Kamikaze Lust Page 26

  “Left him there?”

  “Yeah. Then he made up some story about being kidnapped by terrorists, and how they threatened to take him to Texas or something.”

  “How do you know he made it up?”

  “’Cause he was drunk. It was on the news, the troopers found him wandering around the desert. Sent him to psycho central.”

  “Daddy?” Ivory said, jumping up onto the couch.

  I opened a pint of ice cream with fudge and nuts and chocolate chip cookie dough, took a spoonful, and handed it over to her.

  “Who else?”

  “You’re not supposed to say that,” Ivory said. Sonic put down his control panel, turning the television back into a television, and grabbed the ice cream container from Ivory.

  “Hey!” she screamed.

  “Sharing is caring, capish?” he said sternly, then turned to me. “See, Neil’s got this rule. Anyone that mentions the old man owes him a dollar.”

  “Or has to have punishment,” Ivory said.

  Sonic grabbed the bag of Oreos and dipped a cookie into the ice cream. “The thing is, he makes you do stupid things, like clip his toenails, or count bullets. Anything that keeps him thinking he’s the shit, you know.”

  “Oh, I know,” I said. I opened the styrofoam box with the nachos and separated a couple of chips from a glob of cheese.

  Sonic grabbed the remote, upping the volume with his thumb and flicking the channels. He stopped on Kim Mathews, superjournalist, sitting on an examination table in a blue gown, nodding reporter-like as a doctor discussed the lump in her breast. The back of my neck tingled: it was the night of the Kim Mathews lumpectomy.

  I thought about shutting off the TV, or telling the kids to go wherever it was they went when Neil sent them away, but the authority didn’t feel right this time. I was no child molester, but I wasn’t a V-chip either. So we sat on the torn couch, three sets of eyes on Kim—and she was just Kim now that we knew she needed surgery. We watched her squinting at her x-rays as the breast doctor applauded the early detection due to Kim’s regular mammograms. “You’ll see to it these don’t show up at Christies,” she quipped, and the breast man laughed the laugh of a man about to become a celebrity himself. Then they dissolved into a beer commercial.

  Ivory reached into my lap and grabbed a few nachos, the cheese now hardened like mortar. “What’s a biopsy?” she asked me.

  “It’s when, you know, a doctor cuts into…something,” I said, uncomfortably. Maybe I should have banished myself from the living room.

  “They’re gonna cut her tit off,” Sonic said.

  “They’re not cutting it off, they cut into it so they can get the lump out.”

  “Why?” Ivory said.

  “Because it’s not supposed to be there.”

  “Then why’s it there?”

  “’Cause she’s got cancer, stupid!” Sonic said.

  “No, her lump wasn’t cancerous.”

  “How do you know?” he said.

  “They did the surgery months ago, it’s been all over the news,” I said, frustrated by my inability to explain that the Mathews biopsy had received more coverage than most small military maneuvers. The entire country knew her lump was benign. In fact, that had been the point: early detection, life over death, TV woman beats disease of the week—you can too!

  When Kim came back she was speaking to us from the operating table in a scene more gruesome than anything out of an Alexis Calyx film. You could see her feet strapped to the table, her bare ankles, the curtain separating her head from the rest of her body where the surgical team prodded with rubber gloves. “Okay, I’m going to make an inch long incision just below the aureole so it doesn’t scar,” the breast doctor said, and a camera followed his fingers on the scalpel, careful not to reveal any skin that might identify the famous newscaster’s breast, though we did see a quick burst of blood before the dissolve.

  “Ew!” Ivory screamed, and buried her head against my shoulder. I felt the nachos and ice cream wrestling in my stomach, but couldn’t stop looking at the screen. We were inside Kim’s breast, down with the sound of suction, the bloody gloves and Frankenstein tools bobbing against her flesh. A pull back to the other side of the curtain, and Kim smiled. Through lipsticked lips she said she could feel pressure, but no pain. Oh modern medicine! Oh local anesthesia! Kim had outdone herself for her sweeps week close-up, a celluloid coup like the suicidal corpses of Ida and Marvin Salinger that all of New York had seen on that mid-October morning, which just happened to have been my birthday and the day the strike began. Since then I’d been marked by death like a yellow-splattered scab. My thoughts plunged to Aunt Lorraine.

