Closing time, p.7
Closing Time, page 7
Its immediate focus was Gerard, not Annabel. Which seemed strange to him because, website aside, he had no idea who Gerard even was. Bass bought one of his paperbacks but he hated thrillers so beyond reading the first few pages to ascertain that the man was capable of handling line and paragraph with more than meager skill he delved no further. So how could he feel such a growing animus—because that’s what it was—toward somebody he’d never shaken hands with? Whose habits, tastes, voice, wit or lack of wit he knew nothing of?
How could you begin to dislike what amounted to a human abstraction?
Good question, he thought.
But his dream-life wasn’t asking.
And Gerard was beginning to show up there on a pretty regular basis.
In one dream he and Gerard were trying to decipher blurred-out cooking directions printed on a bag of frozen food—some kind of stuffed Italian bread. They needed to know the oven time and couldn’t read the damn thing. It was very frustrating.
In another they were playing chess. Pieces kept disappearing. A pawn here, a bishop there. Bass suspected himself of cheating.
In yet another they were seated beneath a shade tree in Central Park watching a little girl play on the monkey bars and the little girl was Annabel. This did not seem strange to either of them. Bass lit a Winston and inhaled and Gerard leaned over smiling and plucked it from his lips and tossed it. Annabel laughed and jumped off the monkey bars and crushed it underfoot. Bass was furious with both of them.
Then there was the really bad one.
There’s Gerard, seated in front of an old, bare, country-style oak table, massive, and he’s tied to a heavy wooden armchair. His legs are tied to the chair legs and his arms are tied to the chair arms. Annabel is nowhere to be seen. Gerard stares at Bass, his brow furrowed with anxiety. Bass asks him, do you love your wife? He nods in the affirmative.
Then suddenly there’s Annabel, similarly tied to a similar chair at the other end of the table. Behind her is a screen door open to the starry night. Moths drift through the doorway, attracted by the light. A luna moth, the color of her wedding dress, settles on the knuckles of her right hand where it grips the chair. Bass brushes it away and his carving knife immediately replaces it, big and sharp and elegant in its way and poised to sever all four fingers and maybe the thumb too for good measure.
He asks Gerard again do you love your wife? and presses the knife gently to her flesh.
He nods yes and Bass sees that he is gagged now, as is she.
Bass lifts the knife off her fingers and transfers it to Gerard’s right hand and asks him a third time, do you love your wife? and he nods again slowly, sadly it seems, almost a polite bow to him and full of understanding. He reaches over to place his free hand on top of the knife and push suddenly down and the screams behind the gag and the sound and feel of knife breaking through bone are what wake him.
He replayed the dream off and on all night long at The Gates of Hell. He didn’t court it. It just wouldn’t go away. Should Gary have asked him even so much as a how’s it going? he’d have told him about the dream in an instant in as much detail as he could muster but he didn’t ask and Bass couldn’t very well blurt it out between banana daiquiris and bijou cocktails.
It was the dream though and dwelling on the dream that goaded him into action the next day.
The Official Gerard Pope Website carried no e-mail address but it did have a message board where readers could discuss his work, swap observations and opinions and Bass noted at first visit that Gerard tended to log on once a week over the weekend and answer whatever questions had been put to him. He was regular about it.
His style in these messages was encouragingly open and unaffected. He was even funny. Approachable. Bass reflected that though Annabel had forbidden him any contact with her she’d said nothing about Gerard.
Bass sat down, lit a cigarette, took a deep drag and dropped him a line Thursday night after work.
Good photo. She looks great in green. I like the faraway sky-look, of course. Know it well. Care to catch up on old times we never had? If you’re curious, e-mail’s above.
—Bass
By Sunday he had a reply.
She’d probably kill me for doing this but yeah, I guess I am curious. You still on the West Side? If so, how about 1:00 Tuesday, lunch at the Aegean?
—Best, Pope
So he used his last name too. Interesting.
He e-mailed back saying Tuesday was fine.
