Chapter 43

JANELLE


I'm a good person. I don’t care what anybody thinks, I’m a good person. All my life the men I really loved always put me down, and they put me down for what they said they loved in me. But they never accepted the fact I could be interested in other human beings, not just them. That’s what screws everything up. They fall in love with me at first and then they want me to become something else. Even the great love of my life, that son of a bitch, Merlyn. He was worse than any of them. But he was the best too. He understood me. He was the best man I ever met and I really loved him and he really loved me. And he tried as hard as he could. And I tried as hard as I could. But we could never beat that masculine thing. If I even liked another man, he got sick. I could see that sick look on his face. Sure, I couldn’t stand it if he even got into an interesting conversation with another woman. So what? But he was smarter than I was. He covered up. When I was around, he never paid any attention to other women even though they did to him. I wasn’t that smart or maybe I felt it was too phony. And what he did was phony. But it worked. It made me love him more. And my being honest made him love me less.

I loved him because he was so smart in almost everything. Except women. He was really dumb about women. And he was dumb about me. Maybe not dumb, just that he could live only with illusions. He said that to me once and he said that I should be a better actress, that I should give him a better illusion that I loved him. I really loved him, but he said that Wasn’t as important as the illusion that I loved him. And I understood that and I tried. But the more I loved him the less I could do it. I wanted him to love the true me. Maybe nobody can love the true me or the true you or the true it. That’s the truth-nobody can love truth. And yet I can’t live without trying to be true to what I really am. Sure I lie, but only when it’s important, and later, when I think the time is right, I always admit I told a lie. And that screws it up.

I always tell everybody how my father ran away when I was a little girl. And when I get drunk, I tell strangers how I tried to commit suicide when I was only fifteen, but I never tell them why. The true why. I let them think it was because my father went away, and maybe it was. I admit a lot of things about myself. That if a man I like buys me a real boozy dinner and makes me like him, I’ll go to bed with him even if I’m in love with somebody else. Why is that so horrible? Men do that all the time. It’s OK for them. But the man I loved the most in the whole world thought I was just a cunt when I told him that. He couldn’t understand that it wasn’t important. That I just wanted to get fucked. Every man does the same thing.

I never deceived a man about important things. About material things maybe I mean. I never pulled the cheap tricks some of my best friends pull on their men. I never accused a guy of being responsible when I got pregnant just to make him help me. I never tricked men like that. I never told a man I loved him when I didn’t, not at the beginning anyway. Sometimes after, when I stopped loving him and he still loved me and I couldn’t bear to hurt him, I’d say it. But I couldn’t be that loving afterward and they’d catch on and things would cool off and we wouldn’t see each other again. And I never really hated a man once I loved him no matter how hateful he was to me afterward. Men are so spiteful to women they no longer love, most men anyway, or to me anyway. Maybe because they still love me and I never love them afterward or love them a little, which doesn’t mean anything. There’s a big difference between loving somebody a little and loving somebody a lot.

Why do men always doubt that you love them? Why do men always doubt you are true to them? Why do men always leave you? Oh, Christ. why is it so painful? I can’t love them anymore. It hurts me so and they are such pricks. Such bastards. They hurt you as carelessly as children, but you can forgive children, you don’t mind. Even though they both make you cry. But not anymore, not men, not children.

Lovers are so cruel, more loving, more cruel. Not the Casanovas, Don Juans, the “cunt men” as men always call them. Not those creeps. I mean the men who truly love you. Oh, you really love and they say they do and I know it’s true. And I know how they will hurt me worse than any other man in the world. I want to say, “Don’t say you love me.” I want to say, “I don’t love you.”

Once when Merlyn said he loved me, I wanted to cry because I truly loved him and I knew that he would be so cruel later when we both really knew each other, when all the illusions were gone, and when I loved him most, he would love me so much less.

I want to live in a world where men will never love women as they love them now. I want to live in a world where I will never love a man as I love him now. I want to live in a world where love never changes.

