Permission Page 16

  ‘I’d like that.’

  He was quivering. He took off his jacket, folded it neatly and placed it on the ottoman. His cologne hung in the air. I tried to be subtle about checking my watch. Barely two minutes had passed.

  ‘May I?’

  ‘Please.’

  He traced the edges of my shoes and stuck his finger in the peep-toe.

  ‘You’ve been running around in these all night,’ he said. He gripped my feet and squeezed them together.

  ‘I was at another party.’

  ‘What kind of a party?’

  ‘A Hollywood party.’

  ‘I knew it. I thought you might be an actress, or a model.’

  He took off my right shoe and pressed his nose to my sole. ‘You were barefoot.’

  I laughed at his powers of detection, and embellished: ‘Yes. I even drove here without shoes on. I like how the pedals feel.’

  He moaned and licked my foot from heel to toe. He fell into a rhythm. He knew exactly what he wanted to do. He used his tongue. He used his nose. He massaged my feet and calves, finding pressure points and releasing every tension in me. All the while muttering about how lucky he was to have found a woman like me, a fine young lady. A woman who liked to have her feet touched. Who let him do it. A successful actress with good style, a natural model beauty. The kind of woman he could introduce to his mother. I started getting into it, the fantasy that I was a perfect woman offering what no other woman could. I felt special, like when I’d shown off my feet to Piggy. Like some sort of saviour.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh, oh. I could fall for you. You’re a woman I could marry.’

  He pressed my soles to his chest, which shuddered as he sighed.

  ‘I could fall in love with you,’ he muttered and sounded so sincere that for a second I thought I could, too.

  He put my shoes back on my feet. They didn’t feel swollen at all.

  Then he stood up, handed me a twenty, said thank you and walked away.

  Exactly ten minutes had passed.

  His saliva had made my feet sticky and I didn’t like the way it felt between my toes.

  I was sitting at one of the round tables near the buffet, thinking about my car and how I wanted to go home, when Piggy appeared.

  He gave me a warm hug and said, ‘Have you been having a good time?’

  ‘Yes,’ I lied. I didn’t want to ruin his party. ‘Have you seen Orly?’

  ‘No, but she’s somewhere.’

  ‘You were right about the music.’

  He looked around to make sure no one had heard me and then gave me a look that said, ‘I told you so.’

  ‘The potluck’s a nice touch,’ I said.

  ‘It’s a good bunch of people.’

  ‘Could I help with the mood?’ I asked, mostly as a way to pass the time. And maybe it would feel different with Piggy, someone with whom I had a connection.

  He looked at Orly’s shoes and then in the direction of the man in the leisure suit.

  ‘You’ve already been with him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then no thanks. Nothing against your lovely… I’m a little…’

  ‘I get it.’

  ‘No offence.’

  ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘It’s why I get here early.’

  ‘Really, I’m ok.’

  He could tell I wasn’t really.

  ‘How about I clean them for you?’

  Piggy returned with a bottle of witch hazel and sat in a chair across from me, my foot resting on his jeans. He swabbed my foot with damp cotton balls, and when he slipped my shoes back on, the skin squeaked against the leather.

  And that’s when I saw Orly.

  Orly issued a command I’d never heard, but Piggy knew what it meant. He looked surprised. He had been expecting her, but not this. As soon as the backs of his hands were resting on his knees, you could see everything in the room had fallen away for him but her. With the point of her cane, she prodded him and he crawled across the floor and up the steps to the stage. I moved to the edge of the platform, where a small crowd had gathered. She had him stand at the edge of the stage, facing us. They were on full display, but something about them was private. I’d never seen her play with such intensity. She took her time. She teased him through his clothes. Then she spoke into his ear. He looked frightened, but nodded and undressed slowly, bashfully, stopping at his black leather thong. Everyone was looking. Then she took out his rope, silky and red. I’d glimpsed it under his shirt, but I hadn’t seen how the harness was constructed before. Piggy always hid his body from me. She laid out a pad for his knees and had him kneel. The rope draped around his neck and slid across his chest, knots and strands crossing his torso and wrapping around his thighs and between his legs. Her hands never touched his skin. We could see the hairs on his arm rise, and then she took out the clippers. Through the din of drums and guitars, they buzzed. Piggy was trembling.

