Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore

I was reclining on my backside, thighs spread wide open. The smell of flower-scented lubricant filled the air, and hot lights burned down on my sweat-slick black skin. Blubbery and pink-skinned Myron “Big Dick” Palmer was slamming his thing into me, saying, “Oh, baby. Yeah, baby. Daddy’s comin’ home. He’s almost there, almost there.” There were two high-def video cameramen working us: one moving from face to face while the other focused on our genitals. The still photographer was Carmen Alia from Brazil. The recycling hum of her digital camera buzzed around us like a hungry horsefly circling an open wound.

“More passion!” Linda Love, the director, yelled.

She was talking to me. Myron always had the same passion in any sex scene because he closed his eyes and imagined that he was with Nora Brathwait, his high school sweetheart. She had never let him go all the way and every sex scene he ever did was dedicated to wiping that humiliation from his heart.

Luckily for me Myron’s size pushed his thing against a sore spot deep inside. So when Linda called for more feeling I stopped thinking about the details of the shoot and began to concentrate on how much he was hurting me with his attempt to penetrate all the way back to adolescence.

I allowed the pain to show in my face with each stabbing lunge.

“That’s better,” Linda said.

“Almost there,” Myron moaned for what seemed like the hundredth time. “Uh-uh.”

The grunting meant that he was about to orgasm. I knew it, Myron knew it, and, worst of all, Linda was aware of what was coming — so to speak.

Within the next six seconds she’d cry, “On your knees, Debbie,” and I’d have to jump down while looking up into the bright lights as Myron Big Dick ejaculated on my face and breasts.

That was the money shot, the reason I woke up at five a.m., spent hours doing makeup and hair, toes and fingers; it was the reason I’d capped my front teeth, had breast implants, worked out two hours a day five days a week with trainer-to-the-stars Efron Fuentes, and shaved my pussy more often than my husband shaved his chin.

The money shot was not only my paycheck but the salary of every grip, cameraman, makeup artist, and gofer in the room. Our reason for living would spout from Myron Palmer’s big pink dick.

This was no revelation. I had experienced thousands of ejaculations from men of every color, size, and nationality. I had been spouted upon in Moscow, Kingston, Paris, and Johannesburg. This was my job, and the only thing I worried about was keeping the acrid stuff out of my eyes.

I was preparing to slide down from the sofa onto my knees when something amazing happened.

Myron grunted and Carmen switched to a double flash setting, Linda cried, “Debbie...” and Myron plunged up against the one spot in my entire sex that still had sensation. I could feel a blast from the air conditioner and the crusty fabric of the sofa where we teetered, me on my back wearing only leopard-print high-high heels and Myron on his knees thrusting, thrusting. And then, completely unbidden, I imagined a tall, olive-skinned man with intense eyes standing in the corner of the crowded room. I knew this man but could not name him. I was moving toward him and at the same time I was being stalked by the most powerful orgasm that I’d ever experienced. The faster I moved the closer the feeling came until suddenly I was bucking and screaming, begging for more.

“... on your knees!” Linda shouted, but I was way beyond taking orders from her. I could feel my nipples getting so tight that they seemed to be pinching themselves, and I felt the full weight of the experience of every one of my thirty-one years.

Myron pushed me off the red sofa and onto the floor. Then he stood up, drizzling his semen on me while I jerked around like a mackerel just landed on the deck of a day boat off San Pedro.

I wanted to stop but the orgasm was relentless, like a series of storm-driven waves crashing down on the shore. The only option open to me was to let go of consciousness while Linda and her producers tried to figure a way to save the shot and all our paychecks.

I woke up in what was once the nursery of the Bel-Air mansion. The owner of the house had been a movie producer for one of the big studios until his star waned. He foolishly mortgaged his house to finance his girlfriend’s film, Fun for Fauna. The movie didn’t even make it to DVD and now the owner, Sherman Pettigrew, rented his place for porno shoots whenever he could. Sherman lived in a trailer behind his ex-girlfriend’s new beau’s house in Topanga Canyon.

Anyway... I came awake on a daybed in the barren nursery of the failed movie producer’s house, stillborn into wakefulness after wasting what seemed like the last iota of passion in my life.

“You okay?” a soft voice asked.

I raised my head and saw Lana Leer sitting on a pink wicker chair. She was very petite, very white, with hair as short as a new recruit’s buzz cut.

“I passed out,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“It’s so embarrassing.”

Lana giggled. Then she laughed.

“What’s so funny?” I asked even though I knew the answer.

“I don’t mean to make fun, Deb, but it is kinda silly for a woman who’s had sex with five men at once to be shy about an orgasm.”

“Where is everybody?”

“They left. Linda asked me to stay and make sure you were all right but I would have anyway.”

I realized that it was dark outside. When I shifted in the bed I felt the long-lasting slick lubricant between my thighs.

“How long was I out?”

“A long time.”

“Was Linda mad?”

“No. Myron really saved the day. You looked good with him standing over you like that. It looked real.”

“I have to get home, Lana,” I said, trying to gather the strength to sit upright. “Has anybody heard from my husband?”

Linda reached out and took my hands. She remained steady and I was able to pull myself up.

“No. I called the house but only got the service.”

“Thanks for staying with me. I remember once in Jamaica that dickhead Lester Foley got me high and left me in a hut on the beach without any clothes.”

“Let’s get you cleaned up,” the diminutive personal assistant said.

There were three police cars, their red and blue lights flashing angrily, parked on the sidewalk, the lawn, and up in the driveway of our home on South Elm in Pasadena.

Lana and I were walking up the slight incline of the lawn headed for the front door when someone said, “Excuse me, ladies; this is a possible crime scene and we’re not allowing anyone in.”

He was a small man in a black uniform with blue eyes and pink skin. He recognized me from his porno collection; I could see it in those startled eyes. There aren’t many black-skinned women with long white hair and deep blue contact lenses. Debbie Dare was almost unique in the capital of a clichéd profession.

“Aren’t you—” he began to ask.

“The owner of this house,” I said. “What crime has possibly been committed?”

“Wait here, ma’am,” he said, and I knew the news had to be bad.

Lana put a hand on my shoulder. It felt so heavy that I almost fell down. My legs were still weak from the unwanted orgasm and now this.

The uniform called into the front door of my house. A few seconds later a slender man in a cheap dark green suit came out. He traded a few words with the cop, looked in our direction, and, hesitantly I thought, walked toward us.

“Mrs. Pinkney?” he asked, looking at Lana.

“Yes,” Lana said, “this is Mrs. Pinkney.”

“Your husband, ma’am,” he said, shifting his gaze to me.

He had passive, maybe even kind eyes and if he recognized me that fact was hidden behind an honest attempt at sympathy.

“What about him?”

The plainclothes cop tilted his head to the side and I couldn’t help but think that that was the way he spoke to his mother when he’d been bad and had to come to her to confess the breaking of a water glass or leaving a door open, allowing the family pet to escape.

“He expired,” the policeman said.

“Expired?” Lana asked.

“Died.”

“Oh my God,” Lana said, and then she began to cry.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

The news hit me like a bucket of cold water. Finally the intensity of my session with Myron was flushed away.

“I want to see him,” I said.

The electricity was out in the house. Yellow metal stalks with powerful incandescent lamps, brought in by the police, eerily illuminated the sunken all-white living room and the double-wide hall that went past Theon’s bedroom and mine. There was an even stronger light coming from the master bathroom. I could see the shadows of people moving around in there, mumbling words that I couldn’t quite make out.

“Maybe you shouldn’t see him like this,” the plainclothes cop said at the door.

“What’s your name?” I asked him.

“Lieutenant Mendelson.”

“Your first name.”

“Perry.”

“Is that short for something?”

“I was named after Perry Como. My mother loved his voice.”

“Are you married, Perry?”

“Yes. Of, of course.” He said these last three words showing me the wedding band on his left hand.

“If it was your wife in there would you walk away because some stranger told you to?”

The policeman looked down and I instantly liked him. He took a step back and I walked into the huge bathroom.

There were three men and two women in there, all of them wearing blue hairnets and thin rubber gloves. One man was vacuuming the floor with a handheld device while another, a black woman, was taking photographs with a digital camera — bringing Carmen Alia to my mind.

I was further reminded of a porno shoot when I saw the inhabitants of our wide, baby blue circular bathtub.

My husband, Theon Pinkney, was naked on his back with his big belly up above the waterline. His left arm was around Jolie Wins, a sixteen-year-old wannabe adult cinema star.

Jolie was my polar opposite with her black hair and pale white skin. She didn’t look dead.

There was a high-end video camera submerged at the far side of the tub. It was plugged into a wall and had tumbled into the impromptu sex scene that they were filming.

Theon had been a major star in the porn world before he was my husband. He called himself Axel Rod. After he got fat he became a somewhat successful manager before the stars and directors wrested their careers from producers, agents, and managers. Theon probably told Jolie that this was an audition, and he plugged in the camera because the battery had gone dead while he fucked her for hours.

Theon had lost his physical appeal but he could keep up an erection longer than any man I’d ever met.

“Mrs. Pinkney?” Lieutenant Perry Mendelson said.

“Yes?”

There was the sound of a grunting moan in the background. Again I was reminded of my work.

“Are you all right?” the policeman asked.

“Why are the police here, Perry?”

“People have died.”

“But it looks like an accident. Do you think he was murdered?”

“No,” he said. “The way we see it the girl’s foot got tangled in the wire and, and, and when she...”

“When she moved to get on top of him the camera fell in,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Then why is half the Pasadena police department in my home?”

“Your housekeeper, Mrs. Julia Slatkin, came in and found them. She called nine-one-one and said that it was murder. When someone claims foul play we are legally obligated to do an initial investigation.”

“I see.”

“Is this your husband?”

“Yes, it is.”

“The housekeeper already ID’d him but I’m required to ask.”

“Where is Julia?”

“She was distraught. I had one of my men drive her home. Do you know the girl, Mrs. Pinkney?”

“No,” I lied. “No, I don’t. Who is she?”

“We didn’t find any identification in her purse.”

“She looks like a child. My husband was having sex with a child.”

Perry Mendelson looked into my eyes and saw a blank slate. I turned away and went to Lana. She was on the floor in the hall, grunting and moaning, crying with an abandon I rarely felt.

I went to her and hunkered down. It was a familiar movement, a sex position without a partner.

I smiled.

“It’s okay, baby,” I said. And then to Perry, who was standing above us, “How long is this investigation going to last?”

“We can wrap it up in a couple of hours. I’ll have some questions but they can wait until tomorrow if you don’t feel up to it right now.”

“That would be great. I’m an early riser. And, Perry?”

“Yes?”

“If you don’t think it’s a crime you can have them take Theon’s body to Threadley Brothers Mortuary. There’s somebody there all night.”

That night Lana and I lay side by side on white satin sheets under black cashmere blankets. I didn’t really need the company, but Lana was a delicate girl and too upset to drive herself home.

She snored softly and pressed against me. I didn’t sleep much but that wasn’t unusual. I hadn’t had a full night’s rest in many years. It wasn’t that I was sad or even insomniac. I just didn’t seem to need that much sleep. Usually when Theon and I were both home he’d have sex with me and then drop off. For most of the night I’d read books at random, napping at odd times between chapters or sections; sometimes I’d even nod off in the middle of a sentence.

Over the years I read Tolstoy and Tennyson, Mary Higgins Clark and John Updike, Roger Zelazny and Octavia Butler in the early, early hours of the morning. I didn’t finish as many books as some because I usually put down a story I didn’t like and reread, many times over, those that I enjoyed.

If Theon woke up and found me reading he’d usually fuck me again. That was his talent — he could have sex anytime with anyone. If he didn’t like burritos and cheesecake so much he could have been a porn star up into his seventies.

But the reason he had sex didn’t have to do with love or the physical passion I’d felt that afternoon with Myron. Sex for Theon always had a definite purpose, like when he’d drowsily awake and see me reading. I was a herd mare and he was an aging stallion running with all his might to keep up.

I’d lie under him or get on my knees and move perfectly with his thrusts and withdrawals. After he’d come I’d turn him on his side and scrape his skin with my fake nails and bite his shoulders. And after a while he’d fall back to sleep and I’d pick up my book again.

Theon and I loved each other, I suppose. I knew him better than anyone else did and he never hit me. He had sex with other women all the time and I was free to do what I wanted, but that wasn’t very often, not really. I wasn’t worried about losing him, because sex was just a release or a means to an end for him. Theon told me that he didn’t want me falling in love with another man, or woman. I told him that he didn’t have to worry.

He was especially concerned that I didn’t fall in love with a black man. He was white and believed that the races tended to stay together and so felt threatened whenever I spent any time with any of my African American costars.

That night, after Theon’s ridiculous death, lying there next to Lana — her rough breath like hope or something — I wanted to read but didn’t have the strength to sit up or even reach over to the night table where Dead Souls was sitting, waiting for me to reread it for the seventh, or maybe eighth time.

A university professor I dated for a while told me that I was just a recreational reader, way outside of the educational system he lived in.

“You only talk about phrases and what the characters are feeling but you have no notion of the literary ideas or intentions,” he said one night after I’d untied him. “You’d be lost in one of my classes. If I hadn’t talked to you like this I wouldn’t have believed that there was a literate thought in your head.”

“But aren’t your classes about what people in books say and feel?” I asked, as if I were making an appeal in a higher court.

“No,” he said. “The study of literature today is about structure and underlying intention; it’s about the way in which the themes of literature, historically, resonate with one another.”

I stopped answering his calls after that. Professor Abraham was of no use to me if his world and mine were unconnected. We were, I thought, like two islands so close that one could see the other in great detail but the life evolving on each was separated by aeons of evolution.

I loved books and their stories and characters. Books were faithful and true in ways that real people could never be.

But that night, after Theon and Jolie had expired, I was paralyzed, unable even to imagine reading. Big Dick Palmer, completely without volition, had filled me with passion that Lana’s sorrow had punctured and depleted. The deaths were a part of my paralysis but not essential to it, no more than Myron was a part of my orgasm. I felt closer to Lieutenant Mendelson’s timidity and Lana’s unabashed grief than I did to my own husband, his weakness and self-demolition.

Theon had abandoned me but men had been leaving me all my life. His death was a more familiar occurrence than all the years we spent together.

After failing to summon up the will to reach for my book I tried to recall the feeling of my unexpected orgasm. I closed my eyes and imagined that spot of pain and Myron’s grunting and Carmen Alia’s clicking, insectlike camera. But none of it worked. I was numb, had been numb for years but never really knew it. I sometimes experienced this feeling of detachment as disinterest. At other times I mistook my lack of connection for the natural disdain a beautiful woman has for an ugly world. I had, for many years, taken for emotion the hungry look that men and women had for me. I had falsely perceived my own sensations as their oohs and aahs, grunts and groans, catcalls and blown kisses.

These ideas settled in my bed with Lana’s breathing and the thought of Theon on a slab somewhere.

I remembered when Theon had proposed to me.

We were in a small casino in Vegas and both drunk. Theon got sloppy when he drank too much. Matching him drink for drink I moved, and thought, a little slower. The inebriation brought on by alcohol was just a more leisurely version of my sobriety.

“Let’s get married,” he said while fingering me under the table.

I was young, and wet, and Theon had driven us to Vegas in a fire-engine-red Rolls-Royce (which was leased but I didn’t know that at the time).

“Okay,” I said with a leer, “but no more PJ for you until there’s a ring on my finger and we’ve both said ‘I do.’ ”

I didn’t think he was serious. I mean who would want to marry an eighteen-year-old girl who fucks for a living?

But Theon took me in a taxi to an aqua-and-pink-plaster twenty-four-hour chapel, where he presented me with a very expensive emerald and diamond engagement ring and paid a thousand dollars for the finest fast-food marital service.

What I remembered was the fact that he was thoughtful enough to have brought the ring on our little holiday, that and the smile on his face when I said the words of acceptance. I felt something then, like a smile drifting from my center up toward my lips.

Evoking that memory I tried to cry but couldn’t. Even the best moment of my thirteen years of marriage with Theon failed to summon up a tear.

I lay there frozen and unfeeling, like a corpse in the snow waiting for the spring thaw. This sense of death brought an unexpected calm into my breast.

Theon was gone, running into death after the same quim he’d chased since the day he achieved his first erection. Jolie, I felt, somehow died in my place, enticing him with her passion to be seen and adored while collecting a paycheck and pining for love.

These plain truths soothed me. I shifted onto my side and lost consciousness while breathing in the sweet scent of Lana’s troubled sleep.

Someone was kissing my left nipple. It was a feathery kiss with a small lick at the end. The kisser was experienced, knew how to keep their hunger at bay while physically expressing a rapacious desire.

“Hello,” I said.

I opened my eyes on a sun-drenched morning. Lana was leaning over me, retreating from my big, black, wet nipple.

She blew on it and said, “I’m sorry, Deb, I just always wanted to do that.”

“It’s okay with me but what would Linda Love have to say?”

“You won’t tell her, will you?”

“Of course not.”

Hearing this, Lana closed her small mouth and breathed in through her nose, somehow communicating that she’d like to show me other things she’d always wanted to do.

“Not today, baby,” I said. “I just couldn’t after all that happened.”

“I understand,” she said. And she did too. She understood that I would never be her lover but that I wasn’t rejecting her as a person.

“Help me up?” I said.

Little Lana got on her knees and pulled my wrists. This movement imbued me with energy again. I remember feeling that if I had been alone I might have never gotten up.

“I’ll go make us breakfast,” she said.

When Lana left the room I went to the closet and was rendered immobile again for a time. There were latex minidresses, and cashmere pantsuits with holes stitched in so that I couldn’t really wear underwear with them. I had a few Catholic-girl miniskirt uniforms and a dozen pairs of pants that fit so tight they adhered to my sex close enough that the casual stranger could know my form as well as Theon did. I’m naturally tall, so the rows of five-inch heels and platform shoes were designed to make me tower over most men. My blouses were all two sizes too small — T-shirts too. I couldn’t sit without exposing myself in the little black dresses, and all of my panties were white and thong.

“Black-and-white is my signature,” I often said, “from me and my Caucasian husband to this small black dress and my white silk panties.”

I could hear Lana in the kitchen making our breakfast. This act, more than the kiss, told of the love she harbored for me.

At the back of the twenty-four-foot-wide, five-foot-deep closet was a brown paper bag that contained a calf-length yellow-and-blue dress that I filched from a BBW named Wanda in a specialty film I’d once made. Wanda weighed two hundred eighty-five pounds and that dress fit her like a glove. Under that was a pair of worn blue tennis shoes. Inside the left shoe was a.32 caliber midnight special, the only legacy my father had left after being shot in the street by a thug named Kirkland. He’d staggered into the house and into my mother’s arms, blood spilling over her clean white dress and the floor.

As I was putting on the billowy dress the phone rang. I heard it but felt no need to answer. It rang five times before it stopped and Lana piped, “Hello?”

