TheRapist

by J. Levy

  And then, right there, in the waiting room, despite onlookers, Frankie willingly merged into Manny.

  *

  Jezzy

  Jezzy had three lines ringing, a six year old boy to amuse and a desperate need to poke her head around the door of the waiting room to see what was happening between Frankie and her online man.

  ‘Dr. Kampf’s rooms, please hold the line!’

  ‘Hello, Dr. Kampf, just one moment please!’

  ‘Please hold for Dr. Kampf!’

  Jezzy plunged all three lines into Hold Hell where they were audibly greeted by a voiceover artist called Beth who in a throaty whisper, divulged the smoothly scientific wonders of botox, Restalyne and other thrilling fillers. Shoving a blue magnetic hedgehog encrusted with with multi-coloured paperclips towards Sam, Jezzy barked, ‘Build me a tower!’ and hurriedly skulked towards the waiting room. Sidling up against the wall behind the door, peering between the dry crack and the oily hinges, she spied part of Frankie, the bits that weren’t engulfed by a brand new American man or hidden by the door jamb. Jezzy’s mouth dropped open, then lifted itself upwards with glee to form a smile at the half-hidden sight. Frankie had her arms around a man. In public! Amazing. This outward display of affection was a sight rarely, if ever, seen before. Historically, Frankie had always been shy of previously showing her feelings aloud towards men and what Jezzy was now witnessing, was a vision only a dear, true friend of old could identify and cherish.

  *

  Meringue

  Her lease was up, furniture reclaimed by the rental shop, her bag was packed and the apartment walls were bare, not that they were her apartment walls any longer. There were hardly any marks to show where the pastel printed sheets of ‘Sante Fe at Dawn’ and ‘Laguna by Night’ had once hung. Apartments in Los Angeles were too transient to leave marks. Walls were never adorned long enough to show that there had ever been a trace of anything. As soon as apartments were vacated, walls were licked with paint, carpets cleaned if not replaced and toilet seats flung out to pasture to be replaced with shiny, new ones, courtesy of Bed, Bath and Beyond’s Big Brother, untouched by human butts, or otherwise. Within twenty four hours every trace of what had ever been or was ever seen in an apartment had been well and truly eradicated, all thanks to the glossy overcoat of Hollywood, otherwise known as the sheen that hides the shit beneath.

  Meringue had been in this apartment for fourteen months, on a month by month rental after the initial six month lease. A six month commitment in this town was quite an achievement in itself, sometimes the only long term relationship was the one between tenant and space, but now it really was time to go. She was leaving Los Angeles. Her stomach felt heavy, but her mind was already beginning to lighten a little. She had come to the realization that Manny would never love her or even want her that much. He had only been temporarily under her blonde ambitious spell, had really only needed her on her knees and then only sometimes. Strangely, he had begun to change recently, like the time he actually looked into her eyes and the night he had wanted to take her to the movies. Of course, they hadn’t actually gone out that night. Meringue had been waiting patiently at the box office in Westfield, Century City, wondering with anticipation which movie they would see, when he had texted her with an excuse about having to fly off suddenly to London! What a joke! London. He was such a liar. She had decided at that moment that she would go to the movies anyway despite him cancelling, to sit through a mindless feature with or without him, knowing that at least she could rely upon herself to be reliable. She had eaten popcorn and corn nuts and cried in the dark through a comedy. It was during the movie that her mind had somehow shifted to a place of comfort. Her teeth were filled with traces of popcorn and her mascara had streaked across her cheeks. Her head and her heart felt hot and despite the air conditioning, she felt stifled in the movie theatre and had to get out. In the cool night air of the open car park, Meringue leaned against her aging, white 1983 Camero rental car and gazed at the stars. One seemed to wink at her and she took it as a sign. She knew then that she had to leave Los Angeles, had to get home. It wasn’t just the fact, of course it wasn’t, that Manny had let her down too many times, it wasn’t even the rejection of the business or the years spent studying her craft, honing her body and talent, if she even had any talent. It wasn’t the tedious hours at the gym, pounding her way through the years and each style of working out: aerobics at Voight; step class at Martin Henry; street funk with Milo at SC/LA; Pilates; weights; mind-blowing yoga; kick-boxing; booty-boogie; even the ultra hip class where they did nothing but lay perfectly still on pink satin mats, willing their bodies, through their minds, into a state of physical perfection. Although her dedication to all now seemed defunct, these things did however contribute towards the culmination of her decision.

