Kamikaze Lust (24 page)

“I think I’m more that one,” I said.

“Which?”

“Over there.”

“The German shepherd?”

“No, the little one by the fence.” Though embarrassed by my canine self, I pointed to a spunky fox terrier who kept picking fights with the bigger dogs and running away. She wanted to play, but was too shy or too scared or too pristine. In the hierarchy of the dog run she was a fence-sitter.

Alexis nodded; she saw it, too.

“So which is the Alexis dog?”

“I’ll let you decide. I’ve got to get back and see this thing through.”

She left me at the dog run more confused than I’d been when we first entered the park. But before I left I did see the Alexis dog. An elegant Weimaraner who sashayed back and forth with a cadre of smaller dogs at her feet.

I stayed in bed two days, not touching myself, not turning on the television, not answering the telephone, not thinking. Indolence of such magnitude was no easy feat. I had to silence my answering machine, swallow a few Tylenol 3s, and arm my CD switcher with Billie Holliday, Barbra Streisand, Patsy Cline, k.d. lang, and Madonna ballads. I had lost all interest in men, musically. The women spoke my kind of suffering; among them thousands of tears had shed.

Then, just before New Year’s, I got my period and opened the blinds to an eyestrain of sunshine that twinkled the streets as if they’d been glazed. A winter day so beautiful it was almost obscene. I showered, dressed, and drove out to Bay Ridge.

Mom and Hy had already left for their spa near Atlantic City. Rowdy claimed to have a lead on a job he didn’t want to mention for fear of jinxing it. Whatever it was it kept him out of the house. Meanwhile, I settled into my old room, which didn’t feel like my room at all. Only the diplomas on the wall, a World Book Encyclopedia set, and my creaky twin bed remained from childhood. The rest of my past had been obliterated.

Not Aunt Lorraine, though. We played endless games of backgammon and gin rummy like the old days. I mixed chocolate egg creams and prepared salami sandwiches, dousing them with bright yellow mustard and cutting them in quarters, the way she used to do. We watched a lot of television, mostly entertainment shows and off-beat sporting events. Aunt Lorraine had taken a particular liking to monster truck competitions.

On New Year’s Eve we sat together on her bed waiting for the ball to drop. I was fine until I saw all of those people in Times Square so obliviously cheering on time when I wanted only to hold it back, bowdlerize eternity. I zapped the sound, suggested another game of backgammon.

“I beat you already three times,” Aunt Lorraine said. “Besides, I’m feeling good. Maybe I could get in the chair and go outside.”

“Are you kidding? It’s freezing out there, supposed to snow again.”

“Then how about we go downstairs and watch from the living room.”

Grateful for anything that might take us from the televised reverie, I said okay. I detached the IV unit from her arm and put a new gauze bandage around the tube, impressed with my ability to pretend I wasn’t grossed out by the blood, the black-and-blues, the yellow-green of her skin. Messages from the body, as unnerving to me as cries from a newborn.

Aunt Lorraine grabbed my arm, and I immediately recognized the soft grip of her hand. She was the only person I could place by touch.

Downstairs, I helped her onto the couch and drew back the living room curtains. I sat on the windowsill, toyed nervously with the curtain string. A thin layer of snow glazed the ground, tiny flakes dancing beneath the streetlights. My old block, sheer and sparkling, got me every time. I wanted to cry, but kept a tight lip.

While I did feel something like a stewardess on a crashing plane, I experienced a side of myself I barely recognized: that prosaic maternal instinct. Being with Aunt Lorraine put me as much in touch with Eve as Alexis Calyx had in the past weeks let me commune with Lilith, for Eve was the first earth mother, Lilith the prototype of every sex-positive feminist. I’d heard Lilith was wild and uncontrollable, and she liked being on top, an obvious sign of maternal deficiency. So Adam complained to God, who banished Lilith to the tainted status of succubus, paving the garden path for Eve. Why was it that in the beginning man was one and woman was two? Her self divided along the lines of how she fucked: for purpose or pleasure.

