“Purple haze. You always talk about the windowpane, but we only did it once. You talk about the windowpane ’cause you like to scare people with the notion of you sticking it in your eyes.”
“I only did it once with you. I did it lots with Mickey. We put it in our eyes, in our noses. Son of a bitch even shoved it up my ass.”
She crushes the joint out on the bedframe. She is smiling and relaxed now, very beautiful even though I am getting angry. Mickey was the one took her to California after I ran off. Mickey was the one who got her back on junk, left her in the motel room where she overdosed. Mickey was the one threatened me at her memorial service, with his parole officer standing right there sweating in the heat. Mickey was the one I’d told to try it.
Come for me, asshole, and I’ll cut off your balls and push them up your butt. The parole officer had smiled, and my sweat had turned cold on my back. That wasn’t like me, wasn’t the kind of thing I’d say. It wasn’t even the thing I’d been thinking. It was as if Katy had pushed the words out of my mouth. It was exactly the kind of thing Katy would have said.
But Mickey had overdosed himself at Raiford, and I’d never seen any of Katy’s boyfriends again. Just Katy, anytime she gets restless and wants to come back. I look at her now and my throat closes up. I cannot make casual conversation, cannot talk at all. I want to reach for her but I am too afraid. She is the vampire curse in my life. You have to invite them back, and part of me always wants her, even when most of me don’t. Right now all of me wants her, flesh and blood, body and soul.
Katy’s thick black eyebrows raise and lower, seeing right through me, seeing my grief and my lust. “Ahhh, bitch,” she whispers, and it sounds like lover. She slips one hand under the sheet and strokes her nails along my leg.
I catch my breath. I could cry but don’t. Will we be lovers again? Is she real enough this moment to put her filmy body along my too-tight muscles? She wants to; it shows in the unaccustomed softness in her face. I feel tears run down my cheeks.
Now she says it. “Lover.”
“Junkie.” I hiss it at her, beginning to really cry, making a hoarse ugly sound in the quiet room. “Goddamn you, you goddamned junkie!”
“Ahh well,” she drawls, her fingers still stroking my leg. “It’s not a lie.” She drags herself over, rocking the bed this time, sliding under the sheet. She arranges her body to cup my side, her toes touch my ankle and her head turns so that her mouth is close to my ear.
“Not a lie, no.” One hand caresses my stomach; the other hugs my hipbone.
“Goddamn you!” I try to lie still but start shaking.
“Don’t be boring,” she says. I feel her tongue licking my cheek, wet and almost as rough as a cat’s tongue. My whole body goes stiff, and my hands ball up into fists.
“Why do you keep coming back? Why don’t you leave me alone? You weren’t worth the trouble when you were alive and you sure aren’t doing me any good now.” I start to fight her, trying to pull away or push her away. But she is smoke only, a cloud on my skin, and I can’t escape her.
“Motherfucker . . .” I give it up to cry and turn my face into the pillow of her hair. It smells so sweet and familiar, marijuana and patchouli.
Katy’s shoulders ride up and down. She arches her back and slides her body over so that her belly is on top of mine. I almost scream from the intensity of the sensation. It feels so good. It feels so awful.
“You loved me.” She says it right into the hollow of my ear.
“You love me still. Even after you left me, you loved me. You couldn’t stand me, and you damn sure couldn’t save me. But you couldn’t stand it without me either. So here I am. Feel me.”
She drums her knuckles on my hipbone. Her teeth nip my neck. I gasp and arch up into her. “I’m part of you,” she whispers. “Right down in the core of you.”
I pull myself back down and lie still, giving it up. “I know.” I push my face up. My mouth covers her, tastes her. Her tongue is bitter honey, sliding between my lips, filling my mouth, pushing my own tongue up to the roof of my mouth, expanding until I think I will choke. But I do not fight. I take her in. I want to swallow her, all of her. If she is a ghost, then why not? She could melt into my bones. We could be the same creature.
My hips begin to rock. My fingers curl up and try to grip her waist. A heated sweat rises all over my body. I want to rise up like steam into her, pull up right off my own bones, and become something in the air, a scent of marijuana and patchouli, something sweet and nasty and impossibly sad. But I cannot get hold of her. My very movements seem to push her up and away, the cloud of her becoming mistlike, gossamer and fading.
