by Dale Peck
Giovanni let me do all this: stay in the apartment for thirty-two days; sunbathe on the living room floor all afternoon; drown in the red-black night of the bedroom; empty out, die, and revive three times each night. He let me do this because I wanted to. His only demand was for me to do as I wanted in the hope that it would always lead me back to him. I owned him now. I used sex to become exactly what he wanted. That was how I had captured him. I was his property now. He used sex to become exactly what I needed. We were deforming into Siamese twins.
As a child, I needed everything. I couldn’t get anything from just being me. I couldn’t masturbate. I couldn’t sleep alone, I couldn’t make decisions. I was a body looking for a schedule or set of instructions. I didn’t know exactly what I should be wanting: I only knew how to be unsettled with what was happening around me but with no clue as to how to change that into something more satisfying.
I had one unbreakable routine. I sat around until no one was looking and then walked out the door. I kept walking until I somehow stopped: zombie-ing across intersections without looking, continuing over lawns, through vacant lots, housing-tract construction sites, shopping malls. If I hit a wall, I’d pivot like a robot and start in a new direction. I wasn’t going anywhere in particular—I didn’t care about destination. I wasn’t thinking, I was just walking. I didn’t know what else to do. At the time my actions seemed involuntary, now I’m not so sure. Of course I’d be tracked down eventually. It all depended on how much of a head start I had.
During the spanking with the spatula that always followed, I’m told that I stared blankly into space. And why not? After all, I hadn’t been trying to be bad. It was out of my control. When the other kids on the block got bored, they found a new game or made a nuisance of themselves. I was different. I was ready to go out and find whatever seemed to be calling me out of the little house, away from my Tinkertoys and the two-toned TV set. It didn’t matter if I found it. I was just a tourist at heart, a lost soul accidentally born on the wrong continent and trying to find my way back to Paris, a three-year-old sex slave looking for a master.
On the thirty-third day I went out—I was now thirty-three days old—the sidewalk felt like rubber, like a thin membrane floating on water. I wasn’t sure I could move out of the way if someone came toward me. I wasn’t sure I could speak. Staying in a quasi-controlled environment for thirty-two days has nothing to do with being outside. I was sure I couldn’t have forgotten how to live outside the apartment but the sidewalk still felt like rubber.
I walked to the “dime store.” Nothing there cost a dime. Even a #2 pencil was fifteen cents. I bought a package of small adhesive shapes that were made to glow in the dark after a light’s been shone on them. The woman who sold them to me was a dwarf with blonde hair. She wore thick platform shoes to make her four inches taller. Even so, she still only came up to the level of my belly. As she rang up my purchase I suddenly had a paranoid vision of standing there blankly, unable to count out the money—like a three-year-old child. Indeed, as I lifted a handful of change toward her, most of it slid out of my hand and scattered onto the worn linoleum. She said, “Whoopsie daisy,” the way my grandmother used to, the tone warm and meaningless, designed to make me feel more a victim of gravity than just plain clumsy. Her name was Mary. As she stooped to help me pick it up, I introduced myself and invited her to dinner the next night.
When she arrived the next night I was still on a high stool gluing the glowing shapes to the bedroom ceiling. I was making the Milky Way. Here I was God. I could recreate the star world any way I wanted.
Settling onto the bed below me, Mary kicked off her shoes, flipped her hair back out of her face, and told me she didn’t usually accept dinner invitations from people she didn’t know. “I have to be a little careful about people, being so small, but somehow I had a good feeling about you. I’m psychic, you know. I can usually trust my instincts about people. And you know what I thought about you? I thought, this guy doesn’t need me for anything, he just wants company for dinner. A person who doesn’t need you to be anything for them can be a good friend to have. So here I am. Actually I’m not as superstitious as this probably makes me sound. Besides, I never turn down a dinner invitation.”
