Pretty Dead (6 page)

Soon after this disaster, in a hotel room in Paris,
William rips up one of the kimonos he’d bought me in Japan. It has large dark flowers on a pale ground. I imagine flower scars, big petals burned into my skin. He lays me on the bed and ties my wrists and ankles with the strips of silk.

“Call me master,” he says.

“Tatsujin.”

He holds a candle over me and drips wax on my breasts and belly. The wax is scalding but cools immediately, turns powder soft. Of course I don’t feel a bit of pain. I don’t cry. Maybe he is trying to punish me, or maybe he is trying to save me with my own tears. But of course none come.

I think about the London bombing, and now this. I wonder if somehow William attracts disaster to him wherever he goes.

Hollywood, 1947

William is called Billy now. He has come here to be an actor and, he says, to help us forget some of the
horrors we have seen. Acting seems to be a good way to forget a lot of things. But it’s hard to forget the image of the Black Dahlia, Elizabeth Short, with her blue eyes and black locks. And the other images, the pictures they took in the morgue where she doesn’t look like a person at all but a chopped-up thing. It even sickens monsters like us.

Billy looks debonair with his brilliantined hair, his sharkskin suits, two-toned oxford shoes. We go out for martinis and dancing at the Trocadero or Perino’s. Sometimes we catch a glimpse of a movie star. They look like us—too pretty, too smooth. Billy wants a girl and a boy this time, aspiring actors maybe. I find a couple sitting at a pale pink booth. I’m wearing a sky-blue chiffon dress and ankle-strap shoes, my hair in a bun with loose tendrils. I smile at them and remove my white glove to take their hands. They join us for a cocktail. Music plays, a Nat King Cole song, and the lighting is rosy. Potted palms all around, parquet floors. So elegant. The girl is a
brunette in a dove-gray dress and the boy is blond with a Midwestern accent.

Billy leans over to me and whispers in my ear. “You did well, Char. Very pretty. Both.”

He sees a flash of rebellion mixed with fear in my eyes and adds, “It’s just two little lives. We’ve been through wars, darling.”

“What?” the girl asks. “What did you say?”

“We were just saying how lovely it is to be here celebrating after all the hard times we’ve seen.”

He raises his glass to the pretty prey with their trusting martini eyes. “Cheers,” he says hoarsely. “To eternal life.”

The couple giggle and clink their glasses, not knowing they salute their death.

Bethel, 1969 (Woodstock)

So many years of the same thing. Wandering. Seduction. Death. Only the scenery, clothing and faces change. Except for our faces. They always stay the same.

I sit in the rain. It streams over me, soaking my
hair and my dress so that my breasts show through the thin, tie-dyed fabric. Rainwater fills my eyes and I pretend I am crying. Ravi Shankar is playing on the stage. Graceful rhythms of the tabla are stirring something ancient and human in my heart, but my tears are still only rain.

Three people will die here. A heroin overdose. A ruptured appendix. The man who was run over by a tractor in his sleep.

Don’t think about the three deaths.

When William heard about them, he said, “Sacrifice to the gods, I suppose.”

If I could still shiver, I would. Billy isn’t afraid of horror, but I am; maybe therein lies my salvation.

A woman gave birth in the back of a pickup truck. I could hear her screams. I wonder what it would be like to hold my own baby in my arms. The small, round, wet head against my breast—this is something I will never know. It is another thing Billy has taken from me, but I try never to think of it. By now, if he had not made me, I would be an old woman, too old
for babies, maybe no longer beautiful. If I ever accused him of robbing me of the gift of life, he would point this out. He would say, “I have given you the greatest gift of life there is.”

I look around for Billy, but he is gone. Muddy half-dressed girls and boys dance around me. I think,
How can it be that the world changes so much all the time?
I feel the deep sense of emptiness that comes from having to witness so much change, over and over again, forever.

The only way I can do it, I think, is to have Billy by my side. At least I will have someone who understands what is like to never grow old, someone who will never leave me. Even though he is savage, even though he is cruel, he is at least immortal. That alone makes him invaluable to me. He must never leave.

Where is he?

