Chicken

by Lynn Crosbie

  She squeezes me and we change and go to La Scala. She wears a vintage black faille Balmain gown with a melon-pink peekaboo lining and jewelled Miu Miu heels; I wear a black Brioni suit with a flowered chiffon shirt and striped Balenciaga tie.

  The waiter is obsequious: we are impressive. People take covert photographs and rehearse their approach to our table.

  “Vorremmo che l’insalata verde, e alcuni spaghetti al pomodoro e basilico,” I say. “Per secondi, la melanzane alla parmigiana, e mousse al cioccolato per dessert. Sì, e una bottiglia di 2010 Brunello di Montalcino, grazie.”

  “Was that your way of ordering lamb chops?” she says as my phone vibrates, and I excuse myself.

  I slip into the cloakroom to listen to this voice mail:

  “Dad! I’m in the hospital with a broken arm and my boyfriend, Atlas, is gone! My money is gone too, what am I supposed to do?”

  I text:

  Inch by inch, life’s a cinch. Yard by yard, life is hard.

  Then I return to the table, feeling mellow, and swirl the wine in my mouth, feeling it address each of my taste buds by name and in turn.

  “Two thousand and ten,” I say to the sommelier, “a good year.”

  He agrees in a near-frenzy and I think, For wine. I sip from my glass, hold my girlfriend’s hand. I feel I am through with the past.

  “We have arrived at last,” I say, as the cameras start clicking and Annabel reluctantly poses, flashing the smile that keeps the Colgate dividends arriving, and clinging to me possessively.

  I shoot my cuffs over my scars and beam also.

  Life is beautiful.

  * * *

  Pudge sells her story to TMZ. When I am asked to comment, I say, “I don’t give a fuck,” and advance on their mobile team, a clip that is played and replayed online.

  Which serves to make me seem more dangerous, and more cool, and my fan base drops in age and rises in number.

  None of this pleases Annabel, or “Parnell’s ladyfriend.”

  “You were supposed to make things better,” she says.

  “I did,” I protest. “She was ruining her life.” I grab her. “Can’t we be a family, just us? I want to start over.”

  She chews on her ragged lips. There are dark circles under her eyes; she is thinner than usual.

  “Pudge called you a gold-digging cum-dumpster,” I say, and she makes a flicking gesture.

  Says, “Fine. It’s just us, now.”

  That night, I find the real diary in a laundry hamper.

  It is a plain Mead notebook filled with shopping lists and the occasional reference to events and dates.

  I call Rabi, triumphant.

  “Chutiya,” he says. “That’s decoy number two.”

  I add TRUTH to one of the lists, then feel stupid and cross it out.

  What is she hiding?

  * * *

  “Are you angry at Annabel for poisoning Mr. Kray?” Dr. Jain asks, smiling as if pleased by my girlfriend’s ingenuity.

  “No,” I say, taking Annabel’s hand. “She was trying to protect me.”

  “And Annabel, are you angry about Parnell’s actions?”

  “It excites me,” she admits. “No one has ever loved me, not like he does.”

  After a weighted pause, Jain remarks that we seem very comfortable with violence.

  She has no idea.

  “Do you hurt each other?” she says, and we chew on that for a while.

  “He gets a bit rough in bed,” says Annabel finally. “But I’m rougher.”

  Annabel lifts up my Death Row T-shirt to reveal a kaleidoscope of bruises and lash marks.

  Jain stands and traces the damage with her cool fingertips.

  “It is not my place to judge,” she says, “but — ”

  Taking out an old Polaroid camera, she shoots a picture and writes MAP on the tab below.

  Over my wounds, she draws fluffy, leporine arrows, pointing up and out.

  “Refer to this as the way out of hell, if you like,” she says.

  Annabel holds out her wrists, which are also scarred, but deeper and more efficiently.

  “From missing you,” she says, and I go to her as our doctor says, “Cheese,” and makes one last map.

  * * *

  We go home and she wears her holster, black thigh-high boots, and nothing else.

  She whips me and cleans the raised lines later in the tub, and when she goes to her dressing room, I follow.

  I arrive in time to see her adjusting the large framed photograph of Ondine, in Chelsea Girls, over her dresser.

  Later, when she is watching some tedious Agnès Varda film, I slip upstairs, move the picture, and find the safe.

  I don’t have the combination, but the real diary must be in here.

  I text Rabi: “BINGO.”

  “Third decoy?” he texts back, and I am deflated, then taken aback by a shot of him and the blonde waitress, whom he is riding around his living room, on a saddle strapped to her back.

  “Is that even legal?” I text, and he responds, “Stop jellying. Find the book.”

  “Daddy?” says Annabel, and I whirl around, pantless and scared.

  “I was just ordering you something sparkly,” I say, and she is pleased.

  “Look what I got you,” she says, unclasping a bulky platinum chain from her waist.

  “I look dope,” I say, and her eyes widen. “I mean,” I start maundering before she closes my mouth with an amused kiss.

  * * *

  When we wake up, it is 1 a.m. and we can’t sleep.

  We look at our phones, and she shows me a shot of Pudge, baggy and blonde, her nose bobbed to the size of a thimble.

