You're washing your cock off in the bathroom sink when you hear her. Whatever she says is drowned out by the running water, her message only coming through as tones and syllables. You finish, and while drying off, poke your head out the door.
"Well?" She says. She's still naked, leaning against the headboard, laying on the rumpled sheets. She's a thin brunette but her hair's been dyed too many times. It's stuck between red and pink. On her back, she has a massive fresh tattoo; huge angel wings but the feathers are all burnt bones.
"I didn't hear you." You say, and motion toward your left ear in a way that suggests you can't hear well ever.
"Why didn't you tell me you were a psych major?" She asks, holding up a text book, which was jammed under your nightstand. You wonder what she was looking for.
"Never got a chance." You say, smiling and sit down on the bed.
"Do you have anything to drink?" she asks, looking at her fingernails. They are gnawed and blunted.
"Course. I think I have some rum." You stand and begin rummaging around for your boxers. You find them jammed at the end of the bed where the comforter has bunched up into hilly terrain.
"Don't put those on yet. I might want to fuck again after a drink." She leans over the edge of the bed and rummages through her pants pockets and doesn't look up to talk. “Shit.” She says, pulling a broken, final cigarette from a crushed pack. You pass her a one of your cigarettes, and walk down the hall to the kitchen. The blinds are all half drawn and you realize you’re anonymously flashing the outside world through your windows.
“Just the liquor please!” She yells, her voice too loud for the small apartment.
“Any ice?” You pour yours on the rocks and wait for her reply. None comes. You pour her two fingers of rum in a glass and walk back to the bedroom. You hand her a glass and sip on yours.
"My father was a psychologist, for twenty five years." She says. She looks at the liquor, smells it and takes a small gulp. "He also was an artist. He did the psych work so he could make art. He even....." She coughs and puts the glass down on the nightstand. When she coughs, her stomach flexes. She has a beautiful body, like a dancer's. "I don't think I could ever do it" she coughs again. "You know... Talk peoples' problems away. I have enough."
"It's not that hard" You say. "You just have to not let them get to you." You take a long sip. " Don't bring your work home with you." She suddenly gets excited.
"Let's have a session right now, you can listen to me and see how it goes." She's smiling and sitting forward on the bed. She grabs her glass and gulps the last of her liquor down.
"I don't know, I don't think...."
"Don't think.. Just do it." She says. She hops off the bed and lays down on the couch, snagging your glass in passing. You get your leather backed desk chair and a notebook and your cigarettes. You already believe that interviewing this girl, who you met five hours ago, may not be the best decision, let alone sleeping with her again. But you don't turn back.
“Do you have a lighter?” She says holding her unlit cigarette. You pass it to her. She lights up and throws it back. An ugly silence hangs about the room, only broken by her inhaling on her cigarette.
"I feel a little awkward." You gripe, not knowing how to start.
"Ask me anything." She says, motioning with her cigarette, tracing ghosts.
"Why do you like being naked so much?" You glance down at your navel and the dark hairs covering it.
"Ha...Clothes just seem so...conventional. I don't know, we were born naked, we should be happy being naked."
"What about people who don't like it?
"Then it's not for them, ask me something interesting." She exhales. Her breast are small but well shaped. On her right side a small tattoo of numbers runs along her ribs.
"What do you think of your father's art?" You ask with brows raised. The winter light is coming through your windows, casting long weak shadows across the couch. You love and fear the winter. You love its constant change and desolate ways; you fear the sun's demise for months on end. You turn your notebook and begin to quietly sketch her legs in the shadows.
"Well...to understand my father, you have to understand my mother." She takes a drag, looks at the growing ash. You reach and grab a wooden box, and pass it to her. She looks at you, with a cunning smile and ashes in the box.
. "She was crazy about him. But not in a healthy way. Maybe just crazy. She would obsess about everything he did. She was a leech on his life." She ashes again, and sips on your rum. The ice has melted and the amber liquid looks thin.
"When I was younger. He was always around. He had an office in the front room of our house." You continue to draw her quietly. You slowly trace her legs and the shadows. You move to her hips, using darker lines; heavier strokes.
"When I was ten or almost eleven I guess. No. I was eleven, anyways, he got an office downtown, with a pretty college intern for a secretary." She pauses for a second and shifts her back and legs on the couch. "Are you taking notes on me?" She turns her head; her beautiful gray eyes are clouded with red lines.
"A few" You say, making some short sharp strokes that sound like you're writing letters. She smiles and lays back down.
