Red Audrey and the Roping

by Jill Malone

  “Can you speak?” he asked.

  I couldn’t. I couldn’t even fucking breathe. Plotting desperately for some retaliatory kung fu master reversal of his death hold and coming up blank, I focused on not suffocating against the leather.

  “Enough with the kicking. OK?”

  I groaned in assent.

  “We’re going to watch the movie and you’re going to behave. OK?”

  I drooled onto the couch. He lifted off me, and I lay still, checking my reflexes for paralysis.

  “Jesus, dude, you fractured my fucking neck.”

  “Watch the movie.”

  I pushed into a crouching position and massaged my neck, shrugging my shoulders backward and forward, an old boxer. My pulse as rapid in my throat and temple as hummingbird wings, I tried to catch my breath without gasping.

  “Jesus.”

  “Watch the movie.”

  He started the film again, his attention immediately absorbed as Tracy and Mike ran out of frame for a moonlit swim. I felt nauseous and a little dizzy.

  He watched the screen as if he weren’t aware of me, though I was staring at him as defiantly as a child. His face and neck were flushed from exertion, but his breathing was normal. I had an impulse to pummel him senseless, batter his Hippie Gap Model features until I had to pull teeth from my knuckles. High on my impulse, I hurled into him, driving my knees into his gut as our heads slammed together and we both pitched off the couch onto the carpet.

  Now I really couldn’t breathe. Sucking air into the pinprick of my esophagus, I tried to focus my eyes on the wood grooves in the ceiling (did that wood knot really look like a leopard?) until the pounding in my head (was that my heart or my brain?) ceased. I’d found a quick fix to the fuse of my anger: self-slaughter. The plush carpet beneath me not quite plush enough, I was a rapidly deflating balloon.

  “Fuck,” Grey groaned.

  He’d propped himself against the couch, both arms wrapped around his stomach, his head resting on his knees.

  “Jesus, Janie.”

  Taking deep breaths like a diver, I finally rasped: “Sorry. Ten years ago when all this started, I was just kidding around.”

  “You don’t get enough of this from Emily?”

  “Enough of what?”

  “A beating.”

  I was too tired to attempt a diversionary reply or even to explore his question further. Did I get enough of a beating from Emily? I let the whole scene go and settled my breathing instead. But my brain kept sneaking the question in, palming it carefully like a Rubik’s Cube: why beating? Why had he chosen such a word? To ask these questions of oneself is to violate all rules, and I had trouble enough: Rule 1 had broken; Grey knew.

  Rule 2: Live present tense.

  Affairs do not exist in future tense. We, someday, promise, together are abstractions—vague and unsteady—not to be applied to affairs, and you must keep alert despite happiness, sexual fulfillment, emotional connection and compatibility because all pleasure is momentary. You must live like a puppy.

  Present tense frees you as well from your past. Lovers deserted, places fled, the self you shed like a pair of jeans have no context here. You are a new self, a present self, a self without history or complication, existing in the simple light of your own presentation. Do not complicate present tense by telling lies—you never went to medical school or worked for the Peace Corps—you withhold the past and stall the future to exist in the now with the lover you desire beyond all reason, temptation, or sacrifice. This is present tense.

  So I don’t tell about the dentist from Belfast whose family wanted so much to love me, or the years I submerged myself in her skin with every intention of adapting to the conditions. I don’t tell about Rita from Chicago with her red, red hair and the black boots that reached her knees. How her mouth was perfectly shaped, the bottom lip with its single devastating freckle. Their hair in my hands, their bodies as different as stories and how they sculpted me even as the men did—how many times have I been reconstructed?

  I don’t tell Emily about my mother’s orange Camaro because that daughter is not this girl with her tongue testing the resolve of a bellyring. These hands on the broad, speckled shoulders, brushing back her soft hair, resting in the pool of her collarbones, these hands belong to a different girl entirely. And I sift my fingertips across the scar beside Emily’s eye to remind myself that she is delicate, that the story of her hipbones is in my throat like the memory of flavor—that spring in seventh grade when I first tasted honeysuckle—that to exist in present tense I must be a girl without a suicide mother because this woman who has not yet said our affair will never be anything more will say that our affair will never be anything more and when she does, I don’t want to leave more of myself than I take.