And people wondered why women were so screwed up, why all the eating disorders, clinical depressions, self mutilations, sexual hangups, and suicides. But I am being reductive. My journalistic training says avoid generalizations. Specify the statistics. Three concrete examples of anything and you’ve got a trend. I flashed on my mother, my aunt, and myself: women were screwed up about sex.

Aunt Lorraine exhaled loudly. I looked at her sitting on the couch like a child, her feet barely scratching the floor.

“You look sad, hun,” she said.

“Me? Nah.”

“Oh bullshit. It’s New Year’s, you should be out having fun, not stuck inside with an old lady.”

“I hate New Year’s. And for your information I’m not stuck here, I want to be here.”

“You’re a terrible liar.”

“I’m serious, anyway, I wanted to ask you,” I felt my heart speed up, my armpits get sticky. “Are you still watching those movies?”

“Oh, some. Rowdy’s been getting them from the video store. No offense to your friend Alexis, but she should make her films trashier, that’s what gives ’em their kick.”

“You sound like the writers at
Porn Star News.
” She laughed, and I thought the best defense was a humorous offense. A line like that could have ended the conversation and Aunt Lorraine would have been none the wiser. We’d never talked personally about sex before. But the urgency of her situation was changing the way we communicated, giving language to topics that were always taboo. Still, my heart drilled against my rib cage as I ventured. “But when you say kick? Do you mean…?”

“Oh, come on now.”

“Are you talking about, you know,” I bent my head down, hid inside my right elbow. “I mean, do you feel…oh boy, this is hard.”

“Just a little bit tingly, who doesn’t?” Aunt Lorraine answered. I couldn’t believe she used the word tingly. “But mostly they bring back memories.”

Memories? All they’d given me recently was an addict’s craving, less from want than need. Were her memories of sex steeped in such desperation? Or was she being more literal? My mind jolted. Aunt Lorraine was a showgirl. A Betty Page co-star. Maybe she’d owned a brothel. I wasn’t sure if I could handle this.

I hid behind a few giggles. “Okay, what are you talking about?”

“I had my time, you know.”

“Right, but memories? That’s pretty hardcore stuff.”

“It’s just like dreaming, like remembering the ones you sometimes want to pretend you never had. What you do with them is your business, and in my day a lady kept to herself, didn’t go shooting her mouth off all over television…oh, you’re so surprised? I always told you about my sweethearts.”

“True.” My heartbeat settled slightly. Whenever Aunt Lorraine returned from weekends in the Catskills, she regaled me with stories of Saturday night swing dances, high-brief bikinis, and flowered bathing caps, men named Izzy, Mo, and Herman. But as with her stories of their escape from Poland, she revealed little emotion. It was as if she were a commentator packaging the facts for airplay, her point of view left behind in a mountainside bungalow.

A place I could see, now, in Aunt Lorraine’s face, rheumyeyed beneath her Yankee cap, yet almost glowing. This woman knew all that Alexis Calyx knew.

“When you said sweetheart, I thought love, not sex.” I turned my head to the window to check on the snow, but also to avoid looking at her. It was beginning to hurt too much too often.

“Best when they come together.”

“Were you in love with any of them, the sweethearts?”

“Once or twice, but they ended.”

“Don’t they always,” I sighed.

“Not always. Romance, the touchy-feely business, it’s a big circle, finishes itself off like your movies. Love’s what’s left.”

“But you said—”

“Even when it ends it stays.”

“I don’t want you to die,” I blurted out, still staring outside, knowing that if I turned just slightly I would start bawling for sure.

“Honey, I’m hanging in as long as I can, but this is no life for a lady.” The snow fell faster, in big, cottony flakes. “I’m getting tired,” she whispered. “So tired.”

