Kamikaze Lust Page 21

  “I said medium rare, this is still bleeding,” Hy said. “Take it back and cook it, would you?”

  “Everything’s gone downhill here,” Mom said.

  “When you been here before?” Rowdy asked.

  “They’re all the same.”

  I couldn’t care less about Hy’s food, the downswing in service at diners, nor whether Mom’s emergency visit was covered by her HMO. I tried to remember if I still had health insurance while on strike, but couldn’t. This upset me, the not remembering. My thoughts clouded over with Jesus Christ and his downy nimbus, Aunt Lorraine and that feeding tube in her arm. “It’s a nice hospital, very clean,” she’d said upon my arrival. I remembered touching her shoulder, biting the inside of my cheek until it stung.

  Kiki nudged my arm. “You gotta eat, Rachey, you’re getting too skinny.”

  “I’m not hungry,” I said, though I was starving. I couldn’t remember the last meal I’d eaten. But after two bites of my chicken salad sandwich I felt nauseous. It was like my notcoming, no matter how deep the craving I couldn’t satisfy it.

  “Can I have your fries?” Kiki asked. I passed my plate to her.

  “Wait, wait,” Rowdy reached out his hand and grabbed my sandwich. “You don’t want it, right?”

  I nodded no.

  “Rowdy, give me her pickle,” Mom said.

  They devoured my food before ordering dessert. I moved my sunglasses from the top of my head back over my eyes, drank another cup of stale coffee. I didn’t speak again until I stood up and, leaving them at the diner, returned to Sisters of Mercy Hospital to meet the cancer doctor.

  Two zero-degree days passed before Aunt Lorraine could leave the hospital. Rowdy and I borrowed Hy’s Cadillac and found her as feisty as usual. Insisting that she was no invalid, she eschewed her wheelchair, instead clinging heavily to our arms as we walked through the hospital corridors and out into the savage winds.

  It took a while to get her upstairs and settled into bed. I sat down next to her, a pang creeping from the pit of my empty stomach into the back of my throat. It was a combination of fear and anticipation that I imagined as a ball constructed of thousands of rubber bands.

  “You’ll stay tonight,” she said and, though I’d been hoping to get back to Manhattan and see Shade, I said of course I would stay with her.

  “Good, because it’s time we talked serious.”

  “Serious?” The ball in my neck started bobbing.

  “Open that drawer over there.” She pointed to her side table. Inside the top drawer were two containers filled with tiny orange capsules. The labels read Seconal. I removed one, the pills clicking as I opened the child-proof top. A couple of pills I examined in my palm. They were so bright like the psychedelic orange from a black-light poster or neon orange road signs with big Helvetica letters: Warning.

  Alongside the pill bottles was a stethoscope, its base coiled neatly around the earplugs. There were also a few books on assisted suicide, including Kaminsky’s self-published “how-to” guide, and a stack of business cards tied together with a broken rubber band. A few of my own bands snapped. I slammed the drawer shut.

  “I can’t do it,” I said.

  “You only think you can’t.”

  “No, I can’t. Isn’t that why we got Kaminsky?”

  “He’s here if we need him, but we won’t.”

  I stood and began to pace, exhaling loudly. It took every ounce of strength I had not to bolt out of there. “I can’t go back to the hospital,” Aunt Lorraine said. “Understand that, please, just understand that. This is too much already. I’m not living right; I’m stuck in this bed all day…I go to stretch, I break two ribs…I can barely pee on my own.”

  Her voice filled the room, a checklist of crippling pains and ailments. She spoke of everything I already knew, everything I would have expected, but I’d been duped by Jesus and the kindness of a few nurses. Her doctors, too, had been dangerously upbeat.

  “Honey, please,” she said.

  I leaned against the bedroom door, stared at her. A red bandanna covered her bald head, and I thought of my own hairless state, the discomfort it had been wreaking inside my underpants.

  “Does your head itch?” I asked.

  “Not so much.” She touched a couple of fingers to her head as if reminding herself she had no hair. “It’s soft, like baby skin. Want to feel it?”

  “Okay.”

