Suicide Blonde. Darcey Steinke
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would I be when he came in? On the bed would seem like I had already acquiesced. What if I leaned against the kitchen doorway and lit a cigarette? What would that say? Indifference? I could get into the tub, force him to talk to me through the closed door—I liked the implication of that—he would be confronted with the thought of my body, the image always more powerful than the actuality. And I wouldn’t have to risk anything—I’d learned my lesson from the teddy. Or I could evoke my caustic mind by moving the straight-back chair into the middle of the room. I tried it but the chair looked like a stage prop and I hated myself for so carefully marking the power in each possibility.
I always thought of love as a stressful but productive state, because you wanted to improve yourself for your lover. But this was posing, not self-improvement. I wanted to be pleasing. That’s what my mother did to try and keep my father. She looked pleasing, acted pleasing, made the house pleasing, all in an effort to mollify the uncertainties and unpleasantries of the unknown.
Right then the phone rang and I knew it was her. There’s a telepathy between us sometimes so laserlike it frightens me. “Hi,” she said. “How are you?”
My mother used her casual voice, one that hides a heightened desperation. I answered her usual inquiries. When we speak there is a suck that makes me lean into her voice; when I’m in her presence she gets a predatory look. My mother sees me as a part of her body, something that still belongs inside, a heart or a liver that she wants back.
“You remember the bank president? The one that had the affair with his secretary? It’s been very messy, his wife won’t give him a divorce. They say she’s gone crazy. Yesterday, she walked into the bank and threw acid in the secretary’s face.” She stopped, not like the story was over, but like she was startled.
I examined the story for hidden meaning. While it could imply that my life also is in danger because I too dabble in perversity, it doesn’t seem to fit the usual storyline of . . . me falling for a bad man like my father, or that even the wildest people eventually settle down. This one seemed on my side or Bell’s . . . it was chaos.
She started to speak again, but I daydreamed. She was right, I didn’t always listen, but it was her I was thinking of, remembering once, when I was four—I knew she was on a diet and I saw on TV something about an operation where you have part of your intestines removed to make you thinner and I told her about it, that she should have it. Her face got red, she was so angry that I felt confused, terrified, and trailed her the rest of the day trying to make it right. When I heard my father’s tires on the gravel driveway I was sitting on the damp cellar stairs watching her put clothes into the washer. He walked down past me. She told him it had been a lousy day, she started to cry and said I had been rude to her. “I wasn’t,” I said, so upset I was light-headed. She looked at me directly for the first time since morning and said, “You want to cut me open.”
The fabric of the memory dissolved and I heard her voice again. “How are you, honey? You know how I worry.”
“I’m O.K.,” I said, then lifted the phone away from my ear because I heard footsteps on the stairs. I told her quickly I had to go.
“O.K.,” she said rigidly. No matter if we spoke for ten minutes or two hours she never wanted to hang up. “Bye now.”
After our calls I always have an uneasy feeling. It’s like that all the time with my mother. But I love her and probably most after a bad phone call: her fat upper arms, the way she talks like a baby when she’s upset, those slippers with rosebuds she wears until the bottoms are flat and gray, and her sense of rigid honesty that has crippled her in this dishonest world.
Bell’s steps were faint at first—then firmer, centered and serious, paced like a showdown. I ran to the kitchen, realized while he searched for his keys that it was silly for me to hide, so I swung the refrigerator door open knowing the white light would be far off and eerie in the apartment. The key was in the lock . . . there were several odd tinfoil shapes, a green pitcher of orange juice, a single jar of shrimp cocktail, a bit of browning smoked salmon and half a tomato that was losing muscle tone. The problem with being a modern woman, I thought, as the front door swung wide, is that you have to pretend to be stronger than you are.
He walked straight to me and leaned against the doorway. His hair was scruffy and his face showed stubble. His cigarette had a long ash which he knocked into his hand. He drew, the tip glowed, underlighting his face. Like a good actor, Bell’s demeanor was different now than in the bar. His presence made the air in the apartment thicker. I turned on the faucet. The water beat into the sink. I drank down a full glass, then poured another. My proximity to his body made me feel unsure. Maybe I overreacted. The faucet surged. I knew when I turned it off I’d have to say something. His usual approach would be to either act more wronged than me or, by being extreme—“Do you want me to stay chained to the bed?”—make me seem unreasonable.
He would make me speak first, it was always his way. He knew silence was a reprimand, as disturbing as vomit, and in near hysteria I’d rush to fill it, clean the room, make it comfortable. I noticed the skin around his eyes was thin and gray, maybe he was exhausted, but it made him look unhinged and I always associated eyes like that with evil. I realized how my thoughts, since he’d been gone, made him a stranger to me.
“Where have you been?” I hadn’t meant to start off like that, I knew it would be better to seem indifferent.
He let one hip loosen, sloshed into contrapposto and slanted his eyes. Bell probably meant to look sexy or powerful, but instead he seemed dipped in sleaze.
“On the way to get cigarettes I got lost, ended up wandering as far as Bernal Heights. There is a lovely park where homeless men cook over sterno ovens and a little old man plays his fiddle on a park bench.” He meant to sound cute, to try to evaporate tension and show that I was being possessive and martyrish. When I didn’t respond he tried again. “I like your hair.” He leaned forward, tried to touch me.
I swung my head back, bumped it hard on the cabinet. “You fucker, I was worried you were dead.”
His face drew up, mouth tightened. “Bullshit. You thought I was screwing someone. If you were completely confident in me, you wouldn’t even be interested. You need a love triangle, Jesse, to make you feel alive.”
I was addicted to the fear of infidelity and I believed relationships were like the trinity: there were the two human participants, one always more godlike than the other, and then there was the thing between them, the other—an aberrant philosophy, a person or a phantom like Kevin.
“I don’t care what you do,” I lied and he smirked to show he recognized it as one. “But you can’t just wander off.”
“I couldn’t do it, if I wasn’t sure you were here,” he said.
“Tough luck,” I said. He was trying to conjur up the Noble Wife. I should be proud to suffer for him. I tried to brush past him, but he grabbed my arm and said, “I need you with me.”
There was a rusty quality to his voice that implied insecurity. Bell was like this. His posturing was a sign that inside he felt tender and helpless. There were times when he asked my advice on gifts for his family, or if I thought he’d said the wrong thing at a dinner party. It reminded me of him detached from his bad behavior, how I loved him and didn’t really want to leave at all. I decided not to be mean, but honest. “I’m sick of you thinking you have the right to wander off.”
“I thought you were the kind to allow me my mental infidelities.”
It was going to become a discourse on abstract freedom, he would go through his haggard points: about the individual, about how poor people think they’re free because they could leave the country, could go to college or win the lottery. But it seldom happened, instead they worked like prisoners and lived in apartments barely more comfortable then cells. All he wanted, he claimed, was this—he needed to dream.
He was staring coldly at his veiny hand. Twisting his cigarette butt in our blue glass ashtray. While his head was ducked I saw his crucifix over the sink: a pale purple Jesus on a cross so white it glowed.
“It