Kamikaze Lust (21 page)

Down in the street the wind coiled around us, blowing my hair in a thousand different directions. “I always thought you were too good for him,” Jason said. “You’re a total dish.”

Sweet of him, but I felt like Medusa. I hoped my nose wasn’t greasy and the pink lipstick hadn’t lodged in the runnels of my lips, pursed as they were in disbelief. Jason smiled. “Really, as far as HGQs go, you’re off the scale. Thank you, Robert,” he raised his eyebrows provocatively at RR who held open the back door of a cab for us. At that moment I did feel charmed, though in a Cinderella kind of way, as if I were on borrowed HGQ time.

George climbed into the front seat, and in just a few minutes, we were ushered through the doors of a converted warehouse building by the West Side Highway.

The final cab of the evening found me and the porn star silent in the back seat. “Two stops,” he said as we got in and without consulting me gave the driver my address. Then we were off, part of the swarm of urban bumble bees, the black and yellow schools that ruled the streets by night.

I stared out the window, thinking how he’d strut into that club as if he were the headlining act, even after we discovered the crowd was younger and more lesbian-heavy than I would have thought of a drag show. “The girls love Tricky,” George explained. “Put him in a dress and he thinks he’s a glamour dyke.”

“Then why does he keep talking about his I.U.D.?” I asked. “Dress or no dress, he doesn’t need an I.U.D.”

Jason smiled at me. “Your thinking is too literal, Rachel. Gender is a more fluid thing, what do you think the internet is all about?”

George and Jason danced. RR surveyed the crowd, the way I’d seen him watch over the set, making sure he got his money’s worth. So even-keeled was he as we moved from place to place, his bodyguard pose. I found it unnerving, particularly because I couldn’t stop staring at the women dancing. I used to go to the Columbia dances with Jason and watch women dance together, but then I’d been detached, or at least believed myself to be. Now, I could barely keep up my sophisticated ennui when what I really wanted was to bump and grind with Shade on the dance floor, heated by the stream of the strobes, the flinging of bodies, and the thump-thump soundtrack that vibrated my feet and tingled my spine. A fluid thing, yes, but I was unsure of my motives, being with one and wanting the other.

It was an effort not to think of Shade, even with the strong, silent Republican sitting next to me, stretching his arm out behind him as if the cab were his coach. I leaned my head back into the seat, ran a quick loop through my mind:
He cups his hand around the back of Silver Ray’s head and pushes it down to his lap. She feels around, unbuttons his jeans, and there they are, her and that intimidating prick, up close and personal in the stuffy heat, the smell of animal hide.

I cracked the window. “Good idea,” he smiled and I smiled and we must have looked like a couple of idiots; two yellow smiley faces in the back of a yellow cab. He was making me nervous, and when I got nervous I started feeling ethnic. Our cab had become a pumpkin, Silver Ray and her platform slippers had vanished, leaving me at war with my Eastern-European thighs, my Hymietown hair. Nothing like I’d been earlier, dancing with Jason, who kept saying how impressed he was with me. Such chutzpa, dating a porn star. The self-esteem it must require, not to mention the stamina. “You have no idea,” I said, giving myself rare license to provoke. “I’m becoming an equal opportunity employer, too.”

“Girls?” he said, and I darted my eyes around the room full of women, flaunting my ambivalence as if it were a diamond bracelet and not the usual cuffs around my wrists. I’d worked my HGQ, although I could feel it diminishing steadily since this silent cab ride began.

We pulled up in front of my apartment. “Thanks for coming,” I said.

“No problem.” He nodded, but made no move to kiss me or touch me or shake my hand even. Dejected, I clicked the handle, pushed the door with my foot, and climbed out. I didn’t want to kiss him, anyway; I liked women.

“Listen,” he said. “Do you want to go to Vegas tomorrow?”

“Are you serious?” I said, a bit shell-shocked. He couldn’t kiss me goodnight, but he wanted to take me on vacation the next day.

“You still don’t believe me.”

“Okay, okay, I’m sorry, but no, I don’t want to go to Las Vegas.”

