by Lynn Crosbie
“I thought you could hang the sign in your office,” I say, and stop. She isn’t listening; she is lightly whistling, so very like a nightingale, standing by the open window, drawing in fresh air.
I feel less nervous than miserable. She is so beautiful, it is terrible.
She is that model holding the deer: I flash on her holding a repugnant star-nosed mole — me — as it loudly relieves itself.
It’s fine, it’s fine, I think. I am a movie star! Who is she?
Composing myself, I tell her that I have been working on some inspirational writing, and move closer, touching her arm.
She removes my hand and excuses herself, while I quake, thinking I have left the toilet bowl freckled with my posterior anguish; that the towels reek of me, that the sink still cups the blood I spat into it late last night trying to extract a black molar with Rabi’s needle-nose pliers —
I hear my dresser being opened. What could she be looking for? There is nothing to steal.
She returns with an old photo album: a ribbon-bound rectangle with magnified snowflakes on its laminated cover.
“These are your kids?” she says, rudely leafing through the professional portraits Allegra insisted we have done each Christmas.
Her finger is jabbing my son’s face.
It is a picture little Pudge took of him dressed in red velvet and a black bowler hat, setting fire to the tree.
My wife told everyone it was staged but no, no, there were firemen and lies and blackened presents and yet still she claimed he was “just playing around.”
“I will beat you to death,” I said to him that day.
I take the book away and tell her I am not much for looking backwards.
She is so desirable that I ignore her misconduct, sidle up to her, and say, “Is it getting hot in here, or is just me?” — then laugh like an idiot.
Annabel frowns. “Look,” she says. “I want us to work together, but this feels like a date, and it’s too much, too soon. Also, I don’t date guys like you,” she says, and I cringe.
What, ugly old bastards?
And where had I heard that first bit before? Oh yes, I’m the one who has said as much to more girls than I can remember: wanting to pursue but never be pursued, getting bored when my overtures worked.
I’m angry to be trapped in my obvious crush. And overalls.
I stand up and dissever my journal. Face her.
“I was inspired by you,” I say. “I thought I — I thought we were going to change. But only you did: why, why did you come here in the first place?”
I am shaken and tear-damp, and at this moment a bumblebee heads straight for me, droning its murderous intent.
I panic and run in circles as Annabel lights one of my cigarettes and uses its smoke to guide the little fatso out the door.
Mortified, I turn away, my shoulders moving up and down.
“Oh fuck it,” she says, and suddenly she is behind me, snapping my overall straps until I turn around and then she is kissing me, deeply, and digging her pearly nails into my back.
“I love my present,” she says, and smiles. “Buzz.”
She hands me my beer and we both drain our cans in long swallows.
Squashing hers, she presses her palm to my cheek, leaving a pink mark that will spread all over, softening me.
“I came here as myself because I trust you,” she says. “That’s saying a lot. Please. Give me some time. It’s complicated.”
“That’s supposed to be my line.”
“Yes, and this is yours too,” she says, rudely forcing her hand between my legs and rubbing, roughly, until I am excited and mad.
“You’d better go,” I say.
She looks at my tented pants and laughs: “Again?”
“I’ll see you later,” she says, blowing me a kiss. I catch it and jam it into the bib of my overalls.
I have to remind her to take the stupid plaque, which she sticks into the slit of her big feathered purse.
Long after she has gone, I discover a photograph missing from my album — she can have them all.
For there is the smell of oakmoss and May rose; there are feathers enough for the delirious end of a cockfight.
* * *
I am feeling scared and hopeful the next morning when her email appears:
I’m going to Rome with Will. I need to work on my screenplay and book.
I behaved badly last night. I want to change. With you.
I hung the plaque over my desk, thank you.
I will see you when I’m back, and will be sending witchy things your way, some by mail and some, well —
Attendere vostro specchio!
AnWr Xo
* * *
Does Annabel change her mind, and get off the plane? Does she appear, as I read her message, to offer me a bite of her long neck?
No, no, no.
It just rains goddamn hell forever.
She’s gone, gone with him. I must have been insane thinking she and I —
I shake off a memory of my hand, hovering near her like a fat, skittish lapdog.
Turn the phone off, and check my mail. Find among the final-notice bills an embossed invitation to a gala at the Biltmore’s Gold Room.
I see that the gala is tonight. It has been a month, easily, since I opened the mailbox.
This is something, I think.
I pull my one good suit and shirt from the wardrobe and hang them by hot running water in the bathroom. Shave carefully, and shake the last of my Drakkar Noir onto my palms, my face, and my balls. Then sit on the bed, in my undershirt and shorts, until night falls.
When I arrive at the party, the host, a famous benefactress named Mrs. Show, frowns and snaps her fingers. Her assistant nervously scans the guest list and finds me.
Mrs. Show lets a smile slowly ascend her polymeric skin.
“Darling Parnell, so very good to see you,” she says, and as she walks away, I see her savagely crossing my name off the list.
I swallow hard, find the bar. There are a few pretty girls there, drinking apple martinis.
