by Camille Roy
I couldn’t separate my ideas from my bad dreams. What was a good idea? A bright skeleton gleaming through burning flesh—but that was Sara. She had ideas. Once I dreamed that she came to my bedside, surrounded by dogs who were baying and leaping and quivering with excitement. I can’t remember if she said anything, or just looked into my sleeping face. Then they all ran off, flowing down the stairs in a pack, and out into the silent street. Gone. My eyelids slid up as I felt the pressure of her image.
If it weren’t for loneliness I wouldn’t have fucked anyone. I didn’t want to participate in anything. I wanted to just watch.
I mean, Camille wanted that. And the parlor was the best place for that, for her… because, in the parlor, the mouth of the world and the mouths of girls were pressed unusually close together, so the girls got to trick out something precious, something which the world didn’t want girls to have: information. This is how the world works, baby. Camille wanted her life illuminated by the information which the world told her she couldn’t have. And whoring was perfect because it was like life, but more blunt.
The world takes off its pants for every teenage whore. Is that real enough? Camille thought blunt meant no secrets, but she was wrong. There were plenty of secrets in the parlor, just different ones.
I have one photo from those days. It’s a headshot of Spark, Timmy, and myself. Looking at the those three heads, grinning mischievous young women, you’d never guess where it was taken. That’s why I saved it. I’m always covering my tracks, then going back and uncovering them, whatever that takes. I don’t know why. The backdrop in the photo is the burnt orange drapes, tightly drawn, as they always were. Their color seeped into the air, which I breathed over slow afternoons until I felt their burnt orange dusk had filled my lungs. I had long hair then, no particular color, just dark. Its strands spread messily across my face. In the shot I don’t look at the camera. My neck is bent awkwardly to the side. It’s the same pose I struck in the group photo of the field hockey team in the high school yearbook. Just being visible embarrassed me.
Spark is in the middle. The photo was cropped just where her chest began its steady and inevitable rise. Her breasts were like mountains of good health, perfectly formed, capped with perky nipples. They made her, as we used to say, “popular.” That, and her calm. Her style epitomized a Midwestern version of eternal Mom, and it worked on everyone, not just the clientele. Her nasal twang would be ringing with irritation and yet girls would still come up and nudge her, like needy puppies. Timmy was one such girl, tiny and Black, and in the photo her chin is pressing up against Spark’s shoulder. Timmy’s eyes are closed. She’s been snapped mid-giggle. Someone was making us laugh.
We laughed a lot. I remember that. We laughed the way a cat sprays. And it was the same idea: marking territory. I wish I could remember the joke. Who told it. How it fit into all the other pieces of that particular day. Was it winter or summer that afternoon? Was I really there, if I don’t remember these things?
Camille. The name feels like an accident repeating itself through this story, even as the girl attached to me through that name remains somehow indecipherable. She won’t turn to look at me. She has urgency, but not in relation to me—her future. That feels unfair. I want to tell her she’s just stuck in the past. But I sense she chooses to be indifferent, and that wounds me. Why would it be otherwise? What would attach her to me, now that her suffering has gone off, who knows where, like a flock of birds. I can’t believe this has happened: I’m too old for her. Yet my investigation disturbs something—a body, vacated. Its nerves are tender but stupid, its silky exposed organs radiate a thing like pain. Perhaps it’s just information.
Camille sprouted everywhere, like weeds. She was the product of too many accidents. It’s true that I erase and embellish and even lie in everything I write about her, but I don’t think she would mind.
Sincerely,
Camille
Dear Agatha,
I learned: to feel comfortable. To wash regularly. To come for Dusty every single time.
You have to give happiness its due, the moments when you were on top of everything, quivering. Even if that was a mistake! You won’t believe me, of course. But I thought all the elements of my life were wholly contained by the imagination of God. I had a terrific feeling of being inside that, and outside everything else. I guess that’s one way of saying that my sense of belonging was ecstatic.
