And the extended lap dance she gave Lazlo afterward wasn’t too bad either.
3
Near morning, Louise returned to the creaking ruins of the church and went Below, chased by premonitions of dawn. She found the Doctor wandering the library, paging liberally through his dustless tomes. Had he waited up for her all night?
No, that was ridiculous. He must be researching a new disease to treat, she thought. He could not be so obsessed with her. Not as she was with him.
She went down into the gilded, fairytale bedchamber and stripped away the witch dress. She slept naked now, with the Doctor, in their bed. She lay down on the bed and buried her face in the pillows that smelled of him.
She slept. But with time she became aware of the Doctor’s presence, insinuating, like nostalgia. It pressed against her, made of all sharp-edged fabric. She liked his clothes, liked to feel them against her raw skin in a way that was far more intimate than any mere nakedness could be.
She turned herself into the Doctor’s body, looked into his face. His cold metallic mouth came unto hers, intimate and familiar, a comfort.
“Once more above,” she told him as he moved his bloodstained kiss over her face and down her throat, “and it will be done. Lazlo hired me.”
He fell still in her arms. He felt cold, removed. He changed, just like that.
“I have to,” she told him. “I have to do it. You must understand, Doctor.”
He had remade her body, her mind. Even her way of speaking was changing, like something from Charlotte Bronte.
But the Doctor did not immediately respond. She could feel his reluctance, and his rage. It was a familiar, palatable force between them. His hands coursed absently over her body, his clothing hissed against her. Yet he was apart. “Did you dance well for…Lazlo?” he finally said.
“You’re jealous.”
He tried to move evasively aside. But in one liquid dance motion she had him. She climbed atop him, holding him down against the mattress, trapping him from running from her. He was hard against her. She smiled. She leaned down, her hair tenting them in together, and kissed him hungrily. The blood of his face roughed her lips. She dipped her tongue into his mouth. She tasted blood there too; he had been biting and chewing his tongue.
“I didn’t sleep with Lazlo,” she told him as she moved, first with him and then against him. “I touched him, Doctor, but I didn’t sleep with him.” She wasn’t that type of girl.
His eyes flared with rage. He reached up and snagged both her thin wrists in one of his hands, holding them apart for the moment. “Where?” he demanded. He sounded hoarse, scornful, and his face and body were full of writhing vengeance. The hand that held her was electric. “Where did he touch you, Poppet?”
She told him. And he touched her there as well, like an anointing.
And everywhere else.
4
Lazlo was as happy to hand out props to his girls as a pervert is to hand out candy to playground children.
At her request, he had two stripper poles set up on the central stage, and between these he extended a heavy chain, and from that chain he hung a child’s swing with a plain metal seat. He let her pick her own music. She chose Queen. It was danceable but had a touch of neo-classicalism to it. The Doctor would be proud.
Dressed in her neat, short parochial dress and knee socks and pigtails, she swung back forth over the heads of the patrons, the glass heels of her stripper platforms chocking in rhythm against the stage to “Another One Bites the Dust.”
The patrons watched like a collection of silent, slack-faced mannequins as she wriggled butterflylike out of her cocoon of fabrics, revealing more—and yet, somehow, less—of herself to them. She leapt from the swing and hit the stage on her platforms, dressed in little more than frayed threads. But she wasn’t seeing a collection of flushed, desperate, drunken men-faces swaying with her hips and with the contralto baying of Freddie Mercury.
She was far away, underground. She was Below. And she was seeing him. She was gowned in black and silver brocade and he was dressed in his brushed black evening suit from 1933 with its satin lapels and standing collar. They met in the middle of a high chamber full of lighted chandeliers, rust-gold walls, and mournful Chopin. They were waltzing in wide, even circles, hands entwined, rings clinking together.
The club patrons were on their feet, this hungry tide of sweating, desperate male flesh. Were it not for Odin up front, several of the more desperate young men would have crawled up onto the stage to touch the hem of the new girl as if she were a female messiah descended to earth to save their forlorn souls.
But Louise did not notice their admiration. She did not notice any of this. Swaying to the music echoing inside her own head, lost in an abyss of time and shadows, she waltzed off into the backstage.
5
The girl on the swing.
Tim couldn’t stop thinking about her, even as he scrubbed down the bar and cleared away the myriad of sticky-edged glasses and overfilled ashtrays.
Earlier, when the stage lights had first come up, he hadn’t really noticed her, not at first. She was tall and model skinny. She looked like a Catholic school whore. Tim assumed she was like all the rest. Her face was homely, strong, unforgettable amidst a rain of glittering black hair hanging down in pigtailed ropes. Another farm girl who had escaped to the big city, head full of childish dreams, here only to fail. Now she was shaking her tits for a bunch of geek boys who could only get it on with the monthly centerfold or some computer-generated bitch.
Then the music sprang up and everything changed. Tim saw. And Tim thought she might be the One.
