Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore (9780385538398)

by Mosley, Walter

  “You know the Threadley brothers have made it a rule that we have no economic flexibility.”

  “I know that.”

  “But we …” Lewis Dardanelle said and then paused. He frowned and then, quite uncharacteristically, smiled. “We have the names and contact information for people that you invited to other funerals.”

  “The guest lists,” I said.

  “I could have Talia call them and ask if they would donate something to the services.”

  “It could be a graveside ceremony,” I offered. “We don’t need a chapel.”

  “I’ll call Talia at home and get her to start calling tonight.”

  “Why, Lewis? Why would you go out of your way like this?”

  “Theon was always generous with the staff. He was a friend to me in many ways and I believe that I would be judged badly if I didn’t help him on his way.”

  I don’t know why I was surprised that an undertaker believed in an afterlife.

  I ate dinner at a small French bistro called Monarc’s a block north of Pico on Robertson. It was a simple meal of green beans and almonds with chicken cooked in a white-wine sauce. For dessert I had flan with raspberries and peach tea.

  I read a few pages from a book I’d been carrying around in my big blue purse—Behold the Man by Michael Moorcock. It was a story of time travel and a kind of alternate Christianity.

  “Excuse me, miss,” a man said.

  He was young and unremarkably dressed in business work clothes—California style: a herringbone jacket and light gray trousers, no tie but crystal cuff links on his white shirt. He was sitting at the table next to me reading a newspaper.

  “Yes?”

  “I see that you’re reading science fiction,” he said, smiling.

  “Yeah … I guess. So?”

  “Not so many single young women can be found eating alone and reading Moorcock.”

  “I’m not looking for company.”

  “Obviously not.”

  He was of mixed race, black and some kind of Caucasian or other light-skinned group. There was a gap between his front teeth and something like a question in his eye.

  “Why obviously?” I asked.

  “The fact of you sitting there like that, like I said before.”

  The way he talked was playful. I couldn’t remember the last time someone played with conversation—with me.

  “My name’s Rash,” he said. “Don’t ask me why.”

  He held out a hand and I shook it against my better judgment.

  “Sandra. Sandra Pinkney.”

  “Vineland is my family name.”

  “You don’t know why your parents named you Rash, Mr. Vineland?”

  “My dad always said that it just seemed right. My sister’s named Susan and the younger brother is John.”

  “They must hate you,” I said, feeling the smile take over my suspicions.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Here your siblings were given vanilla names and you got something special, a name that one out of ten million don’t get. You might be the only Rash Vineland in the whole world. I bet you are.”

  He squinted at my explanation and I liked him … some.

  “You know,” he said, “you might be right about that. I have to call John three times before he’ll call me back, and Susan had a birthday party and invited everyone in the family except me. She said that the invitation must have gotten lost in the mail. But the way she said it made me wonder.”

  “You see?” I said, realizing that somehow Rash Vineland had lured me into conversation.

  “Are you a therapist?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?” The word had many connotations in my line of work.

  “You know … a psychoanalyst or something like that.”

  I grinned. That might not seem like much but it was rare for me to express any kind of goofy humor. I’d pretty much stopped thinking that silly moments were worth laughing about on the day my father died.

  “Why is that funny?” Rash asked.

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-two.”

  “And what are you doing here?”

  “I like this place. I come here to read The New York Times at least twice a week.”

  “We’re in Los Angeles.”

  “I know,” he said, looking down at my worn blue tennis shoes. “It’s kinda egotistical, I guess, something like that. I feel important reading the New York paper.”

  “Are your parents from there?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever been there?”

  “Naw. Have you?”

  “A few times.”

  “On business?”

  “I have to go.”

  “To New York?”

  “No. I have to leave … here.”

  There was no artifice to the disappointment in his expression. Rash wasn’t going to ask me to stay or even if he could talk to me again. I imagined that he would come to Monarc’s almost every day for a couple of weeks hoping to see me again.… Me, dressed in a pale-yellow-and-faded-blue muumuu with tattered tennis shoes on my feet.

  I was liking him more.

  “I’ll tell you what, Rash.”

  “What?”

  “I want you to write down your phone number on my place mat. I have no idea if I’ll call you but at least I’ll know how. Okay?”

  “Absolutely.”

  When I got home I turned on our state-of-the-art security system, retrieved my father’s pistol, and made sure that it was loaded.

  I changed the bullets yearly so that they’d have pop. My daddy taught me how to shoot on a range east of Riverside.

  The answering machine had twenty-seven messages on it but I didn’t listen to any of them. Instead I strolled through the dark house into the master’s bedroom (as Theon always called it) and rolled up into the blankets thinking of a worm luxuriating in its own silk.

  I turned on a lamp and started reading The Autumn of the Patriarch. That was a book I read often because it made poetry out of the rot and disarray of a life that seemed a lot like mine. The president was Theon and I was an unremarkable peasant among the hundreds who sometimes lived in his sphere. With these ephemeral ideas in mind I nodded and soon found myself asleep.

  I loved Theon in my sleep that night. He was an ideal husband, a man who took care of so many people and things that he didn’t have time for children—or even a proper job.

