Whatsoever I've feared has come to life,
whatsoever I've fought off became my life.
Just when every day seemed to great me with a smile,
sunspots have faded and now I'm doing time
'cause I fell on black days.
Whomsoever I've cured, I've sickened now.
Whomsoever I've cradled, I've put you down.
I'm a search-light soul, they say, but I can't see it in the night.
I'm only faking when I get it right
('cause I fell on black days.)
How would I know that this could be my fate?
[SOUNDGARDEN]
Hers was an intense, unmistakable presence at the lakehouse: the smell of (white, white petals?) rampant wild flowers, an addict crawl of night-blooming jasmine, and the sixth sense that one has encroached upon a thing of particular exquisiteness, of rarity.
An aching testament to the human spirit and its struggle, the transmutation of it toward something greater, she had been ill-equipped as a small lost child coming up in Chicago's projects where oppressively tiny bedrooms hid a family's mistakes underneath a clot of heroin, a sicker version of love, and pillowcases that did nothing to blot out the screams when hush-hush depredations became the memories that give chase only at night. Having employed nothing but her wit, one natural talent, and pulchritude, she escalated from emancipation to rock star to killer to empress with a hunger and a consuming ambition that had not been rivaled since the vis major, the rise of Cleopatra VII.
She had the loneliest (or the fiercest), soul-bruised stare—whisper-soft veins of contusion blue twining around violent violet blooms, intensely doelike, a dominion of ridiculously thick lashes that spread their velvet black darkness over the haunting, unshakable white of her new baby's skin (untouched snow, born-again virgins.) Untouchable, unspeakable things about her (within her, deep down.) A malleable, adaptable quality that promised the parts of her that had been broken could never be broken again, though she was never softer than when she was torn asunder at the sleek, lace-licked thighs by a man who understood that sometimes faster meant harder, and that I can't means make me.
All the things she could call hers had been earned through blood, sweat, tears, and more blood. Always blood.
Often she moved through the grounds as she pleased, visiting its secret places, dainty seed pearls scattered to hardwood floors or within the shallows of grass as an older blackhaired man put her on his puppet strings—and she performed, thankful for the motion no matter how perverse. Said nothing of the devil cousin or his retreat consort, the irritating painter, or the hidden matron unless he did and avoided the shadows that seemed thicker than all the rest. Sylvie spent her days with dolls and pop-up picture books and crayons, and Lucian sometimes even did less than the usual baby would do. At the lakehouse, she was equal parts mother and lover though most of her hours were devotedly spent with Marius Vega in order to remind him just why he didn't need anything else but the wet warmth between her thighs, her lilting murmur in his ear.
(She even caught him once in the kitchen, pouring over another woman's casserole, and waited with the patience of a sociopath until he retired from the room wherein she dumped each dish into the trash from the refrigerator, just enough violence applied to crack glass. Suspended by a magnet on the refrigerator's front, she scrawled out in succinct letters upon a piece of stationary: Dear Shannon, Keep cooking for my man and I'll fucking kill your stupid ass. Love, Jill.)
There was a moment, just one, where she had seen Severin alone. Coming down one of the scattered hallways, freshly rumped from a quick hard screw with his master, she had been as soundless on bare feet as he was on his shoes until turning a corner had them almost colliding, blind to the approach of the other. But she'd slid back quick, too quick, a diaphanous muslin flutter on moist pale skin, red swollen mouth tender with shock and (what, what, Jill Ann?), unconsciously parted while her spine pressed itself to the wall. Immediate. He might have even caught a violet-tinged glimmer before the lashes swept low as a child's; self-protective? Guarded? Only she kept close to the wall for another step, two, until they could keep moving in the opposite direction wordlessly (and wisely so.)
A few hours later, though, she had received a phone call. While she'd been visibly reluctant to leave, she did: his scent on her skin, his man in the driver's seat next to her, and nothing to do but stare out the window in order to keep the levee from breaking.
I know a girl, she puts the color inside of my world
but she's just like a maze where all of the walls
are continually changed. And I've done all I can to
stand on her steps with my heart in my hand. Now
I'm starting to think, maybe it's got nothing to do with me.
