The Year's Best Horror Stories 15

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

  I had no real excuse for tears now, and wiped my eyes with the heel of my hand. My left hand; my good hand. I was still getting used to the weight of the new cast on my other one. One of our famous denizens of the streets had stopped to stare at me. I stared back, head to toe, from the cloud of gnats around his matted hair to the solid-carbon crustiness of his bare, black feet. He had caught me crying, with his mad-prophet eyes, and the grin that snaked his face lewdly open suggested that yes, I should howl, with grief, I should pull out a Mauser and start plugging pedestrians. I put my legs in gear instead, leaving him behind with the news kiosk, the scungy, sensationalist headlines, and all those horrifyingly flawless pictures of her. The bum and I ceased to exist for each other the moment we parted.

  I know what happened to Tasha. Like a recurring dream, she showed up unannounced on my doorstep just four days ago. Like a ghost then, like a ghost now.

  People read People. The truth, they never really want to know, and for good reason.

  Her real name was Claudia Katz. In 1975, nobody important knew my name, or either of hers, and I’d already shot thousands of pictures of her. When I replaced my el cheapo scoop lamps with electronically synchronized umbrella shades so new that their glitter hurt your eyes even when they weren’t flashing, I commemorated the event by photographing her. New Year’s Eve, 1974—five seconds before midnight, I let a whole roll rip past on autowind, catching her as she passed from one year into the next. Edited down, that sequence won me a plaque. Today, it’s noteworthy only because Tasha is the subject.

  “Claudia Katz is too spiky and dykey,” she explained later, as she pulled off her workout shirt and aired a chest that would never need the assistance of the Maidenform Corporation, breasts that would soon have the subscribership of Playboy eating their fingernails. “Claudia Katz is somebody who does chain mail and leather doggie-collar spreads for Bitch Records. Claudia Katz is not somebody you’ll find on the staple page in Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Issue.”

  I pushed back an f-stop and refocused. “Part your lips. Stop. Give me the tip of your tongue, just inside your teeth.” Her mouth was invitingly moist; the star-filters would trap some nice little highlights. Click-whirr click-whirr. “Tilt your head back. Not so much ... stop.” I got a magnified closeup of the muscles beneath her skin, moving through the slow, programmed dance of positions. My big fan was on, making her amber hair float. “Hands together, arms back over your head. Turn, turn, turn ... whoa, right there, stop!” Click-whirr—another thousandth of a second, immobilized. “Sports Illustrated? Why bother aiming it at a bunch of beer-swilling beat-offs in baseball caps, anyway?”

  “You don’t understand the way the world works, do you?” She spoke to the camera lens, because she knew I was in there, watching. “You’ve got to make people look at your picture and either want you, or want to be you. When they anticipate your next picture, that means they’re fantasizing about you. Saying to themselves, “Geez, I wonder what she looks like in bed, without that damned bathing suit on?”

  It was my privilege to know the answer to that one already. Grinning, I baited her: “The women say that, do they?”

  “No, not the women, you dork.” The warm, come-hither expression on her face was entirely contrary to her tone. She was, after all, very good at her job. Click-whirr. “The men. When all the men in the country, in the world, lust for you, then you can say no to the lot of them. If all the men want you, then all the women lust to be you. Voila.”

  “Excluding lesbians, Tibetan lamas and some Kalahari bushmen.” Her reply begged my sarcasm. She expected it. “Not that, um, lust and envy aren’t admirable goals ...”

  If I had not been shooting, her brow would have rearranged and a familiar crease would appear between her eyes, indicating her annoyance at my childish, defeatist, irrelevant, smartass remark. And then she’d say—

  “You just don’t understand.” Right on cue. “But I’ll be on top someday. You’ll see.”

  “I’d like to see you on top after you finish your shower.” It flew out of my mouth before I could stop it. File a lawsuit if you want. “It’s your turn.”

