by Lynn Crosbie
“If you want me to move back in, just say the word,” I said.
She fell asleep and had a nightmare. I woke her and she said, “You were there! How could you let this happen?”
“Where was I?” I said, and she shook her head and wouldn’t say.
I sprayed on a bit of her perfume. “Okay, I was there,” I said.
I had no idea what she was talking about.
I kissed her at the door, and when I was halfway down the path she called to me.
I turned around.
“The word,” she said.
“Done,” I said, as relief poured through me like cold, clear water, revealing more and more of my happy heart.
TWENTY-THREE
BECAUSE OUR LOVE IS LIKE THE WIND, AND WILD
When he left, I wrote, after filing away the bloated rehab book.
I sat at the kitchen table with a new book he, pointedly, gave me: a pretty, candy-striped one with a pink sash.
I wrote about the night he came home, of him lying in our bed as tiny agents of our love supreme bound him there, then crawled all over him, filling him with my smell; carving, onto his palms, the way I felt lacing his tongue with my love and tears.
“He will never touch another woman,” I said to the wobbly full moon that filled his sleeping head with the memory of me, among other annealing memories, standing in its full light, in a sheer, white, shedding chemise.
I DECIDED TO work around my bad reputation by writing music, alone or with Jenna, and seeing no one.
We paid off our group, and split the money that was still coming in. I went online every day to look for Speck, and nothing else.
Silence, exile, cunning — this was the way back.
WHEN HE FINISHED collecting his things from various apartments, he texted me: “DONE.”
Some TMZ videographer caught him in our driveway.
“Hey, Celine, why do you two keep fighting?”
He kept his head down, then looked up and said, “Because the make-up sex is so good,” and smiled as the crew catcalled and thanked him.
I started pulling off my clothes on the way to the door, leaving crystalline footprints on the floor: all of the dogs on the street were barking; the sky was scribbling spells.
We stood by the closed door, transfixed.
In the morning, we were still curled up on his clothes, and two tubby cups of coffee walked up and woke us with their bold flavour and full-bodied taste.
THESE WERE THE days we had conjured so long ago: these were the holy days of love and joy. The perfume that clung to our sheets and pillowcases, to his pillow, into which I had sewn an abracadabra amulet, created tiny atmospheres filled with lush planets and crowned by vegetable stars.
Our music crashed together and clung: while Bleach was now light years beyond us, Jenna’s and my songs got some important attention, and when we were not touring and promoting, he and I performed as Mike and Mindy, playing hard-core gospel songs at tiny clubs, in wigs and leisure suits.
Quickly, Mike and Mindy bootlegs were traded and sold surreptitiously to collectors and true fans who thought our voices, nervous and soaring with love, were something greater than the sum of their parts.
“Crazy” Joe came to see us play at the Know in Portland, in a long white limousine filled with showgirls.
Joe asked me to call him Joey, and after the show I sat in his lap among the sparkly girls in their long, spangled feathers and told him I loved him.
I was tipsy, but I did, I just did.
“Love you too, kid,” he said, and that, again, if I ever needed anything, to call.
“You two sounded good,” he said, pinching both our cheeks, and leaving with the two guys in suits who never spoke and the cheeping girls.
“That guy is cool,” he said as we shared a small dish of Bananas Foster.
“Oh, it’s him you like?” I said, teasing him.
There were sequins and feather fluff all over him, big pops of lipstick.
Glitter on his lap: I raised an eyebrow at and let go, and anyways, he brushed it off. I looked in his eyes and the gaudy specks of light were falling only for me.
HE TOOK ME to the cottage, and he and Misty and I sat and drank and talked until we were easier with each other. We were otherwise clean.
But I didn’t like Misty. I envied their closeness, and thought he looked like a rat. He called this “sibling rivalry.”
