Chicken

by Lynn Crosbie

  She shakes out the tapestry, hands it over, and walks away regally, her brittle bones snapping with each step.

  I hang it on the rail of the canopy, replacing a nude of Annabel on all fours in a lake of cum. “Milk, it’s supposed to be milk,” she said.

  Okay, I wrap myself in her portrait and pretend it is her, crying out, “Oh, my darling!” and “I’m so happy you came back!” until Charles’s mother yells at him and he scurries over, tucks me into bed, and pats my face with a cool cloth as I fall asleep, all windmill arms and spazzy legs.

  * * *

  I sleep for two days, waking to drink the power smoothies that Donna — this is Charles’s mother’s name — makes for me, eliminating into zip-lock bags that she removes, frowning, yet not angry.

  I call her “Mama” one day, and it sticks.

  “Go to that doctor,” she tells me, and I do. I go to her waiting room and pay her next client to hit the road.

  I feel a bit guilty, because the woman had cross-hatched scars on her wrist and a dead animal in her purse, but I’m not feeling very well.

  * * *

  Dr. Jain greets me and sits in an enormous beanbag, watching a projection of stars lace the ceiling.

  I tell her Annabel has not contacted me in a while. That I read she is making a Maybelline video called Bunny, but she has not told me.

  “Isn’t love strange?” Dr. Jain says, and smiles.

  I release all the breath I have been holding — forever, it seems — and throw myself onto the other beanbag.

  “It is a miracle,” I say, and together we point out the formations and make up names for the ones we don’t know.

  Twink Majoris. Ursa Andress.

  “She’s coming home,” I say, drifting on my spacecraft.

  “How wonderful,” she says, and, with some difficulty, we both stand and wave goodbye for now.

  * * *

  “Watch me,” her text says.

  Tonight is the TV and digital debut of her first Maybelline ad. Teasers of her in a vintage Playboy Bunny outfit are everywhere.

  I watch the ad alone, in my bedroom.

  It begins with her in the outfit, pink ears alert, being made up with the new “Bunny” palette. Suddenly, her own video starts: an actual rabbit, sick and shaved, is being jabbed with mascara wands and force-fed stalks of lipstick.

  Annabel appears in a pink lab coat and cradles the dying creature, closes its blood-red eyes.

  The commercial stops and an old one kicks in.

  I open my laptop and watch Twitter explode, then jump around, trying to find her.

  Which I do.

  At LaGuardia, informing a reporter to “tell my baby I’m coming home.”

  I hurry out to meet the breeder Charles located.

  Rush home with flowers and two striped baby rabbits, one black, one white.

  When she comes in, they are capering on the bed, eating dwarf carrots and rolling in hay.

  “I’m in a bit of trouble,” she says, scooping up the white one.

  I adjust my eyes to her beauty and tell her how proud I am.

  We are careful to avoid our new friends as we tear up the bed and she cries after.

  “I wish you loved me,” she says.

  I blot her tears with one of Jain’s tissue flowers and hold her, my darling, twitching bunny.

  “You know how my heart beats,” I tell her, rocking her to sleep. “We will both be fine,” I say, sorry to lie, yet grateful to her for holding on anyway, and anyway.

  It is true enough, this cottontailed night.

  * * *

  Annabel sleeps and sleeps.

  I unpack her things, pausing to watch and fuss over her.

  After several hours, I pull out her arts-and-crafts satchel — she likes to make me dioramas, bell jars containing pipe-cleaner lovers and killers running amok under suspended salt-crystal snowflakes, and diminutive chiming tin mobiles, among other delightfully inept pieces that I keep in a box under the bed.

  Finding a large piece of bright-red construction paper, I fold it, then cut out a half-heart.

