Lithium for Medea

11

We reconciled. It was that simple.

I met Jason for a drink. After all, it had been thirteen months without him. I had spent two months traveling through Mexico and Northern California with another man. Later I decorated a second man’s Christmas tree. I attached neon bulbs and strips of silver tinsel to fir branches with fingers that were not my own, dead fingers, inanimate and oddly frozen, another layer of decoration.

Nothing touched me. Jason clung to everything. I went with another man to Mexico City. I tried to forget him under a gouged white tequila sun while bells rang. I felt stalked by the cathedrals festering like abscesses on wide cobbled plazas where women squatted by stacks of Chiclets piled into holy pyramids. Jason haunted me.

The men came and went. They were interchangeable, pushing meaningless pieces of themselves into me, a stab of quartz, glistening disks, a kind of dying alphabet drying without residue. I sent them away. I dismissed them as Jason did his women and felt nothing. I was a tree in winter, half asleep, whittled naked, enduring.

Jason called on his birthday. I knew he would. I had been waiting all day.

“It’s my birthday.” Jason breathed black warm into the telephone, black with night and expectation, black and warm through the wires, black over the black metal webbing of canals. Jason, a black hawk strutting. Jason with his whole black bag of tricks.

“I’m thirty today,” Jason said, as if those were the magic words and everything would be forgiven.

“So?” It was the first thing I had said to him in four months.

“So I thought we could get together.”

“Your girlfriend busy?”

“I’ve got no girlfriend.”

“Too bad.” I hung up.

My hands were shaking. I could still feel his voice brushing my face. Sealed parts of me breathed again, stretching awake, hungry.

It was dangerous to speak to him. His words echoed through my head and body like a kind of summer wind. The Santa Ana winds, perhaps, that blow fierce and uncontrollable. The sudden desert winds. The city captured, singed nightly. The crime rate rises. There is violence, confusion, a strange burning.

Jason telephoned on the Fourth of July. “I’m all alone,” he said miserably. He made it sound almost like a crime. “I’m not surprised.” I was also alone.

“Let’s just get one drink. Celebrate our illusion of freedom with the other enslaved jerks. Get some almost bicentennial maya. White maya,” Jason offered.

I bit my lip. I remembered Jason tying up my arm with his bathrobe belt, my heart racing, my hand pumping. And hitting. The sigh and transformation into arctic white, enamel white, cloud chips, the white sea opening icy white lips.

I lit a cigarette. I was sweating. “Your timing is terrible. You should have hustled somebody last week. Everybody loves you for three or four days.”

“Do you love me?”

“No.” I hung up.

For the first time I considered the possibility that I might actually see him again. And if I did see Jason again things would be very different, very different indeed.

Jason telephoned at Christmas. He was drunk. Music played loud in the background. He shouted above it. “Sorry to bother you. Nostalgia. Just wanted to hear your voice.”

“You always want what you don’t have, Jason. That’s your private hell.”

“I hurt you. I was stupid,” Jason said quickly. “Could we get together? As friends?”

“We’re not friends. I don’t even like you,” I said. My heart was pushing black torpedoes through my veins. They exploded. It rained and the drops were gigantic yellow moths. Parachutes with red and magenta folds were opening, billowing down. A choir was singing.

“Could you just see me out of pity?”

I thought about it. Then I said no.

Jason telephoned on my birthday. I was surprised. I didn’t know Jason knew when my birthday was. He had ignored the occasion for three consecutive years. I was caught off balance. I was alone. I agreed to meet him for a drink.

At first I didn’t recognize him. He was standing near me wearing a black cowboy shirt and a big black cowboy hat. He looked thin and pale and miserable, vaguely unhealthy, as if he had spent the entire year subsisting on beer and potato chips.

When Jason sat down at the small round table he brushed his leg against mine. I tried not to look at him, to look instead at the city below. The ocean was a solid blue haze. The streets were a simple collection of horizontal and vertical lines now elongated, now fattening into a wide blank gully of freeway.

Jason stared at his beer. “I thought you might have forgiven me.”

He reached for my arm. His hand circled my wrist. His hand was hot, was lava, metal, a kind of girdle, a goddamn wedding band. And I was breathing in the texture of his skin, the pressure of his hand, his closeness. In a rush I began to remember, began to tremble.

I was sipping white wine and looking out the plate-glass window at the city, the pale blue gauzy sky, the slow pale blue sea pocked with sailboats.

“I love you,” Jason whispered. “Don’t you still love me?”

A sadness spread inside me, warm and pasty. Below, houses were a horizontal stack of pastel boxes framed by green patches of front lawn and backyard. Jason tightened his grip on my wrist. And air sparked, sparkled, and suddenly I was laughing.

It was Monday afternoon. We left our drinks on the table and made love in the back seat of the car, parked in the hotel’s underground parking lot. And I was young again. It was before Jason. It was before Gerald. Before the blank cold silence and bricking up. When I was still half girl. When I had force and grace and a shapeless ambition, joyriding a streamlined concentric July and steaming awake in yellow mornings with blond boys, in back seats and bathtubs, in closets like moths, any door that locked.

Monday night we went to the ballet. Francine is held in some special awe by the management of the Forum, the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium and the Hollywood Bowl. At least twice a month envelopes stuffed with complimentary tickets arrive at my house.

“Don’t leave me,” I begged in the darkness. A ballerina swirled, a gauzy blue circle, a piece of sky around her waist. “You give great head,” Jason answered.

I glanced at him in the darkness. Fear was an avalanche, clotting my eyes, lodging cold splinters inside. Something rushed at my face with blinding speed. And something within me broke.

