I have a nap. After the nap, I look for more videos. Find more Belladonna. Jerk off. Turn off the computer. Think of Bride, turn on the computer, find more Belladonna.
I keep looking at the phone, both when it’s silent and when it rings, but when it rings it’s always the wrong number – it’s business, Mark, Jason, telemarketers.
Two more days follow. I jerk off until my dick starts to feel raw. I come up with many excuses for her not calling, invent justifications like an insecure girl: She got really scared of her strong emotions. She has abandonment issues and doesn’t want to get hurt.
My guess is that she’s playing a game, a similar game to mine, where she’s feigning disinterest to make me curious. And she’s better at this game than I am, even though she has no way of knowing that, because in the state I’m in right now, there’s no way she could lose.
27
DAY FIVE: I’M GOING TO SEEK HER OUT. SHE HAS WON.
I show up at the smoothie shack right before it closes. The shack is busy: hordes of girls sucking on straws, chattering, slapping their flip-flops against the concrete tiles, $isi’s latest hit blasting on the speakers. Some of the girls are bald; my hands tingle at these false sightings.
She is not behind the counter.
I wait in line, consciously tuning out the conversations around me. The line stalls as usual – some temporary catastrophe has befallen the juicer – then there is a miraculous resurrection and the line coughs and moves forward again.
The ginger-haired boy behind the counter has no idea who Bride is. When I say her name, I realize how dumb of me it was to not ask Bride to see her ID or something to confirm that was indeed her name.
“I don’t know any Bride,” he says. “You sure she works here?”
“Yes.”
“And that’s the chick’s name? Like bride, like she’s married?”
“Never mind,” I tell him and grab my acai smoothie and push through the cloud of coconut, sun and sweat to surface outside.
I untie Dog and start walking.
I’ve no idea where I’m going, but as soon as I come across a poster of $isi with a guitar, I stop. The poster announces An impromptu appearance! $isi’s Acoustic Beach Tour.
Now I recall all the unanswered calls and two emails from Mark letting me know about $isi doing a small spontaneous tour. I recall making a note to reply but not replying.
On the poster, $isi is pictured wearing a white blouse, no makeup. I look closely. The blouse seems see-through but you can’t make out the nipples. Her head is smooth like an egg. She’s holding a guitar, which makes me wonder if Mark has finally invested in some guitar lessons for her as he always promised. Good for her if he did.
Did she pick this particular beach town because she knows this is where my beach house is? Is this a masochistic manifestation of her leftover attraction to me? I wonder if she’ll try to contact me, if she will hang up, if I’ll be forced to hang up, if we’ll end up not hanging up but talking. All three options are bad.
A tiny claw inside my throat squeezes then lets go. I take a few deep breaths and tell myself to calm down. I calm down.
***
When I get to the small stage under a huge white tent, there are people already gathering around even though the concert is not supposed to start for a while. There are security guys everywhere, already. I walk around the white tent to see if I can spot her trailer, but I get stopped by a man as big as a gorilla.
Back in the tent, a tall wooden stool and a mike are set up on the stage. I watch as $isi comes out from behind a white parting in the tent, with a guitar. Her sudden appearance is so shocking that my body doesn’t even react to it – no anxiety, no time for it. She sits on the stool and starts plinking away, tuning.
The girls erupt in screams but quickly quiet down. Everyone starts taking pictures with their phones. The security guys form a line in front of the stage, but the girls don’t even try to force through. I walk toward the stage. I’m shoved and pushed by hordes of girls rushing from all over the beach.
“She’s so real. She’s like real-real,” a lispy blond says to a non-Bride Ribbonhead beside me.
“I follow her on Twitter. She posts hilarious photos. Like the dog that’s on the cover of Vogue,” says the non-Bride. “Dogue.”
“She really connects with the fans,” I overhear another girl say.
