Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore (9780385538398)

by Mosley, Walter

  Theon and I loved each other, I suppose. I knew him better than anyone else did and he never hit me. He had sex with other women all the time and I was free to do what I wanted, but that wasn’t very often, not really. I wasn’t worried about losing him, because sex was just a release or a means to an end for him. Theon told me that he didn’t want me falling in love with another man, or woman. I told him that he didn’t have to worry.

  He was especially concerned that I didn’t fall in love with a black man. He was white and believed that the races tended to stay together and so felt threatened whenever I spent any time with any of my African American costars.

  That night, after Theon’s ridiculous death, lying there next to Lana—her rough breath like hope or something—I wanted to read but didn’t have the strength to sit up or even reach over to the night table where Dead Souls was sitting, waiting for me to reread it for the seventh, or maybe eighth time.

  A university professor I dated for a while told me that I was just a recreational reader, way outside of the educational system he lived in.

  “You only talk about phrases and what the characters are feeling but you have no notion of the literary ideas or intentions,” he said one night after I’d untied him. “You’d be lost in one of my classes. If I hadn’t talked to you like this I wouldn’t have believed that there was a literate thought in your head.”

  “But aren’t your classes about what people in books say and feel?” I asked, as if I were making an appeal in a higher court.

  “No,” he said. “The study of literature today is about structure and underlying intention; it’s about the way in which the themes of literature, historically, resonate with one another.”

  I stopped answering his calls after that. Professor Abraham was of no use to me if his world and mine were unconnected. We were, I thought, like two islands so close that one could see the other in great detail but the life evolving on each was separated by aeons of evolution.

  I loved books and their stories and characters. Books were faithful and true in ways that real people could never be.

  But that night, after Theon and Jolie had expired, I was paralyzed, unable even to imagine reading. Big Dick Palmer, completely without volition, had filled me with passion that Lana’s sorrow had punctured and depleted. The deaths were a part of my paralysis but not essential to it, no more than Myron was a part of my orgasm. I felt closer to Lieutenant Mendelson’s timidity and Lana’s unabashed grief than I did to my own husband, his weakness and self-demolition.

  Theon had abandoned me but men had been leaving me all my life. His death was a more familiar occurrence than all the years we spent together.

  After failing to summon up the will to reach for my book I tried to recall the feeling of my unexpected orgasm. I closed my eyes and imagined that spot of pain and Myron’s grunting and Carmen Alia’s clicking, insectlike camera. But none of it worked. I was numb, had been numb for years but never really knew it. I sometimes experienced this feeling of detachment as disinterest. At other times I mistook my lack of connection for the natural disdain a beautiful woman has for an ugly world. I had, for many years, taken for emotion the hungry look that men and women had for me. I had falsely perceived my own sensations as their oohs and aahs, grunts and groans, catcalls and blown kisses.

  These ideas settled in my bed with Lana’s breathing and the thought of Theon on a slab somewhere.

  I remembered when Theon had proposed to me.

  We were in a small casino in Vegas and both drunk. Theon got sloppy when he drank too much. Matching him drink for drink I moved, and thought, a little slower. The inebriation brought on by alcohol was just a more leisurely version of my sobriety.

  “Let’s get married,” he said while fingering me under the table.

  I was young, and wet, and Theon had driven us to Vegas in a fire-engine-red Rolls-Royce (which was leased but I didn’t know that at the time).

  “Okay,” I said with a leer, “but no more PJ for you until there’s a ring on my finger and we’ve both said ‘I do.’ ”

  I didn’t think he was serious. I mean who would want to marry an eighteen-year-old girl who fucks for a living?

  But Theon took me in a taxi to an aqua-and-pink-plaster twenty-four-hour chapel, where he presented me with a very expensive emerald and diamond engagement ring and paid a thousand dollars for the finest fast-food marital service.

  What I remembered was the fact that he was thoughtful enough to have brought the ring on our little holiday, that and the smile on his face when I said the words of acceptance. I felt something then, like a smile drifting from my center up toward my lips.

  Evoking that memory I tried to cry but couldn’t. Even the best moment of my thirteen years of marriage with Theon failed to summon up a tear.

  I lay there frozen and unfeeling, like a corpse in the snow waiting for the spring thaw. This sense of death brought an unexpected calm into my breast.

  Theon was gone, running into death after the same quim he’d chased since the day he achieved his first erection. Jolie, I felt, somehow died in my place, enticing him with her passion to be seen and adored while collecting a paycheck and pining for love.

  These plain truths soothed me. I shifted onto my side and lost consciousness while breathing in the sweet scent of Lana’s troubled sleep.

  Someone was kissing my left nipple. It was a feathery kiss with a small lick at the end. The kisser was experienced, knew how to keep their hunger at bay while physically expressing a rapacious desire.

  “Hello,” I said.

  I opened my eyes on a sun-drenched morning. Lana was leaning over me, retreating from my big, black, wet nipple.

  She blew on it and said, “I’m sorry, Deb, I just always wanted to do that.”

  “It’s okay with me but what would Linda Love have to say?”

  “You won’t tell her, will you?”

  “Of course not.”

