IN THE SILENCE OF THE BART TRAIN ON THE WAY TO MADAM Pig's, I could only think of last night: how we slept curled close like petals, how at dawn Bell woke to tell me his dream-we were in a driverless taxi following a tennis ball I'd hit hard enough that it still soared above us. We chased the ball down a road surrounded with abandoned factories and tin warehouses, then made a violent turn into a subdivision of burnt-out ranch houses. The last thing he remembered was squatting at the foot of a dolmen of seared wood, the bloodied light at the horizon.
At first I thought the dream seemed a good omen, maybe even a mark of my power. But any contentment with last night wore off like the fading charm of a hit song. I realized the bombed suburbia was his idea of domesticity in general and our future specifically.
It seemed crazy that I stayed. Bell made me feel edgy and hysterical, but at least this way I was alive. Also, I suspected I was close to winning him and if I did he would become a docile and genial lover. But the myth of breaking a man was stupid, just as stupid as believing there would be any long-term good in the sexual ending we tumbled into last night.
The BART swayed toward Oakland. I thought love was about forgetting yourself, a sensation that calmed and centered you, like being pleasantly stoned, but all I felt was a speedy panic. I couldn't forget myself for one minute and it was disconcerting how Bell's life seemed superimposed over mine. Even now, Bell would be sitting at the table by the window smoking a cigarette, watching traffic, glancing occasionally at the play script he was to audition for today. He'd be drinking tea with a splash of bourbon to settle his nerves. But it seemed like my own hand poised on the teacup, my own ear listening to the water rattle into the tub for his bath.
Bell was exotic to me still. If I could learn to think of him as a normal person I could disentangle myself. I had never known anyone like him or seen a life like his. He took me to the velvety apartment of an actress who had a dozen fur coats and a voice that sounded like gin and cigarettes. When we went to the museum in Golden Gate Park Bell stared at the Caravaggio for twenty minutes. I loved how he was always on the side of life's losers and considered them more intuitive and intelligent than others. He wore secondhand suits and read obscure books in Greek. The slender volumes lay elegantly as tulips around the apartment. And when I looked inside, the indecipherable alphabet seemed like the language of dreams. After my bland suburban past this was as powerful as heroin.
From the elevated track I saw the front of the train curve ahead. Behind it, huge Trojan horses unloaded steel barrels from ocean tankers, and refinery stacks blasted blue fire. A police helicopter hovered. At the sharpest point of the curve I thought, This is how things are beautiful now. There were aluminum warehouses in dull shades of gray and green and, nearer the track, boarded-up houses.
The BART slid into one station after another. Maybe I had ruined my life. Everything you do matters too much and it's possible to poison your present relationship by actions made in the past. With Bell, it was his obsession with Kevin. I watched my own past work adversely on lovers, when I admitted juggling men and lying to them. Infidelity is a tricky business. There's less meaning in an infidelity than in a relationship, so I would lie to Bell. And though I wasn't now, the fact that I would lie might mean he was lying.
I wondered how Madam Pig would be feeling today? Pig was a huge woman who wore tent dresses with sparkly thread and patterns of tropical birds. Her hair was dyed strawberry blond and her face was always covered with a generous amount of make-up. She had long fingernails, always perfectly manicured and painted a shade of pink she said reminded her of Persia. Her name came from a story about her ex-husband having a pet pig that could smoke cigars and drink cans of beer. Pig was the best storyteller I'd ever encountered, specializing in adultery tales where women, hearing their husbands unexpectedly on the stairs, make their lovers hide naked on the fire escape.
There were lots of rumors about how she came into money. She said it was left to her by a contessa she once accompanied on a trip through the Middle East. Others said it was her husband's money, that he'd been heir to a jelly business in Wales, that he paid her off to live with a Parisian starlet. One woman told me Pig strangled him, buried him in the empty lot beside the house. People said she'd starred in blue movies, that she had been the madam of the most stylish bordello in New Orleans.
