Fresh Girls & Other Stories (4 page)

          S
he has put her fist through the window of her apartment. As she pulls her arm back, along with half the window, the shards slice across her wrist and the palm of her hand, simple as a knife slicing through uncooked white chicken meat. The blood begins to fill the gash to the brim, spilling over, as she looks down at her hand with detachment. The sound of glass falling fills her ears with wind chimes, the sound of glass spinning in the blue night. Ballerinas of glass cling to her wrist; she plucks them out, lets them fall to the floor.

She walks to the bathroom and holds the cut hand under the tap, filling the sink with diluted blood. She smiles to herself — she always smiles when she feels
broken and ground up, with nothing left except a diamond in her chest. A diamond that nobody can pluck out and possess. A diamond beautiful like herself. She knows she is beautiful, because the sure, sharp mirror tells her so.

I see someone in the mirror, though, who is not beautiful, and that is why she hates me. I am the part of her she wants to kill. She has tried before, but what she doesn’t know is that if it wasn’t for me she would have died long ago. I won’t let her die; even if she doesn’t like me, I won’t. Maybe that is why she hates me so much. I’m the one who holds her together, and how can I help it if I see bloodshot eyes and the pores of her skin when she bends over the mirror?

The blood mingles in the water in the sink, in sluggish streaks. The water becomes the color of roses. She can hear the glass falling in her apartment; her attention has always been held by bright and flashing things, and she is awed at having created the scattering glass with its private, special orchestra. She loves anything prismatic, fake or real. Chandelier droplets. Diamonds. Treasure buried in white lines… . She wraps her hand in a towel, watching the blue material become tie-dyed with splotches of red. She walks back to the living room and sees the window, an open mouth in the night, dripping glass.

I wish she would pick up the phone and call someone. I want to help her, but she will do whatever she wants to, as she always has. She needs stitches, but although the cut — so clean and deep — was painless, she is terrified of blind needles probing the depth of the wound. That she is never afraid of anything unusual, but will flee from the ordinary, is a remarkable contradiction. She is all contradictions, her need and her dependency warmly sloshing inside her, and on the surface the frozen lake for others to skate on. I know all this. I don’t know why she can’t hear my voice. I’m the only one who can love her unconditionally, but she persists in looking outwards.

She stands, holding her hand, near the waterfall of glass. She wants to be with someone brilliant and crazy and artistic like herself. As she thinks this, a smile leaps around her mouth and she spins, dodging the glass that flies into the room. It winks at her lethally from the carpet. She bends over and picks up a piece, stroking it carefully with her finger; it has a sharp, sexy, dangerous curve to it.

Do you see why I am worried about her? Her hand has stopped bleeding, but I don’t like the way she acts in times like this, when the white lines seem to tighten their weave around her, when, with her eyes closed, she sees a razor busily cutting, chopping, dividing. But the lines are
not the problem; the problem is that she is like a newborn baby who will die without touch. Only my arms can enfold her body, and sometimes, strangely, I want her all to myself. I want it to be just me and her, forever. Like diamonds. Forever. I could rescue her each time from her madness. I could catch the fragments of her and hold them together when she falls and cracks open. Whenever she spins like this, dizzily, I could press each star of her close and protect her.

She stands static, thinking of Allan as the flakes of glass hum in the background. The last time they had been together, she had lain there looking up at him with so much trust in her eyes. He had looked back down at her without smiling, without tenderness, in the 3:00
a.m.
dimness. She had seen embarrassment and anger in his face as he thrust himself in and out of her deliberately, one of her white legs stretched up like an arching swan’s neck onto his shoulder. Perhaps that trust had frozen him because he could not meet it. Perhaps he could not admire her for this. Perhaps he too only craved things beyond his reach and despised her for giving herself to him. But how else could she have done it? He never phoned, though from the first night he had said he loved her, would have married her if … if she wasn’t so needy? If she didn’t pull at him quite so much, trying to take hold of just a corner of him to pull down into her
blackness? Allan called himself a marketer of mirages. His phone began ringing every morning at 5:00 with stock-market representatives from New York; he sauntered whistling to his sports car to drive to company meetings. On the evenings when he came to pick her up, jazz on the radio, the web of stars jailed her and she reeled, spinning apart from the speed. Those nights when he buried his head between her thighs for hours, arduous, relentless, she had always felt as if he was trying to take her to some place where she did not belong. Maybe he was searching for the diamond inside her? That was why although in her mind and behind her shut eyes she was looming larger and larger, threatening to branch out, transcend her body, she stayed intact, with her nails digging into the hands on her belly. Their nights grew progressively silent until they never talked anymore; he busily digging with his tongue, she fighting the commands of her body.

No, she could not whirl seductively on the edge of his world. I see that, I see how impossible it all was, and how she had to phone him then, late at night when the white lines had faded and she would speed in a dark cab across the city, looking at the lights colorful and cold. It disturbs me that she was always in such bad shape when she arrived, was always pulling and dragging at his corners. They could have loved each other, measured out
equal amounts of light and dark for each other, if she hadn’t been on the verge of what she thought was death. If maybe, just once, she had not called him and made herself ugly by whispering
I need you.
Because, though he is the one person who could live with her level of pain, he didn’t choose to. I don’t think he was contemptuous of her, exactly. It was only that once, just once, he would have liked to see her real smile, not the crazy butterflies that flitted around her mouth. He would have enjoyed that, I think. They could have built something together then, from that one smile.

But she stands now at the jaws of the window, her hand clothed in tie-dyed cotton, listening to the radiant music of falling glass. She pictures Allan in his penthouse bed, with the mountains melting outside the window, the city gathered together and pooled beneath the balcony. The wind is blowing into his apartment, over the crystal ball on his desk, over the bamboo plants, over the waterbed. He is settling under the rose-colored comforter, grateful for the silent phone, the stars floating past the breathing green bamboo, past the pulsating crystal, settling around the mountains.

She stands there, holding her own hand, empty of pain. She watches the glass swoop from the window onto the pavement below, sprawling like dancers in lewd but beautiful positions on the sidewalk. And I hold
her hand and tell her that it is better this way, that I am the only one she has, the only one who can keep her safe. She nods, and the diamond glitters in a lump in her chest, intact, and I take her hand and guide her away from the music, down a line of soft white glass.

          T
he club is black-painted, underground. Sabina hears the rattle of the chains before she reaches the end of the narrow corridor. The clunk of boot heels on the floor, the creak of tight leather pants. Justine walks slightly ahead, her body sharp and as purposeful as an arrow. When Justine’s jacket swings open, Sabina sees her friend’s familiar breasts exposed, the squarish nipples sticking out like antennae from her chest.

The bartender is naked, but his piercings give him the appearance of being dressed, thin crescents of gold and silver jutting from different points in his body. Justine orders soda, Sabina a vodka on ice. Together they make a
quick tour of the club, squeezing between knots of people wearing smooth black leather or bare skin, many glittering with studs and rings. Several men have hoods fitted over their heads, resting like mantles on their shoulders. An Oriental woman stands against the wall, a latex sheath outlining her curves, plucking with a red fingernail at the juncture where stocking and garter belt meet. A blonde wearing a cocktail dress and a loop of gold and diamonds around her neck is being strapped stomach-down to a table, ropes and cuffs materializing to curl around her waist, wrists, ankles. A slave hangs his head by the doorway, a spattering of tiny bulbs blinking around his crotch, his girlfriend pressing the button in a small box tucked into the rear of his underwear.

Over by the piano, Sabina notices a man watching her steadily, with his hands clasped in front of him. He lowers his eyes when she returns the gaze but does not move otherwise, as though chained to the spot. She decides to ignore him for now, moving to the lounge area where there are paintings on the wall she can’t quite make out in the dark, but they seem to be landscapes: men in bulky sweaters walking dogs near cliffs, waves crashing against rocks and spraying the sky. She chooses a plush, high-backed chair, and Justine clambers onto the arm, resting one foot on the seat and dangling the other leg. Stroking Sabina’s hair with one hand, she
points out the key players with her cigarette in the other — the internationally known male dom, the female pain freak who was runner-up in several tattoo contests, the transsexual centerfold model. In the dark the model’s eyes are a wet washed-out blue, wide and heavily lashed above the cheekbones where the skin is stretched tight enough to break.

Sabina sets her drink on a wooden table beside her. The glass is sweating from the melting ice and the heat of the bodies in the room. The club is full, each person taking up extra space with the accoutrements they wear, the collars protruding with nails and screws, the paddles and whips hanging from belts looped around their hips. Across from her, two girls barely out of their teens are huddled together on a corner of a couch. One is wearing a headband that tugs all her hair off her forehead, making her appear even younger and more vulnerable. They say nothing to each other, but watch with the nervous, insatiable gaze of voyeurs. No one in the club approaches them.

The whipping has been going on for some time. A man is stretched out unrestrained on a table, gripping a piece of leather between his hands. He is naked except for underwear and a leather collar and bracelet. Another man, wearing a fluffy shoulder-length wig and lipstick,
his body tightly laced in garter belt and a merry widow, is circling him expertly, flicking at his legs and the slope of his back with whips of various sizes. After half an hour of warm-up he is dancing around his lover, his arm rising and falling with tireless strength, blows hailing upon the man’s body. As the flogging crescendoes, Justine scrambles closer to Sabina until she is almost sitting on her lap, the soda forgotten in her hand. Sabina curls her arm under her friend’s jacket and presses her breast comfortingly. The man on the table has already taken more pain than anyone she has seen, but it is a while yet before he begins to bite on the leather strap in his hands, like a woman giving birth. Shouts escape his lips, and he turns his face towards Sabina. His eyes are black and tortured and he is staring straight at her. It seems for a moment as if he is trying to draw strength from her face, which she keeps impassive. His eyes hold hers as his lover whips him with all the strength in his arm in the now utterly silent club, his eyes tell her not to blink or breathe, not to disturb the spell. Only when he ducks his head down again to clamp his teeth on the strap does Sabina’s heart start beating again, hurtfully, as if she is being pounded repeatedly from inside her chest. The whipping must stop but it doesn’t stop, the people standing around in their elaborate costumes no longer seem threatening, their chains hang limply by their chaps, one
or two women are stepping forward to tell the man he is whipping the same spot repeatedly, he mustn’t do that, he’s hurting him too badly, and still the whip descends on breaking flesh and the walls and the ceiling are ringing with its sound. The man on the table is finally crying, his whole body rising and falling with his sobs as if his body was a white-and-pink wave of raw flesh.

Long after any tolerable ending, the beating stops. His wigged lover, breathing hard, tugs the strap tenderly out from between his fingers and helps him off the table. The man staggers and almost falls, and the two make their way supporting each other through the crowd. People clear a wide path for them, and the silence takes a long time to form again into conversation. People cough and clear their throats, testing their voices as if using them for the first time. In a corner, before they disappear through a doorway, the man in the wig kisses his bleeding lover, and Sabina hears for a moment their soft, commiserating laughter.

The man who has been watching Sabina all evening is suddenly, magically, on his hands and knees in front of her. She looks at Justine and shrugs; her friend grins and moves into another chair, tucking her knees up to her naked chest, drawing on her cigarette. The man kisses the floor around Sabina’s feet, and when she crosses her
legs he cautiously moves towards her dangling shoe. His face reminds her of a storm cloud — soft brown curls, bushy eyebrows, large turbulent eyes, and a bow mouth in a round face. Reaching between his legs her hand collides with the pendulum of his penis, cloaked in rich, supple leather. Without being asked, he draws a whip from the belt around his waist the way a soldier might unsheathe a sword, surrendering it to her, and she begins to step around him in the first stages of the tormentor’s dance, the music familiar and dependable, the whack of leather against skin, the small unchecked cries of pain.

Sabina’s slave is circling the club now, as he has been ordered to do, his ass raised high and his forehead bent to the ground. He is alternately barking and howling. People make room for him, glancing at Sabina curiously, smiling now that the tension from the man’s whipping on the table has been replaced by a more playful mood. A girl with cropped hair and rings piercing the skin of her temples, nose and neck asks to borrow the slave for a ride, and when Sabina assents she climbs nimbly onto his back and digs the heels of her ankle boots into his side, yipping, her small neat body arched in pleasure. Occasionally she reaches behind her to strike his rump with a leather strap. When the slave returns, head bent,
to Sabina’s side, the girl dismounts him and thanks her, returning him with a bow and a flourish of her hand.

Fetish Night is almost over. Lights blink on in different parts of the club, exposing white faces and garish makeup on the women and some of the men. Sabina heads for the bathroom, which is a modern, unfriendly cavern of mirrors and polished cement. She and Justine leave through lit passageways, brushing against the other club-goers who appear startled in their states of transition, many carrying changes of clothing draped in rustling bags over their arms.

Outside, taxis line the block. People emerge from the change room at the rear of the club, unrecognizable in shirts and slacks, jeans, pantyhose and trench coats. The sky is lit by street lamps and a light, cold rain has begun to fall, sticking in the air like snow. Justine waves at a taxi, digging her other hand into her tight leather pants for warmth. Someone touches Sabina hesitantly on the arm and she turns to find her slave with his eyes lowered, handing her a folded piece of paper. She opens it to find his phone number, but when she turns to say good-bye he has already disappeared, down the block or into a cab, or back into the shadows between the broken, shuttered buildings in the neighborhood. As she
slides into the waiting cab, Justine points out the man who had been whipped on the table. Sabina would not have known it was him, otherwise. He is fully dressed and walking with an easy, swinging gait down the street, his denim-clad, de-wigged lover beside him. As they round the corner she notices they are almost the same height, their shoulders bumping gently as they disappear from sight.