Maidenhead (23 page)

‘See, Dad? It’s okay, I’m fine, Anna agrees.’

‘You’re not fine. Fucking hell. Excuse me.’

Me and my dad stood there like that, both our chests caving in while Anna was back at the sink, scrubbing a pot, and then at the fridge hauling out plastic bags. I didn’t know where all that food came from. Eventually, Anna looked at my dad and smiled as encouragement.

‘Anna’s making dinner tonight. Tofu goreng. Do you want to eat with us? Jeff is joining us too. Jody might arrive a bit later because she’s coming in for the weekend.’

‘Since when do you eat tofu?’ Since when does a domestic worker make our dinners?

‘Anna shared her lunch with me a few times,’ my father said.

After you deleted your stash of bikini-fisted cunts? Anna chopped garlic. My father looked at the floor. I wanted to laugh but no laughs would come.

‘After all these years your mother just couldn’t do it anymore,’ my dad said. ‘Your mother and I are getting a divorce. I still have to tell Jeff that this is final. But you know that, correct?’

My father rubbed his face. Anna, with sticky hands, was beside him again with a fresh tissue, like a saviour, or a moth. I wasn’t babying him like my mother thought. But he needed babying, it seemed. And my mother was out of that role, a millionaire now. She’d just sent me and Jeff a package in the mail. It had two Korean bank envelopes inside, one for him and one for me. The envelopes said
Korean Kash for my Kids! Kiss, Kiss!
in a weird loopy script that I didn’t recognize. Each of our envelopes had two thousand bucks in American bills.

‘
Myra.
You know that your mother and I are getting a divorce, correct?’

I had two thousand American dollars courtesy of my mother’s revolt.

Anna was back at the garlic, chopping. Her skin seemed moist, her black eyes were bright.

‘I know that Spartacus was the leader of a slave revolution,’ I said. ‘I know that slaves rise up and fight.’

My father looked scared of me. Anna, eyes down, did not.

‘Come on, Dad. Yes. I know that, yes. Divorce, correct. I’ll come for dinner. Thank you, Anna.’

My father’s face settled. It was as if, for one second, he understood my need for spectacle.

§

In my bedroom, healing, I read Aaron’s Weil. The floors shone, the sheets were clean because of Anna. ‘Subordination: economy of energy. Thanks to this, an act of heroism can be performed without there being any need for the person who commands or the one who obeys to be a hero.’

Lee called me the moment I moved from Weil to Bataille.

‘I know you didn’t want me to talk to your father,’ Lee said. ‘I know I crossed that line.’

I read from Bataille in silence:
Cruelty and eroticism are conscious intentions in a mind which has resolved to trespass into a forbidden field of behaviour.

‘Myra? Respond. Talk, please. I’m sorry.’

It was my conscious intention to trespass into a forbidden field of behaviour.

‘Look, I just feel like since I kept what happened to me from my parents for so long, I’m really sensitive to it,’ Lee said. ‘I’m kind of on the side of the parents.’

‘You were in Grade 6, Lee. I am seventeen years old.’

‘I
know
, Myra. That’s why I’m saying I’m sorry. I miss you. I’m sorry. I’m just overprotective. You’re working it out, I know. I don’t want our friendship to be aborted in the process. You’re just in this really raw state of something unreal ... ’

My heart sped up. Lee didn’t understand. Pornography with Gayl and Elijah was
real
. It was my forbidden field to stomp in – full of hairy red flowers on sharp spotted stalks.

‘Myra?
You
still exist, okay?
You’re
real.’

‘Listen to this.’ I cracked open the centre of the book, a section of Bataille that I had never read before: ‘“
Silence cannot do away with things that language cannot state. Violence is as stubbornly there just as much as death, and if language cheats to conceal universal annihilation, the placid work of time, language alone suffers
.”’ I paused on that, repeating: ‘“
Language alone suffers, language is the poorer, not time and not violence
.” Hey, Lee, you think I can finish my essay in language that does not suffer?’

‘No. I don’t.’

‘Why?’

‘Myra, listen, I want to be friends with
you
, okay?’ Lee said softly. ‘The free woman, the tender one, not the one in thrall of some violent American asshole and his girlfriend.’

‘Elijah is Tanzanian and Gayl is from Kentucky,’ I said quickly. I was anticipating sex: violence, assholes, annihilation. ‘Gayl is really smart. She’s an artist. I think you should meet her.’

‘They’re using you.’

‘They are not.’

‘Of course they are.’

‘I don’t care if they are.’

‘You
should
care, Myra.’

But I didn’t. I had money in my pocket. I had a thick envelope of cash. I wanted to see Gayl and Elijah with my money, with my freedom, and explode on the floor, come on the floor, show my tits tongue ass and knees to both of them together. I wanted to share the money from my mother. Somehow the whole thing made sense. Slave revolt cash for a slave revolting.

‘Myra?’

‘What.’

‘What are you thinking right now?’

I wasn’t thinking. I was shaking. Language cheats and conceals. ‘I am on this path of Absolute Knowledge,’ I whispered.