We tried, at any rate, for his sake. I mended Misty’s jeans with big patches of cowboys, lariats, and little dogies, and he took lots of pictures of us. In my favourite, we are spinning like seed pods as the sun arranges itself in the sky like a blanket, red with an orange zigzag.
One night, after Misty was taking his nightly walk, or “constitutional,” he and I lay in bed and cut our hands, then pressed them together.
We promised that the past would stay where it was and that there was no future, just this, just these kisses, slow and interrogative, then the quickening ones.
HE AND I didn’t talk about my big belly.
We didn’t think of names or buy baby stuff: when Misty appeared with a swing set he had obviously jacked from a playground, we covered it with a tarp.
It was that time at rehab: the only bad sex we’d ever had.
It couldn’t come true.
Q CALLED TO say that Joy’s song, “Are You Sorry I Made It?”, had, incredibly, broken into the charts.
Q wanted us to make it: he genuinely believed that I was a born star. He got together with his management and, after they had fielded all the requests and chosen the fewest and very best, they made arrangements to send a single photographer and writer, for a Vanity Fair cover and a feature story called “Love, Alternative Style.”
We insisted that 100% Corporate-Free, a local zine, be invited as well.
They wanted to style us as historical figures, embattled lovers like Antony and Cleopatra, Jason and Medea, Lee Majors and Farrah Fawcett.
He refused, categorically.
I pleaded with him: I need this, and I had seen the Farrah wig. It was stunning.
He saw the raw need in my eyes and capitulated partway: “Let them dress you however you want, and leave me out of it.”
So, in the cover shot, he, as Mark Antony, lies at my feet as I apply an asp to my jugular vein.
I am wearing a mulberry shantung gown, slit to my crotch, and my hair is beaded with porcelain skulls.
He, who made the stylist cry, is wearing no makeup, jeans, and a ripped Anne Murray T-shirt. He kept it on for every picture, even after spilling soy sauce all over himself at lunch when he chomped too hard on the little plastic rectangle.
Which set me off, and my cat’s eyes had to be redrawn by a pissed-off girl with a holster of MAC brushes.
“All shall be well said the ocean,” is written on his bare feet.
As puffy as the cover story is — “He says that his favourite movie is — ‘The Honeymoon Killers,’ Evelyn interjects, and they smile. ‘We finish each other’s sentences,’ they say, smiling at each other and very clearly quite smitten” — the zine piece wins.
The reporter calls us a “reason to believe in love and music,” and included a number of charcoal sketches he made of us looking lustfully at each other with huge smudged eyes and mouths.
“Hey, look,” he said, and I was mortified. Marley, the zine kid, had drawn my rack as two pontoons with hard, heart-shaped nipples.
“Well, look at yourself,” I said, and he groaned. His package looked like a huge stump.
Oddly enough, both of these stories burned like wildfire through the Net, and on this one time only, we seemed to have gotten it right.
“Dear America’s favourite crazy-cool couple,” Marley wrote in his thank-you letter that included a Tupperware container of homemade cookies that we ate until din
osaurs wandered past the house.
“This is, like, pure hash,” he said, which was so funny I couldn’t breathe, and then I couldn’t breathe. I panicked and he fixed me by giving me mouth-to-mouth and then, well—
You know.
TWO DAYS AFTER what we called the “terrifying hippie incident,” his dealer, a girl with Jean Seberg hair, long feather earrings, and a black coat with a train, pulled up to the cottage in a taxi.
She was just unfolding one long leg to the gravel when I fired a warning shot over her head.
“Come here again and I’ll blow your brains out.
“Wait, I’m not that good of a shot. I’ll just shoot your face,” I said, then aimed.
She blinked and her long lashes opened and closed: I thought of a lady at the opera in black gloves, clapping.
“L’amour est un oiseau rebelle que nul ne peut apprivoiser,” he said.
He had just come outside.
There was peacock green and blue everywhere.
“Did you fuck her?” I said.
“Don’t ask,” he said, holding up the slice in his hand about the past.
