“Oh, there are lots of reasons for that,” he said, eating caviar, and sucking on some of his remaining fingers. “First, I wanted to accept the punishment you had given me. I deserved it.” He picked up his glass of champagne and said, “Shall we drink to that?”
We clinked glasses through the bars of the cage, and drank.
He continued: “Second, I thought it would be a nice souvenir of you and from you, this absence of finger. An irreversible souvenir.”
We clinked our glasses to that one too.
“And third, and most importantly, it would remind me of the sacrifice I had made for you, the thought of which would cheer me up in moments of melancholy, making me feel better about myself.”
He extended his glass to get it clinked again. Instead, I threw my champagne in his face and stared at him impassively.
He blinked from the sting in his eyes. He clinked his glass against one of the bars of the cage, drank, and resignedly said, “Everyone is entitled to their own reasons for leaving a finger behind.”
“Did I escape?” I asked.
“No, of course not; you were released,” he answered, wiping his champagne eyes with his napkin. “I gave you a sword.”
“Why did you fight me, then, and resist my departure, and push me to the point cutting off your finger?”
“To give you the illusion of escape. I was afraid that if I released you in a straightforward manner and told you the truth, which was that we had achieved our goal and that you were now ready to conquer the acting world — I was afraid you would be more resistant to this destiny that I had so painstakingly planned for you and prepared you for. Whereas,” he stressed the word by holding up his plastic knife, “if you thought you had escaped, or even if you weren’t sure, you would then have a sense of control over your life and over your future, you would feel powerful, self-reliant, and self-satisfied at having gotten yourself ‘out of this jam.’ ” He made the quote marks in the air with his remaining fingers.
Chapter Thirteen
The days passed. Damon kept asking why I wasn’t releasing him, and I said it was because our little conversation wasn’t over yet. He got into the habit of frequently throwing things at me: his toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, the roll of toilet paper, the stopper from the bath, his shoes, his watch, his plastic cup to brush his teeth. I wanted to believe he was not really trying to hurt me, but I couldn’t, particularly when the heavy metal stopper hit me in the cheekbone, cutting me slightly. I then would shout at him some French words that a French friend of mine said to her cat when it was being bad: Méchant! (bad); Arrêtes! (stop); Fais gaffe! (watch out).
During many hours a day I would sit on my reclining chair outside his cage and watch him and talk to him, and, on the whole, get what I began to call “my Damon tan.” I enjoyed these sessions; they charged me up, like a battery. I kept a bucket of ice cubes by my chair, from which I practiced my aim when he annoyed me. My spirits were very high in those days. Damon was my human pet, my hobby, my adviser, my therapist. I asked his advice about all sorts of things. We’d have deep, serious conversations about issues, such as: me. Mostly me. For example, he’d tell me how I should deal with such and such a person. And then he would throw his razor at me with great force. When I asked him why he did that, he said it was because it was normal.
Every weekday we watched The Bold and the Beautiful, and Damon cried. I never understood why. The plot of the show concerned itself with the romantic problems of a family of successful fashion designers, and how one character, the long-lost legless brother, Stem, was making everyone’s life better.
“Why is that so sad?” I would ask impatiently. “Why are you crying? I think it’s kind of nice that Stem told Brooke that Ridge really loves her. It means they’ll get back together. So why are you crying, god dammit! Tell me!”
“Please be quiet,” he’d say, putting his hands over his ears.
As an experiment, I made him watch The Young and the Restless one day, which ran an hour before the other soap. And he didn’t cry. It was therefore something about The Bold and the Beautiful that devastated him. I scrutinized his face, while he watched, and tried to detect a pattern to his crying, but found none.
Occasionally, I would be interviewed at night on live TV, about the movie I was doing, and then go home. After throwing things at me when I entered, Damon would tell me he had seen my interview and found it great.
When the interview wasn’t live, we would watch it together, our feet propped up on things, just like friends, the only difference being the few bars between us. We would drink mint, peach, raspberry, and cocoa liqueurs, and eat unpasteurized cheeses, and chocolate truffles, and Damon would laugh at my jokes to the interviewer or scowl at a stupid question of theirs.
As the evening would wear on, Damon would try to control me from the cage, saying, “Okay, you’ve had enough truffles now. If you don’t moderate yourself, I’ll have to confiscate the box.”
I would then stare at him and stuff three truffles in my mouth and chew them noisily, making sure he saw lots of glistening brown paste rolling around my tongue and over my teeth.
“Oh, Anna,” he’d say, covering his eyes. “What are you doing to yourself?”
I responded once by throwing a truffle at him, which left a circle of cocoa powder on his cheek before it dropped to the floor. Damon carefully picked up the truffle and placed it on the edge of his bathtub. “I am confiscating this truffle until you control yourself.”
I had twenty more in the box, and I threw another one at him, and he repeated the procedure until he had six or seven truffles lined up on the edge of his bathtub. Then I got bored, and low on truffles, and stopped.
Damon wanted to listen to music. So I got him a tape deck, which I placed outside his cage, out of his reach, so that he couldn’t fabricate an escape device out of it. I played him some of my tapes, including the one of Nathaniel playing the cello, without, however, telling him that Nathaniel was my boyfriend, or that I knew him in any way, or that I even had a boyfriend. Nathaniel’s cello compositions made a strong impression on Damon. He seemed mesmerized, and didn’t want me to play anything else. My questions to him, of course, yielded no results, and this happened in the following, rather typical, manner:
“You really like this music?” I asked.
“No, the word like doesn’t apply here,” he said, stretched out on his bed. “I feel a communion with it. It reminds me of certain emotions I’ve felt, and of other emotions that were not mine but were present in the atmosphere around me during a time in my life.”
I threw an ice cube at him. “What were these emotions?” I asked, staring at him intently through two bars.
“The same old thing, Anna. The same old thing I can’t tell you about.”
“That thing that makes you cry during The Bold and the Beautiful?”
“Yes. It all goes back to the same old thing.”
“Will you ever tell me what that thing is?”
He was thoughtful for a long time, staring at the ceiling, his arms clasped behind his head. “I don’t know. I’m not having much success imagining a time when I would feel compelled to tell you.”
I threw another ice cube at him, which he then brushed to the floor, so it wouldn’t wet his mattress, I suppose. “To tell me or to tell anyone?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Anyone, perhaps. Perhaps you more than some others,” he said, glancing at me.