In the first scene, a woman was lying on a couch in a silk nightie. There was a knock on the door. She opened it. It was the TV repairman. Within twenty seconds, the two of them were in a clump on the couch, jerking around. Griffin, the brother to my right, had his hand in his pants at this point, and I whacked him on the side of the head. The tussle that ensued, with the three of us clamped onto one another, arms flailing like some crazy octopus, me scratching and biting the twins and they spitting into my face and head-butting me, attracted an usher, who led us out fast, cursing. I came away from that incident with a bloody nose, and the certainty that you had to get to the point fast in dirty movies. And Kat sure did that. Her alter ego, Kitty, didn’t waste a second. No sooner did she arrive at the ornate country mansion than she was feeling up the parlor maid and pressing up against her hostess.
At first, I thought I was reading the manuscript behind Kat’s back. But I think she must have noticed that it changed location, because after that first time, she made sure she left it in a neat pile right by my bed. Every morning during breakfast, she would look at me and wink. Poor Aunt Trish. I don’t know how much she knew about Kat. Yet how could she not have known? There was Kat’s obscene friend Shelly, the ‘actress,’ who, despite being ‘based in San Francisco,’ was in and out of the apartment every few weeks; there was the hypersexy, slightly spastic way Kat moved and spoke – not to mention what she was writing … Well, I guess the thing was, Trish loved Kat, and she wanted to believe she was loved in return.
That morning, as I knelt under the table, sweeping up the crumbs from under her seat, Kat contemplated me silently for a long time. And then finally she said, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ I sat back on my haunches, looked up at her, and shrugged.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘what are you good at?’ The thought of Mr Brown closing his eyes at the beach, astonishment on his face as I touched him slowly and deliberately, came into my mind.
‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘You have to have some kind of talent.’
I shrugged. ‘Not everybody has talent.’
‘People who don’t have talent are usually nice,’ said Kat. ‘Are you nice?’
I saw Suky, slumped on the side of Trish’s couch as though she had been shot. I shook my head.
‘Well then, you’d better have talent,’ said Kat.
‘What are you on my case for?’ I asked.
‘I believe in you, kid,’ she said. And then she went into the bathroom to turn herself into someone’s secretary. When she came back, she pretended to have an idea on the spot. She needed some dirty pictures to illustrate her novel. She wanted me to be her Kitty. I thought about it for a few seconds. ‘I’ll pay you, too, if the book gets published.’
‘Okay,’ I said.
Getting naked was the easy part. It was the outfits I balked at. Kat had been hoarding them in the closet of her office in a big, cardboard box marked ‘Kitchen Supplies.’ There were riding breeches with the crotch cut out, a stewardess dress with snap-on boob covers, a rubber cat suit. It was absurd. I couldn’t stop laughing. Especially since Suky had basically been doing this to me since infancy: I was dressed up as Mae West at three, Jayne Mansfield at seven. Suky kept all my dress-up duds in a wooden box we called the ‘fun box.’ Even now that Suky has left me – having politely, obligingly, and without fuss stopped breathing one foggy evening – even now I believe those bizarre and slightly creepy albums are stored somewhere in Chester’s basement. The pages may be disintegrating, eaten out by the acid in the cheap paper, but if you were to open one of those leatherette volumes, you would be surprised to find not pictures of four boys and a girl, a healthy, happy family of the local pastor, but the likeness of only one child, a blonde, sloe-eyed girl in a skimpy dress and feather boa, staring the camera down. Pippa at one, at two, at three and five, at seven to fourteen, her expressions moving, as the years went by, from innocent cheer to a knowing, sullen stare, and finally to full-fledged hatred. So, I was a natural. Kat couldn’t believe it. I had no shyness at all in front of the camera. I looked at it as if it were a person I knew and didn’t like. That’s what she said, anyway. She said it was ‘pure Kitty.’ Kitty, she explained, was every woman’s wild side. She was fearless.
‘Don’t you wish you were fearless?’ she asked as she reloaded her battered Canon.
‘I guess so,’ I said.
‘You act hard, but you’re a marshmallow. If you were fearless you wouldn’t cry every time you hang up the phone after talking to your mother. You would forget the past. You would look ahead.’