Is paradise just being protected by the right idea? My stubborn happiness ignored every crisis & required only Dusty. The strangest thing I had for her, the one new quality I’d never given anyone before, was loyalty. Inexhaustible, dumb, & sexy.
Our difficulties continued. After the parlor bust, the incest secret blew up. Incredible destruction. One night, after a movie, her mother asked her about the stepfather, and Dusty told the truth. That was the beginning of the disclosures—Dusty had six siblings, and she told them one by one.
I was there when she told Clarence, her second youngest brother. We were in Spark’s yard, sitting around her flimsy card table. My silence was complete, almost breathless. The day was hot and moist. Clarence sagged when he heard. Shock revealed the terrible forward momentum of normality; losing it was like dying. I watched him become estranged from himself the moment he realized: My father is a child molester. Blood drained from his face as he peered down at his plate and teacup.
Mostly her siblings tolerated the news, swallowed it whole, without visible disturbance. The strongest reaction was the sob, Let go of the past and stop disturbing our family. Dusty said this was normal, even though the stepfather was a real predator, cornering Dusty every week when Mom was at bridge club & raping girls in the neighborhood.
One night, Dusty’s mom called and wailed into the phone.
“Oh Dusty I couldn’t say anything to him. I tried and I couldn’t. I’m going to poison him. I’ll get a book out of the library on poisoning, that’s what I’m going to do. I swear it to you, Dusty.”
Afterwards, Dusty sat there on the bed, expressionless. Then she toppled over. The sobs that barreled out of her mouth sounded like nothing I had ever heard… blasts of wind. I lay down next to her and put my hand where her rib cage throbbed. A calm entered me which felt like love, but also resembled neutrality. I sunk into it with relief. Eventually Dusty’s sobs became shudders, which slowly faded away.
Dusty sat up and grabbed the phone.
“He should give me money. I want to call him. I’m going to ask for money.”
“Blackmail him. It’s a public service announcement. Tell him if he doesn’t pay you off you’ll leaflet the school where he teaches. Leaflet the neighbors. Put up a billboard. Everybody should know he’s a child molester.”
“I can’t do that. What a fucking lot of work. And my family will hate me.”
“They hate you already.”
Dusty handed me the second receiver and then dialed. She wanted a witness I guess, or just support. I felt a guilty interest. I was going to listen to the perp talk. I’d be secretly observing him in his monster life.
“Hi Dad.”
He grunted. I pictured an overweight white dude in a recliner, probably in boxer shorts, relaxing out on the screened-in porch. I’d never met him but I’d seen a photo in which his sour face floated above a roomful of lively kids. His tiny eyes sucked up all the light. He didn’t like kids but he sabotaged Dusty’s mom’s birth control, so she’d had five with him, plus there were two from her first marriage: Dusty and her brother Seth. Dusty he had molested and Seth was the punching bag. From Dusty’s brief and reluctant descriptions, I imagined the stepfather as sullenness in a wad, until he crashed down and silenced everyone: Shut up or I’ll give you something to cry about.
“Dusty? What do you want?”
“I want money.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m going to need lots of therapy after what you did to me.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes you do. You molested me, what was it—hundreds of times? When mom went to bridge club. When she went to bingo. Every chance you got.”
“That was years ago. I’ve moved on. You should move on.”
His voice was nasal. The only emotion it conveyed was resentment. What kind of person was this, drenched with sullenness—drip, drip. He didn’t deny anything. Was it not even important enough to lie about?
“Money.”
“Anything I give you comes right out of your mother’s pocketbook. You want to deprive your mother of her basics, just because you haven’t been able to let go of your miserable childhood? I’m not giving you a cent.”
Your miserable childhood. Dusty was silent. Her face had emptied out. Then she took a deep breath.
“I’ve told everyone.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve told Mom and all the kids exactly what you did to me and the girl down the street too.”
He was silent. When Dusty was a kid he’d threatened more than once to kill her mother if she told anyone.
