Knockout

Tara meets me at her door in a bathrobe and tells me she’s about to shower in hopes of relieving her back pain. I see her in the bathrobe, a thigh peeking through, her hair messed up like she’s been driving with the top down, and I fall in love with her all over.

She’s been to the doctor today, her back was hurting, and so she goes to the doctor and they diagnose her with pleurisy, which I hadn’t heard in years. This is a knack Tara has, she gets things I thought had gone the way of smallpox and the dodo bird, things from other centuries, from Bronte novels. Last year she had scarlet fever.

I go up the stairs into her apartment. “What’s next?” I say.

“Beats me,” she says. “Consumption?”

We get into her place on the second floor and I’m trying to read her for signs of anger about the video, but she doesn’t seem upset.

“Are we cool?” I say.

And she turns and messes up my hair and smiles and tells me we’re cool, but it’s a sad-looking smile and she heads into her bathroom and I hear the water kick in the old pipes. She says, “I’ll be out in a minute—then we can get a drink.”

She closes the bathroom door and I hear the whine of the hot-water pipes. I put on one of her CDs, The Urinals’ What Is Real and What Is Not. I do what you do when you’re waiting, poke around and read the spines in the bookcases. There’s a bunch of architectural theory, stuff on Frank Gehry, some on the Usonium houses of Frank Lloyd Wright, the Robert Ven-turi book that she loved, Learning from Las Vegas, that gave her the idea for the book of signs. There’s all of Pat Califia’s books, a bunch of Roland Barthes, and a series of comic books called The Diary of a Dominatrix. An art book on bowling signs. I check and see if the Java Lanes, Long Beach’s cool bowling alley with a hip fifties futuristic sign, is in there, but it’s not.

I sit on the couch and flip through a book on string theory, which is a new and unprecedented unified theory of the universe. It seems pretty interesting, but next to it is a coffee-table book called Fetish Girls from Prague, which beats string theory hands down. The book has a series of women from, I’m guessing, Prague, wearing rubber dresses and thigh-high boots strutting around with riding crops and sexy bored looks on their faces. The book has a note tucked in it. I open it up and it’s one of Tara’s fantasy letters, on L.A. County Parole Department stationery.

Happy Birthday

Mistress X’s slut, her bad girl, her pathetic toy, is cuffed on her knees. Mistress X puts a dog collar on her slave. Mistress X places her slut in a ring gag. Mistress has a small bowl and a honey bear. She pours some honey into the small bowl and dips a kitchen brush full of honey. She then paints the honey on her slut’s tongue and back against the slut’s teeth and gums and cheeks. Mistress X then attaches her slut’s dog collar to a ring in the floor so that she is bent over inches away from the floor.

She cannot control her drooling and drools on the floor beneath her.

Now, Mistress says, you get a special birthday present, worm. She takes out 33 birthday candles and puts a drop of Krazy Glue on the bottom of each and glues them to her slut’s back and ass (I have tried this—no problem—the glue holds the candle to the skin—they come off easily, then the glue brushes off. Be careful, however, not to get it on the fingers—they stick together. The best way is probably a drop on the back/ass, hold the candle in place for 10–15 seconds, then move on to the next one).

She arranges these candles however she’d like, then takes a 12" candle and tells the slave she’s going to K-Y it and stick it in her ass and light it so that it drips onto her cunt. The Mistress plays with the candle in her ass—humiliating and violating her helpless slut. She doesn’t yet light this one, however.

First, she lights the 33 small birthday candles and lets the wax drip on her back and ass. She laughs at her slut’s helplessness.

She lets them burn for a while and blows them out. After this torture, she lights the candle in her slut’s ass—she tells her to make a wish. She taunts and tormerits her—calling her names—she threatens to fuck her in the ass with her strap-on when she’s done with the hot wax. Mistress tells slut to lick her boot. To humiliate her slut, she steps on her head with her boot, grinding her face into the drool on the floor. She blows out the candle and takes it out of her ass. If she’s in the mood, she fucks her slut into further humiliation.

Then Mistress tells her she’s going to whip the 33 birthday candles off her. As a final present, she gets 33 paddles with a long-handled palm paddle before she’s allowed to please her Mistress.

I read it twice. Mistress? Strap-on? It is a fantasy, after all—and it’s not like I don’t know where Tara’s tastes run. Maybe it’s an early draft. Maybe they all start out with a Mistress before I get my copy. I’m not sure I could do this one, though, but I guess I’ll wait and see it when I’m supposed to and see if it’s the same.

