Going Native (23 page)
The first time Garrett hit Jessie, a hard slap to the cheek, he apologized immediately afterward. The baby had been crying for an hour, he was trying to eat breakfast at five in the afternoon, Jessie was complaining about his many moods, when suddenly he reached over and let her have it. Jessie was shocked, but she couldn't stay angry at anyone for long, especially not her husband; that face retained an absolving sweetness through all its weathers. And though welcome routine readministered its anesthetic throughout the house, there remained between them the dull throb of the vast unsaid.
Garrett took to carrying a copy of the life plan around with him, consulting it at inappropriate moments. He was scared; time was pulling away and his grip was weakening. A couple of drinks after work helped him to think, get centered into the quick of the issue. Then, without premeditation or regret, he found himself engaged in stealing from the casino, palming a chip here, a chip there. He bought himself a fancy gold watch exactly like the ones the players wore, and when Jessie questioned the expense, he hit her again. No apology. He sewed a modified magician's stash on a length of elastic up inside his sleeve, chips cupped in his hand vanished into his clothes faster than the eye could see, including, presumably, the electronic version hidden in the mirrored ceiling. He bought more gifts for himself: suits, jewelry, cameras, video gear, an occasional trinket or two for Jessie and the baby. She said nothing. The cowboy game had evolved, almost inevitably, into the abuse game, his tantrums as routine as a shrug, assimilated with daunting efficiency into the great apparatus of habit, nature's shock absorber, the trivial and the tremendous domesticated with cool equality. Repetition amounted to acceptance, on his part at least; home-front matters finally attaining a performance level he could get cozy with. For he was changing now, metabolism, psychology, the very patterns of thought, sloughing off that sickly loser's skin, moving up on his schedule, neutralizing the psychic assaults launched against him from every quarter, substituting beer for orange juice at breakfast. He was becoming the new man, immune, one who did as he pleased.
By now Jessie was pregnant with Bas, alone most of the day with Cammie and her reflections. As a girl she had heard her mother boast, "Every woman in this family can take a punch, and most have had to" -- not a tradition she wished to perpetuate. From the vantage that motherhood had provided she could see that Garrett was simply another of the ubiquitous embryo-men who had swarmed around her life like roaches, roving canisters of unexpended ball juice, toxic to others, toxic to themselves, the lost boys who hadn't found, and never would find, any use to their lives, better off simply being managed by the big stick, big-daddy figures they seemed to be so desperately seeking -- a role, unfortunately for her, completely absent from her repertoire.
It was after Garrett was arrested for drunk driving, and the scene that ensued in their bedroom, that Jessie began to imagine how she might kill him, a fantasy occupying the most pleasant moments of her day. As details accrued, picture quality sharpened, she understood how an imaginative act might be prelude and goad to its realization in actuality. She was scared by her own potential. What was worse, she could smell the decay on him, the house was contaminated by it, every room.
One hazy morning, Garrett sleeping off a binge, fully clothed body flung selfishly across their bed, the cessation of his snores an adequate warning, Jessie dressed her daughter, stuffed some clothes into a laundry bag, and left. There was a place for women like her, a nondescript house on a street of nondescript houses. In a month Garrett had found her. He pleaded and promised and she couldn't help herself, she went back, what the hell, she was sad, and lonely, too. The birth of his son, Bas, had a welcome sedative effect. Then, several weeks later, as Garrett prepared to leave work, he was met by the humorless representatives of casino security. When Jessie arrived to pick up her husband, a nice man in a gray suit and silver glasses explained the situation. She knew what was next. Back home she took what cash she could find, fat packets of it secreted throughout the apartment, and she took the car, another of his many recent extravagances, and she fled. One week of L. A. lunacy was enough to drive her back, to Mother's, despite the fear he'd be waiting for her there. But why should she twist her life about the tortured shape of him? And then, one dawn, there he was, standing out on the walk, a sheepish petitioner in the same wrinkled shirt and pants she'd last seen him wearing. "No comment," declared Mother, obviously angry, whether with her or with him was unclear. Jessie hesitated only a moment, then she unlocked the door and went out to meet her husband. His eyes were lidded, his complexion gray, apparently he hadn't slept in days. "You look good," she said. Keep the kids, he told her, keep the car, I'm sorry, I think of you always. He wouldn't discuss his legal affairs. He was frighteningly adult, so much so she experienced a perilous lifting in her chest not easy to suppress. She cared about him, she always would. They shook hands, they exchanged goodbyes, and as she watched him walk away down the empty street, she realized she felt sorrier for the both of them than she would have preferred.
