After Delores Page 12

  “Priscilla, what would you do if someone you loved, who had hurt you very badly, killed someone you loved who hadn’t done anything bad to you at all?”

  “I’d stay out of it,” she said.

  “What would you do if your old girlfriend used you for a place to live and then dumped you for a yuppie in a loft in TriBeCa?”

  “Keep the gun,” she said. “You’re gonna need it.”

  She dropped the accent and started washing up in the kitchen sink, putting on her plain clothes and looking like a normal girl again.

  “I’m gonna give it to you straight. If you’re nice, people think you’re a sap. Give it back! Show how much you hate them. It’s the only thing they’ll understand.”

  “Yeah, what you’re saying works theoretically, but in real life, that’s how people get killed.”

  “Oh, don’t be such a pansy,” she said, brushing her hair. She said it so carelessly that it tossed off her head with a stroke of the brush. I saw a fire inside her that cleansed her skin. It burned through her makeup.

  Then I looked at the clock. The hands were dramatic. It was seven-thirty, almost time for Delores. I watched the second hand race round its face and I didn’t have the stomach for hating her. I wanted, most of all, to believe in peace and love. I wanted to be romantic, read Chinese poems on a snowy day, watching a crow fly across a country sky. I wanted to sit with my lover in a big house in old sweaters, drinking tea and listening to Javanese music. I wanted to ride a horse and when it gallops, I start coming and when it stops, I keep coming. I wanted to be the horse.

  “You’re sweet,” she said, kissing me. “And this was fun. Maybe we’ll do it again sometime. But not too soon.”

  “Peace and love, Pris,” I said when I walked out the door. “Peace and love.”

  And oh God, I really meant it.

  25

  THE BASIC OBSTACLE to getting justice is that everything in life has its consequences. Of course, you could argue that they hurt you and your revenge is their consequence. But bullies see themselves as the status quo, and when a person is a reactive type, like myself, what you consider “getting even,” they call “provocation.” They actually expect you to sit back and take it. And once you learn that the consequences are coming, it gets harder to ever relax. For each pleasure I’ve enjoyed I’ve had to pay back in sorrow. So now, every moment is shadowed by the evil one, waiting with a grin. Each emotion becomes, in that way, a parody of itself.

  Outside it was nice and cool and clear. Every single person in the whole city was right there looking at each other. All the hidden craziness was blatantly dancing, blasting radios, making conversations, shrugging off responsibilities, flirting, fighting, leaving forever and turning over a new leaf. It was evening. It was beautiful. Then, across the street, I saw Sunshine.

  I was a freight train. I didn’t have to think. I ran right into her, screaming. Not words, but a high-pitched shriek and she saw me coming and was surprised. I ran into her face and it had surprise on it because bitches like that think they can get away with anything. They think they can take your girlfriend, rub your face in it, sic their goons on you and still be invincible. It was so sweet letting her know how wrong she was. I smashed her. I could smell her fear. I could smell her leather jacket, it was spanking new. I smashed her face and gritted my teeth and pulled her by her new shirt and smashed her again. I hit her so hard, my hand broke. I could feel it go. Then she actually fell down and began to cry. You hit them and they fall down. It really works that way. Then some blood started dribbling out of her nose, like a school kid. It was the same color as Dino’s blood but there was a lot less of it this time. Everyone on the street who had nothing to do kept looking at us and everyone else kept walking.

  She didn’t say anything. I felt great. I felt really good. I walked away with my hand swelling but I started to feel tense again, so I kicked her one more time, really hard, and then I felt fine. I was so happy. I was free. I was the freest bird.

  There was only one thing left to take care of, Delores. I touched the gun. I could shoot her. Or better yet, I could smash her too. I could smash her ugly little face.

  Then the weirdest thing happened. I remembered the way Delores used to say my name when she came in after work. I remembered how I was the only one who never took her money or broke her nose and who always took care of her, even when she was driving me crazy. I remembered the way we used to run into the water in our underwear in front of everyone at the beach because neither of us had bathing suits.