  Until in the end, it was just a simple mind shift on a cool, still night.

  A feeling that the right time to leave was right now, to escape while her mind was still whole. She felt as if she were being dredged from a place that had been stronger than her, a town filled with slow moving quicksand that had been whirling her in for years and years. Now, in her solitude, standing beside her lone car, beneath her very own winking star, she finally knew she had the inner strength to leave. To the place where she had always felt safe and loved. To her home town, to her mother, who she hoped would still be waiting.

  *

  Edie

  Edie had managed to get back to her past again. She had taken her mind and forced it back to the time when she had been happy and light and carefree. It was difficult because there were so many more distractions today. That woman from down the hall, Delia, the one with the craggy neck and sullen look, was trying to break the arm of Trudi, one of the attendants. Trudi, a small, wiry woman from The Phillipines, merely fobbed Delia off, swatting her away as if she were no more than a pesky fly.

  There were lots of flies in the south anyway, thought Trudi, what was another one?

  Swat. Swat.

  Delia grimaced her teeth, struggling fiercely to contort Trudi’s hand, bending it back the way it shouldn’t go. Trudi’s face remained stoic. She was so used to this. These tussles with Delia were so tedious, way too boring to get riled up about. This had been going on for years. It was one of the milder cases with which she had to deal. At least with Delia there was a reaction. Most of them were so blank. Sad. Vacant. Lost somewhere within their own age-ravaged minds. Dealing with Delia was better than dealing with the spitters. Trudi hated that more than anything. Even more than wiping their behinds or cleaning up their stained sheets. That was just loss of self control and becoming horribly helpless. Spitting was the worst. It almost made her cry. How could a person have such immense personality changes that they would actually, purposefully, spit in another person’s face? That, to Trudi, was the saddest thing of all.

  Alan and Walter were peeing in the hall. Everyday was the same, but they would pick a different time and location, so nobody knew when they would do it. But they did it every day and always together. Simultaneous streams dribbling from their soft, wasted penises, trickling down their legs and onto the floor. They would both laugh hysterically. It was the only time they did. Then they would be chastised like little children and sent to their ward. Every day was the same routine. Pissing. Laughing. Punishment. Some people needed their routine in order to survive.

  Survival of the fittest or survival of the misfits?

  Despite the irritating distractions, Edie fought to stay where she was in her mind. In her secret little pocket of peace, tucked away inside her small safe space that had been mercifully saved from the ravages of her mind, a bubble, a cocoon, her one bead of sanity.

  Then she saw him, there he was! Her John! She knew he would come. So handsome in his casual pants and blue checked shirt made from the finest Sea Island cotton, his sandy hair short and slick. The sun was shining and he had come to take her on a picnic by the edge of the lake. Maybe they would even take a little blue wooden b
oat and row out to the island, which would be dotted with scarlet poppies at this time of year. Their island, where he would put a soft tartan blanket, spun from the underbellies of Alpaca goats, on the ground beneath a great willow tree and lay her gently down, kissing her hair, her eyelids, her neck, as his strong hands softly found their way inside the flowered gabardine of her summer dress. That had been their first sweet summer, its potency claiming them so that from then on they never had eyes for anyone else.

  Edie Masters and John Pierce. Edie and John Pierce.

  Mr. and Mrs. Pierce and Family. Mrs. John Pierce. Widow.

  A sharp pain suddenly tore through the scene, leaving debris scattered through the sentimental pictures in her mind. She tried quickly to piece it back together but it wouldn’t come, it was drifting away from her and Edie desperately longed to get back to John under the willow tree. She needed to feel his arms around her keeping her safe, to look into his deep brown eyes and to touch his body as he lay beside her. As hard as she fought, it just wouldn’t work, she couldn’t get it back and now there was a smell she didn’t like. Unable to fight it anymore, Edie opened her eyes, which took more than a moment because they had been so tightly glued together by her thoughts. The offensive intruder was lunch. Soup. A white, chipped bowl of watery beige soup with bits floating in it had been placed on the small table beside her. Her stomach felt hot and tears had filled her eyes. Horribly wrenched from her thoughts, her mind had betrayed her again and as she looked down at her damp nightie, she felt and saw that her body had too. Willow, weep for me.