Wherever the money came from, she didn't mind spending it. Pig loved having parties with giant lasagnas and champagne fountains. She lit candles and let the drag queens fight over the record player. I met several people there: a feminist trying to destroy the myth of the aesthetic canon, musicians who insisted house music was the blues of the nineties and a performance artist who covered himself with animal blood and said narrative was dead.
At the last party, I was in the kitchen helping Pig prepare an appetizer of avocado halves with cheese and shrimp when she turned to me, held her glass out for more wine and said, "Bell's beautiful, isn't he?" I didn't answer. "But couldn't you marry someone else and take him as a lover?"
I was so startled I spilled burgundy over her fingers, tried clumsily to defend myself, saying I didn't want to get married, that I appreciated his spontaneity. She stood back from the oven, her face flushed and eyes a little teary from the heat and took my hands, looked at me as my mother might. "Well… I've never known a beautiful girl who wasn't doomed."
Later that night, after two young Irishmen sang a Celtic song about a ship full of sheep sinking into the sea, Pig stood woozily, holding her glass high, and began to toast. It was late, everyone lying languidly over the furniture. "To love," she said, "that delicate egg… and to evil… which teases and tempts us as a good lover might." Pig moved her head with great drama. "Also, to my dear departed husband… who was lovely to see with a day's beard stubble." The drag queens giggled. "And most of all, to the mental and physical wasteland of the future. Finally our inner boredom and bareness will not be intimidated by a lush and healthy nature."
There were scattered claps all around and Madam Pig blushed, turned toward the stereo. She wanted to hear the Hildegard Knef record. But before she took a single step, Pig swayed slightly, raised her hand up as if grabbing for a butterfly, then fell to her knees and rolled onto the floor.
For a moment, she lay still, then said, her face pressed into the carpet, "Could someone please take me to my room?"
Three men rushed up, took her legs and shoulders, heaved her massive body up like it was a pool table. I cradled her head, which was limp as a baby's. On the way she spoke incoherently, told the men she loved them, said we could all come and live with her. Drool ran down Pig's cheek and onto my hand. They laid her gently on the bed, stood awkwardly, instinctively folding their hands like in church. The oldest one gestured with his head that they should leave. He squeezed her hand and her eyes opened, she said, "Let them dance." I threw a blanket over her, closed the drapes against the faint orange industrial light. She asked me in a blurry voice to come over three times a week, that she needed me now and would pay me well, because she suspected very soon she would die.
The BART stopped high above the street. Walking down the steps past the cement columns, I saw, lying in the tall weeds, two lovers pressed close, old newspapers and fast-food containers scattered all around them. The girl's hair was long, stretched out like ivy. They didn't notice me. The noise from the highway and the BART passing created a kind of negative silence around them.
This part of Oakland was barren compared to the civilized patter of San Francisco, even anemic with its tin buildings and fenced lots. In front of the station was a supermarket that sold grapes for thirty cents a pound, a variety of peppers, prickly pears and other Mexican products. Behind the market stood a row of pasty houses with dirt yards. There were empty crack vials all over the sidewalk and a dead cat in a cardboard box near the dumpster.
A man in a white Ford by the pay phones kept saying, "Hey, skinny. Hey, skinny." I scanned him quickly. He wore a Caribbean shirt open to show his chest hairs and a slender gold chain. He whistled, but I still wouldn't turn. "Your pussy stinks," he said as I walked away. "I can smell it from here." He laughed like he really thought he was funny. I hurried past his headlights with decals of Jesus, past a wall of graffiti tags and a silent brick factory. Through empty window frames I could see figures sitting on mattresses spread over the floor.
Pig's house was covered with vines. Hers was a stone Victorian, impressive still with the cherubic faces on every cornice. The gutter loosened and slumped, jammed now with the sharp leaves of the lemon tree. Paint chips blew off like snow in every wind. And the flower boxes of silk irises had paled in the rain. Every other house on her street had been demolished, the earth turned over, the ground pockmarked with deep filthy puddles. Beyond the mud, the houses were boarded up, adjacent lots filled with trash and sofas swollen with rats. The path to the door was marked with chunks of slate. Burrs stuck to my pants as I passed. Inside I paused to rest, picking off the burrs, letting my eyes adjust to the cooler dark air. On one side, the dining room, which always had a scent of rose petals and chamomile tea. Here was a long walnut table and strange paintings of stylized factory workers in a maze of equipment and smoke. Madam Pig had her garnet glass collection displayed, hundreds of red plates, mugs, goblets, salt shakers, candle holders, gravy dishes and ashtrays. With the curtains drawn they seemed demure. But on the nights Pig lit her candles, the glass sent candied light every which way. The living room door was shut, but I could hear the grandfather clock behind the velvet couch.
