I like Miller, really. He’s an interesting person. But he is beginning to irritate me. I want him to stop using that word. Excellent. It bugs the fuck out of me.
What about you? he says, looking at Molly.
She stares at him and I get the feeling they have had this discussion before.
Yes, she says. I believe. You know I do. I want to believe and I want love to work. I may be romantic and stupid and puritan but I believe that monogamy is possible. And I expect to find it, with the right person. I am with you now, but I don’t want to be yours.
That’s enough, says Miller. That’s more than enough.
He turns to Jude but she withers him with such a look that even I feel pale.
Never mind, says Miller.
Where is the bathroom? I say.
The nearest one is upstairs. Down the hall to the left.
nineteen.
THE UPSTAIRS BATHROOM IS LARGE and relatively spartan with a black-and-white tile floor and a white clawfoot bathtub. Toilet and sink and shower with smoky glass door. Black towels. The closet is empty. In the shower are expensive shampoo and conditioner and black soap. I have brought my glass of gin with me. I am smoking a cigarette. I drop my clothes to the floor and consider the bath. I don’t much like baths. I don’t care to sit in a pool of my own filth but I have always loved the clawfoot bathtub, as an abstract concept. And it reminds me of my mother’s house. I stand there, naked and smoking. It is everything I can do to stop from looking in the mirror. The coke is causing a nasty rattle in my skull and I don’t want to descend into any prolonged examination of self. I have an unfortunate tendency to cut my hair in these situations, to somehow mangle myself. There are knife scars on my arms and chest that no one can account for. I drop my cigarette into the toilet and crank up the hot water in the shower.
I scrub myself fiercely with the black soap. It smells of opium, of wormwood. There is something visually disturbing about black soap and somehow this appeals to me. I wash my genitals with curious fanaticism. I let the water pound down on my head. I am obliterated by needles and I am slowly disappearing into the smoke of irrational shame. If not for the night in jail and a fear of parasites, I’d probably not bother to wash my hair. The shampoo is also black. I dump a small amount of it into my hand and drag it through my hair, then rinse. I sink into the corner of the shower with glass of gin in hand and breathe the hot steam.
Jude opens the shower door and stands there, looking at me. I am crouched in the corner, rubbery and wet and dizzy from the heat and under her gaze I feel like Gollum with my empty glass in hand. I have lost my precious. I want to ask her a riddle. What is the shadow with green skin that is not man and not woman, the shadow that stretches before us and becomes another.
It’s not fair to ask us what it’s got in its nasty pockets.
Jude still wears that green dress.
She mutters something that I can’t hear.
What? I say.
She smiles and steps into the shower with me. The water crashes down on us and soon her hair is wet and hanging like black ribbons in her face. Her dress is soaked, a dark green secondary flesh. Jude kisses my neck, my chest and belly. I am thirsty and I want her. I reach for her but I am clumsy and my muscles are atrophied from the heat. I am briefly detached from my arms and legs. I want to drink her, to eat her wet eucalyptus skin. I want to rip the green dress from her body but I am floating somewhere above her and I have a magnificent almost distended erection. I pull Jude close to me and lift the wet green dress up over her waist and slip inside her and she is so wet and my thoughts are so splintered that it is hard to say where either of us begins or ends but soon the noise of our breathing is like the rattle and hiss of new fire.
I read somewhere that more than half of all household accidents take place in the shower and I am not surprised. It’s very slippery and dangerous in there, what with your arms and legs wet and twisted into rubber doll parts that don’t quite belong to you. Your mouth is full of hair and you can’t breathe and you can’t talk and within five minutes I come inside her, which is exactly what she wanted. Because I have been unable to come lately. And because it makes her feel pretty when I come inside her, or so she says.
Are you joking? I say.
But she just smiles at me. If I were her shrink, I would probably say it has to do with power. I would speculate that she was anorexic as a girl. I would root around in her skull for some barely remembered incident of childhood fondling or worse. But I’m not her shrink and wouldn’t want to be. I would rather eat my own eyeballs with a spoon than wiggle around in that head for money. As for birth control, well. Jude told me a few nights ago, in bed at the King James, that she doesn’t bother about birth control anymore because she had her tubes tangled sometime after the unwanted pregnancy in New Orleans.
Ten minutes later we sit on the black-and-white floor. The air is white with mist and we pass a damp cigarette back and forth. I’ve put my borrowed pants back on and Jude has wrapped herself in a massive blue towel. She’s wrapped in a chunk of sky and only her feet poke out. Her feet are beautiful, but not so pretty as Molly’s. I shut my eyes. I have a sudden urge to grind the cigarette out on my arm.
What are we doing here? I say.
Jude blows smoke at me. Don’t, she says.
What?
Don’t think about it so much. And don’t try to suck me into some philosophical debate.
Okay.
Brief silence while I wonder who is going to die.
What shall I think about?
Jude shrugs. The sleeping arrangements, she says.
What about them?
You’re sleeping with Molly tonight.
Jude is not kidding, it seems. She gives me that look of stone and I can’t tell what she’s thinking. She lets the blue towel fall to the floor and stands there a minute, naked and foreboding. Now she gives her hair a shake. The water flies from her in tiny rays of broken light.
You’re kidding, I say.
I’m not kidding.
Jesus.
What’s the problem, she says. You want her, don’t you?
Maybe. But I might rather make that choice on my own.
Jude shrugs. I don’t see how it makes a difference.
And where are you sleeping?
Wherever I want to, she says. With menace.
With Miller, you mean.
I have to get into character, she says. We both do.
Give me a fucking break, Jude.
Listen, she says. We are shooting this goddamn movie with Miller. When it’s done, he will bring Cody to me. Until then, we cooperate.
I watch as she takes a robe from the back of the door, a man’s robe. Black with green checks. She pulls it tight around her and she doesn’t look like any of this bothers her much.
And this doesn’t bother you? I say.
Weren’t you listening? says Jude. Monogamy is hopelessly antiquated. And therefore defunct.
You want me to sleep with her.
Jude stares, never flinching. Yes. Tonight, I want you to sleep with Molly.
I just nod. All right, I say. Anything for you, baby.
I walk down a hallway of muted yellow light. Molly is waiting for me behind door number three and I feel
