Scar Flowers (27 page)

She
would stay in control this time. Today she was a guide, not a player.

Leah tried to press a condom into
the girl’s hand, but Faith would not take it.
She knows the rules about playing safe. I’ll have to talk with her later.

Faith may have his body
, but it was Leah’s eyes he looked into. Whom would he remember more vividly, the girl who had served him on command or the woman who brought the pleasure into being? The warm, insistent tug of a wet mouth. So soft, so easy to give in to. His gaze misted over. Yes, he was in it now, the desire like a sudden coiling of snakes in the belly, their smooth, scaled armor enclosing the writhings of animal heat.

Did he believe her,
when she said he should not have come back?

He
soon would.

Simon’s forehead grew hot under Leah’s palm, his eyes darker. Not like they needed to be filled, but as if they could draw something out of her. He opened his mouth, but before he could speak
, she said, “She thinks she is mine. And she’s right. Her hands are my hands, her mouth is my mouth, because she gives them to me.”

Leah ran her fingers over his eyelids to close them. Straight black lashes and that sloped, broken nose. She wanted to touch his mouth, the carved line of the
Cupid’s bow pillowed on the full lower lip, like the silhouette of a seabird above a swelling wave. Instead she turned to Angel.

“
I’ll reward you again if you do well,” she whispered. “Later, when we’re alone.”

She drew Angel toward the shower and kissed him, closing his sex in her hand for a quick caress. Of course he would do well. The boy had a quiet strength that drew everyone in, an innocent, unconscious beauty. When Leah gave her the signal, Faith with
-drew to make room for him.

Simon opened his eyes. The smell of soap
hung sharp in the humid air, and Angel’s lean body standing next to him had to be nothing like the voluptuous pressure of Faith’s limbs. No one moved. Even if Simon wanted to push him away, his hands were bound to the wall. The water hissed, striking tiles and rising as vapor.

“Angel,” she said, but the boy kept his eyes downcast, his face innocent of pride or rebellion. “He still thinks he could only ever be attracted to women,” she continued, her voice just one notch louder than the pelting water. She gave the cloth to Angel and motioned for him to wash Simon’s chest.

It wasn’t fair, of course. In this state of arousal, Simon would not be in the frame of mind to resist.

“A mirror to reflect your own wants without alien judgment,” she said. “Who else but another man could know the secrets of your mind and body so well?”

Was it her imagination, that he looked to her reaction for the cue to his own?
Don’t fight it
, she willed him.

“He thinks he is wholly mine because of all he’s suffered for me. And he’s right, isn’t he? His hands are my hands
. . .”

Leah pulled Angel closer so that all three of their faces melted and swirled together in the foggy air, the pressure of Faith’s presence receding behind them.

“. . . his mouth is my mouth . . .”

Still without raising his eyes, Angel leaned toward Simon’s face and bent his head. Something glowered in him, but he obeyed her.
Will he lose his nerve? No.
She had imagined their kiss, the two of them together like this, and here it was: nothing soft in it. Anger, hunger, a test of strength. The muscles in Angel’s jaw rippled, and his breath hissed from his nostrils as Simon’s fingers tightened into a fist.

“
. . . because he gives me the right to use them as I will.”

The words poured from her mouth like a prayer. They were true
; she made them true.

“That’s his gift to me: He has the strength to give me his strength, to offer me his beauty.”

Angel accepted the protection that Faith had refused. He tore the packet open and knelt in front of Simon and reached up, lips parting.

This wa
s it; if Simon refused, it would be now.

“That is how he enslaves me,” she whispered.

Not just him. Both of you.

She touched her arm to make sure she was not shaking. Her thoughts melted into the energy around her: Angel’s distance and Faith’s longing. But it was Simon, the way he let her take him like this, who held her.

Shouldn’t do this, any of it. It’s the evil Delilah warned against: thinking I can set everyone’s boundaries for them.

She shifted to step aside,
to remove herself, but she must have turned the wrong way; suddenly Simon’s lips were against hers, a taste of everything he experienced. Torment, denial, and pleasure. Her knees relaxed so that she had to catch herself. Simon groaned, then his mouth slid away. His teeth caught at her lip as his body arched, fists clenched, in a burst of expelled breath.

