Kamikaze Lust (34 page)

“Are you sure?” Vera said.

“Of course she’s sure,” Neil said. “She’s a little do-gooder liberal, it’s her duty.”

“Go to hell, Neil,” I said, shocking both of us. I never used to talk back, no matter how piercing his own words had been.

Neil laughed. “I see you’re finally getting laid.”

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” I snapped, and we stared. The more my temples throbbed, the harder it was not to look away, but I had the force of my anger behind me. Finally, Neil gave in and stormed outside. Vera couldn’t help smiling.

Ivory and I played video games until she beat me enough to bolster her ego. We looked through Sonic’s old dinosaur books, watched music videos. She’d warmed up to me so quickly after Neil and Vera left, I was convinced Neil had her frightened, on guard, right where he wanted. She seemed overly sensual with me, too, touching my arm or thigh when she spoke, standing in front of me all feminine insouciance, hands on bony hips, head cocked to the side.

Watching her I couldn’t help wondering if that was how Neil saw me, a pint-size vision of sexuality. Before inhibition reared its censorious head. I could almost understand the pedophile’s desire in this context, the drive to consummate a long forgotten sexuality. But it was ultimately selfish and dehumanizing. I knew this because there was an adult inside of me holding up a flashing sign: Keep your hands off of the kid, you pervert!

“Rachel, I’m hungry,” Ivory whined, and I knew I would make a lousy pedophile. I didn’t hate myself enough to mess with someone else’s childhood. Besides, I usually did exactly what was expected of me. Until recently.

“What do you want to eat?” I asked the kid.

“Ice cream.”

“Okay.”

We drove Vera’s minivan to a 7-11 and picked up a couple of pints of Ben and Jerry’s, nachos dripping with bright yellow cheese, burritos, a box of double-stuff Oreos, and two cherry Slurpees. I dropped a few quarters in the slot machine, didn’t win anything, but Ivory was happy for the chance to pull down the lever.

“Children can’t gamble here,” said the man behind the checkout counter.

“She’s not gambling, I am.”

“Don’t you have any morals?”

“Maybe not.”

Ivory laughed out loud. “Yeah, assface!” she yelled. Before the man could say anything else, I grabbed her hand and we sprinted through the 7-11 parking lot in the bloom of night, laughing. As we pulled away, a giant plaster cast cowboy in a checkered shirt and leather chaps leered at me from the steak house across the street, the lights above him flashing: “Best in the West.” This city was creepy. So man-made in that San Simeon sort of way. It was all about money and women, enough to satisfy even a thirty-foot cowboy. For blocks, he loitered in my rearview mirror.

At home, we found Sonic playing video games, and Ivory told him about our scene at 7-11. She said I was cool and he agreed and I went soft. Instead of leaving, as Vera said I could whenever Sonic returned, I decided to stay with them a while longer.

Sonic sent Ivory into the kitchen for spoons; I sat down next to him. “Do you and Neil have both the same parents?” he asked, eyes fastened to the rainbow of bleeping pixels on the television screen.

“We do. How about you and Ivory?”

“Uh, huh. But we haven’t seen my dad in a while. Neil told him if he came around he’d kill him. It’s about the only cool thing he’s ever done.”

“You don’t like your dad?”

“He’s a loser.”

“Was he the one who cut your mother’s face?”

“Pffff,” Sonic exhaled through lawnmower lips. “That happened when she was a kid. She doesn’t talk much about it, I think she was raped, but my dad…he couldn’t do anything like that, he’s too stupid. Neil once drove him out to the desert and left him there.”

“Left him there?”

“Yeah. Then he made up some story about being kidnapped by terrorists, and how they threatened to take him to Texas or something.”

“How do you know he made it up?”

“’Cause he was drunk. It was on the news, the troopers found him wandering around the desert. Sent him to psycho central.”

“Daddy?” Ivory said, jumping up onto the couch.

