Joe leaned his left shoulder against the door frame. “There’s nothing for her to tell.”
“OK.” I stood up. “Wait here. They’ll be here soon.” I looked at the half-packed suitcase and said, “Don’t tell me you thought she was gonna run off with you.”
Joe puffed out his cheeks.
“Look around. Look how you live. You saw how she lived.” I stepped up to his face. “She used you, just like she used me.”
Joe squinted at me. “What you mean, she used you?”
“She came over last night.”
Joe shook his head. “She went to her mama’s.”
“Come on, wise up. She fucked us both. Only you’re gonna take the hot squat.”
Joe balled his hands into fists.
I looked him hard in the eyes. “What’s the matter with you? You killed a fuckin’ white man. You’re history.”
He blinked.
“Forget her, man.”
I could see the wheels turning behind his eyes. He opened his mouth, shut it, then said, “He beat his wife.”
“I know.” That was the thing that tipped the scales, that brought me to Treme, instead of just going home. I hate wife-beaters. I lowered my voice. “You killed a white man. You’re in a world of shit, man.”
“How… how did you… know?”
How? It was a gut feeling. It was the way Brigid looked at him, the way he looked back. It was that look of intimacy. Joe was the obvious killer, so obvious it was obscene.
“It had to be you,” I told him, “because it wasn’t me.”
Joe blinked and I could see his eyes were wet.
“You willing to turn her in? You willing to tell the cops she was in on it?”
He looked at me and shook his head. “I’d never do that.”
“Then you better beat feet. Go to California. Change your name. But get out now.”
Joe looked hesitatingly at his suitcase.
“Forget her,” I said forcefully.
“Forget her?”
“Like a bad dream.”
I stepped past him. I knew if I was caught here, I’d be in a world of shit too.
Joe grabbed my arm, but let go as soon as I turned. He looked down at my feet said, “Why you helpin’ me?”
“Because I’m more like you than I’m like them.”
I’m not sure it registered, not completely.
“You’re not getting rid of me to keep her for yourself,” he said in a voice that told me he didn’t believe that.
“She’s done with both of us, man.”
I went out the way I came, my heart pounding in my chest as I jumped the fences. I slipped behind the wheel of the DeSoto and looked around before starting it. I took the long way home.
It’s night again. The French doors of my balcony are open, but there is no breeze. I’m on my fourth Scotch, or is it my fifth? I’m waiting for Capdeville and Spade. They’ll be here soon, asking about Joe Cairo, wondering where the fuck he went.
I’ll tell them I drove around and went to Cairo’s on a hunch. Figuring someone must have seen a white man jumping fences, I’ll tell them I tried to sneak up on Cairo, but he was gone.
They’ll do a lot of yelling, a lot of guessing, but won’t be able to pin anything on me. After all, I didn’t do it. I was too busy fucking the wife at the time of the murder. I close my eyes for a moment and the Scotch has me thinking that maybe, just maybe she’ll come. But I know better.
Rising from the sofa, I take my drink into the bedroom and look at the messed-up bed.
God, she was so fuckin’ beautiful it hurt.
I sit on the edge of my bed. It still smells like sex. I’m sure, if I look hard, I’ll find some of her pubic hair scattered in the sheets. That’s all I have left – the debris of sex, the memories, and the fuckin’ heartache.
Entertaining Mr Orton
Poppy Z. Brite
London, 1 August 1967
“Have you been reading my diary?”
Kenneth looks up from the baboon’s head he is pasting onto the madonna’s body. He is standing on the bed to reach the upper part of his collage, which covers most of the wall, and the top of his bald cranium nearly brushes the pink and yellow tiles of the flat’s low ceiling. They have lived together in this tiny space in Islington for eight years.
“No, I have not been reading your diary,” Kenneth lies.
“Why not?”
“Because it would drive me to suicide.”
“Right,” says Joe with an edge of impatience in his voice. He has heard this threat many times before, in one form or another, and Kenneth realizes dimly that his lover either doesn’t believe it or just doesn’t care. That doesn’t mean Kenneth can make himself stop saying it, though.
“But if you won’t read my diary and you won’t talk to me,” Joe continues, “what’s the point of remaining in this relationship? You’re always telling everyone how I make your life miserable. What keeps you hanging about?”
Kenneth wipes glue from his fingers onto his pants, then turns and sits heavily on the bed. He took a number of Valium earlier in the day, but something in Joe’s voice pulls his brain out of its pleasant half-numb fog. They can still listen to each other, and even talk seriously when they really try.
Of course, most of the serious talk these days is about writing. Writing Joe’s plays, to be precise. The very same brilliant and successful plays that have made Joe’s name synonymous with decadence, black wit, and tawdry glamour as far as London was concerned. If the talk isn’t about Joe’s plays, it is about what they should do with all the money Joe’s plays are making. Joe spends most of it on toys: clothes, Polaroid cameras, holidays in Morocco.
“What surprises me,” Joe continues, “is that you haven’t killed me. I think you don’t leave or top yourself because you can’t stand the thought of anyone else having me.”
“Rubbish. All sorts of people have you.”
“Ah! You have been reading my diary.”
Kenneth rises up suddenly in one of his outbursts. “When you come home reeking of cheap aftershave, I don’t need your diary to tell me where you’ve been!”
Joe waves this away. “I mean, of anyone else having me permanently. And I can’t conceive of it either, honestly. It’s as if we’ve become inextricable.”
Suspicion flares in Kenneth’s mind. “Why are you talking about me killing you? Are you setting me up for something?”
Joe throws back his head and brays laughter, a sound which usually lessens Kenneth’s tension but now induces a smouldering rage. “What did you have in mind? Me setting you up for murder and slipping back off to Tangier? My family gets your fat arse thrown in prison and you do your De Profundis bit again? Oh, Ken…” Tears are spilling out of Joe’s eyes now, tears of laughter, the kind he used to cry in bed after a joyous orgasm. Kenneth remembers how they tasted, salt and copper on his tongue like blood.
“I think I could kill you,” he says, but Joe doesn’t hear him.
Tangier, 25 May 1967
Five English queens stoned on hash and Valium and Moroccan boy-flesh, sipping red wine on a café terrace against a blood-orange sky. Two American tourists, an older married couple, sitting nearby eavesdropping on the conversation and making their disapproval evident. Joe Orton lets his voice rise gradually until he is not so much shouting as projecting, trained Shakespearian actor that he is.
“He took me right up the arse, and afterwards he thanked me for giving him such a good fucking. They’re a most polite people. We’ve got a leopard-skin rug in the flat and he wanted me to fuck him on that, only I’m afraid of the spunk. You see, it might adversely affect the spots of the leopard.”