Ride Around Shining (9 page)

I turned and looked at the sign over the bar, which listed about forty-six things you couldn't do inside the club. I'd been going through it before, while the gray-haired man broke down at the rail.

“It says no punching women,” I said, pointing vaguely.

As I turned back I felt her on my ear. I felt her short nails bite as she twisted the lobe.

I heard a strange sound then. I thought I heard a man far off, beyond the lacquered walls, keening in a high, effeminate voice. I saw my arm twisting back, moving hers aside and reaching out, gripping the strings of the hood, pulling her toward me. It shouldn't have worked, but she came forward willingly, almost softly, as if compelled. She had a fearful, rapt, knowing expression on her face, as if I were doing something fated she'd long waited for.

I felt my mouth soften and my eyes go half-closed. I imagined my face as someone else's, a soft, sensitive face with a curling, brutal mouth. I let the strings go loose in my hand, but still I held them.

“We'll go now,” I said. My voice had gone deeper.

She nodded, suddenly obedient and demure. “I only thought you'd want to look at these girls.”

“It's no substitute,” I said. “Put your hood up.”

“What?”

I reached across and lifted the hood and put it over her head softly. For a moment she looked like a mysterious androgyne. She didn't protest. “Pay the dancer,” I said, and she went and shyly laid the bills onto the rail. The dancer was collecting her clothes; she looked at Antonia curiously.

I went out into the alley. I felt myself shaking, exultant and terrified that she'd obeyed. Expressionless under the low clouds, I stood and waited one minute, and then two, and then she came out, still wearing the hood, and I opened the door for her, and closed it tenderly behind, and we rode through the red-lit city, with all the buildings as distant and unchanging as if they had been captured inside a glacier of perfect ice. Through silent canyons we rode home to the bachelor's house.

Bringing her round at last
, I did feel proud. The carriage house where I garaged the car looked antique and strange in the dim cloud-light; the old house itself seemed to stand timeless and tall as some ancestral home. I'd used the place once or twice, to fill in some detail about my fallen family, so to come on it now was a sort of homecoming. Its disintegrations were soaked with night, half-invisible. Even the landlady's house cat, who had previously proven himself to be a simple machine that turned kibble into yowling, managed to be picturesquely asleep beneath the grandfather clock in the foyer. The second floor was dark, and I took Antonia's hand easily and led her up to the attic stair.

For all I'd thought of having her there, I can't say I was prepared. As I turned the knob, the next image my mind offered was of her lying facedown over the edge of the bed. But I didn't want to go right to that. I wanted to show her some class, and make her feel at home. As we got up on the landing I even had a strange feeling of satisfaction already, as if having her for my guest was all I'd wanted.

I made us some drinks, with pineapple juice and the bachelor's rum, like we were just a couple of old friends kicking it there in that Mardi Gras mausoleum. I handed her the cool glass and we went from room to room, turning on all the lights, and the old beads and relics of revelry shone dully, projecting their weathered best in perpetual sad festival. There was a poignancy in having Antonia look at these things, as though the bachelor's old walls were gazing at her with reverence and crying out yes. I took up the glasses and we went and looked at his books of love.

“
Loving a Woman in Two Worlds
,” she read, marveling. As soon as I failed to assault her she'd grown calm again.

I showed her
Sacramental Acts
and
If the Buddha Dated
, and while I wanted her to be amazed by this accumulation of overly heartfelt advice, this embarrassment of embarrassment, I was glad she didn't laugh. I wanted her only to be in awe, as if observing the ritual of some strange and derided religion.

Next came the cat shrine. I clicked on the small lamp with the Bourbon Street shade that gave the corner its own rich light, and she knelt on the carpet amid the mothballs and picked up the old Polaroid by its corners.

She flipped it over. “Sabonis,” she read. “Your name was Sabonis.”

She sat back, thinking.

“Be right back. Is that okay?” She waited for me to nod and then her bare leg brushed by me in the narrow way. I heard the door to the apartment creak open.