  She decided not to blow up, and rolled her eyes to keep from giggling. Click-whirr. My heart fumbled a beat. I’d just netted a shot of an honest-to-U.S.-Grant human being, peeking out from behind a cover-girl facade of plastic. Nude from the waist up, sensual not from flaunted sexuality, but because her expression let you in on the secret that the whole sham was strictly for laughs and wages. A real woman, not a fantasy image. I wanted that photo. It reduced the rest of the roll to an exhausted, mundane repertoire of tit shots—pretty billboard face, pasted-on bedroom eyes of that inhuman chromium color, the “ideal,” a dime per double dozen from one shining sea to the next, from the four-star hookers at the Beverly Hills Hotel to the smartly attired, totally paranoid corporate ladies who took their Manhattan business lunches in neat quarters.

  “To hell with the shower,” she had said then, lunging at me with mischief in her eyes.

  I still have that photo. Not framed, not displayed. I don’t make the effort to look at it anymore. I can’t.

  Claudia—Tasha—got precisely what she wanted. That part you know, unless you’ve spent the last decade eating wallaby-burgers in the Australian outback. The tiny differences in the way we perceived the world and its opportunities finally grew large enough to wedge between us. Her astronomical income had little to do with it. It was me. I made the classic mistake of trying to keep her by blurting out proclamations of love before my career, my life, was fully mobilized. When you’re clawing through the riptide of your twenties, it’s like a cosmic rule that you cannot be totally satisfied by your emotional life and your professional life simultaneously. We had been climbing partners, until I put everything on hold to fall in love with her. So she left, and became famous. Not many people know my name even today. They don’t have to; I pull down a plush enough income. But it did come to pass that everybody wanted Tasha. Everybody still does.

  I was halfway through my third mug of coffee at the Hotel Restaurant when I admitted to myself that I was consciously avoiding going home. Bad stuff waited for me out there. A Latino busboy had made off with my plate. Past the smokey front windows, Geary Street was acruise with the bunboys that gave the Tenderloin its rep. In New York, where things are less euphemistic, they’re called fudgepackers. I wondered what gays made of all the media fuss over Tasha.

  Nicole was giving me the eye. She’s my favorite combat-hardened coffeeshop waitress in the charted universe, an elegant willowsprout of West Indies mocha black, with a heaving bosom and a lilting, exotic way of speaking the English language. When I watch her move about her chores at the Hostel, I think she’d probably jump my bones on the spot if she thought I could click-whirr her into the Tasha Vode saddle—worldwide model, budding cinema star, headliner. And still missing. When I try to formulate some logical nonsense for what happened to her, I fail just like I did with the street bum. Nothing comes out. Instead, I watch Nicole as she strolls over to recharge my cup. She watches me watching her.

  “How’d you know I wanted more, Nicole?”

  She narrows her panther eyes and blesses me with an evil smile. “Because you white boys always want more, hon.”

  My house cum studio hangs off the north end of the Fieldings’ Point Pier, which is owned by a white-maned, sea-salt type named Dickie Barnhardt, whom no mortal dares address as “Richard.” He sold me my home and plays caretaker to his pier. I live in a fabulous, indifferently-planned spill-together of rooms, like building blocks dumped haphazardly into a corner. Spiderwebbing it together are twelve crooked little stairways, inside and out. At first I called it my Dr. Seuss House. On the very top is a lighthouse tower that still works. Dickie showed me how to operate it, and from time to time I play keeper of the maritime flame because the notion is so irresistibly romantic. In return for spiffing up the place, I got another plaque—this one from the U.S. Lighthouse Society in San Francisco. Lighth
ouses have long been outmoded by navigational technology, and the Society is devoted to a program of historical preservation. There’s no use for my little beacon. But there are nights when I cannot bear to keep it dark.

  After ten years without a postcard, Tasha knew exactly where to find me. Maybe she followed the light. I answered my downstairs door with the alkaline smell of developer clinging to my hands; the doorknob was greened from all the times I’d done it. And there she was.

  Was I surprised? I knew instantly it was her, knew it from the way the ocean tilted and tried to slide off the edge of the world, knew it because all the organs in my body tried to rush together and clog up my throat.

