good girl. People think, but not what I see.'
'What do you see?' I asked. Curious as to what bizarre distortions my image had undergone in the translation within the sewer system of Sergei's mind.
'You see me, you like. I feel you watch but then look away. Maybe afraid you get like her, da?' He jerked his head toward the front of the house, Yvonne, gesturing a big belly. 'You don't trust. I never give you baby.'
As if that were it. I was afraid, but not of that. I knew if I ever let him touch me, I would not be able to stop. I remembered the day my mother and her friends went to drink at the revolving bar on top of the Bonaventure Hotel, and I was pulled toward the windows, the nothingness was pulling me out. I felt that feeling every time I was in a room with Sergei, that sliding toward a fall.
'Maybe I like Rena,' I said, making tiny cuts down the mermaid's tail for scales. 'Women don't like it much when you screw around with their lovers.'
His smile wiped his face like a mop. 'Don't worry Rena.' He laughed, a rumbling laugh that came from beneath the neat belt, the tight jeans. 'She don't own thing long. She like to trade. Sergei today, somebody tomorrow. Hi, bye, don't forget hat. But for you, something else. Look.'
He pulled something out of his shirt pocket. It caught my eye like a firefly. It was a necklace, a diamond on a silvery chain. 'I find this lying in street. You want?'
He was trying to buy me off with a stolen necklace? I had to laugh. Found it in the street. In someone's nightstand, more likely. Or around her throat even, how could I know? / take the sliding glass door off the track of a two-story house in Mar Vista. A child-molester offering you candy, a ride in his car. So this was how someone like Sergei seduced a woman he wanted. Where just his smell and voice and the blue ropes of vein in his arms was enough, those sleepy blue eyes now sparkling under silver lids, that criminal smile.
He pulled a sad face. 'Astrid. Beauty girl. This is gift from my heart.'
Sergei's heart. That empty corridor, that unaired room. Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven't really got. If I were a good girl, I would be insulted, I would kick him out. I would ignore his smile, and shape of him inside his jeans. But he knew me. He smelled my desire. I felt myself slipping toward the windows, pulled by thin air.
He hooked the chain around my neck. Then he took my hand and put it on his groin, warm, I could feel him getting hard under my hand. It was obscene, and it excited me to feel him there, a man I wanted like falling. He leaned down and kissed me the way I wanted to be kissed, hard and tasting of last night's booze-up. He unzipped my polyester shirt, pulled it over my head, took my skirt off and threw it onto Yvonne 's bed. His hands waking me up, I'd been sleeping, I hadn't even known it, it had been so long.
Then he stopped, and I opened my eyes. He was looking at my scars. Tracing the Morse code of dog bite on my arms and legs with his fingertips, then the bullet scars, shoulder, chest, and hip, measuring their depth with his thumb, calculating their age and severity. 'Who does this to you?'
How could I begin to explain who did it to me. I would have to start with the date of my birth. I glanced at the door, still open, we could hear the TV. 'Is this an exhibition or what?'
He shut it noiselessly, unbuttoned his shirt and hung it on the chair, pulled off his pants. His body white as milk, blue-veined, it was frightening, lean and dense as marble. It took my breath away. How could anybody confuse truth with beauty, I thought as I looked at him. Truth came with sunken eyes, bony or scarred, decayed. Its teeth were bad, its hair gray and unkempt. While beauty was empty as a gourd, vain as a parakeet. But it had power. It smelled of musk and oranges and made you close your eyes in a prayer.
He knew how to touch me, knew what I liked. I wasn't surprised. I was a bad girl, lying down for the father again. His mouth on my breasts, his hands over my bottom, up between my legs. There was no poetry about us humping on the yellow chenille bedspread on the floor. He hauled me into the positions he liked, my legs over his shoulders, riding me like a Cossack. Standing up with his arms linked to hold my weight as he thrust into me. I saw us in the closet mirror. I was surprised to see how little I resembled myself, with my lidded eyes, my sexual smile, not Astrid, not Ingrid, nobody I ever saw before, with my big bottom and long legs around him, how long I was, how white.
I SEPARATED our dirty clothes at the Fletcher coin op, colors from lights, cold from hot. I liked doing laundry, the sorting, dropping the coins, the soothing smell of detergent and dryers, rumble of the machines, the snap of cotton and denim as the women folded their clothes, their fresh sheets. Children played games with their mothers' laundry baskets, wearing them like cages, sitting in them like boats. I wanted to sit in one too, pretend I was sailing.
My mother hated any chore, especially the ones that had to be performed in public. She waited until all our clothes were dirty, and sometimes washed our underwear in the sink, so we could put it off another few days. When we finally could not get away with it one day more, we'd quickly load our wash in the machines and then leave, go take in a movie, look at some books. Each time, we 'd come back to find it wet, thrown out on top of the washers or on the folding tables. I hated it that people handled our things. Everybody else could stay and watch their laundry, why couldn't we? 'Because we're not everybody,' my mother would say. 'We're not even remotely like everybody.'
Except even she had dirty laundry.
