Darcey Steinke - Suicide Blonde

Bell only wandered when he was depressed. He would complain about the vague unhappiness of life. He was sad he wasn't famous. Though he told me, once you knew you could be famous, it didn't matter if you were. Bell knew not to complain, everyone loves a martyr. I thought of happy endings, how novelists usually flinched. To admit your characters are doomed means you are too.

The familiar smell of our clothes made me sleepy, it was dark and I could still hear the Indian music, a sitar drawing me toward sleep, it was an anxious lonely sleep. I was walking south of Market toward the Bay Bridge, paper blew against a chain-link fence and I realized how empty the city seemed. I stuck my thumb out, pressed my hips forward, saw a car ahead I knew would stop for me. The man behind the wheel reminded me of someone, though I couldn't remember who. He asked me how far I was going, but I didn't answer. I saw myself in his sunglasses, transparent, held together only by his gaze.

* * *

WHEN I WOKE IT WAS DARK, THE HOTEL HUNTINGTON'S LIGHT dammed at the curtains. I crawled over shoes, through Bell's cashmere coat and curled up under the comforter. With my knees touching my chin I drifted down, then heard the sound of water dripping. Not to porcelain like a leaky faucet, but falling into other water. Plup. Plup. Plup. Bell must have come in while I was asleep and drawn himself a bath. I pressed my ear against the wall, listening for his breath, or the classical tape — the Jupiter Symphony or some boys’ choir. Nothing. I sat up. Should I wait for him to come to bed? Pretend to talk in my sleep? It's been two weeks since I dyed my hair. I stood and walked on my tiptoes down the hall. There was light coming from under the door, bright as a laser. “Bell,” I said, “I know you're in there.” He didn't answer. Maybe he'd found out I was at the wedding? Maybe Kevin had called? “I want to talk to you.” Still no answer. He pissed me off, using his silence to emasculate me, make me feel vulnerable. “I touched Kevin's dick,” I said. Plup. Plup. No swish of water, no long fed-up sigh.

I put my hand on the knob and pushed the door, letting it creak open. There was Bell's head tipped back over the edge of the tub. He must be drunk. I saw the red water, how Bell's right arm floated palm up, how he'd sliced his arm from elbow to hand, the open skin evocative as a mouth. The other arm hung over the tub's edge, blood streaked his hand, congealed in a puddle fed by his fingertips. He was strangely beautiful with pale white skin, blue eyes, purple lips, and on his cheeks a soft spot of pink rouge. I felt weak, nauseated, then so hot I took off my sweater. My ears began ringing, sweat rose under my clothes. I leaned over the toilet and puked. Yellow bile that swirled in the bowl, the bitter taste of lead.

I screamed. My vocal cords quivered and stung. Louder so the sitar stopped, so the sound swallowed me, Bell, the apartment, the block. I used to kiss his lower stomach, the warm hair around his cock. I'd put an ear to his skin and hear liquid sloshing in his bladder, his heart beating. His body was proof of life to me.

I leaned against the sink, turned the glass knob until cold water beat from the faucet. I let the water wash over my wrist, then put my head under, wet the hair at the back of my neck until I got chills. There were blank spots where I stared at the water swirling around the drain, the hair curling on the porcelain, and remembered my first morning with Bell, how I wrapped a sheet around me and came into this room and how my pee was warm, stinging from sex. I squeezed in between the toilet and the wall. The room reeked of bile and blood. I could tell by his wrinkled skin that he had done this last night, about the time Kevin said his vows. Bell's head was turned slightly toward me, so I could see only one eye. As a child he had learned that remoteness drew people to him, but this had proven dangerous. The tile was cool on my spine and I looked into his unyielding eye. He wasn't meant to be a groom, or a father, or even a son. He was meant to be dead. And in death he was mine. He used to tell me that a person who reads all day, then watches the sunset is just as valuable as a person who interacts with the world, but he didn't believe it and God knows this world doesn't either.

My life fans out like a string of paper dolls. I am malleable, chameleonlike. Each life eats the last until I'm a Russian doll, containing ten women of decreasing size.

Across the desert, the midlands, creeping back into the South. To Virginia where you can feel the water in the pages of a book and the light rain makes the leaves tender as skin. I will plant a rose garden and I will wait in that garden for the flick of the snake's tongue that will change me again.

On the tub's shiny faucet, the distorted image of my face floated above the toilet. Watching Bell's unblinking eye I brought my hand to my mouth, kissed the palm deeply, wet tongue against the ridges of my lifeline.

If he died for my sins, I am grateful.