It was an instant, really, a flash she looked at as the end of her childhood, or at least a precipice of her ending childhood from which she could see the terror and power of adulthood. Despite her father’s explicit desire that she not associate with the “below the line” technical employees on the set, she found the makeup trailer the only hospitable hangout. She sat and watched them work, and out of boredom they would beckon her to the chair and start to play. One inspired afternoon, Jay, huge, bulk-muscled, and lavishly gay, cooed and applied artful pats of makeup to her young face. Emmy, who despite her dyed black crew-cut adored creating the most conventional beauty, fussed at her hair. And she loved it, being touched by more than one person at once, being touched at all — lately, it seemed people hesitated to touch her as much, especially her father, who nearly cringed when she leaned on his lap one night, so tired she’d forgotten her sulkiness and tried to settle in between his spread knees, perching on a thigh, head to chest, where she could survey the world from the smell of his soapy sweater. She felt a brittleness in his body, a reluctance, and she quickly untangled herself and went to lie in his trailer, wrapping a blanket as tightly around her body as possible. It was not so only with Michael, who would still wrestle and roughhouse as always, still throw an arm over her shoulder, still squeeze her head to his mouth and make smacking noises as he kissed. Even much later, when his episodes had apparently alreadybegun, she took his arm and clung to him, satisfied that people might think he was her boyfriend, and he must have known, because he held open doors and lit cigarettes for her and bought her a rose from a ragged woman on the street.
Her father had no affection for her adolescence, and as the makeup and hair were played, she realized this was the most touching she had had all summer. She missed her mother so badly thinking of her own loneliness, she actually started to cry, only quickly stopping to prevent streaking her made-up face.
“You have the most beautiful skin,” Jay said.
“Such soft hair,” Emmy said.
“Wait until you see this,” and she held still as he used small wet cold brushes that felt like a tiny tongue on her eyelid. It made her shudder. Jay smiled at her.
“Edie Sedgwick or Audrey Hepburn?”
“Rita Hayworth,” she said, and they laughed at her, and powdered her and turned her finally to look in the mirror, and there she was, pixie woman-sex-child, and she could not stop staring, so mysterious she seemed. It was a heavy movie star look, but an accent here and a smoothness there and a slight artifice about the eyes that gave her a deliberate sexiness made her suddenly dangerous. “Wow,” she said, and it changed the way she moved. She wandered about the set staring at people, anxious to be seen. It was this enjoyment of attention that worried her later when the incident with Dennis happened, and in her mind the makeup day and the incident were conflated, though she was aware that they very well might have occurred months apart, but memory had conflated them to make a logical narrative, to make a causal relation in which she could find some coherence. She felt the strain of trying to remember things as they actually were, the precise chronology, but it washopeless, gone in a veil of wishes and regrets. How particularly when someone was ill, like her brother, the chain of your memories of that person alters irrevocably. His illness became like her own personal Hays office, erasing the offense and the disquiet from all her brother memories. There were, however, the seams of the edits, the wafting hints of darkness she had forgotten. How this kind of remembering was like insanity, and the way later disturbances threw off all the pleasant dreams of her brother. They must be there, the indications, the evidence. And so she would remember things, incidents to make the present presentable and understandable. She knew the incident with Dennis was colored like the memories of her father and her brother, it was colored by her no longer being able to believe in her own innocence, or any innocence at all, even though she also knew that reality was much more complex than innocence and culpability, cause and effect, truth and lies.
Road Stop: New Orleans
I wake in the hotel room. Lorene is out. Sitting in some cafe, no doubt, transforming into some kind of voodoo priestess. She doesn’t want to leave. She says she wants to be in a place that respects decay. I still have to go to my mother’s. I can’t sleep. I watch TV.
John Ireland is in a gray-checkered suit, talking in a journalist weary sexy voice.
“Now you have a secret, too” is what Dennis had said.
But I didn’t want a secret.
It was not Thanksgiving, but the week after. My body confirmed what I suspected all along: it was against me, an enemy. It was not pliant, it wanted things, it grew things.
Dennis had touched me because I had wanted him, too. I made him. He hesitated and I pushed him.
You could just undress like you did before. If you want.
Oh, I want, all right.
It wasn’t Thanksgiving, but the week after.
He looked at me, OK? And no one seemed to see me at all. I felt for the first time electric and possible.
“She’ll never be the beauty her mother was,” my father had said.
“Everyone has secrets, people aren’t what they seem.”
“It’s a surveillance site. For videotapes.”
I felt my beauty upon me when men looked at me, it radiated out, electric, and illuminated the world.
My body had been doing strange things. Unfamiliar things.
“Your father,” he said, “your mother.”
You can count on it. You absolutely can.
John Ireland was married to Joanne Dru. In real life. I know this.
Every desire contains its counterdesire. It’s already there, embedded.
How did — David had bruises on his hand.
He said, with absolute confidence, “You’ll get over this.”
It wasn’t Thanksgiving, but the week after.
I wanted to get the thing over with, get it out of my body. Michael came home, to be there, the week after Thanksgiving. Left school and came home to me. Just like that.
He zipped up his pants. He didn’t look at me in the same way.
Scott cried. It wasn’t a movie to him, was it?
Michael took me to the clinic. They wouldn’t let you do it unless you had someone to drive you home.
“What’s up?” Michael said. “I hear this rumor you don’t eat or speak anymore.”
“No comment,” I said.
When you ignore me I feel as though I don’t exist.
“Just sit tight. I’ll be there tonight.”
“No, no, no,” I said. But he came anyway. Took me to the clinic and drove me home. He put me to bed.
Lied to the doctor about being eighteen.
“You’ll get over it,” the doctor said. I didn’t cry.
“Well?” Michael had asked, holding my hand while I lay in bed. I was groggy. What did I say to him?
“It’s obvious, isn’t it? I’ve ruined my life.”
He said, Michael said, he looked at me and I remember what he said, “Nothing lasts, it doesn’t. I promise.”
“Is that a comfort or a threat?”
“The world is full of second and third and fourth chances.”