“Have you ever been?”

“No.” I knew only what I’d seen in the movies: flashing lights and the green baize of gaming tables, sequined tights and tuxedos, call girls and comedians on the glitter circuit. I also knew it was where Neil lived, and that I would therefore avoid it.

“Well, you really should go,” he said.

“Maybe I will.”

“Just not tomorrow.”

“No, not tomorrow.”

“That’s too bad.”

“What is it with you and Las Vegas?”

“It’s where I live.”

Such simplicity again from the porno man—Rob Vaughn, with his conservative politics and cryptic smile. Where he lives. Sure, RR, whatever. I clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth. “Well, viva Las Vegas to you then.”

He laughed, and I liked the way his lips parted. Okay, maybe kissing him wouldn’t be so bad, but no way was I making the first move. He would at least have to get out of the cab. I leaned my arm against the door, giving him one final opportunity to jump out or call me back. He didn’t move. I sighed, “All right, I’m going in now.”

He nodded. “See you around, Silver.”

“Goodnight Mister…RR.”

I slammed the door behind me, trudged up to my apartment where I kicked off my boots, slid out of my gown, and crawled into bed. There was something pathetic about lying naked in bed, alone. The wishful thinking and fantasies took over. If only I’d been more aggressive about him coming up. It wasn’t Vegas, but I did have a couple of Elvis CDs to guide us through the land of make-believe. Yet, given my fantasy of choice, I would rather put on Chet Baker singing “My Funny Valentine,” wound with the repeat button, the way I liked to listen to music: one song over and over again until I knew every word and breath and nuance. And Shade would be here with me, her body on mine, and…I felt sappy and weak. Lonely, too, planning the soundtrack for a scene that existed only in my mind. I turned on the TV: channel-surfed. The clock flashed three and I wanted to talk to Shade. A few minutes I wrestled the should-I-or-shouldn’t-I concerns of late-night callers—number one being convinced that she had another lover with her—before taking my chances.

She picked up on the fourth ring, just as her machine was about to click on. “This better be good, Slivowitz,” she said.

“I hate your caller ID.”

“I have to be at the airport in a few hours.”

“I’m sorry, I just wanted to talk.”

“So talk,” she sighed, and I told her about my evening, feeling particularly self-righteous since nothing had happened between me and the porn star, and we’d actually ended up at a drag show with a bunch of lesbians. Shade laughed, but wouldn’t stop calling RR my boyfriend, choking on the word as if it were an aspirin tablet.

A brief lull in conversation found me staring at the half-lit walls. Beneath the covers, the fingers of my left hand tickled my stomach.

“What are you doing, anyway?” Shade said.

“What am I doing?

“Like, are you on the futon? In your PJs with a jar of Skippy?”

“Actually I’m in bed with the TV on. No sound, though.”

Shade asked me if I was watching a porn film. I said no, then asked: “Should I be?”

“Sure.”

I reached for the remote.
X-posure
already in the VCR, I fast-forwarded, giving Shade an overview of the plot, superfluous information about the characters and a few historical bits and pieces I’d picked up from Alexis. I slowed the tape at my favorite scene, the girl-girl action I’d practically committed to memory. “You want me to tell you what’s happening?”

Shade laughed, said yes. “Well, Claire Blue has dark hair, blue eyes, and very red lips. Her neck is long, with thick jugular veins—”

“Please, Slivowitz! Not a coroner’s report.”

I felt my neck heat up. “Okay, her lover is taking her tongue and running it up the middle of her stomach, past her breasts…she’s whispering something in her ear and they both look…I don’t know.”

“Horny?”

“Yes, that’s a good word,” I said, and prompted by Shade’s questions, described the look in Claire Blue’s eyes. I was overheating; my comforter felt like the full-body bib the dentist covers you with before an x-ray. I kicked it off and lay naked, my body shining like an x-ray star: Silver Ray in
X-posure
sweet-talking the sexy Shade, whose name was all the introduction she needed, honey. I was made for this business.