Fathers, be good to your daughters—
daughters will love like you do.
Girls become lovers who turn into mothers,
so mothers, be good to your daughters, too.
Oh, you see that skin? It's the same she's been
standing in since the day she saw him walking away;
now she's left cleaning up the mess he made.
Fathers, be good to your daughters—
daughters will love like you do.
Girls become lovers who turn into mothers,
so mothers, be good to your daughters, too.
Boys, you can break, you find out how much they can
take. Boys will be strong, and boys soldier on, but boys
would be gone without warmth from
a woman's good, good heart.
On behalf of every man, looking out for every girl,
you are the guide and the weight of her world.
Fathers, be good to your daughters—
daughters will love like you do.
Girls become lovers who turn into mothers,
so mothers, be good to your daughters, too.
(so mothers, be good to your daughters, too)
(so mothers, be good to your daughters, too)
— John Mayer
She wandered through the little Arthurian bedroom nestled in the marbled hollows of the Vega's estates—her daughter's temporarily vacant sanctuary with its exquisite doll houses, damask canopied four poster, its hauntingly delicate miniature furniture embroidered in pale lace, gold lacquer. Arranged tea set, half-dressed dolls spilling out of pink-painted princess chests: a world that Jill had meticulously constructed from children's catalogues but had never, ever had.
"He's not answering his phone," she sighed out toward the direction of the cellphone's mouthpiece, stressed but calmly quiet. "Since he's being such a douchebag, I can meet up with Marius at lakehouse then send for Sylvie a week or two after that."
A pretty towheaded maid hovered behind Vega's lover as the black-haired womanchild ran a free hand over the row of closet hangers, selecting dresses to hand over, wherein the maid would take the chosen article. Gently removing the hanger, Blaise would fold the corners of petticoats and slim white hosiery and lavender velvet coveralls, retire them to the suitcase splayed open along the little girl's bed in impeccably compact squares.
"Dad?" Dad, and not Greg anymore, a transition that began after they had buried Scottie together in Chicago. "Dad, I don't want to talk about it. If you had nothing to do with it, then it's none of your business. I don't want to discuss it with you because I have a therapist I pay for things like this." Pinching the phone between an ear and the slender, round curve of a shoulder, she selected article after article of clothing, draping them over a softly hooked arm. "I am talking about it, we're talking about it right now, but I have to go. If Jett doesn't call me back before I leave—which will piss me the fuck off because I'd like to see Sylvie before I—yeah, I'll call you."
Greg was still talking when Jill ended the call to check the incoming text message, half-swiveling to hand off the armload of outfits to Blaise as if it were a languid afterthought. Doctor's appointment? from an unfamiliar number. Wordlessly, she left the maid alone in her daughter's room to finish up, escaping through the door into the maze of hallways, wide-sprawling corridors. Opulent, inkspilled French lace (the diminutive robe with the dramatic kimono sleeves) shivered above sleek fishnet thigh-highs, and so did the fat, silken dribble of ebony partial curls betwixt the eyelet-shadowed shallow valley the shoulderblades formed tenderly, so tenderly.
Saint Vincent's, thumbs typed out over the keypad, 10:45 AM. Meet me at 10:30 in the front lobby. It didn't vibrate after that so she left it face down on the bar in the master suite once she had permeated it with her decadent perfume (like wild berries on a summer's night dripping a pink-stained juice, honeysuckle dew drops over a bacchanal trickle of jasmine, caramel and vanilla, Juicy Couture's version of praline), sinking pale silverwhite fingers over a dense Baccarat, the Vega's cachaca, tilting them bonelessly into each other until the saccharine rum had nearly splashed over the glass lip.
Vega's letter had been stretched open over the bar's surface previously and she traced the edges of it with her manicured nails, the warm liquor bleeding down a delicately sleek throat demurely darkened by a lowered chin.
