My mother often told me that my sweet mouth would get me into trouble, that no love followed a man whose lips dripped honey. My mother died having only ever seen one photograph that I’d taken of her, despite my irritation. She said it frightened her enough. I’d made her beautiful after a lifetime of You never gwine get a man, man goin’ breed you an’ lef’ you fe pretty gyal, yes him ah beat you, but tek it an’ pray, after all, where you gwine get one next man?—all about my father, an empty soul, defined only by his fine Chinese origins that he wore as if he’d made them himself, and his splendid cruelty to my mother. And to me. Years of blood and invisibility. But I don’t want to talk about that.
I met Brianna at one of Lillian’s parties. I remember that I walked up to the door and laughed. It was covered with purple balloons and silver condoms: someone’s idea of convenience and questionable humor. I pushed it open and played Name That Drug as weed and coke competed with the smell of women’s thighs and the orange peel that simmered in oil-filled, antique vats. Along the brittle corridor, couples kissed and groped, twisting hands in the shadow of thighs, their laughter and moans tinkling on the air. One man, resplendent in a heart-shaped eye patch, pushed peach chiffon aside to bite his partner’s neck under the dark ceiling. Somewhere, bass buzzed insidiously.
As I walked through the house, groups of beautiful people chatted and paused to nod at me; a woman masturbated in a far-off corner, her groans unheard by the rest; a man lifted a sodden mouth from his companion’s vagina and waved. He was the only person I recognized; I’d taken pictures of him in the moonlight last year, his two-year-old son in his arms, his love for the child marred only by my knowledge of his promiscuity. I’d spent three months in the company of Jamaica’s high-red, most debauched crowd, all happy to be captured on film by a young, up-and-coming, feted, new photographer. They’d amused me, and I’d amused Sasha, telling her the outrageous gossip I collected every night. She wasn’t interested in that kind of scene. As I stood in the middle of the bacchanalia, I breathed deeply, trying to get clean air into my lungs, regretting my decision to come. It was the kind of place that made me stop feeling.
Lillian passed me by, and stopped to air-kiss my cheeks. She was so covered in gold that she clanked as she moved: Countless gold loops fell down her face; they were in her eyebrows, her cheeks, lips, and ears, drowning her delicate throat. Bracelets, like sand-colored spaghetti hoops, dangled from her arms, and twisted bunches of jewels glinted around both ankles. I wasn’t surprised when she opened her mouth and gave me a glimpse of rubies, embedded in her teeth like flecks of ketchup.
“Nice to see you, Jerry,” she purred.
“And you’re as gorgeous as usual, Lil.” I felt like squinting in her opulence.
“Not as gorgeous as you, baby!” She slipped a hand between us and squeezed me. “Want to take some pictures of me later?” I murmured an excuse; she wanted me as a lover, but I was a good boy, my wife’s boy, and embarrassingly faithful. Besides, I had all the pictures I wanted of Lillian. She was a shallow woman, made even worse by her overt sexuality. Those were the days when I liked to chase the mystery of a woman, when obvious was no challenge for my art.
“Another time, eh?” She grinned, undefeated, and then clapped her hands. The busy, frenzied lovers around us paused in their play and looked up. She spread her arms. “This evening’s entertainment will begin in five minutes. By the pool.”
Brianna sat on the steps of the swimming pool, her hands, skirt, and bare feet soaked in water. We gathered around her, our fashionable cynicism held like a weapon before us. I wondered what she was doing there. She was too clean for us.
She was the barest woman I’ve ever seen. Her fragile skull was nearly bald, newly shaved. She wore no makeup, no jewelry. Her skin was enough decoration, buffed and unblemished, like squeaky, gleaming leather. It was as if she’d never played as a child, never skinned her knee, or eaten too-green mangoes and stained herself on their flesh, as if she’d never brushed a market woman’s arm, taking with her the rebellion or camaraderie of daily higglering. She was very still. A man called out, “What a pretty gyal, to rass!” crinkling her brow with what looked like embarrassment. I’m sure my mouth was open. My fingers itched. I wanted to squeeze her for juice.