  Of course, this ties directly into Rule 3: Confessions are landmines.

  You see why this is, of course; if you have to retrace your steps, you might be blown to pieces. And so the most dangerous moments often follow the most blissful: lying in bed in the cool of the pre-dawn with the sheets wrapped like a python around your lover and her face tender with an expression akin to love, you must be vigilant—wary as her fingertips linger on your belly, her mouth brushing your lips.

  As I climbed back into bed, the candle on the end table cast ghoulish shapes against the walls. Emily lay propped on two pillows, her hair in a brown tangle around her neck and shoulders, her brown eyes less intense in the near dark though no less cautious. I lay my head on her belly, just above the silver ring with the blue knob; her fingers ran softly through my hair, coaxing me toward hypnosis. A frog croaked outside.

  “How were midterms?” she asked.

  “They went well. My students all scored above eighty-four percent; Dr. Adams was pleased.”

  “I thought about you in class today—imagined you in front of a group of glossy-eyed kids, chanting incantations like a witch. I’ll bet you blush when you teach. You do, don’t you? You’re so excitable.”

  “Am I?”

  “Yes, like a kid. Do any of them have a crush on you?”

  There was a girl, Judy Suzuki, a petite slender girl with shoulder-length black hair and puffy bangs, who stopped by my office a couple of times a week to chat about the translations and vocabulary lists. She had a habit of pulling her chair very close to mine and touching my shoulder like an exclamation point while we looked over whichever assignment she’d questioned. Lately, I’d developed an anxiety about being alone with her.

  “They’re too preoccupied to have crushes.”

  “Bullshit. I had a couple of serious crushes when I was at U.H., especially the German professors. I had a German professor for Greek History who would get so excited during class that he’d start writing his notes on the board in Greek and German instead of English. He had this huge white beard with no mustache and was tall and thick … absolutely beautiful man.”

  “You sleep with any of your professors?”

  “One. I thought it would be transcendent—seriously, that’s what I was expecting. But I was really bored.”

  She started laughing, remembering, evidently, how bored she’d been. I was distinctly aware that we were no longer in present tense.

  “Did you ever sleep with any of your professors?”

  “Yes.”

  Her fingers stopped brushing my hair.

  “Male or female?”

  I’d slept with two of my professors: a shaggy-haired poet who wore tweed jackets and carried a leather briefcase, was pompous, extremely funny, and wrote some of the most beautiful odes I’d ever read. The second professor was an actor.

  “Male.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “That’s all you have to say?”

  I stared at the candle shapes instead of answering. Confidences were no good here in the desert, where a mirage transformed easily into the oasis I wanted so desperately.

  “What do you miss about Ireland?”

  A girl who read
aloud to me in the evenings, flawlessly, as though she’d spent the day rehearsing: the caesura just so, the dialogue exact and clear, the descriptions fluid. How the stories took shape in the air between us—all those worlds we wandered through—her voice a rope I bound myself to. Or the train, commuting from Belfast to Dublin five days a week for three years: I’d memorized the hum of each station; the reliability of town after town and the sea; the passengers one came to recognize and the lives I invented for each of them. Or the pubs with their jovial madness—always the fiddle, drum, and flute—the old people who knew a thousand stories, a million songs, and still drank Guinness though all the kids downed Budweiser (and more’s the pity of it).

  “The pubs.”

  She hit me with one of the pillows.

  “Liar. You’re such a liar. You vanished just now, remembering what you loved.”

  “Glorious redheads.”

  Another pillow.

  “I’d say that’s more likely.”