Leah clutched the wall. She hugged her waist and silently cursed the water for
making her shiver. Simon in profile filled her vision: the slow descent and rise of his Adam’s apple, his lips poised as if he might speak. His hands hung limp in their restraints. Angel, face turned toward the wall, got to his feet and wiped his mouth.

Once again Simon had surprised her.
He’s not afraid; how could that be?

He had not transgressed—she had.

Delilah’s voice rang in her ears: “With each person you add to the scene, the more you have to stay in control of yourself.” Leah could not step down and be one of them, or the whole thing would crash into pieces.

But she had not strayed far. All that was left was to coax Simon into the reciprocal act. Then there would be no doubt that he participated knowingly, was not just surprised and seduced. Then he would look for someone to blame: her. That would put an end to this whole experiment, as she had intended to do by leaving
L.A.

She unclipped his plastic cuffs from the wall.
Leah whispered in Angel’s ear, “He’s yours to use now, and then I’ll send him away,” using the tone she reserved for awarding him pleasure. She pressed Simon’s shoulders and he knelt. Mist rose from the tiled floor. A second condom offered, this one also accepted. Her hands slid over Angel’s, to guide them to the sides of Simon’s face. Water falling. Her lips formed a word.
Suck
.

Her knees still threatened to buckle, her legs tangled in wet fabric. This scene
should not any feel different from others that she had led before: the overlapping network of projection and empathy, the revealed desires. Such encounters created their own energy, caught the participants up and dashed them out, the way a torn-off door caught in a tornado falls to earth miles from its orig-inal frame. This time it was Simon’s hair under her fingers, the flex of his jaw and tongue working. Ripped from the rules that should have contained him. In his place, she would—she
had
—curled in on herself with shame, dried like a pill bug into an armored ball.

Soon it was over for Angel as well, his face slack as he leaned against the wall. Simon knelt over the drain, hands braced on his knees like a runner after a marathon.

Everything was fine, the scene was over, everyone but Faith had played safe.
So why am I still worrying?

Guilt. Sin. The claptrap everyone grew up with in this culture. She must not let her doubt show, or it would infect all of them.

Yes, that’s it: be the good girl. Look after everyone.

Leah stifled a laugh, a flash of rage. She shut the water off.

“Faith, Angel, wait for me upstairs. I’ll show our guest out.” She handed Angel a towel, trailed her hand over his shoul-ders as he walked past, though the moment she touched him, he angled away from her. Faith followed behind him.

Water gurgled in the drain. Leah’s hair clung to her face and neck, the humidity melting it back into spr
ing-coil curls. Simon got to his feet and aimed those eyes at her, glinting under his brows as if they could bore holes in her.

A last stream flowed from the showerhead in a burst, followed by a few drops. A trace of scent hung in the air, the bathhouse smell of male sex.

“I think you should go now,” she said.

Simon stood immovable, somehow taller and broader with
-out clothes, with more bulk to his shoulders than she remembered.

“It’s my house, and I want you to leave.”

“No, you don’t. Want me to leave.” Shadow defined the etched line where his chin and lower lip met. Together with the emphatic arch of his mouth the effect was of will, someone who would not be swayed.

“One thing I’m always aware of is what I want. You might say I’m an expert at it.” She tossed a towel at him. He let it drop. “Your clothes are in the front room.”

“Do you ever act on what you want? Or does everyone else do it for you?”

Moisture pooled at his feet and ran toward her through the tiny channels among the tiles. A voice in her mind started to ask what he meant, but she silenced it.

“Why does everyone pay so much homage to their wants? If someone had asked you this morning how you wanted to spend your afternoon, would this have been it?”

“Why did you kiss me?” he asked.

Her throat felt full, sore. Beads of water collected at the ends of Simon’s hair and fell to his shoulders. Her stomach burned cold, then turned, like a cat resettling itself.

“Because I wanted to. Now I want you gone.”

“You have a way of twisting things,” he said. “Especially desire.”

Through the camisole, translucent with water, Simon brushed his finger against her breast. A whispering touch, as if he were admiring a butterfly that had lighted on her. Her hands found his face. She bit his mouth, chill tiles at her back, the blunt
weight of his body. Too violent and sudden to be called a kiss.