  I walked to the bed and helped her untie the bandanna. Bald, she looked stalwart, a monument to individual bravery, or so I kept telling myself, avoiding her eyes, trapped as they were within the purple sockets of a once fully fleshed face. Gone were her ruddy cheeks and bushy eyebrows, lost was the rubious glow of her lips. As painful as it was for me, it must have been devastating for her. I don’t think she hated anything as much as she hated being sick.

  Though I felt a little creepy, I put my hand on her head. It was as soft as she’d said, just like her hands. “Look, promise me this at least,” she said. “You won’t let them put me back in the hospital.”

  “Okay,” I said, my palm on her velvet pate as if I were swearing in a court of law. Behind my back, however, I crossed the fingers of my other hand. I wasn’t sure I could do what she wanted. I knew only that I had to get out of Brooklyn.

  I left at the crack of dawn to meet Alexis Calyx at a Midtown post-production house. Exiting the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel more than an hour ahead of schedule, I decided to stop by Shade’s apartment. Had I a cell phone, I might have called ahead. I felt funny stopping by unannounced, that was more Shade’s style than mine.

  I parked directly in front of her building and stepped outside. The air had a bounce to it, the kind that kept you dancing on cold winter days. Or was it, perhaps, the grave pounding of my heart that had me shuffling my feet and blowing steam into my cupped leather gloves? I pressed the buzzer. There was no answer, so I pressed again. Finally, came her voice: “Yeah?”

  “It’s me.”

  A few garbled words floated from the speaker.

  “It’s freezing, Shade. Open up.”

  She buzzed me in. I yanked open the two sets of doors to her brownstone and inside found her standing in the doorway of her first-floor apartment. She was barefoot, wearing jeans and a tank top, and looked as if in my figure she’d seen a ghost. I wondered if I’d carried death all the way from Brooklyn.

  At the door she whispered, “Tina’s here.”

  “What?” The mention of her name set off the ball of rubber bands in my neck.

  “Trust me, it’s nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “I’ll explain later.”

  She led me inside, and like an idiot, I followed. Tina Macadam sat on the futon with her legs crossed. Her maroon hair was darker…wet. She casually smoked a cigarette.

  A nervous Shade kept her words breezy as she introduced us, though the situation told each of us more than we’d wanted to know. I sat down on a lounge chair next to the futon and unbuttoned my pea coat.

  “Have you recovered from the Tannon benefit yet?” Macadam said, shooting straight for the heart.

  “It wasn’t a big deal,” I shrugged it off.

  “Right, she’s very resilient,” Shade said, pacing. “Did you want coffee?”

  “Apparently so are you,” I snapped at Shade, then looked down. On the hard wood floor lay my ribbed turtle neck, next to it her flowered bra: signs like glowing Seconal pills. I wanted to wrap the bra around Shade’s neck, tight.

  “Everyone makes mistakes, Slivowitz,” Shade said. Upon hearing her use that name, I went soft for a second, felt as if we could boot the intruder and spend the morning making love.

  “You said it,” Macadam said. “They arrested a bunch of people for tipping a truck the other night.”

  “No!” Shade said, and a conversation ensued about the enervated spirits on the picket line. Shade brought me the coffee I didn’t remember asking for. I took a sip, then put down the cup. Source light showered throug
h the window, turning curlicues of dust and highlighting the dirty veins and ovals sprawling like mammoth vaginas upon the almond floor. Shade and Macadam talked on, their words sounding like Swahili; I felt more in synch with the cranking and whining of the radiator. Trapped in Shade’s baking apartment, there seemed no tidy way out of this predicament. That I worried about having a scene only fueled my self-loathing, but I was getting sick of scenes. Still, I could not sit here making small talk, pretending our sensibilities so modern they precluded jealousy, ourselves so evolved we might fall into a threesome as any porn film would have scripted it. One of those happy coincidences, like the goddamn Dominos man at your door.

  Macadam’s voice ripped into me. Her head swung backwards and I imagined her coming. She could come and I couldn’t. Maybe they’d even come together; I was the intruder. I felt sick to my stomach, had to get out, but again feared breaking their conversation. Do it, Slivowitz, just get up and leave!