I opened a pint of ice cream with fudge and nuts and chocolate chip cookie dough, took a spoonful, and handed it over to her.

“Who else?”

“You’re not supposed to say that,” Ivory said. Sonic put down his control panel, turning the television back into a television, and grabbed the ice cream container from Ivory.

“Hey!” she screamed.

“Sharing is caring, capish?” he said sternly, then turned to me. “See, Neil’s got this rule. Anyone that mentions the old man owes him a dollar.”

“Or has to have punishment,” Ivory said.

Sonic grabbed the bag of Oreos and dipped a cookie into the ice cream. “The thing is, he makes you do stupid things, like clip his toenails, or count bullets. Anything that keeps him thinking he’s the shit, you know.”

“Oh, I know,” I said. I opened the styrofoam box with the nachos and separated a couple of chips from a glob of cheese.

Sonic grabbed the remote, upping the volume with his thumb and flicking the channels. He stopped on Kim Mathews, superjournalist, sitting on an examination table in a blue gown, nodding reporter-like as a doctor discussed the lump in her breast. The back of my neck tingled: it was the night of the Kim Mathews lumpectomy.

I thought about shutting off the TV, or telling the kids to go wherever it was they went when Neil sent them away, but the authority didn’t feel right this time. I was no child molester, but I wasn’t a V-chip either. So we sat on the torn couch, three sets of eyes on Kim—and she was just Kim now that we knew she needed surgery. We watched her squinting at her x-rays as the breast doctor applauded the early detection due to Kim’s regular mammograms. “You’ll see to it these don’t show up at Christies,” she quipped, and the breast man laughed the laugh of a man about to become a celebrity himself. Then they dissolved into a beer commercial.

Ivory reached into my lap and grabbed a few nachos, the cheese now hardened like mortar. “What’s a biopsy?” she asked me.

“It’s when, you know, a doctor cuts into…something,” I said, uncomfortably. Maybe I should have banished myself from the living room.

“They’re gonna cut her tit off,” Sonic said.

“They’re not cutting it off, they cut into it so they can get the lump out.”

“Why?” Ivory said.

“Because it’s not supposed to be there.”

“Then why’s it there?”

“’Cause she’s got cancer, stupid!” Sonic said.

“No, her lump wasn’t cancerous.”

“How do you know?” he said.

“They did the surgery months ago, it’s been all over the news,” I said, frustrated by my inability to explain that the Mathews biopsy had received more coverage than most small military maneuvers. The entire country knew her lump was benign. In fact, that had been the point: early detection, life over death, TV woman beats disease of the week—you can too!

When Kim came back she was speaking to us from the operating table in a scene more gruesome than anything out of an Alexis Calyx film. You could see her feet strapped to the table, her bare ankles, the curtain separating her head from the rest of her body where the surgical team prodded with rubber gloves. “Okay, I’m going to make an inch long incision just below the aureole so it doesn’t scar,” the breast doctor said, and a camera followed his fingers on the scalpel, careful not to reveal any skin that might identify the famous newscaster’s breast, though we did see a quick burst of blood before the dissolve.

“Ew!” Ivory screamed, and buried her head against my shoulder. I felt the nachos and ice cream wrestling in my stomach, but couldn’t stop looking at the screen. We were inside Kim’s breast, down with the sound of suction, the bloody gloves and Frankenstein tools bobbing against her flesh. A pull back to the other side of the curtain, and Kim smiled. Through lipsticked lips she said she could feel pressure, but no pain. Oh modern medicine! Oh local anesthesia! Kim had outdone herself for her sweeps week close-up, a celluloid coup like the suicidal corpses of Ida and Marvin Salinger that all of New York had seen on that mid-October morning, which just happened to have been my birthday and the day the strike began. Since then I’d been marked by death like a yellow-splattered scab. My thoughts plunged to Aunt Lorraine.

