In unison, the majestic opening of ‘Le Tombeau De Couperin’.
Mary let the reel run, caressing the highlights, the soft sweet roll call of nostalgia and pornography.
The hippies were hypocrites, the politicals were prudes, the rich guys were straight out weird, and the straights were weirded out by her lack of interest in their cat-and-mouse games, not to mention the vibe she sent that let them know she knew more than they could ever guess at. For a spell she kept running into poets, of all things, but they turned out to be either incurably limp or sickos, and if given the choice between fey gossip and fucking they’d choose the former every time. Artists were okay but their vanity made her own look like modesty envirtued, besides which, they were a constant hustle-bustle as they rearranged the mirrors for a better angle, or rearranged her body to accommodate the light meters on their cameras, in snapshot sessions in which she found she wound up distant co-star. As for the pool of fellow musicians, there was peril indeed, the cock-and-cunt equation as riddled as Apache-Cheyenne, Montague-Capulet, iconized in the self-serving warning of ‘don’t fuck the chick’. And from the touring musicians, with their vinyl and their dollars, floating in and out of town with no rules to follow but their own, Mary quickly received a lesson in distinction.
At the after-show party during the Golden Horde’s next tour, in support of a fan-pleasing, critic-drubbed fourth album, Mary gave up waiting for Lester to disengage from the newest crop of jailbait, and got drunk with Art the bassist and Sly the guitarist, who she’d thought didn’t like her but who was flirty and funny, hiking her skirt up over her knees and making a four-fingered run up her thighs while she grinned and half-heartedly slapped his hand away. She asked after Lindsey and was told that she was back in California having somebody’s baby. Bobby the drummer came over after a while and the room got stuffier and louder, till someone said let’s move this party to the hall, meaning the hall between the two suites reserved for the band. If anything the hall was even more crowded, and wild, and crazy, a pulse of reckless desperation and adrenaline like a cut artery, with strange young girls lining up to show their tits like it was audition time.
There was a long low table, a linen cabinet or something, covered with artificial greenery, very quaint and chintzy and sort of sweet. As a joke Art swept it free, tossing plastic foliage here and there and Mary felt a little sad, thinking of the maids the next morning, or the hurt feelings of whoever had put the decorations there to begin with.
-Drink up, Art said, tilting her head back and splashing her face and throat with champagne.
-Stop trying to get her drunk, man, Sly laughed, his arm around her waist.
-he just wants to ball you, you know that, right?
-Yeah? Mary asked.
-Sure I do, Art said, and so does Sly, can’t you tell?
-Yeah? Mary asked.
And then Bobby showed back up with what looked like a king-size atomizer, with a little tube and a gauze pad attached to the end of it.
-What’s that? she asked, in between traded tongue-thrusts from Art and Sly.
-I’ll show ya, Bobby said and clamped the gauze over her nose and mouth, and it was like a bomb blast of ether or pure oxygen, and the room went white and the noise went thin and next thing she knew…
Next thing she knew she was leaning against a wall in a bathroom, nude and leaking, her clothes artfully scattered across the floor. Sly was gently slapping her face and she could see Art and Bobby behind him, buttoning up their jeans.
-There you are! Sly said, and to the others, she’s gonna be all right.
Sly then offered her a spot on their bus for the next few dates and told her she was a trouper and they’d had a blast trashing her, and that they all agreed she was the best triple-hole they’d ever had, which she took to be a compliment.
-Mary, I’d like a word with you, and Mike Mullen, the stout, beret-wearing Dubliner who managed the band, shouldered his way in, past the departing Horde.
-Huh, Mary said, words like pebbles in her mouth.
-Get some clothes on, lass, Mike said, putting the lid down on the toilet, taking a seat and turning his face to the wall, old world gentleman.
-Yer workin’ the shadowlands, girl, and now’s the time for decidin’. I’d recommend you do it while it’s still yours to decide.
-Decide what? Mary asked, flossing over the sink, preparatory to a good rinse from a tumbler of what was it? vodka, and, spritz, taste of cum still in her mouth.
-Are you a guitar-player or a groupie? Dublin Mike asked.
-I’m not a groupie.
-No? I think you’d have to agree that any body what witnessed yer wee playtime with the lads might hazard a different opinion.
