Tabloid Dreams (9 page)

And I've still got Ivan. He's grabbing around at his chest, maybe to see if he's hit, maybe reaching for a gun, which he doesn't seem to have. He looks at me and he says something in Russian. Probably something about being my fucking father. I put the next shot way up there in the center of his forehead and he flies back and the place is very quiet again and my real daddy's gun is feeling like it doesn't weigh anything at all, it's just floating there in my hands like it's part of me.

That was a few hours ago. I'm sitting in Tompkins Square Park and off somewhere behind me I can hear the swing chains creaking and I know I'm going to have to make a few plans soon. Some things are tough the first time you do them and then you get used to them. Some things you only need to do once. I figure if I ever meet up with my daddy now, him and me could maybe just talk.

“Every Man
She Kisses Dies”

Bring on the sports heroes and the U.S. senators and the middle management bosses and the bad-seed uncles and the boyfriends your mama brought home from the cheap bars for the night, bring them to me and let them put their hands on me and their lips on mine and I'll kill the sons of bitches, giving them what they want. I might as well. Because the men I love, the ones who come to me gentle and speak sweetly and take it slow and look me in the eyes and try their hardest to do it right, they all die, as it is. From the touch of my lips.

He's gone for the moment, into the bathroom. He's surely afraid. He's so gentle and he must be afraid. I haven't kissed him yet. The room is white. The sun is coming through the window and the glare from the walls blinds me. I have nowhere to look, it is so pure and so empty. I listen for him. He clears his throat. Even that sound from him, coming through the closed door, has a tiny trembling in it. He is afraid. So am I.

Did I catch this from somebody? In some unprotected moment of passion? It's possible. How do you protect yourself from passion? And if you can protect yourself, how can it be passion? Must passion be gone from this world forever? Is that what we have to expect from each other if you suddenly find a man looking you in the eyes and you're sure he's seeing you and you can see him, real clear, and he says here is my body, take it, from my love for you, and I say here is my own body, I give you the same. If you are to really love each other, do you have to want this thing made of rubber between your sweetest flesh and his? If you find a moment on this earth when there is passion and there is love, shouldn't this barrier between the two of you make you sadder than death?

It does me. And it made me that sad even before I knew my own curse was worse by far. I have nightmares—they seem like nightmares but maybe they're just visions of the right thing to do in a world like this. I am about to kiss a man and we both really feel something between us and I say, Wait a minute. I go into the drawer in the nightstand and I pull out a foil pack and I tear it open and it's wax lips, big red wax lips, and I put them on and I murmur okay out of the corner of my mouth and we kiss.

The thing is, I believe in God. I still do. My daddy was a preacher and he would talk about the lips of a strange woman dripping like a honeycomb and her mouth being smoother than oil but her end being bitter as wormwood and sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death, he would say, and her steps take hold on hell. It was from Proverbs that he was quoting, and he quoted it about once a year in our church and I would always remember it. Later on, though, I would read farther in Proverbs and I would hear the voice of those bad women and they would talk to the men passing by and they would sound to me like they were simply full of yearning and love. I have decked my bed with coverings of tapestry, with carved works, with fine linen of Egypt, one of them says. I have perfumed my bed with myrrh, aloe, and cinnamon. Come, she says, let us take our fill of love until the morning: let us solace ourselves with love. The Bible says the house of this woman is the way to hell, but I've thought about her often. And about God. I want to ask Him: What's wrong with seeking solace with love?

I went on to disappoint my daddy till he wouldn't even talk with me when he was dying. But I went to the hospital anyway and he turned his face from me and I went out into the hall and I watched my mother bend to him and they kissed on the lips. He would kiss her on the lips at night in our house, all my childhood long. He would do that. I think I forgave him his ideas for a long time more than I should have because I would see him kiss my mother on the lips.

I did not become a woman like the ones in the book of Proverbs. They were prostitutes and all I did was love the men I wanted to love, even if sometimes I made some bad choices. He knew I kissed them and sought solace with them. He would quote these verses in his church and look at me when I was there and think of me when I wasn't, and there was no difference in his mind between what I did and what he believed was an abomination.

