by Lynn Crosbie
I play a game with him that involves me guessing, blindfolded, what ladies’ garment he is wearing. I am applauded for saying “an edible G-string.”
This appearance leads to bigger requests, which we decide to put on hold until the Kray film is done.
We agree to one Vanity Fair shoot: a one-page shot of me in a torn Sex Pistols T-shirt, artfully lacerated jeans, and motorcycle boots, pointing a gun at the camera beneath the words SID VICIOUS. The accompanying paragraphs, pure fluff, call me “hotter than ever and back with a vengeance.”
I look insane; the photograph is unreal in its nasty perfection. Yet I am more like the man in the picture every day.
I wonder if I am delusional, and take a walk through Cherry Park. I see a young lady down by the river, toasty-tanned, with a cumulonimbus cloud of rich amber hair.
“Hey,” I say, sounding cool while apprehensively clenching my gut.
“Hey yourself, sugar,” she says, and winks. Her boyfriend catches up to her, and she walks away with him but turns her head back and smiles.
And that smile —
Like the gates of heaven swinging wide open and all the angels inside singing, “In the club.”
* * *
First I get a little haughty, then a lot, then mean: at first only to people who have it coming.
I happen to meet the girl from the car, for example, the one who told me to eat shit when I looked at her. She is reading for a walk-on in an HBO crime series; I have a guest role as a refined butcher and law professor. The suits want my character to recur. Coolly, I say I’ll think about it, and when the girl walks in and smiles at me, hard, I write NO on the script in front of me and pass it down the line.
“Next!” the director says, and I look at the girl and laugh when she bursts into tears.
I become vain. I visit surgeons, a hair specialist, and a cosmetic dentist who renders my teeth opaline. I have my own nutritionist, hairdresser, makeup artist, personal trainer, and stylist. Jerry is taking a calculated risk: Kray never fails.
I am being groomed to win an Academy Award. The team has even located my Palme d’Or for Ultraviolence, in the pawnshop by Cindy Club.
It is hard to tell anymore what magic Annabel has unleashed, and what is happening because of a run of good luck.
One morning, after I turn on the TV and see her and Harford checking into the Four Seasons, I tell myself that she is simply a nice girl whose kiss and whose little videos kick-started my comeback.
I should write her a thank-you letter, I think as I sit in my Jacuzzi, listening to the coyotes howling.
They are almost as hungry, as deeply incensed, as I am: “Dear Annabel, Best of luck and do remember that I enjoyed our meetings.”
This is the letter I write her later this night, the polished one I complete after crumpling at least five drafts. On the brush-calligraphy envelope I have sent to her hotel, I pick out the words HATE YOU with a straight pin in Braille.
I meet new women every day now. I am fine.
I’m fine, I cry underwater, fighting the overwhelming urge to stay there, my lungs burning, my eyes huge with despair, the sickly yellow of the recessed sun.
* * *
The next morning, I awake and shout.
Where the fuck am I?
An egg-shaped man in purple livery walks into my bedroom carrying a standing tray bearing coffee, rolls, fruit, juice, and a selection of papers.
Someone has hired me a butler.
“I am Charles,” he says, and nods at the bell beside the sugar bowl. “Ring if you need me. I’ll be cleaning your master bath. You’ll be able to eat off the floor,” he assures me, and disappears.
Among the papers is a Four Seasons envelope that I open, shaking.
“My darling,” it begins.
I’m not surprised you hate me. Will is like a sickness with me. When he hurts me, I feel that only he can make it better, like venom & anti-venom L.
Anyways, I know that I am just a step on your way back, and I should leave now before you leave me.
Weak, I know. I made another movie about us. You know where to find it.
Xo A
“I love you so much it hurts,” she has written, and crossed out, in the margin.
I watch Cannabel, a hazy love story in which she takes small bites of my body as I sleep in hospital. She cries when someone knocks at the door and leaves singing “Cherish,” in a low, thunder-dappled voice.
I’ve had enough. The dramatic entrances and exits, the broken promises, the mere existence of her cretinous boyfriend, and her willingness to be demeaned by him.
“Find a new leading man,” I text her. “And try to protect yourself, JFC!”
It makes me sick, sending this.
I end up crawling back under the covers and when Charles returns with my pressed clothes and pictures of the spotless bathroom, I tell him that I am going to fire him any second.
“I shall wait in suspense,” he says, and leaves me be.
I feel Annabel with me in my bed, walking her fingers down my chest and snap, beneath the elastic of my pajama bottoms.
She is swallowing me with her dark throat, with her tight, aromatic asshole.
“Are you sure?” I ask, and she responds by arching her back and moving toward me, taking me in inch by inch until I explode, until she soaks my crooked fingers and squalls — her hot, salty storm spraying us both.
This happened, once: my God, the power of beauty. All alone, I nurture my melancholy like the tender shoot of a black flower.
But I hear her crying, I hear it above the brisk housecleaning and suddenly raging wind, I call for her and she doesn’t answer.
I cover my ears to drown her out and somewhere under the same cool, Egyptian sheets, my girl —
A girl I am crazy about is choking, she is crying so much. She can’t show anyone my text so she deletes it, throws the phone against the wall and breaks it.
