I accepted this hospitality not because I wanted or needed it but because he offered. The kindness was like a high-denomination poker chip: valueless as a thing but representing something of significance.
“I’m so sorry about Theon,” he said after we were seated and looking out.
It was early afternoon. The sun was high and hot.
“He went out with a beautiful girl on top of him,” I replied.
“He loved you though.”
“Yeah. I guess he did.”
“It’s hard being an old porn star, Deb,” Kip said. “I mean, it’s harder on women but guys feel it too. There’s no retirement plan and unless they can use a camera there’s no work to speak of.”
“It’s quiet around here,” I said, because there was no reply to Kip’s pronouncement.
“Not rentin’ out too much. I took in Jolie ’cause Theon asked personally. Place is paid for and I got my government check for the bills.”
Kip gazed back at the vacant area inside the horseshoe. It was a brick playground turned patio, with grasses and weeds growing up through the cracks. Looking at that space I remembered seeing Kip gazing down from his second-floor window when I was taking one man’s hard-on down my throat while his German friend was fucking my ass.
“I was chokin’ at one end and trying to relax at the other,” I told Theon that night.
He told me that he’d been in the exact same situation once when a gambler, Coco Manetti, made him do a gay film to pay off a bad debt.
I remembered feeling sorry for Theon.
And now he was dead.
“It’s good that you quittin’ the business,” Kip said. “That’s no kind of life for you.”
“No kind of life for anyone.”
“But you’re so smart, Deb,” he argued. “A lotta these people in the life couldn’t be anything else. At least they get paid for bein’ young and flexible. But you read books... you talk like you know somethin’.
“I remember when I first met you, when you were just a kid. You talked like you were straight outta the hood, but now you talk like some kinda coed or somethin’.”
Theon had paid for my etiquette lessons.
“How do you know I read?” I asked. I never talked about books to anyone except my therapist and that one arrogant literature professor.
“Theon told me. I asked him did he get jealous with you havin’ sex with all those young men and he said that it was only the books made him turn green. He said that he always felt like he was about to lose you when you were lookin’ in a book.”
The window of Jolie’s room looked down the cliff and over the Pacific. It was the kind of place that only wealth or beauty could afford. My family and I had lived in a small cottage. There was no privacy, much less solace, and the only view was of the street and smoggy city sky. What little green we had was painted on the concrete of our front yard. But I was never bothered by any of that. I adored my brothers, took care of my mother, and my father was a dream come true. He read me fairy tales and showed me how to count money when he was still comfortable with me sitting on his lap.
I was remembering the scent of Aldo Peel as I sat on Jolie’s last bed. Aftershave and deodorant, tobacco smoke and whiskey — the feeling of my father could still steal up on me and transform, for an instant, wherever I was into the home I abandoned.
There was a small stack of magazines under the bed. Style and fashion publications that showed off beautiful women with handsome men, along with the chic clothes and gorgeous architecture.
Myrtle May had read these glossy magazines closely and voraciously; I could tell this by the wrinkled pages and sentences that had been underlined in pink ink throughout.
Beauty, one such underlined passage read, is a thing that rises out from the inside of a person. A man will be attracted by form and style but this inner beauty is what he lives for.
Your body is the bank, another sentence said, but the wealth is your spirit.
There were many such lines in the beauty magazines. This surprised me. I read the same publications and couldn’t remember having come across such insightful comments.
She had cigarettes and a joint in her desk drawer, quaaludes and a tiny bag of cocaine in a small lacquered box on the bureau. Her childish jewelry was either silver or gold plated. Her clothes were jumbled in a box on the floor.
There was a violet diary with a stylized red heart and yellow flower stenciled across the cover. There was a small latch that she had locked. The key was probably with the police, or maybe her parents had it now.
I had just pulled out of Kip’s driveway when I decided to drive off the road and crash my car down the cliff and into the Pacific. It wasn’t a difficult choice; nor was it a judgment or verdict. It was like deciding to listen to jazz after five years of rock and roll, like changing the radio station after renting a car in a different city.
I was just going to drive off the road. There was no trepidation or physical awareness; I wasn’t afraid of the pain.
Up ahead of me, just beyond the turn there was a clear view of the sky. That’s where I was going to fly off. When I got there and made the turn, I found myself on a little area designed for motorists to pull off when they got lost. The cliff was guarded by trees and three big boulders.
There was no egress (a word I once read in a nineteenth-century romance). I had to stop.
And when I stopped the entirety of the days since that orgasm, since those senseless deaths, since I’d lost everything I’d worked for for fifteen years and more — it all crashed in from behind, like a bulldozer trying to push me over the edge.
I had never cried like that before. Even the heartrending loss of my father didn’t call up such grief. I screamed so hard that I couldn’t breathe, cried so violently that it felt like my insides would come out of my eyes, nose, and mouth.
I flung the car door open and threw myself from the seat. Falling to the ground I willed myself to stand, then lurched stiff-legged to the gap between the boulders and looked down.
I remembered every sensation, sound, and smell as if I were experiencing them at this very moment. There was the chattering birdsong from the bushes below, but Death filled the horizon. I remembered smashing my favorite doll after my mother came home from the emergency room and told me that my father was dead. It was a fancy, old-fashioned black doll that he had given me.
“Niggahs done kill him,” Mom’s friend Galia said.
I destroyed that doll, hoping the sacrifice would somehow reverse time and bring my father back. I was a mad scientist and an angry child. But now, overlooking the ocean, all I could do was cry.
I sat down between the guard stones and wept. The misery in me was hot wax over an unrelenting flame. I was being consumed by my own fires. My soul, I felt, was dripping down that mountainside between the bushes and birds, ants and hidden animals. I was a husk then, an empty vessel that had been filled with poisons.
When it was over I was both drained and clear. I felt like the inner-city sky after the rains had washed away the pollution. I stood up, experiencing a sensation of weightlessness. The sorrow was gone from me but I had no reason to smile. The spiritual infection that drained out of me on that little turnabout had been inside for years. Cutting off my hair had been like pressing the wound but not treating it. Days of sleep only served to deaden but not destroy the pain.
I’d left Kip’s residence at two-oh-two that afternoon. It was two twenty-eight when I got back in the car.
While driving down the canyon road I thought of my mother hanging clothes to dry on the line in the backyard. She’d usually have a radio playing old disco songs while she danced with the sheets and T-shirts, bras and socks.