Lying in Bed

by J. D. Landis

  “Tell me the truth.”

  “What?”

  “Do you really believe in right and wrong?”

  “That’s …”

  “Complicated?”

  “Yes.”

  She came around the desk and put her arm around my shoulder. “You’ll do just fine.” Then she took my arm and walked me to the back of the gallery. There were 3 doors. “That one’s storage and supplies. Canvases. Coffee filters. Plastic cups and barf bags for openings. That one’s the W.C. Customers only, needless to say. Watch out for art connoisseurs among the homeless.” She knocked on the third door and opened it before anyone answered.

  There was a young man in a beautiful black suit sitting behind a desk. We seemed to interrupt him staring off into space.

  “Isaac Labrovitz,” said the girl.

  He finally looked at us. “I see you two have met. If you’re who I think you are.”

  “She is,” said the girl.

  “What’s your name again?” he asked.

  “Clara Bell.”

  “Clarabell what?” asked the girl.

  “I believe that’s her name,” said Mr. Labrovitz, if that’s who he was. I had imagined someone much older.

  “It is,” I said.

  “From Howdy Doody?” asked the girl.

  “Yes.”

  “You must have strange parents,” she said.

  “Very.”

  “Don’t we all,” she said.

  “Isn’t it remarkable,” said Mr. Labrovitz.

  “I like her name,” the girl told him.

  “I was referring to how much alike you 2 look. You give the impression of being willowy without having the gall to be taller than I am. I detest towering women. Have you noticed how many more of them are being made that way these days? And you both look a bit like boys without giving up a dram of your femininity. That’s very important. It’s 1984 after all. We must challenge conformity in every way. I tell you, that agency is first-rate. Are you sure you aren’t sisters? Now Monica, why don’t you show Clara the ropes and then take her out to lunch. On me. Just bring me the receipt. I’ll reimburse you. And by the way, you were magnificent. The best assistant I’ve ever had.”

  “Then why are you firing me? I need the work, you know.”

  “Need you ask—because I get tired of looking at the same person day after day.”

  “Turnover,” she said.

  “That’s the key,” he answered. “In life as in art. As for you, Clara, the same thing will happen. About a year from now you’ll look up from that desk out there and share a precious moment of bewilderment with someone who I can only hope is as fetching as you. In the meantime, you will be the most important person in my life. Goodbye.”

  Monica took me for lunch to Da Silvano on Avenue of the Americas. I refuse to call it 6th Avenue. To me New York City is America. The rest of it’s another country.

  “Spend a lot,” she said.

  I looked at the menu. “It’s very expensive.”

  “Yes, it is. But put that down. You should never order from a menu, especially in an Italian restaurant. The waiter wants to seduce you. The chef wants to cook something he didn’t cook yesterday. The owner wants to be able to charge you something unprintable. And Ike won’t be happy unless you bring him back a huge bill. Let’s have a bottle of wine. An old one.”

  We ended up having 2 bottles. It was like a date, and I fell in love with her.

  “What will you do now?” I asked her.

  “Work for the competition.”

  “Another gallery?”

  “Don’t be silly. An artist.”

  She told me artists were always asking her to work for them. “Some of them are the most disorganized people in the world. And the rest of them are the most organized people in the world. So they all need all the help they can get. What about you? Are you organized?”

  I told her about my diary. I have never told anyone about my diary. I showed her my handwriting (not in my diary!) I told her my life story, or at least the interesting parts. I told her about the photographs (after a lot of wine)

  “That’s sick,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a form of rape.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s almost incest. By both parents.”

  “Yes.”

  “But how lucky you are.”

  “Why?”

  “To be such an object of desire.”

  I told her I was a virgin.

  All she said to that was “I wish I were.”

  I asked her if she’d slept with Mr. Labrovitz.

  “He’s gay.”

  “Did you try?”

  “Of course.”

  “What happened?”

  “He told me to go practice my sgraffito on someone else.” (I just looked that word up so I know I spelled it right. I also know Monica really does know what it means)

  “What does that mean?”

  “Not to try to scratch beneath the surface.”

  She paid our bill with a credit card. She gave me the receipt and told me to give it to Ike and tell him to mail her the money along with her last paycheck.

  “Aren’t you coming back?” I asked.

  “I’ll walk you to the door.”

  I gave her my phone number.

  She gave me hers.

  We walked arm in arm through Soho.

  Thank you for being my friend, Monica.

  Hozanna

  He says, “Have you ever been fucked like this before?”

  “Oh, yes,” I lie. “Many times.”

  Which only makes him fuck me better than I’ve ever been fucked before.

