Lies & Ugliness Read online

  Beside its Great Lake, Chicago drowsed and rumbled like a leviathan, slow to rouse, but when it did its demands could be insatiable. Its residents had about them all that civilization could offer, yet still died by the helpless scores. Last summer’s worst heat wave had roasted hundreds in their skins. Winters were crueler still. In January he’d read of an old woman, unseen for days, discovered in the frosty gloom of her apartment, kneeling in prayer and frozen into two inches of ice from a burst water pipe. A statue, in the temple of Blake’s satanic mill.

  Its casual brutality aside, the city’s distractions had been antidotal whenever life in academia approached the intolerable. A faculty position paid a comfortable wage but the living was gilded with sameness, each semester beginning with an audience of glazed and indifferent eyes, challenging him to make them react, for whatever benefit that would be. They were sheep, shorn of the brighter futures enjoyed by their parents, and they knew it. To the banana republic squabbles in his department there was no end, nor of exhortations to publish or perish, careers furthered by wordy masturbation read only by the few, the proud, the stagnant. Here was higher learning.

  While this life laid no direct claim on Shawn, its touch could hardly be escaped. She taught dance to girls, pubescent and younger. Nearly all were brought by their mothers — faculty wives, often. Seeds of great talent lay in few, if any, but that was no loss. The sad part was seeing them begin with the pure joy of the dance, then watching their feet grow heavier and their shoulders droop, as the nattering moms pecked the joy right out of them.

  Two career couple, here were their lives, well-paying prisons that they might have become.

  Bodies, then — hers, his, and others. Bodies would be their escape, expanded new geometries of limb and loin their frontier to explore. It was never difficult to find willing men; impossible to find any who could exhaust her. Shawn made love with a dancer’s grace, turning orgy into poetry. Watching her with others was like discovering her all over again, each familiar swirl of tongue and thrust of hips made new to him by this radical change in perspective. He could feel her grind against him even though he was across the room. Seeing her greed for what strangers offered became prolonged and exquisite torture. It had gone on just long enough for Kraaft to forget who’d suggested it in the first place.

  And now that she’d left, he could think of only two reasons:

  It had become too much for her. Or it was no longer enough.

  He met Maggie late that night in a midtown bar, just the sort of place he’d expected her to be a regular — from the street, not very inviting, and once inside, not very reassuring. Her drink of choice appeared to be green. He didn’t ask.

  “Did you bring money?” she said, and he told her he had. “How much?”

  “Is this the inventory before the attempted robbery?”

  “Well, that’s that, I guess you’re too smart for stupid me.” Late hours certainly hadn’t diminished her charm. “I’m just making sure I don’t look like a dipshit, bringing somebody around asking questions when he can’t tip for answers. Just see how far you get with goodwill and IOUs.”

  “We’re meeting somebody else here?”

  “Downstairs.”

  “And what’s downstairs?”

  “King Tut’s tomb, would you just chill awhile? Like, keep your mouth shut and your wallet open? You might as well start practicing now.”

  As Kraaft watched the clock behind the bar, Maggie twice got up to confer with the bartender, coming back fuming each time.

  “Couldn’t help but notice,” he said, “you carry a lot of weight around here.”

  “You’re so observant, how come you didn’t notice your wife packing a suitcase?” Maggie slumped in her chair and began nibbling her fingernails, worrying at them until it seemed that anything would be better than the click of her teeth. “She, um, she said you teach college. Sociology? Isn’t that it?”

  “My main course is Collective Political Violence. Looking at riots, revolutions, coups.”

  Her interest perked up. “Those who can’t do, teach, right?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Like you never had the urge to throw a bomb. God, it’s so obvious now that I know this.” She’d forgotten about her nails. “Look at you, that stumpy little ponytail, that grotty little goatee. You’re too young to have done the sixties, but you’re too old to make those look really fashionable. So you talk about riots and revolutions and wish you’d been there, right?”

