I jumped a fence and moved through backyards, leaping two more fences to come up on Joe Cairo’s studio from the rear. As I moved up the back stairs, I thought how much this reminded me of a bad detective movie. Easy to figure and hard to forget.
I knocked on the back door. A yellow light came on and Joe’s face appeared behind the glass top of the wooden door. His jaw dropped. It actually dropped.
“Come on, open up,” I told him. “You don’t have much time.”
He opened the door and gave me a real innocent look, and I knew for sure he did it. I breezed past him, telling him to lock the door. I followed the lights to a back room bed with a suitcase and camera case on it.
“Going somewhere?” I sat in the only chair in the room, a worn green sofa.
Joe stood in the doorway. He looked around the room but not at me.
I put my hands behind my head and watched him carefully as I said, “She’s gonna roll over on you.”
Joe looked around the room again, his fingers twitching.
“If I figured it out, you know Homicide will. They’re a lot better at this.”
Joe started bouncing on his toes, his hands at his sides.
“They found the pictures. She’ll bat those big blue eyes at them, roll a tear down those pretty cheeks and tell them, ‘Look at the evil things my husband made me do . . . with a nigger.’ ”
Joe stopped bouncing and glared at me.
“Don’t be a sap,” I told him. “She’ll tie you up in a neat package. Cops like neat packages, cases tied up in a bow. Get out now. Leave. Go to California or Mexico. Just leave, or you’ll be in the electric chair before you know it.”
Joe leaned his left shoulder against the door frame. “There’s nothing for her to tell.”
“OK.” I stood up. “Wait here. They’ll be here soon.” I looked at the half-packed suitcase and said, “Don’t tell me you thought she was gonna run off with you.”
Joe puffed out his cheeks.
“Look around. Look how you live. You saw how she lived.” I stepped up to his face. “She used you, just like she used me.”
Joe squinted at me. “What you mean, she used you?”
“She came over last night.”
Joe shook his head. “She went to her mama’s.”
“Come on, wise up. She fucked us both. Only you’re gonna take the hot squat.”
Joe balled his hands into fists.
I looked him hard in the eyes. “What’s the matter with you? You killed a fuckin’ white man. You’re history.”
He blinked.
“Forget her, man.”
I could see the wheels turning behind his eyes. He opened his mouth, shut it, then said, “He beat his wife.”
“I know.” That was the thing that tipped the scales, that brought me to Treme, instead of just going home. I hate wife-beaters. I lowered my voice. “You killed a white man. You’re in a world of shit, man.”
“How . . . how did you . . . know?”
How? It was a gut feeling. It was the way Brigid looked at him, the way he looked back. It was that look of intimacy. Joe was the obvious killer, so obvious it was obscene.
“It had to be you,” I told him, “because it wasn’t me.”
Joe blinked and I could see his eyes were wet.
“You willing to turn her in? You willing to tell the cops she was in on it?”
He looked at me and shook his head. “I’d never do that.”
“Then you better beat feet. Go to California. Change your name. But get out now.”
Joe looked hesitatingly at his suitcase.
“Forget her,” I said forcefully.
“Forget her?”
“Like a bad dream.”
I stepped past him. I knew if I was caught here, I’d be in a world of shit too.
Joe grabbed my arm, but let go as soon as I turned. He looked down at my feet said, “Why you helpin’ me?”
“Because I’m more like you than I’m like them.”
I’m not sure it registered, not completely.
“You’re not getting rid of me to keep her for yourself,” he said in a voice that told me he didn’t believe that.
“She’s done with both of us, man.”
I went out the way I came, my heart pounding in my chest as I jumped the fences. I slipped behind the wheel of the DeSoto and looked around before starting it. I took the long way home.
It’s night again. The French doors of my balcony are open, but there is no breeze. I’m on my fourth Scotch, or is it my fifth? I’m waiting for Capdeville and Spade. They’ll be here soon, asking about Joe Cairo, wondering where the fuck he went.
