Killing Adonis

by J M Donellan

  The mere thought of her greeting me at the door with a kiss on the cheek and a plate of roast beef is utterly detestable. That’s what I have Rosaline for, to be my little Annie Homemaker. Still, Rosaline is something special. A perfectly deluded princess, so safe in her tiny cage of saccharine fantasies. There are days when she genuinely makes me want to be a better person, and I both adore and despise her for that.

  26

  Vodka and Sleeping Pills

  ***

  Rosaline stumbles back from the edges of her dream and finds herself sprawled on the couch in Elijah’s room. The sun streaming through the windows forms a solar stencil on her skin. Outside there is a ceaseless storm of chance meetings, awkward greetings, births, deaths, and first and final breaths. She cares for none of this right now. This tiny room and its one other occupant is her world entire.

  Beep.

  Beep.

  Beep.

  As she crawls back into consciousness, the memory of her dream hums in her mind, and a bright and gleeful grin illumates her face. She walks over to her sleeping lover and lays her head on his chest, listens to the sound of his heart.

  “My heart beats in 6/8 time for you,” he’d told her once, on one of those myriad sun-filled days they’d spent together. Days she had thought would never end. She feels the warmth of his skin on her cheek. Feels his warm breath on the top of her head.

  “Yes. Of course, I will. You’ve made me so happy.”

  Beep.

  Beep.

  Beep.

  ***

  A stream of angular synthesiser notes fills the air, as if produced by a robot with an asymmetrical haircut and a faux French accent. Freya watches the watercolour wash of blues and greens accompanying the hollow sounds in her vision. Cloudland’s ceiling has been rolled back for the evening to reveal an array of brilliant stars.

  “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but notice you dropped something?” The stranger, dressed in a black silk shirt and tight-fitting pinstripe pants flashes her what she guesses is a finely practised smile.

  “Thanks. What is it?”

  “My number. I’m Luke, you should call me sometime.” He winks at her and passes her his card. His smile slips into an uneasy bemusement as she whips out her phone and starts dialling.

  “How ’bout right now?”

  “Ah…what…? Ha. Yeah, sure thing.”

  She holds her hand up for silence. “Shh. It’s ringing.”

  A tinny commercial rap song, unsurprisingly.

  “Why, hello there.”

  “Is this Luke?”

  “Sure is!”

  “Just letting you know I’ll be scrawling your number on the wall of the men’s room advertising you as a potential candidate for all-male orgies. Ciao.”

  Luke slinks away. Freya returns to her Moscow Mule.

  “Really, Frey? That’s how you treat a guy for hitting on you?” says Callum, returning from the bathroom.

  “That’s how I treat that guy. His card says he works for an oil company.”

  “So?”

  “They’re a menace. They perpetrate more environmental crimes than the other Fortune 500 companies combined. Oil drilling in the Arctic, huge bucks funding anti-global warming spin.”

  “Who’s been feeding you propaganda, love? Someone you slept with lately perhaps?”

  Freya rolls her eyes, leans back into the lounge and stares at the clusterfuck of chiffon, velvet, gold trim, and sculpted glass that adorns the club’s interior. “This place had to be designed by three different trust fund babies who never had a conversation.”

  “Freya, please! Do you have to criticise every place we go? Can’t we ever have a quiet drink and relax?”

  “I wanted to go to Black Bear Lodge and drown my sorrows to actual music played by actual humans.”

  Callum sighs petulantly and slumps into a chair hanging from the ceiling by a gilded chain. “I don’t get to pick the places they assign me, but since they are paying for our drinks, even you can’t complain about that.”

  “Fine. I know. I’m being a bitch. Ever since Maria…” She stops because nothing else seems worth saying. For a few moments there are no words between them, just the bleeps and tweets of electro-audio porn. “Can you get me the most expensive thing on the menu, please? I have to go to the little girl’s room.”

  Callum nods and heads back to the bar. She can hear his product proselytising even over the sea of synth. “I looooove the way you spin that Kahlua bottle!”

