Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore (9780385538398) (10 page)

“Well,” Theon mused, “like I said, Debbie's out of town on one of her exotic shoots … in Tahiti actually.”

“Tahiti,” Jolie said breathlessly. “Man, I'd love to be there.”

“Yeah, me too. But I'll tell you what, Jolie. This is Deb's
private line. If you have this number that must mean that you're important to her. So what I'll do is send a car over to get you and bring you here. Maybe I can help you out until Deb gets back.…”

They talked a little longer. She was down on Alvarado at a diner. The cook was buying her coffee and doughnuts, probably with the same intentions of my sometimes-slimeball husband. Theon promised to send a limo over to pick her up.

The rest was obvious.

When Theon took one look at Jolie he saw dollar signs and got an erection too. He told her that she could make the same kind of money that I did when I was a kid and that all he had to do was see how she worked on camera. The date on the recording was a week before the two died. He might have been fucking her that whole time for all I knew. Maybe he was putting her up somewhere, promising her a starring role in his upcoming feature-length adult masterpiece.

It was my fault. I should have kept tabs on her. Or I should have ignored her at the hip-hop party and let her find her own way down. Instead I gave her false hope and a phone number that Theon had access to.

I had killed them both.

“Hello,” Kip Rhinehart said, answering his phone.

“Hey, Kip, it's me—Deb.”

“Hey, babe. Long time no see.”

“I been kinda busy.”

“I know, big important woman like you. What can I do for you?”

“I was just wondering …”

“Yeah?”

“Did Theon have a girl in one of your rooms up there?”

“I heard he died,” Kip said.

“Yeah. Him and this sixteen-year-old. They let a camera fall in the bathtub and electrocuted themselves while fucking.”

“That's hard.”

“Was she there?”

Silence.

“Come on now, Kip,” I said. “He's dead. She's dead. There's no one left to protect. You're the first person Theon'd call if he needed to put up someone on the QT.”

“Yeah. She had one of the garden rooms. Nice kid. Fucked-up, but she was nice. Had manners, you know?”

“I'm gonna wanna see the room and her stuff,” I said.

“Sure, Deb. Nothing worth anything there but I'll lock it up until you come.”

“I'll drop by tonight or at the latest tomorrow morning.”

“Whenever. I'm here day and night.”

After calling Kip I lost steam for a while again. My life was in its uphill phase (a term I once read in a self-help book). Every step I took was a strain. I wanted to go to bed but I knew that I'd sleep for another three days if I did.

So I sat in the polar bear room staring at the thick white carpeting.

“How do you feel, Deb?” I asked after twenty or more minutes had passed.

“Like shit.”

An hour went by. I began registering sounds from various sources. There was ticking from an antique porcelain couple fornicating on the white marble end table. Theon had bought the little sculpture for me but I never realized that the platinum disk on the side was also a clock.

One of the fourteen environmentally friendly ceiling lights was whining softly. A strong breeze was blowing and the sliding glass doors that led to the patio and swimming pool rumbled gently on their tracks.

I realized that I'd agreed on buying the house because it resembled the home of the shoot I'd done in the south of France—the one I dreamed about.

Why hadn't I known that?

“Really, Deb,” I said. “How are you?

“I'm cut off,” I said. “A junkie in paradise. A bitch in heat locked in a room full of doggie dolls.

“Write that down.”

I don't usually talk to myself. As a matter of fact I had never done so (or at least I don't remember doing it) before that day. But I got up and went to the kitchen where our housekeeper, Mrs. Slatkin, usually kept a blank book diary where she wrote down the things she wanted us to buy. This little journal was fairly new. Only a few pages had been scribbled on. I tore out the used sheets and jotted down the words I'd asked myself to write.

Only the first few words,
I'm cut off
, seemed to go anywhere. A junkie in paradise was more like a book or movie
title, and a bitch in heat locked in a room full of doggie dolls used too many words to get the point across.

