Brand New Cherry Flavor

by Todd Grimson

  “Investment by astrology can go only so far,” he said as they walked around, getting acquainted, smoking cigarettes and checking out many rooms emptied of furniture, all recently sold off. Code gave her this drug to take called Kick, and it made Rachel Farb feel outgoing and confident, a little itchy and thirsty. She felt talkative, she told Code her life story in about five minutes and then felt like elaborating, telling it all over again, but she zoomed in on what they needed to do and said, “Let’s start taping, OK?”

  Code smiled with nervous lips—she wondered how long he’d been high—and said sure. He had dyed black hair, cut short and spiky and messy, maybe some blue in there, earrings in each ear, wearing a charcoal gray shirt and baggy sand-colored brushed cotton trousers, wing tips, and he was drinking orange soda pop and walking around in circles the whole time he talked.

  “Just a minute.” Then he came back in with Lauren and hogtied her, using the ropes and rubber straps with great facility. Soon Lauren couldn’t move, or at least move much. This was what Lauren wanted, Rachel Farb decided. Code gave Rachel an ironic, tired smile, an indecipherable shrug, and when he nodded, she pressed the red record button.

  “I met Lisa Nova in New York, when she was in art school … before film school. She and I and her friend, Christine, used to get together occasionally for a menage a trois. Lisa loved to fuck, she loved to give head. She loved the taste of sperm. I think she had some voodoo theory about getting power from it—she and Christine were into all that stuff, they knew some Haitians and some old woman from Guadeloupe … it was, like, Lisa’s dark side.”

  The insouciant smile made Rachel Farb understand they were doing fiction. She was restless, her body felt restless. She was turned on by Code’s corrupt fuck-it-all philosophy of life, and his looks, all that.

  “What happened here in Hollywood when she didn’t make it?” Rachel asked after a while. They had finished yet another tape, and it was dark out. They had gone through the tactical liaison with Lou.

  “Lisa financed that film she made in Brazil with tax-free money she made through prostitution. She was what you’d call, um, a high-class call girl. That’s how Roy Hardway met her. He saw this video of her and fell in love with what he saw.”

  Rachel Farb was laughing. She’d had more Kick, and they were also drinking Bombay gin and tonic. Now that it was dark, it seemed more humid out. The door was open to the extensive terrace, but there was no breeze. Lauren was tied up on the couch in a position that incidentally revealed that she was a transsexual, a pre-op transsexual. Old Vincent Garbo had been married to a chick with a dick. This seemed unremarkable just now.

  Code sat next to Rachel on the bed and rubbed her back. Then, without even kissing her yet, he helped her pull her olive-green t-shirt off over her head. She had dog tags, real ones collected from pawn shops, Vietnam vets. Nice little tufts of hair under her arms.

  After sex they became hungry and took Lauren’s black Mercedes to go get some food. When Rachel asked about Lauren—”Should we just leave her like that?”—Code said, “Sure. I’m so sick of that fucking bitch, you cannot imagine. Have you ever fistfucked anyone?”

  “No. Why?”

  “That’s the ultimate for her. Do you wanna do it next time, maybe tomorrow night? It would be good research for you. We build up to it, down in the dungeon, downstairs.”

  “I’ll think it over. Is it messy?”

  “I don’t know. What’s messy anymore?” Code said, pensive as hell.

  They went to McDonald’s because of the take-out window, and Rachel said, as they ate, “If Lisa was this prostitute and that’s how she met Roy Hardway and all that… who else did she do?”

  “Oh, you want other names, like famous clientele?”

  “Right.”

  “Let’s think about that one for a while. Who would be good?”

  Then, a little later, when Rachel realized there actually was a video of Lisa, she wanted to know if it was available, if she could see it.

  “It’s expensive,” Code said. “It’s become this incredible collector’s item.”

  “Who sells it?”

  “Who do you think? Your friend Sender.”

  “Oh.”

  Back on tape, unable to sleep: “You know Boro?”

  “I met him twice,” Code said. “He liked Lisa because she reminded him of Nastassja Kinski, or at least that’s one story I heard.”