  *

  Devon

  ‘More tea?’ enquired Mr. Birdman, his teeth gnawing monotonously on something that wasn’t there. Devon felt her stomach lurch as she muttered that she didn’t want any. She felt trapped in the school hallway, as if she was almost powerless to get out. There was nothing to keep her here, but she felt imprisoned between the stained glass window throwing slashes of coloured light across the hall and the beady glint in Mr. Birdman’s sad, watery eyes. She needed to summon up strength from within and tell herself that this was not her past and that she was free. But the eerie memories of decades long gone had strangely rooted her to the faded seat. She was unable to move because in order to move away from this, she first had to get past herself. What was it her therapists had told her, on the rare occasion that they actually spoke? To reach into the pit of her mind and summon up the believability that she could do this? To stretch her thoughts back so far, that they could practically reach to her previous lifetimes? To elongate her memories, then delve into the recesses of her head that held so much buried knowledge?

  And there, in the narrow hallway, filled with ghosts from the past, something odd happened to Devon. Something unforeseen. An unexpected moment. A thing that couldn’t ever have been foretold. After countless years of practice, meditation, deep analysis and therapy, so much therapy, the moment had finally arrived when she could see the a realistic possibility of escapism from her convoluted mind.

  Devon burst into impromptu laughter.

  As she laughed, she cried. And the creepiness of the stained glass dissolved into splashes of bright colour, while before her eyes Mr. Birdman melted into the weak, old man that he had become. Her laughter filled the hall, echoing along the narrow passageway, pushing at the walls, gushing into every room of the school, washing away each guilty crevice. Her laughter caused an eruption inside her own head. Nothing sinister. Quite the opposite. A sort of cleansing quake. Almost ridding her completely of vile, bent memories. The floodgates had open at last and Devon was aloft on her own pathway to freedom.

  *

  Frankie & Manny

  After the initial thrill of their first meeting, Frankie had to rush away, to deliver Sam back home, with a promise to Manny that she would meet him at 8pm, in a buzzing, buoyant restaurant in Primrose Hill. Her heart hadn’t stopped leaping around since that afternoon. No surprise there as he was as glorious, even more so, as she had envisioned. Her only disappointment, silly really, (but what’s a dramatic change without the drama?) was her slight, almost imperceptible disappointment that she had not been completely and entirely ready for him. She had almost been there, but perhaps needed another month so that it would be just perfect. Utterly perfect. Possibly with a small deviation somewhere over the ‘erf’, for was anything ever total perfection?

