by Lynn Crosbie
“This can’t last,” I say.
I say this hours later, when she has managed to fuck me again in something like a hot trance, and I burst open and blossom.
“No,” she says, squeezing all of our ravishing life inside her as time waits on the sidelines, smoking; watchful.
Volta, I write on my palm with my dentist’s pen the following day.
We sleep late, and after dinner we drive around, Annabel wanting to go to the ocean while I would rather park at the observatory and look at the stars.
We decide again to have coffee, to spike with whiskey later, and a bag of donuts.
“Let’s go to both places and have picnics,” she says, and we head over to Spudnuts on Figueroa.
We park, step outside, and start playfully grappling when two cops, fat and thin, stop us.
“Is she bothering you?” the fat one asks, and I smile.
“Always,” I say, smiling, and suddenly she is pushed up against the cruiser as the thin one demands to see her ID.
What the fuck is happening?
I take a swing at him, and see the fat one hit Annabel with his baton. I hit him again, but this is different, I feel weak and enervated and I am cuffed and she is cuffed and Jerry bails us out. He scares the two cops with talk of lawsuits and the press and she and I never speak of it, although we should, and some time later their two bloated bodies are pulled out of Bell Creek, naked and mutilated.
“Crazy Cop Killer on the Loose,” claims the L.A. Times in its lead story. “A surgical scalpel found two miles downstream, our reporter has learned, is thought to have removed segments of their flesh.”
“There go Fat and Skinny,” I remark, passing Annabel the paper that she looks at as though she is blind.
“This is a dangerous city,” she says, and stretches. “I’m still craving a donut,” she tells me, playfully chewing on my ear and teasing me until I drag my ass to Stan’s and feed her bits of blackberry and raspberry and blueberry.
She cries when we kiss.
“I love how things work out in the end,” she says.
I love all that blood, I remember the Night Stalker saying during his murder trial almost thirty years ago.
I felt disconcerted at the time and now — “I do too,” I say.
* * *
Annabel’s bad dreams persist.
She wakes and moves around the dark bedroom, eyes wide, arms outstretched.
“Please help me,” she says, collapsing into me when I reach her.
I lead her to bed and within the hour she is up again, cowering in the shadows, clutching her nightgown at the neck and pleading.
I will get up and carry her several times before she falls asleep, clinging to me and praying on what appear to be rosary beads.
After a few days of this, I ask her to see someone.
She refuses angrily and that night sinks her teeth into my hand so deeply I tell her to take me to see a doctor.
Ashen, she drives me to an urgent-care clinic, her pale face framed by damp segments of long, snaky hair.
I let myself feel every bump of the ride, watch the pulsing lights, and place my wound in my mouth.
It is dangerous to be this happy: the blood ringing her mouth is the first sign that we are too far gone, too hungry and fearless.
It’s just a flesh wound, we discover, and a badly bruised bone.
Later, at home, as she crawls on the floor, weeping for someone to save her, I get up. Cloaking my injured hand in a pillowcase, I pray for relief, just a morsel, and there is none.
* * *
My nightmares follow suit.
The man in the bridal veil and morning suit is never far behind me. When I spin around to confront him, he becomes a raven and flies away.
“This won’t hurt,” he says, and I bury my face in the pillows. It hurts so much. The blood is his nourishment; it is the sea he plunges into and patrols, revealing only the apex of his black dorsal fin.
Annabel is sleeping.
“We were the Piccadilly Circus freaks,” I tell her.
Runaways, addicts.
Some of my friends are rent boys, but I stick to crimes and shacking up with the occasional old lady.
The men won’t leave me alone, though.
This one, a huge brute, tells me he’ll give me a hundred quid for a few kisses.
“You’re the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen,” he says, and I believe him: just some kissing.
But he changes his mind and demands a blow job. I do the best I can; he cums all over me, then throws me out of his car, calling me a dirty little nance.
I go to one of the old ladies’ places and say I have the flu. She runs a bath and tucks me in bed, sets me up with tea and juice.
I am so grateful I thank God.
Then the old bitch grabs my cock. I knock her out, rip the gold choker from her baggy neck, and hock it.
“I’ve always had bad luck,” I tell Annabel. “You’re better off without me.”
Annabel yawns.
“What time is it? What did you just say?”
“It’s late. Nothing at all.”
I hold and pet her, feel her burrow under my arm like a little rabbit.
I am grateful she knows none of this. The story gets worse, I tell her. It’s not for her.
“Are you worried I’ll love you less?” she asks between slow, somnolent breaths. “Because I won’t. I’ll love you more, because you’re brave and a survivor. And you are the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen,” she says as the moonlight crowns her lustrous head. I kiss her limp hand and it wakens, grabs me, pulls me close.
“A miserable failure” is how one of my late reviews started: the critic was referring to me.
You were wrong.
To hold Annabel, to be filled with her, is to flourish; to know what joy is, a melody the miserable wind tries to pick out on taut catgut strings, failing every time.
* * *
We take off.