I looked at her little handbag, tipped beneath the mustard suits. I thought of opening it, but I was a little afraid there would be nothing in there. I imagined digging through some lip balms looking for an object that reassured me there was some strangeness worth seeking within her cultivated origins and the bright flits of her little heart, and how I would feel if it weren't there. Instead I hopped to, and collected a few of the things I'd need for later. I found the hickory switch and slid it under the bachelor's old four-poster.

When Antonia came back to the closet, she had a handful of books and the house cat in her arms. He wriggled out and fell heavily to the floor, glaring around with a haughty look.

“This is for you,” she said, handing me what looked like a comic pamphlet.

“‘El Libro Del Amor, numero 511,'” I read.

For herself she showed a volume by the Kensington Ladies' Erotica Society.

“You're reading all these, right?” she asked, sipping the rum.

“Of course.”

“By the time you get your own place, you'll know everything about love,” she said. “You're so lucky.”

I nodded gravely, and we turned to our books. The cat padded shyly over to her, and she showed him the cover and underlined the title with her finger for his benefit. He snuffled her knees, then climbed carefully into the hollow of her crossed legs and plumped down.

“‘Denuded, he was as stark and white as the cliffs of Dover, and just as hard,'” Antonia read. “‘His reverent face gleamed up at mine and I partook at last of the soft stone of his unscabbarded delicacy.'”

We laughed, and I wondered if I ought to feel emasculated, smiling so benignly at this girl over whom I'd just been asserting my command. It was a sort of relief to let that slip away a bit, to just be two people again, with no pressure on us. Still, I knew if I just let her off altogether she wouldn't respect me.

“What have you got there?” she asked.

I'd taken some spare sheets from a little blue cabinet the bachelor kept, and I was twisting them up and tying loose knots in the ends.

“What are those for?”

“You know,” I said. She'd put her head in, so she'd have seen the four-poster.

“Let me help,” she said, and reaching her slow hand out I let her take a corner. I watched her little fingers work quietly upon the soft blue sheets.

“Did you know,” she said finally, “I married him because I thought he'd cheat.”

She brushed her finger over the soft, folded ear of the sleeping cat distractedly.

“I thought we'd be young and in a new city and he'd be famous and it'd be kind of dazzling like that for a while, and then it'd settle down and he'd cheat and then I could do what I wanted again.”

The cat flicked its ears and began to purr through its nose in a lively snort.

“Only he didn't,” she finished. “And then I didn't know what to do.” She looked down at the cat beseechingly.

She was sitting at the edge of the light, so her face and hands were warm and whiskey-colored, lit up with all the rich life that the bachelor yearned for us, his guests, to know that he had known, while the back of her neck looked only meager by the closet's bare bulb. I saw her there, leaning into the light, and again I thought I understood something of her want. She seemed to want only life. I saw her at home in Dunthorpe, with Calyph gone to Cleveland or Charlotte to play eighteen minutes a game and then not hit the town, pacing restlessly in a house she must have still been trying to own. I imagined she'd walk out at night onto one of several balconies and look up the riverbank at the distant city lights as though they were shining on some inaccessible nocturne society, that she had neither the transportation to nor the language for. Just to have been up here, and not there, must have felt like all the difference.

Our glasses were empty, and when I came back she was lying with her face toward the wall. The dress had ridden up a little, and the skin above her knees looked like she'd bathed in milk her whole life.

“Whenever you're ready,” she said, her face to the wall. Her voice was dead and indifferent but she almost gasped at the end, she had so little breath. I took up the sheets and the old, soft shirt that I thought would serve as a blindfold. It had the lineup from a jazz festival on it, and I hoped when we were done she might like to sleep in it, it was so soft and worn.

In the bedroom I put my glass on the table and fixed the sheets to the posts of the bed. They were light blue with little sunflowers. All in all, I thought it was a soothing setup. It would be just like tying up your wife.