Far below me I could see her lying on the bed and talking. She looked even smaller than the day before. Without her shoes, her legs curled underneath her. For two hours she gave me suggestions about where to put the small glowing shapes, how a nebula should look, what parts of the Milky Way needed more filling in. From my perch I thought, she certainly seems to know a lot about stars, she’s a good person to have around at a time like this. I could take her suggestions or not, she didn’t seem to care. She kept on giving advice either way, another trait that reminded me of my grandmother.
“How about a supernova over there. No, more to the right. A little more . . . right there. Perfect.”
I lay down on the bed with her and we turned out the lights. The blackness above became a sky, a black heaven with a thousand dots of green-white light, as if somehow I had covered the ceiling in a black sheet full of tiny pinholes and then shone a bright light above it. The room had changed, but then again it hadn’t. It was still the black night it had always been, only more so. The feeling of sinking still soothed me. We lay on the bed for three hours. I told Mary about having not left the apartment for thirty-two days. She told me about her childhood.
Giovanni sat in the living room reading. Later the three of us ordered out for Chinese and watched David Letterman. Billy Idol was being interviewed, only he wouldn’t answer any of the questions. He had his leather shirt open to the waist and kept sliding his hand inside to play with his nipples. Mary and Giovanni found this slightly shocking for TV. I didn’t. Then Mary said goodnight and went home. Giovanni took me into the bedroom and killed and revived me three times under the stars. Afterward, he told me he loved me for making the bedroom into heaven. I loved him for making my body into heaven. It was now thirty-four days since Giovanni followed me. I was the same number of days old. Then I fell asleep and dreamed about Mary.
Here’s part of what Mary told me that first night. Two days after her father tried to kill himself, her mother put her two children into the car and drove to the beach. Mary was five years old. The Santa Ana Freeway was bumper to bumper and it took hours to get there, hot and boring. The radio in the old Chevy was irritating with static but left on anyway, the same jingle repeating a hundred times: “One block Main Street, Santa Ana Freeway, Stanley’s Chevrolet!” Other than that, no one said a word.
The Huntington Pier is long, old, and high above the water when you get out to the end. The three of them walk very slowly. The whole day seems as if it’s happening in slow motion. Mary’s mother wears a pink suit, something like the one Jackie Kennedy would make famous two years later in Dallas. In fact her mother looks something like Jackie Kennedy: dark shoulder-length hair, pink suit, medium high heels. Her face is beautiful and tense. They walk to the end of the pier and stand for a long time, not talking. Mary’s mother holding each of their hands, one of them on either side. She’s thinking. Anyone could tell. She’s standing at the end of Huntington Pier where the water is very deep and the fishermen catch sand sharks and the barnacles on the pilings are said to be razor sharp.
Mary thinks about the one death she’s already seen. She went fishing with her father and saw a girl jump off the pier here. The girl drowned. That day, her father stood, holding her hand, as they watched the Coast Guard cutter fish the body out of the water and bring it up to the aid station on the pier. Mary’s thinking about that as she stands and watches the seagulls fight over little bits of bait and fish gut.
When she talks about that day now, her Jackie-on-the-pier story, she’s got it down to one basic sentence: “There were gulls, fish smells, sun, a little breeze, and my mother in her pink suit holding her two children by the hands.” One basic sentence for a scene that’s flashed throu
gh her mind hundreds of thousands of times. “I understand what happened. I just don’t know what it means.
“When my father came out of the hospital a year later, he rented a hotel room and stayed there for six days. He killed himself with a mixture of valium, Gordon’s gin, and hypothermia. He passed out in a tub of cold water and his body temperature dropped until he died. When I was older, and my mother told me how he’d done it, I imagined him frozen from the inside out. She said his heart just stopped beating.”
This is the story Mary told me the first night she came over, one day after I met her and thirty-four days after I met Giovanni.
The only people I know now are Giovanni—the man who followed me—and Mary. I never told anyone where I’d moved. I never went back to my old place; I didn’t want anything there. Everything I needed was here. About the third day, Giovanni asked me if I needed anything from my old place. We were sitting at the little dinette table in the tiny room full of windows between the kitchen and the living room. I was wearing his plaid shirt. “No, nothing,” I said. “I mean, you don’t have a cat or anything?” No, I thought back, remembering, I don’t. Dino was dead. I shook my head. “Good.” That was the end of it.
