Kamikaze Lust Page 4

  He tore open a condom package, rolled over his dick with latex smelling like the gloves that earlier had covered Dr. Janis’ fingers, and I climbed on top of him, rocking him hard and fast enough that I thought I might have felt something myself, if I had anything left of myself to feel. “Slow down,” he said and I went faster, almost amused that I could have this penis diving mechanically in and out of my body and not feel a goddamn thing. My vagina was on Novocain, making me tense, hyperaware of the action, yet unable to register any sensation. But I had to feel something, so I swung violently up and down ignoring Ethan when he said, “It’s too much, I’m going to come,” and instead kept up my pace as we went back and forth, him huffing, “I’m going to come,” and me heaving, “Come,” until he said he didn’t want to come, not yet, because it had been so long, and I said not as long as it was for me, and we were suddenly having a conversation in the middle of our thrusts, which made me angry, and wishing I had weight enough to crush him, I slammed my body down on top of him, and he screamed, “Fran’s pregnant!” The room went quiet. I looked down at his red face…his black hair…his white teeth…black and white and red all over, like a cow in a blender…fucking Cow Week! I laughed maniacally, but only for a breath or two, until I felt a sharp pain pound up into me, and I didn’t know whether to scream or be thankful that I finally felt something when another jolt came up through my chest, and then another and another until Ethan screamed “Oh god fuck!” and I wanted to smack the surly look from his face, but instead fell forward on top of him, slid my head against the thin, wet hairs on his chest, and listened to the beat of his heart retreat before raising my head and staring down at the little man-boy soon to be somebody’s father. I wanted to puke.

  I rolled over on my back and covered my eyes with my elbow. “You can go now,” I said.

  “Come on, don’t do this.”

  “No, don’t talk. Just go.”

  I kept my eyes covered, listening to the sounds of Ethan dressing, the swish of his zipper, the clink of his belt buckle, every sound amplified as if with his clothing he could smite the heavy silence that hung between us. Then I had to look up and catch his sullen stare as he put on his shoes.

  Freddy strolled up and lay languorously at his feet with her arms and legs outstretched. She was such a little tease, reminded me of Shade actually. Ethan couldn’t resist and went to pet her. She clamped down on his finger.

  “Ow!” He lifted his hand as if he might hit her.

  “Touch her and I’ll kill you.”

  He shook his head. “You know, you haven’t changed at all. You just sit there all cold like a—I don’t know, like a statue. Everything’s so tied up in your convoluted perceptions of power.”

  “My convoluted what! You mention your pregnant wife when you’re about to…you know, whatever.” I tried running my fingers through my hair, but was halted by clumps of dry mousse. I squeezed my fists until my scalp burned.

  “Come, the word is come. You still can’t say it.”

  “Would you just go home! We’ll call it a mistake and walk away.”

  “You did that already, know what I’m saying? There’s no airplane this time.”

  “No, just wives and babies, what was I thinking?” I sat defiantly. Counted backwards from ten, waiting for him to be gone, but he stayed there staring at me. I folded my arms over my knees, the red sheet tenting in between them, then leaned forward, taking a deep, long breath. “Jesus, Ethan, what are we doing?”

  He shook his head back and forth, his eyes softening into contrition, his palms and mouth agape. “I don’t know,” he said finally, and we mirrored each other with monkey-see-monkey-do gestures until the whole thing seemed so damn absurd.

  He walked to the front door. I followed. He turned and looked at me with his silk blazer draped over his shoulders. If I could have named the designer his latest collection probably filled the pages of Jammin’. Ethan was never much for integrity, nor journalism. The glorified gonzo life suited him well.

  “So, I guess I’ll see you,” he said.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  He leaned over and kissed the top of my head. I looked up, smiling slightly, wishing he would just leave, because with every lingering second I grew colder, petrified like stone, or what did he call me? A statue.

  After he left I remained numb. Riding an insomniac’s rage, I scrutinized the sheets for any sign of him—a smell, a stain, a leftover pubic hair—something to prove he was actually here and qualify the emptiness I felt, just as I used to search my bed for quarters left by the tooth fairy, a small compensation for the gaping hole between my teeth. Once, sleeping with my head above a tooth, I felt Neil’s hands underneath my pillow. I screamed. Dad came in and they fought violently, punching and grabbing at each other like amateur boxers. They were both red in the face when Dad, finally, using all of his weight, took down his pubescent son.

  “You steal quarters from your sister!” Dad screamed.

  “Fuck off,” Neil said, and they eyed each other so viciously I wanted to bury my head in my pillow.

  Dad let go of Neil’s arms and stood up.

  “Drunk loser ass,” Neil mumbled, and, despite Dad’s fingerprints all over his neck, he towered out of the room as if he’d been victorious. Dad slammed the door behind him and tucked me back into bed. Still wearing his Milky Way brown leather jacket and smelling of cigarettes and onions, he sat down next to me with his tan boots hanging over the edge of my bed. Just to make sure Neil couldn’t take anything else. He stayed sentry until the sun came up. I know, because I woke to him silently slipping away.

