by Lynn Crosbie
“It was this prick’s idea,” I said, and he looked at me as though I had slapped his face.
“Demasiado,” I said, and fell, immediately, into a dope-sleep where he was, where he always is, in a fragrant snarl of white sheets and blankets, breathing spicy red hearts.
Q BOOKED US rooms in the French Quarter, and I immediately stationed myself on the black lattice balcony, with my computer, notebook, and a pitcher of lemon cola and a bouquet of fresh mint.
I wore a flimsy off-white chemise, yellow mules, and a makeshift beehive, and watched the street with opera glasses.
Jenna came by and we did a few lines, and she told me that he was in town, recording a new album.
“The Lady Grace” was the title song.
James had called me about this, but I was doing lines of smack that I scored from a junkie bitch who loaded it with Yardley’s rose-scented talcum powder, and couldn’t follow the conversation.
“The furnace guy is here,” I read off one of my index cards. “Can I call you back?”
Jenna and I kissed for a while, but it felt too good.
I needed to beat my languor off with a stick, and concentrate.
She started to lift my slip as the sun raised sweet hearts on her brown shoulders, but I stopped her.
I wanted to be pure.
I CALLED THE hotel, and he hung up on me.
He hung up on me twenty-seven times, then asked for my address.
I unlocked my door, and went back to reclining with my body buzzing like a beehive.
I was radiating like Venus.
How could he resist me?
HE COULD.
“I came here to tell you that I want a divorce.”
He was expressionless, his arms crossed.
“You don’t love me anymore?”
I felt as though he had hit me with a hammer.
“No,” he said, and his mouth twitched, almost imperceptibly.
I seized on this and sprang to my feet. “You do love me.”
“No,” he said firmly, and left.
“Please come to my show?” I called after him.
The door slammed.
I knew that he and I were fate: I didn’t even have to try.
Still, I ransacked my trunk and found the perfect dress.
A THOUSAND TIERS of cerise lace.
I fixed my hair, added the rubies and the red spike heels he had found for me early on, that I had covered with crushed red glass.
I saw he had left, of all things, a flash drive, shaped like a fat little Batman.
I stuck it into my computer and listened to the first three songs of his record.
In “Almost Heaven,” we think we are angels; in “Dolores,” I wear heart-shaped glasses and fuck him like a bow on a fiddle.
And in “We Are Circles,” a girl who is almost dead cries out to him, and they save, and destroy, each other.
Hours passed. I played the songs until I knew them by heart, until my heart could sing them back.
I walked to the Bourbon Orleans, dragging my foamy train, my eyes running black.
The scream that resided deep inside me was building.
I asked what room “Blind Lemon Jefferson” was in, and headed to the top floor.
When he answered, he started to close it again.
“He raped me!” I said. I screamed that he beat me and raped me; that he held me down and hurt me.
“You were so mad at me. But it was our baby and he died.”
He was still with shock, and I slumped down the door frame until he lifted me up and laid me on the bed, where we stared, dry-eyed, at the ceiling until the night smashed in the windows, making stars.
IT WAS STILL dark when I woke up.
He was watching me, and I saw myself in his eyes, looking clean and cared for.
“He hurt me,” I said again, and covered my face.
“Then it’s a good thing I killed him,” he said.
TWENTY
I SAID NO NO NO
The scream began deep inside me: “No, no, no.”
Then it was muffled, as always. By my fear and confusion. I did know one thing, though: he had done something so odious, it was beyond computation.
I pillaged my pockets, found something like a quarter, and smoked it off the foil.
He grabbed my dope and took a hit. We leaned against the wall, and spoke in Leonese.
I wanted to know what had happened to Page, but all he said was he knew about our violent sex and pregnancy.
“Yes, the sex was — Well, it’s not Page’s baby. I told you.”
“But I thought it was, that night at the house. I could feel it inside you. Fucking kicking me.”
I looked for remorse in his eyes and saw none.
I MANAGED TO get through the show, seeing his eyes in the stage lights, and remembering Page’s horrible life. For the encore, I sang a song I made up on the spot called “Three Pines,” and covered my tears with my hair as the others fought to keep up.
“Why are you sad?” he said when I went backstage.
I couldn’t answer.
He pulled the needle out of my hand, and we checked into a rehab in Malibu the next day.
No one knew where we were.
We dressed like civilians, and wore clear glasses and hats. Mine, a pretty white cloche; his, a three-foot-wide sombrero.
We invented stories about who we were, but our desire to get clean was true.
“My name is Barry, and I’m an addict,” he said at our first meeting.
“Hi Barry!” everyone said, and he told a long story about feeling good then losing the good feelings.
When he returned to the chair beside me, flushed and happy, I placed my hand over his.
I was shaking it rough, and I hated it.
And the scream, something unspeakable, was still lodged inside me. Why, I did not know.
HE FLEW THROUGH the steps.
I felt like I was going through the motions.
I kept asking what he had done to Page, but he wouldn’t tell me.