‘Is that what you do?’
‘Oh, baby. I’m the girl from Pluto. I’m the scary thing.’
‘How did you ever get hooked up with Aunt Trish?’
‘I know, right? But she loves me. She’s my Momma. Not everything has to make sense, Chicklet.’
The next morning she came bouncing out of the bathroom in her sweats, shadowboxing. No work today; she’d called in sick. The doorbell rang. Shelly burst in, her naturally amplified voice bouncing around her spacious rib cage. She let out a Texan ‘Whoop!’ then started pawing through Aunt Trish’s record collection, derisively holding up a Carole King album.
‘Don’t even bother,’ said Kat, producing a cardboard box from under the electric piano. ‘Check mine out.’ They put on ‘Knock on Wood’ and danced to Otis Redding singing ‘I better knock – on wood, yeah …’ Shelly’s dance was obscene, her thick pelvis thrusting forward again and again, an ugly frown on her face, her arms in the air, big, hard breasts stretching her sweater. ‘Let’s get this show on the road!’ she bellowed. Kat oozed to the downbeat, her eyes hooded, glazed, private. She touched my wrist very lightly, drawing me in. I began to move to the music, aware, somehow, of turning my back on good Aunt Trish and entering a poisonous, glimmering circle. I felt a sharp, defiant joy at my recklessness.
Shelly had been cast in the part of Mrs Washington, the wealthy woman whom Kitty seduces in her country mansion. So this session was going to involve a certain amount of reenactment. In a trance of creativity, wearing a new, self-important face, Kat placed the lights, chose the costumes, set the scene: I am dressed in a pair of large white girls’ underwear, a pointy black bra, and high-heeled, black fetish shoes. I am stealing Mrs Washington’s pearls. Mrs Washington walks in, dressed in her riding clothes. She looks imperious. Infuriated by my crime, she decides I am in need of a beating. This was a still photo we were posing for, yet Kat directed us as though it were a scene in a film. Shelly got herself so worked up when she discovered me that she actually wept with rage. Kat was over the moon about her performance.
But now, having so utterly nailed this preamble, our director was confounded by a technical dilemma: when Mrs Washington gave me my lashes, how were we to make the scene seem real without hurting me? Kat suggested that Shelly grab the rubber paddle conveniently stowed on the mantelpiece and bring it down to just above the skin of my buttocks, so it looked like she was spanking me. Shelly tried, but her aim was off, you might say. She brought the thing down so hard I let out a yelp. A little red welt rose up on my butt; I craned my neck to see it. At first, Kat rushed toward me, to see if I was hurt. But something in my astonished expression must have told her I was feeling all right. ‘Shall we try that again?’ she asked quietly. I nodded.
So we took a little detour from illustrating Kat’s book. At first, I couldn’t believe it was happening. I mean, don’t get me wrong; if I cut my finger, I say ‘ow,’ like everyone else. But there was something about the circumstances here, the setup, the elaborate way I was tied to the table or the bed or the radiator. The pain was different from stubbing my toe. If it went on long enough, if I was spanked or whipped or slapped long enough, my skin went cold and tingling, I was able to bust through the pain, leaving the reality of the moment, into another place where I couldn’t really see anything in focus. The feeling I had there was serene, silent, empty, euphoric. My Feeling reminds me of the happiest born-
agains, ones I’ve seen on TV, when their eyes roll back in their heads and they raise their arms, out of their minds on bliss. This particular ecstasy was limited to those few weeks with Kat and Shelly. I have never been able to pass through pain that way again. Or haven’t allowed myself to.
Fever
Here’s the thing we didn’t think of: one afternoon, Aunt Trish came home from work with a fever. She turned the key in the lock, heard Gladys Knight blasting out of her bedroom, hurried in, and found me manacled to the bed with the skirt of a pink crinoline gown over my head, being slapped by Shelly as Kat photographed us, shouting, ‘Great! Do that again. Freeze. Okay! Beautiful!’ Aunt Trish was standing there, pale, shivering, and horrified, when I turned and saw her.
I moved out that afternoon, while Aunt Trish was sleeping off her flu, having called the police and watched the woman she loved flee her apartment. I couldn’t bear to be there when she woke up; I was too ashamed.