  Rolling Stone

  Today I closed the shop for lunch and took Johnny shopping. For somebody with so much money he never wants to buy anything. All he gets are CDs and books, usually through the mail. Sometimes he splurges on a fancy bottle of wine. And presents for me. The only time he goes out of the loft without me is when he’s going to buy me something. He says the reason for that is this is where he lives, not out there. I kid him that he meets one of those strange maiden girls he’s always looking at when we’re out together and that’s why he buys me so many presents.

  I love to be out in the streets with him and watch him watch women. He doesn’t do what men do when they put that stare on you like they were capturing your image on some film that loops behind their eyes. It’s more that he watches them leave. Even when they’re walking right toward us. I can almost hear him saying goodbye to them. It’s not that I want him to have them. I don’t want to be the only woman in the world, the way he said I was. I want to be them all and then for him to have them.

  I took him into Armani. It was very crowded because it’s lunchtime but there must be something about Johnny that makes people think he’s got money to spend, because we had a boy and a girl on us right away. They were both almost as tall as Johnny and looked like incestuous siblings. Their clothes were the color of eels. I was about to make some excuse for what Johnny was wearing when the boy said, “That’s an amazing look.” And the girl said, “Your shoes are presumptuous.” “I’m square,” said Johnny. “Exactly,” said the boy. “Fadulous,” said the girl. What a ditz, I thought, but Johnny said, “I like that word.” She said, “It means …” Johnny held up his hand. “No need.” She was his forever. He could read her mind. Which would take all of 2 minutes, and that’s with a bathroom break. “Let’s get out of here,” I said. But they wouldn’t let him go. “Do you model?” asked the boy. “Oh no,” said Johnny. “You should,” said the girl. “You look … you look … you look …” “Gifted,” said the boy. “No,” said the girl, “not gifted.” “What then?” said the boy. “Whole-some,” said the girl. “Exactly,” said the boy. “Your clothes are unapproachable. Your shoes … well, Shibboleth told you. And your glasses … they remind me of my favorite professor. He was like a father to me. Are you a teacher?” “Good heavens no.” “Well what do you do then? D
on’t tell me you’re a designer.” The girl thought she had it. But Johnny said, “I’m a husband.” “Don’t I wish,” said the girl. “It goes with the clothes,” said the boy. “I’m glad you like them,” said Johnny. “But Clara admires your wares. What might you have for her?” That son of a bitch, he bought me 4 thousand dollars worth of things. He called me his little onion in front of those 2 dummies.

  So I took him up the street to Barnes and Noble and told him I’d buy him any book in the place. And what does he buy? A blank book! And he gives it to me. I can’t believe it. “Did I ever tell you about my first day in New York?” “Tell me again. Over lunch.” I tell him I have to get back and open the shop. But he takes my arm and pulls me a couple of blocks south to Union Square Cafe. Even though it’s late, they don’t have a table. So we sit at the bar and we both order tunaburgers and I tell him how I got a room at the Martha Washington Hotel and I threw my bag down and walked out of there and through some park and got to Fifth Avenue, which I couldn’t believe they actually let you walk on, and came to this bookstore and bought a blank book. “Isn’t that amazing,” said John. I asked him what. “You told me that story, but you never told me what you bought that day.” So the book he bought me becomes all the more precious to him. He takes it out of the plastic bag and opens it up and leafs through the blank pages. I don’t know if he’s trying to read what I’ll write there or he’s just trying to see me at 16 with a book like this one in my hand. He wants the impossible: me before he met me.

  Snail’s Trail

  I never know what to say when I’m about to come. Whoever I’m with’s looking at me and as soon as I get close I start to talk. I say I’m there. I say help me. I say do it. Where do those ridiculous words come from. I don’t talk like that. What am I trying to say. Whoever I’m with doesn’t know what to do. I’m not talking to him. But there has to be somebody somewhere to help me. In the meantime I sound ridiculous. Someone should publish a book with instructions. What to say when you’re about to come. At least when I’m actually coming I don’t say anything. I just scream and moan as Jonathan Edwards says. Words fail me thank God.

  Log Cabin

  I just put the last piece of grandma Belzidases quilt on the cover of this book. I remember I used it on the very first book I bought on the day I started my diary which also happened to be my first day in New York. A lot has happened since then. You can read about it in my diary. Except you can’t. I don’t even know who you are. So go away. I like the idea that the first and last thing I used the quilt for is my diary. I also made pillow covers from the quilt. I am lying on those pillows now. Actually, I’m not lying on them. I’m lying against them. Today I moved into my own apartment finally. If you can call it that. It’s one room. Nobody lives like this in the Valley of the Moon. But I wouldn’t go back there if it was the last place on earth. Which is exactly what it is. The last place God would ever visit if It visited earth.

