Chicken

by Lynn Crosbie

Wistfully.

  “Good luck, honey.”

  When she hangs up, I look up some of the words and phrases I picked out: semiotic shock, cavilling administrators, pluperfect inconstancy, collective postwar shame, armscye, rose madder, Ladurée, and fin’amor.

  I consider some; others I wander away from, into the field of poppies with Darkling, who is always curled up in the corner of my mind, legs twitching and ready to spring up, like me, at the perfume of a soft tail and crushingly big, fluttering eyes.

  * * *

  I hate being alone now.

  No matter how much luxury I heap on myself, I cannot shake the bad years.

  I will drink a champagne cocktail in my huge claw-foot tub, inhaling one of Annabel’s hand-blended soaking potions, drifting, only to hear, “Wake up, you useless has-been!” being shouted into my ear.

  Drop the glass, run soaking outside, and hide under a tree, shaking until I feel safe enough to dart to bed and bury myself below the Porthault sheets and hand-embroidered comforter, a reproduction of details from Louise Dahl-Wolfe’s fashion photographs of flowers, of farouche nudes, of the sea.

  Someone did this to me, someone I owed money to, I can’t stand to remember. If I do, the whole rotten stinking mess tumbles down, smothering me until I am sick.

  Rabi is in Calcutta, on business. What business, I have no idea.

  And so the call girl is pressed into service again. Annabel would likely kill me if she knew, but how to explain?

  She never asks questions, and she does what I say. Except wear the mask I have made with a paper plate and string — of Annabel’s face.

  * * *

  After a few meetings, Kray decides to start shooting.

  He finds locations and orders sets as he goes, hires new cast members along the way, and rewrites the script from scene to scene.

  I am tricked out in a bespoke striped velvet suit and a white shirt by Anna Matuozzo, with a pink Hermès tie and heavy black boots from a thrift shop. The makeup team defines my cheekbones and fits me with heavy sable lashes as I go over the first scene.

  Kray wants to have Suicide’s “Frankie Teardrop” play as I walk in slow motion into Belle Reve, Sid’s old haunt. Kray did the same in Ultraviolence, a technique that not one critic failed to remark on, usually calling the scene “chilling” or “hotly predatory.”

  Kray puts a new spin on the shot by speeding up everything else so it looks like I am moving in a different dimension.

  As I walk through the bar, everyone stops speaking and stares.

  Suicide’s Alan Vega starts wailing and I stare at the bartender, walk toward him, and grab his collar, pulling him close.

  “Otis, you old cunt, how are you?” I say, and the music drops, stops, and rises as “Cold, Cold Heart,” performed by Tony Bennett.

  The room explodes with relief and happiness: glasses strike one another, couples stand and dance as confetti falls like heavy snow and then speeds into a dizzying whirl.

  Otis and Sid dance too, in a clumsy box step, and laugh. Otis is still laughing when Sid pulls out his gun and shoots him in the heart.

  He crosses a name off a list and walks back, briskly now, through dead silence and a loaded mass stillness.

  The word REVENGE drifts by as Sid pulls Star — Lana Del Rey — to her feet and marches her to the door.

  “Why?” she says, and he cocks his head. “One down,” he says, pushing her through the door and into an idling black Cadillac.

  The Violent Femmes sing about rat finks and the heart of hell as they speed away, and so begins the modern Senecan tragedy — or “black comedy,” as Kray calls it — that is Deadly Nightshade.

  “It’s good,” I say.

  Yum-Yum, one of the makeup artists, is powdering my flesh silvery pink and jewel-smooth.

  “It’s brilliant,” he says.

  * * *

  We shoot the scene in five takes, a record for Kray.

  He asks me to have a drink with him to talk about the rape scene we are shooting the next day in “Star’s apartment stairwell.”

  I don’t want to talk to him alone: he is repellent.

  But everyone has left and he is already uncorking a bottle of Gran Patrón.