“No!”
Her thumb is in the hollow of my throat. My own pulse roars in my ears. Her laughter is soft, too soft.
“Stop,” she says and it comes from very far away. Too far. “You’ll make yourself sick.”
“I’ll take a pill.”
“Junkie.” She laughs again. Her pleasure in being able to say that to me almost makes me laugh back. “You take too many pills.”
That is too much. I go limp again and look up into her black, black eyes. “Oh, Mama,” I giggle.
“Ooooh, Maaamaaaa.” Her mouth draws the words out delightfully, rich with lust. She rocks against me, and I can feel her, the flesh hard and cold and powerful.
“I’ll make it interesting for both of us,” she promises. Her nails rake me lightly. Goose bumps radiate from every burning pinprick. I am not afraid. I burn. I want her so badly. Like a mad-woman, I don’t care anymore what is real.
“You move,” she tells me, “and I’m gone.” The cloud of her lifts and it is all I can do to hold myself still until she comes back down.
“You must hold yourself absolutely still. Absolutely.”
Her skin burns me where it touches. I stiffen, holding myself for her. Her weight comes down until I shudder with pleasure. Instantly her body lifts, becomes again a cloud. Her phantom laughter is rich and close. I bite my lips and hold myself still again. She comes down again. So cold. So hot. I groan. She lifts, laughs, and rises again. It goes on and on.
Do you love me? Do you want me? Do you remember me? Do you hate me? Do you love me? I love you, love you, lover you, come all over you, come up into the dark of you, the pit of you. Pull me down into the pit of you. Memory and touch and taste. You are never alone, never going to be alone. If you cry, I will. If you scream, I will. If you are, I am.
“I love you,” she says.
I am drifting. I have come so much my bones have turned to concrete. Their weight immobilizes me. Katy’s hot skin presses all over me. It is so dark, so still. It is the pit of the night, and I am drifting off into sleep. I want to wrap my arms around her and pull her down with me, sleep in the luxury of her embrace. But hours of conditioning stop me, and I do not move. I just slide further down into sleep. She says it again.
“I love you.”
“You’re dead,” I mumble.
Her weight increases, presses down on me. I open my eyes.
“Doesn’t matter.” She has spread out, filled the room. She is enormous, masses of dark all around me. I am afraid. Suddenly I am deeply, deeply afraid, and when she laughs I feel the cold.
“Doesn’t matter at all.”
Her Thighs
I was thinking about Bobby, remembering her sitting, smoking, squint-eyed, and me looking down at the way her thighs shaped in her jeans. I have always loved women in blue jeans, worn jeans, worn particularly in that way that makes the inseam fray, and Bobby’s seams had that fine white sheen that only comes after long restless evenings spent jiggling one’s thighs one against the other, the other against the bar stool.
After a year as my sometimes lover, Bobby’s nerves were wearing as thin as her seams. She always seemed to be looking to the other women in the bar, checking out their eyes to see if, in fact, they thought her as pussy-whipped as she thought herself, for the way she could not seem to finally settle me down to playing
the wife I was supposed to be. Bobby was a wild-eyed woman, proud of her fame for running women ragged—all the women who had fallen in love with her and followed her around long after she had lost all interest in them. Hanging out at soft-ball games on lazy spring afternoons, Bobby would look over at me tossing my head and talking to some other woman and grind her thighs together in impatience. The woman was as profoundly uncomfortable with my sexual desire as my determined independence. But nothing so disturbed her as the idea other people could see both in the way I tossed my hair, swung my hips, and would not always come when she called. Bobby believed lust was a trashy lower-class impulse, and she so wanted to be nothing like that. It meant the one tool she could have used to control me was the very one she could not let herself use.
Oh, Bobby loved to fuck me. Bobby loved to beat my ass, but it bothered her that we both enjoyed it so much. Early on in our relationship, she established a pattern of having me over for the evening and strictly enforcing a rule against sex outside the bedroom. Bobby wanted dinner—preferably Greek or Chinese takeout—and at least two hours of television. Then there had to be a bath, bath powder and tooth brushing, though she knew I preferred her un-bathed and gritty, tasting of the tequila she sipped through dinner. I was not supposed to touch her until we entered the sanctuary of her bedroom, that bedroom lit only by the arc lamp in the alley outside. Only in that darkness could I bite and scratch and call her name. Only in that darkness would Bobby let herself open to passion.
