“Excuse me,” a woman said.
I looked up from my half-eaten meal to see a young white woman with bleached hair and a silver stud on the left side of her nose.
“Yes?”
“We’re getting ready to close up.”
“Oh.”
I sat in the driver’s seat of my car for more than an hour, afraid to turn the ignition. The scenario of the night my father kissed me kept going through my mind. I understood now, twenty years later, that X-rated moviemaking had become my cage. When Coco said that I had to work for him I realized that either I would shoot myself or him at that table. I would not, like my father would not, go back into that cold cell.
This conviction finally overcame my fears and I drove home at a normal speed, managing to keep my wheels within the lines but wanting to crash into every car and pedestrian I passed.
Anna Karin’s office was on Wilshire not far from La Cienega. It was on the third floor of a boxy brown office building. I was at her gray door by five fifty the next morning, Wednesday. I knocked and, after a brief wait, she pulled the door open and smiled. She was wearing a coral-colored dress with a string of light green stone beads around her neck.
The office was as I remembered: rented furniture that was designed for function and not beauty. I’d shot many a sex scene in offices like this one, anonymous rooms that some secretary leased on the sly.
“I like your outfit,” Anna said of the tan-and-blue dress I wore.
“Thanks.”
I made it to the brown leather chair that was there for her patients. She sat on a maple chair that had a checkered cushion as its seat. The window behind her looked out on Wilshire and there were paintings of forest scenes on three walls.
“You said that your first session was at eight, didn’t you?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Then why did you want me here at six?”
“Because I have the feeling we might go over and I didn’t want to rush you or have my next patient wait.”
“How are we going to do this?” I asked.
“Nothing has changed,” she said, smiling. “We’ll talk and try to see where you are.”
“I haven’t shaved my cunt or fucked anybody in over a week.”
“Hiatus?”
“I quit.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“I have absolutely no idea.”
I could see by Anna’s face that she wanted to smile; maybe there was even a laugh dammed up behind her faltering professionalism.
“I think we should start from the beginning,” she suggested.
I went at the story like a novice craftsman practicing laying brick. I’d gone over it a hundred times in my head and told parts of the tale to this one and that. When I’d come to the end I’d knock it over, a child with her blocks, and then build again — each time constructing a slightly different explanation.
The events were familiar in my mouth. The only difference with Anna Karin is that I told her everything.
I included the gun and my intentions to kill or die, the fact that I knew Jolie, and even what happened between Coco and Jude.
“Did you ever want to shoot Cornell?” she asked at one point.
“No... never.”
“Are you still considering suicide?” she asked at another juncture.
“Only when I think that I might have to go back to making films.”
I’d been regaling her for well over an hour when she said, “Tell me more about this orgasm you had on the set.”
“It was nothing special... I mean it didn’t have to do with Theon or Jolie — I didn’t even know that they were dead yet. It’s just that... I don’t know...”
“Do you often have orgasms on the set?”
“I’m too busy pretending to have any real feeling.”
“Then why did you have one that day?”
The question was like the sounding of a huge Buddhist gong. It vibrated in the air around me. Instead of ideas the experience of that room came back to me. I could hear Carmen Alia’s camera clicking and buzzing and the footsteps of the cameramen as they shifted with the gyrations Myron was putting me through. I heard Linda Love’s voice but not the words, and most of all, I felt the hot lights on my skin. It was music and it was dance and I was a dead woman being flung about in the pretense of celebration and abandon, and somewhere in the rising and falling, the lifting and heartlessness... I came alive.
“It just all came together,” I said. “The sounds and light, the pain inside me. It just all came together and I was coming harder than I ever had — ever.”
“Did you enjoy it?”
“No, not at all. As a matter of fact I wanted to get away from it. It was like I passed out on purpose just to stop feeling.”
For a while there we were both quiet. I appreciated the silence and wondered why I had that sexual awakening as Theon was dying. What sense did it make? It was as if, in some cockeyed way, we traded places.
“What will you do?” Anna Karin asked me.
“I like reading books.”
“What will you do for work?”
“That’ll come,” I said. “I have to finish quitting before I can start working again.”
Anna smiled then.
“Can I go now?” I asked.
“See you tomorrow morning?”
“You bet.”
At nine o’clock I was at a park bench just outside the fenced-in La Brea Tar Pits, looking at the plaster statue of a great woolly mammoth stuck and being pulled down into the muck.
The red phone in the blue bag rang.
“Hello.”
“Hey, Aunt Deb,” Dr. Neelo Brown said, “I have someone here who wants to talk to you.”
The phone made some transfer noises and then a masculine voice said, “Hello?”
“Yes?” I said. “Who’s this?”
“Willie Norman, Mrs. Pinkney.”
“How are you feeling?”
“I just wanted to thank you, ma’am, for putting me together with Dr. Brown and making it so that I could get my spells under control.”
“Neelo’s been treating you?”
“Uh-huh. Yeah. I never went to no doctor before ’cause I didn’t think they could do anything, but Dr. Brown gave me these pills and this light I could look at and now I’m almost perfect. So I just wanted to tell you thanks from me and, and, and Tai too. And I wanted to tell you that you don’t have to worry about my car. I can fix that myself.”
“Thank you, Willie. Thanks a lot.”
“And I wanted to say that I’m sorry about your husband. I’m sorry he died.”
Anna Karin asked me if I wanted to kill myself and I told her that the idea entered my mind only when I thought about making films again. But I realized later that that wasn’t the case, I wrote in my pilfered journaclass="underline" The truth is I’m thinking about it all the time. It’s like a door open at the side of the house and this cool breeze is blowing in over the back of my neck. The breeze is Death whispering and that door is open for me to go through anytime I want. And I want to go through. I want the confusion to stop — no, not only confusion but pain too.
In Anna’s office I realized that fucking Myron Palmer somehow jump-started me back to life like a woman finding herself suddenly awake after years and years in a coma. It hurts to feel all these things and to know that all I have to do is shut them off again and the pain will stop.
Just breathing hurts me. Feeling love for my son hurts me. The idea of the sun shining cuts at me with red-hot blades...