She talked intermittently. I could make out random words but not the sentences they formed.

I finished dressing, put my father’s gift into a big blue purse, and headed for the kitchen.

I don’t know why I decided to take my father’s pistol; maybe my meditations on death resonated with the hardware the way Professor Abraham’s books echoed through history.

On the way out I passed my full-length mirror. The dress served its purpose, so I didn’t pay any attention from the neck down. What caught my eye was the head and face.

I’ve been told many times that I am beautiful. My father, a small-time hood, said it every day that he and I shared this earth. There was a temporary white-stain tattoo under my left eye. It was a perfect circle, two inches across with a dime-size white dot off-center inside. That was my signature. Even Theon didn’t know it was a stain. He wanted to mark me, to deform me, but I never could go with that.

My straightened, bleached-white hair came down way past my shoulders. Sometime during the night I had taken out the deep-sea-blue contact lenses, so my eyes were their natural dark brown color.

I took a pair of chrome-plated scissors from the dresser and began to hack away at the hair that so many men had yanked on and women had caressed while penetrating my sex and rectum, slapping a black ass that would swell but never blush.

“I like your hair, Deb,” Lana said when I finally made it to the kitchen. She was still naked.

“Really? I left most of it on the bedroom floor. You can hardly tell it from the white shag but I suppose you could pull it up with a vacuum cleaner.”

“I mean I like it short, silly. It’s so cool how uneven it is. You turned from Marilyn Monroe to punk-slut with just a few snips.”

“Who was on the phone?” I asked.

“Richard Ness.”

“What did that fool want?”

“Theon. I told him what happened and he hung up.”

Just then the kettle began to whistle and Lana turned her attention to the French-press pots. She’d prepared them with the Italian roast coffee I loved.

There was low-fat turkey bacon sizzling on the grill and egg-white omelets cooking in their special Teflon pans. Lana gestured at the breakfast nook, which was nestled in between three mostly glass walls that looked out on Theon’s pride and joy: a lawn of Kentucky bluegrass.

He’d look forward to every late spring when the green grass bore its blue flowers.

“I love that grass as much as your ass,” he used to tell me.

The memory of those words almost pierced the veil and brought Theon back from the dead, so much so I feared that my mind could conjure him and lose something that was waiting for the girl in the ugly dress and down-at-the-heels blue tennis shoes.

“I made a decision last night,” Lana said, breaking through my fears.

“Oh? What’s that?”

The breakfast had been served while I fought off the dead. I had juice and coffee, turkey bacon, a grilled slice of tomato, and an Egg Beaters omelet on an oblong plate.

“I know this is your moment, Deb,” she said, “that you lost your husband and all. But when I saw him and that girl in the bathtub I realized how awful what we do is. It was like everything in there had a meaning. His half-hard dick and her draped over him like that — the camera in the water and the house all shorted out. I realized that I had to quit this business and break away from Linda.”

“What would you do?” I asked. I really wanted to know.

“Get a straight job and maybe a boyfriend or something.”

“Is Leer really your last name?”

“No. It’s Koski. Kristin Koski. Linda gave me the name Lana Leer. She said that it sounded better and that you should never use your real name in the credits of a film.”

“Were you ever on camera?”

“That’s how I met Linda. She could tell how much I hated it and took me in.”

“Why not go by your old name if you’re not acting anymore?”

“I don’t know,” she said, letting her head loll to the side like Perry Mendelson had done the night before. “My parents kind of disowned me and I guess having a new name was me letting go of them. Is Dare your name?”

“Peel,” I said. “Sandra Peel. I was born in Inglewood to Aldo and Asha. She was a seamstress for a Jewish tailor downtown and he was a thug but I loved him.”

Lana smiled and then she laughed.

“What’s funny?” I asked.

“I always like the way you talk, Deb. Most people... most people say one thing and then somebody else has to ask for more. You know, like if you said your real name was Sandy Peel and stopped there. But it’s like you tell the whole story. Like you were on a stage or somethin’ and the rest of us were at the play.”

Skinny little Lana was probably in her early thirties with short-short brown hair that showed a few gray sprouts here and there. Her big eyes were gray — almost white.

“What are you looking at, Deb?”

“Hmm?”

“You were staring.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. I just wanted to see you. You know, my great-grandmother Henrietta used to say that people are always going so fast that they never appreciate where they are, who they’re talking to.”

“So you were appreciating me?” Lana asked behind a half smile.

The question didn’t want answering. Lana was happy under my watchfulness and I was aware that something had come to an end, like a crescendo in a piece of classical music or at the conclusion of a scene in a play where the lights are still up and maybe even the actors are still onstage but there’s no movement or speaking, only a pause before the next action. This, I thought in that brief moment, punctuated by Lana’s half smile, was the beginning of the beginning after Theon’s foolish end.

“Where the fuck are you, motherfucker?” a man yelled.

We could hear him stomping in through the entrance room, into the wide hallway, and from there to the door of the kitchen.

Tall and broad, Richard Ness was both ugly and oddly attractive. He was a white man with darkish skin clad in a ridiculous light green suit. His nose had been broken so often that it looked like a pillow with the indentations of a night’s sleep left on it.

I clutched my bright blue leather bag, the weight of my father’s gun feeling like a premonition.

“Where the fuck is he, Deb?”

“What are you doing here, Dick?” I replied.

“Don’t fuck with me, bitch.”

“Never have, never will.”

There was something soft about the thug Ness; you could see it in his eyes. My playful disdain for his manhood stung him. He was just a boy posturing the way boys think men are supposed to be.

“I’m lookin’ for Theon.”

“He’s dead, Dick.”

“Yeah, right.”

“He was electrocuted in the bathtub with some girl he probably promised a job in my new movie.”

Lana had both hands on the table, her fingers curled into hardscrabble landbound bird claws. There was a tremor going through her.

“I will tear this house apart,” Richard promised.

“He’s down at Threadley Brothers Mortuary. The cops said it was a stupid accident. Why don’t you call down there if you don’t believe me?”

Lana’s eyes were pleading with mine. I smiled at her. I really felt relieved; Dick’s interruption was easier to deal with than my world turning upside down.

“Why don’t you suck my dick?” Richard said.

“Dick’s dick,” I said lightly.

My calm caused him to clench his fists and scowl. He really didn’t know what to do in the absence of fear.

“What would it cost you to call, Dick?” I asked. “I don’t know what business Theon had with you, but I certainly wouldn’t let you mess up my house if I knew where he was.”

“You know something?” he said, his mouth puckering up like a baby’s when it tastes its first lemon. “I always hated your cool bullshit. You think you’re better than everybody, but I will kick your ass like Theon should have. I will make you crawl like a fucking worm.”

Ness took two long steps forward.

Lana reached for a fork on the table.

I smiled at the futility and bravery of Lana’s action and then pulled my father’s chrome-plated midnight special from out of the blue bag.

Ness registered the weapon with his small eyes but took another step, more out of reflex than bravery.

I pulled back the hammer and it snapped loudly, like some bug warning a larger predator of its venom.

Ness stopped.

Lana began hiccuping.

“My husband is dead,” I said. “And if you don’t move your ass out of my house you can collect whatever it is he owes you in hell.”

Lana hiccuped loudly and brought both hands to her mouth. In her left she still clutched the fork.

“Don’t be crazy, bitch,” Richard Ness said.

“What did you call me?” I said softly, dangerously.

Ness’s hesitation humiliated him. The shiver that went through his battered face told of the man he wanted to be but wasn’t. He wanted to come at me regardless of the pistol, rip the gun from my fingers, and batter me to the floor.

But he stayed in his place.

I stood up, luxuriating in my frumpy dress, and Richard fell half a step backward. He was looking in my eyes for some kind of weakness. His disappointment showed itself as a squint.

“I will kill you, Dick. Because you know, I’m not cool — I just don’t give a fuck.”

I had decided with those last six words to kill Richard. It felt right. The deadness, the orgasm, the death of the shallow-but-sweet man I called husband.

The muscle in my trigger finger contracted.

Richard leaned back, closing his left eye completely.

Lana hiccuped again.

“Hello? Anybody home?”

The voice came from the front of the house. It was male and sounded familiar but I couldn’t place it right off.

“Back here!” I shouted, giving up on the murder I wanted so badly to commit.

Just before Lieutenant Mendelson walked into the kitchen I placed my gun hand into the purse while still holding on to it, because I didn’t know if Richard was armed or what he might do if he had the chance to grab me.

“This is Perry Mendelson, Dick,” I said. “He’s the detective investigating Theon’s death.”

Richard’s big broken face showed a great deal of relief. He knew from the look in my eye that he was very close to the terminus of his life. A few seconds earlier I was going to kill him and claim self-defense — now... I wasn’t.

“Theon’s really dead?” the thug asked.

“Yes, he is,” Perry said, his senses filled with the unnamed danger that had just passed.

“Murdered?”

“It looks like an accident. I just came by to ask Mrs. Pinkney some questions about the woman he was with. Were you a friend of his, Mr...?”

“Ness. Richard Ness. I’m a... I was an associate of Mr. Pinkney.”

“What kind of business did you do together?”

“Movie production...” Ness said, looking at me. “... that and financial advice.”

“Would you happen to recognize this woman?” Perry took a photograph from the side pocket of his gray suit jacket.

“You really are a cop?” Richard said.

I noticed that the tension went out of the big man’s burly, lime green shoulders.

“Policeman,” Perry said correcting the term. “Lieutenant Mendelson. Do you recognize this woman?”

Richard took the photograph between two blunt fingers and examined it.

“I better go put on some clothes,” Lana said.

Lana was unobtrusive sitting there, almost invisible. She had a prepubescent boy’s body, with small breasts and a shaved pubis. When she darted out of the room Perry averted his eyes from an innate sense of propriety. Richard didn’t look because he didn’t care.

“No, Lieutenant,” he said. “I’ve never seen this young woman before. Looks like jailbait.”

“And you, Mrs. Pinkney?” Perry said as he retrieved the photograph and held it up for me. “Do you remember your husband talking about this young woman? Or maybe you even met her at some point?”

Jolie was lying on a slab in the picture. Her black hair was pulled back to show her face.

I had seen her looking worse.

“No, I haven’t,” I said. “Would you stay and have a cup of coffee with Lana and me?”

The question was carefully phrased. I wanted Perry to know that he was welcome while Richard was not. He caught the drift and turned his gaze on the leg breaker, loan shark, hustler, thief, and coward.

“Well, I guess I better be goin’,” Richard mumbled. “You have my condolences, Debbie. You know, usually when I’m told that people who owe me money are dead I take it with a grain of salt.”

There was a moment of absolute silence in that vast blue suburban kitchen. Then Richard nodded and walked swiftly from the room.

I followed, blue bag in hand, going all the way to the front door (which, I realized, the police must have left unlocked the night before) and watched the man who nearly died at the foot of my breakfast table get into his vintage purple Impala and drive off.

“Was he giving you trouble?” Perry asked at my back.

“No,” I said, “not at all. Dick thinks that because he’s so big and ugly that people are supposed to be scared of him, but not me.”

I stood there looking out at the blue, blue July morning, Perry Mendelson behind me, peering over my shoulder.

“You cut your hair.”

“I had to do something.”

I felt him holding back from touching my shoulder; I was sure of it. I wanted that touch. How long had it been since I yearned for a man’s hand on me?

I turned to him and said, “Let’s go get that coffee.”

When we got back to the dining nook, Lana was there wearing her faded blue jeans and a pale violet T-shirt from my dresser drawer. When she saw Perry with me she got up and set another place at the table.

“You don’t have to bother,” Perry told her.

“Oh, that’s okay,” she said, displaying that crooked smile. “There’s lots of room and food.”

“Just coffee for me... black.”

Lana’s expression was mild and yet overflowing with feeling. Men filled two roles in her life: predators and fathers. Perry, at least momentarily, had taken up the daddy position in her quivering heart.

“We’d really like to get a line on this girl,” Perry said when we settled across from each other. “She has a family somewhere, people who care about her.”

“Didn’t your people find her purse or anything?” I asked. “Wasn’t there something in her pockets?”

“Forty-seven dollars and some makeup.”

Poor Jolie. She didn’t even have a pay-as-you-go cell phone. Girls like her slept in a different bed each week and washed out their panties by hand every night. Friends came and went one at a time, each one promising something and delivering somewhat less.

Theon had obviously offered her a career in adult films. Depending on how they met he might have asked me to help her out. He wouldn’t necessarily have known that I’d already met the child.

Three weeks earlier my sometime producer, John Toland, had sent me to a hip-hop party at a music producer’s home in Laurel Canyon. When I walked through the open front door I found myself in an audience of about thirty people. Everyone was black except for little naked white Jolie on her knees giving up-and-comer Fat Phil Harmonik a very energetic blow job.

The men in the room were mostly leering while the women sneered uncomfortably. I waited until the job was finished before taking Jolie by the hand and leading her around until we found a bathroom with a lock on the door.

I could tell by her eyes that she was only partly aware of where she was and what she was doing, so I laid her in the bathtub and turned on the cold water of the overhead shower. She was so high that it took five seconds or so for the chill to take effect. When she started shivering I held her in place for a few seconds more and then pulled her from the tub.

“Help me, miss,” she said as I was drying her off.

“Do you know where you are?”

“No.”

“Did somebody bring you here?”

“They must have but I don’t remember.”

Someone banged on the door.

“She’s throwing up!” I yelled.

Then I took out my cell phone and hit a special code.

“Hello, beauty,” he said on the second ring.

“I need help.”

“Give me the address and I’ll be there as soon as I swap out this passenger.”

Forty-five minutes later I had the half-conscious child wrapped in a bathrobe. We were sneaking as best we could through the back of the house. From there we made it to a small gateway and down to the canyon road.

Short, dark, and unmistakably South American, the Brazilian Leonidas Asimante stood next to a black Lincoln Town Car waiting for us.

Once we were driving away I told him that I needed to take the girl (I had yet to learn her name) someplace where she could sober up.

“I have a client who keeps a house at the beach in Malibu,” the flawless English — speaking driver said. “I look after it for him when he’s out of town. You two can stay the night if you want.”

I sat up with Jolie until the distant ocean glinted orange. She vomited bile and cried, thanked me over and over, told me her life story, and then fell so soundly asleep that she seemed dead, more so than in the photograph that Lieutenant Mendelson was showing me.

In the afternoon Leonidas came with clothes I had him buy. We dressed her and drove her to a rooming house I knew of down around Venice Beach.

“I have no idea who she is,” I said, answering Perry Mendelson’s query.

A look of concern creased the policeman’s already doubtful visage.

Lana put a cup of black coffee down in front of the detective.

“What?” I asked.

“Excuse me,” Lana said as she climbed over my lap to sit on the other side.

“It’s just that I find it hard to believe,” Perry said, “that a woman would have no idea how to at least find out what her husband is up to.”

“You want Theon’s cell phone?” I asked. “He never finished high school and didn’t even know how to spell the word computer. But maybe there’s a phone book in there somewhere.”

“That won’t help me if I don’t know a name.”

“You could just call every name until somebody doesn’t answer,” Lana offered.

“We don’t have that kind of manpower,” Perry said, taking her seriously. “I mean if this was a murder or something, but right now the worst is that it’s an underage runaway that died.”

“If she was underage like you say,” I offered, “and she died having sex with a mature man like my husband... you could construe that as some kind of homicide.”

“Yeah. Maybe second-degree manslaughter, I guess. But the chief of police and the city prosecutor wouldn’t want to use public funds in that manner. You weren’t here and so there’s no living perpetrator.”

“Can I be straight with you, Perry?” I asked.

“Sure.”

“Do you recognize me?”

“Um... no. Not personally.”

“Did some of the other cops last night make jokes?”

“Uh...”

“It’s okay. I’m not shy. I take off my clothes in front of a camera and fuck for a living. That’s the kind of business we’re in — me and Lana... and Theon too, when he was alive. We’ve all met thousands of girls like the one from last night. With most of them I’m more likely to remember if their ass stank than their names.

“A dozen girls like that flutter around me every single day. To tell you the truth, Theon might not have known her name. And even if he did it wouldn’t have been a real name. Nobody gives their real name — no, no, no.”

He picked up on the reference to Fats Waller with a Lana-like smile and glanced down at his hands.

“You listen to Waller?” His words told more than they asked.

“My father loved old-time jazz. I used to sit on his lap and listen with him.”

Our eyes met and I saw that he was experiencing hunger that was unfamiliar to him. He felt a connection with me and that made him uncomfortable.

“You like being a policeman?” I asked to relieve his tension and to explore it at the same time.

“I used to.”

“Not anymore?”

“I still do the work,” he said. “I think it’s important but I care too much. A cop can’t really care. We come across a dozen tragedies every day.”

“I know what you mean.”

“You do?”

“With me it’s even worse. I have to pretend to care and I don’t give a shit.”

“I better be going,” he said.

He stood up.

I nodded.

He turned.

I wanted to say something: the kind of words that held out hope for a next meeting.

He walked the distance to the kitchen doorway and I remained silent, telling myself that it wasn’t the time and he wasn’t the man.

“Deb!” Lana yelped maybe three minutes after Perry had gone. “We have to get to work. It’s a ten-o’clock call.”

“I thought you quit the business?”

“Uh... um... But Linda expects us.”

“I thought you were breaking up with Linda?”

“I am but... but this is our job.”

The bewildered look on her childlike face was perfect. Decisions and actions didn’t have anything to do with each other in her mental life. She was a kid, from Ohio I think, who was still looking for the magic door that led to a place where things fit together because you wanted them to.

“Tell Linda I couldn’t make it today,” I said.

“She’s gonna be mad.”

“My husband died last night, honey. He was electrocuted in the bathtub where he was fucking an obviously underage girl. The police are questioning me. Richard Ness is on my ass. And in the meanwhile I have to bury Theon. You tell Linda that, and then, if she gets mad, you tell her to bring her skinny ass and her razor blade over here.”

“O-okay, Deb. Don’t be mad at me. I wasn’t really thinking is all. Do you need a ride somewhere?”

“Back to my car?”

“It was parked on the street and so I gave Linda your keys. She said she’d have someone drop it off in the afternoon.”

“That’s okay then. I’ll take Theon’s Hummer.”

“Do you want me to stay and help you?”

I could have said yes but that would have torn Lana apart. She had to go back to Linda and the set. She had to do what she was told because that was how she had survived all these years.

“No, baby,” I said.

“What are you going to do?”

“What every girl does when she needs to think.”

“Hairdresser?”

I smiled and she did too.

Half an hour after Lana had gone I went out to the driveway to ignite Theon’s bright yellow Hummer. It was the largest model ever made and even a tall person needed the extra step to climb up into the driver’s seat.

I grabbed onto the door handle and was about to pull myself up when he spoke.

“Hey, Deb.”

I should have known that Richard wasn’t the kind of dog to let a bone go so easily.

The pistol was in the house so I was on my own against the huge bundle of woman-hating violence. The fact that he was a coward only made him more dangerous.

