Willful Creatures Read online

  The motherfucker told her he liked her hat. She said, Thank you. He asked about her son; she said, He’s four. The kid rolled in the grass, collecting stains on his clothes like lashings from a green whip.

  “I think you’re a good actress,” the man said. “Why do you always pick such sad characters to play?”

  “Me?” she said. “Sad characters?” And she flashed him her teeth, the long white ones that had been photographed a million times by now, each tooth a gleaming door into the mysteries of her mouth.

  The motherfucker said yes. “You,” he said.

  He stood with the starlet for a while and told her he was a graduate student at the school for emotional ventriloquists. She raised one carefully shaped eyebrow. “No,” he said, “it’s true.” She laughed. “No,” he said, “it’s true. You throw your emotions on other people in the room,” he explained, “and see what they do then.”

  “So what do they do?” she asked, keeping that perfect eyebrow halfway up her forehead.

  “It depends,” he sighed. “Sometimes they lob them right back at you.

  “Turns out life,” he said to her, “is a whole lot like tennis.”

  They walked to the gazebo. The party was ending, and the sun was going down and the grass had turned a softer shade of green. He knew he needed to do something to make her remember him so he stood there with her in the gazebo, watching her son, and put his hand on her famous shining hair, just for a second, lifted it off her back and let it down again. She jumped.

  “Oh!” she said. “Oh,” he said, “your hair was stuck.”

  Then he didn’t touch her again, not for weeks.

  He got her phone number from the host. Motherfuckers have their ways. It took only one lie and he left with those ten numbers, one dash, and two parentheses tucked with care inside his shirt pocket.

  At home, he put in a call to crazy Heddie from Butte. He asked her a half hour of penetrating questions and then tried to have phone sex but found he couldn’t really muster up the gusto. His mind was elsewhere. The next day, he called the starlet and asked her to dinner.

  She laughed. She sounded even prettier on the phone. “Aren’t you afraid of me?” she asked. “After all, I am a movie star.” He said no, he wasn’t afraid of her, he thought of her as an interesting, attractive woman who happened to have a very public job. She said that was sure a new way to put it. They set a date to meet at an Italian bistro on Vermont, and there she signed twelve autographs and he asked about how what she did as an actress and what he did as an emotional ventriloquist were similar, but she said they were in a restaurant and it was too distracting so they should talk about something light while they were there. “Maybe you’re afraid of me,” he said. She looked closer, eyes green and piercing. “Maybe I am,” she said, and the rest of the dinner was quiet. The waiter asked for an autograph on a napkin, and by the time they left, it was already hung up by the host’s podium with a red thumbtack, next to some signed black-and-white photographs of other stars, many of whom by now were regular people or else dead.

  The motherfucker recognized one of the mothers he’d fucked at a table to the right and waved while exiting but the mother didn’t acknowledge him because she was jealous and also starlets made her nervous.

  The starlet found the motherfucker trustworthy so she invited him back to her new house in the dark curves of the Hollywood hills, the wood floors brown and shining, the pillows sentimental, the magazines unread. They sat and had a good talk on her thousands-of-dollars couch. He mentioned his train trip and she said her father had been a conductor for years. They discussed depots. At the door he did not kiss or hug her but just said he’d had a terrific time, and she closed the door behind him, pensive. She paced a little and then watched some TV. She saw herself on the news.

  The motherfucker went home and rented one of her latest movies and watched it closely, and even though it was a comedy, he looked at the smile on her face and decided she was possibly the saddest person he had ever met or pursued.

  He didn’t touch her even when they went to lunch and she cried about her empty house. About how she had known all along with her husband but never would say it was true to herself. He didn’t touch her even when she raised limpid movie eyes up to him and gave him the look that meant Kiss Me to film fans from all over the world. He let his other mothers call and call but he didn’t pick up or call back. He invited the starlet to the ballet and during act two, he picked up her hand, and while the stage was full of people as flowers and birds, trying with all available muscles to be lighter than air, their hands learned each other, fingers over fingers, palm on back, palm on palm, edge to wrist, watchbands clinking because both of them liked to know what time it was at all times.