  He broiled me steaks while preparing avocado salsas, squeezed lemonade from the fruit off our own tree, and then, after the meal, he washed the dishes before asking could he fuck my ass.

  The sour lemonade on my dreaming lips ushered me into another dream:

  I was on a posh set that I had once shot on in southern France. It was the living room that led to an outside veranda of some duke’s mansion on the Mediterranean. There were four cameramen (not including photographers) and some of the most beautiful men I had ever seen. They were all naked and fully erect, looking at me haughtily and yet somehow hungrily.

  “All right, Deb,” Linda Love shouted.

  I knew even in the dream that she didn’t belong there. The director at the beach house was Polish, very tall, and dripping with the veneer of sophistication.

  I looked in a full-length mirror that had been placed on the set and saw myself. My hair was long and white. The tattoo was there under my left eye. I could tell somehow that it was now permanent and a sadness filled me. My breasts were small again, sagging a little.

  “Debbie.”

  “Yes, Linda?”

  “This is going to be a revolutionary shoot. We’re going to make millions on it.”

  “We?”

  “The owners.”

  Then there was a tall beautiful man with tanned skin and no pubic hair standing before me. I fell to my knees and took the head of his huge, upstanding erection in my mouth.

  “Slower, Deb,” Linda whispered from across the room.

  I could hear the waves cras
hing because the doors to the veranda were open wide.

  “Slower?” I asked. All Linda had ever asked me for was more passion.

  “You’re making love to him,” she said.

  “What shot are you trying to get?”

  “Don’t worry about the shot. Just go with your feelings.”

  Whatever he did to me I wanted him to do. The feeling inside me was the sound of waves: waves in my womb, flushing out my rectum, across my clitoris, and rushing between my toes. I screamed with pleasure but the sounds were drowned by the turbulent Mediterranean Sea.

  “I’m going to enter into your side now,” my well-oiled lover said.

  The room had grown to infinite proportions. The cameramen had put down their cameras. Linda was reclining in her director’s chair. The crew members were all sitting on the floor smiling and watching.

  “You’re going to turn me on my side?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. He had a slight accent but I couldn’t place it. “I’m going to press my cock in through your skin and under your ribs, into your body.”

  “But that would kill me.”

  “You can learn to live with anything.”

  I wanted to say no but the scene of the dream shifted and I was on a hassock with the Adonis there next to me moving his erection deeper and deeper into my side. It was a very uncomfortable feeling, like gas and freefall at once.

  “See?” he said. “You feel it inside. They all are watching me fuck you. They want to see it from every side and in every way. You feel me between your intestines, under your heart, pressing, pressing?”

  And for the briefest moment I tried; I tried to accept his presence inside my body, a sexual surgeon on a syndicated reality TV program. I could feel the hunger and fear of the crew as he pushed farther into me.

  Then I woke up.

  Actually I threw myself from the bed, landing hard on the side of my left knee. I was up immediately, fleeing from the bedroom. I turned on lights as I ran. I choked on a sour taste that seemed to rise up from my defiled internal organs. I made it all the way to our white-on-white sunken living room.

  Theon had called it my polar bear room.

  I had my father’s midnight special in my hand.

  The nacre clock on the wall was seven small white shells from midnight.

  My sex was dry and shriveled like a very old woman’s. The fear thrummed under my heart and I was shivering. I couldn’t shake the images of the dream. They wanted to rip me wide open and expose my beating heart to excite some country fool’s four-inch erection.

  The phone rang at that moment. It seemed like fate.

  I didn’t move and the answering machine picked it up after the sixth burp of chimes.

  “Sandra,” a woman’s voice said. “This is Dr. Karin. I read about your husband’s death online and I wanted to call. Are you all right? If you want to see me I’m free all tomorrow afternoon. You can just drop by.”

  I wanted to pick up the phone but there was a pistol in my hand. I couldn’t let the gun go, not at that moment. I couldn’t.

  There was a hesitation and then the click of Dr. Karin hanging up. I was relieved at her absence, overwhelmed with relief to be free from the dream. I also was ashamed of myself.

  “Hold it open,” the demented little director, who called himself DeLester Grind, had said to me after Myron had suddenly pulled his big dick out of my ass on my first anal shoot. “People want to see inside you. They want to imagine where that thing was.”

  “It’s just a job,” I told my mother that very afternoon. “They pay me and I pay your rent.”

  I believed those words. My poor black widowed mother needed somebody to look after her, just like a million men wanted to stare down my stretched and reddened rectum in order to sleep alone, or next to their wives—or both.

  I stayed in the house all the next day with the phone turned off. Nobody rang the doorbell. I didn’t even look outside. I didn’t play music, watch TV, read a book or newspaper, or turn on the radio. I would sit in a white chair in the white room for hours staring at the white walls, wondering what my memories meant. Was it me, the woman alone in the house, who had starred in two hundred feature-length films that centered on my breasts and clitoris, my fake blue eyes—all dubbed in sighs?

