Skin, p.26
Skin, page 26
"You made more?"
"Bibi, for God's sake-they're not mine! I would never- Bibi, listen to me!" but she was not listening: as if unable to listen or hear, as if Tess spoke the language of a species of steel and she so patently a creature of the bleeding earth; and Tess saw like a box cracked open Bibi changed in ways past all sane charting, her angry soul grown only angrier with each turn of the knife, each pierce of the warm needle, grown now both wizened and monstrous, crouched resentful and wet as a tumor in the blind cave of her brain. Could no one see this? bodyguards, lapdogs, a troupe full of drooling yes-man sycophants crawling avid and openmouthed as if to catch the flecks and driftings of her very skin as it fell, queen, mother, master in adoration, those stupid fucks there in the corner, didn't anyone see this? "Bibi!" Shouting, as if down a well, a hole, a hole in the center of the earth's beating heart; her own heart, beating like falling down the stairs; runaway, arrhythmic. "Will you listen to me? I'm telling you they're not mine!"
Eyes turned on Tess now, stare like an animal on a choke-chain. Her hands, visibly shaking, her whole body one bright jitter, chains and hooks and slender silver rings. She opened her mouth twice before she could speak, working muscles and tight tendons suggestive horribly of feeding; and when she finally spoke her voice was ultimatum.
"Then smash them."
Silence, the quiver before the stroke, the graceless blow that splits here from now, wrong from right, expediency from the moist blind obedience of love that sees only one road: and Tess at that crossroads: "Bibi," her own voice flat with fear, fear of Bibi there before her, with the power to burn every bridge Tess could build, burn it instantly as if it had never been. "Oh Bibi. You know I can't."
More silence, pause like power building, huge static to discharge in one surge like lightning; and Bibi blinkless, staring as if vindicated in a dreadful conclusion, a terminal diagnosis.
"He said you wouldn't."
"Who said?"
"Michael."
Staring now as if she, too, was blind, deaf, adrift on a vast confusion, and Bibi's sudden siren shriek, "Michael! Michael motherfucking Hispard, that's who, Tess, like you didn't know, like you-"
"Michael never even saw these things, he was gone before they ever-Bibi, stop it. Stop it!" but she was screaming now, wild, one arm pumping up and down as if to drive her point like a metal stake into frozen ground and one part of Tess stood apart and silent, frightened in the way we fear fire, or the twist of a tornado across a flat ledge of ground: Bibi was completely out of control, completely gone in an escalation of rage and hysteria that no matter the cause was in itself horrible, and threatening, to watch. But why was Tess the only one staring, why weren't Bibi's bodyguards upset? Because, the calm of her answering logic, the voice that can speak in the midst of the whirlwind, they see her like this all the time.
And Bibi's mouth Kabuki, siren and that pumping arm, faster and faster, "I thought it would bring you back, that's what I did it for, having him there with me-you might follow him, I thought you loved him, I thought it would make you come back but you didn't! it was for nothing! It was for nothing!" in one long atonal screech, now the bodyguards were moving to her, were trying to calm her down. But it was like laying hands on a hurricane, on the face of motion itself, her screams were energy and-now she wept, hideous sobs without tears and "Smash it!" shrieking, advancing on the torso, Nicky's work, Nicky's mean-spirited vision and "Smash it, Tess, smash the fucking thing, smash it!"
"I can't!" Someone else's work, someone else's rights, oh God Jesus must she always fight for other people, other people in the face of Bibi's naked rage, oh God and in agony she raised the nearest implement, long-handled chipping hammer to strike, nearly weeping, strike without heart at the misformed body, legless, escapeless, all for nothing for it did not soothe or placate, did not penetrate the juggernaut shell of Bibi's pain, her anger and her unconvinced disgust and Tess dropped the hammer, let it fall to try to take Bibi's arm, grab her, stop her but Bibi pushing her off, shoving her with such loathing violence that Tess fell, pratfall sprawl on her ass, her twisted arm; and screaming something, back over her shoulder like one last curse: and gone. Bodyguards trailing, tailing, trying to take her in hand and Tess risen from the floor, crying in big ugly sounds like an animal, is everything broken? Does everything have to be broken? and turning on the sculpture, her own rage now, frustration like a burning ulcer and she battered the torso as if it were living flesh, breaking it more, splitting it to chunks and pieces and then slinging the hammer aside to crouch, no longer even weeping, breathing hard and fast and heavy through constriction like a band, pain made metal clenching tight and tighter around the fist of her breaking heart.
