Sex and Death (31 page)

Standing now in her living room, the evidence of Arlette was scanty: a purple foam exercise mat rolled up beside the TV; a film poster for
Chinatown
thumbtacked to the wall above; a shelf of paperback novels.

A photograph framed on that same shelf caught my eye. It showed a guy standing in the suburban back yard of a light-blue
clapboard house, an Oldsmobile parked in the drive. He was wearing a blue apron and a button-down shirt, holding a set of cooking tongs and smiling.

‘My dad,' she said. She was kneeling below me, rooting through a shoebox of cassettes. She picked one out and put it in, a Windham Hill Sampler from a year or so back. ‘He passed away just before I moved out here, not so long before I met you. Pancreatic cancer.'

Had she told me that before? Probably.

‘You were close?'

‘Yeah.'

Arlette's father, he was of similar colouring and build to myself. Born not so very long before me either, if I were to hazard a guess. Shouldn't have surprised me really; it's not like she was the first girl looking for a father figure.

I set the frame back on the shelf. ‘You know I'll be fifty next year?'

‘No way,' Arlette said as she stood back up. It gratified me that her surprise seemed genuine.

I kissed her as she made the coffee. She was faced away from me, standing at her kitchen counter, and I scooped her hair into my hand and kissed the skin at her neck. She stopped, her hands on the counter top, still holding a coffee spoon.

I reached to pull up her skirt and had just hooked a thumb under the elastic of her panties when she whispered, ‘Not like this.'

Taking my hand, she led me through to the bedroom. She didn't turn on the light.

‘Slow,' she said, as we sat together on the edge of her bed.

She lifted her fingers and ran them over my face, like she was trying to reacquaint herself, then stroked them through my beard and slow across the lines the years had left on my skin. Sliding
her hand to the back of my hair she pulled away the elastic that held my ponytail. ‘This is how I remember you,' she said with a small laugh, as my hair fell over my shoulders.

I reached for her belt. Heard the snag in her breath as I unbuckled and pulled it through the belt loops. I lifted her dress next, her ass lifting from the mattress for me, arms raising so I could pull it up over her head. Her white lace bra and panties showed in the dark.

‘You sure?' I said.

‘I don't know,' she replied, and pulled me towards her.

Greedy, a little wayward, that was the kind of lover Arlette used to be. She was good in bed still, her body trim and lithe from her dancing, but she was holding back. Each time I went to kiss her mouth she'd turn her head, which was weird, but I let it go because it's not like I'm going to make a woman kiss me.

And then, as we lay there afterwards, she said something that I guess explained a lot. ‘You know, I was in love with you, Ray. You were the first guy I ever loved.'

I made to say something but she touched my lips with her finger. ‘It's okay. It really is okay,' she said. ‘You fall too deep with your first. It sticks with you, you know?'

I wondered how much she'd thought about me over the years and almost felt a little badly that I hadn't even recognised her earlier on. I wondered if I'd lived up to her memories, but I didn't ask.

A question came to me. ‘How old were you when we met, Arlette?'

There was a pause.

‘Seventeen,' she said. ‘I'd have been seventeen.'

‘You were a child.'

‘I didn't feel like a child,' she said. ‘Sometimes I feel like more of a child now.'

I reached over and stroked the hair back from her face.

‘You must have been round about my age now,' she said after some reflection. ‘What were you doing hanging around with us kids?'

I didn't answer. ‘It's not like you're so old,' was all I said.

‘You still do drugs?' she asked. ‘Smoke grass and whatever?'

I shook my head no. I didn't do any of that any more. Hadn't even smoked a joint in several years. ‘The stuff was killing my libido,' I joked, although it wasn't so far from the truth. It was easy enough to let it all go. I've never had an addictive personality.

Not for drugs anyhow.

Maybe she could tell what I was thinking or I don't know but when she spoke next it was hard to read her tone. ‘You haven't changed so much though, have you?'

We lay there together in the darkness and when I didn't say anything eventually she rolled away from me onto her back, then got up for some water.