"Is that you, Jesse?" Madam Pig yelled from the kitchen.
"It's me!" I answered, walking the hall toward her voice. Along the wall hung pastel portraits of Madam Pig's only child, Madison. The girl had shell-white skin and blond hair. It might be her paleness or that there were ten portraits on each side, but they always seemed to glow and animate like a film clip.
Pig sat at the round table in the kitchen eating cold raspberry soup from a bowl and drinking red wine. She looked well today, but with her bulldog face and strange red shade of bouffant hair, she was always a spectacle. Since Pig never left the house I knew her flush could not be from exercise, but a particularly lucky application of make-up. Today her eyebrows were superbly drawn.
"I love cold soup. It goes so well on these days when I'm the last person in the world." Pig stared into her soup as if something she lost years ago would surface any minute.
"Soup's good," I said, never knowing if her exclamatory statements were meant to be answered.
She looked up. "Jesse," she said quickly, "did you bring some mangoes?"
I shook my head. "But I can go look for some." Pig looked at me like I was crazy, her eyes wide. "Why would you want to go out there?" She gestured to the window and the mud lot.
"I meant I'd go to the store to look." It was always hard for me to know what to say to Pig. Besides, whatever I answered never seemed to pertain to her reply. "No," she muttered, "no, no, no…"
I sat in an overstuffed chair. I loved this room. The wallpaper, a big bawdy pattern of magnolias drenched in hazy moonlight. Pig sat across from me at the round cherry table with mismatched chairs. At first I thought the upholstered chairs looked strange in the kitchen, until I realized the house's inner logic of abundance and how silly Madam Pig would look in a spindly chair.
I watched her elegantly spoon the soup into her mouth and flip the pages of an old magazine; there were stacks all over the table. She read them, some even twenty-five years old, like it was new information.
"You look well," I said.
At this she raised her head, gave me a look that showed her disapproval of innocuous pleasantries, plunked her spoon into the bowl and said suspiciously, "Who told you that you have to do what you don't want?" I could tell by the set of her chin that she had been thinking of this all weekend. "Your mother?" Pig asked. "It's a shame what mothers do. What they really mean is that women get stronger by the bad things that happen to them. Not that you have to make bad things happen to you, and more importantly, pretend to like situations that you don't."
The last phrase made my eyes well, and Madam Pig said, "Oh honey, did he leave you again?"
I nodded my head and wiped my eyes, staring at the glass bowl filled with oranges in the table's center. I told Pig how he had gone to get cigarettes and not come home all night. Then how I searched for him and spied while he had spoken with the little man.
She interrupted me to say thoughtfully that she didn't hate her former husband, "I only wish he never again treats anyone like a cow." She had a vacant look then, like she had to go inside and think of what she said.
I felt uncomfortable in the silence and stared at her magazine, one picture of an astronaut floating unconnected to surface or spaceship-he seemed threatening with the black mask of his helmet twinkling.
When she saw me staring she said, "It's amazing what you can learn from watching someone."
"I don't know that I learned anything from watching Bell."
"Once you see your lover doing something you could never discuss with him then sooner or later you will leave."
I thought how once at a bar Bell was mesmerized by a pair of drag queens in their long black wigs, go-go boots and miniskirts.
"Can't you just start up with someone else?" she asked sympathetically. "Oh I know I'm always rallying for it, but adultery is so much better when you have an ax to grind."
I said, "Bell is the one I have chosen," and the sound of my voice frightened me. It was firm and inarguable like a born-again Christian.