The night lay down on us as Brianna Riley began to sing. A slice of moon soared above the trees as the sound of her took me back to my childhood bed, the pillows soaked with sweat and tears as my father denounced my dreams. I let her stretch her gift along the length of my spine, pausing to touch each bone, sweeping around to cup her music to my face, the sound of her filling my eyes, kicking at the cotton clouds, silencing the crickets. Jamaicans, as she would have known, are a demanding audience, but in the middle of the seediness, we were suddenly, pathetically eager. She was that good. She pushed our facades aside with her gentle, crooning melody and she reminded me of drunken Christmas cake on a Sunday morning, of cricket matches in perfect whites, of children on their way home from church, of tamarind balls searing the mouth, of Chinese skipping in Kingston playgrounds. Three men shambled from the poolside and fled to the parking lot. I could hear the rumble of their car engines as her voice fell silent. I clapped until my fingertips felt scalded, and watched as the island’s strangest elite surrounded her like mosquitoes.
Later that evening, Lillian and I entertained her, long after the last of the crowd slipped away. She listened to us intently, balanced in the middle of the pool, her elbows on a plastic float. Her dress drifted around her, like a huge lily. Her big, seal eyes flickered over us both.
“Lillian is the one who gave me the money to do my demo tapes,” she said. Her speaking voice was pleasant, but normal. I restrained my disbelief; I didn’t know Lillian to be a generous woman. I glanced at our hostess. Surely she could tell that this woman would never become part of her sordid little circle of adorers.
“And now you have a deal?” I asked.
“Yes. Well… almost. Warner Brothers are very interested,” she said.
“Of course they are. She’s so cute!” said Lillian. I wanted to swat her, like a fly.
“They like my… voice.” She stopped. I noticed that she half answered, or ignored questions, as if she was unused to idle chitchat. “Jerry, can I ask you about your parents’ background? You have a very… interesting… look.”
“My father is a Chinese Jamaican and my mother is Indian and black. Hence the eyes.” She tilted her head.
“Yes, my dear, Jerry is our favorite onlooker,” said Lillian. “We all want him, but he won’t play our little games with wifey at home.” Her laughter disturbed the pool water. “I must check the locks.” She rose, tinkling.
Brianna looked dismayed. “Oh—I’ll go. I’m keeping you from your bed. I’m so sorry.” She reached out a long, sinuous arm and paddled to the poolside, shot me a look that I didn’t understand. “It’s just nice to talk.…” I watched her take a breath before she stepped out of the water. “Could I call a taxi?”
Lillian shook her head. “No, no. Stay if you want.…”
“I can take you home,” I said.
I watched her struggle. “All right,” she said, finally.
* * *
In my car, after she’d dried and changed, she was silent. I made up for it, coaxing laughter from her like a pathetic court jester, driving as slowly as I could. I didn’t want the night to end. I nearly crashed into a tattered goat strolling through Half Way Tree in my efforts to watch her and drive at the same time. She was so calm, even regal, and yet she’d carelessly taken Lillian’s monogrammed towel with her, holding it in her lap as if it were a purse.
We reached her home too quickly. I followed her out, making sure that she was safe. Dawdled at the door, looking for the words to delay her. I can honestly say that in that moment, I became two men. One, the faithful husband, a man I pushed aside. The other, totally led by desire. I wanted to kiss Brianna until sunrise, because she looked like the kind of woman who would have liked that. I gest
ured at the towel. “Lillian will want that back,” I joked.
“Oh, yes. I’ll… take it to her.” She twisted the damp cloth in her hands. I could tell that she wanted to stay, and yet something greater urged her away.
“I could come back and take you up there,” I offered inanely.
“No. No. I’ll do it.”
Desperately, I reached through the bullshit.
“Brianna. I’m a photographer. Would you consider…”
She looked alarmed. “No, I don’t like taking photographs. I’m sorry. I have to go.”
I sat in the car outside her house for half an hour, imagining her under my lens.