I was still wearing Giovanni’s clothes, only now it didn’t seem like I was wearing someone else’s clothes. Now they were just our clothes. That sounds silly, but the fact is we were both wearing them, every day. I never returned any of the phone calls to those friends that found out where I’d moved to. I let the machine talk instead. They were not my friends anymore. They were friends of someone they remembered me to be that I wasn’t anymore, or maybe never had been. I’d never had that many friends anyway. Now as I moved about the apartment every other day or so the phone rang three times, then the message went off, then a maybe distantly familiar voice might say my name, leave a number, and hang up. As time went on this happened less and less.
On Sundays the three of us took Mary’s one-eyed, no-tail dog, Barney, for walks in the park, or sometimes a picnic. Tuesday nights we’d go to Charlie’s to watch Giovanni shoot pool. I loved holding the shiny glass balls in my hands. Sometimes I’d slip one in Mary’ s purse when no one was looking and take it home. Mary would roll her eyes at the theft in a slight bit of disapproval, then say nothing and walk out. In a way she was as attracted to the pool balls as I was, delighting in the growing collection. Mary attracted things anyway, all sorts of things, accumulating and stacked into her upstairs apartment over the dime store. Giovanni and I had almost nothing. Gio liked it spare, minimal, clean. A big pile of colored pool balls sat in one corner of the living room.
Coming into the kitchenette area one day, Mary spotted her mother languishing with coffee at the metal dinette table. Occasionally she brushed the hair out of her eyes with her hand. She was reading a stack of colorful magazines and smoking a cigarette. The effect was stunning, the style and positioning of the elements in the pose an almost unbelievably glamorous combination, so self-absorbed, so eloquently casual. A perfect laziness. “Maybe she’s eating a little square pan of fudge with a spoon,” Mary told me. “I can’t recall.” For a long time after this we steal cigarettes from the neighbors’ house and lay them out with a magazine on the dinette, hoping to entice Mary’s mother to repeat her impressive carelessness.
Sitting at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette, with the latest issue of Vanity Fair, I try to imitate the way Mary remembered her mother looking that day. I drink more coffee. I try slumping more. I take another drag on my Salem, but her study in coolness escapes me. I’m a million miles from the image, from the experience I’m after. Maybe the magazine isn’t trashy enough to make me not care about anything, to induce the total laziness. I wonder if possibly a hangover Mary never knew about is supposed to be part of the scene. Maybe it’s the missing pan of fudge that’s keeping the whole attitude from solidly setting in.
At some point, Giovanni decided the apartment had become too cluttered and he systematically began removing things, maybe one every other day. At first I hardly noticed. I didn’t really know where these things went until one day Barney and I stumbled over our portable TV outside. I guess Giovanni had been putting the stuff out on the sidewalk free for anyone who wanted it. That’s Gio, I thought to myself. I picked up the little TV and took it to Mary’s. I had the key.
After a while there was nothing left in the apartment except the mattress in the bedroom, the lava lamp on the floor next to it, the dinette in the kitchen, and the Saturn chair in the living room. I didn’t mind so long as he didn’t throw out anything Mary had brought over. Next, the few things left started moving from room to room. One day the mattress was in what used to be the bedroom, then in the living room, maybe in the dining room a week later. As the mattress moved, the dinette and Saturn chair usually moved too. The rooms didn’t really have names any more, except the bathroom. They were all just empty spaces. Boxes. I had to look each day to see where things were, but that wasn’t too hard since there weren’t many things and I wasn’t doing anything but reading the paper and walking Barney anyway. I never asked him why he was doing it. He wanted to.
Then one day I realized that the phone no longer worked. It had been so long since it rang that I’d stopped thinking about it. I’d always let the machine answer anyway since the only one I wanted to talk to besides Giovanni was Mary, and she never called, she just came over. Or left a note. “Come by the store.” I don’t know when it stopped working.
