Ride Around Shining (15 page)

I edged forward until I could just see through the steam. Odette was sunk deeply in the tub, the ends of her loose hair floating around her, the water lapping at her throat.

“It's you,” she said, the words echoing rounded and childish.

“Shouldn't you be at the party?”

“They don't need me tonight,” she said, the lisp filtering coolly out of her voice. “I'm just for when there's nothing better.”

I stood before her with the mist around me, wishing I was more compelling. I could almost feel her trying to summon some interest as she stared up at me.

“You're bleeding,” she said suddenly. Her hand came out of the water and I could see the straps of a demure, black-and-white one-piece.

“I'm a man of violence,” I told her.

“It's very soothing in here.”

I kicked off my shoes just to see how we would feel about it, and then I went from there. I got down to my undershirt and trousers and decided it was far enough. The trousers had been torn a little that day I'd been flared and I was grateful to be seeing them to their ruin. Throwing the clothes to the ground, I felt a flash of disdain for myself, at my relief in settling back so immediately into unexamined lust for my own people.

I'd stepped up on the platform when I saw a second towel and a wallet laid out beyond her own discarded things.

“Who's that?” I asked, sliding into the water.

“Who?” she asked innocently.

My foot brushed hers a moment beneath the water and she kicked out at me playfully. “It's only me,” she said.

Watching my shirt pull away from my skin and bubble with the surface, I leaned back and tried to look comfortable. As I stretched my legs out I could feel hers entwine with mine—it was like the sight of my blood had announced a new physical magnetism.

“Who hurt you?”

“Some lady,” I said, knowing this was the right answer.

“There's just one drop, and it doesn't fall. It gets bigger but it just hangs.” She reached out and touched my face. No one had ever liked to touch me and suddenly I was irresistible. She put her wet hand on my chin but avoided the wound, which she seemed to revere.

“Have you ever been married?” she asked suddenly.

“I haven't even been born yet,” I told her.

“Really?” Her eyes lit in admiration. “I bet you're the oldest person here but me.”

“You?”

“Look,” she said. She lifted herself a little out of the water and ran her hand over her side where the suit curved away. As the skin pulled taut, two stretch marks purpled out.

She held the fabric back for me to touch the marked skin. I traced my finger across, but I couldn't feel anything.

“They're all children,” she pronounced. “But they've already lived full lives, and we're gray and wrinkled and full of potential.”

She smiled at me, wryly. When she spoke again her lisp had dried up entirely, and her voice was cool and exact. It was an affect, and it was shocking to hear this honed, grown woman's voice. She seemed almost a different person.

“We had a fight, Savier and I, about marriage. We talk about it all the time, but I know he won't. He says it's me; he says I always want other people. But I don't. If I was set up I could just let all that go by. What can I do but give myself to someone, before I get old? I know it won't work, it won't make me happy forever. I know we'll end up in hate. But I'll do it just the same.”

Slowly she submerged herself. For a moment she peered up at me through the water's churn, and I knew I'd seen her before after all, on some pinup website. She was on a gray beach much like the one beyond the walls. There were about thirty pictures of her, in which she was captured walking down to a rocky shore in what looked to be an icy spring dawn, wearing a simple black dress. Her hair was much longer then, and black—it must have been her goth phase. What made the pictures most memorable drew the focus off her: the errand captured in the photoset was the “walking” of a puppy, made of bones. It looked like a done-up veterinary skeleton, leashed with a red ribbon and set off through the chill dew as though it were a necromancer's best friend, and she casually possessed of a few of the more fashionable black arts. Toward the sea they went, in somber procession, stopping here and there so she could scratch behind its vanished ears and carefully dry its feet. As the pictures progressed, the bone puppy led her to the beach and then down, stone by stone, to the edge of a tidepool. In the last photograph she stared up at the camera from beneath the water, clutching the puppy to her chest. By then the set had become a full nude.