Open suitcases obscured the lower half of their shared bed and the upper half had been smothered with layers of her own clothes: mainly the most modest pieces in her wardrobe, which didn't count for much outside of the general effort applied, for it wasn't always easy to impress both a man and his mother. When planning a trip instead of spontaneously dropping off the face of the earth, Jill learned that she would be in a state of packing for days—doing a little here and there as she went, changing her mind, adding things, subtracting them—and even if Marius wasn't the most eloquent correspondent, individual words made her knees squeeze together desirously.
I really wanna and stresses me and ride me.
So one glass after another, and one thing to led to another; one of her weaknesses had always been a particularly hungry, hedonistic self-indulgence. One of the things that she loved about sex was the fact that she could disappear, that a bad day suddenly didn't have to mean a whole lot anymore, and that no matter what else she felt, she could share something of herself (one of the better parts) and nothing else had to matter until her body stopped twitching as if she was coming unglued at the seams.
In the plush marble bathroom, she took pictures on the phone after shouldering out of the Agent Provocateur kimono through the mirror, alternating between artistic and lewd. Ultimately there wasn't any point to that super-sleek black open bra except maybe to show off the pasties with their dusk-dark silk fringe tassels—and there was nothing at all to the matching satin thong, more fabric in the fat ribbons that had been twisted into flowery, half-flattened bows low on the small, milken sickles of her hips. Posing, arching; a rum-wet finger in her mouth, tracing downward between the subtle impressions of her ribs, disappearing into that inky knot of black between her thighs as her jaw went lax, obsidian-velvet eyelashes swerved low, low like they did when she implored Daddy in the middle of a painfully silent night.
Giving Marius ten minutes to receive the text messages, she finished off another round of alcohol, started on a joint, and found a place to sprawl belly-down on the bed between rivers of silk, tulle, leather before calling. During the course of their conversation, she let him know that she was leaving within the week and probably complained casually about Jett, someone's ass she did think he could kick, but she didn't mention a word about hospitals or men that came crawling at you from the darkness when it was late at night. Perhaps, perhaps she asked if Aden would still be there and whether he thought it would be okay, if she should really bring the baby.
And if he let her, if he cooperated, she spoke on all things filthy and verboten, smoke-feathered tongue and soft-throated voice—refusing to disconnect until her fingers were as moist as the panties she wore, until all the bad little girl words she knew had been spoken.
Dear Caesar,
You couldn't tell me this face-to-face? Not that I didn't have warning, I know. Aden is such a meddling asshole. He isn't going to be there, too, is he?
Either way, you know I'll come. Going without sex for too long isn't my bag, you know? And I suppose I'd miss you, too. I have some things to do here at home before I can come up, but I'll keep in touch over the phone until then and it shouldn't take more than a couple weeks.
Love always,
Jill Ann
P.S. I started calling the baby Lucian. After we changed his name over to yours, I don't know, it just seemed to fit him better. August is kind of a pussy name, don't you think?
P.P.S. I don't know about good, but I'm yours.
"So what are you doing, Jill? What is all this?"
Brooks was spread out on a chair, his legs long and his elbows hanging out over each scratchy upholstered arm. When he spoke, he angled one hand toward the ceiling without discretion, pointing. The joint had burned toward the tips of his fingers but he clamped the sticky dark end in a pair of silver clips, inhaling without making contact several times and quickly until the drug-smoke expanded in his lungs. His mouth zippered up thin, and in that dimmed down half-light of the living room, he appeared to be half in shade. Broad, sharp cheek bones cutting shadow back toward his cynical eyes.
Rorschach beauty: only the blood red of her lips showed color when her eyelids drooped as low as they had, the spiderweb of shadow that clung to her cheeks before slowly melting away with the lazy upward flutter of her lashes. On him, she pinned a look of cool defiance versus casual indifference, and made him lean forward to pass off the clips. It was twisted around in her fingers idly, and she didn't frown at him but every line along her face refused to be kind. "I wish you wouldn't be such an asshole. You know you don't like me when I'm cruel," flippantly, her mouth hushing off the words when closing to a tiny hole a breath away from the joint, sucking in to draw out the smoke.
