Kamikaze Lust (6 page)

Aunt Lorraine was more Bette Davis in
All About Eve.
She believed drama was better left to the stage or at least confined behind locked doors. Then why the urge to see Kaminsky? He was all image, nothing but a spin-doctored psychopomp.

“Honey, I just want to talk to him,” she pleaded with me. I stood silently at the kitchen counter, naked underneath my red sheet.

“I heard he’s from Poland,” she said. “Both of his parents were killed in Auschwitz. We’re practically related.”

“Then why don’t you call him?” I lifted my left pinkie to my teeth and gnawed.

“How can you say that? You have no idea how I feel, you barely know what you feel. You’re such a journalist sometimes.”

“Not anymore. I’m nothing now.”

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself. I’m dying and don’t you try and tell me anything different, because I’m sick of taking care of everyone else’s troubles. I need you, you understand?”

I took a deep breath, picked at my chapped lips with my fingernails. I couldn’t stay mad at her for getting sick, for seeking out even the most bizarre anesthesia. “All right, I’ll call him,” I said finally. “But just to talk.”

“That-a-girl,” she said.

When we hung up I was in the bathroom. I lifted my red toga and peed, hoping the warm liquid might thaw out my vagina, yet I felt nothing but a vain hole between my legs. I might as well be Barbie.

Standing up, I caught a quick glance in the mirror. My eyes burned into my face, the eyes of death’s messenger, unemployed adulterer and feckless father-fucker. I hated myself, but looked striking. I could be beautiful even, my eyes blacker than black and feral, my face spirited with anger. For the first time in a while I wanted to masturbate.

The next day it rained.

Outside, pellets bounced from the pavement; inside, windows fogged against the dreary, wet day. Shade and I sat across from each other at our half-way point, an art deco café on Ninth Avenue in the upper Forties called The Movie House.

I curled my fingers around my big gulp latté, bending my head down so the steam came wafting up my nose. Good for the allergies.

“Rain, schmain,” Shade said. She sipped her orange mocha frappé through a straw.

“It’s funny, I can’t remember rain in Miami.”

“What are you talking about? It was always raining. Remember the hurricane? We had to evacuate your grandmother.”

“Sure, hurricanes, but regular rain?”

She leaned her arm on the empty chair next to her and smiled. “How about after the Redford preview when we got stuck on Joey’s boat?”

“Oh my god. We had to sit in that cabin watching his one music video over and over and over.”

“Hey, he had a vision,” she pursed her lips.

“Please…and Sam kept calling him Johnny.”

We smiled in recognition. Shade’s boyfriends, sporadic though they were, tended to be souped-up con men—usually in advertising or the music business—who made Sam feel inferior for wanting to do something as unglamorous as perform pelvic exams and diagnose yeast infections. I had to admit I got off on Sam’s inferiority complex. With him, I actually experienced myself as having the cool life, just as with Shade I felt as if my life were not cool enough.

Shade used to namedrop the crazy people she knew, the wild places she frequented, and she’d cloaked an air of mysteriousness around the women she dated. So adept she’d been at velvet roping the disparate parts of her life. Now, she was out and proud. Maybe it was a New York thing, but in the year I’d been back I’d already met three different girlfriends, not including Tina Macadam. Apparently, they’d had what Shade said was an uneventful date last night, which I knew meant that Shade didn’t have sex, as opposed to my own nonevent.

I brought my latté to my lips and inhaled a dollop of foam. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

My heart sped up involuntarily. I unzipped my sweater, but kept it hanging from my shoulders. “Why didn’t you? Last night?”

“With Tina?”

“Is there someone else?” I asked, terrified she might say yes. My reaction shocked me, that it suddenly mattered so much.

“No, no,” she nodded. “There’s no one else.”

I was relieved and couldn’t help smiling. She smiled back. Before I knew it, we were deep gazing, and I was taken back to those times in Miami when she told me about her sex life, and I remembered being jealous that she had a sex life, while Sam and I were engaged in a tiresome psychological battle over my orgasms. It occurred to me now that my jealousy might have been misplaced.