Let me set the scene for you, me in my hunger for her great strong hands and perfect thighs, and her in her deliberate disregard. When feeling particularly cruel, Bobby would even insist on doing her full twenty-minute workout while I lay on the bed tearing at the sheets with my nails. I was young, unsure of myself, and so I put up with it, sometimes even enjoyed it, though what I truly wanted was her in a rage, under spotlights in a stadium, fucking to the cadence of a lesbian rock-and-roll band.
But it was years ago, and if I was too aggressive, she wouldn’t let me touch her. So I waited, and watched her, and calculated. I’d start my efforts on the couch, finding excuses to play with her thighs. Rolling joints and reaching over to drop a few shreds on her lap, I scrambled for every leaf on her jeans.
“Don’t want to waste any,” I told her, and licked my fingers to catch the fine grains that caught in her seams. I progressed to stroking her crotch. “For the grass,” I said, going on to her inseam, her knees, and the backs of her thighs.
“Perhaps some slipped under here, honey. Let me see.”
I got her used to the feel of my hands legitimately wandering, while her eyes never left the TV screen. I got her used to the heat of my palms, the slight scent of the sweat on my upper lip, the firm pressure of my wrists sliding past her hips. I was as calculated as any woman who knows what she wants, but I cannot tell you what magic I used to finally get her to sit still for me going down on my knees and licking that denim.
It wasn’t through begging. Bobby recognized begging as a sexual practice, therefore to be discouraged outside the darkened bedroom. I didn’t wrestle her for it. That, too, was allowed only in the bedroom. Bobby was the perfect withholding butch, I tell you, so I played the perfect compromising femme. I think what finally got to her was the tears.
Keeping my hands on her, I stared at her thighs intently until she started that sawing motion—crossing and recrossing her legs. My impudence made her want to grab and shake me, but that, too, might have been sex, so she couldn’t. Bobby shifted and cleared her throat and watched me while I kept my mouth open slightly and stared intently at the exact spot where I wanted to put my tongue. My eyes were full of moisture. I imagined touching the denim above her labia with my lips. I saw it so clearly; her taste and texture were full in my mouth. I got wet and wetter. Bobby kept shifting on the couch. I felt my cheeks dampen and heard myself making soft moaning noises—like a young child in great hunger. That strong, dark musk odor rose between us, the smell that comes up from my cunt when I am swollen and wet from my clit to my asshole.
Bobby smelled it. She looked at my face, and her cheeks turned the brightest pink. I felt momentarily like a snake that has finally trapped a rabbit. Caught like that, on the living-room couch, all her rules were momentarily suspended. Bobby held herself perfectly still, except for one moment when she put her blunt fingers on my left cheek. I leaned over and licked delicately at the seam on first the left and then the right inner thigh. Her couch was one of those swollen chintz monsters, and my nose would bump the fabric each time I moved from right to left. I kept bumping it, moving steadily, persistently, not touching her with any other part of my body except my tongue. Under her jeans, her muscles rippled and strained as if she were holding off a great response or reaching for one. I felt an extraordinary power. I had her. I knew absolutely that I was in control.
Oh, but it was control at a cost, of course, or I would be there still. I could hold her only by calculation, indirection, and distraction. It was dear, that cost, and too dangerous. I had to keep a distance in my head, an icy control on my desire to lose control. I wanted to lay the whole length of my tongue on her, to dribble over my chin, to flatten my cheeks to that fabric and shake my head on her seams like a dog on a fine white bone. But that would have been too real, too raw. Bobby would never have sat still for that. I held her by the unreality of my hunger, my slow nibbling civilized tongue.
Oh, Bobby loved that part of it, like she loved her chintz sofa, the antique armoire with the fold-down shelf she used for a desk, the carefully balanced display of appropriate liquors she never touched—unlike the bottles on the kitchen shelves she emptied and replaced weekly. Bobby loved the aura of acceptability, the possibility of finally being bourgeois, civilized, and respectable.
