About five years ago I dated a girl from Alabama State. She was thin and blond and tan and sweet, just like all the others. Her name was Mary Kim Patterson. She always wore dresses and her lips were almost always shiny with lipgloss though I never saw her actually applying it. She liked that I was an artist. She liked talking about her friends and how much they liked me, how jealous they were of me. This was before the fire department, before the calendar and before the adult film agent approached me. This was before I thought I would ever take my clothes off for money, or even be asked. Mary Kim was from a town called Blacksburg but I could never remember what state she was from. She never seemed to have any interest in going there. I dated her for two weeks and our "dates" were never really more than scheduled preludes to sex. Mary Kim called it "making love." I always had to try hard not to laugh. It always happened at my place and she would deliberately leave things laying around as if by accident. It all ended the night of a sorority fundraising dinner when Mary Kim came to pick me up and she came in without knocking. She was wearing a little frilly white thing and her skin looked nearly orange by comparison. I looked at her once and added this new information to the list of things about her that were already starting to bother me.
We had met at a bar and gone home together because my place was close. Eveyrthing that followed seemed superfluous to me by that night, by the time the first sexual encounter was over and we had both gotten what we wanted. I didn't even know what I was doing with her. She had come in and sat down on the couch with cautious stiffness, smoothing her hand over her skirt over and over again, while I fiddled around with my tie in the mirror. It would be my first black tie event ever. I was done with her by then, but I was still going.
Mary Kim did not get off the couch to help me with my tie even though I knew she could probably tie it better than I could. By then she wasn't sweet anymore. My apartment then was a nice efficiency that came furnished, with a serving window between the kitchen and the rest of the room, wall to wall carpeting. I had hated the whiteness of the place so I put down dark rugs over the carpet, hung bright tapestries and posters on the walls; Axis: Bold as Love, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars with Bowie standing in a darkened alleyway. Mary Kim had looked at it and asked who the hell was Ziggy Stardust and I had decided right then not to play it for her for fear she would insult it and switch it to pop or country and I would have to go be sick somewhere.
She sat on the couch, smoking a Marlboro Menthols and asked across the room, "what's wrong? Can't you tie a bowtie?"
So finally I turned around and asked her to do it and so she did, patronizing me like I was her son and she was proud of my show of effort. When she was done she kissed me and her shiny lips slid upon mine and left a trail of slime on my face. I wiped it away with more than a little revulsion. She tucked her purse under her arm and smoothed her skirt one more time. I saw it first; the red streak across her mid-thigh where she had just run her hand.
I said her name and her eyes followed mine and she screamed like a poisonous spider were crawling up her leg. She looked at me, and for a blink of time, her look seemed to be one of blame, before she looked down at her hands and saw the lump of red oil pastel on her right ring finger, picked up from the couch, the table (what else did she touch?).
I melted into concerned sympathy and reached out as if I might actually do something besides make it worse, and she swatted at me like a bug and left without a word, her footsteps percussive and angry. I followed her, though even as I was doing it, I wasn't really sincere in my efforts to get her to come back inside, and she opened the door to her convertible and didn't object when I got in.
"We have to go back so I can change," she explained, then said "dammit" to herself over and over like it was the most effective cuss word she could think of, or muster the bravery to say out loud. In her deep southern accent, the word seemed to have three or four syllables.
Mary Kim changed into something small and royal blue and just as revealing, just as flattering and I complimented her on it enough to sound completely insincere (though I did mean it, actually) but she clearly didn't like this dress as much as the white one. All through the dinner she pulled on it like it was an uncomfortable sling holding an injured arm and she didn't really talk to me unless she had to. I knew it wasn't just because of the pastel. So I danced with some other girls who all said they knew me "by reputation of course" and I started to wonder what Mary Kim had told them, if it was even about my paintings or something else.
I had sold some top-shelf acid to a guy in town who owned a liquor store that all the college kids went to because he overlooked their fake ids. At first, the guy, whose name was bobby, asked me to paint a giant bar filled with famous dead people as a mural on the outside of the store. He even had a list written out of who he wanted in the mural. He asked me if I could do it in the style of Hopper. I said yeah, I could, and Bobby had shaken my hand and said, "make sure you put Marilyn in something skimpy."
The girls I danced with at the fundraising dinner were hypnotized by their proximity to me, openly and unashamedly worshipping him simply because my domain was public, because I had created something that everyone in town, at one point or another, had to walk by and see, even if they didn't really look.
Yeah, that's me. The painting on the liquor store.
Mary Kim was no longer enjoying her friends and their coveting of her "artist boyfriend" and she even went so far as to say "don't touch me" when I found her on the dance floor after dancing with Haley, the only redhead in Mary Kim's circle of friends. We left early and she didn't care if people saw she was upset. In fact she played it up and the whole ride home I was so pissed off at her and her superiority, her pursed lips like a fucking little princess on the throne that I thought I might reach over and give her a good slap before getting out of the car. She acknowledged this, looked right at me and told me with her cold, dead eyes, that she knew and didn't give a shit what I thought about her. I unclenched my fist and got out of the car. As I walked away I heard her flicking a lighter over and over, a lighter with a flint that wouldn't catch.
She had left a tube of lipgloss, a bra, a barrette. I started a small fire in the kitchen sink and dropped the items into it, one at a time. The lipgloss released a smell of magnolia and strawberries and my apartment reeked of it for a week.
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