Darcey Steinke - Suicide Blonde

THE NEXT NIGHT I WENT IN THROUGH THE BACK DOOR AT Carmen's, saw Madison waiting at the top of the stairs. The stairwell was dimly lit and I liked the priestly way she stood, wearing the same clothes as last night. As I got closer I could tell she was high.

“The snake beguiled me and I ate,” she said. I felt uncomfortable. Whenever time lapsed, she seemed to forget the status of our relationship. “I have a hardcore upstairs,” she said, somewhat bored. “He likes an audience.”

“I just watch?”

Madison nodded.

“O.K.” I followed, her scent rich like menstrual blood. I was curious, I still hadn't felt that exquisite kick of perversity. A man sat on the bed — he was younger than I had imagined, with pale blond hair and small perverse features. In his bow tie and expensive suit, he looked awkward as a game bird in Madison's space-age room.

“I thought I told you to undress,” Madison said, not looking at the man as she poured me an inch of bourbon in a blue glass.

The man slipped off his shoe, then pulled his sock off and folded it into the loafer. He removed his other shoe, rolled the sock down, placed that sock inside of the other shoe. His hands shook as he put both shoes together next to the bed. He unzipped his pants, stepped out one leg at a time, folded them neatly and placed the pants on top of his shoes. Then he undid his bow tie and took off his shirt, till he stood in his flowered boxers, shivering, looking anxious and pleased.

“Those too,” Madison said firmly. He pulled them down, folded the boxers on the top of his pile. His skin goose-pimpled and he looked at her longingly, waiting for directions.

“Bend over the bed,” she ordered.

He draped himself over the edge. Cracked his butt so I could see his anus, dark pubic hair curling around it. I slung down the bourbon, my organs glowing like a space heater. Was this Madison's idea of intimacy, me staring into this guy's asshole?

She sat down at her dressing table, got out a fingernail clipper and snapped the white nail from her thumb. The man gasped. Madison worked on the other hand, with each snap of a fingernail the man moaned. She took off a go-go boot, folded her foot up onto the chair and clipped her toenails.

“This woman here,” she said, “is going to tell your little boys all about you.”

I winced. Though the man didn't say anything I could tell she'd excited him. Now that I knew something about her past, Madison was no less of an enigma. She wanted to escape her own consciousness in another's flesh, but it made me uncomfortable that it wasn't sex she considered exciting, but the idea of evil. Madison preferred the narrative, the “then I do this” to the reality. She considered the sexual narrative holy and could thus disentangle herself from the act.

She took off her other boot, a deep click for the thick nail of her big toe and then smaller snaps as she cut the nails in decreasing size. She put each boot back on and zipped them up. She opened a drawer and took out a rubber glove. Pulled it up over her hand and snapped it at her elbow. She took up a tube of lubricating jelly and squeezed some over the glove, spreading it out so the rubber gleamed. She straightened two fingers and squeezed a drop out onto the tip. When the man heard her stand he sighed and spread his cheeks further. I could see his hard cock peeking out between his stomach and the bed.

Madison sat next to him and slid two fingers slowly into his anus. She slipped in a third finger, moved them in to the hilt. The man's legs jangled softly. With a continual slow movement back and forth she pushed her whole hand in, then her wrist, her forearm. She fisted her hand and the man sucked air. His back arched, his pink anus was stretched wide as a mouth. Madison moved her arm in and out, she seemed fascinated by the way the rubber glove disappeared inside the man's asshole. She punched up hard, the man raised his head, gasped. Her arm in to the elbow, she flexed her bicep and grabbed for his bowels. The man made a series of vowel sounds. Then a hard “Hhhhhhhhhh” that rose high like a cat's scream. Madison's lips opened into a snarl and I could see the muscles of her neck strain and flex. He splayed his arms and legs wildly like a bug with a pin through its belly.

“Madison,” I yelled instinctually. She looked at me, but her eyes were dead. She had gone away from me, away from the man, the room and Carmen's, away from San Francisco too. Madison was on the lot behind the grocery store watching the flames. She quickly looked back down, reached around the man to restrain him with a tight arm around his waist. She knew fathers didn't have to be loving toward their children, that mothers could be raped like schoolgirls, that people's relationships to one another are sinister, violent, even murderous. He wailed, his eyes bulged and he swung his head side to side. “Madison,” I yelled again, but she was concentrating now, reaching her fingers up toward his heart. She wants his heart , I thought, because she doesn't have one of her own. I ran out of the room, down the back stairs and onto the street.

I WAS HEADED FOR THE BLACK ROSE TO FIND BELL. WATCHING Madison's fist made me realize Bell had never treated me like a lover. He lived with me to appease his dead father and I stayed with him because his loving disinterest was exactly the kind of mixed signal I used to get from my mother. I wondered if Bell missed me. I'll tell him how I whored myself because he rejected my body — not just its surface, but its general longing. I'll tell him that there is more strength in low moments than in powerful ones. “Bell,” I will say, “there is something centering about despair.” But he would be disappointed that I had left Madison's, say I was fascist to think that heterosexual sex was the only cosmically right kind, that whenever one body enters another it was life-affirming.

Bell sat in the corner of the Black Rose in a red leather booth. He seemed different, with his dirty hair parted to the side and the lining of his coat ripped so it hung down like a rag. He looked up, grabbed my hand and kissed the palm deeply.

“I convinced myself that you were dead,” he said, pulling me across the table to him. He smelled of stale smoke and beerish sweat. “You must come back.”

I pulled away and sat back. “I can't do that.”

“You don't understand.” He looked into my eyes, his skin was liverish, puffy. “I'm afraid I'm going crazy.”

I shook my head. “I came here to tell you that the only reason we were together was because you thought your father would have loved me.” He hardly listened.

“Oh Jesse, things are so much worse than that. I can't sleep. I feel like somebody will trick me if I do, all I can think of is my poor father. I was just remembering how I promised to take him to the theater. He came up because it was my first long-running show. We were supposed to meet at two o'clock and I got there a little early, sat across the street to wait, drank a beer in a diner. He showed up, stood out front. I watched him. He looked ridiculous with his thick arms and striped rugby shirt. I thought he was too excited and I would be embarrassed. He tried the locked theater door several times. The horrible thing is that I took pleasure in this.”

“It certainly wasn't very nice, but you can't do anything about it now,” I said. “He's dead.”

Bell shook his head. “But he was always so kind to me and I did horrible things. On Father's Day we had a special breakfast. Mom bought a coffee cake and she forced me to get a present. He was thrilled, touched my arm, then opened the box to find an old stained tie that I found in the neighbor's garbage. My father put on the tie, smiled, kissed me and finished his breakfast.”

“Bell,” I said, “stop torturing yourself.”