by Linda Sands
Over the years, she’d learned how to use the window displays as ideas for her own wardrobe combinations and how to dress if she wanted the girls at the cologne counter to stop spritzing in her general direction and actually sell her something. She knew the difference between shopping in workout wear and shopping in a suit with your hair pinned up and in full makeup even if your eyes were hidden behind dark Chanel shades.
While perusing silk scarves and lounging pajamas, cocktail dresses and cashmere wraps, Barbara convinced herself that Chamonix was in a better place, that she had not suffered in her death, but been swept up in an angel’s arms and gently floated through the pearly gates.
Though Barbara hadn’t been to church in a long time, she was pretty sure they were still calling Heaven’s doors “The Pearly Gates.” Unless the Pope had become as politically correct as the rest of the people and now used the term “Equal Opportunity Entry.”
She thought about the unfairness of a life cut brutally short, about young women who’d never grow old, never complete the tasks they were put on earth to do. Barbara hardly knew the North Carolina girl, Cress, but surely she had been as special as Chamonix and Roxie. If only the good die young, then why was Smith dead too? How was that fucking fair?
Right there, in the crowded shoe department of Neiman Marcus, Barbara Leonard started crying, dripping tears onto a very expensive alligator pump and drawing stares.
“Are you all right, dear?” an older woman in a mauve sweater set asked.
Barbara cried louder.
The woman patted Barbara’s back, waved away the nervous clerk, and made shushing, soothing sounds as Barbara murmured, “I’m sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry.”
The woman said, “There, there,” like a kind stranger in a fairy tale talking to a lost child in the woods. She handed Barbara a tissue, but when the crying didn’t abate she slipped a small oval pill into Barbara’s palm and closed her fingers around it.
Barbara looked up to see mirrored pain in the woman’s eyes, laced with understanding.
The woman smiled. “Try one, sweetheart, it works for me.”
Barbara watched the woman walk away, then blew her nose, swallowed the pill, and bought the alligator pumps with a matching handbag, thinking that’s what Chamonix would have wanted.
Barbara wished she was as sure of herself as her daughter had always been—or even half as determined or comfortable with her life’s choices.
There was never a moment in her youthful incarnation as Buffy that Barbara had felt absolutely positive she was doing the right thing. Even on bubble tests, she’d mark A, then change it to C, then see a pattern of dots on the paper and erase all the B’s. Her tests were a disaster. Labeled an “anxious tester,” she earned the right to take exams in a quiet room off the library, a room that was seldom monitored, allowing her to cheat her way through algebra, science, and two years of German.
It wasn’t that she was stupid. She was just easily distracted. In her senior year, the distractions were boys. Boys on the football team. Boys on the baseball team. Boys in ski club and theater. Boys who played in garage bands and skipped school and hung out on the smoker’s path, and even smart boys who knew all the answers in biology class and weren’t afraid to slice the dead cat splaying its legs wide and removing the organs one by one.
Boys were everywhere. Lounging at her locker, waiting in the cafeteria to queue up behind her. A group of them fought each afternoon for the honor of walking her home. Buffy figured it was the same for everyone and was surprised to learn during a girl’s birthday sleepover most of the girls had an entirely different view of boys. Odder still, the boys they wanted to get close to weren’t even on Buffy’s radar.
She couldn’t figure it out. She didn’t even know if she wanted to. Everything seemed so complicated at the time. The trauma of teenage years where you truly believe you’re the only one in the whole world who’s ever felt some way, done something, or had that much bad luck. Drama and angst, blended with love-struck joy and thrills of first time everythings.
As tough as those years were, and as glad as Barbara had felt to leave them behind her, she knew now those troubles were blessedly simple.
Therapy helped her understand she’d made the best choices with the knowledge she’d had at the time, but it was still hard for her to sit in the shrink’s office and admit past mistakes. From stealing to dating married men, to the abortion “for medical reasons.” Most days, if it came right down to it, Buffy-Barbara felt like a goddamned failure, except for the day she’d given birth to Chamonix.
