Kamikaze Lust (26 page)

That I understood. She needed it to be real as much as I needed to prove it to her. So we held each other, fighting the same soporific divide that now had me watching her back, dueling with my weary eyelids, slipping back into the black hole of morning.

The ringing telephone jostled me. I’d fallen asleep again… shit! At least Shade hadn’t left, I could feel her stirring next to me. She reached her hand back and I squeezed it. The voice of Alexis Calyx flooded in between us: “Rachel, I must speak to you immediately. I’m a bit disconcerted about the situation you’ve created.”

Shade turned over, leaned against her elbow. We looked at each other and immediately knew what Alexis was talking about. “Guess we’re not the only ones who missed the play,” Shade said.

“I cannot have reporters calling my home,” Alexis continued. I was about to pick up, when Shade grabbed my wrist. “We don’t know what anything says yet, we need the paper, the information.”

She got up and stood at the edge of my bed. Alexis hung up. I stared at Shade who was smiling a half-mocked,
You bad girl, Slivowitz.
I’d apologized a lot last night while we were talking on the couch, but still couldn’t scrape the embarrassment from my skin.

Shade went into the bathroom, leaving the door open behind her. She turned on the shower. I drifted back to sleep imagining her, then woke to her footsteps. She was wrapped in a towel, her body scented with lemon soap, her mouth tasting of toothpaste. “Do not even tell me you used my toothbrush,” I said.

Story #27—the guilty child routine. Was I supposed to reprimand her? Put her over my knee? I was the guilty one, the bad kid. This reversal made me a little uncomfortable. “I warned you, baby, no half-assed shit,” she said, obviously pleased that she’d spent the night in my bed. She kissed me fiercely, then, rubbing her hands together like a fruit fly, stood in front of my closet. “Now…your clothes.”

We suited her up in a pair of hiking boots, faded jeans, and a ribbed turtleneck, which I pulled over her bare shoulders and smoothed down at her waist. Before sending her out on the newspaper run, I kissed each of her nipples for good luck. The wool tickled my lips.

I took a quick shower and erased Alexis’ message from my answering machine. I was tense, but energized, feeling groovy enough to switch my stereo from public radio to hardcore disco. Moving to the rhythm of the boogie, the beat, I straightened the magazines, videocassettes, and remote control units on the coffee table, swept the tiles around the kitchenette, wiped down the counter, swished a little bleach around the toilet bowl. Cleanliness demanded urgency now that somebody was looking.

I’d just finished the Cinderella routine when Shade came barreling in. She dropped a few plastic bags. A bagel broke free and rolled along the floor.

“You lost your bagel.”

“Oh, just you wait.” She shed my snorkel jacket, dropped it on the couch, and paced, flipping through the paper for Gerri Michner’s column. I lowered the music, sat down on a kitchen stool. “Okay, I hope you’re ready,” she said and started reading. “Despite an angry despondence among reporters gathered at the Mark Tannon benefit last night, one reporter on strike had a confession to make: ‘I happen to have work,’ said Rachel Silver, a midlevel reporter—”

“Midlevel, what the fuck is that?”

“That’s nothing…midlevel, covering the courts, blah, blah…‘I’m ghostwriting the autobiography of Alexis Calyx, the feminist pornographer,’ Silver said. ‘Like Alexis, I believe women have a right to pleasure, that women can like porn, too.’ Silver’s colleagues, as well, were shocked by her new employment. ‘I had no idea she was working for a porn star,’ said former city desk reporter Tony Dibenedetto. Arts reporter Teesha Marie Simpson, also on strike, had no comment.”

My heart sank hearing Shade read her own name. We exchanged a quick glance, and she read on, a comment by one of the union leaders about how I was collecting strike pay and therefore should have reported
any
outside employment, “particularly something that might compromise the moral standards of the union.” Next came the off-the-hook statement, that a spokesperson from Zipless Pictures would neither confirm nor deny whether Alexis had officially hired a ghostwriter, although Gerri Michner did manage to dig up a lackey who admitted to seeing me hanging around the set asking questions. “People are always passing through,” said the employee who wouldn’t give his name. “You never ask who anybody is because you don’t want to offend the next big star or someone who might be throwing money our way, that kind of thing.”

