Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [50]
Sometimes, like when Fate’s croupier fixes the throw, and the suety slob in the white suit pockets your dice, and Lawman Lance weighs in with low blows, and the burned-out bimbo you saved from rape runs off with the finicky florist from Sacramento, there’s only one way to go: just suck it in and spur your tired mare on on the hot, dusty, cruel trail home, ’cos there’s a sweet, sad-eyed woman waitin’ for you by the kitchen stove, a loving woman who knows you and cares for you, a real woman who understands you so well she doesn’t shackle your ankles to the bedpost but gives her blissful womanhood to you of her own accord and for as long as you need and want her to, and who senses when to step aside, and lets you go without tears, and weeps only after the dust’s blown …
That’s when I stopped the head count. Swann groupies writhed in their seats. I was witnessing a feeding frenzy. I was hearing a refrain: He made me wanton. I understood the apparition Jess’d confessed to at the Middle Grounds. A romance writer, like Starkie Boy, had inspired Jess’s tropical fantasy about a sweaty night of love with an alien god. Emily Dickinson had been an excuse. Bio-Mom had scripted her life—and mine—on a romance novel off a rack. I hated Starkie Boy for not telling the whole tale, the part about what happens after the dust clears, and the child is strangled. I need the world to connect Starkie Boy with vultures tearing flesh off a corpse’s bruised throat.
My voice; I suddenly understood, the sexy nun’s voice, graveled by scar tissue.
That’s why I agreed to the glass of wine in his room. He said, “Come in for a drink? Help me unwind? I hate hotels, they’re so sterile.” It didn’t qualify as a hitting-on-me situation. Let’s just say he facilitated what I planned to do.
I accepted the invitation. I went with him to the bar and sipped a Chardonnay because I wanted to. Then I rode the elevator to his floor, led the way into his suite, let him pour minibar brandy into two snifters, let him undress me before I undressed him. That night, nobody made me do anything I didn’t want to do. I slow-paraded my nakedness and watched him twitch and harden. Enthrallment is an exquisite instrument of pain. When it comes to enthralling, I am a natural. Which was why he didn’t see me shake too much Mandrax (thanks, Larry!) into his snifter, didn’t taste it on his greedy tongue, and after a while didn’t feel me pleasure him. And just before he passed out, I had him roll over and lie on his stomach, and when he was out so cold he wouldn’t feel the tickle of the K-bar knifepoint (thanks again, Larry!), I nicked an endearment on his left buttock: cw. My homage to my neighborhood graffitiste, Cee-Double-You. Because that’s what the women who give of their blissful selves of their own accord and for as long as you want them to, the real women, do.
The night I was practicing K-bar calligraphy on Starkie Boy, Fred Pointer was jogging to his death. I imagine connections everywhere; more of them are nooses than bridges.
Fred’s life changed after our last meeting at Steep Steps. He became accident-prone, pulled a pectoral on a bench press, sprained his ankle on a golf swing, burned his hand on the car radiator. Things. There are things out there waiting to zap you. Unguardedness may prove fatal. In Fred’s case it did. A woman walking her black Lab in Land’s End by the Sutro Baths found a badly charred body under a cypress tree. Like Rajeev Raj, like Madame Kezarina, I find signs all around me. The papers called it an accident, but Fred committed suttee. Fred’s despair burned as brightly as a funeral pyre.
Fred made better than the obit page in the local papers. The way he died made him news. Accident or Homicide? Two national tabloids picked up the death. I read Bay Area Private Eye Slain by Viet Gang of San Jose at Wal-greens, and San Francisco Gumshoe Molested by Aliens from Outer Space at Safeway.
The coroner’s report was later leaked to the press by a lab assistant with a cash-flow problem. Fred’s blood