Barbara could wish all she wanted that she’d led a life that was kinder and more giving, that she’d recycled, donated, and volunteered more. She could wish she’d been the kind of person who went to church regularly. Maybe that was what was missing. Though it was easy to suck up to God now that her only kid was dead and her marriage was falling apart.
Buffy-as-the-new-Barbara figured God probably hated mercy-seeking cop-outs, those losers who used faith as a last-ditch effort to make up for a lifelong list of fuck-ups. He probably put people like that at the end of His salvation list.
Chapter 13
CHAMONIX. SAY IT THE FRENCH WAY.
She was young by most people’s standards, if numbers could tell everything about someone’s life. But the way her heart felt cracked and empty, the way her soul ached on cloudy Wednesdays in June, made Chamonix old in every other sense.
After high school, she ran to college and kept running, blazing a trail across the campus. From the volunteer center to the Olympic-size track, from the sorority houses to the library and art studio and back to her dorm by way of the frat houses. She lived as if experience—in whatever form—would expand her, increasing the single space she’d been allotted in the world to a space for three.
Chamonix’s roommate, Jolie, liked to say that Chamonix grabbed life by the mane, squeezed her thighs around it, and rode it until it was sweaty and spent. But that was the way Jolie talked about everything—sexually.
Back up. There’s the guy. There’s always a guy, isn’t there? The same one who’s in the picture when “love you” is offered up as a question and the “I” is nowhere around.
The guy was Jolie’s big brother in the fraternity, a sweet boy with a tough-man look, the kind of man-child Chamonix thought might challenge her, or if her parents were right, tame her.
After their first date, a cafeteria dinner followed by a movie at the dollar theater, she wrote, “It’s the beginning of my new beginning. I’m going to be good now,” in her black journal—the one she hid when Daddy visited, not wanting to know what he would think of his baby if he knew what his baby was thinking.
But the one date didn’t lead to more. By spring, Jolie and the frat brother man-child had hooked up and moved off campus, leaving Chamonix alone in a dorm room that used to feel small. She immersed herself in obscure classes. Her favorite was an art history lecture called Images of Women in Western Art. There wasn’t an instructor, just a video that ran and ran in an auditorium where a naked mannequin in a cowboy hat leaned against the podium.
Chamonix realized there was no reason to be good anymore.
She started sleeping around, on campus and off. She held little respect for men—or anyone for that manner—and grew tired of dates that ended in silly games of “Just the tip,” and “I promise to pull out.” She hated that she frequently traded a lay for a dinner and hated how most men thought there was absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Chamonix yearned for a relationship with the kind of man she read about in books or saw in foreign films. Strong, confident, independent, passionate men. She figured she was fantasizing some reality she’d never know and blamed it on artistic preferences. She’d been spending most Sundays at the art museum on a bench in front of Tissot’s The Artist’s Ladies, praying that she’d dissolve into it and become one of the mysterious women at the white linen-draped tables, a woman who men would tip their top hats to.
Some
nights she begged God—if there was one—to let her die so she could jump into another soul—because if there was a God, then surely there were souls. And she wanted, if only for a moment, to see what someone else’s life was like, to know if they also suffered from feelings of inadequate deportment.
With the melodramatic cloak she managed to drape over everything, Chamonix might have been a great actress, but she had trouble memorizing lines and following direction. The one frat house play she’d been in was never performed the same way twice, as Chamonix kept changing her character, showing up one night as a French magician and the next as Pippi Longstocking. She was a gifted mimic, aware of her audience, and knew that if things took a dark turn or something hit too close to home, she could always pull back, turn the joke on herself, sacrificing Chamonix over and over to make people laugh.
No one was surprised when she dropped out of school—least of all her parents. But when she waited a month to tell them she’d turned in her ticket to Paris, where art school waited, for a one-way bus pass to Seattle and the first month’s rent on a loft in the arts district, a flag was raised.
