Red Earth and Pouring Rain

by Vikram Chandra

  So we ran out of film and had to come back the next day to get the come shot. Then we sat up stickily in bed and ate doughnuts. When I asked why the come shot (this one in slow motion, luxuriant sprays of liquid), they both shrugged, said that’s the way it’s done, babe, it’s the money shot. Weird, I thought, but I didn’t really care, because I really was okay. People don’t believe me when I tell them this, straights, I mean, squares, good folk, Mom and Pop with their two-point-oh-five kids. They look at me with pity and horror alternating over their faces, and when I insist, they try to pretend I don’t exist. You’re just deluded, Mom says, you’re crazy, you don’t really know what’s happening to you, you don’t know what’s being done to you. When I still say, no, no, this is me, they snarl “slut,” and try to forget about me. But, hey, I’ve been all over. After that first day, with the money I got, I bought a beat-up Packard, got in it and drove. I’ve been to every small town from Albany to Zanesville, every city, and when you get in, when you start seeing the shopping malls, you swing past the stores, you avoid the commercial streets where the suits live, you angle away from the suburbs and the lawns, and look for ruined buildings, bums, police cars, rain, and there you find it. I went from town to town and did strip. Then I came back up east and I did loops, grainy black-and-white stuff, badly lit, the guys sometimes with their shoes on for fear of cop raids. Then suddenly it was the seventies and we were doing film, with credits, music, and everything, and people, even women, started to know who I was. I never went home.

  I guess to put it bluntly you would have to say I became a star, but what I want you to know is what I do is work, and it is a craft. Think about it —you show up in the morning, and maybe the person —him or her —the person you’re working with, if you’re unlucky, isn’t into it, they hate it, hate themselves, or they’re just bored or tired, so now you have to carry the scene. Then there are the lights, hot and headache-making. If they’re going to move the camera you sit there and then you have to start again, maybe the guy’s losing his hard, the fluff girl’s working away on him but it’s going, so then you have to revive him. After all this it’s got to work, at least for me it does, I take pride in my art, and it does work, after all there’s the flesh, shiny and soft under the arcs, the room fading away, a still, lovely concentration even with the director’s voice from behind the camera.

  So I did it for years. The first real film I did, credits and all, the producer said, honey do you want to use your real name. I told him I’d think about it. That night I sat in my apartment and thought about it. My real name —never mind what it was —didn’t seem real to me anymore, and maybe it never had. I thought of myself hiding in a bathroom, skin damp from steam, and outside the thin atmosphere of Mother’s house, the climate of temperate reason we lived in, and I knew my name had never been mine. So I cast about for another one, I flipped through the books on my walls, walked about from window to window. Finally I threw on a coat and went outside, north —I lived in Manhattan then, on Columbus. It was late now, winter, and the streets glittered with ice. I walked, and I could hear the voices of carolers, clear and sharp as blades in the crisp air. I turned a corner, and St. John’s loomed, I stood facing the huge black shell. As it hung over me I waited, waited for it to tell me something, waited to ask a question that trembled half-formed in me. But finally I turned away, nothing said, nothing remembered.

  The next morning I had a call from a doctor at Bishop’s: Mother had been brought into the emergency room after a collapse at work. The symptoms were of acute starvation. When I got to the hospital, the doctor (after his moment of startled recognition, I was getting used to those) told me that she had been suffering from long and unrelenting constipation, and it seemed that rather than suffer the abdominal pain, the headaches, the mixtures and pills, the indignity of straining morning after morning, she had stopped eating. She was asleep, and I looked through the glass window on the door of the room, preferring not to go in, scared of waking her up. They had an IV in her arm, a tube in her nose.

  “We’re feeding her,” the doctor said.

  Her hands were curled up in two tiny fists on her chest.

  “How long didn’t she eat?”

  “Two weeks, it looks like.”

  “How long is she going to be in here?”

