Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore (9780385538398) (2 page)

“I have to get home, Lana,” I said, trying to gather the strength to sit upright. “Has anybody heard from my husband?”

Linda reached out and took my hands. She remained steady and I was able to pull myself up.

“No. I called the house but only got the service.”

“Thanks for staying with me. I remember once in Jamaica that dickhead Lester Foley got me high and left me in a hut on the beach without any clothes.”

“Let's get you cleaned up,” the diminutive personal assistant said.

There were three police cars, their red and blue lights flashing angrily, parked on the sidewalk, the lawn, and up in the driveway of our home on South Elm in Pasadena.

Lana and I were walking up the slight incline of the lawn headed for the front door when someone said, “Excuse me, ladies; this is a possible crime scene and we're not allowing anyone in.”

He was a small man in a black uniform with blue eyes and pink skin. He recognized me from his porno collection;
I could see it in those startled eyes. There aren't many black-skinned women with long white hair and deep blue contact lenses. Debbie Dare was almost unique in the capital of a clichéd profession.

“Aren't you—” he began to ask.

“The owner of this house,” I said. “What crime has possibly been committed?”

“Wait here, ma'am,” he said, and I knew the news had to be bad.

Lana put a hand on my shoulder. It felt so heavy that I almost fell down. My legs were still weak from the unwanted orgasm and now this.

The uniform called into the front door of my house. A few seconds later a slender man in a cheap dark green suit came out. He traded a few words with the cop, looked in our direction, and, hesitantly I thought, walked toward us.

“Mrs. Pinkney?” he asked, looking at Lana.

“Yes,” Lana said, “this is Mrs. Pinkney.”

“Your husband, ma'am,” he said, shifting his gaze to me.

He had passive, maybe even kind eyes and if he recognized me that fact was hidden behind an honest attempt at sympathy.

“What about him?”

The plainclothes cop tilted his head to the side and I couldn't help but think that that was the way he spoke to his mother when he'd been bad and had to come to her to confess the breaking of a water glass or leaving a door open, allowing the family pet to escape.

“He expired,” the policeman said.

“Expired?” Lana asked.

“Died.”

“Oh my God,” Lana said, and then she began to cry.

“I'm so sorry,” he said.

The news hit me like a bucket of cold water. Finally the intensity of my session with Myron was flushed away.

“I want to see him,” I said.

The electricity was out in the house. Yellow metal stalks with powerful incandescent lamps, brought in by the police, eerily illuminated the sunken all-white living room and the double-wide hall that went past Theon's bedroom and mine. There was an even stronger light coming from the master bathroom. I could see the shadows of people moving around in there, mumbling words that I couldn't quite make out.

“Maybe you shouldn't see him like this,” the plainclothes cop said at the door.

“What's your name?” I asked him.

“Lieutenant Mendelson.”

“Your first name.”

“Perry.”

“Is that short for something?”

“I was named after Perry Como. My mother loved his voice.”

“Are you married, Perry?”

“Yes. Of, of course.” He said these last three words showing me the wedding band on his left hand.

“If it was your wife in there would you walk away because some stranger told you to?”

The policeman looked down and I instantly liked him. He took a step back and I walked into the huge bathroom.

There were three men and two women in there, all of them wearing blue hairnets and thin rubber gloves. One man was vacuuming the floor with a handheld device while another, a black woman, was taking photographs with a digital camera—bringing Carmen Alia to my mind.

I was further reminded of a porno shoot when I saw the inhabitants of our wide, baby blue circular bathtub.

My husband, Theon Pinkney, was naked on his back with his big belly up above the waterline. His left arm was around Jolie Wins, a sixteen-year-old wannabe adult cinema star.

Jolie was my polar opposite with her black hair and pale white skin. She didn't look dead.

There was a high-end video camera submerged at the far side of the tub. It was plugged into a wall and had tumbled into the impromptu sex scene that they were filming.