  He pours us shots that taste like scorching bliss: I drink and I drink.

  “I want you to hurt her,” he says. “Fuck her so hard.”

  I am unsteady by now, but tell him that I know how to act and not to worry.

  “I’m worried you don’t know how not to act.”

  He laughs.

  “I want her pussy to bleed,” he says.

  I thank Christ when Kray’s assistant walks in and takes the bottle away, scolding him that he is not to drink after his near-fatal stroke.

  Kray allows himself to be led away mutely and I realize I am not afraid of him anymore.

  I walk in Sid’s measured pace to the door, recalling another revenge tragedy as I contemplate my own Duchess.

  “Cover her face,” I recite to a few hangers-on by the studio door. They are holding old-fashioned pastel-paged autograph pads that they extend to me breathlessly.

  “She died young,” I say, homing in on the saddest girl, a dump truck in a John Mayer T-shirt, and kissing her livid cheek.

  She swoons, splitting her head when she falls, and I drift through the fans, murmuring, “You’re all too kind.”

  * * *

  Lana Del Rey walks off the set and is replaced with a Keane-eyed ingenue named Kitty Candelabra, a small girl from Lubbock, Texas, with glasses and the mudflap girl’s body.

  Del Rey tells the media she could not tolerate the violence against her and that there’s “something wrong with him.”

  She means Kray, I think.

  We shoot the rape scene in Crenshaw. I hurt this girl as she recites the Angelic Salutation in a meager voice. When her nose starts to bleed, Kray is so pleased he wraps the scene.

  She cries behind her script and asks if she can quit. Kray threatens her with a lawsuit and she flees.

  I watch her run off, her heels kicking the torn seat of her dress.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, but I am talking to myself.

  * * *

  The next day, Kray announces that he is revising more of the script.

  “Sid will lose all his money at the track. Then I think he should lose everything and fall apart. So you can better understand him.”

  I sigh; say nothing.

  We shoot all day. It is a two-minute scene in which I savagely beat a cashier for not taking my last bet.

  The cashier is an actor who once mildly criticized Kray in an interview. I am told to “make it real,” and do.

  He leaves on a stretcher and we are on hiatus until the new pages are ready.

  I take the call girl out for popiah and sticky peanuts and a bottle of 2014 Domaine de la Pépière Muscadet at Button Mash. I am cleverly disguised in a beige wig, an adhesive goatee, and a clownishly large suit I have stuffed with padding.

  “It’s for a new role,” I explain.

  She nods, eats with one hand on mine, and laughs warmly at everything I say.

  A tiny part of me, I am embarrassed to admit, longs for a submissive armpiece like her as she walks, calling all eyes, to the washroom.

  No. I want my girlfriend back. So much so that I am instantly disgusted with myself for spending time with a hooker because I’m too chickenshit to be alone.

  I signal for the bill.

  What if someone sees me and tells Annabel? What was I thinking?

  My date is nonplussed. A stack of bills makes her smile return, even when I decline to drive her home.

  Let the terrors invade.

  And invade they do: at 3 a.m., I am standing behind my bedroom door with a tennis racquet, shaking.

  “I’m not afraid of you!” I call out, m
eaning everything and lying also. The days pass so slowly I think I will die of heartbreak, and then Annabel calls.

  “I’m coming home,” she says, and I fall down, pawing at the floor in long, crazed strokes.

  “Parnell?”

  “Yes, that’s such nice news,” I say. “I was asleep. Call me when you’ve arrived?”

  She says that she will and I move through the house like a prizefighter, arms raised, and weak from my brutal victory.

  Annabel calls back.

  “I’m already here. Come get me?”

  I dress instantly, open the door, and there she is, creamy from the magnolias in her hair to her fluent dress and high, buckled heels.

  “Boo,” she says.

  “You scared me,” I say.

  She takes my hand, is silent, and I glow.

  Annabel always knows what to say, and when to say nothing at all.