Her brow furrowed as if she were thinking big. “You know how they say be careful what you want because you might get it?” I nodded blindly, unable to stop staring at her. “Well, let’s just say I’m trying to be careful.”

“She wouldn’t sleep with you, huh?”

“You little bitch,” she smiled. “I’ll have you know it was the other way around, actually. I find I’m getting more prudish with age.” She leaned her elbows on the table, crossed her arms over her breasts with a slight tilting forward of the shoulders. Her eyes telegraphed a catch-me-if-you-can quality. I could see how she attracted both men and women. But screw the rest of them. She was getting to me.

I felt as if I were entering the shallow end of a swimming pool, adjusting step by step to the cold water. The thing is, I never learned how to swim. You don’t in Brooklyn.

Shade rolled her lipstick-stained straw in between her fingers amid the simmering hum of the café. I had to sit on my hands to keep them from shaking.

“And you?” she said. “What ever possessed you to go to bed with Ethan again?”

I wanted to say, You, you idiot. You, because I called you first and you weren’t there; you, because I was jealous of you and Tina; you, because I was feeling rejected and needed comfort. But I didn’t get anything close to it. Oh, what I would have given to utter half of what I was thinking, if only I understood it myself. Instead, I remained impenetrable: a frizzy-haired wall.

“It was just one of those things,” I said.

“One of those things. Yeah, right.” She pursed her lips.

“I’m serious.”

“You don’t have sex for months and end up with Ethan, he’s a total dog. There’s something else, what aren’t you telling me?” She stared at me with her spicy mustard eyes, so I stared back, tongue-tied. Rain slapped and streamed next to us, giving cinematic pause as we lapsed into stone.

Shade shifted in her seat without taking her eyes away from me. “Come on, what is it?” she said.

“He said he might have work, all right?” My pulse jolted at the iciness of my tone. Actually, Ethan had left a message earlier telling me he had a job for me, but I felt too creepy to talk to him this morning.

“All right, no need to get all huffy,” Shade said. Then she pushed her chair back and stood up as if she were leaving. I felt abandoned.

“You’re mad?”

She dropped her palms on the table and leaned in close. The musky scent of her skin blended with the freshly ground coffee. It made my ears tingle. “Look, I’m happy you might have work, did you think I wouldn’t be?”

Feeling like a big liar, I couldn’t answer. I turned my head away as she continued to speak.

“It’s not the work, it’s that you don’t trust me, and, I don’t know, the way you act sometimes…what’s going on?”

“Nothing’s going on,” I said, averting my eyes. My lower lip shook, and I was afraid if I said anything I might start crying. Now, I rarely cry and when I do it’s not in front of anyone. That would be manipulative.

I glanced around to see if anyone was staring at us, but the people in this casually hip Saturday afternoon crowd were too wrapped up in themselves to notice the force field between Shade and me. Turning my eyes back to Shade, I felt the throbbing in my gums where Dr. Janis had drilled and filled me almost twenty-four hours earlier. The delayed reaction made me feel quizzical, whimsical. I was gushing.

Catching me, Shade’s lips softened into a crescent. “Dammit, Slivowitz, what am I going to do with you?”

“I don’t know, take me to the movies or something.”

“No,” she said. “You’re the one who got laid last night, you can take me to the movies.”

She walked off to the bathroom and left me sitting at the table with my cheeks and ear lobes radiating as if I’d been drinking red wine all morning. My responses to her were becoming so physical, the opposite of last night with Ethan.

I wondered if Shade believed I’d slept with him for work. I could have; I’d slept with men for a lot more. And for less. Sitting here in this noisy café, with the rain coming down and Shade only a few feet away, my reluctance to call Ethan now seemed foolish, counterproductive. A job was a job.

I picked up Shade’s cell and called. He answered on the first ring. “Are we okay?” he asked, sounding somewhat brusque.

“Yes,” I said.

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” he said. Then came a few awkward seconds.

“So what’s up?” I said.

“Up? What do you mean, up?”

“You said you had work?”

