Promiscuous Unbound

by Bex Brian

  “Took a long time.” The anthropologist nodded. “I couldn’t pay them. There are strict rules about that. . . .”

  “Cheapskate,” Alastair said, although I was the only one who heard.

  “I had to convince them that I was quite mad. For the first couple of months I didn’t do much of anything. Then I started to go into their Awis in the evening. Once there I made a point of blowing my nose into a cloth handkerchief. Each time I put it back into my pocket, they roared with laugher. Couldn’t understand why anyone would want to hang on to their snot. After a couple of weeks of this, it wasn’t such a stretch for them to believe that I wanted to collect piss too. Been at it now for nearly eight years.”

  “That’s lot of piss,” my father said.

  “Not as much as you’d think. All these droughts . . . Well, the body tends to conserve.”

  Later, after the anthropologist had gone off on his evening piss-gathering rounds, my father, robust with enthusiasm, and Alastair, just as hyped up with rage, faced off.

  “Absolutely not!” Alastair shouted. “You can’t stick in the middle of a wild animal show a bunch of native women, no matter what their ovaries are doing. It’s just not done. The network wouldn’t stand for it.”

  “Bullshit!” my father said, waving his arm, hoping to dismiss all objections in one fell swoop. “Christ, Alastair, I have spent my lifetime trying to knock people out of this crazy notion that somehow they exist outside nature. . . .”

  “Don’t give me your pat speeches,” Alastair snapped, “speeches, I might add, you use primarily to get some halfwit into bed.”

  I remember the production assistant my father was sleeping with on that shoot raising an eyebrow, but she knew better than to interfere. We all did, though I did hear Luke whisper under his breath, “Good one.”

  “Alastair,” my father responded, clearly angry now, “your shortsightedness, your pettiness, your fear of what people think is wearing me down. It’s a fact that these women have evolved this system. There is no reason on earth we shouldn’t include it.”

  “Yes,” Alastair countered, his face flush with rage, “if you were making an ethnographic film. It is not right, however, to include these women in Maurice Yellow’s Wild Kingdom. Fur, scales, feathers. End of story.”

  “No bush?”

  “No bush.”

  “Exactly—that’s why you are a fucking idiot. No bush.”

  After that Alastair refused to have anything more to do with him. For hours he paced up and down the wadi, kicking up sand. Then, as night fell, he had Luke bring him out a blanket. He would sleep outside.

  My father ignored him. He concentrated instead on trying to convince the anthropologist to let him film his women. Late into the evening he produced a bottle of scotch from which he poured generous shots for our mild-mannered host and a handful of village elders. But my father’s grandiloquence convinced no one, especially not the piss-hoarder. For eight years he had patiently built the framework of his thesis. He certainly wasn’t going to have his theories trumpeted now by a TV front man.

  I remember all through the discussion a strange trick of the light: the more father railed the smaller he became, while the anthropologist’s flat, plain shadow loomed higher and higher on the wall. When nothing more could be said, my father sat down with a thump. It was only then that he noticed that all the scotch he’d poured for the village elders lay in pools at their feet, having trickled out of the tribal scarification holes beneath their lips. I thought he might go out and retrieve Alastair, haul his old friend back in to deal with this absurd situation of his own creation. But he and his production assistant disappeared into his tent.

  In the morning, Alastair pulled me aside. He tried not to cry; I was only sixteen, after all. But as soon as he said, “Right, I’m off. You’ll have to deal with your father from now on,” the tears started to flow. He was a man in love. Unrequited love has no equal. I held him. It was adolescent sympathy, full of schoolgirl hugs and silly things like tucking his hair back behind his ears, but Alastair bore up pretty well. Before my father awoke, he’d taken one of the trucks, heading back to the city and, as he put it, “a life beyond your father.”

  Such drama. Queers and teenagers, what would one expect? I was surprised, though, that Alastair managed to keep his distance. No reproach when we got back to London. No calls once we were in New York. Nothing. For years. I stopped accompanying my father on his trips. Went to university, took a degree in English, and told no one who my father was. As for my father, although he would never admit it, the trips were becoming more arduous. He blamed his young inexperienced producers, he blamed his incompetent assistants, he blamed everyone but himself and age. I blamed Alastair. The stalwart have no right to be peeved. But now that he was, I feared he would be stalwart in that. And I truly mourned that I might not see him again.

