Submit (Songs of Submission) (12 page)

When I got out of the shower, I hadn’t made a decision.

Jonathan was gone.

CHAPTER 20

I sat in the Echo Park Family Clinic, checking my phone. I tapped at the letters, considering a message to him, but with nothing to say about what I wanted from him, how could I show him the disrespect of a message? And with no word from him, maybe he was going to make my decision for me.

Darren texted:

—
Are we cleaning Gabby’s room?
—

Lately, he and I only discussed practical matters. I thought that would be okay for a while. Eventually, we’d have to discuss what had happened.

—
Can we do later in the week?—

—k—

—BTW I got my voice back—

—good—

—I want to use one of Gs comps. I’ll credit her as author so the estate gets the royalties—

There was a long pause after that, then:

—
You’re a good and honest person with an incredible right hook
—

“Monica Faulkner,” called the Hispanic woman behind the desk. She wore pink scrubs and slippers. I stepped forward as she took a triplicate paper from a sleeve. “Okay, you had a dose of postinor for emergency contraception and a depo-provera shot. Sign here. Did the doctor give you a date to return for another shot?”

“Yeah.”

“Anything else?”

“I don’t know if this guy is worth it.”

“They never are,
mija
. Not one of them.”

CHAPTER 21

We wove words under popsicle trees,

The ceiling open to the sky,

And you want to own me

With your fatal grace and charmed words.

All I own is a handful of stars

Tethered to a bag of marbles that turns

Will you call me whore?

Destroy me,

Make me lick the floor,

Twist me in knots,

Turn me into an animal?

Will I be a vessel for you?

Slice open our lying box

Through a low doorway for our

Shoulds and oughts.

Choose the things I don’t need,

No careless moments, no mystery.

And you need nothing.

My backward bend doesn’t feed.

Will I ever own you?

Tie you?

Can I ever collar you?

Hurt you,

Hold you, and own you?

Will you ever be a vessel for me?

“That,” said Jerry from behind the glass, “is exactly what I’m talking about. That is a
song
.

“Thanks,” I said into the mic as I took off my headphones. I’d laid down the piano track first to get the tempo down, then I’d sung over it as I listened. “I’d like to do that second chorus again.”

“It’s that or you lay in the theremin. We’re short on time”

My little electromagnetic box sat in the corner. The second chorus was going to have to stay the way it was. I needed to lay in a track with an instrument played without touching it, or the whole song wouldn’t work. The lyrics were the culmination of all my fears, but there had to be a portion of the music that was comforting and sweet. Anything less would have been unfair.

Jerry didn’t know that I hadn’t actually composed an accompaniment for the theremin. I told myself I hadn’t had time, but the fact was, I didn’t know what I wanted out of the thing. The sounds it made were the opposite of Gabby’s percussive composition, and the two things together made no sense at all.

As I stood in front of it, listening to my voice and the piano together in my headphones, I reached for the instrument. My hand crossed the electromagnetic field and made a note. I moved the other hand between the metal poles, stroking the music, not touching a thing, the vibrations caused by the lack of physicality. The hand dance became a sensual thing, as if I touched an imaginary man who had come too close to me when I felt vulnerable, who had touched me when I hurt, and who had made the mistake of caring about me when I asked him to. For those sins and the mistake of letting his skin touch mine in a dangerous way, I’d shut him out.

“Can I start over?” I asked Jerry, who was flipping dials in the control room.

“Yep.”

Then I played the thing with all my anger and sorrow, flicking my fingers into the air to create notes of apology in measures of longing and grief.

CHAPTER 22

I got back from the studio feeling as though I’d just played to a stadium crowd. Jerry was going to remix the whole thing and review it with me in the next few days. Until then, I was high. I had to shower and change before meeting Kevin and Darren about the Vancouver piece.

A Fiat was parked in front of my house. I recognized it as the one that had been parked in Jonathan’s driveway the second night we were together. On my porch stood his assistant in all her blond sullenness.

“Hi,” I said. “I don’t think we’ve met?”

“Kristin.” She didn’t shake my hand or smile, just handed me an envelope. “I’m supposed to wait until you read it.”

I tore it open. Inside was a sheet from Trend Laboratories. In the top right corner, Jonathan had scribbled,
Sleep well.

Under the header were the words TEST RESULTS. Smaller words lined up beneath that. Many were no more than jumbles of consonants, each with two checkboxes. Positive and negative. Negative boxed were checked all down the line. I did a purposeful check for HIV, and when I saw the Negative box checked, I breathed a sigh of relief.

“Do you want to come in?” I asked.

“I’m late.”

“Can I give you something to pass back to him?”

“Sure.” Though the word itself implied that giving Jonathan a note would be her pleasure, and though her tone was completely professional, her posture and stony face told another story. She was probably a Harvard MBA passing notes between her boss and his mistress.

I unlocked the house. “This won’t take a second.”

I had a box of receipts, and I dug through it until I came to the one from the Echo Park Family Clinic. I circled the prescription for my morning-after pill and wrote,
You too,
in the upper right-hand corner
.
I stuffed it into the envelope, went back outside, and handed it back to her. I knew what I wanted to do.

He hadn’t texted or called since he’d spanked me pink in the hotel room. I knew he was giving me space, taking the pressure off. He’d broken a cardinal rule by entering me without a condom, but I wasn’t such a child as to think I had no responsibility to protect both of us. I could have checked. I could have been more diligent. When his dick felt so good in me, I should have known. It wasn’t as if I’d never felt an unwrapped penis before.

I held my phone, feeling the heft of it in my palm. I could call him. I could reach out to him, and we could discuss him tying me up and hitting me with riding crops. Or chocking my mouth open so he could fuck it. Or sharing me with his buddies. How far did it go? How deep was the kink? I had no idea. I’d shut him down pretty quickly.