  I think I underestimated Emily then. I mistook her quietness for wary distance, but she might have been responding to my own terror. She might have been trying to love me. On the bed that night, she shifted so that she could look into my face, her wide eyes like wells that I wanted to drink from. She smirked at me.

  “One of these days, I’m actually going to learn something about you. I hope I survive the shock.”

  Sessions with Dr. Mya: Day 3

  Dr. Mya expelled me from our morning session, remarking that I’d wasted enough of her time for one day. She’d been questioning me about where I grew up, and my earliest memory from childhood. What that had to do with my fucking coma, she wouldn’t say, although she’d speculated my past probably had more to do with my present than I could fathom. When she said I needed to find a path back into my memory, and plunged into some diatribe about childhood guilt, I became belligerent and unreasonable; anyway, that’s how Dr. Mya characterized my position. I don’t remember the point I was trying to make, but I know it was valid.

  These headaches are ruining me. I get anxious over nothing. This morning, I couldn’t get my blanket to cover my foot and I just freaked out, ranting and raging like a nasty little kid. I want Audrey to find me. I want her to sense that something has happened and seek me.

  My appetite is back. I’m craving something spicy to burn through my sinuses, something like the curried dinner Audrey prepared for the Montana dykes their first night in Honolulu.

  That evening, Audrey took another sip of wine and continued shredding the coconut. She’d been cooking for hours, meticulously preparing couscous, pitas, spicy tofu curry, and hummus. I’d set the table and done most of the household chores—including dusting, which I abhorred—and finally joined her for a glass of wine. Her three art buddies from grad school had flown in from Missoula earlier that day for a fortnight’s vacation. They’d taken off for the beach, but were expected back within the hour.

  “Should I jump in the shower?” I asked.

  Audrey glanced at me and nodded. Her face glowed from working at the stove and her shirt was spattered with some greenish substance. I’d never met any of her school friends before. I took a long drink of wine.

  “You should hurry,” she said.

  I showered quickly but stood, staring into my bag, trying to figure out what the hell I should wear in front of these Montana dykes. Khaki slacks seemed so pretentious and oddly formal—yes, I teach Latin, have I mentioned that? Surf shorts seemed too casual, too obvious.

  “Babe? What are you doing in there?”

  I grabbed my black tank top and threw on a pair of khaki shorts, furious with myself for letting what I wore matter to me. Audrey glanced at me when I returned to the kitchen, but she didn’t say anything.

  “What?”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “So say something.”

  “I can see the burns.”

  I looked at my wrists. The burn scars were still obvious, ridged and white like some bizarre tribal bracelet. I’d become comfortable enough lately to go topless around the house, but certainly guests deserved better than to be exposed to my scars. I carried the bowls of tangerines, raisins, shredded coconut, and peanuts to the table.

  “You want me to change into a long-sleeved shirt?”

  “Do what you want.”

  “Fine, I’ll change.”

  Instead, the front door opened and the three of them swarmed into the room—one, a short spiky-haired girl with a paunch and stunningly white teeth was already bright pink from the first afternoon—laughing loudly. They each kissed Audrey in greeting, smiled at me, and asked how they could help.

  “It’s finished. You guys, sit. Jane, will you bring another bottle of wine to the table?”

  I brought the wine and sat between the spiky-haired girl and her partner, a thin, tall chick that didn’t wear makeup or need to—her face flawlessly crafted and her recessed brown eyes expressive and quick. Hopelessly, I tried to smooth my hair. The third chick, one of Audrey’s ex-girlfriends, was petite and competent-looking with shoulder-length black hair and a silver ring on each finger. Her name was Fiona. The other two were Gloria and Glenn, but I hadn’t yet figured out which was which.

  “So, Jane, you surf?” Fiona asked, after we’d finished loading our plates.

  “Yeah, I longboard.”

  “Any chance you’d be into taking a newbie out sometime this week?”

  “Sure. I’ll take you out. We could do Queens tomorrow if you like: surf’s probably about four feet or so this time of year. Just you?”

