Slut Lullabies

by Gina Frangello

  “Hey!” she shouts out in the direction of the Mexican boy, though she can no longer see him. “Angel . . . !” He could have taught her Spanish. Something she would carry inside that nobody could take away. Light breeze answers. He was only a child. Besides, what would her end of the transaction have been but the same?

  Annette’s tote is heavy. Holding her breath, she shoves the stolen book under a damp armpit, palms only the key to her apartment, and stuffs the tote and its remaining contents under a tree. Less an offering of peace than a sacrifice she prays will be miraculously ignited by the heat should she panic and rush back. Her wallet, spread open on top, should help in case the elements alone will not assist her. At last sucking air in, fast and thick, deliciously anonymous and far from dead, she slips out of her high-heeled mules, steps out of the comfort of shade, and begins to walk.

  Trilby in Brasil

  Approach

  Her name is Merlot, she says, like the wine. It is not her real name, of course, but one she adopted in college because her lovers were always butchering the pronunciation of her actual name during sex. This is what she tells me as we stand by the coffeemaker in the telemarketing department of Houston Magazine. She does not lower her voice. She tosses her foamy, black, perfectly disheveled hair so it falls over her left breast in a way that makes me so envious I have to bite my lip. She says, “I’m talking to you because you don’t speak like a Texan.” She is even happier to learn that I’ve only been in Houston for three years, less than half the time she’s lived here. Later, though, when I accidentally say “y’all” in conversation, she looks at me out of the corner of her eye disapprovingly. I am careful not to do it again. I say “you all” or “all of you” or even “you guys,” like we used to say back in Minnesota. Merlot seems pleased by my effort.

  She befriends me, and so I am befriended. The routine of my life changes with alarming speed. Quiet evenings with Bobby, watching reruns of Cheers and Star Trek: The Next Generation, are replaced by hours at cafes and gallery openings, which I attend in borrowed black outfits. I am pretty, Merlot says—unbelievably pretty given my mousy personality. “I am attracted to beauty,” she says, “any kind of beauty.” She was a dancer before she moved to Houston, and even now she goes to the symphony and the ballet all the time. I have never been to the symphony or the ballet. “You don’t do enough with your beauty,” she says, “so I’m going to help you.”

  Her husband lives in Chicago, she tells me, because he had a great job opportunity at the Board of Trade. He is clerking now, but once he starts trading, she will move, too. They have a lot of debt, she says, and implies it is due to some habit that is terribly glamorous and somewhat decadent. At first I think she is hiding a drug addiction, but, although she smokes two packs of Dunhill Menthols a day, she hardly ever drinks (nothing but champagne and crème de cassis) and never says anything I would imagine a drug addict saying, nor would a drug addict want to be friends with someone as un-hip as me. Not that I understand why someone who can go into Brasil in a slinky black dress and kiss all the bartenders hello and who receives personalized invitations to receptions at the art galleries on Lower Westheimer would want to be friends with me, either.

  I start to tell her stories about my few girlfriends (none of whom I have seen since I moved in with Bobby), about my relationship (though I omit almost everything, like the fact that I spent fifty-eight dollars and twenty-seven cents last month on self-help books for agoraphobics, which he has refused to look at and called me a bitch for buying), and about my cats (though I do not mention the part about Bobby never letting them leave the pantry). I hope these fragments of my life will keep her from thinking I’m a loser, even though my cowboy boots are not authentic Tony Lamas like hers. A month passes. She does not stop calling. Well, at least it isn’t pity, I think.

  Merlot is an insomniac, which makes me think she is very worldly. I never have any trouble going to sleep. This is because I’m a simpler person than she is, and, in my opinion, the more complicated a person’s mind is, the harder it is to slow that mind down at night. Merlot spends hours thinking of things that never cross my mind at all, like who should play the roles of characters from her favorite books should they be made into films. With all the books she reads, it’s no wonder she has trouble sleeping.