I’ll tell them I drove around and went to Cairo’s on a hunch. Figuring someone must have seen a white man jumping fences, I’ll tell them I tried to sneak up on Cairo, but he was gone.
They’ll do a lot of yelling, a lot of guessing, but won’t be able to pin anything on me. After all, I didn’t do it. I was too busy fucking the wife at the time of the murder. I close my eyes for a moment and the Scotch has me thinking that maybe, just maybe she’ll come. But I know better.
Rising from the sofa, I take my drink into the bedroom and look at the messed-up bed.
God, she was so fuckin’ beautiful it hurt.
I sit on the edge of my bed. It still smells like sex. I’m sure, if I look hard, I’ll find some of her pubic hair scattered in the sheets. That’s all I have left – the debris of sex, the memories, and the fuckin’ heartache.
Entertaining Mr Orton
Poppy Z. Brite
London, 1 August 1967
“Have you been reading my diary?”
Kenneth looks up from the baboon’s head he is pasting onto the madonna’s body. He is standing on the bed to reach the upper part of his collage, which covers most of the wall, and the top of his bald cranium nearly brushes the pink and yellow tiles of the flat’s low ceiling. They have lived together in this tiny space in Islington for eight years.
“No, I have not been reading your diary,” Kenneth lies.
“Why not?”
“Because it would drive me to suicide.”
“Right,” says Joe with an edge of impatience in his voice. He has heard this threat many times before, in one form or another, and Kenneth realizes dimly that his lover either doesn’t believe it or just doesn’t care. That doesn’t mean Kenneth can make himself stop saying it, though.
“But if you won’t read my diary and you won’t talk to me,” Joe continues, “what’s the point of remaining in this relationship? You’re always telling everyone how I make your life miserable. What keeps you hanging about?”
Kenneth wipes glue from his fingers onto his pants, then turns and sits heavily on the bed. He took a number of Valium earlier in the day, but something in Joe’s voice pulls his brain out of its pleasant half-numb fog. They can still listen to each other, and even talk seriously when they really try.
Of course, most of the serious talk these days is about writing. Writing Joe’s plays, to be precise. The very same brilliant and successful plays that have made Joe’s name synonymous with decadence, black wit, and tawdry glamour as far as London was concerned. If the talk isn’t about Joe’s plays, it is about what they should do with all the money Joe’s plays are making. Joe spends most of it on toys: clothes, Polaroid cameras, holidays in Morocco.
“What surprises me,” Joe continues, “is that you haven’t killed me. I think you don’t leave or top yourself because you can’t stand the thought of anyone else having me.”
“Rubbish. All sorts of people have you.”
“Ah! You have been reading my diary.”
Kenneth rises up suddenly in one of his outbursts. “When you come home reeking of cheap aftershave, I don’t need your diary to tell me where you’ve been!”
Joe waves this away. “I mean, of anyone else having me permanently. And I can’t conceive of it either, honestly. It’s as if we’ve become inextricable.”
Suspicio
n flares in Kenneth’s mind. “Why are you talking about me killing you? Are you setting me up for something?”
Joe throws back his head and brays laughter, a sound which usually lessens Kenneth’s tension but now induces a smouldering rage. “What did you have in mind? Me setting you up for murder and slipping back off to Tangier? My family gets your fat arse thrown in prison and you do your De Profundis bit again? Oh, Ken . . .” Tears are spilling out of Joe’s eyes now, tears of laughter, the kind he used to cry in bed after a joyous orgasm. Kenneth remembers how they tasted, salt and copper on his tongue like blood.
“I think I could kill you,” he says, but Joe doesn’t hear him.
Tangier, 25 May 1967
Five English queens stoned on hash and Valium and Moroccan boy-flesh, sipping red wine on a café terrace against a blood-orange sky. Two American tourists, an older married couple, sitting nearby eavesdropping on the conversation and making their disapproval evident. Joe Orton lets his voice rise gradually until he is not so much shouting as projecting, trained Shakespearian actor that he is.
“He took me right up the arse, and afterwards he thanked me for giving him such a good fucking. They’re a most polite people. We’ve got a leopard-skin rug in the flat and he wanted me to fuck him on that, only I’m afraid of the spunk. You see, it might adversely affect the spots of the leopard.”