In London, I try to connect with old friends and colleagues, but most are dead or missing.
Jerry, however, ensures that we are invited to all the right parties and premieres. After our picture appears in the papers, Vivienne Kray personally invites us to the opening night of a retrospective of her husband’s work at the Saatchi Gallery.
We see Date with the Devil, a noir about a bookie who keeps getting blackout drunk and waking up with Satan — a forked tail is coiled on the pillow beside him, a horrified glance reveals scorch marks on the sheets, and so on.
Not as complex as his later work, it is still visually stunning, and the ending, where the protagonist and the devil kiss, put on cowboy hats, and ride into a flaming sunset, is both modern and quaint at once.
Vivienne, a sculptress, is taken by Annabel: she presses her enormous Chanel cocktail ring on her after she admires it, and the two of them speak privately and with animation about the script, and about Kray.
“Are you sure?” says Annabel to a question I do not quite hear, and Vivienne tells her, “I’ll place it in his hands myself.”
“What?” I hazard, and the older woman, a congenital liar, says, “All in due time, darling Parnell, all in due time.”
So I choke on my curiosity and hold out my arm for her withered, diamond-loaded arm to grasp, the opulent vulture.
She tells me that Kray is recovering beautifully and will be back soon, or so she hopes, blushing in a way that makes her skin mottle.
I tell her I am happy to hear the news and squeeze her like a python until she weeps.
“How very ugly you are,” I murmur as I blot her tears, knowing she is deaf as a stone, and she readily allows my ministrations.
When we return to the Dorchester that evening, Annabel models the ring and a pair of sequined silver slippers as I lie on the bed.
We are very drunk.
“Fuck me,” she says, biting her lip hard.
I take my time, nervous as a honeymoon girl, with kisses and nips and bites, all the time waiting to be tapped out.
But she remains reclined, circling me with her silver nails and crossing her stilt-legs over my back until I take the plunge.
And plunge and plunge until I am depleted and she is in tears.
“I’m sorry,” she says, turning away.
“Darling,” I say, holding out my hands.
In them is a nostalgic assortment of fine cutlery.
“Oh!” she says, spooning and forking me ecstatically until she is ready to climb aboard, waving the knives like six-shooters and coming loudly enough to wake the gentleman next door.
He raps on the wall between us and we hear, “Good heavens, old girl, where are your manners?”
Annabel falls off me, laughing, and I join her on the carpet, where she lands.
I join her in Persia, epicenter of the Parthian Empire, where the Tigris pours glossy square jewels and lilac water and Annabel’s skin is an unbroken, silt-smooth ostracon.
* * *
We tour the continent.
She shops as if possessed and I buy travel guides and join groups of other old men on literary walking tours, usually led by scandalized spinsters.
“And here is the saucepan that Lord Byron’s half-sister, his lover, employed to boil his diaries, the flabby bint, and there is the cock ring that Oscar Wilde fashioned in Reading Gaol.”
The matron, who is clearly insane, is pointing at a napkin ring in the middle of Harrods.
The other old men gasp and take pictures. I text one to Annabel, who speeds back a shot of her in the changing room at Glamorous Amorous, modelling a pair of white scalloped knickers from Strumpet & Pink, gathered with white ribbons and affixed with a black taffeta bunny tail.
“Buy everything,” I write back as our tour guide brandishes “the dull knife that Jane Eyre used to blind poor Mr. Rochester.”
“Reader, I mutilated him,” I say, and the other men grunt amiably.
But I am preoccupied looking at yet another of Annabel’s lingerie shots; in this one, she is denuded of everything but plush cat’s ears, blowing me a kiss.
“Cleopatra’s Needle pronto,” I text, leaving my group to marvel at John Donne’s extensive collection of nude lipsticks.
Annabel waits in a long black coat that I open just enough to peer inside at a black bustier and stockings fringed with cherry-colored fluff and fringe before entering her without ceremony. We rock slowly and languidly as pictures are taken and the interminable rain begins.
“It’s almost working,” she says, gnashing into my neck, so I tear off her coat, and before we are arrested, Annabel howls into the lovesick wind, purpling the perfumed air with her amazed pleasure.
“We’ll let you off just this one time,” the officer says after cuffing and pushing us into the back of his squad car.
We have been recognized from any number of gossip columns and papers.
Annabel ignores him and, leaning forward, shouts through the open window.
“You are so alive,” I say as she drops and rests against me, then, adorably, asks the cop to drive us to our hotel, which he does.
We are the happiest right now, I think, pushing a pin through the moment as it passes into memory and is leached of color and sound.
We fall into bed fully dressed.
She kicks me in her sleep and I kick her back, hard.
The anger that resides within us, customarily in abeyance, has been roused like uncharmed snakes.
We leave for home on the first flight the next morning, exhausted from packing and the laborious politeness we have adopted as a stand-in for the rage coursing through us like deadly poison.
She brushes against me and apologizes.
“No, excuse me,” I say.
The more beautiful it is between us, the closer we are to dying alone.