Monday night he dreamed about something else entirely. At least he thought it was about something else entirely. It was a bright beautiful day and he was driving along a highway when another car pulled up alongside him and Bass and the driver glanced at one another. The driver was a woman, a blonde, slightly overweight he thought, but she gave him a gap-tooth smile that simply beckoned.
The next thing he knew he was in her car, in the passenger seat, and the next thing after that they were parked along the roadside and the car had become a trailer and they were naked on her bed making love and even though her body had a fleshy quality it was pretty good, really—not bad at all. It got even better when she morphed into a slim beautiful brunette, the model Paulina Porizkova, who Bass had wanted since he first laid eyes on her. And she kept doing that—morphing from Paulina to the blonde with the gap in her teeth and back again.
“I think maybe you should stay the night,” she said as the blonde.
He said, “I thought you’d never ask.”
He woke with barely enough time to shower and shave and grab a cup of coffee along the way.
The Aegean was doing a moderate lunch business and there were plenty of open tables but Pope was at the bar at the corner facing the door. He immediately smiled and offered his hand. “Gerard Pope,” he said.
“John Bass. How’d you know it was me?”
“What? Oh, the photos.”
“Photos?”
“Yeah.”
“She kept the photos?”
“Some, I guess. I don’t know how many. I just know you from the ones she showed me. Cape May, mostly. You know how it is with the ladies—the ones she looked really good in.”
He smiled and shook his head. “Damn.”
“What’ll you have?” said the bartender. Pope was drinking an O’Doul’s non-alcoholic.
“Amstel Lite.”
“Coming right up.”
“I thought she destroyed them all.”
“Annabel? Annabel can’t throw away a burned-out light bulb.”
His beer arrived complete with frosted mug and they asked for menus and talked trivia, about his website for the most part which Bass said he admired and which was handled for him by a fan in Colorado in exchange for collectables, first editions and such and they ordered and then gradually the conversation began to get more personal and Bass learned that they had moved twice in three years into larger better apartments from Hell’s Kitchen to the West Side and finally to Soho. He learned two of Pope’s books had movie options but that Pope wasn’t necessarily counting on anything to come of them. He learned that Annabel was working in mixed-media now, seascapes like stylized beach-combings and that they were selling fairly well out of their Soho loft. They were currently working on a website to promote her stuff too.
By the time he’d finished his broiled squid and calamari salad and Pope his chicken lemoni, Bass realized something that didn’t make him happy at all. He kind of liked the guy. What a pain in the ass. And he guessed that Pope could see it on his face because he laughed.
“Disappointed? That I’m not some prick you could just keep on hating?”
“I never…”
“Come on. If you didn’t hate me you were sure working on it. Look, I’m a writer. I’m good at body language. There was a definite poker up your ass when you walked in. You only just relieved yourself of it a while ago.”
He thought of the dream, Gerard’s sad nod to him that was almost a bow. He was pretty good at body language himself. But he only now realized what the nod was telling him. Not resignation to the knife, which was what he’d thought it to be the following morning. Recognition. Recognition of the Other.
In his mind he spoke the dream-words do you love your wife? but what came out of him was “You love her, don’t you.”
“Of course I do. She’s pretty damn easy to love. Which you of all people ought to know. She was trying to do you a favor, Bass.”
“Oh yeah? How so?” He hoped it didn’t come out as bitter as it sounded.
“Telling you she’d thrown out the photos, for one thing. Telling you to do the same. By cutting you off. That was the main thing.”
Cutting you off. He thought of his dream and suddenly it clarified and almost startled him. He realized that in the subtle inversions dreams will make it hadn’t been Gerard sitting tied to the chair at all. It was Bass. Unable to move or defend himself, unable to speak or argue his position. Waiting, nodding sadly in recognition of Gerard. And finally cut off at the very moment of awakening.
“She knew it wouldn’t work. She was trying to do you a kindness by not letting it go any further. And herself a kindness too. Me too of course.”
