ghostwriting an autobiography for Alexis Calyx.”

  “The porn star!” Tony said.

  “Feminist pornographer, she makes films now,” I said. Gerri Michner’s nose wrinkled. “What’s the matter, are you one of those anti-porn women? You think it’s all degrading? That women shouldn’t like it, too?”

  Gerri Michner scribbled something in her noteboo
k, looked up. “It’s a tired argument, but you don’t think pornography’s degrading?”

  “Women have a right to pleasure, and I’m not talking about running through the flowers like a feminine hygiene commercial.”

  “And we know how pleasurable that is,” Shade said, locking her arm around mine and attempting to push me away. The second curtain call sounded.

  “Did you know she was doing this?” Tony asked Shade.

  “Of course she knew,” I said. Shade’s chin dropped, and her eyes blew wide as a cartoon character. “What? I can’t say that?”

  “Then neither of you have any concerns about her working for a pornographer?” Gerri Michner said.

  “Concerns?” I said. “What kind of concern—”

  Shade jabbed her elbow into my stomach. I lost my breath and spilled the remnants of my Cosmopolitan on the carpet. “Dammit!” I screamed. Shade twisted her head around as she tugged me away. “The answer to your last question is: no comment.”

  A few feet away, Shade let go of me with an angry shove. We glared at each other. Around us, the hum of voices, the buzzing of bodies scrambling to find their seats. I suggested we go inside, but Shade just stood there. “I don’t understand you,” she said. “You know, this isn’t a game and these aren’t actors playing out your little fantasies. It’s the goddamn New York media!”

  “You’re such a hypocrite, you’re always talking about how open you are.”

  “Yeah, for real. Not to titillate some dumbass reporter!” Her words echoed in the now-empty lobby. She walked to the coat check. I followed silently, trying to recall if in all the years I’d known her I’d ever seen her this enraged. The golden doors shut behind us, and she continued screaming as if our few minutes of silent bundling had kindled her anger. How could I shoot my mouth off like that? Did I take anything seriously? Didn’t I see that I’d put us in jeopardy?

  “By telling her about my job?” I broke in, my breath visible in the cold, dark night. “Look, pornography is a part of life. If people can’t deal with it, that’s their problem.”

  “Of course it’s a part of life, but it’s private.”

  “I can’t believe you’re saying this.”

  “Jesus, Slivowitz, I’m a black woman, okay? Not to mention one who likes to sleep with other women. You know how this industry is, even though nobody will admit it because it’s New York and we’re all supposedly so enlightened, but I can’t afford this shit!”

  I leaned back, felt my hair pull against the cement wall. It pinched almost as much as the disappointment in Shade’s eyes. She shut them, tilted her head up: story #14—the what-am-I-going-to-do-with-you face. Her eyes opened, she sighed, and I still felt lousy. “See, this has been my problem all along, why I was wary of kissing you that first night. You’re playing, you don’t know what you want.”

  “I want you.”

  “One minute, sure, and then the next minute you’re going to a party with that porn star. It’s like we’re all part of some experiment.”

  “It’s real, this…you.…” I couldn’t finish. Instead I looked down and saw two pairs of feet in stockings and pumps. My clothing had grown up faster than I had. I looked at Shade, hoping if I locked eyes with her she would see I wasn’t playing. Her face softened slowly, and I sensed she knew, or maybe the cold was getting to her. Either way, she tugged me by the sleeve over to Broadway to hail a cab.

  I woke up to Shade’s bare back, the darkness outside reminding me I’d probably only drifted off a few minutes ago. She slept soundly, barely moved. I don’t know why, but I’d pegged her for a midnight mumbler, lip-twitcher, and limb-wanderer.

  Meanwhile, I couldn’t keep still in my own bed. I thought about getting up and taking a magazine into the bathroom, the only space in my apartment with a door that shut, but I didn’t want to leave Shade, not even to float a balmy bliss toward sleepyland. I was afraid of waking up and finding her gone. So I remained as if in a sentinel box, memorizing the perfect triangle of Shade’s back, her head with its tight braids slumbered against my peach pillows. I wished she would wake up and take me in her arms the way she did last night after the hours we’d spent on the couch, both of us in our ridiculous cocktail dresses, talking until our eyelids curtained and voices cracked, talking, sometimes as if we’d known each other forever and other times as if we’d just met.

  We kissed in the dark and it felt like an old jazz song. We kissed with our clothes on, long, soft kisses with our legs intertwined and dresses hiked up to our hips. Finally, I unzipped her, she unhooked me, and we were half-naked, me wearing nothing but a pair of black pantyhose, and Shade in matching bra and underwear, black with lacy red flowers—a bit Victoria’s Secret I’m afraid, but we’d come from a benefit. We crawled beneath my comforter and kissed some more. It was me who pushed further, unsnapping her bra and burying my face in her breasts. She patted my head affectionately first, then harder. I felt her grab my hair, pull my head up to her chin. “Not yet,” she said, and I wanted to cry or scream or smack her. She held me tighter, whispered, “I don’t want to be drunk.”