  “Really? I don’t see it that much.”

  “I know. There’s one movie, though … called Harem, where Nastassja gets kidnapped by this Arab sheik and taken away. Not too many video stores have it, because it wasn’t very popular. I don’t think it was ever theatrically released. Nastassja was still young, it was before she married that Egyptian millionaire and started having kids…. There’s this one scene at the end, in a hotel room, where she takes off her top and gives Ben Kingsley—uh, Gandhi—this kind of ‘Well, here it is’ smoldering pouty look. That look is so totally Lisa.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ve seen it a million times.”

  It was 7:30 A.M. by now, and Rachel needed a shower or something. She drank more gin, and shivered. It was cold out, kind of. She felt cold.

  FOURTEEN

  When Richard was away, Mona lolled around, drank, listened to music, had trouble sleeping, didn’t know what to eat, hating to cook anything for just one and then throw away the rest. She cried sometimes, just out of nowhere, or when the afternoon passed and he did

  not come. Of course it was ridiculous to expect him to come every day that was unrealistic, but still, every day, unless she specifically knew he wasn’t coming, at about eleven o’clock or so she began to make herself up and lay out her prettiest clothes. It was for him, only for him. Afternoons were the only possible times for their trysts.

  And then, more and more, after she had so longed for him, when he came to see her, the slaking of their mutual lust was not enough. She worked on him, to kill Elaine, and at first he was all for it, they fucked more wantonly with murder hovering over the bed. But he delayed, he picked holes in the plan, he seemed to lose his nerve. Elaine was ten years older, not especially blessed with good looks; it wasn’t fair. Mona came to hate her more and more, and she built up a whole class-warfare justification for the planned crime. She said, “I’ll do it if you won’t, I’ll kill that rich bitch in a second!” Richard slapped her, and then was sorry. She went down on him, her arms fiercely around his hips. She reminded him that this was something Elaine would never do. Elaine would not even kiss it, he had admitted once, and now, smoking a cigarette, Richard wished he’d kept his mouth shut.

  “What if we don’t get away with it? What if something goes wrong?” he said, in some anguish. “Then we’ve had it, we’ve thrown away our lives. If I’m going to risk my whole life like that—risk dying, being executed … I want to be goddamned sure.”

  “I can’t go on like this,” Mona said. “It’s not so bad for you, you have your whole other life, you see people all the time, but I’m here like a prisoner, just waiting, waiting for you … and most of the time you don’t come. When I really need you, when I’m so lonely … I can’t call you, I’m just stuck. If I didn’t love you, it would be different, I’d go meet a shoe salesman, bring him back here … just to talk to someone, to have someone to hold me during the night.”

  “You’d do that? You’d cheat on me?”

  “I said if I didn’t love you. But I do.”

  “And I love you,” Richard said. “Every moment I’m in that house with Elaine, I’m thinking of you.”

  “Then why don’t you just walk out, and we’ll go away? I wouldn’t care if we were poor. We’d be together.”

  Richard laughed briefly, scornfully, maybe more at himself than her, and shook his head.

  “I need money,” he said. “I’m not going back to taking orders from jerks.”

  ”Let’s kill her, then,” Mona said. “We can figure out a way it’ll look like an accident, and no one
will ever know.”

  “Doesn’t it bother you, just a little?” Richard asked, his head coming up from her breast. “The idea of taking a life? I’m worried that if I do that, if I kill someone, it’ll drive me crazy, it’ll haunt me the rest of my life. I worry that I won’t be able to think about anything else. Everything will be poisoned; my conscience won’t leave me alone. Aren’t you afraid of something like that? If we love each other, maybe there’s nothing more sure to destroy that love. You’ll always have something on me, and I’ll always have something on you. We might come to hate each other worse than we ever hated Elaine.”

  “It doesn’t have to be like that,” Mona said, after taking a drink. She wore lacy black underwear. One strap of the bra was down. When she turned a certain way, a tattoo could be seen on one cheek of her ass. There were no marks anywhere else. “You’re too high-strung,” she said. “You think about it too much. It’s better to just act, do it, and then you forget. You’re sensitive, I love that in you, but sometimes you have to be a Borgia, you know? You don’t let anyone stand in your way. You just act. You do what needs to be done.”

