by Lynn Crosbie
An idea begins to take shape as she pushes me back and presses herself against me, fucking me gently to the mechanical prayer of “O Superman.”
What if I gave Crispin her screenplay, the parts I highlighted, and asked him to mash them into his?
If I show him her films, the story of love and danger that they tell — the lit and sauvage visual poems, as Rabi calls them — he will agree.
She is poignantly sincere, I think, making another note to buy her the cardinal-red metallic vinyl poms I saw on Melrose: two for her, and the Columbia blues for me.
“I can’t wait anymore,” she says, her face screwed up and doe’s eyes shining. I let go like a bottle of shaken pop, knocking her, amazed and delighted, off me and onto the bed, where she keeps coming in waves filled with coarse salt and deliriously happy little fish.
* * *
She is often sad after our trysts, and then she is irritated by my need to cackle and fuss like an old pullet.
“No, I don’t want tea,” she says, as though I have just offered her a bottle of baby formula.
She is breathtaking when she is cross.
Tonight, she stands in a black half-slip and structured vintage bra that makes wired torpedoes of her breasts, drinking gin from a jam jar, a cigarette affixed to her full, ruby lip.
“We are bad people,” she says, and my memory jams, stutter-starts, and stops.
“No, we’re not,” I say, although I know, without knowing, that I am.
“You’re not half the devil I am,” she says, flattering herself while expertly blowing Cheerio-sized smoke rings.
She brightens and pulls on a sheer pink robe that I have snatched from Wardrobe after many fantasies about her wearing it.
“Why don’t we write down our sins and eat them?” she says.
I go along with her and write about ten things on the scraps of paper she provides. Chew and swallow them with difficulty.
“I feel better,” I say, and she says that she does too.
We have tombstones for eyes; we are gaunt and twitchy.
Too much has been left unsaid, that’s all me, and she has said too much.
Something has got to give, and I pray it isn’t us.
* * *
“What’s this?” Annabel says, holding up a shirt cardboard.
“Give me that!”
She reads it, one of the many poems I have written about her since she first appeared in my apartment.
“It’s terrible,” I say. “I wanted to give you something back then and I couldn’t afford a bunch of carnations from the liquor store.”
She reads it with one eyebrow raised:
Your eyes are combustible fluids, suspended colloids, an amber formula where two zeroes lie between brackets and “lesser than” and “greater than” equal your smile —
“Oh, that’s so sweet,” she says, and kisses me with big smacks.
“Tell me what he did to you,” I say.
Her face falls.
“I already told you. Does it turn you on?” she says miserably.
I feel struck.
“No,” I say. “I’m trying to understand why I have no compassion for my only son lying in a morgue drawer.”
The police were still investigating, holding up the funeral service and cremation being referred to, on Twitter, as #burningman2 and #creepella.
The jumbo-sized mortician, wearing more makeup than Allegra, met with us. “Your son is being kept as cool as a cuke,” he said. “Please don’t worry yourselves with thoughts of decomposition.”
Until then, I hadn’t.
Annabel says, “The only romance I had ever had before your son raped me was with Curtis Jones, another five-year-old, who told me he loved me and kissed me once on the roundabout. When I came home from New York, I kept to myself. I was too scared to tell anyone what happened, scared even that they’d laugh. Because he’s so good-looking and —”
My rage actually leaves my body and becomes a ghost, wild for revenge. “Soon,” I murmur to the ghastly apparition. “Soon.”
“I realized I was pregnant and had to tell my mother,” Annabel says. “She sent me to our family doctor, who told me, privately, to learn to keep my legs shut. He went after that fetus like a burdock root. I bled for weeks.”
“Say, what is that doctor’s name?” I ask, planning to chisel out some hollow points later on.
“No, I won’t tell you. No more of this,” she says, and clams up.
I console myself for the time being with the thought of sneaking into the mortuary and cutting the cool air.
Of his dick browning like an old banana and falling off.
I will remember to find Annabel’s doctor’s name on the way to the funeral home.
And forget about the baby, the shrimp-sized one encoded with pale-blue eyes, with monstrous intelligence and some kind of love.
* * *
The cops arrange a lineup of a few vagrants who live near the Palladium, one a known arsonist, another a police officer.
They pull in a hundred eyewitnesses, all of whom pick the officer.
“That’s him, man. Lookit those crazy eyes.”
The arsonist’s attorney smiles and takes his client home to the trailer park in the hills, where several scorched husks sit on blocks.
The vagrants’ court-appointed counsel sets them loose at Circus Liquor, where they make a small fortune telling their story to Kraut fans.
Unofficially, the police have given up.
Cat Pause, Alexander’s manager, is infuriated. “He knew the guy!” he says. “They hugged, and talked.”
“Yeah, then he knocked him down,” says one of the cops. “Look, we’ve investigated, this is a big case. Your client was, all due respect, a real piece of shit. We found disgraceful juvie records, also battery and sexual-assault complaints, DUIs, larceny, destruction of property — I’m sure Mr. Wilde had his reasons.”