I tugged at my mousse-hardened hair. “We’re almost through,” Shade said, and read the grand finale, how whether or not I was officially on the Calyx payroll, I was certainly towing the pro-porn line. “You want to talk about morality here,” I said, apparently. “Look around you, these people are all so self-serving, just like the anti-porn women.”

I jumped up from the counter. “Did I say that? I couldn’t have said that, it’s totally out of context.”

“Well, sort of.”

“She’s saying I called everyone there anti-pornography.”

“No, she’s saying you called everyone self-serving. You only called
her
anti-pornography.”

“Not the way she said it.” I turned my head away, close to tears. Shade grabbed my flailing arms by the biceps.

“Baby, I’m sorry,” she said, the fear in her eyes summoning last night. As from a scratchy newsreel, the images rolled forward: Gerri Michner’s face, how badly I’d wanted to show her up, trumpet my Silver Ray liberation as if it were a badge of honor. My jaw shook, and I felt as if a marble had lodged in my throat. The phone rang. Shade and I shrieked, jumped backwards. “Good morning, you lovely loose cannon,” began Jason’s message.

“Oh god,” I said. “I am such an idiot.”

“Don’t worry,” Shade said and lifted the telephone, Jason’s voice sailing through the speaker a few seconds before she shut off the sound and ringer. Watching as she fit the phone underneath my bed, I was thankful Gerri Michner had left Shade out of it, that the fears about her reputation had not borne out. If for no other reason than to have her sitting on my bed, looking as if she might smother me with tenderness.

“Come here, my little loose cannon,” she said, there, on my tousled sheets, in my clothes, looking like love should, equal parts desire and consequence. I felt every breath crawl through my heart as I walked toward her amid the faint roll of the drum machines. A Moog, a melody, and those digitally mastered cries of passion and dreams and shaking it, baby, shaking it because when you dance it’s all about making love, isn’t it?

Shade leaned back on her elbows. I fit myself in between her legs, her hands parted my bathrobe. Soon I felt nothing but her fingers.

So evening came, and morning came; it was the first day, and then the second before we left my apartment. We walked the wet streets, as if we were inside of a bubble, one of those scenes you shake and the snowflakes swirl. It wasn’t snowing yet, but the air was heavy, the sky a mist of gray guncotton.

We bought coffee in paper cups and continued on, going nowhere. Shade stopped in front of a vendor hawking hats, modeling a few, as I sipped my coffee through a crack in the plastic lid. She chose a black, knit cap, the kind worn by urban thugs on television. “Are you planning on turning over a candy store?” I asked. She smiled, said the hat made her feel tough. But she was more of a sap than I was. When we passed the multiplex just as the feel-good movie of the season was about to begin, she begged me to go inside.

“Come on, Slivowitz,” she cocked her upper lip at me. “Ever made out in the movies?”

I didn’t have to answer. I’d always been urbane about movie-going, arriving early to be Coke-and-popcorned by the first preview, and barring all communication once the lights went out. On occasion, I’d even shushed a peanut-gallery commentator or two. But there I sat kissing in the back row like a clumsy adolescent, though not my adolescence—for I’d never even kissed a boy until I was eighteen years old, and never would have imagined that all the boys I’d kissed since would be obliterated by one woman in a dark movie theater.

We were feeling good, so much so that we skipped out before the movie ended and ran back to my apartment, forgetting that we’d originally come out for food and toilet paper.

Home again, as if we’d never left the bed, I was overwhelmed by my craving for Shade, my longing to bind her hands and feet so she couldn’t leave. Yet, whenever I tried to express these feelings without sounding like the mildly neurotic and needy adult I was, my language retreated to the vapid patterns of pornolinguistics.

