Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore (9780385538398) Read online

  He told me that he’d been in the exact same situation once when a gambler, Coco Manetti, made him do a gay film to pay off a bad debt.

  I remembered feeling sorry for Theon.

  And now he was dead.

  “It’s good that you quittin’ the business,” Kip said. “That’s no kind of life for you.”

  “No kind of life for anyone.”

  “But you’re so smart, Deb,” he argued. “A lotta these people in the life couldn’t be anything else. At least they get paid for bein’ young and flexible. But you read books … you talk like you know somethin’.

  “I remember when I first met you, when you were just a kid. You talked like you were straight outta the hood, but now you talk like some kinda coed or somethin’.”

  Theon had paid for my etiquette lessons.

  “How do you know I read?” I asked. I never talked about books to anyone except my therapist and that one arrogant literature professor.

  “Theon told me. I asked him did he get jealous with you havin’ sex with all those young men and he said that it was only the books made him turn green. He said that he always felt like he was about to lose you when you were lookin’ in a book.”

  The window of Jolie’s room looked down the cliff and over the Pacific. It was the kind of place that only wealth or beauty could afford. My family and I had lived in a small cottage. There was no privacy, much less solace, and the only view was of the street and smoggy city sky. What little green we had was painted on the concrete of our front yard. But I was never bothered by any of that. I adored my brothers, took care of my mother, and my father was a dream come true. He read me fairy tales and showed me how to count money when he was still comfortable with me sitting on his lap.

  I was remembering the scent of Aldo Peel as I sat on Jolie’s last bed. Aftershave and deodorant, tobacco smoke and whiskey—the feeling of my father could still steal up on me and transform, for an instant, wherever I was into the home I abandoned.

  There was a small stack of magazines under the bed. Style and fashion publications that showed off beautiful women with handsome men, along with the chic clothes and gorgeous architecture.

  Myrtle May had read these glossy magazines closely and voraciously; I could tell this by the wrinkled pages and sentences that had been underlined in pink ink throughout.

  Beauty, one such underlined passage read, is a thing that rises out from the inside of a person. A man will be attracted by form and style but this inner beauty is what he lives for.

  Your body is the bank, another sentence said, but the wealth is your spirit.

  There were many such lines in the beauty magazines. This surprised me. I read the same publications and couldn’t remember having come across such insightful comments.

  She had cigarettes and a joint in her desk drawer, quaaludes and a tiny bag of cocaine in a small lacquered box on the bureau. Her childish jewelry was either silver or gold plated. Her clothes were jumbled in a box on the floor.

  There was a violet diary with a stylized red heart and yellow flower stenciled across the cover. There was a small latch that she had locked. The key was probably with the police, or maybe her parents had it now.

  I had just pulled out of Kip’s driveway when I decided to drive off the road and crash my car down the cliff and into the Pacific. It wasn’t a difficult choice; nor was it a judgment or verdict. It was like deciding to listen to jazz after five years of rock and roll, like changing the radio station after renting a car in a different city.

  I was just going to drive off the road. There was no trepidation or physical awareness; I wasn’t afraid of the pain.

  Up ahead of me, just beyond the turn there was a clear view of the sky. That’s where I was going to fly off. When I got there and made the turn, I found myself on a little area designed for motorists to pull off when they got lost. The cliff was guarded by trees and three big boulders.

  There was no egress (a word I once read in a nineteenth-century romance). I had to stop.

  And when I stopped the entirety of the days since that orgasm, since those senseless deaths, since I’d lost everything I’d worked for for fifteen years and more—it all crashed in from behind, like a bulldozer trying to push me over the edge.

  I had never cried like that before. Even the heartrending loss of my father didn’t call up such grief. I screamed so hard that I couldn’t breathe, cried so violently that it felt like my insides would come out of my eyes, nose, and mouth.

  I flung the car door open and threw myself from the seat. Falling to the ground I willed myself to stand, then lurched stiff-legged to the gap between the boulders and looked down.

  I remembered every sensation, sound, and smell as if I were experiencing them at this very moment. There was the chattering birdsong from the bushes below, but Death filled the horizon. I remembered smashing my favorite doll after my mother came home from the emergency room and told me that my father was dead. It was a fancy, old-fashioned black doll that he had given me.

  “Niggahs done kill him,” Mom’s friend Galia said.

  I destroyed that doll, hoping the sacrifice would somehow reverse time and bring my father back. I was a mad scientist and an angry child. But now, overlooking the ocean, all I could do was cry.

  I sat down between the guard stones and wept. The misery in me was hot wax over an unrelenting flame. I was being consumed by my own fires. My soul, I felt, was dripping down that mountainside between the bushes and birds, ants and hidden animals. I was a husk then, an empty vessel that had been filled with poisons.

  When it was over I was both drained and clear. I felt like the inner-city sky after the rains had washed away the pollution. I stood up, experiencing a sensation of weightlessness. The sorrow was gone from me but I had no reason to smile. The spiritual infection that drained out of me on that little turnabout had been inside for years. Cutting off my hair had been like pressing the wound but not treating it. Days of sleep only served to deaden but not destroy the pain.

