by Lynn Crosbie
She flicks through the desk drawer, her face changing in degrees from remorseful to rapt.
She wheels around, trains the gun at me.
“Get undressed,” she says, and I do.
She orders me to lie down and ties me to the bedposts securely.
Undresses bit by bit, walks over, and sits on my face while holding the gun to my temple.
I get her off until she falls back, exhausted.
She raps my skull with the gun to punish me and then unties me.
We roll toward each other. She cries over Harford and I remember her wet lips skimming my teeth and the new, louder noises she made, like an engine starting. I press my hard cock against her thigh and cradle her head, saying, “There, there.”
Then she takes me in her mouth, swallows, and chokes.
She slips away again as I sleep, dreaming of a miniature world where only she and I live, wearing coconut and grass apparel and singing Hawaiian cowboy songs.
“We are changing each other,” her note says.
Changing! I roll over and glance into my compact: Chanel, brand new.
My devil’s eyes possess clarity and definition; my nose is refined.
I close my fantastic eyes, and feel Annabel everywhere.
Her little feet have left impressions in the carpet, a trail of shapely pins, of seed pearls strung above them; her behind: two perfectly melon-shaped dents in the mattress. Her silvery charmeuse bra, its spheres still chiming, is slung from the bedpost: I hear the primum mobile, doubled. Her sounds linger and catch on the heavy drapery; the air is filled with clouds of her Mitsouko perfume.
I fall deeply asleep as these billows rain tiny pears of lemon wash, of pink pressed powder, and the red, sugared meat of her cunt, where dwarf fish swim through salty plankton.
* * *
I get a text in the morning with kisses and a link to another film, this one called Big Daddy.
The sex seems more graphic, more disturbing. Seen through a yellow filter, the two-minute video shows Annabel hitting me with the gun while Beethoven’s Sonata Pathétique plays on a scratchy old record.
My arms look corded and strong as I hold her meaty hips; the fast shot of my still, intent face is all shadows and planes.
I admire myself some more and call room service for a carafe of coffee and a bowl of fruit, then slip into my robe.
Jerry calls and says, “Keep doing whatever it is you’re doing to that girl. I’m sifting through hundreds of offers for movies, interviews, and commercials. Good stuff too, no more chickens.”
I put the phone down. How does he know? The ad never ran: Annabel had a couple of her criminal fans steal the master footage and rough up the Chickman CEO.
Returning it to my ear, I laugh and say, “Where did you hear about that?”
“Let’s just say I have my ways. And that I’m hanging on to it as a little insurance policy.”
Krishna has sold me out, I realize, already considering our next encounter.
The near-fatal assault is a fait accompli.
The aesthetician has arrived and is soaking my feet in a lavender brew.
“Insurance,” I say, calmly. “Do you mean like the old pictures I have of you sticking your tongue down a fourteen-year-old girl’s throat?”
It’s a risk, but the pictures could easily exist: Jerry used to throw the best and the most debauched parties.
“Let’s go through the offers,” he says, briskly.
“After you get rid of your policy.”
“What policy?” he asks, and I know that I’ve won.
“Paint them a white,” I say to the girl kneeling before me.
“Like the moon on a pure black night,” she says, separating and kneading my frothy toes.
“Sure, like that,” I say, lighting a contraband cigarette.
“Miss you,” I type to Annabel. And, “Good movie.”
“Can we just talk tonight?” she zaps back, and I groan.
“OK,” I write, even though I feel she is cheating me.
“Other foot, Handsome,” says the girl, and I check out her cursive-w ass. It bobs as she works, which barely excites me.
What has become of me?
Instead I think of Harford, of the crack that is bone on bone, then the soft yielding, blood like a fountain being fed in pieces.
Vengeance is mine, I think, and feel a chill finger on my spine.
“Leave,” I tell the girl.
She packs up her case, exits.
And a voice says, “You are wrong my, my, my — ”
Christ cannot bring Himself to say my child and tries a few synonyms: my kid, my boy, finally settling on “my ravening wolf.” He preaches this phrase from the shore of Capernaum until soft white-bellied orcas pile up like cordwood, their souls unhooking happily.
We may now live without fear, they say.
Without shame, without humiliation.
I was in StarWorld this winter, and I had the shakes.
A very assertive bat assailed me as I handed the cashier
— a pudgy boy with a rabbinical beard and high-water jeans — a signed picture, admittedly soiled, of me in Hamlet, a London production that received very fine notices.
He is chatting up a cute teenaged girl and is angry to be interrupted.
He sizes me up, flicks the picture back at me. “Look around, has-been,” he says, and I glance at all of the new stars I do not recognize.
“Take your dirty picture and fuck off,” he says, and the girl laughs shrilly, and so I memorize him and the winter’s flaw is expelled!
I will tell an airier version of what happened at the store to Jimmy Kimmel tonight and laugh, and he will negative-advertise them enough to send the cashier right into my arms.
And there lies the blade: what I did not hear as I walked, half-mad, away.