  No one can find me now. I have my own apartment. I cut my hair. (You should see it short. I never knew how pretty I really am) I changed my name. Clara Bell. It’s almost like my old name, which I used to love. One of the branches of my family even changed their name to Bell but that was because they didn’t think Belzidas was American enough. They were trying to fit in. Me, I’m trying to fit out.

  Some guy in a bar told me it was a clown’s name. Yes, I said, isn’t it awful. What kind of parents would give a kid a name like mine? I told him I ran away from home because of my name. “Isn’t that a little extreme?” he said.

  Not compared to the truth.

  In the Valley of the Moon where the Pomo and the Wappo Indians once roamed there was a beautiful girl named Carla Belzidas. She lived in a nice house on a nice street in a little town with hills all around and grapes growing everywhere. Her mother was a bookkeeper at a winery, but it was in the next county over, on the Silverado Trail. Her father was a commercial photographer who was supposed to take pictures of nothing but things. His claim to fame was how he could capture the sunlight that had just broken through the fog from the west in a glass of wine so that the sunlight seemed to be part of the wine itself and came out of the page (if it was glossy enough I guess) and actually landed red on the lips and eyes of anybody looking at it. At least that’s what somebody said about it when one of his photographs won a prize from an ad club and they all went down to San Francisco to see him get the prize and he made a speech and said he was inspired to capture the color of the sun in the wine from the way he had seen the sun in her hair. “That was the color I wanted,” he told everybody. “The color of my daughter Carla’s hair.” “Oh, you’ve embarrassed her,” her mother said after her father had come back to their banquet table with everybody applauding him and her hair, but she said, “No he didn’t. I wasn’t embarrassed at all.” Nothing embarrassed her by then. She was 14 years old. She was opening up to everything. That’s how she felt. She was exploding. She would see herself lying on the ground with her arms stretched out and her legs apart and her eyes open and mouth open and ears open and forehead open and she’d say take me, hold me, shake me, burn me, twist me, grab me, kiss me, fuck me. Just walking through the air was a thrill. Her sheets were criminals. Wiping her ass was a whole new kind of love letter. Nothing embarrassed her. She was born again. She was naked and unashamed and ready to get handed around. The boys got a whiff of her fast enough. It wasn’t anything she said. It wasn’t anything she did. She was just a wine-headed column of want. At first she just kissed. That was enough. It happened on her lips, but it involved every living cell in her body. She was a pool with one finger stuck in it and the whole thing boils. Her lips ached, her eyes burned, and rain fell in her panties. Then it was her skin. Touch me, touch me. Not her body parts. Just her skin. Under her arms. On the back of her neck. Her throat. Her shoulders. Down her sides. Her waist, where she’d put boys hands because they never thought of that themselves and they preferred her breasts, naturally, though what she liked best about them was to look down and see them in a boy’s hands. She liked them to hold her breasts from underneath, not cover them up and start grinding them into her chest. It took a while for her to pay attention to whoever she was with. It took months. She even forgot sometimes that anyone was there. She made them all into pieces of herself. While they were touching her, her own hands held on for dear life to the air around her. But once she started touching boys, she saw them. And once she saw them, she started telling them apart. That’s when she got boyfriends. The first boy she took her pants off for was her first boyfriend. His name was Paul. It’s the first name I remember. He kept his own pants on. He didn’t touch her. He just looked. He kept blinking, and staring through his blinks. “You can touch it,” she said. “No thanks.” He blushed and went back after her breasts. She never said goodbye to him but she got other boyfriends. They knew how to touch her, or she taught them how. The first time she came unalone was in the middle of a lesson. She curled up like a snail and trapped his hand between her legs. When she finally opened her eyes, she couldn’t speak. There didn’t seem to be anything it would be possible to say. So she smiled at him instead. But he looked frightened and pulled his hand away and looked at it like he’d shot somebody with it and wiped it on his underpants. After that she went for older boyfriends. Not much older. In the next grade, maybe 2. They took their pants off and that was something. The first time she saw a penis she looked around her room. The boy got scared. Roger Stare. He covered himself up. His eyes followed hers. “What are you looking at? Who’s there?” “Sorry,” she said. She tried not to laugh. He got dressed and left. She didn’t tell him she’d been looking around at all her stuffed animals. She sees a penis for the first time and wonders what her animals could possibly be thinking of this development. But it was her who the sight of Roger’s penis haunted. So from then on she didn’t worry about her animals. She concentrated on her own shock. And she never got used to it. Not to this day. They are such a surprise. They take up so much space. Not because they�
