by Paula Guran
“What’s out there?” I asked her.
“Nothing,” she answered, turning to me. “All those people who don’t know or care about me.”
We stayed to ourselves most of the time. Leila wanted to meet my friends, but I always found an excuse not to call anyone. I liked having her all to myself.
A few weeks after I first met Leila, I went into a painting slump. And then Leila began to wane. That is the only word I can use. As my paintings grew worse, she changed. I urged her to go out while I tried to paint, but she would not. She stayed on the couch, sometimes biting her fingernails, sometimes looking out the window. When I asked her what was wrong, she just shook her head.
One day she said, “Leave me alone, Matthew. It’s you, don’t you understand? You’ve changed.” She went to the bedroom and closed the door.
I stared at her unfinished portrait and wondered what I could have done. What was happening to us—to her? She had been such a vivacious person. Now she was withering away.
I stopped dreaming.
Leila and I grew further apart. Though we still slept together, she spent most nights hugging her side of the bed and would not let me near her. Those were the worst times. I felt so alone. Other nights she turned and made love to me furiously. No longer the golden goddess. A fury. Or a gorgon. Medusa’s child.
Things worsened, and I was afraid she would leave me. I still loved her. I sat down and tried to figure out why. We never talked; she only listened. I never learned anything new from her. She was beautiful. Or was she? Had she ever stood tall? Was her hair golden? Had she danced for me?
“I need to meet new people,” she told me one afternoon. “I feel like a prisoner here.”
I sat at my easel turning one of my dark blobs of paint into a spider. Tracing a line here. Putting meat on it there.
“All right,” I said. “We’ll have a party Sunday.”
She chewed her fingernails. How tired she looked. Was it really my fault? Was I somehow draining her of energy?
For the party, Leila wore a black floor-length, V-neck gown. I had bought it for her weeks earlier. I remembered the pleasure I had gotten seeing it on her then—and later off her. The silk had clung to her body, moving as she moved. Now the black dress hung unattractively on her, barely touching her skin anywhere.
Poets, artists, writers, and dilettantes filled the apartment. Ice hit the sides of glasses and twirled madly in baths of gin, vodka, or rum. I passed around hors d’oeuvres, shrugging when anyone asked how the work went.
Leila was everywhere. Touching. Listening. The color returned to her face. She was animated, laughing, touching, listening.
Something was not right.
“I’ve met her before.” A fellow artist, Pete Dobson, was tapping my arm.
“Really?” I turned to him.
“She looks a bit different, but it’s her.”
Leila was striding to another group. Tall and lithesome. Her golden hair shone and caught the light . . .
“Do you remember Franc de Winter?” Pete was talking to me again.
“Yeah, I think so. Isn’t he in California?”
“He was.” He sipped his drink and watched Leila. Her fingers lightly stroked the bare skin in the V of her dress.
“Leila used to live with him,” Pete said. “Saw her at a party there. I’m pretty sure it was her.”
Her eyes were dark holes, bright with life.
“What happened to him?” I asked.
“Don’t you remember? He stopped working. Artist’s block or something. She sort of disappeared right before he died—he killed himself.”
Everything stopped. The people. The smoke. Time. For a split second, only Leila and I were in the room. She turned those horrible eyes on me and she knew I knew.
The terror and repulsion were with me all evening. I felt as if I were sinking into a quagmire and no one would help me out. I drank too much; someone gave me a pill and I swallowed it. Somehow I got through the evening. I kept wondering how she could have done it. She pretended to love me and had taken away all that made me me.
Leila was putting her things together before the last guest left. In fact, one man sat in my living room. A poet I barely knew.
“Where are you going?” I demanded.
“With Henry.” Henry? The poet.
“So you can do to him what you did to me?”
She stared at me. I turned away. I could not look at those eyes.
“What have I done to you?” she asked. I was silent. She shrugged. Her indifference infuriated me. I wanted to smash my fists into her eyes.