  He dropped her off, said he couldn’t come in. She was disappointed. She dreamed he was making love to her in a hamper.

  Heddie from Butte called. Heddie’s father was mad at her about something that had happened four Christmases ago and Heddie was upset. The motherfucker talked to her for a while but he couldn’t concentrate and said he had to go write his graduate-school paper on the relationship between sadness, mime, and Ping-Pong. “Why, I didn’t know you were in school,” said Heddie. “I wish you would talk more about yourself.” The motherfucker pretended he had call waiting. His goodbye was rude.

  He asked the starlet to dinner again. She was pleased. “He treats me,” she told her friend, the other hot new starlet, “like a regular person.” “Why on earth,” said her friend, the other starlet, “would you want that? What’s the point,” said the other starlet, “of being a starlet in the first place?” Our starlet put her hand on her cheek. Her blush was the color of a coral reef, but smooth. “I think it has to do with getting emotions thrown on you,” she said.

  This dinner they shared a bottle of wine and no one stopped to get an autograph. (She was wearing a hat.) She said he could come back to her house again, maybe they could have some tea. They played the hand game under the table and this time the volume was twice as high. His whole body was taut for her. “George is asleep,” she said, meaning her son. They drove back and she paid the babysitter, a huge tip to get her out as soon as possible, and she went to the kitchen to put the kettle on, and the moment of the first kiss was prolonged, longer, prolonged; she offered tea, she offered wine, she went to the bathroom and he pictured her in there, looking down at the toilet paper which was not yellow but clear with other liquid, and she returned, sat next to him on the couch, picked up a magazine, stood, sat, stood, sat, and he thought: It has been a while since this woman has been with a man who wants to be with women. And so he just sat there first and thought of women, thought of what he loved about women, thought of the slopes and the jewelry, the lines and the circles, breasts of all sizes, emotion, opening, contraction.

  He watched her. She put her head on her own shoulder-coy, twitchy.

  “I think about you,” he said.

  “What do you think about?” she asked. She ran through the movie scenes in her head. They all were very pretty options. He said, “I think about how nervous you are.”

  Her face fell. “What?”

  “No,” he said, flustered, “it’s great that you’re nervous.” His expression, for once, was open and earnest. She kept her eyes on him, and laughed once then, the laugh that stole the hearts of a million moviegoers, that fed the wallets of a fat handful of studio executives, and he said, “Wait.”

  “What?” she said.

  He took a step away, and looked at her. She made a wry little joke about directors. Then put her face nearer, ready to kiss him, to prove herself unnervous, how bold, how witty, but he didn’t move forward. “Hang on,” he said.

  She grew bolder, interrupted, said- “Hey. Let’s go outside. There are bushes out there.” The motherfucker paused and smiled, said no. She twisted and said- “Come with me, let’s go to the bathroom counter.” She’d had movie sex scenes on the bathroom counter and in the bushes, both. Audiences had liked tho
se a lot. He shook his head, no. “Let’s do it on a cliff under a tree!” she sang, and he said no. “I want to make love to you in a bed” is what he said.

  This made her feel completely out of control.

  He stepped closer. For some reason, his hands were shaking. Using his finger as a pointer, he drew an invisible line around her. He said, “Listen. Look. Desire is a house. Desire needs closed space. Desire runs out of doors or windows, or slats or pinpricks, it can’t fit under the sky, too large. Close the doors. Close the windows. As soon as you laugh from nerves or make a joke or say something just to say something or get all involved with the bushes, then you blow open a window in your house of desire and it can’t heat up as well. Cold draft comes in.”

  “It’s not a very big house, is it,” she said.

  “Don’t smile,” he said. She pulled in her lips.

