Part I: Home Is Where the Hurt Is

 

Chapter One

Should We . . . Take This Outside?

 

Alessandra was smoking-a good thirty feet away from the other Tobacco Exiles.

It was a warm night, the air humid and thick; having stepped outside with some purpose and determination-closing that last ten yards-I suddenly felt like I was walking through pudding.

I felt dull.

Slow.

Uncertain.

She didn't look up and "see me" until I was perhaps six feet away.

And when she did, the faintest of smiles flickered across her glossy blood-red lips for only a quick moment.

Then she brought her cigarette to her mouth again, inhaled deeply and with obvious pleasure, and blew the smoke directly into my face as I reached her-the cigarette, by that point, held between thumb and index finger, pointing backward from her semi-cupped palm, her arm loose, just brushing her hip.

I don't know enough about 1940s movie heroines.

The Femmes Fatales?

Lauren Bacall?

Marlene Dietrich?

I don't know.

I'll say she looked more than composed; she looked . . . posed.

And perfectly-breath-deprivingly-so.

But, of course, there was nothing remotely new about that.

 

Chapter Two

Why? Part I

 

"Why what?"

"Really? It's not a complicated question and you're not-most days-a fucking moron. Why. Are. You. Doing. This? Makes no sense."

I nodded as though I were considering what Jay had said; to some degree: I was.

"Why do we do anything?" I offered, eyebrows up, voice neutral.

"Alright."

Jay sounded suddenly tired and I felt a little guilty.

"No, no, no, no," I said quickly. "I . . . get it."

Of course, I fucking do!

Why go to the Twenty-Year Reunion if all that mostly meant was going back to the-what seemed at the time like-unending Horror Show of high school?

A more than reasonable question.

To which I had no-really-reasonable or defensible answer.

I'm still trying-to-get-it-right?

I'm stuck?

Both real-if sad-possibilities.

 

Chapter Three

That Bitch

 

Alessandra's a bitch.

Always has been.

I see her on the other side of the hotel ballroom in which the reunion is being held: I can see it from a mile away; no change.

And yet . . .

As always . . .

All of us pushing forty now?

She remains just stunningly gorgeous.

There should be some change?

I still can't look at her; I still can't not look at her.

Well . . . "stuck is stuck" and "stuck is sad."

And I'm sad.

Sorry.

Wasn't my actual plan.

Just seems to be how things worked out.

I moved away, went to college; went further, got an MBA.

I got married, was financially successful, got divorced.

I came back to take care of my dying father-my mother in a nursing home, with Alzheimer's.

And . . . well here I am.

Wherever you go: there you are.

I know she went to California; I know she came back, too.

I know she got married; and I know she got divorced.

I know I was-almost-never a flyspeck on her windshield when we were in high school; I know there's really nothing in the world that I can do to ever change things-even, maybe especially, now.

Got money? Who cares?

Did a little working out and re-sculpting?

Still just a little guy with barely discernable muscles.

And she's still . . . Alessandra.

I feel like I've had an illness for almost twenty-five years-mostly mental but with physical symptoms as well.

If I got it from anybody: I got it from her.

I don't think there's a cure, but I'm pretty sure she's the only treatment.

I want what I've wanted-what I've needed-with desperate and feverish intensity, since I was fifteen.

I want Alessandra to hurt me.

 

Chapter Four

Why? Part II

 

I've had my head examined, on and off over the past fifteen years or so; I waited until I was twenty-five.

When my marriage blew apart it felt like I had waited long enough, or-of course!-too long.

But I'm not sure what all that therapy has gotten me-or where.

I've processed.

I've reflected.

I've learned.

Not enough?

Too much?

It hasn't changed anything.

I know what I'm supposed to do; I'm supposed to understand myself as having been sexually formed by aberrant early experiences, imprinted, or mis-imprinted: my fears and my desires a fetishistic fusion.

Was it that group of slightly older neighborhood girls, who briefly adopted me, when I was seven, as though I were a pet, and more "Did 'Doctor' to Me" than "Played 'Doctor' with Me"?

Was it the wine-scrambled middle aged woman next door who, the summer I turned fourteen, made a weekly habit of blowing me in her dark living room then flying into a kind of rage and throwing me out of her house-or the two occasions on which she changed her mind, dragged me back from the front hall, put me on my knees and thrust my head under her bathrobe, gave me minute and precise instructions on how I was to lick her hairy, slick folds, her sharply filed and garishly lacquered nails digging into my scalp painfully, her orgasmic shrieks rising to hysterical pitch, before she threw me out again?

The fumbling on couches, in basements, in garages?

The failures and humiliations in cars, dorm rooms, eventually motels?

The rare but exhilarating sexual successes?

