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.
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.
There’s a breeze lingering by the window sill and she rubs her arm in defense of the chill. I ask her if she’s cold. Her reply sounds on the inside of my head, making me wonder if either of us had really spoken. Wrapping my arm around her waist I raise her up and carry her to the couch. There are blankets if you need one, I tell her. She only stares into the corners of the room. This time I feel her silence against my skin and I shiver as if she had spoken the chill into life.
‘Get out of my bed,’ she said, while he lay there, inert. ‘I said get the fuck out of my bed.’ She pushes him and he tumbles to the floor, landing with a sick thud that she feels in the pit of her stomach. For a while he just lies there, making her worry that she’d done some actual damage. As she reaches a hand towards him he slowly drags himself upright and looks at her, his eyes red and puffy. He’s been crying. After a time he sighs, walks into the hall and starts putting on his shoes.
It’s always the same. She asks me to come and I tell her maybe, knowing that I will. I waited once, for almost the passing of the sun, for her to come to me and she never did. As I sat there, waiting, I thought about her eyes and the softness of her skin. I go to her, labeling my feet betrayers as they move, though they follow my command. My sins coalesce into shadows, tethered stalkers closing the gap as the day wears on. I weigh my heart in her hands and find them wanting for its weight.
Convened in a court of accusations, my point is that it never happened but my refusals only seem to make it true. I tell her that, but she props her indignation up with other peoples lies like wadded paper jammed underneath an uneven table leg. I feel so frustrated then that I could cry, which makes me angry, and when I take it out on her I know I’ve gone too far, though it doesn’t stop me. I’ve painted her face with a pastiche of pointillist swatches in shades of anger and betrayal, stained by watercolor streaks of sorrow.
Julie comes over to borrow a cup of sugar, which seems so far fetched I laugh right at her, but she tells me no, she wanted to bake cookies and thought she had enough because who runs out of sugar anyway. I tell her that I only have the synthetic stuff now since Darren’s diabetes and she deflates a little as she remembers, so I ask her in for coffee which tastes a bit like old dirt, because I don’t have any real sugar, and I find myself apologizing to her even though I know I don’t really care.
The time we lay in bed, making love as the afternoon sun cascaded through our window. Old vinyl jazz and the hum of traffic mingling with the tang of sweat and salted air. Summer breezes like childhood whispers, drifting languid through laced drapes, over tangled sheets entwined with limbs like M.C. Escher prints. Impossible promises spelt in whispers, warm breath on cooling flesh and sighs like sybaritic siren songs. Electrical storms raging under each fingertip, charged with spent kinetic energy. The way you held me as we fell asleep, wreathed in satisfaction and the flitting shadows of the clouds.
A Few Short Words 