A thirty-two year-old native of New York City, Tim had seen it all. He was nothing like the hungry dogs who visited the Gate nightly, sniffing up the skirts of the girls. He was the very antithesis of just such a man. He was the big brother of the joint. Everyone talked to the barkeep. He was good at what he did.
Lazlo’s girls liked him. He walked them to their cars at night. He drove them home if they were too drunk or stoned to be out on their own. He saw their littered, trashy little apartments, met their impetuous lovers. He knew it was important he surrounded them with compassion. He even told them he was gay—they opened up more easily that way.
But her. The One. For her he might open himself.
She was different. Like Louise, she had a sweetness inside of her, just one hard-packed by vinyl, gloss and makeup. He could see it. He had the sight to do so.
But thoughts of Louise made him cautious. He had thought she was the One, once. And he’d been wrong.
Louise. Lou.
Tim had known almost everything about her, almost from day one. He knew about the false driver’s license she used to dance at the club, and that she used cover-up makeup to hide the fact that she was a cutter. He knew she collected stuffed monkeys and her favorite color was yellow. He knew that she liked three cherries in her whiskey sours.
Yet how much had he really known about Lou? Sometimes he wondered.
He often tied a yellow ribbon around the stem of the glass when he served her. He didn’t even know why he did it; it just seemed like the thing to do, something old fashioned and childish. It delighted her, brought out the little girl under her dirty New York exterior. In his fantasies she collected the ribbons, keeping them in a drawer by her bed, waiting for the day to show him.
But he had been wrong about Louise. She was neither sweet nor naïve. He learned that painful truth one night a few weeks ago.
She’d been crying when she first came in to do her shift. He slid a drink down the bar to her, but it did no good. She was nearly hysterical, ranting about her roommate, about some talent scout letter that was lost.
“I can’t stay here anymore, Tim. I’ve got to get out of this place,” she sobbed, clutching her head like it might topple off her shoulders.
“I’ve always said that,” he told her as he polished a glass. It was the truth. “You’re too good for this place, Lou. Too go
od for Lazlo, that skank. Do you want me to drive you home?”
She shook her head of inky black hair. She had dyed it recently. He was disappointed by that. It made her look pale and hard and doll-like. He had always loved Lou’s flaming blonde hair under the harsh strobe lights. “I have to go on. I need the money.”
And so she had. But in the middle of a complicated twist onstage she stumbled over the chair she was using as a prop. It was a bad sprain, and she was limping badly when she reached the backstage. Tim immediately steered her into the backroom to collect her coat.
He started driving her back to her apartment in the Village, then made a sudden decision and turned off onto Jerome Avenue, toward the projects. He hadn’t brought a girl home in ages. He had promised his mother that he wouldn’t. But everything was out of sync tonight. Why not this?
Lou was reluctant, but not worried, not then, and not until the end. They knew each other too well. He was the girl’s big brother.
“I have ice for that ankle. Let me take care of you,” he said after he had pulled the car into the lot behind his apartment building. He leaned against the headrest. He was tall and slim in his black, soft barkeep’s garb. His hair was carefully cropped once a month, close to his ears, which were a little too large and the source of much derision when he was a kid. His mother used to tape them. But he had bedroom eyes. Everyone said so. Large, black-lashed, almost girlish, like a soap actor. He tilted his head at her. He reached out and abruptly beeped her nose.
Lou was suddenly laughing and crying at the same time.
“It’s not the end of the world,” he told her. “Whatever it is.”
He led her up to his place. It was small, but meticulously kept through the Big Cleaning, done monthly, like his haircut, and the Small Cleaning, or “picking-up” (as his mother called it), done once daily. There was delicate white china in cupboards, fashion magazine fans on the end tables, and a music and TV center that could be closed away to look like an English wardrobe. Lou investigated the cuckoo clock and the pictures on the walls, men in old fashioned dress and cavalry uniforms, women in flapper gowns. He did not tell her they were all purchased in yard sales and antique shops.
He made her a strong drink in the galley kitchen and retrieved ice for her ankle. He made her sit on the sofa, scrunchy with plastic—the only thing he didn’t agree with his mother on. Girls disliked the plastic, even though Mother was right about it keeping the sofa stain-free. “Hey,” he said to Lou, urging her to sit. By then he was anxious with desire.
Things went downhill fast. She didn’t want him fussing over her, she said. She didn’t want a neck massage, and she seemed appalled by the idea that someone—he—would want to kiss her. He even confessed that he wasn’t gay, to no avail. Insult gave way to anger. She acted annoyed, then betrayed, like he had lured her up here under false pretenses. Like she didn’t dress like a slut and dance on Lazlo’s stage every night, advertising herself. Like she didn’t like it, flashing her tits and cunt at those dogs in the audience.
Louise got up to leave.
Tim grabbed her arm. He only meant to plead with her to stay, but somehow they wound up wrestling down on the sofa like two kids sparring. She kicked him somewhere in the groin. He was dizzied by pain, not himself. He struck her a glancing blow across the face. She fell back against the armrest, dazed. He wrapped his hands around her throat. It was soft and gave under the smallest pressure. She began to choke. But after a while she stopped and went all blank and lifeless under him.