  * * *

  We stand there forever, turn into dust.

  “Why was Damian in Paris?” I ask her.

  “His boyfriend lives there,” she says.

  “I don’t want to see him again, ever,” I say, my grip tightening.

  She tells me she has thanked him for his kindness to her long ago, thanked him enough.

  “But you, what will I do with you, jealous monkey?”

  She has melted a vein of silver from the hard ore of my heart.

  “Let’s start here,” she says, pushing me toward our bed and elbowing my ribs hard enough to make me fall.

  “And here,” she says, jabbing my chest with her fists and burying her knee between my legs.

  “And here,” I say, rolling to my side, kicking backwards, and knocking her to the floor.

  She gets up, drops her georgette dress — she is naked underneath — and takes off my clothes with a folding carbon-steel knife.

  “You are killing me,” she says after pulling me vertical and roughly pushing herself into me.

  “I was almost dead,” I say quietly, and stay still as she fucks me hard, cums, and slides me out of her.

  “But,” I say, looking at my still-hard cock.

  “Oh, fuck,” she says, sighs, and gets me off with her mouth quickly, spitting noisily when she is done.

  “Now leave,” she says, although her fingers are still inside her pussy, feeling the last of the seismic vibrations.

  “Where will I go?”

  “To the kitchen. I want a glass of milk,” she says, pulling her dress back on and finger-combing her hair.

  I turn and hurry downstairs, slowly filling with feelings that I thought I had cauterized to death.

  * * *

  I drink more and more, worrying about the movie.

  The day after Annabel returns, she posts a new video.

  I watch it while she is out shopping for dinner.

  Called I Was Cured, All Right, and set to Dre’s “Let Me Ride,” it shows her wearing a bloody sheet as a toga and doing a movimiento lento Mashed Potato with a penguin, an actual penguin.

  Is he supposed to be me in a tuxedo? I wonder of the stiff, waddling thing.

  She is so alive, I think, as I very often do, and feel a muffled happiness struggle to exhume itself inside of me.

  “You are sublimation,” I type, as penguinman1, and then I get up and dance: naked, ridiculous, and blistered with pain and pleasure, each leaving its own mark.

  * * *

  On the morning of my last day off, I grab Tubby and briskly sew him a cheery yellow sports coat, turtleneck, and slacks, and wrap his head in a bauble-covered turban.

  I hand him to Annabel.

  “I took a class, on Berkeley,” I say, and she throws her head back, laughs, and hugs the bear.

  In the middle of the afternoon, as I drink boilermakers on the lanai, I get a text directing me to a page on NewHive called “Sweet Tubby Bitch.”

  Devoted just to him, the site shows him on horseback, at a masquerade ball, and sleeping, oh blessed Virgin, with Annabel.

  Her eyes, closed, are angelfish hiding in the gleaming fronds of her tensile candy hair; her mouth, agape, is the rouge entrance to heaven —

  Who took the fucking picture.

  There are only a few living particles left in me. Now, another is gone.

  Beneath all of the love emojis and messages of adulation, I write “Murderer,” which could mean anything.

  “It’s a selfie,” she says to my drunken ass much later, and clucks.

  “You scare me sometimes,” she says, and I growl. She exits, pursued by me.

  * * *

  Pudge finds my spare key under a planter, lets herself in.

  We hear her, go downstairs.

  Annabel hugs her and goes back to sleep.

  I make tea with a single Tetley bag and warm water, and she tells me that she is failing school and she doesn’t know what to do, for chrissakes.

  Bored, I leave a message for Kray, who calls back instantly: Pudge can play the coatroom girl in the nightclub scene he has just written.

  I tell my daughter, who hugs me for the first time since she was a child and asks if she can stay with me for a while, having been thrown out of her dorm for the sleep violence I am pretty sure is cruelly conscious.

  “Yes,” I say, pointing to the guest room in the back. “But if you sleep-bash me, I’ll hit you back so fucking hard you won’t need accommodations anymore.”

