Maidenhead (13 page)

I felt like I was in a tornado, squeezed so high that I could barely breathe.

§

Elijah had one arm around my waist, one hand on my mouth. The orange curtains in their room were woolly, no light came through from the street. I heard the shriek of the gulls above us on the roof. There was a broken chain lock on the inside of the door. I had been completely subdued.

That woman who slapped me in Key West lay with spread legs on the bed in an old white poncho. The tassels were dirty and full of knots.

‘We thought it was going to be cooler up here,’ she said, looking at my skirt, how short it was.

I remembered her grinding and coming in Key West. I remembered the blood on her robe in the shape of a lake. Her two-eyed breasts, her full-handed slap. Elijah ate her out in Key West.

I knew that she could tell I’d been crying. Elijah’s palm was so big it covered my nose. Three burlap sacks were lined up against the wall.

‘This is Gayl,’ Elijah said. ‘Gayl, meet Myra.’

‘You still have that pretty pink bathing suit with the holes in the sides?’

My pink bathing suit had shrunk in the dryer. I didn’t know that you weren’t supposed to put spandex into heat. My mother had never taught me about laundry. Now it was ruined, a thing for a doll.

‘What’s the matter with her? She shy or depressed? She looks shocked, E. Kind of a good look.’

Elijah took me to the bed that was a foot away from Gayl’s. His palm left my mouth.

I tried not to look at her straight. Gayl’s hair was not the same as it had been before. It was more prominent now: two thick brown coils over her ears like headphones.

‘Yeah, anyway, she’s fine,’ Gayl said. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking.’

I tried not to show my confusion. Gayl was thinner than I remembered, but still those big breasts. She breathed kind of raspy and full so I could hear it. The carpet in their room was colourless. There was a wobbly kitchen table with a hot plate in the corner.

‘We’re certainly glad you could join us, Mira,’ Gayl said, overly friendly.

‘It’s Myra.’

‘Myyyyra? Okay. Yeah, E., she’s not afraid to speak her mind. Very nice.’

I didn’t understand why she was here and evaluating me and why Elijah was silent about it.

‘So what do you got to say for yourself, my Myra? You ready for a ride or what?’

Gayl patted the bed beside her. I sat down. I had a rock in my throat.

Elijah was at the rusty kitchen table with a big brown liquor-store bag.

‘I’m, um, busy at school,’ I said to Gayl, feeling brave. ‘Uh, just doing homework and stuff.’

‘Yeah? You studying the classics?’

‘No.’

‘Good. The Brontës are bullshit.’

I laughed.

‘I read Flannery O’Connor back in the day.’

I didn’t know who that was. I’d have to ask Aaron.

Elijah handed me red wine in a chipped coffee mug. It was like everything was regular for a second between us, like we were all around the same age and I was just visiting two friends. It felt kind of amazing to swing so fast from fear of her to ease.

I sipped the wine. Elijah began to unpack. Gayl sat up, almost robotically, and she moved off the bed and followed Elijah. She took out piles of clothes from one of the burlap sacks on the floor and shoved them into drawers inside a bureau in the closet. Neither of them touched one of the bags. It looked bulky with a stereo or something.

I considered leaving even though I was calm, even though everything seemed all right. Both of them were ignoring me. I could’ve just called Lee and told her to come meet me downtown.

Then, as abruptly as they’d started unpacking, they stopped. Gayl resumed her position on the bed I was on. Elijah poured me a second mug of wine. He filled it right to the top. I soaked my lips. Gayl watched me, smiling.

‘Look at her. She’s a bloodsucker,’ Gayl said to Elijah. ‘And she was such a tight jailbait shit in the Key.’

My cheek started itching. Elijah winked. I remembered seeing them together, his head slipping around on her body, his tongue pushing up in her pussy. I’d seen that a million times now in porn.
Don’t do that to anyone else
, Gayl had said. I wanted to feel that, feel him eat me too.

Elijah motioned me towards him. He had something in his hand. Gayl was watching us but she didn’t seem upset. I don’t even know why I assumed she’d be jealous. I should have been jealous. I don’t think I was jealous.

‘Come closer,’ Elijah said. He showed me what he had: a flute that was made of burnt yellow wood with zigzags etched in it with a knife. He turned it around while he held the mouth end.

‘We might settle here,’ he said. ‘Gayl’s been sick.’

I turned back to look at Gayl. She’d gone under the covers. I was trying to figure out her body under there. Elijah scratched the hairs of his beard. I heard something whirring, a little like a fan. I stared at the lump of her, unmoving.

‘Come,’ Elijah whispered. ‘Let’s leave her alone.’

Elijah had this expression of caring for me. But it was just for a moment before his eyes shifted to Gayl in the bed.

He poured me a third mug of wine. ‘Drink up,’ he said. He wagged the flute.

I knew this was it. I knew we were finally going to have sex. This is what I had come here for, that
disturbance
.

‘You good?’ Elijah’s hand was on my shoulder, pushing me towards the bathroom. I thought I was going to drop my wine. ‘You gonna make me crazy again?’

I made my eyes go like the porn girls’ eyes. I made my eyes glassy and rabid and hot.

‘Yeah, you’re gonna make me lose it, bitch.’

I smiled. Elijah had such a good body, his arms were huge. His eyes were just as needy as mine.

