Stone Mattress: Nine Tales(50)
Maybe that’s what it will say on his tombstone: THE DEAD HAND LOVES YOU, INTERNATIONAL HORROR CLASSSIC. Maybe nubile teeny girl fans with Goth eye makeup, and stitch marks tattooed on their necks like the Frankenstein creature, and dotted lines around their wrists with CUT HERE instructions, will visit his grave and leave him tributes composed of withered roses and whitened chicken bones. They send stuff like that to him already, and he’s not even dead.
Sometimes they lurk around events he’s attending – panel discussions at which he’s expected to drone on about the inherent worthiness of “genres,” or retrospectives of the various movies spawned by his magnum opus – clad in ripped shrouds, with their faces painted a sickly green, bringing envelopes containing photos of themselves naked and/or with black ropes around their necks and their tongues sticking out, and/or baggies containing tufts of their pubic hair and offers of spectacular blowjobs to be performed by themselves while wearing vampire teeth – edgy, that, and he’s never accepted one of those jobs. But he hasn’t resisted other blandishments. How could he?
It’s always a risk though, a risk to his ego. What if he underperforms in the sack, or rather – because these girls like a stimulant of moderate discomfort – on a floor, up against a wall, or on a chair with ropes and knots? What if they say, “I thought you would be different” while adjusting their leather undergear and slipping back into their spiderweb stockings and repairing their glued-on festering wounds in the bathroom mirror? It’s been known to happen, more frequently as age has withered him and custom staled.
“You wrecked my wound” – they’ve even said things like that. Worse, they’ve said them straight, without irony. Pouting. Accusing. Dismissive. So it’s best to keep such girls at a distance, to let them worship his decadent satanic powers from afar. Anyway, these girls are getting younger and younger, so it’s difficult to make conversation with them at those moments when they expect him to talk. Half the time he has no idea what’s coming out of their mouths, when it isn’t tongues. They have a whole new vocabulary. Some days he thinks he’s been buried underground for a hundred years.
Who could have predicted this odd form of success for him? Back when everyone who knew him thought he was a wastrel, including him. The Dead Hand Loves You must have been pure inspiration, from some tacky, pulp-hearted, flea-bitten muse; because he’d written that book straight off, with none of the usual stops and starts and dawdlings, the crumpling of the pages, the tossings into the wastebasket, the fits of lethargy and despair that had usually kept him from finishing anything. He’d sat down and typed it out, eight or nine or ten pages a day, on the old Remington he’d scored at a pawn shop. How strange to remember typewriters, with their jammed keys and snarled ribbons and the smudgy carbon paper for copies. It had taken him maybe three weeks. A month, at the max.
Of course he hadn’t known it was going to be an International Horror Classic. He hadn’t run down two flights of stairs in his underwear and yelled in the kitchen, “I’ve just written an International Horror Classic!” And if he had, the other three would only have laughed at him as they sat at the Formica table drinking their instant coffee and eating the pallid casseroles Irena used to cook up for them, using a lot of rice and noodles and onions and cans of mushroom soup and tuna because those ingredients were cheap though nourishing. Irena was big on nourishing. Value for the dollar, that was her thing.
The four of them would deposit their weekly food money in the dinner kitty, a cookie jar in the shape of a pig, but Irena contributed less cash because she did the actual cooking. The cooking, the shopping, the paying of the household bills such as light and heat – Irena liked doing all that. Women once did like performing such roles, and men liked that part too. He himself had enjoyed being clucked over and told he should eat more, no denying it. The deal was that the other three, including him, were supposed to do the dishes, though he can’t say that happened with any regularity, or not in his case.
To do the cooking, Irena put on an apron. It had a pie appliquéd onto it, and he has to admit she looked good in that apron, partly because it tied around her waist so you could actually see that she had a waist. Her waist was usually concealed under the layers of thick knitted or woven clothing she wore to keep warm. Dark grey clothing, black clothing, like a secular nun.
Having a waist meant she also had a visible bum and some tits, and Jack could not keep himself from picturing what she’d look like without any of her sturdy, nubbly garments on, not even the apron. And with her hair falling down, her blond hair she wore rolled up in the back. She’d look delectable and nourishing, plump and yielding; passively welcoming, like a flesh hot water bottle covered in pink velvet. She could have fooled him, she did fool him: he’d thought she had a soft heart, a heart like a down-filled pillow. He’d idealized her. What a sucker.
Anyway, if he’d come into the noodle-and-tuna-scented kitchen and said he’d just written an International Horror Classic, the three of them would only have laughed at him, because they didn’t take him seriously then and they don’t take him seriously now.
Jack had the top floor. The attic. It was the worst location. Boiling in summer, freezing in winter. The fumes went up there: cooking fumes, dirty sock fumes from the floors below, toilet stenches – they all wafted upward. There was nothing he could do in retaliation for the heat and the cold and the smells except stomp around on the floor; but that would bother only Irena, who was directly below him, and he didn’t want to annoy her because he wanted to get into her underthings.