  Orly stood beside him and lifted his chin. Again, she spoke to him, but we couldn’t hear. They looked at each other for a long while. A few people went back to the buffet and bar, tired of the spectacle or wanting one of their own. With one hand, she took him by the chin, clasping him along the jaw. She hooked her thumb over the bottom row of his teeth. The clippers on her other hand, she began to shave his head. Locks of dark hair fell on shoulders, dusted his chest and drifted to the ground, landing on his feet. When she was finished she wiped him clean and guided him up to his feet. He seemed unsteady, eyes locked to hers. He fell into her arms.

  Her words were a bridge revealing the space between them. No one but Piggy could hear Orly say: I decide if and when I use you. Are we clear?

  We’re clear.

  When Orly and Piggy left the stage, the room began to move again. Piggy sat at one of the round tables, wearing only his harness, sneakers, and thong. He was getting used to being in his skin. He got up and went to the buffet, poured a glass of water and helped himself to a strawberry from the fruit plate. When he touched his shaven head, he looked happy. I saw the way people looked at him now. They knew to whom he belonged. She had left her mark, and he was free to roam. A woman came over to speak with him, they hugged, and found a space where they could be alone.

  M O T H E R

  THE NEXT DAY, I searched the house for my mother. She wasn’t in her bedroom or in the yard. I feared the worst, but then thought that my mother was too proud to negate her own creation. The last place I looked was in the garage. When I saw her sitting there, in Dad’s Karmann Ghia, I wanted to throw my arms around the hood of the car.

  She rolled down the driver’s side window and offered me a Beer Nut. There was about half of the packet left. The sweet spot. Enough sugared and salted husks had fallen off so the bag was half-full of flavored dust that you could scoop up along with a peanut. I dug my fingers in and stuck them in my mouth, but then I couldn’t chew or swallow. She took my hand.

  ‘Come sit,’ she said, reaching across the seats to open the passenger door.

  The smell inside. Stale and intimate. Years of crumbs, breath, sweat, dust, and air-fresheners. We added to it our sorrow. Our noses started running and we laughed when we saw what the other was using as a tissue: the collar of my shirt, the back of her hand.

  I reached into his seat pocket and felt around for his stash of take-out napkins. I touched his Thomas Guide map, plastic cutlery, and driving gloves. Reading glasses, half-drunk bottles of water. A comb. Mints. The kind of mess that makes you say you live in your car. A casual collection of everyday items that could only have come from him.

  ‘Where did he keep the key?’

  ‘One of the canisters of tennis balls had a false bottom. I knew we had a key rock and a fake can of soup, but I didn’t know about the tennis balls. You know how he was when we misplaced our keys.’

  We sat in silence for a while.

  My mother glanced at me and said: ‘The art centre called.’

  I couldn’t read her tone.

&nb
sp; ‘They said you never picked up your cheque.’

  Silence.

  ‘I didn’t know you were working.’

  ‘I quit.’

  She frowned.

  ‘Dr. Moradi was in my class.’

  No one could look as dignified in anger as my mother.

  ‘I don’t know how Joyce can stand to be with that man. His own daughter won’t even speak to him anymore.’

  ‘Ana won’t?’

  She nodded.

  I let it sink in.

  I said: ‘But you didn’t leave Dad either. Even though you wanted to end it, both of you, didn’t you?’

  ‘Since your father…’

  ‘Drowned.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said and reached across the gear shift to take my hand. Her nails were shell pink, and where they’d grown out were pale, bare crescents. Her cuticles were dry and the polish chipped. ‘I keep thinking about how I ended up here. One day, I’m managing the Rotterdam office, the next I’m at the town hall with my co-worker getting married,’ my mother said. ‘Even then I was sure it was all a mistake. He thought this…’

  She touched my arm as one does in conversation, as I did and do. It reminded me of other times when it was easier to smile: a week into a two-week vacation when Dad finally relaxed, or when she’d reach over and touch my arm to tell me everything was under control as she speeded up before the slope where the landslide had lifted the earth under the road. If she hit the incline just right, the car would catch air.