The only person I knew in New York, aside from Aunt Trish, was Jim, the diabetic with the missing toe. His apartment was in a Brooklyn basement with a sizable garden. He stayed there rent free, because his old friend Roy, a drug dealer in his fifties, kept some of his supply stashed in Jim’s broom closet and various other locations in the apartment. Jim also sold drugs for Roy on occasion. Kat had taken me to his place a few times. Jim always doled out shortbread cookies and black coffee, then handed Kat a brown paper bag as she was leaving. This sideline, along with disability checks for his diabetes, enabled Jim to live the life of an artist and man-about-town. Though well below the poverty line, he always had a bit of cash on hand, and he welcomed me to his modest home like a visiting queen.
I had the sense, as I dropped my duffel bag on Jim’s shiny floor painted the color of pomegranates, that I was slipping off the edge of what I had known the world to be and floating in dangerous space. Aunt Trish had been family. Jim was unknown territory, a new life. Suky would go crazy if she knew. My excitement was liberally spiked with guilt. I would call her soon. I would. But for now, I sat at Jim’s kitchen table, sipping strong coffee brewed on a paint-spattered double burner and eating a piece of buttery shortbread. The hot coffee melted the sweet, rich cookie in my mouth. I looked out the glass of his back door, into his tiny garden, walled off by a fence of old painted doors.
Everything in the little apartment had been considered in some way, was either lovely or bizarre or instructive. The shelves were packed with books about everything from cave painting to rocket design: Nuns’ Habits Through the Ages. The Art of Holograms Revealed. I spent hours that first afternoon flipping through books, learning about painters, mostly, from Piero della Francesca to Bonnard, Manet to Pollock. Jim’s work was stacked neatly, facing the wall. Shyly, he turned a piece around to show me. It was a collage made up of countless shreds of paper, movie tickets, newspaper clippings, warning labels, which all cohered to make a landscape. It was obsessively constructed, but the composition reminded me of the paint-by-numbers sets I used to work on when I was a kid. Until I found the little figures hidden in the rocks or the shrubbery – incongruous beer maids peeled off of beer bottles, the man on the Mr Clean bottle, a naked calendar girl. Jim would Xerox the images and shrink them, so they looked like evil elves lurking in a pleasant countryside constructed out of refuse.
Jim rarely sold his work, he had no gallery, but he was ferociously dedicated. He would wake late – eleven or twelve – then perform his elaborate toilette, which included applying a light coat of Elizabeth Arden foundation makeup to his sallow skin and covering his thinning pate with black shoe polish. Only then did he begin to work, sorting through the bins of scrap paper, bits of rag, string, hair – anything to make his landscapes thrum with color and texture. In lieu of rent, I was sent out some mornings to look for material, and I would root around in the garbage, on the street, in magazine racks, for the perfect scarlet, the most acid cerulean.
At three in the afternoon, I went to work. I had found another restaurant, down the street, to hone my serving skills in. When I got off, at nine, Jim was just hitting his stride. I marveled at his ability to work all day, stop to make some inventive pasta dish for the two of us, then go back to his labors for another six or seven hours, finally smoking a joint and hitting the sack at dawn. He would do this for days at a time, then take a few days off and sleep. He was surprised the first night I came home from work bone tired, stood by him as he fitted a torn corner of salmon pink tissue paper onto the rectangle of board on the table, and said, ‘Can I have some?’
‘Have some what?’ he asked.
‘Speed.’ He looked up at me, surprised but smiling. ‘How do you know?’
‘That’s the one I know about,’ I said.
‘How old are you now?’ he asked, crinkling his forehead.
‘Seventeen.’
‘Did you graduate from high school yet?’
‘That’s what I want it for. The test is next Thursday. I have to study.’
‘You can have a little,’ he said. ‘But don’t overdo it. By Thursday you’ll be insane.’ So he gave me a round, white pill that he kept in a misshapen ceramic pinch pot on a shelf next to the sea salt. I swallowed it. The speed hit me hard, like the smell of ammonia. Everything in the room snapped into extreme focus; it all seemed extra clean, and bright. I hadn’t felt so awake, so cheerful, so filled with purpose since the day I swallowed ten of Suky’s finest back in junior high. ‘One thing you can’t do,’ Jim said, ‘is start talking. You start talking on this stuff, you never stop.’ I retreated to my makeshift bedroom – a daybed blocked from the rest of the room by a swath of old pink silk – and read two entire books, one on history, one on math. Hitherto ungraspable concepts glided into my mind like melted butter into pancake batter.
