Chicken

by Lynn Crosbie

  The Real Glory

  Everything is better than all right, as it turns out.

  I win an Academy Award, as does the film, as does Crispin. I take Christine as my date, but so many models attach themselves to me that I am called the “Millennial Hef” on the red carpet.

  I had an invitation sent to Annabel, but it was returned to me.

  But I see her, I am certain, standing silvery on the gallery and gone, in a blink.

  I thank Paramount, Hercamone, Crispin, the cast and crew, my daughter and her husband, my friends, agent, lawyer, manager, trainers, and “Mac from food services, for all of those crazy salads.”

  Finally, I thank “the one who got away.”

  I sleep with the heavy gold statuette and marvel: my anger has long since evanesced, and I am content as I can be.

  I have a proper star unveiled on the Walk of Fame and more press about my talent, my genius even, than I will need for several lifetimes.

  When I meet my people for lunch, legendary stars stop at my table, and I am “Wilde” to them now. They ask me to play golf, attend screenings and intimate dinners at their homes, on islands, in space.

  Everyone seems to have forgotten what a broken-down wreck I was, and I’d like to forget as well.

  I have been knocked to the floor and have returned to my feet.

  Je vais à la gloire!

  I dream that I am a debonair Belgian in a foulard scarf and top hat. That I am alone with my girl again, a dream that smells like red flowers, cured by the sun, their pusher.

  * * *

  I take a ceramics class and make Annabel a tiny pink teacup with her name written in calligraphy on the side, send it to her and pray that she will accept my message of amity.

  She hammers it into fine dust and has one of her birds return it to me.

  “I’m done,” I write on a scrap of paper that I roll up and slide into a tube, attaching it to the bird’s leg.

  I open the window and she flies away. I drink moonshine from a jug, and when it leaks all over me, I am taken aback by tears, more tears.

  “I feel so bad,” I say quietly, not wanting to seem ungrateful, but I know, at last, that it is hopeless, and I can’t see any way out of the dark.

  “Hold me,” I say to the one dress she forgot to pack. It still flutters in her closet, exuding smoke and perfume and her pear syrup–sweet skin, and I wrap the arms over my shoulders and sway as the world slowly chimes for all you lonely people out there; my old radio soothes me as we cling fast through the night.

  * * *

  I start reading again, referring to a list Annabel made me a while ago.

  I read a book, cross it off the list, and start the next: I have ten more to go.

  I am rereading many of them, which I intend to keep to myself.

  I don’t talk about what I read to anyone. When the book is done, I am done with it.

  But when I am in the middle, I can get quite absorbed, in a way I suspect is childish and not comme il faut.

  When Annabel, for example, reread Lord of the Flies for a paper about boy-hooligans, she laughed and remarked that Golding’s thesis is like “Foucault for Dummies.”

  I had no answer: I pantomimed a mouth full of peanut-butter sandwich.

  I read the same book and run away from home.

  I run and I run until I find an empty house that is being renovated, then sit in its roofless living room, crying and unpacking my paper bag, which contains animal crackers, a bottle of rye, a warm sweater, a flashlight, and a picture of Annabel in a pink, heart-shaped frame.

  I curl up on my side and write WHY on the dusty floor, and when I wake up there are quite a lot of bats and they muster, then swarm me, rubbing their sticky business ends all over my face.

  I yawp so loudly it triggers an alarm.

  In the doorway, between the scaffolds: two armed guards and my girlfriend in a flesh-brown wrap, wringing her long, shapely hands.

  “What happened?” she says, and I go to her mutely and hand her the book.

  She quickly charms the cops into leaving us alone, takes me home, and throws the book on the fire.

  “It’s just emotional chiselling,” she says as I lie down with my head in her lap.

  I know what she means and am so grateful I pull her face down for a kiss that lasts and lasts. We give this kiss a chance to show us what it can do, and man, does this kiss sell!

