“Psychic vampirism?” It was so easy for someone in her position to sense that her public loved her only in the way a tumor loves its host. But a blacker part of my mind tasted a subtle tang of revenge. She’d left me to go chase what she wanted ... and when she’d finally sunk in her teeth, she’d gotten the flavor of bile and chalk and ashes. I suppose I should have been ashamed of myself for embracing that hateful satisfaction so readily. And from the hurt neutrality on her face, she might have been reading the thoughts in my head. She watched her cocoa instead of drinking it—always a bad sign.
Just as much as I never said no, I never apologized. Not for anything.
After a cool silence, she said, “You’re saying to yourself, ‘She’s got it made, for christsake. What right does she have to be dissatisfied with anything?’ Right?”
“Maybe a tiny bit, yeah.” She let me take her hand regardless. She needed the contact. The missing ten years settled between us to fog the issue. I was resentful, yes. Did I want to help her? Same answer. When I guiltily tried to pull back my hand she kept hold of it. It made me feel forgiven; absolved, almost.
“In science class, in eighth grade, they taught us that when you smell something, your nose is actually drawing in tiny molecular bits of whatever it is you’re smelling. Particles.”
“Which means you clamped both hands over your mouth and nose whenever you passed a dog turd on the sidewalk after school, am I right?” My prescription for sticky emotional situations is rigid: Always—always joke your way out.
Her smile came and went. “The idea stuck in my head. If you smelled something long enough, it would run out of molecules and poof—it wouldn’t exist anymore.”
“Uh-huh, if you stood around sniffing for a couple of eons.” Fortunately, I’d forgotten most of the junk with which school had tried to clog my head. About hard science I knew squat, like math. But I did know that there were billions or trillions of molecules in any given object.
“My point is that each one of us only has so much to give.” She cleared her throat, almost as though it hurt her, and pressed valiantly onward. “What if you were to run out of pieces all of a sudden?”
“Happens all the time,” I said airily. “That’s what a nervous breakdown is. Entertainers who can’t give their audiences an ounce more, collapse onstage. Corporate guys get physically ill and can’t go near a meeting room. People exceed their operational limits ... and you’re in one of the most high-pressure professions there is.”
“No.” She was shaking her head to prevent me from clouding her train of thought. “I mean run out of pieces literally. Suppose every photo of me ever taken was an infinitesimal piece? Every magazine ad, every negative, every frame of motion picture film—another tiny molecule of me, stolen away to feed an audience that is never satiated. And when someone is fully consumed—vampirized—they move on, still hungry, to pick their next victim by making him or her a star. That’s why they’re called consumers.”
I looked up from the muddy lees in my cup just in time to see the passing lighthouse beam blank the ghost of her reflection from the windowpanes. Just like her smile, it came and went.
Her voice had downshifted into the husky and quavering register of confession. Now I was really uncomfortable. “I know there are celebrities who’ve had their picture taken two million more times than I have. But maybe they can afford it.” She stretched across the bed to place her head on my thigh and hug my waist, connecting herself. “Maybe some of us don’t have so many pieces ...”
I held her while the storm rallied for a renewed assault. My modest but brave beam of lamplight chopped through it. She did not grimace, or redden, or sob; her tears just began spilling out, coursing down in perfect wet lines to darken my pantleg.
Did I want to help her?
She feared that consumers wanted so much of her that pretty soon there would be nothing left to consume. And Claudia Katz no longer existed, except in my head. I’d fallen in love with her, become addicted to her ... and now she was clinging to me because Tasha Vode was almost used up, and after that, if there was no Claudia, there was nothing. She had not brought her exhaustion home to my stoop to prove she could still jerk my leash after ten years. She had done it because the so-called friends who had gorged themselves on her personality were now nodding and clucking about celebrity lifestyles and answering their machines and juggling in new appointments to replace her as the undertow dragged her away to oblivion.
I stroked her hair until it was all out of her face. The tears dried while the seastorm churned. She snoozed, curled up, her face at peace, and I gently disengaged. Then, with a zealot’s devotion toward proving her fears were all in her imagination, I went downstairs to load up one of my Nikons.