Michael is the one.
Try to call him; he will not return your calls, he will evade you every way he knows how and he knows them all, he is a very clever boy, Michael, he knows how to get lost and stay there while being insultingly visible everywhere else: Tess had seen him three times this week alone, once on local TV, twice in print: skinny and beautiful in heavy black, almost burlesque his smile beatific, arms around Bibi who looked like a rabid wolf and took up half the page with her theories, the purity of primitive cultures, their unreason, their expression of primum moveos, the urge of man to transcend himself, to re-create. "Women have babies to try to satisfy this urge," the red-lettered quote, "but in the end everybody's got to remake herself, or himself, one shred of skin at a time." None of which sounded like Bibi, surely incapable now of a sentence this linear; it had come, Tess knew, from Michael.
Who had somehow shown to Bibi what she should never have seen; had lied, in the showing, about Tess, a monstrous lie. What other lies were there, the ones she knew-to Nita, be Tess's eyes-what others? Links of chain leading back to his hands, monstrous Michael whom she had-almost-loved.
Why?
She chased him, grim frenzy to confront confronting the wall of flesh impenetrable: there was no way to get to him, she did not know where he lived and when she assaulted the rehearsals was turned back each time more roughly, the last after what was escalating into a full-scale beating before Matty Regal, of all people, broke it up.
And grabbed her, dirty hand on her arm, lips scabbed as if recovering from a monthlong fever; all of them dirty here, willfully unkempt as if ill with a proud disease: his breath in her face oddly fragrant, warm sweet coffee breath. "Tess," harshly. "Quit it."
Cuts on her hands, a long scrape down one arm; she had torn her jeans. Hair in her eyes. One of the boys she had hit was crying; she could hear him through the door. To Matty she said, "Fuck you."
"I'm serious," but not unkindly, pushing her sore back against the wall. "I know you don't like me, I don't give a shit, I don't like you either. But you're making it worse for her, do you realize that? Huh? Every time you come around she goes a little bit crazier, it takes Michael hours to calm her down."
"Calm her down?" Enraged, last flagging energies like a legless bug spinning circles on the floor, trying to sting the foot that has crushed it. "He's the one who's making her crazy! He's-"
"She is crazy." Mouth almost to her ear, that scented breath past her dry eyes. "She's a crazy saint. She can't leave herself alone, she's cutting on places that haven't even healed yet, she keeps talking about the skin being the gate, like she has to keep cutting to get somewhere-she is so close, Tess, I mean she is really on to something here, and the last thing she needs is you stirring her up. Just let her alone, all right? If you really care about her, let her alone."
Staring at him as if he, too, were crazy; maybe they all were. Maybe she was, too. The boy behind the door had stopped crying and was now cursing, drab repetition like a barking dog; someone else kept saying, "Uh-huh, uh-huh," each time he stopped for breath. Her own voice like a stranger's, "I just want her to-" and she stopped; what did she want? For Bibi to come back, be safe? Not be crazy? Love her again, what?
But she does love you-
-and it was true, she had seen it: still there, crippled, twisted as Bibi herself, cut and broken and cut again; but still there. Almost more terrible than anything else, what in fact made it terrible: she still loves you. And yet in the knowing some small and dreadful joy; for Bibi, too? Who knew.
"I want her to be okay," she said, and Matty's face closed, disgust: "She's past all that shit," and closing the door, too, cracking it again to say if Tess came back, he would not "step in" again. Step in. "Fuck you, Matty," she said again, but there was no heat to it; there was no heat to her. She walked home through the dregs of afternoon, came to her building to find shit smeared on the door, dogshit maybe, maybe not; Nicky was swearing, trying to scrape at it with newspaper, a tilted L of cardboard. She passed him without speech or comment, went up to lie on the bed and stay there.
