And then she notices the carvings on the hardwood, the destroyed walls, and debris littering the floors in layers.
“Were you robbed?”
“I did this.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I mean I think I might know but I don’t know.”
Nodding, seeming to understand, she wanders around the room, stopping at the TV, “Damn, this is a good TV. Too bad about the gash running down the side of its screen.”
“It’s still usable.”
“I wouldn’t use it. It might burn the house down.”
I don’t see how that would be a problem but, either way, I direct her to my bedroom, “It’s the only room that isn’t ruined.”
No hesitation, “Sure!”
On the way up the stairs, Mallory notes, “There are a lot of shadows in this house.”
“Yeah, not a lot of light sources.”
“Not a lot of imagination.”
At the top of the staircase, “This way,” I tell her when she turns left instead of right. She asks me, “Are you left or right handed?”
I tell her I’d never bothered noticing.
“Left, I guess.”
Mallory stops at one particular shadow. “Did something just move?”
But I continue into my room. “Come on.”
She backs away from where Camilla has been hiding for days now, and she enters my room, instantly mesmerized by the red-painted walls, the nearly decadent furnishings.
“You designed this?”
“Yeah. What do you think?”
Before she can respond, I say, “Wait, wait, don’t say anything until you’ve tried my bed. I tell you, it’s the softest, most comfortable bed you’ll ever experience.”
She looks down at the bed, waits a moment, considering the offer, but then shrugs. “Why the hell not.”
She sits on the edge of the bed.
I sit down next to her.
What happens next is a memorable scene in and of itself.
Lying next to each other, I call her Camilla.
“My name’s Mallory.”
“Yeah, I mean . . . umm, never mind.”
She asks me to say her name.
I say it but it comes out as Camilla.
“My name’s Mallory.”
“That’s what I said.”
“No, you called me Camilla!”
I try it again, swearing that I say it right this time but now she sits up on the bed, already partially undressed. “My name is Mallory!”
“What did I say?”
“Oh, it’s all right . . . I can be your Camilla if you want me to be . . .”
She lies back down next to me.
I touch her, really enjoy touching her.
She likes the way I touch her and says, “You think I’m pretty. You think your Camilla is pretty.”
Peeling away the clothing, naked bodies cannot rest easy if they are next to bodies clothed and so I take off my clothes too.
“You never noticed me until now,” she says.
Is this a problem?
“No.” She talks me through it, explaining how she’s kept track of everything. What’s fake will eventually fall apart. She says it’s just that “the fake ones feed off each other. When you have an entire circle of them, it’s hard to reclaim yourself.”
She makes me feel better.
Like there’s still a glimmer of a chance.
I’m only responsible for my life, not theirs. If they don’t like who I am, then it’s their loss. Right?
Yeah, confidence—be confident.
Be yourself.
She kisses me.
I kiss back.
The sun starts to set and I begin to sweat.
I feel a sense of urgency that I misinterpret as arousal taking over. She finds the increase of my actions playful, amusing.
It gets rougher until I ask her, “Have you ever been with a woman?”
“What?” She’s not quite offended but not quite nonchalant about the query. I repeat myself, this time more deliberate.
Less question, more command.
I see it but I can’t stop.
From behind the shadows, Camilla appears.
“Have you ever been with a woman?”
Camilla steps out from underneath the shadows and joins us in bed.
Superimpose the scene from Mulholland Drive between Betty and Rita over my Camilla and Mallory, both naked on the bed, Camilla expressively caressing Mallory’s rigid, tense body.
Mallory stares up at me standing at the foot of the bed.
I watch.
She repeats over and over again the word “Please.”
I tell her one thing and one thing only, “Silencio.”
Camilla drags her tongue across Mallory’s chest.
The sight is more like a sexual fantasy than real sex.
Mallory is an idle body that I take in as whole.
I imagine how Camilla would treat Mallory. I relent when Mallory reaches for me. I tell her, “Wait, my Camilla.”
I wait until Camilla is finished with Mallory before I slip between the sheets. Mallory doesn’t relax until I wrap my arms around her, forming into an embrace.
This was my first time.
First real time.
No longer a virgin. But I don’t tell her.
We are relaxed, immobile.
I don’t check the time.
In the shadows of the room, Camilla is jealous. She’s jealous because, at the moment, I want her to be jealous; when I want her to forgive me, she will forgive me . . . and when I want her to return to me, she will.
I can only hope Mallory will be as understanding.
Life is just so confusing right now.
Life makes more sense when the people around you have advice to give. It makes sense to mold a life around others. Maybe that’s why I fought to be featured, adored, fixated upon by so many others; little did I realize that they had nothing to give in return.
They take but share no advice.
They have no advice to give.
In a way, I can believe this.
I can.
What Mallory whispered, half awake, half asleep:
“We are all derivative.”
As a group we are just people. As a person, you are unique.
I grip her tightly.
She grips back.
I keep my eyes closed. I listen to her breathing.
We are this way for what I’d like to believe a lifetime. The new love cliché in effect.
