Suicide Blonde. Darcey Steinke

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СКАЧАТЬ dead.”

      His face drew up, mouth tightened. “Bullshit. You thought I was screwing someone. If you were completely confident in me, you wouldn’t even be interested. You need a love triangle, Jesse, to make you feel alive.”

      I was addicted to the fear of infidelity and I believed relationships were like the trinity: there were the two human participants, one always more godlike than the other, and then there was the thing between them, the other—an aberrant philosophy, a person or a phantom like Kevin.

      “I don’t care what you do,” I lied and he smirked to show he recognized it as one. “But you can’t just wander off.”

      “I couldn’t do it, if I wasn’t sure you were here,” he said.

      “Tough luck,” I said. He was trying to conjur up the Noble Wife. I should be proud to suffer for him. I tried to brush past him, but he grabbed my arm and said, “I need you with me.”

      There was a rusty quality to his voice that implied insecurity. Bell was like this. His posturing was a sign that inside he felt tender and helpless. There were times when he asked my advice on gifts for his family, or if I thought he’d said the wrong thing at a dinner party. It reminded me of him detached from his bad behavior, how I loved him and didn’t really want to leave at all. I decided not to be mean, but honest. “I’m sick of you thinking you have the right to wander off.”

      “I thought you were the kind to allow me my mental infidelities.”

      It was going to become a discourse on abstract freedom, he would go through his haggard points: about the individual, about how poor people think they’re free because they could leave the country, could go to college or win the lottery. But it seldom happened, instead they worked like prisoners and lived in apartments barely more comfortable then cells. All he wanted, he claimed, was this—he needed to dream.

      He was staring coldly at his veiny hand. Twisting his cigarette butt in our blue glass ashtray. While his head was ducked I saw his crucifix over the sink: a pale purple Jesus on a cross so white it glowed.

      “It makes me feel horrible how you moon over Kevin,” I said slowly. He flinched at Kevin’s name, and walked to the couch, sat sloppily, kicked at a penny on the floor. “My life was very pleasant when I knew Kevin.”

      “Everyone’s life is pleasant at seventeen.”

      “It was more than that. Everything was new, now I’m like a junkie, I seem to need more severe doses of experience to feel anything.”

      In all our arguments I wanted him to deface Kevin’s memory, to say it had been perverse or that he was emotionally undeveloped, that he preferred women, that he preferred me to Kevin.

      Bell was quiet. There were always these moments he receded, felt soulfully misunderstood, above domestic conflict, sullied by interaction with anyone. He crossed his legs, his gaze following the jagged tops of buildings up the hill. He was too beautiful for this world.

      I told him he was the devil. I’d said this often and fondly, but now I said it again, burlesquing the way I used to. “You are the devil. I should have left you in the beginning when I saw you dancing with that black boy, putting streamers around his neck, letting him sit on your lap.”

      A flush spidered into Bell’s cheeks. “The minister’s daughter speaks.”

      Once he started insisting I was prudish, moralistic, crippled by my father, there was no use arguing. He slipped into his extremist mode, called me bourgeois, claiming he was a proletarian, ridiculed my classical education, said he was a student of the streets.

      “Look,” he continued. “Everyone would align with the devil if they could.”

      “And then they’ll drop the bomb.”

      Several seconds passed before he said with perfect dramatic timing, “Pleasure, my dear, does not always equal sin.”

      When cornered I sounded wifish and conventional. I was silent.

      He was getting agitated, rocking himself on the couch, he spoke with force. “Admit that either of us could go to a bar, pick up a stranger and have better sex with them than we could with each other.”

      “That’s because when you’re in love your problems follow you into bed.”

      “You’ve told me yourself, you fantasize about strangers, about giving pleasure to several men at once.” He looked me right in the eyes, stood slowly, puffed up, trying to make his point with his body.

      “I told you because I thought you would understand. It’s like thinking about murdering someone versus doing it.”

      He took my hand, held it palm up, rubbed his fingertips over my lifeline so it tickled. “Just imagine if I were a stranger, if I saw you on the street, noticed you because your hair covered one side of your face and your hips moved in a lazy way that said fuck me.” He put his loose hand above the first one and pulled me toward him slowly as if my arm were a rope. I could feel his breath on my face. “I’d follow you down the street to the steps of your building. Watch your slender thighs beneath your dress disappearing behind the door, thinking how wet you might be, how your breasts would be full and cool to touch. Then I’d follow you up the stairs. The door would open. In the slant of light from the hallway I’d see you nude on the bed.”

      He pulled me to him, grabbed a side of my ass in each hand and whispered into my ear. “I’d sit first on the chair near the bed and touch you, trace your neck bones, my fingers rounding your breasts in tiny spirals until I got to the nipple. Then I’d bow my head and suck.”

      My face pressed into his hair; smoke, eucalyptus. I could feel myself getting wet and I knew I wouldn’t try to stop him. Even though this was not what I wanted, it was a semblance of it. I convinced myself that him wanting sex meant he wanted me, but it seemed naive and overly hopeful, like a schoolgirl or a dreamy whore.

      “I want to fuck,” Bell said, dramatically. Like everything in bed, you pretend; pretend you are inarticulate, more animal, more powerful or weaker than you are. I was flattered he would put this energy into seduction and I allowed him to maneuver me through the room then trip me down onto the bed.

      The blinds were up and the tall buildings zoomed high. He moved his tongue over my eyes and into my ears. I put my hands inside his pants, the hair there was moist and his cock was stretched smooth. Bell pulled my shirt up over my head so I couldn’t see. I felt his hand working my bra clasp. Would he leave me like this? I raised my arms and he pulled the shirt off, lapped at my nipples until they stood up hard like nuts. Bell rested his head on my stomach and unlatched my pants. His fingers gentle inside the folds of wet skin. I wiggled my jeans down, getting only one leg free before Bell stopped me, spread my legs, kneeled down between them, put his hands under my ass and lifted up my sex as if he was filling his hands with water to drink.

      I felt the bed fall away, and the floor, and the ceiling and the walls, and I had the sensation we were floating out the window. Time lifted too and left us, because when you’re fucking it is impossible to think of the next ten minutes or the next ten years. Because fucking, when it’s good, seems like everything and there is pain in the pleasure when you remember things that are horrible, until you are hardly alive, and so many times good things turn bad that you decide to live the life you fear most, the ordinary one, the one that is easy and hard. But now I think of the other time he made me stand on the chair and pulled down my tights, the way I saw his fingers disappearing СКАЧАТЬ