  I pulled back the sleeve of my pea coat, felt a bead of sweat escape from my temple. “Um…I’ve got to be somewhere,” I said, and it wasn’t a lie. Shade turned to me, her face a wide-eyed signal I tried to decipher. Story #41—flagrante delicto.

  I stood, said a quick goodbye to Macadam. Big of me, I thought. Shade bounced up from the couch, said, “Wait!” I pulled open the door and fled. She ran after me in her bare feet, screaming my name.

  “Slivowitz, damn you!” She caught up and pushed me against the side of my jeep. “I told you it was nothing.”

  “It was nothing or nothing happened?” She rolled her eyes, looked down. “Jesus, Shade, your bra was on the floor.”

  “She showed up totally out of it.”

  “So you had to have sex with her.”

  I turned away, banged my fist against the roof of my jeep until I felt my palm sting. Shade spun me around. “It’s not what you think, I totally shut down.”

  “You know, I’m sitting there thinking, why is Shade in a tank top, why is what’s-her-name’s hair all wet? And there’s your bra like a goddamn disco ball.”

  “I’m trying to untangle things, and keep it all healthy.”

  “Oh, get out of here with that. Life isn’t healthy, that’s the biggest scam.” She let go of me. I looked down, caught her nipples poking out of her tank top, and craved her naked body on mine. She must have been freezing, though she tempered it. As if she were impervious to trivialities such as the weather.

  Resisting the urge to hold her, I broke away and walked around to the driver’s side. I fit my key in the door. “You’re missing the point as usual,” she said.

  “The point being?” I looked over the roof at her.

  “I’m in love with you, you jerk.”

  “You’ve got an interesting way of showing it.”

  “At least I can say it. I love you and I fucked up, okay? And it wasn’t even a big fuck up, nothing really happened, so I’ll live with it.”

  “How nice for you.”

  “Hey, it’s not like I haven’t been patient with you,” she said, and her words confirmed everything: Tina Macadam could come and I couldn’t. I felt as if I’d had the wind knocked out of me. Shade’s face dropped. “Oh god, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

  My heart raged inside my coat, and I no longer felt the cold. A few people passed, double-taking upon noticing Shade in her tank top. She didn’t budge, kept looking at me until I started feeling guilty when I was the one she’d just taken down. I opened the door to my jeep, almost tore it out of its socket I was so angry.

  “Slivowitz, I—”

  “Spare me.”

  “I’m the idiot now.”

  “I really have to go.” I climbed into my jeep.

  As I drove away, in my rearview mirror I saw her hugging her arms around her body. Barefoot in the dead of winter. I should have told her to go inside and warm up, but not with Tina Macadam there. I slammed my horn a few times, started running red lights.

  The morning rush passed as if it were a video game. With every street came a new challenge: red lights, green lights, flashing yellow lights, pot holes marked by striped barriers and steaming tubes, one-way streets and no parking signs, pedestrians and commuter buses. Each obstacle took me to the next level, further from Shade, from Brooklyn, or wherever it was the game had begun this morning.

  I was moving steadily ahead until I turned the wrong way down a one-way street. I dodged a few cars, my hands gripped tightly to the steering wheel. Vehicles honked in symphonic streams; then, an aria of screeches and obscenities. My pulse raced and I thought, I’m fucked. I heard myself scream. A UPS truck cut in front of me. I jerked the wheel to the left and skid to a halt, just missing a parked car. I shut off the ignition, took deep breaths as the quaking in my body subsided.

  Seconds later, I looked up and saw I was across the street from a parking garage, it’s neon sign flashing deus ex machina: Over here, stupid! I turned on the ignition and bolted across the street as if I’d known where I was going all along. When I stepped from my jeep, the garage attendants clapped and cheered. I suppose they were honored I’d taken on New York City traffic to make it to their garage.

