The Skin Above My Knee

by Marcia Butler

  The place was noisy and busy, with strong lighting that allowed for quick assessment upon entering. I scanned the bar area and took my stool in a dark corner toward the back. Jim, the bartender, was on duty: just the man I was looking for. I’d slept with him a few times since my breakup with Don G. and in a weak moment succumbed to lending him the two hundred dollars in cash I had tucked away in my apartment for emergencies. He’d stopped answering my repeated calls about paying me back, so occasionally I stopped into the “The Local,” hoping to stake my claim on his upcoming paycheck or his nightly tips. Already in a craggy mood from my encounter with the guy wielding the hammer, I’d reached my limit and was generally sour on men.

  Clint Eastwood walked up beside me. At least that’s what my confused double take confirmed. Upon third inspection I saw that he was just a dead ringer. Settling in next to me, he ordered his drink from Jim.

  Back to my relentless nagging, I slammed my fist onto the bar to get Jim’s attention, startling Clint.

  “When can you pay me back, Jim?”

  “In a month, I promise.”

  “You said that six weeks ago.”

  “I know. But my brother’s been staying with me, and I have to pay for him.”

  “That’s not my problem! In the meantime, I have stuff to buy. You know—food? Clothes? Can’t you just give me your tips from this evening?”

  “I’ll call you, I promise.”

  “Right.”

  Clint was obviously eavesdropping on the unfolding scene, intrigued by the argument between a young white girl and a six-foot-six bearded black man.

  He swiveled on his stool to face me, breaking the torque of the argument.

  “What’re you drinking? Can I buy you the next?”

  “It’s just club soda, but sure, why not?”

  I was careful to keep my newly scabbed palms hidden. Bruce, his actual name, ordered another Drambuie, a sweet and potent liqueur just like ouzo, and my club soda. Grateful that someone was taking me off his back, Jim knocked twice on the bar: a signal that the drinks were on the house.

  “I don’t want a free drink by the way! I’d rather have the money! Jesus!”

  I screamed it at Jim’s back as he turned quickly away from us, grateful to be saved by a pseudo movie star.

  “Are you two a couple?”

  “I slept with him a few times.…He owes me money.”

  “You live nearby?”

  “Chelsea.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I play the oboe.”

  “Ah. What’s that?”

  “It’s a musical instrument.”

  “You mean you play in an orchestra?”

  “I wish.”

  Back and forth we chatted. Over the next hour, he eventually pried out of me the salient surface details of my life. Question after question; one thousand questions. I liked the attention, and it was easy to answer in the fewest words possible. Each short answer raised another question. For me, it was an exercise; for him, a trivia game. Jim just kept the free drinks coming.

  “Do you make a living at it?”

  “Why? Does that matter?”

  “No. I’m just curious.…I don’t know any classical musicians.”

  I sighed, exasperated at having to explain the facts of life to a musical neophyte.

  “Okay. Look. I work as a waitress, but I also play some music jobs. More, lately. It’s a balancing act.”

  “Don’t you want to know what I do?”

  “No.”

  “Are you always this cranky?”

  I thought for a few seconds. Why was I being such a bitch?

  “I’m sorry. So. What do you do?”

  “None of your business.”

  We both laughed, breaking the tension.

  “So you have to be pretty good to make a living as a musician.”

  “You think so?”

  “Well, I’d presume that it’s a pretty niche occupation. Are you any good?”

  “That’s what they tell me.”

  “What happened to your hands?”

  I had loosened my grip on the glass and also on my vigilance. Examining my hands, I carefully considered my response. My attempt at death had been just that afternoon, but it felt like days had passed.

  “Oh. I just fell this afternoon.”

  “Pretty nasty fall…you’re still oozing blood.”

  He was right. The sweat from the glass on my club soda had moistened the caked blood on my hands. The bar napkin was bright pink with diluted blood.

  “Whatever.”

  “Well, seriously, you should have your hands wrapped up. They’ll never heal quickly if you keep using them this way.”