“Hey, Dick.”

“I don’t like people callin’ me that.”

“That’s okay, Dick. I don’t like you.” My heart was thundering and there was too much blood in my brain to make room for the underlying fear.

“I’m gonna kick your ass, bitch.”

“I don’t think so.”

“No? Why not?”

“Two reasons,” I said as if from the middle of a dead calm somewhere far out at sea. “First, if you take one more step I will holler bloody murder and you better believe every one of these housewives around here will call nine-one-one. Two — and you have to listen closely to this one, Dick — two is that if you don’t kill me, I will get that gun and blow you away... today, tomorrow, sooner or later. So if you kill me you’ll never get what Theon owed, and if you don’t it won’t matter.”

His fists clenched and I took in a deep breath — ready to scream.

I was counting on the fact that Theon always said that Richard was an intelligent man in spite of his looks.

His hands unclenched and he took in a deep breath.

“He owes me seventy-two grand.”

“Can you prove it?”

“He signed my book.”

“You got it on you?”

“I could just take your key and drive your Humvee outta here.”

“Then I’d call the cops and you can play Grand Theft Auto with the other fools in jail.”

It was a dangerous game but Richard was forcing it. He wasn’t the kind of guy who gave away anything — no real loan shark is. They always move straight ahead; that’s why they called them sharks.

“I’ll call you,” he said.

“And we’ll meet someplace public,” I added. “Not here. If I see your ass here again I’ll put a cap in it.”

I should have gone back in the house and had some tea after Richard left for the second time. My body chemistry was way off and I needed to calm down. But the adrenaline in my blood wouldn’t let me even try to relax.

On La Brea just south of Wilshire I tried to change lanes without putting on the blinker and smacked into a navy blue Saab. I pulled to the curb and waited. The young black man driving the Saab jerked his car up behind mine and leaped out. He walked around, assessing the damage to his car in a herky-jerky manner that would have been funny if I didn’t know what had just happened.

I climbed over to the passenger’s side and emerged slowly, perusing the damage to his car and mine.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he shouted.

There was good reason for his rage. My car barely had a scratch while his was pretty torn up. Theon had an ornamental pipe running along the side of his car. This garish accessory gouged a deep gash along the side of the Swedish-made car.

A young Asian girl, who was at least seven months pregnant, got out of the Saab. She waddled up next to the lanky driver, willing him, it seemed, to calm down.

“I was in the wrong,” I said. “I’m very sorry.”

“It was your fault!” he hollered.

“That’s what she said, Willie,” the girl murmured.

“Stay out of this, Tai.”

“We should trade insurance numbers,” I suggested.

Tai was staring at my face.

“What the hell are you gonna do about my car?” he replied.

“We can wait for the police to come if you want,” I said calmly. I didn’t want the police there. I never much liked being around cops.

“Willie,” Tai said.

His eyes were bulging and a tremor was going through his thin frame.

“Willie,” pregnant Tai said, some fear now in her voice.

I wondered if I should be afraid, if Willie was about to lose his mind and kill me right there on La Brea.

Then the young man fell to his knees.

“Help me,” Tai cried. She went down too, grabbing Willie by his left arm.

“What’s wrong with him?” I asked.

“Seizures,” she said. “He has them sometimes when he gets upset.”

I suspected that Tai was not from the United States, though she certainly spoke English well enough. Maybe she was from some ex — English colony somewhere. I say this because any good Angeleno would know that I could take the knowledge of his condition and use it against him in traffic court.

“We have to call an ambulance,” she cried.

“Help put him in my car,” I said, “and follow me.”

I grabbed Willie’s other arm and, with Tai’s help, hefted him up into the seat. We strapped him in; then she ran to her car. I turned over the engine and said loudly, “Call Neelo Brown.”

I pulled away from the curb followed by the tattered Saab.

The car’s speakers engaged and then came the sound of ringing.

“Dr. Brown’s office,” a pleasant female voice said.

“Zelda?”

“Debbie?”

“I’ve got an emergency.”

There was a pause on the line. There always was when I called Neelo’s office. Zelda didn’t dislike the syndicate of porn actresses that had sent her boss through medical school, but she was a medical professional and so she perceived us as a threat to his practice.

“Can you come in?” Zelda asked.

“I’m a mile or so away.”

“I’ll set the gate to your garage key.”

“I’ll be there soon.”

I could see Tai in the rearview mirror. The fear in her face was apparent even from that distance.

There were flecks of white foam at the corner of Willie’s mouth. He was shivering and barely conscious.

Two wrongs, they say, cannot make a right, but if you put enough negatives in the pot there’s a chance, I believe, that they might cancel one another out.

On the ride up to Sunset Boulevard, with the boy-man maybe dying next to me and the girl crying in the car behind, a familiar numbness entered my heart. I felt patient with the unfolding of events, treating them in my mind as the unavoidable consequences of a life of my own choosing.

My negativity pot was full to overflowing. There was a dead husband whom I loved but couldn’t bring myself to grieve for, and a young girl, also dead, who wanted a life that would forever elude her; there was the leg breaker and the woman-child, Lana, who wanted to be loved for someone she hoped to be; there was the cop whom I admired and lied to and the hundreds of books I’d read but never understood; there was a boy named Edison who had a perfectly round head and a woman named Delilah who guarded him — even from me.

The list of ingredients was longer than that. I’d done many things wrong and known many people who were crooked but not bad, pretty but not beautiful, religious with no God, young to look at but never innocent.

Neelo’s office was in a nondescript nine-story medical building just north of Sunset.

Approaching the gray-green metal door I pressed the remote control for our garage and the door magically slid open. Tai made it in before the door slid back into place. We drove thirty feet to a set of double doors that were already open.

Two big men in hospital white were waiting there with a wheelchair between them.

“What’s the problem, Mrs. Pinkney?” one of the men asked. He was a tall and well-built man of Scandinavian descent.

“This kid has had some kind of seizure.”

“What’s going on?” Tai said, running up to us as well as she could in her condition.

“This is a clinic, ma’am,” the other paramedic said. From his accent I could tell that he was African, probably Nigerian. “We’re taking this man to the doctor.”

Tai chose that moment to swoon.

The African ran to her and, with impressive ease, picked her up in the cradle of his arms.

“Come, miss,” he said to me.

The waiting room was small and anonymous. Tan walls, light green carpeting, and a low table with magazines like Good Housekeeping and O.

I felt completely safe. No one knew I was there. There were no cameras or oversize erections on muscular men in the next room waiting to rip off my clothes and fuck me from every angle, in every orifice; there were no gaffers or hot lights, smells of lubricants or alcohol.

I wanted to read a book about a place so far away that nobody in this world could get there. The story would be about a woman whose hair had turned white from age readying to bury her husband. There would be a problem — something about property and male lineage — but I’d be concerned only with wrapping his limbs tight to his body after washing him clean from a lifetime of honest but dirty labor.

“Aunt Deb?”

Neelo Brown was of medium height and always, since childhood, a little chubby. He was only five years younger than I but in his eyes I might as well have been his mother’s age.

Neelo’s mother, Violet Caracas, was a real porn star out of the eighties. She was one of the first to take her career into her own hands and had shown many of us girls how to do the same.

I was seventeen when I met her and Neelo; Theon had introduced us. Neelo was so good at his classes that he’d skipped three grades and was about to graduate from junior high school. I had a fake ID and was already making two thousand a week doing DP scenes for Reel Women Pictures in the Valley. Violet got a group of us together and introduced us to her accountant.

Thirty-six months later she was dying from pancreatic cancer and five of us girls promised to see that Neelo got through college.

After he graduated from medical school Neelo had his accountant set up a private insurance plan for girls in the business. The primary five got special treatment. We were all his aunts.

“Hey, baby,” I said. “You’re looking good.”

I loved how he looked at me. It was the way a young man appreciated a favored relative.

“You cut your hair,” he said.

“Theon died.”

“Oh my God,” he said from knee-jerk emotions that young men in the straight life are guided by. “What happened?”

“It was an accident. He electrocuted himself.”

“When?”

“Last night or maybe yesterday afternoon. When I got home after nine the police were already there.”

“What does Norman have to do with that?”

“Norman?”

“William Norman... the man you brought in.”

“Oh. Willie. Nothing. I just ran into him and he had this fit. How is he?”

“I don’t know. He responds to treatment like an epileptic would. I haven’t tested him though. His wife is resting. I didn’t want to give her any drugs because of the pregnancy but all I had to do was tell her that her husband would recover and put her in a dark room and she fell asleep.”

He smiled. Neelo Brown smiled and my life shifted course, ever so slightly. A breeze blew into that dead calm and my path had changed continents. I didn’t know it at the time. I was still thinking about Theon and Jolie, Big Dick Palmer and the first orgasm I’d had in a decade.

“What, Aunt Deb?”

“Huh?”

“You’re smiling.”

“Can you look after the kids, Neely? I really have to be somewhere.”

“No problem.”

“If Willie wants my number give it to him. I slammed into his car so I guess this seizure is my fault. Put it on my bill?”

“What bill? You know your money’s no good here, Aunt Deb.”

Rhonda’s Beauty Salon was on Pico a few blocks east of Hauser. Rhonda was petite and mannish, black haired and blue eyed, tender and giggly — she was a white woman raised among black people, a ninety-pound weakling who never went anywhere without a razor somewhere close at hand.

“Hey, baby,” she said as I walked into the open door of the storefront business.

There were three young black hairdressers, two women and one man, working on clients along the east wall. Rhonda was in back sitting in her pink leather beauty chair. She lowered a copy of Jet magazine to greet me.

“Hi, Rhonda,” I said softly. “You got time for me?”

“I always got time for my movie star,” she said, dropping the tiny magazine in a pouch at the side of the chair. “What you need?”

“Darken my hair and give it some body. And take this white circle off my cheek.”

“Uh,” she grunted. “Baby girl is quittin’ the industry.”

As I took the seat I thought about Lana telling me that she was through with the business, and the hair on the floor of my bedroom, about an imagined picture of Richard Ness lying at my feet leaking blood onto the kitchen floor through a hole in his eye socket.

“... yeah,” Rhonda was saying as I thought about a future I could not exactly imagine. “Derek is a no-good lazy niggah but he love my skinny li’l white ass like it was the first peach in season.”

“What’s he doin’ now?”

“Nasty young ho named Cassie done messed up my sheets, my sheets, with Derek’s stuff an’ then sit her stank ass in this here chair askin’ for the cut rate. You know I did her whole head an’ then I put a razor to her neck an’ whispered in her ear that if I evah saw her again I was gonna cut that pretty black th’oat from one side all the way to the othah.” Then she let out a deep, sinister chuckle. “You know Miss Cassie Ass-Worth done left the neighborhood since then.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t cut off Derek’s thing,” I said.

“I would if I didn’t like the way he work it so good. You know, Deb, I ain’t nevah had a man love me like he do. He know every touch on my body and every word in my head.”

I could almost experience the thrumming passion in Rhonda’s body as she leaned close to massage my scalp. It was as if her emotion was water or air passing over me. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes.

“What’s happenin’ with you, girl?” Rhonda asked after the tide of her emotions ebbed a bit. “How come you quittin’?”

“Theon’s dead.”

“What?”

Rhonda levered the chair up from its reclining position and twirled me around until I was facing her.

“He what?”

I told her most of the story, everything except the part about me knowing Jolie.

“Oh my God,” Rhonda said when I’d finished. “Well... I guess they got what they deserved.”

“Nobody deserves to die when they have a chance at life,” I said.

“So you forgive Theon like I did Derek?”

“I fuck for a living, Rhon. You know the best thing Theon could do for me after a hard day was make me some chamomile tea and rub between my toe bones.”

Hearing this Rhonda took on an expression of confusion wrapped in pity.

My hair was dark brown and wavy and the tattoo was almost completely gone. Rhonda explained that the dyes used over the years to maintain the white circle and disk had stained the skin and that it would take a while for the pale shadow to recede.

On my way to the accounting offices of Mintoff and Myers I called a number that Theon’s car phone knew by heart.

“Threadley Brothers Mortuary,” a woman said with liveliness you wouldn’t expect from an undertaker.

“Hi, I’m calling about Theon Pinkney. This is his wife.”

“Oh yes. We have the remains and were wondering what to do.”

“I want to come in around six to make the arrangements. Will Lewis be there?”

“Yes, Mrs. Pinkney,” the woman said. Even though I’d never gone by the name Pinkney, I liked the anonymity of its usage. It was as if I were somebody else — hiding in plain sight.

I drove straight down Pico toward the ocean. When I got to Lincoln I turned left and went for about a mile or so. On the way no one tooted their horns or made lewd gestures as was often the case. My look had been so unique and pornography was so widely viewed that I was more recognizable than most movie stars. Men (and women) asked for my autograph, honked their horns, and offered me money to show my breasts — I didn’t always refuse them.

Chas Mintoff and Darla Myers’s office was on the second floor of a shabby building three blocks up from the beach. They were both surfers and musicians. Sometimes they were lovers. Now and again I joined them. But our only real connection was that they were honest accountants who took care of our investments.

“Hey, Deb,” Juana Juarez, the receptionist, greeted. “I almost didn’t recognize you.”

Juana was the color of amber, freckled, and afflicted with a smile that would not be dominated. If she knew about my work she refused to comment on it. If I ever needed a friend she would have been the person I would have chosen.

“Are they in?” I asked.

Juana pushed a button on the big blue office phone.

“Yes, Juana?” a woman said.

“It’s Debbie for you guys.”

“Send her in.”

Their desks were positioned across the room from each other, slanted away so that where they’d meet (if you continued the lines) they would form a perfect right angle. This seemed appropriate; they led away from and toward each other at the same time.

“Hey, Deb,” blond-haired, green-eyed Chas said.

“Hi,” his counterpart, the mousy brunette Darla, murmured.

Whenever approaching the partners you were faced with a choice: sitting next to one desk or the other. This wasn’t odd seeing that they rarely represented the same client.

Theon and I were one of the few exceptions.

“You cut your hair,” Chas noticed.

“And had your tattoo removed,” Darla added.

“Theon got electrocuted in the bathtub with some teenage girl. They were trying to make a movie but the camera fell in.”

The accountants stood in unison and moved toward me, Chas pulling his chair and the guest seat and Darla rolling her own, specially made, wicker office chair.

“I can’t believe it,” Chas mumbled.

“Sit down,” Darla said.

I went over the details I cared to share. Big Dick Palmer didn’t make the cut; neither did the name Jolie. I went into detail about Richard Ness and his seventy-two-thousand-dollar request.

“But, baby, you guys are in hock up over the line,” Darla told me. “You know that, don’t you? You signed all the documents.”

“Sign the papers on the kitchen table, will ya, babe?” How many times had Theon said that to me? I hated legal mumbo jumbo, so I rarely read, and never understood, what I was signing.

“There’s nothing left?”

Darla squinted while Chas looked down at his feet and hands. There was no sense in me blaming them. There was no comfort to be found in recriminations or rage.

“What about the Hummer?” I asked.

“If you don’t pay fifteen hundred dollars a month the bank will take it away,” Darla said softly.

“Where did all the money go?”

“I don’t know what all he spent it on,” Chas added, “but he was funding some preproduction expenses for a movie with Johnny Preston.”

“A legit?”

“I think so. We’ve been in contact with Preston’s business office.”

“Any money on the horizon?”

“Not yet.”

The youngish surfers each took one of my hands.

I held on tight. I don’t think I would have ever let go except I had a funeral to plan.

I looked at my watch before getting out of the Hummer. It was five fifty-eight. I was almost always on time to any meeting or appointment. It’s not that I looked at the clock or anything; it was more of an internal timepiece that ran like a little motor in the center of my being.

“Hello, Mrs. Pinkney,” Lewis Dardanelle said when I walked through the front door of Threadley Brothers Mortuary.

The entrance hall was large, pretending to be vast. The floors and walls, even the ceiling, were tiled with varying shades of gray and green marble. The only furniture was a unique stone desk that the undertaker sat behind.

“Hey, Lew,” I said.

He was up on his feet before I crossed the bleak expanse to the granite table. He gestured at an aluminum chair with a dull finish and I sat as demurely as the occasion required.

“I’m very sorry, Deb,” he said. “Theon was so full of life.”

“He was. Thank you.”

“It was so unexpected.”

Dardanelle was created to be a mortician; nearly six-six, he didn’t weigh a pound over one sixty. His skin was pale, head bald, with rectangular glasses that were both thick and wide. Lew’s fingers would have made great albino daddy longlegs; when they moved they seemed to have lives of their own.

He sat down, lacing the lanky digits of his hands.

“What shall we do?” he asked.

Theon and I had spent an inordinate amount of time and money at Threadley’s. People died in our business with frightening regularity. STDs and cancers, some murders and a nauseating number of suicides, drug overdoses, and the odd death that even the county coroner couldn’t explain — people who died in their rented houses, apartments, and trailers simply by exhaling and leaving this world behind.

We had paid out of pocket and chipped in with friends for many funerals: longtime acquaintances and one-night stands and ex-lovers who didn’t have family. If I still had the money we’d spent at Threadley’s I could have retired and moved to Wyoming, where the cost of living would have fit my purse.

“I’m broke, Lew,” I said. “No stocks, no bonds, no cash, no property. Theon wasted it all. Or maybe he stole it — I don’t really know.”

Lewis’s gray eyes were magnified and elongated by his lenses. They widened further to take in my words.

I’d spent a week with him when we planned the funeral of Oceanna Patel, who knew men so well that she could make them ejaculate without touching their genitals — on camera.

That funeral cost eighteen thousand dollars.

Death wasn’t cheap and the funeral director met with would-be charity cases every day. Poor sad widows and confused children, brokenhearted lovers... they all came to him asking for a deal.

“There are certain rules,” I once heard Dardanelle say to a sad, fat, fifty-year-old woman whose husband had killed himself. “We cannot make monetary exceptions. The city has resources for people in your circumstance.”

I wasn’t expecting Lew to help me but I had to ask — not for Theon but for myself. Nothing turns to dust faster than a dead sex worker. When I died no one would lift a finger to lay me to rest. At least I could try.

“You know the Threadley brothers have made it a rule that we have no economic flexibility.”

“I know that.”

“But we...” Lewis Dardanelle said and then paused. He frowned and then, quite uncharacteristically, smiled. “We have the names and contact information for people that you invited to other funerals.”

“The guest lists,” I said.

“I could have Talia call them and ask if they would donate something to the services.”

“It could be a graveside ceremony,” I offered. “We don’t need a chapel.”

“I’ll call Talia at home and get her to start calling tonight.”

“Why, Lewis? Why would you go out of your way like this?”

“Theon was always generous with the staff. He was a friend to me in many ways and I believe that I would be judged badly if I didn’t help him on his way.”

I don’t know why I was surprised that an undertaker believed in an afterlife.

I ate dinner at a small French bistro called Monarc’s a block north of Pico on Robertson. It was a simple meal of green beans and almonds with chicken cooked in a white-wine sauce. For dessert I had flan with raspberries and peach tea.