I went away to the city. The big city, Chicago. And I suppose I've received my answer from God. He's fixed it so that I kill with my kiss. Even a man, I must assume, like Philip. A good and sweet man like him. The wood floors shine between me and the door to the bathroom. One large room. Utterly empty. All white. The sunlight is white, too, and in the great splash of it on the floor, there is not a single scuff mark. We are barefoot. We are wearing white linen. I am sitting in the center of the floor on a white down cushion. I think Philip loves me, and we have not kissed. He knows about me.

I'm not entirely sure when this began. I think it was up in Wisconsin a couple of years ago. It was when Daddy was alive and I went up there with a man named John. A poet at heart. And on the first day in some lodge on some lake up there beyond Oshkosh we ran into a man and woman from Daddy's church. An hour later Daddy was on the phone.

“We haven't talked much in recent times,” he said.

“I know,” I said.

“I'm not going to quote scripture to you,” he said.

“Good for you,” I said.
“
‘He that reproveth a scorner getteth to himself shame. And he that rebuketh a wicked man getteth himself a blot.
'
” That was Proverbs too.

I heard him squeak in rage on the other end. But still he didn't do what came so natural to him. I felt a sneaky little admiration for him at that. But he did pick up my words. “Do you see yourself as a scorner and a wicked man?” he asked.

“Not a wicked man.”

“Person then,” he said.

“No.”

“I was afraid that was so.”

“So why did you call?”

“Because I love you.”

“You sure it's not because I'm embarrassing you in front of your friends?”

“It's not their souls I'm worried about,” he said.

“Bye, Daddy,” I said, though I didn't hang up the phone. Neither did he. He didn't say a word. For a long time we just sat there on the phone listening to each other breathe. He wasn't going to be the one to do this. So finally I did. I put the phone on the cradle as softly as I could.

That night I was with John. He took me in a rowboat out onto the lake and there was an enormous red moon coming up over the trees. God was mooning us on the lake. John was rapturous over it. He started quoting poems, one after another, until I said, “Quiet. Please.” I said it very gently and he obeyed without a flicker of hurt on his face and I appreciated him for that. “I want to hear you breathe,” I said. And he drew near and put his face close to mine and I listened to him. Perhaps we dozed, as well, because a long time passed, and when we were conscious, we did nothing but listen and drift. Then the moon was very high. It had shrunk above us but it had grown much more intense. It was full and silver and cold. He'd made no attempt to touch me, though we had rented one room with one bed. He was a patient man, and I was filled with longing to touch him. So I put my hands on his cheeks and drew him to me and kissed him.

He sighed deeply and began quoting Chinese poetry. Written by Li Po, he said, a man in love with the moonlight. Then John turned and the image of the moon was floating right beside us in the water and he said, “Li Po would kiss the moon from love.” And John leaned out of the boat and bent his face toward the moon in the water and there was only the slightest roll of the boat and he was gone.

“John,” I said and I leaned out and waited for him to come up, tossing the water out of his face and hair and laughing. But he never reappeared. Not even to flail around and go down again. Nothing. And I feared at once that I had done it.

That fear passed, of course. No one could be sure of such a thing from one incident. My father died soon after, going to his grave without acknowledging me again, though, to his credit, this dismissal of me was not compromised even to try to draw some judgment-of-God lesson for me about John's death. I was depressed for some months, though I mourned John's death much more intensely than my father's. That made me feel guilty and so it was nearly a year before I went out again.

With Frank. Frank was a big man, square jawed and blond, and I felt almost fragile next to him. That's a nice feeling for a woman who's always been a little too tall and big-boned for many men. Frank made me feel almost ­dainty and we both worked at the Merchandise Mart and one afternoon he said to me, “Let's take our summer-Friday half day together and go to Wrigley Field.”

So we did. We got on the el and headed for Addison and the friendly confines, and we got pretty good seats on the third-base side. About six rows in. It was one of those Chicago days when the wind comes in off the lake and it feels like it blows all the humidity away and the flag was stiff out over the bleachers and the ivy on the outfield walls was quaking and my hair was thrashing around and the Cubs were even winning. Frank turned to me, on this first date, and he gave me a smile as white as the moon and before he could look back to the next pitch, I moved my face toward him and he was ready and we kissed and our lips had barely touched when there was a crack in the distance and then a crack very nearby and his lips lurched hard into mine and slid away.

They say the ball rebounded out past second base. Ryne Sandberg made a one-handed catch. Frank would have liked that. But he was dead.