  And then he just reappeared. A letter came. It sat on the mantelpiece for weeks while father roasted on a shoot in Yemen. When he returned he, too, circled the letter for weeks. I think he assumed it would be news of a death. Then one night, called from my room, I watched as he ripped it open and handed it to me. “Read.” The paper was very flimsy and the letter itself was grease-stained, making certain words indelible and transparent at the same time.

  “M.,” it began, “I am sitting at a food kiosk on a street in Bangkok, eating fish. Very good, as always. And I am drunk, as always. And in a panic. I thought of you today, and when I did I realized that you had become a memory. For most of my adult life, even when we hadn’t seen each other for years, you were never a memory . . . far from it. You were—I can see you stiffen now, that famous veiled look of yours descending—something decidedly more active. You possessed me. My every action was filtered through you. That’s the problem: ‘was.’ We’ve both seen enough symbiotic relationships to know how vital they are. This morning, I felt like the hippo who’d lost it’s back-pecking birds. Well, you get my bloody drift. You as memory will be the death of me.

  “I don’t fear coming back. You are a man who accepts what, or who, is in front of him without question. I know through my sources that you are in Yemen until the end of March. Allowing time for contingencies, I will be in New York early May. I won’t come empty-handed. I have an idea for a show. And now to Bangkok’s other delights.

  “Love, Alastair.

  “P.S. I’m crying and I am terrified to end this letter. A link, any link to you . . . I’ll stop. A.”

  My father and I both looked at the front door, as if, on some farcical cue, Alastair would actually ring the bell and make his entrance. As it happened his return was not off by much, and he was right about the ease part. In fact, he practically fell through the door, wracked, as he was, with fever and chills from a bad dose of the clap. We didn’t even have a chance to say hello before we had to rush him to the hospital. My father stayed with him the whole time.

  Doctor Ricard. Doctor Luc. So pleased, so vain, such assholes, their faces patient with this patient who didn’t take kindly to the way they pinched my thigh, tickled my toes, and measured my leg—only a half an inch lost!—and then pronounced me fit and fixed. I hated them. I suppose I am, after all, my father’s daughter. He hated all doctors. If only I could have done what my father did and just not speak to them. But I have no Alastair to be my emissary, to listen, free of contempt, to men of healing as they laid out scads of advice on what to eat, what medicines to swallow, what attitude to take, while Dad, the object of their concern, sat tight-lipped and stewing in his bed. I had to listen. It was my near future they were summoning up. I am, like some goddamn sidewinding crab, supposed to transverse the corridor all day long. Build up strength in my leg. This is my charge. I’ll do it, but I won’t be good about it, I won’t have pluck and grim determination. I won’t let them be proud of their handiwork.

  Boy, I’m in a temper. It’s got me by the throat. Shouldn’t it be the opposite? All joy and jubilation? But something rankles. Is it the matter of being
lorded over? Or that soon I won’t be. I’ll be shipped out, the mattress flipped, the memory of me gone forever. Perhaps, in this too I am my father’s daughter. “Is that all they figured out?” he would say when Alastair returned to the bedroom to consult on the consultation. My father’s mounting disdain fueled by the thought that his history was only relevant to the doctors during the time of his illness. I know that loneliness. The little panic, the fear of suddenly being invisible as soon as your chart is snapped shut.

  How that panic must have reached its crescendo when he was dying, the prospect looming of the final closing of his chart. Not even all of Alastair’s constant ministrations helped. And he was strict. Didn’t let him out of bed. Didn’t let him watch too much TV. Didn’t let him smoke, or drink. I will give it to my father—despite his fear, or rather because of it, he did try to shorten the whole ordeal. Late, late at night as I sat bolt upright by his bed, wondering in my wide-eyed fatigue why it is exactly that we have to watch a person die, I’d see him taking the equivalent of a swan dive into what he hoped would be his death. Drawing himself erect, he’d pop open his eyes and stare for a moment unseeingly at the ceiling before loudly exhaling every whiff of air in his body. When, unbidden, his next breath would be drawn, his defeat was palpable. Patting his shoulder, I’d lean over and whisper in his ear that it was alright, that it was hard to die.