If my father knew I was here he would’ve called the police. Being a bitch in a dirty motel, feeling my ass move side to side in my skirt with a man who was twenty years older than me.

Elijah left the bathroom door open a crack. The light was fluorescent. Elijah’s dreadlocks fell out to each side and seemed to separate his face in two, as if he had a good face and a bad face. The tiles were swirly mother-of-pearl. The grout around them grew flowers of rust. I looked up at the ceiling, a buzzing white tube hung from two tiny chains.

‘You scared?’ Elijah looked behind me towards the crack in the door.

I was totally wet. I liked both of his faces.

‘That’s okay, Angel. Come right here. Come to me.’

I didn’t feel degraded. It occurred to me that an angel could not be degraded.

‘We’ll go slow,’ Elijah said, gripping my arm. ‘It’s been a long time.’

I was finally where I wanted to be. In a bathroom alone with this man who I wanted so bad. His hand squeezing my arm made me rush, anticipating it. Gayl, his girlfriend, was in the other room. I felt wild. She hated me.

LEE: You’ve got to be careful about a woman who hates you. Women are vengeful fuckers. Powerless women, completely the worst.

GAYL: Powerless? Who’re you calling powerless?

LEE: Look, it’s not personal. It’s systemic. Systemic oppression inherited from generations of our people being enslaved. It’s made us ruthless and vengeful, ideally. I’m a black woman too, you know. My mom’s from Zimbabwe.

GAYL: Well, your theory is bunk ’cause I’m an artist. An artist from Kentucky. Artists don’t count.

§

Lee read the first draft of my essay in the ravine, under our light. I titled it ‘Sex Slaves: The Modern, the Foreign, the Free.’ I was trying to prove that all slaves are ashamed but that within this shame there is the potential to be free. I was echoing Agamben, I think, and trying to challenge the historical information about slaves which says that they are ashamed and subjugated, thus they can’t ever be unashamed or free.

Slaves, it seemed to me, had secrets, secret lives.

I was expanding the definition of slave to suggest that there was such a thing as being enslaved and being free. I remembered the exploitative exhibition I saw with my mother in Key West. It was exploitative because it was totally from the viewpoint of the oppressors, not the slaves. So far I knew that slaves were ashamed, or portrayed as ashamed, because a) they had no freedom, b) they were enmeshed in wars and c) they were always kept apart and alienated from each other. Ms. Bain always told us that we needed to know our conclusion before we even started to write, that that was how you proved something, by working backwards from the conclusion. But my questions were serpentine, inconclusive: What if slaves were not kept apart from each other? What if slaves could take pleasure while enslaved?

My essay was getting more confused as I wrote it. Slaves can have a freedom within shame, I thought, if they create their own subjectivity. Agamben wrote that shame was ‘the most proper emotive tonality of subjectivity.’ (I felt like Ms. Bain would think that I didn’t understand that quote but Mr. Rotowsky would probably give me the benefit of the doubt.) I really did understand it, that emotive tonality. Because slaves can experience pleasure self-consciously, in secret, I wrote. And it is ironic that we see this displayed in contemporary pornographic actresses who subvert, very publicly, the notion that slaves are not supposed to feel pleasure. Modern-day slavery is different than slavery in the past. Slavery, I proposed, needs to be re-thought from the contradictory knowledge and expression of shame.

‘So, it’s just a first draft,’ I told Lee. ‘It’s kind of all over the place, I know.’

Lee was smoking pot. She told me she smoked first thing in the morning sometimes.

‘You have to check out the master-slave dialectic.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Oh man, I’m not gonna spoil it for you!’

It occurred to me right then that a master was specific, that not every slave had their own master to love or to hate.

‘I want to give this to Chris,’ Lee said. Chris being, of course, the legendary dealer that she and Aaron worked for. ‘Maybe he can publish it in one of his anarchist rags – they’re American, you know.’

‘It’s not ready for that.’

‘Why not? It’s pretty good, even without the dialectic.’

Lee held on to my essay. She didn’t pass it back. ‘
Don’t
, okay?’

‘But you gotta ship out the goods sometimes. You’re a good writer, Myra. You should keep doing it. Have you shown this to Aaron? He’d like the way you quoted Agamben. You should acknowledge the way he’s educating you.’

The light green-washed Lee’s beauty marks. It coloured the smoke streaming out of her nose.

‘Uh ... It kind of bugs me that you just said that.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m not a blank slate, you know. I’m not just there to be educated. I read too. I wrote this.’

‘Myra. Come on, I
know
you wrote this. I just read it. I think it’s amazing. You write kind of rhythmically and it’s totally creative. I wasn’t doing shit like this in high school. I hope your teachers recognize that. And give you A plus plus plus plus.’

Lee passed me the joint. The joint shut me up.

§

‘Hey, Angel.’

‘Yeah?’

I wasn’t sure what to do, what he wanted.

‘Pull down your pants.’

Elijah started playing his flute. It was fast, pointy, climbing the walls.

‘Pull down your pants and piss for me.’

That flute was a twig that someone had gored to make sound.

‘Go ahead. Do it.’

Elijah looked at me through the mirror. He stopped playing. I pulled my skirt down and sat on the toilet. I didn’t take off my underwear.