Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore (9780385538398)

by Mosley, Walter

  I turned on the lights.

  “So who was he?” Rash asked while I peered into the double-doored refrigerator.

  “You want some banana-orange-strawberry juice?”

  “I think I could use a real drink,” he said.

  “In the low cabinet behind you.”

  Rash squatted down while I poured my juice. Then I went to the little alcove next to the dark windows.

  “Can I have some of this brandy?” he asked.

  “Sure. The glasses are over your head. You need ice?”

  “No, thanks.”

  I watched him pour a triple shot into a squat glass. He seemed to be quivering a little.

  I didn’t blame him.

  He pulled in across from me.

  “So?” He managed a light tone and I was impressed.

  “My husband died in debt,” I said. “Some of the people he owed money to are what you might call disreputable. This guy Dick was a kind of leg breaker. Manetti is somewhat worse than that.”

  “Should we call the police?”

  “And say what?”

  Instead of answering he took a healthy swig of our thirty-year-old cognac. Rash was wearing a buff-colored jacket, blue jeans, black tennis shoes, and a white T-shirt. Only in California could you find black people like him and me.

  “What kind of work did he want you to do?”

  “Do you want to be my friend, Rash?” I decided to speak without thinking, to find out what was going on in a kind of trancelike stream of consciousness. If Rash could flow with that then he could come along—wherever it was I was headed.

  “I don’t know you well enough to answer that question yet.”

  “Do you think that you might like to be my friend?”

  “That’s why I’m here. Though I’m not quite sure what I’m getting into.”

  Rash was smiling. He had a small gap between his two upper front teeth. He was looking straight at me without the slightest aggression.

  “Are you gay, Rash?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Why does a girl ask a guy if he’s gay?”

  “Uh …”

  I had been in the business for too long. I was blocking the sex scene that this conversation would become on Linda Love’s or Roger Bonair’s set. The shy guy and the brash whore. He’s her husband’s clueless friend and she’s hungry for sexual exploration.…

  “Rash is a funny name for such a shy guy,” I said, trying to derail my knee-jerk train of thought.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yep.”

  He looked around the room and I saw that I was losing him.

  “Are you looking for a way out of here, Rash?”

  “So that guy, that Coco, he was like a gangster?”

  “I wouldn’t be upset if this was too much for you.”

  “I just want to know what happened with that guy. Why didn’t you tell him my real name?”

  “I told you,” I said, trying to keep the frustration out of my voice, “my husband died but he was in debt. Theon had a lot of vices. He gambled and chased women; he liked to drink good brandy too. Guys like that often show up on people like Manetti’s radar. I didn’t tell him your name because you are none of his business.”

  Whenever Rash crinkled up his face, trying to understand what was being said, I had the urge to kiss him. I managed not to give in to these frequent urges.

  “And what about you?” the coffee-and-cream-colored young architect asked.

  “What about me?” I stood up from the table, reminding myself of Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon.

  “That gangster wanted you to go to work for him.”

  I considered lying and, in a flash, I understood the femme fatale of film noir and noir novels. They lied because it was easier than the truth, because they had been invited in for their charms and lies, because the truth always sounded so guilty when they were just trying to make it through the day—like everybody else.

  I tried to say something but the words weren’t there.

  I took in a deep breath to compose myself.

  “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” Rash said.

  For some reason the idea of love crossed my mind. It seemed to me then, in spite of the triteness, that love was an impossible goal unless you broke it down into pieces—fragments. I could love my father because he was tall and strong and funny, because he read stories to me and understood how the world worked. He loved me because I was small and needed him. Those two loves came together but they were not one love.

  “Do you want me to leave?” Rash asked.

  I looked at him, feeling that he was alien, like a high school foreign-exchange student from a country that no one in the class, not even the teacher, had ever heard of. Some kid who wore strange, dull-colored clothing and smelled like bread.

  “What?” he said.

  “You want something to eat?” I managed to ask.

  “I’m still full from the restaurant.”

  “Oh … right,” I said. “I forgot about that.”

  “Why did that guy call you Ms. Dare?”

  “Dare is my stage name.”

  “You act?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Theater?”

  “If you’re looking for an excuse all you have to do is walk out to your car.”

  “Why won’t you talk to me, Sandra?”

  “I am talking.”

  “I ask you if you work in theater and you tell me that I can leave. That’s not talking.”

  I grinned at that, appreciating the young architect’s ability to stay on the scent.

  “How many nights have you eaten at Monarc’s since we met there?” I asked.

  “Every night.”

  “Why?”

  “In case you came in.” He looked down at my hands.

  “Kinda like stalking somebody who isn’t there.”

  “I liked talking to you.”

  “But you don’t like it now,” I countered.

  “Yes, I do. I’d rather talk to you than anyone else I know.”

  “Isn’t that kind of obsessive?”

  “No,” he insisted. “It’s just sudden.”

