"It's up here," Paul says. The house is concrete block like the others and only a little bigger, painted light green and raised on stilts above the rainwater tank. There's a rock garden covering the hill, cactus and rubbery-looking plants. The shrubs at the gateway are dying though, there's a many-stranded yellow vine covering them like a net, like hair.
"See that?" Paul says. "Around here they break pieces of that off and throw it into the gardens of the people they don't like. It grows like crazy, it strangles everything. Love vine, they call it."
"Are there people here who don't like you?" Rennie says.
"Hard to believe, isn't it?" he says, grinning at her.
Inside, the house is neat, almost blank, as if no one is actually living in it. The furniture is noncommittal, wood-frame chairs of the kind Rennie has seen in the beach bars. Beside one of the chairs there's a telescope on a tripod.
"What do you watch through it?" says Rennie.
"The stars," says Paul.
On the wall above the sofa there's a map, on the wall facing it another, island after island, navigational maps with the soundings marked. There are no pictures. The kitchen is an open counter with appliances behind it, a stove, a refrigerator, no clutter. Paul takes ice cubes from the refrigerator and fixes two drinks, rum and lime. Rennie looks at the maps; then she goes out through the double doors, there's a porch with a hammock, and leans on the railing, looking down over the road to the tops of the trees and then the harbour. There's a sunset, as usual.
The bed is expertly made, hospital corners firmly tucked in. Rennie wonders where he learned to do that, or maybe someone comes in to do it for him. Perhaps this is the spare bedroom, it's empty enough. There are two pillows, though nobody lives with him. He untwists the mosquito net, spreads it over the bed. "We can go for dinner, if you like," he says.
Rennie's wearing a white shirt and a wrap skirt, also white. She wonders which she should take off first. What will happen? Maybe there's no point to taking off anything, maybe she should offer to sleep in the other bed. All he said was that he had room.
Nevertheless she's afraid, of failure. Maybe she should be fair, maybe she should warn him. What can she say? I'm not all here? There's part of me missing? She doesn't even have to do that, failure is easy to avoid. All you have to do is walk away.
Then she realizes she doesn't care. She doesn't care what he thinks of her, she never has to see this man again if she doesn't want to. She never has to see anyone again if she doesn't want to. She's been hoping for some dope, he's in the business, he must have some; it would help, she thought, she'd be able to relax. But she doesn't need it; already she feels light, insubstantial, as if she's died and gone to heaven and come back minus a body. There's nothing to worry about, nothing can touch her. She's a tourist. She's exempt.
He's standing in front of her, in the half-light, smiling a little, watching her to see what she'll do.
"I thought you didn't want that," he says.
He doesn't touch her. She undoes the buttons on the blouse, he's watching. He notes the scar, the missing piece, the place where death kissed her lightly, a preliminary kiss. He doesn't look away or down, he's seen people a lot deader than her.
"I was lucky," she says.
He reaches out his hands and Rennie can't remember ever having been touched before. Nobody lives forever, who said you could? This much will have to do, this much is enough. She's open now, she's been opened, she's being drawn back down, she enters her body again and there's a moment of pain, incarnation, this may be only the body's desperation, a flareup, a last clutch at the world before the long slide into final illness and death; but meanwhile she's solid after all, she's still here on the earth, she's grateful, he's touching her, she can still be touched.
V
Jake liked to pin her hands down, he liked to hold her so she couldn't move. He liked that, he liked thinking of sex as something he could win at. Sometimes he really hurt her, once he put his arm across her throat and she really did stop breathing. Danger turns you on, he said. Admit it. It was a game, they both knew that. He would never do it if it was real, if she really was a beautiful stranger or a slave girl or whatever it was he wanted her to pretend. So she didn't have to be afraid of him.
