by Lynn Crosbie
Annabel’s mouth alight on this scar, altering it into our linked initials, her tongue sliding into the crack of my
Alexander is fifteen when I come across him one night forcing a terrified girl down into the basement, her arms pinned behind her back, his hand jammed over her mouth.
She is Aisha, the twelve-year-old daughter of a cancer-stricken single father, a good neighborhood friend who has asked me to look out for her.
“What are you doing?” I say to him, pulling her away. She runs and she runs like Atalanta out the door and across the lawn.
His hand comes away wet with her blood: what has he done?
“Take it easy, Dracula,” he says, and I snap for the first time.
I faintly recall kneeling on his chest and punching him until I have made a nice crater in his fucking face, the pulse of an ambulance’s light in the trees, his shock, and the contempt in his eyes that has been there all along.
He tells the police officer that someone from school — “He was wearing a mask, a pig mask” — attacked him, and asks that I go with him to Central Booking.
I refuse and, just like that, cut off all communication.
I stay until he is sixteen, then tell him and my bitch wife that I’m out the door.
“I’ve done my time,” I say. “L’incident est clos!” I snap, like Yves Montand, whom I vainly feel I have come to resemble.
He moves out, and does very well for himself.
He is currently the lead singer of a psychedelic punk band called Kraut: his hair is bleached white, his eyes altered to look pale blue, with vertical irises.
He tells the media we are tight and that my films are fucking dope, even the bad ones.
I don’t want to think about him; memories trick and violate me.
I turn my face upward and stare at the unfinished ceiling — Annabel wants a skylight, I want a mural — and try to count the specks there while separating them into three categories: stain, bug, and mold.
But my son returns, like Catherine Earnshaw scratching at the window.
I get up, demolish the bathroom, pad downstairs and pour the last of the whiskey into a cup of cold coffee from the day before, and light a cigarette.
Girls still came home with him.
Lots of them.
Muffled screams, once, that I ended by firing a shotgun through his door. Two preteens scurried out; Alexander lay back, pleased.
“I’ll kill you,” I said, and he laughed out loud.
* * *
Before I left, two things happened.
One: I fucked the cleaning lady, Midge, whose visits we had reduced to once a week.
Midge looks like Popeye: short, squinty, and strong, with a huge cleft chin.
She curses like a sailor too, at the squalor she must tackle each visit: piles of sodden, reeking laundry; sinks teeming with stained, unscraped dishes; fungal tiles; toilets caked in shit and hemmed with viscous, bright yellow piss.
I come across her one day using a knife on the powder-room sink to extract rosettes of paste, blood, and phlegm.
Allegra does not do housework. Watching Midge excites me; she is so ruggedly sexual.
I place my hand meaningfully on her yellow glove: she is game.
Allegra swings open the door to find me teabagging her on the floor as she works my perineum with a toilet brush.
“How could you?” she says, then, “Pudge, look at what your father is doing to us!”
Midge and I spring up, dress in a flash, and face our inquisitors.
No one speaks.
Midge says at last, “For the record, this kinda heat starts itself.”
Pudge and Allegra stare, appalled, and walk out, slamming the door.
I feel unclean and excited.
“Get them balls back here,” Midge says, and we roll around like pigs in unseen manure until we are both squealing with pleasure.
I tip her extravagantly and she leaves her number on the wall with Lysol Power Foam.
Two uneasy weeks pass and Allegra returns.
She is not alone.
* * *
The second thing.
Enter Cal.
He is an unemployed glass-blower with a ponytail, earring, and panel van decorated with an airbrushed portrait of Allegra as Adele Bloch-Bauer. Low on funds, he is forced to use yellow instead of gold. She looks jaundiced and incontinent.
“I love her, man,” he tells me, assuming a judo stance.
“Then by all means take her,” I say.
Exit me, at last — too bad Cal leaves her by the cheap motel in Butte where they have been fighting for an entire week; that she, sheepishly, must call me for a bus ticket.
She returns to the house, huffy and disgraced; I move to a little place in Artesia, where Pudge visits me to stare at her phone, stream X-rated horror movies, and raid my cupboards.
I barely notice her except to grimace at the sight of her circus tent-sized jean dresses and purplish ankles jammed into yellow Crocs.
I date a different girl every night. “I’m so lonely,” I tell each of them before asking them to leave.
“Let me help you,” they say, and I think of something that Michael Jackson told me — or was it Jermaine? No, he was small, and perfect. I was blowing my head back with a celery-sized rail of coke —
“Girls don’t want to take away my loneliness,” Michael said. “They want to share it.”
I never saw him again: isolation had folded him into a tiny bindle and inhaled him whole.
My son vanishes also.
He calls me now and then — Allegra gives him my details, repeatedly — and sometimes he sends me checks with fatuous notes in the memo line, like “Saw you in The Wee Pubkeeper. Super!”
It was a serious, though mawkish, movie in which I played a legless, vigorously Irish publican — I kneeled, miserable, for weeks.
Most often, he simply, evilly, writes, “Daddy, please treat yourself, you deserve it.”