She shut the suitcase and clicked the locks. “I’m leaving.”
I grabbed the suitcase—it was mine, after all—and hurled it against the wall.
“Are you all right, Leila?” A voice came from the other room.
Didn’t the little twit know she would ruin him? I charged into the living room. Before the man had a chance to react I had him up against a wall. I was not prone to violence, but Leila had bled me, and I was not going to let her off easily.
“Get out of here, you creep,” I said.
“Leila?” he asked, his voice suddenly very high.
“It’s all right, Henry,” Leila said as she came out of the bedroom. “I’ll catch up with you later.”
The door slammed. She looked at me. “This is silly, Matthew.”
There was no emotion in her voice. She had used me; now it was time to let me go. Suddenly I felt tired, worn. How long can a person live without dreams?
“Will I ever get it back?” I asked. “Or will I end up like Franc de Winter?”
“Get what back?” she asked. “Who’s Franc de Winter?” She went to the window and looked out.
“You just take, don’t you?” I said. “You find people like me and you drain them of their imagination, their creativity.”
She laughed harshly. “Is that what you want to believe? First I was your muse and then I became some kind of monster sucking away your life? Believe what you want! When you took me into your apartment that first night you were going to paint me, make a masterpiece, use me, and then send me away with a cheese sandwich, weren’t you? Woman does not live on bread alone.” She laughed again. The sound was horrible.
“You disgust me,” I said.
“I wasn’t always this way,” she said. “There was a time when I could take care of myself. You artists and your pomposity. You think you are the best dreamers? The most creative? My first love was an artist, too. I was a child. All he did was take from me, cage me with his love, keep me to himself. I had to do something to save myself. I learned to please him.” She turned and stared at me. “I gave you what you wanted, didn’t I? And when you couldn’t paint anymore, you blamed me.”
She looked back at the city.
“I lived the longest with an old Mexican woman. Five years,” she said. “She could build an entire world around a worm hole.”
“And you took that from her, didn’t you?”
She shook her head. “No, Matthew, she gave herself to me f re ely.”
She went back into the bedroom and returned with the suitcase.
“You can’t leave, Leila.” Maybe she could give it back to me; I didn’t know for sure, but I could not let her go.
She sighed. “You will tire of this, Matthew. There is nothing left between us.”
She tried to leave several times, but I threw her back. The hours turned into days. I locked her in the bedroom at night and only let her out after I slept. I spent the days pleading with her to give back what she had taken.
“I can’t live without dreams, without my art,” I told her.
“I don’t care,” she said.
I was without reason, I believe, during those days. I did not let her eat very much. I wandered around my apartment looking at my painting. I thought of Franc de Winter, I thought of the Leila I had loved. Everything was crumbling around me. The woman in the apartment was not the Leila I had known. With
each hour she grew more sullen and ugly and nervous.
“I’m begging you! Please let me go,” she said. Her eyes were dead, her hair straggly, her mouth cruel. “I’m dying.” She stared out the window.
“I don’t care,” I said.
I realized then why the city frightened her. All those mindless people going to their mindless jobs. They were so frightened, so dazed; many of them thought of how to get home at night and little else. They had no imagination. Leila would die in that city.
“If I could help you paint again I would,” she said on the fifth day, “but I can’t.”
On the tenth day I was tired and I believed her. She had emptied my soul and no humanity remained. I took her out of the building and led her into the heart of the city. She did not have the energy to struggle; she let herself be pulled along.
We walked down the stairway and into the subway station where hundreds of people waited to board the morning trains. I pushed Leila into the crowd. The people paid no attention to us. They stood on the gray floor in their gray suits waiting for the train.