  On it, with a gold gel pen, I write:

  Between your legs is

  Alabaster, apricot

  Bee’s feet

  Champagne fizz

  Duckling fuzz

  Ebony slit

  Flowers dripping pollen

  Girl goo

  Haute hotness

  Indian milk

  Jams and jellies

  Kisses that enter sighing

  Liquid nirvana

  Monster’s milk

  Nest for tiny birds

  Orgasm O’s

  Pussy galore

  Queenly dew

  Rills of cyprine

  Sluicing salty spume

  Two lips, rosy pink

  Underwater divers, breathless

  Vagina divina

  Wet joy

  Xtra slick slide

  Yarrow — the devil’s nettle

  Zillions of plays, “Your Sweetness Is My Weakness”

  I leave this folded into one of her shoes and am exhilarated. My mind is whole enough for now, I think, as I lie cautiously beside her and then I am reading at the Agora in ancient Greece.

  Medu Neter, the gathering whispers, then shouts.

  * * *

  Maybelline tries to sue Annabel, whose contract, composed by her, is bulletproof.

  They launch instead a series of infomercials of their laboratories in China, where animal testing is mandatory.

  In it, the creatures apply their own contour and rouge, gradations of hot-pink shadow, while hopping around a cage lit up with strobes and glitter balls.

  “Zhège hěn yŏuqù!” they say. This is fun.

  * * *

  We talk for days, calling in for food and clean clothes.

  She tells me about walking through Central Park and how she jumped when a boy handed her the handkerchief she dropped by the little castle.

  I tell her about my new therapist, whom I want her to meet, and about feeling like a post-surgery Chang or Eng without her.

  “Either one,” I say, as she shakes her head.

  She finds my poem and slips it inside of her bra. I tell her about the alphabet game, and never even having reached F before.

  “Fear,” she says, handing me a Virginia Woolf book about a painter and the same letters that I swear I’ll read later.

  Because now she is back and just the same, but more powerful — and more gaspingly beautiful. Look at your hair, look at your eyes, look, look, is all I can think to say.

  She is happy to spread out on a bed of pillows like my maja and let me drink her in to the last heart-shaped (naturally) freckle, located on the lips of her —

  I have been indiscreet before.

  Better to say that I kissed her in all the tender places I had longed for: firm, yielding places that seem to kiss back.

  That at last I fed her truffles, chocolate and rich, fruiting fungus.

  * * *

  When finally we leave the bedroom, it is to shop at the farmer’s market for pinwheel-sized sunflowers and loaves of soft, grain-pocked bread.

  A vendor tells her she has a nice ass, and when she ignores him, starts to follow her and calls her a cunt.

  I am in the middle of a joyously brutal beating in the parking lot, where I have frogmarched him, when she finds us and pulls me off.

  “You’re lucky,” I say, spitting on his prostrate, fetal-shaped body and shaking some canines loose from my hand.

  An elderly man sees me as we re-enter, whistles, and says, admiringly, “Aren’t you the pretty boy from Ultraviolence?”

  “Fuck off, you old fruit,” Annabel says as I try to hide my trembling with a fast stride.

  We stand holdi
ng hands in front of a bin of walnuts.

  She pries one open, shakes out the center, and swallows the meat of our terrors.

  We decide to see Jain sooner rather than later.

  Then I get on my knees, take her hand, and sing Little Dragon’s “Don’t Cry.”

  I heard it at the doctor’s office. We made felt puppets and everything.

  * * *

  “The psychosis of Sir John Everett Millais, the crew of the Red Dragon, Movie of the Week template, takes an axe to Act Two’s inability.”

  I am reading — discovered under our mattress — Annabel’s abstruse diary, berserk in its feminine detritus. It has a pink-and-white candy-striped velvet cover featuring Winnie Harlow as a centauress, a pinking-sheared white silk bookmark, and a lock shaped like a heart that I pick with a metal shaving.

  The diary is about writing and nothing more.

  Occasionally she scribbles our initials in hearts, sometimes filling an entire page, but I am otherwise absent.

