Suicide Blonde. Darcey Steinke
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and similar as kidney beans,” our narrator Jess says as she faces the group of men for whom she will whore for the first time), or unusual, amusing progressions of thought (Jess again: “I remembered the story of one saint, a virgin, who cut off her breasts rather than succumb to a rapist. I made myself think God is dead, but it seemed dangerous. Then I thought, my pussy is the same color as this carpet. This comforted me somehow.”) Steinke also has a poet’s feel for imagistic patterns which accrue into their own kind of plot or argument (keep your eye on the color burgundy, as per the wine vomit), as well as a poet’s instinct for hotshot lines that move us in and out of her novels. The feeling I typically get when I finish a Steinke novel is one of exhilaration and relief, as I realize with delight that her performance has sustained its unique pitch from start to finish, no wobble.
This exquisite technique does more than impress. It also builds trust. In the case of Steinke’s writing, this trust is especially crucial, insofar as she traffics in transgression, gliding with Fassbinder-esque grace from scenes of abuse to rape to suicide to high glamour to boredom to pleasure to abandon to myriad other forms of exaltation and ruination. (“Because fucking, when it’s good, seems like everything and there is pain in the pleasure when you remember that things are horrible, until you are hardly alive,” Jess tells us while fucking her gloomy, bisexual boyfriend, Bell.) Smart sentence by smart sentence, dicey scene by dicey scene, exceptional novel by exceptional novel, I have come to trust Steinke to the point where I will follow her anywhere she decides to go. Most often, she takes her heroine/the reader to the cusp of a deep badness, then pulls back; sometimes, most notably in Jesus Saves, things go all the way bad. (I’ll never forget my first time reading Jesus Saves: I felt sick about the ending, I wanted to undo what the novel had done; maybe I even felt betrayed. But upon reflection, I could see why Steinke made her narrative choices; over time, I’ve come to respect that ending as a kind of limit test of what is possible in her novels, an edge she knows how to topple over or ride.)
Suicide Blonde doesn’t go all the way dark—as in most Steinke novels, not everyone survives, but (spoiler alert) our heroine does. We’re never entirely sure of her fate after the story ends, however, because Steinke is into ongoing odyssey, not moralistic parable. Unlike some of my favorite dissolute novels by women—I’m thinking of After Claude or After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, for example—Steinke’s daring or wit is not wrought from a certain meanness or nihilism. Suicide Blonde’s antihero Madison may tell Jess that “there are a million ways to kill off the soft parts of yourself,” but no matter what experiences Jess undertakes or surrenders to, she seems almost quizzically unable to kill her soft parts, probably because her soft parts and her hard parts are marbled together. I can barely think of another writer—much less a religiously infused writer—who so naturally eschews binaries, who feels and renders the world’s marbled complexity with such poetic ease.
It comes off as easy, but I doubt it is—writing well isn’t easy for anyone—but Steinke’s writing has been marked by a kind of languid sureness from the start. Like so many naturals with a singular vision and an unyielding gift, Steinke wrote a perfect book nearly right out of the gate, one which both emanates from its time and will last the test of time. I’m glad, on the occasion of its twenty-fifth anniversary, for Suicide Blonde to come around again, to show us how it’s done.
—Maggie Nelson
Los Angeles, 2017
CHAPTER ONE
WAS IT the bourbon or the dye fumes that made the pink walls quiver like vaginal lips? An acidy scent ribboned the pawed tub, fingered up the shower curtain. My vision was liquid and various as a lava lamp. In the mirror I saw the scar from the blackberry bramble that had caught my chin and scratched a hairline curve to my forehead. It was hardly noticeable, but left the impression that my face was cracked. Taking another sip of bourbon, I put on the plastic gloves and began parting my hair at the roots. As the dye snaked out there was a faint sucking sound, like soil pulling water, and I wondered: if I were brave enough to slit my wrists would I bother to dye my hair?
This is what happened: all day yesterday Bell had stared out the window, smoking cigarettes. There were his usual reasons— his father, no acting jobs, that he was getting ugly and old. Plus there was Kevin to moon over. He eyed the eggshell envelope of Kevin’s wedding invitation and stared out the window for hours, his face vaguely twitching as he moved from one memory to the next. His melancholy made me think he was getting sick of living with me. And this, in turn, made me want to please him, to show him I was not one of his worries. So when he went walking I put on my black teddy and arranged myself on the futon. Looking at my breasts covered in lace flowers, I thought I seemed overly anxious, like a Danish or a little excitable dog. I looked desperate . . . using the one thing that would keep him near. It seemed manipulative, even if it was an attempt to jerk him from his melancholy. Men are never more appealing than when they brood.
Bell came in and walked to the foot of the bed. His eyes narrowed with lusty admiration for my forwardness. He lay over me and said, “I’m in charge now.” But when he didn’t release his weight I asked him if he was going to take off his clothes. “You seem to want me to,” he said. I blushed and asked him if he felt bullied, told him now he knew how women felt. “You take off that,” he said, stretching the lace of the teddy. I rolled it down and then adamantly pulled his shirt off. There was something hard in me that wanted him, no matter how awkward it was going to be. We kissed in a distracted way. Eventually, he turned his head, as if watching a bird move across the horizon. I saw dark continents under the paint of the walls beyond his profile.
“I’m bored,” he said.
I sat up on the edge of the bed, then walked to the closet. Shifting the hanging clothes, I felt my hands already beginning to shake. I dressed and went into the kitchen. There was a taste of pennies in my mouth, a fierce nausea and tinny rawness, like the moment after you break a bone.
Bell sat in the dark at the painted table by the window. Occasionally the streetlight would show a wisp of cigarette smoke, his face dissected by crossing panes of light, his eyes clear and vacant like a cat’s.
“I have to get more cigarettes,” he said.
He didn’t sound mean, just sullen. And I couldn’t tell whether he was falling clunkily out of love with me, or if, as he claimed, it was just his usual reticence. Sometimes I suspected he was stunted, not capable of predictable human emotions. Last week he had laughed at a tourist couple separated by the BART train doors. I imagined a wire grid behind the skin of his forehead and a cold metallic look in his eyes. Of course it was only my imagination, but the sensation was terrifying, like finding out your lover is a killer.
Now he’d been gone twenty-four hours. For a while I had found his habit of floating off charming, but to appreciate this suddenly seemed masochistic. I didn’t want to be one of those women addicted to indifference.
I peeled down my gloves and threw them gingerly, like used condoms, into the trash. The teddy incident was terrifying because it exacerbated the sensation that my feminine power was diminishing, trickling like drops of milk from a leaky pitcher. I wrapped my hair in a towel. The way I looked reminded me of some clichéd floundering female, so I took off my robe and lay across the couch, a better spot to watch shadows gather in the fleshy green fingers of the big jade plant. He’d inherited it from the last inhabitants of the apartment, because it wouldn’t fit through the door when they moved. Near the plant was a cedar wall panel with a Japanese scene. Bell’s boa hung on a hook beside his film stills; blurry body gestures from a super-8 film Bell made years ago. There were lots of little things: the blue glass lamp, the leopard with eyes that glowed, empty wine bottles, brass goblets, postcards of Europe from former lovers, candles and incense on a special table with a linen cloth, along with Bell’s crucifixes, saints, Hindu gods, a GI Joe doll, obsidian voodoo beads, a dog’s skull and an African mask of an antelope.
The window looked over Bush Street and toward the staggered roofs of Nob Hill, slanted like some Middle Eastern capital. The penthouse terraces had exotic French doors, miniature lemon trees and lacy wrought-iron furniture. On one there was a green fountain; another, on warm days, had a stand with a cockatiel.