by Lynn Crosbie
“And besides,” she says later, as I smoke and happily recall the most virile of my many moves, “you look best of all like this.”
“In the raw,” she says as I rooster around, admiring my thick haunches and big, brawny chest.
“More,” she says, snapping her fingers.
She is Hedy Lamarr in Ecstasy and the pale-green carpet is the field she runs through naked, exclaiming the onset of a colossal orgasm that I grab a piece of, filling my hands with blades of grass and tender pink flowers.
“I want these pearls,” she says as we lie on the floor, watching the sun set in white bars across our still, wet flesh.
“They are yours,” I say.
I will blanch at the price tag the next morning when she is away at the shoot, and soothe my worries after securing a flight to Buffalo to meet the boy who called her an animal and cut her face with a lawn ornament.
His name is Rory and he is, to my amusement, a docent at the Albright-Knox.
I find him standing beside a strange sculpture by the artist Jacob Kassay, a white doorway leading nowhere.
A small group of high-school kids listen to his rap about the white chunk’s ability to “narrate our own movement through space” and clap when their teacher, who is swallowing saucer-sized antacids, hisses at them.
I wait until they leave, and size Rory up.
He is short and lean, and his scarred face narrates his movement through enough street fights and domestic violence to warrant a government-sponsored rehabilitation through the magic of art.
“You grew up in Toledo, didn’t you?” I say, and he nods.
“You like this work of art?” I say, standing close to him.
“Sure,” he says, nervously. “But — ”
“How about this one?” I say, showing him a picture Annabel has texted me of herself standing beside a horse, draped in white moiré and the pearls, worn as a single, waist-length strand: she calls this image, more painfully beautiful than anything in this gallery, IOU and Xo.
“Jesus!” he says.
“Yes,” I say, and ask if he remembers her, and what he did.
I ask him many times, punctuating the question with fast, brutal punches to his stomach, kidneys, and face.
“I don’t remember,” he says, then falls to the ground and starts to cry.
I hear footsteps, bend down, and cut his face, ruining it.
Or improving it, I think, and laugh.
“The docent is unwell,” I tell two guards, who thank me and hurry to his side.
In the airport washroom, I discard the jeans, sweatshirt, wig, and glasses I changed into when I landed in Buffalo. I put on a suit and carefully cleanse my hands and shoes.
Order a large Scotch in the lounge and unwind, reluctantly, from the rush.
I managed to take a picture as I strolled away: Rory’s inert, pasty hand in an impressive lake of blood; it is a still life with broken teeth, curds of fast-twitch muscle and bone.
At the airport, a little kiosk prints it for me as I bite my cheek to taste what I feel, which is elated and starving.
I place the photograph in Vindicta, a file I am assembling for Annabel, who meets me at the airport in faux-sable stoles, a sweeping cloak, and brocade slippers.
“You owe me,” I say, and she loosens her coat.
The pearls are luscent against her naked flesh, rolling in her salt and warmth.
“Your hands!” she says as I flag a car.
“I helped a homeless Iroquois man build a tiny yet serviceable one-bedroom colonial by the mouth of Cazenovia Creek,” I tell her.
She is skeptical, then my songbird returns as I remove the necklace, fill her with it, and pull out and lavish each pearl with my mouth, my tongue.
“Oh, that is lovely,” our driver remarks, and chirps and calls along, opening the windows so that a great hybrid flock joins us, singing and drifting, leaving us, in the end, spackled with feathers and each holding a single pulsing egg.
The next morning, it occurs to me that I am too happy, especially when I read a small item in the Buffalo News about a “tragic assault on a local man, who may never walk again.”
Scrolling further, I see that an imprudent nurse has informed the reporter, “He’s as ugly as that Elephant Man.”
My heart flattens in pleasure and then rolls up, gathering starlets of joy.
I check on our eggs in the natural nest I demanded the concierge make, and call the United Way.
I make a donation in honor of my alibi and imaginary Native American friend, matching the price of the pearls and requesting that the funds go to the Iroquois Healthcare Alliance.
One egg has started to hatch!
“Baby, hurry,” I call out, and my dark queen rustles to my side; our hands cover our dumbstruck faces as a wet, grizzled head appears from the shell, peeping angrily for food and explanations.
* * *
We start shooting in three days.
When the birds hatch, we check out and transfer them carefully to the driver, who, luckily, lives in an apartment that is more aviary than home.
He promises to send pictures, and we leave him seeds and honey sticks, a massive Victorian cage, small period accessories, and a fair bit of the money Annabel earned.
We marvel over and blow kisses at Francis and Zelda and just make our flight.
On board, I wonder out loud if I should model too, which earns me an explosion of laughter and her a brooding and angry flight companion.
Near California, she calls my name and I turn and she takes my picture and says that I am terribly handsome; everyone in the rows around us agrees.
“It’s true,” she says. “And I’m sorry, but I want you all to myself.”
“Mile-high club much?” I say to the homely steward a half-hour later, and he rolls his eyes.