In the middle of it, Angel returned
, dressed in a pair of loose cotton pants, the towel still in his hand, his hair a crown of wet spikes. He stopped, not surprised, his features hardening like a fist, a snapshot of confirmed suspicion. His expression,
I knew you would
, pierced her breastbone, and she pushed herself free of Simon so hard that she stumbled. Anger surged in her. Simon stood to lose nothing while her life collapsed.

“I told you to leave!” she cried at him. Her voice, a thin, ragged thing, went begging through the air. Too late; her words were lost in a dull thump that shook the house: Angel’s fist against the wall, the parenthetical whisper of the towel falling to the floor as he walked away. The slam of a door.

Simon took a step toward her, and she felt her features twist.

“Go.” Her voice burned in her throat. If she said one more word
, she knew it would come out in a scream.

Angel, gone. She had told herself it would not hurt when it happened, but tears stung her eyes as she pressed her face to the
tiles, wet with drops like tears.

11:47 p.m.

Leah checked her answering machine.

“Ms. Smith, this is Fran Beringer at StarBorn Studios returning your call. I appreciate your interest in
Babylon
, and yours is such an important publication. I’m booked solid, so let me give you my associate producer Paul Jonas’ number. He can tell you everything you need. Probably more than I can. You can reach him at—”

She did not finish listening to the message. So Paul had not been lying after all.

Thursday, September 21, noon.

From her bedroom, Leah heard the phone ring in her office, the answering machine’s click. No matter; she had cancelled her client sessions for the next two weeks. She stared at the ceiling, one hand dangling over the side of the bed. Sasha, curled beside her, groaned and sighed. Leah had not dressed or opened the blinds. Every time she tried to stand up, her head spun. Her thoughts paced from Angel to Simon and back again.

She had hurt Angel, used him. Just as Luis had done to her.

Leah heard footsteps in the hall, followed by three quick scratches on the door: Faith’s signal. Angel had always knocked instead. Sasha raised her head, ears perked.

The
girl waited a few minutes, then scratched again. The knob rattled, but Leah had locked the deadbolt. After a few minutes, Faith’s footsteps rang on the spiral staircase, and the house fell silent.

Leah pressed her face
to Sasha’s fur and closed her eyes.

Friday, September 22, 3:34 p.m.

Simon sat in the editing studio watching the first flashback scene in
Babylon
. The tiny images—of the dining room burning while Blake’s family ate dinner—recalled high-school philosophy class and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Puppets and shadows, one step removed from truth. He stretched his legs and consoled himself with the idea that even shadows had to follow immutable laws.

Then again, he had gotten a D in philosophy.

A mail order package sat on the floor by his chair. Thirty-five hundred dollars’ worth of new sheets and pillowcases in one slim box. The same brand that Angela had spoken reverently of, what seemed like years ago:
So-and-so of Paramount buys them!
So-and-so the executive, whom she had started dating as soon as she broke up with him. Simon ordered the sheets from L.A.—no Seattle store carried anything so ridiculously expensive.

Maybe
he would use them once and then throw them away. He smiled at the tiny images of Blake and his family as they passed the fried chicken and poured iced tea while the linoleum curled and smoked and windows exploded in the heat—the same shots he had sketched that morning in L.A., waiting for the crew to arrive.

As for other recent paychecks, he had wired the funds from one
check to his parents. With another, he sent kayaks to his brother Sean and his wife and a mountain bike for his nephew’s birthday, along with his regrets that he could not visit in person.

I
f the checks stopped coming tomorrow, how could he complain? He had abandoned
Babylon
before shooting wrapped. But what else could he do with the money—send it back?

Make another film.

He laughed and wondered if he had any good ideas left—look at all the great flameouts in the Directors’ Hall of Fame, from Welles to Bogdanovich: a couple great films, maybe three, followed by decades of chasing former glory. Grandiose, to include himself in their company, but
. . .

No matter how laughable he found the idea of continuing, he could not stop. Too many people would take satisfaction in his failure, or at least no one had ever wanted him to succeed. His mother had grown up in an unheated shack eating government surplus food and wearing donated clothes. Clinics funded with federal money still forced or tricked Indian women into
steriliz-ation. He could not let himself lose everything.

