Red Audrey and the Roping

by Jill Malone

  I start to cry, then startle out of it when Dr. Mya’s pencil, which she has managed to drop, rolls from her lap onto the carpet, and glides toward the front wheels of my chair. Betrayal has always made me feel less vulnerable: a flash of red in the slick of the pavement.

  “Jane, had you practiced masochism with lovers before Nick?”

  I shook my head, “Not sexually anyway.”

  “But emotionally?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “You’ve been an emotional masochist with other partners?”

  “With Emily, I think.”

  “You had a sexual relationship with Emily?”

  “Didn’t she tell you?”

  She doesn’t answer, only sits awaiting my response. I almost miss the freakish display of the previous session: it is unnerving how rigidly she maintains control of herself.

  “Yes, I had a sexual relationship with her.”

  “How long did your sexual relationship last?”

  “Less than a year.”

  “Do you consider yourself a bisexual?”

  “Do we have to tag everything?”

  She lets that one go, almost grinning at me.

  “Why did the relationship with Emily end?”

  “I’d started seeing someone else.”

  If she’d had her pencil, I’m sure she would have made a note of that. She tenses in her chair. Non-monogamous masochist seeks dysfunctional male or female for non-spiritual connection. All vices welcome.

  “Why had you started seeing someone else?”

  “Emily wanted to.”

  “So your relationship was non-monogamous?”

  “It became non-monogamous, yes. She said she wanted to see other people.”

  “Did you want to see other people?”

  “No. It just happened.”

  Dr. Mya reaches behind her and picks up a pen from her desk. On the bookcase beside me in an oval frame, two gleaners bend in a golden field. They wear muted colors and weathered faces; from the painting, I know exactly how rough their clothes feel. I think of Hiromi hunkered in Emily’s garden, always tending.

  “How about with your lovers since Nick? Have you been sexually or emotionally masochistic with recent lovers?”

  “No.”

  “Why haven’t you practiced masochism with other lovers?”

  “I fantasized instead. I didn’t think they’d be into it.”

  “Because they weren’t sadists?”

  “That’s too easy, isn’t it? Nick was a sadist and that’s why things got fucked up? I have no responsibility, no role? I didn’t contribute in any way?”

  “How did you contribute?”

  “I let him wail on me.”

  “Because you’re a masochist?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who has never practiced masochism with anyone else?”

  “It’s not like you need a fucking learner’s permit. Practiced masochism. You make everything sound like you’re reading from a fucking textbook.”

  “You contributed because you consented?”

  “Yeah, I consented.”

  “Because you never said no?”

  I want to crush that yellow pencil beneath the wheels of my chair. What does any of it matter anymore? Her skirt stretches across her knees, and she holds my file on her lap the way old women hold afghans.

  “Are you trying to give me an out? I was part of the scene; I let it happen.”

  “Do you consider yourself a difficult person to love?”

  Warily, I examine her, but her face gives nothing. In her hand the pen cradles, immobile. She doesn’t wear rings on her fingers.

  “Yes.”

  “What makes you difficult?”

  “I’m withdrawn, secretive. I have trouble communicating what I feel.”

  I could have added coward the way Audrey did when she evicted me, but I don’t need another tag line. It wasn’t Tantalus who rolled a stone uphill forever. The Greeks envisioned gods and goddesses who punished by repetition, and erred that way as well. Could I have kept my mother in the kitchen longer that April morning? If it hadn’t been that morning, wouldn’t it have been another morning? Metal buckling against cement, blood on the windshield, dust settling in the air, and me, eating gingersnaps with milk, still explaining: she was so tired. She was just so tired.

  XXXIII.

  At the U.H. men’s volleyball game that Friday night, Nick and I ate Red Vines while watching the terrifying blitzing power of the men’s spikes. We almost pitied the poor bastards on the opposing team whose blockers sucked so badly that their outside hitters were forced to dive into the firing line repeatedly, making for a double beating as the U.H. crowd rose like fervent worshippers to chant, stomp, and cheer. Often during these games, I had to remind myself to breathe as the stadium thundered around us, silencing only for serves and slams.