  Freya pushes open the bathroom door on a heavily bejewelled woman sobbing. Her hair hangs in a thick black veil around her face and down into the sink. Yvette peers up and shakes her hair out of her eyes, rivulets of mascara running down her cheeks.

  “Yvette? What are you doing here? Are you okay?”

  “Sure. I’m fucking dandy! I’m rehearsing for the lead role in a film titled Sexy Rich Gal Who Was Dumb Enough to Fall in Love.”

  “Jennifer Aniston’s already made that movie five or six times.”

  “I’m just drunk. Don’t be nice to me. It makes me feel pitiful. I’ve been such a perfect bitch to you.”

  “That’s true, though I don’t understand why.”

  Yvette rolls her eyes. “Are you serious? Couldn’t you see how jealous I was?”

  “Jealous? Of what?”

  Yvette yanks a sheet of paper towel from the dispenser and dabs at her face.

  “Wasn’t it obvious? I just—”

  Her sentence halts abruptly as two young girls enter, hurling verbal vomit with abundant sprays of “like,” interspersed with a smattering of verbs and nouns.

  “Sorry sweethearts,” says Yvette, “this is a private party.”

  “Piss off, you old scrag!” the taller girl retorts, and the two burst into giggles as they check themselves out in the mirrors. Yvette sighs and closes the distance between them with three confident strides. She removes a gold-plated butane lighter from her bag and flicks it on. The two girls stare at the dazzling flame, the blue splashes of their eyeliner sparklingly iridescent around their hypnotised eyes.

  “Gorgeous, isn’t it? A sheik I had a brief romance with had this custom-made for me…as a flame that would burn as bright and strong as his love. Such a poet, that one! Pretty average in the sack, though. In any case, you are going to turn around, walk out the door, and find somewhere else to titter and giggle. If you don’t, I am going to set your cheap, tarty little dresses on fire. Is that clear?”

  The two girls turn and run out of the room as fast as their impractically elevated heels will allow. Yvette calls out behind them, “And I am not old!”

  She turns back to Freya. “I’m only thirty-two, for fuck’s sake. Pretty little teens like that think anyone old enough to remember the fall of the Berlin Wall is a ragged old crone.”

  “I’d be impressed if I wasn’t scared shitless.”

  “Relax, I would never have set them on fire.” She dabs at her face again. “Probably. Now, where was I? Ah yes…jealousy. It will make people do terrible things. Cain and Abel. David and Bathsheba. Adonis and Aphrodite. I’ve never claimed to be a nice person, except when it served my purposes. But you had the one thing, the one and only thing in the world that I ever truly loved and cared for.”

  “You mean Jack?”

  “Oh, sweet pea, you really are as stupid as you are thick, aren’t you? I’m talking about Elijah. I’ve been in love once and only once. I’d always thought all that wistful, romantic crap pop singers and the like ramble on about didn’t have the slightest lick of truth to it. But there I was, gazing lovingly at photos for hours on end, my last thought before sleep, the first thought on waking, an imbecilic grin smeared across my face every moment of the day. The whole shebang.” She looks at her reflection in the mirror then back at Freya.

  “I assume you’ve
figured out by now that Elijah isn’t exactly the golden child everyone makes him out to be? Anyone would think he’d been raised by Mother Teresa and Mahatma Gandhi, the way the Vincettis go on about him. He slept around, for starters. Whores, diplomats, wives of best friends, high-school girls, businesswomen, whoever he could get his grubby little paws on, or inside of as the case may be. But when we met he promised me that was all going to change. He promised me. I was stupid enough to believe him, too. I mean, he was with Rosaline at the time, but I always knew that was just him playing one of his wicked little games. I never thought that would last.”

  Freya thinks of Rosaline’s note, wonders if Rosaline would even be capable of conceptualising her love as anything but perpetual. It would be like asking an eight-year-old to ponder quantum mechanics.

