Darcey Steinke - Suicide Blonde

I pulled away from her. “That makes them lies.”

Pig was creepy. Her emotional reflexes were mild, unfocused, so she relied on emotions of the past.

Pig looked up at me, startled. “You think I'm a liar?” There was a long silence, the kind when you run out of things to say or get caught off guard. When she did speak it was slow, and she didn't look at me. “Pity is such a strange emotion. Once felt, disgust is never far off and then too a certain need to make it perfectly clear the pitied is completely separate from the pitier. This is done mostly with moralistic accusations of the sort you just used on me. This pedanticism,” she said loudly and stamped her foot. “I'll tell you something. I stayed with a man in my mother's summer house and never changed the sheets. To my mother it meant I didn't love her, and that my men were more important than her.” Pig sipped her wine. “Of course, she was right. Sex is a kind of alchemy. It's the one thing other than death that if used properly can change everything, like that first night with Madison, it's all in my head like a beautiful dream. I remember her skin. Its texture made me believe I'd never die.” She looked out the window over the mud range behind the house.

I had no sympathy for Pig's rambling lyricism, because I felt like a rat in a garbage can. There would never be peace. My father, in leaving my mother, poisoned my memories of childhood. That's why Madison's idea that family members had no ordained purpose one to another appealed to me. My family splintered as if they'd been together for the shooting of a movie.

I was glad I'd pitched my polluted self into Bell's memory, because he confused his urge to please his dying father with passion for me. Our relationship, like all romantic ones, had been fodder for the family.

“Madison is a whore,” I said. “And so am I.”

The color drained from Pig's face. “So,” she nodded. Her face falling in on itself.

“Did you expect she was married with a baby in some split-level ranch?”

She looked into my eyes, at my hands, the set of my shoulders, tried to figure out why I'd sabotaged her memory of Madison. Pig shook her monstrous legs and leaned forward to rise.

“Get me my coat,” she said. “We are going out.”

IN THE TAXI PIG PRETENDED NOT TO BE SURPRISED BY THE LACK of neighboring houses, by the mud lots stretching all the way to the water. Though I saw her flinch as we passed a man in a gray hooded sweatshirt laid out on a dirty mattress. Closer to Carmen's the skyscrapers pressing up to the cab and the taxis’ hectic movements seemed to frighten Pig. She tried to make small talk with the cabbie: Latin music, how seductive it was, how flamenco was the most sensuous of dances. But he just nodded and looked into his rearview mirror as if he didn't understand English. On Polk Street Pig pointed out the window, her mouth open. “Isn't that Bell?”

It was him, standing near the Black Rose in his dirty overcoat talking to a strange young man.

“Who's that with him?” She touched my arm.

“I don't know,” I said and twisted my body toward the door: I did not want to talk about Bell.

At Carmen's I paid and helped Pig out of the backseat. Her eyes still hadn't adjusted to outside light and she was unsure of her footing and squinted as we walked to the door. Inside, she seemed to relax immediately: the darkness, the rows and rows of booze. We took stools at the bar. It was early so the place was empty. The lap dancers drank at the other end and the disco music was superfluous like Christmas decorations after the new year. We ordered red wine and she smiled when she saw the tall thin glass. We didn't speak for a while, she was busy absorbing the decor: black-light murals, the metal bar. I was preoccupied too, trying to decide why I'd agreed to take her here. Wouldn't it only hurt Pig more? Was it evil? I hoped Pig and Madison would turn into me and my mother, that they would say true things to one another. Whenever the front door opened she got edgy.

“What will you say to her?” I asked.

“That I love her,” she said. “That's all I want to say.” Pig was like a mother in that what she perceived as simple love carried a truckload of complications. “When you love a woman, you love yourself, and it's terrible really, how it seems perfectly possible to swallow the other. With a man you want to join, you want your ribs to connect like handcuffs. But with a woman if you swallow, she becomes you.”

“Is Madison the main one,” I asked.

“Well, yes and no, there was Claudine, a little black girl from France. She was into a kind of sophisticated drag. Once walking home from a party, she went into an alley to pee and when she walked back, all I could see was her dinner jacket floating toward me.”

The lap dancers giggled at the end of the bar. They were wondering who Pig was and why I was with her.

“Do they have children?” Pig asked, motioning to them.

“Some do.”

“I think the idea of reproduction is absurd.” She felt insecure, but was hiding it behind indignation. What exactly she was thinking I couldn't tell, but it must have pivoted around some derailed idea of motherhood. Maybe her obsession with Madison was shored by a biological yearning.

Pig ordered another glass of wine. Her cheeks flushed and her fat fingers curled around her drink. A little base make-up gathered in the ridges of her nose. “But Madison, she is like nobody else, like a wolf caught in the body of a woman. I'll never forget how once, drunk on sake, very late on a rainy night, the tenth night of hard rain, Madison said it was God beating his fist, that she couldn't take it anymore, and would confess everything to me. She told me how in Paris she'd stuffed her dead baby into a trash can, wrapped in clear plastic. It's name was Elaina and it wore a tiny emerald ring. All that night she was insane, fucked several men then spent the money on drink. Early in the morning she was walking in a quiet neighborhood. The gray stone buildings were damp, water dripped off the black grillwork. Ahead she saw an older lady in a raincoat wearing a funny little felt hat. Madison said what rose in her was a kind of blind rage. This old woman had survived, her very life condemned Madison's. She rushed her, sat on her chest and cut her throat. She stared at the woman, her skirt twisted, her throat cut crudely with a penknife. Madison said the woman's eyes were completely colorless.”

“Madison killed someone?” It shouldn't have surprised me, but it did. It was the logical end to everything I knew about Madison, but it was hard to believe, coming from Pig. True or not it tinted every idea or memory of her.

Pig nodded. “So you see, it makes her special in a way.” Pig watched the bartender bend over into the cooler. “I still have all her old love letters stored in satin boxes. It upsets me to read them.” Pig trailed off, stared past me at Madison, who'd come into the bar from the back stairs. “Honey,” Pig called to her, rising up on her stool.

Madison wasn't surprised. “Fat as ever, huh, Pig,” she said, walking over.

Pig blushed. “I'd like to speak to you about some things.”

Madison nodded O.K. and pointed outside. The intimacy between them surprised me. Madison had a certain respect for Pig. Or maybe in Carmen's Madison treated everyone like a customer. I ordered another drink, thought how people are different things to different people. Maybe this was what I resisted? It upset me that my lovers always had old lovers. I wanted a pureness in my relationships. But Bell longed for Kevin and my father has a new wife. The story of Adam and Eve has less to do with evil than the cosmic human sadness that relationships are never straightforward, never pure enough.

Out the window I could see the glittering sidewalk and Pig crossing her arms over her breasts as Madison lectured her. I thought of all the things I wanted to tell my own mother — that I loved her but wished she wasn't so needy, so depressed, so unhappy. And that I felt responsible for her unhappiness, it was suffocating. Pig put her arm on Madison's shoulder, looking at the ground while she spoke. They resembled each other in a general way as women do who have had a hard life. Madison leaned into Pig, then pulled away and said something surly. Pig shook her head. Their different positions reminded me of various relationships, mother, daughter, sisters, husband and wife. Nobody knew what went on between two people except those two. I thought of Bell and decided to leave. This place was as constant as the planets and I felt even worse knowing that.