  Sometimes when she’s lying awake, she calls me in the middle of the night. After the first couple of times, I start to keep the cordless phone right by my pillow so that I’ll hear it first and sneak out of the room before Bobby wakes up and yells. I don’t tell her to stop calling so late, even though I hardly ever get a full night’s sleep anymore what with waiting for the phone to ring.

  Usually when she calls I go into the pantry with the cats, though if I stay in there for too long, the ammonia smell of the litter box makes me dizzy, and I have to move to the bathroom. The sensation of the cats rubbing almost maniacally against my leg while Merlot talks to me makes me feel doubly loved. Of course, if the cats knew the truth about the world outside the pantry and how I am contributing to their captivity by my selfish desire to have pets despite Bobby’s allergies, they would probably hiss at me. Certainly if Merlot knew about their bleak treatment in my care, she would hang up on me. Even though she hates cats, still, no one approves of cruelty to animals.

  Finally Bobby says, “What the hell’s the matter with you, sitting in the pantry talking on the phone all night? Don’t you think I hear the damned cats yowling? You’d better keep them quiet, or I’m throwing them out in the street.”

  After that, I don’t go into the pantry. Sometimes, though, the cats hear me moving around and start to meow anyway. I crouch down outside the pantry, touching the ends of their paws, which they shove beneath the door, claws extended. I stroke the small pads of their fingers and whisper, “You won’t be in there forever. Don’t worry. Someday, I’m just going let you out.”

  One night, after we have become good enough friends that people at work have started to refer to us as “they,” she calls during Seinfeld. Bobby and I always watch Seinfeld together, it is his favorite show. We are sitting on the couch with his arm around me. He has said again that he thinks he’s feeling calmer from the Valium—that having kept a job in sales for six months is making him believe in himself again. I have been thinking that maybe later we might actually make love, but when I stand up to answer the phone, I know I’ve blown it. He looks hurt, dejected, immediately puts on the headphones so he won’t miss a word. I take the phone into the kitchen anyway, though, in case he’s just pretending and has actually turned the sound down to eavesdrop.

  The conversation goes like this:

  “Hey,” she says. (Never hi, but hey.)

  “Hey,” I say back.

  “I talked to Jeffrey on the phone earlier,” she says. “He’s been working twelve-hour days and never goes out to the bars anymore. It makes me feel bad about all the money I spend here. I don’t mean to be inconsiderate of him, it’s just that I have such a hard time conceptualizing the world in concrete terms like finances. I’m going to improve, though. We had a talk about it.”

  “That’s good,” I say. “You do spend a lot of money.” Then I fall silent in case she thinks I’m being rude.

  Instead she says, “That’s what I like about you. A lot of women think their husbands should work themselves into the grave so that they can buy cool clothes, but you understand. I don’t love him for his money. It’s passion I’m after.”

  I don’t stay on the phone long. I’m edgy and nervous and get off before Seinfeld is over in hopes of curling back up on the couch with Bobby. It is too late, though. When I come back in the room, he doesn’t take off the headphones. I go to bed early without him.

  Eventually, after she gives me a ride home one night, Bobby says, “Why are you spending so much time with that Chinese girl?” For some reason the comment really bothers me. What irks me most is that Merlot is not Chinese; she is a mixture of Filipino and Spanish, although she looks Hawaiian. I say,
“Well, you never want to go out. I have to spend time with someone.” He says, “Why can’t you stay home with me? I don’t like that girl. There’s something weird about her.”

  I manage to avoid an argument by leaving the room. I don’t say, If you’d stop peeing in your pants every time I make plans for us to leave the house, I wouldn’t need her anymore, would I? I don’t say, Yeah, and how come you’re zoned out on Valium so much of the time that it took you two months to notice I’m going out? I don’t say, Hey, stupid, do you even know her name? I go into the kitchen and make dinner and hope that maybe he’s mad enough to break up with me, because all kinds of men talk to me now when I go out with Merlot. I don’t think about breaking up with him, because once I tried to before and he broke all the windows of my car and threatened to kill himself. Not that I think he’d really do it, but then that is probably what my mother thought when she left my father, and, generally speaking, I am wrong a lot more often than my mother.