Tim was certain he had killed Lou. He scooted back on the sofa. “Mama,” he said, and then louder, as panic unwound within him, “Mama!”
But his mother wasn’t feeling well, he knew. He thought she must be asleep in the bedroom.
He had just started wondering about what he was going to do with Lou’s body when her eyes suddenly flared open. She was alive, but too weak to move. She could only make rasping, hiccupping noises through her bruised throat.
He couldn’t let her go. She would tell.
He carried her into his bedroom, to the bed. She was hardly down a second when she sprang up like a cat and started fighting him in earnest. She could not cry out, but her long nails raked over his face like claws. He held her down. She grew wild, possessed. But now he was angry. Everyone thought he was skinny, weak, but he was much stronger than he looked. Especially now. Her arm broke like plastic under his firm grip. She made mewling noises, and again she passed out.
He pushed her down, wrestling with all the silly clothes women wear, and pushed himself inside her. He had never had real sex with a woman before. He expected to feel something supernatural, like in books and movies. He expected to feel the universe spinning out of control. Instead, it was all sweaty work and no fun at all. He didn’t even come. He grabbed Lou by the scalp and shook her violently like a giant rag doll, but she was out cold.
He left her to clean up in the bathroom. It took maybe five minutes.
When he returned, Lou was gone, lurching like someone gut-shot into the hallway of his apartment building. He lunged after her, but she had made it to his neighbor’s apartment and was pounding frenetically at the thin piece of plankboard that passed for a door in this building.
“What is it? What do you want?” His neighbor, Jerry, called hoarsely through the skin-thin door. He and his wife Nora went to bed early, Tim recalled. They’d be angry, and they might remember details later on.
Lou made gargling sounds out of her crushed throat.
Disguising his voice through his hand, Tim said, “She’s seizuring.” It was the first thing he thought of. “It’s the drugs.”
He waited to see what would happen, if the old man would call the police or open the door. But Jerry, like Tim, was a native of New York. He knew better than to poke his nose in other people’s affairs. And as he suspected, the door never opened.
Tim dragged Lou back into his apartment. She was almost spent by then. She collapsed inside, panting and bleeding from somewhere down there all over his clean white carpet.
“You cunt,” Tim said when he saw the staining. “Look at the mess you’ve made.” His mother would make him do the Big Cleaning now.
He dragged her by the hair back to his bedroom. She bit his hand as he hauled her up to the level of the mattress. He slapped her down to the floor. The pain in his hand had made him mean.
He kept expecting the sex to get better, but it was just Lou mewling and writhing beneath him. All she did was bloody his clean white sheets. He stopped and put some music on in the living room, tuning the stereo to a heavy metal channel and turning the volume up to cover any sounds Lou was making.
His bedroom looked like a warzone when he returned. Somehow Lou had found the strength to drag herself to the closet. The closet door hung open and Mother lay dustily on the floor on her face, the clean dress Tim had dressed her in that morning tangled around her waist, which was unacceptable. One of her fragile old arms was cracked at the elbow, and when Tim lifted her carefully into his arms he saw that her mouth hung open and voiceless as it always did, but now she seemed to be screaming in pain. His anger boiled.
“You hurt my mother,” he told Lou.
Lou shrank against a corner of his bedroom. She looked like one giant bloodied bruise, and he wondered how he ever thought her beautiful. She was a mess. He stalked toward her. She lifted her good arm to defend herself. He saw, more as an afterthought than anything else, that she had a baseball bat in it that she had taken from his closet.
He caught it mid-swing. She had almost no strength left, and the act pitched her forward, into his legs. Tim bunted her back against the wall, the thudding music covering the soft, deep sound of her body’s impact in the soft plaster. He raised the bat, bringing it down like a sword over Lou’s shoulder, over her good arm. Her body vibrated from the impact, but she hardly reacted at all. It was like she was made of wood. Her eyes saw him blindly, like bloodied white jewels in her pale, icy face.
After Tim had
smashed both her arms to pulp, he thought about breaking her legs. He had seen that once in a movie. But Lou had really beautiful legs. It was the first thing you noticed about her. He just couldn’t bring himself to do it. Like Lou, his mother had done ballet, once upon a time.
Lou was finished, anyway.
After he had put Mother back into the closet where she couldn’t see him with the girl, and had turned off the stereo, he tried one more time with Lou, but he was soft. It wasn’t going to work. Obviously, she wasn’t the One his mother had told him about, the One who would one day make a man of him.
He went to the kitchen for the bottle of wine he kept at the back of the refrigerator. He’d kept it there for years, for the blessed day he’d found the One. But he knew now that that would never be. Mother was wrong. He uncorked the bottle and poured the wine down the kitchen sink. Then he returned to the bedroom with the empty bottle.
The Dreadful Doctor Faust by K. H. Koehler Page 6