  I bounded up when the phone rang, knowing immediately who it was. “Were you sleeping?” Aunt Lorraine said as I lifted the receiver.

  “It’s two-thirty in the morning.”

  “You don’t know what’s going on here,” she said. “Rowdy won’t wash dishes or shower, the government’s talking to him through the water or something, I don’t know. Everyone’s crazy—really! I can’t trust them anymore. Your mother said she’d take the phone away.”

  “Okay, calm down. Nobody’s taking your phone away. I’ll talk to Mom.”

  “Her, I don’t care. She’s worse than those doctors, treating me like I’m some kind of baby, but I know exactly what’s going on.”

  I got out of bed and walked over to the kitchenette. “What do you want?” I asked, turning on the floor lamp next to the counter. My eyes adjusted to the muddy light.

  “You know what I want, your—”

  “No you don’t.”

  “I do!” Her voice stopped me cold it was so childlike.

  “Look, he probably won’t even take my calls. I’m no use to him anymore.” I heard my tone growing harsh, felt the back of my neck get all hot and sweaty. I was still suffering from the remnants of a lousy lay. And I didn’t have a job. And now Aunt Lorraine was deserting me.

  Worse, I was sick of playing death’s little emissary in this family. It began the day Dad dropped dead of a heart attack, and Mom, who’d been seeing shrinks for as long as I can remember, finally graduated to the psycho clinic. She showed up at the funeral two days later looking like Gloria Swanson in big sunglasses, flanked by two extraordinarily beautiful nurses. Sobbing through the rabbi’s soliloquy, she fell to the ground before the service was over. We all ran to her, but the nurses stopped us, one handling crowd control, the other reaching into her pocket for smelling salt. Mom rose dramatically, smiling beyond those of us who’d gathered around her as if the footlights rendered us invisible. The nurses led her out and that was the end of Dad’s funeral.

  Aunt Lorraine was more Bette Davis in All About Eve. She believed drama was better left to the stage or at least confined behind locked doors. Then why the urge to see Kaminsky? He was all image, nothing but a spin-doctored psychopomp.

  “Honey, I just want to talk to him,” she pleaded with me. I stood silently at the kitchen counter, naked underneath my red sheet.

  “I heard he’s from Poland,�
�� she said. “Both of his parents were killed in Auschwitz. We’re practically related.”

  “Then why don’t you call him?” I lifted my left pinkie to my teeth and gnawed.

  “How can you say that? You have no idea how I feel, you barely know what you feel. You’re such a journalist sometimes.”

  “Not anymore. I’m nothing now.”

  “Stop feeling sorry for yourself. I’m dying and don’t you try and tell me anything different, because I’m sick of taking care of everyone else’s troubles. I need you, you understand?”

  I took a deep breath, picked at my chapped lips with my fingernails. I couldn’t stay mad at her for getting sick, for seeking out even the most bizarre anesthesia. “All right, I’ll call him,” I said finally. “But just to talk.”

  “That-a-girl,” she said.

  When we hung up I was in the bathroom. I lifted my red toga and peed, hoping the warm liquid might thaw out my vagina, yet I felt nothing but a vain hole between my legs. I might as well be Barbie.

  Standing up, I caught a quick glance in the mirror. My eyes burned into my face, the eyes of death’s messenger, unemployed adulterer and feckless father-fucker. I hated myself, but looked striking. I could be beautiful even, my eyes blacker than black and feral, my face spirited with anger. For the first time in a while I wanted to masturbate.

  The next day it rained.

  Outside, pellets bounced from the pavement; inside, windows fogged against the dreary, wet day. Shade and I sat across from each other at our half-way point, an art deco café on Ninth Avenue in the upper Forties called The Movie House.

  I curled my fingers around my big gulp latté, bending my head down so the steam came wafting up my nose. Good for the allergies.

  “Rain, schmain,” Shade said. She sipped her orange mocha frappé through a straw.

  “It’s funny, I can’t remember rain in Miami.”

  “What are you talking about? It was always raining. Remember the hurricane? We had to evacuate your grandmother.”

  “Sure, hurricanes, but regular rain?”

  She leaned her arm on the empty chair next to her and smiled. “How about after the Redford preview when we got stuck on Joey’s boat?”

  “Oh my god. We had to sit in that cabin watching his one music video over and over and over.”

  “Hey, he had a vision,” she pursed her lips.

  “Please…and Sam kept calling him Johnny.”

  We smiled in recognition. Shade’s boyfriends, sporadic though they were, tended to be souped-up con men—usually in advertising or the music business—who made Sam feel inferior for wanting to do something as unglamorous as perform pelvic exams and diagnose yeast infections. I had to admit I got off on Sam’s inferiority complex. With him, I actually experienced myself as having the cool life, just as with Shade I felt as if my life were not cool enough.

  Shade used to namedrop the crazy people she knew, the wild places she frequented, and she’d cloaked an air of mysteriousness around the women she dated. So adept she’d been at velvet roping the disparate parts of her life. Now, she was out and proud. Maybe it was a New York thing, but in the year I’d been back I’d already met three different girlfriends, not including Tina Macadam. Apparently, they’d had what Shade said was an uneventful date last night, which I knew meant that Shade didn’t have sex, as opposed to my own nonevent.

