My body was like a part of the room, a chair or a vase. I remembered the first time I saw my mother naked. She stood before a mirror, pulled at her hips, pressing her stomach, checking as I was now for signs of decay. The female body, I thought, has the capacity for such exquisiteness and such horror. I sat up to drink, but the bourbon spilled and trickled over my breasts, running all the way down to form a puddle in my navel.
Watching my body I had the sensation it was the same as Bell’s. Images came fast: an expressive hand gesture, his smell— wet dirt and hand-rolled cigarettes—how his features were large and most beautiful when he was meditative, how in certain light his skin paled so that it looked blue, how he seemed at those times like a creature and I half expected to see wings appear on his shoulder blades.
In temperament Bell was not so much exotic as sophisticatedly adolescent. He had intellectualized youth’s themes, perfected and lyricized them. And this core of exquisite longing was his excuse for brooding, for his erratic behavior, and the fuel for his philosophy of life’s emptiness and the cult of pleasure. But Bell wasn’t really immature, just trapped in some premature state, like a beetle whose back is all the more vivid because the last homogenizing stage to adulthood is never reached.
The clock ticked loud; it seemed to mock me with its pointy fingers and monotonous rhythyms. I took a swig from the bottle and realized I was drunk. My thoughts were jagged and I had the sensation that my life was exactly half over. It started with a tingle in the back of my skull that made me shiver, then spread over my head like a hood. But I’ve never felt any different. And I knew my memories, childhood or otherwise, were simply times I rose up into consciousness and was intensely myself. I heard the hum I always do when a memory is encasing itself and I recognized that sound as my particular and continual way of being alive.
My hair stunk up the whole apartment. I cracked the window and Bell’s boa expanded with air. In the bathroom, the porcelain tub was cool to the touch. I adjusted the water, pulled the towel from my head and then got in, kneeling on all fours. My breasts swung down, reminding me of the utilitarian tits of mammals. And through the scope of cleavage I could see the hair between my thighs. The tiny black curls seemed scrawny, even obscene. Water beat on my hair. The bleach was strong. My face became prickly and warm and I realized that even though I was alone, I felt embarrassed. The acidic residue backed up, biting into my knees. I am dyeing my hair to get Bell back, I thought, and because the whole world loves a blonde. The bright light made the room stark, soap flecked into my eyes and I felt a rising frazzled sensation that always means I’m going to cry. The water ran clear down the drain. When I stood, my hair was steaming, tangled together in clumps like pale shiny snakes.
I moved, dripping through the dark apartment, to the window. The hotel sign blazing through the evening fog. Its aura occasionally flared out like a sunspot and I could feel the power spark into me through the thousand roots of my scalp, each one now flaunting a golden hair.
The brass door of the apartment building sucked shut behind me. The night was balmy. I heard the bells of Grace Cathedral, thought of going there, sitting in a back pew, the bloodied light over me, heady as a red-wine buzz. Jesus would be everywhere in radiant stained glass, his face over and over like a man you loved or one you had killed. Bush Street was so steep I had to lean back slightly, which made the comforting city minutiae—the lanternish lights of Pacific Heights, the quiltlike Victorians and the sculptured bushes—seem distant. I held my arms forward to stop this sensation, then quickly let them fall, the gesture seemed crazy.
Maybe I shouldn’t search for Bell, but to stay in the apartment was impossible. What did it mean that I wasn’t the kind of girl who could wait, dispassionately passing time drinking wine or reading a novel? My instincts told me to leave him, it’s what I always did when I sensed the first soft spot of discontent. I was the kind of girl who left men. It wasn’t like me to look for Bell. And I knew searching was no different than putting on the teddy or dyeing my hair. I thought of my mother, how when my father threatened to leave her, she started to take longer to get ready and always wore a bright shade of red lipstick . . . suddenly she was working so hard to be loved.
At first the nights were cozy, I’d make soup and we’d lounge on the bed reading the paper, the radiator crackling. The night was distinctly outside and we were safe in its center. Now, the night is like poisonous gas and infiltrates every room. And Bell, like a whore or a junkie, has changed day into night. My love has splintered, so I saw him everywhere. Inside storefronts and bars, in the shiny elongated cars, even in the eyes of a big-assed woman in pink pants, and a tall thin man with a shaggy mustache like a Texas cowboy. The bourbon exacerbated Polk Street’s seedy carnival ambience.
The Motherlode was much like other gay bars on the block, filled with men in casual clothes. The disco music was so loud it shivered the glass. Most watched the large video screen showing a man on all fours on top of a bar, a leather monster, with a little chauffeur’s cap and a black leather vest. His pants were around his knees. An identical man was jerking his fist into the first man’s anus. The crowd watched, but no one seemed particularly interested. Instead of arousing the men, it seemed to make them shy, and together with the bar’s decoration—crepe paper and silver stars—the place had the atmosphere of prom night.
On the corner, a covey of young men waited between windows filled with vinyl shower curtains, sensuous as tongues. All were thin as eels and there was one peroxide blond with a complexion so puckered it resembled the surface of the moon.
His hips were pressed forward and he wore a leather belt with straps circling his thighs. I couldn’t help staring, there was something puffed up and trembling about him. He caught me looking and said, “I wouldn’t sleep with that,” and flipped his chin toward me. There was a riff of laughter from the others. I tried to avoid them, but the blond stepped forward and nudged me, startled me enough so I lost my balance and stumbled toward the glittery cement. When I tried to stand he thrust his hips into my face. My lips brushed the grainy texture of his jeans. He laughed, his head haloed by the moon.
I stood, ran. My face burned and I yelled, “Assholes!” and the blond camped back, “For sale!”
My teeth clenched and there was that shifting and shaky feeling again. I was terrified that Bell was going back to the boys.
The Black Rose had a postapocalyptic feel, as if burnt out and only marginally re-established. The interior was black with low ceilings and any light was random and murky. I noticed particularly the metal cone fireplace and how the bartender stoked and tended the fire diligently, as if his were the last embers on earth. It wasn’t a gay bar like most of the places off Polk Street, but there was a smattering of queens among the punks with nose rings and ruddy-cheeked old-timers at the bar. All of them, as well as the people in the deep booths and at the carved tables in back, came for the cheap beer. A screamy song blasted from the jukebox. And though I came to wait for Bell, because he had a drink at the Black Rose every night, I was relieved he wasn’t here. What would I say? I felt strange for pursuing such an awkward situation. I thought of crazy things: I would walk up to him and tell him my mother died, I would say an old boyfriend called, tell him a magazine wanted my photographs or maybe go all the way and pretend to be pregnant.
But I hated myself for thinking like that. Why should I need anything interesting or provocative to say? It reminded me of the sudden and forced interest my mother took in my father’s middle-aged hobbies after he threatened to leave, of how once in the car searching for the church softball game she almost started to cry because we couldn’t find the playing field.
I ordered a bourbon and sat in the back. Scribbling on my napkin I wrote, Just give me back this one, then Love is not based on worth and No one is dying from this. I wrote and rewrote that, and because it was true I felt overly dramatic, even stupid. I realized I was writing phrases with a vague thought that Bell would see them. The idea that everything I did was generated by him made me feel dismal.
Why was Bell so dissolute? When I confronted him on his wanderings, he would say I was selfish to think I was responsible. It had to do with his father, he’d say, how motionless his face had been the moment he died, how the slack skin around his chin reminded Bell of his own loosening flesh.