I WAS HEADED FOR THE BLACK ROSE TO FIND BELL. WATCHING Madison's fist made me realize Bell had never treated me like a lover. He lived with me to appease his dead father and I stayed with him because his loving disinterest was exactly the kind of mixed signal I used to get from my mother. I wondered if Bell missed me. I'll tell him how I whored myself because he rejected my body — not just its surface, but its general longing. I'll tell him that there is more strength in low moments than in powerful ones. “Bell,” I will say, “there is something centering about despair.” But he would be disappointed that I had left Madison's, say I was fascist to think that heterosexual sex was the only cosmically right kind, that whenever one body enters another it was life-affirming.
Bell sat in the corner of the Black Rose in a red leather booth. He seemed different, with his dirty hair parted to the side and the lining of his coat ripped so it hung down like a rag. He looked up, grabbed my hand and kissed the palm deeply.
“I convinced myself that you were dead,” he said, pulling me across the table to him. He smelled of stale smoke and beerish sweat. “You must come back.”
I pulled away and sat back. “I can't do that.”
“You don't understand.” He looked into my eyes, his skin was liverish, puffy. “I'm afraid I'm going crazy.”
I shook my head. “I came here to tell you that the only reason we were together was because you thought your father would have loved me.” He hardly listened.
“Oh Jesse, things are so much worse than that. I can't sleep. I feel like somebody will trick me if I do, all I can think of is my poor father. I was just remembering how I promised to take him to the theater. He came up because it was my first long-running show. We were supposed to meet at two o'clock and I got there a little early, sat across the street to wait, drank a beer in a diner. He showed up, stood out front. I watched him. He looked ridiculous with his thick arms and striped rugby shirt. I thought he was too excited and I would be embarrassed. He tried the locked theater door several times. The horrible thing is that I took pleasure in this.”
“It certainly wasn't very nice, but you can't do anything about it now,” I said. “He's dead.”
Bell shook his head. “But he was always so kind to me and I did horrible things. On Father's Day we had a special breakfast. Mom bought a coffee cake and she forced me to get a present. He was thrilled, touched my arm, then opened the box to find an old stained tie that I found in the neighbor's garbage. My father put on the tie, smiled, kissed me and finished his breakfast.”
“Bell,” I said, “stop torturing yourself.”
“I can't, I just keep thinking of incidents that make me writhe.” He looked into his gin and began to fold his napkin into smaller and smaller squares. The bartender brushed near us with a wrapped grocery-store log and placed it on the fire. It didn't give off any heat, but the flames were green and purple like a bruise.
“When he died I saw a demon, furred, batlike, crawl out of his mouth.” Bell's eyes closed and tears dripped through his lashes down his cheek.
I put my hand over his, squeezed. He opened his wet eyes and said, “You don't understand how I'm already in hell.” He stood and walked back to the bathroom.
A man at the bar stared at me. He had a full face and wore a leather jacket that tightened at his wrists with zippers. He narrowed his eyes on me. I got nervous thinking he was a customer at Carmen's. I was almost sure not. There was something appealing about him that told me he didn't pay for sex.
The man walked over. “So,” he said, and it was the humid hot house smell and his fat calloused fingers that made me realize it was the stranger from Madison's room.
Bell walked up, took his seat in the booth. “Friend of yours?” he asked.
I couldn't think of anything to say and besides all the air in the place seemed to be gone. “Please go,” I said stiffly.
“Why you working this faggot?” the stranger said.
“What?” Bell's face reddened as he looked from the man to me. The stranger took a swig from my glass. Bell rose up off the bench, but the stranger pushed him back into the booth.
“You see,” he said, “it's my job to tell little fags like you the secrets about their girlfriends.”
“What's the truth about you?” Bell asked. “That you try to get girls off the school bus, that you have herpes, that you fucked your mother?”
“You little fuck.” He grabbed Bell, pulled him from the booth, moved him over to the exposed brick wall and raised his arm. Bell's eyes bulged. The bartender's voice was loud. “No goddamn fights in the Rose.” Then he was on the stranger, pulling him back, telling him to act civilly or he'd kick his butt out onto the street.
Bell was upset, he told me he'd wait outside and walked swiftly to the door.
I watched the stranger as he glared at the bartender walking back to the bar. “Did Madison tell you I was waiting in her room?” I asked.
The stranger nodded, grabbed my wrist. “Have that door open,” he said. “I'll be coming around.”
WHEN BELL SAW ME COME OUT OF THE BLACK ROSE HE TURNED his head. He was waiting in a doorway, smoking a cigarette. Everything was horrible, but it had always been like that, and I felt relieved, the pressure to keep things nice was gone. When I came near, he dropped his cigarette and crushed it with his shoe.
“I won't be able to think of anything else but your delicate hips fucking that thing.”
Nervously, I fingered the lapel of his coat. “It's easier than thinking of us together in some sort of regular life.”
He didn't answer and we stood in dry silence. I remembered a day we'd walked to the pond with the swans in Golden Gate Park, how he'd touched my hair as the birds rose and I looked up into his face.
C h a p t e r N i n e
I PASSED THE TATTOO MUSEUM, SEXPLOSION AND THE LUSTY Lady. On the corner of Eddy and Taylor a man in a wheel-chair was peddling paper roses that lit up in the middle. And a little farther up a man in a jogging suit, holding a baby on his shoulders, tried to sell me a bus transfer. The strong wind blew trash around the street and there was a skinny junkie in corduroy bell-bottoms smoking crack in a doorway. I ducked into an Arabian deli and bought a quart of beer, stood in front of the porno-video shop looking at the blue lava lamps in Carmen's upper windows. I drank recklessly thinking it would excite the men talking out front. It felt right drinking beer, one eye on the lava lamps and the other on the soft-porn movie playing on the screen in the window. I looked for my reflection, but there wasn't any. Chilly, I pulled my shirt-sleeves over my wrists. It didn't really surprise me that Madison had the stranger fuck me. She didn't believe in equality, she manipulated me like a slave. Her philosophy was seductively dangerous.
I'd taken my parents too literally, because it was clear now I wasn't a princess. My emotions were complicated, but no better than the whores’ at Carmen's. Liars attracted me because I was one myself. I was like all women who have great fidelity to their memories and delusions.