  Among the sport’s enthusiasts, Nick looked quite formal in his clay-colored oxford shirt, black Docs, and belted khaki slacks. He’d kept his black leather jacket on to forestall the chill of the stadium. Still damp, his bangs hung in his eyes.

  “So I’ve got news,” Nick hollered at me.

  “Should I guess?”

  “I’ve got a gig in L.A. for a couple of weeks in January—celebrity torso shoot.”

  “How’s that?”

  “It’s an ad campaign for cancer prevention. Twenty-two celebrity women are going to have torso shots taken, and their names will be on the back of the pamphlet or magazine or whatever and each shot will be anonymous. The viewer gets to flip through and guess whose tits are whose.”

  “How does this help prevent cancer?”

  “Apparently, it’s going to encourage men and women to look more closely at breasts.”

  “Ah, yes, our great failing as a society: breast neglect.”

  U.H. won four straight points before sending the ball out of bounds. They lost the next two points from ace serves, then recovered with a thudding block that sent the other team sprawling to the ground in a futile effort to recover the ball.

  “It’s the Hollywood concept: sex is the only cause that sells.”

  “OK, seriously, what’s the shoot?”

  “It really is twenty-two celebrity women mixed in with a dozen women who have had radical mastectomies. It’s about solidarity and education through exposure.”

  “Isn’t the word radical superfluous in that context?”

  “These photos will not elucidate that question or any other, but they will certainly generate a lot of hype, and hopefully a lot of money.”

  “Pandering and exploitation—good thing you’re in on the ground floor.”

  The crowd let out a collective groan when one of our hitters slammed his spike into the net. Before the other team could serve, jeers leapt from the rafters to the court and bounced around the bleachers as fans waved rainbow streamers and trumpeted air horns.

  “Why would you say that?” Nick yelled over the mania. “Breast cancer prevention is a worthy cause.”

  “A cause worth serious attention. This is just about celebrity vanity. I mean, my god, they should at least include some medical information about how to check for lumps, how often to visit your doctor for mammograms, cancer statistics, treatment options, support centers …”

  “What if these weren’t celebrities? What if they were just regular women off the street? Would you still object to the concept?”

  “As a statement about cancer prevention? Yes, I would. Where’s the message? So they raise a lot of money for research selling these things at black-tie dinners—don’t get me wrong, I see the value in raising the money—but what have they really done in terms of education? How have they helped cancer awareness?”

  “Have you ever seen a photo of a mastectomy?”

  I thought of the scars I knew: “No.”

  “So this will broaden your awareness. Anyway, to my way of thinking, money for cancer research is worth pandering and exploitation, if that’s what we’re doing.
It may be vanity, but no one’s getting paid to participate.”

  “Even you?”

  “Air travel and hotel expenses are covered, but I’m donating my time and my work.”

  I watched as the U.H. setter flung the ball perfectly, holding his strange insect-like posture as the hitter drilled the ball past the opposing blockers to regain serving advantage. The crowd stomped like bulls. What difference did it make to me how celebrities approached cancer prevention? Wasn’t any attention better than silent neglect?

  “Two weeks in L.A.,” I said. “That’ll make for a nice change.”

  Nick smiled then, relieved finally to see me being reasonable about his project.

  “Then in February I’m going to cover the NCAA fencing tournament.”

  “God, the beekeepers.”

  “Somebody discovered my hobby. I’m being paid for that one.”

  “And then?”

  “New York for a few weeks. I’ve got a show there in March. We’re still in talks about a show in Seattle.”

  I held my breath as the opposing blockers capped one of our spikes; U.H.’s setter pancaked, knocking the ball straight up with his fist, and the nearest hitter lobbed it to the backcourt on the opposing side. The visiting team returned the ball with a sloppy set/spike combination, only to have it blocked as U.H. scored again.