Bass thought about it. Finally he nodded.
“I had a dream about you,” he said. “I lit a cigarette. You took it from me and threw it away.”
“Pushy little bastard, huh?”
“No. It was for my own damn good.”
They split the bill.
“You asked me if I loved my wife,” Gerard said—though he hadn’t, exactly. “If you love her you’ll do the same as she tried to do for you. Metaphorically at least, throw those damn pictures away. Tear them into little pieces. Maybe someday when we’re old and grey, you can take a new one.”
“Or maybe not.”
“Or maybe not. Nice meeting you, Bass. This never happened but I’m sort of glad it did, if you know what I mean.”
Bass ordered another beer and sipped it slowly, thinking things through.
A little while later he switched to scotch.
Midway through the second one he stepped outside for a smoke and watched the street life. Nannies and brisk young mothers with double-wide strollers. Truckers delivering paper goods and dairy. A woman across the street jogging in place at a stoplight and shouting furiously into a cell phone. A guy in a mohawk, moccasins and fur earmuffs, stripped to the waist, all buff and tanned. What’s with that? he wondered. Tonto Nuevo? Earmuffs in August? It seemed there were people out here way more strange and obsessive than he was.
He went back inside and finished his scotch and had another. He sipped this one for a long time. The bartender made no effort to engage him in conversation. Sometimes they just knew.
He paid for the beer and scotches and headed home. Home was as he knew it would be. Empty. Empty of Laura, mostly.
He poured himself a final scotch he certainly didn’t need and sat back heavily on the couch and sipped it and he supposed he must have dozed for a little while because the next thing he knew his face was wet with tears, he was crying in his sleep now for chrissake, that was different and he thought of the dream and what the dream maybe wanted him to do so he went to the kitchen and opened the drawer and took out the knife.
He looked at the long, heavy blade. It needed honing but he guessed it would do the trick. He looked at his fingers spread out on the counter. A symbol, he thought. That was what dreams were all about, weren’t they? Symbols for what still needing doing in your life? He lit a cigarette and thought about it some more. Nah, he thought. That’s more loco than the earmuffs. Not even the tip of a pinkie. You didn’t want to take this dream-terminology too damn literally.
Besides, something else had occurred to him. In his dream, the end of his affair with Annabel was loss, pure and simple. Symbolized by a few missing fingers. He thought it was more complex than that.
You lost something, sure. But when you did you added something too.
Scar tissue.
He could live with that.
He put down the knife and stripped off his shirt, pulled deeply on his cigarette and then pressed it slowly to the flesh directly over where he imagined his heart to be. He wanted the burn to last. Here’s to you, Annabel, he thought. He smelled his chest hair burning and another sweeter smell beneath it and felt something like a hornet’s sting, sharp and abrupt and then fading to a bright throb as the ember gutted out.
He tossed the butt into the ashtray and headed for the bacitracin.
Roughly seven years later preparatory to Annabel and Gerard’s tenth anniversary party he stepped out of a steaming shower and admired the pale white circle that stood out plainly against his glowing flesh.
Laura was already waiting, dressed and ready to go.
She always was a bit ahead of him.
~*~
About a year or so before I wrote this I’d had a deeply painful breakup and like my character here felt utterly shut out of this woman’s life and utterly adrift. Worse so when I learned she’d married. But like Annabel in the story she was ultimately wiser than I. And over time I became reconciled to that fact—though the meeting with her husband is wholly fictional.
The wedding photo I refer to is actually a photo of my friends Gerard Houarner and Linda Addison, who wed at Mardi Gras.
Many happy returns of many happy days.
—JK
At Home With the VCR
“Jeez. Now what are you watching?”
“Early Cronenberg. Rabid. Great movie. C’mere. Sit your butt down next to me on the couch here.”
“Oh god. Is this another one of your godawful horror movies?”
“Uh-huh. But this one’s a classic. Come on. Sit down.”
