The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (10 page)

On my way to work I see this woman wearing a short shirt that shows her belly button. She has a rounded stomach, and the skin curving in makes her belly button look like a very deep hole. I’m walking with my Walkman on down Steiner, music loud in my ears for a Friday morning, and I feel a wave of desire to stick my dick in that deep dark belly button hole, to fuck the woman with the short shirt, to lay her down on the sidewalk and take her. She walks by and I walk by and I continue on my way to work.

Of course nothing happens. But I can imagine so clearly what it’s like to enter a woman, I feel like I’ve done it. My body is on hers, drunk off the conquest, sliding in slow: my hips, push, the glaze. I think about that belly button girl and I think I would shock her and I like that. I want to see girls melt because girls are so goddamn elusive, you can’t tell what the fuck they’re thinking, except I am a girl, and I know just
what a lot of girls are thinking, I know what I’m thinking, and right now it’s exactly this.

I go to a party and sit around with people I don’t know very well or like and we talk about movies we all hated. I am wearing a short skirt that flows, and a shirt with a scoop neck and I am luscious. I meet a man at this party who walks me back to my car. He has shaggy red hair, and calluses on his fingers from construction, or guitar, or golf; viva la mystery—I do not ask.

By the car I take his hand and I lay it on my breast. I’m feeling very bold since I had three beers and all I really want right now is this warm callused mysterious hand on me. He seems taken aback, but then his face lightens and his other arm reaches out to hold my waist, and I melt, I melt, I open up like a dream and I’m his for the night until the warmth goes cold.

He is a bad kisser, but he has very fine hands. We’re in the Mission and he happens to live just a few blocks away on Valencia so we go to his room which has curved-out Victorian windows and a bed on the floor and a poster of a band I’ve never heard of called Swat and next to the poster there is a flyswatter hanging on the wall signed by the band and I think it’s sort of cool. He kisses the back of my neck, and I change my mind and decide he’s a good kisser, and our clothes come off in the way that clothes do, and it’s semidark in his room, and I, for the moment, never want to leave.

He tells me nice things about my body.

While he fucks me, I imagine fucking some woman, my
mouth set in a grim way. It’s the three of us in bed: me the woman, me the man, and him, the red-haired guy with the great hands. He thinks I’m just some girly girl, receptacle envelope girl, he doesn’t know what I’m thinking. He doesn’t know that I’m also a shadow on his back, pushing in.

“Oh,” he keeps saying over and over, “oh,” and his eyes are closed in concentration. When we sleep together, he holds me like he loves me. I’ve noticed this: when it’s the first date, and you fuck, the guy holds you much better than he does the next few times. The first date, you’re sort of the stand-in for whomever he loved last, before he fully realizes you’re not her, and so you get all this nice residue emotion. I felt cherished, tucked into his belly, like we’d known each other for years and I was his wonderful girl and we both slept great.

The red-haired guy’s name is, of course, Patrick.

Before he wakes up I run to the bathroom to see what I look like, and I actually look pretty good. Flushed and fuck-able. I go back and he’s still sprawled out on the bed and I fold my body back into his and think about how I want to look to him when he wakes up. I want to be sleeping in a casual sexy way, to make him want me again.

I remember, especially in high school, I was so good at this kind of fake-out. I rehearsed thoughtfulness, I appeared carefree—and how many guys did I trick? As I sat there, hair tucked behind my ear, supposedly lost in a book, thinking
this exact monologue, rereading and rereading the same paragraph, waiting for them to see me and want me, caught in this image of myself as a reader. What about staring at ants, wanting to seem close to nature and whimsical? What about staring into space, wanting to seem expansive, trying to find the thoughts that would fit my self-portrait? I fooled so many guys! I was found mysterious so many times, oh that girl, we don’t know what that Susie thinks, and all I’m thinking is what do I look like, and all I’m thinking is that I own their thoughts.

Curled into Patrick, I end up falling asleep again anyway, and when I wake up he’s across the room. I run my finger over the titles in his bookshelf and find a photo album. It’s pretty heavy but I lift it into bed and start flipping through it.

“Patrick,” I say, “who’s in these pictures?”

He’s sorting through videotapes maybe because he wants to watch something. He glances up.

“Friends, old girlfriends, you know, photo album stuff.” The morning light is on his back and he looks pale and beautiful.

“So who’s the most important girlfriend of all these people?” I ask. I can see several women in the pictures, and they’re all attractive which makes me feel both good and bad.

“What do you mean the most important?” He has a yawn in his voice, but I think he’s faking.

