Kamikaze Lust Page 20

“Well, sort of.”

  “She’s saying I called everyone there anti-pornography.”

  “No, she’s saying you called everyone self-serving. You only called her anti-pornography.”

  “Not the way she said it.” I turned my head away, close to tears. Shade grabbed my flailing arms by the biceps.

  “Baby, I’m sorry,” she said, the fear in her eyes summoning last night. As from a scratchy newsreel, the images rolled forward: Gerri Michner’s face, how badly I’d wanted to show her up, trumpet my Silver Ray liberation as if it were a badge of honor. My jaw shook, and I felt as if a marble had lodged in my throat. The phone rang. Shade and I shrieked, jumped backwards. “Good morning, you lovely loose cannon,” began Jason’s message.

  “Oh god,” I said. “I am such an idiot.”

  “Don’t worry,” Shade said and lifted the telephone, Jason’s voice sailing through the speaker a few seconds before she shut off the sound and ringer. Watching as she fit the phone underneath my bed, I was thankful Gerri Michner had left Shade out of it, that the fears about her reputation had not borne out. If for no other reason than to have her sitting on my bed, looking as if she might smother me with tenderness.

  “Come here, my little loose cannon,” she said, there, on my tousled sheets, in my clothes, looking like love should, equal parts desire and consequence. I felt every breath crawl through my heart as I walked toward her amid the faint roll of the drum machines. A Moog, a melody, and those digitally mastered cries of passion and dreams and shaking it, baby, shaking it because when you dance it’s all about making love, isn’t it?

  Shade leaned back on her elbows. I fit myself in between her legs, her hands parted my bathrobe. Soon I felt nothing but her fingers.

  So evening came, and morning came; it was the first day, and then the second before we left my apartment. We walked the wet streets, as if we were inside of a bubble, one of those scenes you shake and the snowflakes swirl. It wasn’t snowing yet, but the air was heavy, the sky a mist of gray guncotton.

  We bought coffee in paper cups and continued on, going nowhere. Shade stopped in front of a vendor hawking hats, modeling a few, as I sipped my coffee through a crack in the plastic lid. She chose a black, knit cap, the kind worn by urban thugs on television. “Are you planning on turning over a candy store?” I asked. She smiled, said the hat made her feel tough. But she was more of a sap than I was. When we passed the multiplex just as the feel-good movie of the season was about to begin, she begged me to go inside.

  “Come on, Slivowitz,” she cocked her upper lip at me. “Ever made out in the movies?”

  I didn’t have to answer. I’d always been urbane about movie-going, arriving early to be Coke-and-popcorned by the first preview, and barring all communication once the lights went out. On occasion, I’d even shushed a peanut-gallery commentator or two. But there I sat kissing in the back row like a clumsy adolescent, though not my adolescence—for I’d never even kissed a boy until I was eighteen years old, and never would have imagined that all the boys I’d kissed since would be obliterated by one woman in a dark movie theater.

  We were feeling good, so much so that we skipped out before the movie ended and ran back to my apartment, forgetting that we’d originally come out for food and toilet paper.

  Home again, as if we’d never left the bed, I was overwhelmed by my craving for Shade, my longing to bind her hands and feet so she couldn’t leave. Yet, whenever I tried to express these feelings without sounding like the mildly neurotic and needy adult I was, my language retreated to the vapid patterns of pornolinguistics.

  “I’m waiting for this to blow up,” I said, moving my leg beneath her until I felt her on my knee.

  “What?”

  “This you and me against the world thing.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “It can’t last.”

  “Yes it can,” she said, and despite the barrage of phone messages from Alexis, union leaders, Mom, Aunt Lorraine, various friends and colleagues, and, that first day, a few scavengers from the media hoping I might be a loose cannon for them as well, I believed her. I would have believed anything she told me with her body on mine, her fingers slipping inside me and teeth biting my nipples, a little bit hard, which I discovered I liked. Though I couldn’t come, I felt closer than ever, beyond it even, the way the graze of a finger can in the right circumstances be more intense than a grasp. Still, there was the dark-continent part of me that believed our relationship would not be fully consummated until I had an orgasm.