Theon had been a major star in the porn world before he was my husband. He called himself Axel Rod. After he got fat he became a somewhat successful manager before the stars and directors wrested their careers from producers, agents, and managers. Theon probably told Jolie that this was an audition, and he plugged in the camera because the battery had gone dead while he fucked her for hours.

Theon had lost his physical appeal but he could keep up an erection longer than any man I'd ever met.

“Mrs. Pinkney?” Lieutenant Perry Mendelson said.

“Yes?”

There was the sound of a grunting moan in the background. Again I was reminded of my work.

“Are you all right?” the policeman asked.

“Why are the police here, Perry?”

“People have died.”

“But it looks like an accident. Do you think he was murdered?”

“No,” he said. “The way we see it the girl's foot got tangled in the wire and, and, and when she …”

“When she moved to get on top of him the camera fell in,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Then why is half the Pasadena police department in my home?”

“Your housekeeper, Mrs. Julia Slatkin, came in and found them. She called nine-one-one and said that it was murder. When someone claims foul play we are legally obligated to do an initial investigation.”

“I see.”

“Is this your husband?”

“Yes, it is.”

“The housekeeper already ID'd him but I'm required to ask.”

“Where is Julia?”

“She was distraught. I had one of my men drive her home. Do you know the girl, Mrs. Pinkney?”

“No,” I lied. “No, I don't. Who is she?”

“We didn't find any identification in her purse.”

“She looks like a child. My husband was having sex with a child.”

Perry Mendelson looked into my eyes and saw a blank slate. I turned away and went to Lana. She was on the floor in the hall, grunting and moaning, crying with an abandon I rarely felt.

I went to her and hunkered down. It was a familiar movement, a sex position without a partner.

I smiled.

“It's okay, baby,” I said. And then to Perry, who was standing above us, “How long is this investigation going to last?”

“We can wrap it up in a couple of hours. I'll have some questions but they can wait until tomorrow if you don't feel up to it right now.”

“That would be great. I'm an early riser. And, Perry?”

“Yes?”

“If you don't think it's a crime you can have them take Theon's body to Threadley Brothers Mortuary. There's somebody there all night.”

That night Lana and I lay side by side on white satin sheets under black cashmere blankets. I didn't really need the company, but Lana was a delicate girl and too upset to drive herself home.

She snored softly and pressed against me. I didn't sleep much but that wasn't unusual. I hadn't had a full night's rest in many years. It wasn't that I was sad or even insomniac.
I just didn't seem to need that much sleep. Usually when Theon and I were both home he'd have sex with me and then drop off. For most of the night I'd read books at random, napping at odd times between chapters or sections; sometimes I'd even nod off in the middle of a sentence.

Over the years I read Tolstoy and Tennyson, Mary Higgins Clark and John Updike, Roger Zelazny and Octavia Butler in the early, early hours of the morning. I didn't finish as many books as some because I usually put down a story I didn't like and reread, many times over, those that I enjoyed.

If Theon woke up and found me reading he'd usually fuck me again. That was his talent—he could have sex anytime with anyone. If he didn't like burritos and cheesecake so much he could have been a porn star up into his seventies.

But the reason he had sex didn't have to do with love or the physical passion I'd felt that afternoon with Myron. Sex for Theon always had a definite purpose, like when he'd drowsily awake and see me reading. I was a herd mare and he was an aging stallion running with all his might to keep up.

I'd lie under him or get on my knees and move perfectly with his thrusts and withdrawals. After he'd come I'd turn him on his side and scrape his skin with my fake nails and bite his shoulders. And after a while he'd fall back to sleep and I'd pick up my book again.

Theon and I loved each other, I suppose. I knew him better than anyone else did and he never hit me. He had sex with other women all the time and I was free to do what
I wanted, but that wasn't very often, not really. I wasn't worried about losing him, because sex was just a release or a means to an end for him. Theon told me that he didn't want me falling in love with another man, or woman. I told him that he didn't have to worry.

