We became each other’s obsessions, bound by need and craving and death. Later, she stood naked in her living room, high heels punching depressions into the deep pile carpet. Her place was in the Hills, and when we looked out, we could see forever. The glittering lights of Hollywood sparkled far beneath us, dreams made and dashed in the blink of an eye. Swing music played as we moved around that apartment, her with her grace and elegance, me with my clumsy efficiency. Every time we kissed, she told me she loved me, and I went on believing her. I was in jeans and a T-shirt from a band I’d once seen in Encino. When she pulled me tight, her sweat soaked through everything I wore, and whenever I slept alone, I wore that shirt to remember the way she smelled. But smells fade and sometimes grow sour.
When I got close I couldn’t help but notice her scars. They crisscrossed her arms like fine lattice. I expected tears in her eyes when I touched her chin, but they were dry.
“How many times?” I asked.
“I lost count.” Her voice was thin but strong. She didn’t look at me. She kept her dry eyes on the lights below, all those stories she’ll never hear.
“How many more times?”
“Who can say?”
“If I asked you not to kill yourself, would you listen?”
She stood apart from me, her naked body bathed in the warm glow of her chandelier, her arms and breasts and stomach raised dozens of times in those horrid, beautiful scars. Her mouth, a bow, spoke in a whisper.
“You would never ask,” she said, “and I would never listen.”
I followed her into the bedroom and she lay down, begging me to enter her so I could know how cold she was inside, how dead she already was. But no…no. Her warmth enveloped me and I thrust harder and harder still, hoping for reaction, desperate for signs of life. The only coldness about her were those eyes when they finally settled on me. They were tombs, gaping and empty and ancient. Once she cried out, and it was a victory. An omen that she would be breathing in the morning.
“I was waiting for you,” she told me, propped up on one elbow, that blond hair pooling onto her pillow. “These scars were marking time.”
“You can’t know that,” I said, but of course she could. “You can’t talk like that.” But of course she could.
“You don’t think I know what you are? Who you are?”
“Jessica, how can you know when I don’t even know myself?”
She sat up and adjusted pillows behind her back so she would be more comfortable. Funny that, how even in the midst of death she wanted to feel just a bit better. “Tell me,” she said, “who was your first?”
I closed my eyes and smelled her hair, that huckleberry perfume she wore. Feigning ignorance would only draw it out. She wasn’t the first to ask this question. She wouldn’t be the last. But for some reason I felt myself pause before speaking. Jessica didn’t want this knowledge, she only thought she did. I didn’t want to tell her, but I was going to. Sometimes telling the truth destroys us slowly, in increments we can’t feel right away.
When I was nine, the darkness of who I was had only begun to singe the edges of my life. We went swimming, Todd and I, every day alone. He wanted to be a Triton, he said, and he would rule Atlantis in his city underwater. There was a pond near his house and we’d swim deep, deep, deep, looking for lost civilizations and pretending to find them before racing back up to the surface to gasp for breath. Sometimes Todd broke the surface crying.
“The Tritons,” he told me, “they don’t need to breathe air. They’ve got gills. They can stay underwater a long time. Forever if they have to. Why can’t we be Tritons? Why can’t we live down there?”
I might have told someone. I should have. Todd’s single-minded obsession with the bottom of the pond and the people who, by all rights, should live down there had begun to terrify me. That creeping darkness kept me awake at nights. I saw his face clearly in my dreams, plunging down, his white face getting lost in the murk. In the daylight hours, I sensed the darkness all around him, gripping his skin like hundreds of octopus suckers. The small rime of beach around the pond was nothing but a loose crescent of sand, and intervals of scrubgrass birthed from it like dry miscarriages. Todd would sit there for an hour or longer, contemplating the still surface of the pond before diving in and staying under for obscene lengths of time. He was giving himself brain damage, I worried. You can’t hold your breath for that long, not if you want to go on living.