My father's midnight special was on the kitchen table next to where I wrote. I was wondering about the significance of this, this juxtaposition, when the doorbell sounded.

It was the first nineteen notes from Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. That was the only classical music that Theon knew. He'd loved it as the orchestration of the Sean Connery movie
Zardoz
.

I put the pistol in the pocket of my tatty blue-and-yellow dress and wandered up toward the front door thinking that everything was connected but, at the same time, nothing mattered.

She was tall and austere-looking in her navy blue, calf-length dress suit and maroon high-heeled shoes. Dr. Anna Karin was ten years older than I but in some ways her face seemed younger, at least more innocent. She smiled when I opened the door. I could imagine why. When last she saw me I was in a tight red vinyl minidress with white hair nearly down to my tailbone. My eyes were oceanic blue and I had glossy platinum-colored nails longer than a toddler's fingers.

“Hello, Sandra,” she said.

Karin was born in Copenhagen but she didn't have an accent. Her enunciation was very, very American, more so than most people you meet who were born here. That was how I could tell that she wasn't—American, that is.

We met when I was going through a bout of anorexia.
Theon was afraid that I'd hurt my health (and our income) and so he got Karin's name from one of his legit Hollywood friends.

“A house call?” I said.

“I was concerned.”

We stood at the threshold staring at each other—the handsome Scandinavian and I.

I wondered why she was there and what my black skin would look like next to hers. This latter thought wasn't sexual musing but professional reflex. How women looked on a set when paired up with one or many men often made a scene work.

But I was retired.

“Come on in,” I said, turning my back and leading her into the white-on-white-in-white living room.

“Have a seat,” I offered, and she lowered herself into one of the three oversize stuffed chairs that were upholstered in lambskin.

“This room is quite stark,” she said. “Is it your husband's design?”

“No. This is the only room in the house that I'm responsible for.”

“You look very different.”

“So do you.”

“How do you mean?” Anna asked, holding her hands up a few inches, indicating the space around her as if it were a permanent aura.

“I've never seen you outside of your office before.”

“How are you, Sandra?”

“I haven't shaved my pussy for days. It itches.”

“What does that mean to you?”

“No,” I said.

“No?”

“You're a visitor in my house, Anna. I'm not on your couch; I haven't asked for a session. If you want to be a friend I'm happy to offer you some wine or mineral water. I'll even make an omelet if you're hungry. But I will not be psychoanalyzed in my own home—by a guest.”

Ideas and convictions were already coming out of me and I'd only written a few words in my journal.

“What happened?” Anna asked.

I told her the story of Theon and Jolie, of Big Dick and my first orgasm in years, of the gangster, the cop, and Rash Vineland, who could get me to talk like no one had in a very long time.

“I don't want to sound like a therapist in your own home,” Anna said. “But you sound so detached. It's like you have no connection to these tragedies or any other feelings.”

“I'm a spiritual paraplegic,” I agreed. “I'm stuck, cut off, and numb.”

Concern creased the sophisticated brow of the descendant of bloodthirsty Vikings.

“What can I do?” she asked.

“I'm broke, Anna. That's why I didn't return your call. Theon spent all our money, every cent, before he died. I can't afford to see you. In a couple of months I won't even have my own bed to sleep in.”

For a long while she stared at me. I thought that she was looking for a friendly way to excuse herself. The world we lived in was defined by the ability to pay, and I no longer
had that talent. Her accent alone was enough to tell me that she couldn't, that she wouldn't and even shouldn't reach out across the void of poverty.

“I work from eight in the morning until five every afternoon,” Anna said after a long span of silence. “You can choose any two mornings at six and I will be there to meet with you.”

“I don't need two mornings,” I said, a little breathless with gratitude, not in appreciation for the free offer of therapy but for the generosity itself. I might have been near tears.

“Yes, you do,” Anna Karin said. “As a matter of fact I will only agree to see you if you consent to meeting me twice a week.”