  “Jesus! I’m not a baby!”

  “Well, don’t bite my head off.…I’m just trying to help.…”

  “I don’t need your help. But you know how you can help? Just shut up about my hands and all your questions. Take me home and fuck me. That would help a lot. We’ve been wasting all this time here so you can figure out how to get me to that place where I say yes. Well. I’ll just cut to the chase for you. I say yes very, very easily.…You’ll see. Just ask Jim. He’ll tell you: yes is my favorite word.”

  His eyebrows rose. After a few seconds he smiled that devil smile.

  “Okay. You’re the boss. Let’s go.”

  We left the bar at 1:00 a.m. and stayed up well past dawn, closed up behind the metal door of a hundred dings. Bruce introduced me to my first taste of the racing, zippy, motormouthed, best-ideas-in-the-whole-wide-world drug, cocaine. Suddenly we were smart. Brilliant, even. There was so much to say and not nearly enough time to say it. The trick was to jam as many words as possible into a twenty-four-hour night. What a 180 for the tamped-down, somnolent girl who was spare with her words.

  In between all the millions of words, we managed to slip in sex. The best sex, the kinkiest sex, the hardest-driving sex, legs-flying-in-the-air sex, every-which-way sex. We had the truest, bluest sex that two human beings had ever experienced or could even imagine.

  In the lull of those rare deathly still moments, lying next to each other, molding our bodies together while face-to-face, we proclaimed our love over and over and over, with our voices directed straight into the other’s airway—offering each other the breath of life. This hours-old love was intense and urgent and crazy and undeniably revolutionary. Then, when the birdies finally chirped, off to sleep.

  This Mephisto-man, this rapid scene changer, demanded a new devil’s pact. Married at New York City Hall after a few months of nonstop drugged dating, I let the oboe fall from my hands, bouncing to the ground. I became someone I didn’t recognize—the devoted female lead in an opera called Faust.

  Noise

  That penetrating sound of Kirsten’s love voice must have merged with the genetic makeup that had been stamped into your brain as a young girl, when you listened and heard what was unknowable at the time. It was hollow and echolike yet, paradoxically, fully filled out, spreading to the edges of her sound cavity. Her vocal vessel had no bottom, just the abyss. Her vibrato had an even quality to the amplitude, which left you feeling satisfied and, sometimes, oddly smug. You’d dive into that sound and wallow, spending a leisurely afternoon dozing in bed with the drapes drawn shut. No worries about time or whether it was day or night. Kirsten kept you on a limp edge, at the wonderful cusp between awake and asleep. When she sang, things in your world were just about as right as they ever could be. Even as you lay on the carpet, four years old, a naive witness to her mystery.

  Yet music is simply sound, or, more fundamentally put, noise. The rhythm of a hammer on a door. The distantly dulled slap to a dog’s fur. The screech of a car braking too late. Or too soon. The oboe that has fallen off the face of your map. Now you want to banish all noise from the planet earth. And Kirsten’s voice? You want to scrub her DNA from your skin with a rough, violent rasp. It’s all just noise: some damned tremulous volcanic connection that’s erupted, leaving a messy flow of
hot lava that you need to quickly sidestep.

  Gato

  THEY COULDN’T LIFT her head because she had been intubated, so the nurses had just plaited her hair down the sides. She looked like Heidi, yodeling on the Alps. Taut braids started dark brown at her skull, and then, about two inches down, where her dye line began, Heidi emerged, turning platinum. Peering into her face, I tried to discern some kind of movement or awareness. Her eyes were swollen shut, the lids violet-blue, with shallow veining and goopy stuff crusted around the slits.

  And she was skinny; so lean and sweet. She really was a thin-boned girl after all. I’d always taunted Jinx for being the fat sister. But here she was, revealing her true delicate, waiflike frame. In a coma. On life support. Denuded of all pretense and bravura.

  I reconnected with my runaway sister a few months after I married Mephisto. I’d seen her, upright and chattering, just a few weeks before at Palsson’s, a restaurant-bar on West 72nd Street. Jinx sold us cocaine from time to time.