  With Sam safely home, Frankie found herself with a precious hour to shower, wash her hair and transform herself into a thing of beauty. As she switched the knob on her digital radio to Smooth, a soft tune swirled out and floated into the room. Ella Fitzgerald was musing melodically about the wonders of a zoo in July, a necessary accompaniment to Frankie’s boudoir. In the shower, she gelled and scrubbed, exfoliated and oiled, shampooed, conditioned and moisturized. She pulled on white lacy Lejaby underwear and pale Armani jeans, ones that she had saving from a trip to an outlet in Italy two summers ago. Tight, bitter orange sweater. Stomach flat. Hair glossed. Nails buffed. She sprayed one of Artisan’s spicy perfumes into the air and leapt with glee through the fragrant cloud. A text beeped on her phone. Jezzy, saying, speak tomorrow and have a fab time with a smiley face inserted between fab and time and three exclamation marks. Frankie was carefully applying Bobby Brown nude lipgloss, which would not stay on her lips and instead was dribbling down her chin, when a song came on the radio that transported her back in time. She suddenly felt like a complete idiot. The room smelt like a meadow of cow parsley and sweet peppercorns, assorted outfits were strewn across the bed and Heatwave’s 70’s classic, Mind Blowing Decisions was playing on her radio. Frankie bit her lip, just catching the last gummy strand of gloss as it trickled away, so different from the glass tubes with a rollerball top she endlessly reapplied when she was a teenager. She felt like a hormonal idiot, a paradox caught between the longed for entrance to puberty and the unwanted, savage exit to perimenopause. Those thirty or forty years inbetween, when a girl became a woman, but didn’t really change that much inside, not when it came to feelings and emotions, came and went simultaneously, lasting hundreds of years and mere seconds all at the same time. She was embarrassed by herself at feeling as much excitement about Manny as she had been when she was thirteen and getting ready to go to the youth club in the village. All those teenage thoughts about boys! Would it be Daniel Ward or Kevin Baker? All the girls had liked Robert Green, but he only had eyes for Karen Shaw, or was it Steven Corman? The pit of Frankie’s stomach felt the same now as it had twenty five years ago. Then there had been David Caine, the boy with the dark hair and golden eyes. The boy all the girls liked. Frankie and David had kissed once. At a dance, in the youth club, the same dance when Craig Shaw had danced with an upside down chair and snogged one of the wooden legs, ending up with a splinter in his tongue. Peaches and Herb were singing about the thrills of being ‘Reunited’ and the 45’s were spinning jerkily around the turntable when David pushed his tongue inside Frankie’s mouth. It seemed to frighten him and he pulled it out quickly. This was Frankie’s first kiss. David’s too. The first time they had felt anyone’s tongue against their own. David’s tongue had been warm and wanted, if a little rigid. Then he took a deep breath, closed his eyes and plunged in again. This time their kiss was long and soft. Tongues intertwined, probing, licking, swallowing each other’s saliva. Frankie’s first kiss. Right in the middle of the youth club disco. Soon after that, David Caine moved away and was never seen again. She had always remembered that kiss and it had such a profound effect upon her that she couldn’t welcome public affection anymore. That kiss with David Caine, remained within her, deep inside, never to be forgotten.

  *

  Meringue

  Palm trees swayed in the Santa Ana winds as the rays of the sun burnt their way across Hollywood. La Cienega changed schizophrenically from its silken spun beauty just below Sunset in the north to the ravaged route of doughnut shops and oily gas stations, south of Venice. The oil fields looked as eternally creepy as ever, like a forgotten scene from a
n early sci-fi movie. Cranes stretched their creaky beaks up and down, digging and pulling, extracting whatever lay beneath Los Angeles, the city of lost souls. Is this where they could all be found, the lost and the lonely, the ones who had traveled here in search of fame, only to be devoured and spat out? Could they all be here, in the bottomless pit below? Maybe that was why Los Angeles had suffered from so many earthquakes? Maybe it was all the tormented, ridiculed souls, lost to their dreams, swallowed by the San Andreas fault, but still stirring, still fighting for fame and clawing to get back out and be discovered. The earth was probably filled with The Unidentified. The groans and the heartache of lives just out of reach, so close to their longed for lives of perfection. It was all always so close. So very close and so out of reach.

  That could have been me thought Meringue gazing at the oil rigs, as she rode in the back of a blue and white cab on her way to LAX and terminal freedom at the freedom terminal, possibly an oxymoron in itself. She had donated some of her things to the charity shop. The flimsy, miniscule clothes she knew she would never wear again she had dumped in a recycle bin in the alley behind an improv school on Fairfax. In the cab she had two cases of the things she wanted to take home. A couple of nice sweat suits. A beige linen dress. Two new pretty blouses, one with tiny purple and yellow flowers and the other in a black and white check. A couple of pair of decent Payless shoes that she had bought precisely to take home. For her mother, a set of lavender bags and sweet, perfumed candles from a white, marbled shop on Beverly Drive. She opened her bag, a sensible one from Bloomingdales with lots of pockets inside, and took out her credit card holder. Then she removed a handful of cards she would never need again: SEG, SAG, Equity and Aftra, Blockbuster, the gym and a couple more. The name on every one read, Meringue Pavlova. She smiled softly, a small expression loaded with memories, some sweet, most bitter, then she ripped through the biodegradable cards, opened the window and let the Santa Ana winds carry them away. Away to the oil rigs, to be buried with the other faded failures.