“Yeah, except she didn’t get mad at me. She laughed instead.”
Joanne cuts the radishes like my mother did, like her mother must’ve done—like flowers. I cut the sandwiches into triangles, like Daphne, Sara, and I used to have sandwiches. Like Trisha and Heather and Joelle might one day make sandwiches for children.
“She gave the book back and told me it was sweet. I asked if she did the exercise, and she said, ‘Hon, I may not know much about love, but I know it’s not an act of will.’ She said picturing all those fags chanting ‘I love my ass’ made her laugh.” In fact, Veronica said she didn’t know whether to laugh or
cr
y. “Trying to put love up their asses like they used to put dick, under the benevolent ur-gaze of this grandmotherly ‘healer’ like finally Grandma loves and accepts your ass—please. Mv shame didn’t cause this and my love won’t cure it.”
“I remember she said, ‘How do you think Stalin and Hitler wound up killing so many people? They were trying to fix them. To make them ideal.’ She said, ‘There’s violence in that hon.’”
“Yeah,” says Joanne. “I see what she means. But I liked the exercise. I didn’t expect it to fix me. I just found it comforting.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Me, too.”
She drops a double handful of cut radishes in the center of the sunburst. Light comes through the window and shines on her hands; they are wet, rough, and slighdy red at the knuckles. There’s a torn hangnail on her thumb and chipped silver polish on her broken transparent nails. “Do you want apple juice?” she asks.
Heather and Joelle run through the room, using our legs to play hide-and-seek. Their young faces peep in and out of our aging limbs; their hands and eyes flash. I think of roses climbing a battered trellis.
“We’ve gotta get lunch on,” says Joanne. “My radio program is gonna be on in forty minutes, and today it’s the director of Lost in Translation, and I loved that movie.”
The place Joanne is building inside has rooms for all of this. Not just rooms. Beautiful ones. For Karl and Jerry and Karen and Nate in his cowboy hat and the hot-tub guy and movie directors and old-lady healers and people trying to love their asses and people who think they’re stupid for it. In these rooms, each thing that looks crazy or stupid will be like a drawing you give your mother, regarded with complete acceptance and put on the wall. Not because it is good but because it is trying to understand something. In these rooms, there will be understanding. In these rooms, each madness and stupidity will be unfolded from its knot and smoothed with loving hands until the true thing inside it lies revealed.
Joanne goes to get Jerry for lunch. The girls help me carry the food into the living room so we can eat it on a blanket while we watch Animal Planet. There’re cheese sandwiches with lettuce, peanut butter and jelly ones, radishes and carrots, plus animal crackers and juice in little cartons. Joanne and I sit on the floor with the girls; Joelle sits between Joanne’s spread legs, her plate balanced on Joanne’s thigh. Jerry’s next to Nate on the couch, laughing about something. The light from the fish tank glows behind them; fish traverse the rippling green.
On Animal Planet, people are putting computer chips under the skins of beautiful lizards in order to help save them from extinction. The camera zooms in on the writhing creatures. Their eyes bulge; their hinged red mouths fiercely gape. One strikes the air with a stiff webbed claw. Joanne presses the mute button to say grace. The bright and scalding past breaks through.
Toward the end, Alain would talk to people about me while I sat right there. I understood French well enough by then that I could understand most of what he said. “She’s gone cold. Morbid, a litde weird. She doesn’t have the strength to carry that off. But you should have seen her when she first came.” I just sat there, not saying anything. What shames me most about it is that by then I didn’t even love him. I loved the rich things and the money and people kissing my ass. I loved the song I was living in, and he was the singer.
He still used the apartment for meetings and to hang out. He brought over girls and his beautiful friend Jean-Paul, an exmodel who smiled, dirty and sweet, when Alain called him “cunt face.” He didn’t have official parties there. That was for his real house, which he shared with his real girlfriend. But the apartment was set up so that little parties could happen it they wanted to. There were fresh flowers in freshly polished vases.