  “A week, maybe ten days. Her insurance should cover it, don’t worry. At least this time.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  It wasn’t. What I was thinking of was how dark her body looked against the white of the hospital sheets, her rage when she would awaken and find herself defeated. In the parking lot the tears froze quickly on my face, and my head was filled with a single word, a memory perhaps from some late late movie of childhood, or perhaps I had heard it lifting toward me from the hospital chapel. That afternoon, I paused from tonguing a breast, from sucking its perfect nipple, and I raised up and said to nobody in particular, “Kyrie. That’s my new name, Kyrie.”

  They kept Mother in the hospital for three weeks, for treatment and psychiatric observation. She refused to answer the shrink’s questions, and refused to see me: “I don’t want any of her filthy money either.” They released her on Christmas eve, and I watched her from my car as she strode out confidently into the haze of snow that hung over the city. She walked away and I watched, for a long time, the lights glowing dimly and far away, listened to the silence. They had her back at Emergency the next morning, throwing up violently and in pain —she had gone home and gorged on food, on thick slabs of ham, whole cakes of butter, game hens, pie. When they took off her clothes her stomach bulged, its circumference weirdly translucent and webbed with black veins. This time they kept her for a month, and had her looked at by teams of nutritionists and psychologists. Hesitating but reluctant to keep her in the hospital —she seemed so damn healthy —they released her to the care of a live-in nurse and a smart young doctor out of Harvard. But now, even though she ate regularly and carefully, under the eye of the nurse, her body seemed to starve. The food disappeared into her, and then vanished altogether —she grew weaker and weaker until she couldn’t get out of bed. Her hair fell out, and she took on the appearance of a famine-ridden child, the swollen belly, the huge hurt eyes. She slipped silently in and out of sleep, then into a coma, but then suddenly she awoke and asked for steak. They gave her some sort of soft gray nutritive slop instead, but by next morning she was sitting up in bed eating huge quantities of scrambled eggs and asking for more. They swore, afterwards, that they had seen her flesh fill up with muscle minute by minute. So she lived for the next few years in alternative two-month cycles of hunger and gluttony, of control and terror, surrounded by her models of Voyager I and, later, the space shuttle.

  Meanwhile, I lived. I made a deal with her insurance company, so I could pay most of her bills without her knowing about it. I was working almost every day —at first I made five hundred a day, then eight, then a grand, then two, then more. I became known, and I was able to buy a house on Long Island. I filled it with books, old ones, mostly, and, for some reason, rocks. I don’t know why, but to see an octavo of The ecuyell of the Histories of Troy in full limp vellum, next to a cracked and jagged piece of gneiss, gave me pleasure. I had a television for a while but finally I had to throw it out, because watching it late at night, seeing all those beautiful people, those beer commercials and ads for jeans in which they wafted toward each other, never quite fucking but always with a hint of it, all this gave me a quite unbearable feeling of loneliness, I mean the kind of loneliness which makes you hate yourself and talks to you about death, which makes your own home unfamiliar and waking up tomorrow impossible. So I threw it out. But mostly my life was ordinary and very good. I worked, I had friends, I had lovers. I came home in the evenings and made myself a cup of hot chocolate, and sat on my porch and read. When it grew dark I ate, usually healthy stuff, salad and artichokes and things. I invested in General Motors, two startup agricultural products companies, a bank, and so on. I had a li
ve-in boyfriend for a while, for five years actually, a porno actor too, his name was George. We broke up because of the usual couple stuff, growing apart and all that, but not jealousy as you might think. I’ve had other girlfriends and boyfriends after that, some for longer than others, and a couple of times I’ve thought of marriage but didn’t really do it. I mean all in all my life was quite average and almost boring, except I went and sexed people for a living, which is good. It was good. But I’ve also seen people flame and crash, flame on some drug or some furious anger that drove them to the life, to the desperate affair with guilt and rejection that was mostly the meaning of Joyland. I saw some flirt with the hard guys and chicks who appeared like hyenas on the edge of the particular ghetto that I lived in, and these friends disappeared into the long black maw of justice. Some of these appeared later on talk shows to participate in the daily circuses of guilt and victimhood, to play the preening lambs who owned up to transgression, who bore the holy anger of America, and then returned gratefully, weeping and sometimes clutching a book contract, to the fold of righteousness.

