Faithless: Tales of Transgression Read online

  The man’s lips moved. His face remained expressionless. I didn’t exactly hear what he murmured after me—Don’t bounce your tits, honey.

  I didn’t acknowledge this. So maybe I hadn’t heard. I was grateful that Karla hadn’t.

  The restaurant was nearly empty, only a single section was open for service, and a single counterman in a soiled white uniform. Karla ordered “decaf”—“and make sure it’s decaf, man, not coffee, OK?”—and a large jelly doughnut covered in powdered sugar which she insisted I share with her—“I certainly don’t intend to eat this thing all by myself.” Consuming the jelly doughnut with the counterman and other customers looking on was a performance of some hilarity. I wasn’t hungry but managed, with Karla’s encouragement, to swallow a few mouthfuls, which tasted like mashed dough laced with sweet, vile chemicals. Close by at the counter, the youngish bus driver in his Greyhound uniform observed us smilingly. And other men observed us. “This night!” Karla exclaimed. Though speaking to me, she was speaking to be overheard. Yet she seemed sincere, her smooth forehead creased for the moment. Drinking hot coffee, even decaffeinated, diluted with cream and sugar, seemed to enliven her; her eyes, which were a hazy green-brown, were widened and oddly dilated. “Jesus God, Kathryn! I have crucial business in Albany and already it’s 3:20 A.M. Feels like I been awake and going for days.” Sitting on a stool at the counter, legs crossed, sheer black stockings giving a sexy glisten to her shapely legs, Karla turned in restless half-circles. She fell into a spirited conversation with the bus driver, who seemed to have known her from somewhere, and the counterman, a taffy-skinned young black or Hispanic with deep circles beneath his eyes but an infectious laugh. In the joking and laughter that followed—what was funny exactly, I didn’t know—especially with the dour doggy man from the bus, Karla’s ex-seatmate, sitting on a stool at the edge of our hilarity—the counterman asked me if I was Karla’s kid sister and what were “you girls” doing in the middle of the night in the middle of Nowhere, USA? He made an eloquent gesture with his hand to indicate the bleak, tacky expanse of the restaurant, all Formica and plastic surfaces, a space large as a warehouse but semidarkened now and nearly empty of customers. Near the bright-lit entrance to the rest rooms a lone cleaning woman was mopping. What if this is all the world adds up to finally, I thought: a lone woman mopping a grimy floor in the middle of the night in the middle of Nowhere. I felt the horror of this vision but heard myself laugh in Karla’s bright way. I said, “We have secret business, don’t we, Karla? We can’t tell.” It was a clumsy, blushing flirtation. I might have been thirteen years old. Karla didn’t help me, saying with a frown as if distancing herself from a reckless younger sister, “I can’t tell. I sure as hell can’t see into the future that’s black as ink.”

  I remembered a line I’d written in my journal, copied from a library book; the author was Thomas Mann (of whom I’d only just heard, had never read) and this was taken from a letter to his son. The secret and almost silent adventures in life are the finest.

  “D’YOU MIND?”

  Back on the bus Karla climbed luxuriously into the seat beside the window that had been mine, and curled up to sleep. Of course I didn’t mind, and wouldn’t have spoken if I had.

  The remainder of the night passed in dreamy jolts and blurs. Karla slept like a cat; breathed deeply and evenly, low as a cat’s purr; before long she nudged her head against my shoulder; I was stirred that a stranger should so trust herself with me. On the floor was the lizard skin bag pressing against my legs. I would have liked to look inside. In the women’s room back at the restaurant I’d caught a glimpse inside the bag of a jumble of items including a plastic makeup kit, a bottle of red nail polish, the metallic handle of what might have been a knife but was probably a cheap hairbrush. And there was Karla’s wallet, thick with snapshots and a wad of bills.

  In the stark solitude of the night I could hear the snores and occasional mutterings of strangers. Earlier I’d told Karla where I was going, hoping to impress her, but now I was beginning to feel anxiety about my plan. An interview that would decide my college career (for so I thought at that time) after a night spent like a vagrant on a bus; without even a change of clothes, because I hadn’t wanted to carry so much. I planned to use the women’s room at the Greyhound station in Albany to “freshen up”—my mother’s term. I’d remembered to bring a stick of deodorant, but didn’t have a toothbrush. Even if my nerves kept me alert and awake I was certain to be exhausted by eleven o’clock in the morning after virtually no sleep the night before. This is madness. Why did they let me do this. Did they know—I’d fail. Want me to fail. What a fool. Like the Hairy Ape. I missed my step on stairs, cried out as I fell. Someone was poking my shoulder, hard. “Hey, Kathryn. Wake up.” It was Karla. I was groggy, confused. Somehow, it was morning: a bleak gray dawn beyond the bus’s rain-splotched windows. We’d left the Thruway and were passing through the outskirts of a city I guessed must be Albany. I murmured I was sorry, embarrassed; I hadn’t thought I was asleep. “You were grinding your back teeth,” Karla said. “Like you were having a bad dream.”

