The Drowning Girl (33 page)

“I’ve never thought about it.” I asked her name, and she squinted at me, as if trying to puzzle out some devious ulterior motive for my having asked.

“Teodora,” she said. “When I had a name, it was Teodora. But it went away one day when I forgot to watch my skin. Now, I don’t know. But once it was Teodora.”

“My name is India,” I told her, and she laughed, which made those loose dentures slip around a bit.

“That’s a strange name, little lady.”

“My mother got it from
Gone with the Wind
. It’s a book, and there’s a woman in it named India Wilkes.”

“It’s a book,” she repeated. Then added, “It’s your name. You’re a book,” and stared out the window for a while at the storefronts along Westminster.

“I’m sorry if I bothered you,” I said.

She sighed and didn’t take her eyes off the window. “You haven’t bothered me, India Wilkes. But watch your skin. Don’t you wear so many clothes. Nobody knows to watch after their skin anymore. Look at ’em. Nobody on this bus watches their skin, so it waltzes in the night. You watch skin, or it moves around.”

I gave her five dollars, though she didn’t ask me for it. She held the bill wadded up in her left hand, which wasn’t clean. She didn’t appear to have bathed recently.

“I’ll watch my skin more closely,” I assured her. “You stay warm, and get something to eat.”

She didn’t reply, and I got off at the next stop. The bus driver wanted to know if Teodora had been bothering me, or panhandling. “No,” I told him. “We were just talking.” Then he looked at me funny. “You say so,” he said.

Back home on Willow Street, Abalyn was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of her television playing a game called
Fallout: New Vegas
. I only knew the name because she’d told me the night before. She was playing a character named Courier who was wandering about a post-apocalyptic Mojave Desert trying to find a lost package containing a platinum poker chip. None of it made much sense to me. I told her I was going to write the story, and that I’d be in the blue room with too many bookshelves.

“Do you want me to remind you about dinner?” she asked. I said if I got hungry—and I knew I probably wouldn’t—I’d come out and find something to eat. But I thanked her for offering, anyway.

And so I wrote my story about the November Eva I didn’t find on Valentine Road, only it came out more of a story about Albert
Perrault and Elizabeth Short. It came out as it needed to come. Because I couldn’t manage a recitation of false facts, I managed a recitation of truth. I was worried Dr. Ogilvy might question the utility of having written a story about the wolf that was only indirectly my story of the wolf. But she didn’t, even when I suggested I’d only set one box within another, that all I’d accomplished was the creation of a fiction to contain another fiction.

“If the fiction has been contained,” she replied, “then you’ve gained control over it.” And I didn’t argue with her. It took me five days (and nights) to write “Werewolf Smile,” and I’m never going to try to sell it to a magazine. It belongs to no one except me.

BY INDIA MORGAN PHELPS

I
don’t know whether it’s true that Eva slept with Perrault. Probably it is. I know she slept with plenty enough men—men and other women—those nights when she’d slip away from me, wrapped in a caul of cigarette smoke, perfume, and halfhearted deceit. She’d laugh whenever anyone dared to call her polyamorous. Unless, of course, she was in one of her black moods, and then she might do something worse than laugh. I never called her polyamorous, because I knew that she never
loved
any of them, any more than she loved me. There was no amour in those trysts. “I fuck around,” she would say, or something like that. “It doesn’t need a fancy fucking Greek word for it, or a fucking flag in a pride parade. I’m a wanton. I sleep around.” Then, she might ask, “What’s got me wondering, Winter, is why you
don’t.
” She almost never used my actual name, and I never asked why she’d started calling me Winter. We met in July, after all. On a very hot day in July. But, sure, she might have slept with Albert Perrault. She liked to call herself his disciple. I heard her call herself that on more than one occasion. She fancied herself somehow favored by him. Favored beyond the bedclothes, I
mean to say. It pleased her, imagining herself as more to him than a mere student, as though he were some unholy prophet, Eva’s very own
bête noire
come to lead her down to places she’d spent her life only half imagining and never daring to dream she might one day glimpse. She assumed—from his paintings, from
what
he painted—
he
had glimpsed them, from his paintings, from
what
he painted. She assumed he had something to show anyone
besides
the paintings. Eva assumed a lot of things. But don’t ask me what he truly thought of her. I hardly ever spoke with him, and then only briefly, and it was never anything but the most superficial sorts of conversation. Our exchanges were cursory, perfunctory, slipshod, though never exactly awkward. I don’t know what he thought of her as an artist, or as a lover, or if he derived some satisfaction from my suspicion about the two of them. Sometimes, I wanted to warn him (I’d often wanted to warn others about Eva), but I never had the nerve, or I never had the heart, and, besides, that probably would have been like warning Herod about Salome. And, likely, I’d have only succeeded in appearing jealous, the disgruntled green-eyed third in a disconnected
ménage à trois
trying to gum up the works. I can see how my feelings for Eva might be misinterpreted. But I do
not
hate her. I love her, as I have loved her since the hot July day we met, almost five years ago, and I know that’s why I’m damned. Because I cannot push away. I am unable to push away. Even after all her lovers, after Perrault, and the Dahlia, and all the things she’s done and said, the hideous things I’ve seen because of her, all that shit that’s going to be in my head forever and ever, I still love her. I seem to have no choice whatsoever in the matter, because I have certainly
tried
to hate Eva. But I have found that trying not to love her is like someone trying to wish herself well; thinking, for example, I could simply will a gangrenous wound back to healthy pink flesh again. You cut away necrosis, or you die, and I plainly lack whatever cardinal resolve is necessary to cut Eva out of
me
. And I wonder, now, if
she ever had these same thoughts, about me, or about Albert Perrault? I cast her as I have, and as she claims herself to be, a willing plague vector, but perhaps Eva was also merely one of the infected. She may well not have been a Typhoid Mary of the mind and soul. I can’t know for sure, one way or the other, and I’m weary of speculation. So, better I restrict these meanderings to what I at least
believe
I know than to speculate, yes? And when I sat down to write about her and about Perrault, I had in mind the Dahlia, in particular, not all these useless (and generally abstract) questions of love and fidelity and intent. How can I pretend to have known Eva’s intentions? She called herself a liar as frequently as she called herself a wanton and a slut. She was the physical embodiment of the pseudomenon, a conscious, animate incarnation of the Liar’s Paradox.