It is a week before we stop being painfully civil. I tell her about the tour guide and she can’t help it, she laughs.
She shows me the bill for her lingerie and French perfume and I roar at and kiss her roughly.
She sighs, softly. We are back on.
* * *
The next morning, Annabel presents me with a script rolled into a Soft White Bimbo bread bag tied with Chanel ribbon.
Ultraviolence TWO: I open it and see there are just a few notes, some maps, and drawings.
“I didn’t know you were making a full-length sequel, “ I say anxiously.
Kray will not allow this to happen, regardless of what Vivienne says.
“Legally, are you even allowed to make one?”
She tells me her lawyer has worked it all out and I wonder if she is telling the truth, then realize these forensic issues are the least of my concerns.
She wants to move beyond the flash films, she tells me. The plot is all in her head. In her story, Sid, who is now a timid old shopkeeper, meets a girl, Veronica, who changes him.
“Veronica is a sadist and criminal,” says Annabel, “but she loves Sid. He’s afraid of her at first and then a romance grows as he becomes more feminine and she, more masculine.”
“What do you mean? Does he start carrying a handbag?”
“No, I’m using these gendered terms loosely in order to invoke dangerous ideological inventions that hurt women and deform men.”
“Oh.”
I am not sure what to say.
“Wait. Isn’t that like that the stuff in your book?”
“Yes, but the book is more academic,” she says. “The film is an imaginative iteration of its premise.”
“What’s it called?”
“Church of Dork,” she says, and shows me a picture of a trashed old tabernacle with the words spray-painted over the altar.
What does she mean by this? I haven’t the faintest idea.
Whenever she is frowning over her critical-theory books, painting them with her squeaky pink highlighter, I pretend to be absorbed in the most boring-looking book I can find. Currently, I am on page two of The Mill on the Floss and have been for weeks.
I think it’s about a candy factory, I’m not sure.
It pleases her, though — “I love Eliot,” she says, and kisses me — so I soldier on, reading one word at a time and holding it up to the light to try and see what’s inside.
She catches me mouthing a phrase and frowning.
“Don’t read it for me,” she says, taking the book from me and putting it aside.
“Oh why, why do you love me,” I ask, like a stupid oaf.
“No anguish I have had to bear on your account has been too heavy a price to pay for the new life into which I have entered in loving you,” she says.
“Did you just make that up?” I say, turning away my ugly face.
“No, but now you will never know where I found it.”
“Stupid flossy mill!” I say, retrieving the book and starting again as she covers my face with little kisses.
“My angel, my big man,” she whispers until I feel myself inflate and grow young.
I read and let my fingers creep inside her. My mouth attaches to her neck, leaving half-moon marks until she arches her back, mates her own book with mine, and we are pulled into a dark flood that pulls us under and we drown.
* * *
She has raised the money for the film through modelling. I never knew she was all over glossy magazines in Europe and Asia, plus several in the U.S. that I managed to miss.
She gives me a Vogue: she is on the cover in a rose-colored Giambattista Valli gown and about a hundred crinolines, standing by a murky pond, holding a black swan.
Her hair rises in two white-powdered wings; her eyelashes are long, arched feathers: the swan’s hooded fa
ce rests on her flushed cheek.
“Do you like it?” she says like a hard slap.
“I love it,” I say, stammering. Yet again, I feel the power of her beauty, like a hammer to my ugliness.
“You do?” she says. “Because I think I look disgusting.”
I snap my mouth shut, scared.
She tears the magazine apart in a frenzy, crying, “I’m so ugly, I’m so ugly,” as she does.
“I don’t understand,” I say. “The other magazines, your films.”
“I control the films. I destroy the other magazines,” she says. “I’m all in ruins,” she says, and I gather her to my baggy sweats, consoling her, knowing, at that moment, exactly what she means.
The flaw is in the reflection.
What others see.
“To me, you are the loveliest girl,” I say after I have coaxed her into the shower, where she sees her perfect self in my eyes.
And mine in hers; amidst the smell of eucalyptus and coconut milk, her damp, ripe body fits into mine like a piece in a puzzle about the mystical muscle of love.
* * *
Annabel and I fly to New York.
She is rounding up her film crew and doing a MAC-sponsored tribute to Hedy Lamarr — the inventor, she tells me as she tries on wig after wig, of spread-spectrum technology.
I love her in the shoulder-length congeries of platinum blonde curls and insist she keep it on, with the ropes of pearls and textured, skin-tight black chiffon dress.
By the time our car pulls up to the Plaza, the dress is shredded and covered in mad-dog foam.
I cover her with my jacket and the concierge appears at our suite within moments to take the garment to “someone discreet and fabulous.”
“This gentleman repaired Lindsay Lohan’s apparel,” he says, letting the mauled frock dangle from one finger. “Daily and nightly,” he adds, retreating, as we fall to the bed, my darling in pearls and new, springy curls and I, still somewhat shy, in a robe she unwraps as she murmurs, “There is no modesty between us.”