The pantry was stocked with wine and fancy nuts, big fat oliv^aj figs, sugared almonds, and marzipan animals that I ate myself * sick on when I was alone. In the refrigerator were salted fish {Dates, cheeses. Also boxes of syringes filled with antibiotics fofjl syphilis and clap. There was always cocaine in a big china plate on the mantel. Some nights, people would tumble in like were being poured from a giant cornucopia, falling out on their royal asses, then getting up to dance and eat and strut. Some of them thought I was just a girl at the party. But lots of them knew this was actually my home. Alain insisted on keeping up the pretense of no sex, even though so many people knew. Once I did it with Cunt Eace when people were over, to mock Akin |j and his policy. That’s when I realized how many people knew I We came out of the bedroom and people looked at Alain to see i’ what he would do. When he didn’t do anything, they looked® away. little laughing people skipping and playing in the place 3 where the huge things are.
But I wasn’t a little person. I was huge. I was hugel||| drunk. I was a model and secret mistress of a powerful agen,t/i who could flaunt another lover in front of him.
I walked down a hallway crowded with gorgeous people. Lush arms, gold skin, fantastic flashing eyes, lips made up so big and full, they seemed mute—made not to talk but only to sense and receive. So much beauty, like bursts of violent color hitting your eye together and mixing until they were mud. I passed a bathroom and heard the sound of puking quickly covered by the music on the stereo. Rich, dreamy mud of sound. A girl met my eye and I was amazed to see her face emerge with such clar-ity. For a second, I was starded to think I knew her from childhood. Then I realized she was a movie star. I had watched her on TV with my family. She was looking at me curiously. I smiled and walked past. My father had loved her on TV If he could see this, he would reach up and scratch his ear, not knowing what to say. Jean-Paul had scratched his ear just before he leaned in to kiss me. His kiss had been surprisingly sweet. I ducked into
a bedroom to call my father and tell him about the movie star. I closed the door and sat with the phone cord wound against my chest, listening to the phone ringing in the dingy kitchen in New Jersey, my call hurding through the night, over the cold ocean to land in that dingy phone.
I was going to show myself to my father, living big and bold. Mosdy when I called him, I was stilted and hidden. Now I would show him something. I didn’t know what. But I would show him. Jean-Paul had fucked me shallowly a long time before finally sticking it in. I was still drunk with feeling between my legs. The room blurred and swam in my eyes. I heard myself murmur, “I love you, Daddy.” But when he answered the phone, I couldn’t speak. His voice was a mild voice, tired and kind. There was nothing big in it. I didn’t know how to speak to it. I was abashed before it. “Hello?” said the voice. “Hello?” Darkness spread around me, and in it I was tiny. “Hello?” Across the ocean, my father sighed. “Hello?” He hung up. Comforted, I went back to the party.
Sometimes, Alain and I still slept together. He would come into my room in the early morning, when it was still dark. He would bend over me and cover my face with tiny kisses, his rough coat brushing against me. He stroked my face with his cold hands and spoke so gendy that I couldn’t hear him. I thought I heard “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He was so drunk, his eyes were finally quiet, swollen and rolled back in his head. He would lie beside me, and I would kiss his hands and his temples, shivering with the night air on his clothes. He would kiss me back and touch my body and then fall asleep. I would put my back against him, then pull his arm around me and hold it there. Litde gusts of morning air made the shade tap against the window frame. Sunlight crept under the shade and across the floor. Strange to think it was the same sun the cat and I had watched on the dining room floor a long time ago.
But mostly, he didn’t sleep with me. Sometimes he didn’t sleep at all. Sometimes I’d wake up and find him in the living
room with Jean-Paul and some girl, watching TV with red eye
s
and open dry mouths. Once I came out and saw Cunt Fa
Ce
bent over the kitchen table with his pants down so that Aim could give him a clap shot. Alain didn’t look up. Jean-Paul smiled wanly, then winced when Alain jabbed him. He must’ve asked for the shot; Alain didn’t give them away. Even friends had to pay.
Heather and Trisha are almost asleep before the TV Joelle is •• standing at the sliding glass door, looking at the sky. The sun has broken through somewhere; the tops of the trees are glowing, •’ almost gold with sunlight. Everything else is gray. A piece of rippling fish tank is reflected in the glass, like a mysterious heart in a gray body. A tiny fish flickers across it. Joelle stretched up ; a hand. “This is my eyes.” She stretches up the other. “ThisM my ears.”
Joanne stands beside her The sun plays across her side- . ways face. I can see the white down on her skin. I can see thel tiny crosshatch marks in the softness of her cheeks, the acni'J scars pocking one side of her face, the dark pouches under her eyes. liver, weariness, bile. The weight of her cheeks just start? ing to pull her mouth into a severe shape. Sensitive lips now sensing death mingled with all the tastes of life. All her pores opened and saturated with waning life. Still sending Out the message of Here I am. The little girl stretches her face up to receive it, drinking in with her own perfect skin what it is to be. Joanne turns to face me. Behind her eyes, she is going from room to room, turning on the lights.