I was the uncivilized thing in Bobby’s life, reminding her of the taste of hunger, the remembered stink of her mother’s sweat, her own desire. I became sex for her. I held it in me, in the push of my thighs against hers when she finally grabbed me and dragged me off into the citadel of her bedroom. I held myself up, back and off her. I did what I had to do to get her, to get myself what we both wanted. But what a price we paid for what I did.
What I did.
What I was.
What I do.
What I am.
I paid a high price to become who I am. Her contempt, her terror, was the least of it. My contempt, my terror, took over my life, because they were the first things I felt when I looked at myself, until I became unable to see my true self at all. “You’re an animal,” she used to say to me, in the dark with her teeth against my thigh, and I believed her, growled back at her, and swallowed all the poison she could pour into my soul.
Now I sit and think about Bobby’s thighs, her legs opening in the dark where no one could see, certainly not herself. My own legs opening. That was so long ago and far away, but not so far as she finally ran when she could not stand it anymore, when the lust I made her feel got too wild, too uncivilized, too dangerous. Now I think about what I did.
What I did.
What I was.
What I do.
What I am.
“Sex,” I told her. “I will be sex for you.”
Never asked, “You. What will you be for me?”
Now I make sure to ask. I keep Bobby in mind when I stare at women’s thighs. I finger my seams, flash my teeth, and put it right out there.
“You. What will you let yourself be for me?”
Muscles of the Mind
I slept through one whole year of my life—the year I did not have the money to go to graduate school the way I had expected. Being awake would have meant making decisions, and I did not know what to decide. I did not know who I was supposed to be. I dreamed through that year, heavy-lidded and silent, though I went almost every day to work as a salad girl, pickle chopper, housekeeper, waitress, substitute teacher, counter girl, or line worker in a mop factory. I could do any of that again easily—make change with one hand while wipin
g terrazzo with another, keep grammar-school children at their desks, slice lettuce or pickles bracing the blade with the flat of my palm, rack up two hundred mops in an hour or scrub babyshit off crib slats—but I’ve lost the ability to sleep during the day. I wake at first light, even if I have blacked out every window in the room, no matter how late I got to bed the night before. It is as if I had slept myself out, used up that talent in that long terrible dragged-out year, and now I’m doomed to come awake early every morning, suddenly, completely, my heart pounding in my ears as if someone were screaming in the next room.
“It’s your circadian rhythm,” Anna told me. “I read about it someplace—all about crickets singing at twilight even if you try to fool them into thinking it’s still daytime. You—you’re always gonna know when it’s dawn—a useful thing when you think about it.”
“Uh huh.” I rubbed tired swollen eyes. “Well, tell me, do crickets ever sing at noon or nap when they feel like it?”
“Don’t know.” Anna gave me one of her lopsided grins. “Don’t know shit about crickets, really. It’s twilight I know about—that’s when I wake up. Just about the time you need a little nap or something, right?”
“Something.”
“Well, we an’t never gonna get in phase, are we? I’m always gonna be pissed at you stumbling around making noise early in the morning, and you an’t never gonna forgive me for banging pots when I get the urge to bake ’long about three in the morning. Right?”
“Probably.”
Anna grinned wider still and used her elbow to wipe sweat off her eyebrows. The late-afternoon sun was pouring in her big shaded windows, laying a pattern of silhouetted walnut leaves on her bare feet where they were folded up against her thighs. She was naked except for the polished white handkerchief she had spread over her lap to catch any stray grains of grass from the loose bag she was slowly pushing through her flour sifter. Like my mama, Anna believed you never washed a flour sifter; you brushed it clean. When she cleaned her grass there was a slight dusting of flour sprinkled among the pungent leaves in her mixing bowl. I didn’t really smoke anymore myself, but I’d tasted Anna’s blend once or twice and imagined a slight baking-powder aftertaste that reminded me of home. The aura of biscuits and marijuana-induced relaxation that surrounded Anna was one of the things I liked about sharing the apartment with her. She kept it calm, dimly lit, and sweet-smelling.