  Richard, almost crying, yes, he was crying, shook his head, embracing her, his face visible over her shoulder. Maybe he was just drunk. He had a glass of golden bourbon in his hand. His mouth was open like he wanted to say something, like he was trying to speak, but nothing came out.

  FIFTEEN

  Veronica didn’t know why she was having the memories she was having. They weren’t hers. She was afraid she was going crazy, or that she’d been crazy for a while now. She remembered hiring the Mexicans to paint the giant moth on the side of the house, a project that was doomed to incompletion, events conspired against her, it would have been a powerful sign to keep evil away. Naturally, what with the curse that had befallen the family, her countermagic had to be foiled. The world was evil, and evil’s representatives must win.

  She had spent a month in New Mexico, with this odd group of people, they believed a spaceship was going to come and take them away, help them escape (not completely unreasonably, Veronica

  thought), before coming back to a burned-down house, no Lou, and then getting together with Steve Zen. Other things followed from that.

  But she was crazy. She’d seen a short Guatemalan man with tattoos on his face come into her gallery and ask her for something. What had he wanted? She couldn’t remember it right. It was different every time.

  He had a two-headed penis, like a hammerhead shark, agile and long, wrapping around her neck. Or he spat on the floor, and within the gob of spit was the whole world. He said he wanted to buy a jaguar from her, a stuffed jaguar, and she said, “We’re not taxidermists.” He said, “You don’t understand. The jaguar is white. It is a white woman with the spirit of a cat. You can tell me where this jaguar dwells.” She said, “Get out of here and don’t come back.” He had said—was she imagining this now? it was all mixed up—he had said, “I’ll send your son.” Then Jonathan’s art-project facsimile of a normal, naked white male had blown his mother’s gallery into the sky.

  She had called Steve Zen when she got back from New Mexico, and things had gone on from there. Steve knew some weird people. She had found out some things.

  She was now waiting for a sign. The television was always on: “How Many Did She Kill?” Veronica reflectively clicked the remote.

  Nobody knew where all Lou’s money had gone. Veronica had the uncomfortable feeling that she was responsible for part of this shortfall, but she didn’t want to think about it for a while.

  She had wanted her fortune told, she’d wanted some things explained to her, and none of that was free. Everything had a price.

  Veronica took a Heaven 17. It gave you a glittering yet soft-lined high. She cut out pictures, carefully, newspaper clippings and headlines, but mostly she liked photographs, she taped them to the mirror until it was all covered up, all you could see was the slut. She drew on this person with an ink pen, tattooing her face with swirls and curlicues, she drew with a thick crimson Marks-A-Lot, suggestive of blood (why not?), and sometimes she idly wrote words, cartoon-type voice balloons out of the person’s mouth, and then it was hard to think of what to have her say. Hi, I’m Lisa, I like to eat shit. That was OK. Veronica burned fat red candles and arranged a couple of dildos, turned on this one that moved (batteries) in an obscene manner all by itself. One dildo was clear glass. She took another Heaven 17, and it soothed her, it melted her bones in a remarkable way. Her mind cleared. She hadn’t gone crazy. She brushed her ash blond hair, walked around in her underwear, as lithe and boneless and full of poison as a walking serpent in disguise. Serpent goddess on this foul plain.

  Veronica waited for Steve. When he came home, they laughed together about something. Steve was dressed up like a cowboy. He showed her his fast draw.

  “Sometimes I’m the cowboy,” he said, “sometimes I’m the Indian. Depends on the script,” and Veronica, energized, laughing, tackled him onto the messy bed.

  Did he still think he’d connected with a rich widow, that when the legal shit went through his future was set? Did he care?

  “Let’s do something,” he said. “No, wait.”