Away from what he never said as I lay on the sidewalk inflamed by vermin, before they came for me again, that is.
Now cracks a noble heart: never has anyone taken the blame.
* * *
Annabel appears in jeans, running shoes, and a big, hooded sweatshirt that covers her hair.
I am wearing a new navy suit with a pale-blue shirt and matching pocket square.
I feel absurd.
“I see,” I tell her, and leave the room, to change into sweatpants and the HOLLYWEIRD T-shirt I have found in the back of the drawer.
“Better?” I say, coming back to the living room, where she is lying on the sofa, drinking mini-bar bourbon and popping candied almonds into her mouth.
“Yeah, you look great,” she says, ignoring me.
“What did you want to talk about?”
“Nothing in particular,” she says, emptying the bag. “These are the notes for my screenplay, and this is the final draft of my book.”
I move beside her and weigh them in my hands.
She jumps up, visibly agitated. “Will refuses to talk to me. When I asked why, he told me to ask you.”
“He must be brain-damaged from the attack, the poor kid.”
I open the book in the middle:
Reading Kubrick’s fragmented, agonized women — the milk dispensers, tables, lashes, teeth, and garish wigs — as misogyny is a dangerous misprision. As with Kray’s deployment of fingernails, heels, and the infamous blow-up doll, this death-camp detritus supports the idea that women are in peril; that the feminized, made-up Alex and Sid are de facto women themselves —
“Women?” I say, remembering myself in the film, pouring a tumbler of milk as two girls snaked up my naked body.
“Well, symbolically,” she says. “Remember in Clockwork when Billy Boy tells his gang to get Alex, or her?”
Her skin has broken out; she has put on a pair of glasses that are taped together at the bridge and is standing beh
ind me, animated and as homely as I have ever seen her.
“Kubrick and Kray sympathized with the oppressed: the women of their generation were in danger. Well, we still are in danger. But — ”
“Why don’t we have a little nap?” I say.
She is furious.
“You hate me like this, don’t you? This is who I am. This is me in high school, this is still me.” She is breathing hard.
“I don’t understand,” I say, frightened.
“No, because I remade myself, just like you should have, after Kray.”
What does she mean? I see myself young enough still to be growing. This boy says, “Never tell.”
Tell what? I pull, I pull the T-shirt off: I seem to be having a heart attack. I throw up inside of it and curl into a ball.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I say mildly and see my mother, on one of her good nights, hovering over me with a crocheted blanket, smelling of cold vermouth.
* * *
I wake up attached to lines and a pole.
Annabel is asleep on a hard chair beside me, with all her papers and a plush teddy bear wearing a GET WELL SOON sweater and a bright red cap.
As she sleeps, I convince the nurse to give me my phone and I watch Verity.
It is black and white: in it, four teenage girls are smoking and dangling their legs in a kiddie pool.
They are all very pretty, including the hefty one with thick glasses and braids, who never looks up.
Three boys ride up on bikes, and I feel nervous, I am not sure why.
“Hi, girls,” the oldest one says. “You,” he says maliciously to the hefty girl.
The girls squeal and splash water at the boys, who join them.
They stop eventually, but this one boy won’t let up.
He douses the same girl’s shirt and pulls her hair.
“Stop it,” one of the girls says, but she is batting her eyes as well.
The screen goes black, and returns in vivid color.
“Go hang around with your own friends,” he says, shoving her face into the water. “The other animals.”
She manages to pull her head up and howl.
Everyone else takes off, but the older boy lingers a bit, watching her, amused.
“Leave me alone,” she says. “Please?”
He throws a lawn flamingo he has wrenched from the grass at her, and it cuts her face.
His friends call and he finally lopes away.
She stumbles to her feet and walks up to the lens. Wipes the blood from her face and says, “It is my thirteenth birthday. This is my party.”
She must have then thrown the camera onto the grass by the pool: the last shot shows an inflated giraffe drifting up to the lens and sticking to the sound of a girl’s grim, miserable crying.
I delete it. I can’t ever see this again.
“No one cares about me,” Annabel soughs in her sleep.
Tripping more alarms, I get up and lift her into my arms.
“I care about you,” I say. She doesn’t answer, but holds me tight as I walk the room, soothing her and myself.
I screw the surprise pair of marquise-cut diamond earrings into her delicate lobes. They are four-petalled flowers. She feels their necrotic white centers and soft platinum tips.
“You didn’t have to, I wasn’t hinting,” she says nervously, meaning the day she teased me about serious ice.
I ignore her objections and say, “You are my invaluable cure,” and we cry a bit and the orderly follows the alarms and I tell him everything is all right.
That my heart has been cured by a duchess.
“Amen,” he says as he reconnects me and kindly says nothing about the girl in my arms I won’t let go.
* * *
“Parnell Wilde in Heart Attack Drama!”
So rages the Star, which Annabel brought me along with a pile of cards, a bouquet of balloons, and loads of flowers from well-wishers.
I hate it all. The smell is disgusting, the cards toxic with insincerity.