  “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  He hesitated.

  “Come on now, honey,” I said. “Tell me the truth.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Annabella. Annabella Atoll.”

  “Are you engaged?”

  “No.”

  “Do you live together?” I had almost forgotten Coco Manetti by then.

  “Uh-uh, no. We … we date.”

  “And where has Annabella been all these nights you were waiting for me?”

  “She goes to grad school at UCLA. She’s studying for her accounting finals. I won’t see her for at least another ten days.”

  He was a nice guy but a little out of focus, like somebody you meet at a bar after the sixth or seventh drink—the kind of man I’d remember liking but just couldn’t recall the name of. I had been blaming this haziness on my depressive trauma, but just then I saw that it was Rash himself that was out of alignment in the world he lived in.

  “Do you recognize me?” I asked.

  “You mean from TV or something?”

  “Answer the question.”

  He scrunched up his face and concentrated. After thirty seconds or so he shook his head no. He’d have to be a consummate liar to have succeeded with an act like that.

  “My husband just died,” I said, lifting the words up like a shield.

  “I’m not trying to do anything,” he said. “I mean, I was, I am attracted to you, but I wouldn’t have even said anything in the restaurant if you didn’t want me to. And I came here because you asked me.”

  “Kind of like a puppet.” I immediately regretted these words. I had been playing the hardhearted seductress for so long that the role was both my first and last resort.

  Rash moved his head from side to side, genuflected in the ch
air as if he meant to rise and walk away, but then sat back.

  “You just looked so calm,” he said at last. “Sitting there reading your book, looking up now and then with this little smile you got. I don’t know … I guess I wanted to feel like that.”

  “Like what exactly?”

  “Like I wasn’t all the time waiting for something else to happen. Like I was just sitting in a chair completely comfortable with myself.”

  “You were,” I said.

  “No,” Rash Vineland said.

  He looked me directly in the eye. That’s what I was waiting for: for a man who had not seen or heard about my genitals who was talking straight in my face.

  “Get up,” I commanded. “Come with me.”

  I took him by the hand and led him back into the polar bear room. I sat him on the large sofa facing a fake fireplace and picked up a nacre-plated remote-control unit.

  “My full stage name is Debbie Dare,” I said. “Have you ever heard that name?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Is Annabella pretty?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Very pretty?”

  He nodded.

  “Why did you start talking to me at the restaurant?” I asked him. “I mean, I wasn’t wearing any makeup and my dress looked like it came from a Salvation Army box.”

  “I already told you. It was the way you looked out,” he said, “like you were really seeing something. When I saw you I wanted to know what you were thinking, who you were.”

  “And what about now?”

  He stared for a moment and then nodded.

  I smiled.

  “It’s not going to be easy getting to know me, Rash Vineland,” I said. “Annabella won’t like you being my friend and the friendship will be hard on you.”

  He took in a deep breath through his nose and then exhaled through his mouth.

  “The one thing that’ll be easy for you to do is walk away,” I continued. “You can walk out of my life right now or next week and I won’t complain.”

  “Why do you sound so hard?”

  “That’s the way I am. Can you accept that?”

  “I’m here right now.”

  “Fine. Now … before you can know who I am and what kind of friend I’ll be, you have to know who I was.”

  I pressed a button on the fancy remote and the oil painting of white horses prancing in a pale golden field slid away, revealing a seventy-two-inch plasma screen. I hit a few more keys and a DVD hidden in another part of the house began to play.

  The title of the Crux Brothers film Debbie Does Death appeared and Rash’s mouth fell open.

  “Have you seen it?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  The film began with tiny clips of me getting fucked in a dozen different ways. My heart was racing with panic but I made myself stay there and watch.

  The story started with a carjacking. Debbie and her husband park at a rest stop because they’re so much in love that they can’t wait to get home to have sex. Hooded men attack them, kill the nameless husband, and drag me off to a sinister mansion, where they and a dozen more men with hoods perform extraordinary sexual acts on me. At one point four different men were inside me, getting off on one another as much as with me. I remembered somewhere in the middle of the film how Joey Crux had brought three ounces of cocaine to the set so that my inhibitions were all but nonexistent.

  Maybe half an hour into the film, just before I was to walk into a door that had the name “Mr. Death” stenciled on it, I pressed the off button and the plasma screen went black.

  This didn’t stop Rash from staring though. He was looking at the blank screen with the same intensity that he watched the flabby, ass-slapping story.

  “Is your dick hard, Rash?”

  “Very.”

  “I’m not that woman anymore.”

  “I can see that. Why’d you want me to see it if you don’t do that anymore?”

  “Because I want to know if I can make a transition from what you just saw to the world you live in without lying and hiding my past.”

  “Are you embarrassed about making that movie?”

  “I’ve been in hundreds of films like that and I’m not ashamed of anything I’ve done or anybody I’ve known.”

