I go on a date with a librarian, a quiet girl who wants to discuss Dostoevsky and Dickinson. She paints in watercolors, writes poems about trees, about weeping willows. We go to a café; she wants to kiss over a cup of tea. I see a life of yoga in the mornings, of easy nights reading in bed.
But I tell you, I was still hungry for the girl in the mansion who could make every night feel like my last one on earth. I kiss the librarian goodbye, tell her I have to go. I catch the BART to Oakland and Miss Matte Black is waiting at Van Kleef’s, smoking and smiling as I walk in.
“I knew you weren’t going anywhere but back to me.” She grabs my leg and says, “Just don’t do it again.”
Three rounds later and I’m back at her house, she’s pouring champagne down my chest. It feels like back to high times again until she breaks a wineglass and begs me to cut my name in her chest, brand her, make my words become flesh. She tells me the flesh is weak, but love is permanent. This isn’t love, this is a tango that’s turned into a mosh pit. The deeper we go, the harder it’s going to be to find the surface.
This time I vanish for a week, go back to waiting tables, and then the hostess tells me I have a new table in my section.
There she is, smiling, with a bandage on her arm. She unwraps it; a scorpion tattoo exactly like mine.
“I had to draw it out from memory but it’s pretty close, isn’t it?” She holds it next to my arm. “See? Now we’re a reflection of each other. You said poison should always be labeled.”
I tell her I’m not going to Oakland tonight. She says, “Don’t worry, I got us a hotel room. There’s a champagne bucket waiting for you.” She puts a bag on the table. “Open it.”
Inside is a pair of handcuffs. She says, “Come commit some crimes with me and when we’re done, you can arrest me.”
What kind of crimes?
She says that’d be premeditation. “It’s nothing you haven’t done before.”
I’m thinking, I haven’t even told you what I’ve done.
If she’s my reflection, then I wonder what I’m afraid to see. I ask her again what kind of crimes, but she says it’ll ruin the surprise.
She’s quiet on the ride there. We pull up outside a café, she turns the car off and points inside. “Now you can stop a crime about to happen.”
I look through the café window — the librarian girl I kissed a week ago is sitting at a table, sipping tea. “What the fuck is this?”
Her eyes flash. “You can stop a beating if you want to.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Well, it’s simple: you could have stopped this girl from a beating if you didn’t kiss her last week. But you did, and now here we are.”
“You watched me? When?”
“It was by a window, you know. You weren’t exactly being sneaky about it.”
“You drove here from Oakland? You were fucking stalking me?”
“I missed you, that’s all, and you didn’t want to see me. And you didn’t see me. But I saw you. And her.” Her fists clench on the steering wheel.
“You’re just gonna walk in there and attack her? In the café? In front of everyone?”
“Unless you stop me. Just tell me you love me and you don’t love her. And you’ll stop a crime.”
I stare at her. “Tell you I love you. And then we’ll leave?”
“And then we’ll leave.”
I tell her I love her. I lie. Her fists come off the steering wheel.
I’m in a game I don’t know the rules of anymore. She drives away from the café, the librarian vanishing in the rearview. We’re back at the hotel, champagne in an ice bucket. She throws the handcuffs on the bed and says, “Good job, officer. Throw the book at me.”
I realize we’re alone in this room. No one knows where I am.
I open the champagne instead, start chugging until it froths down my shirt. Someone could die in here. She gives me that smile again over her shoulder. I feel sick. She’s a spider in skin.
She tells me that anyone can learn to love anyone, it just takes time. Then she tells me my time is running out. I pour the rest of the champagne on the floor and hold the bottle by the neck. I tell her, “I’m walking out of this room, and don’t follow me. Don’t show up at my work again.”
She doesn’t stop smiling but her eyes are blinking at a weird rhythm. Like a TV starting to fritz. “You’ll come back.”
I don’t see her for a month and I can’t believe I still miss her. I miss the champagne, the pornographic prologue turning into a horror film.
A month later, she walks into my birthday party, says she was just in the neighborhood, didn’t even know it was my birthday. She sits in the back corner while I’m going round for round with my friends.
She moves closer, joining conversations, buying me drinks. After the fifth round her hand slides up my leg and I don’t stop it. It’s closing time, my friends are offering me a couch to crash on, but she whispers in my ear, says a birthday boy should stay in a bed.
No, I’m done with that madness.
She says just for old time’s sake. I tell her no.
“Okay then, I’m sorry. How about a ride to your friend’s house at least?”
I slam back the last of my drink. “All right. It’s a ten-minute ride — but nothing more than that.”
“Nothing more than that.”
As soon as the doors lock to her BMW, I know I’ve made a mistake. But she’s got child locks, and I didn’t think of that. Thirty seconds later she’s driving 45 mph down a 25 mph street and has a slur in her voice I didn’t notice before — maybe I didn’t let her talk long enough, maybe I didn’t ask the right questions.
But then her voice gets real cold and quiet.
“Anybody can learn to love someone, it only takes time.” She’s not even looking at the road, just at me. I tell her to slow down. We hit a speed bump so hard my head smashes against the ceiling. She’s listing off the reasons why if I knew myself, I would know I was in love with her. I would love to debate this paradox of me not knowing what I should know, but all I hear is the gas revving, horns blaring. I realize I’m going to have to jump out of a moving car. Every action movie I’ve ever seen is replaying in my head, like how the hell to roll once you hit the ground.
She blasts through a traffic light like it just wasn’t red enough.
“Slow down,” I plead.
She’s says, “What, am I taking it too fast for you? You want me to slow down? Tell me you love me!”
A man pushing a shopping cart leaps out of the head-lights. She doesn’t even notice. A three-way intersection is coming up fast ahead of us.
“Tell me you love me!” Syd screams.
“I love you, all right? Stop the car!”
“Love doesn’t stop.”
I watch a stoplight fly past above us. I put my forearms out in front of me.
We smash headlong into a sedan that goes spinning into the crosswalk, glass shattering across the street. There’s the sickening screech of metal grinding, the windshield cracking in pieces, the hood crunching into a twisted mess, then just broken glass twinkling down to the asphalt. I sit heaving for a second, hands on my face, moving my toes in my boots. Everything is spinning. My forearms are wet with the spit that flew out of my mouth on impact.
The other car is twenty feet away, spun out on a crazy axis. A black woman is at the wheel, holding her head, checking herself for damage. I turn to Syd. There’s blood trickling down her forehead.