She looked up at me then as she had looked at all of us, all the round world of men, through the tidepool. The world was full of naked people getting older. It was true, what she said: in the presence of men who'd been tracked in scouting magazines since the fifth grade, who'd been the new names shouted by overexcited color guys during thawing March days, when I was feeling really sort of a big deal now for having got a prime slot on college radio, one felt older, like talent already wasted. Our eyes were failing, our spines were curling in, soon we would be thirty, and thirty-five; we were graying in the womb of our undefined future excellence. To love sports, to love music, to love how young women in blinding bloom sat on old gray rocks and opened their arms, was to live in a world where it got late early. The sunken-eyed coach only now approaching mastery, the craggy composer of the sublime concerto, became irrelevant; how unhappy they looked, for all their wisdom, like they scratched their balls and got ashes on their fingers, on this elemental earth next to which even our ancience is fleeting. But, oh, old enlightenment, your business is nice, but while a man can yet jump so high his breath snuffs a candle on the back of the rim, while Odette unfolds her arms, then, old enlightenment, go somewhere and wait for us to need you, we will live forever as long as this lasts.

When Odette surfaced within my arms and kissed me for reasons too remote to protest, this vision had put me pretty well at my ease, and I had no trouble at all catching her by the shoulders and pushing her against the stone edge of the tub. She clasped my head wetly with both hands, to hold me still, and it was like a child's need for assertion, to set the rules of play, and so I pressed into her, and would not let her lead. We battled like that for a while, and then I took her wrist and dragged it pinned against the stone, just for fun. Looking up I saw it was the splinted hand.

“You're rougher than you look,” she said huskily, turning her head aside. She put her hand over my face, and as her fingers spread I closed my eyes and she pressed lightly on my lids.

“You like it,” I said automatically, because it had always been so.

“What if I don't?” she asked, making her voice small.

“Suck it up then, I guess.” I pushed my face into her hand to see if she would hold me off. I felt her fingers drag luxuriantly away.

I went at her neck a bit, very chaste, careful to leave no mark, but with energy, leaving behind a faint streak of my own blood. She clutched me to her and began to speculate.

“You're one of those servants who thinks they're better than their masters,” she said, chuckling lowly. “Usually you're very uptight.”

“You smell like food,” I told her, just to balance things. It wasn't true, but along the tub's edge I'd seen a plate of leftover beans and chicken bones. She stiffened a little, and then we heard the echo of steps.

For a long moment I thought it would be the Pharaoh, but his gait was wrong, misshapen—instead of casual steps we heard the squeaking, half-mechanical shuffle of the recently invalid. The hospital sounds of him seemed a judgment of their own, and as he came toward us through the mist Odette drew quietly away.

I didn't know how to face Calyph that way. It wasn't that I was ashamed, or had any feeling of having misbehaved. I was proud to be found out in her company, yet I felt outed somehow, uncomfortable at the revelation of my desires even where they were most universal. Again I lay back in the water, trying to be easy. I watched him loom up in the light and take us in. I remember hoping he'd see her as an unexpected wrinkle of me, a hidden prowess.

“You shouldn't be here, J,” he said right off.

“Why?” I asked lazily, hearing my voice calibrate itself to some libertine cadence in the lone drawled word. I would've been glad to be treated almost any way, as a rival even, rather than to be given more stern warnings.

“You know,” he said, and there was real heat in his voice. He didn't look at Odette, but still she shrank away, fading into the background as far as she was able. She'd lowered herself into the water so the purse of her lips lay along the waterline.

“Did I take your place?” I asked, hearing again the strange caress in my voice. “You forgot your wallet.”

“I was here,” he said, “before she was here. Then I got out. As you best.”

Odette seemed to have sunk lower yet, intently watching us, her whole mouth submerged.

“It feels nice in here,” I said. “Isn't it nice, Odette?”

“Yes,” she lispered.

I felt all at once in total command of the situation and all parties in it. “You ought to join us,” I said. “I'm sure Puma would like it.”