“Very recently,” I say, “I’d have been on the county hospital payphone, begging my daughter to bring me a pair of socks.”
Annabel leaps the bars and arranges herself next to me. “I would have come,” she says.
“You might have,” I say, softening, as she whispers “movie star” in my ear, and picks at the knots holding my robe closed.
She slams the curtain shut, making the rings rattle, and strips.
I am wearing a catheter: alarms sound.
She is up like a shot and rolls under my bed when the nurse with the spiky mole bursts in, asking what I have done and jamming the stick back into my urethra so roughly I cry out.
Hearing this, Annabel cuts the nurse’s ankle, nicking her Achilles tendon; crawls toward and kisses me quickly, before sprinting off.
“I’ll be back tonight,” she calls out from the hallway, and I place my hand between my legs and try to think of unpleasant things.
That mole. The little cop. Siobhan’s undergarment. Annabel, topless, her breasts full and firm, spilling over the frilly edge of her pink satin bra. No, no.
I ask the medic who is working on the nurse, and to whom I have denied knowing Annabel — “Just some crazy fan, I guess” — to remove the catheter again.
It releases with a pop, and I say, “Keep it out.”
I hold on to an elimination jug and let myself remember every spot of Annabel, including the three heart-shaped beauty marks on her ankle, shoulder, and lip.
* * *
When I am returned home by town car, I take one look at the Elsinore, my splintered, puce apartment complex, and demand to be taken somewhere else.
My phone pings and it is my daughter, leaving the following, thoughtful text: “Heard you were sick, sucks. I need my tuition money, btw.”
Delete!
I want a place of my own. The driver, Dante, who is clearly stoned, is agreeable, and stops at several places for rent. I settle on a tiny house in Malibu, a short drive from the ocean.
He even signs the paperwork for me.
I give him the keys to my Mustang and a vague description of where I abandoned it. “She needs a bit of love, but the old lady’s got style and speed,” I tell him.
His brother is a mechanic. He tells me about repainting the car “in the dolce stil novo,” with speedy silver details, while methodically popping orange gelcaps.
Dante gets me inside the furnished house and kisses me goodbye, promising to visit.
Annabel was gone when they discharged me. No note this time, no text or email.
I check her social media sites, and none has been updated. Love is pouring in, however, for Catheter Cutie, which consists of a shot of her hand inside my robe that blows up into a grid of thousands of the same shot, as she sings “I Will Always Love You” in an operatic soprano that crumbles, during the verses, into raw, almost feral, growls.
I sit cautiously on the massive bed, and rest my head against its pink quilted headboard. The house had belonged to a pop star who swiftly milked the last drop from her only hit, the insufferably insincere “Mad Girls.”
This song is also the doorbell chime, and pipes through the house ceaselessly: I will soon find its source and take a sledgehammer to those “Mad girls, bad girls, you feel me, bitch?”
But first, I need to find Annabel.
Between calls to her voice mail, I phone Rabi and send him shots of the essentially barren house. I have furniture and electronics, but it looks featureless, like a large-scale variation on my miserable apartment.
He pulls up in a panel van a few hours later with a crew of big kids. They hang lamps and huge paintings, unroll modern Afghan rugs covered in rifles and ammo, and throw bright faux furs on every surface.
Rabi arranges the smaller objects — goldfish lu
xuriating in big, glass globes, plaster divinities, dioramas of famous murder scenes, beaded curtains, and pillows screened with Black Panthers.
And he places one of the best pieces, a seven-foot-tall stone angel — tinted with bleu des Anciens — by my bed. “In case you’re jonesing for her,” he says.
I hand him all the cash I have, and he refuses it.
Standing on a chintz ottoman, he looks me in the eye and says, “Don’t forget who she is, and what she did.”
Then he whistles for his crew, who are smoking by the pool and drinking banana daiquiris.
He lets me tip them, and I do. Extravagantly.
One of them pulls out the Enquirer picture of me and Annabel and says, shyly, “This you?”
I say that it is and he whistles.
“Where she at?” he says, and I tell him I don’t know.
“Find her,” he says.
I swear that I will.
I poke around for voice memos on my phone and find “Serenade, Annabel.” Lie back and listen to her warble,
Green eyes ringed in blue, the world captured by a Delft lasso.
Play it again. It is so awful, it is the algorithm for perfection, I sigh, before singing along.
* * *
Jerry has me do small, significant roles for money and prestige before TOP SECRET KRAY SEQUEL begins shooting.
Kray and I have yet to speak in any form, which is both suspenseful and soothing.
When my first new film appears, I am singled out for stealing scenes and for “muscling my way to where I belong.”
My management team tells me to be modest yet assured in interviews.
Jerry calls in favor after favor.
I talk to Howard Stern about my early retirement, a euphemism that he seizes on: “Do you mean your total, humiliating failure?” he says.
I am deflated, but he quickly spins my decadent years into my having been “king of the big ’70s bush,” drops a few starlets’ names, and declares that I am well-hung — which I am, legendarily so.
I do a few local TV morning shows, and Jerry manages to get me Fallon.