When she came back I asked, ‘So what was the deal with you leaving like you did? Sneaking out on me without even saying goodbye?' A part of me wanted to remind her that even if I'd been no prince she hadn't been totally faultless back then either. By her silence now I got the impression this had worked.

‘Running away was a pretty immature way of handling the situation,' she said finally, but she didn't apologise.

She kept me waiting a long while before she spoke again, and when she did I thought maybe she'd jumped topic, wasn't going to answer the question. ‘Do you remember that girl we picked up near Indian Rock?' she asked. ‘Really dark eyes and all that crazy black eye makeup. Short, dark hair. Kind of wild-looking?'

I looked over. There wasn't enough light to make out the expression on her face but I could feel a shift of mood, something in the pauses maybe, a sort of nakedness; it seemed evident that she was telling me something she hadn't planned to share.

Back when Arlette and I ran around together, I was driving a tan sedan and yeah – couple of times at least – it happened like she said. We'd be out and we might see a girl looking lonesome and Arlette would roll down the window and offer her a smoke. If they took a drag most usually they'd come back with us to party. It worked pretty well.

‘So you remember her?' she asked again.

‘Maybe,' I said, ‘I think yeah.' I gave a slow nod, but really I just wanted to see where this was going.

‘Remember her name?'

Nope.

‘Susanne,' she said. ‘Least that's what she told us when she got in the car. She wasn't a good liar. Is this coming back to you at all?'

‘Yeah, I guess. Or maybe not. I mean, it was just one of our things, right.'

Arlette took in a long breath, then released it again very slowly.

She started to talk. About that night, and how the girl – Susanne – climbed in the back seat. How she smelt of unwashed hair and patchouli, sort of feral; I could imagine the smell of her there in the car with us. We drove back to my place and Arlette read Susanne's cards, and we had a couple of joints, Arlette was good at rolling by then, couple of drinks, no doubt talked the usual stoned bullshit we used to talk back then, and Susanne started coming on to her. Really coming on. ‘Just me though,' Arlette made clear. ‘It was me she was into and she didn't hide it. You might as well not have been there.'

The thought of it was intriguing. ‘Go on.'

So the two of them started messing around on the bed. Clothes came off. Susanne kept whispering to Arlette that she was beautiful, telling her real nice stuff. No one had ever talked that way to her, she said.

And me? I'd taken a seat in the armchair, she told me, in the
corner where I could keep out of their way and watch the two of them.

Funny, I could recall that armchair all right, a hulking green-upholstered thing someone had left on the sidewalk. Likewise the apartment I was living in back then. A studio on Arlington. I used to keep the bed under the window, no curtains. I had an embroidered Indian quilt I'd picked up in a yard sale, a crimson lava lamp. I wanted to remember this Susanne girl too, but I couldn't.

Even so, it was easy enough to picture the scene she was describing – two girls fooling around on the mattress in the red light, one long-haired, the other smoky-eyed, all of it loose and spontaneous, destined to be forgotten by the morning. I must have lived through a string of similar nights back then. The girls themselves were interchangeable. It didn't need to be Arlette, could just as easily have been some other girl I'd dated, in bed with some other woman.

‘She took a scarf,' Arlette continued, ‘and then she tied my wrists. You know, to the bed frame. Went down on me.'

‘Uh huh?' I said. Her story was definitely getting me a little aroused again. ‘You liked it?'

‘Yeah,' she said. ‘Sure. At first anyhow.'

‘And then?'

‘And then, just as I was about to come, Susanne broke off and stopped.'

‘Stopped?'

‘Yeah, she gave me this really weird look, straddled my chest. Pinned me there to the mattress. And it all changed.'

‘What do you mean “changed”?'

‘I mean suddenly it wasn't about me any more,' Arlette said. ‘It was like— Kind of like a telephone line just dropped, you know? The connection broken. And then it was all about you, Ray.' She gave a small bitter laugh. ‘Maybe it was about the two of you all along.'

‘I don't know,' I said, giving an uneasy shrug, and then frowned.
‘So, this girl just left you hanging, didn't get you off – and that was it?'