  It is, in fact, so devoid of intimacy, I wonder if she knows what diaries are.

  I buy one that closes with a lock and toss the key. On the first page I write, “Well, this is daunting!”

  Dear Diary,

  Having a nice day with my girlfriend, Annabel, who is very pretty and smart.

  We may go to the beach tonight and have a bonfire, or stay in and watch movies.

  Whatever we do —

  I end it like that, as if she has just come into the room, and hide it under one of the bed pillows.

  I am nervous for the rest of the day. Will she read it, and amend hers? What does she really think of me?

  After dinner, she yawns and says, “How about that bonfire?” and I run upstairs, calling back something about a bag of kindling.

  I grab her diary and skim the latest entry, dated today.

  It reads,

  I have been asked to do an ICA talk in London, based on the book. I think I will talk more about the optics in A Clockwork Orange and Ultraviolence, about the ways in which they — and this is more Alice stuff, to be sure — force us to consider perspective in such an unsettling, active (i.e., assaulting the passivity inherent in viewing cinema) way.

  I feel like a dick. Even her half-assed line drawing of her lips with my initials on them, floating on a blank page, does nothing to assuage me.

  Annabel texts me from downstairs:

  How much kindling do we need ffs?

  “Coming,” I text back, and call Rabi.

  I ask him to meet me tomorrow and he sulks for a bit — it has been a while — then says, “Okay, Planet Hollywood at noon.”

  He hangs up as I wonder: is that really still a thing? I smash one of the guest-room chairs, ball up some pages from one of Mama’s Nora Roberts novels, and set back downstairs, confused but still puppyish, love’s young nightmare–like.

  * * *

  I have never told anyone I loved them.

  Not my mother, not Lola, Allegra, Pudge, Alexander, even Annabel.

  It was hard with the kids. They sensed I was holding back and tried wheedling, extortion, and outrageous tantrums to get me to respond to their hopeful, mostly outraged admissions of love.

  I deployed verbal trickery. “You too,” I would say, or, “Hey, that’s so nice to hear.”

  Allegra said I was gutless.

  In the middle of a formal dinner party, her eyes cloud and she says, “I love you, my darling.” As the silence grows and grows like a swarm of locusts gathering strength in the distance, I answer, “And I love this papaya-based sauce,” swirling my finger around my empty plate as the guests scatter.

  “What are you afraid of?” she says, slapping and scratching me as I work very hard to restrain myself. “Of love, of being loved, of being rejected? Which is it?”

  “Nothing,” I say.

  “So what is it then,” she says. She sits down, hair unkempt, eyes swollen and running.

  Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous, I think, and tell her: “I don’t love you or anyone, for that matter, and that’s all there is to it.”

  I show her my steady hands. “Look,” I say. “No fear. Not much of anything,” and leave her to her manky crying self, walking past my sleeping kids’ rooms and thinking, It’s not like I hate them, then walking out.

  One of our guests, a well-built redhead whose husband is home ill, is waiting on the porch.

  “I knew you’d come,” she says, and we climb into the back seat of her car, where I lift her spangled dress and fuck her ass and molest her tits until I do.

  She, more dreary tears, more talk of love, does not.

  * * *

  “Do I love Annabel?” I ask Rabi at the Backyard, my choice, my treat, where we are pinned by the sun, miserably fighting off striped throw pillows on a blindingly blue sofa.

  The dazzling blonde waitress doesn’t ask him for ID, even though he has chosen to wear a terry-cloth shirt, baggy jean shorts, and suede booties.

  He smokes and speaks with such authority, he is never challenged. He even gets the girl’s number.

  “You’re nine years old, what do you want with that?” I say, irritably. The girl doesn’t appear to know I exist.

  “Don’t worry about me,” he says.

  We sip horchatas and I tell him about Annabel’s diary, and how I don’t love anyone.

  He stares at me like I’m stupid.

  “Not her diary,” he says. “That’s a decoy.”