And-no shrink has ever really sold me on the idea of normal-isn't all that shit just some version of what every boy goes through, growing up (maybe girls, too; what do I know)?

Beyond all reason, I don't think it's any of that.

If it's bad wiring, it's bad wiring.

But . . . I think it's just Alessandra.

Chapter Five

Smoke in My Eyes

 

"Jimmy," Alessandra said, voice soft and sultry, "you shouldn't be out here. Good little boys like you don't smoke."

Jim, I wanted to say.

But . . . no-obviously-I was Jimmy again.

No point arguing that.

My voice didn't quite crack, but it was damn close.

"Maybe I'm a Bad Boy?" I offered tentatively, working at "aloof."

We might have both laughed at that.

But didn't.

She made a little hum of thought, dropped her cigarette, crushed it under the sharp toe of her spike-heeled pump.

Her smile was faint but seemed somehow sympathetic.

"Maybe a Bad Little Boy," she murmured, throwing my breathing, heart rate, and body temperature into utter chaos. "And of course," she leaned in a little, close enough that I could feel her breath on my cheek, "everyone knows that bad little boys all really want to be punished."

She pulled back just a little, her eyes locked on mine, patient, her expression an odd combination of mockery and sympathy, interest and disdain, boredom and-it wasn't just me-a little jot of sexual excitement.

Eyes steady, she extracted a pen and a business card from her small, black, patent leather, clutch, wrote something on the back of the card without looking, tucked it into my shirt pocket.

Then she turned and left.

The power of speech had left me entirely; I thought it unlikely I was ever going to be able to move from that spot: seasons would change; I would remain there, a statue beside the hotel parking lot, bewitched.

Chapter Six

The Iron Butterfly

 

"No, Jimmy," Alessandra said, voice calm, almost friendly, "I have not given you permission to sit on my furniture. Sit here, please. That's right. At my feet."

Her living room: location, date, and time specified on the card.

Dazed, I sat.

All just a dream anyway.

Had to be.

It was strange that we were both "home again."

Strictly speaking: she was one suburb over.

And the ranch house she lived in was infinitely more elegant than the place she had grown up-granted I had only seen that house from the outside, biking to that side of town in the dark, watching from the shadows across the street: the lights going on, the lights going off, silhouettes through windows.

Sounds-sometimes violent.

Smells-sometimes wafting from the grill they had in their backyard, sometimes seeming to come from the house itself.

I watched for three years, most of high school; I never looked through her window; never been a peeper-never wanted to see, not in that fashion, anyway.

Summers, I would sometimes bike barefooted, the serrated metal of the pedals digging into my feet, a pain I felt I deserved, the damp-cooling-air-of-evening sweet, the streets quiet.

There were boys.

I watched them come and I watched them go.

I watched them pick her up and I watched them drop her off.

I came to feel that I could "read her shoulders," see from a distance what they had or had not done-never mind what happened in the car, in front of the house, or on the stoop, under that bright yellow bug light.

And I watched her change.

It's not that she started out soft-not at all.

But sophomore to junior to senior year, she became steadily less tentative.

A butterfly emerging from a chrysalis-and then morphing into an Iron Butterfly?

I saw this with other people, saw it from a distance; for me she'd never changed.

From the moment I first saw her, it felt like the way she looked at me was different: a flash and crackle, anger and desire, longing and threat-even when, to everyone else, she looked shy.

"Aww, Jeez," Jay had moaned to me during gym class, pointing with his chin, "the new girl's a fox! Bet she could really hurt you . . ."

And I murmured the required response, ". . . if you were lucky," perhaps genuinely understanding that phrase for the first time.

Now, almost forty?

It didn't seem possible that anyone could fail to see what I'd seen then.

When she'd clicked across the marble-floored ballroom, after checking in at the reunion table in the hallway, a little knot of paunchy, aging, jocks first went silent, then began to mutter amongst themselves and gawk.

It was like radar: her head swiveling, slowly and smoothly-a gun turret acquiring targets-her eyes, just slightly heavy-lidded, paralyzing them, like they were the deer-in-the-headlights.

And here I was, scant days later, sitting at her feet, on the floor of her elegant, minimalist, living room, as she idly tousled my hair with one hand, the other holding a highball glass from which she took the occasional languid sip.

Finishing her drink, she landed the glass on a side table, next to a silver cocktail shaker.

I had gone into something of a trance, just staring at her ankle.

She dropped her hand from my hair to the side of my face, almost tickling me with her long, sharp, French manicured and lacquered nails, encouraging me to look up at her-which I did with reluctance and great effort.

"I'm going to tell you a story, Jimmy," she said softly, seeming both amused and a little sad. "I'm going to tell you your story."

I felt myself nod.