Fresh Girls & Other Stories (5 page)

          I
t is your wife’s fortieth birthday, and I am torturing you to the sounds of a tape of Dylan Thomas giving a poetry recital. His voice is theatrical, and at times it hovers at the edges of breaking into song. “Do not go gentle into that good night … Rage, rage against the dying of the light … .” His words, charged with command, seem to pulse through my own body. Obediently I slip the spiked heel of my shoe into your mouth. You are watching me with confusion because I am drunk and balancing over your naked body takes more skill than you think. I don’t want to fall on you with my weight and the stabbing silver of my bracelet, injuring you, making it impossible for you to meet your wife later in the evening for dinner
down by the harbor where the white ships come in. She will chatter on about
The New York Review of Books,
literary magazines, publishers’ conventions, and other things that bewilder you because you decided to make money in medicine instead of writing poetry. Neither of us knew when we made our respective choices that we might be equally unfulfilled. I do not want to hurt you, at least not clumsily, not out of drunkenness, not because the high arches of my feet prevent me from balancing in spike heels. I want it to mean something when I hurt you, I want each transgression to be a deliberate one that cuts both ways, something that neither of us will be able to blame on bottles of wine or the fact that when I am in this position, one foot balanced on your neck, there is nothing nearby to hold on to and the only thing stable is the floor which seems a long way off from up here.

I will not go gentle into you. The high heel of my shoe is in your mouth, and it is cutting the roof where the flesh is ridged and ticklish. You suck the heel as you would a phallus, and I wonder what you are tasting, what grotty remains of dust and dirt and sidewalk you are swallowing down the soft pinkness of your throat. Up here I can see you are going bald, the expanse of your forehead with your gray hair tossed backwards onto the carpet is wide and gleaming. With your eyes shut and your mouth working to please the point of my
shoe, you could easily be an inflatable doll or a cartoon and I am able then to withdraw my heel as carefully as a penis and rake it in pink crescents across your cheek and down your chin.

In my sessions with you I search for the evil inside us that we share like kisses between our open mouths. The boundaries I once saw as steel fences in my mind turned out to be sodden wooden planks when I reached them, easily kicked down. Each act of pain became easier to inflict once the initial transgressions had been committed, and we had understood ourselves capable of surviving them. Once I even tried on myself the things I do to you. Whipping myself with a silver chain, I became fascinated by the stopped seconds of pain that opened my mouth and closed my eyes. Afterwards I was left looking down at my thighs where the circle of the chain I had snapped down my body had left a perfect imprint of itself, pink like a rubber stamp, like one of those playful rubber stamps with happy faces on them.

When the pain stopped, time moved again and I wondered if perhaps in our time together you felt this also, this stopping of time as it races past you now that you are middle-aged and some of your friends are already dead. Perhaps only the absorption of pain can distract you from the details of your daily life — the necessary hours at the office, the teenaged children
demanding money for concerts and clothes, the golf lessons on weekend afternoons. All this leading you down the road of increasing age, minor illnesses, and death.

“Old age should burn and rave at close of day,” Thomas instructs sternly. Perhaps only in the clutches of pain, when your eyes are closed and your lips forced apart, does the day seem long. Perhaps this is what you seek, this element of immortality, the way I do by writing poems. I tried that day to understand what it must be like for you when the pain hits, when you protest with a convulsion in your voice that stops me because it is no longer a pleasurable pleading that runs out of your mouth like water or thin blood.

It is easy to become addicted to hurting you, to aching for that moment when you take off your clothes and lie on my floor. There is a slight roundness to your stomach and a soft field of black chest hair that sharpens into a tiger’s stripe running down your belly. It appears knife-like, sadistic. I could picture you with a black beard, trying on black leather vests and turning in a mirror like the men I watch downtown in the shops I frequent now, fascinated, struck by how warmly this fringe community welcomes me. I had never been accepted so unquestioningly elsewhere. I finger the bewildering chains of my new trade, and talk to the
women behind the counter who are pierced and smiling and who recommend books that make me realize I am only on the circumference and that the center has no bottom. You could just as easily have been one of those men who advertise for young blonde slaves to torture, who read magazines that teach them how to build benches and restraints and instruments of pain. You could have turned out like that, and I am given to understand that perhaps even now, one afternoon you will. Some nights I pace my apartment and wonder if one day I will push you too far and you will lunge up from the floor and hurt me. There is no way either of us can tell, because we are each other and there is nothing restraining that moment when we exchange power as others do body fluids.