  Before we know it, we are actually hanging from the many-paned Tiffany lamp, locked together precariously but tightly, oh my blessed Virgin, my girl’s pussy is so tight, it feels like an assassin’s hand in a kid leather glove.

  She fucks me with the space inside her that is not a vacancy but an inverted long, thick shape and I feel a series of small, acute spasms and spirals tear from me like the skin of an orange.

  I let go at last with a sound like a menagerie in the woods where at least fifty animals are cooped up and free at the same time.

  In the sound of the bars bending and breaking beneath my mouth, Your body, your body, I importune —

  What is it?

  Her body is the way out, past every enclosure ever made, past the heavens, nirvana, God’s parlor, where there is always a lit fire, several small chairs, and the tinkling music of drowsy giraffes, wearing bells.

  * * *

  In between such febrile memories, I do more media, learn conversational Amharic, sign on for three hot projects, and become a licensed pilot. I make plans to travel to various screenings around the world, make a rainbow cake, promote the crazy-hit film on late-night talk shows, and become very good at knitting.

  And I find by the trash in the garage a Hermès bag and, inside it, Annabel’s old magazine clippings and a short script written by her called UltraviolenceToo.

  In it, Annabel visits girls in hospitals. Some are rape victims. Some have had their genitals mutilated by their families, and some are abused.

  The exhaust of burning flesh: bones snapped like wet sticks, Annabel a girl herself somehow.

  They follow her to Central Park and lie in wait. The image of Sid, in shadow, emerges, and they attack like the Confederate army, howling like banshees as Alex DeLarge did in his stolen motor car.

  (Kubrick’s iconic signifier of the romantic, read: the heroically doomed, maniac South.)

  And they take him apart to his boutonniere.

  It is in Annabel’s mouth as she leads the girls forward, blood-painted and fattened, into a golden circle the Lakota Sioux call the moon when the plums are scarlet. The color of her skin is its reflection always, I think with a shiver.

  “A full, Corn Moon,” she has written, below which her girls drink and grow black stretchers and ribs between their shoulder blades to bat-terrorize the city.

  As I read, I apprehend her. She is dark clover honey; Roman stones, old pennies, and phenocryst tablets.

  Hoc est corpus meum, she has written by hand at the script’s end. I carry this perfect film inside and call Crispin, who buys it and intends to make it with her along the line.

  I clap throughout the night, alarming Charles and Christine; see Annabel’s undead girls banging at the window, baring their teeth, and tell them that she is majestic, isn’t she?

  My daughter makes me go to bed and cannot wrest away the screenplay, even though it is torn in two and smells like garbage; it is the barge I ride to sleep below an empurpled mainsail and spinnaker broadened by the wind’s frequent, intemperate kisses.

  * * *

  Lamprey sends me an envelope addressed to me in Kray’s hand — discovered, he said, by Vivienne, whose health is very poor.

  I want to tell her I am sorry, but I can no longer apologize or explain.

  “My dear boy,” the weak, barely legible writing begins.

  I am so pleased that you avenged the girl. I saw how you were living, and I was ashamed.
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  And then I saw her, Annabel, and knew that if you could win her and protect her, you would be safe.

  To live or die, it scarcely matters.

  Please remember the one good day.

  Then curse my devil’s soul forever,

  Lamont

  * * *

  The good day.

  We flew to Los Angeles to meet with the promoters: he was in fine form. He wore Ray-Bans and an I <3 LA T-shirt; he urged me to do the same.

  Later he was magnetized to the Santa Monica Pier. He won me an enormous pink elephant and we rode the Ferris wheel, marvelling: So this is America. Beautiful, beautiful America!

  He squeezed my shoulder swiftly; his “I’m sorry” flew with the edacious gulls.

  I forgot the day, kept the elephant.

  Annabel lifted it up once from the sofa, taking in its bald patches and missing button eye.

  “Hello, Peanut,” she said.

