We leave the kitten on our porch for the second night in a row. He’s not ours – he belongs to the neighbors who don’t notice him missing and wouldn’t care if they did. The kitten follows us, crying, almost jumping into the collected water at the curb. Leather-bound arms lift him, return him, so he waits underneath a wooden chair.
We duck out of the rain into her car. The absence of scent seems a blow so forceful it disconcerts me for the remainder of the evening. She’s allergic to most things, see.
She drives an old Cadillac, with an impressive leather interior the color of congealed blood. I feel small in the back seat, enveloped in the upholstery and the hum of the big motor, the heavy metal frame. Her easy grace and his loquacity creates a flow of conversation I cannot access. They have known each other for years. I am a stranger in this, in their words, in the soaked black metropolis surrounding. The stars are far. He halfheartedly points out the downtown streets, but the spray is louder, and the lights are brighter, and I still cannot pin myself to this city despite my love.
She pulls off into a side street, brick walls tagged in graffiti, eerie in the glow of headlights; leads us winding around the ghetto church parking lot. It’s flooded. My boots are soaked.
Her steps are light, precise, quick. With practiced flair, she leads us to her top-floor apartment, lets us into a room smelling of cooked hamburger. The first scent of the evening. Stained-glass eyes of saints stare at us through her dining-room window.
He lived here at one point, with her, when he first moved back. Their history is long. About ten years longer than my own with him. It didn’t work out for them, but he casually lights the hall, like he’s never left, showing where she’s lined up her shoe collection, and it’s suddenly Christmas. Nothing under three inches, in every color, in every ornate beaded design, in every glitter-tone you could possibly imagine. It’s glossy. It’s a fucking catwalk disco. It’s the dream of femme wrapped up in white lights and stretching on forever. I imagine the chests of feeble-minded men she’s trampled on. I imagine the price tags. I imagine how such gifts, such tributes, were presented to her. It’s dessert for me, but it’s her bread and butter.
Taking charge, he pulls me into the play room, and I am confronted with a St Andrew’s cross. Whipping implements. A TENS unit, the bulb delicate at the end of the dark handle. I am uncomfortable. I am possibly aroused. I need out. She lazily shows us a crinoline she’s made for her upcoming burlesque show, delicate and sparkling as snow. I chew the inside of my mouth.
I am led into the next room, and it is filled with furs. Second scent of the evening. Souls of animals. Her bed is in here, too. The fur blanket is ruffled at the foot. Lingerie lies on the carpet, forgotten. She has so much of it.
We are rushed out to the living room, as she briskly shuts off the lights behind us. We sit on a leather couch. I wish I could creep closer to him so as to breathe him in. The cooked hamburger smell is making me ravenous. I crave his cigarettes. I crave the laundry detergent on his t-shirt. But I sit very, very still instead and stare at the television.
She returns (somehow, she had left the room again, with a feline silence) holding a tray. Mentions something in a light voice about hors d’oeuvres, and I hope it’s food. Instead, a blackened ash dish, a pipe, plastic baggies. Of course.
We partake, and I stone myself into silence, taking shotguns from his mouth because I still can’t hit a pipe without burning my hands. It’s the third scent of the evening and I am embarrassed to kiss him in front of her. Abjectly humiliated, more accurately, and I feel my distance in years from them, in lifetimes lived and rooms shared and shadows of romance and affection long since thrown to the wolves.
But the evening goes on. He attempts to file her things. The other half of a drug deal, in good faith. But her passwords are wrong, and the sites are down, and so passes another night in which she cannot push her services onto the world. I glue myself to the faint scent of his leather jacket, perched precariously on the couch. Their banter is calm, easy, kind but guarded. I excuse myself to use the powder room, and he (so at home) guides me down the long hallway haunted by her shoes.
Too forcefully, I close the bathroom door, greeted by sudden beige and white and the absence of scent again. Strands of her lovely dark hair show up on the bathmat. I move to wash my hands, and catch the scent of herbs in the soap bar. I frantically chase the scent on my palms, trying to catch up to that light sting, that freshness, that whispered something, but it’s hopeless. Sterile nothingness.
I return, and his coat is laid out for me. I wrap myself in it, wrap myself tightly in the wool scent like it’s armor. My fear is showing by now. They move to another room, and I am left to look at the décor. A ring left there. Silk flowers in a white vase. A beveled mirror. The trappings of performance and perfection scattered, but perilously neat.
They return and I meet the eyes of no one. We descend.
Outside the supermarket, he smokes a cigarette and I leech it off of him, sucking greedily, near-panicked. He asks if I am alright. I tell him I am cold, because there are no other words.
She said, with a sardonic smile, that her clients paid for their own projections upon her, above all else. It must be difficult.
It occurs to me that a certain kind of apotheosis happens in those trappings of shoes, furs, crinolines, corsetry. The electric implements and the crystalline canes. The leather, the bench, the cuffs, the fucking rack. To be worshipped in dismemberment – the delicate arch of her foot, the swish of silk, the flawless lip curl, and the practiced stare – but never revered in corporal wholeness. Her services are fragmentation. Her actual being is remote as ice, the likes of which he has scaled time and time again. I can only watch. I can only piece an attempt at wholeness from their exchanged words.
And rushing into the supermarket, loading the cart with all the junk food and instant ramen and terrible delicious unhealthy things one could ever imagine, I let the uneasiness pass from me. I let it fly elsewhere. Everything is bright and packaged and edible in here. I can only think, consume, consume, consume.
The congealed-blood Cadillac’s retreat that night felt almost better than the kitten purring in my arms. Final scent of the evening. Kitten-sweet. Furred. Alive.
- Unknown