  “You can tell all that, from the most superficial details. Amazing. Although it’s a shame you never learned any better than that romantic notion you seem to have that they accomplished anything substantial or lasting in the sixties.” Probably she’d learned history from pop songs. “But if you want to talk haircuts, fine, what about yours? What’s with the waffle-iron look?”

  “Oh, go build a bomb and get it over with, why don’t you,” and she said no more until the bartender called her over. After speaking with him a moment, she motioned for Kraaft to follow her toward the back, through the smoky crush.

  They were buzzed through one door that led them to another, manned by a pair of bull-necked giants who were flipping coins to determine who got a bruising punch on the shoulder. Both nodded at Maggie, ignoring Kraaft completely. The hallway reeked of sour armpits.

  “Slow night, Magpie?” said one doorman. “Can’t stay away?”

  “What’s up with this?” said the other. “Either you’re with a guy, or that’s the hairiest dyke I’ve seen you with yet.”

  She barely slowed while elbowing past them. “Slug each other a little harder, why don’t you. Maybe you’ll break the skin and the steroids’ll run out.”

  Kraaft followed, and heard behind him the wet smack of a huge fist on flesh, a grunt. A pause. A smack and another grunt.

  Her path led back around to yet another door, no wider than a broom closet’s. When she opened it, out drifted muffled music and the voices of an appreciative crowd. Kraaft could see nothing but a steep narrow stairway. Evidently an employee’s back route, it led down into a warren of tiny rooms, not much bigger than phone booths and lacking doors, dingy with scabbed paint under the harsh light of bare bulbs. Each stall was furnished with a folding metal chair and a cracked mirror. Inside some of the empties, clothing hung on nails. In one his eyes met the flat, unblinking gaze of a woman in a garter belt who slumped splay-legged in her chair while dragging off a joint. In the next a muscular kid buckled a leather cuff-and-strap contraption around the base of his swaying cock.

  “You like to watch,” Maggie said, “well, now’s your chance.”

  They slid out from backstage and along a side wall, ignored by an audience of thirty, forty. Onstage, cuffed at the wrists and ankles, a man leaned face-first into an X of wooden beams. Someone else — Kraaft couldn’t discern gender because of angle and obstructions — knelt at the feet of the rack, busily fellating the man. Under low lighting, a corseted woman withdrew the coils of a whip from a bowl, then lit its length from a taper. It came alive then, a bright serpent. Each time she lashed the man, more gently than one might expect, it left across his back a long trace of flame that flickered blue, then went out as he shuddered.

  “She calls herself Brandy Infernal,” Maggie said. “Like she ever burned anything more expensive than rubbing alcohol.”

  Kraaft could only stare as the man writhed under conjoined assaults of whip and mouth and flame. Gradually, senses returned. He understood in his gut before the picture was clear in his head.

  “She performed here,” he said. “Shawn performed here.”

  “Getting that Ph.D. must’ve been a whiz for you.”

  He felt more left out than betrayed, Shawn having forsaken his eyes for those of strangers. It thrilled him and enraged him, left him with a deeper ache than any he’d known before. On that stage. Up there. She’d opened herself there and he’d missed it.

  Maggie tugged at his arm. “See that guy over there? That guy who lo
oks like he’d steal from orphans? He manages the downstairs. Whatever I say, go along with it, okay?”

  The manager was thin-faced and balding, tufts of wiry hair bristling from either side of his shiny domed head. He appeared to regard Maggie as he might a stepdaughter on the verge of being disowned. They stood in the doorway of his cubbyhole office and argued, although not viciously, and too softly for Kraaft to make much of it. Finally Maggie turned to point at him.

  “I really hate that it’s come to this, Skeeter, but since you never would tell me where she went, then meet her husband. Maybe you’ll tell him, instead.”

  “Husband.” Skeeter scowled while checking him out. “Why would I even tell this asshole to duck when I spit?”

  “Well look at him, Skeeter, you don’t think he can afford to hire enough lawyers to give you more headaches than you’ve got Tylenols?”