  Day four, alone in the shower, I gave in and masturbated. Though it wasn’t the climax I’d wished for, I came in about two seconds. It was insidious, a litmus test that left me feeling physiologically defective. A sexual misfit. Not like Shade who could come when I fucked her, but only if I used two fingers at about a forty-five degree angle so the base of my hand hit her clit, and even then, only after she’d gotten off once already some other way. This kind of specificity amazed me. Clearly, Shade’s was a sexual history spawned by trial and error, along with a few creative lovers all of whom I’d become insanely jealous of; jealous because they’d been with her, but also because of the things they’d done together. None of the men I’d been with even liked being on their backs.

  In all fairness I couldn’t blame them entirely. I never said what I wanted, what I liked, and through my frustrated silence I’d grown contemptuous of their easy orgasms. I’d lorded my frigidity over them as if it were a sacred cow. But it ruined me sexually.

  “I understand now,” Shade said. It was day six and I’d finally confessed that I was indeed troubled by my not coming.

  “What?”

  “The other night, at the benefit. There’s just no letting go for you, is there?”

  “I guess not.” I looked up from the couch where I’d been clipping my toenails. She was sitting at the counter in my bathrobe, drinking a glass of orange juice and not-reading a magazine.

  “It’s all inside,” she pointed to her temple. “That’s the real sex organ, the rest is just friction.”

  I pursed my lips, returned to my clipping.

  “No, really. We’ll figure it out.”

  Let her hope, but I knew better. People who came easily never understood this, how it felt to be perpetually on-the-verge, revved-up and good-to-go, but then you’re going and going and going and suddenly everything shuts down, like someone flicked a switch in your head. Whatever you do next is inconsequential, you’ve passed the point of no return. Bottomed out. Sometimes when I hit bottom, I became so dejected and angry I couldn’t speak for hours. Other times, I could pretend I’d actually come, feeling sated enough by wet sheets and a lover’s arms. With Shade it was mostly the latter.

  She took the nail clipper from my hands and sat down next to me. “There’s something I want to ask, don’t be mad, but—” she giggled so I knew it wasn’t serious. “In your closet, I saw these…these boots.”

  “They’re the real thing, straight from the dungeons of Mistress Wanda Lynne.” I explained about the mishap on the set, yet in the telling it seemed as if the entire day had been lived by someone else. Silver Ray, perhaps.

  At Shade’s request, I took out the boots, and together we inspected them. “They’re sort of scary,” she said.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Put them on.” She smiled, and within seconds was helping me into the thigh-highs I’d inherited because that idiot Robbie Rod had cajoled me into trying them on when he must have known it was bad karma to wear a dominatrix’s boots without asking. That day I’d been devastated, but balancing around my apartment for Shade I wished I’d thanked him.

  “Take off your underwear,” Shade said, and I did, the sun making waves through my dirty blinds, and it was naughty and illicit, as if we were slumming in a dive bar in the middle of the afternoon. But if in the boots I’d felt like a whore with RR, with Shade I was a woman, or I accepted some idea of femininity that had always felt like an act with men. I liked
being sexy, I liked her watching me being sexy.

  We danced naked and I was suddenly tall. She put me in her lace bra and spun me around. “There, now you look like a porn star.”

  “I have way too much pubic hair.”

  “Let’s get rid of it.”

  “You serious?”

  She nodded, cheeks dimpling foolishly, but I knew she was indeed serious. She said she’d always wanted to shave a woman and, at that moment, she could have said she wanted to have a threesome with a goat and my response would have been, “Let’s find a petting zoo.”

  An occasional advocate of the clipped bikini line, I had the necessary accoutrements. Scissors. Shaving cream. Disposable razors. Vitamin E capsules and aloe vera lotion. Shade draped a towel over the toilet seat and sat me down, spreading my patent leather legs. She picked up the scissors and my thighs caved inward. I had this fear of sharp objects near my pussy, especially when they were in somebody else’s hands.

  “It’s okay,” she said. She kissed the top of my clit, stroked me with her fingers and already I wanted to scream. I leaned my head back, felt the pull of my pubes, the cold metal of the scissors, and then, a tense snip. My eyes shut to the clip of the shears, the hum of Shade’s voice.