  “You look like you just swallowed a starfish,” she said. She was burrowed into a minky-lush fur that hid everything but the tips of her boots. The chill sea breeze pushed wisps of her hair around. I don’t have to describe what her face looked like. If you want to know, just haul your ass down to Slater’s Periodicals and check out the covers of any half-dozen current glamour and pop-fashion magazines. That’s what she looked like, brother.

  Her eyes seemed backed up with tears, but maybe tears alone were insufficient to breach the Tasha forcefield, or maybe she used some brand of eyeliner so expensive that it was tear-resistant. I asked her why she was crying, invited her in, and then did not give her room to answer me. I was too busy babbling, trying to race past ten years in ten minutes and disguise my nervousness with light banter. She sensed my disorientation and rode it out, patiently, the way she used to. I fixed coffee and brandy. She sipped hers with picture-perfect lips, sitting at the breakfast overlook I’d glassed in last summer. I needed the drink. She needed contact, and hinted at it by letting her leg brush mine beneath the booth-style table. My need for chitchat and my awareness of the past hung around, dumbing things up like a stubborn chaperone. Beyond the booth’s half-turret of windowpanes, green breakers crashed onto the rocks and foamed violently away.

  Her eyes cleared, marking time between me and the ocean outside. They grew darkly stormy, registering the thunderheads that were rolling in with the dusk to lash the beach with an evening sweep of rain.

  At last I ran out of stupid questions.

  She closed my hand up in both of hers. My heartbeat meddled with my breathing. She had already guessed which of my odd little Caligari staircases led to the bedroom loft.

  The night sky was embossed by tines of lightning somewhere between us and Japan. Fat drops splatted against the seaward hurricane glass and skidded to the right as a strong offshore wind caught and blew them. I had opened the shutters on the shore side, and the wooden blades of the ceiling fan cast down cool air to prickle our flesh, sweat-speckled from fervent but honest lovemaking.

  A lot of women had drifted through my viewfinder after Tasha had left me. Except for two or three mental time-bombs and outright snow queens, I coupled enthusiastically with all of them. I forgot how to say no. Sometimes I was artificially nice; most of the time I was making the entire sex pay because one of their number had dumped me. The right people found out my name, yes. My studio filled up with eager young lovelies. No brag, just a living. I settled into a pattern of rejecting them about the time they tried to form any sort of lasting attachment, or tried to storm my meticulously erected walls. Some of them were annoyingly persistent, but I got good at predicting when they would turn sloppy and pleading ... and that made snuffing their flames oddly fulfilling. I was consistent, if not happy. I took a perverse pleasure in booting cover girls out of my bed on a regular basis, and hoped that Joe Normal was envious as hell.

  Lust. Envy. Admirable goals, I thought, as she lay with her hair covering my face, both of her legs hugging one of mine. We had turned out to be pretty much alike after all.

  When I mumbled, she stirred from her doze. “What ...?”

  “I said, I want a picture of you, just like you are, right this moment.”

  Her eyes snapped open, gleaming in the faint light. “No.” She spoke into the hollow of my neck, her voice distant, the sound of it barely impressing the air. “No pictures. No more pictures. Ever.”

  The businessman part of my brain perked up: What neurosis could this be? Was Tasha Vode abandoning her career? Would it be as successful as her abandonment of me? And what was the difference? For what she earned in a month, I could buy the beach frontage below for several miles in both directions. What difference? I’d gotten her back, against all the rules of reality, and here I was looking for the loophole. Her career had cleaved us apart, and now it was making us cleave back together. Funny how a word can have opposing definitions.

  After five minutes of tossing and turning, she decided not to make me work for it. “Got anything warm?” She cracked a helpless smile. “Down in the kitchen, I mean.”

  “Real cocoa. Loaded with crap that’s bad for you. Not from an envelope. Topped with marshmallows, also real, packed with whatever carcinogens the cocoa doesn’t have.”