  “And then one day he tells me he’s done with me. Casting me aside like I was last season’s fashion. No explanation, no apology. Nothing. I felt smashed into tiny little pieces. The damned brat had worked his way right into my heart and I couldn’t get him out. I did everything I could to forget him: exotic holidays, slept with other men, tried drugs I’d never touched before, saw a shrink. Nothing worked.

  “One night, I couldn’t sleep, and simply couldn’t stand it anymore, so I rang his mobile at three-thirty and he picked up after the first ring. I said I wanted him to tell me to my face that it was really over, that he owed me that much. He said fine, I was right. It wouldn’t be easy, but it was the right thing to do. He told me he was staying at the Hilton, to get away from his family. He gave me the room number and told me he’d leave the door unlocked.

  “So, I raced over there, rehearsing my little monologue as I drove, tears streaming down my face. I felt my heart pounding in my chest as I hit the elevator button. It seemed to take an age and a day to reach the third floor. The doors slid open, and there’s this young couple waiting there…you should have seen their faces when they saw me. Black rivers running down my cheeks, eyes all red. Kind of like now, I suppose.” Yvette runs some more water, wets the paper towel, dabs at her face again and throws the paper on the floor. The muffled sound of bass pounds through the bathroom walls.

  “I pushed past them and made my way down the hall to his room. I threw the door open and was greeted by a smorgasbord of debauchery: drug and sex paraphernalia all over the floor, used condoms strewn like wrapping paper on Christmas morning, champagne bottles everywhere, syringes, pills, baggies of coke. I’d only a second to take it all in before I saw him, staring at me, naked, leering, eyes lit with fiendish joy. God, it was horrid. Between his legs I saw a blonde head bobbing quickly up and down, his hand gripping savagely at its hair.

  “He’d wanted me to see the whole thing. He’d planned it that way. What a fucking…piece of shit…” Yvette’s eyes rim with red and she dabs them quickly with a paper towel. “I ran wailing from the room like some common tart. I drove home in a rage and drank vodka and popped Halcyon sleeping pills until I passed out, then spent the next two weeks doing much of the same. I turned off my phone, smashed the TV with an umbrella and tried to forget that I even existed. When I finally came round and opened a newspaper, I saw he’d been in an accident and had fallen into the coma.”

  “Tell me about the accident.” Freya doesn’t bother concealing the eagerness in her voice.

  “All the Vincettis revealed to anyone was that it was a car crash. They used their usual combination of threats and chequebooks to keep the details out of the news. But I dug deeper…hired a private investigator. The whole thing was disgusting, even by Elijah’s standards.” She lowers her eyes, flicks her lighter open and closed a half dozen times and then lights it, watching the flame burn as she speaks.

  “Elijah was driving a hooker home. He was drunk and on a mishmash of drugs and he slammed into another car. Killed both of the people in it, as well as the hooker in his car. And now the shit is in a coma and I’m still stupid enough to be in love with him, even after everything he’s done…and she’s won, after all.”

  “Who’s won?”

  “Rosaline, that marshmallow-brained twit! The Vincettis have just issued a press release and claimed that he ‘couldn’t wait a day longer to be married to her, that he spoke to her in a dream.’ Fucking fevered delusion, more like.” Yvette bursts into tears again and slams her fist against the paper towel dispenser, leaving a dent in the metal that twists her reflection like a funhouse mirror. “That crazy fucking bitch!” She dissolves into a heaving mass of sobbing and wailing.

  Freya tentatively places her arm around her. Yvette leans into her chest and sobs for a while longer, then looks up. “Thank you for listening to me whine. You’re a nice girl…the dumpy ones usually are. Can’t exactly get by on your looks, can you?” She unwinds herself from Freya’s arm, straightens her dress, and disappears out the door.

  27

  Orange Juice

  ***

  Jack bounds from sleep like a lion through a ringmaster’s hoop, his eyes wide, his face frantic, his body charged with electric energy. It takes him a moment to recompose himself, to verify that he is awake and no longer dreaming…of his brother, as always.

  He tries to remember the last time he dreamt of anything else. Wearily, he drags himself over to his desk and swipes the clutter of notebooks and magazines to the floor. He feeds a fresh sheet of paper into his typewriter and stares at the blank page with a serene sense of oblivion.