I take off my wet dress, peel the fabric away from my body, and stand to dance with the girls and boys in the relentless rain. I have seen bombings. I have
seen brutality. I have seen blood. What is this? A bacchanal, a joyous thing, a brief interlude of peace and love. A time that will never come again.
Celebrate the rain, the mud, Charlotte,
I tell myself.
Celebrate the lovely bare flesh, beating beneath the surface with young blood.

Maybe someday you, too, can leave the earth with this memory inside you.

I wonder, if so much of the mythology about us is untrue, what of the myth of the stake through the heart? Is that true? Who would do such a thing for me? Who would ever love me that much?

London, 1972

If not by disasters and music, I mostly remember my history by what I wore.

Now it is floppy suede hats, minidresses, and psychedelic tights or bell-bottoms, purple suede platform boots. My eyelashes are false and sparkled. My lips are Mary Quant white. Billy in his three-piece dandy suits with the flared legs, thick-heeled boots. His hair
brushes his collar, and he sports a handlebar mustache.

We live in a Victorian flat with garlands embossed on the ceilings and walls. I remember the flat by closing my eyes and seeing myself dressed in my Carnaby Street finery, dancing around the living room to the Rolling Stones. “Wild Horses.” That’s how I feel about Billy; nothing can drag me away from him. His favorite Stones song is “Sympathy for the Devil.”

There are always people crashed out on our floor; you have to step over bodies in the morning to get to the kitchen. Some of the girls are the ones I have procured for Billy, lost souls with pretty hair, long legs and lashes whom I found at boutiques or bars or in dark alleys. I feel bad every time I bring one home, but I can’t seem to stop. I am like a loyal hunting dog dragging back the birds by their broken necks. But these birds have not been shot down yet; that is to come.

Why do I keep doing it? Not only because it is my nature. Not only because I am devoted and afraid. I realize now that my participation in his work was the closest I could get to creating something when I had nothing left to make myself.

Paris, 1976

Sometimes Billy takes me with him when he goes out. We walk along the Champs Élysées at night. He is incensed by the McDonald’s they’ve put there, can’t seem to get over it.

“And they think because they serve red wine it is all right!
Merde!”

In France, Billy wants me to dress elegantly and all in black. I have a collection of black dresses and a lot of colorful printed silk scarves.

“They can make it seem that you have more clothes,” he tells as he gives me a new Hermès scarf as a present.

I have my original black Chanel cardigan from the
1920s and Coco’s No. 5 perfume. Billy prefers classic fashion for me, though he is quite a dandy himself, and I am still trying to please him.

I really want to eat at McDonald’s and to buy one of the plastic necklaces full of virulent-seeming glow-in-the-dark green liquid that vendors sell along the boulevard, but Billy says they look cheap and are only for tourists.

The city stretches out before us, twinkling with the magic of so many lovers’ fantasies and dreams. It has changed so much since Billy first brought me here. The fast food, the plastic, the traffic. But then, I’ve changed, too. He and I have changed. Once we loved each other all night long. He whispered poetry into my ear. He told me he would love me forever. Now we are like an old bickering couple, and we do not even have death to look forward to as an escape from each other.

Manbattan, 1986

Ten years can be a long time in the world of mortal fashion.

I have my hair teased over the bandana at my brow. Strategically ripped white T-shirts over black spandex tights and shoes with pointed toes. Lots of bangles and chains. I want to wear big crosses for the fun, the irony of it, but it feels wrong, weirdly dangerous somehow, though I wouldn’t admit it. I am still dancing. The T-shirt, cut at the neck, slips off over my bare shoulders. The bangles click together.

This time I am dancing to Madonna in a penthouse apartment lit with candles. Black marble floors. City shining down below us, looking immune, but it isn’t. Six years ago John Lennon was shot. We were here then, at the eye of the storm again. Lennon was only forty years old and as in love as a man can be. I remember how one Halloween Billy and I dressed in white and flowers, and I wore a long black wig, pretending to be Yoko. I suppose Billy thought this costume, like the crosses he wears, was ironic. I didn’t tell him that it was my fantasy, the way I believed love was supposed to manifest itself.

