Chicken

by Lynn Crosbie

  “But I thought you — ”

  “Is something the matter?” she asks, walking over to me and grabbing a box of condoms out of the drawer on the way.

  “No,” I say in an unusually high voice.

  “Wouldn’t you like to throw these out?” she says, biting my ear and squeezing me passionately.

  I think of her enormous in a sitz bath, her body marred by fat, wormy lines.

  Gross. No.

  “Of course,” I say, stalling. “But is now a good time?”

  “We don’t have to have a baby,” she says, and my relief is palpable.

  I lift and toss her onto the bed and fuck her from behind, pulling out to bust on her back.

  I get up and go to the bathroom.

  Sing as I clean myself and comb my long, prolific hair.

  When I return she is still lying on her belly, her back cradling a basin of fishy goo.

  “Get up and clean yourself,” I say sharply, and she does.

  When she returns, I hold her face, which is puffy and red.

  “Are you crying?” I ask, and she says no, but I am lost in a reverie of how her back cracked when I chopped it, of being deep inside her, thinking, You’re my baby, you’re all that I need.

  * * *

  I feel tractor-beamed into Tiffany’s, where I buy a ring — a four-row band of blue diamonds pavé-set in platinum.

  I’m too frightened to look at the price. Also, I am too absorbed with planning a romantic proposal.

  Cocktails at the Tropicana, then dinner at Mélisse, where I will get on one knee in front of the room, open the robin’s egg–blue bag and the black velvet box, and offer her its blazing contents.

  She will cry, the room will applaud —

  I put the bag on the dash of the Jag and speed home.

  Annabel is asleep on the sofa in boxers and one of my T-shirts.

  She is bleeding.

  I shake her awake: “You have your period,” I say.

  She looks down and starts to cry.

  “Charles will clean the sofa,” I call after her magnanimously as she runs upstairs.

  But my plans dissipate: I make no calls as I trundle after her, just put the ring in the vault.

  I lie down, close my eyes, and hear his voice.

  “Who loves me?” he says.

  This is how it always begins. I swallow puke and fright.

  Annabel walks in and says, “I was bleeding because — ”

  “I know basic biology,” I say, and turn my head.

  Hear her run off again, maybe sad, maybe angry.

  I’m doing well. Things are good.

  * * *

  Maybelline offers Annabel a TV commercial.

  The money is insane, she can’t say no. But what she does do is insist that they use one of her videos in their TV and digital campaign: she sends a sample short of her swimming naked in a lake of celadon to the tune of “Black Pearl” and they are thrilled.

  Annabel is too.

  “This will be my mainstream breakthrough,” she tells me in bed. Then, sadly, “You seem a little uncomfortable with me lately, anyways. Maybe a bit of time apart will help us? It usually does.”

  Even hurt, she is all grace: why can’t I throw myself at her and babble at her goodness?

  I am dumbstruck.

  “Maybe it’s time,” she says, “for me to stand squarely in New York, look that fucking city in the eye, and start over.”

  “I will miss you terribly,” I say. I have fallen asleep listening to her, and she is gone.

  I kiss and kiss the L’Heure Bleue–soused rupture in her pillow, and wonder what has happened and why it hurts so much.

  * * *

  I am looking at one of the PETA emails she has signed me up for.

  I see a list and wonder: does she know?

  Hesitantly, I text her the index of cruelty-free cosmetics and an unhappy face. Maybelline is not mentioned.

  “I miss you already,” I write. I want to go on and on, but I am still stinging about what she said.

  I don’t feel uncomfortable with her.

  All I can remember are the thrilling things — carrying her up the staircase like Rhett Butler, her resisting faintly in red velvet and crisp white lace, the two of us kidnapping the weeping mastodon from La Brea and releasing it by the Hollywood Reservoir, so many formal dinners, on Turkish beds and tiny, ornate chairs, speeding around the hairpin turn at the end of the Snake, dancing at the Mayan —

  I am standing in our bedroom, holding myself, swaying, lightly swaying as all her birds break in and fill the room, diving and coursing, the outrageous show-offs.

