I
Boxing herself in the bright light of the phone booth, within sight of the spire. One last call, one last coin, one last try to dial up love. Patience patience no one needs to use the phone To someone watching in the rain and the dark she must be silhouetted like a sitting duck. Two blocks from the cathedral, having hung up the public phone, with the last in a long line of criminal boyfriends tapping a token against the mouthpiece on his end and lecturing about this third person. This third person that was her in some farthest fetch that ran parallel to the storyline of his and not her silent home movies. His wine-bittered tongue was an outrage in the tender thickets of her native language, shocking her adorable idioms, however well he used them, creeping advice and creeping threat. She must learn, you must learn, Marie she must learn that she is not above the law.
There, where the cluttering of plastic bags stretches out of the alley’s mouth. A wind-rattled sign, pointing to an automatic booth, beckoning just outside the pharmacy. Dispensation of images (three for the price of one) in various poses of gullibility, guiltless spontaneity, funny faces and sexy muggings, sitting on the lap of one’s soon-to-be-ex.
The wind ripples light onto a flock of birds, white over the junked enamel of the pond.
An unfiltered, followed by a menthol, followed by cold frost and stung remembrance.
Branches whip the form of love, moving behind her.
For a moment everything is out of symmetry and lovely beyond despair, and the lights, both blue and red pssst someone comes the lights, both blue and red, treating her with indifference, and from one strobe to the next she was flame or icicle, her hips a cheerleader’s bump and grind gone truant, although a talent scout might spy some sentimental remnants of ballet lessons in what her hands were doing. A slide guitar solo howls from the speakers and she spins through the goalposts, winding up naked before the dumbstruck love-deprived specters stooled round the bar at her feet, asking each other if she was the one who’d precioused that productive take-off of cathedrals, pitched upward for the benefit of the talented fence whose genius lay in the kingdom of miniaturized electronics (easy to disassemble, hard to identify). Clumsy coppers, beware. And when quite naked she began to drift to that lazy afternoon that turned to lazy evening in the park outside the cathedral they’d sworn they’d visit together but never had. Someone slips a brand new bill between her ankle strap and her skin and she bends her knees for a close-up and slits her eyes so as to list the contents of memory’s picnic basket. Bechamel and crackers and warm sweet tea, spread blanket and tongue’s heat. If she’d stayed on the phone much longer he’d have reminded her of her guilt. How could you, my souvenir was you and yours was me A pause while he lights a cigarette and says something into the laughing room beyond him. How could you, Marie?
II
The glass is heavy and gives up a low moan before erasing itself in immediate spiderweb and easing into shatter.
Sometimes, very quietly, it all comes back to her. She sees through those 35mm eyes of his. She watches her salvation, her discipleship, her deliverance into and then out of his hands.
Profiled beneath the baffle of the windblown curtains he was yelling at her:
-Transform! Transform!
The sweat coursing down her naked sides. His urgent commands making less sense than usual. She took turns worshipping both strange girls with her mouth. The folded bills look odd beside the telephone. He suspected they were faking and wouldn’t back off until he was convinced. He hinted at something a little different next time, but was too sly to say what.
Live each moment as though history had no meaning. As though a mannequin, an arsonist, an oracle had fallen asleep into the same deep dream. As a means of discovery each eruption of violence was driven through the same filter of ritual; the same sacrificial anticipation of what will be asked next.
What do you want – I want you.
What don’t you want – I don’t want not to want you.
On the night she was raped stars fell over the hotel. Lights patrolled the river, the waiting taxis burning at the perimeter of snowdrifts. A reflection pulsed in the carpet till someone overturned a chair and gravity became displaced.
Heads or tails the first one said. Looking directly at her but speaking sideways out of his mouth. The second one coughing but clear enough through the phlegm that she understood they’d need a third to hold her down. We’ll meet in the middle the first one laughed, ten steps away and unzipping.
In the parking garage afterwards she was a spectacle of off-white maul and fishnet bruises as she dabbed and staccatoed on a broken high-heel, bleeding lightly from both nostrils. A trio of shadowed toughs interrupted their hubcapping to consider a further violation.
And that’s how they met.
He walked up past a yellow pillar and stopped when she was about the same distance from them to him. He opened his jacket, let them have a good look-see. The butt, the curve, the hammer, the patient presence of the gun in his waistband and (did she notice or was she told?) the grip tight with black electrical tape, its shine deducted by simple use. He reminded them who owned these particular shadows and was magnanimous at their slow retreat. You can save face boys but better not put it in the bank. He extended his empty hands and she went to him.