I said at the beginning that I make no apologies. What I meant was that I make no excuses. I drove home fantasizing. I hugged my wife. My sexual interest in Brianna had nothing to do with Sasha. Women will dismiss this as cliché, but I know it’s one of those clichés that is utterly true. I can understand why women feel betrayed by the deceit of infidelity, how conned they feel at a change of plan, of structure, without their being involved, how their men change the rules, lie, dip, dive, curve underneath them, avoiding discovery. I can see how foolish they feel, why the idea of their man naked with another somebody offends the ego and the heart. But I don’t understand why they think that sexual arousal for another woman has anything to do with them. Wanting to possess a different woman does not reflect on the beloved. So I went home and kissed my wife.
Jake hadn’t been born yet, and we spent a quiet night together, regrouping. She wanted to hear my stories of San Jose and Costa Rica and Brazil. She said that she missed me, and I knew it was true, in between her job as senior editor at Randall Publishers. She rolled a spiff for us as she spoke, sifting the ganja between her fingers, discarding tiny seeds and debris in a silver-colored ashtray. Real weed. The first time I showed her hash in London, we both laughed. She’d turned the black clump between her palms, wondering. The first time I met her, at her sister’s house, she was rolling a spiff. She looked up at me as I walked into the living room, and I wondered how anyone could be so compact, so complete. Watching Sasha lick the edge of a piece of Rizla comforts me. Watching her lids weighed down by the buzz makes me feel safe. As moths burnt themselves on the lamplight, I looked at my wife’s face, half in shadow, and let myself resent the comfort and the safety.
“Sash, how do you feel about the women I take pictures of?”
She put her head to one side. Inhaled. I could see her shoulders relaxing.
“What do you mean?”
“I spend a lot of time with other women.”
“So?” She passed the spiff to me. I took a puff, felt it glide inside me.
“Some women would be jealous. Have you ever been jealous?”
She laughed and coughed. “They’re no competition.”
“Seriously, Sash.”
“Would you give them up?”
I shook my head.
“Do you sleep with them?”
Again, a shake of the head. Part of me wishes that she’d asked the question differently, that she’d allowed herself to stop trusting me in that moment. If she’d asked me if I was considering it, I would have said yes, laid my head on her knee, and confessed like a child, sought ways to go past Brianna. But she didn’t.
“I don’t worry about it, Jerry. Really. I know you love me, and I know we’re friends. I know you wouldn’t mess with that, so I married you. You told me that… the other thing… didn’t matter. First man who ever said that to me. So, I married you, knowing that I was enough.”
I didn’t notice her pain. It was so familiar. Let the weed paint pictures of Brianna Riley in my head. I suppose I pretended that I had permission.
We take sweat for granted. I remember what I was told at school, that sweat was the body’s way of cooling itself; I suppose everyone remembers that. Brianna used to say that if that was the case, a volcano lived inside her, constantly waiting to be cooled. I liked that image; when we became lovers, I would imagine, when I was inside her, that I touched that inferno and made her sweat all the more. She sweated and hummed when we made love. Song and sweat. To be defined by such things. To love one and hate the other so much that you can’t see your own reflection in the eyes of others. But I knew what it was like to be defined in twos: pictures and need. I didn’t admit it when I was a young man, but I loved the women I took pictures of, needing me. One wasn’t enough. I believed in quantity over quality.
Two days later, I went back to Brianna’s house and knocked on the door. She opened it and looked at me as if I had never left.
“Hello,” she said. I felt absurd.
“Can I come in?” I said.
Her stance was odd, her hands behind her back, breasts pushed forward, like a kid hiding a present. Her face worked.
“Tell me you’re not attracted to me, B, and I’ll leave.” An old approach, but sometimes they’re the best.
“Please try and understand.” Her voice was low. “I can’t have a relationship with you or anybody. Can’t you accept that?”
“Are you attracted to me?” I grinned. “What happen, babylove? I don’t look nice to you?”
“I have to go—”
“Don’t I?” I said.
“Yes, okay? That what you want to hear? Yes.”