They gave her space to find herself and waited, credit card in hand, secretly hoping their daughter would fail and return home to them.
Chamonix took a job at a gallery as an assistant to the assistant. She pierced her nose and dyed her hair different colors every week, but kept old pictures of herself looking as innocent as a freshman at an all-girls’ school to send to her parents twice a year. She dressed in mismatched clothes from thrift stores and garage sales, with the fashion sense and attitude that made ugly look good.
She threw theme parties at the loft, which she shared with half of an ex-grunge band —pajama night, beach blanket bingo, come as your favorite carnivore—and invited everyone from the gallery.
When her boss, Guy, drunk and draped in a tiger pelt, knocked over Chamonix’s easel and saw her latest painting—one ruined when she’d cut herself with the canvas knife and splattered blood across the pristine landscape, he said, “Sweetheart! Why have you been keeping this from me?” Followed by, “I love it. Do you have more?”
It wasn’t as easy as it seemed. To keep painting with blood meant you had to keep bleeding. Chamonix, though never a squeamish girl, was beginning to get a bit apprehensive every time she sat down with a knife in one hand and her own flesh in the other. There were only so many places you could cut without leaving scars, only so much you could take before growing anemic, and she certainly didn’t want to get a rep of being a “cutter.”
She tried painting with cow’s blood from the butcher mixed with an oxidizer to maintain its reddish hue, but it was too thick and the rank smell choked her. She brought home a guinea pig from the pet shop, but it squeaked pitifully when she grabbed it so she ended up giving it to one of her roommates for his birthday.
The first time she asked a date to play rough, he was cool with it. The second time, she cut too deep, collecting more pints than the Red Cross normally allowed. When he almost died, she figured at least she wouldn’t have to do that again for a long, long time. A thought that oddly depressed her.
Guy acted as her agent and her encouragement, telling her how important her work was. Pressing her to think bigger, do more. He gave her uppers and hooked her on energy drinks. He sent Wiccans to clear the negative energy in her studio when she was blocked. He took her to a hypnotist the one time she professed she’d like to try painting serious portraiture.
“The world needs your work,” he told her. “I need you,” he said, dollar signs in his eyes.
But the words were the right words.
Chamonix needed to be needed.
Guy said that people who bought art bought stories. They wanted to hear about the vegan artist who only wore blue, the one who collected frogs, the sculptor who lived in an old bomb shelter. There was a perceived romanticism surrounding the soul of the artist, something ordinary people believed unachievable. Something paranormal.
When Guy began a new client’s campaign, he usually had to recreate them. The Jewish good-boy sculptor from Brooklyn became a troubled dyslexic from a broken home in Chicago who’d been living in a dilapidated cardboard box in the shadow of Oprah Winfrey’s high rise before Guy discovered him.
Guy knew how to take someone from humble beginnings—the second son of a Poughkeepsie metalworker—and transform him into a misunderstood, genderless, passionate soul depressed by the industrialism of the new America, an artist who yearned to bring life to a dying art while carrying on the grand traditions of his heritage by welding confiscated airport nail files, corkscrews, and pocketknives into warriors battling giant insects. An artist who could now ask twenty times the going rate for airport art, and appear on both Letterman and CNN.
Chamonix hardly needed Guy’s help. They simply mounted her name and photograph on the wall next to her paintings.
Her work sold better than the imported stuff, better than big local names—better than anyone expected. The people who bought her paintings said they understood where she was going and what she was saying. Some said they could hear her scream. They said they felt something—a pulsing life force. Chamonix never told them how close they were to the truth, and she was certain to always seal the paintings with coats and coats of polyurethane.
Enjoying all the liberties of a successful artist, Chamonix moved a lot, finally making it to Europe. She kept in touch with her parents in Syracuse, sending them expensive gifts from abroad, inviting them places she knew they’d never go. She shipped her paintings to the Seattle gallery. Guy took care of all the business details, leaving Chamonix alone to create.