He led her up the ramp and away from near repeat and smiled, angry throughout his lecture on know-it-all women who refused the safe haven of the lambkin stay-at-home. Scared witless, knocked pale in the nimbus of damsel in deep shit, she could only indicate her gratitude with a show of hyperventilation, hoping he wouldn’t tell anyone. Anyone who mattered. Anyone who might remember and go quiet and thoughtful. She still held to the illusion that she might someday see them again. The faces, the names, the shames and places she’d run away from to start with.
In the morning she signed the contract and vetoed nothing laid before her. He allowed her a month before letting anyone touch her. He himself waited for longer than that.
On the public terrace, looking down the coast, they stood watching for the newest neighborhood bullies to make a move, to show themselves. There were already two upstart bodies behind the planetarium. One mistake more and the latest kids would be numbers three and four. On the public terrace the smell of the sea was blotted in diesel and carnations.
He spat onto her dustwhite palms, making it seem like an imitation of Christ, pressed her thomasing fingers to the wound’s pout. It hardly felt like the staking of some formal claim, bait and switch skulking up her sleeve. She whispered a revised, a freshly-prefaced lie for Judas who came cupping his gift of salt to zen her with his vulture eye. He knew she was partial to Sartre, whom he parodied as a drooling creep, the scattershot leer of monocular perversity (Hey! I’m over here!). But in this line of work she’d quickly gotten used to the quiet ones with their x-ray vision.
You are undoubtedly your mother’s daughter. Oh, and where’s it say that? Right here he said, right here. Well that’s an awful thing to say. I quite agree, he said, and don’t say you weren’t warned and other things along a similar line, none of which seemed relevant to the occasion or her pain.
The nurse handed over the sealed envelope with a look of tempered disgust. The disinfected ones murmured at the end of the hall, knees buckling in the seasick light.
Your hand / give me your hand. She was afraid of the intimate voice which knew too much.
Mapped out by small vices, the terrain they’d come to regard as home was boobytrapped, ripe for infiltration by any silver-tongued uniform or suit with just that extra bit of inside evidence. One puff and the whole house might come down.
He insisted that she answer him, if only out of politeness, if only to prove to eavesdroppers who was alpha and who omega. He took to filming everything. He wanted to consume the moment and the memory, to lift her soul to his lips while keeping a running record of her surprise, her boredom, her desperation, of when she trembled and when she lay still.
In a hectic reordering of the senses he taught her the glass bead game. Encouraged her to frustrate his release, prolong his pleasure, annotate his pain. With two fists and a gold coin he was resolved to teach her the alphabet of crime, run her through the obstacle course of sin, drive her round the bend with bright fancies and dark threats. In flight from the angel of nuisance, silver-sandaled and quick in permanent scold, while the blanket of anonymous night lay covering the hot corrosive plains.
Her skull peeked through the ravaged face it now called home, rattling its erotic implications. The only thing she could point to as unique was the number on her file folder, crammed in with the others in the inter-war era filing cabinet. Not quite nothing but not much more than one of how many streetwise strays, let in for the feed and the context. She wanted to want more but waited, each time, as less undressed her with slow genius.
Her lips bruised under the impact as he blew into the foil. She cantered above him, groaned a succession of gutter clues. She was noisy, shouting in a seminal ellipse not influenced by language. His silence made her loud. Spinal silk built for battery, where he pulled the material tight, cutting off her breath, drawing her right up to the edge of his chair. The faint teeth of her backbone under his restless fingers. He turned her round, showed her the mirror on the other side of the room, laughing and whispering, urging her to back up till she found what she was looking for.
Betrayal, even at that late date, still seemed jellied with a sweetness she couldn’t imagine and didn’t want to. It was research, it was slumming, it was anything but what it proved to be.
She met her match in that Caligula of emotions. On the bridge that spanned the old school and the new. In his hands the backstabber’s kit he’d promised. She accepted it on credit, let me try it on for a day or two, see if it fits. Simple, really. Simple red thread of abortion, out of Celine’s address book. She’d read as much in the eyes of her benefactors. It wasn’t necessarily love that made them warn her. You’d do well to stand near the wall … the masonry falls at a tangent to the walkway below.
A yacht was taking aboard a quartet of swimsuited toothpicks. And the wind changes from north to south or left to right if she looks now through his eyes. She can’t bear to look over his shoulder while that light shines in their eyes.
The breeze was gentle right to left and her hair kept blowing sideways into his face. But he wasn’t bothered. How could he be? When she looked up the headlights found him and she could see them trying to steal his soul. She rocked herself in the arms of misplaced mercy. She knew they’d pay dearly for that attempt.
The sea changed from teal to fake plastic blue and she felt oh so happy forever, however unreal.
He required the thing that solitude withholds. So she asked whether he had had a pleasant image of her, writhing to their comfortable thrusts, their hands upon her waist to guide themselves in.