Creeping from the pain of an imperishable routine, I could already feel it, feel the tingling sensation, anxiety and restlessness forming in the very core of me. I pretend that I don’t feel it, that Mallory is enough to consider this day worthwhile. I pretend that this isn’t about revenge. I pretend that I’m still a person, someone that people turn to because they want to talk to me.
I pretend it’s all aligned correctly and that my life is under control.
My life makes sense.
See?
No one’s there to see it.
And I do not believe it.
But I think about it, laying there in bed, listening to Mallory sleep, isn’t life meant to be confusing? If it were simple, there’d be nothing to go off of. No abstractions, no challenges, no effort.
Life on standby.
Default setting.
But I don’t want to be a loser . . .
I tell myself anything to ease my mind.
In her sleep, I hear her say, “I’m so glad I met you.”
I hear singing. Am I dreaming or am I awake?
Real or imaginary?
I wake up in pain on the greasy pavement of a fast food restaurant parking lot.
I hear singing.
I shiver, frozen in place.
I hear singing, and it’s her voice.
Mallory’s body is sprawled out on her back.
When I see her there, I can’t stop screaming.
On
my knees, next to her body, I am screaming, as if trying to drown out her voice.
I scream over every single word.
Every night at midnight, I wake up confused, wondering if any of it is real. The body next to me cold and very dead is the only proof I have that it’s real. And yet, still, I’m not so sure.
If it must be real, then make it real . . .
Please, just don’t let me be alone.
FIRST MOVEMENT
SUZANNE BURNS
Cherise wanted a man to call her mouth a symphony. Not because of all the things she learned to do with her lips over the years, the precise way she blotted her lipstick with a cloth napkin at finer restaurants, or pouted to win arguments without anyone really catching on, her suitors and debaters unaware Cherise was snaring them in a series of charming little traps. Her lips even helped form her infamous bubble laugh, recognizable as she thumbed through tabloids at a grocery store or watched the slapdash flicker of previews before any feature film, usually by herself.
Cherise’s lips had helped her land first dates and jobs at perfume counters and the biggest piece of cake at birthday parties, but none of this had ever lasted very long, or in any way sounded like a symphony. Cherise was ready for her overture to begin.
Single for more years than not, at thirty-six Cherise wanted to become a different woman. Not from plastic surgery, dieting or even bleaching her red hair blonde, Cherise vowed to recreate herself by becoming unique. She loved how unique the word unique even sounded as she made room on her small bathroom counter for her coffee cup among a powdery tower of half-used make-up that smeared her fingers.
Cherise stared at her lips in the mirror. “It’s not what’s on the outside that will make you sing,” she spoke to her reflection the morning she decided to change, “but the inside that has always counted.”
Cherise brushed her teeth and spritzed perfume on her neck, which she then washed off with a moist cloth.
“No,” she admonished her reflection, “we are recreating you from the ground up. At the end of the day,” she promised her minty but apprehensive smile, the smile that revealed a fine tangent of lines around her mouth, “you will be a unique, dare we say even perfect woman.”
She put on an old flowered dress and new cherry red ballet flats, then slapped herself hard across each cheek the way she did every morning, sometimes so hard, she split her bottom lip. Sometimes this splitting made her late for her office job as droplets of blood surfaced on her mouth like flower blossoms she waited to thicken and fall off. Cherise wondered if this was why she had never kept a man in her life long enough to reach the point of timeshares and matching monogrammed towels.
She decided not to go to work as she blotted a few drops of blood from her lips with a tissue. Her new cherry shoes deserved more than to be shoved under a desk in a cubicle all day. Cherise wondered if she would ever reach the point in a relationship for an anniversary date to the symphony. It had actually been years since she was even invited to a birthday party. She had trouble recalling the last time she was offered a piece of cake.
Cherise avoided eye contact in her apartment elevator as it deposited her fifteen stories down to meet the city floor. She wasn’t going to use the word “sidewalk” anymore, part of her new uniqueness, instead preferring to view the asphalt and concrete that surrounded her more like the bottom of the ocean, dark and permanent until something shifted, the driver from the same bus route going by with a different advertisement shouting from its side, a deli closing while a new café opens, a homeless man shuffling across her avenue to ask for change on the opposite street corner, everything around Cherise built with the strength to never change and the inability to stay the same.
“Maybe I just need a new coat?” she asked the morning sunshine with a hard squint, a bluster of April breeze grabbing her flowered dress. The air stung her slapped cheeks and dug a needle into the fresh split on her lip, the one she knew would open up to reveal more blood if she smiled. She walked twenty blocks towards her favorite candy store to break in her new shoes.
Hours later, stomping down the sidewalk, the newly malleable city floor, in time to the invocation “cherry red, cherry red,” Cherise considered changing her name to Cherry. She thought it sounded unique, and effervescent as a Cherry Coke on a hot summer day, and sort of sticky sweet as a maraschino cherry balanced on top of a banana split. She believed that men liked to think about cherries and bananas. She thought about calling herself Banana, but in Cherise’s head the word sounded like she was trying too hard, the fuzzy line between unique and desperate blurring more with each step.