  AT THE GREYHOUND STATION in downtown Albany I felt another wave of panic. I stood on the pavement not knowing where to go next. Karla too was looking quickly about as if in dread of seeing someone she knew. On the bus she’d powdered her face and fluffed out her hair; despite the rocky night, she seemed alert and enlivened. She was carrying a lightweight polyester suitcase as well as her lizard-skin bag. “Say, Kathryn—I’ve got this place I’m going to, you could come with me, OK? Like if you wanted to wash up or whatever.” Though I didn’t think this was a practical idea I wasn’t sure how to decline. Karla said, as if impulsively, “Y’know what—I’ll make breakfast for us. I could get some things.” Still I hesitated. Karla seemed almost to be pleading with me. She added, with a nervous giggle, “This early in the morning, I don’t like to be alone with my thoughts. The rest of the day’s like a goddamn desert.” “Thanks,” I said awkwardly, edging away, “—I guess I can’t.” Karla must have stared after me as I hurried away, almost colliding with people, to search out a restroom. I knew I was behaving strangely. I was desperate to splash cold water onto my eyes, which ached as if I’d been crying (maybe in fact I had been crying), and I badly needed to use a toilet; my stomach churned with tension. I’d been overwhelmed by Karla’s powerful personality and wanted only to escape her.

  Yet, when I emerged shakily from a toilet stall a few minutes later, there was Karla in the rest room waiting for me, briskly washing her hands at a sink and smiling happily at me through the clouded mirror like a kindly older sister. Had I agreed to go with her after all? “We’ll take a cab, Kathryn. You’re looking pale. This job interview or whatever it is—what time is it? Not till eleven? You need to be fed.”

  WHY I WENT with Karla whom I didn’t know when it was my adamant wish not to go with her, I could not have said. In the cab I nervously studied a city map the admissions office had mailed me on which I’d marked in red ink the locations of the Greyhound station and the university campus, which appeared to be some distance away. Karla seemed annoyed that I was looking at the map. “I’ll take you there. It’s only a mile or so from my place. You have plenty of time.” She was speaking brightly and rapidly and tapping at my wrist with her red-polished nails, which were uneven, some of the nails much longer than others. When I told her worriedly that I couldn’t seem to match the streets we were passing with street names on the map she laughed, took the map from me, and folded it carelessly and shoved it into her coat pocket. “There! No need to fret. I don’t like to be alone with my thoughts, either.” This made no sense but I wasn’t in a mood to object. My hands were tingling warmly: I was thinking of how in the bus station rest room after I’d washed and dried my hands on a coarse paper towel, Karla had seized both my hands in hers, her hands that were startlingly soft, and rubbed Jergen’s lotion into them so that now my hands were fresh and fragrant as Karla’s though nowhere near as soft. Fall
and winter I’d played basketball at school or practiced shots whenever I could, I wasn’t the most competitive girl player at school but there was something fascinating about sinking the ball through the hoop, dashing toward the basket and shooting, or shooting from the foul line, something deeply satisfying even as it was clearly pointless. But the palms of my hands were calloused from gripping the ball. Compared with Karla’s hands they hardly seemed like a girl’s hands at all.

  WHY I WENT with Karla, and why I found myself a half-hour later ringing the doorbell of a house, Karla’s place as she called it, while Karla remained in the cab idling at the curb not in front of the shabby brownstone rowhouse but a few doors down; why I was with this woman I didn’t know, obeying her without question; I could not have said for my head was a doll’s head rattling-empty and finely cracked beneath the hair. As I slid out of the rear of the cab Karla impulsively looped her silk scarf around my neck. “This will keep you warm, Kathryn!” I smiled at Karla not knowing what the gesture meant—if the scarf was a gift I’d certainly return it for I couldn’t accept such an expensive gift from her but maybe it wasn’t a gift exactly and in any case how could I hurt Karla’s feelings?