On screen, the action heated up. “She’s back downtown again,” I said, “with her tongue on her thigh and both her thumbs in her…I can’t, I can’t say it.”

“Come on, it’s easy. Just say it: cunt.” The word sent shivers down my spine.

I laughed nervously. “Cunt.”

“Very good.”

“Are we having phone sex?”

“I think so, is that a problem?”

“No.”

“Then go on, I’m all ears. And fingers.”

“Are you…?”

“Uh-huh. Are you?”

“Not yet.” I switched the phone to my left ear. I am a righty. “Okay, there we go, now where were we?”

“What are they doing?”

“Oh, remember, she’s got her thumbs in her…you know.”

“Her cunt, you can do it,” Shade said.

“I can’t, I feel stupid.”

“Don’t,” Shade said. The rasp in her voice warmed my limbs. “You know how much I want you.”

“No, I don’t.”

She sighed. “…umn, what can I say? It’s been like forever. Remember the first day of the strike? I put the green M&M on your tongue, and I don’t know, I just wanted to leave my finger there, and I hadn’t felt that way in a while, at least not here in New York, and…oh…”

“No, please, don’t stop,” I whispered, and moved my middle finger on top of my clit.

“I’m…I’m getting all hot here for the record, but anyway, I don’t know, when you kissed me…you know those kisses you feel in your chest? And
you
kissed
me,
I always thought I would be the one…and frankly, it scared the shit out of me, but since then it’s all I think about. Baby, I want you. So much.”

“I want you too.” I fingered myself as if I were standing alone in front of the mirror, thinking: baby, baby, baby. No one had ever called me baby. A word straight out of the generic supermarket, it always sounded so patronizing in those rock-and-roll anthems by men, but coming from Shade’s mouth got me all liquid. I had her repeat it a few times, then she followed with a play-by-play of what she would have done had she seen me in my black dress earlier. Her language was so crude and wonderful, a wire-tapper would have thought she was the one who’d been watching all the porno tapes. I would from that moment live to hear her say the word cunt in my ear, as she told me to add a finger and another until I was buried up to my knuckles and my wrist cramped. I knocked my head against the on-off button, accidentally hanging up the phone.

“Shit!” I pushed the button, got a dial tone. My call waiting beeped.

“You could give a girl a complex,” Shade said.

“I needed both hands.”

“Use something, go get a cucumber.”

“Don’t have one.”

“A carrot.”

“I don’t eat vegetables.”

“You really should, you’re not getting any younger. How about a candle?”

“Too dangerous.” I reminded her of the blaze of my Chanukah candles the night I’d kissed her and the three hundred dollars the vet later charged for the kitty colonics to flush the wax from Freddy’s system.

“I guess you need my penis then,” she said so seductively I was embarrassed by the image of her standing over me with a large strap-on and me, the big, fat bottom, craving her cock, begging for it. A flash of Tricky deep-throating his mike came to me. He’d said something like, “Fuck my pussy, you dyke bitch,” and I thought it strange at the time, and even stranger now, finger deep in this gender fluidity business.

I lost myself in her words by the frosty glint of my TV screen. Closing my eyes, I stroked myself to the sound of her voice. I opened them, and there, as if set off in flashing lights, rested on my night table the toy pop-gun Mom had given me, its oblong shape and handle teasing.

I inched forward and quietly grabbed the gun, cocking the cork in place, sliding the handle into the body, slowly, so it wouldn’t release. I slipped it in with a piercing jab, then the smooth swallow of my cunt and the feeling that the gun wasn’t big enough, that nothing would ever be big enough. I moaned and said something like please.

“Oh yes, baby,” Shade said. “Yes.”

And those were the last sentences we spoke for a while, the static of our connection usurped by a moan & groan track to match anything in
X-posure,
with Shade throwing in the occasional,
oh baby, yes baby…
and I knew I was going to come as if it were the easiest thing in the world, as if it were the only thing in the world, and I didn’t even care that her ear was so close to my voice when I did.

Our heaving subsided into laughter then silence, the peaks and valleys of social realignment. Finally, Shade said she had to go, it was almost time to catch her plane.