Jack O'Connell - The Skin Palace

“That explains it,” Sylvia says and then regrets it, but Leni isn’t going to let the comment go.

She says, “There’s a real attitude there, Sylvia. It’s the only unattractive thing I’ve seen about you so far.”

“I didn’t mean anything. It was a compliment—”

“No, no,” Leni says, “don’t hide behind that. You find me intelligent and confident and you couldn’t figure out how a slut like me came to have a brain. Have opinions and ideas and everything.”

“You’re overreacting,” Sylvia says. “I didn’t mean to sound condescending. You said you’d dropped out of high school and—”

“There are all kinds of classrooms if you look for them, Sylvia. I’d sit in the dressing rooms down Lodge 217 and I’d always have a book with me. I hit the library every morning on my way down the Zone. I read everything I could get hold of. The owners teased the hell out of me. Stupid grunts.”

“You were supporting your mother at this point?” The question comes out somehow harsh.

Leni nods. “For a while. She didn’t last long. But what you really want to know, Sylvia, is — did she know? Did my mother know how I was earning a living? Right?”

Sylvia just shrugs.

“The answer is no, Sylvia. She never knew. She was beyond caring about things like that anyway. If you haven’t lived this kind of thing, you haven’t lived it. What can I say?”

Sylvia sits back and thinks about her story. “I don’t mean to be obtuse,” she says, “but I just can’t get past the fact … I mean, you walk in off the street, you’re what, sixteen years old—”

“I was a mature sixteen years old,” Leni says. “In every way.”

They stare at each other for a few seconds, then Leni breaks eye contact, reaches into her pocket and pulls out roll of bills, peels off a few and slides them under her shot glass.

“Finish that,” she says, gesturing to the mug, and Sylvia drains the last of her drink.

Leni slides out of her seat, yells goodbye to the Family Aumaeta and heads for the stairs. Sylvia follows along and says, “I think I did need to get out of that booth for a while.”

They exit the Tower and as they start to thread their way through a cluster of zombie-like drunks that’s materialized during lunch, Leni says, “Sylvia, I think you met me just in time.”

Sylvia wants to think that there will be a point maybe five or six months from now when this blur, this weirdness of the last few days becomes understandable. She wants to imagine some fixed point in time, some day up ahead when the apartment is quiet and she’s come in from work and it’s another hour or so before Perry gets home and she’s sitting at the kitchen table drinking a club soda or an iced coffee, leafing through the Spy, looking at what movies are playing at the colleges, maybe reading her horoscope. And then she’ll think back on the day she went in to buy the Aquinas. And she’ll follow her steps through, she’ll be able to see herself move from location to location, meeting these people she’s never seen before, going to these places she never knew existed. Behaving in ways she never did before and never will again. And the distance from these events will give her some perspective. She’ll sit there and sip her coffee, take a melting ice cube into her mouth and suck on it, and she’ll come to an understanding of why she did those things, why she fought with Perry and prowled around the Zone and walked into a riot and sat in a sex theatre. She’ll just naturally, easily, come up with answers, like remembering some math forumla that orders all your components and solves the equation. A will equal B and B will equal C. Maybe she’ll laugh at herself there alone in the kitchen. Maybe she’ll just shake her head and still feel uncomfortable with the memories and go back to scanning the paper, finding out if this is a good day for Moon Children.

She wants to have faith that a day like that will arrive.

But the problem is that she’s felt this way before. Dislocated. Strange to herself. Motivated by forces that she can’t name. After her mother died and she was living on the couch, subsisting on breakfast cereal and cookies and every Rita Hayworth movie ever lensed, she knows she tried to tell herself the same thing — that a moment would arrive like something destined by prophecy, and everything would be made clear. That she’d be straight about her mother’s death and her own decline. That she’d receive this innate explanation of why the only things she could tolerate were Chocolate Chip Clusters and another showing of You Were Never Lovelier.

But that instant, explanatory moment just didn’t arrive. There was no epiphany. No second of pure satori. Life simply changed. She just got better and moved on, left the couch. She found a job, found Perry, integrated herself back into the flow of the normal majority.

And she’s had days when she’s sat at the kitchen table, listening to pop songs from her years in college, thinking about what to make for dinner, chopping vegetables for a salad. And she’s gone back three years, regressed so completely that she could feel the harsh wool from her mother’s sofa against her face, could feel her eyes glaze up with the third watching of Cover Girl. And she’s expected the answer to roll in with the next second. She’s expected that this time, her recall will give her that clarity that’s just beyond her reach.

But it’s never happened.

Sylvia doesn’t know why she sank in the way that she did. She doesn’t know what was going through her mind during those months she was tethered to her dead mother’s apartment. She doesn’t know why she couldn’t just shake loose and move on. Do something. Save herself. She just knows that at one point she couldn’t. And at another she could. Life changed. The wheel turned. Things altered. But there was no wisdom earned in the process. Just raw experience. And to this day it feels like a useless wound.

So maybe next summer, she’ll be checking the times on the feature at the Cansino Drive-in. Maybe she’ll be at the kitchen table making sandwiches to take to the movies. And maybe as she slices the bread and pushes the sandwich into the little plastic bag and folds the flap secure, she’ll suddenly flash on this moment with a porn actress named Leni Pauline, driving through the Canal Zone in a Citroen, taking in air and trying not to be sick, woozy from booze and weirdness. Maybe she’ll be able to call up this exact scene with photo-clarity.

But she doubts she’ll understand anything about what she’s been doing. She doubts the memory will hold any meaning or tell her something that’s been previously hidden. It will just land there for a minute, in her brain. Behind her eyes. It will just remind her how odd things can turn at any given moment.

They come around the corner onto Watson and Leni hits the gas and Sylvia’s stomach lurches. They screech to a stop in front of the Skin Palace, hop the curbstone and come to a stop at a tilt, two wheels in the street, two up on the sidewalk.

Leni kills the engine, raises up in her seat and gives a horrible, shrill whistle. One of Schick’s beefy spandexmen comes out the front entrance, glancing up and down the walk, still wary from yesterday’s rumble. Everything’s fairly quiet though and Leni climbs out of the car, tosses the keys through the air and says to the bouncer, “Be a gentleman and park it for me, huh Franco?”

He mimes a kiss at her as she passes and then looks at Sylvia to see if she’s going along for the ride. Sylvia takes a breath and stumbles out to the sidewalk, stands still for a second to get her balance. She looks up at the theatre and the wave of dizziness comes over her again, so she tries to ignore it and follows Leni into the lobby.