He observed her queenly sprawn on the sofa just a foot away from the tip of his chair, head tilted back over a corner pillow and a knee cocked up in such a way that washed the candlelight-ethereal hem of her skirt back away from her thigh. If he had sat in the other chair, he would be at an advantage to see what lay underneath but from his current angle, he could only watch the slow rising of her breath, the pretty longness of her limbs. A black magic voodoo disguised as something less harmful, illegitimate child to streetwise legend; she had all the control, every worthless cent of it. "You're losing your head."
"I should pretend I don't know what the hell you're talking about," her tongue painting out the words in smoke, twisting pink with an outcurl of grey whisper, skin goldenly white when she angled back the crown of her head to look at him from an upside down perspective. "But I do, and I think I'm offended, so say what you have to say." Possessed by those half-lights, she could've been something beautiful and strangely remniscent of those lovely Egyptian girls (bled dry of their poison ivy), her perfectly lined thick kohl, the bruise-flowers of her irises. "It's sweet that you're concerned about him, or me," she continued, tacking on an amusingly patronizing tone, "but really, I think we can each take care of ourselves."
He snorted, kicking up his feet onto the coffee table when she finally gave him back the clips, the ashtray on his knee moved up on his lap and gravitating toward the center from atop his wide palm. After a couple of consecutive hits, he dropped the silver and smoke into its base, moving it down to the floor over the arm. It was three o'clock in the morning, the streets moving silently out the short blocky windows, the room a mess of unsheathed records and half-empty pints of Chinese dishes. "I wouldn't say concerned as much as curious. Curious to see what you think you're doing here, because I don't believe that you do."
"So let my wings break and let me crash," she answered, rolling over onto her stomach with one hand reaching back to make sure the hem of her skirt didn't twist up too high. "It's not as if it hasn't happened before. It's not as if I care what the final results are." Cigarette pack left on the floor, she pried the box-top open with her fingers and wriggled one out before taking the lighter beside it to strike up a flame. It was true, she never lived for the future; she learned once that to shove through life, to cope, she had to live in every day individually and she'd never stopped. Once the cigarette was lit, she tossed the lighter to him where he was taking out one of his own. "I'm not thinking, I'm doing, and I have no problem with that whatsoever."
The lighter had bounced into his lap and he struck flame up with a roll of his thumb, hand cupping while he puffed in hard. His chin cut ceilingward, the smoke pouring out in one long cloud before he threw the lighter to the floor in the general direction of her pack, under-handed. In that perspective, his features were tough as concrete within the lukewarm orange-red glow flickering up past his jaw every time he inhaled. "You're exposed," informatively mild. "I've known you for four years now. You could have anything you desired if you set your mind to it, if you only worked for it just enough. From what I gathered earlier, you don't do much than work with your band or hang out with this new boyfriend of yours. Where's your drive, Jill, that ambition? What of that, 'ay?"
"What exactly do you consider 'working with my band,' isn't that ambitious? It's fun, but it isn't exactly a hobby." An elbow propping up on the sofa pillow, she cradled her chin to a palm while the ringleted jungle of rioted blindly black around the coolly composed angles of her face. The caving slope from her shoulderblades to the small of her sleek back was slitherine, the skinny white blouse draping like magnolia petals peeled away from her shoulders--showing the feminine delicacies of her clavicle, the hollow of her throat where the gothic cross's silver chain sunk in. Her eyes flashing between inhales and exhales: that violet violence, that blue blood bleeding.
Brooks looked over toward the corridor that narrowed away from the living room toward the bedroom, absent-mindedly. "I've never known you to put so much focus into one person before, so that you neglect your usual routine. What about the producer's parties, all the shows and trashy venue soirees, I'm guessing you aren't taking off your dresses for bigwigs at this point? You do all the work, of course, but half of the work is the social scene. You know that. He's not one of you. He doesn't fit. It's your world, not his."