Too much freedom can be a bad thing. It can lead to thinking and plotting, cataloguing and sorting. With too many choices and the time to explore each one, freedom became a noise in Chamonix’s head she needed to silence.
There was only one way to quiet the panic. Fill canvases. And for that, she needed blood.
In Philadelphia, Chamonix had created alter egos with intricate backstories, usually giving herself names that ended in y because those girls were always the cutest in high school, always the most innocent.
She’d choose the bar in the daylight, never going in, never talking to anyone. It might take a few visits, but sometimes she could feel it at the first pass. Something about the light when the door opened, the strain of music that filtered out. If it felt like misery, it felt right.
Once, after a ride into the city and after she’d stashed her bike in an alley, after she’d changed her jacket and tugged on a curly brown wig, Chamonix found herself standing outside a dingy South Philly bar. A man brushed her sleeve as he passed. He didn’t say anything, just opened the door to the bar and disappeared inside, but she knew. This was the place. He was the one. Just like that.
She could tell he was the type of guy who needed a drink before heading home, his idea of wrapping up the day. She walked around the block and was waiting fifteen minutes later when he came out. He looked less tense—his wrinkled forehead relaxed, his cheeks flushed, tie hanging loose around his neck.
Chamonix let him go a few steps, then called after him. “Hey!”
The guy glanced back but kept walking.
“Hey!”
The man stopped and turned around.
She bent to the sidewalk to place, then pick up, a palmed hundred-dollar bill, then dangled the money. “I think you dropped this.”
He was about to shrug her off and keep walking until he looked a little closer. She might have reminded him of a drawing on an animator’s board, some artist’s version of feminine perfection in her shiny black jacket and tight pants, except the footwear was wrong.
When Chamonix put her hand on her hip and smiled, he smiled back. He might have been thinking about the whiskey the cash would buy, or how having a young lady like this across the table might help him forget what was waiting for him at home. He stepped toward Chamonix, patting the rear pocket where his wallet was, then shoving a hand into the fr
ont empty one, adding a hint of surprise to his face when he caught her eye.
“You’re right. I think that might be mine.”
Chamonix winked and handed him the bill, then waited as he held open the door to the bar.
Four hours later he said he really, really had to get going. It had been great fun and all that but, shit, he had an important meeting in the morning and, Christ, was it really that late?
As they stepped outside into the rain, Chamonix smiled.
Perfect. Just as forecasted.
She said, “Yeah. You gotta go. Me too.”
He started to walk away, then a tiny part of his nice-guy brain kicked in and he looked around. “Hey, do you need me to . . . I mean, it’s not the safest neighborhood, you know.”
Chamonix smiled. “That would be nice. I’m just around the corner.”
Giggling and tripping, acting more drunk than she was, she grabbed his arm to steady herself and a moment later pulled him into the alley.
“Whoa. Hey there,” he said as Chamonix pressed up against him. He stuttered like a ten-year-old forced to stand next to the cutest girl in fifth grade and recite the Pledge of Allegiance over a school loudspeaker.
“If . . . if you want to we could, you know . . . we could get a room.”
Chamonix kissed him hard, sticking her mouth on his and sealing off his air. He went weak in the knees and she pulled back. He opened his eyes, dazed.
She whispered, “I don’t think so,” then jabbed the syringe into his neck.
The bags in the satchel filled fast as the jugular vein released two of the body’s ten pints of blood so quickly that the man convulsed, slipping into hemorrhagic and then hypovolemic shock. Chamonix removed the cattle syringe and pressed a gloved finger on the puncture wound. The last bit of blood ran out the back of the syringe and through the tubing to the sterile bags in the satchel. She eased the man to the ground, capped and stowed her tools, then jogged to the other end of the alley where she’d hidden her bike behind a Dumpster.