Hell's Half Acre

ten.

THERE ARE FOUR CHAMBERS IN THE HEART, four rooms. I stumble through the house of Miller and my chest is full of terrible echoes.

Through the kitchen and a woman is there. Blue jeans and a white tank-top. Pale blond hair, wispy. She stands with her back to me, staring into the open refrigerator. Her shoulders are narrow and bare and I don’t want to frighten her.

Excuse me, I say.

The woman turns around, slow. Honey brown eyes with dark circles. Thin lips, silent and moving. As if she is whispering to herself. Or praying.

I thought I heard voices, she says. She shrugs. I wondered if we had company.

Exhale. Sorry if I startled you, I say.

Molly, she says. My name is Molly Jones.

Phineas, I say.

Her lips begin to move again and I think of Franny Glass. Her mouth silent and ever moving to form the words Jesus Christ have mercy on me in not quite perfect time with her heartbeat as she slowly came to pieces in a snotty restaurant while the ivy league boyfriend yawned and explained that Flaubert was ultimately a mediocre talent because he had no testicles. Franny Glass was my first love. Hopeless and somehow appropriate that at the age of sixteen I was in love with a fictional woman.

Your lips are moving, I say.

Oh, she says. I’m sorry.

Prayer?

It’s a short monologue that I’m having trouble with.

What do you mean?

I’m sort of an actor, she says. I’m a theater major at Berkeley.

And the monologue?

I’m playing May in a production of Fool for Love, she says.

Sam Shepard, I say.

Do you know the play?

Hell, it’s the story of my life. Do you want to practice on me?

Molly smiles, takes a breath.

I don’t understand my feelings, she says softly. Her face goes pale, as if she’s banished the blood from her skin. I really don’t, she says. I just don’t understand how I could hate you so much after so much time. How… No matter how much I’d like to not hate you, I hate you even more. It grows. All I see is a picture of you. Of you and her. I don’t even know if the picture is real anymore. I don’t even care. It’s make believe. It invades my head. The two of you. And this picture stings even more than if I’d actually seen you with her. It cuts me. It cuts me so deep. I will never get over it, never. And I can’t get rid of the picture. It just comes, uninvited. Like a little uninvited torture. And I blame you for this torture. I blame you.

I stare at her. I feel hot, almost guilty. Molly shrugs and her face returns to normal. I’m having trouble with the tone, she says. How did it sound to you?

Very cold. A little psychotic.

I know, she says. It needs to be more vulnerable.

Heartbroken and weary, I say.

Molly bites her lip, thinking. Yes.

Think of your mother, I say.

What do you know about my mother?

I shrug. Mothers. They are often heartbroken, weary.

She nods, staring. Do you want a sandwich?

A sandwich?

Yes. I was going to make a tomato sandwich.

Okay.

You have a gun in your hand, she says.

What?

Is that a prop, she says. Or is it real?

Uh. I believe it’s real.

I am so fucking stupid. I know that. The gun hangs at my thigh. I slip it into my jacket pocket and mutter an aborted apology. Molly shrugs and turns back to the fridge. She takes out mayonnaise and a brick of white cheese, then leans over the sink to get a red tomato from the windowsill. She opens a drawer and takes out a long sharp knife.

Echoes, footsteps. Miller is nowhere to be seen.

Molly wears scuffed brown cowboy boots. I look around. The kitchen is not so cold and frightening as before. The lights are different and I never noticed the tomatoes in the window.

It’s okay, she says. But would you mind leaving the gun on the island, where I can see it?

I hesitate, watching her slice the tomato on a round wooden cutting board.

Please, she says. Humor me.

I take out the Walther and remove the clip, then place the gun on the bright steel surface between us. I am tempted to give it a spin, to see who the gun favors.

Thank you, she says.

Oh. You’re welcome.

Long pretty hands, unpainted nails.

Molly cuts the sandwich in half and wipes off the knife. Takes two red paper napkins from a drawer and gives me half the sandwich. White sourdough bread, red tomato that drips onto my fingers and white cheese. Molly leans against the island while she eats, holding the sandwich in two hands.

I realize how hungry I am.

John refuses to get barstools, she says. He thinks they reveal a profound lack of taste.

I nod, dumbly. Molly takes small, fierce bites of bread and tomato. She murmurs softly as she swallows. I contemplate the aesthetic of barstools. I watch the muscles in her throat ripple.

The corner of your mouth, I say. You have a bit of mayonnaise there.

She touches the red napkin to her lips and says thank you.

I should be going.

No, she says. Don’t go.

The soft flash of honey eyes. That monologue got to me, the way her lips moved. It tore me up. I tell myself to be careful.

Miller is your husband? I say.

Molly frowns. Did he tell you that?

I stare at her and realize she has likely not read Miller’s script.

He has gotten so weird, she says. I can barely talk to him.