“You’re sick and now everybody knows it,” Dusty said.
Then she hung up.
“Well you did it,” I said. “You told him.”
“Yeah. The asshole won’t kill anybody. He’s too old. I’m out of the house. And everybody knows.”
“Right.”
My love was so selfish and perfect that I could handle anything. Dusty’s grief streamed into it. She became strange in her eating habits, restricting herself to boiled spinach and boiled eggs and seeds. She got thinner. I remained serene.
There were books on love in the parlor which had been left by a retired lawyer named Albert. He’d leave them behind, like droppings. It was Albert’s higher calling, spreading the message of his love guru, Leo Buscaglia.
Once I flicked through the pages.
Real love always creates, it never destroys.
…
Love is open arms. If you close your arms about love you will find that you are left holding only yourself.
…
Love is a warm and wonderful encounter…with Leo Buscaglia.
What I had was so good I felt cruel. A little room opened in my brain & started showing movies, which I could almost ignore or turn off, but not quite. Mostly the images were of a knife stabbing a soft white belly sprinkled with hair. No face, no sound. I wanted to do it.
I told Dusty what was going through my head.
“Life goes on, even for psychos. My problem is not your problem,” Dusty said.
“But if anyone could kill him, I could. I’m the one.”
“Listen,” said Dusty, “I have a sense of justice. So shut up.”
It was true. Dusty preferred justice like some people prefer the color yellow. It seemed arbitrary but there it was.
I walked around just doing my business and sometimes the movies played and sometimes they didn’t. It made me feel like a somewhat abstract personality. Still, my love thickened its root. It stunned me. I was so happy. Love, love, love.
Sincerely,
Camille
Dear Agatha,
Mostly I remember the people. Brandy for instance. Brandy was the one who led everyone right into trouble, when it was festive, like discovering money. She had a parched thinness that was underneath gender, deeper than that split, eviscerated & sexy. She was Peter Fonda incarnated as an elongated girl.
Her band used to play on Friday nights. I picture her as I write this: Brandy on the bass guitar in a dark corner of the stage wearing a pair of mirrored aviator shades that she swore were vintage sixties.
Karen was the one who taught me about information. That it was there; all I had to do was ask. I was shocked, and weirdly honored, and giddy at that brink. She nailed capitalism; union organizing; the correct political line on sex work. She told me who was blowing who and for what. She gave me a copy of Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Karen was a fiend for organizing, really a genius. She didn’t get caught up in the parlor bust because she was at a meeting to organize a transit workers union. But she planned the whole defense.
In her schoolgirl white blouses and wool skirts, Karen didn’t look anything like what she was: prostitute, communist, queer. She had that helpless genius incongruity with her own body. Towards the end of her life she began wearing knee-high boots with her skirts. On Karen, stacked heels and stubby toes looked like an odd racy flowering of femininity, a bit of a shock. It seemed she was edging towards something new. But she always drove herself with such urgency and then one day there was an accident on an icy road.
The one political cause Karen never mentioned was animal rights. It may have been the most important. I found out about this when I went to her farm, for some organizing meeting. I’m not sure why I went. I was only a body at various events, I never organized a thing. But I piled into the pickup with Dusty and Brandy.
On the way, Brandy told me that Karen’s dad had a slaughterhouse. He forced his kids to work in it.
“Blood flowing in the gutters. Body parts swinging from the rafters. So now she’s got fifteen rescue cats and six rescue dogs. A 500 pound rescue pig, a pony, a cow. She feeds their tumors,” Brandy said, with relish.
Dusty gazed soberly ahead. This whole campaign was mostly to get her off and today she was serious about that. I felt her thigh solid & warm against mine.
As soon as we walked in the kitchen, Karen handed Dusty a paper. At the top scrawled and underlined was the heading Three Pronged Resistance. And there were three columns drawn, with subheadings: Provocations, Events, Celebrities.