On Tara’s built-in desk is a box of little birthday candles and a minitube of Krazy Glue. I hear her singing from the shower—high notes swelling above the steadiness of running water—and I feel like I could spend the rest of my life keeping up with her if she’d let me. I let myself slip into seeing us years down the road, people make arrangements, not all relationships are the same, people let each other be happy. If she wanted to be with women, maybe I could be the kind of person who could be cool with that. I turn the CD down and I listen to her voice from another room and think that I could listen to that voice for a hell of a long time. When she gets out of the shower, I’ll drop it on her, see what she thinks.

Tara turns off the water. The pipes give a wobbly growl. I’m seeing if the whole Krazy Glue/birthday-candle thing works. I put a few on the inside of my forearm and she’s right, just a little drop holds them. I take a Zippo off the desk and light a few candles. When the wax drips down, it stings, not terrible, but it must really sting when thirty-three of them are lined up and lit on your back. I wonder where she thinks of these things.

Tara says, “What are you doing?” She’s wearing her bathrobe with a towel around her head.

I turn around quickly and the four candles on my arm throw wax down. I blow them out. “I was just seeing how this worked,” I say.

She closes her eyes and quietly says, “Shit.” She looks over at the coffee table where the fantasy letter’s open on top of the book and she stomps across the room and picks up the letter and puts it back in the book.

She looks frustrated, so I just blurt it out. I tell her I’m sorry for reading it, but that I know her, that I love her, that I’ll let her be anyone and anything she wants if she’ll stay with me.

She doesn’t say anything for a minute, for too long. I hear the drips of water into the claw-foot tub. The gabble of TV from her neighbor’s apartment. The beginnings of an early New Year’s party from across the alley.

She says, “Oh, Nick,” in a way she would say it if I told her I had inoperable cancer. She’s got tears, but they aren’t happy ones. And she says, and somehow makes it sound kind, if not good, “No, Nick.” She takes a deep breath and tells me that she called me over because after I called about the video, she’d done some thinking.

She says, “I’m leaving Jenny.”

“Not that many people will see that video,” I say.

She shakes her head. “I’m not upset about that. I was, but then I tried to understand why I was upset and the reasons weren’t good. I’m not hiding who I am anymore—I can’t be ashamed of myself anymore.”

“You haven’t seemed ashamed,” I say.

“Not around you,” she says. “In general. With the rest of the world. No one at work knows about me. My family. People like that.”

“You’re telling them?”

“No, but I’m not lying, either. I want to live a totally honest life.”

“You’re telling me this is a blessing in disguise?” I say.

She chuckles. “Not telling you that,” she says. “It would be a hell of a disguise.”

“Does Jenny know?”

She nods.

“How’d she take it?”

“Not good. I’m hoping worse than you,” she says.

“What does that mean?”

“Nick, I need to be alone for a while. I need to figure some stuff out.”

“I love you.”

“Don’t say that,” she says.

“But I do.”

“Nick. Please understand this. I need some help here.”

“With what?”

“I need time to figure shit out. I care about you, you know. Deeply.”

Not love, but not tossed out the door, either.

She says, “I need you to be my friend.”

And I’m sure I will. This is one of those moments in life where you can see ahead and know that this is the way it had to turn. That this is a friend being a friend and letting you down easy and the right thing to do is to understand, but you don’t, not right off. There will be understanding, but for now there’s hurt.

I look down and realize that I’ve still got four candles on my arm and I wonder if I’ve ever felt dumber in my life. I knock them off and stand up. I sit back down. I have no idea what to do here. How could I be so dumb?

I’m six years old and I hear my parents fighting and it takes a few minutes until I realize they’re fighting about me. And my father says, “It’s not like having the kid was my idea.” And my mother says, “It wasn’t my idea, either—you think I wanted to be a mother? I had a life.”

That’s what I’m remembering here. I could hear them because their closet was always full and my father would hang his dry cleaning over the bedroom door, so the door never shut, so I found out that I, in some foundational and essential way, was wholly unwanted in this world. And I felt it as a physical sensation, a cold buzzing all over the skin.

Everything else has been a reminder, ever since.

I fall to her chest and I feel my face against the terrycloth robe and against her rising and falling chest and I think that this is pretty much how things end. Most of my endings are full of hugs and tears and full of people swollen with sadness and an inability to make better what they desperately desire to make better.

I don’t know what else to say, so I say what I think I’m feeling. “I love you,” I say. “Why not me?”

She looks at me. “Nicky, you’re such a fuckup.” She smiles. “You’re great, Nick. You’re kind and good, but be honest—would you want to share a bank account with you?”

“Not if you put it that way,” I say.

“You’re not a long-term plan,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

“But I love you,” I say again, and feel dumb repeating myself, but it feels like maybe one of these times, it’ll do the job.

She holds me tight, with something that feels very close to love itself, and she says, “I know.” She kisses the top of my head. “You still want that drink?”

And struggling not to sound desperate for the drink or her company, I say that yes, I’d still like that drink.