  Oh shit, I thought. Oh shit. I can’t smash Delores. I love her. Maybe we can talk things over. Maybe she can act like a reasonable human being. But we’d have to go away from here, far away from Sunshine and all those yuppie influences. Then she could get her own apartment and we could have a normal relationship. All she had to do was show in some little way that she really loved me.

  When I got home, the red light was blinking on the answering machine. Wow, my first message. I bet it was Delores. She probably thought the whole thing over and decided to come back home.

  “Hello? This is Coco Flores. I want my eight dollars for the paint. Eight dollars.”

  She didn’t even add, “I know you’re having a hard time right now and I can’t be there for you at this moment but I really am your friend.” She just said, “Eight dollars.” In fact, she said it twice.

  I almost turned off the machine but there was a second message. Dolores!

  “I hope you fucking die,” she said.

  All my breath came out of me. I was very quiet. The city was quiet too. All I could hear was the buzz of the cassette inside the phone machine. It was spinning around and around. What would happen to all my anger now? Where could it possibly go? I walked into the kitchen and poured a drink. I didn’t care what color it was anymore. Then I stood at the threshold of the bedroom, staring at the bed. Maybe I’d be able to sleep there in a couple of weeks. I went back into the living room and stared at the answering machine, sipping my drink. I listened to the hum as the tape rolled on empty, empty.

  “I just want you to talk to me, Marianne.”

  It was a man’s voice. A man’s voice on the tape. A man’s voice was inside my apartment. He was panting, out of breath, but from tension, not exercise. You could hear him sweating. I punched the button and rewound it back.

  “I just want you to talk to me, Marianne. Talk to me or I’ll kill you.”

  “I know who you are.”

  Oh God, it was Punkette’s voice.

  “I know who you are and you’re in big trouble.”

  Right on, Punkette. What a doll. Look at the way she stood up to that bully. Who was it, Punkette? Who?

  But the tape finished.

  All that was left of Punkette was her comeback.

  Outside, the church bells tolled eight. I could hear the noises again, the cars and the drug dealers and people saying all kinds of bullshit. I was shaking with the memory of Punkette and the voice of her killer. A killer who wasn’t a dope-fiend actress. Charlotte was just a run-of-the-mill liar in a standard fucked-up relationship. She didn’t murder women. She loved and hurt them. That’s all. She didn’t kill Punkette. It was a man. A man did it. Of that, I was sure.

  26

  “HI, CHARLOTTE,” I said, when she answered my knock on her door.

  Something about seeing her again made me happy, like I was the person I was supposed to be because Charlotte was in the same place as me. I rocked back and forth on my heels, shyly like a little boy in short pants and suspenders. I was smiling, feeling peaceful because Charlotte was as close to innocent as she could be while still being Charlotte.

  “I was wondering when I’d hear from you again.”

  She looked great. She was so beautiful. Just the way gay men look when they’re on display walking down the street, cool and embraceable.

  “You can come in, I guess.”

  We sat around the kitchen table. I could smell an overripe mango fermenting in the he
at, mixing with the warm garbage, the perfume of Charlotte’s refuse. She was quite fashionable and proper that day. Almost pristine, like the librarian in the old commercials. Once she washes with Breck, she becomes a showgirl. She was wearing those trendy, nerdy horn-rimmed glasses on the edge of her nose, complemented by a shock of black hair hanging over her forehead. Her eyes were dancing black things.

  “What do you say, Charlotte?”

  “I say what the Maharishi said. ‘The purpose of life is the expansion of happiness.’ That’s all.”

  We sat there for a while in the quiet. I broke it.

  “You know what I found out? I found out that you didn’t kill Punkette after all.”

  As soon as I said it, I wasn’t so sure.

  “Right?” “No, I didn’t.”

  Charlotte was my fantasy so I could make everything right.