“I don't understand.”

Anna's eyes were a pale blue, like a day that had been bright but was now being covered by a thin layering of clouds.

She smiled.

“I don't want you to leave yet,” I said then, realizing that she wasn't going to answer my question.

She sat back in the plush chair and eyed me closely.

I enjoyed the scrutiny. This made me think of the pleasure Lana got when I gazed so closely at her.

“I know you don't,” Anna said. “But there's a delicate line here. We are about to embark upon a very fragile phase of our relationship. This is not about friendship. A friend would not be able to break the bond that you're held by. A friend would not be able to let you go.”

Again I felt something. There was some kind of truth in
her statement. I knew what she said was right but I couldn't have explained why.

Anna stood up then and nodded.

“Wednesday and Thursday,” I said, because it was a week away and I needed time.

“Six in the morning,” Anna added.

“Do you have to go?”

“Yes,” she said. “I do.”

The next thing I knew I was on my feet holding Anna with all my might. She gripped me in an embrace that was almost a restraint. I was surprised by her strength.

We let go at the same moment, as if the movements had been choreographed.

“I will see you this coming Wednesday,” she said. “Six a.m.”

I watched as she walked away, unable to bring myself to accompany her to the door.

I got to Threadley's at a little after nine that evening. The door was locked, so I pressed the bell and waited patiently. Lewis Dardanelle was somewhere inside. He was like a vampire who only came out to work at night. Most of the people he met were by appointment only.

I was still wearing the faded dress and tattered sneakers. But I had showered and so felt presentable.

“Mrs. Pinkney,” a voice spoke from a speaker embedded in the wall.

“Yes, Mr. Dardanelle. I'm here about your call.”

“I'll be right down.” His voice was crisp, almost buoyant.

I thought about my mother. She still lived in the small house where I was raised, off Central Avenue, down around Watts. I wouldn't be able to send her any more checks. That would make my older brother, Cornell, happy. He always wanted to be seen as the breadwinner of our family but I was the one who supported Mom. I wondered how Cornell was, if he'd speak to me ever again.

The extra-wide door of the mortuary swung inward and the lean mortician bowed for me to enter.

“Let's go to my office,” he said with a wan and yet somehow a profound smile. Or maybe I was just reading things into every gesture and motion; maybe the only truth in my world was a fabrication perpetrated by a state of shock.

He led me through the barren stone room to a small hallway. At the end of this shabby lane of coffin-lid-thin doors we came to a small elevator. It was crowded in there with just the two of us.

The vestibule moved slowly past the second floor and the third. I could hear Dardanelle's bellowslike breath coming slowly and strong.

“He wants to what?” I had asked Theon one evening when he had come home from planning the burial of Sack “Big Daddy” Pounds.

“He wants to have sex with you in this special coffin he keeps in a room next to his office,” Theon said, as if my
answer were a foregone conclusion. “He says that he'll give us Sack's coffin at half off if we do.”

“We?”

Passing the fourth floor of the six-story house of death I was brought back to the night Theon expected me to whore for his dead friend. I considered walking out, calling Theon a bastard, breaking the glass I held in my hand. It wasn't so much that I was appalled by Lewis or by having sex with someone and being paid for it. Almost every woman I knew considered the monetary value of the man she took off her clothes for.

What upset me was the thought of having to fuck for money after I died (even if that death was only a metaphor), of being lowered into a coffin and having some man with a hard-on put on top of me instead of a cool muslin shroud.

I wanted to scream and run from the image Theon had conjured up for our death-house discount, but instead a pastel calm came over me.

“Theon,” I said, looking into his eyes with my head cocked and my fake blue eyes beaming.

He saw in me the turmoil of a life under hot lights, of marriage to a man who was sometimes no better than a pimp, of sores and viruses and intimacies that no living being could endure without some kind of protection.

I saw my thoughts roll around behind his eyes and he saw me observing his most vulnerable insights.