She entered a period of high restlessness, beyond the possibility of placation, replaying old adolescent arguments with her mother, flirting outrageously with Mother's sympathetic boyfriends, losing her temper with the kids -- an alarming development she defused by leaving the house. She buckled herself into the car and she drove, up I-15 to Moapa, down I-15 to Roach Lake, and back again, the loop she looked to hang herself on. A woman mad and alone in a dangerous machine at high speed. She liked the idea. Then, while chasing the sunset of one long and particularly melancholy day, the vanilla marbling in the sky going to raspberry red, holiday frosting dripping onto the stone jury of the mountains, she witnessed a remarkable sight: the flight of several thousand pounds of white Camaro through the clear liquor of a late desert afternoon, a movie image really, trailing the usual streamers of ragged unreality, the car some hundred yards ahead suddenly catapulting up out of a knot of braking traffic, flipping twice over with a dolphinlike incongruity, then slamming backward into the median gully in an explosion of dust and smoke and splintering glass. Jessie wasn't even aware she'd stopped until finding herself among a shocked group of other eyewitnesses, racing for the wreckage. The driver, a young woman, was still strapped to her seat, dangling upside down in her safety harness. She was unconscious, blood running freely from her honey blond hair. Jessie got one good glimpse of the face and immediately wished she hadn't. A man with a cellular phone dialed 911. A woman reached in through the shattered window, felt for a pulse. She looked up at Jessie, her dark eyes spirals to nowhere. "She's dead," she said.
"What?" Jessie asked. She had heard each word, separate and distinct, but there appeared to be a delay in comprehension.
"She's dead," the woman repeated. "Are you all right?"
A cool evening wind had sprung up, peppering their cheeks with sand. Out of the dusk the EMS van approached, a futile carnivalesque expression of color and noise.
The woman walked Jessie to her car, sat beside her as she began to cry, her body seized and shaken by something other, a release from levels so deep the fear would have been unendurable but for the tacit understanding that this woman, this stranger, would remain at her side until the crisis passed, however long it took. An hour later, no more tears to shed, her exhausted flesh a shell of shame and regret, what remained of her, spirit fragile as smoke, followed this woman home, where she was pampered, soothed by exotic teas, listened to attentively far into the night. Jessie liked her. Seemed they had met before, to Jessie's surprise, at Jessie's own wedding, where her new friend, an accomplished organist, had played at Garrett's request a solemn down-tempo rendition of "Light My Fire." The woman was Nikki.
A month later Jessie moved in.
She was changing so rapidly now, she fretted, only half jokingly, about the difficulty keeping up with herself. Actual molecules were being rearranged. She went about in wonder, muttering openly to herself, I am not me. Extraordinary. Waking up in bed beside the warm presence of another woman was an experience of such dislocating astonishments much solitude was required, silent tracts of it, to properly locate and sort her feelings, examine them for clues: what was the meaning of this confounding joy? She was like a child who has discovered ice cream and wants it every day, several times a day. Sure, she'd touched, even kissed, a girlfriend or two, but those were friend touches, friend kisses. How odd, though, how undeniably thrilling, to make sweet body love to your own sex, to know in the sand-papered tips of your soul the combination to the vault, to be wholly absorbed into the sensual treat of finding yourself, your complete self, in the living mirror of another's pleasure. Her hunger for Nikki was frightening; she'd revealed for the first time to anyone the emptiness of her life and been herself astounded by its size, the magnitude of its need. Each day was a relentless emptying-out, she thought, without the binding power of love.
Nikki, an unaffiliated sexual mystic, believed that love was the manifestation of the hereafter into the here and now, and that each time you made love, you did so literally -- the rubbing of genitals warming the earth with the fires of heaven -- as well as enlarged your future space in eternity.
"I want to be a wealthy angel," Nikki said. "I want to inhabit a mansion on paradise's north shore."
"I love you," Jessie declared. "I love the quality of your mind, I love the easy shape of your asymmetrical breasts."