  From there, it was only a few blocks to the address Alexis had given me. I rode the elevator to the thirty-third floor and was directed down a carpeted hallway, quiet but for the clackety-clack of a few keyboards, voices murmuring room to room. I heard Alexis talking as I entered the edit suite, and though the heat pumped proudly throughout the facility, her voice chilled me more than the streets outside. “Well, well, my demon writer has arrived,” she said, then turned back to the young man she’d been talking to. “Look, just get the Bran Flake people out of here, okay? They’re driving me crazy, I mean, what do they make, like a thousand dollars a minute?”

  “Something like that.”

  “And they’re in here all night drooling over my low-budget pussy. Call the ad agency if you have to, just get them out.” The man backed up a few feet and landed at the crowded edit bay. Alexis pointed her neck to the door, a gesture that soon had us entering the empty suite across the hall. She sat down in a black leather chair with wheels. I stayed standing. “They say the pen is mightier than the sword, but what about the evil tongue?”

  “Am I fired or not?” I said, in no mood today for her perverted voir dire.

  “I was ready to cut you a break after the scene with Wanda, but using my name like that.” She swiveled in her chair, looked up at me. “Jesus, Rachel, the one thing I expected was a little discretion, that’s the whole point.”

  “I know, I slipped up.”

  “Oh, you bet, and your slip is really showing this time. You’re like a teenage boy who can’t get laid.”

  Her words hit too close to home, made my cheeks flush with shame. Again, my heavy coat had me sweating as if I were in a sauna. Alexis shook her head. “My last ghostwriter used to buy me stuffed animals and tea, I have boxes and boxes back in the office; the one before that did novenas before she came on the set, they all seemed normal at first, too. You know, other people have problems with secretaries, me, I can’t keep a ghostwriter.”

  “You don’t want a ghostwriter. We always talked about me when I’m supposed to be writing your life.”

  “It’s funny you say that, I haven’t seen a word from you.”

  I sighed, leaned my hip against a steel console. It was true, I hadn’t written a word. Even worse, I could no longer remember writing at all, nor what my life had been like with a day job. I’d phoned people, visited them, typed little stories into my computer. For this my paycheck passed directly into my checking account.

  The biweekly checks had since diminished into strike pay, a pittance almost wrested from me by the union after the Gerri Michner incident. The union now had me on probation: One false move and into the poor house I hobbled. Faster, too, without the five-thousand-dollar advance Alexis had promised but as yet not tendered my way. I’d maxed out a couple of credit cards counting on that money. I needed the money.
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br />   So I did what any mildly self-respecting woman on the brink of losing her second job in four months would do: I groveled. Alexis listened, then wheeled sideways in her chair. “I’m sorry, but it’s over,” she said. My heart dropped to my stomach. I felt manipulated, as if she’d promised me stardom without telling me what I would have to do for it; how she would bring me to my knees, like a good little porn star begging for the money shot…oh, baby, please come all over my face!

  Alexis stood, smoothed down her wool pants with painted fingernails. At that moment I would have sworn she was a man. Ultra-femme like Tricky in drag, but a man nonetheless, passing with the swish of her trousers and a whiff of herbal shampoo. In the dim hallway, she turned around. “I don’t understand, I try to teach you young people what I know and it always backfires.”

  “Maybe you’re trying too hard.”

  “I hope you get what you want, Rachel.”

  She returned to the edit suite, and I knew I would someday remember our parting as pivotal. What I hated was that Alexis knew it, too.

  My apartment felt lonelier than ever. The message light blinked three, but I couldn’t bear so much as listening to Shade… or Aunt Lorraine…or any human being. On the way home I’d vowed to abstain from human concerns, be they of the flesh or the spirit.

  Instead, I grazed through my beleaguered check book, charting the stack of bills I’d before so happily ignored. Beneath my desk, Freddy circled, shoved her nose up against my shin. “You think you’re hungry now, just wait,” I told her, imagining the two of us fighting over the last tin of Fancy Feast.

  I remembered Aunt Lorraine saying she’d left a little money for me, but I would have to kill her first and, although that was in fact what she’d requested, nobody would believe me if the sum were too large. There might be a courtroom scene like the kind I used to write about, then the headlines and column inches: