Kamikaze Lust (13 page)

A cup of coffee teetered in between my thighs on the couch. Moted stripes of sun beamed through half-open blinds, double-exposing bars over my apartment like an illusive cage.

“I forgot to tell you, Alexis thinks I’m bisexual,” I teased, the way only the telephone would allow. As if through the wires I had less at stake and could break through the hazy poles she’d erected between us. Alleviate the rejection I was feeling.

Shade laughed. “Bisexual?”

“Yup. But she says I’m probably man-primary. Apparently there’s man-primary or woman-primary, she says it’s about your emotional allegiances.”

“What a visionary.”

“Okay, forget it,” I said.

“I’m sorry, it’s just not that simple,” Shade’s voice cracked, and for one second, I thought she might be as frightened as I was. “You have no idea,” she said. “Women will tear your heart out.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“Exactly, you’re killing me.”

“Is that why you’re afraid to come near me? You froze up yesterday when I kissed you hello. On the cheek.”

“For a smart girl, you’re awfully dense.”

“You say you’re old enough to be my mother, you’ve got responsibilities.” Those last words made me wince. Who was I to talk? My own “catch” quotient was down: no steady job, recently broke off an engagement, never been with a woman before. But Shade wasn’t exactly stable.

“I can take you to a lesbian bar if you want,” she said.

“I don’t pick up men in bars, I’m not going to do it with women.”

“Never let it be said I wasn’t encouraging of your experimentation.” “I don’t want an experiment, I want…”

“What? What is it you want?” she said, and I felt muzzled. I was valiant in my mind, I want to kiss you again, idiot. Instead I said, “You’re driving me crazy.”

“Then we’re even.”

“So now what?”

“Don’t ask me,” she sighed. “We crossed a line, anywhere we go it’s trouble.”

“Stop saying that. Why do you always say that?”

“Because I know. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go and get drunk before I remember I don’t have anything else to do this afternoon.”

I hung up feeling cast off. Jealous, too. Shade had become part of the strike, or at least one of the core journalists who’d been hanging around The Corral. Who knew the people she’d been cavorting with? The Tina Macadams of the world. Serves me right for abandoning my colleagues to shuttle back and forth between Alexis Calyx and Aunt Lorraine. I was on the outskirts; a journalist among journalists.

I walked to the sink determined to wash the few days worth of dirty dishes. Warm water trickled between my fingers. I remembered Shade’s lips on my neck, her breath angling toward my ear. My hands found each other in between a few suds and I rubbed them together, slowly, feeling each finger the way Shade had touched them the other night. Pretending to be loved through my fingers. Hot water scalded my hands, my arms. The pounding in my chest expanded to my throat. I shut off the tap before picking up a single dish. I sat down on the couch, hiked my knees up next to me, thinking of Shade at home, maybe sipping from a 64-ounce Pepsi bottle or opening a can of tuna fish, careful not to let the oil drip between her fingers. Save those fingers for my touch. My lips. My tongue. I wanted her to bite me so hard she left teenage marks, then skim her tongue along the insides of my thighs until I screamed. My left nipple peaked through my T-shirt, sending adjectives rolling: hard, swollen, aching, empty.

I tore off the shirt and squeezed my breasts with both hands. As if I could wring my longing from them. My desire for a face so familiar I could barely remember it. I kicked my sweats to the floor and stepped in front of the full-length mirror, mindful of the savage glow in my eyes and Shade’s voice:
You kiss good, Slivowitz.

Naked, I pressed my palms against the mirror, its cool surface steaming at my touch. I gyrated my hips in a circle, swinging left and right like the Israeli dancers on public access TV. Whose body was this? Reeling in the rhythm of these hips… come swing with me and be my love…I caught a quick shadow of myself and had to fight another voice:
Look at you, the fat on your stomach jiggling, those awful asymmetrical nipples, that pubic sprawl on your thighs…who would want to touch you?

Not Shade, not anyone; not even me.

I backed up into my dresser and scavenged my underwear drawer. Looking for a shield, a veil: the cover-up, please. I found the one black lace and silky bra I owned, a pair of shiny black underpants, and put them on along with my new platform boots that zipped up the inner calf, just like the ones Alexis wore. Prancing back and forth, I felt the power of my heels crush against the hard wood floor, the sweep of hair on my back.

Sexy as a character from an Alexis Calyx film, she was. The moment belonged to Silver Ray as she arched her back aware of the angle that kept her stomach taut for the camera. Her hand slipped into the swatch of satin between her legs. “My cunt is so wet!” she said.

And I laughed out loud at the ridiculous appeal of the words. Porno talk was generic, black letters on white packaging: napkins, soap, cereal, cunt. All object, no presentation. A wet cunt was what it was no matter how it got there. Last night it had been another Alexis Calyx video; today it was all me, or maybe Silver Ray, but it was for myself, or maybe for Shade, because she’d started it somehow, before everything became cloudy, except for my body in front of me.

I was a porn star in my mirror, here with my black bra and dirty words and thoughts of Shade holding me as I let myself go. The muscles in my legs contracted, my lips shook, and I closed my eyes to the breathing and moaning and screaming…
fuck me, make me come, oh yes!

Generics. But they worked.

I lay on my mock-Oriental rug pondering another shower, my second today. I was breathing heavily, my throat parched and muscles jellied as if I’d been training all morning to run the New York City marathon, and I felt isolated. Lonesome in the quiet time, I got to my usual wondering about the philosophical nature of orgasms. If you come and nobody’s there, did you come at all? And what if you could only come alone? Was the rest of it all rehearsal? The prelude to a life of solipsistic romance?

Not that I ever had any answers, but the questions themselves seemed less important than ever. There must be a joke about the journalist who stopped asking questions. I couldn’t remember, I was too busy trying to forget.

Here is a truism I learned the very next day:

Nothing but nothing restores a girl’s memory quicker than being with her family. With them, I was transported back to the turbulent climes of childhood, at speeds faster and more far-reaching than the Concord, which after all only goes two places. I’d moved to Miami to escape this proximity to my youth. “You’ll come back, girls always do,” Aunt Lorraine had said, and even then, green-eager at twenty-three years old, I knew she was right. Like Israel, we Slivowitzes clung to visions of eternal return.

I came back to Bay Ridge that November morning after spending more than an hour on the telephone with Mom the night before, trying to explain that yes, it was necessary for Dr. Milford P. Kaminsky to come to the house to see Aunt Lorraine and no, I hadn’t intentionally planned for him to come on the day she’d set aside to start preparing Thanksgiving dinner. The holiday was a week away.

Yet, the moment I saw Hyman Hogan’s Cadillac in front of the house and heard him scrambling to greet me at the door, I knew I was in for a difficult visit. Mom had summoned her protector. Who would help me? Our argument had distracted me so, I hadn’t realized how afraid I was of this meeting with the good Doctor Suicide. I shivered, partially from the autumn wind, but also remembering the last time I’d seen Kaminsky. How I’d broken down like a cry baby. The girlie-girl running from her brothers.

Hyman Hogan yanked open the front door and, eyes twinkling, said: “Hey, Ray!”

“Hi, Hy!” I smiled and walked past him. Immediately, I noticed the hard-back chair rigged to a metal conveyor belt and attached to the banister of the staircase. The straps hanging from it made it look like an electric chair. I felt those straps tighten inside me, clamping my stomach.

Hy grabbed me by the elbow. “Glad you’re here, Ray. Here, here, give me your coat, you can try out the chair. Rowdy had to be first already, but he scraped his hand against the wall, the moron. We got it from the magazine, the one doctors use. You should see what they got in there, it’s unreal…what, what’s the matter?”

My face must have betrayed the sickness I experienced upon viewing this anachronistic contraption, which reminded me of the movie
What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?
starring Joan Crawford and Bette Davis and seemed eerily apropos given the dynamics inside this Brooklyn brownstone. If I didn’t know Hy, if I hadn’t been aware of the benign spirit behind his thinning white hair and basset-hound face, I would have thought the chair a sick joke. As it was I just felt queasy.

Hy explained that he was always nervous watching Rowdy walk Aunt Lorraine up and down the stairs, so he thought the chair might ease her transport. “Go ahead, try it,” he said. “Don’t be scared, this thing could hold an elephant.”

“Uh…maybe later,” I demurred, saying I really should see Aunt Lorraine.

“She’s asleep, been down for about an hour,” he said. Our eyes met, and I knew he was about to offer an opinion. He had many opinions, most at odds with my own. I braced myself. “Say, Ray, it ain’t right with this doctor. Lorraine’s got goo-goo eyes from that lousy death movie. Why’d you do it?”

“I didn’t do anything,” I sighed, running my hand through my hair to cover my watery eyes, my unsteady chin. This man was not a member of our immediate family, he would not be allowed entry into Aunt Lorraine’s hospital room should there be an emergency, and here he was ordering Baby Jane chairs and blaming me because Aunt Lorraine wanted to see Kaminsky. Mom had her old man brainwashed against me.

“The man’s a bellyaching crackpot, a—”

“Look, I’m just doing what she wants, what she asked.” My tone was as harsh as it had ever been with Hyman Hogan, and I feared becoming even more antagonistic. We stared at each other, adversaries in a war without words. I thought I smelled my breath mingling with his, breeding a new stench between us. If I tried to swallow I was afraid I might choke on it. Regurgitate the anger I was nursing.

“I guess it’s nobody’s fault really, just a tragedy all around,” Hy said, shaking his head, though not exactly in contrition. It was more like the temporary stave of a good salesman. Before his son had taken over the family business, Hy had done his share of selling. Costume jewelry and plastic flowers. He’d been an ornamentalist.

“Mamma’s in the kitchen, if you want to see her,” he said.

I left him fiddling with the chair and went inside. Mom stood next to the kitchen sink. She was wearing her flowery satin housecoat, and her face was made up perfectly: blue shading beneath painted eyebrows, precise red lines on her lips, accent on the beauty mark above the left side of her mouth. I never understood the pains she took with her makeup when she had no intention of changing out of her bathrobe.

I kissed her powdered cheek and sat down at the kitchen table. We didn’t talk, didn’t have much to say without rekindling last night’s argument, and I’d made a vow on the way out not to fight with her. She was breathing loudly, as usual, although her face looked almost serene, like a mother on television. I still kept a close watch on the knife she used to chop pecans for her Thanksgiving cranberry mold. It had always amazed me that my mother knew how to cook, a skill I was careful not to adopt by way of rebellion.

Mom was talking about the guy across the street who’d sold his brownstone to a family of Indians from India. I tuned out, letting my attention wander from the dingy cabinets to the sickly irises next to an old transistor radio on the windowsill. Was there anything new in this house? Mom called the Indians dot-heads. I didn’t respond, just let the soft swish of the knife lull me into deep space.

“Rachel, stop it!” she screamed. I jumped up in my seat. Apparently I’d been shoving my fingernails into the gap between the formica tabletop and its metal siding. Not my fault the glue wasn’t holding, again.

“Sorry,” I said.

“You’ll break the table yet,” she said coolly, then turned back to her cutting. “Now, you’re bringing the bread, right?”

“Bread?”

“Why do I bother…Thanksgiving? I’m saying it because last year the bread was a little stale, so if I were you I’d go somewhere else.” She went on about the bread as if where I bought it would decide the entire fate of the holiday. The quickening chop of her knife was beginning to scare me. “Of course, I’m doing this all myself, nobody’s coming in here helping me. You might try and help you know.”

“I’ll help you, I always do.” I felt my pulse loosening a bit. “We have a whole week.”

“I know, but I have to make sure everything’s in place before I leave.”

“Leave?”

“For Bermuda,” she said as if I should have known.

“Bermuda?” I moved in closer to the cut and swish of her knife. “When are you going to Bermuda, why are you going to Bermuda?”