  “I don’t take Tylenol for headaches, I have ‘em shot in the back of the skull.”

  “Gimme a break, you manage a hardcore tittie bar, not Murder, Incorporated.”

  Skeeter gave her a warning look, wagged a finger. “You don’t think I’m a fucking connected man, you think again.”

  “Yeah, connected to the point of being disposable if you don’t keep this place low profile. This isn’t Bangkok, y’know.”

  Finally, something that Skeeter seemed to take seriously. He gave Kraaft another appraisal, then stepped back into the privacy of his claustrophobic office. Maggie and Kraaft followed, shutting the door on the music.

  “Lawyers,” Skeeter said. “That right? What the fuck for, you mind telling me?”

  “A civil suit.” It was the first thing out of Kraaft’s mouth. “Alienation of affection between husband and wife.”

  Skeeter guffawed. “If that was your wife, she didn’t need any alienating from me. Wasn’t my snoot buried between her legs. You want someone to sue, sue Carrot Top here.” He gave Maggie a look beyond disbelief. “Fucking psycho-cooze, what kind of game are you running, you bring this—”

  There was obviously so much she’d neglected to tell him that Kraaft wasn’t sure how to proceed. Not that it mattered now, not after Maggie slapped Skeeter across the face, as hard as she could.

  “You don’t call me that!” she cried. “I don’t care how connected you think you are, you don’t call me a name like that!”

  Red-cheeked, Skeeter was swift to retaliate. One hand raked over his desktop and found a letter opener. He jabbed at her once, missing by a clumsy foot, and then her hand darted back at his face, spritzing it with pepper spray. Skeeter dropped the dagger and slapped both hands over his eyes, and he screamed. How he screamed. He groped blindly for the phone but Kraaft beat him to it, hopes of finding Shawn melting away as Skeeter fell back across his desk, and Kraaft whacked the receiver against his brow. Again, again, until the man was beaten over that threshold where survival pins its hopes on silence rather than shrieks.

  The battered head thrashed before him at waist level, mouth wide enough to count dental fillings, eyes poached and bloody. He gripped the head by either side, levering a thumbnail into each crimped eyelid.

  “You don’t understand,” Kraaft said, and this was news to himself as well, nothing he’d admitted until now. “If I don’t go home with Shawn, I might as well not go at all.”

  “Oh god, oh god,” Maggie was murmuring, backing away from the desk, fingernail at her teeth. “Oh god…”

  Just as Kraaft thought she would be no more help, Maggie lunged forward and threw herself over Skeeter’s knees to stop his kicking. His arms still roved free, but as feebly as the legs of a crushed roach.

  “Where did she go?” Kraaft asked, but heard nothing sensible in reply. He pushed his thumbs deeper into the hot, teary folds of eyelid, listening to himself repeat the question. Himself, yet not — another man, really. Another man buried beneath the layers of civility and diplomas.

  Sentences begun, never finished; words bitten off between syllables. Kraaft eased some of the pressure. When something like coherence emerged, it meant nothing to him. Just talk overheard, Skeeter said, heard last week, or month. The whore below — it was Shawn now. The whore below — this was all he knew, nothing more.

  The whore below. While the phrase meant nothing to Kraaft, he caught the recognition flickering across Maggie’s face. There, then gone, and still his thumbs were in another man’s eyes.

  The injustice of it overwhelmed him — all that this man, this Skeeter, this parasite, had seen of Shawn, to his own exclusion. Here was the agony: All that these eyes had taken in of her, to their owner it was only commerce. To the poetry he was blind already.

  Beneath Kraaft’s thumbs the eyeballs felt hard as peach pits. But he knew better; stood back and watched as that other man deep within gouged hard enough to find the softness at their core.

  It was a start.

  Dawn must’ve been near before she said much, after giving up and sliding to the floor with her duffel bag half-packed. She sat beside it and watched the door as if any moment expecting its implosion.