-I don’t do that with every band that comes through town.
-Ah, so y’re a specialist then, love? Spread yer legs, yer cheeks, and open wide just fer the Horde, is it?
-It just happened. It wasn’t planned.
Mike pushed his beret back on his head and laughed softly.
-My dear, I’m not sayin’ this to hurt you. I’ve got a niece about yer age and I’d snap the neck of any yob who did to her what my boys just did to you.
-Even if she didn’t mind?
-Oh now, especially if she didn’t mind. This is no life fer a young woman, surely you can see that. I’m no fool, groupies are like the poor, they’ll always be with us but I’m thinkin’ yer in over yer pretty head. Look at yourself in the mirror. Go ahead. Do it for me, love.
And she did.
-Now what? she asked.
-Respect that, he said, fierce finger pointing at her reflection.
-keep on playin’ yer guitar like you did the other night and you’ll be the one who fucks, which is a sight better than bein’ the one who gets fucked.
-Be the star, not the starfucker?
-Couldn’t have said it better meself. Now go back to the party if you aren’t goin’ home. Have yerself a good time. But promise me. No more fuckin’, or I’ll have to turn you over me knee.
And so Mary declined the offer to travel with the band and couldn’t help but shake her head when, at the next 722s rehearsal, the singer said ‘you got lucky’ and pointed to a story on page 12 of that month’s Rolling Stone.
‘Boogie rockers The Golden Horde busted in Raleigh-Durham, following a concert. The band is touring in promotion of their latest album ‘All The Sad Girls’. Following a tip from an angry parent, members of the Raleigh Police Department searched the band’s touring bus and found what they have called a ‘sizeable amount of various controlled substances’, along with two females who appeared to be traveling with the band and who were not related to band members or their associates. Initial unconfirmed reports cited the girls as aged 14 and 15.’
But still Mary flailed, buffeted on the desires of others, with bathroom stall one-offs, back-of-the-van orgies, and, for comic relief, an hour of maternal comfort (channeling both Lindsey and Dublin Mike) for the elevator boy at Locksley Hall who had cried when she told him what he was doing wrong. From the shadowlands she skirted the borderlands of sex-as-barter, sucking off the cashier at College Park auditorium for a pair of tickets to Led Zeppelin, followed a few weeks later by another visit to the packing crates at the loading dock, for a repeat blowjob which netted her even better seats to Procol Harum. She told herself these were special circumstances, trying hard to imagine what respect might feel like.
She listened and nodded and promised to be good on each visit to the VD clinic, but the convent was not yet a goal she could believe in, and it was all down to faith after all, a quest with no priceless talisman dangling beyond the equal sign. She felt safest among the junkies, the marginals, and the self-destructives, and ten hours versus twenty minutes meant less each time a gleaming needle dripped seaspray silver, each time she pulled her jeans down and lay on her stomach.
Mary go round the roses, as into and out of her orbit swam the other girls like her, a winking, whispery eight-pack that first year alone.
Name them, please.
Pisser Sexton, squall-mouthed singer with the Flying Vs, up from Norfolk on a flood of horse and jism; Wakefield Towton, white on pearly white, who every guy yearned to soil, who gave Mary a pair of gloves once worn by Edie Sedgewick; Astrid Thunder, who goaded her into a semi-public poolside striptease to get back at her asshole boyfriend and who came back for more on the sly; shave-headed Alinet, who everyone called Heidi, who taught her how to ride a Vespacicleta, sitting tight-thighed behind her, crotch to ass, hands a slow scrabble down Mary’s front as they took in the District’s sites; Daphne ‘Dimples’ Prescott, who liked her ass licked and who reciprocated with a long afternoon at the movies, bestowing a rosary of little orgasms, which rose like the bubble-string of a goldfish up through Mary’s belly, diaphragm, chest, and throat, issuing in lip-bit moans as she squinted at the distracting screen, where David battled Yul and Gina screeched at a befuddled Dean; an all-girl threeway with Beverly Bookend and Mona Breed, sharing swallows from a bottle of red wine on Virginia Beach, cleansing their palates of each other between resumptions; and fresh from Ireland, Dublin Mike’s other niece, Aphrodite Murphy, Mary’s pale, black-haired doppelganger, visiting the You Ess of Ay while her barrister mom sorted out the Horde from their burgeoning rap sheet, who mixed tobacco with her marijuana, gobbled mollies by the fistful, lifted albums out of their bins at Giant Music and stage-whispered to Mary that she’d banged everybody in the band, who poked her head up from between Mary’s knees to recommend Germaine Greer as excellent bedtime reading.
