The empty quart made a hollow scratchy sound as I set it against the brick wall. I went in the back door of Carmen's, up the dim stairway. The fishtanks seemed louder than usual and the black light made the white shag purple. Between blasts of strobe light Susan danced in her window. I walked straight up the spiral steps into Madison's room. She sat at her dressing table with her head tipped forward. At first I thought she was praying, but then I saw the syringe and rubber tube behind her. She was asleep and I walked closer, saw that the roots of her splayed hair were dirty blond and how the veins of her arm were bruised. She lifted her head and I stepped back.
“I can always tell when someone is watching me,” she said.
“I ran into the guy you sent over to fuck me.”
“And?” Madison sat up, laughed awkwardly.
“Fuck you, Madison! You might as well have raped me yourself.”
“What's the big deal? You're already past your prime, every man you fuck has and is going to fuck someone else.”
It took all my willpower not to hit her. “I can't believe you think being a whore helps.”
“It helps me,” she said, flopping onto the bed.
“You're sick,” I said.
“Meaningful relationships flutter between two things, convention and sentimentality.”
“Some stranger can't mean more than a lover or someone in your family.”
“That's the point. . they do to God and they do to me. . This is silly,” she said. “Come over here. Do you want me to say you mean something to me?”
When I didn't answer she said, “You're so predictable.” She unbuttoned her shirt, showed me her pale cleavage, her hard pierced nipples. “I'll touch you with an incident from my sad sad childhood, how my father raped me, how my mother was murdered. . then maybe you'll kiss me.” She pulled her blouse off one shoulder and her breasts goose-pimpled. “You want your life to be like a movie,” she said. “That's why you won't come to me. . because it's not perfect enough. For you, everything is ruined before it even begins. Do you want me to tell you I love you?” she said.
I still wouldn't come to her and this made her angry, she clicked her jaw.
“You'll see,” she said. “Relationships are like wallpaper patterns, you think you're moving forward but you're always caught in your own obsessions.”
“You are already dead,” I said to her. It hadn't been what I intended to say, but it seemed true enough.
She jumped up from the bed and flew at me, chased me down the stairs. “I know what you're thinking!” she screamed. “Get out of here with all your true-love bullshit!”
PIG SAT IN THE LIVING ROOM ON THE CRIMSON VICTORIAN, tarot cards spread out over the marble coffee table. She looked very put together in her huge gabardine suit and pinkish wig. Her bracelets jingled.
“I absolutely knew in my heart of hearts you'd return.” She patted the sofa near her signaling for me to sit down. Pig's body heat was like a radiator. I leaned into her and she put her arm around me. “You just can't wear your heart on your sleeve dear,” Pig said, “unless you have big teeth. Not everyone is as good as you at falling in love.” She pressed my head into her breast and smoothed down my hair. “I knew a man once, met him in a café reading working-class poetry. He had these dreamy bedroom eyes. He told me right away that his mother had died lately of a heart attack, that he'd once accidentally killed a man with his car and that his girlfriend was a whore. His pupils were dilated and I saw the raised keloid scars on his wrists. He carried his red wine over to my table and told me that a little boy had found a dead baby in the woods. The boy thought it was an angel because clenched in its stiff blue hand was a white feather. What I'm saying,” Pig said, “is that horror is everywhere, it's the rule, not the exception. Life is a disease.” Pig paused, her breath smelled of wintergreen, she swung her fat leg gently but it knocked the coffee table. “After so many broken hearts, the really bloody kind — I've decided it's better to rely on memories. I sift mine, refine them, till they are like jewels in a black velvet bag.”
I pulled away from her. “That makes them lies.”
Pig was creepy. Her emotional reflexes were mild, unfocused, so she relied on emotions of the past.
Pig looked up at me, startled. “You think I'm a liar?” There was a long silence, the kind when you run out of things to say or get caught off guard. When she did speak it was slow, and she didn't look at me. “Pity is such a strange emotion. Once felt, disgust is never far off and then too a certain need to make it perfectly clear the pitied is completely separate from the pitier. This is done mostly with moralistic accusations of the sort you just used on me. This pedanticism,” she said loudly and stamped her foot. “I'll tell you something. I stayed with a man in my mother's summer house and never changed the sheets. To my mother it meant I didn't love her, and that my men were more important than her.” Pig sipped her wine. “Of course, she was right. Sex is a kind of alchemy. It's the one thing other than death that if used properly can change everything, like that first night with Madison, it's all in my head like a beautiful dream. I remember her skin. Its texture made me believe I'd never die.” She looked out the window over the mud range behind the house.
I had no sympathy for Pig's rambling lyricism, because I felt like a rat in a garbage can. There would never be peace. My father, in leaving my mother, poisoned my memories of childhood. That's why Madison's idea that family members had no ordained purpose one to another appealed to me. My family splintered as if they'd been together for the shooting of a movie.
I was glad I'd pitched my polluted self into Bell's memory, because he confused his urge to please his dying father with passion for me. Our relationship, like all romantic ones, had been fodder for the family.
“Madison is a whore,” I said. “And so am I.”
The color drained from Pig's face. “So,” she nodded. Her face falling in on itself.
“Did you expect she was married with a baby in some split-level ranch?”
She looked into my eyes, at my hands, the set of my shoulders, tried to figure out why I'd sabotaged her memory of Madison. Pig shook her monstrous legs and leaned forward to rise.
“Get me my coat,” she said. “We are going out.”
IN THE TAXI PIG PRETENDED NOT TO BE SURPRISED BY THE LACK of neighboring houses, by the mud lots stretching all the way to the water. Though I saw her flinch as we passed a man in a gray hooded sweatshirt laid out on a dirty mattress. Closer to Carmen's the skyscrapers pressing up to the cab and the taxis’ hectic movements seemed to frighten Pig. She tried to make small talk with the cabbie: Latin music, how seductive it was, how flamenco was the most sensuous of dances. But he just nodded and looked into his rearview mirror as if he didn't understand English. On Polk Street Pig pointed out the window, her mouth open. “Isn't that Bell?”
It was him, standing near the Black Rose in his dirty overcoat talking to a strange young man.
“Who's that with him?” She touched my arm.
“I don't know,” I said and twisted my body toward the door: I did not want to talk about Bell.
At Carmen's I paid and helped Pig out of the backseat. Her eyes still hadn't adjusted to outside light and she was unsure of her footing and squinted as we walked to the door. Inside, she seemed to relax immediately: the darkness, the rows and rows of booze. We took stools at the bar. It was early so the place was empty. The lap dancers drank at the other end and the disco music was superfluous like Christmas decorations after the new year. We ordered red wine and she smiled when she saw the tall thin glass. We didn't speak for a while, she was busy absorbing the decor: black-light murals, the metal bar. I was preoccupied too, trying to decide why I'd agreed to take her here. Wouldn't it only hurt Pig more? Was it evil? I hoped Pig and Madison would turn into me and my mother, that they would say true things to one another. Whenever the front door opened she got edgy.