The power floods into me warm and soft and golden, dusty as pollen. I had not realized previously the extent of my emptiness that no kisses could fill, no flowers or brave words of love. The emptiness sang hollow and blue and then turned red as rage. I knew from the first session that I could have killed you, and that, indeed, you were not letting me go so far as I needed. Looking down at your muscled body on my floor, I wanted some of that red inside me to bleed out through you, in slashes and strokes of thudding color.

You bought me a bracelet the other day from one of
the sex shops downtown. It was sitting curled up in a dusty corner of the glass case, half-concealed by wrinkly dildoes and packets of Day-Glo creams and lotions. I was browsing impatiently, needing to use the bathroom, my feet swelling in my heels, bored by the plastic-coated magazines and the multicolored underwear nailed to the walls. The woman behind the counter had a toothless glazed expression and eyes that looked like they were made of glass. I did not particularly want to be there and perhaps neither did you, you were lifting your watch every so often to check the time and thinking of dinner with your wife who, if you were lucky, might wear the red leather outfit you had bought her, even if she never assumed the role. There was no time that afternoon to duck into changing rooms with burgundy lace and ripped, fringed leather skirts. The fluff no longer interested me, the delicacy of lingerie seemed an offense. It was the trickling cat o’ nine tails that tickled my fingers, it was the canes perched rigid on the walls, it was even that morbid black leather mask molded to the dummy’s unseeing white face on the top counter that ran currents through me. I felt as though the world I had walked on for years had flipped and on the other side there lived people who turned up palms of blood and leather.

The woman with the motionless eyes uncurled the bracelet and we felt the tips of the studs. When she said
the bracelet had been banned I said I wanted it and you paid for it and that night I fell asleep with it on my wrist, while candles flickered around the room in crystal holders. It tormented me all night because each time I moved my hand I would hurt myself into consciousness. The next day I wore it and pretended it was a joke from a friend, and at lunch a man came to my table and said, “You could kill somebody with that.” His eyes were brown and overly trusting. Later when I hugged my lunch companion good-bye she let out a yelp and said, “You stabbed me in the back.”

It will be a good toy for next time, applied to the more vulnerable parts of your body. I will stroke you with the eager points of the bracelet and then I will hurt you with them. That is part of the joy, the caresses that I allow before pressing down the pain. I like it best when I kiss you with full-mouthed tenderness before slapping your face; when I lick a finger and circle it lightly around the head of your penis before pinching the skin of the shaft; when I take one of your truncated nipples into my mouth and stroke its little hard point between my teeth before I bite.

I listen to you when you call at night needing somebody to talk to, and I spend half an hour with you on the phone while you talk about your marriage and your kids and your practice, and I never tell you you are
boring me or that my time is not for you. I show my harmlessness by giving you books of poetry, but I am never able to read more than a few lines aloud to you before you become impatient and pull me to the floor, where we lose our words and our regular faces.

If we are victims of each other, then in those moments we are the most beautiful victims in the world. Sometimes when I stand over you, when my heels are gouging into you, I look beyond you towards some thin line of distance and understand that each time your face wrenches with pain I am spreading a slow dark stain down the still-white years of my future, and that in that sense you are killing me and not the other way around. Each time you scream, it wrings out the light in me and leaves twisted red and black cords like knotted whips lying on the wall and waiting, hungering to be used, to be applied against white skin that flinches away and cries.

You have the kind of engaging smile and blue eyes that, in the daytime, makes you one of the most popular dentists in the city. How could they know those same fingers take a piece of wire and wind it so tightly around the base of your penis that I wince for you? How could they know your mouth fills with everything that sifts across the bottom of high-heeled shoes that have walked the pavement? You are friendly enough, your hand cups
their trusting chins, you see into them and reassure them. You see into them the way you saw into me the first night we met over drinks and lounge music, and even though I said little and at that time knew nothing, you saw something in me you described as dark, very dark; you saw a part of me I had not seen in hours of mirror reflections.