  I’d left Kip’s residence at two-oh-two that afternoon. It was two twenty-eight when I got back in the car.

  While driving down the canyon road I thought of my mother hanging clothes to dry on the line in the backyard. She’d usually have a radio playing old disco songs while she danced with the sheets and T-shirts, bras and socks.

  “Why you always got to be washin’ clothes an’ hangin’ ’em up on a line, Mama?” my younger brother, Newland, asked for at least the hundredth time.

  My mother never got tired of the question. She’d always answer, “You have to wash ’em sometimes, baby; otherwise they get all stinky and stiff.”

  Marcia Pinkney’s home sat between two other flat-roofed houses in the dead-end arc of a cul-de-sac on a street named Pine Circle. The grass was green and trimmed and the front porch was the length of the front of the ultramodern-looking house. I parked in the driveway and walked across the lawn.

  The blue tennis shoes were worn and so I could feel moisture from a recent watering through the soles and sides of the shoes. The cold spots made me smile. I stopped to appreciate this sensation.

  The sky above my head was gray from air pollution. A gang of starlings squabbled madly in the limbs of a great oak standing in the left-side neighbor’s yard.

  Somewhere, I was sure, a black woman in a white wig was rutting under the high school dreams of Myron Palmer or one of his friends. The woman in the wig would certainly steal my name.

  I willed myself to take a step but my legs resisted. I took a deep breath and leaned forward—if my legs refused I’d fall to the ground. Half the way into the fall my right leg jutted forward and I was again stalking toward Theon’s mother’s home.

  The door was open but the screen was shut.

  I pressed the button and chimes filled the air.

  Inside the house was dark, shadowy. It was hot outside but cool air was rushing out through the screen.

  It came to me that I should walk away at that moment. This
was the only appropriate action to take.

  “Hello, dear,” Marcia Pinkney said.

  She was standing in the haze of the screen door, neither smiling nor frowning, staring into my face.

  “You look different,” the slender and small white woman said.

  “Can I come in?” I hadn’t spoken since leaving Kip’s house.

  “Of course,” the older woman said as she undid a latch and pulled the door open. “Do you have a cold, dear?”

  “I’ve been crying,” I said.

  “Oh … yes, of course.”

  Theon’s mother was short and frail-looking. The white of her dress made her skin seem gray. Her bones were made for birds and other slight creatures but her eyes were dark and magnificent.

  She led me through the unlit rooms that were not walled off from one another. To the left was a sunken living room that had green carpeting and violet walls. To the right the kitchen lay. It was a brown-on-brown affair with tall stools and a plank apron that went around three sides of the stove.

  Marcia led me through the house to a double yellow door that opened onto a covered patio, which looked out on a waterless swimming pool. The bottom of the pool was littered with dry brown leaves and caked with dirt.

  “Something to drink?” Theon’s mother asked me.

  A crystal pitcher sat on the coral-colored aluminum table. Sweating, it was filled with a bright green liquid.

  “Gin and sweet lime,” she said, as if introducing me to a sentient being.

  The baby-blue chairs were made from some kind of space-age ceramic material. It felt like I had to press myself down just to sit. I still had the feeling of weightlessness. As if in a dream I imagined that I could float up above the roof and sail away to Hawaii or even farther—to lands that had not yet been discovered.

  There was a silver tray with two unbreakable clear plastic tumblers on it. Marcia poured the tumblers full and handed one to me.

  I took a sip. It was very sweet and tangy, not alcoholic at all.

  “Were you expecting someone?” I asked.

  “You, my dear.”

  “Oh?” I felt complimented and at the same time compromised.

  “Where do I begin?” Marcia asked.

  “The funeral is set for next Saturday at Day’s Rest.”

  “Oh.” I could see her thinking of the zoo the memorial service would be.

  “You could come the night before to say good-bye if you wanted,” I offered.

  “Theon told me that you were very perceptive,” she said through a mild smile. “But I didn’t listen to him. I never listened to him.”

  She took a deep gulp from the glass.

  I did the same.

  “Did you love him?” she asked.

  “Often but not always.”

  “I blamed you for destroying his life.”

  “When Theon and I met he was forty-three and I had just turned fifteen.”

  The math pained her. She took a drink and I responded in kind.

  “That young?”

  “He always liked younger women.”

  “You were a child.”

  “Not on the street I wasn’t. I couldn’t afford to be.”

  “I …” she said, and then took another drink.

  I swigged my gin Kool-Aid and waited for the rest.

  “I can’t … I can’t bear to think about these things in my house,” Marcia Pinkney said at last. “I told Theon that I didn’t want his sordid business here.”

  “He was born here, Marcia.”

  “I know.”

  We both finished our sweet drinks and she refilled our glasses.

  I felt the mental stutter of inebriation when I looked up to see a jet flying high above.

  “What was he like?” Marcia asked.

  I gazed at her, nearly flummoxed by the question.

  “Did he collect stamps?” she added. “Did he play softball?”

  “Didn’t you ever talk to him?”

  “When his father was alive …” she said, and then paused. “When his father was alive there was a lot of conflict between them.”