  ‘…was me coming on to him. I thought his eagerness was foolish at first. Boyish. I was a woman paying attention to him. But we were at that age and both wanted children, and when he talked about California…well. Your father loved me. I had no idea why, but he was there, offering himself to me, so sure of us from the start. Who was I to say no? He made me laugh, he adored me, and we wanted the same things, at least for a while. He was – ’

  ‘ – an excellent salesman?’

  The words made her flinch.

  She continued: ‘Twenty-six years is a long time for anyone to be in the wrong place.’

  ‘Why didn’t you leave?’

  ‘And be a divorcée here?’ she scoffed and seemed to detach from the conversation, no longer speaking to me, but announcing a general truth. Her tone of voice made me sad. ‘And have you shuttling between him in our home and me in whatever condo the alimony would buy me? No thank you. I could never have done that to you.’

  Why she wouldn’t allow herself to imagine divorce as a fresh start, I don’t know, and if I asked, there was a risk it would end with us screaming. It was her attitude, I realized, that provoked me. It hurt to hear that she had locked herself into an idea of being. I wanted to wrestle her away from her preconceptions. But she didn’t want me to come up with solutions. I think she just wanted me to be there to witness her wounds. I could do that.

  ‘It must have been tough,’ I said.

  My mother brought my hand to her lips, then pressed it to her chest, rising and falling with her breath, her heart beating steady below.

  We passed the bag of peanuts between us, and when they were all gone, she took my fingers in her hands and looked at my nails: ‘I have my two o’clock. Would you like to come with me and see Janine?’

  WE FOLLOWED THE ROUTE we knew, but it was novel in Dad’s car. We were driving fast. I looked out for cops, and she slowed down at the speed traps, the rhythms of the drive now reflex after years of rushing to get places on time. We drove to her favourite shopping mall, the one with Spanish tiles.

  The bell on the door tinkled and Janine looked up from her magazine and came over to greet us. She was the only one there. Her acrylics clacked when she took my hands in hers and told me how sorry she was.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. Janine said my mother had told her how good I was: staying with her at the house and taking care of things.

  I looked at Mom, flattered to hear how she talked about me to others.

  ‘I don’t know where you found the strength,’ Mom said. ‘I’ve been barely getting by with the paperwork, and I keep thinking that we should arrange a memorial, but…’

  Janine sat her down in a massage chair, saying ‘One step at a time.’

  ‘We’ll figure it out,’ I said.

  She smiled at us. She looked so grateful.

  Then Janine grabbed a pile of magazines and set me up in the massage chair next to my mother’s. Janine filled a basin with hot water. My mother took off her shoes and submerged her feet. The magazines lay unopened in my lap as I watched Janine set to work on her. My mother’s head tipped back. She shut her eyes. Janine scrubbed, kneaded, trimmed, and polished. Loving her felt easy when I saw her like this. Relaxing into pleasure. Sustained. Receptive to an act of care.

  We went to pick up my cheque when we were done. As Mom waited for the woman at reception to return from the office, I wandered around the art centre’s gallery. It was the same art but different. One of the painting classes had been themed to Moulin Rouge. The colours were muddled, brown, purple, and grey. The angle of the spine made the model seem as though she had been pieced together from parts of other women and had failed to reanimate. The elaborate undergarments seemed punitive. I wondered how the painter had learned to see, when he’d closed his eyes. If it was a choice or a reflex. On a table near the paintings was a twisting torso made of red clay. I recognized Fumiko’s hand, the troublous curves. Not a figure study, not a nude, but a landscape of desire.

  I TOOK THE KARMANN GHIA and my board and headed for the surfers’ bay. There was no one on the road this time of night. The night was clear, the late-August moon large. I could even make out the lights on the island. I’d split the week between my apartment and here – not just to see Orly, I wanted to get to know my mother better and see Krit. He and I only really had the one thing in common, but it was enough – an interest in the sea. I didn’t want to be afraid of the water. As I drove, I imagined paddling out and floating in the wake of the moon, communing with the stars. I could already feel the wave inside me, its swell and curve. The surf was loud as I came down the path, and when the waves pulled back, a sound that has always made me sad, I heard shrieks of joy and chatter.