“I don’t know when the idea finally came to him,” I told Jessica, lying on top of her while my penis shriveled and found its way out of her. “And to this day, I don’t know if he did what he did because he wanted to live or die.”
Her eyes were still on me, like portals into eternity. “Does it matter?”
“I think so. I need to know if the Tritons stuff, the Atlantis stuff, if that was just a smokescreen.”
“What do you think?”
The day Todd died, it was early October. In Los Angeles, that’s still the warm season. T-shirts. Shorts. We wouldn’t need our occasional sweaters until late November at the earliest. But it was cold that day, too cold for swimming. But when I went around to his place, he had a towel with him and swim trunks, and the goggles he sometimes wore when he wanted to dive deep.
“You can come with me,” Todd said, “or you can stay home.”
That threw me and I only followed him, mutely, to our pond. The wind was up and the pond’s surface rippled, as if in anticipation. Maybe that’s what it was. And what about me? Was I anticipatory? I don’t know. I’d like to think I wasn’t. When I think about that day now, all I can think of are the clouds that whispered across the sun, and the pall it cast over our little swath of earth and water. We keep coming back: Do I have a say? Do I have a desire? Am I the cause or just an effect? I don’t know.
But I suspect that a part of me, a very small part, was looking forward to this.
The pond and the area around it were silent. If we’d chosen to, we could have pretended we were kings of the world here, and no one could have disputed us. Everything was deathly still when he threw his towel down in a heap to the ground. He stripped off his shirt and added it to the pile. He stared defiantly at me and fished something out of one of his trunks pockets. It didn’t take me long to realize what it was: an X-Acto knife, so like a scalpel, the kind of knife you use for crafting and hobbies and cutting scars into your arms so deep they’ll still show up years later.
“Todd.” Only that and nothing more.
“I know how to do it,” he told me. “I know how to be a Triton.”
“You do?”
“I thought my lungs were the problem. But that’s not how fish breathe. Fish don’t have lungs. And neither do the Tritons.”
“I’m your best friend, Todd.”
“I know you are. I know,” he said, and for a moment he only looked miserably lost. I wanted to hold him by his shoulders and keep him there. I wanted to make sure he didn’t do anything stupid. This moment, I would think much later, is why I was here. When I think back on his momentarily sad face, I know that if I’d wanted to stop him, that was the time. Inaction is my real gift. It would repeat on me over and over and over, countless times, stretching across the vast awful gulf of my life. A moment of doubt. A moment of will. It was in Todd for only a second and I failed to jump on it. Then it passed.
“They have gills. That’s what the Tritons have. That’s what I need.”
I didn’t say another thing. His eyes met mine, and I saw in them what I later saw in Jessica’s eyes. Tombstone stillness and six feet of dark. He raised his knife and, almost faster than I could watch, sliced three deep slits on the sides of his throat. Then, never breaking eye contact, repeated on the other side. Six cuts altogether, all sliced in the wink of an eye, and I did nothing but watch. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, as if on a timer, blood spurted out through the cuts all at once, surging down his throat, cascading over his pale, skinny chest. I merely watched. It was all I could do.
&
nbsp; He tried to speak, but his voice was only a croak: “Don’t try to stop me,” I think he said, but I couldn’t be sure. Why would I try to stop him? We’d gone too far for that. I stood on the shore as he stutter-stumbled to the water, the blood gushing from him puddling to the sand at his feet, coloring it, staining it. He didn’t dive into the water so much as fell into it, a fish flopping back into his natural habitat. Would he be happier underwater? Would he be a Triton? I glanced down at the beach and saw that he’d left his goggles behind; a small splat of blood oozed over one of the lenses and was already drying there. When I looked back up, Todd was gone.
They didn’t find him for months. I had hoped they never would. He wanted to be underwater, and they should have left him there. I saw the pictures when they dragged him above the surface, and he no longer looked like Todd. The skin of his feet and hands had sloughed off and his belly was bloated as if he were pregnant. Turtles had eaten the skin from his eyes, and I thought about the goggles he should have worn. He no longer looked human, but that had been his intention all along. Was this what Tritons looked like? I wondered. Was this what Todd had wanted to be?
