Kate Zambreno - Green Girl

I don’t think souls talk. Things are more transcendent.

They pass a hen party waiting to cross Oxford, women wearing veils decorated with toy penises.

Transcendent sounds boring, Ruth pouts.

The crush of bodies on Charing Cross Road. Tickets for Electric Six! a man with a Cockney accent, hands in pocket, strolls by. Past a field of Mohawks like roosters.

Simone Weil says we need to let go of our ego. You must forget I. Says Rhys.

They shake their heads no to the smocked girl standing outside an overpriced pizza place, holding a metal pizza tray on which remnants of a cheesy carcass rested. They pass alleys with their human stink.

They shake their heads, sorry, no, to the skinny homeless girl who sat on a blanket outside Sainsbury’s, clothed in flannel surrounded by a cloud of smoke. With a mournful expression on her sooty face she holds up a sign. Help me. To complete the picture is her three-legged golden retriever, fur spiky from lack of wash, limping near an overflowing trash bin, his bandaged half-limb now blackened.

They are at home, sitting on Ruth’s mattress, facing each other. He her priest, her confessor, her solemn philosopher.

I need I says Ruth. I am all I have.

He began to stay the night when Agnes wasn’t home, which was often. He would hold her while she wept.

I’m scared of dying.

Sh, sh, it’s okay.

He cradles her, his body long and tender, as they listen to a man being beat up on the street.

She cries and cries as he kisses her all over her face her neck her hair he covers her covers her in kisses. He holds her like a child.

Oh, Ruth. He murmurs into her hair. How you’ve suffered.

That night was the first night Ruth tried to defile Rhys. She pins his pale arms down. She sees herself in his eyes, liquid shadows of self, twisting and turning. She wants him to make love to her. Or is it more that she was resistant to being saved? Maybe she has a desire to ruin him. There was something so virginal and pure about him that she wanted to soil.

Ruth I love you but no he said.

Sometimes, as a cruel consolation prize, he let her put makeup on him, blue eyeshadow highlighting those blue eyes, a bit of red lipstick, and she would laugh and laugh at how pretty he was, her solemn philosopher.

He gave her books to read, the confessions of Angela of Foligno and Teresa of Avila.

On a night when she was not with Rhys and Agnes was home she read some of Teresa of Avila’s confessions out loud to Agnes. That is some fucked up stuff, Agnes said. She was painting her toenails black on the foot of the stairs. Ruth was lying down on Agnes’ bed.

I know, I know, listen to this. Ruth began to read:

The angel held a long golden dart in his hands. From time to time he plunged it in my heart and forced it into my entrails. When he withdrew the dart, and it left me all inflamed with love divine…I am certain that the pain penetrated my deepest entrails and it seemed as if they were torn when my spiritual spouse withdrew the arrow with which he had penetrated them.

The two of them giggled like schoolgirls.

Who is that? asked Agnes.

It’s St. Teresa.

What a whore.

Yeah, I know.

So this boy gave this to you?

Yeah.

He’s BIZ-arre, isn’t he? Sometimes they were over while Agnes was getting ready to leave for the night. Ruth could tell Agnes didn’t like Rhys.

A little.

And are you two finally fucking?

No, not yet.

Why not?

I don’t know. He respects me too much, I think. I think he’s afraid I’ll break.

Well, maybe you should read some of that stuff first. It’ll get you in the mood.

They both giggled again. Oh these green girls do they have reverence for anything except the fragility of their own pendulum of mood?

Aren’t I attractive? Aren’t you attracted to me?

She is being manipulative and cruel, she knows. She who lets boys into her bed unthinkingly, as a consolation prize.

Why won’t you just fuck me?

Ruth, Ruth. He stares into her eyes. Oh how they have hurt you Ruth. How they have hurt you.

She begs and pleads. She wrests his clothes away from him. He has a large penis flaring like a gray mushroom. A flesh tulip surrounded by a cloud of rust-colored hair. He lies there, skinny and vulnerable. She climbs on top of him. Begins to have sex with him. He lets her. He stares into her eyes helplessly. Then he begins to moan and moan and Ruth watches him writhe about. She watches him with curiosity.

Later he goes down on her, raising his wet face to stare into her eyes lovingly, his face glowing. She feels a shiver of revolt.

She did not desire to be loved and cherished and caressed. She desired a beast. Someone to destroy her. Her own Jack the Ripper. Her own serial killer. She did not want to make love. She wanted to be fucked — over and over again repeating her own disappearance.

When they have sex now she thinks of HIM instead.

The first time we ever had sex you hurt me so badly that I was convinced my appendix had burst. You grabbed at me and shook me like a rag doll, throwing my legs over your shoulders, poking at my womb, my anus, my mouth. I had only known adoration before. Not this hate mixed with semen and want. I wrenched away from you like some hurt animal while you simmered in disgust, your penis dangling like a raw, red, piece of meat.

Afterwards Rhys kisses her tenderly. I love you Ruth. Ruth feels detached. Maybe that’s why she did it. Because afterwards he is just someone else. Something happens and he is just like everybody else and then he can go. Then he can leave too.

I want to dance on your grave in my sparkly reds.

Soon afterwards she began to be cold and distant. She began to complain that Rhys was being too clingy, that he bored her. And why couldn’t he move out of his parents’ house? And why couldn’t he ever fuck her, really fuck her, just throw her against a wall and do vile things to her?

I can’t do that, he would say sorrowfully to Ruth, like a dog that’s been beaten. I’m in love with you. I love you too much.

To make sure it is really over Ruth knows what she has to do. She has to go and sleep with someone else. Start a clean slate. She goes to Ava Gardner’s leaving-do. A leaving-do, that’s what they call a going-away party. She was going on an extended holiday to Egypt or somewhere similarly glamorous and remote and wouldn’t be returning to Horrids.

At the pub Ruth spied a boy giving her the drunken eyes. She looked at him. He came over to talk to her. He was Canadian. He was studying here. Now he was studying her. He has touched her elbow twice. She cannot get over that almost detached curiosity of wondering what someone will look like, naked, suspended over her.

He was a filmmaker. That was what he is going to school for, anyway. I like film too she said. But then can’t think of any film she had ever seen. He listed off directors — Cassavetes, Scorcese. She nodded and sipped her drink. She had never seen Taxi Driver . A cardinal sin. He grunted in astonishment, began to lecture her on its significance in film history, world history. Standing there in the crowded noisy pub, their beer splashing against their wrists, she decided that he was arrogant. She decided that she couldn’t stand him. She decided that she will probably sleep with him anyway.