We are home soon and then Annabel is all business.
* * *
She has scouted and secured the locations, one of which — Sid’s bedsit — she builds herself in our living room.
I meet my co-stars: Colette, an attractive woman my age who plays my ex-wife, and Damian, a maddeningly good-looking young man with a cool fade and a lean, cut body.
He plays Sid in flashbacks and I hate him on sight.
We have a read-through in our kitchen with a few other minor characters.
Annabel has used proper software to turn this into a screenplay. I read my first line:
INT: SEAMY APARTMENT — NIGHT.
SID DELACROIX, a broken-down old man, sits in his boxer shorts, drinking a bottle of beer at his rickety kitchen table. HE STANDS.
SID
I am so washed up. I look, what did John Ford say, not like the ruins of my youth, but like the ruins of those ruins.
A HUNDRED CHICKENS fill the room.
“Wait a minute,” I say, throwing down the script. “Is this about the film or is it about me?”
Damian stands up and stretches, baring his rib cage and shredded abs. “This is tense,” he says. “Relax, Sid,” he says, unfastening a memory I cannot —
Colette and, God help me, Annabel are watching him with undisguised admiration.
Breathe, I tell myself: there is cement in my throat.
I pick up the script and resume.
SID
I wish a mythically beautiful girl would kiss this frog and save my soul.
A HUNDRED FROGS fill the room.
I put the script down and look at Annabel, who is looking back expectantly.
“This is it? Cheap effects to make you look edgy? Let’s not forget the La traviata–flavored house music and a wholesale fairy-tale exploitation of my life.”
“You haven’t read it all,” says Annabel, distressed.
“And I won’t,” I say, kicking my chair aside and slamming every doo
r I pass through on my way to the car.
I drive to Las Vegas in three hours flat.
When I am blind drunk at the blackjack table, I call Jerry.
“How’s Kray?” I say.
“Better,” he says. “Much better. You start production on Monday, so rest up.”
I hang up and tap out a text, attaching a picture of myself surrounded by glittering showgirls and stacks of chips.
It is a message to Annabel:
Starting ACTUAL sequel next week.
She doesn’t write back. I check every few seconds, then drop the phone into my glass and cash out.
* * *
I wake up in bed at the Excalibur with three outrageously beautiful drag queens and gently shake them awake as I look out the window, mildly amazed at all of the colorful turrets.
“Did anything happen?” I ask as I button my pants.
“You gave us all money for college,” says the youngest one, a teenaged boy in a tall beehive and daisy-shaped enamel earrings.
The others rub their eyes and one of them says, “Get back in here, honeybunch,” but I can’t. I leave them the room and everything in the mini-bar and tell them to keep in touch.
I settle the astronomical bill with one of my many new cards, buy a burner phone from the gift shop, and have the valet bring my car around.
I call home and a stranger answers. “I’m the cleaner,” he explains.
“Let me speak to her,” I say.
“She left a half-hour ago,” he says.
“Where did she go?” I ask, lighting a cigarette and doing a messy bump of coke off my fingertip.
“She just said she was taking off. Sorry, guy, she’s a fine piece of ass.”
“The finest,” I say, disconnecting and hitting the gas.
I play George Jones songs and sing along like an old, howling dog.
* * *
I return to a spotless home, with nothing missing except a few of Annabel’s personal items: a quarter-rack of clothes, a bag of shoes, her makeup and hair-care stuff.
But the place feels empty, as if all the life has been drained from it and replaced with embalming fluid.
I lie on the bed and play with the new phone I sent Charles out for, adding her as a contact, as my only favorite.
I use a picture of her I find online, one she calls Mise en abyme: she is curling her lashes in the mirror, and inside the mirror she appears again and again to infinity, speck- then atom-sized, the lavish lashes that sweep my cheek when she sleeps.
Her Twitter page says, “Movie shut down indefinitely, thanks LK and PW,” and her anger makes my belly flop.
Her note is brief:
I’m staying at my place for a little while, until you stop acting like a lunatic. I will miss you, regardless, and see you soon. Xo.
* * *
I sleep for twelve hours and wake up refreshed.
I decide to sort my life out and begin with a short meditation.
Sitting like a lotus as some fruity pan flute plays, I ask myself why I punished her so badly.
She humiliated me, I think, and unfold my legs, ignoring the red curve of the devil’s lips as, gratefully, he pushes the word pride into my mouth.
I take a long, punishing run.
Several ladies with first-class facelifts chat me up as I pass their gates.
I thought that Annabel would take my new looks with her, and she did. But she left something she can’t take away: my cruelty, which makes me less good-looking, and far more intriguing.
I don’t need to get in shape, I realize. I need to nurture what is sick in me and let it flourish into a hard shell.
I begin by calling a randomly chosen name from my contacts list.
It’s Cotton and I’m glad: he is a shaky fuck and I want to get high.
I ask him to come over and play cards and he sounds thrilled. Our little horror movie has gone on to become a much-watched “FCKN MASTERPIECE” — this according to user GoreLVR666.