He was especially concerned that I didn't fall in love with a black man. He was white and believed that the races tended to stay together and so felt threatened whenever I spent any time with any of my African American costars.

That night, after Theon's ridiculous death, lying there next to Lana—her rough breath like hope or something—I wanted to read but didn't have the strength to sit up or even reach over to the night table where
Dead Souls
was sitting, waiting for me to reread it for the seventh, or maybe eighth time.

A university professor I dated for a while told me that I was just a recreational reader, way outside of the educational system he lived in.

“You only talk about phrases and what the characters are feeling but you have no notion of the literary ideas or intentions,” he said one night after I'd untied him. “You'd be lost in one of my classes. If I hadn't talked to you like this I wouldn't have believed that there was a literate thought in your head.”

“But aren't your classes about what people in books say and feel?” I asked, as if I were making an appeal in a higher court.

“No,” he said. “The study of literature today is about
structure and underlying intention; it's about the way in which the themes of literature, historically, resonate with one another.”

I stopped answering his calls after that. Professor Abraham was of no use to me if his world and mine were unconnected. We were, I thought, like two islands so close that one could see the other in great detail but the life evolving on each was separated by aeons of evolution.

I loved books and their stories and characters. Books were faithful and true in ways that real people could never be.

But that night, after Theon and Jolie had expired, I was paralyzed, unable even to imagine reading. Big Dick Palmer, completely without volition, had filled me with passion that Lana's sorrow had punctured and depleted. The deaths were a part of my paralysis but not essential to it, no more than Myron was a part of my orgasm. I felt closer to Lieutenant Mendelson's timidity and Lana's unabashed grief than I did to my own husband, his weakness and self-demolition.

Theon had abandoned me but men had been leaving me all my life. His death was a more familiar occurrence than all the years we spent together.

After failing to summon up the will to reach for my book I tried to recall the feeling of my unexpected orgasm. I closed my eyes and imagined that spot of pain and Myron's grunting and Carmen Alia's clicking, insectlike camera. But none of it worked. I was numb, had been numb for years but never really knew it. I sometimes experienced this feeling of detachment as disinterest. At other times I mistook
my lack of connection for the natural disdain a beautiful woman has for an ugly world. I had, for many years, taken for emotion the hungry look that men and women had for me. I had falsely perceived my own sensations as their oohs and aahs, grunts and groans, catcalls and blown kisses.

These ideas settled in my bed with Lana's breathing and the thought of Theon on a slab somewhere.

I remembered when Theon had proposed to me.

We were in a small casino in Vegas and both drunk. Theon got sloppy when he drank too much. Matching him drink for drink I moved, and thought, a little slower. The inebriation brought on by alcohol was just a more leisurely version of my sobriety.

“Let's get married,” he said while fingering me under the table.

I was young, and wet, and Theon had driven us to Vegas in a fire-engine-red Rolls-Royce (which was leased but I didn't know that at the time).

“Okay,” I said with a leer, “but no more PJ for you until there's a ring on my finger and we've both said ‘I do.' ”

I didn't think he was serious. I mean who would want to marry an eighteen-year-old girl who fucks for a living?

But Theon took me in a taxi to an aqua-and-pink-plaster twenty-four-hour chapel, where he presented me with a very expensive emerald and diamond engagement ring and paid a thousand dollars for the finest fast-food marital service.

What I remembered was the fact that he was thoughtful
enough to have brought the ring on our little holiday, that and the smile on his face when I said the words of acceptance. I felt something then, like a smile drifting from my center up toward my lips.

Evoking that memory I tried to cry but couldn't. Even the best moment of my thirteen years of marriage with Theon failed to summon up a tear.

I lay there frozen and unfeeling, like a corpse in the snow waiting for the spring thaw. This sense of death brought an unexpected calm into my breast.