‘No, that wasn't it,' she replied. ‘No.'

Arlette had her arms crossed and was rubbing her shoulders gently with her hands, like she was cold or something.

‘Well, what?'

‘She grabbed my blouse and she held it over my face, really tight over my nose and mouth. She kept looking back over her shoulder, checking that you were watching, making sure. I thought she was playing around at first, you know. But I couldn't breathe, Ray. And she wouldn't let go.'

Arlette's voice was a little thin, spinning off someplace else. Something clicked then in my memory. Holy shit, I did remember it. Like seeing a picture on a TV screen. This girl straddling Arlette, looking back at me over her shoulder, her knuckles white where they held the flowered blouse tight. And Arlette's eyes, wide and frantic as she tried to signal that she was in trouble, her lower half writhing in the red glow of the lamp, naked legs thrashing against the mattress. God, seeing her kick like that.

‘It was turning you on,' Arlette said plainly. ‘Wasn't it?'

A lot of my memories from that time are hazy; things shift, try to trip you up, it's hard to pin down the details. I didn't let on to Arlette that pieces of that night were coming back, because it's not like what I could recall was all that clear.

‘I remember you just watching,' she continued. ‘Sitting there, watching. I remember trying to get free, fighting for air. And then everything went black. When I woke up again you were in the bed with me and Susanne was gone.'

She stopped talking then and the room was quiet. The cassette next door had played out.

I thought about the scene a while, tried to rearrange it, to put it together – what I could remember, what she could, the stuff that maybe happened with me and the other girl while she was out of
it, and even what if it did, I mean, we were high, a little drunk, and it's not like anybody got hurt. Arlette was just too young, a kid out of her depth.

She shifted away from me on the bed. ‘You don't get it, do you?' she said. ‘I thought I was going to die. That's why I left.'

I didn't know what she wanted me to say. ‘Look, I'm sorry,' I offered at last.

‘Forget it,' she said. ‘It's no big deal. Why apologise for something you can't even remember?'

‘I liked you a lot, you know,' I told her. ‘I really did.'

‘You know, Ray,' she said after some seconds, ‘I think I'd like you to go now,' and she pulled the quilt up to cover herself.

I was tired when I got back, a little hungover from the wine I'd drunk that afternoon. There was a message from Judith on the answering machine, she was pissed I hadn't called her back, and I turned it off halfway through. I opened the fridge but felt uninspired.

In the bathroom mirror I caught my reflection as I took a piss and it made me pause. ‘You're looking old,' Arlette had said.

I felt weird all night. Things hadn't exactly panned out how I thought they would and I couldn't let it go. Part of me now wished I'd let Arlette walk away earlier.

I fell asleep on the couch,
Saturday Night Live
on the TV.

Just before I zoned out though, a strange, random image came into my mind, of one of those red fortune-telling cellophane fish. You know, the ones you hold in your hand? At first they lie flat and then the humidity of your palm makes the red slip of plastic writhe up and curl, slap back sometimes, flip, like a landed trout on a dry dock. It's supposed to tell you what you are.

A week or so after the party, I was driving down Solano and I saw the dance studio where Arlette had said she taught. There was
a bunch of little girls in leotards coming out the door, evidently just finished a class. I don't know why but I made a U-turn at the next junction and drove back the way I'd come, parking across the street from the studio. The little girls' leotards were the colour of candy. They wore ribbons in their hair and skipped about on the sidewalk. The moms were chatting together on their way out. After some time, the women and girls all dispersed.

I was just about to turn the ignition again when the door opened and out came Arlette. She was wearing a leotard too, with a pair of sweatpants. She unloosed her ponytail as she stepped outside and shook her hair out over her shoulders, then turned to lock up the studio.

Next door was a frozen yogurt shop and she stepped in, the guy behind the counter smiling as though she were a regular there. He fixed her a paper tub of yogurt and she took it over to a high stool in the window. Setting the tub on the desk, she pulled a paperback from her shoulder bag.

‘Have you ever been in love, Ray?' she'd asked, as I was putting on my clothes the other night to leave.