“Those tourists can hear what you’re saying,” one of the entourage advises. (Not Kenneth Halliwell; though he is present, he wouldn’t bother trying to curb Joe even if he wanted to.)
“I mean for them to hear,” Joe booms. “They have no right to be occupying chairs reserved for decent sex perverts . . . He might bite a hole in the rug. It’s the writhing he does, you see, when my prick is up him, that might grievously damage the rug, and I can’t ask him to control his excitement. It wouldn’t be natural when you’re six inches up the bum, would it?”
The Americans pay for their coffee and move away, looking as if they’ve had it considerably more than six inches up the bum – dry.
“You shouldn’t drive people like that away,” says the sensitive queen. “The town needs tourists.”
Joe sneers. He has practised it in the mirror. “Not that kind, it doesn’t. This is our country, our town, our civilization. I want nothing to do with the civilization they made. Fuck them! They’ll sit and listen to buggers’ talk from me and drink their coffee and piss off.”
“It seems rather a strange joke,” offers another member of the entourage timidly.
“It isn’t a joke. There’s no such thing as a joke,” says the author of the most successful comedy now playing in London’s West End.
Leicester, 2 August 1967
Joe leaves his father’s small threadbare house and walks two miles up the road to an abandoned barn, where a man he met in town earlier that day is waiting for him. He is in his home town, which he mostly loathes, to see a production of his play Entertaining Mr Sloane and fulfil family obligations. Just now he has some obligations of his own to fulfil.
Joe often likes to have one-off trysts with ugly men, men he finds physically appalling, but this one is a beauty: tall and smoothly muscled, with brown curly hair that tumbles into bright blue eyes, a thick Scottish accent, an exceedingly clever pair of hands, and a big-headed, heavily veined cock.
In the late afternoon shafts of sunlight that filter through the barn’s patched roof, they take turns kneeling on the dusty floor and sucking each other to a fever pitch. Then Joe braces himself against the wall and lets that fat textured cock slide deep into his arse, opening himself to this stranger in a way that he never can to Kenneth – not any more, not ever again.
London, 8 August 1967
Conversation after the lights are out:
“Joe?”
“. . .”
“Joe?”
“What?”
“Why did you ask me if I’d kill you?”
“I don’t know what you’re on about.”
“Do you want to die, Joe?”
“Do I . . . ?” A sudden bray of laughter. “Hell, no! You twit, why would I want to die?”
“Then why did you bring it up?”
“Hm . . .” Joe is already falling back asleep. “I suppose I just wondered whether you were that far gone.”
His breathing deepens, slows. Joe is lying on his left side, his face to the wall. The collage spreads above him like a fungus, its components indistinguishable in the street-lit dark. Kenneth sits up, slips out of bed, maybe planning to take a Nembutal, maybe just going to have a pee.
But he freezes at the sight on the bedside table: Joe’s open diary and, balanced atop it carelessly, as if flung there by accident, a claw hammer. Joe hung some pictures earlier in the day, so the hammer has every reason to be there. But the juxtaposition of objects hypnotizes Kenneth, draws him.
He extends his hand cautiously, as if he is afraid the hammer will disappear. Then it is in his palm, heavy, smooth wooden handle, a comfortable fit. He raises it.
“Joe?”
Slow breathing.
“Joe?”
I suppose I just wondered whether you were that far gone . . .
And the knowledge that he is that far gone, that Joe must know that or be blind, sweeps over Kenneth like a dark sea. All the years he has invested, his work, his talent, his whole existence subsumed by Joe. The infidelities lovingly recorded in the diaries, literally under Kenneth’s nose (the flat is only sixteen by eighteen feet). In that moment the dam overflows, the camel’s back breaks, the shit hits the fan, and life as Kenneth Halliwell knows it becomes intolerable.
Without allowing himself to think about it further, he lets the hammer fall.
Nine times.