I lifted Ivory’s head from my shoulder and stood up from the couch. “Wait, Rachel!” Ivory said. “Look, look, they got it, they got the bump!”

“You mean lump,” Sonic said. I turned my head to the screen. The breast doctor held out a metal tray with Kim’s lump in it. I had to hold my stomach to keep from retching. This was wrong, all wrong.

I ran into the kitchen and called Aunt Lorraine. Rowdy answered, but said he wouldn’t wake her until I proved I was at Neil’s house, so I put Ivory on the phone. Rowdy sobbed, “You found my brother! My long lost brother!” As difficult as it was for me to take his emotions seriously just then, I lied and told him Neil had asked about him, that he wanted him to come and visit. When his crying subsided, he woke Aunt Lorraine.

“It’s late,” she said.

“I know, but I’m coming home, I had to tell you.”

“Finally.”

“You don’t believe me.”

“I do.”

“I’ll be there, I promise.”

“I know, hun,” she said, her voice so matter of fact I thought she must have more faith in me than I had in myself. At that point I knew only two things: I would do whatever she wanted; and Kaminsky’s camera crews were not getting anywhere near her. I hung up, then left a note for Vera.

Before leaving, I asked Ivory if she would show me King Henry and she took me out to the damp tool shed. The air smelled of oil and rust. Against the back wall was an old workbench like the one back in Bay Ridge, only this one was stacked with gun parts and all of the bullets that weren’t allowed in the house.

In the corner, King Henry lay on top of a pile of towels, the most visible being an upside down head shot of Elvis. The two kings met eye-to-eye, with Henry encased in a plastic collar that framed his face like an earl’s neckpiece.

Ivory ran to him and threw her arms around the back of his collar. Her touch seemed the opposite of the rubber-gloved fingers on Kim Mathews. It looked like intimacy. “Hello, baby dog,” she said, and the gnarling in my stomach returned. Did she know he was dying? No matter how tightly she held on.

I knelt down next to her in front of the not-quite German shepherd, but Neil was right, he was no mastiff either. Like most of us, he was a mutt. Clumps of sticky hair covered his face as I looked into his blinded eyes. They saw me without seeing, the way Dad’s had been the day I’d found him.

Ivory lifted King Henry and led him outside. It was colder now. Goose bumps shuffled up my arms, but for the first time in months I saw stars. Underneath that dazzling expanse, with stars as phony as a Van Gogh rip-off, I watched Ivory pat her dog’s head while he took a shit, then bundle up his excrement in newspaper. I thought of all the times I’d seen Rowdy empty Aunt Lorraine’s bedpan. Cleaning up someone else’s shit was all you needed to know about life and death, love and loyalty.

“What’s the matter?” Ivory asked after we’d taken King Henry back to his throne of towels, back to Elvis and one more night.

“Nothing,” I smiled. “My allergies are bumming me out.”

“Bumming me out,” she imitated me. “Rachel, you’re funny.”

“More than you know.”

“Are you a Yuppie?”

“Do I look like one?”

“I don’t know, I never met a Yuppie.”

“That’s good management for you,” I said.

Ivory raised one side of her melancholy mouth. Then she asked if we could go to the store again.

RR let me in without saying a word. I followed him through the darkened space over to the couch. He sat down. In front of him candles flamed, sending shadows like modern dancers against the windows. On the table: his laptop, cell phone, and a beer bottle sweating slightly at the neck. “What took you so long?” he said.

“I called.”

“Hours ago.”

His eyes flared, and he was the parking lot RR again. Pressure flooded behind my face. All the way home I’d rehearsed: Not that this hasn’t been nice, but…I’d even had visions of him being the romantic RR, the one who’d squired me about Caesar’s Palace and then took me home to his silly waterbed, before the sex and money clouded in, before he started glowering at me as if I were so vile it soiled his eyes. “Okay… listen,” I backed away from the table, remembered Vera’s minivan parked outside. “I think I’ll just go.”