Yeah. He seems a little preoccupied with…baseball.

You’re going to work on the film with us? she says.

I don’t know, I say. I haven’t decided.

You have a beautiful face, she says. Your cheekbones would look good in black and white.

Have you read the script? I say.

Molly sighs. Only bits and pieces. John is very secretive with it.

I’m sure he is.

Molly has finished her sandwich and now she takes out a red and white pack of gum and pulls one stick out. She offers it to me and I shake my head. She slowly peels away the cellophane and folds the stick into her mouth. I reach for the gun between us and at the same time her hand drifts down and brushes mine. She is reaching to touch the gun, to touch my hand. I don’t know which. But her touch is soft and maddening, the touch of someone in a dream soon forgotten. Then she pulls her hand away and her face is slightly red. The blood comes and goes in her face. Molly is sensitive to barometric pressure. I put the gun away and hesitate, then offer her my empty hand. Molly doesn’t smile. Her lips come apart and I can see her teeth. Now she takes my hand and I feel her pulse with the tip of my middle finger and this is not what anyone would call a handshake because our hands are not moving but holding each other and our skin is the same temperature and after a long silence one of us lets go.

Dark outside and moonless. I stand in the middle of Miller’s road, staring at his mailbox. Bullet hole in bright metal. I wonder if there are phantoms out tonight. Neighborhood kids with spirit. I touch my hand to my mouth and wonder if Jude will smell Molly on me. It doesn’t matter. Jude pushed me at these people and now there’s a small body of water between me and the King James Hotel. I should go east but I won’t.

Fool for Love. I know that play, yeah. Three people in a room, two of them lovers. Tortured, forbidden. The third is an old man who may or may not be real. Then another man enters, the hapless blind date, who one might suppose represents the unsuspecting audience because the two lovers proceed to fuck with him without mercy. I have never seen a live production but I have seen the movie with Kim Basinger and Harry Dean Stanton a few times. It’s a tight, claustrophobic picture. One long act, relentless. Four people in a room, crashing into walls. Four people turning inside out. Four people in a room and the whole time you’re wondering which one of them is going to get killed.

Down the black, winding hill. Lost and then not. I wander along Telegraph a while. Faces bright and searching. The infinite flow of tourists and junkies and homeless guys and skate rats and lost hippies and spare changers and vendors and privileged boys and girls. This is the sweet hate machine of human chaos and no one wants to be noticed, no one wants to be saved. My brain is a rattling trap and I think it would not be easy to live here. I have a low tolerance for the culture of emptiness. I buy cigarettes and a green slushy drink at a convenience store. Brief overhead view of myself through the store’s surveillance camera. Black and white. I’m looking through the eye of a fish. The subject is a white male, late thirties. Medium height and thin. Dark circles under pale eyes, unshaven. Dirty blond hair. Brown leather coat and blue jeans and black T-shirt. He is not a student, not a thief but possibly an English professor, which makes me laugh at myself.

I walk until I come to the BART station. The machine that dispenses tickets is complex and unforgiving, but I manage to buy a ticket without causing a scene. The platform is crowded with people who don’t look at each other. I want a cigarette but the use of tobacco is prohibited in California, everywhere it seems.

I crouch against a wall and wait.

Drunk white guy shambles up and down the platform. He wears torn gray pants stained with bodily fluids and he’s looking for someone to talk to. Young black girl sits on a bench, reading a book. Drunk white guy sits down next to her and everyone on the platform takes a breath.

I love to eat out a girl’s asshole, he shouts.

Oh, boy.

Humming silence.

I love to eat asshole, he says again.

The drunk is going to touch her any minute and she’s going to freak out. I have a gun in my pocket. I could show it to him, if he touches her. Everyone is watching but no one has moved. The drunk reaches for her hair with one trembling hand but the black girl doesn’t freak out. She laughs and the drunk’s hand falls as if it suddenly became too heavy for him to carry. He wanders away.

Lonely.

I almost miss John Ransom Miller. He was a freak but at least I had a sense of purpose when I was following him. And he would have loved the drunk guy, the asshole eater. I take out his ruby ring and slip it onto my finger. Rumble and sigh and here comes the train. I wonder what time it is. Every other car is packed with flesh but mine is ghostly, quiet. I turn my face to black windows and no one pays me any mind.

Downtown. I retrace my steps past Nieman Marcus and back to the King James. There is a different doorman on duty. This guy is massive, maybe a foot taller than me. His arms are the size of my thighs and his face is like a fat gray melon, with small dark eyes sunk into gray skin. Thin cruel mouth. He shrugs and opens the door with a grunt.

What happened to Jeremy? I say.

Don’t know, he says. Punk called in sick.

Too bad.

Why? he says.

I shake my head. No reason.

There’s nothing Jeremy can get what I can’t get. You need a whore?

Not yet.