  Yet on the sidewalk I’d hesitated, staring at the brownstone house with its four front windows in which blinds had been yanked to differing levels, a weatherworn row house in a block of similar homes, and Karla leaned out the car door—“Just go ring the doorbell, Kathryn. Just to make sure. Nobody’s home, I promise.” I asked who might be home and Karla said emphatically, “Nobody! But we need to be certain.”

  The narrow front yard was grassless and rutted and the front stoop listed to one side yet I found myself bounding up to the door buoyant and daring in my ballerina flats wanting simply to please Karla, not thinking, Where am I, why am I here? Who is this woman? The morning was raw and scintillating, patches of bright blue sky overhead and a rising sun so fierce it made my eyes water. Everywhere the pavement was wet and glistening. I rang the doorbell and heard the buzzer inside and it was an extension of the morning’s raw scintillating mood. I was nervous but not frightened exactly. In my good-girl shoes and nylon stockings that were beginning to run and my plain blue raincoat and Karla’s silk scarf around my neck, the long ends fluttering in the wind, the most beautiful scarf I’d ever worn. A scarf that seemed to confer upon me a new, strange, mysterious power, an invulnerability to harm or even distress. Though conceding that there was—there might be—an element of risk in what I seemed to be doing. A second time and a third I rang the doorbell and there was no sound from inside the house; so narrow a house I imagined that I could stretch my arms across the entire facade. In the adjoining brownstone a dog had begun to bark hysterically. Claws scratching against a windowpane.

  Karla hurried up the walk behind me and gave me a quick hug. “Good girl! You’re my heart.” It would occur to me later that by this time, in her state of excitement, Karla had forgotten my name. Her eyes were widened and despite the morning sunshine oddly dilated, there was a feverish glow to her skin. She seemed to me more beautiful than ever. She’d had the presence of mind to take from the cab both our bags and her polyester suitcase and she was brandishing on a strip of red wool yarn a key with which she unlocked the door and drew me breathlessly inside with her. We were confronted by cold stale air that seemed to rush at us, an underlying odor of something rotted, mustiness like damp newspaper. “Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello?” Karla cried, as a guest might call out stepping into a house whose front door is open. Except for the dog barking frantically next door there was silence. Yet the interior looked lived-in, and recently—a pair of men’s boots in the narrow hallway at the foot of the stairs, a plaid shirt tossed onto a chair, in the living room a space heater, unplugged. In a glass bowl on a table, floating on the surface of scummy water, was a black-striped goldfish which upset Karla so she hid her eyes. Her lips moved almost inaudibly—“Bastard.”

  In her staccato high heels, still carrying her bags, Karla marched back to the kitchen, where a faucet was dripping loudly, jeeringly; here the odor of rot was stronger. She threw open the refrigerator door and recoiled with a curse from the stink. I didn’t want to look inside; in that instant I was beginning to feel nauseated; exhaustion was catching up with me; through a crudely taped-together windowpane above the unspeakably filthy sink I could see into the small backyard grassless as the front, and littered. A space the size of a large grave. By this time the sun was more fiercely blazing and the April day would rapidly warm except in the foul-smelling house where the air was still cold ehough for our quickened breaths to vaporize. Yet even now not thinking, at least not thinking coherently, Why am I here? And where am I? For Karla gave me no time to think. Scarcely time to breathe. I glanced worriedly at my wristwatch, seeing with alarm that it was already past nine o’clock and Karla noticed, pinching my wrist, saying, “I promised I’d get you to wherever, didn’t I? Stop obsessing. You’re getting on my nerves.” Karla led me upstairs, my heart beat with anticipation. You could be trapped: up these stairs and no other way out. In a dim-lit bedroom smelling of soiled clothes and mildew and stale cigarette smoke Karla dropped her suitcase onto an unmade bed and opened it and began tossing in items from a bureau drawer, and from a closet, articles of clothing. “C’mon, hon, don’t just stand there, help me, huh?” So I helped, clumsy and hurried, my hands shaking. The bedroom was small and would have been depressing except for its lilac wallpaper, inexpertly laid on the walls (my father had wallpapered much of our house, which my grandmother owned, and I knew well how difficult it was to paper walls even if you know what you’re doing), and cream-colored organdy curtains on the back windows. The front-window curtains had been yanked down, it seemed, curtains and curtain rods on the floor as if they’d been tossed there in a rage; these I kept tripping over. Karla said, whistling, “Jesus God! Look here.” She was holding a lacy red nightgown against herself; the front had been ripped nearly in two. She stared down at the nightgown smiling a peculiar smile as if the nightgown were her own mutilated self. By this time I was anxious to use a bathroom. My bladder ached, there was a loose hot rumbling in the pit of my belly, a threat of diarrhea like scorn. You’ll miss the interview. Fail the interview. To erase this shame you’ll have to kill yourself. Karla decided to laugh at the torn nightgown and ripped it further and threw it to the floor.

