Maidenhead

LEE: I miss that fucked-up sneak.

GAYL: I still have her.

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nbsp; LEE: I’ll have her back soon.

GAYL: Sabotage!

LEE: Reality.

GAYL: Myra’s learning, finally, what is real.

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When I arrived that night at Filmore’s, I was a brand-new woman. Gayl was gone. So was the sack where she kept her camera and cords. Elijah said that she needed some air.

‘She’s suspicious,’ he said. He went back to his bed, crawled under the covers.

Now that I finally knew what they did together, I didn’t believe him. I mean, what the fuck was she suspicious about? Gayl and Elijah made porn. And I was a porn connoisseur. I was a porn scholar! I was there to tell Elijah that I wanted to do it again. I wanted to be filmed. I wanted to hear Gayl and Elijah talk about me while we fucked. I loved that part, when Gayl said, She’s the best one we’ve ever had. I wanted to be a porn star. I wanted to move to L.A. and get a website or something. Gayl could be my manager. There were girls like me. I knew there were girls out there like me. Girls who liked to be in porn. Girls who liked to make men feel. We would all be together, me, her and him. I was changing up my life, climbing out of the hole of not knowing who I was. I could be anything ’cause I had porn in my blood!

Elijah looked towards the door. ‘Well, look who’s finally found her way back.’

I hoped that Gayl had her camera and was ready for something. But the lock was stuck, she started banging against the door. I ran over to open it for her.

‘Holy fuck! What happened to you?’

Gayl had two black eyes and a puffed-up mouth.

She pushed by me to Elijah in the bed. His arms opened and she curled up on his body like a cat.

‘I’ll get ice!’ I said.

The hallway stunk of smoke and beer. Ice would bring that swelling down. My mother put ice on my face in the bathtub in Key West.

Gayl was crying and whispering to Elijah when I came back in with the bucket. She was in these tight black jeans with a short white leather jacket that showed her stomach. I’d never seen her so done up.

It didn’t occur to me then, holding the ice and watching her squirm on his lap, that he might have been the one who did that to her.

‘I don’t want that,’ Gayl said to me, her face in Elijah’s chest.

I put the ice bucket down on the floor.

‘I don’t like you, Myra,’ Gayl said. She kissed Elijah’s beard. She got up off his lap and lay down on the floor. She pulled her camera bag out from deep under the bed. Her lip was bleeding. ‘I think you look good on a screen, but I don’t like you.’

Gayl passed Elijah the video camera.

‘Why do you have to be so mean to me?’

Elijah started laughing. I knew I sounded like Jen, spoiled and naive: Why don’t you like me? Why do you have to be so mean?

I couldn’t conclude my essay. I couldn’t bring it all together. I didn’t know how getting fucked a thousand times turned a slave free in Hegel’s dialectic.

It took me a second to realize that Elijah was filming, that Gayl was shimmying, puffy-eyed, towards me. Even barefoot, she was so much taller than me. I looked back at Elijah. The big black glass eye in front of his face. There are slaves on the earth right now. Gayl took off her white leather jacket.

‘Ready, E.? You ready for the first take?’

‘What is going on, you guys?’