Psychopath, I seethe.
On the rare occasions that I answer his calls, I tell him I will rip up his checks and do.
I then tape them back together and empty entire shelves at Catalina Liquor.
Shame: drink enough and the word loses all meaning.
* * *
Annabel pries it out of me.
It is midnight and she is bathing. I am rapturously cleaning her dusky shoulders, her prominent rib cage, and her convex belly with a rough, soapy little washcloth.
“This tattoo,” I start to say, and she stands up, shaking like a dog as she steps out of the tub.
“Don’t ask,” she says. Groans and tells me.
“My girlfriend and I were drunk, and we wandered into some ancient parlor with crazy old boards. She got this cartoon tattoo that says KEEP ON TRUCKIN’. It covers her back, she won’t go swimming.”
“You dumb kids,” I say fondly, I think. But all she hears, and she’s not entirely wrong, is a pompous old man.
The fight is on.
We hurl insults at each other and shake with rage.
She pulls out her camera after she’s dressed, which infuriates me.
“Why do you lie all the time?” she says in the background as the lens homes in on my pursed, sweating face.
“About what?”
I dodge and she follows me, never losing sight.
“Isn’t this your son?” she says, holding up a photograph torn from a magazine.
It is one I have never seen. He is dressed as Sid from Ultraviolence and looks just like me.
“Yes,” I say. “We’re not close, you know that.”
All at once, I remember my son’s birth: his large head crowning as the delivery room fills with the smell of fear and shit.
“Do you want to meet him?” I say speciously, and she
throws the camera at me.
I never see this film; she doesn’t mention Alexander again until it all comes down, and when it does, she can’t speak for fear of dying.
THREE
Annabel and Parnell,
pacific palisades, 2017
The War in Heaven
Annabel and I would come to refer to the night of our big brawl as the War in Heaven.
We fight for hours: crockery is shattered and a picture window; pieces of furniture become kindling; some of my good clothes are altered with bleach, scissors, and a Magic Marker.
And the bear, our fat little bear!
Just as I am holding manicure scissors to his now-rumpled GET WELL SOON sweater, Annabel yowls.
“Oh no, not Tubby!”
We are imbeciles regarding his welfare and company.
He spends half the week with her, in her purse, usually, on a bed of flannel squares she has sewn into a small quilt and matching pillow; during the other half, he rides in my car in a shoebox outfitted with a floccose lining, a shag pillow, and his travel gear: a coat and loose pajamas that Annabel made from a pattern and scraps of colorful, downy fabrics.
He also has a case containing several more garments, three additional hats, a pair of yellow rain boots, and six pairs of knitted socks.
His own nanoscale teddy bear, which we made together — drunk and cursing, then proud beyond reason at the amiable, misshapen result.
A tiny book about grizzly bears, a bowl and cup, a ring of keys.
And a framed picture of us, holding him from either paw.
Tubby sleeps with us separately and together, and has a high, gentle voice that has ended a lot of animosity between us.
“I’m so sorry,” I say, to her, to the bear, as I quickly retrieve his robe and shower sandals and place him in the tub with his Chiclet-sized bar of soap and rolled-up square of Turkish towel.
She runs a few inches of water and we wash him with Q-tips, dry him off, dress him, and, exhausted, place him between us on the bed.
We sleep.
Her voice is a bird that has lost its way: “Are we a joke?”
“What do you mean?” I say, and reach for her hand.
“Look at us,” she says sharply, flicking Tubby to the floor.
I move to get him and she stops me.
“It’s a toy,” she says. “Leave it be.”
I retrieve him anyways, with a lot of elderly grunts and one bottomless wheeze.
“This toy is who we are and what we yearn for, made tangible,” I say, and she writes a note on her phone. I see the words PW: REIFY.
“And it means as little or as much as we want it to mean. It means everything to me,” I say, and tuck the little chap between our pillows before turning away from her.
I cannot stand the thought of her seeing me cry again.
Then again, she is crying, audibly.
She is so beguiling when she cries, as the entire world gathers in breathing, tensile drops and breaks, and the seas and forests rush in living lines along her miraculous face, and gusts of salt air rush from her quivering lips.
I, on the other hand, shout and honk, turn crimson and leak dense, viscous fluids that gather in the folds of my raw skin.
“Why?” I manage to say.
“I’m crying,” she says, as she delicately tidies herself with a chiffon napkin, “because of what you said about love, about us. It was so beautiful,” she says, and I light up. Secretly, I am fairly intimidated by her, and afraid she thinks I’m an idiot.
But Annabel wrote down something I said. The woman followed and venerated by more than a hundred thousand smart, cynical kids; the woman constantly singled out by the right magazines and papers as an unparalleled rising star in her field.
The woman I never said I loved, not ever.
I keep crying, as does she.
We cry into our dreams, dreams where we run and cannot escape the agony that awaits us; we cry until we are hoarse, roll back and hold each other on the sodden raft, raising the white flag that the pirates never fail to shoot at and burn.
* * *
There is a call: Kray is ill — his doctors believe he has had a stroke — and shooting is postponed indefinitely.