Leila stumbled and almost fell into a man reading the paper. He sighed and moved out of her way. She touched his arm and peered into his eyes. “Help me,” she whispered. “This man is crazy.” She veered from him and into another person. I stood apart from them. Leila’s face crinkled in pain again as a woman pulled her arm away. She bumped into one person after another. They ignored her or pulled away. Lines of pain ran down Leila’s face and into her body. The emptiness of the place was devouring her. She began sobbing. “Someone help me, please,” I heard her cry. She touched another person and he pushed her. She fell against the wall and crumbled to the concrete floor. Her head bobbed. Her mouth slackened. Saliva dribbled over her lip and down her chin. Her eyes were black stones. People kept a neat distance from her, either pretending she did not exist, or else not caring.
I did not care either. Not anymore. She had taken that from me. Foul air rushed around me as the train approached.
I climbed the stairs as the train pulled in. I heard people shuffle to get aboard, heard the doors swish closed. I stepped out onto the streets and walked toward home.
My dreams returned. Rather I should say: I dream now. Just one dream. I close my eyes and sleep comes and with it Leila. The dream is always the same. Leila sits on the cold concrete floor of the subway, lifeless, people walking around her. Saliva drips from her mouth, slowly at first, and then more rapidly, and suddenly the clear liquid is red, it is blood, and the blood pours from her mouth until the whole subway station is filled and though I am on the steps, the blood follows me, envelops me, and finally fills my lungs and drowns me.
When I awaken from this nightmare, alone in the dark, I am terrified for a few moments, wondering if I could have been wrong. And then I close my eyes and dream again.
Nothing matters except Avery. That’s what people don’t understand Avery belongs to her, and he is the cornerstone, and he is Man and she is Woman, and that’s that, and people should understand it.
Barbara
John Shirley
She knows that Avery loves her. There’s no doubt about it. If he says, Barbara, don’t call back . . . that means: Barbara, call back again. Barbara, don’t give up. It was there in the catch in his voice. It was heartbreaking, really, how Avery suffered. He can’t say what he means, not with his witch wife—that witch bitch Velma—looking over his shoulder. Busting his balls, excuse my French. Not letting his manhood emerge. His manhood trapped inside him. Avery should never have let Velma come into the office at all.
When Barbara had worked in the office, it was beautiful, they’d share treats, and he’d smile at her in the way that meant, I want you, even though I can’t say so, and you know I do and I know I do: I want you. It was so precious how all of that was in one smile! That was Avery. But Velma kept him on a leash like he’s one of those little dogs with the hair puffed up over their eyes, little brown eyes like Avery’s.
“You don’t do some guy, even some old guy, them motherfuckers are all NRA nuts, homey; you might think you get some old white dude can’t do shit and he dust you up.” VJ is telling Reebok this while they stand in the bus shelter, watch people coming and going in the mall parking lot, late afternoon. California spring breeze is blowing trash by, couple of plastic cups from Taco Bell.
“He got an AK in his walker?” Reebok jokes. He’s out of high school now, still the class joker.
“You laughin’, some of those old dudes are strapped big. Some senile motherfucker shot Harold’s dog, all the dog do is run up on his porch. They got those M16s, that shit pops off, you canceled.”
“So you think . . . it should be girls?” Reebok ponders, scratching his tag into the clear plastic wall of the kiosk with a house key. Key to his grandma’s house. His mama left town with that white dude.
“Girls maybe armed, too. Most of ’em at least got that pepper spray, but you smart, you don’t give ’em a chance to use it, you take it away, put it in their eyes.” VJ nods to himself.
“Can’t make her use the fuckin’ ATM, she got pepper in her eyes.
“I hear that. I hear that. We just jack the bitch from behind, is all, take her pepper away. Maybe later on, we clock her, too.”
“When we do it?” Reebok asks.
“Fuck it. What about that one?”
