Cradling the phone in the hollow of her shoulder she tells her suitor ‘Babe, I know,’ with prescient firmness and rolls her eyes in my direction. I sigh, hoping she hears the ticking of a clock, knowing it won’t matter anyway. I tell myself I’m leaving in five minute increments and stay long past all my deadlines. She lays her hand upon my stomach and apologizes without meaning it. Somehow I feel she should be sorry for that but it doesn’t matter, her fingers are soft and warm against my skin and manipulate my libido with paper craft precision.
Watching myself in the mirror makes me feel like a voyeur and suddenly I want to feel her hurt me. I trace the line of my collarbone with my fingers, drawing her memories on my skin. Here a faded archipelago of bruises like markers on pirate parchment, there the shriveling scratches lingering like crime scene chalk. I press my palm to the reflection of my chest, watching the man there waste my tears. I wish that I could tell him something meaningful, something beautiful and kind. I can’t. I know that later I will restock his sorrow with selfishness.
I tell Wicks I’m not real and he pokes me with the end of his pencil the way a child might molest a dead thing. He smiles, satisfied, and pokes me again. I can see the lines of vintage dentistry running across his two front teeth, the consequence of some past violence. I try to imagine installing their absence myself. Wicks watches me thinking and asks me to elaborate. There’s a mortar and pestle feeling to our conversations that leave me feeling purposelessly milled, when I tell him this he shakes his head and asks me what I need.
When I think of him now its always the same. I see him sitting on that ledge, swinging his legs and watching the city. He always looked so peaceful, like the world never died. That’s what I loved most about him. I think everyone found what they needed in Shush. They took their answers from his silence and thanked him for it. I never thought much about the future back then, I let Shush think about it for us while I went out and fought. I never had time to wonder, I was busy surviving for both of us.
Even though I hate them I let Colt drag me to one of those estate parties. He tells me the point is to get found. So I hide myself away. It’s so dark that I start thinking I made myself up. I hold the whiskey bottle against my chest like an anchor and moor my shoulders into the corners of the closet. The door slides open and I can see the moon staring in over the shoulders of a shadow. I’m ready to give up but the silhouette slips in before I can speak, so I take another drink.
Draped against my couch with her eyes closed, there’s something so posed in her repose. Lying there like a dime store novel cover model, she does the damsel well. I think all she needed was the cigarette. I read what Chandler wrote as I stand over her, she had eyes like strange sins, and I hear her say, ‘You want me,’ in that thousand thread count voice, ‘the way a magician wants an illusion.’ Sure, I think, but not another trick, when she’s already pulled the aces from my sleeve and played the queen of hearts upon her own.
She plays hard to get
the way jelly sets,
an easy indifference
in different flavours.
I wonder if she savors
what she does to me?
If she does it deliberately
or simply exquisitely?
I ask Sasha what it feels like to be in love and she laughs the way a hummingbird eats. She tells me love is like skydiving with a marshmallow parachute and laughs again, still hungry. Something in my silence must sound a little off because she turns to me with an inquisitor’s concern, dragging her eyes across my face as if it were a whetstone, her features sharpening with each stroke. When she asks me which end I want to start with, I tell her the middle. She sighs and says, darlin’, that’s just the beginning of the end.
I’m at that topless place on George with Jeremy. It’s a squint of a place with a dirty strip of bar that runs the length of one wall, paralleled by poles that aren’t used support the roof. The red lights are bright and the girls are dim but I don’t hear anybody asking to see their wits, anyway. I order two beers that cost more than most of the implants on show. Jeremy sways a little as I pass him the drink, blinking his thanks with lugubrious lids. Somewhere in back the Beatles are playing Can’t Buy Me Love.
My mother told me the story of the princess and the pea once, by way of explaining a joke she had made. It didn’t make the joke better, but it would elucidate things for me. I think of it sometimes now, finding myself with a wry grin and an inward groan, shaping different pleasures from my mother’s failure to make me laugh. The story unravels in my head and I reknit the words to fit the women I meet, draping it over them while they sleep. It warms them till they wake, dropping like a veil as they rise.
I don’t want to go straight home so I walk over to Sasha’s place. When she sees me there she smiles with her eyes and pulls me inside. It’s still early but I’m not surprised she’s awake. I love her place, the sun comes straight in over the deck as it rises, warming the house and painting its rooms in the dulcet tones of a Tennessee Williams heroine. Sasha ushers me into the lounge room and pushes me into a sofa. She tells me she’ll make coffee, her voice trailing away from me as she pads into the kitchen.
There was no way that I could convince her she looked great, so I persuaded her to try an exercise class once a week and see how it goes. Said she could quit if she hated it. Then I started slipping her the pills. When she started losing weight she gave all the credit to the classes. I knew she couldn’t lose it all by herself. In the end she left me, though not for another guy, she left me for herself. All toned and beautiful, she thought she was above me. Never did find out about the pills.
Colt asks if I’ve heard anything and I shrug. I don’t know what to say, I hear about her more than I hear from her. I say nothing and finish my beer. When the girl comes by to collect our glasses she leans over the table and I can see down her top. There’s a small silver razor hanging menacingly in the promise of her cleavage. Her hair smells like sea salt. Colt raises two fingers in the air like he’s giving the peace sign and she nods silently. I tell him that she’ll be back when she’s ready.
Under the mask she smiles. The guests natter around her, crowding the apartment and making sounds like summer crickets. Their mingling measured, scene but not herd. Brazen gestures shade furtive glances under idle lighting hiding busy hands. Dust addled speakers push a slow Miles Davis around the room with the grace of potato mash through a tin colander. Dignity disguised, she moves to its strains, her dress flowing around her as she sways and twists, roses in the fold of clouds dancing to the missing notes of an unheard melody. Her feet remember the way, she lets them be.
Perched above me, knees braced against the outsides of my thighs, she sighs. I knead the ball of her foot with my thumb, my fingers splayed between her toes. The smell of rain and desert sage couch themselves around us in the stillness. I smile at her with the corner of my mouth and she steals it with a kiss. The pulse quickens in my neck. Steadying herself on my chest with one outstretched hand, like a traffic warden’s warning, she tames a drift of hair. I watch her hard eyes soften under the gypsy lights. ‘Fuck,’ she sighs.
A Few Short Words 