A month before the operation Rennie had a phone call from Visor. Keith, the managing editor, thought it would be sort of fun to do a piece on pornography as an art form. There had already been a number of anti-porno pieces in the more radical women's magazines, but Keith thought they were kind of heavy and humourless. They missed the element of playfulness, he said. He wanted a woman to write it because he thought they'd crack the nuts of any guy who tried to do it. Rennie tried to find out who he meant by "they," but he was vague. Tie it in with women's fantasy lives, if you can, he said. Keep it light. Rennie said she thought the subject might have more to do with men's fantasy lives, but Keith said he wanted the woman's angle.
Keith fixed it up for her to interview an artist who lived and worked in a warehouse down off King Street West and did sculptures using life-sized mannequins. He was making tables and chairs from the mannequins, which were like store mannequins except that the joints had been filled in and plastered over to make them smooth. The women were dressed in half-cup bras and G-string panties, set on their hands and knees for the tables, locked into a sitting position for the chairs. One of the chairs was a woman on her knees, her back arched, her wrists tied to her thighs. The ropes and arms were the arms of the chair, her bum was the seat.
It's a visual pun, said the artist, whose first name was Frank. He had one woman harnessed to a dogsled, with a muzzle on. It was called Nationalism is Dangerous. There was another one with a naked mannequin on her knees, chained to a toilet, with a Handy Andy between her teeth like a rose. It was called Task Sharing, said Frank.
If a woman did that, said Rennie, they'd call it strident feminism.
That's the breaks, said Frank. Anyway, I don't just do women. He showed her a male figure sitting in a swivel chair with a classic blue pinstripe business suit on. Frank had glued nine or ten plastic dildoes to the top of his head, where they stood out like pigtails or the rays of a halo. Erogenous Zone Clone Bone, it was called.
You're going to find this boring, said Rennie, but your work doesn't exactly turn me on.
It's not supposed to turn you on, said Frank, not offended. Art is for contemplation. What art does is, it takes what society deals out and makes it visible, right? So you can see it. I mean, there's the themes and then there's the variations. If they want flower paintings they can go to Eaton's.
Rennie remembered having read these opinions already, in the file on Frank given to her by Visor. I guess I see your point, she said.
I mean, said Frank, what's the difference between me and Salvador Dali, when you come right down to it?
I'm not sure, Rennie said.
If you don't like my stuff, you should see the raw material, he said.
That was the other part of Keith's plan, the raw material. The Metro Police had a collection of seized objects, Keith said; it was called Project P., P for pornography, and it was open to the public. Rennie took Jocasta with her, not because she didn't think she could get through it on her own, she felt she was up to almost anything. Still, it didn't seem like the kind of thing you would do by yourself if you could help it. Someone might see you coming out and get the wrong idea. Besides, it was Jocasta's kind of thing. Bizarre. Human ingenuity, that's what you should stress, said Keith. Infinite variety and that.
The collection was housed in two ordinary rooms at the main police building, and this was the first thing that struck Rennie: the ordinariness of the rooms. They were rectangular, featureless, painted government grey; they could have been in a post office. The policeman who showed them around was young, fresh-faced, still eager. He kept saying, Now why do you think anyone would want to do that? Now what do you think that could be for?
Rennie made it through the whips and the rubber appli
ances without a qualm. She took notes. How do you spell the plural of dildo? she asked the policeman. With or without an e? The policeman said he didn't know. Probably like tomatoes, Rennie thought. Jocasta said it all looked very medical to her and she understood that in England it was the truss shops that used to sell under-the-cover bondage magazines, before sex supermarkets came in. The policeman said he wouldn't really know about that. He opened a cupboard and took out something even the police hadn't been able to figure out. It was a machine like a child's floor polisher, with an ordinary-looking dildo on the handle. He plugged it into a wall socket and the whole machine scooted around the floor, with the handle plunging wildly up and down.
But what's it for? Jocasta said, intrigued.