  “My father is an evil and dangerous man” is the caption, and I shake my head.

  “What is she talking about?” Annabel says.

  “Some horror of a Barbie I neglected to buy her, in all likelihood,” I say.

  I would have bought her anything back then, but the way Pudge asked! It was like being swarmed by those awful little bugs that live for one day and never stop advancing.

  “I had the best Barbie collection when I was eight,” says Annabel. “My mom’s co-worker’s kid died and I got all of her stuff. There was even a canopy bed.”

  I almost ask how the little girl died, but she is so happy.

  “That was my second-favorite year,” she says.

  “What was your first?” I ask, knowing she will say this one, and that I have the code for her safe.

  * * *

  The third diary is frightening.

  It is a black notebook bound in elastic bands and covered in silver imprecations and dire warnings.

  I open it trepidatiously, and it is empty.

  Except for this:

  STOP LOOKING FOR MY DIARIES OR ELSE.

  I almost laugh, it is so childish, but a part of me has always been afraid of her and her strange magic.

  I will stop.

  For now.

  The TV, always set on an entertainment channel, announces, “Comeback Star Parnell Wilde’s Daughter’s Explosive Revelations!”

  Not again.

  After a number of sickening commercials for candied pig snouts, comical rectal thermometers, and kale-flavoured condoms, the revelations unfold.

  “I have been to a therapist,” a much-altered Pudge announces. She is finally thin. Loose-skinned but thin, in a ruffled brown bodysuit and, inexplicably, an eyepatch.

  “She put me under. And told me, she told me.”

  She stops, covers her face with her hands, resumes.

  “That he molested me. He’s not my biological dad, but still. I can barely look at myself,” she says.

  The female host puts her arm around her shoulder, and Pudge looks bravely forward.

  “I’
m not afraid of you anymore, Dad!” she says while tousling her frizzy yellow hair.

  “Just disgusting,” the male host says in closing, and I leave the room to find Annabel watching the same show in the bath.

  “Pervert,” she says, and I gasp.

  Then she blows me a bubble kiss and says, “As if.”

  I climb in with her, fully clothed and shaking. She strokes my face and sings broken old country songs about black-hearted ladies and male tramps bearing raccoon-skin coats and frogs in black velvet boxes.

  * * *

  I cannot deal with this.

  Annabel can.

  She wards off Allegra and finds Pudge.

  “Tell me what his cock looks like,” she demands.

  “Like . . . a small pencil!” she says, picking up her hotel-room phone to call security.

  “A small pencil,” Annabel repeats so scornfully that Pudge puts the phone down. “What else can you tell me?”

  “He touched me, he made me touch him!”

  “Bitch, he did not,” Annabel says. “Why are you making up this shit?”

  “Because he never pays attention to me, because he ruined my life, all right?”

  It is better than all right: Annabel has recorded the outburst.

  It’s harder to undo damage than create it, but she is a hot sell, and several of the big outlets invite her to play her recording and talk.

  She does, and she looks straight in the camera when she says, “It’s like a club. Or a mutant cucumber — with a cute little birthmark, but I’m not saying what that looks like, just in case.”

  The hosts are uncomfortable but Annabel is so charming, such an ingenue in her checked pink dress and white Mary Janes, that they smile.

  I smile at home, watching her.

  The mark, it’s a star.

  I want it between her legs so badly I can’t stand it.

  On TV, her lips part and I know she is thinking the same thing.

  “Isn’t Mr. Wilde twice your age?” someone asks.

  She replies, “More than that!”

  And then, “He is so much more than that,” in this breathy voice that leads the host to shift in his seat and end the segment.

  She walks away and he watches, along with millions of viewers. Knowing this, she flips up her skirt, shows her bare bottom, and causes a Twitter spike, #wildeass, that persists for hours.

  “I’m sorry you are such a miserable person,” I write to Pudge, and have Charles bring a box of new Barbies to her hotel.

  His mother has died. After learning her story, I sent her to visit her lover in Barcelona, and after a long, happy reunion, she never woke up.

  Charles is devastated. Pudge, sensing this, kisses him and yes —

  My daughter, long story short, is now happily married to my butler.

  * * *

  Pudge moves in and shares the cottage with Charles.

  Love suits her.

  She lets her hair grow back to its natural chestnut color, gains a bit of weight, which Charles loves, and starts making nervous and sincere visits to me and Annabel, whom she comes to see as a sister.

  They talk about clothes and men and Regency romance novels, and I lose most of my froideur.

  The day my daughter bakes me a cake shaped like an S and says it means she is sorry, I am happy enough.

  I cut into the curve and eat a big lemon-gooey chunk.

  “It’s all right,” I say, hugging her as I pat and pat all of the tears and shudders away.

  For this little while, it is all right. Better than that.

  Then I start filming Deadly Nightshade and find the final diary.

  And we see Jain for the last time together as Annabel, caked in makeup, is coaxed to reveal the bruise covering her eye and cheekbone.

  She says, “Don’t you understand? He loves me.”

  I cast around, trying to match the cuts on my knuckles to the atrocious purple starfish on her face.

