Suicide Blonde. Darcey Steinke

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      CHAPTER TWO

      IN THE silence of the BART train on the way to Madam Pig’s, I could only think of last night: how we slept curled close like petals, how at dawn Bell woke to tell me his dream—we were in a driverless taxi following a tennis ball I’d hit hard enough that it still soared above us. We chased the ball down a road surrounded with abandoned factories and tin warehouses, then made a violent turn into a subdivision of burnt-out ranch houses. The last thing he remembered was squatting at the foot of a dolmen of seared wood, the bloodied light at the horizon.

      At first I thought the dream seemed a good omen, maybe even a mark of my power. But any contentment with last night wore off like the fading charm of a hit song. I realized the bombed suburbia was his idea of domesticity in general and our future specifically.

      It seemed crazy that I stayed. Bell made me feel edgy and hysterical, but at least this way I was alive. Also, I suspected I was close to winning him and if I did he would become a docile and genial lover. But the myth of breaking a man was stupid, just as stupid as believing there would be any long-term good in the sexual ending we tumbled into last night.

      The BART swayed toward Oakland. I thought love was about forgetting yourself, a sensation that calmed and centered you, like being pleasantly stoned, but all I felt was a speedy panic. I couldn’t forget myself for one minute and it was disconcerting how Bell’s life seemed superimposed over mine. Even now, Bell would be sitting at the table by the window smoking a cigarette, watching traffic, glancing occasionally at the play script he was to audition for today. He’d be drinking tea with a splash of bourbon to settle his nerves. But it seemed like my own hand poised on the teacup, my own ear listening to the water rattle into the tub for his bath.

      Bell was exotic to me still. If I could learn to think of him as a normal person I could disentangle myself. I had never known anyone like him or seen a life like his. He took me to the velvety apartment of an actress who had a dozen fur coats and a voice that sounded like gin and cigarettes. When we went to the museum in Golden Gate Park Bell stared at the Caravaggio for twenty minutes. I loved how he was always on the side of life’s losers and considered them more intuitive and intelligent than others. He wore secondhand suits and read obscure books in Greek. The slender volumes lay elegantly as tulips around the apartment. And when I looked inside, the indecipherable alphabet seemed like the language of dreams. After my bland suburban past this was as powerful as heroin.

      From the elevated track I saw the front of the train curve ahead. Behind it, huge Trojan horses unloaded steel barrels from ocean tankers, and refinery stacks blasted blue fire. A police helicopter hovered. At the sharpest point of the curve I thought, This is how things are beautiful now. There were aluminum warehouses in dull shades of gray and green and, nearer the track, boarded-up houses.

      The BART slid into one station after another. Maybe I had ruined my life. Everything you do matters too much and it’s possible to poison your present relationship by actions made in the past. With Bell, it was his obsession with Kevin. I watched my own past work adversely on lovers, when I admitted juggling men and lying to them. Infidelity is a tricky business. There’s less meaning in an infidelity than in a relationship, so I would lie to Bell. And though I wasn’t now, the fact that I would lie might mean he was lying.

      I wondered how Madam Pig would be feeling today? Pig was a huge woman who wore tent dresses with sparkly thread and patterns of tropical birds. Her hair was dyed strawberry blond and her face was always covered with a generous amount of make-up. She had long fingernails, always perfectly manicured and painted a shade of pink she said reminded her of Persia. Her name came from a story about her ex-husband having a pet pig that could smoke cigars and drink cans of beer. Pig was the best storyteller I’d ever encountered, specializing in adultery tales where women, hearing their husbands unexpectedly on the stairs, make their lovers hide naked on the fire escape.

      There were lots of rumors about how she came into money. She said it was left to her by a contessa she once accompanied on a trip through the Middle East. Others said it was her husband’s money, that he’d been heir to a jelly business in Wales, that he paid her off to live with a Parisian starlet. One woman told me Pig strangled him, buried him in the empty lot beside the house. People said she’d starred in blue movies, that she had been the madam of the most stylish bordello in New Orleans.

      Wherever the money came from, she didn’t mind spending it. Pig loved having parties with giant lasagnas and champagne fountains. She lit candles and let the drag queens fight over the record player. I met several people there: a feminist trying to destroy the myth of the aesthetic canon, musicians who insisted house music was the blues of the nineties and a performance artist who covered himself with animal blood and said narrative was dead.

      At the last party, I was in the kitchen helping Pig prepare an appetizer of avocado halves with cheese and shrimp when she turned to me, held her glass out for more wine and said, “Bell’s beautiful, isn’t he?” I didn’t answer. “But couldn’t you marry someone else and take him as a lover?”

      I was so startled I spilled burgundy over her fingers, tried clumsily to defend myself, saying I didn’t want to get married, that I appreciated his spontaneity. She stood back from the oven, her face flushed and eyes a little teary from the heat and took my hands, looked at me as my mother might. “Well . . . I’ve never known a beautiful girl who wasn’t doomed.”

      Later that night, after two young Irishmen sang a Celtic song about a ship full of sheep sinking into the sea, Pig stood woozily, holding her glass high, and began to toast. It was late, everyone lying languidly over the furniture. “To love,” she said, “that delicate egg . . . and to evil . . . which teases and tempts us as a good lover might.” Pig moved her head with great drama. “Also, to my dear departed husband . . . who was lovely to see with a day’s beard stubble.” The drag queens giggled. “And most of all, to the mental and physical wasteland of the future. Finally our inner boredom and bareness will not be intimidated by a lush and healthy nature.”

      There were scattered claps all around and Madam Pig blushed, turned toward the stereo. She wanted to hear the СКАЧАТЬ