Oh, God, let me live in dreams; when I die, send me to a paradise of lies, undiscoverable and self-forgiven, and a lover will love me forever or not at all. Give me deceivers so sweet they will never cause me pain with true love, and let me deceive them with all my soul. Let us be deceivers never discovered, always forgiven. So that we can believe in each other. Let us be separated by wars and pestilence, death, madness but not by the passing of time. Deliver me from goodness, let me not regress into innocence. Let me be free.

I told him once that I had fucked my hairdresser and you should have seen the look on his face. The cool contempt. That’s how men are. They fuck their secretaries, that’s OK. But they put down a woman who fucks her hairdresser. And yet it’s more understandable, what we do. A hairdresser does something personal. He has to use his hands on us and some of them have great hands. And they know women. I fucked my hairdresser only once. He was always telling me how good he was in bed and one day I was horny and I said OK and he came up that night and he fucked me just that once. While he was fucking me, I saw him watching me turn on. It was a power thing with him. He did all his little tricks with his tongue and his hands and special words, and I have to say it was a good fuck. But it was such a coldhearted fuck. When I came, I expected him to hold up a mirror to see how he did the back of my head. When he asked me if I liked it, I said it was terrific. He said we had to do it again sometime and I said sure. But he never asked me again even though I would have said no. So I guess I wasn’t too great either.

Now what the hell is the harm in that? Why do men when they hear a story like that just put a woman down as a cunt? They would do it in a shot, every son of a bitch. It didn’t mean a thing. It didn’t make me any less a person. Sure, I fucked a creep. How many men, the best of them, fuck creepy women and not just once either?

I have to fight against regressing into innocence. When a man loves me, I want to be faithful to him and never fuck anybody else for the rest of my life. I want to do everything for him, but I know now that it never lasts with him or me. They start putting you down, they start making you love them less. In a million different ways.

The love of my life, the son of a bitch, I really loved him and he really loved me, I’ll give him that. But I hated the way he loved me. I was his sanctuary, I was where he ran when the world was too much for him. He always said he felt safe with me alone in our hotel rooms, our different suites like different landscapes. Different walls, strange beds, prehistoric sofas, rugs with different colored bloods, but always our naked bodies the same. But that’s not even true and this is funny. Once I surprised him and it was really funny. I had the big tit operation. I always wanted bigger tits-nice and round and standing up-and I finally did it. And he loved them. I told him I did it especially for him and it was partly true. But I did it so I would be less shy when I read for a part that required some nudity. Producers sometimes look at your tits. And I guess I did it for Alice too. But I told him I did it just for him and the bastard had better appreciate them. And so he did. And so he did. I always loved the way he loved me. That was always the best part of it. He really loved me-my flesh-and always told me it was special flesh, and finally I believed he couldn’t possibly make love to anyone else but me. I regressed into that innocence.

But it was never true. It is, finally, never true. Nothing is. Even my reasons. Like another reason. I love women’s tits and why is that unnatural? I love to suck another woman’s tits and why does that disgust men? They find it so comforting-don’t they think women do? We were all babies once together. Infants.

Is that why women cry so much? That they can never be that again? Infants? Men can be. That’s true, that’s really true. Men can be infants again. Women can’t. Fathers can be infants again. Mothers can’t.

He always said that he felt safe. And I knew what he meant. When we were alone together, I could see the strain go out of his face. His eyes became softer. And when we were lying down together warm and naked, soft skin touching, and I put my arms around him and truly loved him, I could hear him sigh like a cat purring. And I knew that for that short time he was truly happy. And that I could do that was truly magical. And that I was the only human being in the world who could make him feel like that made me feel so worthwhile. That I really meant something. I wasn’t just a cunt to fuck. I wasn’t just somebody to talk to and be intelligent with. I was truly a witch, a love witch, a good witch, and it was terrific. At that moment we both could die happy, literally, truly die happy. We could face death and not be afraid. But only for that short time. Nothing lasts. Nothing ever will. And so we deliberately shorten it, make the end come faster, I can see that now. One day he just said, “I don’t feel safe anymore,” and I never loved him again.

I’m no Molly Bloom. That son of a bitch Joyce. While she was saying yes, yes, yes, her husband was saying no, no, no. I won’t fuck any man who says no. Never, not anymore.