  That I understood. She needed it to be real as much as I needed to prove it to her. So we held each other, fighting the same soporific divide that now had me watching her back, dueling with my weary eyelids, slipping back into the black hole of morning.

  The ringing telephone jostled me. I’d fallen asleep again… shit! At least Shade hadn’t left, I could feel her stirring next to me. She reached her hand back and I squeezed it. The voice of Alexis Calyx flooded in between us: “Rachel, I must speak to you immediately. I’m a bit disconcerted about the situation you’ve created.”

  Shade turned over, leaned against her elbow. We looked at each other and immediately knew what Alexis was talking about. “Guess we’re not the only ones who missed the play,” Shade said.

  “I cannot have reporters calling my home,” Alexis continued. I was about to pick up, when Shade grabbed my wrist. “We don’t know what anything says yet, we need the paper, the information.”

  She got up and stood at the edge of my bed. Alexis hung up. I stared at Shade who was smiling a half-mocked, You bad girl, Slivowitz. I’d apologized a lot last night while we were talking on the couch, but still couldn’t scrape the embarrassment from my skin.

  Shade went into the bathroom, leaving the door open behind her. She turned on the shower. I drifted back to sleep imagining her, then woke to her footsteps. She was wrapped in a towel, her body scented with lemon soap, her mouth tasting of toothpaste. “Do not even tell me you used my toothbrush,” I said.

  Story #27—the guilty child routine. Was I supposed to reprimand her? Put her over my knee? I was the guilty one, the bad kid. This reversal made me a little uncomfortable. “I warned you, baby, no half-assed shit,” she said, obviously pleased that she’d spent the night in my bed. She kissed me fiercely, then, rubbing her hands together like a fruit fly, stood in front of my closet. “Now…your clothes.”

  We suited her up in a pair of hiking boots, faded jeans, and a ribbed turtleneck, which I pulled over her bare shoulders and smoothed down at her waist. Before sending her out on the newspaper run, I kissed each of her nipples for good luck. The wool tickled my lips.

  I took a quick shower and erased Alexis’ message from my answering machine. I was tense, but energized, feeling groovy enough to switch my stereo from public radio to hardcore disco. Moving to the rhythm of the boogie, the beat, I straightened the magazines, videocassettes, and remote control units on the coffee table, swept the tiles around the kitchenette, wiped down the counter, swished a little bleach around the toilet bowl. Cleanliness demanded urgency now that somebody was looking.

  I’d just finished the Cinderella routine when Shade came barreling in. She dropped a few plastic bags. A bagel broke free and rolled along the floor.

  “You lost your bagel.”

  “Oh, just you wait.” She shed my snorkel jacket, dropped it on the couch, and paced, flipping through the paper for Gerri
Michner’s column. I lowered the music, sat down on a kitchen stool. “Okay, I hope you’re ready,” she said and started reading. “Despite an angry despondence among reporters gathered at the Mark Tannon benefit last night, one reporter on strike had a confession to make: ‘I happen to have work,’ said Rachel Silver, a midlevel reporter—”

  “Midlevel, what the fuck is that?”

  “That’s nothing…midlevel, covering the courts, blah, blah…‘I’m ghostwriting the autobiography of Alexis Calyx, the feminist pornographer,’ Silver said. ‘Like Alexis, I believe women have a right to pleasure, that women can like porn, too.’ Silver’s colleagues, as well, were shocked by her new employment. ‘I had no idea she was working for a porn star,’ said former city desk reporter Tony Dibenedetto. Arts reporter Teesha Marie Simpson, also on strike, had no comment.”

  My heart sank hearing Shade read her own name. We exchanged a quick glance, and she read on, a comment by one of the union leaders about how I was collecting strike pay and therefore should have reported any outside employment, “particularly something that might compromise the moral standards of the union.” Next came the off-the-hook statement, that a spokesperson from Zipless Pictures would neither confirm nor deny whether Alexis had officially hired a ghostwriter, although Gerri Michner did manage to dig up a lackey who admitted to seeing me hanging around the set asking questions. “People are always passing through,” said the employee who wouldn’t give his name. “You never ask who anybody is because you don’t want to offend the next big star or someone who might be throwing money our way, that kind of thing.”

  I tugged at my mousse-hardened hair. “We’re almost through,” Shade said, and read the grand finale, how whether or not I was officially on the Calyx payroll, I was certainly towing the pro-porn line. “You want to talk about morality here,” I said, apparently. “Look around you, these people are all so self-serving, just like the anti-porn women.”

  I jumped up from the counter. “Did I say that? I couldn’t have said that, it’s totally out of context.”