She rose up in the water then, just slightly, so that her hair came dripping clear, watching him, waiting.

He hesitated a moment, and I could see he did desire her. I wondered if she'd told him about her fight with the Pharaoh. If he was true to his code it wouldn't have made any difference, but still he lingered, and did not look at her, and after all she was one to turn men's rules for themselves into just so much false dignity, so many resolutions left behind in a drawer somewhere at the moment of crisis, and I knew he knew it. Yet my own presence must have baffled and unnerved him—I was curious which force would be the stronger.

I imagined him stripping off his brace and lowering himself down, the water in the tub rising, bracing for our negotiation of one another as two bodies in the close space. How could we resist her, yet how could either of us touch her with the other there? How would she react to our mutual presence? I imagined she would be for it. All at once I imagined us both going for her, his hands and mine around her, feeding on her lips and limbs, our heads banging accidentally together. His scarred, shrunken leg would lie awkwardly against mine beneath the water; my blood off her would mark his face. I felt the sudden urge to clutch her, to hold her up to him. Full once more of the thrill of becoming unknown to myself, I grabbed her thigh to turn her toward him.

I watched him lower himself upon the crutches, and he leaned his face down to mine.

“You do what you want now, Jess,” he said quietly. “This some sorry shit, though, you want to know the truth.” Then he straightened and swung himself slowly away through the silent, dripping room.

As he receded I could feel her coming back to me. “It's all right,” she tried to begin.

“Shut up,” I said.

She sank herself into me a moment, obediently. Then she rose again and put her face in front of mine. “You're one of those white deviants,” she pronounced, looking at me with mock-horror with a sort of approval breaking through it, as though she'd found in me something more interesting than expected.

I felt my lip curl at this. I thought tiredly that I'd better play along, just for an instant, that this deviance was something I ought to suggest an affinity for, so I could transcend it.

“Naw,” I said. “Naw.”

“No?”

“I got a little black in me,” I told her.

She looked at me close; with soft fingers she examined my hair.

“You poor thing,” she said.

I looked at her fiercely, willing her belief and, I was sure, its consequence, her envy.

“You poor, poor thing,” she repeated.

I fondled her carelessly then—I turned her and once more pressed her against the stone of the pool. The fun seemed to have gone out of it a little, but I gripped her by the scruff of the neck and willed it back.

“Close your eyes,” I said. “Turn your head.”

She frowned but she did it.

“Keep them closed,” I ordered. “Now open your mouth.”

Her face was set in a thrill of dislike, but she'd decided this deviance I was supposed to have was attractive, a force to be obeyed. Her mouth opened slightly, warily, the corners of her lips peeling apart.

Rising up, I reached over to the edge of the tub and took the chicken in my hand. It was cool and greasy. I felt a shudder of disgust, but there seemed such a logic in what I was doing. It was like an inspiration of wrong. I put the fleshy end of the chicken bone to her lips.

After that I do not remember, only that we were on our feet in the spray and she was blazing at me, and I was trying to comfort her, to change her mind about me, absurdly to show her all the flair and daring of the act, how brave I was to carry through, knowing its repugnance.

“See,” I kept saying. “No, look.”

But she only blazed out. I don't remember if I was hit—the marks would have been obliterated by the marks of what came after. I only remember pleading what a childlike, innocuous, not-worth-telling-anybody time we'd had, and then just trying to get out of there, to get her to let me go quietly, but then I heard more steps, and saw Joseph Jones through the mist, and Ras too, and Goat. It seemed they were trying to keep Goat from coming in, but when they saw me they put away their differences.

On my twenty-eighth to last day
, just as my bruises were at their most vivid, I drove out to Dunthorpe and Ras answered the door. There was a tin of polish in his hand, and he frowned a little when he saw me. He twisted the lid, ensuring its tightness, and I got the sense that with that gesture his trove of professional advice was closed to me forever. “From now on, de car stays heah.”