Cherise felt blisters between her toes when she reached the candy store in time to be assaulted by the automatic cotton candy machine blasting its electronic calliope music towards a child whose two dollars bought a pink, fluffy dream.
“I don’t want to be known as the woman whose breath smells like a circus,” Cherise spoke towards the teenage girl who stood behind the store’s candy counter, “or at least like a clown. I am looking for something unique. Something that will alert everyone, but most specifically the new and as yet unrevealed man of my dreams, that I am not only a woman to get to know, but a woman to hold near and dear for the rest of his life.” She scanned the counter. “You know, two of hearts, ’til death do us part, that sort of thing.”
“Butter mints?” the girl behind the counter answered.
“Excuse me?”
The girl pointed to a wall of bulk candy. “Brides-to-be come in here once or twice a week and buy bunches to wrap in tulle and shove in those place setting swans. Since you said you are getting married and all.”
“I didn’t say that, and do you really think my dream lover will call my mouth a symphony when he sees me sucking like some puffer fish on a pillow mint? That’s what everyone called them when I was young. My grandma kept a full glass dish on her piano . . . and Moonglow is not exactly what I’d call a symphony . . . you?”
“I saw someone play a violin at the mall one time. It was around Christmas and he was playing that song about fig pudding, but I’ve only ever had a Fig Newton, so it didn’t really do much for me.”
“Yes, well,” Cherise walked through the small store, pausing at the gelato counter and the display of handmade truffles, “I need something that I don’t have to scoop out of a bin and carry out of here in a plastic bag.”
“What about Choward’s mints? No one’s bought a pack since I’ve worked here. That’s been, like, at least seven months.”
Cherise stared at the packs of lemon and guava flavored mints. Then she saw a purple glimmer hidden under piles of individually wrapped chocolate candies. When she smiled, she tasted blood. The taste made her feel alive.
“Oh,” the girl pointed, “that’s the violet flavor. No one has bought a pack of those, like, ever.”
“Then I’ll take all the ones you have.” Cherise opened her red patent leather purse, bought to match her red ballet flats, and asked the girl to toss in handfuls of violet mints.
She wondered what she was missing at work, if the co-workers who made fun of her for bringing lunch each day in a fabric-covered metal bin that matched each outfit would find someone new to harass. She wondered how someone who wore cherry red ballet flats could ever be made fun of. She wished she lived in Paris, a different city that must look like the bottom of an even more exotic ocean floor where other women named Cherise wore red ballet flats. In Paris she would wear green high heels and insist on calling herself “Banana.”
Outside the store Cherise ran her fingernail across the purple foil of a pack of mints. Ballet flats planted firm on the sidewalk, she looked both ways, then stuck a violet candy in her mouth. Her lips erupted with the taste of perfume and she spit the candy on the ground. As soon as it landed, Cherise bent to retrieve the lavender-colored square.
Women who reinvent themselves do not litter. That was the old her, trying so hard not to rub against any sharp edge each day as she made her way through the city,
hiking up her long skirts, “prudish skirts” her co-workers said, betting right in front of her on whether or not she was old-fashioned enough to wear a girdle underneath, whether she shaved anything off, or kept her body furry in the places that really count, her bare legs rubbing against the elevator buttons, the escalator rails, anything that would gouge her pale skin and leave tiny red trails on her legs by the time she made it to the office; how she had to litter if the tissues used to mop up her own blood, the tissues buried deep in whichever matching handbag Cherise chose, piled up and peeked out from the top of her purse straps. For years her blood had seeped into nearly every street in town.
The new Cherise hid the spit-out candy in one of her shoes, settling the fragrant disk between two blisters.
She unwound the purple foil and placed another candy on her tongue, this time easing into the taste of flowers as they overtook her mouth. She swallowed hard, then spoke towards the bustle of the city in front of her, its souvenir shops and rival candy stores, the magazine kiosks that sold some of the best candy of all, “I am becoming the scent of violets. I am becoming a flower. I am becoming.”
She checked off turning her mouth into a symphony on her mental list then decided she needed to do more to become unique.
“My name is Banana,” she said to an older woman who passed her on the street in a cloud of designer perfume.
The woman ignored her.
“I meant Cherry!” she yelled after the stranger. “You know, like the color of my shoes!” The woman and the cloud of perfume kept walking, not even turning back to remark on Banana-Cherry-Cherise’s after breath of violets.
Cherise tucked her roll of violet mints into her purse, kept the one she threw on the sidewalk tucked between her sore toes, and walked back towards her apartment.
Four blocks into her journey home she stopped in front of a department store. She sat down on a bench and waited long enough to feel like she had missed her lunch break, if she had gone to work.
“New perfume. I almost forgot,” she said to no one in particular as she left the bench a few hours later and walked through the front doors of a store decorated in pearl garlands and leather wallpaper. She walked over to the closest glass perfume counter. The violet candy slipped from between her toes to feel like a smooth pebble rolling around inside her shoe.
In Heaven, Everything Is Fine: Fiction Inspired by David Lynch Page 17