I read a few pages from a book I’d been carrying around in my big blue purse — Behold the Man by Michael Moorcock. It was a story of time travel and a kind of alternate Christianity.

“Excuse me, miss,” a man said.

He was young and unremarkably dressed in business work clothes — California style: a herringbone jacket and light gray trousers, no tie but crystal cuff links on his white shirt. He was sitting at the table next to me reading a newspaper.

“Yes?”

“I see that you’re reading science fiction,” he said, smiling.

“Yeah... I guess. So?”

“Not so many single young women can be found eating alone and reading Moorcock.”

“I’m not looking for company.”

“Obviously not.”

He was of mixed race, black and some kind of Caucasian or other light-skinned group. There was a gap between his front teeth and something like a question in his eye.

“Why obviously?” I asked.

“The fact of you sitting there like that, like I said before.”

The way he talked was playful. I couldn’t remember the last time someone played with conversation — with me.

“My name’s Rash,” he said. “Don’t ask me why.”

He held out a hand and I shook it against my better judgment.

“Sandra. Sandra Pinkney.”

“Vineland is my family name.”

“You don’t know why your parents named you Rash, Mr. Vineland?”

“My dad always said that it just seemed right. My sister’s named Susan and the younger brother is John.”

“They must hate you,” I said, feeling the smile take over my suspicions.

“Why do you say that?”

“Here your siblings were given vanilla names and you got something special, a name that one out of ten million don’t get. You might be the only Rash Vineland in the whole world. I bet you are.”

He squinted at my explanation and I liked him... some.

“You know,” he said, “you might be right about that. I have to call John three times before he’ll call me back, and Susan had a birthday party and invited everyone in the family except me. She said that the invitation must have gotten lost in the mail. But the way she said it made me wonder.”

“You see?” I said, realizing that somehow Rash Vineland had lured me into conversation.

“Are you a therapist?” he asked.

“What do you mean?” The word had many connotations in my line of work.

“You know... a psychoanalyst or something like that.”

I grinned. That might not seem like much but it was rare for me to express any kind of goofy humor. I’d pretty much stopped thinking that silly moments were worth laughing about on the day my father died.

“Why is that funny?” Rash asked.

“How old are you?”

“Thirty-two.”

“And what are you doing here?”

“I like this place. I come here to read The New York Times at least twice a week.”

“We’re in Los Angeles.”

“I know,” he said, looking down at my worn blue tennis shoes. “It’s kinda egotistical, I guess, something like that. I feel important reading the New York paper.”

“Are your parents from there?”

“No.”

“Have you ever been there?”

“Naw. Have you?”

“A few times.”

“On business?”

“I have to go.”

“To New York?”

“No. I have to leave... here.”

There was no artifice to the disappointment in his expression. Rash wasn’t going to ask me to stay or even if he could talk to me again. I imagined that he would come to Monarc’s almost every day for a couple of weeks hoping to see me again... Me, dressed in a pale-yellow-and-faded-blue muumuu with tattered tennis shoes on my feet.

I was liking him more.

“I’ll tell you what, Rash.”

“What?”

“I want you to write down your phone number on my place mat. I have no idea if I’ll call you but at least I’ll know how. Okay?”

“Absolutely.”

When I got home I turned on our state-of-the-art security system, retrieved my father’s pistol, and made sure that it was loaded.

I changed the bullets yearly so that they’d have pop. My daddy taught me how to shoot on a range east of Riverside.

The answering machine had twenty-seven messages on it but I didn’t listen to any of them. Instead I strolled through the dark house into the master’s bedroom (as Theon always called it) and rolled up into the blankets thinking of a worm luxuriating in its own silk.

I turned on a lamp and started reading The Autumn of the Patriarch. That was a book I read often because it made poetry out of the rot and disarray of a life that seemed a lot like mine. The president was Theon and I was an unremarkable peasant among the hundreds who sometimes lived in his sphere. With these ephemeral ideas in mind I nodded and soon found myself asleep.

I loved Theon in my sleep that night. He was an ideal husband, a man who took care of so many people and things that he didn’t have time for children — or even a proper job.

He broiled me steaks while preparing avocado salsas, squeezed lemonade from the fruit off our own tree, and then, after the meal, he washed the dishes before asking could he fuck my ass.

The sour lemonade on my dreaming lips ushered me into another dream:

I was on a posh set that I had once shot on in southern France. It was the living room that led to an outside veranda of some duke’s mansion on the Mediterranean. There were four cameramen (not including photographers) and some of the most beautiful men I had ever seen. They were all naked and fully erect, looking at me haughtily and yet somehow hungrily.

“All right, Deb,” Linda Love shouted.

I knew even in the dream that she didn’t belong there. The director at the beach house was Polish, very tall, and dripping with the veneer of sophistication.

I looked in a full-length mirror that had been placed on the set and saw myself. My hair was long and white. The tattoo was there under my left eye. I could tell somehow that it was now permanent and a sadness filled me. My breasts were small again, sagging a little.

“Debbie.”

“Yes, Linda?”

“This is going to be a revolutionary shoot. We’re going to make millions on it.”

“We?”

“The owners.”

Then there was a tall beautiful man with tanned skin and no pubic hair standing before me. I fell to my knees and took the head of his huge, upstanding erection in my mouth.

“Slower, Deb,” Linda whispered from across the room.

I could hear the waves crashing because the doors to the veranda were open wide.

“Slower?” I asked. All Linda had ever asked me for was more passion.

“You’re making love to him,” she said.

“What shot are you trying to get?”

“Don’t worry about the shot. Just go with your feelings.”

Whatever he did to me I wanted him to do. The feeling inside me was the sound of waves: waves in my womb, flushing out my rectum, across my clitoris, and rushing between my toes. I screamed with pleasure but the sounds were drowned by the turbulent Mediterranean Sea.

“I’m going to enter into your side now,” my well-oiled lover said.

The room had grown to infinite proportions. The cameramen had put down their cameras. Linda was reclining in her director’s chair. The crew members were all sitting on the floor smiling and watching.

“You’re going to turn me on my side?” I asked.

“No,” he said. He had a slight accent but I couldn’t place it. “I’m going to press my cock in through your skin and under your ribs, into your body.”

“But that would kill me.”

“You can learn to live with anything.”

I wanted to say no but the scene of the dream shifted and I was on a hassock with the Adonis there next to me moving his erection deeper and deeper into my side. It was a very uncomfortable feeling, like gas and freefall at once.

“See?” he said. “You feel it inside. They all are watching me fuck you. They want to see it from every side and in every way. You feel me between your intestines, under your heart, pressing, pressing?”

And for the briefest moment I tried; I tried to accept his presence inside my body, a sexual surgeon on a syndicated reality TV program. I could feel the hunger and fear of the crew as he pushed farther into me.

Then I woke up.

Actually I threw myself from the bed, landing hard on the side of my left knee. I was up immediately, fleeing from the bedroom. I turned on lights as I ran. I choked on a sour taste that seemed to rise up from my defiled internal organs. I made it all the way to our white-on-white sunken living room.

Theon had called it my polar bear room.

I had my father’s midnight special in my hand.

The nacre clock on the wall was seven small white shells from midnight.

My sex was dry and shriveled like a very old woman’s. The fear thrummed under my heart and I was shivering. I couldn’t shake the images of the dream. They wanted to rip me wide open and expose my beating heart to excite some country fool’s four-inch erection.

The phone rang at that moment. It seemed like fate.

I didn’t move and the answering machine picked it up after the sixth burp of chimes.

“Sandra,” a woman’s voice said. “This is Dr. Karin. I read about your husband’s death online and I wanted to call. Are you all right? If you want to see me I’m free all tomorrow afternoon. You can just drop by.”

I wanted to pick up the phone but there was a pistol in my hand. I couldn’t let the gun go, not at that moment. I couldn’t.

There was a hesitation and then the click of Dr. Karin hanging up. I was relieved at her absence, overwhelmed with relief to be free from the dream. I also was ashamed of myself.

“Hold it open,” the demented little director, who called himself DeLester Grind, had said to me after Myron had suddenly pulled his big dick out of my ass on my first anal shoot. “People want to see inside you. They want to imagine where that thing was.”

“It’s just a job,” I told my mother that very afternoon. “They pay me and I pay your rent.”

I believed those words. My poor black widowed mother needed somebody to look after her, just like a million men wanted to stare down my stretched and reddened rectum in order to sleep alone, or next to their wives — or both.

I stayed in the house all the next day with the phone turned off. Nobody rang the doorbell. I didn’t even look outside. I didn’t play music, watch TV, read a book or newspaper, or turn on the radio. I would sit in a white chair in the white room for hours staring at the white walls, wondering what my memories meant. Was it me, the woman alone in the house, who had starred in two hundred feature-length films that centered on my breasts and clitoris, my fake blue eyes — all dubbed in sighs?

My pale blue Jag had been returned to the driveway sometime during the day. After sunset I got in and drove with the sunroof open and all the windows down. When I made it out to the desert the air turned cold but I didn’t mind.

I knew where I was going though I had never been there. It was a little house with a fruitless and perpetually dying apple tree in the front yard. There was a Beware of Dog sign on the chain-link fence but the ragged mutt was too old even to bark.

There were three cars parked on the lawn of the house. Actually it was a trailer with add-ons constructed on both sides and behind. Eerie lights blossomed from within. More than anything the structure resembled a cluster of luminescent mushrooms.

I walked up to the door wearing the yellow-and-blue muumuu, carrying the blue purse with my father’s gun inside.

The front door was aluminum, corroded in spots. I knocked and then waited for no more than sixty seconds. A weak light came on over my head.

After a moment a frail woman’s voice asked, “Who’s out there?”

“Mrs. May?”

“Who are you?”

“I’m Sandra Peel, ma’am. I came to bring you news about Myrtle.”

“What news?”

“May I come in?”

“Are you alone?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Do you know what time it is?”

“It’s important.”

“I don’t know,” the timid voice complained. “I don’t know.”

“I’ll leave if you want me to.”

“You could come back tomorrow,” she suggested.

“I live pretty far away, Mrs. May. I might not be coming back.”

It felt that the woman and I were merely giving voice to a bad script, a drama that we were acting in but had no part in writing, no heart in performing.

The door came open and a short and wide white woman stepped out onto the gray step. She was wearing a green robe over a T-shirt and jeans.

“What about Myrtle?” she asked.

“Can I come in?”

The front door opened into a wide and shallow living room. There was a TV tuned to a late-night repeat of The Tonight Show and a man, older than the woman, propped up in a wheelchair. He was held in place by a seat belt that crossed his chest from left to right.

The room smelled of stale urine and uninspired cooking. This atmosphere was sickening but I’d come too far to turn back.

“Only seat is on the couch, Miss Peel,” the forty-something Mrs. May said. “I’ll have to sit next to you.”

The man let his head fall to the side so that he could see me with his watery russet eyes.

“Lester,” Mrs. May said. “This is Sandy Peel. She’s a friend of our Myrtle.”

That room was why I’d fucked ten thousand men and women on four continents. Thousands of us boys and girls had run screaming from the same filth and stink of poverty. Black and white and brown and yellow and red had put out their thumbs and pulled down their pants, used lubricants and drugs and alcohol to escape these decaying ancestors and others just like them.

“Lester had a stroke six months ago,” Mrs. May said. “I think it was because he was so heartbroken over Myrtle runnin’ away.”

“It killed her,” I thought and also said out loud.

“What?” the broad woman asked.

“Myrtle’s dead,” I said. “She changed her name to Jolie Wins and came to L.A. to be a movie star. A producer offered her a job but there was an accident during the audition and she died from an electrical shock.”

Lester had raised his head maybe half an inch.

“Dead?” Mrs. May said. “You come in here in the middle’a the night an’ tell me my little girl is dead?”

“Yes, ma’am. You can call a Lieutenant Perry Mendelson of the Pasadena Police Department to get more exact information.”

“Myrtle’s dead,” the woman said to Lester.

“And in a drawer in the Pasadena morgue.”

“Why are you so cold?” Mrs. May’s voice and Lester May’s eyes asked me.

“Because I can’t sleep, and even though you never knew enough to know that Myrtle hadn’t been inside a classroom since she was twelve, you are her parents and you should know that she’s gone.

“Because she told me where you lived and I have to believe that she wanted me to come here and tell you that she died trying to get as far away from you as she could. I believe that she wanted me to come here and ask Lester why he did what he did to her and to ask you why you closed your eyes and ears to her pain.”

“You black bitch,” Mrs. May said, her placid features turning into those of an ogre.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, “and much, much worse than that. Bitch and cunt and whore like you wouldn’t believe. Yes, ma’am. Jolie sent a demon to announce her death. Now you can do what you want.”

I stood up and Lester’s eyes followed me. There was pity in that gaze but not, I think, for his daughter. He was feeling sorry for himself, for his loss, for his stroke. He was grieved that he was paralyzed in that room with a woman who transformed into a monster now and again.

I had brought my father’s pistol maybe to kill them. If Jolie had been my daughter I would have sent her to school with Neelo Brown; I would have tried to love her.

As I drove away from the mutated trailer I told myself that the only reason I left Lester alive was so that he could suffer a little more, so that Mrs. May could keep him breathing while she collected his Social Security checks and boiled potatoes and guzzled beer until they both ran down the drain and into the sewer.

I woke up with the sun in my eyes. I had driven out to a fairly deserted campsite at Joshua Tree National Monument and slept there in the driver’s seat of my pale blue Jaguar.

The moment I awoke I used the key to open the glove compartment and check out the ownership papers of my car. It was still mine, probably the only thing I owned. Somewhere Linda Love was looking for me and Richard Ness too. The sun was just risen and the desert held the chill from the night before. I got out of my car and went to the corrugated tin-walled camp outhouse.

A mother and father with three preadolescent boys were standing there. The boys had the jitters in their legs.

“Let the lady go first,” the youngish blond woman said when an older gentleman, dressed in army surplus, came out of the crude toilet.

“That’s okay,” I said. “Boys feel the urgency more than women.”

The father was staring at me. I was familiar to him but he couldn’t place my face. This wasn’t unusual. The odd thing about porno is that the face was usually the least memorable part of the experience. That’s why I had a false tattoo and platinum hair. Those white marks against black skin made me stand out. Maybe the father just thought that a black woman in a pale schmatta was an odd visitor for a desert campsite.

“Here with your family?” he asked me as the boys crammed into the outhouse, slamming the tin door behind them.

“No. I used to come out here with my father when I was a kid. We’d make canned chili in a tin pot on a pit fire and pour it over a paper plate lined with Fritos. I was out this way last night and figured that it would be nice to sleep under a million stars and remember my dad.”

“Not as many stars as there used to be,” the man said with only mild lament. “Now civilization is closing in and the stars are fading.”

He was an ugly man with friendly features: thin and Caucasian-brown with big dingy teeth and patchy hair sprouting from his chin. I had done a guy like that in a porno art film called Amateur Nights, made at a deserted gas station in Twentynine Palms — not that far from where we stood.

The pale-skinned wife was chubby and very pretty. She had the unconsciously haggard look of a feminine woman who lived in a house of maleness. She survived in an atmosphere of shouting, stomping boys and a man who cared but didn’t really understand.

The door to the outhouse banged open and the brood of boys tumbled out, not quite zipped up or tucked in.

“I’m Sadie,” the woman said to me. She held out a hand.

“Sandy,” I said as we shook.

“You can go in now. Albert and I have already gone.”

The aluminum toilet seat was wet because the boys hadn’t put it up. They just pulled down their pants and had swordfights into the hole — getting their piss everywhere.

I used the stiff toilet paper to dry everything and then did my business. The mess and turmoil didn’t bother me. I liked boys — always had. I liked their grins and hopes for triumph in battle. They made me laugh.

At the center of the camp was a huge pile of red boulders that might properly have been called a small hill. There were ridges and natural footholds that led up so you could climb the full thirty feet to reach the top.

I did this.

The west side of the stone hill was flanked by an eight-foot-high, twenty-foot-long stand of spiky cholla cactus. The yellowy white needles numbered in the tens of thousands and some were as much as six inches long. There was a breeze at the top of the stone hill and you could see across the desert for miles.

It was my living limbo: the place that stood between an old life that had withered and died and a new one that had no form as yet. There was nothing I’d miss from the days I’d spent with Theon and, so far, nothing I could look forward to.

The children laughed, screamed, and sometimes cried across the camping area while the mother and father used stern voices to try to rein them in. The sun burned down on me like the memory of a thousand fuck scenes under intense electric light.

I got weak and dizzy up there but refused to come down. As long as I was on that red rock hill no one, except the little family, would know where I was.

“Excuse me, miss,” the oldest of the three boys said.

He had climbed up into my little retreat.

“Yeah?”

“My mom said that you might be thirsty up here and she wanted me to bring you some water.”

He held out an ice-cold eight-ounce bottle of water. I drank it in one steady gulp.

“That was good,” I said.

“You were real thirsty,” the dusty boy said in wonder. “My parents said that you could come to eat breakfast with us if you wanted to. It’s really more like lunch but we call it breakfast because it’s still morning.”

His blue-green eyes were filled with innocent desire. It reminded me of something. I couldn’t quite remember what.

“Darryl’s in love,” Errol, the second-oldest boy, sang.

We were all sitting together at the wooden picnic bench next to the family’s campsite. White bread with bologna and mayonnaise was the entrée alongside watermelon on ice in a big Styrofoam cooler and Kool-Aid mixed up in a three-gallon jug with a spout at the bottom.

“You leave Darryl alone, Buster,” Albert Freemont told the middle son. He rubbed Darryl’s head and the boy both scowled and grinned.

“You look so familiar, Miss Peel,” Albert said.

“I live in Pasadena. Do you spend any time there?”

“No. We’re from Bellflower.”

I shrugged and stood up. I hadn’t had sex with anyone in more than forty-eight hours and it felt good — really good.

“Where you goin’?” Darryl asked.

“Darryl,” Sadie said.

“What?”

“You shouldn’t be so nosy.”

“That’s okay.” I squatted down and kissed the ten-year-old on his cheek while both brothers oohed. “I just have to get back to my life.”

“Will I see you again?”

“In this life you never know.”

I was exhausted by the time I got home. It was late afternoon and I barely had the strength to stagger through the front door and turn on the alarm system. I made it to the twelve-foot, white cotton-covered couch in the polar bear living room. There I stretched out with the pistol next to my head. Sleep came down on me like a limp corpse.

My rest was a dead thing too: an unprotected body under a ton of soil backhoed in more to hide the stench than to protect the deceased.

The color of the darkness was not black. It was a mottled and opaque gray, revealing nothing but its formless self.

The ringing phone broke through the gray from time to time, and bodiless voices spoke out. I didn’t recognize them; I didn’t care. Light sometimes pressed in from the bleak landscape behind my closed eyes. Jets passed over me. Men took turns urinating on the grave above. I moaned out loud and prayed in a language unknown to me (and maybe to everyone else). I felt pains in different parts of my body, which, at rare intervals, forced me to shift position.