The amount of blood on his collage is staggering. Even in the dark Kenneth can see that most of the cutout figures are spattered if not obscured entirely. The thing on the pillow is no longer Joe; it is like a physician’s model, an example of a ruined cranium. And yet he still imagines he can hear that slow breathing.
After undressing (Joe’s blood is sticky on his pajama top) and scrawling a brief, unremarkable note, Kenneth goes for the bottle of Nembutal and swallows twenty-two, washing them down with a tin of grapefruit juice. He is dead before his considerable bulk hits the floor.
Joe’s sheets, however, are still warm when the bodies are found the next morning.
London, 8 August 1996
“Harder! It’s not going in! Lean on it . . . Oh bloody fuck, Willem, get out of the way and let me do it!”
Clive shoulders his way up the narrow staircase and pushes Willem away from one end of a large sofa upholstered in royal purple velvet. The other end of this venerable piece is stuck fast in the doorway of the tiny flat. Clive leans against it and gives a mighty shove. Wiry muscles stand out on his neck and shoulders. Willem mutters something in Dutch.
“What?”
Willem points at a spot just below his navel. “What do you call it when the intestines come out?”
“Hernia? No, look, you push with your knees bent. Like this . . . Ugh!” The paint on the door frame surrenders several layers, and the sofa is in the flat.
Back outside, they struggle to get an antique steamer trunk full of Clive’s photography equipment up the granite steps of the stoop. The staircase looms above them. Everything seemed much lighter in Amsterdam, probably because they had two friends helping. Now that they are here, their possessions appear enormous and unmanageable.
A young man passing on the street stops to watch their efforts. Clive is annoyed until the man, who is distinctly rough-trade, says, “Need a bit o’ help wi’ that there?”
They accept too gratefully, and he asks for forty pounds. They bargain him down to thirty-five. A bargain it is, for they could not have done it alone. By the time their things are in the flat, they feel sufficiently comfortable with the young man to ask if he knows where to get weed in Islington. The young man exclaims that he lives right around the corner and knows a guy
who had some good stuff coming in today. They pay him the thirty-five pounds, give him an additional twenty towards the weed, and say goodbye, half-expecting never to see him again.
Of course, they never do.
“Fucking London,” Clive grumbles over Indian takeaway that night. “Fucking welcome home. Forgot why I left, I did.”
On the verge of thirty, Clive has received glowing reviews for his art photography, but couldn’t get the lucrative portrait work he needed to live well in Amsterdam. He has decided that Dutch people don’t care for having their pictures taken nearly as much as the English do. Even Willem, in all his scruffy blond loveliness, is a lousy model, always fidgeting, wanting a cigarette, wanting a joint, saying he is cold. Willem is a writer (some of the time) and can work anywhere (or not), so they have decided to relocate to Clive’s home city. Willem is excited about the move; he is twenty-five and has never lived outside the Netherlands. Clive hopes it will be temporary.
“We’ll get it somewhere else,” Willem consoles.
“You’re in England now, luvvie dear. You can’t just wander down to the corner coffee shop and ask to see the menu. Anyway, I don’t care about the weed.” Clive makes an expansive gesture ceilingward. “It’s the attitude of this place I loathe.”
“The flat?” Willem looks around in alarm. He selected their new home, and particularly likes the pink and yellow tiles on the ceiling, though he wondered at the wisdom of bringing the purple sofa.
“No, no . . . London. Filthy place, innit? Always somebody ready to rip you off, from the drug dealer on the street to the poshest restaurant in the city.” He looks up at Willem. “Don’t you think so?”
They have visited London twice in their three years together, and Willem has been coming here on his own since his teens. He loves the grand spaces and vistas, the whirl of traffic, the diversity and dazzle. “No. I find it glamourous.”
Clive smirks. “Wait ’till you’ve lived here a while.”
Willem finishes his rice, sops up the last of the lamb vindaloo with half a chapati, and begins to clear away the containers. “Shall we do some unpacking tonight,” he asks, “or are you too tired?”
“I think I’m too tired for unpacking.”
The Mammoth Book of the Best New Erotica Page 9