This is after the War in Heaven and its concomitant terrors. We are inseparable, and have woken up wound together like snakes.
“I’m sorry,” Annabel says, disingenuously.
I am free to work on her untitled film now.
“Oh, what a shame,” I say, making a solicitous call to Kray’s wife, Vivienne, and bounding downstairs to make French toast with fresh blueberries, singing, “Every 1’s a winner, baby—”
As I stir the batter and hum, I think of what has changed between Annabel and me. Our affair feels so fragile, as though one harsh word would shatter it, and shatter us irrevocably.
She keeps her apartment because we concede that we are something of a Molotov cocktail together and prone to agitation.
That said, she uses it only to store clothes she has tired of and to retreat to during bouts of anger that never last longer than a day.
I put it out of my mind: as far as I’m concerned, we will live together forever. I have enchanting visions of us, of me, elderly and riding up a set of ornate stairs on a plump motorized chair as she, still beautiful, but silver now, waits for me.
There are more, there shall be a lifetime of such visions!
* * *
We find a house in the Pacific Palisades, a billionaire’s 3,500-square-foot cottage on countless acres of lush, fertile land where mustangs run free and painted birds perch on every tree.
There is a studio/office for her, and a den I can retreat to now and then to rest, as happy as I have ever been; happier than that.
We ventilate our life to include a small group of friends, oddballs that she has collected — antique poets, young gangsters, jaded, heartsick models, corpulent acrobats, and more.
The house is decorated, with pleasure, and we welcome strays: two dogs, a half-wolf, who scare everyone but us, and a litter of abandoned skunk cubs we tame and have de-scented after a few misfires.
Annabel cooks some nights, a strange, sherry-loaded mock–mock turtle soup — made with tomatoes, green peas, and amniote-shaped crackers — with fresh-baked bread; vegetable creole stew, swaying soufflés, and desserts dripping in chocolate that we eat on the slate roof, as it rains and rains, holding us fast.
Mostly, we order food in and project movies onto a sheet that we staple to the living-room wall. We lose our phones and fuck constantly to Moroccan love songs.
I email Pudge that I am going to Venezuela to play Rum Tum Tugger at the Caracas Athenaeum; Annabel sends a mass email saying she has joined me.
Occasionally, we dress in black, with large sunglasses and her hair in purdah below a white Hermès scarf. We visit MOCA and watch Arthur Jafa’s Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death, standing against the back wall like violet-flowering jacaranda trees, still, our heads swaying toward each other, sending questions we answer by kissing passionately, and, being impudent, write TL;DW in the comment book.
We eat tofu dogs at Pink’s and visit the planetarium. Very stoned, we name stars after each other and when one shoots by we squeak the same wish and say If I tell you it won’t come true
We document and love our adventures, the drives to the ocean and desert, weekends in Catalina, Ojai, and Palm Springs, but what we love the most is being as close as possible, something that has caused us to be thrown out of two cinemas.
And a diner, almost.
She was telling me about visiting her mother’s folks back home, and living, for a while, in the mountains with lambs, wearing nothing but a linen scrap, and I slapped a hundred-dollar bill on the table for the advancing waiter and slid from my booth to the ground, crazed with love, parted her legs and —<
br />
Made her come true, and me too — she slings silverware like the Great Throwdini, nailing someone.
We don’t know who. When the cops show up, we have long since vanished in a cloud of smoke.
* * *
We are on our way to a puppet show–slash–play reading by some casual friends, people Annabel knows, and are wanting coffee.
“Starbucks?” I say.
She says no.
She tells me she had an idea in high school about why the shop was named after that Moby Dick character.
“Starbuck is a minor character, but near the end, he falls asleep and messes everything up,” she says, animated now. “I always wondered if the Starbucks founders were making a joke, like if the eponymous sailor had drunk some coffee, he’d have stayed awake and, you know, whale meat for everyone!”
“I like that,” I say admiringly. “Did you ever tell anyone?”
“I did,” she says. “Some barista, who brushed me off and wrote Bananaball on my cup.”
“Bitch,” I say, frowning. “I’m glad we fucked on their kiddie changing station.”
This excites her, and she starts teasing my fly and then loses her hand inside my jeans.
We pull over and fuck fast and rough.
Skip the show and hurry home, where my insatiable beast flips me onto the sofa while gnawing off my pants, leaving me gasping in socks and a too-short dress shirt.
But I am half-limp, distracted. Should I impress her coffee idea more vigorously to the Starbucks suits?
In such a way that they have to hear her out.
As if she can read my fiendish mind, she redoubles her efforts.
Eases open each shirt button, removes both socks while filling my ear with blandishments like “so sexy,” “pussy burning,” and “take me like a god.”
Quietly, almost soundlessly, to be enraged with a dumb thing seems blasphemous.
I fold her open and hammer away until we are both hoarse and traction-burned and exhausted. I am reduced to pulling feebly at the sofa bed’s bar until it springs open and, relieved, we crawl aboard, finding individual pillows and blankets at its stern.