  “So you’ll be flying back and forth to the various events?” I asked.

  “Probably. I’ve got work scheduled in the studio here as well, so we’ll see how it plays out. I just wanted you to know what was coming.”

  “Thanks.”

  Two of our players collided and the crowd jumped up, craning to see the players, thirsty for some heinous injury, the knob of a protruding bone. Both men picked themselves up slowly and stretched their backs and ankles. Applauding wildly, the fans began a war cry.

  Was it relief? Is that what I felt then, aware so suddenly that I’d have three months to myself? Three months without girlfriend obligations, without the roping, without Nick. No, it was joy.

  On the court, the men won the third straight game to take the match, and we shrieked in the stands like schoolgirls.

  XXXIV.

  My classroom was cold in the afternoons—a musty draft stole inside during the winter months through the rows of windows. More often, I felt disheartened, even here in the classroom, though these students were like a haven to me: the Latin they chanted deliberately, the purity of their harried youth, their seriousness. I’d meant to show them beauty in the scope and possibility of the language; instead, I felt blind to it myself.

  We’d finished a translation of Ovid’s myth—an abridged version—about Philomela and Procne when Steven Hamada raised his hand. Since I was no longer the green teacher I had been, I’d anticipated apprehension about this myth; in fact, I’d come to expect disquiet about brutality in the myths at least twice a term now.

  “Yes, Steven?”

  “I don’t understand this myth—I mean, I get that it’s completely sick—but I don’t understand why they’re all transformed into birds.”

  “Yeah,” said Joyce Kim, “Philomela should at least be a tree or a constellation; something more permanent.”

  Steven gave Joyce a disapproving look: “Why Philomela? She slit a child’s throat, then helped tear him to pieces. What I don’t get about this is: aren’t they being rewarded, being transformed into birds? I mean, I get that sometimes a transformation is a punishment, like Arachne being turned into a spider, or Callisto being changed into a black bear; but then there’s Daphne, who’s transformed into a laurel tree to save her from Apollo. So when Philomela and Procne and Tereus are all transformed into birds, are they being punished?”

  “Any ideas?” I asked the class.

  “Well,” said Margaret Wong, “I don’t think this myth is about reward or punishment, I think it’s really an explanation of why these specific birds are the way they are: I mean, Procne is the nightingale—Ovid said swallow, but that’s illogical—mourning, with her sad song, for her dead son; Philomela—whose tongue was cut out when she was human—is a swallow, chattering unintelligibly about her rape; and Tereus, in his aggression, becomes a bird that looks like it’s wearing armor. The myth is a genesis for the birds.”

  “Yeah, I get that,” Stephen said patiently, “but it’s like all of their crimes are being equated: is killing a child and serving his body for supper as bad as raping your wife’s sister, cutting out her tongue so she can’t tell anyone, and holding her hostage in a fortress in the woods? Why are they all transformed into birds?”

  “I don’t think the crimes are being equated,” said Martin Reid. “I think the gods just wanted to stop the cycle of revenge before it escalated. I mean, if you look at Callisto: Zeus rapes and impregnates her; Diana excommunicates her from the Virgin Huntress Club; and Hera transforms her into a black bear—all the while, the myth keeps talking about Callisto’s guilt like it’s all her own fault—but rather than allow her son to kill her while he’s out hunting, Zeus transforms both of them into constellations. It’s like there’s a point at which even the Greeks and Romans can’t take any more of the carnage.”

  The class mulled this over, silently. It was a pleasure to watch them consider the implications of the myth—its purpose and its method.

  Then Steven looked up at me and said: “But it seems like a gift, their being changed into birds.”

  “Is it a gift?” I asked. “Only their physical condition, after all, is modified, not their circumstances. Did the gods transform them into birds out of a sense of compassion?”

  “That’s what I don’t get,” Steven said.

  When the students, still puzzled, filed from the room at the end of class, I too was undecided. Perhaps a half-gift—a god’s gift—to alter their form but not their nature: Philomela’s incessant chattering; Procne’s endless mourning; Tereus a bird of prey.