"Fuck you, I never screwed for a step up in the ladder--unless I wanted to screw them besides. And you don't know anything," she retaliated haughtily, curling her lips in show of a moment of silence around the filter of the cigarette she smoked with all the sick love of twining lips around the barrel of a gun. Letting that be absorbed, she slanted her head marginally to the side and let it siphon out. "I still attend those things; it just isn't all the time like it used to be, it isn't every single night. It shouldn't have to be, it's my career but it isn't my whole life. I'm already comfortably established, I don't need to be out there letting everyone know who I am constantly; I just make sure they don't forget." Distantly contemplative, she stopped to indicate that she needed the ashtray wherein he pulled it up from the floor to prop it between them on the edge of the coffee table. Ashing, she finished her knowing little spiel. "I think our worlds collide, beneficially. Not like it's your business."
"It's different this time, is my point. You think your friends can't tell? You think we tell you you're changing because you're cute when you're pissed off? It is cute, maybe, but in a very psychotic way; no offense."
"What's so different?" Patronizingly patient, she leveled her eyes on him with her eyebrows lifted up just far enough to be contrary.
"Your heart."
Jill snorted as if vainly amused by this, but there was something in the way her eyelids crawled low--the color of her eyes slivering off to the lashed corners discreetly.
We had only been seeing each other five months before we got married on a trip to Las Vegas. At Caesar's Palace, we blew a thousand dollars in the casino below our hotel suite, high on complimentary drinks and white rabbit pot we'd smoked in our bathroom upstairs. At a drive-through chapel with a huge roadside neon sign, we made it official and when we kissed, it was more with our tongues and our teeth than with our mouths. His hands in my hair, my hands over his shirt--a reminiscently animalistic, symbiotic pose. Now after five more months, there's nothing that can level me like his hand on the slippery skin underneath my skirt.
He hits me deep South, right above the garters and between my thighs, ripe with memory. Crawls like a buzz up and down my spinal cord, sinking his insidious fingers into all my hot spots like a disease until I'm nothing more than a marionette in my smeared eyeliner and a messily torn dress. The vicious uppercut of his hipbones, my cutthroat fingernails and nothing else but the noises we make. We leave each other bruised for days, purpled shoulderblades and blue-blackened hips, and the images we leave behind on the mirrored ceiling are slow to fade.
This is a violent union, never a tender affair. He's stapled my shape to every wall of the apartment and I've been on my knees in manipulation more times than I can count. Glasses have shattered, the dead bodies have piled up, and now we're swimming through the undertow of our sins. Watch as the skeletons in the closet shake and one by one the walls fall away like exhaled smoke.
Anything now. He's taking anything he wants.
"Have you ever been in love? Horrible, isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and, it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor so that nothing can hurt you -- then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life. You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness. So simple a phase like 'maybe we should just be friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love."
She's missing (somewhere out there in the spring's cool rain, erringly childlike, doll-like in her ruffled silk mini-dress), missed, a wayward child-mother. Underneath the setting sun that turns the sky with colors that herald the memory of fire, all the weeping willows by the stream are sighing, and the two cast shadows that are far too long behind them as if to measure the insidious depth of the secrets they both keep.
It's like a dream: the two of them there wet under the tender spring shower, blackhaired children that have been forfeited to some silent cause, so lost that neither can find themselves; irreclaimable souls. Jill is in a drug-addled haze — her mirrors are powdered white, framed with razorblades and rolled up hundred dollar bills, and she's been drinking expensive vodka for weeks to dampen the viper's bite of stress. But she's beautiful, so beautiful, too beautiful; her triumph is her disgrace.
"I sent him far away; he's looking in the deserts for you, Medina this time. He won't buy this circle game for too much longer and I don't even want to think about the repercussions," she whispers, just loud enough to be heard above the pelting of the gentle downpour, and he closes his eyes at the sound of her voice—slowly, slowly for it's spellbinding, as pleasurable to the ears as the milksilk white of her unsullied skin is to the touch, pure silver twining in the ether. "I shouldn't be lying to him after everything that's happened. I'm a stupid girl."
