Denial (14 page)

"Great."  Diagnosed fake by a car dealer.

Rachel's music, ‘Purple Rain,’ by Prince or whatever the fuck his name is, had started.  She came out wearing white lace panties and a black leather jacket, with silver zippers and a chrome buckle.  I don't know whether etiquette would dictate my laying down a five or abstaining.  I put down the five.

She swayed her way over and stood in front of me, biting her lower lip.  Her auburn hair fell over her eyes.  She sat down with her legs spread, the panties not quite covering her, and ran a finger over the lace.  Then she turned over and pulled the panties down to her thighs, letting me look at her from behind.  I wanted to touch her.  To taste her.  Maybe she remembered my request from the night before, because she reached behind herself with one hand and slapped herself.  Then she stood up, without taking my money, and let her panties slide down to the floor.  She stepped out of them, left them there and danced to the other side of the stage.

The car guys were staring at the five.  "You know her or something?" Stein asked.

I felt strong.  Chosen.  Because
I knew the stripper
.  They could only imagine what that might mean.  I winked at them.

When the waitress came closer, I asked her to bring me another Black Label, straight up.

She brought it right over.  I reached for my wallet.  "Tiffany told us your drinks are on the house tonight," she yelled over the music.

My relationship was fractured.  I had no money in the bank.  My car was a mess, not to mention a fake.  Westmoreland's case had gone sour on me.  I might never see any more work out of the Lynn Police Department, which had been most of my work for the past year.  I needed a detox.  Badly.  Yet for that moment, on Perverts’ Row, with a little cocaine left in my pocket, a free scotch in front of me and lace panties within reach, I could still fool myself into thinking I was OK.  More than OK.  I was on top of the world.

Chapter 8

Rachel had danced last at the Lynx Club, and the Rover smelled like sex by the time I drove her from Revere to Chelsea, two square miles of urban blight just north of Boston.  I watched from behind as she climbed the stairs to her apartment, the fifth floor of a five-story industrial building on the waterfront.  She was wearing no panties, and her jeans were worn through where her legs met her ass.  With each step she took, I could see creamy flesh pressing against the denim threads.

Intellectually, I know a woman's rear end is nothing more than gluteus maximus — a strap of muscle anchored in pelvis and femur — but I have never achieved any scientific distance from it.  Much of my adult life has been spent in the pursuit of that bowing flesh.

My brain was mostly adrenaline and testosterone by the time Rachel slid open the iron door to her apartment and stepped inside.  I grabbed her and pushed her against the wall.  We kissed, tonguing and biting each other's mouths and lips.  I tried to unbutton her jeans, but she batted my hand away and unzipped my fly.

"You need to come," she whispered.  She licked her palm and slipped her hand inside my boxers.

The wetness against my skin made me sigh.  My tongue found her ear.

"Relax," she said, tilting her head away.  She started to move her hand faster.

I rested my head on her shoulder and closed my eyes.  Then, without warning, she spun us around so I was pressed against the wall.  When I reached down to feel her ass, she grabbed my wrist and pinned it at my side.  I could easily have overpowered her, but I didn't want to.  Did that mean, I wondered, that she had overpowered me?

"What's this?" she asked, looking down at my bandaged wrist.

"A long story."

"We don't  have time for a long story," she said.  "Don't move.  I want to watch your face."  She licked her palm again and reached back inside my pants.  "Tell me when you're about to come."

It usually takes me a while on coke, but her hand was doing pretty much what I would do to myself, only I wasn't doing it, couldn't anticipate the exact pressure and pace, and that excited me to the point of exploding after just half a minute.  I hesitated to tell her I was about to lose control, maybe because she had asked me to, maybe because I feared she would slow down and tease me, keep me hanging, a puppet to my own pleasure.  But I did tell her.  "I'm going... to come," I strained.

She was on her knees with her lips around me when the spasms started.  My back arched against the wall, and the muscles in my legs contracted all at once.  I looked down, saw her staring into my eyes and pulled out of her mouth.

She kept looking at me as my sperm splattered her lips, chin and cheek.  She waited a few seconds, slowly wiped her face with the back of her hand and stood up.  She leaned into me, touching her forehead to mine.  "Did you like coming on me?" she cooed.