“Is this the section you wanted to speed up the pace on?” the editor asked.

“Yeah.”

They sat in front of a monitor in the editing suite. Empty coffee cups from a nearby espresso stand, their white plastic lids stained with lipstick, lined the ledge above the control panel, next to a pyramid of empty diet
pop cans. His own empty bottle of water from yesterday tilted from the top of the garbage can, flanked by crumpled candy wrappers. Orange carpeting covered the walls, and mixing consoles lined both sides of the room. Tiny figures toiled across the screen: first Karen and then a young man with dark hair. They paused in front of a two-story house.

A house. Leah’s house. And the young man looked like Angel. Lean with large hands. Tall. White tiles, running water.

Puppet. What have you done? What are you?

That was easy: whatever
Leah wanted.

No, it was not that simple. But when he closed his eyes he saw
her house, the wooden baseboards and patterned carpets, the varnished floorboards. That was the view he recalled: mostly from his hands and knees.

A place he had been barred from.
Aside from going to her yard and having her lock the door against him, he had left messages on her machine. Unreturned. He had been invited, then uninvited, then she chose him over Angel but stopped speaking to him. Any sane man would long ago have steered clear of it all.

Thursday, the day after his last session at Leah’s, he stepped from the shower
and stood in front of the mirror, trying to read the marks on his body. The cuts were hardly visible, thin red scratches. They changed color when pressed with his fingers, from white back to red, but stayed closed and mute.

All it meant was that she had been there with him and now she was gone.

It was only now that he let himself remember Julian. His best friend in college, a year younger than he was, a scholarship kid, expected to be the hotshot of the school one day. He’d let Julian work on his film project at night in the high-tech editing studio he was allowed to use as part of an internship. Better than the film school’s facility and without prying eyes around. His film project, his studio hours, his internship. He’d made that clear, but Julian had started asking to add his own ideas. Started complaining. Maybe it was the hours they’d spent cramped in that tiny room lit by jagged progressions of light from the monitors, trying to get everything done before morning. Never having enough money or sleep, never seeing any women.

He hadn’t been very drunk when he’d kissed his friend. One night at
three in the morning, as they were leaving the studio, he shouldered him into the wall, planted his boot next to Julian’s foot to keep him there. His friend still held rough-cut cassettes, and the edges dug into Simon’s chest. It was a joke, a dare. Dangerous, with a moment of electricity just beforehand: would he do it, go through with it? There had been something, a bolt of possessive jealousy that could have been desire. He did it to see what it was like and whether Julian would let him. And it stopped the com-plaining. Julian left a week later to start his own project.

Simon stood. The air in the editing suite had grown thick, overbreathed. “Cut some of the reaction shots to pick up the pace. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He stepped out onto Cleopatra Street in east Ballard, a Seattle neighborhood established by fishermen and the local Scandinavian population. In the last few years, the editor had told him, wine bars, indie-music record stores, and designer home-furnishing shops had sprung up among the thrift stores and Danish bakeries that had been there for years. A main arterial from I-5 ran one block away. A mini-mart hunkered across the street from a carry-out pizza joint and a postal and shipping service. The rest of the street consisted of modest houses with children’s toys or crab apple trees in the front yards. Simon tucked the mail-order box under his arm and headed for his motorcycle. Yesterday he had bought a black Ducati bike, a Monster S4R 1000 S café racer. An old Honda would have done just as well, but he had not been in the mood for sussing out equivalents, and the urge to rid himself of StarBorn money was too strong.

“Why d’you want a crotch rocket like that anyway?” Tom said over the phone. “
Get something butch, like a Harley. Not that fussy Italian shit.”

The fussy Italian shit was all about performance, not about making a racket so that everyone in town had time to look up and see you farting by on a genuine Harley.

Simon put on his helmet and slid the box of sheets in his backpack. Behind him, a girl with long black hair cut into short bangs with Asian-style, chin-length side locks leaned against the back wall of the studio. Her eyebrows were so pale as to be invis-ible, which gave her a ghoulish beauty. Despite the heat, she wore a black motorcycle jacket and jeans. Her mouth, painted a dark bruise color, worked as she chewed a piece of gum.

