A powder room. A dressing room. A place to change one’s appearance, to maintain the mask, the cover-up for the night. Or the day. Day or night. Night and day. It doesn’t matter for the actor. Actors act on and off the stage. A different kind of love in each case. Adoration. Affirmation. All accolades. All because she can successfully sit before a mirror and change herself over. Put on a sham with an exquisite touch. She is good at it. Very good. Perhaps because she likes it, the character acting. She is an honor roll student at her profession.
‘I’m the proud parent of a—.”
Only she is no parent. Has no children. She never let herself have any. Never let herself go that much. Never let herself go that far. Never let herself go. Never so much as to really be with a man.
Making her fashion is a forte. It is her guard, holding herself aloof. Keeping just enough distance to keep herself clean and alluring. Maintaining virginity. It is the bait that is desirable. A carefully decorated hook. A disguised piano wire.
But there really isn’t a man worth his weight. Not many worth their dicks, either. Maybe there just aren’t any worthwhile men? None for her. Men are men. It is all the same to her. It. She takes her pleasure with whomever. Even if he is lousy, she finds something to pleasure her. She has to. Otherwise she won’t have survived. She can’t just lay back and let it happen. Hoping it will be over. Using her muscles and hips.
Once. . .once she’d had a. . .pretty good man.
* * *
Early in history, dressing rooms were called closets. Places where costumes were kept and façades were kept. A place where men were kept, entertained in a teasing sort of way. Then boudoirs came into fashion. More clothes, more fashion, more men crept in. They became the highlight of the evening. Then the boudoir was replaced by the bedroom. Closer and closer to the real thing.
* * *
“Play hard to get,” mom had said. “No man wants an easy piece.”
Something she did, though. Sometimes. Easy. With ease.
“It’s like fly fishing,” her father had said. “Keep a loose wrist. The rod’s just an extension of your hand. Your body rhythm keeps that line arcing, coming back in better and better ellipses til the moment of casting. Then it’s just a matter of reeling it in.”
* * *
Just a touch of reality was enough. A nose-powdering to take care of the glare. That was good. Just enough to keep him coming. Then she had the last say. Yeah. She had to have the last say. Even sometimes when she was wrong. Sometimes she erred. But she usually came away with something. The last say. A powdered nose. A touch of reality.
* * *
But the bedroom changed, too. To the parlor. Here, one could be watched, by everybody. Like an entranceway, coming and goings manipulated with politesse. The affair lost its allure. Its hue. The shadow flying out across the water was the tempting morsel. And so the parlor led to the car seat and sleazy motels and, eventually, anywhere. When you’re hot and ready, where isn’t as important as when.
* * *
She smiled wryly. In she went to get the spirit and out she came to practice the message.
For her, the pre-game show was just color commentary. After that, it was decorum, demeanor and dissembling. Then, back to the closet. A practicing disciple following her long historical precedent. There was no need for her to advertize. No need to shout from the top of the mountain, “I’m a cunt!” No. They knew she was a cunt. Men loved a cunt. Probably because they were just dicks baying at the moon. Big mouth bass coming to the surface to snatch that fly.
Once. . .once. . .there had been. . .
* * *
She stood at the door to her boudoir. She liked the name: boudoir. It excited the romantic sentiments in her. Her place. She was the boss here. This was her secret closet. At just the right geometric angle, her large dressing table with its large triptych mirror was placed to good advantage. A man couldn’t tell when this woman was watching him watch her.
The outer room she called her odalisque. There, she had the Romanesque-Art deco divan draped decorously with a woven silk-fringed shawl, which she never wore.
The bed was in the next room. Five or six thick, hand-made futons piled high and soft so she sank into their plush interior. The pile of bedding sat in the middle of the room. She liked wide-open spaces. That was an aesthetic she’d picked up in her travels. And, oh, she had travelled a lot! A plush middle-Eastern flying carpet was spread before the fireplace grating. A few throw pillows.
The windows to the street were only half-blinded. She liked showing off her well-kept body like her well-kept face. No one could see the lift surgery or the adjustment to her jowls. Anything to keep her from looking like her mother, a once-pretty woman who has overused, stretched chipmunk cheeks and turtle-like folds at her neck.
“Well,” she said to herself, “time’s a-wastin’.” And into her make-up room, her artist’s garret, she went to once again create her magic.
Like every good artist, she had a plethora of masks to choose from. They were ranged about her closet in tasteful fashion. She smiled at them. She smiled at herself. She sat down at her piano bench, back straight as a ramrod, waist so slim an Edwardian lady would have swooned for want of it, gently rounded heart-shaped hips–no Rubensian over-exposure for her, though she did have a finely rounded ass.
Men liked a good ass and she gave it to them every morning with gluteal exercises–and maybe some stomach crunches to flatten her belly and emphasize her mound of Venus. And her ass. Like everything else about her, she picked and chose her assets. Her exhibition pieces.