I start to tell them one of my best stories, about Sir John Gielgud and an amphetamine-crazed squirrel, when the short one interrupts with a sullen “Who?”
This is their cue to turn on their heels and leave.
I keep a look of fake confidence in my eyes and start to plot my exit. Jason Velour, a hot director, approaches me and starts to rave about Ultraviolence.
“ — and when you tell the girl it might not be too repulsive to violate her!” he is saying when I interrupt.
“Do you have any work?”
I sound like a migrant tobacco picker.
“Oh. Ah, no. Things are crazy right now. But call me, absolutely, and we’ll talk.” He winks at his seven-foot-tall girlfriend, and scribbles on a dirty napkin he hands to me with a slap of my shoulder.
“This guy is the best,” he says, and disappears into the crowd.
I pluck a pimiento from the napkin, thrilled by my daring, and look at the number.
310-555-1212.
And this is how well things are going: I turn my phone on and try it.
* * *
I am standing in the corner of the room, by the open bar, having a rowdy conversation with no one.
I press the phone to my ear with one hand and use the other to signal for a double Nicaraguan Twilight, then pour the deep-violet drink down my feverish throat.
“I told Finchy they weren’t Scottish delicacies!” I am shouting as the bartender summons over a fastidious man with a short, curly wiglet who tells me I’m cut off.
“Please ask him to leave,” an ancient dowager says. Allegedly I rifled through her purse while she talked to her walker, a miserable young man in a too-large baby-blue tux.
“I was on my way,
” I say, leaving in a huff after snagging a slender bottle of cognac. When I get outside, I feel my heart contract. This is something new: I slide slowly down and plant my ass on the sidewalk.
I have several twenty-dollar bills and a gold pillbox in my pocket.
I’m rich!
A girl whose legs look like skyscrapers walks past in a cloud of 24 Faubourg.
“Hello, my lovely,” I say, discreetly hiding my frayed cuffs and the new, jagged tear on my slacks.
“Creep,” she says, picking up her colt’s pace.
“I’m not crying,” I say to myself as the sky opens and issues forth, lacerating my face.
I get up somehow and aim myself at the valet, who is stepping gingerly out of my car.
“You take it easy, man,” he says, and gives me a short squeeze.
I put the pillbox in his palm and drive away.
There is some goodness in the world, I think as I zigzag home.
At a crosswalk, a chubby pimp flicks his cigar onto the seat beside me, starting one hell of a fire.
“Bitch, watch out,” he says, brushing ash from his ankle-length zebra coat.
But ugliness always prevails, I realize as I do the unthinkable and walk home — and by home, I mean my local bar, Cindy Club, where at least one older lady believes I’m something special.
“Thanks for waiting up,” I say to Siobhan. She jumps up, yanks at her tube dress, and gives me a wet, smoky kiss.
* * *
Siobhan is a former actress, a year or so younger than I.
In the right light, she is quite pretty, and tonight I decide to take her home with me.
We take her car to my place and the minute I close the door, she gets on her knees and eases my limp dick from my fly.
It just sits there in her orange-tanned hand like a sea slug.
She licks and rubs it, grazes it with her teeth, and finally yells at it, “Get hard, for Christ’s sake!”
I return it to safety and zip up.
“It happens,” she sighs, peeling her dress off and walking to my bed in her large, buttressed bra and support hose.
I want her to leave so badly.
I drain the rest of the cognac — Bache Gabrielsen Hors d’Age — in a single draw.
“What about me?” Siobhan says, and I think she means the bottle.
But no. She has spread her legs and exposed the slit in her beige underpants: all I can see is gray bush and crumpled labia.
“I’ll be right back,” I say.
I run to the door, slam it, and keep running.
I hear her follow: she is calling my name as I lie under a balcony by the parking lot, gripped with blind panic.
“Fine, you fucker,” she says, and I hear her go inside and quickly come back out. I see her marker-mended heels two feet from my hiding place.
Her voice catches as she tells me never to call her again, which is when I sit up involuntarily, cracking my head.
Her footsteps stop, then resume.
I stay put, enjoying my view of a wedge of deep blue sky and a glitter of stars.
I think of Annabel in my bathtub, how her pussy must have looked like an apricot, with a thin slit at its center.
I go inside and to bed, where I abuse myself, howling with pleasure and abominable loneliness as I release white spume onto the mattress.
* * *
In the middle of the night, I wake up sweating.
I had forgotten being arrested.
On my way to the bar, I’d seen a grimy blank star-shaped tile on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
It is perfection, I decide.
It is located at Vine and Cahuenga, right beside that of another monster, Bela Lugosi; his star is dressed with tiny bat wings and framed by old vials of morphine.
I rush into a souvenir shop and lift a Sharpie, a packet of Kleenex, and a bottle of Windex, then take off my shirt and get on my hands and knees to scrub the tile. I have just lettered my name on it when red lights illuminate this fraught exercise.