-Let’s see, the Sunnyvale therapist had said, tapping her pad, taking off her glasses, sucking the end of her pencil, using a summing-up tone of voice, presumably fed up with Mary’s remorseless truthfulness as much as with the lies and evasions.
-we’ve discussed the things you think you get out of sex. There’s excitement, even danger, you’ve mentioned feeling a sense of freedom, and fun, I think you said? Is there anything I missed?
-Education? Mary smiled.
-Ah, yes. You feel as though having so many different sexual partners has … what has it done exactly, Mary?
-Improved my skills. It’s really not complicated.
-And these skills are important to you because ….
-Not everything has to have a reason, does it?
-Maybe not. Maybe you’re right. Do you think I’m a square, Mary?
-How do I know?
-Yes, okay, well. Hmmm, what about … tenderness?
-What about it?
-Is there any of that in your sex life?
Well. She hadn’t seen that one coming. Like a speck of blue diamond flying out from some desert waste halfway around the world to pierce her eye and burrow to a lodging in her brain. She was able to bite back her first reaction just in time, which, had she not, would have been the quiet simplicity of a fuck you, doctor.
-I’ve only been forced a few times, if that’s what you mean.
-‘Only a few times’. It seems to me once would be enough?
Mary paused, stared at the sdc stencil on her cuffs, extended her fingers and saw no tremble.
-It seems to me that maybe we have different expectations …
-But isn’t everyone …
-Everyone isn’t … sorry to interrupt … everyone isn’t looking for the same thing … if that’s what you were going to say …
And the therapist smiled and not for the first time Mary noticed that she was one of those women who was pretty despite herself. As though a slight scatter of dandruff were a charm against licentious misreadings.
But that matter of tenderness, the question it came tubed inside of, powder in a bullet, rankled when she thought of it. It carried with it the scent of romance, what Lindsey had dismissed as knight on a white horse expectations. Or was that even true? In any case, when authority was involved, telling the truth was the same as cheerfully agreeing to build one’s own cage. Mary did her brief time and lied as needed, exiting into her fifteenth year with her gifts intact, locked-up fieldwork polishing the sparkle on her skills as thief and brawler, with an honor’s ribbon in survival, to wit the eating of much anonymous white trash pussy.
Cecilia stirred, lifted his whiskers, lifting also his green, unsentimental eyes towards his dreaming mistress. Life with Mary was all right, he observed. She was a decent pet, all things considered.
Mary dreamed of Fontainebleu.
A bewigged courtier galloped noiselessly down a corridor of birch trees. Ladies-in-waiting, some sporting lavender mohawks and fish-scale garters, moved across the lawns. Drugged, ethereal, bare-breasted. (A little historical telescopage in this, but then dreams possess an outrageous sense of chronology: Xerxes in sunglasses, La Malinche dreaming above a fax machine). A magistrate from the Lorraine district slouches towards the drowsy women, his erect penis protruding from his suet-colored breeches like a monstrous hormonal sunflower. Laughing, the women scatter in all directions, turning suddenly into swallows to vault the hedgerows, flying towards the gauzy white building looming through the sunlight like an obscene dessert. It is the same building that Mary often sees in her dreams, hovering discretely in the background, emitting a sort of psychic squalor that’s quite hard to resist. She’s never been inside the place and isn’t all that sure she’d like to be, afraid that once through the glistening grillwork doors she’d find herself moving forever through the fragments of disjointed rooms, unable to speak to the only one who can save her – the little man with the sketchpad who waits forever at the base of the ruined pedestal, the far end of the garden which even the cats avoid.
Cecilia saves her this time though. He’s hungry, wants to go outside, wants her to find this one particular flea behind his left ear that’s giving him nightmares. Cecilia doesn’t fare very well in his dreamworld and consequently prefers the world of hard facts. When Mary’s fingernails come probing now to ambush his tormentor he almost smiles, waiting for the lovely fatal click of instant death.