“Oh, Winter, everything I’ve ever told you or ever will tell you is a lie, but
this
, this
one
thing is true.”

Now, work with that. And I’m not speaking in metaphors, or paraphrasing. And I do not, here, have to rely upon an inevitably unreliable memory, because when she said those very words, I was so taken aback, so galled at the audacity, that, less than an hour later, I scribbled it down in the black Moleskine notebook Eva presented me on the occasion of my thirty-fifth birthday. That
is
what she said. And I sat very still, and I listened, because how could I refuse to hear the one truth uttered by a woman who will never be permitted to speak one truth? I sat on the floor of my apartment (I never thought of it as
our
apartment), and I listened. “It scared the living shit out of me,” she said, “and I have never seen anything so beautiful.” This, I suppose, was her one true thing, which, perforce, must also be false. But she continued for quite some time thereafter, and I sat beneath the window, not
not
listening. There was a Smiths CD in the stereo, set on repeat, and I think the disc played twice through before she was done describing to me plans for Perrault’s new installation. “The parallel is obvious, of course, and he acknowledges
that up front.
Le Petit Chaperon Rouge
, Little Red Riding Hood,
Rotkäppchen
, and so forth. The genius is not in having made the association, but in the execution. The cumulative effect of the assembled elements, both his paintings and the reproductions of various artifacts relating to the murder of Elizabeth Short.” Eva laughed at me when I told her it all sounded pretentious and unspeakably morbid. She laughed loudly, and reminded me of games that we had played, of scenes beyond counting. “I know, Winter, you like to pretend your heart’s not as rotten as mine, but do try not to be such a goddamn hypocrite about it.” And there’s our lovely paradox once more, because she was absolutely right, of course. I don’t recall interrupting her again that night. I can’t even recall
which
Smiths CD was playing. Not so much as one single song. “You know,” she said, “before the ‘Black Dahlia’ moniker stuck, the newspapers in Los Angeles were calling it the ‘werewolf murder.’” She was silent a moment then, just staring at me, and I realized I’d missed a cue, that I’d almost forgotten my line. “Why?” I asked belatedly. “Why did they call it that?” She lit a cigarette and blew smoke towards the high white ceiling. She shrugged. “Albert tried to find out, but no one seems to know. Back then, LA journalists were always coming up with these lurid names for murders. Lots of times, they had to do with flowers. The White Gardenia Murder, the Red Hibiscus Murder, and so on. He thinks the werewolf thing maybe had something to do with the smile the killer carved into her face, pretty much ear to ear. That it sort of made Short
look
like a wolf. But that still doesn’t make much sense to me. I assumed that the newspapermen were referring to the murderer as the werewolf, not to the victim.” That’s the only time I ever heard Eva disagree with Perrault. She shrugged again and took another drag off her cigarette. “Either way, it’s a great angle, and he means to make the most of it. He hasn’t told me exactly how, not exactly, not yet. But I know he’s been talking to a taxidermist. Some guy he worked with
once before.” And she went on like this, and I sat and listened. “It’s very exciting,” Eva continued, “seeing him branch out, explore other media. He did that thing with the stones last year in New York, the stones inside their cages. That’s what really set him moving in this direction. That’s what he says. Oh, and I haven’t told you. He got a call from someone in Hollywood last week. He won’t say who, but it’s someone big.” I promise, for what that might be worth, I am not trying to make Eva sound any more or less insipid or sycophantic than she actually did that night. She knew I didn’t care for Perrault’s work, that it gave me the willies, which is probably why she spent so much time talking about it. Come to think, that’s probably why she started fucking him to begin with (assuming that I am not mistaken on that count, assuming she actually
did
fuck him).