It is too awful to talk about: the cops’ amused faces when I finally produce my sagging, cowboy-stitched wallet, the radio call — “What’s the numerical code for fastidious old drunk?” — and then my clumsy attempt to button my soiled shirt.
“Whatever happened to respect?” I had called after the little cop with the handlebar mustache.
He stroked it as he told me to ask myself that very question.
The little sage.
* * *
A new day.
I pass a nearly bald deodorant under my arms, stick my head under the tap, dress in a deep-yellow shirt, brown slacks, and tan loafers.
“You look like a hot dog,” Rabi says when I step into the hall.
He’s wearing a gingham dress, tap shoes, and a knit taqiyah: he pushes past me, carrying a box of mice dressed for a relay race.
I am meeting my daughter at SEAS Café, a beige, institutional place she likes “because none of my classmates ever come here.”
At twenty-eight, after innumerable failed ventures, she has returned to school — she now wishes to become a dental hygienist.
As I approach her, I see she is wearing pink scrubs, that her damp hair is tied back with a length of blue floss.
She had wanted me to meet someone — her Oral Hygiene instructor, it turns out, an ill-conceived fix-up.
“I told her to forget it: she’s too old for you,” she says, glumly shaking a cannonade of sugar into her fudge latte. “She’s your age,” she says, sinking into the chipboard booth. I pay her tab and walk her to her dorm; attempt to ignore her roommate, who is napping in her underwear and nothing more.
I look at my whalelike daughter, whose eyes look a bit like mine. Mine, which were compared by one exuberant reviewer to “Hiroshige’s sea in Sudden Shower over Shin-Ohashi Bridge and Atake.”
And I grab her and smell her head, which is always salty and filled with sun, like a little beach.
“How did things get so bad between us?” I say, handing her a tuition check that is going to bounce.
“You left us,” she says, nudging me to the door and closing it.
As I walk down the hall, I see Ultraviolence posters in three rooms.
In the film, I beat a college dean half to death and raped his wife while whistling the theme from For a Few Dollars More.
The music escapes my lips as I hit the stairs.
The woman who played the dean’s wife was thirty-five at the time. I fucked her. I almost go back and tell Pudge, but I am suddenly limp with exhaustion.
I sit for a while on the steps, and am eventually shaken awake by the janitor, who recognizes me from Kill Your Face!, a straight-to-video movie I made in the 1980s.
“That was so scary, man,” he says.
He has no idea.
* * *
Pudge is very wrong.
There was an Arabic actress and activist I met through Kray.
Fatima: a maker of smiley-faced breakfasts, the owner of lithe, solid legs, a gifted cellist, and the fifty-eight-year-old mistress of dirty, thrilling talk.
She left me, she said, because her husband “didn’t deserve to be hurt.”
But for a short while, she called me her Chérie each time I rode between her sleek, sandalwood-soaked thighs; she let me comb her lustrous dark hair and wear her long pealing necklace. Craning her head on her lovely neck, she would talk about things I didn’t understand in words that sounded like rain freckling a tin roof.
The many men at her funeral kissed her white tombstone, leaving imprints.
The kisses remain. On occasion, I visit the marble grave with lotus blossoms. I still fall to my knees the way I did the day her husband, who never knew, called to tell me about the car accident and her neck broken horribly, the neck of my mare.
Kray came
to the funeral with me, and, as her ivory casket was lowered into the grave, asked, “Did you bang her?”
“Yes,” I said quietly, and he laughed.
“Oedipussy,” he said.
* * *
I thought of Kray as a bastard and a genius.
When he signed me up for Ultraviolence, I smoked some hash and went to see Exterior, Kray’s first film, in a nearly empty theater on Regent Street.
It is, on one hand, a barely comprehensible story about a space cavalry led by a messianic stallion who communicates with the past by racing past the stars for a gifted astronomer.
On the other hand, Exterior is an almost painfully beautiful, Promethean study of what film could be, divorced of linear narrative, consensual logic, and the prevalent metanorms regarding structure and meaning.
When X, the holy stallion, is spurred to his death by a sadistic chimpanzee, I throw my hard, sugared popcorn into the air and, as if physics do not apply to the Locust Theatre, it rises to form a glowing nebula that I and the others pray to, fervently.
I say another prayer for Kray to save me.
The small shrouded woman three seats to my left stares at me and, with some difficulty, pulls what appears to be a golden stick from her heart. “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones,” she says.
I am so stoned, I know none of this is happening. Not really.
All the same, I have a glass of wine with the saint, Teresa, and stroke her wimple, dreamily.
“It’s all coming true,” I say, and she murmurs her assent
Weeping, she says, “Yes, everything you want.”
* * *
I am thinking of Fatima, of Teresa, and of Kray’s movie as I coax the engine to turn over.
“Purr for me, precious,” I say, stroking her dash and patting her gently.
Nothing.
After Exterior, I see another of Kray’s early films, a black-and-white adaptation of The Miracle of the Rose starring Warren Beatty as Harcamone and Catherine Deneuve as Jean Genet.