In that sleep I realized that death was an impermanent situation, a transition from bubbling thought to inert thing. The grave was also ever-changing but at a much slower rate. The ground was like glass — liquid but seemingly solid, flowing and yet so slowly that it would take centuries to move appreciably. And the thing that was my remains would flow with it, no longer rotting or stinking, writhing under ten thousand men, their eyes closed and dreaming of women who had unknowingly betrayed them.

The phone made its chimes at irregular intervals. The voices of men and women nattered at me. The doorbell rang but I slept on. The sun rose and set, rose and set. I remember staggering through the darkness to the toilet, twice. Somewhere Theon lay dead, his flesh slowly collapsing toward the earth.

Then there was somebody screaming loudly, beseechingly. Maybe there was a fire and a lost child, an explosion on a street somewhere named after a person I didn’t know or in a language I didn’t speak.

I was forced up out of the coffin of sleep, grasping my father’s pistol.

The alarm system was blaring. Lights were going on and off all over the house. It was day, maybe morning, maybe afternoon.

Whatever door or window the voice says, you go in the opposite direction, Theon had told me when the sophisticated system was installed. He had been worried about men like Richard Ness coming after him in his sleep. He was still my husband, still taking care of me in his wrong-headed way, still alive.

The phone began to ring. That was the security company calling.

“Back door intruder,” the recorded voice was saying over and over.

Whatever door or window the voice says, you go in the opposite direction.

I headed for the back door.

With an arm jutting through the broken window the intruder was just undoing the lock as I made it to the kitchen.

“Back door intruder!” the recorded voice spoke.

The telephone was ringing.

I was still at least half-asleep.

“Stop!” A single warning before I allowed myself to pull the trigger.

“Police!” a man’s voice responded. It was simultaneously a plea and a command.

Perry Mendelson, the upper half of his light brown suit coming through my shattered back-door window, held up his hands to ward off bullets and suspicions.

“It’s us, hon,” Lana Leer screeched from somewhere behind him. “We thought you were dead, baby.”

I was holding the gun so that Perry was looking down the barrel. He was scared. That made me smile. I lowered the pistol and went to the wall panel to disengage the alarm. Then I answered the ringing wall phone.

The security company had a special ring that bypassed the answering machine, so it would have rung all day.

“Everything’s all right,” I said into the receiver.

“Mrs. Pinkney?”

“Yes.”

“What is the code phrase, please, ma’am?”

“Brer Rabbit.”

“And what are the last four digits of your social?”

“Two, two, two, nine.”

“And your maiden name?”

“Peel.”

“Is everything all right?”

“My friends thought I was dead and they broke the back-door window.”

“Do you need help?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“I told you I’m fine and I answered your questions. Now I need to go look after my window.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but it took you so long to get to the phone,” the male security operator said. “One more minute and I would have had to call the police.”

Perry and Lana had come into the kitchen. She was looking worried while he seemed embarrassed.

“I was dead asleep,” I said. “I guess I’ve been depressed or something. It took me a while to realize that the alarm was even going off. But I’ve turned it off and I’ve answered your questions. Can I go now?”

“Sorry, ma’am,” the operator said. “Certainly. Have a nice day.”

I hung up and turned to my visitors.

“Do you have a permit for that pistol?” Perry asked.

“Yes.” I did. I registered my father’s illegal piece when I turned eighteen. “I even have a carry permit after I was stalked by this crazy guy from Glendale.”

“What happened to him?” the cop asked.

I didn’t blame him for asking. He had broken into my home — a policeman. He needed to get some control back. Maybe if he showed some authority I wouldn’t bring him up on charges for breaking and entering.

“Fuck that,” Lana said in an unusual show of anger. “Where have you been for the last three days?”

“Three days?”

“It’s Thursday,” Lana said. “Linda’s been calling you morning and night. She even made me give her your red phone number.”

My red phone.

“I was sleeping,” I said. “All those days?”

“You really been asleep all this time?” Lana said.

“What are you doing here, Officer Perry?” I asked.

“Ms. Leer called me.”

I looked at the waif-woman.

“It’s true,” she said. “When you didn’t answer I called down to the police department and asked for Mr. Mendelson.”

“I’d called twice myself and I was worried,” Perry added.

“Worried?”

He looked down at his feet and it felt to me that an empire, somewhere, had crumbled without warning.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said. “And then I need a bath. Come on.”

I led the odd allies through the hallway, past the guest bedroom, leaving them while I went into the smaller bathroom where no one had died.

I went in and did my business, dropped the rest of my clothes on the floor, and then went back to open the door for Lana and Perry. He was surprised to see me naked; I knew he would be. With some men, maybe all men, my sexuality gave me various advantages. Sometimes it was them wanting to take my clothes off; with others they were driven into a shell, seeing my body and not knowing whether to run or to scream.

When I bent over to turn on the bathwater I’m sure Perry looked away.

I took pity on him and poured bubble-bath gel under the stream. Then I climbed in to let the rising water and bubble line slowly hide my dark body.

“Is there any other reason you’re here, Officer?” I asked.

“Um,” the policeman uttered.

“What’s wrong with you, hon?” Lana asked. “Linda says that if you aren’t on the set by this afternoon she’s going to fire you.”

“Hm,” I mused. “How are you, Lana?”

“What?”

“How are you?”

“I understand that your husband’s dead and all, baby, but you have commitments.”

“Who’s that guy?” I said. “The carpenter that works on the sets on all Linda’s shoots?”

“Richie,” Lana answered, upset to be derailed from her line of questioning.

“Richie — that’s right. Call him and ask him to fix the window you guys broke. There’s an extra set of keys in the knife drawer in the kitchen. The security code for the alarm system is bilbo.”

The bubbles were rising quickly and so Perry chanced a glance in my direction.

“We’ve identified the woman who was with your husband,” he said.

“Oh?”

“Her name was Myrtle May. She was a minor from out near Barstow.”

“And how did she know my husband?”

“We haven’t figured that out yet.”

“Hm.”

“Myrtle’s mother told us that she found out about her daughter’s death from a black woman who came to her home in the late hours of the night a few days ago.”

“Really? And what does that have to do with her identity?”

“Was it you?”

“No.”

I expected the tightening of his eyes. Seeing this expression made me smile.

“Would you like to put me in a lineup?”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“You seem to think I’m lying.”

“What about Linda?” Lana asked me.

“You know, Lana, dear, I haven’t shaved my pussy in three days — no, five. It’s all stubbly.”

“Deb,” she pleaded.

“No, honey. I’m not going back. Theon was my husband and I have to bury him and then... then I have to settle his affairs.”

“You have to work,” Lana said, taking on the unwieldy mantle of maturity and logic.

I put my feet up on either side of the tub and laid my head back against the edge. I was still exhausted.

“You haven’t met the woman who works harder than I do, babe. You know it; I know it; Linda fuckin’ Love does too. I’m tired, I’m broke, my husband is dead, and I need a moment. Like that guy with the candy bar on the TV commercial.”

Perry Mendelson was staring at me now that my nakedness was mostly covered. He was feeling something — what, I couldn’t tell.

“Linda’s gonna be mad,” Lana said again, “real mad.”

I wanted to say more but I was too tired under the hot water. I closed my eyes for a minute or so and when I opened them again Lana had gone.

Perry was still there though, still staring.

“Was it you who went out to Barstow in the middle of the night?”

“No.”

“I’m not trying to get you in trouble. There’s no crime in notifying parents that their daughter has died.”

“There is if I was aware of what my husband was doing with an underage minor.”

“Did you?”

“No.”

“I just want to know what happened.”

“Why?” I asked.

“It’s my job.” The words sounded feeble — no, they sounded distant, as if the man who spoke them had moved past that identity but had not yet picked up a new one.

I realized then that he had somehow identified with me, that the last vestiges of his professionalism had deduced that I had shed an identity the night my husband died.

“Do you want to fuck me, Lieutenant Perry?”

“It’s not like that,” he said. “That’s not why I’m here.”

“That’s not why you’re in a woman’s bathroom when she’s naked in her tub?”

“You asked me in.”

“Do you do everything a woman says?”

Anger replaced innocent confusion in his face.

I laughed. It wasn’t a pretty sound.

Perry turned and walked away without another word.

I didn’t miss him or Lana. I liked them both but they wanted answers that I either did not have or found intolerable. I was no longer able to function as a proxy for other people’s desires.

My life, I felt, was like moisture on the cars and leaves, gates and painted walls of morning. I was evaporating like that dew and I had only a few minutes of life to say good-bye.

I considered putting my head under the water and breathing in. I’d known whores who had killed themselves in that manner.

But I was too drained even to want death. It was too much work to die — hardly worth the effort.

“I want my money,” Richard Ness said.

There were one hundred and thirty-nine messages on my phone. He counted for sixteen of them. He never really made a threat, because he knew that could be used against him. He didn’t even say my name, just that he wanted his money. In court he could have said that he was calling Theon. He had no proof that my husband was dead. Lieutenant Mendelson hadn’t even shown him a badge.

There were dozens of messages from sex workers who had known Theon either through me or from doing business with him. Prince Spear, Mocha Elan, Aphrodite Affair, Darlenee Fox, Johnny “On the Spot” Myles, and many others left their condolences on the tape.

“I heard about Theon from Trixie Ballstrom,” Moana Bone said on message seventy-nine. She had been a real porn star back in Theon’s day. They had done revolutionary work in the field: quadruple penetrations, multiple simultaneous ejaculations, and possibly the first-ever scene to be done completely underwater.

Moana never failed to forget my name. I don’t know if she even recognized me from one chance meeting to the next. Her eyes were always on Theon — willing him to see her as the ravishing beauty of the past.

“I was devastated,” Moana continued. “Theon was a wonderful man and I can’t imagine what you must be going through. He was so vital when he was young, before you could have known him. What we did together was never pornographic. We weren’t just actors; we brought love onto those sets. We brought feeling...”

Her message went on for a full eight minutes. Toward the end she stopped mentioning Theon. There were rock stars and movie stars and political office holders and millionaires whom she spoke of in reference to her career, which, according to her, was far beyond the petty business that I, the current bimbo, was accustomed to.

I listened to every word. I sometimes, even today, replay her monologue. I wasn’t angry at her self-centered soliloquy; I wasn’t insulted. I didn’t laugh at her, because she was the voice of so many men and women who fed the rapacious sexual hunger of the Western world while trying to keep their heads above water.

We have eight young men and a four-hour time slot, a young producer-director once said to me. I’d get seven hundred per come shot — a thousand for every time I swallowed. We all had those kinds of days. How could Moana or anybody else think of their life like that and survive?

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Pinkney,” Lewis Dardanelle said at the beginning of message one seventeen. I had been listening to the machine for almost three hours. “Talia has made over seven hundred calls on your husband’s behalf and the great majority have offered to donate money or services to the funeral. We have raised, in real dollars, nearly thirty-five thousand. And if the promises are met we will have at least fifty. We, the brothers and I, would like to have the service next Saturday afternoon at two forty-five. If the costs go over the collection, the business will cover the extra expense. Please call or come in anytime after six in the next few days and we will make the arrangements.”

There were other messages from Perry Mendelson, Lana and Linda, loan companies and debt reduction services, more porn actors, and one from Marcia Pinkney.

“Hello, dear,” the elderly woman said, her voice frail and ragged. “This is Marcia, your mother-in-law. I heard from one of my church friends that Theon... that he passed away. They saw it on the Internet. I’m so sad and so sorry for you. I know we never really got along and I see now that as a Christian I treated you and my son badly. The moment I heard about Theon’s transition I realized that I might have helped you and have been closer to my own son if I was not blinded by the feelings I had about your... his lifestyle. Now Theon is gone and I can’t speak to him. But I hope that you call me and maybe even come see me so that I can make you tea and apologize in person.

“Are you having a funeral? Do you need some help? Please call me, Sandra. God bless you.”

Toward the end of the litany of condolences and threats was a message from a man I knew and didn’t know. His voice was strained with real emotion.

“Hello, Deb,” he said. “This is Jude Lyon. I heard about Theon. Call me if you need to talk or anything else. I’m bereft.”

Bereft. That was the word he used. I remember thinking that Jude Lyon was one of the few people I knew who could put that word in a sentence without sounding pompous or awkward.

Jude Lyon was in love with my Theon. He followed him around and did odd jobs for him, and for me too sometimes. Jude was gay but rarely had a lover. Theon was straight but I suspected that he’d had sex with Jude a time or two.

When Theon couldn’t make it to pick me up at the airport or accompany me to one of the dozens of porn industry galas, Jude would show up in his vintage BMW dressed in just the right clothes.

Jude loved Theon with an uncritical passion. Though he had no interest in things like baseball, barbecues, or me, he learned to care for these things because Theon did.

“What’s up with that guy?” I once asked my husband. “I mean are you two in love or what?”

“It’s not like that, babe,” he said. We were sitting in the kitchen drinking cognac from juice glasses.

“Then what?”

“You don’t want to know too much about JL,” he said. “He’s probably the most dangerous man I ever met.”

“Jude? He doesn’t look like he could do five reps with my three-pound dumbbells.”

“Don’t be fooled; that little faggot could carry the whole world on his shoulders if he had to.”

I asked more, and at other times, but that’s all I ever got about Jude and what Theon thought of him.

The last message was from a collection agency. The loan company that Theon was borrowing from was dunning him for a sixteen-thousand-dollar payment. They would repossess everything that he’d put up for collateral: the Humvee, the house, the condo in Aspen, even certain pieces of jewelry that were being held by a third party.

It was like the first page of the first tale in a short-story collection, the first line in a romance of descent.

The red phone was my most precious possession. It was a ruby-colored, semiopaque, glistening cell phone that only a few people had the number of. Built into it was a device that recorded every time someone spoke into the line. It had more than sixty-four gigabytes of memory.

I picked up the little phone in Las Vegas when there was both an adult film convention and a tech convention in the same hotel.

The pasty-faced kid who was in charge of the spy booth was a young man named Bobby Seaton. I asked him to give me one of the samples and he refused.

“If you give it to me I’ll fuck you till the ache in your nuts won’t stop for a week.”

Bobby wasn’t fat but his body was very soft. There was no definition or strength. He insisted on wearing two condoms and had a scared look on his face the whole time we were in his hotel bed.

The only indication he gave that he wanted to be with me was a small, unflagging erection.

“Can, can we stop now?” he asked after his fourth ejaculation.

“Give me the phone,” I said.

He hesitated and I grabbed his dick.

He took the phone out of his pants on the floor and handed it to me.

“You can’t tell anybody where you got it,” he stammered. “It’s a federal crime to record phone conversations without consent.”

He showed me how to change the chip and use the various features. When he’d finished I reached for his cock again — it was erect immediately.

He actually whimpered.

“Lie down, white boy,” I whispered.

He got down on the bed and I fucked him twice more.

If he’d worn only one condom at a time I don’t think I would have tortured him so. I hated his fear but reveled in my power to frighten him. I loved it that he could cringe and orgasm almost simultaneously but I loved that phone even more.

I entered a certain code and was told by the display that I had three unanswered calls from Linda Love’s number. I erased them without listening. Then I noticed that the battery was at half power and that the ringer was on. I did a different search and saw that there was another call answered and recorded...

“Hello,” Theon said in his faux-distracted tone.

If you knew Theon you knew that this quality of voice was a ploy on his part. He was trying to keep the caller from understanding his intentions; in this case he didn’t want the caller to know that he was secretly spying on me.

My stardom didn’t raise envy in Theon’s heart but rather he was hungry to share in that success, like an elder in a pride of lions wanted to share in the kill. He must have been overjoyed that I’d forgotten the phone with the ringer on. That way he’d be able to spy on me like a little boy peeking through the keyhole of his mother’s boudoir.

“Hi,” a girl’s voice said — Jolie Wins, Myrtle May. “Is Deb there?”

“She’s not in right now,” my husband said. “Can I help you?”

“Who, who are you?”

“My name’s Axel. I’m Deb’s manager. She’s out of town and left her phone here at her house. Who’s speaking?”

“Jolie. Jolie Wins. Did Deb tell you about me?”

“Jolie? Yeah. Met you the other day at that thing, right? Can I do anything to help?”

“I wanted to ask Deb if maybe there was some kind of job I could do on the set of her new movie. I’m unemployed and they kicked me out of my place. I mean I don’t blame ’em. I couldn’t pay the rent and so I had to go. Deb’s the only kind person I’ve met in Hollywood. I’d work real hard.”

“Well,” Theon mused, “like I said, Debbie’s out of town on one of her exotic shoots... in Tahiti actually.”

“Tahiti,” Jolie said breathlessly. “Man, I’d love to be there.”

“Yeah, me too. But I’ll tell you what, Jolie. This is Deb’s private line. If you have this number that must mean that you’re important to her. So what I’ll do is send a car over to get you and bring you here. Maybe I can help you out until Deb gets back...”

They talked a little longer. She was down on Alvarado at a diner. The cook was buying her coffee and doughnuts, probably with the same intentions of my sometimes-slimeball husband. Theon promised to send a limo over to pick her up.

The rest was obvious.

When Theon took one look at Jolie he saw dollar signs and got an erection too. He told her that she could make the same kind of money that I did when I was a kid and that all he had to do was see how she worked on camera. The date on the recording was a week before the two died. He might have been fucking her that whole time for all I knew. Maybe he was putting her up somewhere, promising her a starring role in his upcoming feature-length adult masterpiece.

It was my fault. I should have kept tabs on her. Or I should have ignored her at the hip-hop party and let her find her own way down. Instead I gave her false hope and a phone number that Theon had access to.

I had killed them both.

“Hello,” Kip Rhinehart said, answering his phone.

“Hey, Kip, it’s me — Deb.”

“Hey, babe. Long time no see.”

“I been kinda busy.”

“I know, big important woman like you. What can I do for you?”

“I was just wondering...”

“Yeah?”

“Did Theon have a girl in one of your rooms up there?”

“I heard he died,” Kip said.

“Yeah. Him and this sixteen-year-old. They let a camera fall in the bathtub and electrocuted themselves while fucking.”

“That’s hard.”

“Was she there?”

Silence.

“Come on now, Kip,” I said. “He’s dead. She’s dead. There’s no one left to protect. You’re the first person Theon’d call if he needed to put up someone on the QT.”

“Yeah. She had one of the garden rooms. Nice kid. Fucked-up, but she was nice. Had manners, you know?”

“I’m gonna wanna see the room and her stuff,” I said.

“Sure, Deb. Nothing worth anything there but I’ll lock it up until you come.”

“I’ll drop by tonight or at the latest tomorrow morning.”

“Whenever. I’m here day and night.”

After calling Kip I lost steam for a while again. My life was in its uphill phase (a term I once read in a self-help book). Every step I took was a strain. I wanted to go to bed but I knew that I’d sleep for another three days if I did.