  “So are you quitting because your husband died? Was he the one who made you do … that?”

  “No, not really,” I said. “He opened the door but I went through under my own steam. I mean, there are reasons I became what you saw up there but I didn’t have to do it. I wasn’t a sex slave or anything like that.

  “I don’t even know if I’m quitting because Theon died. Something happened to me before I ever got home that day. I felt what it was like to die and be reborn—”

  “Like a Christian?”

  “No. Not religion. It was something else, something inside me that I didn’t want to see but suddenly I couldn’t look away. Not even that. It was me all of a sudden realizing what it was that I saw, like for the last sixteen years I had been seeing the world one way and then, for no reason whatever, things looked different.”

  “I think it was good that you showed me that, that film,” Rash Vineland said.

  “Why?”

  “Because if you just told me I wouldn’t have understood. I mean, I would have thought I did, but really I had to see it with you sitting there to know what was and what wasn’t.”

  We sat there next to each other in the bright white room, lost in our own thoughts about reality and truth. The flesh around Rash’s eyes crinkled with the attempt to understand but I was dead set on not kissing him—or any other man.

  “Do you want to spend the night?” I asked him.

  Again he hesitated. This time I smiled.

  “We’re not going to have sex,” I assured him. “And it’s not because you have a girlfriend. I just want to have some friendship from someone who doesn’t fuck or fight for a living.”

  “Do you, um, usually sleep with your friends?”

  “Tonight I am.”

  After showing my nervous new friend to the bedroom I went to the bathroom, where Theon died, took off my dress, and put on a cream-colored slip. Rash had stripped down to his boxers while I was gone. I could see the erection straining against the fabric.

  “Across the hall is a guest bedroom,” I said. “If you have to come you can go over there and do what you need to do. We have a cleaning lady, at least for a little while longer, so you don’t have to straighten up.”

  “Maybe, maybe I’ll go over there for a little while right now,” he said.

  After he was gone I turned off all the lights except for the reading lamp. I went to Theon’s night table and rummaged around until I located the one book he had always intended to read but never did, The Twelve Caesars, the ancient text about the private and public lives of some of the most powerful men in history.

  Theon had that book as a kind of counterbalance to my ever-changing library, but it was more than that. Theon saw himself as some kind of working royalty. He was king of the fuck flicks in the old days when he made a movie every week. Even after his star waned and he began living off my money and fame he acted as if everything centered around him. The historical work was a kind of talisman for his ego.

  I decided to read it for him as an offering to his death.

  I had just settled in and opened the book to the preface when Rash came back into the bedroom.

  “That was quick,” I said.

  “I don’t usually watch films like that. My parents thought they were trash and every girlfriend I ever had was too proper to want to see one.”

  “You could have watched it with some guys,” I suggested, putting The Twelve Caesars to rest on the night table.

  “I get nervous around guys even when they’re just talking about sex,” he said as he got under the covers.

  I cut off the light and turned my back to him. For a long while he lay behind me, motionless.

  “Hold me,
Rash.”

  He curled up behind me, managing to get his arm around me without caressing my breasts. He exhaled with some strength and then did so again. After that his breathing was normal—for a while.

  “I have a son,” I said.

  “How old is he?”

  “Five. He’ll be six in December.”

  “Where is he?”

  “At my stepsister’s house.”

  “While you go through this funeral stuff?”

  “No. He lives with her. My brother Cornell was trying to find me unfit to raise a child when I was pregnant and so Delilah took Edison in.”

  “Edison’s a nice name.”

  Rash managed to say just the right thing even though he wasn’t trying.

  “It’s my father’s brother’s name. He raised my father and one time, when I was a little girl talking about when I grew up and became a mom, my dad said that the only thing he wanted was if I had a son that I’d name him Edison after my dead uncle.”

  “That’s the perfect way to honor your father,” Rash said, and I pulled his arms up to my breast.

  For a moment he held his breath.

  “Um,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “Why aren’t we having sex?”

  “I’m not,” I said. “You have the room across the hall.”

  “Uh, okay, but why aren’t you?”

  “In the last four weeks I’ve had unprotected sex with at least sixteen men and almost as many women. We all have regular checkups and most of us are professional enough not to work if we think we’re sick. But I won’t know about my health for sure until at least nine months from my last sexual encounter.

  “And even if that wasn’t true, you have to know that sex to me is like cornflakes or toothpaste. I don’t connect it with love or even mild concern. I don’t anticipate sex; I dread it.

  “That’s why I brought you to bed.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re sweet and considerate and I knew from the first minute we talked that you would keep it in your pants and hold me anyway.”

  “Um, you know, I think I have to go in the other room for a while again. I’ll be back.”

  I started counting when Rash got up from the bed. I made it to seventy-eight before he returned and embraced me again.

  I could feel his heart thundering against my back.

  This made me smile.

  “Why?” I whispered.