On Tuesday we drove into the Santa Monica mountains. We parked the car on a dirt road and pushed our way up an old narrow dirt trail. We made love under eucalyptus trees. Twigs and burs stuck to our clothes.

Then he was zipping up his pants, moving back toward the road, already somehow in a hurry. I watched the small patch of his white back. Thud. And something inside me broke.

On Wednesday night we were given a free pass to an X-rated movie in Hollywood. The actress had once been Jason’s neighbor on the Grand Canal. He had painted her riding on the teeter-totter. She always sent him passes for her porno movies.

“I want to do it all. Just like the movie,” Jason breathed, later. He was on his knees above me. He was watching his body in the mirror over the bed.

“We’ll need a birch rod,” I said.

“I’ll get one.” Jason was reaching for his pants. He stared at me, my wrists tied behind my back, my breasts pushed up toward him, twin offerings. “Wait here. Think about what it will be like.”

I lay in the darkness. I thought. Jason came back with a strip of bamboo and a knife. He cut a rod. “Are you afraid?”

“Yes.” I looked at Jason. He was looking in the mirror.

“Good. Turn over,” Jason said.

I turned over. The bamboo slapped against my back. I gasped. I tried to sit up.

“Does it hurt?” Jason asked. “Yes.”

“Good.” Jason slapped the rod against my back again. I jumped. I moaned. I heard the air whiz by, shattered. The rod slapped down again. My flesh was stinging, impossibly hot. The whole world felt red. And Jason was breathing warm against me, “There, there,” and licking the red lines in my skin, sliding his tongue, a red moth, across the flesh grooves and cooing, “There, there,” and I was tumbling, falling through soft pockets of luminous air, floating down, down.

On Thursday morning we drove into the mountains. It was the tail end of winter.

“You know the women don’t matter. The ones I pay,” Jason said out of nowhere. “They’re still lifes. I try not to touch. It’s my work, my job. It’s business.”

Outside the window the high desert coughed in my face. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

Jason pointed to a yucca in the snowbank. He said the yucca needed one special beetle to complete its sexual cycle, that short season when it pushes out a massive midsection, explodes the thighs and lays down a suggestion of shell. “I saw a special on it, on Twenty-eight,” Jason said.

The sky was cold blue splinters. I realized I never understood Jason or why I needed him.

“I’m going to suspend a girl from ropes next. Hang the raft on wires. Make it look like she’s really floating.”

I stared out the window. I thought of a young girl’s legs floating above a tapestry of blues and yellows and reds. Jason wound up a road marked closed into an icy late afternoon mist.

He stopped the car. I sledded down a hill into a creek of fresh melted snow. I lay in the white and cold, wet, afraid to breathe, afraid to move. Jason was standing on the hilltop above me, above the timberline, where trees twist bizarre and unkept like the savages at the end of a race.

Jason dropped me off near the bridge over Eastern Canal. He seemed agitated, restless, a claustrophobic with the walls inching in. I didn’t see him for three days.

Silence. Silence like a live thing, feeding itself, breeding. My house filled with invisible things, blood trails of old wounds, shadows, shadows like snails glued to the walls, shadows and the ghost glows of the women Jason had painted, the oily half-formed flowers that glared at me from his walls and the walls of the Woman’s House.

Three days of darkness swelling and pulling apart like petals. Three days of sun tearing at the soft bodies of nesting shadows. And mornings startled, punched open, entirely yellow and wide as a lethal wound, a bullet hole from a magnum.

“Hello, baby,” Jason breathed. The night opened then, opened into black warm layered pathways, hot currents of moon rays, waves, the wind rustling burdened with salt.

“I’m busy.” I dropped my voice. I imagined I was sitting in a diving bell on the floor of the ocean. I filled my voice with the accumulated pain of everything, the thorn-edged darkness, my solitude, the weight of his absence, the hole it tore in me, through me.

“I want you,” Jason said.

“I have a date.”

“Send him home at midnight.”

“I can’t do it that way.” It was a lie. I could do it that way, had in fact done it precisely that way many times.

I couldn’t remember whose move it was. Outside it was late afternoon. The canals were browning, shadow-burdened, the color of charred wood.

“I started a new painting,” Jason told me, as if I cared.

“A new whore,” I said, pointlessly. I knew to Jason they were all equal. You cannot multiply zero.

“Who are you kidding?” Jason snapped. “How many have there been? How do you think that makes me feel?”

“Feel?” I repeated. “You’re incapable of feeling. You’re defective, Jason, like someone born with thalidomide flippers for arms. You can’t expect someone like that to play basketball or lift weights. You’re not whole, Jason.”

“Neither are you.”

Impasse. A house of mirrors. Quartz tunnels and blind alleys. A maze. A graveyard, perilous abundant web of sharp curves. Sculpture garden of crashed automobiles, scrap metal, hopeless. Box canyons. Hopeless. Sheer cliffs. And the walls and floors are glass. And I am multiplied, exaggerated. And no one is laughing.

I hung up. The night was a sheared-open place, a crater on the dark side of the moon. The air was a fibrous network. I burrowed in. I made a cocoon and slept.

I woke up to the sound of pounding. It was after midnight. Jason was beating his fist against my heavy wood front door, against the dead-bolt lock and chain. I let him knock for a long time before I opened it.

Jason stared at me. He looked surprised. He looked as if he was prepared for a crisis, prepared to find me stretched out on a floor, comatose fingers wrapped around an emptied bottle of neatly labeled Seconal.

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t think of anything to say. It was the seventh night of our reconciliation. It was the end of our first week together, again.