The lilt in her voice was familiar.  I had a memory of being ten, dressed in cutoffs and a T-shirt, sitting on a love seat with my mother as she stumbled through the facts of life.  I'd been found fondling the breast buds of Kim Daney, a nine-year-old blond-haired girl with green eyes who lived two houses down.  "When a little boy likes a little girl, sometimes his little penis gets hard," my mother had said in that same singsong.  She glanced down at my crotch.  "That hasn't happened to you with Kimmy, has it?"

I didn't know how much trouble I might be in.  "No," I said.

"
No?
"

"Yes," I admitted.

"Don't be embarrassed, Frankie."  Her tone became severe.  "And don't lie to me."  She paused.  "Did you like that?  Your thing being hard?"

"No... yes," I shrugged.  I tried to hide behind my bangs.

"When people are older — older than you — the man puts his hard penis into the woman, into.. a slit between her legs.  He pushes it in and out, for some reason, that gives him a good feeling."  She watched for my reaction.  "You haven't done that to little Kimmy, put your hard thing between her legs, have you, Frankie?"

I hadn't done anything remotely like that.  It sounded interesting, but I had one practical concern.  "What if you need to pee when it's in there?" I asked.

"If you need to
pee?
"  She started to laugh.

I tried to rescue myself.  "No.  I didn't mean..."

It was too late.  She was already shaking my father out of his drunken sleep on the La-Z-Boy to tell him what I'd said.

I had started to cry.

My father shook his head as he listened, glanced over at me, then backhanded my mother so hard she collapsed to the floor.  "You don't make fun of kids like that," he muttered.  He looked at me, nodded — one man to another — then fell back into his stupor.

Rachel pinched my gut playfully, and my parents disappeared.  I was back with her.  "I asked you if you liked coming on me?" she cooed.

Her forehead against mine suddenly felt oppressive.  I took hold of her shoulders and pushed her off me.

She stood there in my grip.  "Well, did you?"

I thought of telling her not to flatter herself, that I had ejaculated on better-looking faces, which happened to be true.  But in my heart I didn't feel she meant me any harm.  "Yes," I said, "I liked it."

"And you liked watching me spank myself at the club."

I stayed silent.

"Didn't you?" she insisted.

"Yes."

"You'd like to spank me yourself.  Across your lap."

I shrugged.

Her voice dropped.  "Not just my ass.  Between my legs, too.  You'd like to slap me there."

My gusts of breath betrayed me.

"You should say what you want, Frank.  There aren't any rules."

"Tell me what
you
want," I managed.

"But it doesn't matter to you what I want."

"Yes, it does."

She smiled and pressed forward to kiss my cheek.  "Liar."  She twisted back, out of my hands, and started toward the galley kitchen.

I felt exposed and alone.  I fumbled to tuck myself back in my pants.

"Scotch alright?" she asked.

My boxers were damp and uncomfortable.  I cleared my throat.  "Scotch," I rumbled, "will always be alright."  I sounded like a caricature of John Wayne.  I shut the front door with such force that it bounced back along its track.

"Tricky door," she called out.

I closed it more gently.

"Feel free to look around."

"Thanks."  I was glad for the chance to get my legs — and my brain — working again.

Rachel's apartment was a loft with exposed posts and beams and lots of brick.  A mahogany sleigh bed covered with a velvet patchwork quilt sat atop a three-foot-high platform that was centered against the wall opposite the door.  The other walls were covered with oversized black-and-white photographs of people down on their luck.  Men with despair written in their faces huddled outside a soup kitchen called A Day's Bread.  A black boy not more than eight grimaced in pain.  I turned toward the kitchen.  "The photographs are your work?" I asked.

"I shot all of them here in Chelsea," she said.  "Did you want ice?"

"Straight up."  I looked back at the old woman.  A clear plastic tube delivered oxygen to each of her nostrils from a tank strapped to the chair.  "No one would accuse you of being a romantic."

"No?  I think their will to live is beautiful.  Just like my customer and his cancer.  ‘Staring death in the face,’ as you put it."  She started over with our drinks.