I think about the $isi I used to know, a girl who despised her fans and had to drink a gallon of vodka to be able to come out on stage. Dogue. A dog on the cover of Vogue. I chuckle to myself.
I can hear $isi clearly from where I stand. Her voice does sound much better than the last time I heard her. When singing, $isi can be playful, and even flirty at times, but she can do wronged like no other. Except this time, the wronged is more resigned; she sounds at ease with what she’s singing about. Her real-life experience has finally lined up with things she’s singing about: real heartbreak and real pain and some melancholic happiness in there too. There’s a new trace of hoarseness to her voice that I guess is the result of her smoky, drinky past, maybe even chemo or radiation. All of that – the way she sings, the way her voice is now – hints at maturity, enough of it to make you believe in what she’s singing about.
Right now, she’s singing about her surprising lover, which must be about Mark. Possibly about some kind of rape-play they’ve got going on. Maybe he likes to wear a clown suit to bed. Who knows? In any case, if it’s about Mark, I’ve no doubt that she’s surprised – anybody would be to find herself having sex with him. I have no evidence that they’re sleeping together. I am unsuccessful in making myself chuckle this time.
I’m glad to see $isi looking so healthy and sounding this good. I’ve no taste for folky music, which is what this whole thing is verging on (minus the shoes – she’s still wearing ridiculously high stilettos), but it works. I suppose I’m happy for her.
I wait till the song is over and then walk back on the beach. At night, the beach is even louder, all lit up with phone screens like fireflies in its darker corners, but mostly lit up from all the bars – so light it doesn’t matter that the sun is long gone. It’s still hot, only a few degrees cooler.
I see Bride. Even though she’s too far away and she’s as bald as dozens of other young women here, I recognize the walk, the gentle sway of the hips and the graceful half-bounce of her tall, boyish silhouette.
I shout, “Hey,” suddenly unsure about calling her by the fake name she’s given me. What a ridiculous thing, that name.
She comes closer, squints. “Hey.”
“How are you?”
“I’m great. How are you?”
“Great. I was wondering what happened to you.”
“What do you mean?” She tilts her head.
“I never heard from you.”
“Oh.”
“Well, no big deal. I had a crazy week.”
“Yeah. Well, it was nice to run into you,” she says and turns around and starts walking away.
“Hey,” I shout.
She turns around. “Yes?”
“What’s this about?”
“What’s what about?”
I say as lightheartedly as I can, “Nothing. I’m just glad to have run into you. Have a good night. Take care,” and I turn around.
I walk, half expecting to hear footsteps behind me, but when none follow, I decide that I will need to find a new girl tomorrow. This one is a glitch.
There’s a roller-coaster drop in my chest.
***
When I get to the beach house, I try to watch television. I flip through the channels like it’s my job. I can’t seem to find anything boring enough to get stuck on. I get up. I turn on my computer and look for clips with Belladonna. I jerk off.
I try to watch television again.
Next, I sit outside with Dog on the front steps, listening to the distant sounds of the beach, partying. The fresh air doesn’t help.
I go back to bed. I lie in bed for what s
eems like hours, trying not to think.
I get up to look in the trash to find the novel about the girl with leukemia. I have no other ways of putting myself to sleep.
***
Bride comes by in the middle of the night. I open the door to her quiet knocking and scratches. She slinks into my hallway and waits for me to invite her farther inside. It’s dark on the main floor except for the moonlight coming through the skylight.
I gesture for her to come closer and she does. She is silver, reflecting the moonlight coming through the skylight. We move softly, neither of us talking, and as we kiss, we do it quietly, without any sloppiness or panting.
28
THERE’S NO SINGLE DETAIL THAT I’M ABLE TO FOCUS ON. I want it all. The way her upper lip curls up even when she’s not smiling – like mine. The way her eyebrows are thick, dark slashes above those eyes. How her irises expand (coming below me, above me, next to me), how her eyes narrow, making me want to know what has upset her, where she has gone in her mind. (I don’t ask. Asking means losing control. But I want to ask.) Onward: her large nose, jutting forward; I like it. Her chin. The small dimple in it – why is even this negative space demanding I not look away? I can’t look away.