�re big but because they don’t look like they belong anywhere. Certainly not on a person. Their color never matches. It’s like somebody’s mother never taught him how to dress. They’re never the right shape, though maybe they would be if they didn’t have balls hanging off them. And they’re all out of proportion. They make men look ridiculously beautiful. She couldn’t keep her eyes off them. Or her hands. The first time she touched a boy he came. She’d read about it but who could possibly describe anything like this. All she did was put the tip of one finger against the side of it, just to kind of test reality, and the thing jumped up and away, and Kevin said something like “Oh no” or “Uh oh” or “Oh oh,” and his penis for one split second stood completely still in the air, and while it was like that, completely still, out of the end of it flew a round white little moon that landed halfway across the bed on her pillow. Then there was no stopping it. His penis moved up and down all by itself while white ribbons streamed out of it and came down one after another on her bare skin, each one a little farther down her body, starting with her lips and chin and then right in the space between her breasts and into the crease in her stomach and onto her thighs, her knees, the toes of one foot. It was hot when it landed, almost burning. Then it cooled very quickly and made her shiver. But she didn’t move a muscle. She just sat there before him watching how his penis rested now among the tufts of her bedspread. It was still swollen, but it looked soft instead of hard. And very slowly it was crawling away from her, back to him. She reached over and put her hand under it. It weighed less than it looked like it would weigh. He said, “What about your parents?” Kevin had never been here before. They’d never done this before. Did guys get fearful of the consequences only after they’d climaxed? She never worried about her parents because she never once thought there was anything wrong with what she was doing. But to make Kevin relax she said, “My mother’s at work in Napa, and my father’s over in Dry Creek Valley. You know that.” “Are you sure?” “Kevin, I do this all the time.” “You do? Who with?” “Boys, of course.” Kevin came again. He seemed much happier with himself this time. Before he left, he offered to make her come. She said no. This seemed to relieve him. He said, “Please don’t do this with anyone else.” She said sure. And she didn’t do it with anyone else. She did it with everyone else. Well, not everyone. But everyone she could. Why not? She was curious. It was fun. And it was the best way to get to know boys. It’s how you learn that people lie when they say boys are all alike. Boys aren’t all animals. Boys aren’t all pigs. Boy’s aren’t all crude or awkward or insensitive. Boys don’t all want the same thing. Unless it’s getting their penises stroked. And who can blame them about that? So she invited them over. After school. One at a time. They couldn’t believe their luck. They figured they were going to have to borrow a car and take her out necking to Nuns Canyon or Moon Mountain Drive. And she leads them right into her own bedroom with the furry little animals and no place to sit except the bed so they didn’t waste time trying to break down the terrible space between human beings who have never touched before. It was the greatest experience of her life. Nothing had ever brought her more peace than to lie on her bed with a boy on their backs or facing each other with her hands on him and his hands on her and their bringing each other off as slowly as the light of the sun dripped down her window before it fell behind the hills to the west. Some of the boys were as happy with that as she was. A few others really wanted to fuck. But she wouldn’t. She told them they were both too young. But that wasn’t the reason. Age had nothing to do with it. If God hadn’t wanted kids to fuck, It wouldn’t have given them such fuckability, not to mention such miraculous equipment. And a desire so great it and it alone could make you believe in God. No, the reason she didn’t want to fuck was she couldn’t bear to let anybody’s penis out of her sight for that long, however long it takes to fuck, which is something I’m not sure about since I’ve never done it. Also, if the truth be told, there wasn’t anybody she wanted to fuck. Until Andy. When Andy showed up, all the others just dissolved—in her hands, in her eyes, in her mind. He never told her to get rid of them. It wasn’t his decision. It was hers. But he knew all about them. He said, “Sometimes when you’re holding my cock I picture another cock in your hand.” He smiled both shyly and slyly. He was proud of being such a worldly boy. “Me too,” she said. Oh, how that made him laugh! He did what lovers have to do to be true lovers. He made the whole world their world. He locked them both up within it and threw away the me. They had nothing to hide from each other, so she didn’t mind losing sight of his wonderful penis. They talked about fucking all the time. They planned for it like a summer picnic when it’s still winter. They probably would have done it, too, if they hadn’t enjoyed talking about it so much. For the first time, she felt her age. She was young. There was plenty of time. Besides, in the meantime she’d hide his penis in her mouth and close her eyes and nod her head upon him yes yes yes until he came. She could always tell when he was about to come because he’d put his hand