  Hearing this, Lana closed her small mouth and breathed in through her nose, somehow communicating that she’d like to show me other things she’d always wanted to do.

  “Not today, baby,” I said. “I just couldn’t after all that happened.”

  “I understand,” she said. And she did too. She understood that I would never be her lover but that I wasn’t rejecting her as a person.

  “Help me up?” I said.

  Little Lana got on her knees and pulled my wrists. This movement imbued me with energy again. I remember feeling that if I had been alone I might have never gotten up.

  “I’ll go make us breakfast,” she said.

  When Lana left the room I went to the closet and was rendered immobile again for a time. There were latex minidresses, and cashmere pantsuits with holes stitched in so that I couldn’t really wear underwear with them. I had a few Catholic-girl miniskirt uniforms and a dozen pairs of pants that fit so tight they adhered to my sex close enough that the casual stranger could know my form as well as Theon did. I’m naturally tall, so the rows of five-inch heels and platform shoes were designed to make me tower over most men. My blouses were all two sizes too small—T-shirts too. I couldn’t sit without exposing myself in the little black dresses, and all of my panties were white and thong.

  “Black-and-white is my signature,” I often said, “from me and my Caucasian husband to this small black dress and my white silk panties.”

  I could hear Lana in the kitchen making our breakfast. This act, more than the kiss, told of the love she harbored for me.

  At the back of the twenty-four-foot-wide, five-foot-deep closet was a brown paper bag that contained a calf-length yellow-and-blue dress that I filched from a BBW named Wanda in a specialty film I’d once made. Wanda weighed two hundred eighty-five pounds and that dress fit her like a glove. Under that was a pair of worn blue tennis shoes. Inside the left shoe was a .32 caliber midnight special, the only legacy my father had left after being shot in the street by a thug named Kirkland. He’d staggered into the house and into my moth
er’s arms, blood spilling over her clean white dress and the floor.

  As I was putting on the billowy dress the phone rang. I heard it but felt no need to answer. It rang five times before it stopped and Lana piped, “Hello?”

  She talked intermittently. I could make out random words but not the sentences they formed.

  I finished dressing, put my father’s gift into a big blue purse, and headed for the kitchen.

  I don’t know why I decided to take my father’s pistol; maybe my meditations on death resonated with the hardware the way Professor Abraham’s books echoed through history.

  On the way out I passed my full-length mirror. The dress served its purpose, so I didn’t pay any attention from the neck down. What caught my eye was the head and face.

  I’ve been told many times that I am beautiful. My father, a small-time hood, said it every day that he and I shared this earth. There was a temporary white-stain tattoo under my left eye. It was a perfect circle, two inches across with a dime-size white dot off-center inside. That was my signature. Even Theon didn’t know it was a stain. He wanted to mark me, to deform me, but I never could go with that.

  My straightened, bleached-white hair came down way past my shoulders. Sometime during the night I had taken out the deep-sea-blue contact lenses, so my eyes were their natural dark brown color.

  I took a pair of chrome-plated scissors from the dresser and began to hack away at the hair that so many men had yanked on and women had caressed while penetrating my sex and rectum, slapping a black ass that would swell but never blush.

  “I like your hair, Deb,” Lana said when I finally made it to the kitchen. She was still naked.

  “Really? I left most of it on the bedroom floor. You can hardly tell it from the white shag but I suppose you could pull it up with a vacuum cleaner.”

  “I mean I like it short, silly. It’s so cool how uneven it is. You turned from Marilyn Monroe to punk-slut with just a few snips.”

  “Who was on the phone?” I asked.

  “Richard Ness.”

  “What did that fool want?”

  “Theon. I told him what happened and he hung up.”

  Just then the kettle began to whistle and Lana turned her attention to the French-press pots. She’d prepared them with the Italian roast coffee I loved.

  There was low-fat turkey bacon sizzling on the grill and egg-white omelets cooking in their special Teflon pans. Lana gestured at the breakfast nook, which was nestled in between three mostly glass walls that looked out on Theon’s pride and joy: a lawn of Kentucky bluegrass.

  He’d look forward to every late spring when the green grass bore its blue flowers.

  “I love that grass as much as your ass,” he used to tell me.

  The memory of those words almost pierced the veil and brought Theon back from the dead, so much so I feared that my mind could conjure him and lose something that was waiting for the girl in the ugly dress and down-at-the-heels blue tennis shoes.

  “I made a decision last night,” Lana said, breaking through my fears.

  “Oh? What’s that?”

  The breakfast had been served while I fought off the dead. I had juice and coffee, turkey bacon, a grilled slice of tomato, and an Egg Beaters omelet on an oblong plate.

  “I know this is your moment, Deb,” she said, “that you lost your husband and all. But when I saw him and that girl in the bathtub I realized how awful what we do is. It was like everything in there had a meaning. His half-hard dick and her draped over him like that—the camera in the water and the house all shorted out. I realized that I had to quit this business and break away from Linda.”

  “What would you do?” I asked. I really wanted to know.

  “Get a straight job and maybe a boyfriend or something.”

  “Is Leer really your last name?”