His head was found under a tarp in the back of a farmer’s pickup, heading south.
The farmer was inundated with reporters. He was terrified, and obviously innocent.
“I thought it was a rotten melon,” he said, which was disgusting enough, and then the pictures showed up online.
Rotten melon pretty well covered it.
Lafayette’s songs played ceaselessly, and there was a huge tribute show slated for the night of the private funeral.
“Should we go?” I asked him, and he just shook his head.
He had cut off his beautiful hair, and had grown chipmunk cheeks and a paunch. He wore tan-coloured plastic glasses, caftans, and Tevas, with visors or garish plaid tams.
“Forget about the past,” he said. “Because the past has forgotten us.”
I stared at him for a while and said, “Are you using again?”
“MY FATHER KILLED a man,” he told the rapt group.
“My father, a striking figure who dressed in white rodeo couture, discovered that this man had defiled my mother,” he said.
“My mother accepted his gesture as if it were a gift of jewellery, with her usual refinement — she said, ‘Oh, thank you, darling,’ and brushed her lips against his.
“It all happened very quickly. He went to the man’s house with a gun, and came across a big blade that he liked better.
“He sliced off his head with one blow.”
Numbers, the old bookie, asked, “Where did the head go?”
“I have no idea,” he said. “But he burned the body.
“Right down to a few fancy buttons, a gold filling, and some burnished slivers of bone.
“There is beauty everywhere,�
�� he said, holding his arms open wide.
Everyone clapped, and he grabbed me and rubbed my head with his knuckles.
“Oh man, I feel so good,” he said, and I saw it at last, I saw him popping white pokeballs, and by the time he was singing “Rapture,” I knew he had managed to find a connection inside.
The hug drug!
“Who are you?” I said, but he was full on by then, his moon face split with a smile that looked like an axe wound.
DURING THE NINTH step, he called Misty, who shouted so happily, everyone in the hall heard him and clapped.
They made a visiting-day plan, and I went and holed up in my room with my notebook.
When he knocked at the door, I told him to leave me alone.
“You’re acting like a teenager,” he said, and I said, “I am a teenager.”
“STUPID JERK,” I wrote in block letters.
WHEN WE CHECKED in, they took all of our stuff, which they doled out after it was vetted.
I had a hooded robe and pyjamas that I never took off, Turkish slippers, and Señor Loco, who was carrying a little bindle of sand-coloured, chunky heroin and tiny works I commissioned from a miniatures-maker I found on Kijiji, who specialized in “unusual doll-accessories.”
And the notebook.
We all got the same one: a thick and spiral-bound book with a photograph on the cover of a man in camouflage gear, strapping a ten-point buck to the roof of his car.
GO FOR IT, says the buck’s blood in the snow.
When I turned, appalled, to look at the guy beside me, he said, “I just want to be in my pool with a ten-gallon margarita, watching my girlfriend suck me off.
“She wears a snorkel when she works on my balls.
“Who gives a goddamn?” he said, tearing his notebook in two and leaving it under his seat when the orientation meeting ended.
I took mine with me. I was scared, obviously, of starting a new one, but I needed to.
There were things to say. Things I couldn’t talk about with anyone, especially him.
“DEAR DIARY,” I wrote in shocking pink ink.
We had all been urged to keep the notebooks open and available.
I still stashed mine in my pillowcase, though.
“I wish Page wasn’t dead,” I wrote.
I hid the diary, and went to the bathroom to rub one out.
I heard yes and no crash into each other like fighter planes as the first O tracked, locked, and burned through me.
I WROTE MORE about Page.
That he shouldn’t have died. That sometimes I even missed him.
About one time we stayed up all night playing cards and inventing a new language called Pandorave.
Then I wrote some things in this language, which only consists of punctuation and spaces.
“Page,//.”
THIS GUY IN a Chilote cap and long pirate’s beard sorted me out when I ran low.
“One eight-ball of salt,” he said, slapping it into my hand.
We went to his room and looked at his paintings of women getting their asses paddled in rooms filled with flowers.
“It’s not cheating if you need it,” I said as we lay on the floor like chalk outlines.
He agreed, and asked, “Are you with that guy who looks like a deformed Kurt Cobain?”
I didn’t answer.
“He wrote a song about you and played it in group. It was fucking great.
“‘There are no lies between us, lies that demean us,’” the bearded guy sang, and I managed to get up and out.
“DUDE, YOUR EYES are pinned,” he said.
I saw Page’s body float leisurely by us, and stifled a scream.
“I had an eye test,” I said.
“Listen to this,” he said, and pulled out his guitar.
I listened to all of “Coming Clean,” while staring blankly at his nubby robe and wiry new beard.
He was anxious to know what I thought.
“Well, I felt bad when you rhymed ‘enjoy her’ and ‘destroy her,’” I said.
He just sat there, emanating rage, his smile intact. I had forgotten he was still himself, under his gauche, mellow carapace.