I told this story to Jessica without affect. We were naked, my semen drying in her; there was no chance of her getting pregnant. My seed is dead.
“Why didn’t you try to stop him?” she asked me levelly.
“It was too late. The knife…”
“No.” Her voice was soft, calm. “Why didn’t you try to stop him?”
I took a breath in and let it spill out from me. “Because he was my friend. I loved him. And he wanted to die.”
“And you don’t stop people who want to die?”
Honesty ate at me like a rabid creature. “No. I never have.”
“Never? How many have there been?” How many times were we going to ask this question?
“I couldn’t tell you, Jessica.” She measured me and didn’t ask me to clarify whether couldn’t meant wouldn’t. I might not have been able to, anyway. My memory is long and my memory is spotty. How long ago had I known Todd? He stuck in my brain like a bone down a throat: You wouldn’t think a nine-year-old could contain so much blood. You wouldn’t think he could walk with so much of it out of him.
Jessica closed her eyes again. Her huckleberry perfume lingered in the air, hovering between her and me like a secret. “I want to dance forever,” she said. “And hear the music I love. I want to spin in the dark. Will you help me dance?”
I kissed her lips, wanting to tell her that I couldn’t help. I could only stand by and watch. I could only love her and let her go. But maybe she knew all that.
As she drifted off, she spoke one more time. “Who are you?”
But I couldn’t tell her that, either, and I think she knew that, too. I think she knew everything, even the things I didn’t know. I watched her sleep, wishing I could wish her awake, wishing I could wish her alive. Wishing I hadn’t fallen in love with her. Or, better, that my love could have saved her.
I left her bed and her room and went to the huge plate-glass window that overlooked the city and pressed my hand to the glass. Somewhere out there, love was building something. Love was making people better. Love was making people live.
I took my hand off the glass, expecting a handprint there. It was blank and clear and I never left a trace.
—
There was swing music playing the night I followed her down to the Santa Monica Pier. A man was set up midway down with a boom box and he was singing a song I hadn’t heard since the nineties: “Jump, Jive, and Wail,” the old Louis Prima song. Jessica ran ahead of me, her green dress flying under the cover of that blanket of stars above. My heart almost broke in its love for her. Everyone on the pier that night watched her running, briefly entranced by her beauty. But beauty is fleeting, even exceptional beauty. If you wrap yourself in it too long or too often, it grows stale. How many people fell in love with Jessica that night at the Pier? How many, just as quickly, fell out of love with her, simply because she moved too fast? That wasn’t me. Maybe I couldn’t love her forever. Maybe I wouldn’t even try. But I would love her for a very long time, because love is what I am built for. It’s one of the things I was built for.
“I want you to kiss me,” she said, spinning and stopping me in my tracks. She could have been a beauty queen. She could have been a novelist. She could have been an astrophysicist. What else could she have been if she didn’t want so badly to be dead? “Under this moon. Above the ocean. I want you to kiss me. Will you kiss me?” Please don’t die. Please don’t leave me. You are everything to me, please don’t do this.
I kissed her, inhaling her scent, closing my eyes and letting my hands plunge into her hair. I could still hear swing music, because nothing stops but lives.
“Jessica,” I said to her when she let me up for air, but I had no more words. They were caught in my throat, held back by my nature, this terrible thing I do. Her eyes searched mine, allowing glimpses into her soul. The lantern above shone into them. Until this moment, the only truth those eyes held was finality.
But now, oh, God, now they told a new truth.
She wanted me to stop her. Now that death was no longer a romantic, tragic concept to ponder far above the city, now that we were at the proving ground, she wanted me to stop her. But this was the moment of my inaction. This dreadful moment I’d been stuck inside too often to count, and now I was in it again. We both were. Oh, God. Oh my God, Jessica.