  “Why bother,” Maggie said. “They’ll come, sooner or later somebody’ll come and that’s it. Skeeter wasn’t kidding about being connected. He had bosses.” She hugged her knees with both arms. “You they don’t know, you can go back to your house and play like it never happened. Me they know. Me they could kill.”

  From his pockets, a keyring. He removed one, tossed it across the room. It clattered on scuffed wood near her workboot.

  “To my front door,” he said. “I can draw you a map.”

  “I never hurt anybody before,” she whispered. “Not even the ones who deserved it.”

  “But you’ll lie, won’t you. You knew Shawn a lot better than you let on.”

  Maggie rocked back and forth, arms around her knees. Outside the window, the sudden metallic hurricane of an El train, subsiding as swiftly as it had come.

  “Yeah, so?” she said. “The first thing I tell you is that I maybe loved her? I don’t think so.”

  The story came in fits and starts. Kraaft rarely needed to prompt, just waited and let it find its way out of her. For a few weeks she and Shawn had performed together, onstage, at that club for basement voyeurs. It was where they’d met, Shawn having apparently answered a personals ad, performers wanted, and knowing what it really meant.

  “She told me she didn’t have any experience with women, but you meet a lot of them like that. Curious. Even if they only try it once. All they need’s some time, and…” Maggie shook her head. “But you know how, maybe once or twice in your life if you’re lucky, you find someone and even if they’re a lot younger, or totally inexperienced, it doesn’t matter? You still feel like a beginner with them, like a kid? Like they can swallow you whole … and you want them to? That’s how it was with Shawn. When her tongue would hit me…”

  Maggie trembled. And he waited for more, starving for it. The door waited as well, to admit the violence that had to be seeking them out. Yet he had to hear more. Shawn with another woman was no Shawn he’d ever known. If Maggie stopped now, she might never speak to him again.

  “And she left you too,” he said.

  Maggie nodded.

  “You don’t know why?”

  “She never gave me the chance to ask.”

  “If you felt this way about her, why answer my ad, why bring me here at all?”

  “I knew she wasn’t back with you. I’d call the studio where she taught, so I knew she hadn’t gone home. I thought Skeeter might know where she was, like maybe because she looked as good as she did they might have her somewhere doing movies, but he wouldn’t tell me shit. He’s a prick like that. I thought if you showed up, you could afford to buy it out of him. Or he’d give it up if he thought her husband was gonna complicate things for him.”

  “Did she ever tell you” — each slow word was another notch of dread cut into his heart — “why she left me?”

  “Are you sure you want to hear this?” Maggie asked. “L
ike I said, Shawn never made any secret of what you two were doing. But I think she was starting to feel she liked it too much. You know, here’s this heavy kink she’s into, but it’s totally against everything her family and everyone else taught her to be, and wherever she goes back home, and everybody she sees, she’s thinking, oh god, if they only knew. If they only knew…

  “That whole life, you know what she told me it was? A skin that she had to shed while she still could, and she just didn’t have the heart to tell you.” Atop her knees, Maggie’s hands turned to fists. “So I have her for six weeks, and one day she’s gone, and I’m left thinking, well, what does this make me? Just one more skin?”

  Kraaft wandered to the window, saw El tracks and power lines and the backs of brick buildings as seedy as this one. Feeling very far from a home and a life that would take him back, never knowing what a sham he was. They weren’t him and maybe never had been. Maybe they’d only been the path of least resistance.

  It occurred to him that the studies he found most fascinating were those of humanity at its worst. Sweeping change that was not pretty, indiscriminate tides that sought to topple empires. Riots, revolutions, coups … these began with mere sparks but developed momentums and wills of their own, making puppets of people, slaves to the whole. Single cells in the body politic, they were freed to indulge urges buried so deep within, they might never have known such drives were there at all.

  Show me the worst, Kraaft had been saying all along. I have this need to see it. Show me the worst of hate, and love, and the places where they lead.

  “What did that mean, the whore below?” he asked, ready now to hear it. “That meant something to you.”