  She hits me, when did I start? She cut me and I knocked her off of me, and kept hitting —

  I see my hand as a fractal; I see the larger shape of my illness —

  Amnesiac, batterer, cunt, dumb fuck — the letters are falling away.

  Dr. Jain — Lisa — stops smiling, and says she cannot see us again.

  “I see how this all ends,” she says. “It cannot be otherwise, and it is too sad for me.”

  She hands us knitted facecloths at the door and says that ideally, love is kindness, sweeping like a clock’s hand across fear and pain.

  I attend to a worried, distressed Annabel with one of the cloths, soaked in witch hazel, and say that I never meant to hurt her, that all will end well, as she watches enormous seabirds through the window and sits in their sovereign shadows.

  But hell rapidly breaks loose, and I disappear.

  You will see me soon enough: sitting at Hollywood and Vine in a torn, crappy Michael Jackson costume, with a Styrofoam cup in front of me and enough liquor inside of me that I slosh when I moonwalk.

  FOUR

  Parnell, skid row, 2018

  (the world) will beat you to your knees and keep you there

  I am sleeping on a big white painted polka dot in Leimert Park, with a newspaper blanket and inflated-plastic-bag pillow, dreaming that I have rented an empty apartment in Paris, with big covered windows, a mattress, a ladder.

  Annabel leans against the wall, shirtless, in tight jeans. Her hat, black with red roses, lies on the bed with her fleecy white coat.

  I am kicked awake by a cop. “You want to get killed?” he says. “Move along.”

  I get up and start walking.

  Make it to Melrose as the sun rises, and dodder along, my head filled with Annabel, a deck of images I squeeze in the middle and speed-shuffle: her kind, limpid eyes; her lush vegetable hair; the tiny freckle below her left eye she sometimes embellishes with a pink pencil.

  I am staring into a shop called SLTS, at three mannequins dressed in leather masks hitting each other with whips.

  “Parnell?”

  No, no, not this.

  It is an admirer, some jackass dressed like Sid aiming a camera at me.

  “Looking good,” he says cheerfully, even though I am grimy and dressed in a child’s ski jacket, wide-wale, flared yellow cords, and one gaping shoe.

  I have to make him stop.

  “I read that you broke up with your lady,” he says. “I’m sorry, she is bad.”

  I do the worst thing I can think of to stop him.

  I shit in my hand.

  A tour group of elderly women start crying.

  I say, “Okay, ladies, let’s get information.” Then I laugh, beat up the Sid guy, break his camera, and run.

  What happened?

  Listen to many, speak to a few.

  Listen to me, just listen to me.

  Entr’acte

  Parnell and Annabel,

  The Pacific Palisades, 2018

  there cracks a noble heart

  It is Annabel’s birthday in two days.

  “A pony, a dragon ring, my name tattooed over your heart, a first edition of Dubliners — ”

  She is sleepily listing the things she wants. I tell her she is getting a coupon for a perm in the Valley and a set of golf clubs if she doesn’t stop.

  “You talk then,” she says.

  I hold her and graze her hair.

  I say, “When I was in elementary school, I made a picture for art class: the world, with NO ONE HERE GETS OUT ALIVE lettered over it. My teacher told the principal, who asked if everything was all right at home. It wasn’t, but I told him that my picture was not about my life.”

  “What was it about?” she says, laying a hand on my belly.

  “The fact that we all die, but don’t believe it will happen.”
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  “You don’t think?”

  “No. And we don’t seem to realize that there are worse things than dying. We can live so poorly, so swinishly, that a long nap in a satin-lined coffin is, relatively, not so bad.”

  “Tell me that when you’re dead,” she says, and laughs.

  “Promise to sing ‘Baby Got Back’ at my funeral?”

  “You’re joking,” she says, and bursts into tears.

  Annabel: my arms filled, always with flowers —

  “Don’t die,” she says, and practically breaks my neck, holding me as she falls asleep.

  She would walk down the street and sick, miserable old men would brighten, open their rusted-out throats and sing “She’s a Rainbow.”

  Annabel, walking in colors with the juice of peonies between her legs, behind her ears.

  At the end of her rainbow is me, is nothing. At the end of my rainbow —

  “Don’t you die,” I say as I try to make her small, so small that I can hold her, my wild little wren, in my hand.

  She breathes and tiny painted eggs spill from her mouth, she breathes her birdsong and spins the Saliera, a vitreous enamel vessel where we, terra e mare, repose in gold, in ivory, and brood over our baluts.

  * * *

  Annabel is busy with the party planner, so I go driving around aimlessly and then see a fortune teller in Tarzana.

  I listen to the woman ramble on about curses and my flair for numbers, smack her gypsy fortune teller’s hand off its crystal ball and grab it — she is as much Roma as I am.

  Tell her that I think I am in love and keep talking, staring into her frightened eyes, until I mention that my son raped my girlfriend — well, my fiancée, I guess.

  I am thinking of how I plan to propose during dessert tomorrow night.

  The dumpy lady in veils pulls her hand away.

  “Why was your son dressed like you?” she asks, her eyes suddenly shrewd.

  I look back, warily.

  “He wasn’t. He was dressed as a character I played.”