SHE HAD permanent nerve damage in her face and throat and internal injuries where he’d torn her anus. She had blurred vision in both eyes. Headaches. Spinal pain. Couldn’t sleep without barbiturates and then mostly during the day. We begged her to move out of Manhattan. At least, to get married again. She was still good-looking, she had a flair about her like, who?—Lauren Bacall in those old movies. She wasn’t yet sixty. She wasn’t a pauper. And she’d tested negative for AIDS. “Don’t tell me,” I said laughing over the phone, “you’re replacing that gun? Oh, Mother.” Mother laughed too, in her nervous-angry way, saying she had a new friend who was a retired law enforcement officer (Nassau County) and he was advising her to purchase, for self-protection, a .38-caliber Colt Detective Special, a six-shot revolver more reliable than the Bauer semiautomatic, though the Colt, too, had a snubbie (two-inch) barrel. Mother said, “Next time, I’ll be better prepared.”
G. G. SIGNED FOR a Fox comedy series. The pilot was being filmed in L. A. and we’d be living in somebody’s house in Pacific Palisades, a fantastic estate owned by a megawealthy record producer. If I came with him, which wasn’t 100 percent certain. G. G. had this weird old west–looking six-shooter, a stainless steel .357 Magnum with an eight-inch barrel. One of his doper friends traded him for something. (Maybe me? I’d had my suspicions.) G. G. put a bullet in, spun the chamber (it wasn’t too well oiled), saying, “How’s about Russian roulette? Me first.”
TARGET PRACTICE AT the town dump outside Greenwich. Rats and “garbage birds.” He exploded a grackle in midair and wounded a furry panicked scuttling thing he called a “rabid raccoon.” He was a pretty good shot. He closed my fingers on the rifle (a Winchester .22, nothing special), fixed my index finger on the trigger as if I couldn’t have found it myself. He adjusted my arm. My shoulder. Breathing into my hair. He steadied the barrel. It was our first time. He was married, he took all that seriously. I was set to pretend to be afraid, upset by the noise of the gunshot and the recoil but in fact I didn’t need to pretend. Afterward we made love so hard it hurt in the back of his Land Rover smelling of gunpowder, oil, grease, and aged running shoes and sweatsocks belonging to his sons.
RUSSIAN ROULETTE! I’d never do it, it’s a guy thing. They say you need to get a coke high first, then there’s no high like it.
AT SCOTT E.’S HOUSE, when we were living in Malden Heights and just kids. Scott went to Choate. His dad (whose own dad had been a World War II Air Force hero) was showing us his gun collection. I’d had so many beers I wasn’t focusing too well. This guy I was with kept brushing against me, my breast. Scott was embarrassed of his father but sort of proud of him, too. We couldn’t touch any of the guns but he’d answer questions if we had any. I remember a “German souvenir” and a “man-stopper” with a nasty long barrel made of what looked like iron. I asked Mr. E. if he kept any of his guns loaded, which was a silly question, but Mr. E. said with a sly smile, “Maybe. Guess which.” It was like Scott, so quick, that guy was dazzling sometimes, in front of us all he picked up one of the fancy old revolvers, steely-blue with an eight-inch barrel at least, and silver engravings, and before his dad could stop him he turned the chamber and pulled the cock with his thumb, aimed at his own head and pulled the trigger. Click!
IN NEW YORK, I ran into my cousin Midge, now called Margery. I spoke of the time she and her brother Jake had been playing with their father’s .22 rifle at the summer place on Mackinac Island. Midge, or Margery, said with this frozen face, “We never played with Daddy’s guns. That’s ridiculous. He’d have given us hell.” (Uncle Adcock had died of cancer the year before, in Saint Petersburg. I’d meant to send a card or call.) I started to speak but Midge, or Margery, turned her back on me and walked away. I stared after her, shocked, as if I’d been slapped. I could remember the deafening crack of the rifle. The recoil against my shoulder that practically broke it. The burned smell of gunpowder in my nostrils. That exciting smell. And the way the white sails on the lake, billowing and slapping in the wind, looked almost, for a fraction of a second, like they’d been shot.