“I’m trying to sleep,” says her boyfriend, who came to bed at 6 a.m. calling her unspeakable names. “I’m sick of you,” he says, raising his hand, and her nose bleeds, meeting her tears and mucous.
I see all of this and do not move. I barely breathe until Charles carries me into the verbena-scented tub and scrubs me from head to toe, murmuring, “There, there,” as my own face seeps like hers into a hot washcloth.
Women’s faces are carved into the granite walls of the washroom. The sinks are womanly forms in a curvy pedestal with shapely legs.
She is everywhere; she is all in pieces.
“Forget her,” a small, mean voice insists, and I do, until I am clothed, and for some time after, driving my bottle-green Jaguar along hairpin turns and as fast as fucking lightning halfway to Mexico.
* * *
I hear two things on the radio that make me spin the car around and race back.
One: Harford has eloped with a French film star named Hedy Conasse.
Two: Annabel, “Harford’s former lady love,” is in intensive care at Cedars-Sinai, my recent habitat.
One report says she has been assaulted: I pull onto the shoulder and find the story online.
“Allegedly, Miss Wrath was assaulted by Mr. Harford in his home. The fight ended, bystanders report, when he tried to throw her through his living-room window to her death.”
I call someone I fear and despise.
He listens to my imprecation. Hangs up.
Harford’s plane crashes over the Pacific, killing him, his new bride, the pilot, and several hangers-on.
The pilot is revealed to have been drunk out of his mind: the black box has recorded him talking to his co-pilot, a glass of vodka with poor navigation skills.
But still. Did he arrange this? I asked only that he have someone shoot out his tires. Something, but not this.
“May God bless you,” I say to th
e infinitesimal remains of the dead, the flocking on gull’s wings, the small shimmer in the blue glass of the sea.
I get back on the road. It is her turn to hurt, and to want — want me — I hope, as my reservations about her are reconstituted and leave the car like a pale tendril of exhaust.
* * *
I freshen up in the hospital bathroom, combing back my hair, smoothing my striped sleeves, and checking out my worn blue jeans and the engineer’s boots.
I buy her flowers in small clay pots, two heart-shaped balloons, and a box of truffles, and add to this haul a copy of Nightwood, the new Guns & Ammo, some loungewear, marabou slippers, toiletries, perfume, and a cashmere robe I have quickly shopped for on the way.
And the bear in the sweater we call Tubby: he rests on top of a shopping bag in a dapper new cap and scarf.
I evade the nurses and slip into her room, which is barren of cards or flowers.
Quickly I set up a nice tableau, slipping the same kind orderly from my own residence here a few hundred-dollar bills to fill the windowsills with tulips, bright gerbera daisies, and a selection of forged, cheerful notes.
I sit beside her and hold her hand, evading the PICC line. Her face makes me cry, which wakes her.
“It was an accident,” she says dreamily, swatting at her morphine dispenser.
“I fought back,” she says with frail pride. “I don’t remember much of anything, though.”
She tries to smile. The smile dies halfway up. She slaps her hands over her face. “I remember everything. I hurt so much. He said things too, things I never want — What will I do if he calls?” she says as I hold her carefully, smelling the marrow and peppermint that emanate from her little fiddlehead ear.
It occurs to me she doesn’t know about his marriage.
Or death.
“I won’t let you take his calls or see him anymore,” I say. “You are mine, and I’ll fight him if I have to.”
“I am yours?” she says shyly, and shrinks into her pillows.
“Yes, and we are going to begin from the beginning: I want to know about you, and I will tell you things about me I have never told a soul.”
“Like what?”
“Like we are the same, you and I.”
I kiss her, and her smashed face begins to reassemble. It is as if I am watching rugged caterpillars push their way into their glorious wings.
A nurse walks in when her transformation is well underway.
Shocked, she asks, “Are you the plastic surgeon?”
“Yes, and I am also Miss Wrath’s hairdresser,” I say as I brush the mats from her hair and coax it into lustrous waves.
“You’re a witch?” Annabel says, quietly.
“No, and neither are you. This is adoration, that’s all, and that is everything.”
“I need to work on her body,” I say to the nurse, and she opens and closes her mouth. Leaves.
I call Dante, who collects us in a prom limo, half a block long and appliance-white.
When she is home and changed, I ravish the prettiest girl in the world until she sings in plainsong then polyphony, prying apart the bars of the staves until she reaches, then sticks to me with her own succulent goo and ravenous lips: “Let’s stay together,” she says from a heart-racing height.
“You are the one who always leaves,” I say, and we crash as she rakes my back until it opens into fine red stalks.
I fall asleep and find her reading something on her phone when I wake.
This will destroy her. I hold my breath reflexively, to prepare for her exit.
“That actor died,” she says. “The one in the new Desiree Akhavan movie.”
“Are you all right?” I say cautiously.
“No. A lot of people died in the crash, the poor things: he even had a wife.”
“So why are you laughing?”
“I’m just so happy,” she says, slipping into my shirt with me, so our hearts may speak privately.
“Tell me everything about you,” I say.