  Goddamn.

  “You love everybody, suckhole.”

  “I do not,” I say, and he is all over me, tickling and jabbing me, demanding I say it, say it!

  “All right, I like you!” I say, out of breath and cross.

  “I know you’re lying, yaar, but to say love is hard for you. I get it,” he says, and, as I protest, slaps down cash over the check. “Love means pain, no matter how good it is.”

  He’s right, as always. “If I could feel that way,” I say, “you’d be in the top five.”

  “Get outta here,” he says, and laughs as the blonde returns in her street clothes and pulls him to his feet.

  “I could just eat you up,” she says.

  “That’s the plan,” he says, and leaves me alone with my thoughts and what will become a disfiguring sunburn that Annabel laughs at and covers with zinc, while I brood about her real diary and its whereabouts.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, Annabel and I have started to see Jain often, and I once more get my drinking under control.

  At Annabel’s insistence, I hire a team to manage my finances. On the same day, I bring home a tiger cub I have named Sandy and take him for a walk on a jewelled leash in tight leatherette shorts and a diamond sun visor.

  Everything is returned, by me, as my girlfriend pinches my ear — except Sandy, who is taken directly to Tippi Hedren’s Shambala Preserve and donated to the animal sanctuary with both a hefty maintenance check and the name of the Craigslist lunatic who sold him to me out of the back of his pickup truck.

  I am lectured about conflict-free diamonds versus blood diamonds, animal trafficking, gluttony, and invidiousness.

  Told to mend my relationship with my daughter and there’ll be no more sex for me until the harridan I call my girlfriend says so!

  I rebel, naturally. Once more, I drive to Vegas and, just as I spot a glimmering roulette wheel, a stupefying showgirl, and a tray of chilly martinis, she calls.

  “Baby, please come home,” she says.

  Home. The word hits me like a silver striker on a still triangle.

  “I’m lonely for you,” says Annabel. She says it again and by then I have already grabbed my keys from the valet. I am slamming my foot down on the gas and heading toward the voice that begins in the base of her throat —

  It is a lustrous black bird with long, curve
d flight feathers in mid-ascent.

  I am flying to this voice, which starts as deep, desiring tympani, and bumps its pitch higher and higher into her own string-crossed cries; cries I match with the blood in my heart, the blood pouring back and forth into the smaller chamber,

  a white jug, painted with pink roses, bearing her name

  * * *

  Annabel, in a batiste shift and chiming ankle bracelets, greets me at the door and wraps her legs around my waist.

  “I came home,” I say, carrying her up the stairs.

  “I’m so glad,” she says, and when I lay her on the bed she is all girl — open and warm and candy-sweet in her readiness for me.

  * * *

  I call Pudge.

  She is living in Sacramento and burning through her money on cosmetic procedures and the Petrossian Royal Ossetra caviar and Dom Pérignon her fancy man likes with each meal.

  Allegra has called me to tell me this, worried about her daughter and, for once, wanting me to intercede.

  “The prison job lasted a week,” she says. “Christine looks like an enormous Joan Rivers. And that man! My God, he’s a lard-ass too, a gigolo and a cokehead.”

  “I’ve never seen a fat cokehead,” I say, genuinely intrigued.

  “Would you please just talk to her?” she says, and I promise that I will.

  “Pudge!” I say when she answers the phone sleepily at

  3 p.m. “If you do not stop spending money like a drunken sailor on shore leave, and if you let that eurysome villain stay with you a minute longer, I will have you taken care of by professionals.”

  “You’ve been in too many B movies, Dad,” she says, adding a sarcastic spin to this sparse term of endearment.

  But her voice is shaking.

  “All right, kid. You were warned.”

  I hang up and make a few more calls, humming.

  Annabel comes into the kitchen and smiles.

  “Did you tell her you loved her?” she asks.

  “No, that’s not going to happen. But I helped her. And I’m about to help a lot more.”