I fell asleep at the foot of Aunt Lorraine’s bed that night and woke up while it was still dark. I’d done this many times as a child, but never remembered the room being so quiet. My heart did a quick sprint. I jumped off the bed and put my hand over her face. Slowly, I felt my palm warm. Then, as my eyes adjusted to the dark, I deciphered the expand and contract motions of her stomach under the white sheet.

I kneeled down beside her, eyeing her smooth, almost translucent skin, her fallen eyelids, so big and purple, eyelashes like pieces of wet thread strung together.

We were getting closer, so I set my sights small. If only we could make it through the winter, not have to battle the icy roads. I lifted the heavy afghan from the chair next to her bed, draped it over my shoulders, and walked to the window. Dark and dreamy, yet so desolate it made me shiver. I pulled the afghan tighter around my body, smelled a lingering scent of the hair creme Aunt Lorraine no longer had any use for. She’d knitted this blanket back in the days she was never caught without a colorful roll of yarn in her lap. As a child I’d tried to help her, but, like Mom, could never get it quite right. I had no patience for the sedentary.

I left the window, stretched my limbs across the carpet next to Aunt Lorraine’s bed like the faithful little pooch I was. No matter what I could or couldn’t do in the dog run, I felt okay at home. Until home started slipping away.

I couldn’t sleep, but didn’t dare move, remained still until my thoughts became indistinguishable from my dreams. Like dying, or maybe something else.

THE BROADWAY EPISODE

Arriving at The Movie House ten minutes late, I spotted a braided Shade wearing a red cocktail dress and sipping a frothy drink through a straw. I was nervous, but relaxed a bit when Shade upon seeing me broke into a stream of relentless smiles. It was her smiling I’d missed these last few weeks, the way my own face responded with burning cheeks.

I melted into the seat across from her, took off my gloves, my coat, unraveled my scarf. Her eyes perused my torso, encased as it was in the dress I’d bought earlier, short and black with a low scoop in the back. “You look all grown up,” she said.

“You look like you did when I first met you.”

“My mother.” She rattled her extensions then held up her hands. “I had three manicures, okay. Three. I have no nails.”

I took her fingers in mine. “They’re so glossy.”

We finger-frolicked until the waitress came. I dropped Shade’s hands and ordered a Coke. Her toe nudged my left leg underneath the table. I looked out the window. Evening with its hopes and promises glowed in front of us, streetlights blaring frosty white spots upon the nicely dressed tourists, little pieces of recycled glass sprinkling down the jet black pavement. Even the taxi cabs looked elegant.

“I don’t want to go,” I said.

“We have to.”

“Why?”

“Because.”

“Because why?”

“We just do.”

“And what if we don’t?”

“Not an option.”

“But it’s your first night back.”

“A couple of hours, that’s all. It’ll be a hoot.”

The waitress brought my Coke, and we sat silently, Shade’s foot tickling the back of my knee. I stared as if taking photographic stock of her eyes, her lips, the tiny cleft of skin on the right side of her nose, the result of a jet skiing accident that left her nostrils slightly lopsided. It said she was a bit of risk-taker. Hovered the voice of my dead father, the lay photographer:
You have to watch, to look, to eavesdrop on the face; hundreds of stories come and go in a minute.

I wanted them all; but there wasn’t time.

We bundled up and stepped outside, breathing heavily through the thick winter air. Though I endeavored another round of pouty “I don’t want to go”s, I was soon following Shade through the gold-plated doors to the theater on Fourty-fourth Street, poised to see the new Mark Tannon play, a love story about a couple of veteran journalists set in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War. Not that I wasn’t impressed the TV newscaster had the spunk to write a play, but this benefit preview for the Newspaper Guild and their friends—the latter being anyone who could shell out the five-hundred-dollar ticket price—made me nervous. You had benefits for diseases or starving children, not newspaper reporters. Having just left Aunt Lorraine this morning, I was perhaps morbidly biased, but in the hierarchy of suffering I would say we were down there with landlords who felt abused by the vestiges of rent control.