Walter Mosley - Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore

I took him by the hand and led him back into the polar bear room. I sat him on the large sofa facing a fake fireplace and picked up a nacre-plated remote-control unit.

“My full stage name is Debbie Dare,” I said. “Have you ever heard that name?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Is Annabella pretty?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Very pretty?”

He nodded.

“Why did you start talking to me at the restaurant?” I asked him. “I mean, I wasn’t wearing any makeup and my dress looked like it came from a Salvation Army box.”

“I already told you. It was the way you looked out,” he said, “like you were really seeing something. When I saw you I wanted to know what you were thinking, who you were.”

“And what about now?”

He stared for a moment and then nodded.

I smiled.

“It’s not going to be easy getting to know me, Rash Vineland,” I said. “Annabella won’t like you being my friend and the friendship will be hard on you.”

He took in a deep breath through his nose and then exhaled through his mouth.

“The one thing that’ll be easy for you to do is walk away,” I continued. “You can walk out of my life right now or next week and I won’t complain.”

“Why do you sound so hard?”

“That’s the way I am. Can you accept that?”

“I’m here right now.”

“Fine. Now... before you can know who I am and what kind of friend I’ll be, you have to know who I was.”

I pressed a button on the fancy remote and the oil painting of white horses prancing in a pale golden field slid away, revealing a seventy-two-inch plasma screen. I hit a few more keys and a DVD hidden in another part of the house began to play.

The title of the Crux Brothers film Debbie Does Death appeared and Rash’s mouth fell open.

“Have you seen it?” I asked.

He shook his head.

The film began with tiny clips of me getting fucked in a dozen different ways. My heart was racing with panic but I made myself stay there and watch.

The story started with a carjacking. Debbie and her husband park at a rest stop because they’re so much in love that they can’t wait to get home to have sex. Hooded men attack them, kill the nameless husband, and drag me off to a sinister mansion, where they and a dozen more men with hoods perform extraordinary sexual acts on me. At one point four different men were inside me, getting off on one another as much as with me. I remembered somewhere in the middle of the film how Joey Crux had brought three ounces of cocaine to the set so that my inhibitions were all but nonexistent.

Maybe half an hour into the film, just before I was to walk into a door that had the name “Mr. Death” stenciled on it, I pressed the off button and the plasma screen went black.

This didn’t stop Rash from staring though. He was looking at the blank screen with the same intensity that he watched the flabby, ass-slapping story.

“Is your dick hard, Rash?”

“Very.”

“I’m not that woman anymore.”

“I can see that. Why’d you want me to see it if you don’t do that anymore?”

“Because I want to know if I can make a transition from what you just saw to the world you live in without lying and hiding my past.”

“Are you embarrassed about making that movie?”

“I’ve been in hundreds of films like that and I’m not ashamed of anything I’ve done or anybody I’ve known.”

“So are you quitting because your husband died? Was he the one who made you do... that?”

“No, not really,” I said. “He opened the door but I went through under my own steam. I mean, there are reasons I became what you saw up there but I didn’t have to do it. I wasn’t a sex slave or anything like that.

“I don’t even know if I’m quitting because Theon died. Something happened to me before I ever got home that day. I felt what it was like to die and be reborn—”

“Like a Christian?”

“No. Not religion. It was something else, something inside me that I didn’t want to see but suddenly I couldn’t look away. Not even that. It was me all of a sudden realizing what it was that I saw, like for the last sixteen years I had been seeing the world one way and then, for no reason whatever, things looked different.”

“I think it was good that you showed me that, that film,” Rash Vineland said.

“Why?”

“Because if you just told me I wouldn’t have understood. I mean, I would have thought I did, but really I had to see it with you sitting there to know what was and what wasn’t.”

We sat there next to each other in the bright white room, lost in our own thoughts about reality and truth. The flesh around Rash’s eyes crinkled with the attempt to understand but I was dead set on not kissing him — or any other man.

“Do you want to spend the night?” I asked him.

Again he hesitated. This time I smiled.

“We’re not going to have sex,” I assured him. “And it’s not because you have a girlfriend. I just want to have some friendship from someone who doesn’t fuck or fight for a living.”

“Do you, um, usually sleep with your friends?”

“Tonight I am.”

After showing my nervous new friend to the bedroom I went to the bathroom, where Theon died, took off my dress, and put on a cream-colored slip. Rash had stripped down to his boxers while I was gone. I could see the erection straining against the fabric.

“Across the hall is a guest bedroom,” I said. “If you have to come you can go over there and do what you need to do. We have a cleaning lady, at least for a little while longer, so you don’t have to straighten up.”

“Maybe, maybe I’ll go over there for a little while right now,” he said.

After he was gone I turned off all the lights except for the reading lamp. I went to Theon’s night table and rummaged around until I located the one book he had always intended to read but never did, The Twelve Caesars , the ancient text about the private and public lives of some of the most powerful men in history.

Theon had that book as a kind of counterbalance to my ever-changing library, but it was more than that. Theon saw himself as some kind of working royalty. He was king of the fuck flicks in the old days when he made a movie every week. Even after his star waned and he began living off my money and fame he acted as if everything centered around him. The historical work was a kind of talisman for his ego.

I decided to read it for him as an offering to his death.

I had just settled in and opened the book to the preface when Rash came back into the bedroom.

“That was quick,” I said.

“I don’t usually watch films like that. My parents thought they were trash and every girlfriend I ever had was too proper to want to see one.”

“You could have watched it with some guys,” I suggested, putting The Twelve Caesars to rest on the night table.

“I get nervous around guys even when they’re just talking about sex,” he said as he got under the covers.

I cut off the light and turned my back to him. For a long while he lay behind me, motionless.

“Hold me, Rash.”

He curled up behind me, managing to get his arm around me without caressing my breasts. He exhaled with some strength and then did so again. After that his breathing was normal — for a while.

“I have a son,” I said.

“How old is he?”

“Five. He’ll be six in December.”

“Where is he?”

“At my stepsister’s house.”

“While you go through this funeral stuff?”

“No. He lives with her. My brother Cornell was trying to find me unfit to raise a child when I was pregnant and so Delilah took Edison in.”

“Edison’s a nice name.”