  “Don’t smile,” he said. “It’s not supposed to be big at all. It should be the closest it can to being your actual size.”

  She could feel it brimming on her lips, that superstar smile, the bow shape, the teeth long and solid tombstones. She knew just what she looked like.

  “Don’t,” the motherfucker said, harder.

  And the smile, like a wave at the beach, receded. And when she didn’t smile, when the windows stayed shut, the glass bending out to the night but not breaking, the glass curved from the press of release but not breaking, then the tension went somewhere else, something buckled inside her and made the longing bigger, tripled it, heavied it, made it so big the whole house grew thick and murky. This was not something she knew well, this feeling; she was used to seeing her desire like an angora sweater discarded on the other side of the room.

  And she felt like she needed him then. In the same basic way she needed other things, like water.

  She was up again refilling her cup of tea and he followed her in and as she was pouring it he took the teapot out of her hand and balanced it right on top of the teacup and while she was looking at that, her hands shaking now, he took her fingers and leaned in and kissed her. Took her face in his palms, then suddenly the faces were too close for anything else to be happening and the kiss was soft and so sweet and in the next room the kid shifted and his dream switched to one about lightning and a boy who stuck his hand in the electrical socket and what happened next.

  “What do you want?” asked the motherfucker, getting ready to motherfuck, and he stepped into her house and her hands were all over his face, his neck, his bones, his hair.

  “Stop asking questions,” she said to him, kissing him again. “That breaks open your windows, doesn’t it?” And the motherfucker felt he could crush her, because she happened to be right, and he shut up and his house grew smaller, smaller than he was used to, and she didn’t smile or run to the bushes, so hers grew smaller, smaller than it had ever been, and then smaller, and then smaller, until she fit inside, gloved, a house of desire the exact size and shape of her. She thought she might wheeze away but then his hands touched skin, and her throat cleared and lifted.

  The next morning, a dry clear day, the starlet made the motherfucker banana pancakes. Her son wandered in in pajamas and got some pancakes too. The motherfucker took a shower in her gourmet shower and used shampoo made from the placenta of sea urchin. He came out as fresh and clean as an underwater urchin infant. She was a yield sign, all sinews and mush, and he sat down and she whispered, “That was a wonderful night,” and he said, “It was,” and he meant it and he meant it too much and he said, “I think I have to go now.”

  She called him a motherfucker, but in a teasing way.

  He said, “It’s true, though.”

  He didn’t call her that day. He didn’t call her the next day. She realized she did not have his phone number, could not tell him that she had to go on location to shoot the movie about people with problems but would miss him. During her movie the director asked her to smile but she said no. “This movie,” she said, “I am going to stay in my house.”

  On the screen, she was so luminous in her seriousness, she made the whole cinema fill with tension, so much so that every cinemagoer went home charged up like an electrical storm, fingers in sockets, so much so that she got nominated for seven awards. The motherfucker, who never called again, watched her win from the quiet of his small bedroom. She was wearing a dress the color of the sky before it rains and had become, suddenly, beautiful. She had been something else before, but now she was something else from that. She thanked her parents most of all, her father the train conductor, her mother who rode the trains back and forth across the country to be with him. The motherfucker held his own body close. His apartment was very plain. “This is the house of your desire,” he whispered to himself, looking at the small walls behind him, and when he closed his eyes, the torrent of longing waiting inside was so thick he thought he might drown in it.

  So there we were, Steve and I, smack in the middle of the same fight we’d had a million times before, a fight I knew so well I could graph it. We were halfway down the second slope of resignation, the place where we usually went to different rooms and despaired quietly on our own, and right at the moment that I thought, for the first time in seven years, that maybe things were just not going to work out after all, that was the moment he suggested we drive to Vegas right then and tie the knot. “Now?” I said and he nodded, with gravity. “Now.” We packed as fast as we could, hoping we could pack faster than those winged feet of doubt, driving 100 miles per hour in silence, from sand to trees to mountains to dry plains to that tall, electric glitter. Parked. Checked in. Changed clothes. Held hands. Together we walked up to the casino chapel but as soon as Steve put his nose in the room, well, that’s when those winged feet fluttered to rest on his shoulder. Reeling, he said he had a migraine and needed to lie down. An hour later he told me, washcloth on forehead, that he had to fly home that instant and could I drive back by myself? I stood at the doorway and watched him pack his nicest suit, folding it into corners and angles, his chest and legs and back and butt in squares and triangles, shut and carried.