  Three o’clock in the morning at Palsson’s seemed to drag the life stories out of anyone. Gato Barbieri played “Europa” in what seemed to be a continuous loop on the jukebox, the perfect heartache music for punching regret or hope out of the best of the bar patrons. Ron, the bar manager, told his rubbed-raw tale of saving his brother from a car crash. That brother now sat in a wheelchair at the back of the restaurant, appearing sanguine about his lot as a quadriplegic. Every now and again the owner, Stella Palsson, showed up, assessed the action, and quickly departed for destinations unknown.

  My new husband recounted his own version of a life: working in London and Milan as the “youngest account executive for Young and Rubicam ever.” I sat next to him, mute, smiling and high, as he regaled any dupe within earshot with sagas of driving around the shores of Lake Como, in Italy, at one hundred miles per hour with his friend Ahmed.

  We were living off his hefty severance package from Y&R in an apartment on West 73rd Street just off Riverside Drive. When we returned home from our Palsson’s postmidnight adventures, I walked into the apartment, knowing what must be done. Mephisto would sleep. But for the first time in my life, I could not bring sleep on without help. On the pretext of fetching a glass of water, I snuck into the kitchen to forage under the sink, where I hid the antidote for my molar-grinding cocaine buzz. Vodka—the original sneak’s see-through booze. Blending in nicely alongside the cleaning supplies, or simple H2O, it overrode the coke. My balancing act was well calculated: I chugged hard and deeply, and within ten minutes was so out of it I could not be roused until 1:00 p.m. the next day. My best state of being now was not listening to music or playing the oboe. I was in top form when I was tipping precariously into the land of Dead to the World.

  It was clear what my Mephisto needed from me. He never smoothed out our wrinkled marital map neatly on the table, but I knew our weak point was all about my talent, which seemed to punch him in his solar plexus. So my oboe, the ever-compliant third party, made a gallant and gracious retreat: first it lay on a desktop, unopened, staring me down daily. Then it backed onto a high shelf in a closet while I dug deeper into this marriage and committed myself more fully to a Mephistophelian version of love and happiness. Just as the devil planned, I dropped out of the music scene, at first showing up occasionally for the odd gig. Then, quickly, even those receded into the far-off horizon as my oboe began to gather dust on the floor of a closet I never opened.

  Fighting was another clause in our marital contract. An abrasive energy pulsed between us, particularly when slivers of the bright light of day jabbed, unwanted, across our morning vision. I never actively participated in these fights, taking the complaints and the occasional backhanded swat—like Ali in his later years, backed against the ropes. A rope-a-dope who never fought back. There was no possibility of a reasonable truce with this devil.

  Once in a while, my old self tried to reenter the ring, the old urge breaching the surface.

  “I feel like I should practice today. It’s been a while; I can’t even remember how long. I need to get back into shape.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, what if somebody calls me for a job? I need to sound good.”

  He roughly took me by the shoulders, pointing me to the front door, away from the closet where the oboe lay sleeping on the floor.

  “Let’s go get a drink. You can practice later.”

  Then I got the call from my mother about Jinx.

  Having tried to end her life with pills, she lay in a coma and on a respirator at Bellevue Hospital. I quietly sat at her bedside, watching for movement, trying to imagine what it was like to be so unconscious that you couldn’t even breathe for yourself. At first glance, I’m sure I looked like a concerned sister. Just below this thin veneer was the aching desire to be right where she was—not asleep but gone. For the first time in my life I envied my sister and her pumped diaphragm: in and out, steady as a funeral march.

  The doctors kept strictly to business and were not sure of Jinx’s prognosis. She might get off the respirator but still be a vegetable; or perhaps she might gain consciousness but have some brain damage. The nurses were simply angels, making sure that her hair was newly plaited every day, swabbing the yellow goop from her eyes in case she might open them and try to see. Jinx had slammed-shut eyes. She did not want to see.