I emerged from my lair to tell Jim how incredibly smart I had become, he said something in response, and we were off. We talked for six hours straight, said things so perceptive and profound that it amazed us no one in the history of the world had yet come up with them. Jim even took notes, our ideas were so brilliant. Finally, we crashed. When we woke, hours later, to read the scrawled notes he had written during our jam session, and found that they contained pearls of wisdom such as ‘flounder are bottom-feeders, hence should never be eaten with carrots or other vegetables which grow underground or you are liable to develop depressions, NUTRITION IS EVERYTHING,’ I was dumbfounded, but Jim just nodded his head with a rueful smile. When I opened the history and math books that I had wolfed down, I recognized next to nothing, except what I had already gone over the old-fashioned, nondrug-induced way, so I went back to my old method of studying. I passed the high school equivalency test.
Surprisingly, Jim had a girlfriend: a Swedish woman named Olla. She was around forty, an artist, very kind to Jim, and she didn’t seem to mind me hanging around. We would go out sometimes, the three of us, to museums or movies. Jim and Olla taught me about painting, the history of it and the point of it. I came to recognize different periods, different artists. I went to the galleries and even started forming my own opinions about the new art.
Jim had reminded me how harmless he was so many times that I figured sex was not a part of his life anymore. He would lounge around the apartment with his socks off, feet up. The smooth gap left by his missing pinkie toe made him seem curiously unreal, like an imperfect doll. But Olla was always kissing him, making much of him, and guiding him gently into his bedroom for an hour or so at a time while I sat in the garden, or did the dishes, or went out on a walk. I liked Olla, and I was determined to seem as nonthreatening as possible. After Mr Brown and Aunt Trish, I didn’t want to wreck anyone’s life, and I didn’t want to end up on the street, either.
Crash
I still don’t know the reason for what happened next. I don’t understand it. I mean, I was doing relatively well. I had a job, a place to live, friends, I had finished school.
It started with a normal dose of speed one night. We were all going out dancing: me, Jim, Oll
a, and a bunch of their friends, hard-core bohemians in their forties, missing the occasional tooth. I hardly ever went out anywhere, so it was a big night for me; I didn’t want to drag around exhausted from work. I danced all night, and in the morning I just couldn’t bear the idea of going to bed and waking up with my head raw and jangled, my thoughts morose. So I swallowed some more, to keep up the happiness. Jim didn’t know. He wasn’t counting his stash. I went to work high and slapped those plates of eggs Florentine and Belgian waffles onto the tables so quick that whipped cream and hollandaise sauce spattered all over my arms. A few customers needed sponging down, but at least they got fast service.
That night, I decided to go out on my own and see what happened. Before I left, I got up on my tiptoes and reached into the clumsy clay speed pot like a kid filching M&M’s. By now I had been levitating for forty-eight hours. I was starting to feel omnipotent. I took the 2 Train into Manhattan with no idea of where I was going, jumped out of my seat at Fourteenth Street. Hot air laced with feces swirled around the platform as I hurried out of the train. There was a sound in my head, a high, metallic whistle. My movements were fluid, precise, like those of a perfect machine. My mind felt spotless, sterilized, my thoughts gleamed like stainless steel. The people and cars around me, by contrast, were pulsing in a staggered, irregular pattern, freezing one moment, then oozing by in slow motion the next, as though time had become as elastic as toffee. A gleaming scenario played and replayed itself in my head with razorlike precision; I was going to find that pregnant girl with the flaxen hair who was holding on to her own leash, the one I had seen the time I came to the club with Kat and Shelly, and I was going to save her life. I would track her down in her filthy squat and swoop in like a commando, excise her from her perverted existence, buy her a square meal, take her home to Olla and Jim. We would all live together, the five of us, a family. Her child would be fair, with violet eyes and a saintly disposition.
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee Page 11