When I turned to fetch her she was already standing in the door, watching me. Her face was tight again, but I thought I saw a curiosity there. It was like when she'd given me that chiding look, for kissing her, but beneath you could see she was pleased. She frowned as if she found the setup distasteful, but that just made me wonder if she'd done it before.

“I'll let you do your legs yourself,” I said. There was an armchair just past the foot of the bed, where the sun fell in the afternoons, and I sat back to watch, stirring the new ice of my drink.

Slowly she took her shoes off and slipped the knots around her ankles. She stared me down as she yanked each tight.

“Take off that hood,” I said. “You'll want to loosen your dress.”

She stared at me strangely, proud, unwilling to divulge herself. At last she threw the hoodie aside and I got up and did her arms. The skin of her wrists was like damp paper faintly inked. I bound her very gently; I wanted her to have some play. Last I prepared the old shirt for the blindfold.

“Is that necessary?”

“I thought we had an understanding,” I said. I expected her to scoff, but she just closed her eyes dutifully, waiting for the cloth. I could hardly believe it myself, that she was so acquiescent. It couldn't have been just to get me to be silent. She told herself that was all it was, a trial to be undergone to achieve some end, all the while wanting it. She must have been having her own daydreams for years. I wound the old shirt around her gently. Then I stood at the foot of the bed, savoring it a moment, rising up to my fullest height though there was no one to see.

“Please take off your dress,” I said.

She lifted all four of her limbs at once, in helplessness, like a flipped turtle. I suppose she meant to be funny.

“It should come with a little work,” I assured her.

I saw her face twist in genuine confusion beneath the wrap of cloth. “Did you forget which part was supposed to come first?”

I reached beneath the bed then, and brought up the switch. It was the thinnest thing, a toy really, but she didn't know that. I sent it whistling down onto the bed beside her, where it made a good crack.

“I didn't forget,” I said.

“What's that?” she asked quick.

“I won't have to use it, I'm sure,” I said with great confidence. I sent it down on the other side of her, just for symmetry, and she set to work.

The straps of her dress weren't much trouble. They were thick, but she could just bite them and work them off the shoulder. She shrugged her shoulders in circles and a bit more of her appeared, though nothing that was new to me. But then she had to get creative. She tried dragging herself along the bed, but it wasn't any help. She'd have to really exert herself, to wriggle even, to make any progress. She didn't want to do that, I could tell. She forgot she was a willing prisoner and wanted to be a dignified one.

“I give up,” she said. “Come help me.”

But she'd hardly tried. So I switched her, just once, very gently with the tip of the thing. She gasped, and for a moment she seemed very fragile, like she might cry, but then she went hard and still again, her teeth bared.

“You should have loosed it properly,” I said.

“Do you see a zipper?” she asked, full of disdain. Of course she was right. It just came off over her head; it didn't loosen at all.

“You'll just have to try very hard,” I said. I sent the switch down a lot then. It was only on the bed of course, but it was all around her, she could hear it whistling through the air, it was a bit psychological. She began to really struggle at last. Beyond caring how she looked, she twisted and writhed upon the bed. At last the tips of her soft debutante's breasts slid out into the light.

She felt her exposure and sank back. She was breathing heavy. Even this small nudity shocked me, her nipples were so dark. There was a bright red line on her calf where I'd switched her.

The moment pressed upon me. Again I felt unprepared. I'd only gotten the sheets so the night would seem to have a direction. Once she'd seen me prepare them, I had to use them. I only wanted to have control.

But then, I reminded myself, she'd been having these dreams, too, about servants, all her girlhood probably. For every boy in a nowhere town taking the family car to the lake to see the distant figures on the private docks, there is a girl in a high window on a humid southern cul-de-sac, looking at the gardener. I was the gardener now, I reminded myself. She'd waited a long time for this, too. She'd tried to get it in marriage, but he would've transcended that by now. He couldn't be everything at once. Though he still loomed over all her life, he had lost his power, through the inarticulable diminishment of marriage. She wanted a substitute, some new body on its instinctual rise from obscurity, a self-made man still in the making.