Your guess is as good as mine, the policeman said. It's too short for anyone standing up, and there's no place on it to sit down. Anyhow, the way it runs around the room like that you couldn't keep up with it. We've got a private bet on here. Anyone comes up with some use for it that wouldn't take your guts out, we give them a hundred dollars.
Maybe it's for very active midgets, Jocasta said.
Maybe the police made a mistake, Rennie said. Maybe it really is just a floor polisher, with kind of a strange handle. Next thing you know you'll be raiding General Electric and seizing pop-up toasters.
Fifty percent of fatal accidents occur at home and now we know why, said Jocasta.
The policeman somehow did not like them laughing. He disapproved of it. He took them into a third room, which was set up with black-out windows and a video viewer and showed them some film clips, a woman with a dog, a woman with a pig, a woman with a donkey. Rennie watched with detachment. There were a couple of sex-and-death pieces, women being strangled or bludgeoned or having their nipples cut off by men dressed up as Nazis, but Rennie felt it couldn't possibly be real, it was all done with ketchup.
This is our grand finale, the policeman said. The picture showed a woman's pelvis, just the pelvis and the tops of the thighs. The woman was black. The legs were slightly apart; the usual hair, the usual swollen pinkish purple showed between them; nothing was moving. Then something small and grey and wet appeared, poking out from between the legs. It was the head of a rat. Rennie felt that a large gap had appeared in what she'd been used to thinking of as reality. What if this is normal, she thought, and we just haven't been told yet?
Rennie didn't make it out of the room. She threw up on the policeman's shoes. Sorry, she said, but he didn't seem to mind. He patted her on the back, as if she'd passed a test of some sort, and took her arm, leading her from the darkened room. Politely, he did not look down at his shoes.
I thought that one would get to you, he said. A lot of women do that. Look at it this way, at least it's not for queers.
You need your head repaired, said Jocasta, and Rennie said she thought maybe it was time to leave. She thanked the policeman for being so cooperative. He was annoyed with them, not because of his shoes but because of Jocasta.
I can't do this piece, Rennie told Keith.
Why not? he said, disappointed in her.
It's not my thing, she said. I'll stick to lifestyles.
Maybe it is a lifestyle, he said.
Rennie decided that there were some things it was better not to know any more about than you had to. Surfaces, in many cases, were preferable to depths. She did a piece on the return of the angora sweater, and another one on the hand-knit-look industry. That was soothing. There was much to be said for trivia.
For a couple of weeks after that she had a hard time making love with Jake. She didn't want him grabbing her from behind when she wasn't expecting it, she didn't like being thrown onto the bed or held so she couldn't move. She had trouble dismissing it as a game. She now felt that in some way that had never been spelled out between them he thought of her as the enemy. Please don't do that any more, she said. At least not for a while. She didn't want to be afraid of men, she wanted Jake to tell her why she didn't have to be.
I thought you said it's okay if you trust me, he said. Don't you trust me?
It's not you, she said. It's not you I don't trust.
Then what is it? he said.
I don't know, she said. Lately I feel I'm being used; though not by you exactly.
Used for what? said Jake.
Rennie thought about it. Raw material, she said.
Later on, she said, If I had a rat in my vagina, would it turn you on?
Dead or alive? said Jake.
Me or the rat? said Rennie.
Feh, said Jake. You sound like my mother. Always worrying about the dustballs under the bed.
No, seriously, she said.
El sleazo, he said. Come on, don't confuse me with that sick stuff. You think I'm some kind of a pervert? You think most men are like that?
Rennie said no.
I ran into Paul in Miami, says Lora. At first he told me he was in real estate. I was down there with some guy, that was after me and Gary split up, and around that time if there was a free weekend going I took it. It wasn't the sex, I couldn't have cared less if a man ever touched me again or not, that's how I felt then. With Gary it was never that great anyway, it was a lot like going through a revolving door, in and out before you know it and if you sneezed it was all over except for washing the sheets.