  “Oh” is the text I get back and I think, someone’s in trouble.

  * * *

  I miss her so much I can’t breathe.

  We talk every day, but when she tells me things like, “You said I looked like a pregnant Kardashian that day at the beach,” I am mystified.

  I tell her I may have a brain tumor and how delicious is an expecting Kim or Kourtney, for that matter?

  She warms up, but urges me to make a doctor’s appointment.

  I do, but it is with a therapist: Dr. Lisa Jain, whose card I find on a bulletin board at the hippie food co-op that Annabel urges me to visit regularly for spelt, amaranth, and freekeh; repulsive-looking vegetables still caked in dirt and covered in scars and blemishes.

  There has been a cancellation: I can see Dr. Jain the next day.

  Fragments of memory begin to assail me: “Don’t you have any friends?” I am shouting at her as she joins me on the sofa to watch a movie.

  I don’t think it happened? It couldn’t have.

  The day is shot.

  I go back to bed and run my hand along the memory of Annabel, now feeling the mattress, long and slender, C-curved toward me.

  “Kiss me,” I say to her absence, and my eyes water, I am such a baby.

  A baby! I cry, and turn away from the circle we make every night to watch the bright-pink hibiscus on our Juliet balcony crawl toward the sun that looks like a mentally ill person has drawn it — it is a fat, spiked yolk in the center of the pale-blue sky.

  “You’re such a baby,” a cruel voice spits, a girl cries, oh Christ, I said this, I think, my stomach blasting acid, as sleep quickly and safely contains me.

  * * *

  My first email from Annabel in New York is a film.

  She is leaning against a wall in Spanish Harlem, dressed in a pink body stocking, Docs, and a crown.

  A light-blue radio perched on a high windowsill mews the Supremes: I hear a symphony.

  She starts to move and ten little girls dressed like her appear and dance behind her in a vee.

  At the end of the song, she says, “I miss you, boy,” and slaps the camera out of her way.

  I watch it three times in a row.

  “This is good, honey,” I write, and delete COME HOME NOW.

  Everyone always leaves, I think.

  I am watching my mother, tarted up in a clingy dress and pumps, walk down the street.

  I am hungry and scared.

  I eat noodles I pour into a bowl of hot water and fall asleep holding a kitchen knife.

  This time, she is only gone two days.

  She is gone five when they find her body in a bedsit in Lewisham, cut up and pulverized, bloated to twice its size.

  * * *

  I go to see Dr. Jain, who is slight and almost plain until her big smile pops, showing off deep, fetching dimples.

  My hands start to shake. What will she say? That I have murder in my eyes?

  She plays something strange she tells me is called The Drift. The singer sounds like an old crooner on his deathbed.

  I like it.

  “Should I start with my childhood?” I ask, reluctantly.


  “Start wherever you like,” she says, lighting a cigarette and grasping a squeaky plush toy.

  “There was a field of poppies,” I say, then talk for fifty minutes straight.

  Her frown tells me we are out of time.

  “I never even got to meeting Lamont Kray,” I tell her at the end of it all. “Or my girlfriend’s recent departure.”

  “Let’s meet again,” she says, and hands me a large blossom she has made by picking at the plies in a tissue.

  I slip into the adjacent washroom and am about to toss it when, remembering the pleasure of her quiet company, I fasten it behind my ear with the bobby pin holding it together.

  “I miss you,” I text Annabel as I hit the street.

  “Me too,” she writes back. “Talk soon.” She adds bee emojis one by one, making a swarm.

  I think about her as my iPod shuffles and wails, anger is an energy.

  When I start my car, my eyes are half-closed and leaky; my flower is askew.

  * * *

  Occasionally, Annabel used my computer to update her sites.

