Walter Mosley - Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore

“I haven’t shaved my cunt or fucked anybody in over a week.”

“Hiatus?”

“I quit.”

“What are you going to do now?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

I could see by Anna’s face that she wanted to smile; maybe there was even a laugh dammed up behind her faltering professionalism.

“I think we should start from the beginning,” she suggested.

I went at the story like a novice craftsman practicing laying brick. I’d gone over it a hundred times in my head and told parts of the tale to this one and that. When I’d come to the end I’d knock it over, a child with her blocks, and then build again — each time constructing a slightly different explanation.

The events were familiar in my mouth. The only difference with Anna Karin is that I told her everything.

I included the gun and my intentions to kill or die, the fact that I knew Jolie, and even what happened between Coco and Jude.

“Did you ever want to shoot Cornell?” she asked at one point.

“No... never.”

“Are you still considering suicide?” she asked at another juncture.

“Only when I think that I might have to go back to making films.”

I’d been regaling her for well over an hour when she said, “Tell me more about this orgasm you had on the set.”

“It was nothing special... I mean it didn’t have to do with Theon or Jolie — I didn’t even know that they were dead yet. It’s just that... I don’t know...”

“Do you often have orgasms on the set?”

“I’m too busy pretending to have any real feeling.”

“Then why did you have one that day?”

The question was like the sounding of a huge Buddhist gong. It vibrated in the air around me. Instead of ideas the experience of that room came back to me. I could hear Carmen Alia’s camera clicking and buzzing and the footsteps of the cameramen as they shifted with the gyrations Myron was putting me through. I heard Linda Love’s voice but not the words, and most of all, I felt the hot lights on my skin. It was music and it was dance and I was a dead woman being flung about in the pretense of celebration and abandon, and somewhere in the rising and falling, the lifting and heartlessness... I came alive.

“It just all came together,” I said. “The sounds and light, the pain inside me. It just all came together and I was coming harder than I ever had — ever.”

“Did you enjoy it?”

“No, not at all. As a matter of fact I wanted to get away from it. It was like I passed out on purpose just to stop feeling.”

For a while there we were both quiet. I appreciated the silence and wondered why I had that sexual awakening as Theon was dying. What sense did it make? It was as if, in some cockeyed way, we traded places.

“What will you do?” Anna Karin asked me.

“I like reading books.”

“What will you do for work?”

“That’ll come,” I said. “I have to finish quitting before I can start working again.”

Anna smiled then.

“Can I go now?” I asked.

“See you tomorrow morning?”

“You bet.”

At nine o’clock I was at a park bench just outside the fenced-in La Brea Tar Pits, looking at the plaster statue of a great woolly mammoth stuck and being pulled down into the muck.

The red phone in the blue bag rang.

“Hello.”

“Hey, Aunt Deb,” Dr. Neelo Brown said, “I have someone here who wants to talk to you.”

The phone made some transfer noises and then a masculine voice said, “Hello?”

“Yes?” I said. “Who’s this?”

“Willie Norman, Mrs. Pinkney.”

“How are you feeling?”

“I just wanted to thank you, ma’am, for putting me together with Dr. Brown and making it so that I could get my spells under control.”

“Neelo’s been treating you?”

“Uh-huh. Yeah. I never went to no doctor before ’cause I didn’t think they could do anything, but Dr. Brown gave me these pills and this light I could look at and now I’m almost perfect. So I just wanted to tell you thanks from me and, and, and Tai too. And I wanted to tell you that you don’t have to worry about my car. I can fix that myself.”

“Thank you, Willie. Thanks a lot.”

“And I wanted to say that I’m sorry about your husband. I’m sorry he died.”

Anna Karin asked me if I wanted to kill myself and I told her that the idea entered my mind only when I thought about making films again. But I realized later that that wasn’t the case, I wrote in my pilfered journal: The truth is I’m thinking about it all the time. It’s like a door open at the side of the house and this cool breeze is blowing in over the back of my neck. The breeze is Death whispering and that door is open for me to go through anytime I want. And I want to go through. I want the confusion to stop — no, not only confusion but pain too .

In Anna’s office I realized that fucking Myron Palmer somehow jump-started me back to life like a woman finding herself suddenly awake after years and years in a coma. It hurts to feel all these things and to know that all I have to do is shut them off again and the pain will stop .

Just breathing hurts me. Feeling love for my son hurts me. The idea of the sun shining cuts at me with red-hot blades...

The phone was ringing again.

“Hello,” I whispered.

“Deb? It’s Bertha, Bertha Renoir.”

“Hey, Bertha,” I said, feeling real pleasure at hearing her voice. “It’s been so long, girl.”

“Uh-huh, it sure has. Lana called and told me about Theon. That’s a shame. I’m so sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you. I guess he went out the way he would have wanted, though.”

“At least he didn’t take you with him.”

I was remembering how blunt and straightforward Bertha was. That was a real help in movie makeup; subtlety did not show up on digital shots.

“I’d love to get together with you and talk, B, if you have the time.”

“That’s what Lana said. I’m up north of Malibu on a surfing movie shoot. You could come up anytime today.”

She gave me the directions and I scribbled them down below my notes about death.

I was on my way to Malibu when the red phone rang again. “Hello?” I said into the multidirectional car microphone.

“Hey... It’s me.”

“Hey, Rash. I’m sorry I haven’t called you, hon. You wouldn’t believe the things been going on.”

“Oh, um, well, yeah... I know that you’re a very busy woman. I guess I just wanted to know...”

“It’s okay, honey. I wanted to call but I really couldn’t. This funeral thing has been a bitch, and I had to deal with that guy Coco.”

“Did you work it out?”

“Will you come to the funeral? It’s gonna be Saturday at two forty-five at Day’s Rest Cemetery.”

“I didn’t know your husband.”

“You’ll be there for me.”

After a long silence he said, “Okay. All right. I’ll be there.”

“There’s another call,” I said, looking at the monitor above the rearview mirror. “I’ll talk to you later.

“Hello?” I said, after disconnecting Rash by answering the next call.

“Hi, Sandy,” Delilah Peel, my stepsister, said.

“Hey, Deihl. How you doin’?”

“You wanna come by tonight, hon? I think Edison expects to see you.”

The sensual feeling of suicide flitted through my mind and body. I wondered why.

“How you feelin’ ’bout all this, Deihl?”

“He’s your son.”

“But you raised him. You been there for all his first days and bruised knees. When he wakes up scared in the middle’a the night you the one, the one he calls to.”

“He asks God to bless you in his prayers every night.”

“But you the one sits there when he gets down on his knees.”