THAT EASTER BREAK, junior year at Vassar, I told my parents I was going skiing in Boulder with my roommate and her family but in fact I was with Cal at his stepfather’s lodge in the mountains. We spent most of the time stoned, in bed, listening to heavy metal rock and getting up mainly when we had to use the john. (We’d see who could go the longer. We were drinking fruit juice and stuff like that. I was embarrassed at first having to pee so often but would’ve been more embarrassed to wet the bed. I had sort of a yeast infection I guess.) I walked around naked, a Yale sweatshirt around my shoulders and the sleeves tied beneath my breasts. The sunshine was too bright for our eyes, we had to keep the blinds mostly drawn. I was looking through cupboards and saw a rifle and an opened box of ammo. A Winchester .22, hadn’t been cleaned in a long time and the blue-steel barrel coated with dust. On another shelf was a Sturm, Ruger six-chambered revolver, also dusty, stainless steel with a walnut grip and a barrel of about four inches. I liked this gun. I liked the feel and the weight of it. A heavy barrel and a sizable grip like you’re shaking hands. Cal came in and saw me and about freaked. Like he hadn’t known the guns were “on the premises.” (Cal wasn’t one to acknowledge his mother had married a paranoid schizophrenic who kept guns in all the places he lived and, being a criminal lawyer, had a permit to carry a concealed weapon.) Cal said, “Jesus, baby, put that down, OK?” I was stoned and really grooving with this fantastic piece. You hear talk like that, a man knowing when he connects with the right gun, but not women; but it was as though it was all between the Sturm, Ruger and me, and Cal was this third party, like a voyeur, looking on. I said, “Ever play Russian roulette?” Cal said, scared but trying to make a joke of it, “What the point of Russian roulette is, I never could figure.” I’d clicked off the safety. I was checking to see if there were bullets in the chambers. I laughed, saying, “You take a chance, that’s the point. If you win, you don’t get a bullet in the brain.” Cal said, as if it was philosophy class and arguing was part of your grade, “You don’t have a bullet in the brain anyway. That means you’re a winner?” “Hey, no,” I said laughing. “You’re a loser.” Cal just didn’t get it. A guy can be sexy and sweet and all that but just not get it.
AFTER MY MOM she was the first woman I knew who carried a gun in her purse. Kept it in her bedside table when not in her purse. It was a Sterling Arms Model 400 semiautomatic with a nickel finish and a three-inch barrel and a classy ivory grip. I was cool, holding it. Loaded, and the safety on. “Could you ever shoot this at a human being?” I asked. She just smiled, and took it back from me.
THERE WAS a rumor, Nahid A., this sexy rich kid from Kashmir we’d known at Vassar, had become a “mercenary arms dealer” in his native country. Other people said, “Bullshit. Nahid is a poet.”
SHOCKING NEWS! Charl S. (whom I’d been out of contact with for eight years at least) called to tell me. But I’d been reading about it in the New York Times and seeing it on TV. Lurid headlines on the front page of every tabloid. A pregnant social worker (white) and her unborn baby had been “riddled with bullets” and her husband wounded in their car in Worcester, Massachusetts, by a black male assailant believed to be (according to the husband’s testimony) one of her welfare clients. The dead woman had been a wan, pretty blond from a well-to-do Boston family. Her husband, Charl pointed out, was our old mutual boy friend Nico. Nico, wounded by gunshot! Charl sounded thrilled. “Who’d ever suppose Nico would marry a social worker? He wasn’t ever that type.”