  I open up my photo folder, linger over a bunch of us that she uploaded for me, and watch the racy home movies, mouth ajar.

  I see a new file called ham.doc and open it.

  It is a video, but unlike any of her other work: it is some kind of puppet show and it is so creepy.

  The background music is whatever city noise is seeping through an unseen window: ambulances, blasts of music, brief outbursts, an unpleasant sonic haze.

  Dominating the screen are two unfocused figures: a female character — a decapitated rubber chicken on a fork wearing a pink-dotted head wrap — and a male, who is an old, navy-blue Tonka truck.

  She jabs at him with one loose tine and he reverses, then flattens her.

  The truck trails tin cans, each bearing a name and skull. It dumps a melted plastic baby on the ground that the hen spears, then carries, weeping, to a bowl of water.

  “I’m sorry,” I write her, and she calls me in the middle of my night.

  “I know you don’t mean it,” she says, and I am not sure that I understand.

  Asphodel, bluebell, carnation, daffodil, everlasting daisy —

  “Sing to me,” I say, and she does.

  She sings a murder ballad and I fall asleep before the madman is felled by Wild Elderberry’s axe.

  When I wake up, she says hello.

  She waited for me: my heart almost explodes.

  * * *

  Summer is coming to an end.

  Annabel’s Maybelline campaign and her antagonism toward it are a smash hit: she is trailed by little mental patients and elderly captains of industry all day long, fawned over and offered the world by admirers, publishers, filmmakers, and more.

  She doesn’t care: I have never understood this part of her.

  She spends an hour every morning answering lonely, barely literate comments on her social media, but blows off a meeting with Graydon Carter because “his hair makes me nervous” and lunch with Anna Wintour:“What if she’s wearing fur?”

  Her date request from Drake has me playing Othello, but he is also dismissed with a perfumed note: “I’m afraid I am otherwise engaged,” she writes in her fluid script.

  I have flown to New York to visit, to watch her at her pink ivory wood desk in a red rippled moiré peignoir, dashing off stories and letters and RSVPs.

  I arrive at her hotel late at night, carrying bags of Chinese food and calla lilies.

  She takes away the bags and my carryall, places them neatly on the bed, and fucks me in the doorway, murmuring hellos at passing guests.

  “Tell me again what you see in me?” I write later on an insane fortune-cookie slip declaring, “Your tight ass will take you far.”

  I hand it to her as she steps out of the shower, wrapping her wet hair in one of my old T-shirts, one of her model tricks. She laughs and agrees.

  I point to the other side of the slim paper, dying of embarrassment.

  “I’m not exactly sure,” she says, and I feel myself coming apart.

  “All I know is that we work together,” she says. “And that you are one hot specimen.”

  I scoop her up as she protests, but we just, my hair my eyelashes I’m late, and burrow inside of her like a common warthog, snuffling and gratified.

  She reclines as if bored but there is no missing the walls of her pussy slamming shut, then open, like a magical iron maiden.

  * * *

  When I return home, I rehire Charles, whom I fired in a rage when Annabel decamped. He has the gardens tended to, the windows washed, dead rats scooped from the pool, and so on.

  He takes Fang and Lupe, the dogs, on long walks every day, and Annabel keeps in touch with him and sends things. I overhear him one day saying, “Your mama is sending you both the nice donuts today,” and smile, thinking of her taking care of us.

  Time drags: Crispin is tweaking the screenplay, and the work that Jerry cherry-picks for me invariably involves me walking into a scene and slapping, choking, or killing one of the principals.

  My allure heightens because of this. Rabi visits and shows me hundreds of fan pages, some by adolescent girls, many of which are outright filthy: “I want his boner in my vagina so bad!”

  I look like a soft forty-five, at the most: my hair has grown and I wear it in a loosely gathered ponytail; I have a girl at Bloomingdale’s teach me how to contour and make my eyes look “like a panther’s,” she says, batting long, jewelled lashes.