  XXXV.

  As the D.J. spun a post-punk caterwaul at the Spark late one Saturday night in January, every twenty-something on the island skin-gambled the smoky blue dark: groping their way to and from the bar, grappling on the dance floor, colliding into one another urgently with a certain studied despair. Grey had danced all evening with one honey after another, stopping by the bar to slug a shot, wipe the sweat off his face, and ask me again if I was sure I wanted to stay.

  Reloading whiskey shots, I’d amused myself most of the evening rejecting dance offers—not that I felt compelled to celibacy—just to watch Red Audrey from the relative safety of my barstool. When we’d first arrived, I’d seen this familiar red-haired girl with corkscrew curls and an Audrey Hepburn neck on the fringe of the dance floor, and had staked out the bar ever since—the only immobile, rooted thing in the place. I had this vision of her drawing her phone number on my forearm: calligraphy numbers like some underground code.

  The bartenders were all California boys who’d come to Oahu for the surfing and headed straight for the beach when the bar closed up at 5:00 a.m. They weren’t, to be kind, my type. Emily’s sometime boy, Ray, was always sunburnt—even his hair blistered white—and looked like a mutated candy cane. Emily could get him riled up for anything. Anxious for brawls and eighteen-foot swells, the guy didn’t hinge properly; and given the way he’d huddled around me most of the night, I reckoned I’d been adopted as his latest crusade: “Emily says your boy’s fucking you up.”

  “Emily would.”

  “So your boy’s fucking you up?”

  “What?”

  “So your—”

  “No, Ray.”

  “Lift up your shirt.”

  “Ray, don’t touch my stomach. Pour me a whiskey and fuck off.”

  “Just show me—one quick flash.”

  “I swear to Christ, Ray …”

  “Alright, but I’m aware of this. I’m aware and I’m gonna wreck that guy next time I see him.”

  Maybe no one should be expected to keep my secrets when I couldn’t keep them myself, but I wanted
Ray to know like I wanted my throat cut. I hated that lanky candy cane prick and his big-brother posturing.

  “Another whiskey,” I called without looking round.

  I didn’t want Nick wrecked; we’d had wreckage enough. But his absence, his absence was a narcotic, the first clean breath I’d had after a long submersion. While Red Audrey pushed her way off the dance floor and traced a line to the bar, I shot the rest of my whiskey and contemplated my keen and raging body.

  Like everything else about the bar, the people were vague. With electric lights as subtle as shadows, you never really saw anyone until closing when it was too late to matter. Red Audrey wasn’t aware of me until I held my mouth against her ear, my fingertips light on her wrist.

  “Kamikaze?” I asked.

  She stepped back to look up at me, calculated something, and then nodded. Behind her on the dance floor, the D.J. switched records.

  The aching music and this girl spinning coasters on the bar like pinwheels, I was memorizing her skin—pale and delicate—while I ordered the glass, double vodka. She was half kneeling on the black seat of the stool, her blue skirt resting halfway down her thighs, and she wore soft blue knee socks like she’d just stepped out of a French girls’ school. Her collarbones made my stomach cramp.

  “You don’t look old enough to be in here,” I said, handing her the drink.

  She pulled her I.D. from her pocket; when I took it from the shallow of her palm, she cupped her fingers around my hand like a flower closing. I grinned at her.

  “Jesus, your name really is Audrey.”

  Her head cocked to the side as she tried to figure out what I meant. In the photograph of her driver’s license, her eyes looked dilated and wild like a maniac. Eyes: blue, it read. I looked across at her to make sure. Somehow, swallowing had become difficult.

  “Thirty-four? You expect me to believe you’re thirty-four?”

  The crowd was on a techno fix: music rumbling over every silhouette in the blue smoke. My hair was whacked: moussed straight out like a bunch of black weeds. A line of deviants mobbed the bar looking for IVs in chilled glasses, and Red Audrey still had my hand.