∗ ∗ ∗
MUST’VE BEEN a month later when Charl called back, this time even more thrilled. Now there was truly shocking news! Nico’s wife hadn’t been gunned down by a black welfare client after all but by Nico himself. He’d just been arrested. He’d caused every black man in the Worcester area to be a suspect. It was national news. “Nico insured that poor woman for $1 million only a few months before he shot her. Isn’t that terrible?” I was trying to
feel that this was terrible news. Or even unexpected. I told Charl it hadn’t been very bright of Nico to insure his wife for $1 million and then kill her himself. Thinking of Nico’s velvety eyes and his weird lukewarm tongue thrusting and parrying in your mouth like some kind of sea urchin.
THE PHONE RANG during the night. It was my brother in Palm Beach. More bad news about Mother. But hadn’t she just gotten married? Wasn’t she on her honeymoon? The man sleeping beside me didn’t stir. He was used to me prowling the place at night. Already my head was pounding with pain. “No, wait,” I said, trying not to panic, “I already heard this. Didn’t I?” My brother said rudely, “No, you haven’t. This time she’s dead.”
HER COLT DETECTIVE SPECIAL WAS left to me, in Mother’s hand-written words, My only daughter. For her commonsense protection. That and a box of tangled costume jewelry (what had happened to the good jewelry?) and family mementos and a couple of million dollars in bonds.
I CRIED all that spring. Couldn’t stop. As though my heart was a block of ice now melting. Kaho held me for old time’s sake. He wasn’t so young and virile as he used to be, he warned. Kaho had been married, too, to an older woman who’d died in “mysterious” circumstances. (Not Kaho’s fault!) After a while in my bed Kaho’s ropey-muscled arm began to get stiff where I was lying on it, the weight of my body like a drowned girl’s. Between us where we touched our skins were slick with cold sweat like gun oil. I was crying, “I love you, Kaho. I always have.” But Kaho was embarrassed. It was all so long ago, he said. His big mariner’s watch glowed pale green in the dark like a floating green fish, or an eye.
∗ ∗ ∗
YOU CAN special-order gun grips in rosewood, zebra wood, birds-eye maple, ivory. I’d always wanted ivory. In Jackson Hole, this “Native American” (Crow Indian, but he didn’t look anything like Blackhawk) carved gun grips out of blocks of wood with a knife that flashed so in his fingers, you’d swear it was throwing off sparks. Lyle Barnfeather carved custom orders for Smith & Wesson, had quite a back order, and wanted me to know he didn’t “come cheap.”
G. G. RETURNED to my life. His TV career had bottomed out. Sometimes he seemed to blame me, for not coming with him. Other times, he borrowed money. When I kicked him out, he stalked me like a guy on TV. One of those serial killer specials. Except G. G. didn’t have a van, or even a car. How’d he dump the body? He called me leaving messages, Baby I love you don’t do this to me. It was all a bad TV movie except I didn’t know how the script would end. I had my mom’s Colt Detective Special, though, for commonsense protection.
AT THE READY-AIM-FIRE SHOOTING RANGE on Staten Island, we wore neutral (gray)-tinted glasses with adjustable nose pads. We were equipped with earmuffs approved by the EPA. Still, the noise was deafening. If you didn’t hear it at full blast, you felt it vibrating through your body. Some of the men were firing machine guns. Like air hammers, and their faces shining. One of them, I saw drooling down his chin. My (male) instructor Buzz was patient with me. We started out with just lightweight practice pistols, then after a few months graduated to the Remington .44 Magnum (“most powerful hand-gun cartridge in existence”). Target shooting was like lovemaking with me, sometimes I hit the bull’s-eye, but most of the time I miss. There was no logic to it. There was no design. My own wishes had nothing to do with it. My heart kicked when Buzz brushed against me, breathed into my hair. My bad habit was flinching. And shutting my eyes when I pulled the trigger. Buzz scolded gently, “That’s how in actual life people get killed.” The human silhouette is the hardest. You shut your eyes, breathe, and fire.