I reached for her, but she backed away, her hands still behind her. There was a kind of mute appeal in her face.
“Brianna, what are you holding—”
I stared. Water pattered around her bare feet, drenching them. Fat, unceasing drips, like the leaks we’d had in the roof at high school. Faster and faster.
“Brianna, you’re spilling something—what—”
Her voice broke into pieces.
“I’m spilling myself. Okay?”
She raised her hands to my eyes.
“It’s called hyperhydrosis.”
We were sitting in her apartment. Like her, it was bare. The plastic-covered sofa was the only piece of furniture in her living room. The floorboards were naked, too. I glanced up at a light switch. It was shrouded with plastic. I wondered what her bed looked like.
“Most people with it get very clammy palms, but I’m a severe case.”
“Have you always had it?” I asked.
She nodded hesitantly, then plunged forward. “When I was a little girl, no one wanted to play with me. Even grown-ups said I was nasty. I couldn’t do anything about it… I hid my hands in my pockets. I wore gloves that got soaked in twenty minutes.” She laughed softly, bitterly. “I learned to live in twenty-minute increments, which is as long as it takes before they… start getting bad. Then I had to sit on them. I rubbed them on my clothes. The kids laughed.”
She held her slightly cupped hands in a glass bowl on her lap, as if they didn’t belong to her. I watched the water bubble to the surface of her skin and roll over her fingers. The bowl was half full.
“I can’t imagine how you felt,” I said.
“No, you can’t,” she snapped. “My parents took me to a dermatologist, and she gave me something that looked like roll-on, to put on my fingers, but it didn’t help. Then they sent me for a kind of electric shock treatment, but afterwards I couldn’t eat or drink… or talk, because there wasn’t any saliva in my mouth. It made me dry for about a week, and I was happy. But it gave me heart palpitations. I could’ve dealt with that. But my parents said it cost too much money for the treatment. My mother said it was God’s way, and I had to accept it. But I hate it. Hate it!”
“But there must be something—”
“Yes there is, there always is. An operation, but I can’t afford it. When I got the money from Lillian and Warners were interested, I was going to have it done. But the guy at Warners keeps jumping up and down—he loves my voice, but he calls the sweat a hook. He thinks it’ll fascinate the fans.”
“I can see that,” I said.
“I don’t care.” The bowl tilted, spilling drops on her bare knees. “People think I’m nasty. They think I
smell. They think it’s my fault. You know how Jamaican people scornful. They point at me: ‘Is time you clean up youself, mi dear.’ Like I can’t see what I am! I won’t let anyone feel sorry for me!”
I sat beside her. She scrambled to get away, the bowl wavering dangerously. She grabbed for it, but it slipped out of her hands and shattered on the floor. She leapt to her feet, ignoring the glass.
“Brianna, you’ll cut yourself.”
“Get out of my house!”
“No.” I moved toward her, trying to get her out of the way of the shards, but she shrank from me, scrubbing her hands against her T-shirt. Big wet splotches stained her chest, soaking through to her nipples.
“Please, please, Jerry, please go. It gets worse. It gets worse—”
“When you’re upset?”
“Yes!” She sounded as if she wanted to cry. I watched her hands weep, instead. They were all but gushing now, their merciless flow darkening her wooden floor.
“I have to get something to hold my hands over—”
I grabbed her shoulders. “No. We can clean it up afterwards. I can. Move out of the way of the glass and stay here.” She pushed at my chest with her elbows, sweat pumping from her palms, coursing down her wrists onto my shirt.
I grabbed her face and held it. I made her look at me. “This is part of you. You’ve got wet hands, B. You can’t even push me away. Why not? You want to. What’s the worse thing about this? Huh?”
Her face crumpled. “That… I can’t touch anybody, not even my… mother.…”
“Touch me,” I said.
Her hands circled my neck. I felt water soak my back as I gave Brianna Riley her first kiss. I felt like the hero in some cynically penned drama. It was what I needed in those days. Extremes. Drama. Don’t we all?
Dark Matter Page 10