  From the top shelf of the closet Karla took a small but heavy cardboard box and handed it to me to dump into the suitcase. A cascade of loose snapshots, printed documents, and letters. One of the snapshots fluttered to the floor, I reached for it and glancing up saw a man standing in the bedroom doorway. He was just standing there.

  Though I was staring directly at this man and though he was surely aware of me only a few feet away he didn’t seem to see me at all. He was watching Karla. And he was smiling.

  A good-looking man in his mid-thirties compact and muscled as a middleweight, not tall, with dirt-colored oily hair curving over his ears and thinning at the crown of his head, and a glittery stubble of beard on his jaws; his eyes were coppery as a stove’s coils, heated. This was a man who looked as if, if you made the mistake of touching him, your fingers would burn. Karla came out of the bathroom adjoining the bedroom with an armful of toiletries and when she saw this man she gave a little scream like a kicked cat, and dropped the toiletries, and the man said to me out of the side of his mouth without so much as glancing at me, “Get out of here, you. This is between her and me.” Karla cried to me, “Don’t leave me!” and I stammered I would not, even as the man pushed past me to grab Karla’s arm, and Karla was screaming, shoving at him, he gripped her shoulders in both hands and shook her and she punched and kicked and used her elbows against him as in a clumsy violent dance. I picked up one of the curtain rods from the floor and swung it at Karla’s attacker, striking him on the side of the head; he turned to curse me and in desperation I swung the rod back this time striking him on the neck, and he grabbed the rod and tossed it aside, the torn curtains sti
ll dragging with it as in a comic cinematic sequence, and as I stood paralyzed he punched me with his right fist, a blow to my jaw that knocked me backward, legs dissolving beneath me, and I fell heavily to the floor. There I lay unable to move, I’d been knocked unconscious, concussed, like a boxer who’s been struck a blow he has seen flying at him yet hasn’t comprehended, and now he’s out though his eyes are open and he’s staring blankly not seeing anything not even the proverbial black lights that mimic death; and by the time vision and comprehension return you understand that a very long time has passed in your life, if only a few seconds by the clock.

  Always afterward recalling, How close to brain-death, extinction. The snap of a finger more and you’d be gone.

  And what would they have done with my body, Karla and the man who was her ex-husband, or husband? I’ve never wanted to speculate.

  But this happened instead: as the man turned to me, Karla drew out of her lizard-skin bag a knife, a steel-handled eight-inch steak knife, and in a fury began stabbing at him, and the astonished man backed off saying, “Jesus, Karla! Give that to me!” He was actually laughing, or trying to laugh. As if he thought it might be a joke. And there was something comical about Karla’s rage, the awkward way she wielded the knife, as a child might, the handle gripped tight in her fist and her blows overhand like a windmill’s blades; so that the man, quick on his feet, shrewd and strong, had reason to think he could take the knife from her without being cut even as, trying to wrest it from her by the blade, he was being cut; blood ran down both his hands in quick eager bright streams. They were shouting accusations at each other. Cursing each other. Karla had the man backed against the edge of the bed; the flashing blade struck him in the shoulder, in the upper chest; he fell clumsily onto the bed and yet more clumsily onto the opened suitcase, trying to shield his head with his arms and pleading for her to stop as blood spilled like a garish crimson blossom down his chest, darkening his shirt and unzipped suede jacket. “See how you like it! See how you like it! I hate you! I’ll kill you! Why are you here! You’re not supposed to be here! You have no right to be here!” Karla cried. But seeing then what she’d done, she threw down the bloody knife; in an instant her fury changed to horror and repentance. “Arnie, no—I didn’t mean it. Arnie—” She knelt beside the bed, now desperate, asking was he all right? saying he’d made her do it, she was sorry, don’t die on me Karla was begging, don’t bleed to death Karla was sobbing. By this time I’d managed to get to my feet though reeling with dizziness; I leaned over coughing, and a thin scalding stream of vomit issued from my mouth. When I could speak, I told Karla I’d call an ambulance and went to a phone on a bedside table, began to dial 911 when the wounded man Arnie told Karla, “Take that fucking thing from her,” and Karla stumbled to me, one of her high-heeled shoes on and the other off, and snatched the receiver out of my hand, fixing me with her widened blackly dilated eyes. “He’s all right! He isn’t going to die! We can take care of him ourselves!”