Something about her, an association with some object of desire, sent a spike of adrenaline through him. As he straddled the bike and started it up, the girl flicked her gum on the ground and examined the ends of her hair. A silver choke collar, the kind used for dogs, swung from the shoulder of her jacket.

That was a wig. Under the lipstick and false eyelashes, it was Faith.

Popping gravel, he took the Ducati in a tight circle around the lot to pull up beside her, half expecting Leah to appear
too.

“Can we talk?” Faith asked.

That’s what he thought she said, from reading her lips over the bass thrum of the engine. Skimming on top of this, the whirring high note of the intake vibrated. Not loud for such a powerful machine, but Faith spoke softly. The girl’s body draped against the building, as though her posture were half sulk and half shyness.

“Not here.” Simon lifted his visor.

“There’s a restaurant close by.”

“Get on.” He took a spare beanie helmet, just barely street-legal protection, out of his backpack and handed it to Faith.
Biker’s law number three: Always carry an extra helmet. He stuffed the pack through the open casement window to the studio’s bathroom. No room to wear it with a passenger on board.

Some things were still simple after all. Some women, when he said,
Get on,
swung themselves up behind him and locked their hands around his waist—an intimate maneuver on a bike with no passenger seat cover, not even so much as a slight rise for a second rider to brace her tailbone against. Just six inches or so of smooth space to perch on. He could not picture Leah on the back his motorcycle. Even in his fantasies, she would not wear the wardrobe that he chose for her or follow the choreography that he devised; his mind could not hold onto her as anything besides cool, aloof, and on top. Was his fascination that superficial, that she existed only as an idea to him?

Keep it superficial. In
fact, forget Leah completely.
She had no qualms about using him and Angel, and she had sent her errand girl instead of coming to him herself.

Hadn’t Leah already told him how things stood?
It’s my house, and I want you to leave . . . It would be best if you didn’t come here again.

A
s soon as he drove out of the parking lot, his body remembered that he had never had a woman on the back of his bike whom he had not slept with, either before they rode together or soon after. So where was he going with this rendezvous?
Just to talk
, his brain replied.

Faith’s legs rested inside the crook of his, her weight pressed and shifted against him. Each time she breathed, her ribs expanded against his back, which
brought to mind Leah, encased in leather, her arms around him. When they stopped at a red light, Faith laced and unlaced her fingers. In the rearview mirror she squinted at something across the street, lips parted. The pavement was freckled with oil drips from cars, brownish black slicks in the glare of the afternoon sun. As he guided the bike through traffic, Faith leaned with him when he took the corners, did not hold on too hard or try to make conversation.

The restaurant Faith chose was in the old part of town, a long, narrow space with an ornately carved wooden bar up front. A stuffed toy rabbit with a “Miss Misery” banner across its chest sat on a shelf next to a framed hand-lettered sign that read “Be Nice
or Leave.” The smell of the kitchen, with its whiff of bleach and dirty dishes, was soon covered by cigarette smoke in the windowless bar.

Faith kicked one boot against the table support and stirred sugar in her
tea. She wore a collection of silver rings, and her nails had chipped black polish on them.

“How’d you know where to find me?”

“
Fan-site message board.” She sucked her spoon to get the last trace of liquid, then set it back on the red Formica table. “There aren’t many places to edit movies around here, and that one had a motorcycle outside it. You’re the one Leah went to L.A. for, aren’t you?”

She leaned back in her seat and slouched under her jacket, cupping her mug. The bartender, a chubby girl with a peroxide
d pageboy, put a Lou Reed CD on the stereo.

“The one. Are there so many?”

She snorted and rolled her eyes as if contemplating the hordes of Leah’s pathetic admirers. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell any-one I saw you at the house. Or make any posts about it.”

With an arch of her eyebrows she added more:
Those fan-site losers are drooling groupies, but how else could I track you down? What do they see in you, anyway?

Good question, now that he had forgotten how to be a director.

“How’d you come to be there? At Leah’s house.”

“I live there.” Faith regarded her hands a moment, then narrowed her eyes at him. “You wouldn’t be talking to me at all unless you were one of hers. Hoping I’ll tell you a secret. Some
-thing the others don’t know.”