"Anyways. I remember that Dad was almost never home, He built a studio on the top floor of his psych office. He and Mom fought constantly when he was home. It seemed like a dumb argument to me then and now..." She lifts her right leg, stretches it and brings it back. You want to tell her to stop moving. "It seems even dumber. I mean. It's self-defeating. Being angry with someone when they are around, saying they are never around. Well, after a few of those, he was never around." You shift uneasily in your chair, realizing you will learn more than you want anytime you're in this position.
"Mom got bored and tried to get even. I remember her meeting men at the country club. Dad hated being a member there, but he needed it to get more clients. You wouldn't believe what kind of drugs those people were on. They looked so perfect, yet take a blood sample of the room and you have enough pharmaceuticals to treat a criminal ward." She laughs at her own joke, then gets quiet, realizing the implications of that. "All those perfect wives are doped up and if they aren't, they are doped up on Jesus. I could never decide which was better. My Dad wasn't a bad looking guy, he was actually a pretty man. He tried to hide it behind a beard, but it only made him more handsome. He never tried to make a move on those stepford wives but they all wanted him. And even as Mom was cheating, it drove her crazy that he didn't react."
"People do crazy things for love and attention. Even hurting those they love." You say, trying to put your voice in, let her know you're listening. She rolls that over for a moment and wipes her face. You can't see her eyes, but you think she's crying silently.
"When I was fifteen. My Dad was in a crazy car accident. He'd just bought a new Toyota truck, literally first twenty minutes off the lot and he's at a stop light. It's late on a Friday, and Dad isn't paying attention. He's playing with the dials of his new truck and when he looks up, there's a guy with a gun pointed at him. Some toothless hill-billy with a Colt pointed at my Dad two feet from the driver's side window." She spreads her hands apart two feet and holds them parallel in the air. "My Dad put his hands in the air. But just as he does it, he sees something behind the car-jacker. He always said that it was just a flash of black and chrome, but it was a church van, being hit by a drunk-driver. The van smashed sideways into the driver's side of Dad's new truck." She brings her hands together in a sharp clap. "The car-jacker was smashed to jelly. My Dad lost his left hand in the accident and his left eye. All three people in the church van died."
"Jesus." You say. You stop drawing for a moment and think about the scene of that accident.
"I always wondered what sort of divine intervention that was." She turns toward you, smiling like a cat."I mean really. Kill one bad guy and three church volunteers. If there is a god, he's a sloppy motherfucker at best." She lays back down. "But anyways, Dad was never the same after that." She laughs. "Predictably so. Also, he was a potter. I don't think I told you that. He made beautiful vases and other thrown work. But after he lost his left hand, he couldn't throw anymore. Funny though. His amputations didn't make him less handsome, if anything....Can I have a cigarette" You light one and pass it to her. She takes it and smiles.
"If anything, it made him distinguished looking. He had a fucking claw hand though. I remember guys in high school were petrified of him." She laughs and takes a drag, blows a smoke ring and destroys it with another. You're drawing is becoming beautiful. You're working on the shading. It's just a naked female torso and legs running down a couch. Her face and upper body are hidden behind the arm rest. You light a cigarette.
"But after the wreck, he started working with metal. He figured out that he could have a prosthetic hand, that was essentially a blow-torch. He made these beautiful and mournful looking pieces of metal and steel art. Twisted and curved fire made of steel reaching toward the sky. Actually, you know that sculpture garden, near Demen's Park?"
"Think so. On the water right?" You look for a place to ash, give up and ash on the floor.
"Yea, in it is a piece of my Dad's work, we'll have to go see it sometime. Anyways, he started working with metal. He moved his studio into the garage of the house and for awhile he even closed his psych practice. He said he had to work some stuff out. In the mean time. Mom got close to Dad again. But he wasn't the same. She said he'd changed." She scoffs at the end, pausing to smoke her cigarette. She sits up and cracks the window above the couch and throws the cigarette out into the winter air. Cold rushes into the room.
"She started sleeping around a lot more. Trying to provoke him, or something I gues..."
"Don't read too much into other people's actions." You say. "Everyone has their own reasons."
“...Either way, after Dad had some success with his sculptures, he opened his psych practice again. I was a eighteen and it was the summer before my freshman year of college...Can I have one more? I promise, I'll run out and get a pack." She says, motioning toward the cigarette pack. You glance at the dwindling pack and pass her one.
"Don't worry about it, it’s real cold out." You motion toward the windows with your brows.