HOW MOTHER DIED was never satisfactorily explained. Her new husband who’d been seven years younger than Mother claimed he returned home after a two-day trip and simply “found” her. She’d been dead, lying part-dressed on top of her bed, for approximately ten hours, during which time, he claimed, and phone records would substantiate, he’d called six times, and no answer except the answering tape. The coroner declared her death a “natural” death. Yet it would remain a “mysterious” death. For why would Mother have taken her nighttime dosage of barbiturate at midday, why would Mother who was fastidious about such things have lain down on rumpled bedclothes, why would Mother who was obsessive about her nails have had several broken, cracked fingernails, the polish chipped …? My brother was more stunned by Mother’s death than I was. He spoke of hiring a private detective to look into it. I’d become more accepting, more fatalistic, like Kaho. The Asian stoicism.
Also as Dad said, “It was a tragedy bound to happen. Your mother’s taste in men.”
MIKAL HAD RETURNED to my life. I was trying not to be happy, hopeful. I did not believe I deserved happiness or even hope, if you knew my soul.
The primary responsibility of gun ownership is not gun safety but gun maintenance. Because you don’t have gun safety without gun maintenance. I learned this at the Ready-Aim-Fire Range. I purchased in their front office:
pistol cleaning rod
proper size patches
brass bore brushes
special cleaning rags
new toothbrush
gunsmith screwdrivers
Lewis Lead Remover
Bore light/mirror
Hoppe’s No. 9 powder solvent
bore oil
lubricant
bottle, bluing solution
Mother’s Detective Special, my inheritance, had not been cleaned in years. Maybe it had never been cleaned. I held it in my hand, my hand trembled. I kept the chambers loaded. But would this gun fire?
You never know, until you know. But remember: You DO NOT OWE YOUR ASSAILANT THE FIRST SHOT.
MIKAL KISSED ME, and held my head pressed between his two hands in a way I’d remembered from years ago, and nobody else had done, ever. His kisses were like a child’s, anxious, hopeful, not sexual (not yet: for this, I was grateful). “So life has wounded you, too.” But mostly we didn’t talk. Years away from me, married to other women, he’d become lean and nervy as an eel. I could feel the life-current moving through him. “My love. My love.” Mikal’s face was creased vertically as if with tears. His hair was graying at the temples but otherwise had the sheen of satin-blue finish. He was married, but separated from his (mentally unstable, suicidal) wife, whom I had met once, years ago, and could recall only as a flaming, blinding blond light. He was separated from his (vindictive, threatening) wife but deeply bound to her, and to their single child, a (somehow troubled? disabled?) daughter, that was clear. “Oh, hey, don’t ask. Not yet.” Long hours we lay together gripping each other’s lean torsos, pressing cheeks together. Not speaking. Like survivors of a desperate swim across white-water rapids. In the drawer of my bedside table was the Colt Detective Special, still uncleaned, unoiled. I liked the idea, it was a sort of sexy idea, that, when I left Mikal to use the bathroom, he’d roll over and quietly open this drawer and see this mean-looking “man stopper.” My new custom-order ivory grip, glimmering out of the darkness.
BUZZ FROM the shooting range came by, a few times. Buzz, too, was “in a bad place, temporarily” with his wife and family. But Buzz was an ex-U.S. Army sergeant, and you see the world differently from that perspective. And if your name’s Buzz, from age two. Still, seeing the condition of the Detective Special, the corroded finish, Buzz looked as if he was going to cry. Like stepping on something, and it turns out to be a crushed fledgling bird. “Jesus Christ. How could you. Even you.” (He meant, even a woman. I knew that.) When I touched his wrist, he threw off my hand. He was, in his own words, seriously pissed. But we made up. Seeing where I lived, Buzz was always impressed. Expertly he dismantled the gun on a sheet of newspaper on the kitchen table, like an autopsy. His big fingers were deft and, in their way, loving. Using the items I’d bought at the shooting range he cleaned my mother’s gun and reloaded it and clicked the safety on. “Always keep your safety on, see? When you’re not preparing to fire.” I thought there was something like a Zen koan in this, but I didn’t pursue it. Buzz was the most si
lent lover I’d ever known. Maybe the word is stoic. When he came it was like somebody stepping on a nail barefoot, determined not to cry out or even grimace. How I knew Buzz came, he’d stop what he’d been doing and roll off me. He said I had “real class” but I knew he didn’t respect me any longer, seeing the state of my gun. A gun in a bedside drawer like that, like a baby in its crib by Momma’s bed, neglected. He’d seen into my soul. A man knows.