I asked her how she felt the next morning. When she said terrific, I spilled the beans.
“You what—?”
“I repeat for clarity: I took pictures of you while you were asleep. Over a hundred exposures of you wound up in my dark blue sheets, sleeping through a gale. And guess what—you’re still among the living this morning.” I refilled her coffee cup and used my tongs to pluck croissants out of the warmer.
She cut lose a capacious sigh, but put her protests on hold. “Don’t do that again. Or you’ll lose me.”
I wasn’t sure whether she meant she’d fade to nothingness on the spot, or stomp out if I defied her superstitions a second time. “You slept like a stone, love. Barely changed position all night.” My ego was begging to be told that our mattress gymnastics had put her under, but when I saw the care she took to lift her coffee cup with both hands, I knew better.
“Look at this shit,” she said with disgust. “I can barely hold up my head, let alone my coffee. I’m slouching. Models aren’t supposed to slouch, for christsake.” She forced her sitting posture straight and smiled weakly. Her voice was a bit hoarse this morning, almost clogged.
“Hey, lady—slouch away.” Worry stabbed at my insides while I tried to sound expansive and confident. “Do what thou wilt. Sleep all day if that’s your pleasure. Just wait till you discover what I’ve learned to cook in the last ten years. Real salads. Stuff you have to sauté. Food with wine in it. I can artistically dish up all the squares you require. Loaf on the beach; read my library. I have said it; it is good.” I watched a glint of happiness try to burn away the caution in her eyes. She did so want to believe me. “And no more photographs. Promise. Anybody who tries has gotta shoot through yours truly.”
She brightened at that. I’d gotten the reaction I wanted from her. It was the challenge-and-reward game. And goddamned if that tiny acid-drop of doubt didn’t settle into my brain, sizzling—what if what if what if.
What if I was playing it safe because she might be right?
“I don’t want to see those pictures,” she said. “Don’t even develop them.”
“I’ll toss ’em in the woodstove right now, if that’s what you’d like.” I’d made my point.
She gave a theatrical shudder. “Don’t burn them. That’s too much like a horror story I read once. I might shuffle off the coil along with my own pictures.”
The rolls of film were lined up on my miscellaneous shelf downstairs, in the darkroom, the room with the red lightbulbs. Expose the film to anything but that mellow, crimson glow and it blanked into silver nitrate nothingness. The rolls could stay down there, sealed into their little black plastic vials. Forever, if that’s what she wanted.
She kept watch on the sea while we destroyed our Continental breakfast. “I thought maybe we could brave the overcast later, and drive down past Point Pitt for dinner,” I said. “Steaks, salads and a bottle or two of Cabernet. If anybody asks whether you’re Tasha Vode, just blink and say, ‘Who?’ ”
The life had surged back in to her expression. “Maybe. Or maybe seafood. But I want you to do something for me, first.”
“Your wish ...”
“Don’t you have any work to do today?”
Who were we kidding? I think we both knew I’d
do almost anything she asked. “Nothing that can’t wait.”
“Then carry me back up to the bedroom.”
My narrow little stairway was a tight shot, but we negotiated it successfully after a mild bump or two. Our robes got in the way, so we left them crumpled on the stairs about halfway up.
Her need for contact was vital.
Outside the bedroom window, it got dark. I did not notice. All I could see was her.
Her eyes were capable of a breath-catching syllabary of expressions, and I felt my own eyes become lenses, trying to record them. I stopped being friend or lover to be a camera, to try and trap what it was about her that made strangers hear those jungle drums. There were thousands, maybe millions of men out there who fantasized being inside her the way I was, who played my role and spoke my half of the dialogue whenever they passed a newsstand. Their wanting never ceased.
Her eyes told me she knew what I was up to. They did not approve.
