I glance off her curves and come over kind of car sick. I have to take my eyes away but she follows them around to my side of the desk and perches on its mahogany lip. I pour myself a whiskey and watch her drain it. She lights a cigarette and asks me if I mind, her words blown through smoke rings like a Lewis Carroll chrysalis. Sure, I say, what she’s doing has to be illegal somewhere. Neither of us laugh, so I pour another shot and hand it to the fist of nerves clenched inside my stomach.
Mine was the last girl to come out. I was so nervous I couldn’t look at her face. She was wearing this blue sequined gown with a split that ran from the swell of her calves to the bottom of my imagination. I was wearing a borrowed three piece suit that itched my skin and clung to me with adolescent awkwardness. She took my hand, leading me onto the dance floor and we shifted in place while Some Kind of Blue slunk around the hall. I could feel her lips brushing against my ear as she whispered to me.
Carter was a shrewd and paranoid man. He took notes on everything and made records of all his dealings. A different kind of man would have done the opposite. Of course he kept it all hidden but that wasn’t much for a wife with too much time and more doubts. I’m sure he never expected me to find them. He had no idea I even knew they existed. When I found the contract I couldn’t believe it. Neither what it said or that’d he would hold on to something like that. Why would he pay to have himself killed?
I can hear her crying through the wall, the sound punching through like a cappella punctuation after each percussive beating. Sometimes I try to imagine she’s not real. We rode the lift together once, holding our corners like pacifist pugilists, pushed apart by the removal of space. Some diminishing quality in her made me feel increasingly large, as though I were being inflated deliberately. I worried that I might crush her if it continued. I found that I resented her for it and hated myself for that. Later, when she becomes imaginary, I worry that I couldn’t help it.
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.
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.
A Few Short Words 