"He's a fucking dumbass and I'm a fast mover, he'd never know the difference," he dismisses, leaning long against the tree where they have taken shelter. It's her cigarette that he smells first, but below that, the sudden headiness of her perfume. Vera Wang's Rock Princess instead of Cinéma or Obsession now—the succulent meat of white peach, hypnotic heliotrope, night-blooming jasmine, delicate lily, a chorus of spice that his senses cannot quite place but it's sultry, unique, almost poetic. "Why then? Why lie for me, Jill? How does this serve you?"
He regrets the last question almost immediately because he knows her, and he knows her better than that, knows she can be better than that. When he slits one eye, he sees her under that half-shadow of the drooping tree and her face reveals a few of her secrets to him one cracked diamond at a time—it's a little sad, blended with an innocent confusion that borders on helplessness, some personal shame. It's a shapeless dress, nearly, but small enough that he can see where she curves or hollows out now that she's wet, and her bible-black hair is everywhere, beginning to lose its curl under the newfound weight of the moisture it carries.
One hand, she holds furled up against the breastbone, and the other is folded over a cigarette to keep the fire hot by her lavish, lush-soft mouth that glistens pale red from where she was stroking her little pink tongue nervously over it. "Why did you do it? Why did you kill all those people? Children and women, so indiscriminately? I try not to think about what you did out there, Zion, and I can't breathe when I do."
At first, he says nothing—it's hard for him when he sees the unshed tears, tears that she would never allow to completely break through, and he can see that it is difficult for her to not judge him, condemn him, for the savage wolf that he is. Jill is unintentionally doe-eyed, the kohl shadow smudged and trickling down in not-tears, but how wounded she is when she looks at him like that makes him ache hard in places he forgot that he had.
"I didn't— I thought— I didn't know for sure that I wouldn't be able to control it when it came into me," he bites out with some difficulty for he knows how easy it would be to lie to her, but he doesn't want to anymore (unless he feels he has absolutely has to.) "But I murdered a slew of men before that, I was driven and I did what I needed to do in order to get to him, Jill. You don't understand. You don't know him like I do. It's been coming to this for years, you can't stop him and you can't stop me, you can't stop us. One of us has to die, me or him, and this doesn't end until—"
"If you could just— if you could change your mind, maybe I could convince him to stop this, you could both just live and— why can't—"
"No. It's him or me, Jill, why can't you understand that?"
"I can't choose— you can't— this hurts me, don't you care that this hurts me, I know you care that this hurts me, why can't that be enough?"
And she is crying now, silent and slow the darksmear dribble down the high, delicate bones of her cheeks, tries to smoke though her deceptively diminutive fingers quiver from the emotion. Turns halfway so that he can't watch her do it, but still he comes to fold his hands moistly around her shoulders, attempts to comfort her even while his words sharpen themselves like knives.
"Me or him. Why is that so hard for you?"
"Because the world needs someone like him, but I can't let you go—I can't let go."
Luciana Vega, the mysterious mother of Marius fucking Vega, is coming to visit in the near future. It could be tomorrow or in a week or in two, he didn't specify and I didn't ask due to total nervosa. But I do feel, I feel that something big is about to happen; it may or may not be related, I'm unsure. I haven't been socializing as much outside the circle of his home this past week or several, too involved with that inner circle of children, lover, then observing his people. Most of my own business, I've handled over the phone.
I have a new diary, or have had since somewhere in February, and I haven't been burning the pages yet. At times, I think it cannot be so safe for me to keep a personal memoir like this but it means a lot to me when I do. The last time I kept a log, Aden read it and I felt — I don't know, violated, even if I presume he did it for good reasons. But I'm a creature of hope, I guess, and I have the hope that it won't happen again because I need somewhere to purge or to make notes so I don't forget things.
I want to at least try to settle some things before his mother arrives, so I'll be very busy today and so on until she arrives, I'm sure. Maybe it's dumb of me but once she's here, I know that I'll probably strive to be around her as much as possible — to know her, see if she can like me or what I can find out about the family just by being near her, maybe even learn how to be the future matriarch of a family like this in case it happens that I become that one day.
A lot of calls to make.
