“Okay,” I whispered back against the wall now. “I’ll let you sleep.” I wanted to go close again. I thought I should kiss her. I thought I should be the sort of daughter who puts her lips to her mother’s forehead, infuses her with love and light. But I was a dark troll, terrible from every pore. I stood there crumpling my hands, scared to touch her, scared to leave and hating myself.
The door creaked open a few inches. Sally. I was stationed beside the bed in the chair I’d been in that day. I’d brought it over from the corner and I didn’t realize until another person was in the room that my lips had been moving, I’d been whispering, mumbling to my dead mother.
I held Sally’s gaze a moment and then I looked away, back into my hands. She pushed the door a little wider. “I want to apologize for my outburst at the cemetery,” she said. “I know this must be hard for you. I’m not in your skin. I shouldn’t have, uh …” I didn’t answer, couldn’t think what to say. “Maybe you could phone me when you’re ready and we could talk about the estate. The house. I think I’d like to put it on the market, but half of it is your … you might not, ah—we don’t have to talk now. Maybe in a few days. The car, she wanted you to have her car so—I already told you that in my message. Or she did. I’m sorry, Vivian, I’m not handling this very well.” She sounded so tiny and lost, it threw me.
“No, it’s—me neither. I don’t know how,” I said. It was hard to tell the difference between our voices now. “I’m sorry.”
“Okay.” The word scratched off her throat. “We’ll be okay. You call me.” She drifted back down the hall. I heard more footsteps and Len’s voice, then the rustle of their clothes as they negotiated their way around one another. Perhaps they embraced. Perhaps Len made an exception.
Two
STANDING OUTSIDE THE DOOR AFTER LEN DROPPED ME OFF, I could hear groaning inside my apartment. I put the key in the lock and opened it to a man’s low-voiced encouragement: “That’s right, good girl, don’t stop.” Then the moan of a woman with a stuffed mouth. As I closed the door, the VCR clunked off and switched over to television—the Discovery Channel.
In the living room, Frank did up the fly of his jeans as he lay on my couch, tumbler of beer beside him on the coffee table. The air smelled skunky. Next to his glass was a Baggie, quarter-filled with pot, and half a joint tamped out on one of my red and yellow paisley-printed saucers. Crumbs of ash spilled over onto the coffee table. A likeable thing about Frank: he does not watch televised sports. He does, however, watch a lot of science and sci-fi, from Klingons to clones. “Hey, baby,” he said.
“Hi.” I frowned at the TV screen, filled now with the balding pate of a forty-something man. “When did you get here?”
“About an hour ago. I figured you’d be back soon. Check this out—stem cell research. One day, man, one day they’ll reverse the aging process altogether.” Onscreen now was a pink hairless rat on whose ass a small patch of new fur had been grown through the miracle of science. Frank has a thinning spot on the anterior crown of his head, and now, apparently, stem cell research held hope for bald men everywhere.
“Did you work late last night?”
“Yeah. Way the hell out in Langley with about three hundred extras. Took an hour just to wrap everyone out.” The rat was replaced by a man doing backflips down the sidewalk—a commercial for Viagra—and Frank sat up and set the remote down. “You okay? How’d it go?”
I shrugged and flopped down beside him, stared at my knees poking out from my skirt, the sheen of my hose vaguely rouged from the skirt’s red reflection. “How are funerals sposed to go? I’ve never been to one before.”
“Yeah.” He stroked my arm and glanced back at the television. “The agency called. They want you back on Three Hot Days. There’s a message on your voice mail.”
Three Hot Days. Pouring rain five days straight last week, and they kept us outside in a tent, the makeshift floor sopping up more and more water, thirty extras in white Lycra dresses, stiletto heels, fourteen hours at a stretch. On the third day, the flatboards underfoot were so thick with mud Production gave in and moved the tent to higher ground for fear our whites wouldn’t stay white.
An involuntary shiver took me. “I’m not going back there. The wrangler was an asshole.”
Frank’s an extras wrangler too. That’s how I got to know him.