  SIXTEEN

  An image of a mirrored dressing room, soft focus, reflections multiplying, back and forth, forever, now out of focus, close-up on the face, a face that is now dry, but Mona’s mascara has run, she is thinking, a bare shoulder, a strap, dissolve to an ice cube in a glass of bourbon, unmoving, the glass on a stand next to the bed, lose focus to diamondlike shards of light, a groan, someone is crawling on the hardwood floor, the grain of the polished wood, the spilled liquid flowing slowly, like mercury, toward a single pearl. Under the bed we find more, a pearl necklace must have broken, the window is open but from this angle nothing is visible, just bright light, not even the blue of the sky. The silent, slowly moving ceiling fan, going out of focus, like some kind of wings.

  Then, in the afternoon light, a taut landscape that gradually becomes skin. A bead of sweat, leaving a track. Up from that to the extreme close-up of soft male lips, beyond which are the tongue and teeth, seen when the mouth opens to say something, or comes forward, merging into the darkness of the kiss.

  In moving your head from one side of the room to the other, you briefly close your eyes. You do it automatically. Once you know the distance between two objects, you blink instinctively. You cut.

  Black and white photographs of Richard’s face, in a variety of

  expressions. Mona sorts through them, sitting at her vanity, several necklaces (including a string of pearls) lying in a jumble near her hands. Focus on her hands. Dark red nail polish. In one photo he is wearing a dark sport jacket and white shirt, and he appears to have been caught unawares, a lost look on his face, as he brings the cigarette up to his mouth. He is distracted, perhaps afraid. The photograph may have been taken in a bar. Clothes that are 1950s-style. She makes an almost silent exclamation, like a child playing a dreamy game with her dolls. Her hands are shaking a bit. She takes a sip from a glass. She brings the cigarette up to her lips and inhales. Just now, as she exhales pale smoke, she looks into her own eyes. The familiarity changes to something less assured, the gaze seems to tremble and lose confidence; she looks away leaving the photos in disorder next to and partially covered by the jewelry and one small bottle of perfume.

  A plane flying low overhead, out the window, at the same time that a bird chirps and a radio plays, low, some indistinguishable announcer’s words, during a close survey of messed-up sheets. A foot sticks out. After some time it moves, and we see more of the ankle and the calf.

  She eats, slowly, a piece of bread, with butter and red jam. Picks it up with one hand, looking at it before presenting it to her mouth. Her hair is messy, looks uncombed. No makeup. She sits at the wooden kitchen table, in a beige or flesh-tinted, slightly shiny slip in Venetian-blind horizontal stripes of light and shade. Pan in a blur over to an ant, which approaches a smear of jam, almost transparent, on
the table some distance away from the plate. She makes a series of noises setting down her cup on its saucer, unable, evidently, at the moment of contact, to feel she has set it down right.

  Split screen: Richard is smiling, then turning away from some people, hesitating before getting into his car. A Packard. The ant’s mandibles descend to the sweet. Both are in brilliant, brilliant light. The ant is in sunshine, just barely out of a stripe of shade.

  SEVENTEEN

  It was just about ten-thirty in the evening when Alvin Sender thought he heard a noise outside. He opened the glass door, standing

  there shirtless and barefoot, wearing mellow blue velvet jeans, listening, scratching the hairs on his tanned chest. He heard something like a hissing, no, a whispering. Could it be Boro? Sender was frightened. But he’d never had any problems with Boro. Lauren had said he was out of the country, anyway.

  “What is it?” snuggly fifteen-year-old runaway-turned-model Amber asked him, yawning, from the futon. Loaded on a combination of MC5 and Asti Spumante, up all last night on the Net, coming down now, drowsy, in T-shirt and black bikini bottom, golden hair, freckles, not really interested …

  “Nothing, I think,” he said, stepping back in, hesitant, the TV on without sound, lights low and pinkish violet, the place immaculate because the maid had come today.

  Not really knowing why, he slipped on his soft turquoise rayon-silk velvet jacket, rumpled, with wide lapels, and red patent leather loafers—maybe if he went outside barefoot he’d step on a thorn. Could that have been—whispering, calling his name—someone who didn’t wish to be seen? What did that mean? If it was a customer, then who? Why not simply call?