  “And you’re not a dope fiend after all either. You just like a little taste now and again. Plus, you do so like me. You weren’t just trying to intimidate or get information. That’s right, isn’t it?” “Right.”

  “You’re just a regular liar.”

  “I lie all the time,” she said.

  She took the mango in her right hand and bit into the skin. Then she pulled a strip off with her teeth. The whole world smelled of mango. It dripped on the table and when she wiped it up partway, she left sticky mango fingerprints for me to look at and admire.

  “I’m always lying. If that’s the truth, then what I just said is a lie in itself, which makes it even truer than any regular fact could ever be.”

  “Thanks, Charlotte. I was scared to bring all that up but I had to clear the air. Now we can really be friends. Don’t you think? Now that everything is out in the open.”

  “Yeah.” She was slurping the mango and untangling the threads of fruit caught between her teeth and the huge, hairy pit.

  “One more question.” I took a breath because my heart was pounding over this one. It was the hardest question of all.

  “Charlotte, whose house is this really? Punkette said it was yours and you say it’s yours but Beatriz says it’s hers. I mean really, whose is it?”

  “It’s mine,” she said. “Beatriz has a place uptown.”

  Then she laughed but it wasn’t happy. It was unusually stifled. She looked down at her fingernails and for the first time I could see that she was uncomfortable. She didn’t know what to do next. I didn’t want that at all. I liked her on top. It made her radiate. It made her special. Some women you have to break through to get through to, but Charlotte was the kind to turn off if you got her number. It wouldn’t be fun for her anymore. So I tried to put a stop to the bad feeling. I wanted to take it back so she could have fun again, but another way of thinking was rumbling and growing inside me. It was taking over before I had a chance to hold it back. I started to feel very angry. I don’t know why but for the first time I really wanted to hurt her.

  “So you’re not a killer or a drug addict, you’re just evil and a liar and I love you anyway.”

  I wanted her to stop me. I wanted to be generous instead of vengeful. I wanted to say, “I care about you,” without trying to hurt her at the same time. I wanted to prove we were both better than Delores.

  This is the place where the events passed very quickly. Time went so fast that even though there was a sequence, it was three-dimensional instead of chronological. Everything happened on top of each other at the same time. I’m not sure if it speeded up as I was speaking or right after I said, “I love you anyway.” But somewhere between the way of anyway and the period at the end of the sentence, Daniel came into the apartment and he was sweating. I had time to smell him before I actually noticed him, but I’m not sure precisely when. I do think that before he said, “You cunt,” I noticed that he was sweating and I noticed how much he looked like Beatriz.

  “You cunt, you ripped me off.”

  He was holding a gun in his right hand, but I didn’t see it at first because I was looking at Charlotte.

  “This isn’t a game,” he said. “This is real.”

  She didn’t have a chance to say much, but she did open her mouth. That I’m sure of. I saw her open her mouth but everything happened so fast that I don’t know if she opened it to answer me or to answer him. I wasn’t sure what moment she was in. Later on, it did occur to me that she might not have been in my moment or Daniel’s but maybe just in her own as usual. Maybe she was about to protest Daniel’s accusation that she had dipped into his stash at the wrong time, or maybe she was turning away in shame when he said, “And what about that girl, Charlotte? Huh, what about that little girl?”

  Maybe she was turning toward me to defend her, to tell Daniel it was a man who did it, the man on the phone machine. Or maybe it was to tell me to leave, or not to love her anymore. That it wasn’t worth it. Maybe Charlotte only opened her mouth to stretch.

  Daniel’s bullet caught her in the process of opening her mouth. It grazed the side of her head, but that mouth stayed open and she looked both ways out of the two sides of her eyes, behind those brown eyeglasses. She made a classically comic gesture like I Love Lucy used to make when she was in trouble. The laugh track would go wild over that one. Then she put her face on the table next to the mango peels because she thought she had been shot in the head and her blood was on everything.