Slowly I began to realize that Giovanni no longer had any friends besides Mary and me. At least not any that would come over. He always had before. I guess he spent so much time with us now they had just fallen away.
At first this bothered me a little. I didn’t really know what was going on but I didn’t want to ask. I wanted to just let him go through whatever it was he was doing. After all, he’d let me do whatever I wanted without question, as long as I was still there for him. I stopped thinking about it and listened to the radio more. At first I was bored. Then I stopped wanting to do anything else. Then it became satisfying. Listening to the radio seemed to be what I was supposed to do, so I was doing it.
I went out less and less, not wanting to move away from the radio on the living room floor. Giovanni took over some of Barney’s walks. The rest of the time Barney would sunbathe with me on the living-room floor. He was old. Mostly he just slept or else listened to the radio too. I could tell he liked certain songs more than others. Chaka Khan was his favorite.
By this time Gio and I thought I must be going a little crazy again. Except for occasional short walks with Barney, I was going into another thirty-two-day hibernation. I was the one going crazy since the only thing I wanted to do was listen to the radio. Giovanni wasn’t crazy for taking all the furniture out of the apartment and never speaking. I was crazy for living in an apartment that had no furniture with someone who never spoke.
We still made love every night. Amazing, terrific killings and resurrections, night after night. Those were the only sounds we made with each other. It was the only exercise I got. I could feel my legs and back and arms stretching, feel air coming into my comatose lungs. For the first time all day we’d be really looking at each other, our lips brushing, not able to get enough of each other, petting hair and arms and stomachs as if each of us were a little baby with the mother he totally loves and who totally loves him more than anyone else in the world. We were using sex to be together. Once in a while, at these times, I would whisper his name, just to make sure I still had it.
I lived on coffee and cereal. That’s all I would eat. Plus a big bowl of vitamins left by the bed for me each morning with a note that said, “Eat these.” Giovanni must be the one leaving them, but I was asleep so I don’t know for sure. This went on for I don’t know how long. Maybe if I’d felt I was in jail I’d have made marks on the wall to count off the days but I didn’t so I didn’t. Giovanni now took Barney for all of his walks. The front door was unlock
ed but I wasn’t sure if there was a world beyond it anymore or, if so, what kind of world it was. I knew there must be a world that Giovanni went out into every day, but I wasn’t sure that I could do the same. I pictured it as a membrane that you had to try and walk through. If it accepted you, you reached another place outside the apartment. If not, it bounced you back hard onto the floor, leaving you dazed and feeling something was wrong. Inside the apartment nothing was wrong. It was my world, the warm living-room floor and the soft radio. Perfect. Everything just as it should be. I ate my vitamins, had coffee and cereal, petted Barney, followed the sunny spots on the floor around the living room, listened to the radio, and made love at night.
One night Barney woke me up to show me a mouse in his water dish. Apparently it had tried to get a drink, fell in, and drowned. Barney and I lay down on the cool linoleum and looked at the little mouse body for a long time. Then Barney fell asleep.
From where I lay I could see the dinette table where Mary and I had worked so hard at recreating the smoking-Jackie image her mother had once evoked: silver legs, mosaic surface of grays and dirty rose, metallic chairs covered in metal-deck vinyl. I think those chairs were the only furniture Giovanni ever spent money on. A big sculpture of Barney made out of insulating wire hung above the table. I made that, a long time ago it now seems. If you follow the wire Barney to the ceiling, and let your eye travel down and around the bend of the doorframe into the kitchen, you come to a yellowed and grease-spattered de Kooning print, the shiny paper now dull and thick. It’s an ad for his Grand Palais show in Paris, 1979: a woman with blonde hair and two big eyes, one bigger than the other, one set higher than the other. She could be Mary. In the painting you can’t tell how tall she is. A series of slashing lines and scribbles takes your eyes down to enormous breasts, barely covered by what looks like a pink cocktail dress, down past the triangular crotch with the extra line accents, past the type that actually advertises the show, to the white slick of the refrigerator.