G. G. SEEMED TO HAVE disappeared. Maybe seeing me with Buzz scared him off. Or he’d gone underground, in disguise.
THERE WAS A campaign by the mayor of New York and the superintendent of police of New York for citizens to “turn in your handguns at your local precinct, no questions asked.” Now the Detective Special was so beautifully cleaned and oiled I actually thought I might turn it in. I don’t know why: to free myself of Mother, maybe. But I was superstitious, reasoning, The day I turn it in, that night I’ll need it.
MIKAL OWNED an import business, leather goods, jewelry from Morocco. Or maybe (Mikal’s business life was mysterious to me, like his personal life) he was partners with someone. His shop was on Madison at Seventy-fifth. One of those elegant little shops with window displays like something at the Metropolitan Museum. But he was never on the premises when I dropped in. One day he called me, agitated. He had to leave for Morocco that evening. It was an unexpected business emergency. Could I meet him in the park? I’d have preferred my apartment, but Mikal had a romantic attachment to Central Park. We’d actually made love there, to a degree, behind some boulders, once. He was twenty minutes late but arrived half-running and smiling, eager as a boy. His skin was waxy and gave off a clammy heat. He hadn’t shaved for possibly two days. We held each other tight. So tight! I liked it, Mikal could feel my ribs, how slender I’d become and I knew he liked thin women. It was difficult to think such a precious moment wasn’t being filmed. That melancholy twilight time when lights are coming on all over the city. Headlights of vehicles moving through the park, street lamps, lights in high-rise apartment buildings on Fifth Avenue. In the west, flamey red streaks of the sun. And the rest of the sky dark roiling rainclouds. In Central Park there was a damp chill earth-smell. Rotted leaves, mulch. Dark glistening of tree trunks. Mikal and I were holding each other like swimmers who’ve staggered up on to shore neither knowing nor caring where we are. He wanted us to meet here so we can’t make love. Our parting will be spiritual. I respected Mikal for this though I wanted badly to lie naked with him a final time before he went away, and to feel him inside my body. Mikal kissed me, fierce and hard, pressing into my arms a valise of the softest, most beautiful Moroccan kidskin. “Keep this for me, darling. Don’t ask why. I love you.” I weighed the valise in my arms. It was moderately heavy. “What is it?” I asked, though possibly I knew. Mikal said, kissing me again, “Darling, I’ll know when I can ask for this back. When I can see you again, and love you. And we can be together permanently.” Mikal was backing away. His eyes were ringed with fever-fatigue. I felt that my heart was being torn from my body. There were no adequate words to call after my lover. Back in my apartment I opened the valise slowly. Until I actually see it, I won’t know. But I saw. Wrapped in a chamois cloth was a handgun with an unnaturally long barrel, about eight inches. Without touching it I saw it was a 9-millimeter semiautomatic Glock Hardballer, stainless steel frame and finish. I’d never seen a Glock before. It was a heavy gun, a man’s gun. I wondered why the barrel was so long. I guessed the gun had been carefully wiped down. I didn’t stoop to smell the barrel but rewrapped the gun in the chamois cloth. I shut up the valise and hid it away on a closet shelf with my other leather things. I had quite a collection, Mikal had given me things. He’d given me jewelry, too. I was feeling faint. A high ringing sound in my skull, unless it was a siren in the near distance. I wondered if I would see Mikal again. Maybe he would summon me to Morocco. I wondered if I would be questioned about Mikal, if anything had happened in his life to warrant my being questioned. I wondered if I would dispose of the gun but already knew probably I wouldn’t, how could I, that beautiful Glock Hardballer. I just can’t.