  I lifted Ivory’s head from my shoulder and stood up from the couch. “Wait, Rachel!” Ivory said. “Look, look, they got it, they got the bump!”

  “You mean lump,” Sonic said. I turned my head to the screen. The breast doctor held out a metal tray with Kim’s lump in it. I had to hold my stomach to keep from retching. This was wrong, all wrong.

  I ran into the kitchen and called Aunt Lorraine. Rowdy answered, but said he wouldn’t wake her until I proved I was at Neil’s house, so I put Ivory on the phone. Rowdy sobbed, “You found my brother! My long lost brother!” As difficult as it was for me to take his emotions seriously just then, I lied and told him Neil had asked about him, that he wanted him to come and visit. When his crying subsided, he woke Aunt Lorraine.

  “It’s late,” she said.

  “I know, but I’m coming home, I had to tell you.”

  “Finally.”

  “You don’t believe me.”

  “I do.”

  “I’ll be there, I promise.”

  “I know, hun,” she said, her voice so matter of fact I thought she must have more faith in me than I had in myself. At that point I knew only two things: I would do whatever she wanted; and Kaminsky’s camera crews were not getting anywhere near her. I hung up, then left a note for Vera.

  Before leaving, I asked Ivory if she would show me King Henry and she took me out to the damp tool shed. The air smelled of oil and rust. Against the back wall was an old workbench like the one back in Bay Ridge, only this one was stacked with gun parts and all of the bullets that weren’t allowed in the house.

  In the corner, King Henry lay on top of a pile of towels, the most visible being an upside down head shot of Elvis. The two kings met eye-to-eye, with Henry encased in a plastic collar that framed his face like an earl’s neckpiece.

  Ivory ran to him and threw her arms around the back of his collar. Her touch seemed the opposite of the rubber-gloved fingers on Kim Mathews. It looked like intimacy. “Hello, baby dog,” she said, and the gnarling in my stomach returned. Did she know he was dying? No matter how tightly she held on.

  I knelt down next to her in front of the not-quite German shepherd, but Neil was right, he was no mastiff either. Like most of us, he was a mutt. Clumps of sticky hair covered his face as I looked into his blinded eyes. They saw me without seeing, the way Dad’s had been the day I’d found him.

  Ivory lifted King Henry and led him outside. It was colder now. Goose bumps shuffled up my arms, but for the first time in months I saw stars. Underneath that dazzling expanse, with stars as phony as a Van Gogh rip-off, I watched Ivory pat her dog’s head while he took a shit, then bundle up his excrement in newspaper. I thought of all the times I’d seen Rowdy empty Aunt Lorraine’s bedpan. Cleaning up someone else’s shit was all you needed to know about life and death, love and loyalty.

  “What’s the matter?” Ivory asked after we’d taken King Henry back to his throne of towels, back to Elvis and one more night.

  “Nothing,” I smiled. “My allergies are bumming me out.”

  “Bumming me out,” she imitated me. “Rachel, you’re funny.”

  “More than you know.”

  “Are you a Yuppie?”

  “Do I look like one?”

  “I don’t know, I never met a Yuppie.”

  “That’s good
management for you,” I said.

  Ivory raised one side of her melancholy mouth. Then she asked if we could go to the store again.

  RR let me in without saying a word. I followed him through the darkened space over to the couch. He sat down. In front of him candles flamed, sending shadows like modern dancers against the windows. On the table: his laptop, cell phone, and a beer bottle sweating slightly at the neck. “What took you so long?” he said.

  “I called.”

  “Hours ago.”

  His eyes flared, and he was the parking lot RR again. Pressure flooded behind my face. All the way home I’d rehearsed: Not that this hasn’t been nice, but…I’d even had visions of him being the romantic RR, the one who’d squired me about Caesar’s Palace and then took me home to his silly waterbed, before the sex and money clouded in, before he started glowering at me as if I were so vile it soiled his eyes. “Okay… listen,” I backed away from the table, remembered Vera’s minivan parked outside. “I think I’ll just go.”

