TheRapist (15 page)

Frankie & Manny

After the initial thrill of their first meeting, Frankie had to rush away, to deliver Sam back home, with a promise to Manny that she would meet him at 8pm, in a buzzing, buoyant restaurant in Primrose Hill. Her heart hadn’t stopped leaping around since that afternoon. No surprise there as he was as glorious, even more so, as she had envisioned. Her only disappointment, silly really, (but what’s a dramatic change without the drama?) was her slight, almost imperceptible disappointment that she had not been completely and entirely ready for him. She had almost been there, but perhaps needed another month so that it would be just perfect. Utterly perfect. Possibly with a small deviation somewhere over the ‘erf’, for was anything ever total perfection?

With Sam safely home, Frankie found herself with a precious hour to shower, wash her hair and transform herself into a thing of beauty. As she switched the knob on her digital radio to Smooth, a soft tune swirled out and floated into the room. Ella Fitzgerald was musing melodically about
t
he wonders of a
zoo in July
,
a necessary accompaniment to Frankie’s boudoir. In the shower, she gelled and scrubbed, exfoliated and oiled, shampooed, conditioned and moisturiz
ed. She pulled on white lacy Lej
aby underwear and pale Armani jeans, ones that she had saving from a trip to an outlet in Italy two summers ago. Tight, bitter orange sweater. Stomach flat. Hair glossed. Nails buffed. She sprayed one of Artisan’s spicy perfumes into the air and leapt with glee through the fragrant cloud. A text beeped on her phone.
Jezzy
, saying, speak tomorrow and have a fab time with a smiley face inserted between fab and time and three exclamation marks. Frankie was carefully applying Bobby Brown nude lipgloss, which would not stay on her lips and instead was dribbling down her chin, when a song came on the radio that transported her back in time. She suddenly felt like a complete idiot. The room smelt like a meadow of cow parsley and sweet peppercorns, assorted outfits were strewn across the bed and Heatwave’s 70’s classic, Mind Blowing Decisions was playing on her radio. Frankie bit her lip, just catching the last gummy strand of gloss as it trickled away, so different from the glass tubes with a rollerball top she endlessly reapplied when she was a teenager. She felt like a hormonal idiot, a paradox caught between the longed for entrance to puberty and the unwanted, savage exit to perimenopause. Those thirty or forty years inbetween, when a girl became a woman, but didn’t really change that much inside, not when it came to feelings and emotions, came and went simultaneously, lasting hundreds of years and mere seconds all at the same time. She was embarrassed by herself at feeling as much excitement about Manny as she had been when she was thirteen and getting ready to go to the youth club in the village. All those teenage thoughts about boys! Would it be Daniel Ward or Kevin Baker? All the girls had liked Robert Green, but he only had eyes for Karen Shaw, or was it Steven Corman?  The pit of Frankie’s stomach felt the same now as it had twenty five years ago. Then there had been David Caine, the boy with the dark hair and golden eyes. The boy all the girls liked. Frankie and David had kissed once. At a dance, in the youth club, the same dance when Craig Shaw had danced with an upside down chair and snogged one of the wooden legs, ending up with a splinter in his tongue. Peaches and Herb were singing about the thrills of being ‘Reunited’ and the 45’s were spinning jerkily around the turntable when David pushed his tongue inside Frankie’s mouth. It seemed to frighten him and he pulled it out quickly. This was Frankie’s first kiss. David’s too. The first time they had felt anyone’s tongue against their own. David’s tongue had been warm and wanted, if a little rigid. Then he took a deep breath, closed his eyes and plunged in again. This time their kiss was long and soft. Tongues intertwined, probing, licking, swallowing each other’s saliva. Frankie’s first kiss. Right in the middle of the youth club disco. Soon after that, David Caine moved away and was never seen again. She had always remembered that kiss and it had such a profound effect upon her that she couldn’t welcome public affection anymore. That kiss with David Caine, remained within her, deep inside, never to be forgotten.

*

Meringue

Palm trees swayed in the Santa Ana winds as the rays of the sun burnt their way across Hollywood. La Cienega changed schizophrenically from its silken spun beauty just below Sunset in the north to the ravaged route of doughnut shops and oily gas stations, south of Venice. The oil fields looked as eternally creepy as ever, like a forgotten sc
ene from an early sci-fi movie. C
ranes stretched their creaky beaks up and down, digging and pulling, extracting whatever lay beneath Los Angeles, the city of lost souls. Is this
where they could all be found, t
he lost and
the lonely, t
he ones who had traveled here in search of fame, o
nly to be devoured and spat out?
Could they all be here, in the bottomless pit below? Maybe that was why Los Angeles had suffered from so many earthquakes? Maybe it was all the tormented, ridiculed souls, lost to their dreams, swallowed by the San Andreas fault, but still stirring, still fighting for fame and clawing to get back out and be discovered. The earth was probably filled with The Unidentified. The groans and the heartache of lives just out of reach, so close to their longed for lives of perfection. It was all always so close. So very close and so out of reach.

That could have been me thought Meringue gazing at the oil
rigs
, as she rode in the back of a blue and white cab on her way to LAX and
terminal freedom at
the freedom terminal,
possibly
an oxymoron in itself. She had donated
some
of her things
to the charity shop. The flimsy, miniscule clothes she knew she would never wear again she had dumped in a recycle bin in the alley behind an improv school on Fairfax. In the cab she had two cases of the th
ings she wanted to take home. A couple of
nice sweat suits. A beige linen dress. Two new pretty blouses, one with tiny purple and yellow flowers and the other in a black and white check. A couple of pair of decent Payless shoes that she had bought precisely to take home. For her mother, a set of lavender bags and sweet, perfumed candles from a white, marbled shop on Beverly Drive. She opened her bag, a sensible one from Bloomingdales with lots of pockets inside, and took out her credit card holder. Then she removed a handful of cards she would never need again: SEG, SAG, Equity and Aftra, Blockbuster, the gym and a couple more. The name on every one read, Meringue Pavlova. She smiled softly, a small expression loaded with memories, some sweet, most bitter, then she ripped through the biodegradable cards, opened the window and let the Santa Ana winds carry them away. Away to the oil
rigs
, to be buried with the other faded failures.