So I sat in the polar bear room staring at the thick white carpeting.

“How do you feel, Deb?” I asked after twenty or more minutes had passed.

“Like shit.”

An hour went by. I began registering sounds from various sources. There was ticking from an antique porcelain couple fornicating on the white marble end table. Theon had bought the little sculpture for me but I never realized that the platinum disk on the side was also a clock.

One of the fourteen environmentally friendly ceiling lights was whining softly. A strong breeze was blowing and the sliding glass doors that led to the patio and swimming pool rumbled gently on their tracks.

I realized that I’d agreed on buying the house because it resembled the home of the shoot I’d done in the south of France — the one I dreamed about.

Why hadn’t I known that?

“Really, Deb,” I said. “How are you?

“I’m cut off,” I said. “A junkie in paradise. A bitch in heat locked in a room full of doggie dolls.

“Write that down.”

I don’t usually talk to myself. As a matter of fact I had never done so (or at least I don’t remember doing it) before that day. But I got up and went to the kitchen where our housekeeper, Mrs. Slatkin, usually kept a blank book diary where she wrote down the things she wanted us to buy. This little journal was fairly new. Only a few pages had been scribbled on. I tore out the used sheets and jotted down the words I’d asked myself to write.

Only the first few words, I’m cut off, seemed to go anywhere. A junkie in paradise was more like a book or movie title, and a bitch in heat locked in a room full of doggie dolls used too many words to get the point across.

My father’s midnight special was on the kitchen table next to where I wrote. I was wondering about the significance of this, this juxtaposition, when the doorbell sounded.

It was the first nineteen notes from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. That was the only classical music that Theon knew. He’d loved it as the orchestration of the Sean Connery movie Zardoz.

I put the pistol in the pocket of my tatty blue-and-yellow dress and wandered up toward the front door thinking that everything was connected but, at the same time, nothing mattered.

She was tall and austere-looking in her navy blue, calf-length dress suit and maroon high-heeled shoes. Dr. Anna Karin was ten years older than I but in some ways her face seemed younger, at least more innocent. She smiled when I opened the door. I could imagine why. When last she saw me I was in a tight red vinyl minidress with white hair nearly down to my tailbone. My eyes were oceanic blue and I had glossy platinum-colored nails longer than a toddler’s fingers.

“Hello, Sandra,” she said.

Karin was born in Copenhagen but she didn’t have an accent. Her enunciation was very, very American, more so than most people you meet who were born here. That was how I could tell that she wasn’t — American, that is.

We met when I was going through a bout of anorexia. Theon was afraid that I’d hurt my health (and our income) and so he got Karin’s name from one of his legit Hollywood friends.

“A house call?” I said.

“I was concerned.”

We stood at the threshold staring at each other — the handsome Scandinavian and I.

I wondered why she was there and what my black skin would look like next to hers. This latter thought wasn’t sexual musing but professional reflex. How women looked on a set when paired up with one or many men often made a scene work.

But I was retired.

“Come on in,” I said, turning my back and leading her into the white-on-white-in-white living room.

“Have a seat,” I offered, and she lowered herself into one of the three oversize stuffed chairs that were upholstered in lambskin.

“This room is quite stark,” she said. “Is it your husband’s design?”

“No. This is the only room in the house that I’m responsible for.”

“You look very different.”

“So do you.”

“How do you mean?” Anna asked, holding her hands up a few inches, indicating the space around her as if it were a permanent aura.

“I’ve never seen you outside of your office before.”

“How are you, Sandra?”

“I haven’t shaved my pussy for days. It itches.”

“What does that mean to you?”

“No,” I said.

“No?”

“You’re a visitor in my house, Anna. I’m not on your couch; I haven’t asked for a session. If you want to be a friend I’m happy to offer you some wine or mineral water. I’ll even make an omelet if you’re hungry. But I will not be psychoanalyzed in my own home — by a guest.”

Ideas and convictions were already coming out of me and I’d only written a few words in my journal.

“What happened?” Anna asked.

I told her the story of Theon and Jolie, of Big Dick and my first orgasm in years, of the gangster, the cop, and Rash Vineland, who could get me to talk like no one had in a very long time.

“I don’t want to sound like a therapist in your own home,” Anna said. “But you sound so detached. It’s like you have no connection to these tragedies or any other feelings.”

“I’m a spiritual paraplegic,” I agreed. “I’m stuck, cut off, and numb.”

Concern creased the sophisticated brow of the descendant of bloodthirsty Vikings.

“What can I do?” she asked.

“I’m broke, Anna. That’s why I didn’t return your call. Theon spent all our money, every cent, before he died. I can’t afford to see you. In a couple of months I won’t even have my own bed to sleep in.”

For a long while she stared at me. I thought that she was looking for a friendly way to excuse herself. The world we lived in was defined by the ability to pay, and I no longer had that talent. Her accent alone was enough to tell me that she couldn’t, that she wouldn’t and even shouldn’t reach out across the void of poverty.

“I work from eight in the morning until five every afternoon,” Anna said after a long span of silence. “You can choose any two mornings at six and I will be there to meet with you.”

“I don’t need two mornings,” I said, a little breathless with gratitude, not in appreciation for the free offer of therapy but for the generosity itself. I might have been near tears.

“Yes, you do,” Anna Karin said. “As a matter of fact I will only agree to see you if you consent to meeting me twice a week.”

“I don’t understand.”

Anna’s eyes were a pale blue, like a day that had been bright but was now being covered by a thin layering of clouds.

She smiled.

“I don’t want you to leave yet,” I said then, realizing that she wasn’t going to answer my question.

She sat back in the plush chair and eyed me closely.

I enjoyed the scrutiny. This made me think of the pleasure Lana got when I gazed so closely at her.

“I know you don’t,” Anna said. “But there’s a delicate line here. We are about to embark upon a very fragile phase of our relationship. This is not about friendship. A friend would not be able to break the bond that you’re held by. A friend would not be able to let you go.”

Again I felt something. There was some kind of truth in her statement. I knew what she said was right but I couldn’t have explained why.

Anna stood up then and nodded.

“Wednesday and Thursday,” I said, because it was a week away and I needed time.

“Six in the morning,” Anna added.

“Do you have to go?”

“Yes,” she said. “I do.”

The next thing I knew I was on my feet holding Anna with all my might. She gripped me in an embrace that was almost a restraint. I was surprised by her strength.

We let go at the same moment, as if the movements had been choreographed.

“I will see you this coming Wednesday,” she said. “Six a.m.”

I watched as she walked away, unable to bring myself to accompany her to the door.

I got to Threadley’s at a little after nine that evening. The door was locked, so I pressed the bell and waited patiently. Lewis Dardanelle was somewhere inside. He was like a vampire who only came out to work at night. Most of the people he met were by appointment only.

I was still wearing the faded dress and tattered sneakers. But I had showered and so felt presentable.

“Mrs. Pinkney,” a voice spoke from a speaker embedded in the wall.

“Yes, Mr. Dardanelle. I’m here about your call.”

“I’ll be right down.” His voice was crisp, almost buoyant.

I thought about my mother. She still lived in the small house where I was raised, off Central Avenue, down around Watts. I wouldn’t be able to send her any more checks. That would make my older brother, Cornell, happy. He always wanted to be seen as the breadwinner of our family but I was the one who supported Mom. I wondered how Cornell was, if he’d speak to me ever again.

The extra-wide door of the mortuary swung inward and the lean mortician bowed for me to enter.

“Let’s go to my office,” he said with a wan and yet somehow a profound smile. Or maybe I was just reading things into every gesture and motion; maybe the only truth in my world was a fabrication perpetrated by a state of shock.

He led me through the barren stone room to a small hallway. At the end of this shabby lane of coffin-lid-thin doors we came to a small elevator. It was crowded in there with just the two of us.

The vestibule moved slowly past the second floor and the third. I could hear Dardanelle’s bellowslike breath coming slowly and strong.

“He wants to what?” I had asked Theon one evening when he had come home from planning the burial of Sack “Big Daddy” Pounds.

“He wants to have sex with you in this special coffin he keeps in a room next to his office,” Theon said, as if my answer were a foregone conclusion. “He says that he’ll give us Sack’s coffin at half off if we do.”

“We?”

Passing the fourth floor of the six-story house of death I was brought back to the night Theon expected me to whore for his dead friend. I considered walking out, calling Theon a bastard, breaking the glass I held in my hand. It wasn’t so much that I was appalled by Lewis or by having sex with someone and being paid for it. Almost every woman I knew considered the monetary value of the man she took off her clothes for.

What upset me was the thought of having to fuck for money after I died (even if that death was only a metaphor), of being lowered into a coffin and having some man with a hard-on put on top of me instead of a cool muslin shroud.

I wanted to scream and run from the image Theon had conjured up for our death-house discount, but instead a pastel calm came over me.

“Theon,” I said, looking into his eyes with my head cocked and my fake blue eyes beaming.

He saw in me the turmoil of a life under hot lights, of marriage to a man who was sometimes no better than a pimp, of sores and viruses and intimacies that no living being could endure without some kind of protection.

I saw my thoughts roll around behind his eyes and he saw me observing his most vulnerable insights.

“I’m sorry, babe,” he said.

When we went to bed that night he held me and kissed my neck.

There was a cricket somewhere in the house calling out for a mate. I smiled at the memory of a husband who, for all his flaws, managed to get it right every once in a while.

“Here we are,” Lewis Dardanelle said.

The elevator had stopped and the towering man was holding the door for me.

I wondered why I wasn’t afraid. Why hadn’t I, in years, felt the tremors of fear around violent men who hated women with their sex and their words?

Slap her tits while you’re fucking that cunt, one director said in every scene I did for him, and I did four scenes a day, three days a week for eighteen months.

Dardanelle’s office contained the dark and cool calm of a peaceful dream about to end. His desk was white ash and there were paintings of flowers hung on every wall. There was no bookcase, just a round oak table with various religious texts strewn upon it.

“Let’s sit at the table,” Lewis said, gesturing for me to choose a seat.

He sat after I did, lacing his arachnidlike fingers and smiling just under the threshold of humor.

“We have received sixty-eight thousand dollars in cash and credit card accounts,” he said, explaining the smile’s nature with these words.

“That’s wonderful.”

“We could take the big chapel up at Day’s Rest.”

“I like the idea of having the service near the grave,” I said. “How many people have given money?”

“Four hundred and ninety-eight.”

“Then we should plan on a service for, say... seven hundred?”

“Yes.”

“I guess the big room would be appropriate then.”

“Yes. Would you like to view coffins this evening?”

“No.”

“No?”

“I want him in a plain pine box, Lew. Light wood with no flourishes, no finish, if you can find something like that.”

“I’m sure we have something.”

“Take what’s left from the service and get Talia to see to the catering at our house. You have the address?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll get Lana Leer to call Talia. I’ll give Lana the key, so all they have to do is work out the logistics.”

Dardanelle and I were as peaceful as the grave; there was no conflict among the dead.

We sat there in the soft light of the silent office. Now and then an errant sound wafted up from the street.

I don’t remember leaving Threadley’s that evening: not standing up from the round table or saying good night, not thanking Lewis for the work he and Talia had done or filling out the papers that I must have signed. The next thing I knew I was pulling into my driveway, wondering if Richard Ness would be waiting for me.

The night passed like waves that back up on themselves and then press forward again. This feeling was in the form of dreams and half-conscious musings. The ideas from both states of awareness traded places, moved back and forth almost as if I were a fabricated notion of some other being who had conjured me as a character in fiction or a play.

The character, me — young Sandy Peel — was fifteen and on the run from the police. I had been giving blow jobs in a parking lot south of Hollywood Boulevard and the cops were cracking down on that activity. My best friend at the time, Amy Chapman, had been arrested and sent to jail for thirty days even though she was my age.

I saw the cops and they saw me. I went through a wire gate into an alley that split into three directions. I went straight ahead, climbed into a backyard where a dog tried to bite me, and made it to the boulevard. I walked into a chain coffee shop and took a seat at a table where a man was drinking expensive coffee served in a paper cup.

“Excuse me,” I said to the gentleman. “Can I sit here with you for a little while?”

“You solo?” he asked.

“Huh?”

He smiled at my naïveté.

His smile made me mad and I would have gotten up and left, but I saw the uniforms that had been chasing me right outside the coffee shop window.

The man saw my fear and its source with a glance and moved his chair so that his body blocked me from being seen.

“My name is Theon Pinkney,” he said.

He was around forty, ancient to my teenage eyes, wearing gray slacks and a maroon dress shirt open to show off his chest hair.

“I’m Debbie Dare,” I said, making up a whole new life then and there.

“My car’s in the parking lot out back,” he said. “Would you like me to drive you somewhere?”

“Out from this life into another one where a girl could hit a break,” I said.

I had heard these words from Mela David, an older prostitute who sometimes threw work our way. If all a guy wanted was a fifteen-dollar blow job, she’d send him to the parking lot that Amy and I haunted.

Theon smiled and gestured toward the back of the restaurant with his right hand. He wore three thick gold rings, with a single gem embedded in each: one ruby, one emerald, and a yellow diamond. The brightness of those jewels took my breath away.

He drove a red Rolls with the softest calfskin seats I ever sat in.

He reached over and pulled my seat belt on for me. This was also a first in my experience. Every other time I got in a strange man’s car it was to suck his dick, and you couldn’t do that in a harness.

As he turned left onto Hollywood he asked, “Now, where is this life you were talking about?”

“Where you live at?” I asked, and he smiled again.

“Do you know who I am?”

“No.”

“You ever watch X-rated movies?”

“Sometimes I be wit’ a boyfriend who watch ’em but I never paid much mind.”

“I bet it takes a lot to impress you.”

“I like your rings,” I said with some emphasis.

“How old are you?”

“Old enough to get arrested for suckin’ a white man’s dick in the front seat’a his car.”

“Do they arrest the man?”

“No. They give him a summons an’ send him home.”

“They should arrest the john for child molesting and send you home to your mother.”

“I ain’t no child.”

“Only a child could be as beautiful as you are, Debbie Dare.”

I was very young and he was older than my dead father but that didn’t matter. The place I was looking for was a room where somebody looked at me and called me pretty. I was a wild thing when I climbed into Theon Pinkney’s car but he tamed me with just a few words.

When I woke up the morning sun was streaming into the polar bear room. There was drool down the side of my face and my crotch itched.

In the bathroom I peered into the mirror, half expecting to see white roots coming in at the baseline of my brown hair.

I brushed my teeth and ran a comb through the short dark brown mane.

There were three messages on the answering machine. I wondered if I had missed them when I got home, or maybe the phone had rung in the night but I was too deep asleep to hear it.

Marcia Pinkney had called again. She said that she’d be home for the entire day tomorrow and would be happy to see me at any time.

I wondered again at the time of her call. It was ten in the morning and Marcia was an early riser. If the call had come in on Thursday then she meant for me to drop by today; if it was this morning that she called she’d be expecting a Saturday visit.

This displaced feeling fit perfectly with my state of mind. I was lost in time, experiencing the past as clearly as (in some cases more so than) the present.

For long minutes I considered Marcia Pinkney’s call and its origins. It didn’t occur to me to call her. Marcia had never spoken to me directly. When Theon brought me to her home, on the occasion of his brother’s death, she had said to Theon, “Please tell this woman that she is not welcome in my home.”

Finally I moved on to the second message.

“You’re fired!” Linda Love shouted, and then she slammed her receiver down.

“Coco Manetti here,” the third caller said, his voice smooth and somewhat sinister. “I’m an associate of Richard Ness...” He left a number and said that he hoped I would call him.

I knew of Coco. I’d have to shoot him if ever I brought out my father’s piece.

A pang of hunger made its presence known. I was starving. This feeling confused me. For so long I went hungry by choice.

LeRoy’s Chicken and Waffle House was on Venice Boulevard very near the ocean. Absolutely everybody ate there at one time or other.

I had the pecan waffle with two spicy thighs and a side of hash browns along with coffee and orange juice.

I sat at an outside table that faced in a westerly direction but did not afford the view of the ocean; it was just that much too far away.

The sky was clear and vacant like nearly every day in Los Angeles, like most of the people who came to California.

The feeling of Los Angeles is that of free fall, I wrote in the little journal that I pilfered from our housekeeper. There’s nothing to grab onto but it’s beautiful if you could only stop and appreciate the view.

It felt good eating all that food and sitting outside in the stupid but beautiful day. No one came to talk to me because of my dress and shoes. It was the perfect disguise in that part of L.A., the shabby, faded look.

Hey, Debbie, I remembered a male fan once shouting at an adult film event, I just wanna fuck that red dress, baby, that’s all.

Kip Rhinehart lived in a converted schoolhouse way up a steep driveway deep in Malibu Canyon. It was a horseshoe-shaped building with the hump facing toward the entrance drive. The arc of the front of the building was two stories high. Kip had an apartment on the second floor. The rest of the place was composed of single-story classrooms. These were leased by the day or week to people in various businesses, including my own.

I parked behind Kip’s red pickup in the circular area in front of the informal business. Then I rang the doorbell and waited patiently.

You could smell the ocean up there — something to do with the wind currents. There was a wildness to that particular section of the canyon that almost made it seem alive — not filled with life but like a huge creature with a single mind and a long, long life span.

“Can I help you?” a man called from my right.

He would have been shorter than I even standing straight, but Kip was a little hunched over from some natural malady or condition. He wore a white T-shirt and dark blue jeans. He also had on hard-looking light brown cowboy boots.

“Hey, Kip.”

“Yes?”

“Don’t you recognize me?”

The sixty-year-old’s face was wrinkled and brownish but he was a white guy. When he squinted he aged a decade. The surprise made him younger again.

“Deb? That you?”

“Do I have to put on a wig and contact lenses just to come visit?”

“No,” he said.

He rushed over and hugged me.

Kip was one of the few men I allowed this privilege. Guys tried to grab me so often that I naturally avoided cuddles, clinches, and bear hugs. But with Kip it was always friendly, considerate.

“What happened to your hair?” he asked.

“I’m just tired, Kip.”

The empathy in his eyes reflected some decision that he’d reached long ago, before I was born no doubt.

“You wanna cup’a java?” he asked.

Kip’s property ended at a cliff that overlooked the ocean. The tiny bands of waves were far enough away that you could see but not hear them.

There was a stone dais laid out at the far edge. On this platform sat a pink table and four shabby plastic white chairs. It was there that Kip served me his Spanish coffee and canned evaporated milk.

I accepted this hospitality not because I wanted or needed it but because he offered. The kindness was like a high-denomination poker chip: valueless as a thing but representing something of significance.

“I’m so sorry about Theon,” he said after we were seated and looking out.

It was early afternoon. The sun was high and hot.

“He went out with a beautiful girl on top of him,” I replied.

“He loved you though.”

“Yeah. I guess he did.”

“It’s hard being an old porn star, Deb,” Kip said. “I mean, it’s harder on women but guys feel it too. There’s no retirement plan and unless they can use a camera there’s no work to speak of.”