But very little looks the way it really is. People are
dying fast and it is blood-related, but it has nothing to do with us.

Billy walks in—dark eye makeup smudged, a long chain in his ear with a cross dangling at the end. His hair is short and bleached, with dark roots, not the teased pompadour I would have expected based on his decadent style from the last decades; he’s a little more dignified now. He doesn’t like how I am dressed—I can tell by his expression—but I am no longer quite as subservient anymore. I’ll wear what I like; it’s about the only way I have to express myself.

Billy lies down on the couch and turns on the TV. There aren’t any sexy girls or boys lying around on the floor. AIDS has made everyone more cautious, more monogamous. Even though it can’t affect us, it’s hard to watch these lovely men becoming all eyes and cheekbones, then hooked up in a hospital, driven through streets in hearses, in coffins that will never open.

Once Billy said, “There’s something so beautiful
about all these young people becoming aware of their mortality. It’s a shame it took this disease to do it, though. But it’s still beautiful.”

I close my eyes and keep dancing, trying to forget that those words came from the lips of the man who has become my whole life.

Seattle, 1994

Kurt Cobain has just died. And here we are. Eight years later and we’re in an entirely new era, but our faces are just as youthful. I am wearing a white satin slip dress, a plaid flannel shirt, torn black leggings and black Converse sneakers, and am sitting curled up in front of the TV, drinking wine. I can’t believe Kurt’s dead. He looked like me and Charles. He could have been our brother.

They say he shot himself in the head.

Part of me is jealous, although I feel guilty for thinking this.

Outside it is raining. The relentless rain. Why do
we live here? Our apartment is large and sprawling, with bookshelves everywhere, a fireplace and a wall of windows looking out over the wet courtyard garden. Sometimes I walk around the lake and look at the flowering trees. I go to the outdoor market and buy oysters and wine. Sometimes I spend whole days in a bookstore. Mostly I wait and wait for Billy to come home.

He’s not back until late that night. I’m still in the chair with the television on. I can’t cry, but I want to more than anything. Without tears the pain turns to rage. I want to smash the TV.
Why did you kill yourself? You had everything. Even mortality to save you eventually. What have you left me with? Nothing.

Manbattan, 2001

Finally the city is quiet. Too quiet. Hardly any sirens anymore. The silence of defeat. And the air still toxic. Photographs of missing family members paper the walls. I am alone in the apartment again, waiting for
William. He’s been gone since it happened. I know he is safe, but I’m not sure I am. I’ve been sitting like this for days with William’s black cat, Ezra, on my lap. I haven’t eaten, showered, or changed my clothes. I have on the same pair of ripped jeans, the same black cashmere sweater. The television is always on, showing the footage of those planes and the towers over and over again.

At last there is the sound of his key in the door.

The man I share my life with sits beside me. He has started referring to himself as William again, thinks it’s more “twenty-first century.”

“What’s wrong with you?” he asks. “You look like shit.”

“I can’t do this anymore,” I say. “Everywhere I go with you, something horrible happens.”

“I know. It’s as if I attract it. Maybe you bring it out in me. It’s gotten a little out of control now, hasn’t it?”

“It’s like we’re stuck in hell together.”

“We are, my darling. We are. But what’s the
alternative? Being in hell alone?”

I get up from the couch. Suddenly a rush of anger infuses me with energy. I go into the bedroom and find the Louis Vuitton steamer trunk. I pack it with as many of my vintage clothes as it will hold. (Later I will pay two men to come when William is not there and take the rest.) And then I leave.

Willam just reclines on the sofa, watching me go. He thinks I will be back in no time.

He is wrong.

Los Angeles, 2001–2007

In no time I meet a wealthy gentleman who worships me and gives me everything I desire. All I have to do is accompany him to his premieres and parties and let him fuck me once in a while. I know it sounds bad, but remember, I am a monster. At least I treat him kindly and never drink his blood or the blood of his friends or employees. To be honest, none of their blood smells good to me anyway. I spend my days
shopping for treasures. When he dies, he leaves me everything.