“I guess—” she began, and now tears spilled down her cheeks. They were on mine, too. Because I can cry. I can have compassion. Did I cause this or did I just allow her to find me? I needed to know. I needed answers. I needed any answer.
She pressed the tip of her finger to my cheek, allowing my tear to dampen her finger. Then she dipped it into her mouth and tried to smile. I said her name again, but my voice was a whisper; it was drowned out by the music and the tides. It didn’t matter. Even before I could finish speaking, she had turned and was running toward the guardrails at the end of the pier. Above us, the roller coaster screamed. So did I.
Like an athlete, she vaulted the guardrail, her legs tucking up under her as she moved into a dive. Her cornsilk hair flew, catching glints of lantern light and the moonglow. Low tide’s fetid stench swam up at me; only her huckleberry perfume had masked it. I ran after her, shrieking her name. I got to the guardrail just in time to see her plummeting, her arms at her sides, a lawn dart shrieking toward earth. When her beautiful head connected with the rocks below, it exploded. Brains erupted in a pink-white geyser. Blood flew in a fan, lapped immediately away by the encroaching water. The rest of her collapsed in a heap, thudding unceremoniously to the damp sand. Greedily, the ocean tried at once to take her. As far as I know, it did. When she had been reduced to a thing on the beach, I turned and walked away. And for a while, I kept walking.
One day I will forget Jessica, because love is fleeting and death is forever. But I remember her now, that huckleberry perfume, the scent of my soul, tumbling down and down and down. When I come to Los Angeles, it’s because everyone I have ever loved is from here, and most of them have died here. I stand in the doorway of this bar and sip whiskey and think of her.
Swing music is on the jukebox, and there’s a man sitting on a stool who has looked my way twice. He has basset-hound eyes, the eyes of a fellow for whom life has been a series of torments, minor and major. He has come here tonight not expecting to meet anyone, and instead, he has found me. I’m so glad. Before I even cross the floor, I have fallen in love with him.
—
My lasting memory of her is at the pier, looking back at me and begging silently to be set free. Is my desperate need to give people what they want a blessing or a curse? How much beauty must crumble because I can’t or won’t stop its destruction?
Pork Pie Hat
Peter Straub
Part One
1
If you know jazz, you know about him, and the title of this memoir tells you w
ho he is. If you don’t know the music, his name doesn’t matter. I’ll call him Hat. What does matter is what he meant. I don’t mean what he meant to people who were touched by what he said through his horn. (His horn was an old Selmer Balanced Action tenor saxophone, most of its lacquer worn off.) I’m talking about the whole long curve of his life, and the way that what appeared to be a long slide from joyous mastery to outright exhaustion can be seen in another way altogether.
Hat did slide into alcoholism and depression. The last ten years of his life amounted to suicide by malnutrition, and he was almost transparent by the time he died in the hotel room where I met him. Yet he was able to play until nearly the end. When he was working, he would wake up around seven in the evening, listen to Frank Sinatra or Billie Holiday records while he dressed, get to the club by nine, play three sets, come back to his room sometime after three, drink and listen to more records (he was on a lot of those records), and finally go back to bed around the time day people begin thinking about lunch. When he wasn’t working, he got into bed about an hour earlier, woke up about five or six, and listened to records, and drank through his long upside-down day.
It sounds like a miserable life, but it was just an unhappy one. The unhappiness came from a deep, irreversible sadness. Sadness is different from misery, at least Hat’s was. His sadness seemed impersonal—it did not disfigure him, as misery can do. Hat’s sadness seemed to be for the universe, or to be a larger than usual personal share of a sadness already existing in the universe. Inside it, Hat was unfailingly gentle, kind, even funny. His sadness seemed merely the opposite face of the equally impersonal happiness that shone through his earlier work.
In Hat’s later years, his music thickened, and sorrow spoke through the phrases. In his last years, what he played often sounded like heartbreak itself. He was like someone who had passed through a great mystery, who was passing through a great mystery, and had to speak of what had seen, what he was seeing.
Halloween Carnival, Volume 5 Page 8