Netsuke (5 page)

12

NAKED, THE CUTTER APPEARED to be sleeping on the floor. I could see at once that she had not hurt herself, but she was very drunk. There were marks all over her body, and as always the sight of them stunned me. She looked like a kid sprawled as she was, a shameless, crazy kid. A kid up for adoption. A kid up for sale.

I had the distinct impression that she was only pretending to be asleep and that she knew I was standing there looking at her. I think she knew the sight of her naked body ate into me; the Cutter leeched me. There is no better way to say it.

It was beyond the middle of the night. I slipped out of my clothes and tenderly roused her with my tongue, my teeth.
Ah, Kat,
I breathed.
My own Kat, your blue latex, your violet moss, your bitter lime
… She laughed her dizzying laugh; she said:

“So … it’s
you.”

It began slowly, a novelty for us. I knew what I was doing was disgraceful and relished that knowledge. Each time I kissed Kat’s scars I knew I was wounding Akiko.
Unspeakable,
I thought, and it was thrilling. The Cutter in love is enigmatic. This is because she is imagining violent acts, staggering, terrible things.

And now she begins to complain, to enter into battle. I feel her nails tigering my neck and shoulders.

“Go easy,” I whisper. “I’m a married man.”

This simple fact enrages her. I have forgotten my promise to her, that I will stop sleeping with Akiko. When she tears herself away, cursing me, I say:

“You know I can’t totally stop fucking her. I live with her! It’s not easy for me, Sweetheart.” And then she does something that frightens me. She slaps my cock; she slaps it hard. And then she slaps my face.

I found Akiko asleep by the phone with her head on the kitchen table. She looked so vulnerable, so lost, that I felt overwhelmed with shame. Or perhaps it was anxiety.

I covered Akiko’s shoulders with a blanket and went upstairs to shower. I can never get enough hot water. So much filth and always the desire to scald it off. I thought I would stay under the water until the years spilled into the sewers of the city and I was new again. But the knowledge that I had to find a way to safely break with the Cutter had me crouching in a spasm of pain. It was an old pain, the pain of a prisoner who has been tightly bound with wire and abandoned in his cell.

As the burning water thundered down, I continued to crouch, wondering about the lethal necessity of sex, that murderous, that inescapable … and then I imagined that I was an insignificant thing spinning about in the vast sea of first things, irresistibly driven into splitting in two. I imagined that act as inescapable as the impulse to orgasm. I thought I had discovered the first instant of orgasm, there at the heart of things, at the world’s beginning.

But Akiko was rapping on the shower door, peering into the steam and down at me. “My love!” she cried out in fear and wonderment, “My love!” the glass door open but a crack, her face floating above mine pale as the moon, “What are you doing? Are you O.K.?
What are you doing?”

Akiko was hazed in steam, dripping with moisture.

“I’m worried about you,” she said, and pulling her fingers through her hair: “I’m worried about us.” I turned off the water and, grabbing a towel, laughed.

“I’m all right! I’m just all knots—I can’t believe I spent the night at the hospital—what time
is
it? I’ll be late—”

She said: “You haven’t slept.”

Seeing her so lost, so despondent, I gave her a quick squeeze—

“We’re all right,” I said. “Akiko.
We are all right.”

I dashed about scowling, drying myself with ferocity, dressing in haste as she looked on, wide-eyed, her arms crossed over her chest as if to hide her heart.

“Let’s meet downtown for dinner. I’ll call you from the office—” I pecked her cheek—as she once joked:
a poor excuse for what she craved.

In the car I wondered at the brevity of things, recalling how Akiko had once consumed me utterly, how I had trusted her vivacious intelligence, a certain quality, a luminosity I revered. There was a time I thought her superior to other women. I told her she was the one who had
uncorked my bottle.
And in response to her confusion explained:

“I was once a little child who was turned into an imp so nasty he was made very small and put into a bottle, a sealed bottle, without any food or air inside; the bottle was a perfect fit.”

13

THIS MORNING, FOR THE FIRST TIME, I drove to work in the car. A prehistoric Studebaker, it really should be scrapped, and yet I can’t seem to part with it. The car is so much like me: once remarkable and now less so. The car is defective, it needs constant attention, it is calcified, cranky. But despite its defects, it is the only one of its kind out and about, and so I suppose in this way remains remarkable, somehow exceptional. If I took him in for a paint job he’d look a whole lot better. He guzzles gas. Akiko has suggested I replace him with a hybrid. A reasonable suggestion, yet I prefer not to be overdetermined by the current trends. My Studebaker is not easily classifiable. Like my clients, he is unstable. I feel a certain ambivalence about him. He appeals to me. He keeps me vigilant. He manages to call attention to himself. The Cutter thinks he is wildly attractive, touching: “I mean he needs a paint job, a little new chrome, and then,
wow!”
She, unlike my other clients, has seen him; I’m so often at her place when Akiko is away. I feel this knowledge of him adds a touch of coziness to an otherwise often tumultuous and even downright scary affair. He is a reminder that I am “safe,” old enough to be her father, established, accountable, a professional, trustworthy,
her doctor.
Today, she will see him parked out in front of the new office.

When I bought the Studebaker, it was a major step toward the construction of an operative persona. He was remarkable but not showy. Subtly sexy. Not precious, nor flamboyant.

A Studebaker is not a car chosen by a fetishist or a gambler. It suggests a healthy and productive life. It is not the car of a survivor, or of someone overly meticulous. It is not the car of a voyeur. My Studebaker taught me how to dress. He was my mirror and perhaps he still is.

Except that I do need to take him to the shop for an overhaul, long overdue!

14

THE NEW CABINET.

I wait for the Cutter.