Then she noticed me. I thought her eyes scrambled. I was such a nobody I guess. Politically I mean. I hadn’t done anything, I didn’t register.
“I have a pony. Her name is Sparkle. Not that it matters, Sparkle doesn’t come to Sparkle, if you know what I mean. You can ride her if you want.”
I went out to the barn to meet my new pony friend. I felt fine-tuned and fatalistic and full of deadly curiosity, but no one else seemed to notice this. Bitterness of youth! Stuck with nature for conversation!
But this is more true: so happy to be there. After a month of awkwardness, Dusty had become a sturdy sexual partner, so believable that I sunk deeper into my love-state, pliant and yet grounded: muddy. Sweaty and unclean, or not, I woke up feeling nude. Smooth.
It was brilliant outside. The morning rain clouds had scattered and sun shone down upon the clover underfoot. The breeze was soft as lotion, almost sickening. I kicked at the mud rivulets which scored the road down to the barn. My boots, lifting up, slurped.
The barn door was a pocket door, the kind that disappears into the wall. I pushed and the door slid smoothly away, releasing manure and animal sweat. There was rustling inside. When I got used to the darkness, I walked around. The pig was in a stall that bore a nametag: Tony. He was nearly as big as a bull. Tony’s eyes were tiny but he regarded me with a skeptical intelligence. He stood with a kind of nobility, a whole pig country, midway between a pile of clean straw and a puddle of manure. The cat mewing at my feet had no eyes at all.
The pony was drowsing in her stall, ears askew and eyes half closed.
“You’re coming with me,” I told her.
I didn’t notice the tumor until I’d gotten her tied up in the hall. A dark knotted growth, bigger than a grapefruit, distended from her stomach. Was this alarming thing going to flop around? I squatted to stare at it. Black mane-like hairs sprouted from among the wrinkled folds. It appeared to be firmly attached. The pony ignored me, dozing, her tail lazily slapping a fly now and then.
If it jiggled during the ride I couldn’t feel it. Bareback we went through the meadows which were lush and deep. Grasses stroked the bottom of my boots. There were clouds in big white piles and biting flies fell from the sky. Sparkle and I went off down a tractor trail that eventually led through a glade of cottonwoods to the Pontiac River. There the diseased pony drank the muddy water while I warbled an old Bea
tles song: Love is all there is, love is all there is, or something.
After the ice storm the following January, when Karen’s Toyota landed upside down in a glade of leafless birch, breaking her neck, the hardest part of wrapping things up was Tony. The other creatures were placed, including Sparkle, who got to be a companion pony. All Sparkle had to do to earn her keep was to plod around and eat grass in the pasture of a valuable and nervous thoroughbred. Poor, smart Tony. He went to the slaughterhouse. Who can take on a 500 pound pig?
Agatha. I picture you laying this letter flat upon the plank table in your screened-in porch. It’s destined for the pile at the back of a desk drawer. But you will read it thoughtfully, as you sip tea from a steaming little cup. To your right is a stone teapot—flecked black and white granite from the quarry near Northgate. What awed quarryman was moved to make that for you? You flavor your smoky tea with dried elk berries and garden mint, which you particularly savor during a fast. Don’t tell me I’m wrong. Our tastes differ; I’ve taken that into account. You rest on the verdict of your experiences and have chosen restraint. Whereas I walk around on mine like a fly on the screen, dazed by the heat.
You see, Agatha, our livelihoods were more lively than substantial. Being a criminal is hard work (so I’ve been told).
I can love that time only in retrospect. I have a photograph of Camille in which she leans against a brick wall, her eyes closed. She’s wearing a knit cap in summer. I know she’s got a strange image of herself—flooded with disrespect. But it barely matters, because she’s got the coating of youth, that impervious rubber blanket. Do you think she’s as beautiful as you were? I would say—almost. True, she’s a little thin, but that gives her a bony charm, oddly spacious, as though she’s been gently pulled apart. That’s something you might understand.