But wait.

I’ve said too much about that night. I didn’t intend to drone on about that night, but merely present it as prologue to what came afterwards. It was winter, late winter in Boston, and an especially snowy winter at that. I’d just started the bookshop job, and sometimes I picked up a spare shift at a coffeehouse on Newbury Street. I don’t think Eva was working at the time, except she’d taken to calling herself Perrault’s personal assistant, and he’d taken to letting her get away with it. But I’m not sure any genuine work was involved; I’m certain no money was. Eva was only a slut. She never had the requisite motivation to be anything so useful or lucrative as a whore. But, playing his PA, she was involved in all the nasty shit he was getting up to that winter, planning the show in LA, the Dahlia. Perrault decided early on to call the installation The Voyeur of Utter Destruction, after some David Bowie song or another. I heard through Eva, Perrault had landed a book deal from a Manhattan publisher, a glossy, full-color folio affair, though it wasn’t paying much. I heard from Eva he didn’t care about the small advance, because he’d gotten color. Frankly, I heard most of what I heard
about Albert Perrault through Eva, not via my own aforementioned perfunctory conversations with the man. Anyhow, the same day Eva told me about the book, she also told me that she was going to be his model for several of the sculptural pieces in the installation. Life casts had to be made, which meant she had to fly out to LA, because he had a makeup-artist friend at some special-effects studio or another who’d agreed to do that part free of charge. I understand Perrault was quite good at getting people to do things for him for free. Eva, for example. So, she was gone most of a week in February, during the worst of the snow, and I had the apartment and the bed all to myself. When I wasn’t working or slogging
to
or home
from
work through the black-gray slush drowning the streets, or riding the T, I slept and watched old movies and halfheartedly read from a collection by Nabokov,
A Russian Beauty and Other Stories
. The book was a first edition, signed by the author, and actually belonged to Perrault. He’d loaned it to Eva, advising her to read it, cover to cover, but Eva rarely read anything except astrology and self-help crap. Oh, she had subscriptions to
The
New Yorker
and
Wired
and
Interview
, because she thought they looked good lying on the coffee table. Or rather, because she thought they made
her
look good. But she never read the magazines, and she’d not read a page of the Nabokov collection, either. I read most of it while she was gone to California, but can only recall one story, about a midget named Fred Dobson. Fred Dobson got someone pregnant and died at the end, and that’s about all I remember. Eva came home on a Friday night, and she was uncharacteristically taciturn. Mostly, she sat alone in the kitchenette, smoking and drinking steaming cups of herbal tea. On Saturday night, we fucked, the first time since she’d started seeing Perrault. She had me use the double-ended silicone dildo, which was fine by me. I came twice. I’m not sure how many times Eva came, because she was always so quiet during sex, always so quiet and still. Afterwards, we lay together, and it was almost like
the beginning, right after we met, before I understood about necrosis. We watched the big bay window above the bed, flakes of snow spiraling lazily down from a Dreamsicle sky. She said, “In Japan, they call them
harigata
,” and it took me a moment to realize she was talking about the double-ended dildo. “At least that’s what Albert says,” she added, and the illusion that we might be back at the start, that I did not yet know the truth of her, immediately dissolved. I lay still, Eva in my arms, watching the snow sticking to the windowpane. Some of it melted, and some of it didn’t. I asked her if she was okay, if maybe something had happened while she was away in Los Angeles. She told me no, nothing had happened, but it was intense, all the same, working that closely with Perrault. “It’s like being in his head sometimes, like I’m just another canvas or a few handfuls of clay.” She fell asleep not long afterwards, and I got up and pissed, checked my email, and then watched TV almost until dawn, even though I had to work the next day. I didn’t want to be in the same bed with whatever she was dreaming that night.