  Henry Pinkney beat his sons mercilessly. That was why Theon never wanted children.

  My dad would beat us and Mom would leave the house, he’d told me more than once. My idea of family is going to the park and watching other people play with their kids.

  “When Hank died,” Marcia continued, “I thought that things would get better, but Johnny ran away and Theon turned angry and sullen. I tried to talk to him but he wouldn’t listen. He got that apartment in Hollywood and met that … that awful woman, that Moana Bone. She was the one who turned him into a pimp.”

  Marcia didn’t know the right words but I understood what she meant. And anyway, in the end Theon had actually become a pimp of sorts.

  “It must have been terrible to feel like you were losin’ your fam’ly one at a time,” I said. The liquor had affected my words. My mother’s tongue was speaking for me.

  I felt like a field of wheat undulating under the pressure of otherwise imperceptible breezes.

  “Oh yes,” Marcia said with certainty. “I wished that I had a daughter to sit with me.”

  “Girl might not be what you wanted neither, Marcia. Moana Bone was somebody’s little girl once.”

  “Her mother must curse the day she was born,” my mother-in-law said.

  “Just like you and Theon.”

  The widow gave me a grieved look and refilled both our glasses.

  “Am I really so evil?” she asked.

  “I wish none of it ever happened,” I replied.

  “Don’t we all,” she agreed.

  “No, Mrs. Pinkney,” I said. “No. A lot of people love their hate. They live to hate the people wronged them. You cain’t just have one gang. That don’t even make sense. If you took away the white man’s black man or the black man’s white man, most of ’em wouldn’t even know how to walk down the street right.”

  Marcia Pinkney started and stared. She shivered and almost forgot to take a swig of her sweet oblivion.

  “I hated you because you were a black girl,” she said, as if it were a revelation—even to her.

  “I know that.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How could you know when I only just realized it right now?”

  “Theon told me that when he hooked up wit’ Moana you went to her and begged that she let Theon go. He said you offered her money and anything else she wanted. But when he finally did leave her and got together with me you didn’t even try.”

  I could see that Marcia wanted to deny my slurred indictment, that she wanted to say that it was a different time and situation. But she couldn’t put the lie into words.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, and then she began to weep.

  I got a little teary too. Not the racking anguish I felt on the mountainside. This was more like a gentle mist than a raging storm. But still it moved me enough to get up and go over to Marcia. I knelt down next to her ceramic chair and embraced her. She was stiff at first but then let go and cried on my shoulder.

  After a few minutes of these soft tears she patted my arm and I went back to my chair. We divvied up the last of the delicious drink and stared out over the empty, filthy pool into the polluted sky, through which we could see the bare outline of the San Bernardino Mountains.

  The sun was going down but it was comfortable enough outside.

  A trio of hummingbirds came by to inspect the scent of the now empty pitcher. Marcia snored gently as I watched the delicate birds inspect this wonderful but inaccessible plastic flower.

  One of them did a circuit around my head. Maybe she smelled the sugar on my lips. I thought that it would be nice to be kissed by a hummingbird.

  Soon they all flitted away to a bush of yellow flowers on the far side of the pool.

  Not long after that the sun began to set. I was sad and peaceful sitting there.

  “Oh dear,” Marcia said
after a while.

  “What, Mrs. Pinkney?”

  “I can’t seem to stand up.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “I think it’s the gin,” she said, and then chuckled.

  I giggled along with her.

  “Let me help you,” I said.

  I tried to get up but failed on the first attempt. Taking a deep breath I tried once more, stood up, and stayed in that posture. I found that I could maintain that stance as long as I held on to the edge of the aluminum table.

  “Your sheets are in the wind too,” Marcia said.

  I wondered if the words actually meant what she was saying. It didn’t matter—the old racist and I understood each other quite well.

  “I should put you to bed,” I said.

  I helped Marcia Pinkney to her feet and walked with her to the many-windowed master bedroom. I helped her off with the white dress and laid her down, pulling the blankets up to her chin.

  I thought she had fallen back asleep but then she grabbed my hand.

  “Don’t go when you’re still tipsy, dear,” she said.

  “Don’t you worry,” I said. “I’ll sit out on the couch and watch TV until I’m sober enough to drive.”

  In the living room I contemplated watching the old console television but gave up the notion. Just the idea of the jangled sounds and shifting images made me queasy. I sat on an ugly maroon couch that was built to seat two. On a green stone table next to it was a framed photograph of Theon when he was maybe thirteen. He was smiling with his mouth but not his eyes. I saw in the child the future man.

  This vision brought a sigh from deep in my lungs.

  I cradled the picture and sat back on the unsightly but comfortable couch.

  It was so strange to be out in Pomona sharing confidences with Theon’s mother. One of the reasons he married me was that he knew that she and I could never be friends. Theon didn’t trust his mother. He believed that she could have saved him from his father’s savage beatings but that she did not because she didn’t love him enough. This distinction was very important to him: His mother did love him but not enough to save him.

  Smiling at the thought of my dead husband’s delicate psyche I closed my eyes. When I opened them again the sky had lightened. The sun was not yet up but dawn was coming.