  I said, “He won it for me.”

  She said nothing, she is too intuitive. But she squeezed me as I squeeze this letter, knowing it is nothing really, and wrong also, but damn you.

  It is a salve made by fallen angels, I think, crushing the letter without imprecation, and goodbye, I say goodbye at last.

  * * *

  One April morning, the twenty-seventh, I am making Christine’s baby an orange sweater with a raven in its center when she goes into labor.

  I join her and Charles on the race to the hospital.

  She has a beautiful, tiny girl she names Patrice, after my real, or first, name.

  I fill her room with life-sized stuffed animals and baskets of fruit and candy, and I hold the baby, amazed at how easily she fits in my hand.

  I wander down the hall and see a woman in a trashed gown, her hair in snakes, holding a bloody blue bundle.

  Annabel.

  * * *

  I stand in the doorway.

  A short, rotund doctor with a “Dr. Flank” pin on his coat is at her side, squeezing her hand and saying, to my astonishment, “We made it, Anna.”

  “We did,” she says, raising her boy to her face and saying, “Didn’t we, Buzz?”

  The doctor raises an eyebrow at this name, but says nothing.

  They both look up and see me.

  “Christ, you’re Parnell Wilde!” Dr. Flank says, standing up abruptly.

  “I am,” I say, moving in a trance toward my son.

  “Parnell, this is Claude,” she says, miserably. “The father. Um, maybe you’ve seen his dog Munchkin in some of my videos?”

  “The Munch!” Claude says.

  I stop, see a dull diamond ring on her finger, catch up.

  “I’m the adoptive father,” he says, lowering his voice. “The bio-dad was a real piece of work, apparently. Hey, how about a picture?”

  “Could I talk to Parnell alone?” she says, and he complies, dejectedly returning his phone to his scrubs.

  “I’m not barren, like I thought,” she says.

  “Clearly,” I say. Coolly, but my chest feels like it’s trapped under a flame tank.

  “But there were complications. That terrible abortion, the miscarriage.” She blushes. “I never told you, you didn’t want — Anyways, I’m staying here for a while, until the bleeding stops,” she says, and I nod, restively. “It was terrifying, actually. I had a pulmonary embolism during the C-section and was pronounced dead. In the middle of the pandemonium, my baby cried and woke me,” she says, kissing his plush head.

  “Dead?” How could I not have known? “The breaking of so great a thing should make a greater crack,” I say. “Should have shook lions into civil streets and — ”

  “Citizens to their dens,” she says. “You’re quoting Antony and Cleopatra? But you never — I mean, you hate reading.” She opens and closes her mouth. “I never did understand you,” she says. “Or know when you were telling the truth.”

  “I never lie about anything that matters, I never would.”

  “I loved the movie,” she says, her eyes not meeting mine.

  “It was your idea, wasn’t it?” she says. “To use my work.”

  I don’t answer.

  “I sold him your screenplay,” I say. “Call him, and — ”

  “No. That part of my life is over,” she says.

  I reach for my son and she holds him tighter.

  “Don’t,” she says.

  I look at him closely, trying to memorize him.

  “Annabel,” I say. “I was afraid you wouldn’t love me back, because you knew me. I was afraid you’d leave me. And you did.”

  She watches me, says nothing.

  I flash on my old car jammed at an intersection that is alive with rage, and me, pounding on the dash in tears and pleading.

  Just as some seven-foot-tall beast started walking toward me with a tire iron, the car burst into life and I soared off.

  “You are the best thing that ever happened to me,” I say, idling in the doorway, and then I leave her, clutching our perfect child with the lupine eyes and tuft of honey-colored hair.

  I stall, trying to take in all of her.

  Her curved, chancel-gold arms cradling the boy, the glorious love suffusing her beautiful face, her long neck craning to graze the baby’s pleats of sugary skin.

  “I love you,” I say to them both, and leave.