Maybe I wanted it that way, maybe I wanted to be able to take it or leave it. Maybe I thought if I got to like it too much I'd be stuck. I wanted to think, Chuck you, Farley, there's nothing much I need you for, if I want to I can turn around and walk right through that door and the only one who'll be missing a thing is you. I thought it was just something you let men do to you. I don't think most of them even liked it very much either. They only did it because you were supposed to.
I guess I just wanted to be with someone. It wasn't the nights that were bad, it was the mornings. I didn't like to wake up in the morning and have nobody there. After a while you just want someone to like you. You want someone to maybe have breakfast with, go to the movies with, stuff like that. I used to say there's only two things that matter, is he nice or is he rich. Nice is better than rich but take it from me, you can't have both, and if you can't get nice take rich. Sometimes I said it the other way around. Not that there's a whole lot of either one hanging out there on the trees, you know?
At first I thought Paul was only nice. He wasn't mean like a lot of them, he was easy to be with, he wasn't a pain in the ass, you know? Then I figured it out that he was rich, too. He had this boat, he only had the one then, and he said why didn't I come down here for a couple of weeks, get a tan, relax, and there wasn't any good reason not to. Once I got down here I couldn't see any good reason to leave. Around that time I found out what he really did.
I worked on the boats for a while. Most of these boats have two or three crew and a cook, they really do run charters on the boats, it would look funny if they didn't, and the crew all knew what he was doing, they were in for a percentage, he had people he could trust. I was supposed to be the cook, what I knew about cooking on a boat you could stick in your ear, it's not like cooking in a real kitchen, but I picked it up. I was seasick as hell at first, I puked my guts out, but I figure you can get used to almost anything if you have to and when you're out in the middle of the ocean there's only one way off the boat, eh?
A lot of girls work the boats here, the straight boats as well, though you never really know if the boat's straight or not, you learn not to ask what they've got in the hold. Whoever runs the boat expects you to make it with them; if you don't like it you can always get off the boat. I never made it with the charters though, that wasn't part of the deal. It's always them that get the maddest about it too. They think if they're renting the boat they're renting everything on it. Maybe I'm for sale, I'd tell them, but I'm sure as hell not for rent. How much? one of them said, an asshole. Hot-shot lawyer or something. You couldn't afford it, I said. Funny, you look pretty cheap to me, he said. I may be pretty but I'm not cheap, I said. I'm like a l
awyer, what you're paying for is the experience.
Anyway you only had to do a few charters, maybe once a month, you could survive on that. The rest of the time I was living with Paul. Or anyway that's what it was called. We slept in the same bed and all, but there was something missing in him, it was like being with someone who wasn't there, you know? He didn't care what I did, anything I wanted to do was okay with him, other men, anything, as long as it didn't interfere with him. Deep down inside he just didn't give a shit. You know what the locals say about him? He does deal. With the devil, is what they mean, they don't mean the business. It's what they say about loners.
About the only thing that really turned him on was danger, as far as I could figure out. Once in a while he'd do this really dangerous stuff.
Like, a couple of months after I came down here there was this thing with Marsdon. That was before Marsdon went to the States. He was living with this woman, and he came home one day and caught her in the sack with one of his cousins, I forget which one. It could be anybody, sooner or later they all turn out to be cousins if you study it hard enough.
Of course Marsdon beat her up. If he hadn't beat her up, the other men would have laughed at him and so would the women. They expect it, for being bad, which is what they call it. But he went too far, he made her take off all her clothes, not that she had that many on when he found her, and then he covered her with cow-itch. That's like a nettle, it's what you do to people you really don't like a whole lot. Then he tied her to a tree in the back yard, right near an ant hill, the stinging kind. He stayed in the house, drinking rum and listening to her scream. He left her there five hours, till she was all swollen up like a balloon. A lot of people heard her but nobody tried to untie her, partly because he had a mean reputation and partly because it was a man-woman thing, they don't think that's anyone else's business.