“Oh yeah. Ever hear of Alexis Calyx?”

When I said no, Ethan assured me she was all the rage in some circles, particularly in the oxymoronic adult film industry where she’d won numerous Skin Awards and had become one of the first video-box girls. Apparently, she started her own production company, which produced what she called feminist erotica, material that found her enmeshed in the censorship wars. “She testified at the Meese Commission,” he said as if it meant something to him.

“Wait a second, you want a piece on a porn star?”

“No, even better, she needs a ghostwriter. See, she’s got this contract for an autobiography and doesn’t have time to write, or maybe she’s illiterate, who knows? I just met her a couple of weeks ago.”

“But I don’t know anything about pornography.”

“I figured as much,” he snickered, and I remembered how much pleasure it had given me when Freddy bit him last night. “Alexis is keen on that, actually. The last ghostwriter turned out to be some sycophantic fan. Freaked the shit out of her.”

“This is what I get for sleeping with you,” I said. Two women at the next table looked over.

“Here’s a novel concept,” Ethan said. “Someone does you a favor and you say thank you. Want to give it a shot?”

I was getting ornery with everyone today, wasn’t I? I apologized to Ethan and asked for the information. My black roller ball bled into the front page of
The Free Spirit,
upon which I scrawled the name Alexis Calyx and beneath it, her phone number. When I clicked off the phone, I noticed that I’d drawn a few five-point stars around her name. I would soon learn how apt my etchings had been, but for now I repeated the name out loud: “Alexis Calyx.” What a brush of palate-licking that wrought, a name spoken in tongues and multiple entendres. I pictured a woman in white taffeta running through fields of blazing grass and dewy, wet flowers. I was going to hate her.

Stepping out of the bathroom, Shade jolted me from Merchant-Ivory dreamland back to the thunderstorms along Ninth Avenue. I tore the name and number from the newspaper and shoved it into my back pocket. With it went all thoughts of porn stars and ex-boyfriends and everyone else around us. My focus was entirely on Shade walking toward me in her velvet hip-huggers as if she were working a runway, smiling as if she knew exactly what I was thinking.

An espresso machine slurped and steamed. Spoons clinked into ceramic cups as couples practiced synchronized stirring. Shade and I were no different. Sitting across from each other again, not saying a word, she drew circles with her finger on the steamy window pane, and together we looked out into the rain, its reverberant pounding a reminder that we were part of something else, just as a lover, even a bad one, can affirm that you still belong to your body.

I turned back to her, saw her floating in a glowing nimbus like the paint-by-number pictures of Christ they sold on the street, and at that second felt as if months…no a lifetime goddammit! I felt as if a lifetime of Novocain was beginning to wear off.

STILL LIFE WITH VIDEOTAPE

The Master of Self-Deliverance spoke about his thirty-minute
Docudeath
tape of the Ida and Marvin Salinger suicides. I sat silently, preferring to listen to Kaminsky a while before saying anything myself. I hated being back in this office with its obese metal desks and finger-printed walls, the fiendish glow of the fluorescents, the antiphonal chime of the fax machine. And I was here sans working papers. Last time I’d come as a reporter, when Kaminsky still needed the coverage. I’d felt protected, bivouacked by the same credentials that allowed me entry into worlds I would not otherwise see: Congressional assemblies, a Senator’s motel room, towns devastated by natural disasters, crack houses, fairness-in-media conventions, and, most recently, the New York City courthouses. Armed with the First Amendment, the public’s right to know, and occasionally a press pass, I could go anywhere, say anything to anybody, and never take no for an answer. On my own, I was too shy to walk into a bar or go to the movies by myself.

“We’ve just completed the home video copy,” Kaminsky said, sitting perpendicular to me in a chair of peeling chrome and yellow-green vinyl. Apparently, orders for the tape were coming in faster than calls to the Home Shopping Network on a bottom price item. He had set up an 800 number and had an intern monitoring the phones. Then there were the television and radio call-ins, the satellite conferences, round tables on the Internet. His was a conundrum fit for the modern MacLuhanite: so many tools, so little time.