“It’s quiet around here,” I said, because there was no reply to Kip’s pronouncement.

“Not rentin’ out too much. I took in Jolie ’cause Theon asked personally. Place is paid for and I got my government check for the bills.”

Kip gazed back at the vacant area inside the horseshoe. It was a brick playground turned patio, with grasses and weeds growing up through the cracks. Looking at that space I remembered seeing Kip gazing down from his second-floor window when I was taking one man’s hard-on down my throat while his German friend was fucking my ass.

“I was chokin’ at one end and trying to relax at the other,” I told Theon that night.

He told me that he’d been in the exact same situation once when a gambler, Coco Manetti, made him do a gay film to pay off a bad debt.

I remembered feeling sorry for Theon.

And now he was dead.

“It’s good that you quittin’ the business,” Kip said. “That’s no kind of life for you.”

“No kind of life for anyone.”

“But you’re so smart, Deb,” he argued. “A lotta these people in the life couldn’t be anything else. At least they get paid for bein’ young and flexible. But you read books... you talk like you know somethin’.

“I remember when I first met you, when you were just a kid. You talked like you were straight outta the hood, but now you talk like some kinda coed or somethin’.”

Theon had paid for my etiquette lessons.

“How do you know I read?” I asked. I never talked about books to anyone except my therapist and that one arrogant literature professor.

“Theon told me. I asked him did he get jealous with you havin’ sex with all those young men and he said that it was only the books made him turn green. He said that he always felt like he was about to lose you when you were lookin’ in a book.”

The window of Jolie’s room looked down the cliff and over the Pacific. It was the kind of place that only wealth or beauty could afford. My family and I had lived in a small cottage. There was no privacy, much less solace, and the only view was of the street and smoggy city sky. What little green we had was painted on the concrete of our front yard. But I was never bothered by any of that. I adored my brothers, took care of my mother, and my father was a dream come true. He read me fairy tales and showed me how to count money when he was still comfortable with me sitting on his lap.

I was remembering the scent of Aldo Peel as I sat on Jolie’s last bed. Aftershave and deodorant, tobacco smoke and whiskey — the feeling of my father could still steal up on me and transform, for an instant, wherever I was into the home I abandoned.

There was a small stack of magazines under the bed. Style and fashion publications that showed off beautiful women with handsome men, along with the chic clothes and gorgeous architecture.

Myrtle May had read these glossy magazines closely and voraciously; I could tell this by the wrinkled pages and sentences that had been underlined in pink ink throughout.

Beauty, one such underlined passage read, is a thing that rises out from the inside of a person. A man will be attracted by form and style but this inner beauty is what he lives for.

Your body is the bank, another sentence said, but the wealth is your spirit.

There were many such lines in the beauty magazines. This surprised me. I read the same publications and couldn’t remember having come across such insightful comments.

She had cigarettes and a joint in her desk drawer, quaaludes and a tiny bag of cocaine in a small lacquered box on the bureau. Her childish jewelry was either silver or gold plated. Her clothes were jumbled in a box on the floor.

There was a violet diary with a stylized red heart and yellow flower stenciled across the cover. There was a small latch that she had locked. The key was probably with the police, or maybe her parents had it now.

I had just pulled out of Kip’s driveway when I decided to drive off the road and crash my car down the cliff and into the Pacific. It wasn’t a difficult choice; nor was it a judgment or verdict. It was like deciding to listen to jazz after five years of rock and roll, like changing the radio station after renting a car in a different city.

I was just going to drive off the road. There was no trepidation or physical awareness; I wasn’t afraid of the pain.

Up ahead of me, just beyond the turn there was a clear view of the sky. That’s where I was going to fly off. When I got there and made the turn, I found myself on a little area designed for motorists to pull off when they got lost. The cliff was guarded by trees and three big boulders.

There was no egress (a word I once read in a nineteenth-century romance). I had to stop.

And when I stopped the entirety of the days since that orgasm, since those senseless deaths, since I’d lost everything I’d worked for for fifteen years and more — it all crashed in from behind, like a bulldozer trying to push me over the edge.

I had never cried like that before. Even the heartrending loss of my father didn’t call up such grief. I screamed so hard that I couldn’t breathe, cried so violently that it felt like my insides would come out of my eyes, nose, and mouth.

I flung the car door open and threw myself from the seat. Falling to the ground I willed myself to stand, then lurched stiff-legged to the gap between the boulders and looked down.

I remembered every sensation, sound, and smell as if I were experiencing them at this very moment. There was the chattering birdsong from the bushes below, but Death filled the horizon. I remembered smashing my favorite doll after my mother came home from the emergency room and told me that my father was dead. It was a fancy, old-fashioned black doll that he had given me.

“Niggahs done kill him,” Mom’s friend Galia said.

I destroyed that doll, hoping the sacrifice would somehow reverse time and bring my father back. I was a mad scientist and an angry child. But now, overlooking the ocean, all I could do was cry.

I sat down between the guard stones and wept. The misery in me was hot wax over an unrelenting flame. I was being consumed by my own fires. My soul, I felt, was dripping down that mountainside between the bushes and birds, ants and hidden animals. I was a husk then, an empty vessel that had been filled with poisons.

When it was over I was both drained and clear. I felt like the inner-city sky after the rains had washed away the pollution. I stood up, experiencing a sensation of weightlessness. The sorrow was gone from me but I had no reason to smile. The spiritual infection that drained out of me on that little turnabout had been inside for years. Cutting off my hair had been like pressing the wound but not treating it. Days of sleep only served to deaden but not destroy the pain.

I’d left Kip’s residence at two-oh-two that afternoon. It was two twenty-eight when I got back in the car.

While driving down the canyon road I thought of my mother hanging clothes to dry on the line in the backyard. She’d usually have a radio playing old disco songs while she danced with the sheets and T-shirts, bras and socks.

“Why you always got to be washin’ clothes an’ hangin’ ’em up on a line, Mama?” my younger brother, Newland, asked for at least the hundredth time.

My mother never got tired of the question. She’d always answer, “You have to wash ’em sometimes, baby; otherwise they get all stinky and stiff.”

Marcia Pinkney’s home sat between two other flat-roofed houses in the dead-end arc of a cul-de-sac on a street named Pine Circle. The grass was green and trimmed and the front porch was the length of the front of the ultramodern-looking house. I parked in the driveway and walked across the lawn.

The blue tennis shoes were worn and so I could feel moisture from a recent watering through the soles and sides of the shoes. The cold spots made me smile. I stopped to appreciate this sensation.

The sky above my head was gray from air pollution. A gang of starlings squabbled madly in the limbs of a great oak standing in the left-side neighbor’s yard.

Somewhere, I was sure, a black woman in a white wig was rutting under the high school dreams of Myron Palmer or one of his friends. The woman in the wig would certainly steal my name.

I willed myself to take a step but my legs resisted. I took a deep breath and leaned forward — if my legs refused I’d fall to the ground. Half the way into the fall my right leg jutted forward and I was again stalking toward Theon’s mother’s home.

The door was open but the screen was shut.

I pressed the button and chimes filled the air.

Inside the house was dark, shadowy. It was hot outside but cool air was rushing out through the screen.

It came to me that I should walk away at that moment. This was the only appropriate action to take.

“Hello, dear,” Marcia Pinkney said.

She was standing in the haze of the screen door, neither smiling nor frowning, staring into my face.

“You look different,” the slender and small white woman said.

“Can I come in?” I hadn’t spoken since leaving Kip’s house.

“Of course,” the older woman said as she undid a latch and pulled the door open. “Do you have a cold, dear?”

“I’ve been crying,” I said.

“Oh... yes, of course.”

Theon’s mother was short and frail-looking. The white of her dress made her skin seem gray. Her bones were made for birds and other slight creatures but her eyes were dark and magnificent.

She led me through the unlit rooms that were not walled off from one another. To the left was a sunken living room that had green carpeting and violet walls. To the right the kitchen lay. It was a brown-on-brown affair with tall stools and a plank apron that went around three sides of the stove.

Marcia led me through the house to a double yellow door that opened onto a covered patio, which looked out on a waterless swimming pool. The bottom of the pool was littered with dry brown leaves and caked with dirt.

“Something to drink?” Theon’s mother asked me.

A crystal pitcher sat on the coral-colored aluminum table. Sweating, it was filled with a bright green liquid.

“Gin and sweet lime,” she said, as if introducing me to a sentient being.

The baby-blue chairs were made from some kind of space-age ceramic material. It felt like I had to press myself down just to sit. I still had the feeling of weightlessness. As if in a dream I imagined that I could float up above the roof and sail away to Hawaii or even farther — to lands that had not yet been discovered.

There was a silver tray with two unbreakable clear plastic tumblers on it. Marcia poured the tumblers full and handed one to me.

I took a sip. It was very sweet and tangy, not alcoholic at all.

“Were you expecting someone?” I asked.

“You, my dear.”

“Oh?” I felt complimented and at the same time compromised.

“Where do I begin?” Marcia asked.

“The funeral is set for next Saturday at Day’s Rest.”

“Oh.” I could see her thinking of the zoo the memorial service would be.

“You could come the night before to say good-bye if you wanted,” I offered.

“Theon told me that you were very perceptive,” she said through a mild smile. “But I didn’t listen to him. I never listened to him.”

She took a deep gulp from the glass.

I did the same.

“Did you love him?” she asked.

“Often but not always.”

“I blamed you for destroying his life.”

“When Theon and I met he was forty-three and I had just turned fifteen.”

The math pained her. She took a drink and I responded in kind.

“That young?”

“He always liked younger women.”

“You were a child.”

“Not on the street I wasn’t. I couldn’t afford to be.”

“I...” she said, and then took another drink.

I swigged my gin Kool-Aid and waited for the rest.

“I can’t... I can’t bear to think about these things in my house,” Marcia Pinkney said at last. “I told Theon that I didn’t want his sordid business here.”

“He was born here, Marcia.”

“I know.”

We both finished our sweet drinks and she refilled our glasses.

I felt the mental stutter of inebriation when I looked up to see a jet flying high above.

“What was he like?” Marcia asked.

I gazed at her, nearly flummoxed by the question.

“Did he collect stamps?” she added. “Did he play softball?”

“Didn’t you ever talk to him?”

“When his father was alive...” she said, and then paused. “When his father was alive there was a lot of conflict between them.”

Henry Pinkney beat his sons mercilessly. That was why Theon never wanted children.

My dad would beat us and Mom would leave the house, he’d told me more than once. My idea of family is going to the park and watching other people play with their kids.

“When Hank died,” Marcia continued, “I thought that things would get better, but Johnny ran away and Theon turned angry and sullen. I tried to talk to him but he wouldn’t listen. He got that apartment in Hollywood and met that... that awful woman, that Moana Bone. She was the one who turned him into a pimp.”

Marcia didn’t know the right words but I understood what she meant. And anyway, in the end Theon had actually become a pimp of sorts.

“It must have been terrible to feel like you were losin’ your fam’ly one at a time,” I said. The liquor had affected my words. My mother’s tongue was speaking for me.

I felt like a field of wheat undulating under the pressure of otherwise imperceptible breezes.

“Oh yes,” Marcia said with certainty. “I wished that I had a daughter to sit with me.”

“Girl might not be what you wanted neither, Marcia. Moana Bone was somebody’s little girl once.”

“Her mother must curse the day she was born,” my mother-in-law said.

“Just like you and Theon.”

The widow gave me a grieved look and refilled both our glasses.

“Am I really so evil?” she asked.

“I wish none of it ever happened,” I replied.

“Don’t we all,” she agreed.

“No, Mrs. Pinkney,” I said. “No. A lot of people love their hate. They live to hate the people wronged them. You cain’t just have one gang. That don’t even make sense. If you took away the white man’s black man or the black man’s white man, most of ’em wouldn’t even know how to walk down the street right.”

Marcia Pinkney started and stared. She shivered and almost forgot to take a swig of her sweet oblivion.

“I hated you because you were a black girl,” she said, as if it were a revelation — even to her.

“I know that.”

“You do?”

“Yeah.”

“How could you know when I only just realized it right now?”

“Theon told me that when he hooked up wit’ Moana you went to her and begged that she let Theon go. He said you offered her money and anything else she wanted. But when he finally did leave her and got together with me you didn’t even try.”

I could see that Marcia wanted to deny my slurred indictment, that she wanted to say that it was a different time and situation. But she couldn’t put the lie into words.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, and then she began to weep.

I got a little teary too. Not the racking anguish I felt on the mountainside. This was more like a gentle mist than a raging storm. But still it moved me enough to get up and go over to Marcia. I knelt down next to her ceramic chair and embraced her. She was stiff at first but then let go and cried on my shoulder.

After a few minutes of these soft tears she patted my arm and I went back to my chair. We divvied up the last of the delicious drink and stared out over the empty, filthy pool into the polluted sky, through which we could see the bare outline of the San Bernardino Mountains.

The sun was going down but it was comfortable enough outside.

A trio of hummingbirds came by to inspect the scent of the now empty pitcher. Marcia snored gently as I watched the delicate birds inspect this wonderful but inaccessible plastic flower.

One of them did a circuit around my head. Maybe she smelled the sugar on my lips. I thought that it would be nice to be kissed by a hummingbird.

Soon they all flitted away to a bush of yellow flowers on the far side of the pool.

Not long after that the sun began to set. I was sad and peaceful sitting there.

“Oh dear,” Marcia said after a while.

“What, Mrs. Pinkney?”

“I can’t seem to stand up.”

“Is something wrong?”

“I think it’s the gin,” she said, and then chuckled.

I giggled along with her.

“Let me help you,” I said.

I tried to get up but failed on the first attempt. Taking a deep breath I tried once more, stood up, and stayed in that posture. I found that I could maintain that stance as long as I held on to the edge of the aluminum table.

“Your sheets are in the wind too,” Marcia said.

I wondered if the words actually meant what she was saying. It didn’t matter — the old racist and I understood each other quite well.

“I should put you to bed,” I said.

I helped Marcia Pinkney to her feet and walked with her to the many-windowed master bedroom. I helped her off with the white dress and laid her down, pulling the blankets up to her chin.

I thought she had fallen back asleep but then she grabbed my hand.

“Don’t go when you’re still tipsy, dear,” she said.

“Don’t you worry,” I said. “I’ll sit out on the couch and watch TV until I’m sober enough to drive.”

In the living room I contemplated watching the old console television but gave up the notion. Just the idea of the jangled sounds and shifting images made me queasy. I sat on an ugly maroon couch that was built to seat two. On a green stone table next to it was a framed photograph of Theon when he was maybe thirteen. He was smiling with his mouth but not his eyes. I saw in the child the future man.

This vision brought a sigh from deep in my lungs.

I cradled the picture and sat back on the unsightly but comfortable couch.

It was so strange to be out in Pomona sharing confidences with Theon’s mother. One of the reasons he married me was that he knew that she and I could never be friends. Theon didn’t trust his mother. He believed that she could have saved him from his father’s savage beatings but that she did not because she didn’t love him enough. This distinction was very important to him: His mother did love him but not enough to save him.

Smiling at the thought of my dead husband’s delicate psyche I closed my eyes. When I opened them again the sky had lightened. The sun was not yet up but dawn was coming.

I stumbled out to my car and popped the trunk. There I kept a small leather bag with all my toiletries. I brought this into the house, found a guest toilet far from Marcia’s bedroom, and did my morning cleanup.

At least I didn’t have to shave.

Before leaving I peeked in on Marcia. With her defenses of nostalgia and gin she was able to appear somewhat in charge of her diminishing domain. But sleep took away her armor, leaving an old woman bereft of everything she’d lived for.

I thought about the word bereft and remembered Jude Lyon. When Theon had told me that Jude was dangerous there was actual fear in his tone.

I left a note on the kitchen table with my red phone number on it. Then I walked out into the weak sunshine of early morning, put the toiletry bag back into the trunk, and made it to the driver’s seat. There I closed the car door but had to stay still for a few moments in deference to my body’s memory of the alcohol.

My head ached and there was a buzzing in my ear.

I considered letting the seat back and napping for a while before driving off.

A few more minutes passed.

Then there came a tapping on the window.

I turned and saw a uniformed policeman. He’d rapped on my glass with his nightstick. In the side-view mirror I could see at least two other cops approaching.

I was that fifteen-year-old girl again, praying for a Theon Pinkney to help me escape.

The cop motioned for me to roll down the window.

An instantaneous chemical reaction purged me of the hangover.

I opened the car door.

“I said to put down the window.” The cop raised his voice enough for the tones to shift while he was speaking.

“To do that I’d have to turn the ignition,” I said, back in full control of my tongue.

“Get out,” he commanded.

I smiled, swiveled, and stood.

“Lift your hands at your side,” another policeman said.

I’d had a hundred directors telling me what to do with my body parts. These were just two more.

The first cop was white — they all were white — and male. He, the first one, went into the car while the second director turned me around, pushed my arms down behind my back, and put handcuffs on my wrists. I let my body go limp in order to minimize the bruising from the adrenaline-filled police.

I was turned around, not gently.

“You broke into this home,” a gray-headed policeman told me. He wore reflective sunglasses and had almost indiscernible gray stubble on his chin. His breath was both minty and sour.

“No. I was visiting my mother-in-law,” I said. “Now I’m going home.”

“Yeah, sure,” the cop said. “We got the call from a neighbor that a black woman was breaking into her neighbor’s home, taking things from the house and putting them in her trunk.”

My big blue bag was in the trunk with my father’s gun inside. I had a carry permit in my wallet, but if the constabulary was not inclined to believe me then they didn’t have to believe my documents either.

If my hair was long and white and my eyes the color of the ocean they would have recognized me immediately, maybe asked for an autograph. I wrote these words in my little journal not long after that encounter. Of course, now I realize that if I were a white woman driving a pale blue Jaguar the cops would have never put cuffs on me; they would have never been called to the scene or, if called, they might not have come.

“Whose car is this?” the gray cop asked.

“Mine.”

“Where’s your license?”

“Free my hands and I’ll get it for you.”

“You’re under arrest,” he said, and was preparing to say more.

“What’s the problem here?” a strong female voice inquired.

I was surprised to realize that tone had come from Marcia Pinkney.

She was wearing a brown housecoat and turquoise slippers. Her left hand clutched the housecoat at her breast and her right hand was held out to reiterate the question in case the officers were deaf — or dumb.

“Ma’am,” Gray Cop said. “Is this your house?”

“Of course. Why do you have my daughter-in-law in chains?”

“Um,” he said. “Daughter-in-law?”

“Answer my question, young man.”

“We got a call from across the street that a black woman had broken into this house.”

“And you were going to arrest her without even knocking on the door?”

“We had to secure her first. Um. Are you okay, ma’am?”

“Of course I am. Don’t you see me?”

“Because we have her in custody. You don’t have to be afraid.”