“I’m waiting for this to blow up,” I said, moving my leg beneath her until I felt her on my knee.

“What?”

“This you and me against the world thing.”

“Don’t say that.”

“It can’t last.”

“Yes it can,” she said, and despite the barrage of phone messages from Alexis, union leaders, Mom, Aunt Lorraine, various friends and colleagues, and, that first day, a few scavengers from the media hoping I might be a loose cannon for them as well, I believed her. I would have believed anything she told me with her body on mine, her fingers slipping inside me and teeth biting my nipples, a little bit hard, which I discovered I liked. Though I couldn’t come, I felt closer than ever, beyond it even, the way the graze of a finger can in the right circumstances be more intense than a grasp. Still, there was the dark-continent part of me that believed our relationship would not be fully consummated until I had an orgasm.

Day four, alone in the shower, I gave in and masturbated. Though it wasn’t the climax I’d wished for, I came in about two seconds. It was insidious, a litmus test that left me feeling physiologically defective. A sexual misfit. Not like Shade who could come when I fucked her, but only if I used two fingers at about a forty-five degree angle so the base of my hand hit her clit, and even then, only after she’d gotten off once already some other way. This kind of specificity amazed me. Clearly, Shade’s was a sexual history spawned by trial and error, along with a few creative lovers all of whom I’d become insanely jealous of; jealous because they’d been with her, but also because of the things they’d done together. None of the men I’d been with even liked being on their backs.

In all fairness I couldn’t blame them entirely. I never said what I wanted, what I liked, and through my frustrated silence I’d grown contemptuous of their easy orgasms. I’d lorded my frigidity over them as if it were a sacred cow. But it ruined me sexually.

“I understand now,” Shade said. It was day six and I’d finally confessed that I was indeed troubled by my not coming.

“What?”

“The other night, at the benefit. There’s just no letting go for you, is there?”

“I guess not.” I looked up from the couch where I’d been clipping my toenails. She was sitting at the counter in my bathrobe, drinking a glass of orange juice and not-reading a magazine.

“It’s all inside,” she pointed to her temple. “That’s the real sex organ, the rest is just friction.”

I pursed my lips, returned to my clipping.

“No, really. We’ll figure it out.”

Let her hope, but I knew better. People who came easily never understood this, how it felt to be perpetually on-the-verge, revved-up and good-to-go, but then you’re going and going and going and suddenly everything shuts down, like someone flicked a switch in your head. Whatever you do next is inconsequential, you’ve passed the point of no return. Bottomed out. Sometimes when I hit bottom, I became so dejected and angry I couldn’t speak for hours. Other times, I could pretend I’d actually come, feeling sated enough by wet sheets and a lover’s arms. With Shade it was mostly the latter.

She took the nail clipper from my hands and sat down next to me. “There’s something I want to ask, don’t be mad, but—” she giggled so I knew it wasn’t serious. “In your closet, I saw these…these boots.”

“They’re the real thing, straight from the dungeons of Mistress Wanda Lynne.” I explained about the mishap on the set, yet in the telling it seemed as if the entire day had been lived by someone else. Silver Ray, perhaps.

At Shade’s request, I took out the boots, and together we inspected them. “They’re sort of scary,” she said.

“I don’t think so.”

“Put them on.” She smiled, and within seconds was helping me into the thigh-highs I’d inherited because that idiot Robbie Rod had cajoled me into trying them on when he must have known it was bad karma to wear a dominatrix’s boots without asking. That day I’d been devastated, but balancing around my apartment for Shade I wished I’d thanked him.

“Take off your underwear,” Shade said, and I did, the sun making waves through my dirty blinds, and it was naughty and illicit, as if we were slumming in a dive bar in the middle of the afternoon. But if in the boots I’d felt like a whore with RR, with Shade I was a woman, or I accepted some idea of femininity that had always felt like an act with men. I liked being sexy, I liked her watching me being sexy.

We danced naked and I was suddenly tall. She put me in her lace bra and spun me around. “There, now you look like a porn star.”