  When I next looked down, my pubes were tightly buzzed; sort of prepubescent, sort of in-the-Navy, yet caught between these shiny leather lampposts. I almost liked my own body. Shade smiled, filled her palm with shaving cream and my heart beat wildly.

  She started shaving from the top. The back of my neck tingled, and I had to bite my tongue to keep from whimpering. I could feel my legs shaking the closer she came to my vagina. “Trust me,” she said, two fingers spreading my lower lips so she could get in further with the razor. “I was always really good at shaving the balloon. It was my favorite booth at the town fair. I won prizes.”

  “You’re such a little suburban girl.”

  “I never said anything different, everyone just assumes I’m from Brooklyn or wherever. From the ’hood, as it were.”

  “I’m more from the ’hood than you are.”

  “Exactly, but it’s like that’s the past I should have had.”

  “You can have mine if you want.”

  “That’s very kind of you…can you move your left leg up a bit…there, that’s it.” My right leg slanted against the sink as if I were a contortionist so Shade could get underneath. In flooded visions of losing my balance and sacrificing my clit to a disposable bic. No coming, ever. Not even the hope of it. I shivered, felt the muscles in my stomach contract.

  “Relax,” Shade said, as if she’d read my mind. She softened the scrape of her razor, stopping every so often to stroke me with her fingertips. I felt them so intensely, the opposite of relaxing.

  She pulled back, tapped the razor against her chin. “I’m wondering, maybe we should leave the hair on top.”

  “You’re the stylist.”

  “Here.” She tilted a hand-held mirror toward me.

  “Ugh, it looks like a moustache.”

  “Our customers are mad for it, we call it the Charlie Chaplin.”

  The little black hairs sneered above my cunt. Bald, I could handle, but these few molded strands reeked of a slow, uncomfortable death. “More like Adolph Hitler,” I said. “I hate it, take it off.”

  She grabbed my chin in her free hand, kissed me, then returned gallantly to her shaving. When she finished she rubbed me clean with a warm washcloth, and I felt pampered, cared for in a way I’d never experienced.

  White fluorescents streaming, she dropped to her knees in front of my bald vagina. She licked me slowly, so tenderly it hurt more than the pull of her razor. She pushed my legs further apart, fingered me. On her knees, she was licking me and fucking me and I could feel it this time, feel it for real. I was thinking please, please, please…but I lost it again, was soon ambushed by those familiar frustrations. There was just no letting go. I lifted Shade’s head. “You’re all wet,” she panted. I started sobbing.

  We fell down on the cold bathroom floor, Shade’s arms mainlining relief as I wailed maniacally. I said I was sorry for not coming, and she said it was okay, it didn’t matter. “I was almost there, I swear it.” I hiccuped, and she held me, for hours it seemed. I’d never cried in front of a lover, never cried so deeply with anyone before, not even that day in Kaminsky’s office when I realized I was losing Aunt Lorraine for good. Such emotion frightened me, felt more foreign than my shaved vagina.

  I longed only to comfort her back, be good to her, but my own feelings were so overwhelming they left me mute and immobile. Ultimately, I was afraid I’d failed her and would always fail her, because I couldn’t give her what she wanted. I couldn’t give her everything.

  Darkness eclipsed my studio, offering a night and day contrast to the two of us in this light-bright bathroom. “I’m starving,” Shade said.

  “I know, but I can’t move.”

  Gently, she lifted me, put her arms around my waist, and hugged me.

  “Sorry I ruined your fantasy,” I said.

  “You didn’t ruin shit.”

  “It’s not what you wanted, it should have been sexy.”

  “It is, Slivowitz,” she whispered, her breath mingling with my ear lobe. “It really is.”

  I don’t know whether I believed her or not, but the words felt right. As did her body on mine, stumbling from the bathroom and collapsing back into bed.

  GOOD MORNING HEARTACHE

  On the seventh day, Hy called and said that Mom and Aunt Lorraine had been admitted to the hospital. Nothing to worry about, both were doing fine, he repeated a few times before telling me what had happened. They’d been watching television the night before when Rowdy barreled in screaming. “Get the doctor, man! She ain’t breathing right.”