  She is beautiful, but I feel nothing.

  I only want Annabel, in the long grass, feeding poppy seeds to ants; arch-Annabel, powdered, parading around in tap pants and red sequined heels; and Annabel Victrix, quickly writing the last line of her book and murmuring it to me: “Having carved my way out of their thrall, I spit at Sid and Alex: The boys are behind me one hundred percent.”

  When she is away from me, I am left with my muddled memories and calling for Darkling until I lose my voice.

  And when she is with me, I turn on her. Not often, but once is often enough. When she was working during my visit, I repented to every priest in Manhattan and three other boroughs.

  When I return, I stand inside the painted golden vault of St. Vincent de Paul and, at last, the queen of heaven fills my arms with poppies.

  As I breathe in their smell, Annabel appears with my joyous dog and we chase the sun’s poky passage over the sky.

  * * *

  My mother becomes more vivid each day, each night, occupying my dreams with her spatulas and cheese grater, her wooden stick and the rest of the arsenal.

  My teachers think I’m an idiot and ignore my bruises and cuts.

  “With no father around,” one big, boxy old woman says, “it’s good your ma is keeping you in line.”

  “The dirty little slapper,” she then mock-whispers to another of the teachers. They laugh until I sink my teeth into her fat, furry leg and have to be pried off.

  * * *

  “Who’s my big man?” my mother says, letting her smoky hair fall into my face.

  I had been sound asleep under my bed, having heard footsteps in the hall and pounding at the door earlier.

  I tell her and she laughs. “Oh, that was Bernie, he’s so madly possessive. He’s gone, my lamb.”

  “Tell me about your night,” she says, pulling me onto the bed with her and kicking off her shoes.

  “I watched a movie called White Heat. It was good.”

  She doesn’t care. She rubs my back, then asks me to rub hers.

  I don’t want to.

  “Why don’t you love me?” she says, and is suddenly a whirling dervish, slapping me, stepping on my toys, ripping my drawings from the wall.

  “No one loves me!”

  “I do,” I say. “Please.”

  “Please,
what?” she says, knocking everything off my dresser with one swipe.

  Please wake up is what I say, and I do.

  Then, I tiptoe, in my own house, unlock a drawer, and withdraw a bottle of the single-malt Scotch I definitively prefer.

  I am drunk in moments, and feeling fantastic.

  I select a package of Silk Cuts and light up, feeling my lungs perforate.

  I almost call Annabel but ring Charles instead, demanding that he join me for a nightcap.

  It is 4 a.m.

  He comes to my room and stands in the doorway warily, dressed in his white sateen robe with black velvet piping.

  I toss him the bottle and he takes a little sip.

  We drink for a while, and I sing for him and get up and do a little soft-shoe number.

  “Really impressive, sir,” he says, pecking at the bottle.

  I slap him on the back and roar, tears zooming from my eyes I am so happy, happy on my hands and knees emptying my stomach, happy braying about demons and desertion and death to no one, for Charles tiptoed away a long time ago.

  There is only the lunatic’s moon, and me.

  * * *

  Good, yes, things are going splendidly.

  Crispin is blocked, he says, and is headed to Nepal to “wrap my head around this thing.”

  Charles, frightened I have fallen in love with him, sets me up with his mother, “for companionship, sir.”

  She is a bald fossil who speaks in a growl and weaves tapestries of the celestial birth and heraldic death of Princess Diana.

  I sit with her every night while she works at her loom and drunkenly adore the work that emerges, the jets of cerulean blue and hammered gold.

  Because she is deaf and speaks little English, I never do learn much about her. I tell her how lonely I am, and she rewards me with damp hand-clasps and gentle, commiserating sounds.

  She loves Entertainment Tonight and one night we watch an episode I PVR’d for her as she puts the finishing touches on a heroic portrait of me dressed as Lawrence of Arabia, riding a camel into a salmon sky.