He sat up now and put his arms around me. “Did he hit on you?” I shrugged again. He kissed my temple. “I’ll kick his ass. Want me to kick his ass, baby?”
Dropping my head on his shoulder, I delivered a pained whine into his neck.
“You’re shivering.” He reached for the lap blanket he’d been using as a pillow, flipped it open and cloaked me in it. “Is it cold outside? You’re not getting sick, are you?”
I slipped my arms round him. “Stay here,” I said.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Another tremor shook me straight through and I was taken with the notion that I just might fall off the couch any second. I let my weight drop sideways and pulled Frank overtop of me. I craved the gravity of him, his heat, like the insistence of that day’s sun after weeks of rain.
“Whoa.” Frank gave my hair a nuzzling growl. The crimson of my lapels rose up at his face and suddenly I felt starved and empty. He started to pull my jacket off.
“Leave it.”
“You are such a horny girl,” he whispered and opened his mouth wide on my skin. I would’ve crawled inside him that moment if I could have. It was the pressure I needed, inside and out; to be enveloped in another layer of flesh. His hips shoved in hard against me.
I lay on my back with Frank’s arm under my head. My neck was starting to cramp. I stared at the ceiling. “You all warmed up now?” he asked.
“Uh-huh.” My eye caught the blinking eye of the phone’s message indicator. “Did you talk to them?”
“Who?”
“The agency?”
“Nope. I let the voice mail get it.”
The phone’s high-pitched jangle jolted me, the red light pulsing with each ring. Frank and I looked at it. “Not gonna get it?” he asked.
I shook my head. It looked sinister, that red pulsing.
“Might be them again. I think they want you back for continuity.”
The phone gave a last truncated yip before the caller was switched over to voice mail.
“Tough. I don’t want to. Sally wants me to come over in the next couple days and sort out the estate stuff. Junk in the basement, furniture—and the house. I guess we’re selling. She doesn’t want to live there and I sure as hell don’t.”
“Think you’ll buy an apartment?”
I grunted.
“What? I mean, we’ve got keys to each other’s places. You got commitment issues.”
“Living together isn’t a commitment.”
“What is it then? If we’re going to go into business together, it would make sense. Why not cut our overhead and put the money into good equipment?”
“I can’t talk about this right now. And I’m not going back to that shit-show tomorrow.”
Frank reached for the television remote and poked the on button. “Why do you need to be doing anything tomorrow? I was surprised you were working last week.”
I snatched the remote out of his hand and hit the off button. “What do you care? Did you even phone me this morning?”
“Yeah, I phoned. You weren’t here.”
“When? When did you phone?”
“I don’t know.”
Up off the couch, I grabbed the phone off the wall, pressed the call-display button back past the agency’s number to Frank’s: “12:27 p.m. That’s not morning. What were you doing? I had to go to my mother’s fucking funeral and where were you?”
“Christ!” Frank chewed skin off his lip a second. “You said you didn’t want me there. You’re just pissed off at yourself because you didn’t see her last week. You hid out on set.”
“Oh, bullshit. You hated her guts.”
/>
“Speak for yourself.” On his feet, he pulled on jeans and reached for his T-shirt.
I chucked the receiver on the couch and sat, naked from the waist down, and yanked my jacket closed. Frank did up his belt and snatched his coat off the floor. He grabbed his lighter and Baggie off the coffee table and stuffed them in his pocket, headed out of the room.
Chest thumping, an ache hit hard from the backside of my eyes. “Frank?”
Nerves in my thigh jumped when a drop of salt water hit. “Don’t go. I’m sorry.” I wiped at my face. Tears dripped down to my jaw and it was such a relief.
We met for the second time on the set of a cop show, Frank and I. There were about twenty extras that day, all of us background in a scene at the precinct. I was the obligatory streetwalker. Frank was the wrangler. When I signed in that morning, Frank looked up from the list and peered at me a moment. He said, “Hey, didn’t I rape you about ten years ago?” A couple heads turned. “On What Evil Lurks,” he continued. “Your hair’s lighter now. I’m Frank. I was the second guy that chased you into the woods, remember?”