  Mom and Hy followed him upstairs where they found Aunt Lorraine wheezing uncomfortably with her eyes closed, the sight of which caused Mom to drop. Rowdy called an ambulance. When Mom, after they’d roused her, complained of heart palpitations, they put her in the back seat of Hy’s Cadillac and followed the ambulance to Sisters of Mercy Hospital, whereupon they both were admitted. Aunt Lorraine had broken a couple of ribs, Mom, they suspected, was suffering from exhaustion.

  I got out there as quickly as I could, all things considered. Orienting myself to the world after stowing away seven days was difficult enough without having to leave Shade. I dropped her off on my way to Brooklyn. We stared out the windshield for a while, holding hands over the stick shift.

  “I wish I could go,” she said, finally.

  “I know, but…you know.”

  “I know.”

  Our language had become a pyramid; it’s foundation vast and firm, we barely needed words anymore. Yet as soon as we parted, I feared the last few days had been a lie. I felt disconnected, utterly exposed. As if cast from the garden, I was doomed to walk the planet naked, all eyes on me, taunting me for my shaved cunt, my watching porno films, my sleeping with another woman, everything. Like Lilith, I was banished and horny and alone.

  These visions of sprites and spirits were magnified at Sisters of Mercy Hospital. Most of the nurses wore crosses, and biblical scenes adorned the walls. Hy had to hang his coat over the painting of Jesus across from Mom’s bed. “I couldn’t stand him looking at me,” she said.

  She was fully dressed, face painted. Hy said all the tests had come back negative and she was about to be released.

  “I’m glad you’re okay,” I said.

  “I’m telling you, Ray, you should have seen it,” Hy said. “They all come in here and bow down in front of him.”

  “In front of who?”

  “Him, the big guy, in the painting. So, I try to take it off the wall and guess what? It’s nailed down.” He laughed hysterically, was joined by Mom. I must have looked confused. “Nailed down,” he repeated, waiting for my response with his mouth agape.

  “Jesus…ooops!” Mom laughed, covered her lips with her fingers. It amazed me how animat
ed she became when she was the patient. Normally, she couldn’t walk into a hospital without fainting.

  “Don’t you get it?” Hy said. “They say the Jews crucified him, but they got him nailed to the wall.”

  “Oh.”

  “Forget it, she won’t laugh at Catholics,” Mom said.

  “It’s a bad joke,” I said.

  “Look at her, acting all high and mighty after she tells the whole world about the filth she’s involved in.”

  It took every ounce of self-control I had to ignore her comment. I walked to the window, tried to find my jeep among the cars in the parking lot. Already I was antsy and wanted to get back to Manhattan.

  A doctor came in and had Mom sign her release forms. Hy lifted his jacket from the Christ painting. I half expected to see the devil jump from the frame. But he was just your average Jesus, a long-haired guy in a bathrobe. I followed Mom and Hy back to Aunt Lorraine’s room where Rowdy was videotaping Aunt Lorraine and Kiki talking about Days of Our Lives.

  After a quick powwow, during which I barely spoke, we decided to have lunch. Then I would come back later for the meeting with Aunt Lorraine and her oncologist. She’d asked me to be there, and I’d said yes, resigning myself to the fact that I would not be leaving Brooklyn for a while. Though I felt a bit resentful, I swallowed it as I leaned over and kissed Aunt Lorraine’s cheek. “Buckle up, hun,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Your seat belt, can’t be too careful.”

  I took a deep breath, laughed. As much as I sensed her words were coded, I adhered to them when Rowdy and I settled into my jeep for the short trip to the diner. We got there first. By the time Mom, Hy, and Kiki arrived I’d memorized the descriptions of the various Belgian waffles and Rowdy had eaten all of the rolls in the bread basket.

  “Our chauffeur here made a wrong turn,” Kiki said.

  “You said right, I went right,” Hy said, and that was only the beginning of his bickering. He sent back his soup. Then, after he’d dropped his spoon on the floor, he demanded another, saying it was filthy anyway. Finally, when his burger came, he cut into it with a knife and sneered as if he’d discovered a hair or fingernail. “Say, young lady!” he bellowed at the waitress. His voice pierced my ear drums. A few heads turned our way, the waitress rolled her eyes, walked over.