“You know, the one you really loved.”

He walks over to me, leaving a pile of videotapes, and flips through the stiff photo album pages fast, and then I know he
knows the order really well and that he likes to look at his photos and it makes me want to glue myself to his body.

“Here,” he says, pointing. There are a few photos of a brunette with short hair and a big, smiling mouth, Patrick and the brunette at the Grand Canyon, Patrick and the brunette taking a self-timer picture so that their faces are distorted and their noses look huge.

“That’s the one you loved?”

He nods and leaves the room. He leaves the videotapes all over the floor. I study the girl. She does not look a thing like me. He doesn’t come back in for a while, and then I hear the rustle of the newspaper and I know I’ve lost him for at least an hour. I pick up the phone and call my sister Eleanor. She’ll be up early on a Saturday morning. She has nothing else to do.

“Hello?” Her voice is lower than mine, and sounds like the voice of an older woman.

“Ellie, do you think I should cut my hair short?” I’m naked and I stick my legs up into the air because they look the best that way, all the skin slides up and creates muscles.

“Susie, whatever.” Eleanor is always depressed. Eleanor is fat.

“I think I’m tired of the way I’m looking. Do you want to go shopping with me? It’s early, but maybe later on today?” I love to go shopping with Eleanor because in contrast I look so great in everything.

“I work,” she says.

“Is Mom there?” I ask.

“Yeah, do you want to talk to her?”

“No,” I say, “but will you ask her if she thinks I’d look good in short hair?” There’s a pause while I hear Eleanor ask the question like a good big sister. The tiredness in her voice should make me feel bad but it doesn’t. What it makes me want to do is go take a karate class because I like to hold my hands like that and chopping up a board would feel good—smash, the crack, the thud.

Eleanor says Mom doesn’t care. I say goodbye and hang up the phone. I go into the kitchen and have an English muffin without asking and read parts of the paper with the glamorous people and Patrick looks up and smiles at one point which is very smart of him if he ever wants to see my ass in bed again.

Turns out Patrick is working underneath the city inside a pothole, fixing pipes or something. He gets to lift up the pothole and jump inside. I laugh, I tell him it’s like he’s fucking the city with his whole body but he doesn’t get it, and I think when he doesn’t get something he’s just quiet. In fact, he’s usually quiet. In fact, I talk mostly all the time around Patrick, or anyone.

I go to find him inside the pothole. He told me it was on Divisadero and they don’t reclose the pothole, so there it is, like some hobbit door, opened up to anybody. I slip down into the belly of the street which is incredibly exciting, and it’s dark and it smells pretty awful and I can hear the cars
rushing by above me. They seem like they’re going really fucking
fast
.

“Hey Patrick,” I yell, “hey Patrick, you have guests.” My voice booms out through the passages, and after a while I hear a rustling and it’s Patrick wearing something orange and he does not look happy to see me.

“What are you doing here?” He’s gruff, like his boss is next to him or something, but as far as I can tell, we’re alone.

“I thought I’d come bring you a plant for your new house,” I say, laughing, wishing I
had
brought a plant and thinking about how witty I am and why doesn’t he love me yet.

“You need to go, Susie,” he says. “It’s totally unsafe for you to be here. You need a special permit.” He won’t even look at me. His hands are gloved and the gloves are covered with oil. I want him to grab me with those gloves and smear oil all over my body and my nice dress and throw me on the ground, with all these cars above us, a ceiling of cars.

“Susie. Go.” His voice is louder now, almost mean. I start to climb back and he puts his hands on my thighs to help hoist me up and I swear it turns me on so much that I practically drop back in there but I want to see Patrick again, and if I did that, I bet he’d lock his doors to me forever.

Back on the street, the cars seem really slow. The air is bright and I can still smell oil in my nose. I have nothing to do and it’s Saturday night almost and I don’t think Patrick is going to want to see me first thing when he exits the pothole.
I go to a bar and have a beer. The bartender doesn’t look at me and instead talks a lot to the girl next to me who has a perfect ponytail, and I eat a bag of pretzels and then rip the bag into ribbons. The whole experience only takes half an hour, and I’m sick of being ignored, so I leave.

I walk up the street with beer taste in my mouth, warm and bitter and wonderful, and what do you know, there’s that girl again, the belly button girl, leaning back to show that marvelous hole to the world. She has no fucking idea.

