Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

Meanwhile Mother puked, starved, and ate. And so we went into the eighties, and quite suddenly, one morning, Reagan was in the White House, my once-boyfriend George was dead of AIDS, and entire battalions of wild-eyed, stiff-moving robots descended on us, various scriptures in hand, eager to have their revenge on sex. I avoided all of the early extravaganzas, but when my town council moved to have the local fornication emporium — Wonderland — expelled from the body civic, I called them and told them I wanted to talk to the committee, that I’d give evidence or whatever they wanted. When I explained who I was and what I did and why I was qualified to speak, at first the woman on the phone didn’t believe me, she kept on saying, “You live here?” I told her to look up the tax records and hung up. So they had to let me in. On the morning I went in, the local NBC station had a van at the council house, and the room, a big auditorium with a mural of great American inventors (the Wright brothers, Edison, Henry Ford) on one end, was packed wall to wall. The panel was composed of these: a Catholic priest; a mother of three (that’s how she described herself) who worked as an assistant editor in a publishing house in Manhattan; the minister from the local Methodist congregation (which was at the time just starting a two-million-dollar renovation on its church); a feminist writer of some repute and angry notoriety; and a couple, young and very clean and energetic, the wife a real estate broker and power in the P.T.A., the husband a lawyer. As these people arranged themselves on the podium, and as I waited, a reporter leaned over a pew and stage-whispered to me: “Hey, Kyrie, what about the Nero film?”

“No comment,” I said, a little sharply, because that was supposed to be a secret. The thing was that I’d been negotiating for months with a major studio, which, with an already Oscared director, was trying to put together that elusive thing — a mainstream fuck film, you know, big budget, cast of thousands, maybe some real stars. I’d talked to a couple of the executives, and they were slick-haired and blown-dry, but I could tell they were desperate: their studio was dying. So they were seeing big bucks, they were hot for the four billion dollars on the other side of the tracks in Joyland, I could see the numbers ticking by in their eyes as they described the flames over Rome, they wanted to do decadence and lust and destruction and the final gory death of Nero. They’d gotten a couple of major male stars interested in Nero, and they wanted me to do his mother.

But now the loudspeakers crackled in the hall, and we were ready to start. I sat in front of the podium and faced them over a battery of microphones, and the scene had that strange flat look that comes from too many video lights. I’d worn a gray suit and pulled back my hair, so that I looked more like a mid-level executive than the wild half-broken slut they wanted, but soon they got over their slight confusion and the questions came hard and fast.

Sex is a private act. It is a beautiful thing between two people. It is secret. Why do you degrade yourself and the holy gift of love by doing it like animals in front of the whole world?

What you do dehumanizes human beings. What happens between two people is complex, mysterious. What you put on the screen is a caricature of human relations, and encourages people to treat each others like caricatures. Why do you do it?

To any sane person this obsession with the nuts and bolts of the act, this unredeemed and unredeeming gaze at the mere body, this filth is sickening. The sexual act is a gift of God, to be engaged in with all seriousness and humbleness and spiritual consciousness. Don’t you understand that what you are doing is sinful, that it is the enshrinement of sin?

Pornography is violence against women. It is the colonization of their souls and bodies. It is enslavement. Don’t you agree? How can you be a woman and not agree?

Can’t men and women just be friends?

I answered as best I could. I walked out of there weary, and was chased by cameras out of the building and to my car. At home, the phone was buzzing as I opened the door.

“Hi, babe. You were sensational.” It was one of my executives from the coast. “Just keep on doing it. Every minute on the air is ten thousand tickets in the door. So here’s the deal — I’ve been talking to the money people and it’s a go situation. Almost.”

“So what’s the hitch?” I said.

“They’re very impressed with the names we’ve mentioned for Nero, and they see you as the big Mama, I mean they can completely see you, you are her. Specially after your appearance on the tube today. But one thing. See, when you’re talking Agrippina, you’re talking a complete full-blown woman. You’re seeing, I don’t know, you get it, a luxurious woman, almost zaftig .”

“What am I, a matchstick? I mean, am I bones?”

“No, no, you’re it. Put you in a toga and you’re it. All except for one thing. Or maybe two.”

“A tit job! A greedy slimy Hollywood tit job. You want me to have a tit job.”

“Why’re you so mad? Everyone has one, you know.”

So I hung up on him, and he was smart enough not to call right back. I sat by the phone holding my boobs, comfortable friends in my hands, not of spectacular DeMille proportions, but there and a little saggy and beautiful. I’d seen friends who’d done it, and I recalled the black bruises, the aching tenderness that held their arms tight to their sides, the bright purple flush of blood around the teats, the whole chest looking as if some maniac had swung a two-by-four to land smack across it, and as I remembered I twinged all the way from my nipples to the base of my spine. I sat there awhile, and then tried to eat, but my throat was tight and fear made my heart bigger and painful in me, so finally I sat down to a bottle of wine.

The phone brought me out of a fuzzy, drunken sleep, and for a few seconds I blinked, forgetting completely where I was.

“You’d better come,” the voice said, and for one strange moment, in my dizzy state, it sounded not at all human, but as if it came out of the wires themselves, out of the huge network of coils and transistors and dishes and cables. The ground was icy and hard and in the hospital lot my boots rang on it like hammers. They had Mother laid out on this bed with railings around it, covered with a white sheet. The sheet went all the way up to her neck, and what surprised me was that her hair had turned an iron gray. I was afraid to lift the sheet away, but a doctor stood behind me and very softly began to tell me what had happened. He said that her eating disorder had been under control, it seemed to them, and she had appeared even more calm than usual lately. So all was going well, but that day the nurse found the bathroom door locked, and when they beat it down they found Mother in the tub. The skin around her stomach and her ankles was covered with small cuts, deep and deliberately made with a carpet knife, which she was still holding in her right hand. There was a fresh cut on her right ankle, and she had the foot propped up under the hot water tap. The insides of the drain were caked black — it looked like she’d been doing it for weeks, the doctor said, like she’d been trying to drain all the blood from her body. I don’t know, why didn’t she do it all at once, the doctor said, I can’t figure it, but I don’t think she wanted to, you know, go, she had a piece of chocolate cake on a plate by the tub, it was just the blood, I think she thought she could live without it.

They left me alone with her for a while and I touched her face, and the skin was cold but soft. Finally I turned away from her, but from the door I came back to her and lifted the sheet off. Her body lay with that opened up limpness that the dead achieve for a bit, an absolute absence of tension, hands gently curved, knees out. Her pubic hair was white, and above it at regular intervals, were one-inch up-and-down lines, slightly reddish. Around her ankles were rings, bracelets of the same lines. I looked at her neck, the deep creases at its base, the curve of the ribs just under the skin, the confident thickness of the thighs.