  Meanwhile Mother puked, starved, and ate. And so we went into the eighties, and quite suddenly, one morning, Reagan was in the White House, my once-boyfriend George was dead of AIDS, and entire battalions of wild-eyed, stiff-moving robots descended on us, various scriptures in hand, eager to have their revenge on sex. I avoided all of the early extravaganzas, but when my town council moved to have the local fornication emporium —Wonderland —expelled from the body civic, I called them and told them I wanted to talk to the committee, that I’d give evidence or whatever they wanted. When I explained who I was and what I did and why I was qualified to speak, at first the woman on the phone didn’t believe me, she kept on saying, “You live here?” I told her to look up the tax records and hung up. So they had to let me in. On the morning I went in, the local NBC station had a van at the council house, and the room, a big auditorium with a mural of great American inventors (the Wright brothers, Edison, Henry Ford) on one end, was packed wall to wall. The panel was composed of these: a Catholic priest; a mother of three (that’s how she described herself) who worked as an assistant editor in a publishing house in Manhattan; the minister from the local Methodist congregation (which was at the time just starting a two-million-dollar renovation on its church); a feminist writer of some repute and angry notoriety; and a couple, young and very clean and energetic, the wife a real estate broker and power in the P.T.A., the husband a lawyer. As these people arranged themselves on the podium, and as I waited, a reporter leaned over a pew and stage-whispered to me: “Hey, Kyrie, what about the Nero film?”

  “No comment,” I said, a little sharply, because that was supposed to be a secret. The thing was that I’d been negotiating for months with a major studio, which, with an already Oscared director, was trying to put together that elusive thing —a mainstream fuck film, you know, big budget, cast of thousands, maybe some real stars. I’d talked to a couple of the executives, and they were slick-haired and blown-dry, but I could tell they were desperate: their studio was dying. So they were seeing big bucks, they were hot for the four billion dollars on the other side of the tracks in Joyland, I could see the numbers ticking by in their eyes as they described the flames over Rome, they wanted to do decadence and lust and destruction and the final gory death of Nero. They’d gotten a couple of major male stars interested in Nero, and they wanted me to do his mother.

  But now the loudspeakers crackled in the hall, and we were ready to start. I sat in front of the podium and faced them over a battery of microphones, and the scene had that strange flat look that comes from too many video lights. I’d worn a gray suit and pulled back my hair, so that I looked more like a mid-level executive than the wild half-broken slut they wanted, but soon they got over their slight confusion and the questions came hard and fast.

  Sex is a private act. It is a beautiful thing between two people. It is secret. Why do you degrade yourself and the holy gift of love by doing it like animals in front of the whole world?

  What you do dehumanizes human beings. What happens between two people is complex, mysterious. What you put on the screen is a caricature of human relations, and encourages people to treat each others like caricatures. Why do you do it?

  To any sane person this obsession with the nuts and bolts of the act, this unredeemed and unredeeming gaze at the mere body, this filth is sickening. The sexual act is a gift of God, to be engaged in with all seriousness and humbleness and spiritual consciousness. Don’t you understand that what you are doing is sinful, that it is the enshrinement of sin?

  Pornography is violence against women. It is the colonization of their souls and bodies. It is enslavement. Don’t you agree? How can you be a woman and not agree?

  Can’t men and women just be friends?

  I answered as best I could. I walked out of there weary, and was chased by cameras out of the building and to my car. At home, the phone was buzzing as I opened the door.