Someone had called her a choosy bitch. Once. The bitch!
“I’m so slow today.”
She looked at the triple image of herself. Two three-quarter profiles and a magnified frontal. She was much more than a whole person.
“What is it, my love?”
She pouted into the mirrors.
“What is it?”
She leaned forward for a better look.
“No saggy-waggies under the eyes. Little, feathered-out crow’s feet men find so intriguing. And the little chicken pox scar just below the corner of my left eye for the men who like flawed beauty. Like a blue diamond. A little chink in the armor. A hole in the. . .mask. It always manages to peek through for just enough weakness. My windmill. Men are not Sancho Panzas!”
She leaned on her elbows.
“That’s the best of all–no Sancho Panzas. No discerning eyes. God–what would I do with one of then?”
Silence.
“I take what’s mine by right. Divine Right. After all, God was a woman first and foremost. Only we give life. And then we give and give and give. And then we have the life taken away from us and made into a damned mystery. A curse. Trivialize it. Isolate it. Give it back so it’s ours again. But something’s missing. Instead of life coming into life, we’ve been burned into a painful repository. A thrusting place to be used, not worshipped. Fucking two-faced bastards! That’s why you take what’s yours, honey. Your birthright–mother, virgin, whore.”
Sigh. Her body sank in on itself.
“So. . .what’s wrong with the masquerade tonight, Sadie Ladie? High cheek bones with just a hint of youthful blush. Slightly almond-shaped eyes. Long lashes. The full-lipped mouth barely rouged a light coral tint. That wet look. Like I’ve just done one man and now I’m ready for the next. It’s so successful, why do I feel I should change it? I must be losing it. I must be! Look at the way I’m sitting! Come on. Straighten up, old girl. It’s not long now til the need for a veneer won’t be so obvious. Cranky old ladies get to say whatever they want. Look however they want.”
She leaned forward some more, her forearms stretched along the glass-surfaced table, almost another mirror with the high sheen of the wood beneath. Japanese red cedar to roseate the lifted chin and smooth cheeks. To make her look healthy.
“So, why do I worry? I’m not nearly so old. But I feel like shit. Well, then, let’s make a change. Just enough for people to wonder at. What’s different about you, honey? They’ll be surprised it’s me! Just me. The one-eighth Algonquin Indian girl with the. . .with the. . .what? Just the right look. Je ne sais quoi. With the white lovers? What a pollution. What’s being Indian have to do with anything? A cunt’s a cunt. But I’m on the rolls. An authentic Indian fuck. So, I can pay and pay and pay. I’m a pay sausage-making machine!”
She bowed her head. No diluted offspring for her. She was the last of the line.
“Is it any wonder we look for financial stablemates? Love be damned, we need to get something for the time we spend on our backs. Just once. . .once. . . . Love isn’t all, honey. Don’t moon. It’s what he’s got in the seat of his pants that counts. It’s the bankroll that sells. Sex is just the way to getting it. If it isn’t that good, well, that’s the price you have to pay. A lover on the side can liven things up a bit. A gigolo with no standards and no ethics. Who cares? A cock’s a cock. It just takes up space. Money, on the other hand. . .now, there’s something you can get a grip on. Do something with. Make something of. Yeah. Something that doesn’t use itself up. Money changes a girl. Yessir, it surely do!”
Her voice changed to a sugary drawl.
“It sure do. There’s nothing like money to make a woman’s heart go pitta-pat. Atrial fib. A little extra warmth in the chest, a tightness in the throat.”
She pressed her hands together and looked up.
“That’s why the fashioning is so important. They have to feel I’m worth it. Men are so easy! Suckers for a good fly fisher of men. A female Christ. A virgin mother. And I am certainly that! I move with grace and fortitude. Not even number two could fathom my depths. That could be it, though. Stringing them out. I had two lovers with him. Mark Twain. By the time he found out, I was able to. . . once. . . . Boy did I come out the winner on that one! A house and a $17,000 debt that became his responsibility. What a fool! He still loves me. After all I did to him. Raped him. Flayed him. Hung him up to dry and beat him with a switch. All of that love and joining of souls hogwash he believed in. Well. . .if he wishes to believe that, okay. Let him have his fantasy. If I get too tired, I’ll just open the gate again and let him in.”
She leaned back, to get a better look, to see her pride.
“His letters are wonderful epistles of love. Maybe I’ll publish them one day. A little love-letter package. Proof that men are easy. Ruled by the flesh between their legs. Long or short, what does it matter? It’s all the same thing. All the same.”
In a frustrated movement, she kicked her piano bench away from the table, slamming it against the opposite wall.
She stared at the assortment of visages, of shrouds that crowded her walls. All around her. Staring back at her with cold, black, blank eyes. Feral animals. So many to choose from!