  The most unusual element of my experience of this event was that I hadn’t caught up with what had happened at all. So right then I didn’t have time to feel anything about blood from Charlotte’s face, the third blood of the summer, the second blood I’d seen that week. I was still feeling the little seed of anger from our conversation and a bit of surprise that the way I expressed it was by saying, “I love you anyway.” It was that emotion, I swear, that made me reach into my pocket and pull out Prisclla’s gun. I’d held it, caressed it, and posed with it so many times that it felt natural, clasped between my fingers. Then I pointed it at Daniel’s face. Of all the faces I had imagined at the other end of that gun, his was obviously the wrong one, but the turn of events had brought me to this place and there was no going back.

  I felt a terrible explosion. Not huge, but compact and powerful. I tasted it in the air and then realized it hadn’t come from me. It came from Beatriz, aiming at the sky. I knew I was able to kill someone, but only the right and most deserving person. I just had to figure out who that was.

  Beatriz stepped through the bedroom doorway and slapped Daniel’s hand, like he was seven. His gun fell to the floor, spinning, and we all watched it slide across the tiny room. My gun was still pointed at his face but Beatriz paid no attention. She held on to hers and picked his up off the floor. Then, with one in each hand, she fired them into the walls and ceiling until they couldn’t be fired anymore and until the already cracked plaster fell off and you could see the rotting wood underneath that held the building together. Daniel was standing there surrounded by plaster. So was I. Charlotte was sitting, the collar of her shirt soaked through with blood. It was as though none of us could accept what had just happened, so we were all waiting for it to pass. But the room smelled bitter. It would never smell the same again.

  I had begun the motions necessary to shooting Daniel in the face when, in the scheme of things, he wasn’t clearly the most deserving. I had wanted to shoot him right in the middle of some thought that would have never been finished, had I been successful.

  The face is everything. When you want to obliterate someone, you do it in the face. That’s where all the lies come out. That’s what you remember most about someone. No part of a person can be more cruel and stupid than their face.

  Beatriz’s face was stone with fury and had no room for surprise. Then she turned to Daniel and that all faded and transformed into the fear in every parent of burying their own children.

  “I checked your arms for track marks every day,” she said.

  “Kids don’t hit up that much anymore, Beatriz,” I said. “They all smoke coke now.”

  �
��And you,” she said, pointing to Charlotte, who was sitting in a pool of her own blood, unable to decide what she could possibly do about it. “You get out of my house and never come back.”

  “Your house?” Charlotte said, suddenly, as though she had nothing better to do than be indignant. “This is my house.”

  Oh God, they didn’t know who lived there either.

  27

  IT WASN’T UNTIL the sun rose that I realized I had been up all night walking around and then sitting down in different places. Sometime during all of that I got drunk and some other time it rained. That’s what I remember best, the rain. First, it started to land on me softly like kisses, and then it started to sing in an even, settling sort of way. It gave me something to do, which was listen to it, and a place to hide, which was inside it. Then there were thousands of drops coming at the same time and they started to roar, but I didn’t want to leave, because it defined both parts of me: the outside part confronting the rain and the inside part that stayed warm and safe. I waited in the rain because it let me know that inside me there was still something alive that hadn’t been ruined.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Dino said through his teeth when I walked into Herbie’s Coffee Shop and stood behind the counter.

  “Huh?”

  “You’re a mess. Get over here.”

  He dragged me into the dishwashing section like I was a misbehaved schoolgirl and started running the water. “Shit, you got vomit all over your shirt. Where have you been? Never mind. Here.”

  He stuck my head under some warm water running out of those huge industrial faucets, and shoved a white T-shirt into my hands.

  “Now, change your clothes and comb your hair. Here, use this.” He handed me his red, green, and black Afro pick. “Jesus, now sit down and drink a cup of coffee.”

  I threw my shirt into the garbage and sat down in Dino’s large one, drinking the cup of black coffee he put in front of me. The lights were so bright, you could see everything wrong and nauseating about the place.