I wouldn’t call it pleasant exactly and her game was suddenly transparent.
She’d always behaved as though it were a pre-ordained entrance. As though of everyone who’d crowded onto the elevator at lobby-level it was only natural that it should have been him. Looking at him then, it suddenly occurred to her.
Vaseline wormed along the aureole’s edges for swift and painless pasties-removal. What loose cobblestone? What madeleine? What hawthorn? All around her were suits and nothing resembling surrender. They might be debating simple business. Honest to god strategies and campaigns and profit and loss but she was suddenly frightened, imagining an overspill of possibilities, with none of them wishing her well. All of them sweetly separating flesh from bone.
She started the first page of an accusatory milestone love-letter: You use words inexactly / which makes it difficult to follow you and you’re so impatient / until you look round and realizes it’s me / and hurt my feelings with a kiss / and a pat on the bottom as if to say / it’s not your brains I’m in love with / I’m surprised your voice doesn’t get slower and louder to make sure I follow / and anyway
She was distracted by something flying past the bedroom window.
Swift starling in swift flight.
She found what she was looking for, the narrow spaces where her mind could roam, not precisely free but far far away and beyond the practice of her dark art, milking out passion on command.
I’ll have another drink was pretty much her epitaph. Yes, epitaph, not motto. Another drink and bring one also for the dwarves the priests the masturbating angels. Her calendar book looked like a record of trench warfare: across the waste fields into strange embraces. Boy girl boy girl boy boy girl girl.
He was fond of showing her the pictures simply to watch her shove them aside saying I don’t remember and anyway it was a long time ago.
But no it wasn’t. It seems like only yesterday.
He answered every element with illustration. The difference between clip-joint and chop-shop. The difference between a quick one and a ride around the block. The difference between overlap and undertow.
Stalled in the tunnel something rattles against the glass of the windshield. He slides the gloves on before getting out of the car to check the damage and she feels time slipping away. He is turning her into his accomplice as surely as he has turned her into all those earlier girls. Each step bringing her closer to the transfiguring role. Till at some point she will simply cease to cast a shadow. What she does next is forbidden. And, as with the commission of all things forbidden, the door that closes is also the door which opens. Choosing life, choosing danger, choosing freedom. For otherwise she will perish of permitted things. She gets out of the car. She gets out of the car and runs.
III
From nave to choir quickly moving down to up and pausing at the transept to look first left-altar-dexter then right-crucifix-sinister then down to the pleats of my skirt woolen if I remember or not if I’ve forgotten and my shoes neatly through bled white and the dull unpolished stone beneath worn into a round depression by the pause upon pause of year upon year of guided groups of tourists and pilgrims and there looking up again and into the showy curve of the shadowy apse the Madonna’s crown visible opaque and gold like the prickles on an animal’s alert back foregrounded on the choir screen and not one thought of you all day and into evening Marie and something like doubt or only nerves where he came along the railing not quite to the center the fingertips of his right hand passing over and upon the cushioned metal or was it wood to ask me in a normal volume which surprised me though there were none so close in the cathedral that might overhear or understand or even take interest murmuring away off there and there and a smaller bunch still slowly welling round the entrance dimly yellowed in dim electric glow and he asked me if I was the young lady who was to assist at that evening’s seesaw and we introduced ourselves and he added something smiling about my age and our earlier conversation on the telephone and he led the way and I followed up the spiral coiled steps rising narrow through the fleche to where we rang out the bells facing one another and seeming to tread the air lifted on the sound of each huge bell the individual gongs crashing and smoothing into a continuous drone though down below and in the streets and rooms and countryside all around the melody with its highs and fallings and drops and steady rising would have been clear and pure in a way that the thunder in that cold space could never be he was looking smiling over my shoulder out over the western side with its invisible horizon and I open-mouthed with the almost frightening weight of concussion beating on the soles of my feet and coming to a swell in my diaphragm looking over his shoulder and the thunder of bronze was what a storm might feel if one was an ocean and you could have screamed and made no ripple but in the intervals at the end when one bell’s collision had faded and the next had not yet sounded then each whisper was a shout and we looked at each other laughing and unafraid like warriors off to a battle we were certain was victory and over his shoulder the night through the opening in the stone and I looked over the eastern spread of the Aquitanian basin and it was as if God had ejaculated and spilled a stream of stars across the sky and then I sang my name Marie as many times as I wanted till I lost track of number and seesawed more slowly having sung myself hoarse round marie marie marie and whether he heard or was afraid or neither he put up a good front gentling his end under me easing us to the slower rhythm with the eventual space waiting open where it would be silence and sleep and something like reward at long last earned