She toned down the lights on her mirrors. She did not want to look at herself any more, not as she was at any rate. Not now. She was dissatisfied now. She couldn’t let that get in the way. She had to concentrate on the evening’s goal.
She looked down at her red lace crotchless panties. Her thigh-high silk stockings, shimmering white. No garter belt. No bra. Yes. She was ready. But what face would she be tonight?
A new one was in order. She’d been wearing this one successfully for a long time. She called it her Poor pitiful Pierrette. She’d worn it for so long she’d almost forgotten she had it on. It had become so very comfortable. She had friends because of it. A support group. People who believed in her. And best of all, she was quite successful in business: who could resist such a face?
She thought about the diamond teardrop variation but she was really looking for something different. Which one? There were quite a number to choose from, really. It had taken her a lifetime to build up her collection. Her gallery. Her wallflowers, as she liked to call them. She smiled up at them, spaced so evenly about, a firmament of well-placed stars on a rich azure background. Evenly spaced. Even-handedly spaced. An unmoved mover’s geometric logic.
Which one? Which one?
She could sit in her niche for hours looking at these different facets of herself. She liked their brooding lives. She could make things happen with them. She could put together a world with just one accoutrement.
But she was just a little tired tonight. The deftness and swiftness of choice and characterization was no longer with her. Her impetuosity had slowed. She’d noticed this happening over time. A slight slowing, like a lingering disease. Or maybe the beginning of one. Early onset intellectual glaucoma. it just wasn’t as easy as before. The thrill was gone.
“No,” she whispered. “Not gone. Just. . .delayed.”
There was more of an effort involved now. After these many years. One would think, with her experience and repertoire, she’d have nabbed her fish by now but there was no catch for her. Maybe there would never be. But the times. . .the times. . . . The old days. The past. The times. The moments of heady success, of stroking her trump card. Once. . .
The masks around the mirrors were a joy to her. Each new façade the thrill of putting on a show that could never be replaced, would never end. The high of making each new guise work, moving in its world, carrying life through to actualization. The adrenaline rush. Each conceit manipulated to perfection so that life came out of its half-shell. Life, like a disease, took over the wooden body. The mask and the body always bent together. Trout and lure.
She heaved a great sigh. Morbidly vaudevillian romantic. Stilted realistic.
“It’s so hard today.”
She shut the lights off and the sat in the dark.
She sat an inordinately long time. The masks floating in and out of focus, dancing silhouettes around a fire. Now seen, now enshrouded. As her attention took shape, she began to feel funny. Displaced and a little dizzy. The cowls were difficult to look at. They framed the three-eyed dressing table and gleamed out of the glassed table top like dark edifices of dead Greek heroes. Ancient armor. Tarnished livery–chivalry.
The little dressing room pressed in about her. The air was a little oppressive.
She put her hand to her throat and drew in a deep breath. She tried to fight the feeling, to let it sweep over her and pass through her so she could better see, better perceive her through-line of action. She began blinking, attempting to wink out the blackness around the edges but she finally flipped the switch and the lights about the triptych burst into flame, casting her regalia with eerie shadow lives. Chins and lower lips. Cheeks. Pieces of rhinestone jewelry.
Knowing exactly what she looked like, would be looking like, was important. Tonight. It was easy when she knew what was expected. It was the actor’s choice: being and knowing of one’s being at the same time.
“Self-conscious awareness,” she mumbled to herself. “Why am I so jaded tonight?”
In truth, she had been avoiding her closet lately, afraid of the improvisation. The improvidence. Maybe she should simply brush up a bit. But her masquerade beckoned and she could not, after all, resist. So, she’d gotten dressed and entered her little room for the coup de grace and couldn’t back down. Not now. She knew her prey for the evening. The how and the why and the wherefore. But still she hesitated.
She stood and pulled on a thin mantlet and folded it about herself. Right over left. She did not use a tie to fasten it but held it in place with her hand. The cloth felt cool and grateful against her body.
She moved into the glaring circle of light and reached out to ouch the Columbine. It was smooth and smiled quietly back at her, eyes demurely lowered. But she could be regal, too, not just innocent–and with no more than a slight shift in the tilt of the head. Imperious at a harsher angle upward; submissive down.
This particular shell was her bread and butter. Everyone liked Columbine. So sweet and pure and wanton. A greeting. The absorbing caress of acceptance. This was her ravishment. Taking the beguiled. Number two had particularly found it enthralling. The allurement brought out a duality in him. The gentle, thoughtful dominator. Many’s the time they had spent the weekends ensconced in the house–her house–playing Columbine games until exhausted. Fleshed out. It was times like those that she once had. . .once. . .once. . .
This net was good closing material in her business dealings as well. Just a slight hint of sex brought the hardest of men to their knees, contract signed and sealed just as she wanted. No quarter asked, none given. All on the take. And, of course, sometimes the tease would not be contested. That is, sometimes she made a sacrifice. After all, they had to be made to feel in control.