  I brought my latté to my lips and inhaled a dollop of foam. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  My heart sped up involuntarily. I unzipped my sweater, but kept it hanging from my shoulders. “Why didn’t you? Last night?”

  “With Tina?”

  “Is there someone else?” I asked, terrified she might say yes. My reaction shocked me, that it suddenly mattered so much.

  “No, no,” she nodded. “There’s no one else.”

  I was relieved and couldn’t help smiling. She smiled back. Before I knew it, we were deep gazing, and I was taken back to those times in Miami when she told me about her sex life, and I remembered being jealous that she had a sex life, while Sam and I were engaged in a tiresome psychological battle over my orgasms. It occurred to me now that my jealousy might have been misplaced.

  Her brow furrowed as if she were thinking big. “You know how they say be careful what you want because you might get it?” I nodded blindly, unable to stop staring at her. “Well, let’s just say I’m trying to be careful.”

  “She wouldn’t sleep with you, huh?”

  “You little bitch,” she smiled. “I’ll have you know it was the other way around, actually. I find I’m getting more prudish with age.” She leaned her elbows on the table, crossed her arms over her breasts with a slight tilting forward of the shoulders. Her eyes telegraphed a catch-me-if-you-can quality. I could see how she attracted both men and women. But screw the rest of them. She was getting to me.

  I felt as if I were entering the shallow end of a swimming pool, adjusting step by step to the cold water. The thing is, I never learned how to swim. You don’t in Brooklyn.

  Shade rolled her lipstick-stained straw in between her fingers amid the simmering hum of the café. I had to sit on my hands to keep them from shaking.

  “And you?” she said. “What ever possessed you to go to bed with Ethan again?”

  I wanted to say, You, you idiot. You, because I called you first and you weren’t there; you, because I was jealous of you and Tina; you, because I was feeling rejected and needed comfort. But I didn’t get anything close to it. Oh, what I would have given to utter half of what I was thinking, if only I understood it myself. Instead, I remained impenetrable: a frizzy-haired wall.

  “It was just one of those things,” I said.

  “One of those things. Yeah, right.” She pursed her lips.

  “I’m serious.”

  “You don’t have sex for months and end up with Ethan, he’s a total dog. There’s something else, what aren’t you telling me?” She stared at me with her spicy mustard eyes, so I stared back, tongue-tied. Rain slapped and streamed next to us, giving cinematic pause as we lapsed into stone.

  Shade shifted in her seat without taking her eyes away from me. “Come on, what is it?” she said.

  “He said he might have work, all right?” My pulse jolted at the iciness of my tone. Actually, Ethan had left a message earlier telling me he had a job for me, but I felt too creepy to talk to him this morning.

  “All right, no need to get all huffy,” Shade said. Then she pushed her chair back and stood up as if she were leaving. I felt abandoned.

  “You’re mad?”

  She dropped her palms on the table and leaned in close. The musky scent of her skin blended with the freshly ground coffee. It made my ears tingle. “Look, I’m happy you might have work, did you think I wouldn’t be?”

  Feeling like a big liar, I couldn’t answer. I turned my head away as she continued to speak.

  “It’s not the work, it’s that you don’t trust me, and, I don’t know, the way you act sometimes…what’s going on?”

  “Nothing’s going on,” I said, averting my eyes. My lower lip shook, and I was afraid if I said anything I might start crying. Now, I rarely cry and when I do it’s not in front of anyone. That would be manipulative.

  I glanced around to see if anyone was staring at us, but the people in this casually hip Saturday afternoon crowd were too wrapped up in themselves to notice the force field between Shade and me. Turning my eyes back to Shade, I felt the throbbing in my gums where Dr. Janis had drilled and filled me almost twenty-four hours earlier. The delayed reaction made me feel quizzical, whimsical. I was gushing.

  Catching me, Shade’s lips softened into a crescent. “Dammit, Slivowitz, what am I going to do with you?”

  “I don’t know, take me to the movies or something.”

  “No,” she said. “You’re the one who got laid last night, you can take me to the movies.”

  She walked off to the bathroom and left me sitting at the tabl
e with my cheeks and ear lobes radiating as if I’d been drinking red wine all morning. My responses to her were becoming so physical, the opposite of last night with Ethan.

  I wondered if Shade believed I’d slept with him for work. I could have; I’d slept with men for a lot more. And for less. Sitting here in this noisy café, with the rain coming down and Shade only a few feet away, my reluctance to call Ethan now seemed foolish, counterproductive. A job was a job.

  I picked up Shade’s cell and called. He answered on the first ring. “Are we okay?” he asked, sounding somewhat brusque.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay,” he said. Then came a few awkward seconds.

  “So what’s up?” I said.

  “Up? What do you mean, up?”

  “You said you had work?”

  “Oh yeah. Ever hear of Alexis Calyx?”