“Right.” I couldn’t really recall him. But I was flattered that he remembered me. “I played Angel.” Angel was in the movie just long enough to serve a few beers to some guys in a bar before two of them waited outside, raped and killed her.
“Yeah.” He suddenly looked self-conscious. “It was a weird gig. I couldn’t look my mother in the eye for a few days after that.”
“Mine saw it on TV, She asked me if that was the extent of the contribution I wanted to make to the world.”
He winced. “Well, you were amazing. And I remember seeing you in a beer commercial right after that. You were in a blue dress, right?”
I nodded. Good god, the guy had a freakish memory. I’d done that ad nearly fourteen years ago. I was all of nineteen at the time. The scene featured me on a bar stool wearing a tight blue spandex dress. Back arched, I was supposed to wrap my arms around one man’s neck, then look sideways to a second man and roll my hips toward him. When the second guy spied my hotly lit rear end moving his way, the cigarette fell out of his mouth. We shot it over and over to get that cigarette to fall on cue. “Arch a little more, a little more, sweetheart …” My back ached for days after.
“You must’ve been out of town when you saw that. It was banned in B.C.” The B.C. censor hadn’t liked the concept.
Frank laughed. Then he remembered a few more things I’d done: a poster for a power-tool company, a billboard for Bootlegger Jeans, and more recently a small stripper role on DaVinci’s Inquest. I asked him if he was still acting. Not really, he said; he got the odd audition but wrangling brought in steadier money, and with all the hours of boredom on set he could get paid to work on his business plan. He wanted to become a manager. “And when I do, I want to manage you—you should be a star,” he said, adding in a whisper, “not one of these mooks.” He waved behind at the rest of the extras.
We went for drinks after work that night then back to his place where he invited me to get even for our first encounter. I threw him up against the wall and he loved it. And that’s what I loved about Frank. He didn’t have candy-assed fears of a woman with a sexual appetite. A girl didn’t have to play up all the false-virgin crap with Frank, saying no, no, no until at least two-thirds through the story.
A month before I ran into Frank again, I’d been dumped over breakfast in Sophie’s Cosmic Café by a guy who informed me that I had been too sexually eager, that I hadn’t played hard enough to get. “I guess I want a relationship like in an old forties movie, you know, with banter. It should be more like playing a game.”
“You want to play games,” I said, flabbergasted. “I don’t do games. I’m a grown-up.”
“All relationships are a game. With your parents, with your friends. You should have made me work for it. A guy likes to play cat and mouse.” He fidgeted over his ketchup-covered eggs. I pushed my plate away, got up and left him to pick up the cheque. I didn’t return his e-mail the next morning. He sent a couple more, expressing concern that we couldn’t at least be friends. Eventually I answered. “The problem with cat and mouse,” I typed, “is the mouse always dies.” That shut him up.
Frank, on the other hand, worshipped my sexual appetite. There was nothing I could say that would throw him, nothing was obscene, nothing was forbidden. After a month together he told me that he loved me so much that even if I were to sleep with another man he wouldn’t leave me. We were in bed at the time. He tilted my chin up and peered into my eyes. He wanted me to respond in kind, it seemed. “I would do anything for you, absolutely anything,” he said. I couldn’t hold his gaze; no one had ever said that to me.
It was Frank who encouraged me to go whole hog with my hair. My mother hadn’t liked the highlights, which she said looked cheap. Frank thought with all the American cop shows shooting in town, I’d probably make more money going all-the-way blonde. Americans love their blondes, he proclaimed.
“What about you?” I asked him. “What do you love?”
“You, baby. But, yeah, guys are kinda programmed to like blondes. I’ll take you to a hair salon for your birthday and you can check it out for yourself.”
It was supposed to be Champagne—a compromise between the Million-dollar Platinum Frank liked and the Sunny Honey I thought would compliment my skin. I grinned into the mirror at Frank and the stylist, giddy with the pleasure of bleaching Josie completely out of my head.
My finger twisted a rope of hair now, dry and broken and old. Frank came to stand beside me. “I would’ve gone with you if you wanted me to.”