in her hair. He would just kind of slip it in. He didn’t grab her hair or push up and down on her head. She could feel his fingers spread upon her scalp and her hair standing up between them. When he came his hand would arch so he seemed attached to her only by his fingertips and the cock that bounced against the roof of her mouth. And when he finished and the last squirt was out, which sometimes took a heck of a long time, his hand would melt back relaxed into her hair, and his penis would shrink and plop out of her mouth, and so the only place he’d be touching her was right on the top of her head, in her hair. Even if he took a little nap then, his fingers would keep moving in her hair. It was like one of his gestures. She never asked him about it. She didn’t even know if he knew he did it. And she didn’t want anything to make him stop doing it. It was almost better than the sex itself. It was impossible to think of having sex without having his hand end up in her hair. She didn’t even know if he liked her hair until one fateful day when he sat up and leaned over her head in his lap and looked down at his hand and said, “You have beautiful hair.” “Oh, thank you.” “What color is it anyway?” “I don’t know. Red?” “Not red. You’re not a redhead. I can’t stand red-heads.” He laughed. “So obviously you’re not a redhead. But there’s red in your hair. What do they call this color? Name some reds. Auburn? That’s one. Brick?” “Oh please!” “Carmine? I love that word. What else? Come on, Carla, help me out here. Scarlet? What’s another kind of red? Crimson? Cherry? That’s a good one. What’s on your learner’s permit? Cherry hair. Grape eyes. I’d love to see that.” “Claret,” she said. “That’s what my father calls my hair. He says my hair’s the color of wine with the sun shining through it. And claret’s a kind of wine. I’ll show you a picture he took. It won a prize.” She jumped off her bed. “Where are you going?” he asked. “Come with me.” He reached for his underpants. “Don’t worry. Nobody’s home.” They went out naked into the hallway. He had his hands over his groin. She remembers how she spread her arms out and danced a little jig or whatever. “Where are we going?” She opened the door to her parents bedroom. “Excuse the mess.” It wasn’t just a bedroom. It was sort of an office too. Nobody except some rich newcomers building houses up in the hills had very big homes around here. Her father had made the little downstairs bathroom into a darkroom. But this was where he kept all his photographs. And he was never very neat about them. “I don’t like this,” said Andy. He was looking at her parents bed. It wasn’t made, as usual. This gave her a dirty idea, but one look at Andy and she kept it to herself. “What are we doing here anyway?” “I told you. Looking for a picture.” There were photos everywhere but she couldn’t find the one she was looking for. She was beginning to think maybe her father kept that one in a special place since it had won a prize. And maybe he did. She never found it. She stopped looking when she found real pictures of her hair. Not a glass of wine. Her hair. Her head. Her neck. Her shoulders. Her breasts. Her back. Her ass. Her knees. Her thighs. Her pussy. Her feet. Her fing
ers on a penis. Her fingers on penises. In the midst of her despair she couldn’t help wondering whose penis was whose. She didn’t recognize a single one of them. Except Andy’s, and that was because her mouth was over half of it, so it had to be his. All she knew was her own hand. Touching them, holding them, grabbing them, stroking them. They were all so familiar when she was with them, watching them as they grew and shrank and shivered and shot. She would have sworn she would never forget a single one of them. That they were burned forever into her memory. But except for Andy’s, she didn’t know whose was whose. She couldn’t connect a single boy with his own dick. She couldn’t connect herself with a single boy. What had she done, she wondered. What was sex if everyone you had sex with remained a stranger? “Is that the picture?” Andy was upon her. “Yes,” she said. There was her hair, spread out on some boy’s stomach while his dick rose before her face like a traffic light. All she saw were her eyes. They bore into that dick as if she would never want to forget this moment as long as she lived. “This is sick!” Andy threw the picture down and picked up another one. “This is sick!” She watched him watching her as the photos passed before his eyes. She wanted to say I don’t know who any of these people are, but she realized that made it even worse. “Who took these?” he said. Then he looked at where she’d found them. “Your parents use these to get off.” “No!” she screamed. To this day she won’t believe that. To this day all she knows is that her father took them. Andy dragged her back to her room and almost tore the place apart and found the cameras. “Let’s fuck for them.” He was angry. He threw her on the bed. But she was closed up, dried up, dead. He didn’t force himself on her. When his dick shrank he hid it from the cameras and got dressed. “See you,” he said. But he never did again. Carla Belzidas packed up all the photographs of herself she could find. That was her message to her parents: Look, I have found myself. Look, I have disappeared. She knew they could never try to find her, because if they did, she would show the photographs and their shame would become public. Besides, she likes those photographs. She keeps them right here in her diary.