“What will you say to her?” I asked.
“That I love her,” she said. “That's all I want to say.” Pig was like a mother in that what she perceived as simple love carried a truckload of complications. “When you love a woman, you love yourself, and it's terrible really, how it seems perfectly possible to swallow the other. With a man you want to join, you want your ribs to connect like handcuffs. But with a woman if you swallow, she becomes you.”
“Is Madison the main one,” I asked.
“Well, yes and no, there was Claudine, a little black girl from France. She was into a kind of sophisticated drag. Once walking home from a party, she went into an alley to pee and when she walked back, all I could see was her dinner jacket floating toward me.”
The lap dancers giggled at the end of the bar. They were wondering who Pig was and why I was with her.
“Do they have children?” Pig asked, motioning to them.
“Some do.”
“I think the idea of reproduction is absurd.” She felt insecure, but was hiding it behind indignation. What exactly she was thinking I couldn't tell, but it must have pivoted around some derailed idea of motherhood. Maybe her obsession with Madison was shored by a biological yearning.
Pig ordered another glass of wine. Her cheeks flushed and her fat fingers curled around her drink. A little base make-up gathered in the ridges of her nose. “But Madison, she is like nobody else, like a wolf caught in the body of a woman. I'll never forget how once, drunk on sake, very late on a rainy night, the tenth night of hard rain, Madison said it was God beating his fist, that she couldn't take it anymore, and would confess everything to me. She told me how in Paris she'd stuffed her dead baby into a trash can, wrapped in clear plastic. It's name was Elaina and it wore a tiny emerald ring. All that night she was insane, fucked several men then spent the money on drink. Early in the morning she was walking in a quiet neighborhood. The gray stone buildings were damp, water dripped off the black grillwork. Ahead she saw an older lady in a raincoat wearing a funny little felt hat. Madison said what rose in her was a kind of blind rage. This old woman had survived, her very life condemned Madison's. She rushed her, sat on her chest and cut her throat. She stared at the woman, her skirt twisted, her throat cut crudely with a penknife. Madison said the woman's eyes were completely colorless.”
“Madison killed someone?” It shouldn't have surprised me, but it did. It was the logical end to everything I knew about Madison, but it was hard to believe, coming from Pig. True or not it tinted every idea or memory of her.
Pig nodded. “So you see, it makes her special in a way.” Pig watched the bartender bend over into the cooler. “I still have all her old love letters stored in satin boxes. It upsets me to read them.” Pig trailed off, stared past me at Madison, who'd come into the bar from the back stairs. “Honey,” Pig called to her, rising up on her stool.
Madison wasn't surprised. “Fat as ever, huh, Pig,” she said, walking over.
Pig blushed. “I'd like to speak to you about some things.”
Madison nodded O.K. and pointed outside. The intimacy between them surprised me. Madison had a certain respect for Pig. Or maybe in Carmen's Madison treated everyone like a customer. I ordered another drink, thought how people are different things to different people. Maybe this was what I resisted? It upset me that my lovers always had old lovers. I wanted a pureness in my relationships. But Bell longed for Kevin and my father has a new wife. The story of Adam and Eve has less to do with evil than the cosmic human sadness that relationships are never straightforward, never pure enough.
Out the window I could see the glittering sidewalk and Pig crossing her arms over her breasts as Madison lectured her. I thought of all the things I wanted to tell my own mother — that I loved her but wished she wasn't so needy, so depressed, so unhappy. And that I felt responsible for her unhappiness, it was suffocating. Pig put her arm on Madison's shoulder, looking at the ground while she spoke. They resembled each other in a general way as women do who have had a hard life. Madison leaned into Pig, then pulled away and said something surly. Pig shook her head. Their different positions reminded me of various relationships, mother, daughter, sisters, husband and wife. Nobody knew what went on between two people except those two. I thought of Bell and decided to leave. This place was as constant as the planets and I felt even worse knowing that.
They both looked up when the door opened and I told them I was going. Pig urged me to stay but Madison said, “Fuck her, let her go.” I turned, realized how sullen my voice sounded. I did feel left out, but it didn't matter. I would never know what was between them, what held them together, what kept them apart. It was impossible as holding a beating heart in your hands.
* * *
THE PHONE WAS RINGING WHEN I GOT HOME AND I KNEW before I answered it that it was my mother.
“Your father,” she said as soon as I said hello, “says he's not going to send my checks anymore. He says I'm a leech.”
“Maybe he doesn't have it. You can't bleed a stone.”
“That's just what he said. You're just like him. I remember the time I found those unopened letters in your dorm room. He used to not open letters from people he didn't care about.”
“Mom, we've been through this a hundred times. He's my father.”
“But he's evil, I just can't take this anymore. He leaves, you leave. It's like my family's been bombed. It's fine for the strong people, but not for people like me. I'm not very sophisticated.” She was quiet and I could tell by the way she took in air that she was trying not to cry. “Lately, I haven't wanted to live.”
I resisted her, because of her hard childhood, her alcoholic father. She was often melodramatic, always trying to convince me of an inevitable doom. “I know how you feel,” I said.
“Do you?” she said. “Do you really understand? My father was a drunk, he'd forget where he left his car at least once a week. Once he got frostbite because he passed out on the street. Jesse, I married your father because I thought I'd be assured a good life. A minister would provide for me, would be kind and honest. But he cheated and humiliated me,” she yelled. “I can't take this, stuck in this town your father dragged me to. When will he get what he deserves?”
“Mom,” I said, “I'm sorry you feel that way.”
“I don't need this.” She was furious now. “You are an accomplice, you and your father talking about poetry, taking walks, you in a little pair of shorts. I know what he was trying to do and you loved the attention. You loved stealing him from me.”
“I was a teenager.”
“You hurt me so much,” she said. I realized in a clear, more defined way how broken she was. I was angry at myself, that she had to offer me her jugular, like a submissive dog, before I felt anything for her. “God damn it,” she shrieked now. “I am so fucking lonely.” She never swore and this fact alone more than anything she said upset me. I saw how divorce just cements the patterns of a dysfunctional family, it institutionalizes and canonizes the sickness, assures it a place forever. Compassion streamed in with so much intensity I felt light-headed.
“I'll come home,” I said, “if that's what you want.”