– -

Merlyn was sleeping. Janelle got out of bed and pulled an armchair up to the window. She lit a cigarette and stared out. As she was smoking, she heard Merlyn thrash around the bed in a restless dreaming sleep. He was muttering something, but she didn’t care. Fuck him. And every other man.


MERLYN


Janelle had on boxing gloves, dull red with white laces. She stood facing me, in the classic boxing stance, left extended, right hand cocked for the knockout punch. She wore white satin trunks. On her feet were black sneakers, slip-ons, no laces. Her beautiful face was grim. The delicately cut, sensuous mouth was pressed tight, her white chin tucked against her shoulder. She looked menacing. But I was fascinated by her bare breasts, creamy white and round nipples red, taut with an adrenaline that came not from love but the desire for combat.

I smiled at her. She didn’t smile back. Her left flicked out and caught me on the mouth and I said, “Ah, Janelle.” She hit me with two more hard lefts. They hurt like hell, and I could feel blood filling the gap beneath my tongue. She danced away from me. I put my hands out and they too had red gloves on them. I slid forward on sneakered feet and hitched up my trunks. At that moment Janelle darted in on me and hit me with a solid right hand. I actually saw green and blue stars as if I were in a comic strip. She danced away again, her breasts bobbing, the dancing red nipples mesmerizing.

I stalked her into a corner. She crouched down, her red-gloved tiny hands protecting her head. I started to throw a left hook into her delicately rounded belly, but the navel I had licked so many times repelled my hand. We went into a clinch and I said, “Ah, Janelle, cut it out. I love you, honey.” She danced away and hit me again. It was like a cat ripping my eyebrow with its claw and blood started dripping down. I was blinded and I heard myself saying, “Oh, Christ.”

Brushing away the blood, I saw her standing in the middle of the ring, waiting for me. Her blond hair was pulled tightly back into a bun and the rhinestone clip that held it glittered like a hypnotic charm. She hit me with two more lightning jabs, the tiny red gloves flicking in and out like tongues. But now she left an opening and I could hit the finely boned face. My hands wouldn’t move. I knew that the only thing that could save me was a clinch. She tried to dance around me. I grabbed her around the waist as she tried to slip away and spun her around. Defenseless now except that the trunks did not go all the way around her body and I could see her back and her beautiful buttocks, so rounded and full, that I had always pressed against in our bed together. I felt a sharp pain in my heart and wondered what the hell she was fighting me for. I grabbed her around the waist and whispered in her ear, tiny filaments of gold hair remembered on my tongue. “Lie on your stomach,” I said. She spun quickly. She hit me with a straight right I never saw coming and then I was tumbling in slow motion, upended in the air and floating down on the canvas. Stunned, I managed to get to one knee and I could hear her counting to ten in her lovely warm voice that she used to make me come. I stayed on one knee and stared up at her.

She was smiling and then I could hear her saying, “Ten, ten, ten, ten,” frantically, urgently, and then a gleeful smile broke over her face and she raised both hands in the air and jumped for joy. I heard the ghostly roar of millions of women screaming in ecstatic glee; another woman, heavyset, was embracing Janelle. This woman wore a heavy turtleneck sweater with “CHAMP” stenciled across two enormous breasts. I started to cry.

Then Janelle came over to me and helped me. “It was a fair fight,” she kept saying. “I beat you fair and square,” and through my tears I said, “No, no, you didn’t.”

And then I woke up and reached out for her. But she was not in bed beside me. I got up and, naked, went into the living room of the suite. In the darkness I could see her cigarette. She was sitting in a chair, watching the foggy dawn come up over the city.

I went over and reached down and traced my hands over her face. There was no blood, her features were unbroken and she reached one velvety hand up to touch mine as it covered her naked breast.

“I don’t care what you say,” I said. “I love you whatever the hell that means.”

She didn’t answer me.

After a few minutes she got up and led me back to the bed. We made love and then fell asleep in each other’s arms. Half asleep, I murmured, “Jesus, you nearly killed me.”

She laughed.

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