Jessie refused to leave the bed for days at a time, and when she finally did, she shaved the hair from the right side of her head and dyed the remaining half platinum blond. One week she'd dress up like a prostitute, the next like a construction worker. The liberation from reproductive anxiety alone was exhilarating; how oppressively "natural" that weight had been. She wanted to run up to straights on the street, scream obscenities into their startled faces.
"You're out of control, girl," remarked an amused Nikki.
"Eat me," replied Jessie.
In the embattled privacy of their American home, they sampled freely from the smorgasbord of erotic practice, novelty the key factor in their choices. They were young and in love and rubber suits presented an irresistible turn-on. A serious flirtation with S/M ended in unintentional comedy, however, when Nikki, kneeling in oil and swimming inside a leather harness several sizes too large, collapsed in helpless laughter upon the ridiculously polished toe of the jackboot she'd just been rather brusquely ordered to kiss. Jessie, who'd been enjoying her role perhaps a bit too well, a cop's daughter after all, made an attempt at chastisement with a few lame strokes of her whip. Nikki shrieked in merriment, she sprawled on the floor, she wiped at her eyes. Thank God for the handcuffs. A touch of bondage, at least, proved to be pleasurably instructive for both.
One adventurous weekend they borrowed a pair of irons and a converter box from their friend Toby, the tattoo artist. She lived alone in a former storefront with a toothless black and white terrier named Rush and an evil emerald macaw whose entire vocabulary consisted of the phrases "I hate you," "Where's my money?" and "Are you looking at me?" The great unenlightened horde of the nontattooed Toby referred to contemptuously as "blanks." "You take a brand from my iron," she claimed, "and you learn real quick about the meaning of commitment. If everyone were properly inked, this'd be a nobler, more righteous country -- a more beautiful one, too." Her particular specialty was Daliesque designs with a dice or playing-card motif. Her own right bicep sported a boldly realistic depiction of a slot machine, a trio of lemons up in the window -- local equivalent of the notorious Born to Lose. Toby sent off her friends with a tube of Bacitracin, a box of bandages, and her blessing.
Jessie and Nikki began by practicing on a couple dozen grapefruit, inscribing shiny yellowy heads with a dense assortment of happy faces, hearts, roses, skulls, and clumsy unicorns that resembled rats with glandular problems. When all the rind was decorated, fruit flesh scarred for life, they started experimenting on one another, doodling on the body's scratch pad, the bottoms of the feet, the dead callused areas where the needles didn't hurt much and the marks would fade eventually with wear. Once human skin was broken, though, the mood was altered, the ante raised, something new entered the room. Probably it was Jessie who suggested moving the steel to higher ground, and it wasn't long before they were taking turns engraving their names with delicate hesitancy upon one another's trembling behinds. The spontaneous bout of lovemaking that followed was a revelation of animal heat.
"God," Jessie cried, "I never felt so horny."
"It's the chemicals," explained Nikki, "flooding our brains. From the wounds."
The sheets were a mess of blood and ink. Jessie fingered the fresh relief on her butt. "Now we own each other," she declared.
Nikki was examining herself in the mirror. "I think not," she said.
Most Saturdays they'd hop into Nikki's Jeep, drop the kids at Mother's, and head on out into the desert, through the red rock canyons, monuments to the plastic power of time, sandstone minarets and jagged archways, elongated shapes of fantastic animals, the rough busts of human heads, past the great Atlatl Rock carved with the hunting symbols of the ancient shamans who understood the rites of representation, how to ensnare the power of their prey within the inscription of the proper form, then down the seldom traveled spur road, the jeep trail, and off into the country, bouncing gleefully over the petrified tide of prehistoric seas, the hours free, the sky wide open, the day itself a living body with visible cords and vessels, a mountainous heart, genitals of light, to arrive in the secret place of true emptiness where the tourists rarely go. They left their clothes in the vehicle and, naked but for sturdy hiking boots, traversed the burning mesa, female
Wandervogel
of the new age, calling out fossil finds, the glint of possible precious metals, Jessie in fine Bogart rasp, " 'If ya know what's good for ya, ya won't monkey around with Fred C. Dobbs,' " scratching into a boulder pocked like a meteorite her own petroglyph, a stylized entwining of their initials, gift to the archaeologists of the twenty-second century. Hot and exhausted, they rested in the narrow shade of a Joshua tree, skin tones after weeks in the sun blending imperceptibly into earth tones, touch one, touch the other, hand, mouth, tongue.