  “No. It’s Koski. Kristin Koski. Linda gave me the name Lana Leer. She said that it sounded better and that you should never use your real name in the credits of a film.”

  “Were you ever on camera?”

  “That’s how I met Linda. She could tell how much I hated it and took me in.”

  “Why not go by your old name if you’re not acting anymore?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, letting her head loll to the side like Perry Mendelson had done the night before. “My parents kind of disowned me and I guess having a new name was me letting go of them. Is Dare your name?”

  “Peel,” I said. “Sandra Peel. I was born in Inglewood to Aldo and Asha. She was a seamstress for a Jewish tailor downtown and he was a thug but I loved him.”

  Lana smiled and then she laughed.

  “What’s funny?” I asked.

  “I always like the way you talk, Deb. Most people … most people say one thing and then somebody else has to ask for more. You know, like if you said your real name was Sandy Peel and stopped there. But it’s like you tell the whole story. Like you were on a stage or somethin’ and the rest of us were at the play.”

  Skinny little Lana was probably in her early thirties with short-short brown hair that showed a few gray sprouts here and there. Her big eyes were gray—almost white.

  “What are you looking at, Deb?”

  “Hmm?”

  “You were staring.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry. I just wanted to see you. You know, my great-grandmother Henrietta used to say that people are always going so fast that they never appreciate where they are, who they’re talking to.”

  “So you were appreciating me?” Lana asked behind a half smile.

  The question didn’t want answering. Lana was happy under my watchfulness and I was aware that something had come to an end, like a crescendo in a piece of classical music or at the conclusion of a scene in a play where the lights are still up and maybe even the actors are still onstage but there’s no movement or speaking, only a pause before the next action. This, I thought in that brief moment, punctuated by Lana’s half smile, was the beginning of the beginning after Theon’s foolish end.

  “Where the fuck are you, motherfucker?” a man yelled.

  We could hear him stomping in through the entrance room, into the wide hallway, and from there to the door of the kitchen.

  Tall and broad, Richard Ness was both ugly and oddly attractive. He was a white man with darkish skin clad in a ridiculous light green suit. His nose had been broken so often that it looked like a pillow with the indentations of a night’s sleep left on it.

  I clutched my bright blue leather bag, the weight of my father’s gun feeling like a premonition.

  “Where the fuck is he, Deb?”

  “What are you doing here, Dick?” I replied.

  “Don’t fuck with me, bitch.”

  “Never have, never will.”

  There was something soft about the thug Ness; you could see it in his eyes. My playful disdain for his manhood stung him. He was just a boy posturing the way boys think men are supposed to be.

  “I’m lookin’ for Theon.”

  “He’s dead, Dick.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “He was electrocuted in the bathtub with some girl he probably promised a job in my new movie.”

  Lana had both hands on the table, her fingers curled into hardscrabble landbound bird claws. There was a tremor going through her.

  “I will tear this house apart,” Richard promised.

  “He’s down at Threadley Brothers Mortuary. The cops said it was a stupid accident. Why don’t you call down there if you don’t believe me?”

  Lana’s eyes were pleading with mine. I smiled at her. I really felt relieved; Dick’s interruption was easier to deal with than my world turning upside down.

  “Why don’t you suck my dick?” Richard said.

  “Dick’s dick,” I said lightly.

  My calm caused him to clench his fists and scowl. He really didn’t know what to do in the absence of fear.

  “What would it cost you to call, Dick?” I asked. “I don’t know what business
Theon had with you, but I certainly wouldn’t let you mess up my house if I knew where he was.”

  “You know something?” he said, his mouth puckering up like a baby’s when it tastes its first lemon. “I always hated your cool bullshit. You think you’re better than everybody, but I will kick your ass like Theon should have. I will make you crawl like a fucking worm.”

  Ness took two long steps forward.

  Lana reached for a fork on the table.

  I smiled at the futility and bravery of Lana’s action and then pulled my father’s chrome-plated midnight special from out of the blue bag.

  Ness registered the weapon with his small eyes but took another step, more out of reflex than bravery.

  I pulled back the hammer and it snapped loudly, like some bug warning a larger predator of its venom.

  Ness stopped.

  Lana began hiccuping.

  “My husband is dead,” I said. “And if you don’t move your ass out of my house you can collect whatever it is he owes you in hell.”

  Lana hiccuped loudly and brought both hands to her mouth. In her left she still clutched the fork.

  “Don’t be crazy, bitch,” Richard Ness said.

  “What did you call me?” I said softly, dangerously.

  Ness’s hesitation humiliated him. The shiver that went through his battered face told of the man he wanted to be but wasn’t. He wanted to come at me regardless of the pistol, rip the gun from my fingers, and batter me to the floor.

  But he stayed in his place.

  I stood up, luxuriating in my frumpy dress, and Richard fell half a step backward. He was looking in my eyes for some kind of weakness. His disappointment showed itself as a squint.

  “I will kill you, Dick. Because you know, I’m not cool—I just don’t give a fuck.”

  I had decided with those last six words to kill Richard. It felt right. The deadness, the orgasm, the death of the shallow-but-sweet man I called husband.

  The muscle in my trigger finger contracted.