  “Hi, babe. You were sensational.” It was one of my executives from the coast. “Just keep on doing it. Every minute on the air is ten thousand tickets in the door. So here’s the deal —I’ve been talking to the money people and it’s a go situation. Almost.”

  “So what’s the hitch?” I said.

  “They’re very impressed with the names we’ve mentioned for Nero, and they see you as the big Mama, I mean they can completely see you, you are her. Specially after your appearance on the tube today. But one thing. See, when you’re talking Agrippina, you’re talking a complete full-blown woman. You’re seeing, I don’t know, you get it, a luxurious woman, almost zaftig.”

  “What am I, a matchstick? I mean, am I bones?”

  “No, no, you’re it. Put you in a toga and you’re it. All except for one thing. Or maybe two.”

  “A tit job! A greedy slimy Hollywood tit job. You want me to have a tit job.”

  “Why’re you so mad? Everyone has one, you know.”

  So I hung up on him, and he was smart enough not to call right back. I sat by the phone holding my boobs, comfortable friends in my hands, not of spectacular DeMille proportions, but there and a little saggy and beautiful. I’d seen friends who’d done it, and I recalled the black bruises, the aching tenderness that held their arms tight to their sides, the bright purple flush of blood around the teats, the whole chest looking as if some maniac had swung a two-by-four to land smack across it, and as I remembered I twinged all the way from my nipples to the base of my spine. I sat there awhile, and then tried to eat, but my throat was tight and fear made my heart bigger and painful in me, so finally I sat down to a bottle of wine.

  The phone brought me out of a fuzzy, drunken sleep, and for a few seconds I blinked, forgetting completely where I was.

  “You’d better come,” the voice said, and for one strange moment, in my dizzy state, it sounded not at all human, but as if it came out of the wires themselves, out of the huge network of coils and transistors and dishes and cables. The ground was icy and hard and in the hospital lot my boots rang on it like hammers. They had Mother laid out on this bed with railings around it, covered with a white sheet. The sheet went all the way up to her neck, and what surprised me was that her hair had turned an iron gray. I was afraid to lift the sheet away, but a doctor stood behind me and very softly began to tell me what had happened. He said that her eating disorder had been under control, it seemed to them, and she had appeared even more calm than usual lately. So all was going well, but that day the nurse found the bathroom door locked, and when they beat it down they found Mother in the tub. The skin around her stomach and her ankles was covered with small cuts, deep and deliberately made with a carpet knife, which she was still holding in her right hand. There was a fresh cut on her right ankle, and she had the foot propped up under the hot water tap. The insides of the drain were caked black —it looked like she’d been doing it for weeks, the doctor said, like she’d been trying to drain all the blood from her body. I don’t know
, why didn’t she do it all at once, the doctor said, I can’t figure it, but I don’t think she wanted to, you know, go, she had a piece of chocolate cake on a plate by the tub, it was just the blood, I think she thought she could live without it.

  They left me alone with her for a while and I touched her face, and the skin was cold but soft. Finally I turned away from her, but from the door I came back to her and lifted the sheet off. Her body lay with that opened up limpness that the dead achieve for a bit, an absolute absence of tension, hands gently curved, knees out. Her pubic hair was white, and above it at regular intervals, were one-inch up-and-down lines, slightly reddish. Around her ankles were rings, bracelets of the same lines. I looked at her neck, the deep creases at its base, the curve of the ribs just under the skin, the confident thickness of the thighs.

  A close-up. Full-color, outsized, magnified. A penis penetrating a vagina. The frame is so tight we can’t see anything else. The focus is so sharp we can see each wrinkle, each bump, each hair. The human genitals are not beautiful. There is something ugly about this. There is something very ugly about this.

  We as a society are a hair’s breadth away from collapse.

  A thick, musky light like clotted syrup; sidewalks and teenage hookers; bourbon and the tight ropy muscles of heroin addicts. This is the world you live in.