  “Fuck,” she says, stunned but unmistakably impressed. “I’ll make coffee tomorrow, Daddy,” she says, and excuses herself.

  “Don’t call me that,” I say, my flesh crawling.

  “Sorry,” she says. “Sorry, Dad.”

  I climb the stairs and try to remember the day Allegra put her, newborn and oddly silent, into my arms.

  Her fingers like ghostly florets latching on to mine, how deeply I felt her as a good, gentle part of me.

  I want to try.

  I will say this into the night as the sound of her snoring, part power drill, part hog, fills the house until I knock myself out with a mouthful of Xanax.

  As I submit to the pills, I hear “Daughter” and see my kid and myself walking into the waves in Cape Cod; I see her holding my hand, shivering and smiling.

  That’s my daughter in the water

  I am still singing when I wake up and my eyes are wet as if I have been crying.

  * * *

  The car comes for us at five, and we are given our pages.

  Pudge is given more gestures than words, but does get to call me a “despicable mongrel.”

  I look at my new pages and see that Sid’s downward spiral is beginning: he will lose the gangsters’ money at the track, and they will find him at a nightclub with their boss’s wife.

  He won’t have a left hand or much of a face after this scene.

  We shoot the racetrack scene at Santa Anita, then travel to a warehouse Kray has decorated with bright ribbed condoms hanging like bunting and waitress stations made up like the windows of Amsterdam’s red-light district.

  Pudge is dressed in a black shmatte, white dirndl, and cap. I approach her booth and she slaps me, reciting her line.

  Like a ventriloquist’s doll.

  But Kray is pleased: he likes the implication of an indecent relationship between me and my daughter.

  I take him aside and ask that she be let go.

  “No,” he says. “The elephant stays in the picture!”

  Then the gangsters appear and start working me over: many of the wounds to my face are real but Kray uses a prosthetic hand for the axe sequence.

  Through a megaphone, Kray says, “Now rape him,” and everyone stands still. “Rape the little slut,” he says to the youngest gangster, who doesn’t move.

  Pudge looks at me and I start to run.

  Off the set and two buildings down,
where I huddle and call a car.

  When it arrives, I lie flush across the back seat, in case they are looking for me, and ask the driver to take me home.

  He turns on the monitor in the back and I watch a cartoon about baby lions lost in the savannah.

  They are frightened and hungry but they will hear their mother roar for them soon. I can feel it.

  * * *

  I stand by her front door, shaking.

  I am still wearing the light-blue seersucker suit, pink shirt and socks, and orange Chucks from wardrobe, along with a dirty, floral-banded panama hat.

  Annabel, severe in black jeans and a small SECURITY T-shirt, leads me to the living room, sits on my lap, and pours small sips of her sweet tea into my mouth until I can speak.

  “Please talk to me,” she says. “Whenever one of us has something meaningful to say, the other is asleep.”

  I nod, knowing this to be true. I want to tell her everything: to confess, I suppose. I will try.

  “I was sixteen when we did Ultraviolence,” I say. “Now I’m fifty-eight — no, fifty-seven, actually. My birthday’s in the winter.”

  It’s been so long, I forget my real age most days.

  “Kray picked me up when I was hustling. I was doing some queer stuff, the minimum, I hated all the sex work, but it was that or more squatting and more of this — ”

  I show her the keloid scars under my forearm from cigarette burns and she kisses each one.

  He told me he had seen me around and who he was; he rented me a room, lent me money to live.

  I started to trust him. I was fourteen, and feral.

  He was stricter than a drill sergeant. He whipped me into shape.

  Where everyone else saw a worthless street kid, he saw a star.

  It was Kray who saw something in me, who handed me fame on a platter.

  He didn’t even mind when I went off with Lola.

  “Mind?” Annabel says, confused.

  “I mean that he let me be. Kray saved my life: his movie — it made my reputation. And — ”