The freckles. Scattered gold that forms into a pattern but not a pattern at all; there’s too many of them.
Her belly, elastic and long; the pubic bone; the severely trimmed puff of curls; her pussy a wet, warm spot mapped out in pinkness and a tint of purple. Her pussy’s clicking softness.
Her feet with tendons fanning out as she walks, like strings of an instrument.
We stay in bed for a long time. I ask what her real name is. She says it’s Bride. She asks what my problem is.
“Bride?”
“Yes, Guy. Bride.”
I don’t ask again. I’ve lost enough control already. We talk. She talks. She talks about her love of films, especially the iconic violent blockbusters: Taxi Driver, Pulp Fiction, Natural Born Killers, Kalifornia, A History of Violence. She talks about the breakthrough scenes, the characters that made her feel invincible when she’d picture herself shooting a gun, destroying her enemies.
She says, “‘All the animals come out at night – whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets. I go all over. I take people to the Bronx, Brooklyn, I take ’em to Harlem. I don’t care. Don’t make no difference to me. It does to some. Some won’t even take spooks. Don’t make no difference to me.’ Taxi Driver. De Niro.”
She’s good. I don’t know too much about acting, but she’s scary accurate, the accent perfectly New York, voice low and dry-mouthed, cheeks half-full of bagel. A little bit like the characters in The Sopranos.
“You’re funny.”
She says, “It was even worse when I was little because I would watch old Bruce Lee movies and think I could do karate. I’d go out and try to start fights with kids in the neighbourhood. They thought I was nuts. They would run away when they saw me coming.” She stretches, arms reaching for an invisible star above her, her breasts flat, the tiny nipples. “Mmmhmm, what else? Oh, I braided my hair like Princess Leia, even though I thought she was kind of lame except for the blasters, I guess. My dad was a huge Star Wars fan.”
I picture her, a slight child with big, serious eyes, the hair wrapped around her ears like wheels of silk. And her dad – her young-enough-to-like-Star Wars dad. What kind of dad is he? A dude in shorts with a long beard. Maybe he even owns a skateboard.
She tells me more about her past. It’s not a particularly fascinating childhood, but it sounds fascinating when she talks about it. She scrunches her forehead and puffs out her cheeks. She talks with her hands, shaping invisible contours of emotions accompanying stories about mundane events: friends’ breakups, a class trip where everyone got drunk, writing an essay about books on brainwashing – 1984, A Clockwork Orange – and winning an essay contest with said essay.
I reach for her hand without thinking, just wanting to touch her. She pulls her hand back. I strain to laugh; can’t.
She talks about the small town where she grew up. Similar to the place I grew up except hers was poorer, a single-mom kind of place, a beat-up-sled-and-drunk-Santa-in-the-rainy-November-Santa-Claus-parade kind of place. A shut-down mall on the outskirts of town and a meth problem in a trailer park nearby. Four high schools, all four attended by Bride at some point because she had trouble with girls bullying her over her weird name and her childhood antics – the karate moves, the Star Wars hair. Her reputation followed her wherever she went – the reputation of having been bullied, of being the crazy kid – and she had to keep on moving.
“Then I just gave in and became crazy,” she laughs.
She graduated and moved to a larger city to study, but then a close friend had a serious accident. Bride dropped out of school. She’s not sure why – she wanted out and looked for any reason to justify it. So she told herself she quit out of solidarity and to take care of her friend. She won’t say if it’s a guy friend or a girl friend, but I guess from the tone of her voice that it was a guy. Was it drugs? Was she romantically involved with a junkie?
She rolls her eyes, “Good one.”