  Bobby doesn’t like Merlot because she is too pretty. Men don’t like beautiful women they can’t have. Merlot tells me this one day over coffee, but I have kind of known it all along.

  Merlot is sick, so I decide to take Bobby out. I pick up Depends undergarments on my way home from work. The cashier looks at me strangely, and I want to say, They’re for my grandma, but I just stare at the counter until she hands me my receipt. The vodka is in the refrigerator already; we drink it before 6:00 PM. I have two shots just so I won’t care that he has five. I drive.

  La Carafe is not as scary as some of the other places she takes me; it is homey with a rustic look to it, not sleek or modern or trendy. But it is farther away. By the time we get there, Bobby is shaking. He’s trying to say, “It’s OK, honey, I’ll be all right. I want to go,” but his face has turned red and droplets of sweat are popping out like air bubbles all over his forehead. When I park, he won’t get out of the car. I have to sit there on the curb waiting for him, but he doesn’t get out. When I touch him, his heartbeat is wild, pounding right through his now-soaked cotton shirt. He is ugly, sweating, mad with fear, and I think at this moment I could beat him with a stick until he bled his sweaty blood all over the curbside and people stopped to stare. I force myself to hug him, whisper, “It’s OK, Bobby, I’ll take you home.”

  The stench of urine in the car on the drive back almost makes me puke. He is crying, saying he’s sorry, but I can’t answer; I just stare at the road. At home I say, “I’m not trying that again. You can just sit here and die for all I care!” He says, “Please don’t leave me. I’ll get help, I’ll see someone, I promise.” The cats are meowing top volume at the sound of our voices and Bobby starts screaming, “Shut them up, shut them up!” For a long time I look at him, choking and sputtering, no hint of the nice-looking, mild-mannered man I first started dating four years ago. I say, “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you know that cats don’t follow instructions? They aren’t like dogs, don’t you know anything?” I leave the room before he can answer.

  That night I refuse to come to bed. I lie on the couch, seething, and when I fall asleep I dream of Bobby, and a therapist in a lab coat like my old physics teacher’s. My mother abandoned me when I was a kid, Bobby says. I’ve been kinda off ever since. It’s your girlfriend making you crazy, the therapist answers. Her mother did it to her father, and now she’s doing it to you.

  Most psychiatric diseases have their onset when a person is around nineteen or twenty. I learned that in Abnormal Psychology, which didn’t help me understand my family any better but filled my head with a lot of statistics. Bobby is twenty-three, but he has always been a late bloomer. He was a virgin until he was twenty, so that would fit.

  Interlude

  When Merlot was a student at art school, she had a lover who was a paraplegic. His name was Geoff, too, like her husband, only her husband is Jeff with a J, and Merlot never calls him Jeff, only Jeffrey, emphasis on the rey.

  Geoff the paraplegic had a hard time maintaining an erection because of his condition, Merlot tells me. He was a good-looking man and incredibly charismatic, with ice blue eyes. He used to be a race car driver, which is how he got injured. These things apparently enabled him to keep attracting beautiful women even after he couldn’t walk anymore, because Merlot was one of three or four lovers he had concurrently. Once she even agreed to make love with one of his other girlfriends because he swore he would be able to solve his erection problem if they would let him watch. She had never done anything like that before, but she went along with it because she loved him and wanted to help him. It worked, too, but not permanently.

  Sometimes when Merlot went out with him, Geoff would ask her not to wear any panties. She would sit on his lap (right there in his wheelchair), and he would put his hand under her skirt and do things to her, but she couldn’t make any noise because they would be with another couple or something and they might look under the tablecloth to see why Merlot was moaning. Other times he put ice cubes inside her, because hearing her scream made his masculine difficulties less problematic. That is how Merlot put it, which I guess means he shot up like a rocket whenever she stubbed her toe. When she tells me these stories, she always stresses that she had never done anything like that before, but Geoff was so extraordinary she would have done anything he asked.