  And to get well. Yes, that is what has me in a temper. Before I was healing without having to do much, me on the autopilot of cellular reconstruction. Now I’ll have to make an effort, “control,” as Dr. Ricard so adroitly put it, “my destiny.” Won’t get back my half inch, though, will I? Won’t ever sashay into a room, gliding on two perfectly even legs, will I? No, I’ll be Igor, sans the humpback, tripping in, ghoulish and deformed. Clip-clump. Clip-clump. I wish I could die. But what’s the point? That’s a whole other bother.

  There came, in the middle of last night, the secret knock. But she failed to tell me what my end of the code was. My “Come in” obviously didn’t suffice. She stormed though the door and put her hand over my mouth.

  “Shut up, shut the fuck up,” she hissed. Her hand tasted of diesel fuel and was horribly gritty. I had predicted she would be in a foul mood, but this was a bit much.

  “What do you want to do?” I said, when she removed her hand. “Speak in sign language? Nobody can hear us through these fucking dungeon walls.”

  “The night nurse, this time she was awake,” Sonia said, taking off her jacket. I noticed she was wearing the same filthy T-shirt and jeans as during her last midnight visit. “I had to wait until she left the station before I could sneak past.”

  “Well, it’s good to know someone is awake and keeping watch over us poor souls.”

  Sonia sat on my bed. I felt a wave of revulsion at the thought of those scummy jeans so near my leg.

  “I have clothes,” I told her. She raised one brow. “Not here, of course, but at the pension I was staying in. The bitch of a concierge is keeping my stuff for me. The pants might be a little large but the rest . . .”

  “You don’t like what I’m wearing?”

  “Not much variety.”

  “You want your clothes to look like this?” Sonia said, picking roughly at her T-shirt.

  “Can’t you keep clean?”

  “No.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “A dirty place.”

  “Stop it.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yes, very much.”

  “Well it doesn’t matter to me.”

  “That’s the problem, isn’t it. You can’t just be a bum on the street.”

  “I can’t.”

  “No.”

  “OK. Be happy, I’m a bum somewhere else.”

  “Great.”

  Sonia turned and saw my wheelchair. She gave a low whistle.

  “So this is the beginning of the end,” she said, getting up and going to sit in the wheelchair. “First this, then walking, then . . . poof. You’ll be gone.”

  “I am already walking. Dr. Luc has me traipsing up and down the corridor like a zombie all day long.”

  “That fucker.”

  “That fucker. He has pronounced me fixed.”

  “Did he ask after me?”

  “How could he? You made me swear . . .”

  “I don’t care anyway.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  Sonia rolled to the other side of the room and let the leg extension bang into the wall.

  “Our downstairs neighbor used to have to get around in one of these,” she said, banging repeatedly into the wall. “‘Hold the door for me, my dear.’‘Help me up the stair, my dear.’ He was a real pain in the ass. One day I was standing with his wife. We were watching him wheel down the street toward us. She said to me that no one can look elegant in a wheelchair.”

  “She is probably right.”

  Pushing hard on the handrails, Sonia swung away from the wall, tried to pop a wheelie, but the leg extension acted as a counterbalance. The front wheels never left the ground. I noticed that this exertion left her completely breathless.

  “Have you got any food?” she asked after a while.

  “I do,” I said, leaning over and opening my drawer. “I have been saving all the savable parts of my supper. A couple of yogurts, a few apples, jam, some bread.”

  “Throw me a yogurt.”

  “Peach or vanilla?”

  “Peach.”

  Sonia, catching the yogurt, peeled off the lid, licked it, then started licking the contents like a cat at a milk bowl. Her hands were filthy, her fingernails black.

  “Don’t you think you should wash your hands before you eat?”

  She shrugged. “I’m more like drinking.”

  “Even so.”

  “I tell you, you should get out of here. You need to see more things.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “People.”

  “That’s why your visits are so illuminating.”