I blinked up at him and nodded. “I know.”
“I don’t know how to be through this.”
“Me neither.”
Frank woke me at six the next morning, his erection running on overdrive. Briefly, I was contented by it: I usually liked his intense need for me at all hours of the day. Normally he would fall back asleep, but this morning, he leapt up and ran for the shower. He was back in what seemed like seconds.
“Where you going?” I mumbled. Morning light slipped through the curtains in shafts of amber.
“Work.”
“Wrangling?”
He grunted an affirmation and did up his jeans. He was looking lean this morning; the stubble on his jaw gave him a sexy carnivorous look. He wasn’t classically handsome but he had a full, lusty mouth and near-black irises. Those things, coupled with his slight swagger, caused female extras on set to toss their hair at the sight of him, giggle more than necessary.
The sadness that had slammed me so hard the day before began snuffling its way back under and into me. It mingled with the fog of sleep and for a millisecond I wondered if I’d had a bad dream.
“You didn’t say you were working today.”
He shrugged. “Well, I am.”
“I wish you didn’t have to go.”
“You and me both,” he said, yanking on his T-shirt. “But I gots to, baby doll, I gots to.” Grabbing his coat off the doorknob, he leaned and kissed me. “I’ll try and call you.”
I listened to the door open and close, to the key in the lock. I stared up at the ceiling and wondered if Len was working today. Probably. I hardly saw Len lately. If it weren’t for Frank, I thought, I would be an orphan right now. Completely alone. Then I imagined that Frank wasn’t going to work at all, that he was going to another lover’s house, a woman who wouldn’t just lie there when he slipped inside her at six in the morning, a woman who would spoil him, invite her friends to join in. Frank had made noises about threesomes in the past and the idea had irked me. I have never shared well with others. He insisted that having another woman was more for my benefit than his, that he and this other woman would lavish attention on me. “I’m not a dyke,” I answered flatly.
“Well, what about for my birthday sometime,” he cajoled, “Wouldn’t you do that for me?”
“How ’bout we invite another guy. Now that’s a threesome. Or you boys could j
ust go at it together. I wouldn’t even have to be involved.”
He tucked his chin in revulsion, then his inner used-car salesman got the better of him. “Well, what if I made love to you with another guy and then next time, you made love to me with another girl?”
“That’s stupid. It’s just trading discomforts. Shouldn’t we get old and bored with each other before we start swinging?”
He laughed. But maybe he was bored with me already. Maybe he wasn’t coming back. Maybe no one was coming back. I got up and grabbed the phone off my dresser, punched out Frank’s cell. He answered on the second ring. “Hey, babe, what’s up?”
“Nothing. I miss you.”
“I just left.”
I couldn’t think what to say. “I wish you could just stay in my bed and make love to me all day.”
“Mmm,” he said. “Vixen.”
“What are you working on today?”
“Umm,” he said, struggling to recall the name. My chest thumped. “Oh—Near Miss.” Off my silence, he added, “Whaddya think, I’m going to see my mistress?”
“No.” I wished I’d kept the petulance out of my voice.
“I’ll call you when we wrap.”
I hung up and felt shivery and insubstantial. I skittered to the foot of my bed, to the trunk where I kept extra blankets. Goosebumps took me over from foot to scalp and I bypassed the down comforter and dragged out the heavy wool blankets. There were three. I threw them on the bed and grabbed the housecoat off the hook on the door, wrapping it fast around my flesh before I spread the blankets one at a time.
I turned up the thermostat a few notches, then detoured to the bathroom and looked in the medicine cabinet. There was an old Ativan prescription in there somewhere. I just needed to calm down and get some more sleep. Sleep heals all wounds, I said out loud and swallowed one before I turned off the ringer on my phone. Climbing back in bed I wished I knew how to meditate. Meditators sleep like fiends.
It was noon before I woke. Just as it had this morning, the bleakness lagged a moment or two before seeping back into my consciousness. I rolled over and fell back asleep.
Cease to Blush Page 3
