The Royal Family (63 page)

Well, as long as she’s not going to keep it I guess I’m not responsible. Three dollars even, Henry.

Tyler remembered seeing Irene run for the toilet to vomit. She too had suffered miserably from morning sickness. He and John sat there listening to her throwing up and weeping. The bathroom door was open. Finally John got up and went to comfort his wife. Tyler sat swishing ice cubes around in his gin and tonic, listening to water running. Then John came leading Irene by the hand. Stroking her belly, he smiled ironically at his brother and murmured: We’re pregnant.

Domino glided back into the Wonderbar, pale and sweaty. Tyler wanted to whisper into her ear:
Are we pregnant?
but just then the other door gaped, and in came the owner, coked up or cracked up or methed up, manic and red-eyed. Seeing the Queen, he started yelling: No more napkins for you! Now get out, nigger!

That’s a shame, said the Queen. I was just fixin’ to blow my nose again.

Loreena came rushing busily up to her and slipped a dozen napkins into the Queen’s hand. —Don’t take it personally, Maj, but you’d better go, she whispered. Heavyset gets really out of control when he’s like this . . .

Buy you a drink, Heavyset? the Queen said loudly.

The owner stopped short, licking his lips foolishly. —Well, I didn’t know you were a paying customer, he said. Have you bought something already?

I was fixin’ to buy you a drink, Heavyset, since you love me so much. Henry, would you kindly buy this gentleman a drink?

What’ll you have, Heavyset? said Tyler wearily.

Oh, is this lady a friend of yours? said Heavyset. I’ll take a beer. I never turn down beer. Loreena! Bring me a beer!

That’ll be three dollars, sweetheart, said Loreena impassively.

And you can give her an extra napkin, Loreena. On the house.

Well, thank you, Heavyset, said the Queen. Now why don’t you just run along and let me transact a little business with Henry . . .

Heavyset, said Loreena quickly, do you want me to change the channel to the football game?

Hey, Heavyset, leave the Queen alone! shouted Domino. Come on over here an’—an’—what you always . . . shit, I feel so fucked up . . .

What about me? said Domino’s john. I was here first.

What
about
you? Go sit over there by the pool table and chill out for ten minutes and then you can . . . oh, I feel so sick . . .

You need to lie down, said Heavyset triumphantly. Come on in the back room and—

Henry, said the Queen, when you have no money, why you always comin’ in here every night?

Looking for you.

Lordy lordy day, said the Queen.

I want to be with you.

Well, don’t you just want to be with everybody that’s got a pussy? Henry, you don’t
know
what you want.

I want to live with you. The girls live with you. Lily lives with you—

Lily was living with us, and one day she walked out and didn’t come back for two years. She don’t even remember where she was at. I been keepin’ her clothes for her in a box. . .

I figured she’s—

I’m scared about Lily, the Queen said. Lily makes me scared. I can see her going down and down . . .

And Beatrice, too, he said.

Thank you for sayin’ that. Yes, and Beatrice, too. Anyway, Lily she like to stay by herself at the Lola Hotel, Room Twenny-Six—

But you weren’t sad when Sunflower died . . .

It was her time. You thinkin’ Queenie don’t have no strength nor knowledge? You thinkin’ Sunflower wasn’t ready?

Lily reminds me of Sunflower. More than my pretend Irene . . .

But Lily’s still Lily. She still got some Lily things to do. Sunflower was finished. She went beyond all that. When she passed away, Henry, she was already pure sunny happiness. Do you believe what I’m tellin’ you?

I don’t know, said Tyler. That’s the honest truth.

How can I condemn you for that? You don’t put on airs. You
know
you don’t understand. It’s all right, child, ’cause I never yet laid my hand on your eyes to make you see.

Are you going to do that to me?

You want it?

I trust in you to do what’s right for me, he said in a low voice, so that the other alcoholics wouldn’t hear.

She took his hand. They sat together for a while in that bar which was darker and shabbier than the snotty cleanliness of the Cinnabar on Ellis and Jones, whose bar’s wood-grain spread itself under a million coats of plastic while Diana Ross and the Supremes on the jukebox sang
It hurts so bad
—the Wonderbar was the best.

When the Queen went to the ladies’ room, he tore off a scrap of his soggy napkin and wrote on it
AFRICA I LOVE YOU.
Then he clenched it tight in his hand.

