“Finally,” my mother said, when I picked up. “Where have you been?”
“I started a new job last night.”
“Waitressing?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I lied.
“Make lots of money?”
“Yep,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “Maybe you can get yourself some new clothes.” I cradled the phone to my shoulder and shut the curtain against the growing morning light. “I called you because of these incredible stories I heard at a party last night. Remember Timmy Rollins? He dropped out of college and started working as night janitor at the big insurance building on the highway? Last week when he found his girlfriend with another man, he broke her jaw and pulled out half the hair on her head.”
“Jesus!” I said.
“And do you remember June?”
“The one with the fluffy sweaters?”
“That's right. Well, she was cleaning up her VCR unit and noticed an unfamiliar tape, so she popped it in, and there was her husband having sex with a young woman.”
“No way,” I said, imagining the wife in her robe watching her husband with a woman much like herself, only ten years younger. The TV screen buzzing.
“I'll tell you,” my mother went on, “someone should write a book on man's true character.”
“Is that girl Timmy beat up O.K.?” I asked.
“You only get one chance in life, and for women that chance comes early. Before you know it, the million-dollar-baby thing is gone.” I didn't answer. It made me angry that she hated men yet sometimes sided with them. She wanted to believe, even though Dad had left her, that the patriarchy would care for her.
I was thinking of Madison, realizing she was similar to my mother, both believed that hate was sustaining. They each had a well-developed sense of doom and were convinced it was unresolvable, convinced the only way to lessen their pain was to pass it on to others.
“Do you ever pretend that you're dead?” I asked her.
“Jesse, why would you ask me something so morbid?”
“Because I'm exhausted,” I said.
She harrumphed. “You only have one mother.”
“And I only have one life.”
“You call playing house a life?”
“I'll call you,” I said.
“Do you have to go?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said and hung up.
When I thought of the expensive tailored clothes she'd worn as a teenager, still kept in plastic in her dresser, or of the TV show about a career woman she'd watched faithfully when we were little kids, I felt a searing empathy. But on the phone her semiotic stories always carried a curse for me and it was all I could do to protect myself. Too, I felt responsible, still, that Dad had dumped her, mostly because it was hard to pretend that she, or anyone really, was easy to love.
I rolled over on my stomach, moved my arms just under my hip bones, and cupped my palms over my pussy — it was a position I had used since I was a baby. Through the bed I heard the voice of a Chinese woman below and, above, the footfalls of the lovers rising, the woman's fluttering feet in the kitchen, the man in the shower. I imagined my mother coming to me. She layover me, and started to pulse her pelvis. There was something so familiar about giving her pleasure, something I'd been trying to do all of my life.
THE NEXT NIGHT I WENT IN THROUGH THE BACK DOOR AT Carmen's, saw Madison waiting at the top of the stairs. The stairwell was dimly lit and I liked the priestly way she stood, wearing the same clothes as last night. As I got closer I could tell she was high.
“The snake beguiled me and I ate,” she said. I felt uncomfortable. Whenever time lapsed, she seemed to forget the status of our relationship. “I have a hardcore upstairs,” she said, somewhat bored. “He likes an audience.”
“I just watch?”
Madison nodded.
“O.K.” I followed, her scent rich like menstrual blood. I was curious, I still hadn't felt that exquisite kick of perversity. A man sat on the bed — he was younger than I had imagined, with pale blond hair and small perverse features. In his bow tie and expensive suit, he looked awkward as a game bird in Madison's space-age room.
“I thought I told you to undress,” Madison said, not looking at the man as she poured me an inch of bourbon in a blue glass.
The man slipped off his shoe, then pulled his sock off and folded it into the loafer. He removed his other shoe, rolled the sock down, placed that sock inside of the other shoe. His hands shook as he put both shoes together next to the bed. He unzipped his pants, stepped out one leg at a time, folded them neatly and placed the pants on top of his shoes. Then he undid his bow tie and took off his shirt, till he stood in his flowered boxers, shivering, looking anxious and pleased.
“Those too,” Madison said firmly. He pulled them down, folded the boxers on the top of his pile. His skin goose-pimpled and he looked at her longingly, waiting for directions.
“Bend over the bed,” she ordered.
He draped himself over the edge. Cracked his butt so I could see his anus, dark pubic hair curling around it. I slung down the bourbon, my organs glowing like a space heater. Was this Madison's idea of intimacy, me staring into this guy's asshole?
She sat down at her dressing table, got out a fingernail clipper and snapped the white nail from her thumb. The man gasped. Madison worked on the other hand, with each snap of a fingernail the man moaned. She took off a go-go boot, folded her foot up onto the chair and clipped her toenails.
“This woman here,” she said, “is going to tell your little boys all about you.”
I winced. Though the man didn't say anything I could tell she'd excited him. Now that I knew something about her past, Madison was no less of an enigma. She wanted to escape her own consciousness in another's flesh, but it made me uncomfortable that it wasn't sex she considered exciting, but the idea of evil. Madison preferred the narrative, the “then I do this” to the reality. She considered the sexual narrative holy and could thus disentangle herself from the act.
She took off her other boot, a deep click for the thick nail of her big toe and then smaller snaps as she cut the nails in decreasing size. She put each boot back on and zipped them up. She opened a drawer and took out a rubber glove. Pulled it up over her hand and snapped it at her elbow. She took up a tube of lubricating jelly and squeezed some over the glove, spreading it out so the rubber gleamed. She straightened two fingers and squeezed a drop out onto the tip. When the man heard her stand he sighed and spread his cheeks further. I could see his hard cock peeking out between his stomach and the bed.
Madison sat next to him and slid two fingers slowly into his anus. She slipped in a third finger, moved them in to the hilt. The man's legs jangled softly. With a continual slow movement back and forth she pushed her whole hand in, then her wrist, her forearm. She fisted her hand and the man sucked air. His back arched, his pink anus was stretched wide as a mouth. Madison moved her arm in and out, she seemed fascinated by the way the rubber glove disappeared inside the man's asshole. She punched up hard, the man raised his head, gasped. Her arm in to the elbow, she flexed her bicep and grabbed for his bowels. The man made a series of vowel sounds. Then a hard “Hhhhhhhhhh” that rose high like a cat's scream. Madison's lips opened into a snarl and I could see the muscles of her neck strain and flex. He splayed his arms and legs wildly like a bug with a pin through its belly.
“Madison,” I yelled instinctually. She looked at me, but her eyes were dead. She had gone away from me, away from the man, the room and Carmen's, away from San Francisco too. Madison was on the lot behind the grocery store watching the flames. She quickly looked back down, reached around the man to restrain him with a tight arm around his waist. She knew fathers didn't have to be loving toward their children, that mothers could be raped like schoolgirls, that people's relationships to one another are sinister, violent, even murderous. He wailed, his eyes bulged and he swung his head side to side. “Madison,” I yelled again, but she was concentrating now, reaching her fingers up toward his heart. She wants his heart, I thought, because she doesn't have one of her own. I ran out of the room, down the back stairs and onto the street.