I put away the phone, deciding to give it an hour. I wanted him to have that receipt in his hands before I called.

CHAPTER 23

“Why should the space be limited?” Darren asked. “Space is visual, and it’s your problem. Time is aural, and that’s between Monica and me.”

“This is a representation of human limitation,” Kevin said, his posture twisted like a spring, leaning forward, fully engaged as always. “We have no authority over space and time in reality, and any control we wrest is, by its nature, false.”

“So Monica and I will dictate the space, and you’ll dictate the tempo. We work from there.”

I leaned back, arms crossed, legs stretched, and ankles twisted. I had nothing to add. They were in an epic intellectual pissing match. None of what they said mattered, and it ran counter to the original vision, which was to remove the intellectual from the emotional. But they’d started the minute we entered Hoi Poloi Hog, also known as HPH.

The furnishings were found objects rescued from street corners and thrift stores. That included the lighting, the sockets of which had been fitted with bulbs that seemed specifically designed to cast as little light as possible. The sunless, dark blue sky of the October evening didn’t help the lighting situation at all, burnishing the faces of my two companions a deep bronze.

It was lost on no one that I sat with two of the three men I’d shared my body with, but it wasn’t discussed. Art was discussed.

“Either of you guys need more coffee?” I asked. They were both on their second espressos.

“I’ll get it,” Darren said. “You guys got the last two.” He got up and went to the bar.

Kevin didn’t say anything for a second, and neither did I. He’d get to it if I didn’t try to fill the empty space.

“You need a partner for this?” he asked. “Because I didn’t ask for a team.”

“You would have had three of us if Gabby hadn’t gone swimming while overdosing.”

“Was that a cheap shot?”

It was my turn to lean forward. “I don’t work well alone. You know that. I do my best work with other people.”

“You have to get over that.”

“You’re not feeling threatened, are you?”

He leaned back in his seat and gnawed on a lemon rind. “You do
not
like being challenged, Tweety Bird.”

My phone blooped, and I glanced at it. Jonathan.

—
Jesus Christ, the Echo Park family clinic? Are you serious?
—

—
Problem?—

—Let me count the ways
—

I was considering what to reply when it blooped again.

—
Can we stop this and talk before I have an accident?
—

I had a wisecrack at the ready regarding the meaning of the word “accident” and possible incontinence problems that could be serviced at the Echo Park Family Clinic for a nominal fee. I kept it to myself. “I’ll be right back,” I said to Kevin, not responding to his questioning look as I took the phone outside.

The street was active with dog walkers, phone talkers, deep kissers, and loud laughers. The traffic was loud, and I had to pinch one ear shut when he picked up.

“Hi,” I said.

“You walked out of there with more diseases than you walked in with.”

“You’re being a snob.”

“Snobbery is a defense against low social position.
Ego sum forsit
.
”

“I can’t believe you just said that. Even without the Latin part.”

“Which I botched, really. Because I feel like I’ve botched everything with you.”

I let the silence hang for a second, checking in with my memory of him, the way he moved, the way he spoke, his scent, his breath. Then, I thought of Carlos’s blacked-out page from the institution, the ex-wife he may still love, the woman in San Francisco, and of course, the submissive thing.

I took a deep breath before I broke the silence. “We’re both not saying the same thing.”

If there was a way to hear a smile on the other end of a phone line, it would have deafened me. “I’ll be home at ten or so, unless you want me to come there.”

It hadn’t occurred to me to do anything at my house, and the idea was appealing, except for Gabby’s empty room and Carlos’s envelope, which made a huge mental racket for an inanimate object.

“Ten is fine.”

He breathed. Was it a sigh? “I look forward to it.”

I went back in to watch the other two great fucks of my life talk about the dialectics of emotion.

CHAPTER 24

I got out of there at nine forty-five with a head full of multi-syllabic words and no solutions. The boys were still talking about what it all meant in the grand scheme of things and seemed to be enjoying each other’s company more and more as the espressos went down. As I got into the Honda, I decided that if they ended up sleeping together, I’d promptly become a lesbian, then banished the thought.

Jonathan’s gate was open like a mouth ready to swallow me whole. I parked in his driveway and shut the car, sitting there for a second and watching the bougainvillea vine swing in the autumn wind. The yellow pad I’d been working on stuck out of my bag. I’d dashed off some notes during my talk with Kevin and Darren, but the page with my fears about Jonathan remained.

What if he collars me? Slaps me? Spanks me? Bites me? Fucks me in the ass? Whips me? Hurts me? Displays me? Gags me? Blindfolds me? Shares me? Humiliates me? Ties me down? Makes me bleed? Fucks me up? Chocks my mouth open. Pulls my hair. Fucks my face. Calls me whore. Tells me to lick the floor. Destroys me. Makes me hate myself. Turns me into an animal
.

I dug around my bag and found a pencil. I leaned the pad against the steering wheel and crossed out some things. It was probably wildly incomplete, but a starting point.

What if he
collars me
?
Slaps me
? Spanks me? Bites me? Fucks me in the ass?
Whips me?
Hurts me?
Displays me
?
Gags me
? Blindfolds me?
Shares me
?
Humiliates me?
Ties me down?
Makes me bleed? Fucks me up
?
Chocks my mouth open
. Pulls my hair. Fucks my face.
Calls me whore. Tells me to lick the floor
.
Destroys me
.
Makes me hate myself. Turns me into an anima
l
.

My remaining list didn’t leave him with much room to maneuver, but I didn’t see any of the crossed-out stuff as negotiable. The front door opened, casting a brighter light on my paper. Jonathan stepped out and went to the edge of the porch. Clutching my little pad, I got out of the car.