Domino had left her little silver purse on a barstool when she went back with Heavyset, whom she actually valued in a way because although in her years of growing older she had learned enough to avoid any barmaid’s eye so that the barmaid could not immediately sell her another three-dollar beer, still, that strategy could preserve a girl’s finances only so far, and when she inhabited the Wonderbar waiting and waiting for some trick to wander in, her expenses rose faster than cracksmoke because she really could not afford to alienate Loreena; but as long as she permitted Heavyset to bear her away to his
little “office” whenever the fancy struck him, then afterward she could sit for as long as she liked beneath the nice mural of the girl with nipples like Hershey’s kisses; and maybe even shoot a little pool or watch football or hockey on the screen, saving up money and thirst until she was ready to drink the kind of classy bottled beer that made her spit thick. Now it was time to pay. Loreena would look out for her, she thought, but then she suddenly viciously distrusted Loreena and would have gone back for her purse; however, Heavyset, misconstruing her reluctance to be something less trivial than that, whispered in her ear that he had some crystal meth in his office, at which any other ideas which the blonde might have had went rushing up through the ceiling. So there lay her purse. Toilet paper, condoms, keys, lipstick, spermicide, a pocket mirror, change and three self-defensive razorblades had long since forced apart the zipper’s broken lips, so that the purse presented to the world a defiantly overt character not unlike that of its owner. Tyler worried about Domino sometimes when he saw that purse because its silveriness and inviting openness seemed to him to offer an invitation to evildoers, but doubtless Domino knew best. Picking it up by one safety-pinned strap, he slid it across the bar to Loreena, who was working the register, and asked her to keep it safe for the tipsy girl. Loreena nodded wordlessly and stuffed it behind the beer keg where only she could reach it. Returning to his spot, Tyler encountered Domino’s john, who’d dug both hands into the Queen’s shoulder, trying to date her. The Queen was smiling.

Tyler drained his drink and put the balled-up napkin in the Queen’s hand. He said to her: Maybe this will come in handy. —Then he went out.

Just as he reached the swinging doors, he heard Domino’s john say sneeringly: So what the fuck did that turkey give you, a get out of jail free card?

What the doctor sees on the other end of the speculum is your
cervix,
explained the woman in the blue jumpsuit who now was washing Domino with Betadyne. —Do you want to see?

Sure, grinned Domino, and the woman tilted a mirror until Domino could see the brown stain around her vulva through a hole in the plastic. The woman in the blue jumpsuit sounded the depth of the os to determine how far along she was.

You’ll feel a little pinch now, the woman in the blue jumpsuit said.

The needle entered the hole in the plastic and quivered like a mosquito. It twinkled and hummed. The efficient woman in blue stood over her, hands spread; the needle slid in slowly, deeper and deeper. Domino was enjoying the woman’s attentions, perhaps because the woman was so tense-faced, determined, probably quick to take offense. The blonde had already sized her up back in the waiting room where all the very quiet women kept watching each other out of the corners of their eyes and the woman in blue, placidly brushing back her hair, explained: And this is a canula. You notice that it
is
plastic and it
is
flexible. —The patients watched the ring on her hand move, all of them sitting cozy together. It was Domino’s pleasure not to offend her, for now. Moreover, she liked the stinging of the needle, which she pretended was a part of the woman in blue’s body, that the woman in blue was entering her lovingly, sexually and above all subserviently.

Now, the tinaculum clamps into your cervix to keep it in place, the woman in blue said.

Domino smiled slowly.

And then we dilate you like this with the flexible plastic canula. There may be a little cramp when that tube goes through. Are you okay?

Domino smiled and licked her lips. —Not really, she said. I got raped by a bad man named Henry Tyler. That’s why I’m here today. He’s a misogynist. He treated me just like I was a piece of meat. Does it look like meat to you down there between my legs?

I’m so sorry, the woman in blue whispered, flushing.

Domino glowed with pleasure.

The doctor turned on the machine, which hummed like a refrigerator, and Domino began to feel intense pain as very dark red bars of fluid came out. The doctor turned the canula around and around. There was a slurping sound. Something was red through translucency against his white gloved fingers.

Is there a cramping? the woman in blue said.

Please hold my hand, Domino said, her legs spread like wings. She wanted to drink the woman’s buttock-juice.

You see, your uterus clamps down when the fetal tissue is removed, the woman in blue explained, digging the canula in, around and around. Fluid ran out of Domino’s cunt.

Now we’re going in one more time to check, the doctor said.

Please don’t let go of my hand, said Domino, staring at the tiny implements. She suddenly felt a sensation as strange as seeing black shoe-heels percussing across a glass ceiling; she couldn’t remember where she’d seen that but she knew she had.

After he puts the speculum in, he’s going to rinse out your vagina with Betadyne, the woman in blue said, very efficient and tall. Later Domino, craving more of the lovely and very tiny novocaine injections, would vaguely remember a cotton ball, and the drip of Betadyne through the plastic hole.

Now put your hand on your tummy over the uterus to calm the cramp, the woman in blue said.

Would you do it, please? whispered Domino through half-closed eyes. Oh, it feels so good when you do it.

I think you may be in a little bit of trouble, the woman in blue said. I’m going to refer you to one of our counselors. She’ll be able to help you.