Cotton arrives and immediately starts chopping lines of coke. He pulls out his phone and begins filming me, and I slap it out of his hand.
He picks it up and says, “You are completely different,” with admiration and distress in his voice.
I am thin and dressed in black, the color my hair has darkened to, from its vee to the raven’s quills I have scraped back.
“I know,” I say indifferently.
I let him hang around and we drink and do lines until we are confidants. He tells me about his doting, concerned parents, that he left Cat — “her and her mind games” — and a quite disgusting story about a friend he hit with his car.
I tell him about Gary, the old beagle that wandered up Lola’s and my steps one day with no collar. He was at least ten years old, the girl at the pound said, and would not be adopted.
I kept him for one afternoon: I fed and washed him, ran with him at the park, and brushed him until he shone, hoping Lola would fall for him too.
“We can’t afford an old animal,” she said when she returned from class, and walked away.
I drove him to the pound and brought him inside. He just stared at me, trapped in that long, dear, silvery-brown body.
He cried, and I ruffled his fur and said, “See you soon.”
I sat in the parked car and slumped forward, thinking of the dog’s confusion, of his high, frightened barks following me outside.
“That’s brutal,” Cotton says. “But it sounds like you did the right thing.”
“No,” I say. “I never should have left him.”
We just keep working on the coke as the night winds rail, bringing with them the sound of old, ruined creatures, bawling that we love them.
That we stay.
* * *
The weekend is a vacuum, removing all of my feelings of love and kindness.
And desire, more or less. The coke has opened up deep old wounds: I can feel it. And it makes me talk too much, which I cannot allow.
I will stick to drinking out of the tulip-shaped crystal glasses the bartender at Cindy Club used to talk about, wistfully, as he poured the house gasoline into red Solo cups.
Annabel writes me a note on Sunday night: “Normal yet?”
I smile, but I think of how she used me, and her obvious hot pants for Damian.
I will write to her when I feel better. At the moment, I am still in the odious thrall of her awful screenplay.
I remember that I have a copy and decide to read it that night.
I do, and am chagrined to see there is a lot of good in it. It might only be the makings of a small art-house film, but some of the moments, like the writer herself —
“Make me draw in my breath,” I write her.
She sends me a GIF of a tiny pageant queen dancing lewdly.
The next morning, I show up for Kray and a proper read-through in a street-sized office at MGM.
This will be the first time Kray has filmed in America. He is fragile, but still powerful.
So am I.
I meet his gaze and nod; his eyebrows rise.
The script, which I read over the weekend, is slick and seamless. Loaded with chic violence, brute sex, and terse, fiendish dialogue, it resurrects the original while breaking new, majestically evil ground.
I will be acting with huge stars, who all greet me as one of their own — greetings I return coolly, and with a suggestion of disdain.
Where were they when I needed them?
* * *
The trades carry news of the film’s pre-production, and I am interviewed more, photographed more, and gossiped about more as spring collapses into broiling summer, and I am now three weeks away from Annabel.
She is modelling in Paris and teaching a section of Cinéma & audiovisuel at the Sorbonne, and while we exchange feverish letters, we have not seen
each other since my blow-up.
It’s mainly a scheduling problem, but, although I don’t like to admit this, she was getting too close to me for comfort.
I wake, gasping, from dreams of her soft, aromatic skin against mine, of being gripped by the heat and muscles between her legs, of bottomless, carbonated kisses and fast, piercing bites.
Then I shake my head and lose all this sugar.
I start escorting Gala to events. A high-class call girl, she charges me a fortune, especially when I decline to sleep with her.
Often, I retreat to the various foyers, sink into a chair, and open up Annabel’s web site.
One night, I see there is a new video called Past Perfect. In it, shards of Tchaikovsky play as Damian puts a glass platform shoe on her foot and she turns into a dragon.
I call Rabi, distraught. He says, “Damian is gay, stupid.”
I hang up and dictate my misery and relief into a text to Annabel that reads, “Blub blub.”
And, “Hurry home.”
At this point she can live inside me if she wants.
Too impatient to wait for a text back, I call her.
“You’re my honey-damp Queen Bee,” I sing to my sleepy, tousle-headed, brilliant, cherry-flavored baby doll.
“I’m beautiful to everyone I see,” she says, as my mind fills with a slick, mustache-wearing Frenchman lying beside her — “Caaaam to bed, chérie!”
“But I filled my cunt with concrete before flying here, mon amour.”
I am so happy I cannot speak.
She tells me about her class, about the photo shoots and her room at the Plaza Athénée.
I listen, hearing only music.
“Wait for me?” she says. This I manage to decode and I say yes like a newborn beaver.
They mate for life, I remember. If I had a tail I’d slap it on every flat rock in town.
We phone-kiss until she is late for her shoot with Virginie Despentes.
They are going to dress in flowered hats and cocktail dresses, carry nail-studded bats into Porte de la Chapelle, and beat rapists to death, she says.