Darcey Steinke - Suicide Blonde

“The strange part was that when Neal married, his former boyfriend moved in with Neal's mother. He did things for her like grow tomatoes and fix her screen door. Last I heard he was nursing her because she had cancer or leukemia or something like that.”

Her thighs were stained with wine. I opened the towel to the warmer middle. Her dry skin absorbed the wetness gratefully. Pig asked me to bring the robe hanging by the closet. It was a silky thing with a pattern of dogwoods and pink butterflies. She sniffed, leaning up for me to put it over her shoulders.

“I remember too, another time, when I was with my mother's friend. My father was gone for good by then, so I'm sure it was her boyfriend, but people didn't talk like that back then. He took me to a lake to swim and I sprained my ankle, but I didn't tell him. For some reason I felt embarrassed about it. When we got back, he walked ahead, but I had to go slowly, holding onto the car. Why was I so ashamed?” Pig asked me. “Don't you think it's strange?”

“Maybe something else happened that you can't remember?”

“No,” Pig said. “It had to do with hurting myself. I think if someone had hit me or if I'd fallen it might not have been that way.”

I nodded. Self-inflicted pain never gets much sympathy. You keep it to yourself. She grabbed my hand into her own sweaty one. I felt her quick pulse beat against my palm.

“Do you think the opposite of death is love or sex?” Pig asked.

“My father would say it's religion.”

“Oh,” Pig said, not particularly interested. “I always think of that story when Jesus turned water into wine.”

The towel had cooled and I walked down the hall and put it in the hamper and got Pig some water from the bathroom tap. She took the glass gratefully.

“I had a vision, Jesse, but I shouldn't tell you because you'll just think I'm crazy.” She hesitated for a second, long enough for me to notice the dramatic way she tipped her head and how her delivery took a coquettish turn. “I saw Madison and all these men were rubbing themselves against her.”

I frowned. The dream was made up, the details too self-conscious, the meaning obvious — she was trying to lead me into talking about Madison. I wondered if everything she had said before was a strategy to mellow me, make me congenial to the upcoming interrogation. My unease showed and Pig's forehead wrinkled.

“Why are you so negative? It doesn't do you any good,” she said. “Did you find her or not?”

If I looked into her eyes I'd be able to tell if she was lying, but this seemed cruel, so I walked to the window, looking toward the men in orange vests working on the BART tracks.

“Come on,” Pig said, annoyed. “I've got to know.”

I turned toward her. “She said you're not her mother.”

Pig looked startled. “I was her mother!” she said in a high voice.

“Was?” I asked, walking over so I could look down at her restless face, all her features on one level like she had melted.

Her eyes became wide and wet, she fiddled with her wedding ring and another ring with a big obsidian stone.

“Well, I didn't actually have her.”

“She's adopted?” I asked.

“Sort of,” she said. Her eyes were unfocused, she was trying to decide what to tell me.

“What about your husband?”

Pig waved her hand. “He was long gone by then.” She shrugged. “I don't think he would have been jealous anyway.”

“You mean you had me track down your girlfriend?” I felt angry that Pig had lied to me.

“She was more my daughter than my girlfriend.” Pig was getting flustered, the emotional complexity of her relationship with Madison was indescribable even to herself.

“Tell me what happened?” I asked.

Her eyes welled. “It's different than what I told you.” She shifted and the bed swayed. “I saw her hanging around the big squat down the block; Mexican boys with skateboards and a few skinny white girls. She was eating out of the garbage, getting high, sleeping with everyone. Her hair was dyed blond, a good inch of brown at the roots. I saw her with this real evil-looking guy. Once they were smoking pot on the porch and he yelled at me to mind my own business, said I was a busybody. I couldn't care less about their drug problem, it was Madison who fascinated me. One day I gave her a cling-wrapped sandwich out of my grocery bag, then a couple apples, a bunch of little Costa Rican bananas, once a whole ham. It got so she would look for me. Finally one Sunday she rang my bell and asked if I needed any housecleaning done. She had cigarette bums on the backs of her hands and a big patch of hair was gone, her skin was raw and pink as salmon.”

Pig smiled, but then remembered herself and looked to see if the story had touched me. It was hard for me to believe anything Pig said now.

“Did she seem curious about me?”

“She doesn't want to see you,” I said.

Squinting her eyes, Pig pulled her loose features into a suspicious point. “Does she want to see you?”

Pig waited for an answer. Maybe Madison did, though I had no evidence to prove it. And besides, I didn't feel like I owed an explanation. I was disillusioned with Pig because she had lied, because she had used me, and because she seemed so pitiful now. She was a liar and a coward, so afraid that she was trying to make a safety net of her false connection with Madison.

“I know you're going to see her,” Pig said. “Madison has a way of getting into your head.” Her eyes moved around the room, as if the curtains or her hairbrush could help her.

I walked to the door, feeling dismal, concentrating on the open space in the hall and the darker spot down the stairwell.

“Don't you say anything!” Pig yelled from her bed. “You don't know what happened!”

FROM DOWN THE BLOCK I SAW THE LITTLE MAN COME OUT OF our apartment building. He ducked his head, looking cautiously around, hardly inconspicuous with that red hair. I wanted to be invisible, to follow him to his own apartment, to hear his lover yell at him about doing the dishes and where he'd been all night. What did he say to Bell? Did they long for their precious childhoods and fuck on the floor? Did they laugh about last night, and complain about me. . “Bell,” he would say, “all women care about is possession.”

Inside the stairwell, a stench of pizza and urine came from the garbage chute. The knob was oddly warm as if the little man had lingered outside the apartment with his hand there. I used my key, careful not to jangle the chain. . if I could catch Bell in some meditative position I might be able to suss something. But he was his public self, shaving at the sink. The room smelled of lime soap and cigarettes. I watched him turn his head, look for rough spots of beard, specks of shaving cream. He reminded me of my father. Shaving was one of the things that convinced me my father was more important than my mother. It made me feel safe to watch my father shave, that small act somehow held back chaos and kept harm from me. Bell's smooth pink skin seemed excited by the blade and the dots of blood on Bell's neck reminded me of poisonous sumac berries.

Had the little man upset him? Did Bell tell him about his father, how lonely he was near the end — so desperate he took to playing taped phone calls over and over just to hear a friendly voice. I tried to see if Bell's hand was shaking, if his eyes had gone blank.

“What did he say to you?” I asked.

Bell caught my eye in the mirror, waved his hand musically. “That I'm to end badly in a one-room flat with a dangling bulb, playing ‘Tracks of My Tears.’ “

“That sounds like your idea.”

“He's no different than anyone else, he just says what you want to hear.”

“Why didn't you tell me he was here last night?” I tried to resurrect some empathy by thinking about what I did with the stranger, but it didn't work. I wanted to make Bell admit he had perverse reasons for letting the little man stay, that these reasons had to do with his interest in boys. Was Bell motivated by jealousy? He knew I'd been with the stranger, though he didn't know yet that he did.