  His fingers begin to stab at keys.

  Clack.

  Clack.

  Clack.

  By the time he’s aware that he has written anything at all, the words are strewn across the page like bodies on a battlefield. He reads back over them, then curses in a torrent of prolific profanity.

  Where did this come from? This misogynistic, misanthropic rant peppered with God complex and haughty disdain? Jack wishes he could unplug a cord somewhere to stop these thoughts polluting his brain but every time he sits and watches his fingers move, this dross is all he can type.

  He almost can’t remember writing anything else.

  Sounds of life, if you can call it that, he thinks bitterly, are emerging outside his room and throughout the house. He wonders if Freya is back, but decides to leave thoughts of her until after his morning routine.

  He saunters into the corridor, dressed only in his pyjama pants, and then into the kitchen where his father is grumbling into the bowels of the refrigerator.

  “Can’t bloody find anything in here. Where the goddamn son of a bitch did that woman put the damn orange juice?”

  “Maria never bought orange juice. She squeezed it for you fresh.”

  “Huh? Oh, Jack! Good morning. That explains it then. Right. Any idea where the juicer is?” Harland rummages through the kitchen cupboards.

  Jack sighs as he grabs a spoon from the drawer. “Third drawer.”

  “Aha!” Harland says, pulling it open. “And the oranges?”

  “Pantry.”

  “I don’t know about you, but I am thrilled Elijah and Rosaline are tying the knot. Lord knows those two waited long enough.”

  “The coma might have had something to do with that.”

  “Ah, young people these days. They take forever to make up their minds! Always ‘finding themselves’ and figuring things out.”

  Jack pours cornflakes into a bowl but says nothing.

  “How’s the writing going?”

  “Horrible. It’s like someone else is writing through me. Like Yeats’ instructors. It’s all coming out so dark…and foul.”

  “Great! Can’t wait to read it!” Harland says cheerily, having obviously not heard a word. He slices an orange into pieces, throws them into the juicer, flicks the switch and juice squirts over his jacket. “Ah, Christ! The hell with this,” he says, and grabs a tea towel and rubs at it, then takes it off and hangs it over the back of a chair. He runs upstairs to find a replaceme
nt jacket.

  Jack slides out of his chair, reaches into the inner pocket, finds what he needs and sits back down. Harland’s footsteps thud down the stairs as he returns, buttoning up his navy blazer as he walks.

  “I’ll stop at Merlo’s on the way to the office. Got a busy day, what with the oil spill. Publicity has been through the roof, by the way! Those penguin jumpers…a stroke of genius.” He pauses in the manner he usually does when he is waiting for praise to be heaped upon him. Unfortunately for Harland, this is not the boardroom and his usual supply of yes-men are nowhere to be found. Jack pours milk into his bowl and chews his cornflakes. Harland scowls and continues.

  “Terrible tragedy, of course…all those manatees or sea lions, or whatever the devil they are, dying. But you can’t even eat those things, can you? Pretty sure I’ve never seen sea lion on a menu. So, not exactly a catastrophe. Still, all the Lefties seem pretty cut up about it.”

  Jack chews his cornflakes.

  Harland transfers his wallet from his orange juice-afflicted jacket to his fresh one and says, “Don’t forget to make yourself presentable for the party tonight. Remind me to hire a new maid as soon as this oil spill thing blows over. I won’t be home until just before the party. We’ve hired a suit for you; it’s being delivered this afternoon. Bye!” He rushes out the door.

  Jack finishes his cornflakes and only looks up when the door slams. He listens to the sound of the car’s engine revving up and then fading into the distance. He leaves his bowl on the table and walks to his father’s study, swipes the card he has removed from Harland’s wallet and enters. He surveys the room’s contents before sitting at his father’s desk. An intricately carved wooden box is in front of him and he opens its latch. Inside, it’s lined with shaped foam with a cylindrical recess about the size of a large cigar. He closes it and slides open the top drawer.