Pig pushed her soup dish back. "Well," she said, "there is nothing I can do if you won't listen to reason. But I do want to tell you one story. It happened to an old friend of mine. She was a conservative woman, but lovely with kitty-cat blue eyes and peanut-butter-colored hair. She was queen of the flower festival and decided at twenty, though she had her choice of many, to marry a minister. He told her that they would do good works and always have a hundred dollars in their pockets. Sometimes when they were alone she sensed something cruel in his profile, something soft and perverse around his mouth. But they married anyway, had several good years, then a slew of horrible ones. She got fat like me and started to act mean and arrogant and before she knew it he had the smell of other women on him and when she reached for him in bed he'd say, 'Don't embarrass yourself.' "
I felt my eyes get warm and milky. "That's my mother's story," I said to Pig. "I told you that."
"Oh," she said, "no wonder in my mind it seemed to pertain to you." She didn't look at me. Her cheeks got pink under the heavy spots of rouge. She rose awkwardly, her grand body shivering, shifting like a yacht pulling out of dock.
"Time for my bath," she said.
IN THE LAUNDRY ROOM OFF THE KITCHEN THE WASHER WAS A slick erotic white. I loaded Pig's colossal slips and bras into the washing machine. Upstairs the water was still beating into the tub. I could hear the sloshing and squeezy echo of Pig settling in, her thighs relaxing heavily against the sides, her back sinking low against the porcelain. Pig's underwear, all in pastel colors and the size of office trash bags, reminded me of the style I wore in grade school. Why did fat embarrass me? Fat people couldn't hide their weakness or sorrow like most could. I used to wake at night and pull a pillow to my stomach, worrying about getting fat. But as I loaded the washer with her oversized dresses, Pig didn't seem tragic but abundant. I almost felt a comfort in her hugeness.
In the kitchen I poured dish soap into a sponge and washed the green ice-tea glasses and started on the flowered soup tureen filmed with hardened raspberries. Because of Bell and my parents I sometimes felt undermined, then other times I thought I was better off because I had gotten over a certain sentimental view of the world. I brooded on this as I ripped up several pairs of ancient boxers in order to dust, then carried the cloth fragments of a polka-dot pair to the living room. I liked dusting… there wasn't the strenuous arm movement of other household chores, but a kind of elegant glide that even the smartest lady would be willing to do. You could imagine Virginia Woolf dusting, but to envision her cleaning a toilet was impossible. The white couch, the clock on the mantle, the lamp with the porcelain stem; this room was not as eclectic as the others. Instead each object was like a museum piece, icy with purpose. They were like the memories that interacted or repelled to create my changing moods.
Pig called out. I stood still, worried she had slipped on the tiles, lost her breath, realized her heart was about to explode, but then her voice straightened and I heard that she was calling for more wine.
MADAM PIG'S WINE GLASS SAT ON THE TUB'S LEDGE. THE STEAM thinned and her muddy features took on definition. Except for her lyrical personality, it was hard to believe she had ever been beautiful.
"Would you wash my back and make the symbols like you do," she asked. "Don't deny it. I've felt them: stop signs, peace signs, Z's. It feels so good to absorb information through the skin."
Her body underwater was gelatinous and rosy as a Rubens. If you didn't know what a body was supposed to look like, Madam Pig's body would be like a sloppy dream. Her breasts were buoyant and her ancient nipples bobbed at the surface. No matter how many times I saw her naked I was always surprised and a little horrified. But the philosophy of the tub, a woman and her bath, was different than the bedroom-there should be no taint of male criteria.
She spoke lazily about her aches and pains and eventually her voice mellowed into self-conscious wisdom. "When I was your age, Jesse, I'd see some gesture, like the way a strange man opened his jacket or how a girl lifted her foot to check her heel, and I wouldn't be able to lace it into my memory. Instead, the image would be stilled, it would have the awful inactivity of death and this magnified the moment around me: my heart, car tremors, clouds, people working their bodies. Very plainly then I'd see the dark silence of the end. But now that I know death is near, it's not dramatic or startling, just boring."