When I walk past her, I want to grab her wrist and drag her down into the pothole, which is just a block or two back. She looks at me and smiles because she knows she has nothing to fear from me, she thinks I’m her ally, but I’m not. I really want to trample down this girl who has her belly button open wide like it’s there just for me. I want to hurt her because she looks like she might be happy and she might have a date and if she doesn’t, she will. I want to fuck her by a Dumpster and cut her down, like she’s a tree, I don’t care if she wants me back, I don’t care if so many people back home love her so much. I walk and I walk and I walk and I end up at Mount Zion Hospital which means I’m near my mom’s house and I go by the house and in the upstairs window I can see a hint of Eleanor, in front of the TV, with potato chips. I don’t really want to touch Eleanor. Mostly I just want her to wake up. Wake up! I feel like pouring water on her a lot. I keep walking; I don’t want to talk to my sister and I definitely don’t want to see my mom.

I pass a haircutter which is a stay-open-late haircutter for
last-minute urges. It’s just closing and I go in and ask her to cut all my hair off until it’s really short and sassy, and she’s so tired and beat and I bet she has five kids or something, but she does it anyway, in like ten minutes. She charges me ten bucks, a buck a minute I guess. It looks not good. I keep checking out my silhouette in the windows of stores and shaking my head to make sure the reflection is me. When I touch the back of my neck, it feels nice. I walk in zigzags through the side streets until I hit a fancy hotel and wander in and there is a knot of old rich men and I go up to them.

“Anyone want to buy me a drink?” I ask, and they all smile and they all Want to, but none of them do, they sort of shake their heads in unison like they’re old ducks. I plop down on the red velveteen hotel couch and another older man comes up to me.

“I overheard you,” he says, “and I’d love to buy you a drink.”

I smile up at him. He has gray hair, but he’s quite handsome.

“Great. Whatever you want to get me.” I lean back on the couch and close my eyes while he’s off at the bar. When he returns, I want to appear the image of ease and raw sexuality. I open my legs so there’s just a hint of darkness at the crotch. I lay my arms across the top of the couch like I’m claiming the world, this is all mine, I’m so confident. He returns with a vodka something for me, ten degrees below zero, the glass is frosted up and it slides down like very cold, watery-tasting water. I’m drunk in five minutes.

He asks me questions which I lie about and then wants to know if I want to come up into his hotel room which is a few floors up and I’m not really sure if I want to, but I do.

It’s on the ninth floor and it’s a suite. It’s really nice, with gold antique faucets and no lame landscape paintings on the wall, and a view of the bridge and the city lights which are just now coming on, ten by ten.

He stands behind me and unzips my dress, just like that, and I close my eyes and imagine he’s Patrick. Right now, Patrick is probably wondering where I am and maybe is very sorry because he made me feel so bad in the pothole or maybe he never wants to see me again because he thinks I’m some nut who goes into potholes, and maybe he’s right because here I am in a hotel about to fuck a rich businessman who really, in fact, could be my father.

I keep my eyes closed and feel his hands all over me and I think about his body, if it will be wrinkled with gray chest hairs, and I want to cut his throat with a long sharp knife and that gets me wet.

“This is such a nice surprise,” he says. “I didn’t expect this from my vacation.”

I don’t say anything. My eyes are still closed. He kisses me and it’s an okay kiss and he holds my face and smells nice and there’s a door in me that opens and I feel like I could cry and I could crawl inside his wrinkled-up gray chest and cry and it feels like he took his hand and somehow stuck it through my heart.

I need to go, but I don’t. He guides me toward the bed,
and all my energy right now is concentrated on not crying. I don’t even notice when he takes off my clothes and lays me down and I’m just practicing my breathing, one two three, in out. Don’t cry, crying would be bad, but there is a whole cyclone of tears swirling in my throat and I just try to break it down, go away, piece by piece back into my stomach. I put my hands on his arms and the skin slides up a little because he’s this old man, so I decide with my eyes still closed that he’s Eleanor and she lost all this weight and so now her skin doesn’t fit anymore. He’s Eleanor and she’s tucking me in as she did when I was little and Dad left and I kept thinking he would come in through the window and trip over something and die, trying to get me back, and Eleanor would stroke my forehead and tell me there was nothing he could trip on; she would clear the path by the window. I loved my sister so much, that she didn’t laugh at me, that she cleared the path instead. And it makes me want to cry again, my love for Eleanor, and the tears sort of gather while my eyes are closed and I grip those arms and move my hips and I feel so proud of my Eleanor for losing all this weight. And when her skin bounces back to fit her body, oh she will be so beautiful. How I would love it if she would be the beautiful one for a while and I could slide into the background and be ugly and quiet.