My eyes drifted to a piece of taxidermy that served as the base for a glass coffee table in the middle of the room.  It was a coyote with a raccoon trapped in its jaws.  The coon's eyes were wide with terror, but it had managed to sink its claws deep into the coyote's muzzle.

"You do believe what you told me about the scar, don't you?" she asked.  "About him being a survivor?"

That was a good question.  When I had been in private practice, I sometimes felt like a salesman peddling reasons to stay on this dismal planet.  Again and again, I had patients sign ‘contracts for safety,’ assuring me in writing that they would not do themselves in.  But would I have lived Billy's? 
Hang in there
.  Why?"  "It doesn't matter if I believe he's a survivor," I said, taking my scotch from her.  "He's the one who has to believe it."

I walked with her to a set of French doors at the end of the room that opened onto a deck overlooking the Tobin Bridge as it crossed into Boston.  The massive arch of steel was faulted with ruining Chelsea by extinguishing the neighborhoods where its concrete feet touched down.  I had never spent any time looking at it before and was struck by its grandeur.  I sat down on an old church pew Rachel had positioned in front of the doors.  "What was this building used for?" I asked.

"A sweatshop," she said, sitting down with me.  "They made uniforms for the military during Vietnam.  The closed it after the place caught fire."  She pointed up at a few feet of charring along one of the beams.  "This floor wasn't badly damaged.  The other floors were gutted."

I knew from listening to relatives of mine who had followed the path of upward mobility
out
of Chelsea, to North Shore towns like Nahant and Swampscott and Marblehead, that most of Chelsea had burned down twice, first in 1908, then again in 1973.  "You know what they say:  What Chelsea really needs..."

"...is another fire.  I've heard all the jokes."  She sipped her scotch.  "They say that to be cruel, but they're right, in a way.  Nothing ever get better gradually.  You have to die to be reborn."

"Not exactly a vote of confidence in my profession."

"Sorry, but let's face it:  Most of you guys can't see the potential in a nervous breakdown.  A real collapse.  There's more chance of finding yourself in a major depression that there is in a bottle of Prozac."  She leaned toward me.  "Or a gram of cocaine."

"Cocaine?"

"
Cocaine?
" she mocked.  "You really are a terrible liar.  I tasted it when my tongue was in your mouth."

"I have more if..."

"No thanks.  I don't do drugs.  But go ahead, if you want to."

I didn't need much encouragement.  I'd been thinking about a trip to the bathroom for a little blast since starting up the stairs.  I took out my package.

"I tried it for a while — that, marijuana, Valium, Percocet, heroin, Prozac, Zoloft."  She paused.  "Oh, yes, Ritalin.  A lot of Ritalin."

I wasn't sure I wanted to delve into Rachel's psychiatric history.  If I ended up feeling sorry for her, I might not be able to screw her the way I wanted to.  But I have never been satisfied on the surface of anything.  "You were depressed."

"Very good, doctor."  She turned over her arm.  Four vertical scars ran from her wrist several inches up her forearm.  How had I missed them?  "I tried overdosing on Prozac, too.  Nobody told me you have to take a jug of the stuff to do the trick.  It doesn't cure you and it won't kill you.  What the fuck good is it?"

"What saved you?"

"A healing professional, like yourself," she smirked.  "Is that the right answer?"

"Not in my experience."

"Mine, either.  The truth is, stripping saved me.  I started feeling better the day I started dancing."

"A more powerful anesthetic?"

"I think of it as a safety valve."

"How so?"

"In shrink lingo, it allows me to direct my anger outward, rather than inward."

"I thought
we
were the ones abusing
you
."

"Hardly.  I know what the customers are going through when I bend over in front of them.  I know most of them have overweight, aging wives at home who would put dick in their mouths if their lives depended on it.  I know I get them stiff, and they imagine what it would be like to put their cocks in me.  They can get close, but never close enough.  I see the pain in their eyes."

"So you're a sadist."

"Onstage.  Absolutely.  And that's enough for me.  I don't have to kill anybody."

"You're still young."  I took another pinch, spread it over my gums and put the package away.

"My question is, where's your anger?"

"Huh?"