  “He was like a Svengali,” she says, sounding breathless ever since we started talking about him. She drinks some of her cafe latte even though her face is looking a bit moist and excited and I think she should have some cold water instead—but the waiter hasn’t come back with her lemon slices yet, and Merlot won’t drink water without lemon.

  Because I am curious, I force myself to ask, “What do you mean?”

  “He was one of those men who, after you meet them, you are never the same. He had an almost hypnotic power, so that whenever we were together I was under his spell.” She pauses to lick the milk froth off her lips. “He was one of the three most important men of my life.”

  For the rest of the day, I try to prioritize the most important men in my life. My father, who by dying when I was ten managed to avoid ever disappointing me, unless the fact that he blew his brains out can be counted as a disappointment. (My mother doesn’t like it when I make jokes like that.) My grandfather, who always gave me presents and called me sugar. Bobby, because even though his habits are getting harder and harder to explain, I lost my virginity to him, and that qualifies him for something. I wonder whether the third important man in Merlot’s life is the one she lost her virginity to. Jeffrey, I assume, is the other since he is, after all, her husband.

  That night I am plagued with my first bout of insomnia. I lie awake next to the snoring, heat-radiating bulk that is Bobby, intoxicated with fantasies about the phantom Third Man. Maybe he was an international billionaire who had all-night sex orgies on a yacht in the Mediterranean. Maybe he was a European count who lived in a castle—Merlot has been to Europe before. Maybe he was a distant relative whom she met by accident and felt an immediate attraction to, despite their doomed fate. Maybe someday she will tell me.

  I know she lives in the Champions area. It takes her forty-five minutes to get to where I live, near the Galleria. I am closer to the places she likes, though, so it is three months before I see her house. I know by then that she lives with her mom. I found out a month into our friendship when The Mother answered Merlot’s phone. She isn’t supposed to do that since they have separate lines. The Mother’s accent was thick, and she sounded like a commercial for a bad Chinese restaurant, though, as I said before, she isn’t Chinese. She just sounded that way to me.

  I follow Merlot’s directions to the letter; take 610-N then 610-E, then 45-N and exit at 1960. Even before I reach her house, I am afraid of my surroundings, of the enormity of the land encompassing the two-or three-story houses, of the outdoor pools and in-ground sprinkler systems. I think of the wooden frame house where my mother and stepfather live. They rent the upstairs from a crotchety old woman who complains if they w
ear their shoes in the house and insists they are picking up the kitchen table and dropping it on the floor. I am embarrassed.

  At her house she makes an impromptu Filipino noodle dish, then we sit in the Jacuzzi to watch the sun go down. The Mother is out of town visiting Merlot’s father in San Francisco where he lives, though they are not divorced. “He has a good job,” Merlot says, but when I ask questions like, “Are they planning to live together again someday?” she is vague and does not answer.

  People sit naked in Jacuzzis, I discover. I have seen Merlot’s body before—when we go shopping and she brings me into the dressing room with her—but it seems different here, in the dim light of her backyard with glasses of champagne and cassis sitting within our reach. The bones that stretch across her chest above her small, upturned breasts keep catching my eye. Her neck appears longer without her clothes. When she rises to pour more champagne, the foam from the Jacuzzi clings to her jet-black pubic hair for a moment before evaporating. I can see her ribs.

  “You really have to get rid of Bobby,” she says when the bottle is empty. “He’s dragging you down.”

  My father, standing under our window waving a gun: I’ll kill myself, I swear I will. My mother on the phone: If he thinks he can emotionally blackmail me, he has another thing coming.

  “He’s buying me an engagement ring,” I say. Then, as an afterthought, “Besides, I couldn’t afford my apartment alone.”

  “The Galleria area sucks anyway,” Merlot says. “It’s nothing but a pseudo Lincoln Park, full of overpriced restaurants, and yuppie wannabes. Houston’s pathetic.”