“He was a rock star,” Pause says, frustrated and angry. “All of that, it comes with the job.”
The cops exchange looks.
“Nice work if you can get it,” says an officer who is more mountain than man, and whose scowl lifts Pause’s bony old ass off the folding chair.
“Fine, fine. So let one of the greatest voices of the millennium die without justice. Be interviewed for the rest of your lives by lugubrious fans and intrepid makers of conspiracy documentaries!”
The cops watch Pause walk away, emitting tiny bursts of gas in his fear and unquenched animus.
“Tell us how you killed your son’s ass,” Mountain says, and laughs.
* * *
I don’t have to tell Mountain anything, it turns out, because the groupie whose body started the fire has been located at the L.A. County General Hospital Burn Unit.
Her name is Nancy Maddox: her face is the only part of her left partially untouched.
She tells the police I had a quarrel with my son, and that’s all. That he was fine when I left.
I visit her with a thick envelope of cash and the medical video game SnowWorld.
“Why did you lie for me?” I say, touching her sad, sweet face as I rest gingerly beside her among the cold gel packs and worn plush animals.
“He helped make me this way,” she says, and winces. We throw virtual snowballs until her body relaxes.
“He had sex with me when I was twelve. It was my fault. I went backstage dressed like a little harlot,” she says. “But he hurt me, he hurt me so much.”
I capture her tears and I rage inside, tell her that no, it is entirely his fault.
“You sort of look like him,” she says, and smiles shyly.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and curve my hand around her skull.
“No one will ever kiss me again,” Nancy says, so I kiss her and we kiss until I am shooed away and the nerve
flies like a bullet through the corridor. But she was smiling when they unlatched me.
* * *
On the day of the funeral, Annabel puts on a long beige dress and matching loafers, braids her hair into a circle on her crown and wears no makeup other than brown eyeshadow.
I wear a good black suit and a white camellia in my lapel.
We sit at the front of the Bel Air Presbyterian, listening to interminable acoustic tributes and unintelligible eulogies.
My wife and daughter decline to speak. They are too distraught.
I stand at the podium after kissing my son’s cold, waxen lips.
“Alexander was a rock star,” I say.
One mourner says, “Fuckin’ A,” and is silenced.
“A rebel, an outsider, and more of a Sid than I ever was. I will not miss him, nor did I love him. But I am here to tender my admiration for the ruthless way in which he lived his short life, and to be certain he is cremated. I intend to sprinkle some of his ashes on the steps of the Downtown Women’s Center, then spread the remainder over a urinal puck.”
I feign discomfort.
“I beg your pardon,” I say. “By urinal puck, I mean the cheap stinking blue cakes found in men’s toilets. Thank you.”
I step down to shocked silence and a few loud, excited claps.
“Have you thought of a career in writing disgusting eulogies?” Annabel asks when I sit down, and I laugh.
“The cops are here,” she says nervously.
“So what? Sweetheart,” I say, “could you please run home and change before the reception? You look really bad.”
She runs out of the church and I wave after her as if she is getting something from the car.
Annabel will tell me what I said later and I won’t believe her. My anger appears out of nowhere, like a murderous twister, then scarpers off, leaving my mind in shambles.
I suppose that being near Alexander again was traumatic. I did, after all, beat him to death.
Wait. That can’t be true.
He died in a fire, the poor bastard.
At the reception, I dance with a small, curvy brunette who says she liked my speech and rubs up against me so much I toy with the idea of walking her to the coatroom when Annabel returns in a short black dress and heels, her hair loose.
“Was that so hard?” I say.
“Why are you so hard?” she says, glaring at the brunette and pulling me into a tango that very quickly dominates the floor.
* * *
“Please help me, help me, God.”
Annabel wakes me. Adrift in moonlight, she asks what is wrong so gently that I finally feel the brittle shell crack.
“I don’t want to feel anything, it hurts too much,” I say.
“It hurts to keep it all inside,” she says, and I blow up.
I run through the house, wailing and falling. She chases and finally catches me by the kitchen sink, where she gathers my body against hers and pats and rubs my back until all of the black toads and deep-blue bats and small white snakes have crawled out of my mouth; until I can cry clear liquid and not murky, sulphurous waste.
“What will I do?” I say. The moon is high in the sky, sheer and curved.
“Ask to be forgiven,” she says.
I rest my head on her lap and tell Jesus, who is raising a barn for the waning moon, that I have not been myself, that I have behaved very badly. He stares at me with His gelid eyes for a long time and says, “Really?” in a sarcastic voice I am surprised to hear the Lord use.
I fall asleep inches away from paradise. When we wake, several hours later, I have chewed through her pajama bottoms and she is basking in the good vibrations.
* * *
I am out of control, in danger once more.
Time to get on that wagon, shape up.
