“Do you recognize me?” I asked.
“You mean from TV or something?”
“Answer the question.”
He scrunched up his face and concentrated. After thirty seconds or so he shook his head no. He’d have to be a consummate liar to have succeeded with an act like that.
“My husband just died,” I said, lifting the words up like a shield.
“I’m not trying to do anything,” he said. “I mean, I was, I am attracted to you, but I wouldn’t have even said anything in the restaurant if you didn’t want me to. And I came here because you asked me.”
“Kind of like a puppet.” I immediately regretted these words. I had been playing the hardhearted seductress for so long that the role was both my first and last resort.
Rash moved his head from side to side, genuflected in the chair as if he meant to rise and walk away, but then sat back.
“You just looked so calm,” he said at last. “Sitting there reading your book, looking up now and then with this little smile you got. I don’t know... I guess I wanted to feel like that.”
“Like what exactly?”
“Like I wasn’t all the time waiting for something else to happen. Like I was just sitting in a chair completely comfortable with myself.”
“You were,” I said.
“No,” Rash Vineland said.
He looked me directly in the eye. That’s what I was waiting for: for a man who had not seen or heard about my genitals who was talking straight in my face.
“Get up,” I commanded. “Come with me.”
I took him by the hand and led him back into the polar bear room. I sat him on the large sofa facing a fake fireplace and picked up a nacre-plated remote-control unit.
“My full stage name is Debbie Dare,” I said. “Have you ever heard that name?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Is Annabella pretty?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Very pretty?”
He nodded.
“Why did you start talking to me at the restaurant?” I asked him. “I mean, I wasn’t wearing any makeup and my dress looked like it came from a Salvation Army box.”
“I already told you. It was the way you looked out,” he said, “like you were really seeing something. When I saw you I wanted to know what you were thinking, who you were.”
“And what about now?”
He stared for a moment and then nodded.
I smiled.
“It’s not going to be easy getting to know me, Rash Vineland,” I said. “Annabella won’t like you being my friend and the friendship will be hard on you.”
He took in a deep breath through his nose and then exhaled through his mouth.
“The one thing that’ll be easy for you to do is walk away,” I continued. “You can walk out of my life right now or next week and I won’t complain.”
“Why do you sound so hard?”
“That’s the way I am. Can you accept that?”
“I’m here right now.”
“Fine. Now... before you can know who I am and what kind of friend I’ll be, you have to know who I was.”
I pressed a button on the fancy remote and the oil painting of white horses prancing in a pale golden field slid away, revealing a seventy-two-inch plasma screen. I hit a few more keys and a DVD hidden in another part of the house began to play.
The title of the Crux Brothers film Debbie Does Death appeared and Rash’s mouth fell open.
“Have you seen it?” I asked.
He shook his head.
The film began with tiny clips of me getting fucked in a dozen different ways. My heart was racing with panic but I made myself stay there and watch.
The story started with a carjacking. Debbie and her husband park at a rest stop because they’re so much in love that they can’t wait to get home to have sex. Hooded men attack them, kill the nameless husband, and drag me off to a sinister mansion, where they and a dozen more men with hoods perform extraordinary sexual acts on me. At one point four different men were inside me, getting off on one another as much as with me. I remembered somewhere in the middle of the film how Joey Crux had brought three ounces of cocaine to the set so that my inhibitions were all but nonexistent.
Maybe half an hour into the film, just before I was to walk into a door that had the name “Mr. Death” stenciled on it, I pressed the off button and the plasma screen went black.
This didn’t stop Rash from staring though. He was looking at the blank screen with the same intensity that he watched the flabby, ass-slapping story.
“Is your dick hard, Rash?”
“Very.”
“I’m not that woman anymore.”
“I can see that. Why’d you want me to see it if you don’t do that anymore?”
“Because I want to know if I can make a transition from what you just saw to the world you live in without lying and hiding my past.”
“Are you embarrassed about making that movie?”
“I’ve been in hundreds of films like that and I’m not ashamed of anything I’ve done or anybody I’ve known.”
“So are you quitting because your husband died? Was he the one who made you do... that?”
“No, not really,” I said. “He opened the door but I went through under my own steam. I mean, there are reasons I became what you saw up there but I didn’t have to do it. I wasn’t a sex slave or anything like that.
“I don’t even know if I’m quitting because Theon died. Something happened to me before I ever got home that day. I felt what it was like to die and be reborn—”
“Like a Christian?”
“No. Not religion. It was something else, something inside me that I didn’t want to see but suddenly I couldn’t look away. Not even that. It was me all of a sudden realizing what it was that I saw, like for the last sixteen years I had been seeing the world one way and then, for no reason whatever, things looked different.”
“I think it was good that you showed me that, that film,” Rash Vineland said.
“Why?”
“Because if you just told me I wouldn’t have understood. I mean, I would have thought I did, but really I had to see it with you sitting there to know what was and what wasn’t.”
We sat there next to each other in the bright white room, lost in our own thoughts about reality and truth. The flesh around Rash’s eyes crinkled with the attempt to understand but I was dead set on not kissing him — or any other man.
“Do you want to spend the night?” I asked him.
Again he hesitated. This time I smiled.
“We’re not going to have sex,” I assured him. “And it’s not because you have a girlfriend. I just want to have some friendship from someone who doesn’t fuck or fight for a living.”
“Do you, um, usually sleep with your friends?”
“Tonight I am.”
After showing my nervous new friend to the bedroom I went to the bathroom, where Theon died, took off my dress, and put on a cream-colored slip. Rash had stripped down to his boxers while I was gone. I could see the erection straining against the fabric.
“Across the hall is a guest bedroom,” I said. “If you have to come you can go over there and do what you need to do. We have a cleaning lady, at least for a little while longer, so you don’t have to straighten up.”
“Maybe, maybe I’ll go over there for a little while right now,” he said.
After he was gone I turned off all the lights except for the reading lamp. I went to Theon’s night table and rummaged around until I located the one book he had always intended to read but never did, The Twelve Caesars, the ancient text about the private and public lives of some of the most powerful men in history.