  My pale blue Jag had been returned to the driveway sometime during the day. After sunset I got in and drove with the sunroof open and all the windows down. When I made it out to the desert the air turned cold but I didn’t mind.

  I knew where I was going though I had never been there. It was a little house with a fruitless and perpetually dying apple tree in the front yard. There was a Beware of Dog sign on the chain-link fence but the ragged mutt was too old even to bark.

  There were three cars parked on the lawn of the house. Actually it was a trailer with add-ons constructed on both sides and behind. Eerie lights blossomed from within. More than anything the structure resembled a cluster of luminescent mushrooms.

  I walked up to the door wearing the yellow-and-blue muumuu, carrying the blue purse with my father’s gun inside.

  The front door was aluminum, corroded in spots. I knocked and then waited for no more than sixty seconds. A weak light came on over my head.

  After a moment a frail woman’s voice asked, “Who’s out there?”

  “Mrs. May?”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m Sandra Peel, ma’am. I came to bring you news about Myrtle.”

  “What news?”

  “May I come in?”

  “Are you alone?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Do you know what time it is?”

  “It’s important.”

  “I don’t know,” the timid voice complained. “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll leave if you want me to.”

  “You could come back tomorrow,” she suggested.

  “I live pretty far away, Mrs. May. I might not be coming back.”

  It felt that the woman and I were merely giving voice to a bad script, a drama that we were acting in but had no part in writing, no heart in performing.

  The door came open and a short and wide white woman stepped out onto the gray step. She was wearing a green robe over a T-shirt and jeans.

  “What about Myrtle?” she asked.

  “Can I come in?”

  The front door opened into a wide and shallow living room. There was a TV tuned to a late-night repeat of The Tonight Show and a man, older than the woman, propped up in a wheelchair. He was held in place by a seat belt that crossed his chest from left to right.

  The room smelled of stale urine and uninspired cooking. This atmosphere was sickening but I’d come too far to turn back.

  “Only seat is on the couch, Miss Peel,” the forty-something Mrs. May said. “I’ll have to sit next to you.”

  The man let his head fall to the side so that he could see me with his watery russet eyes.

  “Lester,” Mrs. May said. “This is Sandy Peel. She’s a friend of our Myrtle.”

  That room was why I’d fucked ten thousand men and women on four continents. Thousands of us boys and girls had run screaming from the same filth and stink of poverty. Black and white and brown and yellow and red had put out their thumbs and pulled down their pants, used lubricants and drugs and alcohol to escape these decaying ancestors and others just like them.

  “Lester had a stroke six months ago,” Mrs. May said. “I think it was because he was so heartbroken over Myrtle runnin’ away.”

  “It killed her,” I thought and also said out loud.

  “What?” the broad woman asked.

  “Myrtle’s dead,” I said. “She changed her name to Jolie Wins and came to L.A. to be a movie star. A producer offered her a job but there was an accident during the audition and she died from an electrical shock.”

  Lester had raised his head maybe half an inch.

  “Dead?” Mrs. May said. “You come in here in the middle’a the night an’ tell me my little
girl is dead?”

  “Yes, ma’am. You can call a Lieutenant Perry Mendelson of the Pasadena Police Department to get more exact information.”

  “Myrtle’s dead,” the woman said to Lester.

  “And in a drawer in the Pasadena morgue.”

  “Why are you so cold?” Mrs. May’s voice and Lester May’s eyes asked me.

  “Because I can’t sleep, and even though you never knew enough to know that Myrtle hadn’t been inside a classroom since she was twelve, you are her parents and you should know that she’s gone.

  “Because she told me where you lived and I have to believe that she wanted me to come here and tell you that she died trying to get as far away from you as she could. I believe that she wanted me to come here and ask Lester why he did what he did to her and to ask you why you closed your eyes and ears to her pain.”

  “You black bitch,” Mrs. May said, her placid features turning into those of an ogre.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, “and much, much worse than that. Bitch and cunt and whore like you wouldn’t believe. Yes, ma’am. Jolie sent a demon to announce her death. Now you can do what you want.”

  I stood up and Lester’s eyes followed me. There was pity in that gaze but not, I think, for his daughter. He was feeling sorry for himself, for his loss, for his stroke. He was grieved that he was paralyzed in that room with a woman who transformed into a monster now and again.

  I had brought my father’s pistol maybe to kill them. If Jolie had been my daughter I would have sent her to school with Neelo Brown; I would have tried to love her.

  As I drove away from the mutated trailer I told myself that the only reason I left Lester alive was so that he could suffer a little more, so that Mrs. May could keep him breathing while she collected his Social Security checks and boiled potatoes and guzzled beer until they both ran down the drain and into the sewer.

  I woke up with the sun in my eyes. I had driven out to a fairly deserted campsite at Joshua Tree National Monument and slept there in the driver’s seat of my pale blue Jaguar.

  The moment I awoke I used the key to open the glove compartment and check out the ownership papers of my car. It was still mine, probably the only thing I owned. Somewhere Linda Love was looking for me and Richard Ness too. The sun was just risen and the desert held the chill from the night before. I got out of my car and went to the corrugated tin-walled camp outhouse.