This is not a game, you kept saying, until I heard it every night in my dreams. You can call it a game if you like, but I will do almost anything you want, whatever that might be.

I had thought that that for me would translate into walks on the beach and poetry readings and drinking wine, that those would be the extent of my desires. I had not expected this rage that continues to grow rather than subside as you plead with me now to stop, as a thin growl rises in my throat and razors the air.

It is your wife’s fortieth birthday and Dylan Thomas’s voice slows to a stop on the tape. You edge out the door with the sun bouncing off your glasses and your briefcase tucked under your arm. It is always remarkable to me, these partings, how we are able to assume again the responsibilities of work and life as though nothing had changed, as though we had not been permanently altered by our actions. On the surface things are as they always have been — you are discreet with your wounds;

no one asks questions. I sit down at the typewriter and rub my swollen feet, their chafed heels, thinking of our obligations towards wives and poetry and thinking that perhaps this is just as well, we do not want the end to come too soon, the irreversible outcome of the final scene. We want to taste our pleasure bit by bit, inch by inch, we want to lick it slowly and make it last. We will make it good and make it last, my poor tiger-striped victim, we will make ourselves into people we hate enough to kill.

          T
he man’s shower curtain is decorated with coral and fish. Jane is reminded of another apartment, the one where the diver lived. But she won’t think about that. This is a different bathroom, with a
Playboy
smoothed under a travel magazine on the counter, a triangular bottle of cologne on a shelf, the absence of a medicine cabinet behind the mirror. And a scale on the floor, where the diver would have kept his masks, both the one he used underwater and the one he used in bed.

It’ll be fine here. It’ll be different from the other nights. This time, it’ll be good. Jane peels up the edges of the travel magazine and takes a peek at the Playmate of the Month, blonde and for some reason wearing a
crown. She lifts her eyes to the mirror and shrugs. This relaxes her shoulders, so she does it again. A strand of dark brown hair falls over her forehead, and she pushes it back with fingers that tremble in the critical light from the row of bulbs above the mirror. According to the reflection her face is bloated, her hair needs washing, and there are avocado-colored circles under her eyes. Plain Jane. But the man in this apartment wants her, wants her more than just the way a client wants her. Perhaps tonight will be the night he sinks to his knees and tells her that he loves her, that he can’t be a client anymore, he wants them to go out on real dates: movies, dinners, walks around the seawall.

The thought makes her grin with pleasure, and she tries to focus clearly enough on her reflection to do something about her appearance. Fighting the dizziness from the alcohol, she steadies herself against the counter with the palm of one hand, splashing water over her face. As she straightens up she knocks her forehead against the tap and for a moment the bathroom goes gray, like an old movie. But then the hard surfaces gleam again, the wavy marble of the counter, the stretch of mirror, the faucet. And behind her, a school of fish rises and falls across the shower curtain, circling her head in green and orange halos.

The muffled sound of a cork popping interrupts her as she’s tracing a tube of lipstick with exaggerated care
across her mouth; it gives her a sense of direction, a place to go. She tugs the bathroom door open and crosses the hall, towards the memory of that sound. He’s standing at the kitchen counter, the corkscrew bright and winged in his hand. His mouth exudes the perfume of red wine.

“Sweet Jane,” he says.

As she nestles her face against his arm, hair falls into her eyes again, and momentarily the kitchen is seen behind a row of bars and filaments, the counter curving round like a bent dream. She is grateful for this body beside her to hold on to, its limbs more gentle with her than the edges of the counter or the slippery side of the fridge. The wine in her glass catches the overhead light and sends it spinning in thin circles, pretty circles looping between her cupped fingers.

He is kissing her face, her neck, she knows that soon he’ll whisper something about the bedroom.

“Wait,” she says, pushing at his chest, giggling when he blows once into her ear then lets her go. She crosses the kitchen and then through the living room in her high heels, swaying to the beat of the music video playing from speakers connected to his television. Past the wall-to-wall bookshelves, the stacks of records and CDs, the camera equipment dismantled in the corner, towards the open balcony doors where the cold blows in.