Coming out of the mall, Barbara has the gift for Avery in her straw bag, the Italian peasant’s bag she’d bought at the Cost Plus import place, and she’s thinking maybe she should have charged the watch, because this was risky. She’d never stolen anything before, almost never, anyway nothing this expensive, and they could be following her out of the mall, waiting till she crossed some legal boundary, and it’s not like they’d understand. Love paid for it, she could say to them, but they wouldn’t understand any more than Velma did. Velma was the one who had pushed Avery into firing her.
Barbara unlocks her car, her hands fumbling. Then she goes all cold in the legs when a man speaks to her, in that sharp tone, and she’s sure it’s a store cop. She turns, sees it’s a black guy, very young, not bad-looking. Wants some money probably. He’s going to tell her his car ran out of gas and he just needs gas money, or one of those stories.
“I don’t have any change with me,” she says. “I don’t really believe in giving money to people, it just keeps them on the streets.”
“The ho isn’t listening,” says the taller of the two.
How old are they? Maybe twenty. Maybe.
“Lookit here,” the other one says, the one with the blue ski jacket, and he opens the jacket and shows his hand on the butt of a gun stuck in the waistband of his jeans. “I said: get in the car and don’t scream, or I shoot you in the spine right here.”
In the spine, he says. I shoot you in the spine.
It turns out their names are VJ and Reebok. Reebok keeps talking about making her give him a blowjob. VJ says some pretty mean things about her looks and her age, though she’s only thirty-eight and she’s only about thirty pounds or so overweight.
VJ says, “One thing at a time. She suck your dick. But just one thing at a time.”
Barbara’s at the wheel of the Accord, VJ beside her, Reebok in back. He has a gun, too, a kind of oversized pistol with a long, black metal box for the bullets. He calls the gun a Mac. What would it be like to suck his penis? Would it be clean?
He seemed clean. She could smell aftershave on them both. It’s okay if it’s clean.
She wonders why she isn’t more scared. Maybe because they seem so ridiculous and amateurish. They don’t really know what they’re doing. That amateur stuff could make them even more dangerous; an officer had said that on Cops.
They almost drive by her bank, so she has to point it out, though she told them which one it was. “There’s my bank, if you want me to turn in.”
“You better be turnin’ in.”
She changes lanes, cuts into the lot, kind of abruptly so that somebody honks angrily at h
er as she cuts them off. Then she glides the Honda Accord up to the ATM.
“You both getting out with me?” she asks as she puts the car in Park.
“You just shut up, ho, and let us work on what we do,” VJ says. He looks at Reebok.
“I don’t know. We both get out? That might look kinda . . . ”
“Might look . . . ”
“Neither one of you has to get out,” Barbara says, amazed at her own chutzpah “What you do is keep a gun on your lap under a coat, you watch me, and if I try to run or yell or anything, you shoot me. No wait—this is stupid! I can just give you the PIN number!”
They look at her with their mouths a little open as she digs through her purse, comes up with her Versateller card and an eyeliner pencil. Writes the number on the back of a receipt, hands it to VJ with the card. “I’ll wait here with Reebok. He can keep an eye on me.”
“How you know my name?” Reebok says with a whipping in his voice that makes her jump in her seat.
“You don’t have to yell. I know your names because you said them to each other.”
“Oh.” He looks at his partner. “Go own.” That’s the way the word sounded. Own. She guessed it was Go on.
VJ starts to get out of the car. Then he turns back, takes the keys out of the car. “Don’t try any weird shit, my man got a gun, too.”
“I know. I saw it. It’s a big one.”
He blinks at her in momentary confusion. Then he gets out, goes up to the ATM. He puts the card in—it comes back out. He puts the card in—it comes back out. She rolls down the window.
“Whoa, ho, what you doin’!” Reebok barks at her from the backseat.
“I’m just going to tell him something about the ATM.” She sticks her head out the window. “VJ? You’ve got the card turned the wrong way.”
He turns it the right way around. It goes in and stays. He stares at the screen, punches the numbers. Waits.
Barbara’s thinking. Aloud she says, “Were you ever in love with anybody, Reebok?”