  Sonia started to laugh and said, ignoring my sarcasm, “The other day, I was having fun watching people. It’s a stupid game, but you try to spot the foreigners and guess where they come from. It’s easy for me. I can always tell. Especially the Arabs.”

  “Sounds like you have a real knack. What gives Arabs away, do you think?”

  “The walk.”

  “Ohh.”

  “Anyway, I am high up, looking down on all these people, and I see a woman dragging toilet paper behind her. Stupid bitch, her head in the air, had no idea. So, like God, I call down, ‘Madame, vous avez de papier de toilette attache a votre soulier.’ And you know what she did?”

  “No, what?”

  “She looked up, she spun around. I think she might have taken a step backwards. Everything but look down to see if she is, in fact, dragging half a mile of toilet paper. I couldn’t stop laughing.”

  “What a citizen you are.”

  “Ahhh, it’s just something to do,” she said, wrapping her arms around her thin frame.

  “Why won’t you tell me where you are staying?”

  “Nowhere. I just didn’t want to be here,” she said quietly.

  “Thanks.”

  “Not you. Here, in this sick place.”

  “But the intention of this sick place is to make you better.”

  Sonia turned away from me. What did I know? What do I know? There is some fear, so great that I can’t even ask her, “Are you dying?”

  “Alright,” I said, letting the matter drop. “At least let this place make you clean. Go in the bathroom, wash up. Use my toothbrush. In the morning I’ll call the concierge and let her know you are coming over to get some of my things. But you’ll have to look slightly decent.”

  Sonia slouched off. I could hear her in the bathroom, the water at full force, the toilet being flushed repeatedly. When she came out, I could see that the towel had been thrown on the floor. I thought to tell her it would be a dead giveaway that she h
ad been here but something, some impatience or reluctance I saw in her eyes, made me let it go. Stick to the plan. A few clothes, a few francs.

  “By the way, how much money do you have at the pension?”

  Jesus! I suddenly realized I had no idea. There could be wads of cash. Sonia saw me hesitate.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t steal your whole life. Or maybe I should, go live in America. Be a married woman.”

  “You can have it.”

  She got ready to leave.

  “Do what you want with my stuff,” I said, catching hold of her arm. “But please come back.”

  Now that I can move, I can tidy. Wish I had more to clean. I’m itching to clean. Want in my nostrils the powdery grit of Ajax cleaner. Want my hands raw from scrubbing, my face red from effort. At least now I can shake out my sheets after every meal. No more fucking bread crumbs sticking to my ass. In future, I will leave any man, instantly, if he even thinks about breakfast in bed. I also have the Herald Tribunes Marcel brings me, days old and read through, which I fold back to their original crispness. My pills I can line up, although that smacks of a crazy woman’s obsession and I have to fight the urge to pop all of them in my mouth, one candy color at a time. I can roll into the bathroom and wipe down the sink, but without gloves the toilet remains tantalizingly out of reach. Of course, I needn’t do any of this, and my little machinations bring a “Tut-tut” from the cleaning lady. Still, I dare her to white-glove my work. I’m a neatnik. All over the world. Swept the sands, trimmed the jungle, tamed the craggy shore. Never was there a shoot in which my tent wasn’t the neatest. I see it now, set along the sunbaked canvas walls, my work desk, my schoolbooks, my newly sharpened pencils. My bed neat as a pin. And even though we had scores of bearers, porters, minders, cooks, I would do the morning dishes, bringing the water to a fierce boil over the fire and then making sure to give the backs of the plates as good a scrubbing as the fronts. My father once threatened to send me home when he caught me polishing my tent stakes.

  In the great confusing swirl that is being a human, I feel to this day that I am most myself when I’m making a salad, or sweeping out the kitchen. It always shocks people, this domestic streak. For those who had watched me gamboling around the edges of Maurice Yellow’s Wild Kingdom, those short snippets were enough to make them think I was an enfant terrible, a wild child. I was merely a show-off, grateful for the attention and aware of what was required. But there is no safety or comfort in pretending not to be afraid. When the camera wasn’t trained on me, I dreamed of owning a hotel in which I alone would clean every room, imposing order on all the varied lives that passed through my doors.