She pops my buttons, rummages through one of the hospital bags, and sprays herself from a glass DeVilbiss atomizer. Runs her long, candy-striped fingernails through the rope of amethysts she wears over her pink-and-blue nightgown and asks me to find her a pair of her diamanté gripper socks.
“He liked me barefoot,” she says, and grimaces, a revisionist Cendrillon.
So do I, I think and, sensing my little dolor, Annabel says, “You can see them naked anytime,” and I kiss her toes, arches, heels as they disappear into their fuzzy shells.
“I started making movies when I was a kid,” she says, and stops. “Do you really want to hear all this?”
I feel the heat between her legs meet mine and burn.
I do.
* * *
Annabel, née Carolina Rivera, grew up in Toledo, Ohio, in an apartment with her single mother, a ruthless claims collector who never spoke about her birth father except to call him a “pasty-faced liar” and a “ghost.”
Beautiful and almost mute, her mother worked long hours and spent the rest of her time taking long baths, smoking, and listening to jazz or, when she was feeling bitter, bachata on the radio. Annabel holed up in her room with books and movies whenever she was home, which was seldom.
On her ninth birthday, she found a pink video camera in the park and started shooting everything she saw.
She would work on the films after school. Kelly, the AV man, hunched-over and squirrelly, showed her how to edit, score, and upload them; he taught her effects, lighting, and sound. The short films became popular online very quickly: they were weird and edgy; she was still a kid.
She had to let Kelly hold her hand now and then, and once, perch on the very edge of his lap as he stroked the arms of the chair and said, “Pussy, my little pussy.”
When she puked on him, he was genuinely remorseful: he got her sugar water and ice and gave her a twenty-dollar bill, which she refers to, sardonically, as “the first time I made money hooking.”
* * *
Annabel is thirteen years old when she gets her first break.
She is advanced to the eleventh grade after winning a prestigious nationwide arts competition for seniors, for her essay “Alex in Wonderland: DeLarge and Frightening Girl in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.” Her principal asks her, timidly, to redact the section on Kray, whose work he feels “is quite a bit like pornography, isn’t it?”
When she meets the judges, who convene to award her a comically oversized check, they are aghast to meet a short, thick girl in a romper, her hair combed like segmented farmland, with elastic-tethered haystacks on each plot.
When they try to take the prize away, she calmly asks to speak to an advocate. “And a cop.”
She then extemporizes, succinctly, her thesis about Alex/Alice: the Humpty Dumpty–smashed eggiwegs, the auto-erotic hanging of Alice — a man in drag, the many timepieces, the Cheshire Cat–lady, the white rabbit liquefied or gendered as milk, the EAT ME card on the hospital gift basket, the —
The panel has heard enough.
“Well, this looks sexy,” the lady educator in seamed stockings and a sausage casing–tight suit says as they pose for a single photograph and then flee, leaving Annabel wearing her heavy medal and beaming, alone.
She has never won anything, not even good grades. Her long, ponderous essays are returned to her unread with thin, penciled comments like “Didn’t read, too long,” or once, in flaming red, “Get outside once in a while with the other children.”
Barely liked, she can’t even stake out choice loser turf like the corner of the teachers’ lounge or the long table in the library where the ugly algebra hounds and stinking biology mavens gather, mocking their popular classmates who would, they were certain, “wind up selling burgers to my kids one day!”
She hates them more t
han the oblivious, the bullies, and the pompously hateful. Obsessed with style even then, she admires the way these kids look, walk, talk. Like they are dying of a mysterious illness that makes them speak slowly and unintelligibly; that makes them move as if underwater; that requires them to wear gown-loose, flowing, and bandage-tight garments.
She tries to walk as they do, slowly, but she is electric with possibilities. She wears the medal to school and runs down the hall. It bumps against her, and one kid, the only nice one in the world, says, “That’s so cool.” She thanks him, then repeats his name — Damian, Damian, Damian — until it lies among the promises etched in longhand on her brain.
I will spare some and torture others, she thinks, and runs outside, skipping the rest of the day to cash the check.
She buys an important pair of shoes at Dillard’s, lilac-colored Prada kitten heels with wide T-straps and silver buckles.
A perfect black dress: simple, elegant, and short, that she will wear all her life, coal-heavy mascara, diamanté powder, grape-purple lipstick, sheer nylons, a luscious gold bottle of Mitsouko.
Hits the Franklin Park Mall for a bag of books, an iPod, a leopard cape, a spiked belt, a sharp knife, and an enormous bag of sunflower seeds she eats, exclusively, for weeks and weeks until she is rail-thin.
And a new phone, from the back of a station wagon. It’s practically free, but the clothes — there are more basic, yet essential, items in the bags — eat all of her check.
Just having these riches makes her feel as though she is on the threshold of beauty, the great illusion — so great that when she smiles at the young man at the electronics store, he becomes confused, and as he stammers and starts rifling through inventory, she deftly tosses a digital Nikon into her (new) violet purse while releasing her tightly wound hair, which springs out roaring like a lioness.
“I saw you,” he whispers later, at her doorstep, but by then his hands are so enamored of, and all over, her plump, tight ass that he does not give one fuck.
* * *