  “Goodbye,” we said to each other, and the kiss was an old dead sock.

  I spent the day there floating in the glowing blue swimming pool in my brand-new black swimming suit, cocooning myself in a huge white towel that smelled of sunshine, walking past tigers and dolphins. I slept diagonal on the king bed. After checking out, I went to the car, which was boiling hot, and put my bag in the trunk and geared up the engine and turned on the air conditioner and pulled out of the parking structure. The road extended through the desert, a long dry tongue. I didn’t feel like listening to music and was speeding along, wondering if to all people the idea of marrying felt so much like being buried alive, as in particular the idea of marrying this man did. Anticipating the talks we were going to have, to get to the point where we both admitted we were only in it out of loyalty and fear, my mouth dried up and I had a sudden and very intense craving for a mango.

  I’d never eaten a mango in my life. But the craving was vast, sweeping, feverish.

  Great, I thought. It is not mango season and it is not mango country. And I knew those bright flavored gums would not cut it.

  After half an hour, the craving was so bad I stopped at a gas station and tried anyway, bought a pack of orange-pink candy-Mango Tango!-but the taste of each flat circle, so sugary and similar to all other sugar flavors, made me long for the real one even more. I stopped at every market I saw but the fruit they had was pathetic: soft mealy apples, gray bananas, the occasional hard green plum.

  The road was quiet and empty of cars. I sped past gas stations and fast food.

  I was thinking, seriously, of driving straight to the airport and emptying my savings to fly myself to Africa so I could find one there, easy off the tree, the gentle give at the touch of my thumb, when far ahead, several miles up the road, I caught a glimpse of what appeared to be a shack. It was part of a tiny commercial strip facing a doughnut store and an oil lube filter station. From a
distance it looked colorful and lively and as I got closer and closer, I thought I might be hallucinating from the heat because as far as I could tell, the front of the shack was full of trays and tables and shelves and piles of ripe beautiful fruit. My mouth started to water and I pulled over and parked my car on the shoulder of the road.

  The highway was still empty of cars and the fast food doughnut chain was empty of cars and the oil lube filter was closed, so crossing the street was a breeze. The awning of the store was a sweet blue-and-white gingham and sure enough, there were huge tables burgeoning with fruit: vivid clementines, golden apples, dark plums, swollen peaches, three patterns of yellow and brown pears.

  The awning said fruit and words.

  I went inside. I found a tan woman behind the counter perched on a stool, dusting a deep red apple with her sleeve.

  “Hello,” I said. “Wow, you have such beautiful fruit here!”

  She had a flat face, so flat I was scared to see her in profile.

  “Hello,” she said mildly.

  My hopes were swelling as I walked by a luscious stack of papayas, surging as I passed a group of star fruit and then, indeed, next to a humble pile of four, I found the small sign that said what I wanted to hear. And there they were, gentle and orange, the smell emanating from their skin, so rich I could pick up a whiff from a distance.

  She nodded at me. “They’re very good,” she said. “Those mangoes are excellent quality.”

  She placed the polished apple in front of herself like she was teacher and student all at once. I scooped up all four and took them to the counter. I felt a wave of utter unearned competence. Ha ha to everyone else. Finding fresh mangoes fifty miles out of Las Vegas seemed to me, in no uncertain terms, like some kind of miracle.

  “You have no idea how wonderful this is,” I told her, beaming. “I have been having the most powerful mango craving. And here we are, in the desert of all places!”