WE GOT HEALTHY.
“Your face, the rosy-fingered dawn,” he said.
“Your bluebird eyes, ruffling their fine feathers,” I said, and Misty started taking longer walks.
He always came back, though, with pine cones or acorns, and one time an old Halloween costume.
It was a girl devil. I wore it when I was cold, or just tearing through the woods.
TWENTY-FOUR
OPEN MY HEART RIGHT AT THE SCARS
He still heard from the girls, so many of them wrote or called, texted, sent him boxes filled with plush anime toys and baby guitars and antique books of poetry.
One sent a picture of her with him in bed: he is sleeping, and bare-chested; she is pouting and spilling out of a lacy pink bra.
She had framed it, and taped a plane ticket to the back.
He watched me burn the ticket in the sink, heaving with anger as crackling florets of red blew up and away.
He held me. “I don’t even remember her,” he said, but he was hard against my thigh.
This kept happening. I got huge amethyst kisses, pearl necklaces.
And I never complained about the gifts, about watching him handling bags of soiled panties, stacks of dirty pictures, occasionally featuring him, and, once, a small, priceless Renoir.
The nude bathing girl I hung in our living room, then attacked it with a claw hammer until the canvas lay in florid shreds.
Because I loved him so much, it was like a Shirelles song, but violent, more violent.
TWENTY-FIVE
EVERYTHING WENT BLACK WHEN MY HEAD HIT THE FLOOR
I kept the Charles R. Cross biography under our bed, in a locked chest: the key was right underneath. He never looked.
Some days, his story ended with us divorcing and him marrying a Chanel model, “and he and Solange slept in the golden birdcage every night.”
Most of the time, though, his sweet head was filled with bullet fragments; his finger opened like a flower where it blew apart.
And the appendix included a desolate letter to his band, and a secret one for me.
Once, a reversal of fortune had him working as my butler, while I toured and recorded.
On the best days, the pages were blank after he was a kid, learning guitar and blaming things on his imaginary friend. I would draw rainbows and the infant Christ crawling in a pasture filled with candy grass and enormous, smiling flowers.
I would fill the book, only to find it, on the next visit, recounting the story of him in a favela in Rio, listening to funk carioca as he cooked a fatal dose and loaded his gun.
One day, I opened the book and three pine trees popped up, their limbs quivering beneath a black storm cloud.
I closed it quickly, and as I left the room, the tiniest of crows cawed of our misfortune. Things are starting to fall apart, they said.
WE STILL HAD long, luxurious days spent in bed — he massaged me with cocoa butter, and tipped me like a cow, is how I described it, when he ravished me, his hand mashed between my thighs, his teeth in my neck.
Sometimes we wouldn’t leave the bed at all. Misty would bring in the food we ordered, mostly pizza, cartons of ginger ale and cigarettes, and the occasional, very occasional, bag of dope.
And then he started taking walks.
At first, he would come back from his night walks with wildflowers, papery wasp’s nests, and tiny animal bones, and hurry to me, anxious to show me what he had found.
The walks got longer. Misty was dispatched to go get him.
When he came home, he wouldn’t take off his sunglasses. He slumped beside me, conducting the world’s smallest orchestra.
“Did you find anything?” I asked, and he shook his head. “Besides drugs,” I said.
“I’m not high,” he said indignantly.
But it sounded like this: “Mni.”
Misty looked sad most of the time, and I felt like I was sinking, but I hung on to the sweet days on our ripe, tousled bed; to the half dreams and deep, burrowing squeezes.
As always and forever, to his magnetic beauty: how refined it had become, burned of its impurities, and clean enough to kill me.
“Stop staring,” he said one night, flipping over, face down.
When he and I were in New York, we walked by the water and a kid wearing a ball cap and fanny pack, seeing the Brooklyn Bridge, said to his friends, “There it is — start taking mental pictures now!”