Hers was one of the few callings that made you a veteran before puberty was left behind. If you lucked out, it could make you wealthy while still a child; if you weren’t so lucky it could leave you a burned out has-been before you graduated high school. The attrition rate was worse than that for professional athletes, who could at least fall back on commercials for razors and lite beer when middle age called them out. But she did not seem the sort of human being who could relish the living death of celebrity game shows. Staying beautiful had been an unending war; each touchup a skirmish that stole away another irreclaimable chunk of time. Doing it for ten years, and staying the best, had been draining. Her outside was being used up. Her hipbones felt like flint arrowheads beneath soft tissue paper.
Her hand slid down and felt the cingulum cinched drawstring tight above my balls. Comprehension dawned in her eyes, followed by that strange tolerance of hers for my various idiocies. I can’t relate the exact sequence (to come was, for me, a necessary agony by now), but I was almost certain that her rapidfire contractions began the instant she slipped the knot of the cingulum. Unbound, I offloaded lavishly. Her fingers whitened with pressure on my shoulders, then relaxed, reddening with blood. I watched the pupils of those warm Arctic eyes expand hotly in the dimness as she took what was mine. Until that moment, her own orgasms had seemed insubstantial somehow. Disconnected from her. Spasms of her equipment more than sparky showers in her brain. Her breath had barely raised condensation on my skin. Now she came into focus, filled, flushed, and radiating heat.
After holding me for a lapse of time impossible to measure, she said, “Don’t try to impress. You’re not performing with a capital P.” Her eyes saw that I had been intimidated by the imagined skills of her past decade of lovers, and thus the girdle cord trick. Stupid. “Don’t you see? You’re the only one who ever gave anything back.”
“Tasha, you don’t really believe that—”
“Try Claudia.” It was not a command but a gentle urging. But it, too, was vital. “You’re the only one who can give me back some of myself; replace what the others have taken. Give me more.” Her reverent tone bordered on love—the word I could rarely force myself to speak, even frivolously.
Who better to give her back some of herself? I was a goddamn repository of her identity. With other women I had never bothered worrying, and so had never been befuddled as I was now. I’d made love to Claudia, not the exterior self that the rest of the world was busy eating. And now she was steering.
I gave her back to herself; her eyes said so, her voice said so, and I tried to hush the voice in my head that said I was not being compensated for this drain. I tried to ignore the numberless black canisters of film that beckoned me from the room with the red light. And later, past midnight, when the storm thundered in, I carefully took twice what I had given her. No matter how much we have, as Nicole the waitress would say, we always want more.
“Skull full of sparrow shit,” she said the following day, as we bumped knees and elbows trying to dress for dinner. “Gorgeous but ditzy. Vacuous. Vapid. Pampered. Transient values. A real spoiled-rotten—”
“I think I get the stereotype,” I said. “You’re just not stupid enough to be happy as a model anymore, right?”
“Ex-model.” She watched the sea bounce back the glare of late afternoon. “You don’t believe me, do you?”
“What I believe scares the crap out of me.” I tried to veneer what I said with good humor, to defang my fears. “I believe, for example, that you might be a ghost. And ghosts never stay.”
She waggled her eyebrows. “I could haunt your lighthouse. Or maybe I’m just your wish-fulfillment.”
“Don’t laugh. I’ve often thought that I’m not really earning a living as a photographer.” Merely speaking that last word caused the slightest hesitation in the natural flow of her movements; she was that sensitized to it. “I’m not really sleeping with Tas ... uh, Claudia Katz.” She caught that slip, too, but forgave it. “Actually, I’m really a dirtbag litter basket picker up in the Mission. And all of this is a hallucinatory fantasy I invented while loitering near a magazine rack with Tasha Vode’s picture at hand, hm?”
“Ack,” she said with mock horror. “You’re one of them. The pod-folk.”
“Are we gone, or what?”
She stepped back from the mirror, inside of a bulky, deep-blue ski sweater with maroon patterning, soft boots of gray suede, and black slacks so tight they made my groin ache. Her eyes filled up with me, and they were the aquamarine color of the sunlit ocean outside. “We’re gone,” she said, and led the way down the stairs.
I followed, thinking that when she left me again I’d at least have those hundreds of photographs of her in my bed. Ghosts never stay.