"Thanks." She lights it, inhales and sits back. "But when my Dad re-opened his practice, I worked for him as a receptionist. It was one of the first times that I got to see my Dad in a different light than just my father. I finally got to see him in his element, separate from my Mom and her filters. But he opened up a gallery for his work over his office. I still remember the opening. It was beautiful. All of his work showed his pain at losing his true medium and finding a second. He talked about that in the gallery talk, finding your medium in life and learning to master it. Anyways. That whole summer I worked for him. We spent all day together, then after work I'd get to have dinner with him. Mom was left to her own devices and she found them. Most nights we would get home and she would be at the country club, a note taped to the fridge: Out. Don't Wait Up. " She looks at her dwindling cigarette and takes a long drag, and throws it out the still cracked window. "When Dad would see those notes, he would head straight to his studio to burn metal and twist it into new shapes." She pauses for a minute. You stand, and throw your cigarette butt out the crack in the window. You sit again, stretching your legs out.
"I would usually go out with my friends at night. Or I'd have some over. My Dad never cared about drinking as long as those who drank slept over. But Mom would always come home late. Drunk usually and pick fights with Dad. Maybe it was the reverse, but whenever she'd get home, I'd hear yelling from their room. After awhile. I stopped being home to hear it. I'd go out and stay out till I knew Mom would be home."
"Do you feel like you ran out?" You ask, trying to get to somewhere, maybe back toward the bed.
"Well....Sometimes....but... after working all summer, I met a guy at the beach and started seeing him at nights. I didn't tell him about my parents and vice versa. I'd tell them I was going out with my girlfriends and go over to his house all night. He was in college, home working for the summer. Nice guy, but a little dull. Just a pretty face. But as July got to August, Mom got worse. Dad put a futon in his studio and a mini fridge and didn't leave the garage on the weekends. During the week though, he started closing the gallery to the public and having less hours at the psych office I asked to go up, but he said he was laying out a new exhibit." You start shading more and more, trying to get the light right.
"A few weeks before I left for college, I hadn't been home all weekend, I was out with Ian, that boy, and it was late like two or three. We'd just watched some awful horror movie and I looked at my phone and there were a ton of missed calls and two voice mails. The first was from my parent's neighbor. They wanted to make sure I was alright and to call immediately. The second was from an Officer Koaswski. When I got home, the light from the fire trucks cast weird shadows around the neighborhood. The house was just shards of wood smoldering wet wood. The trees around the house were shredded too. All around the yard were chard odds and ends of my family's life. A smoking book. A desk chair, split in half, stuck on a branch. Pieces of clothing. That was the strangest thing actually. The odd bits that survived the explosion intact. Big things which seemed like they could never be shattered, like a couch or a car, were torn to pieces, while picture frames came out looking brand new, just a little ashy." She pauses for minute and you are silent; speechless. You clear your throat.
"How… what happened?"
"It took about two months for that answer. But Dad was hunkered down in his studio in the garage, welding a new sculpture, Mom came home with some guy from the country club named Paul Kopps. He was a golf pro. Dad was in the garage and Mom with her lover upstairs. Around one-thirty, the propane tanks Dad used for his blow-torches, exploded in the garage. The whole house was leveled and burned in the subsequent fire. Can I have one more?" She motions toward the pack. You sit stunned for a moment then throw her the pack and lighter
"Do you think it was on purpose?" You ask, hoping it doesn't touch a nerve
"Depends."
"On what?"
"The day." She says. She plucks a cigarette from the dwindling pack, and taps it twice on the box. "After I graduated college, I took charge of my Dad's gallery. And when I opened it for the first time, found the work he'd been setting up." She lights her cigarette and sits for a minute. She glances at you but you are staring out into the winter dusk. "It was a massive exhibit. Each piece was labeled and had a story attached to it. I showed the exhibit two years ago. All of the work though, was all him telling me something. It was all telling me about his life. And through his work, I was finally able to get to know him. Do you know anything about stars?" The shift in topics throws you.
"A bit, not much. I mean I can find the Pole star and that's about it."
"Well, basically, the stars are so far away, they are probably already dead. But the light they sent out during their life is what we see, in transit.”
"Uh, huh. I don't see what th...."
"My father was like that. Only after he died, I finally understood him through his work. So I love his art.”
"But...what about the fire?"
"Sometimes, I decide for a day or two that it was an accident. Other days, I know he burnt it all." She smokes her cigarette quietly. You examine your drawing: her perfect naked legs, laying on the couch in the weak winter sunlight.