“What are you thinking?” she asks.
That you are beautiful. That not everyone could see it. I almost became the kind of person who could not. I missed being that kind of person by a hair.
“About the way I used to be. Things I used to do. You jmow. Stuff I can’t understand anymore why I did it.”
The girl pricks up her ears. “What did you do, Alison?”
I turned into a puppet with a giant hand inside me. Not a particular hand. Just a hand. During a fitting, a client jabbed my crotch with her long nails. She was supposedly smoothing the wrinkles on some pants. She snapped, “You keep sweating!” then twisted my leg so hard, she hurt my knee. I went into hysterics and was fired for the first time. I insulted Alain in public and arrived home two days later, to find myself locked out of the apartment. I ran to the bank, but I was too late—two years too late. I could only get fifty thousand francs. The rest was in a Swiss bank account in the agency’s name.. <
; I look into the child’s eyes. She meets my look, takes it in. She frowns and looks down, fiddling with the hem of her shirt. At that age, they know about doing things you don’t know why you did. When I was five, I slammed Daphne’s leg in the car door. We were having a fight and she said something I didn’t like. I was in the car and she was just getting in and I slammed her leg. She screamed. My mother yelled, “Why did you do that?” I was too shocked to answer. I stroke Joelle’s lowered head. The shine of the sun follows my hand on her gold-brown hair.
We were stupid for disrespecting the limits placed before us. For tearing up the fabric of songs wise enough to acknowledge limits. For making songs of rape and death and then disappearing inside them. For trying to go everywhere and know everything. We were stupid, spoiled, and arrogant. But we were right, too. We were right to do it even so.
Drew walks in. Rough face flushed and sensate. Eye sparkle rooted in the slow, low body. The spry feet of a dandy. Long graying hair fluffy and touched with rain. He stops and his eyes zero in on me. I sit down and take his socks off my feet. I have to go. Heather and Trisha wake for me to kiss their cheeks. Trisha hugs my legs and shouts, “Good-bye!” I bend and kiss her forehead. Ten years from now, I will be a kiss in
a
great field of faceless kisses, a sweet patch of forgotten territn^B in her inner country. Joanne hugs me, too, her heart against mine. Nice to think that in her dreams Trisha might run through that field and love it without knowing why. Drew puts out his hand and I clasp it. There is a ball of heat and feeling in his palm. The same feeling as when he pressed up against me that time. If I asked him why he did that, what would he say? I still have this. Do you see? I am sick. One day, I could be very sick. But in the meantime, I still have this and it’s still good. Do you see? I do see. It’s not just sex. It’s why he can help other men without making them feel like bums. Why people will listen to him when he’s not saying words. Tes, I see. I tell him that with my eyes. He thanks me with his eyes. He lets go of my hand.
The rain is out again, hammering the puddles full of holes, pocking the black-and-silver world with shining darkness. Rain soaks each leaf and blade of grass, bloating the lawns until they seem to roll and swell. Houses recede. The wind rises. The eyes and ears of God come down the walk.
I should go home. I’m tired and weak. Should take the bus. Should call my father. He is alone in an apartment with junk mail and old newspapers spread all around. Looking here and there in bafflement while dry heat pours out on him from a vent in the ceiling. His radio with a bent antenna on the dining table is tuned to a sports channel. People on magazine covers smile up from the floor and tabletops—a flat field of smiles blurred with slanted light from the cockeyed lamp. My father doesn’t listen to his old songs anymore. They finally went dead for him. Instead, he has these people in magazines and on TV: actors, singers, celebrities. He knows they are vessels for a nation of secret, tender feeling, and he respects them. I think he tries to cleave to them. But I don’t think he can.
Above me, the treetops wave back and forth, full of shapes, like the ocean. Wild hair, great sopping fists, a rippling field, a huge wet plant with thousands of tiny flowers that open and close with the wind. Form recedes. All the smiling television faces blend to make a shimmering suit that might hold you. I see my father trying to put one of them on. Reaching for it trustfully, noticing the poor quality but letting it pass. Smiling like he doesn’t see when it falls apart in his hands. Still wanting to believe. Afraid not to.