Her hand moved with her eyes and came to rest on Diamantina, the beaten or maybe the beater. In either case, Diamantina could–and would–get what she wanted. Large, heavily lashed, wide-open eyes with deep, deep, pupils. Like a Noh mask, there was no conjunction. She could not only see through tunnel vision eyes, as if she were a split brain, a bicameral mind navigating through time and space with two different maps, but she could be the double persona. And to think they called multiple personalities psychotic!
The slight disorientation, the feeling of loss and confusion, worked because men were so very paternalistic, so cocksure they could take care of her. Diamantina never wanted for a guide. Only, more often than not, it was she who led them down the garden path to the green door where the only handle was on the outside and it was broken.
Was it number three who suffered the consequences of this maiden? Soft and polite, her lilting voice danced jigs and subtle minuets around any man’s head. Diamantina, the flashing beauty. But once they took her to hand, the gig was up. These men were no more than laundry lists. Alimony, a house and a restraining order. That’s all it took to defrock the priest. El Capitano brought to his knees.
“Ahh,” she intoned as her fingers found another guise. “Fiorinetta. My very, very favorite.”
With her, the bait taken was refreshened nightly. Any time, any place Ms. Rake took hers. Men appreciated being ravished as much as women and with Ms. Fiorinetta, innocence turned into an insatiable little tart. Lascivious Lolita, loyal only to the flesh and capable of far more submissive a seduction than washing a man’s feet with her hair.
She sat down and squeezed her thighs together.
“Oh, yes, I remember. I remember. It was with that virile body-builder. Number three. He did my morning exercises with Fiorinetta. Ha-hah! An exercise in futility. Begun in the nude and finished with his masturbating directly into my vagina. Right on target from–how far away? It doesn’t matter. In or out, it was masturbation for him. I got off, then, watching his river of come spew over my lips.”
She pulled her chemise closer about her.
“It’s true what they say about athletes. They peak early. Dammit! A girl has a right, too. Doesn’t she?”
Pause.
Or perhaps, as her eyes roved over more of the masters of deception, she’d chose a little less blatant an approach. Possibly pastoral Amarilli would do the trick. Of course, she would do the trick. All of them would! Could. Did. Very well, thank you. That was the whole point: to take one’s due. To take one’s dew. There was nothing personal in her treatment of a man. Why should there be? Two separate bodies. Two separate souls. Ragged, waggish souls. Spirited encounters but definitely not spiritual. There was no way she would let a man rag on her, not since she’d learned to give as she got.
“You give me trash, I give you trash back. Margaret Atwood, hymning a pig.”
She sighed and looked away into the darkness around her, the chaos out of which life was born.
In the beginning was the word. And what was the word? It was her. Hers. Hers alone. It never touched another soul except as succubus.
She was tired of the game. That’s why tonight was so. . .unidentifiable. Perhaps, as she was, untouchable. Unsatisfied. Dissatisfied. But without a mask, without a shield, a castle keep, she was nothing. She needed her enameled skin, her horned dermis in order to live. Every animal had it’s skin. Skin was necessary to keep the outside from imposing on the inside. Overwhelming it. The casque. Feral her. Never once touched. No. Not true. Once. . .
There! That one. That was to be it: Isabelle. The intellectual one. The one who wold take a chance on a razed sailor’s dream. So. . .she would take her chance. tonight. She would reach out and touch what she didn’t have herself, intelligence and stupidity. Definition and altruity. A living up to and giving up to. She had nothing but emptiness to give anyway. So, intellectuality was, of course, the correct course.
Isabelle had once gotten her a man. Once. Once upon a time. One day.
She faced the mirror front-on, feeling tired and haggard, and began to strip off the mask she had worn for so long. She’d worn it for so long the fiction had entered into the reality and as she tore frantically at her face, she pulled off great patches of fascia. Her fingernails, dermis- and DNA-encrusted, ripped red valleys into her face. As she watched the destruction of Aphrodite in Repose, she created the desecration of herself. The face ran with blood and glared out at her from worn, bloodshot eyes.
* * *
In the end, then, she’d lost the reality. There was no more acting. She was just feeling. A mass of feeling. A mask of feeling. Her pain became a super-reality, a surreal sketch with nothing to offer but a desert, a desert after its first and only rainfall. In toto, she was a dadaist persona, a destructed personality to be fulfilled only once. In the end.
* * *
She stared emptily at the carnage, the assassination of herself.
“Here it is. Come and get it. The carcass is on the block. The fingerprint of life is here for all to see,” she said.
The demi-lune could not be changed. She had saved face to lose face. She could not now walk out into the sun. The sunshine.
* * *
What, exactly, is a dream? And what, exactly, is a joke?