Outside there was a son of a bitch, and an asshole.
The son of a bitch was crouched in ambush right next to my front door. His partner, the asshole, was leaning on my XLS, getting cloudy fingerprints all over the front fender. I had backed out the front door, to lock it, and heard his voice talking, before anything else.
“Miss Vode, do you have any comment on your abrupt—”
Tasha—Claudia—started to scream.
I turned as she recoiled and grabbed my hand. I saw the asshole. Any humanity he might have claimed was obliterated by the vision of a huge, green check for an exclusive article that lit up his eyes. A pod-man. Someone had recognized us in the restaurant last night, and sent him to ambush us in the name of the public’s right to know. He brandished a huge audio microphone at us as though it was a scepter of power. It had a red foam windscreen and looked like a phallic lollipop.
Her scream sliced his question neatly off. She scrambled backward, hair flying, trying to interpose me between herself and the enemy, clawing at her head, crushing her eyes shut and screaming. That sound filled my veins with liquid nitrogen.
The son of a bitch was behind us. From the instant we had stepped into the sunlight, he’d had us nailed in his viewfinder. The video rig into which he was harnessed ground silently away; the red bubble light over the lens hood was on.
And Tasha screamed.
Maybe she jerked her hand away, maybe I let it go, but her grip went foggy in mine as I launched myself at the cameraman, eating up the distance between us like a barracuda. Only once in my whole life had I ever hit a man in anger, and now I doubled my own personal best by delivering a roundhouse punch right into the black glass maw of his lens, filling his face up with his own camera, breaking his nose, two front teeth, and the three middle fingers of my fist. He faded to black and went down like a medieval knight trapped by the weight of his own armor. I swarmed over him and used my good hand to rip out his electronic heart, wresting away portacam, tape and all. Cables shredded like torn ligaments and shiny tape viscera trailed as I heaved it, spinning, over the pier rail and into a sea the same color as Tasha’s eyes. The red light expired.
Her scream ... wasn’t. There was a sound of pain as translucent as rice paper, thin as a flake of mica, drowned out by the roar of water meetin
g beach.
By the time I cranked my head around—two dozen slow-motion shots, easy—neither of her was there anymore. I thought I saw her eyes, in Arctic-cold afterburn, winking out last.
“Did you see—?”
“You’re trespassing!” bellowed Dickie Barnhardt, wobbling toward the asshole with his side-to-side Popeye gait, pressed flat and pissed off. The asshole’s face was flash-frozen into a bloodless bas-relief of shock and disbelief. His mouth hung slack, showing off a lot of expensive fillings. His mike lay forgotten at his feet.
“Did you see ... did ... she just ...”
Dickie bounced his ashwood walking stick off the asshole’s forehead, and he joined his fallen mike in a boneless tumble on the planks of the pier. Dickie’s face was alight with a bizarre expression that said it had been quite awhile since he’d found a good excuse to raise physical mayhem, and he was proud of his forthright defense of tenant and territory. “You okay?” he said, squinting at me and spying the fresh blood on my hand.
“Dickie, did you see Tasha?” My own voice was switching in and out. My throat constricted. My unbroken hand closed on empty space. Too late.
He grinned a seaworthy grin at me and nudged the unconscious idiot at his feet, who remained slack. “Who’s Tasha, son?”
I drink my coffee left-handed, and the cast mummifying my right hand gives me something to stare at contemplatively.
I think most often of that videotape, decomposing down there among the sand sharks and the jellyfish that sometimes bob to the surface near Dickie’s pier. I think that the tiny bit of footage recorded by that poor, busted-up son-of-a-bitch cameraman would not have mattered one damn, if I hadn’t shot so much film of Tasha to prove she had nothing to fear. So many pieces. I pushed her right to the edge, cannibalizing her in the name of love.
The black plastic cans of film are still on the shelf down in my darkroom, lined up like inquisitors already convinced of my guilt. The thought of dunking that film in developer makes me want to stick a gun in my ear and pull the trigger, twice if I had the time.
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