Lee didn’t respond. We were both silent for a while.

Then she said, ‘Bataille does not believe in Absolute Knowledge, you know.’

I didn’t know.

‘Wait, just hang on.’

I heard her go through the pages of a book. ‘Okay here it is: “
Circular absolute knowledge is definitive non-knowledge
,”’ Lee read slowly, each word intense. ‘That is Bataille, okay? True inner experience can’t be mapped by absolutes. The whole Hegelian thing was too neat for him. Bataille was all about the cracks. Myra?’

The cracks? Knowledge is cracky? Was it hairy too? I started laughing. It hurt my jaw to laugh. Was cracky, hairy, uncertain knowledge the key to getting fucked a thousand times? Or was it the key to making annihilating porn with a violent asshole and an artist? Or was there no key to any of this?

‘Myra, let me come over there,’ Lee said. ‘I really feel like laughing with you.’

‘But my face is fucked up. It hurts to laugh.’

‘What’s wrong with your face?’

‘Black eyes. A red jaw.’

‘God, Myra.
Fuck
. I was right.’

‘You’re right. Bataille is right. I’m not suffering. I just have to write it down.’

‘Let me come over.’

‘No. Not now.’

‘
Please
, Myra. Let me.’

‘I have to write. I have to finish my essay.’

I heard Lee breathing loudly into the phone. I didn’t know if she was angry or worried or what.

‘Why don’t you come for dinner later? Anna’s making tofu goreng. Jody’s coming home. It smells pretty good in here. All right?’

It was three o’clock in the afternoon. I would act out my conclusion. Come home half-formed, tail dragging: free.

‘Myra ... ’

‘Yeah?’

‘Who’s Anna?’

‘My father’s slave.’

§

The Y-shaped gold handle on Room 303 was stuck. It had a safety pin sticking out of the centre. It wouldn’t open for me. I banged on the door.

Gayl answered. She was alert, her shoulders pinned to her back, her back straight.

‘Sunny,’ she said, eyeing me. ‘’Tis a brand-new day.’

I had two thousand dollars in my pocket. ‘It is, yeah.’

I walked in past her. Gayl watched me. She could tell I was confident.

‘You heal pretty good,’ she said, shutting the door and pressing her body up against it.

Anna had served me cup after cup of tea while I wrote. She kept knocking like a little bird on my bedroom door. I kept thanking her and thanking her, saying, no more! That’s enough! Thank you, Anna! Now only my left cheek was still puffy. My eyes had a yellowish-violet tint around them. That’s all.

‘To tell you the truth,’ Gayl said, ‘I’m surprised we’re even fucking seeing you again.’

Gayl’s eyes were as bruised as the day before. She sat down at the table where there was an opened can of kidney beans.

‘Yeah? Well, don’t be surprised,’ I said. I felt tall in my body. I pushed out my chest and smiled. I felt excited to be with her. I was here, consciously, loaded with cash and the desire not to conceal violence. I had concluded my thinking on the slave.

‘Men don’t like to see the marks they make,’ Gayl said.

‘Oh no?’ I smiled.

Gayl smiled back at me. I think we both had the same thought: sometimes
everyone
wants to see what they’ve done.

‘Where’s Elijah?’ I asked.

‘Elijah is gone.’

‘Where?’

‘You don’t know?’

I got nervous all of a sudden. Where was he? I wanted the three of us. I wanted our porn.

Gayl stared at me. She made a pulse start in my cheek.

I fiddled around in my purse for my stash. I had only enough for one joint. But there was a perfect little pebble of hash stuck to some papers at the bottom of my bag. Aaron must’ve slipped it to me at some point without me knowing.

‘You think that’s going to make it better?’ Gayl asked.

‘I hope it’s still good,’ I said quickly, passing her the hash. ‘It’s been in my purse for a while.’

Gayl turned on the hot plate. She shoved a butter knife between the coils. The curtains were open. Bronze squares flashed into the room. I thought of dinner with Lee and Anna, my dad, Jody and Jeff. It would be better than Gayl’s kidney beans. I imagined her around our table too.

‘My customers liked you,’ Gayl said. ‘They want to see more of you soon.’

‘Okay.’ Another session was what I wanted. A chance to work with her again, be with him.

Gayl pressed a piece of hash on the back of a spoon. Then she slipped the blackened knife out of the burner and smashed the two utensils together. She sucked in the thick smoke like she did it every day, staring at me the whole time.

‘I was taught not to lie, Myra,’ she said at the top of her breath. ‘I was taught by my mummy to tell the whole truth.’

I wasn’t lying. I had tried in my essay not to lie. I’d tried to write in language that did not suffer.
It doesn’t matter
, I wrote,
if the slave is ashamed, or takes pleasure, or display themselves in pornography. It does not matter if their lack of freedom is traumatic or experiential. Because the self-conscious narrative of the slave
, I concluded,
is a liberation narrative
.

Gayl was holding her breath, holding in the hash.

‘That stuff is really strong,’ I said.

Gayl coughed out her smoke and laughed in hoarse barks. ‘You’re getting used to our high-art bullshit already?’