The collection is enormous: a series that begins with cells and carbon and blood; that has only emerged through the epidermis now, to luxuriate on the white plains, swallowing lotus blossoms.
EVEN THOUGH WE were too spooked to talk about Damian, or the “Prince of Darkness,” or “Bub,” names among many he gave him, we were cautiously excited.
He sang a lot to him about the things they would do together: “We’ll see a llama farm and have a bowl of five-alarm chili/We’ll see catfish jump and pistons pump, and take a trip to Philly.”
I smoked very rarely — luckily, the smell of cigarettes made me very sick — stayed off drugs barring the odd slip, and drank red wine with dinner. One measly glass that tasted like the blood of beautiful maidens.
He smoked outside, didn’t like drinking anyways, and stayed clean.
Or tried, at least.
I tossed the balled-up foil, the bright paper bindles that looked like tiny clutches, the bent cutlery and match packs that more often than not contained a girl’s name and number.
I threw it all out and never mentioned it.
“Mstired,” he would say, which meant that he was exhausted, and I would lie down beside him, wherever he was, and put his hands on me so he could feel, and remember, the deep-sea diver below.
HE MADE LITTLE trips to play with Bleach, signed off on the Unplugged recording, and played unscheduled shows in cruddy old bars that, however trashed the places got, made a fortune for the grateful owners.
This turned into their Mega-Micro Tour, a serpentine bus trip through the Midwest that wound down in the Leisure Lounge in Wichita, where they did an acoustic set, taking requests like Chromeo’s “Sexy Socialite” and Katy Perry’s “Roar.”
Someone filmed and uploaded this cover, and after some hurried negotiations with Perry, it made its way to iTunes and sold and sold — fuzz, braying bar talk, improvised lyrics, and all.
“You guys could just sing the fucking alphabet at this point,” I told him during one of our late night calls.
“You’re not wrong,” he said.
Jenna had given up on me: “Call me when your kid is in high school.”
I didn’t care. I wanted to write my own music and words. I could wind up half dead in a rooming house; I could marry
a sadist, or lose my limbs in an industrial accident.
But I would still write.
That’s when I had the revelation that caused me to print “WRITER” under Employment on every form I would ever fill out.
I wrote every day, at every chance I got. One day I might have to become a solo act. On a stool and everything.
Whatever I was going to be, I wrote enough songs to last for years, and a mystery novel about a forensic pathologist-puppet named Kasperle, whose trailing strings keep damaging evidence and exposing him to great danger. Like house cats.
I wrote a collection of sex poems that were so perverted, I self-published as Will. B. Hard; a vegetarian cookbook for reformed cannibals; and a Festschrift for Britney, containing letters from me and all of my dead friends.
I also completed a memoir.
I called it I Killed the Band and sent it to Miss Pamela Des Barres, who sent me a card of her and her Prince in a gondola wrapped in a purple fleece blanket, that she covered in lipstick kisses.
And when I wasn’t writing, I called him. I called him all the time. I could tell it was starting to bother him, but I couldn’t stop.
I had bag lunches messengered to him, and huge bouquets of sunflowers.
He thanked me but sounded far away. Usually, I heard Mercury in the background, telling him to get off the phone.
“Maybe we should just talk at night?” he said.
But at night he never answered.
“TELL ME WHAT happened.”
He was home and we were lying in bed, in a slough of moonlight.
“I told you, I don’t remember.”
“But he raped you, he definitely did that.”
“Yes,” I said, my stomach churning.
I lay on the bathroom floor after I threw up and wrote “Dirty Whore” on myself with a razor.
It must be my fault, at least some of it.
This is how my song for Page, “Meridian,” starts.
It is about loving him in the middle, between his pain and cruelty.
I WAS CAREFUL to hide my notebook, and when I filled one, I attached it to the others and I buried it in the closet, behind the towers of shoe boxes and the slippery dresses that had abandoned their hangers.