“Thanks, honey,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady.
He took me down to the laundry room and, for the first time, we had awkward, sad sex that ended with him huffing and pleading, “Tell me it was okay.”
“It was so good,” I said. “Oh my God, couldn’t you tell?”
The detectives working the Marlowe case found us that night, and I was almost relieved that it was all over.
BUT IT WASN’T.
He happened to grab a black robe with a hood, which, combined with mirrored shades, made him look cool after his long tenure as Philip Seymour Hoffman’s evil twin.
The detectives loved him, and barely listened to his incredible alibi about swimming alone in a dolphin tank.
“We’re hot for the girlfriend,” one of them said.
“Some high school sweetheart. Nasty bitch.”
They gave him their cards and told him to call them anytime.
The younger one said, “You fucking rule,” and left him sitting on his bed making a dream catcher and humming to himself.
I READ THAT Sophie Birkin killed herself.
Hey, revenge feels like shit, it turns out.
“She loved Page,” her mother said in a formal statement. She told me she was his “little T. & A.”
“That means True Affection,” she said primly.
She couldn’t even plagiarize properly!
“We ask that you respect our family at this time,” Mrs. Birkin said as her husband draped his arm across her trembling shoulders.
I watched Page’s funeral online with Roman, the bearded guy.
“Are they going to bury a bowling bag?” he said, and laughed.
“Motherfucker, I knew him,” I said.
We watched the rest of the small ceremony in silence.
His bandmates played “Amazing Grace” and a Rise Against medley, then carried the tiny coffin out of the Carnation Presbyterian Church.
Roman frowned. “Don’t want to mess with the psycho who did that,” he said.
My arms lay stiffly at my sides like long knives and I just nodded.
“Dear Sophie,” I wrote.
You know I don’t love you, but I feel bad about what happened; about your pain.
You had the nicest arms: when you would fall asleep in geography class, I would stare at them, curved into an oval, and I saw Orion and Ursa Major, in your small, cinnamon-coloured freckles.
XO
“WHY WON’T YOU tell me what happened?”
He was sitting in a wing chair in the sunroom, stroking an orange rabbit.
“Don’t ever ask me about it again,” he said.
He saw how agitated I was, imagining the worst possible scenarios, and softened.
“You can ask me one thing. Right now.”
“Was he scared?” I said.
“No,” he said, and I went to him and sat gratefully at his feet.
WE WENT TO the meetings, which didn’t help.
I was tired of the same stories. Tired of the same response from the group.
I wanted someone to get up and talk about bottoming out before discovering drugs; I wanted someone to get attacked for the things they confessed to us.
He was the group’s favourite, and worked the program hard.
I was widely disliked.
“I just feel anger,” I told them all.
“You’re not really angry,” one of them said. “You’re afraid.”
“I’m afraid of your face,” I said sullenly to the multiply injected former movie star, who cried, and was comforted by him, which made me even angrier.
“I’m going to my room!” I said, and stormed off.
I listened to old Biggie Smalls songs curled on my side, and when he knocked, I didn’t answer.
In the middle of the night, I called Q and begged him to get me out.
He said that he’d try.
“There is no try,” I said.
“My best I will do,” Q said, and I drew a hateful picture of him in my notebook, trying to squeeze into a pair of denim shorts and weeping.
SO IT HAD come to this: I locked myself in my room every day, drawing mean pictures of everyone, while biting my black fingernails to the quick and ratting my hair.
I felt like Teen Wolf.
There were twenty-two kinds of therapy available at Passages. I chose to work, using anatomically correct dolls, with a niblet-sized therapist.
She had Parkay-coloured hair and smelled like drier sheets: she worked very hard at being quiet while I discharged my fury.
“He woke me up this morning by singing ‘Here Comes the Sun,’” I told her, throwing the male doll across the room.
“How did that make you feel?” she said.
“I’m still angry,” I said.
The anger, I told her, was like a twister, funnelling hard towards me, sucking dirt and poison into its mouth.
She wrote notes, rapidly.
“Steam Devil, Fire Whirl — I’m just living in its shadow for now.”
“What are you going to do?” she said, removing her glasses and crossing their stems.
“Nothing, Pee Wee. I’m 2 Legit 2 Quit,” I said, watching her already-red face boil — she was that diffident.
I WENT TO group without him, and sat beside a punk trichotillomaniac with perfect bald circlets on her scalp and, in her palm, a daisy made of coloured eyelashes and one long green hair.
“What are you going to talk about?” she said.
“I don’t know. Nothing, probably.”
“Hey, your loser-husband isn’t here for once. Talk,” she said, as she picked at the fine black hair on her forearm.
A junkie hit the podium and we all leaned back: we had heard it all.
This one, mid-forties, pencil moustache and knolls of dandruff, told us that he had spent his family’s savings in Bangkok as a sexual tourist.
“Why did you do it?” I said, disarming him into saying, “Have you seen the girls there?”