"You wouldn't die," I said, "if you went to the doctor." She ignored me, pretended to wash her elbow. Her pubic hair reminded me of some elaborate seaweed.
"Why don't you call your daughter?" I asked.
"I haven't seen Madison for five years," Pig said.
"So, you could call her up now."
"I was hoping you would call her."
"I don't even know her."
Pig closed her eyes so long I thought she had fallen asleep. "In an effort," Pig said, "to explain why I can never call her I will tell you how Madison came to leave. Steven left me. He had a private income and those people never really get attached to anything. Madison took it hard, stayed in her room, cut her hair short and got a nose ring. And in the same spirit she bought a wolf It was half grown and very tame, a charcoal-and-honey colored animal with dark green eyes. She named it London and fed it hamburgers, sometimes the occasional black-market squirrel. We kept it tied in the back. So many times it pulled its stake out we finally got a boy to pour a cement base. It barked a lot and whined. The neighborhood kids threw sticks over the fence to tease it. They thought it was a rabid dog. After a while Madison started asking if we could set it free in Big Sur. I was in a sick mood and liked to watch the thing suffer. Madison began threatening to leave, but I didn't believe her. One morning I woke before dawn to a horrible yelping in the backyard. The air felt like certain Good Fridays. The wolf's chain was pulled tightly over the fence. I looked through the wood planks and saw the wolf's dead eyes and Madison's smiling face. She had called the wolf, who then tried to jump the fence in an effort to follow her." Pig looked into the water. "It hung itself as Madison watched… What kind of a girl would do a thing like that?" she asked solemnly. The lilac soap slipped into the water. The plop disturbed her and she continued. "I haven't seen her since. I heard she was working in the Tenderloin and I had a detective follow her. Get the brass box." I brought it over and she opened it and handed a slip of paper to me. "Go to her. Tell her I'm dying."
"Why don't you go?"
"You know I never leave the house."
I looked at the address, then at Pig. Though she looked drained, the story seemed false. But I felt sorry for her, and her expectant face reminded me of my mother's; both had the cast of women that have been left in middle age. As she pulled herself out with a great suck of water, I handed her a towel.
"I hate the vague egalitarianism of these times, it insists that there are no qualitative standards. Judge and be judged," Pig said. "That is my saying."
She wrapped the towel around her head like a turban and I helped with her robe. Her face was red from the bath. At the banister, Pig had to stop because she felt dizzy. She tipped way forward and I realized then, because of the hingey way her head bobbed, that she was very drunk. Pig's head dropped lower. She gagged and a long line of glittering burgundy ribboned down the stairwell. Lifting her head sleepily, she said, "I want you to find her." I wiped her mouth and helped her down the hall to her room.
The green curtains were shut and the single candle looked fuzzy, like a dandelion. It was mid-afternoon, though inside the room it always seemed like midnight. She clutched my arm and asked if I'd get her a cardboard box from the bookshelf. Inside were photographs, large black-and-whites on thin paper: Pig's husband leaning against the door of his race car. He wore sunglasses and there was something in the firm set of his mouth that told me Pig had had a very hard time. There were others, a lovely woman, who I figured was his sister, in a blouse with a Peter Pan collar, her dark hair tied back with a scarf.
"Who's that?" I asked.
Pig did not open her eyes, did not answer.
"You were beautiful," I said, feeling embarrassed. I shuffled the photos together and handed them to her.
"I was." She grabbed my wrist hard. "You don't want to end up like me."
I wanted to yell at Pig that there was no more poignancy in the aging of a beautiful woman than a plain one. If beautiful girls had higher expectations it was only because of vanity, not that they were better people or more blessed. And besides, it didn't seem possible I could end up like Pig. She let her nails dig into the soft part of my arm and with the pain I thought, Once she was like me.
She must have noticed my look of recognition because she released me and I walked over to the window, held the curtain back. There was a milky lavender rising beyond the power lines.
"You can go now," she said softly. "I'll be all right."
I blew out the candle and walked to the door. Pig sat up into the crack of hall light.
"Remember, Jesse," she said, "there is no black angel but love."