She’s lived in this city all her life, nothing is mysterious about its façade beyond the balcony railings — mountains, a few ships in the harbor, the harshly glittering bridges and ski slopes, and the lights of downtown. The lights of the buildings remind her of the apartments where the other men live.

She holds on to the railing and looks down. If she fell the night would glide past her face like a half-remembered dream. Above her the stars have come out in the sky, some fixed, others winking. The sky is hard as slate, but the man in this apartment is soft. He will fix her, make things right. The man is flesh, he has no edges or corners anywhere in his heavy frame. Idly she tries to conjure up the features of his face, but abandons the attempt when she finds she can’t, there have been too many other faces. Never mind. She will recognize it when she goes back inside, she’ll be able to smile at it and kiss it on the mouth like a lover. If she turns her back now and leaves the balcony, the stars shining fiercely in their flat heavens, she’ll be able to pretend the city is a dead thing and that all those lights in all the other apartments are burning in empty rooms.

In the bedroom he’s warm, like a pillow she’s turned lengthwise and hugged all night into sleep, the way she does at home where she sleeps alone. He smells of detergent and the blue cologne. She regrets that she can’t
lie in his arms and drink at the same time. From time to time she props herself up on her elbows to swallow from the glass on the bedside table. Its contents no longer taste like anything but cloudy water.

The room itself is cold, he has left the window open upon the hated mountains, the indigo sky. On the cupboard the flames of the oil lamps flicker as though the night is making a wish and trying to blow out all the candles in the man’s room. The bed is large and white, like a field of snow. Soon she will have to give him something for his money. Soon she will see his face as if from the end of a tunnel, when he crouches and arranges his limbs above her body.

He is smiling now. He is above her, inside her. The night leaks in through the window, and instead of being with him she remembers all the other male bodies in their apartments bent in supplication or in dominance — her hand raised to push a shoulder down onto a bed or floor, a slender line of blood trailing from a torn nipple. One man struggles with the nozzle of an enema while he fiddles joyfully with his genitals; another lies spread-eagled on a bed, tied with ropes as cleverly wound as the string she played with as a child, making a cradle, making a bridge. Yet another man kneels on a whisky-soaked carpet in an unheated basement, crying and sucking the four-inch heel on her shoe; while in a penthouse one
more man carefully removes his black Italian suit to crawl into the foyer, barking like a dog. All their faces are red with pleasure and humiliation and the rage that accompanies their passion. “Please,” she wants to whisper, digging her fingernails into this man’s arm, “make them go away, make them not real.” But the man in the bedroom closes his eyes, he is making love to her between her legs, unaware that she is sweating from the pain of the men around her. Sweat runs from her temples into her open eyes. She tries to count backwards from one hundred: ninety-nine, ninety-eight, make it stop. The man thinks she is finally feeling pleasure, he is happy, he is smiling so hard she can see his teeth, he too tries to count so he can make it last longer for her: ninety-nine, ninety-eight … it goes on for too long, for too long she hears the men scream.

But then it does end. He rolls off her body and stares at her for a moment, his eyes large-pupilled in the candlelight. He lies back with his arms folded behind his head on the bank of white pillows. “Jane,” he says, “I think you should leave now.”

She drowses all the way home in the taxi, which takes her over the bridge and into the city with its halogen and neon lights alive. The night air is thick as a hangover in her mouth. She sprawls across the back seat, no longer caring about her exposing miniskirt or the driver’s
contemptuous stare in the rearview mirror. Across the water the man in his apartment goes to sleep in his white bed.

Jane huddles inside her jacket, her fingers brushing the fifty-dollar bills wedged in a rectangle in her pocket. The downtown streets run together outside, blue and glimmering — storefronts, restaurants, clubs. She leans her forehead against the window, watching beneath her drooping lids the occasional couple sauntering down the street, bits of conversation and a few shrieks of laughter carried to her on the chill wind. Between the waves of nausea it occurs to her that certain things, things that once seemed so possible, are becoming less and less likely with each passing night.