  They didn’t come to see her every day, but when my parents did show up, my father wisely lurked in the background. On the fifth day, I noticed him standing at the end of a long hallway, holding a telephone book attached to the wall with a chain. Scribbling something on the wall, he let the heavy book drop from his hands when he saw me approach. It swatted down, smacking almost to the floor. Hundreds of phone numbers—the diner around the corner, the local pharmacy, private numbers for people perhaps now dead—had been written in haste on the roughly plastered wall.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Oh, just browsing.”

  “In a telephone book?”

  “Well, I was looking up some stuff, just trying to be prepared, you know.”

  “For what?”

  “Coffins.”

  “Coffins?”

  “Right, in case—”

  Before Wotan, with his perfect Chiclet teeth, could complete his thoughts on the inevitable future for his close-to-death daughter, I grabbed the huge New York City telephone tome. Feeling the heft of eight million phone numbers and the hard binder cover protecting the thin pages from other grieving family members, I threw it down the hall as hard as I could. The ripping effect took plaster and all the dead people’s numbers with it.

  “At least wait until she’s dead.”

  His eyes wandered to the ceiling; he had been caught, sheepish. The orderlies walked on by. It was business as usual at Bellevue.

  As if jostled by the brutality of that off-pitch interaction, the next day Jinx woke up: a sobering miracle to all who witnessed it. Now dozing, she lay on her back with arms hanging down at the sides of the hospital bed, her fingers tickling in her sleep, perhaps from an amusing dream. I gingerly pulled the sheets up to her neck, smoothing out the wrinkles. Then I placed her arms back onto her midsection, with her hands on top of one another. She looked proper, almost regal, and I hoped that she was ready to face the world when she woke up again. Her bed was well made, fit for her next chapter of living. I stepped back, watching her now unaided sleep—without tubes or pump—admiring how clever she really was, and began to assess her suicide attempt with a fresh, discerning eye.

  Jinx’s naturally sleeping face glowed, slightly enlivened by her new consciousness. As for me, that time on 23rd Street had clearly been a warm-up. I needed act 2. This time, I would let fate do its mysterious dirty work.

  In the late 1970s Central Park was not a nice place to be, even during the day. People certainly didn’t dare take their final 9:00 p.m. dog walks in Central Park. Just a few blocks over, in the middle of human activity, the 72nd Street subway station pulsed with danger, abutting Ver
di Square—more commonly known as Needle Park by those in the know. Palsson’s was just down the street, after all.

  With Jinx discharged from the hospital, thin but now upright, I was free to begin my own push. On four consecutive nights, I walked deep into Central Park, far enough so that I felt well isolated. Now I was ready to be attacked. My feet dragged a bit, still uncertain about what I really wanted from this dangerous stroll. Outwardly, I was a nonchalant young woman who just happened to be walking in the dark at one in the morning in a remote area of New York City.

  One night the moon was out and full, and I looked up to watch the branches of the trees wave against the yellow orb. Then looking down, I urged my pupils to adjust to the black again. After peering carefully, I managed to make out the blades of grass on the ground, maybe even an ant or two strolling with me. Looking up and looking down seemed a good way to pass the time, like sightseeing in pitch black, straining for clarity.

  Various benches presented themselves to me. I sat with eyes closed and willed myself to ease up and become disoriented as to where I was, east or west, north or south. Feeling momentarily directionless, I eventually gave in to the simple urge all living beings have—to know exactly where they are—and opened my eyes to scan the distance for the familiar double towers of the San Remo at 75th Street and Central Park West. They blinked with light and life. Only then did I know exactly where I was: waiting for something or someone to end or just divert the current trajectory of my life.

  Stabbing. Rape, then bludgeoning. Gunshot. I mused on each potential future event, after which I might die quickly or I might survive. My uncertain and passive meandering must have been mistaken for a determined and defiant march, because people did walk by. But no one bit; no one even looked. I walked out each night, defeated. Saved.

  Saved