Too worn out to cry, the one question circling her like a virus closing in, the sickness that brings death, why. Why? As if questioning the fact of death itself. What had turned him so against her, what lure? Hate, love, jealousy, what? The brute sweetness of betrayal? The urge to punish? and make no mistake, he was punishing Bibi as well, punishing in fact all three, did he see that? She had made love to them both, in this bed, their sweat on her hands, teeth bare, hair gripped and flying, they had both talked to her about love, about loving her; Jesus God; how it had hurt, to think of them together and she the fool outside; this, now, made nothing of that. Everything broken and she without impetus to rise, to try in her own way for re-creation, to make not new but whole the wreckage around her; she had lost purpose, thoroughly and completely, the way a limb is amputated.
Sleepless in bed, talking to no one: not Nicky or Nita or Edgar-Marc, not Jerome when he and Peter returned; not the phone when it rang which it did; infrequently, but she left the machine on: Bibi might call. Or Michael.
Two mornings, three, lying mute in T-shirt and panties like a body washed up on a beach and, like driftwood, another Bibi-interview, this one in an oversize magazine left at her door like a love offering, a way to rouse her. Sitting up at last to read it, cross-legged on the bed, turning the pages as if she must by rote verify the presence of each. Slick pop culture pretensions, galleries she had never visited, shows of work she despised, when had she last done work of her own? When would she work again? teach? Never?
And all at once the centerpiece, long article with small type, "Performance Art Ultima" and Bibi, there, even less presentable somehow though this was an earlier photo-; graph: an earlier time as the words were still all hers, her.‹white-hot rant, ramble and jumble and as Tess read she seemed to see, like palimpsests, the words Bibi might speak now, on this same subject, the way her eyes might look as she did; the probable cast of her smile. Less thought than pure knowledge, the contrast less immense than immensely skewed: as if the part of her that was still Bibi had had its last fling in these pages: the part that could still make a joke, take one, still slip from the hooked orbit of lesser passions and greeds called into service by the greater greeds and passions that were her, that made up Bibi as bricks make a wall; could still escape her guarding obsessions and be for moments free of the demands of that hunger now devouring her, dark yin to her yang. Were they still distinguishable, one from the other? or instead were they dominoes, grinless twins and each red-mouthed, hands out, hungry not for feeding but the flesh that hunger brings. She had been already crazy, in this article, but she was far beyond that now.
And I can't help her.
I can't help her at all anymore.
Crying, from beneath that twisting pity, twisting like an ulcer giving birth and little tears, very hot, moving lines down her dry cheeks. On the page Bibi's face, gray eyes the color of metal, the color of brittle hooks through flesh shy with blood's embarrassment; she was crying onto the magazine, one smearing hand to wipe the tears away.
Knocking, softly, at the door, two knocks and a pause; two knocks and no more.
She rose, unsteady from her days of lying flat, pulled on a pair of knee-length shorts half-folded on the floor. Face to the door, "Who is it?" and in the summoning breath knew exactly who it was.
A half smile, barely there: stepping in with that same grace, never less than beautiful; she had never hated anyone so much. Chains across his cheek, faint ceremonious scars beneath his gray Bibi-eyes. "I hear you're looking for me," he said, stepping past her; come inside.
Her heart, whipping rhythm, beating as if she were dying; she wanted to strip the bed of its sheet and strangle him with it, garrote his cock, his neck, fill his lying mouth choking-full. All the lies, out there in swift black crouch, what else was there that she didn't know? Helpless through her teeth: "I'd like to kill you."
His understanding instant; a small shrug. "Hey, I never forced anybody to do anything; they were a dissatisfied bunch. And anyway you're as much to blame as I am, you're the one who taught them how." Silence. "I don't lie to her, Tess. Like I never lied to you."
That itself was such a lie there was no answering it; saying nothing, she watched him sit down, herself stayed standing as if she were the stranger come to him in his home. He seemed to be waiting for her to say something, but she had nothing. What should she say: I hate you? Why did you do that? Would the answers mean anything more than the air used to form them, the thoughtless motion of tongue and lips? Finally, "You did a lot of things," she said. "I bet I don't know the half of it."