I fill three boxes with liquor, Class A narcotics, tranqs, some mescaline, and a brick of hash, and leave them on the curb. They are gone before I reach my door. I have the dogs groomed and quarrel with Rabi about the pets he insisted on sitting. Now he wants to keep them.
He tells me that Pepita, Odorosa, and the Bandit, the skunks, are fully grown and deeply attached to him.
“And all of the wild birds flew away,” he says, and I am not surprised. I never understood how Annabel coaxed them inside to perch on her and make nests in her stocking drawers in the first place.
We compromise and he brings over a box containing a baby possum, a Komodo dragon’s egg, and a tiny achondroplasic kitten with seven toes on each paw.
I call my trainer and agree to work like a fighter every day. I quit smoking and fill the refrigerator with organic leafy and fruity items, with soy milk and almond butter, quinoa loaf and flax pita shells.
And write contrite letters on monogrammed cards.
Annabel has moved back in completely, bringing with her the color and light that vanished when she left, when I dressed all the windows with black blinds.
The dogs act like she has never left, while baring their teeth at me constantly and snarling when I touch her.
Jerks.
She cries over the missing pets, but the new ones attach themselves to her. The egg cracks instantaneously when she holds it.
“We are getting a rescue hippo,” she says, and I agree, weak as the kitten she calls Peewee.
I write to Pudge at Annabel’s insistence, telling her that even though she is not biologically mine, she is my daughter and I love her.
I put my pen down.
“But I don’t love her,” I say. “Not really.”
“You told me you were close when she was little,” says Annabel, worried. There are twenty cards to go.
I sigh, and recommence.
“Please remember to be a good girl,” I conclude, signing my name with a flourish.
“She’s just going to throw it out,” I say, thinking of her mouth tightening like a sphincter as she rips the thick card stock in half.
“Keep going,” Annabel says. She is proud of my resolve and has promised me a “dirty swim” after the letters are done: I can’t refuse.
I write my ex-wife that I’m sorry she’s a whore, and am told to correct it.
“I’m sorry I called you a whore,” I write, adding that I wish her well.
I write a bunch of people I was mean to or neglectful of, including Cotton, whom I so seldom call, then beg for a break.
Annabel puts the envelopes in her purse and strips to her polka-dot bikini. I discard everything.
“If I don’t fuck you to death, I’ll write the rest,” I say, chasing her, stark naked, into the water, and mauling her like Jaws.
Later, in a hot bath, I say, “I still feel good. Cleansed. But something is missing.”
“This?” asks my beloved, easing a finger into my ass, then two, a completely repulsive gesture that confuses and excites me.
We stay in the tub until the water is dark and dirty and we are asleep, facing each other, and the sun drops past the window and into its charred, moon-battered hole.
* * *
The night Annabel formalizes her return, she has a miserable cold and can speak only in whispers.
She is determined to make the place feel more homey, and places pictures of us on the ornate tables. In my favorite, taken by a passerby, we are standing on the Champs-Élysées, our arms filled with leafy vegetables, flowers, and bread.
We had planned to make faces, but this stranger — was it Brassaï? — captured us just as we spontaneously dropped the bags and clung to each other.
My hands are tilting her face to mine and our eyes commit indecencies that our bodies have already begun.
We drag some pillows below the pictures and drink ice-cold dirty martinis.
A flood upstairs that I thought I had staunched knocks the paint off the ceiling and Oriental blossoms drift down —
I am reminded of cherry blossoms — and latch on to my skin, my face, my eyes.
This must be what falling in love is like, I think, and she says, hoarsely, that she fell long ago.
“From heaven,” I say suavely, blowing it.
“Sure,” she says.
Annabel is a nice girl above all, and patient with my defect.
I wait until she falls asleep and announce to her curved ear that this really does feel like love, as a whirl of air lifts the last of the rich, pink paint.
She snores quietly, and a small part of me urges me to wake her and tell her, she is so beautiful and good, and I have never —
“I think,” I say, and she opens her eyes, expectantly. “I think that we had better get to bed.”
She sighs and we stand, brushing off specks of dust and flakes of paint, yawning and downcast.
Goddamn my faint heart.
* * *
I meet with Jerry at the Palm and tell him I am going to attach some of Annabel’s work to the sequel.
Jerry says I’m thinking with my dick, or he is starting to say so when some of the old illness returns, like a determined criminal.
He can eat shit.
I look at the Hollywood mural, the vaulted wood ceiling, and think of bringing Annabel here.
I get up and throw my napkin down.
“Lunch is on you,” I say. “Now find me a few small parts to revitalize this fucking project.”
Jerry nods and lowers his head.
I’m getting better, I think, as I slap the valet with my ticket.
I must be in love.
* * *
When I get home, Annabel is standing in front of the window in the bedroom, stroking her suddenly-big belly.
I cough and, startled, she pulls the pillow out from under her dress.
“What are you doing?” I ask nervously.
“Practising,” she says. “What if I can have children?”