  All kinds of alarms go off. I guess she is trying to stand and follow me but it’s too late.

  I get into the elevator, descend, and hit the street.

  “You handsome,” a homeless lady says, and I kneel at her feet, slipping the flashy jewel I have kept in my pocket for months on her ring finger.

  “Be mine,” I say.

  She says yes and stumbles away. I walk into the garage and depress the remote.

  I follow the chirp and drive home.

  I did it, I think.

  I text a couple of friends, throw my phone on the floor. Opening my desk, I grab some paper and write for a while, curse when I can’t find envelopes, find envelopes.

  I dog-ear a book of poems where I have highlighted this:

  Ô pâle Ophélia! belle comme la neige!

  Oui tu mourus, enfant, par un fleuve emporté!

  I am barefoot and dressed in a tuxedo, brushing my hair in the mirror.

  I am very tired.

  I see Darkling in mid-air, her muzzle quivering. I hear a rabbit creeping below the blushing cups of long, rolling poppies.

  Aching with desire, I freeze. Poised above her, I can just make out the sweet twitch of her hindquarters.

  Then she is gone.

  The rest resides silently inside her, the fleet fragrance of what she offered and what I, infatuated and starving, senselessly let go.

  Quickly, before I have to give it much thought one way or the other, I pull a gun from the drawer and blow my brains out.

  EPILOGUE

  Annabel in elsinore, 2019

  Wherein I draw my breath in pain to tell his story

  Parnell liked his dad’s music, a lot of jazz and Sinatra, mostly.

  “It’s my only memory of the sallow little prick,” he said.

  “Send in the Clowns,” which I found torrentially lame, was his favorite. He liked the live version, with the melancholy talking bridge.

  These days, I find myself playing it all the time.

  My husband comes home later and later to our pretty split-level ranch house in Los Feliz.

  I think he is seeing someone else. I have let myself go.

  I spray SHOUT on his lapels to erase the lipstick skids I find there.

  Me here at last and you —

  * * *

  I am on my own again this weekend, and want to make an event of it, not take pills and oversleep or conjure the past.

  Last night,
I dreamed Parnell and I were together again, walking on the beach. We made a lopsided sandcastle by the pinking light of the stars for the white jackrabbit he had presented me with, a blood-red stripe running down his back.

  The bunny hands me a flask of cold water, and I drink, gratefully.

  When he hops away, I see the writing on the flask.

  EAT ME, it says, and Parnell is beside me, decomposing, on the bed, extending his ghoulish arm, and I love him so, I open my mouth and close my eyes.

  He is gone and I am alone in my Wonderland apartment, listening to Nina Simone, writing, “I think I may be falling for HIM, who could be very good for me. He is sort of pathetic, but so kind. He brought me daisies from the park in a cone of newspaper. He looked so shy and scared, I was deeply touched.”

  * * *

  The next morning, I drive to the Pacific Palisades with my hand under my skirt and am smitten with a memory that makes me pull over onto a side street filled with steel gates and a frill of palm trees.

  After we had sex the first time, I was insatiable, of course.

  He was still sort of a mess: paunchy and dishevelled, his face so crumpled with gratitude it both put me off and tugged at my heart.

  To me, he was Marlon Brando in Last Tango: broken but powerful, his looks failing in the peculiar, gaudy manner of faded tulips.

  One day, I woke him by kissing his feet, his knees, his soft downy balls.

  He lifted me above him and ate my pussy as I watched the veins in his big arms pop out, and when I started to beg for mercy, he lowered me on top of him and let me take over, reaching under his pillow and handing me a small riding crop.

  This is one way he saved me: sex was always scary to me, and bad, as if I were injected with Novocain from the neck down.

  When I slept with Will, I always flashed on my rape, which excited and, more forcefully, nauseated me. So I would empty my mind and make grocery lists as he labored above me, wheezing, “You like this?”

  But when Parnell and I first touched, I felt it between my legs.