"I bet you don't either." Smiling wide but not in mockery, the way one old friend smiles to another over a successful practical joke: surely you're not still angry? About that? "I keep trying to tell you, there are more ways than one to perform. You didn't have one, and then you did, with Bibi. And now you don't have one again." Hands in pockets. He was not dirty, his hair was beautifully clean, soft messy strands escaping his braid. Thin chains shining like threads of metal, hardened veins. "But she does. She has one hell of a one, if that makes sense, and it should: you've seen the shows. Shit, half the shows are about you," and he laughed a little, shook his head very lightly. "You know, at first I wondered if you were sending them after all, those kids-you know, your girl, and that dumb beef-stick kid-"
Gazing at him, almost without the urge to speak: as if at a hole, a chasm you had never guessed was there, you had almost stepped into it a thousand times, and finally you fell. Fell down. How had this happened? With effort, "What are-"
"-call those things, those beef sticks?-jerky, right. A big beef jerky." He laughed again. "If you weren't so pissed off at me, you'd see it was true. You could see a lot of things, if you weren't so pissed off. Incidentally I was trying to show you a way, there, with those kids, who do you think put them on to you, huh? As a teacher. You don't think they came up with that stuff themselves, do you? Bibi set herself up, and I was trying to set you up, too."
As if from a distance, somewhere past the airless clamor of rage: "Why didn't you set yourself up? You were in that group, that fou music thing. Why didn't you just-" Impatiently, "Because they were stupid," as if she were as well. "You know that, you saw them. Why should I waste my time?"
"Why waste it," feeling sicker, now, a special red sickness, feeling as if she would like to get close to him, close enough to reach his face. "Why not just keep it all for your-"
"Fuck that," not looking at her, now, a point somewhere above her head. "I came here to talk, Tess, do you want to talk? I even have the password: Bibi sent me."
"Why didn't you?" ignoring him, ignoring his deliberate use of Bibi's name even though she wanted to slap it right out of his mouth, wanted to scream into his face Don't you dare say her name, don't you dare say her name to me. "Why didn't you just make your own group, lead your own-"
"She needs your help," too loud, too loud even for what he was trying to do; more than interruption, he wanted distraction, he wanted her to stop talking. Why? but still going on, Bibi Bibi Bibi until it worked, she wanted to scream again, she had to stop thinking, had to listen to make it stop. "What?" loathing him; showing it. "What did she send you to tell me that she couldn't tell me herself?"
"I told you. She needs your help," and smoothly, unbelievably, his solicitation, there were effects they would like to achieve, things they would like to do if Tess would only lend her expertise; maybe, legs crossed now, jaunty again, maybe they could trade? or she could be paid in cash, if that was what she wanted, they were very flexible after all.
Past disbelief, a moment's pause; then: "I want you to leave Bibi alone. That's what I want."
Shrugging, "It's not what she wants," and that long sweet smile, chain of memories connected to it like roots to a hungry vein; "Come on, Tess. I can't do that. I'm her right-hand man, how can I leave her?"
"You left me."
"That was different. You wouldn't grow. Bibi, now," and actually grinning, "Bibi won't stop growing, she-"
"Were you raised," measured, now, and almost close enough to touch, "by a wire monkey? Don't you care about anybody? Don't you care about anything at-"
"I care about Bibi. I care about her art. I used to care about your art but you-"
And she hit him, suckerpunch, he never saw it coming and in that instant of red surprise hit him again, in the face, in the mouth and this time he hit her back, tremendously hard, both of them two steps back and bleeding from the mouth: her ears were ringing.
"Don't play that shit with me," his glare: no more insouciance, no more shrugs and smiles: all deep-voiced carnivore and strangely this relaxed her, just a little, muscles loose and wire-bright. Deeper still: "I'll break your fucking neck."
"Get out of my house."
Past her, not even wiping at his mouth, self-possessed again and turning at the door: "No telling what I'll tell her, now," and gone, Tess wanting to scream at the door I wish I had killed you, I wish I had choked you when we were fucking, I wish... little red marks, all over him, little scratches, little bites "Don't you remember? You did that last night-"