As I wait I wonder about the world beyond my immoderate interstices. I mean the so-called “real” world, the world of everyday. The world of novelties and embalmers, anesthesiologists and escalators. The world of paper, paste, and cocktail hours. Public attention. Akiko’s world.

I wonder what it would be to be unsevered from the instant, undiminished, as is she, intact. To live in Eden, before the smack, the disorder to which one is eternally espoused. (And even this
before
the father muscled his way into … but I will not
go there!
)

As when an adolescent, one entered into a moment of grace, riding a rented horse across the city beaches in the raging sun of summer, brown as a savage man, proud of the body I had suddenly grown into. Salt on my tongue, the wind thick in my hair—I felt the bounty of the world. And I knew that
I was of that bounty.

Later, the university years, those distant evenings when I sat talking with friends over coffee—a thing I am less and less able to do; I wonder why? I have of late, grown increasingly impatient with language and all the rest. I suffer a general irritation with Akiko’s damned
thingness.
I think: how dare she inhabit time as though she were the apple of its eye? Ah. I am tired of marriage. A house full of carpets and books. Instead I long for my clients, those

CREATURES OF DARKNESS!

They drift in the city air like pages from a charred book. They cannot live out their lives. They die young of famishment; they suicide; they are gnawed to the marrow of their bones by AIDS. (The risk! The risk of keeping such close company!) So unfathomable when one is used to the world as it was, and not so long ago. A spread table. The endless feast.

Once, in a European museum, Akiko pointed out a series of anamorphoses and their cylindrical mirrors. Painted on paper, they were incomprehensible, an ugly spill of color. But when one looked at their reflections on the curved surfaces of the mirrors, they became fully visible. And they were erotic. Shamelessly so. They were beautiful and they were obscene.

I am like these. My tribe is like this.

15

THE CUTTER IS LONG AND LANKY; she’s like a hungry bone. She wants more from the world than she will ever get. She is striking, but in that she is not alone. She has a temper hot enough to fry an egg.

I can see at once that the new cabinet threatens her. For one thing, it further establishes me in my life. It is the demonstration that I intend to see more clients. That I do not intend to cut back my hours. It is likely we will spend less time together.

She is impressed but also outraged at the expense. Yes, I am certain that is so. I have not been particularly generous with her. She begins to resent this. They always do. Sooner or later the interstices are too small for everyone.

She is standing in the middle of the room. As I am seated, she towers above me in very high-heeled sandals and a silk dress the color of bruised plums. Her auburn hair, sparked with red, sets her face on fire. She says:

“I can’t remember a thing. Was I awful?”

“You were
very
drunk.”

“I
was
awful.”

“Why were you drunk? That’s the question you need to ask yourself. Why now? You’ve been doing so much better.”

“So you say.”

“So you’ve told me.”

“So why do you believe me?”

“You’re right. I could be deluding myself.”

“I thought you weren’t supposed to do that.”

“I’m not. Kat. Sit down.” She settles down at once, her feet curled beneath her and I know her heels will leave their mark in the new leather.

“I want more from you.”

“I want more for you, too.” I say. “But not in the way you mean. You know that is impossible. As much as I adore you, Kat.” She glares at me. I continue.

“I think you are wanting more from everything, not just me. You
are
better. You need more room. It’s a good sign, this wanting of yours.”

She snorts. “A good sign!”

“These reversals are inevitable. You know this. Recovery isn’t a linear process.”

Kat bites her lip and begins to cry. “I want to die. I’m … I want to die,” she repeats.

“Sweetheart,” I say, rising, going to her, pulling her to me so that she collapses, shuddering in my arms.

“You talk about … about ideals, universal ideals …” she weeps noisily, extravagantly, “you talk about my … my autonomy … my … my self-determination. You taught me those words! But you don’t mean—”

“Of course I do. It’s all true, Kat. Our work together, our extraordinary love affair, they are all about your coming to terms with your past, your fear of love! Please, Sweetheart! Don’t forget everything we’ve talked about, all the—”

“I’m fucking goddamned guys in bars!” she shouts. “I’m fucking all the wrong guys! I’m more fucked up than ever!” Tearing herself from my embrace she screams so that someone in the dental office upstairs hammers on the ceiling. I should never receive the Cutter during regular business hours.

“You twist everything into … into … any shape you want. And now! And now you want to get rid of me!”

“Have I said that? Have I ever said—Kat! You must stop this!” I point to the ceiling where the hammering persists.

“Look at you!” she glares at me. “Look at you!
Clenching your teeth!”
Grabbing her bag she stands up, having come to some horrendous understanding. Facing me, she says a thing that in another world would have turned me into a block of ice or salt or granite:

“I am
not!
I am not going to die to get you off the hook!”

“What are you talking about?” I whisper. “Where is this coming from? Who is talking about dying here? I—” I struggle for breath. I fear that the Cutter is threatening the entire edifice: Drear, Spells, the New Spells, the park, the house, the marriage, my reputation. All of it.

“Kat,” I implore her quietly. “Sit down. We must talk. We must trust one another. You came to me for a reason. You were on the verge of self-destruction. But now—and yes! I know your tendencies to self destruct are still haunting us both.
Becoming is a fearsome thing!
But you
are
better. And this because of the courageous, the exemplary work we have undertaken together!”

Now she is perched on the edge of the psychoanalytic couch that has served us both so well in so many unexpected ways. In a seemingly infinite—I think:
how infinite the choreography of erotic encounter!
I can tell she is thinking along the same lines.

“Yeah. Well. O.K.,” she says at last. Looking into my face she smiles. Kat’s smile is winning. Sensuous and slightly askew. “It’s true,” she decides. “I’m not empty the way I was. I’d be O.K., maybe, if I could stop drinking. You know?”