“What’s that thing coming out of her armpit? Oh god. It looks like a…”
“Hypodermic dick. Penis dentata. Yeah, I know. See, she’s had major cosmetic surgery because of this burn accident and…”
“Isn’t that Marilyn Chambers?”
“Uh-huh. Her first non-porn role. Looks great, doesn’t she? Surprise is, she can act. She’s good.”
“God, this is disgusting. Can’t you turn it down?”
“It’s a horror movie, Susan. You can’t turn it down.”
TIME PASSES.
“She does have a wonderful body.”
“You got that right. Damn!”
“I bet she works out. She definitely works out. What year was this movie?”
“ ’76, ’77. Something like that.”
“Hardly anybody was working out then. I mean, it wasn’t a thing like it is now.”
“Marilyn was a-head of her time.”
“Wiseass!”
“Ow!”
TIME PASSES.
“Oh, gross! I don’t see how you can watch this stuff.”
“Shhhh.”
“I’m getting myself a beer. You want a beer? Hey, you want a beer or not?”
TIME PASSES.
MORE TIME PASSES.
“Actually, I felt kinda sorry for her. I mean there at the end.”
“Sure. You were supposed to. Wasn’t her fault. Like the Frankenstein monster. Wasn’t his fault either. Hit the OFF button, will you?”
“You were right I guess. It wasn’t bad. For a horror movie. Got me pretty nervous there.”
“That’s not all it got you.”
“Huh?”
“How long have I known you, Susan?”
“Two years in July. You know that.”
“Right. And you don’t think I know the look on your face when something turns you on? After two years?”
“It didn’t turn me on, for godsakes! It was a horror movie.”
“I’ll make you a bet. I’ll bet you five bucks that if I touch you right now, you’re wet.”
“Right. Sure. Wet. Of course.”
“You gonna take the bet?”
“No I will not take the bet.”
“Why not?”
“Because.”
“Why not?”
“Stop it, Richard, come on, stop it! That tickles! Richard! Stop it! Stop…”
TIME PASSES.
“Mmmmm. That’s nice. That’s really nice. Do that some more, okay?”
“Give me my five bucks first.”
“Later. Right now just do that some more, okay? No, wait. Hold it. I got an idea. Rewind. Go to that part in the movie theatre. You know? You know the part I mean? Where the guy has his hand up inside her shirt, right before the thing bites him or injects him or whatever and…yeah…that’s right…that part there, where he’s just starting to…that’s right…now hit the SLOW button…now come here and yes, yes… mmmmmmmmmm… that’s so nice…”
~*~
In 1999 my friend Dean Kaltsas was running the first-ever Erotica USA Festival here in New York City at the Jacob Javits Center. He asked me if I’d like to be a guest and write a little something for their souvenir program magazine.
Would I like to be a guest?
An entire immense hall filled with half-naked women? Demonstrating the use of various sex toys?
Does Ursus Arctos deposit the occasional scat in heavily foliated localities?
Talk about a no-brainer.
I was the only honor-writer in attendance there so I decided that my piece for the magazine would combine the sexual with the spooky. Cronenberg’s Rabid is one of my favorites and one of his sexiest—not to mention Marilyn Chambers’ finest hour unless you count Insatiable which on reflection I guess I do—so it seemed a natural place to proceed from.
The very simple dialogue structure was fun too.
—JK
Those Rockports Won’t Get You Into Heaven
The place was going all to hell—not that you’d necessarily notice unless you worked there. The floor was mopped and the glasses fairly clean. The bottles were dusted and the bar wiped down but then I took care of that.
But the owner had two other restaurants on the same block and kept swapping bottles back and forth between them. So you never knew when you came in after the day shift what would be on the shelves. You’d have plenty of Dewars one day and the next day maybe a quarter of a bottle. It also meant that you’d find a liter of peach brandy or port wine getting overly chummy with the single-malts. The wines kept changing according to whoever threw him the best deal that week and half the time there was no beer on tap whatsoever.