She looks familiar for a moment, like someone I dreamt of. It’s not the first time she looks familiar. Maybe a girl I knew back when I was a kid. Not someone I slept with. Maybe the familiarity is just because we are becoming familiar.
I say, “Are you planning to go back?”
“Just a minor setback. I never planned to drop out for good. Just needed a break, I guess. Now that I’ve got some things figured out, I’m going back for sure.”
“What are you going to be studying?” I ask her breasts, her perfect tiny breasts, a lick of a curve.
She moves my head when I start kissing her belly. “Film,” she says and pushes my head farther away from her body. I stop kissing her.
I’ve been fucking her for what seems like days now. We talk and we fuck. We sleep. Mostly we fuck and we talk. I can’t get enough of either, and I’m able to stay interested to the point of not wanting a break from her.
There’s no faltering, not even a whiff of that ghastly breath of boredom. This is no guarantee that it won’t happen – boredom has sneaky ways of making itself present. Right now, everything is so intense I feel like some shamanist maniac from India or Nigeria, dancing in flames, but I know there will be no warning when I’ll suddenly wonder what is this for? “Is that all there is?” Yet for now, I do my best to not think about all that. Gloria would be proud of me: It actually feels as if I’m living in the now.
So I pay attention to my now, listen to everything Bride says, fulfill every wish (ice cream in bed, pull her hair, two fingers in her pussy instead of three, etcetera). She doesn’t ask questions. In her mind, she must imagine herself an alpha girl, and I let her be one. I let her be the girl she imagines she is.
She talks about books she loves – non-fiction books about serial killers – similar to what Dolores was into – and what she plans to do for the rest of the summer.
“It’s a secret project,” she says.
“You don’t want to tell me?” I’m aware of the fact that asking betrays me again, betrays my desperation.
“Not yet.”
“Should I be worried?”
“Why?”
“Given your interest in serial killers,” I tell her belly button.
She says, “I can’t hear you. What about you? What’s your thing this summer?”
“You, actually,” I answer truthfully.
“What?” She lifts my chin.
“You,” I say. “You’re my big project.”
“How so?”
“I want you to fall in love with me.”
“And then what?”
“And then I’ll leave you and never speak to you again,” I say, truthfully.
“Ha ha ha.”
“You like that?”
&nb
sp; “It’s cute. Good luck with that.”
“What? You don’t fall in love?”
“I don’t know. I think I was born with that part of me missing. It’s just never happened for me.”
“I’d like to be the first then,” I say, and I lick her shoulder. She tastes of sun. I’m giving away my plan but that’s part of the plan.
There is no plan, actually.
“You can try. You’re welcome to try.”
“You’re adorable,” I tell her and bend down to stick my tongue in her belly button again, decide this was enough of a break.
***
“I guess I want to be with someone who’s not boring,” she says the next time we talk in bed. A whole day and night has passed with breaks for meals and naps and a few short walks with Dog.
“Sure, me too.”
“Is that why you see a lot of girls?”
“What makes you think that?”
“The letter. From the girl. Dolores? And you told me about $isi. And the woman who’s been calling you all day today. Gloria?”
“I thought you were sleeping.”
“I was.”
I like that she’s jealous, but part of me is alarmed by how happy it makes me that she might be jealous. A point for me but two points for her because there’s no ease in this satisfaction; I shouldn’t care, shouldn’t even notice – or I should notice, but it shouldn’t matter.
“You’re not jealous, are you?”
“No. Maybe. But that’s natural.” She yawns. “Just biology. I’m feeling territorial because we’re screwing.”
“Territorial,” I say.
“Yeah. Why are you biting on my neck when we fuck? Territorial. You’re marking your territory.”
I pull her hand and kiss her on the inside of her wrist, the delicate web of pretty veins. I’ve abandoned my usual formulas with this girl. I’m going all in. I’m waiting for some kind of opportunity to infiltrate her more. But I’m making mistakes: I’m asking too many questions, and I want to hear her answers, and she knows I want to.
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