I follow him down through the trees of the hillside beneath us and to a cove different from the one where he left me off a few hours ago. I don’t recognize it at all, I have no idea where we are — it will turn out we’re about five miles of shoreline west of where I last saw either Kale or the lake. “Talk about being in the right place at the right time,” I say stupidly when I see the boat in the water. As though, you know, it’s a complete coincidence he happens to be there. As though it’s a complete accident that, at this moment, he happens to be in this one cove out of a thousand. As though some instinct I’ll never understand hasn’t led him here, as though he’s not followed the sound of my heart from the moment I left him.
I’m freezing out on the lake as he rows us south and then east. I want to go back to the Chateau but he’s not taking me there and I don’t argue. I freeze all the way out to the island where he takes me, the top of one of those old West Hollywood hotels rising from the water where he’s set up a little nook between the stairs and a rooftop storeroom of dead telephone lines and elevator cables. There are some mattresses and blankets that have been lying ’round more years than I want to think about, and a little place where someone built a fire once. “I get the feeling you’ve
pregnant but not yet knowing I carried inside me a question that I asked once
done this before,” I finally say about half an hour into thawing out. To the northeast I can see lights I’m pretty sure are the Chateau. I worry about the Mistress, I don’t like having left her alone. I’m angry at myself about the whole evening.
He sleeps next to me. If he had wanted to get in under the blankets with me I would have let him, as long as he kept his hands to himself. I think he doesn’t want to put me in the position of saying yes or no, you see? He wants to take the decision out of my hands, into his, so there will be no question of the night being anything other than what it is. And I’m relieved and looking back perhaps I should have told him it was all right to get under the blankets with me, but I don’t because I’m not sure he’ll take it the right way and I’m too tired to want to think about it — but you see I think he knows that too so that’s why he doesn’t ask. And it moves me about him, that he wants to spare me having to be in control of anything for that moment when I don’t want to be in control of anything, I want to give up all control and be able to trust it’s going to be all right, I want to be able to trust him, to trust the night will pass without event or misunderstanding and I’ll wake the next morning and he’ll already be awake walking ’round the edge of the island looking out at whatever, and I get up and start looking ’round too, wrapping the blanket ’round me because there I am still in my corset and stockings which are pretty trashed from the night before, but there’s nothing else to wear till I get back to the Chateau. I’m stumbling ’round the rooftop in the gray morning sun checking it out and trying to get warm, and there I have another distinct memory of something from before: of sleeping on another rooftop somewhere like this one, beneath an enormous sky.
Back in the little gutted room with the elevator cables I turn and he’s standing there in the doorway blocking it. For a second all my defenses go up the way they do when a woman is cornered
as a little girl, running one afternoon into my uncle’s bar and crying out
and a man is blocking her way out. All my defenses go up and suddenly he looks crestfallen, he’s seen it in my face, seen the way I got a bit afraid of him, the way I hate him just a bit after everything he’s done, after the way he’s slept next to me and hasn’t even tried to get under the blanket with me; for me to suddenly get wary and afraid of him, well, I can see how it hurts him. As though he would ever do anything to me. As though he would ever threaten me in any way. He’s hurt by my collapse of trust in this moment and something else, I know there’s something else, I knew from the first night he came to me. “Sorry,” I half murmur, half snap, and that comes off a bit defensive too.
He nods. He backs out of the doorway to let me by.
In the doorway I take his face between my hands. “I’m sorry,” I say again, gentler.
He nods again.
“Jeez,” I say, “what is it Kale. Are you in love with me, is that it? Do you just want to fuck me, is that all this is about?”
“Those are two different questions,” he answers.
“Why,” taken aback, “that’s the most complicated thing I’ve ever heard you say.” I take his hand and pull him down in the doorway and we sit together our legs entwined. I reach out from beneath my blanket and take his hands in mine and hold them. It’s not like that with me and boys, I try to explain. I know a man always thinks he can change a girl like me if he only gets the chance but that’s not going to happen. Really, at this moment I’m not trying to be a bitch, if anything I’m sort of begging him to understand. You’re pretty though, I’ll give you that, I say to him looking at his water-green eyes that light up in the night and putting my hand in his brown feathery hair that smells like tall dry grass — but it’s more than that. Somehow I feel it’s more than that. Later, back at the Chateau and lying in my own bed, I think about how it’s more than that. Part of me thinks well I can’t see
What’s missing from the world? and years later from L.A. to Tokyo there
him any more, because it just torments him, but the other part of me isn’t sure I can stay away, because there’s a connection for sure. Not like we’re lovers but … something else.
Over the next couple of weeks I go out with him again to the island called the Hamblin because it’s truly mega out there even if there’s no blue anymore, even under the gray sky and looking out over the gray water, and also because of that connection. Because I can’t help wanting to spend time with him. But after a few times I know I can’t anymore, that it means too much to him to be with me and it hurts him too much not to make love to me. Like the first night out on the Hamblin he never imposes himself on me in any way except one time standing next to him looking out at the lake I put my arm in his as the wind comes up and then he puts his arm ’round me and his fingers brush my breast ever so slightly like it’s an accident — boys will be boys, eh? One night he comes to the Chateau with some food and money to be my slave again but we’re somehow too far past that scene anymore, and there in the Lair before the fire he tries to tell me, I know what he’s trying to say and I’m thinking oh no don’t, don’t say it, and he can’t, it catches in his throat or he can’t come up with the words or something, and he starts talking with his hands. His eyes coming at me fixed, relentless, he starts talking in this sort of sign language, his hands making these urgent elaborate pictures in the air, and he becomes more and more frustrated, his eyes closed tight, hands darting in front of him faster and faster till finally I just take them in my own, “Hey, hey,” to try and calm him. He relaxes and his hands rest in mine and he opens his eyes and just looks at me.
I wait for Armand and his boys to show up. I figure it’s a matter of time, that they’re not going to let that night go unanswered for, so I gather up all the cash they paid me and keep it handy on the off-chance that somehow returning the money will