Only Meringue Pavlova would be taken down.

Mary Pierce was alive and whole and going home.

Meanwhile, back at Meringue’s old apartment, the one she had vacated mere hours ago, the toilet seat had already been replaced,
carpets
swiftly cleaned and vacuumed
, dirty marks on the walls painted over
and now, at the threshold of the door stood a girl, about eighteen or nineteen, with a small suitcase, shining light brown hair and a look of excited anticipation on her pretty, open face.

A brand new heart for Hollywood to break.

*

Howie
and The
R
apist

‘It was her ordering a bacon bagel that sealed the deal for me,’ sighed Howie, as he tied and untied his shoelaces together. He was bent over double in the office of the therapist, his body slung carelessly in the brown faux suede of the big squishy chair. ‘There are some things that should just never ever go together and they are two of them! See, the thing is this, I am not a religious person, I can be friends with anyone, you know what I mean? And I thought she was it, the real deal, the ultimate girl. Even the fact that she was from another tribe didn’t bother me! That’s the kind of guy I am, you know? Yeah, my mother would have loved for me to marry a Jewish girl, but she knows that
I can only wed for love. Randi was it for me. My Randi
candy apple, I used to call her.’ Howie crossed his legs like a woman and carried on, ‘you know what she told me? She said to me, she asked me, why do I sit with my legs crossed like a girl?! She said that she thought that a man couldn’t cross his legs because he’s got too much stuff to pack in down there and it must get all squished! Can you believe it, not only have I never even thought about it, you know, the way I sit and stuff, but that girl had more chutzpah than any Jewish girl I ever knew and you know what? I didn’t even care! Because I really loved her. She did it for me. I thought nothing else mattered. Yeah, she would come out with some weird stuff, but I learned to let it go. Compromise is the key to the future I think. I just let all that stuff go. We had a great few months. My mother never liked her though. My mom is not the type to give anyone a chance, not if she’s not Jewish. I am not that attracted to Jewish girls. They remind us guys too much of their mothers and that right there is the problem. The girls are just underdeveloped versions of their mothers. They may not have as much schmaltz in their herring, but believe me it’s only a matter of time. I do not want to spend my life surrounded by fish balls on a Sunday. I don’t want to go to the synagogue on the holidays and see that fake competition between the women and their outfits. The men sit downstairs and the girls are upstairs looking down on us, checking who’s married, who’s getting divorced, who will be their next husband. I think the women were put up there for a purpose. Don’t you believe this stuff they go on about, thinking they’re up there because they’re subservient! What a bunch of crap! They are up there to look down on us! That’s all Jewish women ever do. Look down on men. It doesn’t matter whether they’re at eye level, which is not usually the case as most Jewish women are short, it’s because they got the better part of the deal. They look down on men and that my friend, is the reason why Jewish men marry shiksas.’ Howie stopped for breath and a swallow of Coke. The bubbles made him burp, a small action which he released from the side of his mouth, then flung himself back in the chair and continued. ‘So there I was, all set, ready to marry this girl in some kind of Buddhist ceremony or something because I knew she liked to chant in the mornings, or at least ask her to move in for a while, when she threw me a curveball. Something I could not get over. Something small I suppose, but with huge consequences. Something to make me realize that I did not entirely have my thinking the way I thought I did. We went to the deli for breakfast, Al’s deli over on Ventura, you know it, it’s the best, and I ordered a smoked salmon bagel with a side of kasha varnishkas. There are many choices of bagel you understand. A bagel is bread that can be filled with pretty much anything, really anything at all the way that only bread can. After all what is bread? It is a vessel. So it goes with a ton of things, right? Lox, cream cheese, salad, whitefish, herring, salami, avocado even, maybe just tomato and lettuce. But right there, in the middle of my local deli, she asked for a bacon bagel and that’s when I realized that some things just don’t go together. Bacon and bagel do not go, even the sound of them doesn’t go. It’s just one of those things that is never ever meant to be.
Bacon and eggs, yes. Bacon in a salad, fine. But not bacon with a bagel. It’s disrespectful to food, i
t’s disrespectful to me and it’s downright disrespectful to my tribesters.
And
I
couldn’t
have that. So she had to go.’

*

Jezzy

Jezzy
was alone in the park. After dropping into
a
Tesco
Metro
to buy a loaf of bread for t
he ducks and a Twix for herself, s
he bought tea in a polystyrene cup in the park café and was now idling along beside the lake on a tepid, late spring evening. She needed to think, get her thoughts straight and decide what it was she really wanted. She knew what she didn’t want, but did she already have what was good for her? The decision was all the more agonizing because the gentle beauty of the evening contrasted too sharply with what was going on in her head. She felt as though she had a maze inside her mind, as though there were too many twists and turns, none which led anywhere. She had gone in through one end, wanting to leave this mess behind and exit through another door but she couldn’t seem to find a way out. Surely Adrian had come back into her life for a reason? They would not have met again if they were not meant to be. How could it be possible to want somebody so much and yet at the same time be surprisingly repelled by him?