There is enough of my daddy's sense of the world in me to understand after two in a row that something was happening here that was providential. Not that I didn't test it some more. Not that my own improvised half-theology didn't cling to the notion of a God who would look on the yearning of a woman and a man to touch and take solace—or even a woman and a woman—any two people who found themselves in the terror and isolation of this life they did not choose—I half imagined a God who would look on such creatures and pity them and love them and try very hard to show Himself in those moments when the two people, whoever they were, were letting go of their own selfishness and fears and faithlessness and trying to find a way to cling hard and long and permanently to each other. And if they failed at that, God would see just the yearning for it as worthy of a gift of all the grace a God could give.

So I kissed another man I liked and wanted to love, a man with a life already rich in things. I kissed him one late afternoon in my place, kissed him and lay with him, and he left my bed because he had to be somewhere else and he had to hurry and I began to think it was okay, I was silly ever to wonder about this, and ten minutes later my phone rang. He was calling me on his cellular phone from his BMW convertible and he said, “I had to call. I had to tell you that I have many things in my life, but your kiss is very special.” And then, I figured out from the police reports, he went around a bend on the Dan Ryan Expressway, perhaps with his eyes drifting out to the east, over the lake, to a moon still pale from the verging sun, and he ran right under a stalled semitrailer.

And the bathroom door swings open and Philip steps out and he stops and he is looking at me. His linen pants and his linen collarless shirt hang loose on him and I sense his body inside there, naked and soft, and my heart is pounding and my lips feel tumescent, as if they have their own separate yearning and they are filling for him. With what? A kind of venom utterly new to this world? A plague from God? Or not so grand as that, after all. A plague simply from some sick, mutant monkey in some dark jungle in Africa. He kissed a sleeping traveler on safari who kissed a flight attendant who kissed a businessman from Chicago who kissed his secretary at the Merchandise Mart who kissed a mail boy who kissed me a happy new year at an office party. Perhaps it is as blandly horrific as that. Or maybe I am the scourge of the Old Testament, a modern harlot who dares love a man on terms quite different from a bunch of desert dwellers three and a half millennia ago and eight thousand miles away and so is doomed herself and destined only to bring doom.

Philip says, “I love you.”

He's not said this before. Still, though we've known each other only the briefest of times, I've sensed it. We met at the Merchandise Mart. He brought some product drawings to show at a fair and he was lost in the building and he stopped me and he asked for directions. We spoke and I never even looked at his drawings. I showed him the way and gave him my phone number, in spite of what I knew about myself. In spite of that. He looked me in the eyes, he looked at me and did not look away and I gave him my number, and when he called me, before anything else, I told him. I told him all that I knew about myself. So he came here and he was dressed in linen and he is standing now before me and his eyes are soft on me.

“Are you afraid?” I say.

“Yes.”

I feel a lifting in me, a warm rushing feeling about him because he loves me and because he believes me, and though this makes him afraid, he is here. He has dressed in white for me and I have dressed in white in this new and empty place where I live. I want this to be pure. I want to sit here with him on the floor and I don't know what it is that we will do, but it will be in a place without tapestries and without carved work and without myrrh and aloe and cinnamon. The linen is all right. They wrapped the dead body of Jesus in linen. He was killed by a kiss and then they wrapped him in linen.

He believes me when I tell him about this curse. I did not fully believe it myself even after the phone went dead from the Dan Ryan. I promise that it was still partly my disbelief that made me stop on Dearborn at noon a few weeks later. I was passing a construction site, and a worker there in a T-shirt and a hard hat was calling out to all the women going by. “Oh man,” he cries as I pass. “That's just enough for me. Give me a kiss, honey.”

And I stopped and some part of me still couldn't believe. But it's true that part of me did. And that part was thoroughly pissed at this man. He sought not solace. He sought not love. He would use the signs of those yearnings in order to control and demean and cast away. And so I turned and I moved into this space of unlaid stone and churning cement mixers and he was sitting beneath a web of steel beams and a half-risen wall and I went to him and his eyes widened and he flinched, expecting a blow, but I took his face in my hands and kissed him on the mouth, a kiss full of wrath. And I turned and walked away and I had not reached the end of the block before I heard a creaking of steel and a crumbling of mortar and then a long roar of falling concrete and beams. There was no doubt left in my mind.