“I’m not afraid of my daughter-in-law, Mrs. Theon Pinkney. She’s the one who should be afraid. Four big men grabbing her and putting her in chains. What’s wrong with you?”

The police stood there, slightly confused. I could see that they felt justified, even righteous, for grabbing me in Marcia’s driveway. There was no question in their minds that I was a criminal and that they were on the side of the Law.

Marcia glanced at me then. We’d spent hours together but it was as if she hadn’t really gotten a good look at me until seeing the tableau in her driveway.

“Take those chains from my daughter-in-law’s arms,” she said, sounding just a little like her son.

The gray cop hesitated. He didn’t like being ordered around by a civilian. He was the one in charge. Maybe he considered arresting us both, but he knew that the witness across the street, the one who called about me, was probably still watching and that a patrol cop was subject to the same justice that he carried around on his shoulders like Superman’s cape.

“Let her go,” he muttered.

“But, Joe,” the cop who tapped on my window said.

“Let her fuckin’ go.”

The first cop turned me around and took off the cuffs. I resisted rubbing my wrists — I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction.

“I know there’s something wrong here,” Gray Cop said to Marcia. “And I will be back.”

“There’ll be no need for that, young man,” Marcia said, looking up into the reflection in the policeman’s shades. “Because what’s wrong here is the same thing that’s wrong with you. Just look in a mirror and you will see that like I see it now.”

I went to the passenger’s seat and popped the trunk again. I went to my big blue bag and pulled out my wallet.

“Do you still want to see my license?” I asked the senior cop.

“Let’s get outta here,” he said to his men.

They turned and walked to their cars, gave me a parting warning look, and drove out of the little cul-de-sac, so many angry crows humiliated at being chased by a little girl with a stick.

“Is it always like this?” Marcia asked me after the cops were gone.

“I haven’t been out of my comfort zone for a long time, Marcia. Usually I’m in a place where everybody knows me and everybody treats me with respect. They might not mean it; they might not like me, but at least they smile and pretend.”

Across the circle a white woman came out on the porch of her ranch-style home. She was tall and thin, wearing a burgundy robe decorated with a pattern that I couldn’t make out from the distance.

“I don’t understand what you mean,” Marcia said.

“What just happened here is how people really feel,” I said. “Your neighbor over there saw a black woman fooling around in the front yard and then go into your house...”

“Old Nancy Bierny should mind her own business,” Marcia said with venom.

“You would’a done the same thing, Marcia. If you saw a black woman goin’ in and outta Nancy’s at six in the morning, you would’a called the cops and said that someone was acting suspiciously in front of a neighbor’s house. You would have been scared and the woman you saw would have been presumed guilty. That’s the way it is in the straight world where the good folks live. That’s part of the reason Theon left. He didn’t want to be associated with the world you and your husband lived in — the world where he got beaten and you went to hide in another part of the house.”

Marcia put a hand on my wrist.

“Please stop,” she said. “I can’t stand to think about it.”

“Okay,” I said. “Sorry. I left my number on the kitchen counter. If you want to come see Theon’s body the night before, you just call. I got that cell phone on me all the time now.”

Marcia pulled her hand away from my wrist and put it over her mouth. Maybe she didn’t trust herself to speak.

I know if I were her that I wouldn’t have known what to say.

There’s a little shop on Robertson just north of Venice Boulevard. I’d not been inside before but whenever I drove past I thought that the kind of clothes they sold would be perfect for my mother. It was called Phyllis Designs.

I was thinking about that shop while at LeRoy’s Chicken and Waffle House eating more calorie-rich food. I ate, wrote these words in my little journal, and reread a few chapters of Kindred by Octavia Butler. In between phrases I paused, thinking of the little dress shop.

Hours passed as I sat at the low wall of the outside patio, drinking coffee refills and turning from one project to the next. The waiter made me pay at one point. I suppose he thought I was some kind of thief who would try to get away without paying for the meal.

But that didn’t bother me. I was thinking about Marcia and the gray cop, my father’s gun and a new wardrobe for a new life.

“Can I help you?” asked a tall white woman in an orange one-piece dress.

The dress was designed for a woman younger than her fifty-something years but she probably looked better in it than she would in more age-appropriate garb.

She had brown hair and like-colored eyes and her teeth were too perfect to be her own. She was thin, almost skinny, and did yoga or Pilates daily, I was sure.

She wore little makeup and didn’t give off the aura of sexuality. She strove to be attractive but kept the gate to her garden locked.

I had these thoughts because the woman was checking me out with the same intensity. She saw my fake breasts and tight body under the fat woman’s yellow-and-blue dress. She saw my age and the disproportionate concentration of experience in my eyes. She saw also that my blue bag was a real Thimera, a ten-thousand-dollar accessory that could be purchased only at a single outlet on Rodeo Drive.

“I’ve always loved this shop when I drove by,” I said. “So today I decided to come in.”

The shop woman couldn’t keep the hint of a sneer from her lips.

“Most of my clothes are for older women,” she said. “A young girl like you has less to hide and more to be proud of.”

“You’re Phyllis?”

The excitement in my tone diminished the sourness on the designer’s lips.

I understood Phyllis in that instant. She came from that very neighborhood, probably went to the high school across the street. She was a smart child and well-heeled. Phyllis didn’t want to be just another housewife and was a generation or so too early to have been allowed into the world of high finance. So she decided to be an artist: a clothes designer. But try as she might the world of runways and fashion models was also beyond her. And so her husband... or maybe he divorced her for a younger partner, and so probably her parents bought her this shop. It was a hit among women of a certain age, women who wanted to show off but still had a little something to hide.

Phyllis’s designs were craftier than the clothes made for New York and Parisian models. A thirty-three-year-old mother of two with fifteen extra pounds and less than perfect skin could don one of this shop’s offerings and go to a church or temple fund-raiser with confidence and even hints of beauty.

“It’s just a small shop,” Phyllis said, trying to figure out if she wanted me to leave or to sit and have coffee.

“My husband died a few days ago,” I said.

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“Thank you,” I said, casting my eyes around the small, clothes-crowded shop. “It was sudden and very sad, doubly so because we had grown apart and now we’ll never be able to resolve those differences.”

“What’s your name?” the conflicted storeowner asked.

“Sandy. Sandy Peel, but my married name was Pinkney.”

“You speak so well,” the older white woman said to the young black chick. “You must be well educated.”

“No. When I was a little girl my father read to me and then, when I got older, he’d have me read to him for an hour every night. I think I must have combined the love for my father and reading and so, even though I dropped out before high school, I’ve always read hard books.”

“Why’d you drop out?” my new potential best friend asked.

“After my father was murdered it was the only thing I could do.”

“Murdered? Oh my God.”

“In a way,” I said, “what’s happened with Theon, my husband, was the same as with my father. I cut my hair and threw away all my old clothes and my old life. And I’m here today to get new clothes to go along with my new life.”

“What’s that?” Phyllis asked. “What is your new life?”

“I really don’t know, Phyllis. A lot of that has to do with you, I guess. I want to be something different.”

“What are you now?” Phyllis Amber Schulman asked.

“I think,” I said, “I think I’m a little lost.”

“Why don’t we sit and have some tea?”

“My husband and I lived a kind of wild lifestyle,” I was saying to the clothes designer.

Phyllis had hung a Closed sign in the window of her shop, pulled the shade, and locked the door.

“Drugs?” she asked.

“Everything,” I said. “I can’t really go into details but we were way out there.”

“And now that he’s gone you see that there was something wrong with your life?”

“No,” I said after a few moments honestly considering her question.

“Really?” Her question contained no value judgment. She seemed truly interested in who I was.

“I loved my friends and their lives before Theon died and I still do now that he’s gone,” I said. “It’s just that I can see now that I have to move on. Do you know what I mean?”

“I used to have this boyfriend named Gary,” she said. “He was a surfer and I was his girl, at least when we were in the same place. We did a lot of drinking and cocaine. I did things with him in the bed that I would never admit to.

“Gary loved me harder than either of my children, my husband, or my parents ever did. But...”

“What?” I put down my teacup and took this stranger’s hand in mine.

“One day I woke up in this shack in Maui. Gary was unconscious from all the coke we snorted, and there were flies buzzing around the sink. I knew right then that Gary would never change and that I had to leave him or go down with him.

“I called my parents and they bought me a ticket. I didn’t even leave Gary a note.”

“Did you ever see him again?”

“When our friend Mike died,” Phyllis said, nodding, “eight years later. We bumped into each other at the service. We just said hi and asked how each other was doing. We were both married with kids. He owned a surfboard shop. Still does.”

“Did you feel like you made a mistake leaving him?” I asked. I really wanted to know.

Phyllis shook her head and looked at me with sad eyes. “No. We would have partied our way into early graves. But you know, I’ve never had anything in my life that felt as good as it did when I was with him. I sit in here sometimes talking to women just like me and I find myself wanting to hurry them out so I can call Gary up and beg him to come back. The only problem is that there’s no place to come back to.”

I squeezed her hand.

“So you see, Sandy, I know what you’re talking about.”

I left with seven dresses, four skirts, two pant suits and two pairs of pants, nine blouses, various kinds of nonthong underpants, bras, hose, three pairs of low-heeled shoes, two hats, and a crazy wristwatch with a wide red band and garnet stones for the hours. The colors we chose were burgundy, dark gold, navy blue, lime, white, and tan. There were a few flower prints, and some pinstripes, but on the whole the colors were solid and uninteresting. They fit me well enough but the sizes were appropriate to my form. Phyllis held on to the BBW blue-and-yellow dress and the tattered tennis shoes to throw away. I left the store wearing a navy skirt and a shimmery (but far from vinyl) gold blouse. I wore no hose because it was a hot day, and my shoes were blue with hemp-corded wedge heels.

I hadn’t felt sexier nor less attractive in years.

Phyllis saw me to the door and said good-bye. I nodded at her and she grabbed me in a passionate hug.

“I’m so happy that you came here to me,” she said after reluctantly letting go.

“Really? Why?”

“Most of the time people come in here to hide something or to make themselves look better than they feel and to feel better than they look. They want to spend some money or talk about their husbands and boyfriends, their kids. I guess I kind of hate them. Here I am trying to make something, to create something, and you’re the first customer I’ve ever had who wants to use my clothes the way I feel about them.”

There were tears in her eyes. I allowed her to hug me again and then she kissed my cheek.

Phyllis made me feel normal. Her story about the debauched surfer and life outside the life she was supposed to live was really very close to my experience. She was a hint, an omen that there was a place for me somewhere else.

I had the big blue bag-holster open and on my lap as I pulled into the driveway of my huge, soulless home. There were no dangers, however, no men lying in wait.

I went straight to the kitchen table and began writing about my afternoon. Phyllis was very much on my mind. She was like a spider who had chosen her permanent corner and from there wove her webs. The crevice she lived in was somewhere in the Garden of Eden but she didn’t realize that. Her talent was subtle but exquisite and the world would never know. I was a self-educated thinker but people in my world rarely realized it. And those who did resented me or wanted to fuck me in the rectum.

Phyllis and I were the same in some ways but that wasn’t enough for us to be friends. Marcia Pinkney and I had in common an overwhelming pain but we could not really share it.

It seemed that on those small journal pages all I could do was describe a world of closed doors and failed dreams. Everything I was, everything I saw seemed to be its own opposite — why, I wrote, live in a world like that?

The phone rang while I was going over and over this pointless cycle of thought.

“Hello?”

“Deb?” a man said. He sounded as if he’d recently been crying.

“Hey, Jude. How are you?”

“I’ve been calling for two days.”

“Oh. Sorry, I’ve been so busy. There’s going to be a funeral next Saturday at Day’s Rest. I hope you can come.”

“Thank you,” he said.

The value of death dawned upon me at that moment. People rarely meant so much with their words.

How are you?

I’m fine. You?

Getting along.

Great.

But when someone dies everyone has deep feelings that come to the surface, wailing and screaming and feeling profound.

Marcia and Mr. Dardanelle, even Lieutenant Mendelson showed sincere deference to me and to my dead.

“Can I do anything for you, Deb?” Jude asked.

“I don’t think so, honey. Either everything is done or it’s already too late.”

Jude gasped through the line and I felt sorry for him.

“Was he... was he in a lot of pain?” the eternal friend asked.

“No. It was quick, and if I know Theon he was having a very good time before he passed.”

“An accident?”

“A video camera that was plugged into the wall fell in the bathtub.”

“Oh my God.”

He sounded so sweet. I wondered how such a mild-mannered man could be construed as dangerous.

Jude was much smarter than Theon. He was also quite knowledgeable. Whenever the three of us got together Theon would get pissed because Jude was happy discussing D. H. Lawrence or Virginia Woolf with me. He had a college education and his mind moved easily between speculation and substance.

Jude understood what a video camera in the bathtub meant. His silence was another kind of respect. His friendship, though not for me, not exactly, was just the thing I needed.

“Would you like to meet for dinner?” I asked him.

“Tonight?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Where?”

When I got to Monarc’s Jude was already at a small round table in a partially secluded corner. He stood to kiss my cheeks and press my hands. His trousers were black, shirt gray — he even wore a black beret centered on his head like proper Frenchmen wear them.

“You changed your hair and your clothes,” he said.

“You mean I don’t look like a cheap whore anymore.”

“You always had class, Deb. Even on the worst days you rose above the... the shit.”

Jude was a small man. His hairline was receding but he wasn’t yet forty.

“He loved you,” Jude said.

“As well as he could. He loved you too.”

I luxuriated in the pleasure Jude took in this secondhand emotion. Tears formed in his eyes and I was absolutely sure that no one in the world would miss Theon more than that little man.

“Sometimes I used to hate you, Debbie,” he confessed. “You know, I wanted to be going home with him but he wanted you. You.”

I didn’t know what to say. Jude’s ardor was uncontainable. Theon’s stupid uncalculated suicide brought out feelings from every corner and depth.

“But you were always nice to me,” Jude said. “And I’d go home feeling so guilty because you never treated me bad.

“But he loved you... He told me that you were the woman made for him. It wasn’t just sex either. He said that you were his soul mate. And, and, and I don’t know. In some ways it broke my heart but made me happy at the same time.”

I noticed Rash Vineland staring at us from three tables away. For some reason the sight of him made me reach across the table and take Jude’s hand.

“We both had a place in his life, honey,” I said. “You were one of his only real friends. I mean, he had a lot of acquaintances but when something was important he always called you.”

The gratitude in Jude’s eyes was replaced by something that seemed like guilt. I thought at the time that he was feeling ashamed for his jealousy.

He squeezed my hand and the waiter came up with our menus.

“I can’t stay, Deb,” Jude said. “Right after I talked to you I got this call. I have to go meet with the F-Troop Theatre Company. I’m designing the sets and costumes for their new show.”

“Oh. You should invite me when it goes up.”

“I’ll be happy to. I’ll have them send an invitation to your house for the opening.”

“Um... maybe you should do it by e-mail,” I said. “You have my dot-com address, don’t you?”

“What’s wrong, Deb? Why can’t they send it to your house?” The joy of Jude was his laserlike perceptivity.

“Theon wasn’t the best businessman, hon. He had us in hock up to his nuts. I don’t think I’ll be in that house very long.”

“Didn’t he have a life insurance policy?”

The sound that came out of me was rarer than any orgasm or breakdown. It was so odd... my laughter: high and punctuated, surging up from my diaphragm like some kind of pent-up explosion finally finding its exit.

I leaned over the table and I think Jude was a little frightened. My whole body shook with a mirth that was both light and dark. I lowered my head into cupped hands. It must have looked like I was crying. All I could do was imagine Theon Pinkney, known to the world as Axel Rod, having the wherewithal to plan for something like death, to worry about what he left behind him in the trail of wreckage that was his journey through life. I conjured up the image of the big-bellied man with the lovely naked child at his side, looking like some minor Greek god of the sea emerging with an errant nymph who caught his fancy.

Gods didn’t buy life insurance policies, didn’t worry about money in the bank. Gods were eternal icons of fecundity and desire.

“It’s gonna be all right, Deb,” Jude was saying.

I raised my head, intending to assure Jude that I was laughing — not crying. But there were tears of hilarity in my eyes and I couldn’t speak because I knew that I’d start laughing again. So I nodded and held out my hands to him.

Jude stared at me with intensity. He was worried, inspecting my emotions with deep concentration.

“I really have to go,” he said apologetically.

“It’s okay, Jude. I’m going to stay and have some soup, I think.”

I could see Rash casting glances in our direction.

“Are you sure you’ll be okay?”

I was trying not to laugh, to bury the silly feeling I had about Theon and the future.

“I’m fine, Jude. Better than I can really say right now. It was so sweet of you to call, and... and when I finally make the plans for the service I’d love it if you would say a few words about Theon.”

Jude was shocked by this request. He started and then sat back.

“You mean you want me to come up to the podium?”

“You can’t do it from the pews.”

“I, I, I haven’t... I mean, Theon never really included me in his public life.”

“But you were his friend and you both need this good-bye.”

“I have to go, Deb,” he said. “I have to go.”

He lurched up from the table and staggered to the door. His gait was so odd and pronounced that the waiters and bartender watched warily.

When Jude was gone I wondered about the information that passed between us. He was thinking things that I had no idea of and I was experiencing emotions that he could not understand. Still, we seemed to have shared a profound moment. I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had made me laugh out loud. It might have been my father, long before he was murdered and I became a whore.

The laughter made me hungry. I ordered veal with escarole and saffron rice. I had a glass of dark red wine that the waiter gave me without naming a vintage. He just said, “I have something I think you’ll like,” and I nodded.

For some time I ate without looking at Rash Vineland. There was a smile on my face and a new world somewhere in the recesses of my mind. The substance around me felt malleable. It wasn’t that I felt comfortable or secure. My dense pubic hair was growing in and I’d crossed a big director in the industry; my husband was dead and I had been pushed past broke into serious debt. But the veal was excellent and I could bring joy into people’s lives without spreading my ass for their inspection and titillation.

“Salad, madam?” the waiter asked while clearing away the dinner dishes.

“Please.”

I turned my attention to Rash and crooked a finger. He got right up and strode the six paces to my table.

“Was that your husband?” he asked while pulling out the chair that Jude had vacated.

“And how are you this evening, Rash?” I replied.

“Uh, okay, fine. How are you?”

I smiled and the waiter brought my salad.

“I like this dress,” he said.

I was wearing a white sundress that didn’t crowd my tits or ass. It accented my figure simply because it fit and I liked the way it made me look — somewhat older and a few pounds over the limit.

“Thank you.”

Rash wanted to speak but didn’t know what to say. His discomfort tickled me. He was shy but not because of the size of my nipples or the sighs I lied with on the screen. He wanted to make conversation, to carve out a place where he and I could communicate — one way or another. His wants were commonplace and predictable, like the plot of children’s cartoons on PBS. The story was safe, nonviolent, and fully dressed.

“The man I was sitting with is a friend of the family,” I said. “My husband died a few days ago and Jude was offering his condolences.”