My buddies were all up now, standing in my bedroom doorway, peering at me with their bloody gorilla eyes. “What are you doing?”
“I’m moving out.”
“Where?”
“With her.”
“You’re fulla shit.” Jebets had brought with him from the East a charming manner of speech, which included this classic phrase and many other such unforgettable colloquial gems as: “ya shitbird,” “them’s are fightin’ words,” and “I’m gonna play you the Nose Cracker Suite.” He whipped out his comb and began to groom himself.
“Believe what you like,” I replied.
“Who is she?” he demanded.
“She’s a carnival freak.”
“She must be,” said Jebets, touching up his perennial cowlick. “What’s her name?”
“Bonnie. She’s an actress.”
“How old is she?”
“Twenty-two.”
“How many arms has she got?”
“Twenty-two.”
“That’s less than three octopuses,” said Goldie, who was the only one in the room I liked at this moment because he was the only one who would not try to steal her from me.
“Octo-PIE,” I corrected.
“Octo-pussies,” crowed Woodchuck.
“She must be a pig,” said Jebets, returning the comb to his back pocket.
“No, pigs have four legs. Don’t you remember? Now, if you’ll excuse me,” I said, moving by them with my box. “I’ll make sure to drop you a card.”
“Hey, we’ll come over,” Woodchuck shouted after me.
Not if I don’t give you the address, I thought.
ON OUR FIRST NIGHT OFFICIALLY LIVING TOGETHER, BONNIE and I sat on the couch drinking wine and smoking Trues, and I kept telling myself, I am living with a beautiful woman. How had it happened? It was a miracle. It was like washing up on a desert island or stumbling into the lost regions of a remote African village. The carpet was like the smell of a thatch hut, and the wine was a special green hallucinogenic, and the plastic-filtered cigarettes were made from the poison put on arrows to shoot rare jungle birds from treetops. I felt like the top of my head had been planed off. That serene Neil Diamond girl with the sun hat looking down upon us from the wall seemed to be saying out the side of her mouth in a voice that sounded very much like Bob, the 7-11 clerk, “You’re living with a beautiful woman, ding-a-ling. How did you manage that?”
I watched Bonnie closely for the first two weeks because she was my girl and I was interested to know what in heaven’s name she saw in me. Naturally, I knew something had to be wrong with her. I was willing to overlook a bit of alcoholism, that alarming donkey laugh, and what immediately became recognizable as kleptomania. I had to adjust to a nearly exclusive diet of cake from the grocery store and Oscar Mayer smoked links. Her ability to invent stories about herself bordered on the prodigious, but her memory was poor, so that she was constantly manufacturing new stories, which would clash with the perfectly good old ones. Her autograph of Keenan Wynn that I never saw, for example, turned into a collection of autographs of famous movie stars that I never saw. In the course of one day, her beloved only brother, who supposedly lived in Santa Monica, aged four years. Though she had lived there, she could not tell me where Topanga Canyon was, and one day as we stood in front of a franchise map of the U.S. at the International House of Pancakes on El Cajon Boulevard and she tried to show me where her modeling career had begun in a Minnesota nunnery, she pointed to the upper peninsula of Michigan. I had already been to the downtown library to check a movie directory, cross-referencing Jason Robards, Keenan Wynn, and Double Damnation, and found out that such a film did not exist. But, as I say, I was willing to put up with a few foibles, perhaps even a dangerous girl, because I would not have had a girl otherwise.
Bonnie claimed, with a giggle, to be a nymphomaniac. This may have been the one profession about herself, that and her choice of cigarettes, that was true. I had no shortage of sexual energy and undertook the task of satisfying her, sometimes as many as five times a day, improving my skills and potential for conjugal pleasure by lowering my expectations and occasionally conjuring up a smutty image from one of the sticky-floored rooms downtown. Every night she had dozens of orgasms, bushels of them, more than humanly possible. Though it was the era of the orgasm, and there were best-selling books about orgasms, and wise people from the East commanded handsome lecture fees to discuss orgasms, I learned to have a low opinion of them. In the currency of orgasms there were too many counterfeits. And whatever shudders of genuine bliss you might achieve, you never got to keep one. You couldn’t even remember them.
Every morning Bonnie scribbled, naked at the kitchen table, in purple ink in a pink plush-bound diary that she locked extravagantly with a tiny key inserted into a gold latch and “hid” in her underwear drawer. She liked to write naked in front of me in the sunlight, her painted yellow hair tumbling across her face and down her back, her foot up under her buttocks. As she wrote she would glance at me frequently with mysterious smiles, and say things such as: “I bet you’d like to read this.”
I always told her I wouldn’t, but I was actually very curious. I would have liked to have known what she really thought and felt. Unlike anyone I had spent considerable time with, there was not one substantial thing I could claim to know about her, except that she made Pinocchio look like Pope Paul VI. And the truth about her was in that diary, I imagined. And the truth about me was in there too.
BONNIE WAS SUPPOSEDLY AN ACTRESS LOOKING FOR WORK, but the phone never rang. No one ever came to the door either, except your general-issue Jehovah’s Witness, and then one night a ghetto kid with a box of chocolate bars, and then one other time a neighbor wanting to know if we’d lost a cat. I assumed that Bonnie had no friends—there was good reason to believe this—but one night about nine o’clock, my night off, Bonnie was burning sliced-off-the-tube chocolate chip cookies in the kitchen, and I was sitting on the couch drinking apple wine and watching a program about the manufacture of cheese on PBS with the sound off and Led Zeppelin One playing on the turntable, when someone knocked on the door.
Bonnie dashed around the corner. “Oh, Lance,” she cried, falling out the door, her arms swinging around his neck like ribbons around a maypole. “Come in! Come in!”
I stood up, and my pants gathered into my crotch. Lance looked about twenty-three or twenty-four. He wore a striped harlequin sport shirt tucked into knife-pleat slacks and shiny, tan shoes that zipped up the sides. He seemed very confident to me and good looking in a languid, careless way, locks of his thick curly hair falling over his forehead.
Bonnie frolicked around the room in her long translucent floral evening gown, her breasts jiggling; she kept standing up on her toes and bringing her hands together against her throat. “Come in. Come in. Sit down. Lance, oh, Lance, this is—” she seemed to forget my name for a moment—“Baby.”
He smiled at me in the way you would smile at any adult named Baby. I shook hands with him and felt about as low and masculine as a snail. The arm on the turntable lifted from the record and we were left with a silent PBS cheese documentary. “Nice to meet you,” he said.
Bonnie seemed out of breath. “Can I get you a glass of wine, Lance?”
Lance sat down in the needlepoint rocking chair across from the couch. He must’ve made some affirmative sign on the wine offer, because Bonnie flew off into the kitchen. I studied Lance. He had an actor’s good looks, except for a bulge in the middle of his top lip that pulled it back from the front teeth, and his eyes were a shade too far apart under the buttery locks of hair that fell over his forehead. It gave him the slightest appearance of imbecility. Also, the distance between his nose and mouth seemed