  “Go? What are you talking about, go? Come over here.” He waved his hand at me. “Come on, come on, sit down, stop being so neurotic.”

  A pause, a slight sigh, then my words: “I am neurotic, if you don’t know that by now.…”

  He smiled. We laughed.

  I sat down in the leather armchair perpendicular to the couch and stared out the window. By day, you could see the mountains, by night it was a mysterious black mirror. The outline of my face shone amid the dancing candles. I could see his face, too. Veiled, the way it was meant to be seen. Only through a looking-glass or celluloid smoke screen did his image make any sense. I started to relax a bit. Kicked off my boots, grinning, making small talk.

  He stood up. “Let me take a quick shower.”

  “Now?”

  “Yeah, I was just on the treadmill.”

  He walked upstairs, leaving me alone on the black windows. Strangely rejected. Outside sounded the call of wild animals: fireflies, crickets, the coyote crowd, all making me feel more isolated, lonely. I fantasized fire engines and delivery trucks, the guy above me who moved his furniture after midnight, the smell of sandalwood that escaped from the apartment next door, Shade’s voice on my telephone. I lifted his cell phone and tried her again. She picked up on the first ring.

  “Where are you, Slivowitz?”

  “Las Vegas.” I tried to stay calm but hearing her set off the drill in my sternum. As if my heart were under construction.

  “You’re with that creep?”

  “Yeah, but I’m not having any fun.”

  “Goddamn you! I’ve been going crazy worrying, how could you do that? Just get up and leave, I mean, that’s bullshit. Total bullshit.”

  “What about Tina?”

  “That was nothing, how many times do I have to tell you, Jesus! I just kissed her a little, that’s it. And don’t even try to turn this around when you’re out there doing whatever it is you’re doing.”

  A few time-delayed seconds. Shade was breathing heavily, as if she could have been crying. “I’ve never been like that with anyone before,” I said. “I trusted you.”

  “Oh, yeah, you busted me. I didn’t do anything.”

  “Trust! I trusted you.” There was too much static. I stood up and paced to change the frequency. “Two days, Shade. I leave you for two days and she’s at your apartment.”

  “So you run off to Las Vegas with a porn star!”

  Her words, muffled through the wires, made me sound adventurous, so independent-film. I had to laugh.

  “This is funny?” she said.

  “I’m sorry, but you know those things you’d never imagine anyone saying to you?”

  “Well, it’s true. You’re in Vegas and I’m here with your cat.”

  “Oh my god, Freddy!”

  “Now it’s, ‘Oh my god!’ You are so lucky I fell into an obsessive rage and went by your place, which by the way—”

  “I know, I know.”

  “Did you do that?”

  “I guess, it’s all a blur, I can’t believe I forgot about Freddy. Do you think I’m a bad person?”

  “No, just a colossal idiot sometimes,” her words tapered off into a few snorts. I imagined her picking through the remnants of smashed videotapes, feeding the cat. It seemed so everyday, so removed from the woman who’d run off to Las Vegas with a porn star, the Silver Ray reflection staring back at me from the window pane. I put my palm over her face.

  “I’m coming back tomorrow,” I said.

  “Oh. I hope your plane doesn’t crash.”

  “Okay, forget it, I shouldn’t have called.”

  “Look where you’re calling from!”

  “It’s your fault I’m here,” I said. More static and stray wires; heavy breathing. Then came a click, and I thought I lost her. “Slivowitz?” she said.

  “I can barely hear you!” I shouted above the cacophony in my ear. I thought she said she could kill me—or was it kiss me?—before the phone went dead.

  “You’re going somewhere?” RR’s voice made me shriek. My pulse rushed. I had no idea how long he’d been there, what he’d heard. I turned around, sending his phone thumping into the carpet. He wore only jeans with the top button undone and was leering like the thirty-foot cowboy.

  “Who were you talking to?” he moved toward me, but I couldn’t speak. I felt as if I were caught naked in the middle of a crowded casino, the way it happened in dreams. “Answer me!” he screamed, and I kept quiet, afraid of saying fuck you or fuck me, the pronouns were irrelevant at this point. The result was always the same: We fucked. The sick thing was as much as I wanted to kick him in the gut and run, I also wanted him to touch me, to finger me, to fuck me again.