I want
you
to do it, said Domino with a sleepy, wicked, toothy grin, and savored the woman in blue’s long slow flush.

Domino’s first abortion had been much easier than that, at least in the spurious fashion which lent itself to sugarcoating in her recollections, so that she could complain about subsequent procedures, saying, in one of her typically obscene mixed metaphors: These assholes just want to fuck women up! They’re butchers! It’s a government plot to sterilize us to save money. And they call this a free country. Don’t even get me started, Maj . . . —It had been before Christmas, which to Domino was already becoming as irrelevant as all the other holidays because the only presents she’d ever received were those she’d stolen for herself, seizing them from life’s jaws and running somewhere deep and dirty to hide, to gloat. And yet in those days (she was seventeen) Christmas retained the power to disappoint her; in other words, it was not entirely irrelevant yet. The Christmas
present one of the boys had given her grew brutishly in her belly. If she didn’t do something fast, it would quicken inside her and then she’d be a murderess. Moreover, she preferred not to be pregnant when she was at home. Not that she wanted to be home, either, but a former friend of hers now on the streets had informed her in weary exasperation that her sister was in jail and her father was dying of liver cancer, so Domino, burdened, hence affronted to her usual point of martyrdom, made up her mind to go back for the last time to see those losers, and it had truly been the last time. She’d dyed her hair brown because she was not yet a fulltime prostitute and it was an experiment of hers to learn whether men would defile her with fewer up-and-down stares of fishy-eyed lust if she denied her blondeness, but the results convinced her once and for all that she was doomed to that, at least until she became a hag, so she’d let blondeness creep back into the roots of her brown hair as she sat in the hotel room trying to be unconscious of that qualmish feeling in her uterus. She was supposed to arrive in Vacaville in three days. Her father would have erected the plastic tree if he were well enough, but there’d be nothing beneath it. (What dully studied comparisons come to mind? Did this hollow celebration of Christ’s birthday thus emblematize His empty tomb? Would seven-year-old Domino, instead of squatting bitterly by the tree in her pajamas all night, gnawing angrily at her blonde pigtail, have done better to gaze up at the ceiling in search of presents? By the time she was ten, she’d already sucked a boy off on a dare, and when his manna spewed into her mouth, she vomited. But her control improved over the years. Just as a soda jerk leans, scraping and twisting the tall stainless steel cup upon the rod, so Domino would waggle her lips and tongue about a man’s organ if she had to, although she rarely denied herself the pleasure of stopping halfway through to engage in negotiations of a deliberately aggressive nature, until the man had lost his erection. After a man had passed his mid-thirties he could not as a rule get hard and soft and hard in quick succession more than three or four times. It gave Domino more than a little satisfaction to leave her customer unfulfilled, frustrated, and [American male socialization being what it was] humiliated rather than angry at his failure—although this was a delicate game; every now and then she got a black eye. —Well, this won’t work, she would tell her customer brightly. I don’t know what your problem is. Maybe you just don’t like girls. As for me, I don’t have all night. If you want to try again sometime, pull up under my window and honk four times.) Her father had sounded surprised and glad when she’d telephoned him collect from the booth on Eddy Street. His surprise reproached her, and his gladness infuriated her. He said he’d meet her at the Greyhound station. —Yeah, that’ll work, the girl said curtly, breaking the connection. She was very conscious of her uterus. It just felt as if it were there. For a month now she’d persisted in hoping that that unsought sensation would vanish, but every morning it grew more present until it stood for already not merely a mass of tissue inside her but an inimical being whose purpose it was to weaken and confuse her, then drag her down. —You’re dead! laughed the blonde, punching herself in the stomach. She asked her aunt to send money. It was about a hundred and eighty dollars. Her aunt reminded her that they had mutually agreed that the previous time would be the last time, but Domino wept most fluently on the telephone, pleading that she’d made another mistake, that this emergency was the worst ever. A year or two later, she would have known enough to lie, using the magic word
rape,
which opened so many tear-ducts and money-ducts when carefully invoked. She was in the fifth week. A girlfriend came with her—not a friend, merely a girlfriend, a dumb bitch
who wasn’t in the life,
*
because Domino supposed it would be prudent to have someone drive her back. The girlfriend, whose name she could no longer remember, had borne two babies, one when she was fifteen and the next when she was sixteen. Each time she’d refused to open her eyes when the doctor raised up the child before her, raised up the bloody little rabbit. What was the point? They were both carried away for adoption. She said to Domino: Does he love you? to which the blonde replied, rolling a joint: That’s the most asinine thing I’ve ever heard. —Her girlfriend, broodingly sensitive, lowered her eyes. Neither of them had ever gone to an abortion clinic before. The girlfriend was pro-life, but she was a friend, except of course that she wasn’t a friend because even then Domino had no friends.