  I hoped my question didn’t sound as anxious as I was. I looked at the other two. Spiky-hair smiled at me and asked if I had boards for all of them.

  “I’ll call Grey and between the two of us, there’ll be plenty of boards and instructors, too.”

  “Gloria, your face is totally fried,” Audrey said. “Didn’t you guys bring sunscreen?”

  Glenn and Fiona started laughing. Spiky-hair glared at them.

  “I fell asleep on the beach with my hat covering my face and someone thought it would be hilarious to remove my hat. No one’s telling who it was.”

  My money was on Fiona. They spent the next hour charting who was dating whom, who had split from whom, and how each split had reverberated through Missoula’s gay community. In an effort not to exclude me, they’d give an abridged history of any couple before detailing the drama:

  “So Sammy and Trace—Sammy’s brother is gay and they used his sperm to impregnate Sammy’s girlfriend, Trace—have this kid right, and she’s such a beautiful baby—blond, silly, a complete sweetheart—and what does Sammy do? She starts having an affair with this ski instructor from Wallace. It was so evil. Trace confronted her about it—I mean, people had seen them together—and Sammy actually denied it. Unreal. Trace finally threw her out, so now she’s got to deal with raising the kid by herself.”

  I ate and listened, and wondered at the idea of a community where you had no private life. Apparently, everyone knew everything that happened to everyone else. It sounded like some Orwellian nightmare to me. As much as possible, I tried to obscure my wrists from view. I envisioned the three of them returning to Missoula with tales of Audrey’s freaky scarred girlfriend.

  Into our fourth bottle of wine, we’d moved to the couches and I lit a couple of candles around the room. Seated next to me on the couch, Glenn asked how long I’d been with Audrey. Was it months now, or years?

  “I don’t know, awhile.”

  “She was so hot at school. She was the chick everyone wanted. It’s funny because she was always too driven for a relationship then. Yeah, even Fiona. That was just an affair. She seems really settled with you, though. It’s amazing how different she is.”

  I looked at Audrey—laughing at some undoubtedly witty thing Fiona had said—her white T-shirt still stained pea green on the belly, her hair disheveled, the curls random and puffy. Her face red with wine and excitement, she appeared quite different from the pixie
I’d first met. Had she settled? She smiled at me then as if she’d heard the question, but denied to answer.

  These girls all seemed so comfortable in themselves and with each other. I felt my tagline streaming across my forehead: orphan, professor, bisexual, masochist, coward. Why did I seek out Nick? What perversion in me hunted the perversion in him?

  The first time he’d tied such a bad knot, my wrists kept slipping loose and we’d both started laughing—the whole situation chalked as another meaningless failure. I don’t know how it got away from us: how it mutated into something monstrous. I didn’t blame him. Not entirely.

  Audrey crossed to our couch and leaned against me. I rubbed the small of her back, until her head collapsed against my chest. Mumbling drowsily, she said she’d have to be carried to bed. Why had Audrey chosen me?

  On the floor in the corner, Gloria had fallen asleep, the pink of her face illuminated by candlelight. I shuffled Audrey to bed, then returned to give the girls some extra pillows. They spread their sleeping bags on the floor and blew the candles. From the hallway, I watched Glenn tuck Gloria into her bag.

  God is half altar, my mother had written, half say. Was Nick my orange Camaro, or my first razor? Audrey couldn’t settle for me. I wouldn’t let her. When I left, how much would I keep? Her crooked grinning sarcasm, that tough character she wore effortlessly like broken jeans, her small, calloused hands. Hadn’t the feel of her name in my mouth changed me?

  I’d expected Audrey to be asleep when I crawled into bed, but her hand slid along my thigh, pulling me on top of her. Her mouth tasted tangy and acidic. I lifted off her shirt, sifted my fingertips down her sternum, and rolled her to trace her spine. She shivered as I continued down her thigh, brushing my nails against her skin as if to name her. As if to etch into her the end as I saw it. We both knew I was never gentle.