  He made it to the window and smiled. Such a blatant attempt at being sexy it was almost boyish. And he was cleanshaven, smooth, relaxed. “Who?” he said, taking a few strands of my hair in between his fingers. “Your brother?”

  “No.”

  “Then who?”

  “A friend, in New York.”

  He tugged harder at my hair. “You called long-distance? On my phone? That’s gonna cost you, babe.”

  “Send me the bill.”

  “Why? Are you going somewhere?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve gotta be kidding.”

  “I have to get back,” I said, lightly, but the levity was not appreciated. His eyes expanded like poker chips. He yanked me closer to him by my hair. All of the muscles in my body contracted. I was sick of his tyrannical play, tired of being a worthy supplicant. I tried to pull away, but he held my hair so tightly it burned my scalp. Still, I resisted even harder, working against him until I saw black dots, and together we pivoted sideways. He grabbed my arms, pinned me to the floor. “Fuck you!” I screamed, immediately wishing I hadn’t.

  “Shut up!” He slapped the back of his hand across my face. The stinging reverberated in my nose, my mouth, my jaw, the back of my neck. Everywhere I looked was TV static. I was angry, but energized. Thinking I could fight him, daring him to try and mess with me.

  He tightened the grip on my arms. “You think you’re at Club Med? That you can just take off, not even tell me?”

  I didn’t answer. Turned my head sideways, feeling my hair drag against the carpet.

  “After I bring you out here…look at me,” he turned my chin forward, started unbuttoning my shirt. At that moment, the fury on his face finally registered, so extreme it could have been a caricature. I wanted him off of me. “You proud of yourself now?”

  “Let go of me.”

  “You’re a prima donna cunt, like Alexis.”

  “Get off!” I screamed, my feet kicking out furiously. His left hand bound my legs. He tugged at my zipper, pulled down my pants, and hurled me on my stomach, pushing my face into the carpet. It smelled like turpentine.

  “Do you realize what I’ve done for you, Silver?” he said. “You were a virgin before me and you know it. And now you want to leave? I’m offended. But
all right, let’s see how much you want out of here. Show me how badly you want it.”

  “No!”

  “Maybe you didn’t understand, I said show me!” He put one hand over mine and led my fingers to my clit. His body clamped on top of me. “Look how wet you are,” he said, and I was shamed by the evidence. “I should hold out, make you beg for it again.”

  He took his hand away. I heard his buttons pop, felt him hard against my back. “But that wouldn’t be entirely fair, would it? Hmmm, let’s see….”

  I felt a squirt of lube between my cheeks. How weird—

  He entered me. Condomless. In my ass. I screamed so loud my ears popped. Thought I was going to die; wished for death, actually. Anything to stop the pain, the blood-sucking and desperate disaster-film fucking like Sensurround, where every touch feels like the end.

  I looked up and saw us on the window, RR flailing on top of me, his face enraged and scornful. Mine was blank. He pushed my head down and my cheek scraped against the carpet. I swallowed a few strands of wool. You can take the pain, I told myself. Over and over again, I repeated it like a prayer: Take the pain, take the pain…. The candles flickered low reminding me of the back room at The Rocking Horse. RR moved his hand down to mine and made me rub my clit. I flashed on Alexis.

  “You’re getting wild, Silver,” RR grunted, rubbed harder with my fingers. “You should have threatened to leave from the beginning.”

  I cried into the carpet so he wouldn’t hear me. Take the pain, take the pain….

  I gave up nothing real, just played along, because we were still in the game. That first night at the baccarat table I’d played hardest when I was most afraid of losing his money; this again was all a game, all performance. I was suddenly transposed, transported. Saw my own submission, felt alive in prostration. A scene so tired it was a genre. But we were no longer two consenting adults…just a couple of hollow bodies… blow-up dolls…Barbie and Ken in their mountainside hide-away… playing a scene from the all-new Sensurround, as if we’d found each other after a plane crash and amid the scrap metal and burning flesh and gorgeous orange flames we started fucking like the last two people in Jonestown.