  “Sounds luscious. Bring a whole pot.”

  “You can help.”

  “No. I want to watch the storm.” Water pelted the glass. Now and then lightning would suggest how turbulent the ocean had gotten, and I thought of firing up my beacon. Perhaps there was a seafarer out there who was as romantic about boats as I was about lighthouses, and he’d gotten caught in the squall without the latest in hightech directional doodads.

  I did it. Then I dusted off an old TV tray for use as a serving platter, and brought the cocoa pot and accoutrements up the narrow stairs, clanking and rattling all the way.

  My carbon-arc beam scanned the surface of the water in long, lazy turns. She was facing her diaphanous reflection in the glass, looking through her own image into the dark void beyond.

  I had pulled on canvas pants to make the kitchen run, but Tasha was still perfectly naked and nakedly perfect, a siren contemplating shipwrecks. She drifted back from the window. I pitied my imaginary seafarer, stuck out in the cold, away from the warmth of her.

  “You know those natives in Africa?” she asked as I served. “The ones who wouldn’t let missionaries take their pictures because they thought the camera would trap their souls?”

  “It’s a common belief. West Indians still hold to the voodoo value of snapshots. Mucho mojo. Even bad snapshots.” I couldn’t help that last remark. What a pro I am.

  “You remember April McClanahan?” She spoke toward the sea. To my reflection.

  “You mean Crystal Climax, right?”

  She nodded. “Also of wide renown as Cherry Whipp.”

  All three were a lady with whom Tasha had shared a garret during her flirtation with the hardcore film industry in the early 1970s. Don’t swallow the negative hype for a second—every woman who is anyone in film or modeling has made similar contacts. Tasha never moved beyond a couple of relatively innocuous missionary-position features, respectable porn for slumming middle-class couples; a one-week run at the Pussycat Theatre, max. April, on the other hand, moved into the porn mainstream—Hustler covers, videocassette top-lines, “Fully Erect” notices in the film ratings. And no, she didn’t get strangled or blow her brains all over a motel room with a Saturday Night Special. Last I heard, she was doing TV commercials for bleach and fabric softener as “Valerie Winston,” sort of a Marilyn Chambers in reverse.

  “April once told me she’d figured out, with a calculator, that she was responsible for more orgasms in one year than anybody else,” Tasha said, holding the big porcelain mug with both hands to warm her palms. “She averaged out how many movie houses were showing her films, how many times per day, multiplied by however-many guys she figured were getting their jollies in the audience per show. Plus whoever was doing likewise to her pictures in God knows how many stroke magazines. Or gratifying themselves to the sex advice column she did for Leather Life. I remember her looking at me and saying, ‘Think of all the energy that must produce. All those orgasms were born because of me. Me.’ ”

  “I’m sure there are legions of guys getting the
ir jollies to your photos, too,” I said. “No doubt, somebody is out there yanking his crank to Christie Brinkley’s smile, right now.”

  “It’s not the same thing. April was tough. She got something back.” She sat on the bed facing me, tucking her legs beneath her. She reminded me of Edvard Eriksen’s famous sculpture of the Little Mermaid, rendered not in bronze but shaped from milk-white moonstone, heated by living yellow electricity called down from a black sky, and warmed by warm Arctic eyes—the warmest blue there is in our world.

  “You mean April didn’t mind getting that porn-star rap laid on her—literally?”

  I could see the sadness in her being blotted away by acid bitterness. “The people in porn have it easier. The thuds out there in Bozo-land know in their tiny little hearts that porn stars fuck for jobs. Whereas cover girls or legit models who are rarely seen in the buff, or full-frontal, are suspect.”

  “You can’t deny the public their imaginary intrigues.”

  “What it always boils down to is, ‘Climb off it, bitch—who did you really blow to get that last Vogue cover?’ They feed off you. They achieve gratification in a far dirtier way, by wanting you and resenting you at the same time. By hating your success enough to keep all the tabloids in business. It’s a draining thing, all taking and no giving, like ...”