  There was a small group sitting by the fire lit in the fort. Krit saw me coming and waved. A woman offered me a beer. The can was half-covered in sand, which got in my teeth, even though I’d wiped the top off. I sat down. A wave rolled in, low and foaming over by the tide pools, the rocks tumbled as it pulled out. But the beach wasn’t quite itself. There was something strange about the sandy shore. It was agitated, twitching and pulsing, like water at full boil. Nobody was surfing. I tried to make sense of the moonlight thrashing in the sand. Two women were ankle-deep in the silver, one held a bucket, the other buried her hands in the scrum. When she raised them up, her fists were full of fish. Grunion. They brought their catch to the fire and threw it on the grill. Krit handed me a fish and squeezed lemon on it.

  I took my plate and broke away from the crowd for a closer look. The female fishes’ heads stuck up, their round intent eyes, tails burrowed in the sand, laying their eggs. The males coiled their long, slender bodies around them. The water slid across it all, quieting the wriggling down, only to pull back again and reveal a frenzy. Orly would love this, I thought. This wild nature, so clear about what it wants. I called her. ‘I’m eating grunion in the middle of a grunion run… How do they taste? A little sour.’

  ‘Not like ecstasy,’ she said, laughing. ‘You know, I’ve never seen a fish orgy.’

  I gave her directions, and as we were hanging up, I heard Orly say: ‘Wait.’

  I waited.

  She said: ‘I want you to count each wave until I come.’

  So I started counting:

  ‘One…’

  Acknowledgements

  This novel is indebted to many writers, artists, and activists, and their work. It would also not exist without the communities I’ve been lucky enough to be a part of.

 
Many resources have shaped this novel, too many to list here, but the following should be acknowledged. In thinking about landscape: Mary Austin’s The Land of Little Rain, Jonathan White’s Tides: The Science and Spirit of the Ocean. Womanhood and blood: Helen King’s The Disease of Virgins and Leonard Shlain’s The Alphabet Versus the Goddess. Sex work and BDSM: Pat Califia’s ‘Whoring in Utopia’ and Guy Baldwin’s Ties That Bind.

  The epigraph is from Camille Paglia, ‘The Return of Carry Nation: Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin’ (Playboy, October 1992). The scenes with the Director riff on Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The quotes from Superman are taken from Superman, Vol. 1 #261: Slave of Star Sapphire, copyright Cary Bates and dc Comics. The quotation from the composer when Echo is at Hollywood and Highland is taken from Erika Rothenberg’s permanent public art project The Road to Hollywood.

  I am forever grateful to everyone I came to know through those special houses I’ll refer to here as CdS and HoB, where I was taught new ways of loving that set my life on a particular course. (Thank you for opening the door, S and S.) Thank you, John O’Connor, Rachael Allen, Madeleine LaRue, Lauren Marks, Anne Meadows, Mui Poopoksakul, Ryan Ruby, and Andrea Scrima for reading, listening, and keeping me up when doubt, nerves, and fear were weighing me down. Thank you, Janet Fitch, Noel Riley Fitch, and Amy Friedman for the lessons in writing and the writing life. Thank you, John Freeman and Ellah Allfrey, for bringing me into an environment where I learned so much about reading and writing, and, ultimately, found out what kind of writer I wanted to be. Thank you, Marina Penalva, without whose encouragement and deadline-setting I’d probably still be sitting on an unfinished manuscript, and who, along with Maria Cardona and Anna Soler-Pont, sent this book into the world. Thank you, Sharmaine Lovegrove, for the inspiration, support, and friendship throughout this long journey, for being the first to say yes, and, along with Alana Wilcox, for helping me find the shape of this novel. Alana and Sharmaine, thank you both for a dreamy editing experience. To Bill Vogel, Margot Vogel, and Marsela McGrane for your love and support, no matter what. And especially my mother Margot, the most inspiring reader I know. To Gaby Koeppe and Anne Voss for the gift of space. To David Hermann Fox, the fiercest protector of my heart, my time, and so much more.