9. The Extra Ounce of Power

"Only a man who knows what it is like to be defeated can reach down to the bottom of his soul and come up with the extra ounce of power it takes to win when the match is even."
—Muhammad Ali

The lamp on the table wasn’t red, but it had a red scarf thrown over it, so that red was the color it projected out the window and into the street below. Everything else in the room was also red—the walls a deep burgundy, the mirror framed in fiery teakwood, the bedspread a seductive plush red satin. Jen looked down at her legs, thin white sticks against the bloody color of the bedding. Her corset was black and lacy and left her shoulders, arms, and legs bare. On the table under the lamp sat the one item in the room that wasn’t red: a bowl of bright, cheerfully yellow lemons.

A ceiling fan spun overhead, stirring the hot, steamy air around the room. Overhead, through the roof, she could hear the whirring sound of a helicopter. She knew that someone was arriving. She waited expectantly, fluffing up the satin bedspread and ruffling her hair.

She heard footsteps in the hall, growing closer and closer. A sudden wave of stage-fright came over her as she realized what was about to happen. She looked over at the bowl of lemons and had the sudden awareness that, instead of waiting for a man to walk through the door, she should be juicing the lemons, turning them into cool, satisfying lemonade. But before she could rise from the bed to grab the bowl and leave, Bradley threw open the door, looking every bit the cowboy in brown leather pants and a western-style shirt. She had seen him dressed this way once before in a movie. It was a bad movie; all the critics had agreed.

“I knew I’d find you here,” he said, leering at her from the doorway.

“Don’t talk,” said Jen. “Just get it over with.”

She lay back on the bed, lifting her bare legs in the air. Her thighs were huge. They looked like fat white sausages. They were swelling, growing bigger each second. She reached out to stop them from growing, and they puffed out around her hand like rising dough. The room was growing darker, the light blocked by her legs, which would surely suffocate her in a moment. She cried out, but her voice was muffled by her own flesh, which was filling her mouth and blocking her nostrils. She tried to scream, but her inward breath only sucked her skin more tightly against the back of her throat.

As she lost consciousness, Jen could hear the sound of the helicopter again, circling and circling in the sky above. And she could hear Bradley’s voice, from somewhere far away behind her legs.

“I always knew you’d get fat,” he said.

“Jen,” called Becky, entering the room with a cordless phone in her hand. “Your mom,” she said, holding the phone far away from her own body as though it were something she had pulled out of the garbage. Jen took it from her, opening her eyes wide to demonstrate her incredulity that Becky would deliver such a call to her. Becky returned an exasperated eyebrow raise and displayed her empty palms to indicate that the matter was out of her hands.

Jen had been sitting by herself in the TV room, cross-legged on the couch, holding a book in front of her as though she were reading. The book was Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. It was the most spiritual book that she could find on her little bookshelf. All of the books on the shelf were gifts, and she had only read a few of them. Siddhartha was an old gift from Becky. Jen had been reading it for the last few days, very slowly. Halfway through a paragraph, she would find her thoughts wandering to the recurrent dream she’d been having almost every night for the last three weeks, ever since one tabloid had reported that she was a prostitute and the other magazines had started calling, calling at all hours, circling the house in their helicopters, looming outside the front gate in their dark-windowed mafia cars, like patient but determined hunters following the scent of blood.

The dream was a little different each night, but a few features remained constant. She was always on a movie set. She was always a prostitute. Bradley was always there. And every night the dream ended the same way, with her body inflating like rising bread. The sound of helicopters was also there each time, but since she could actually hear them in her sleep, they didn’t really count as part of the dream.

Becky had barely spoken to her in weeks. She’d been busy deleting phone messages, sending out statements to the press, meeting with Jen’s lawyer. Jen didn’t want to bother her any further by showing up at yoga, so she had started going to Paula’s classes instead. Paula taught at a health club in the valley, but Jen didn’t mind driving out there. It was nice to get away for a while. She had started going twice a day, once very early in the morning, before most of the photographers had arrived at her house, and once in the afternoon. Usually she would stay in the valley in between classes, reading and drinking unsweetened herbal iced tea at various cafés, switching often to avoid word of her location getting out. Still, people stared at her, and took pictures with their cell phones, like she was some kind of tourist attraction. Yesterday she had gone to the public library instead; it was filled with homeless people sleeping on chairs, and no one had seemed to notice her.

Paula must have been wondering what Jen was doing between classes, because she had asked Jen to lunch several times. “Can’t—got an audition,” Jen would say, smiling in polite regret. The truth was that she had increased her fast to five days a week. On Sundays and Wednesdays, she would eat salads and brown rice. But all the other days, she limited herself to her fasting drink, along with as much herbal tea as she wanted. After the first week, the sticky sweetness of the drink began to annoy her, so she had been cutting down the proportion of maple syrup to lemon juice. The lemon tasted clean and bitter and purifying, and she felt light when she drank it. She was becoming obsessed with lemon; her appetite for it couldn’t be satisfied by just her fasting drink. She began adding it to her herbal tea, and even sprinkling it over her Sunday and Wednesday salads.

The prospect of dealing with her mother just now made her feel dizzy. In fact, Jen did not want to deal with anything at all. She just wanted to do yoga, and drink tea with lemon, and sit and read and think, quietly. She didn’t want to talk to anyone.

Jen put down her book and held the phone to her ear in silence for a moment, enjoying the last seconds of peacefulness before the conversation began. Becky smiled weakly, her face revealing the slightest flash of reluctant sympathy, before rushing back out through the doorway.

“Hi mom,” Jen said, when she felt it would be too rude to wait any longer.

“Jenny,” said her mother, in a tone that somehow combined worry and relief together. “Why haven’t you been answering your cell phone?’ Her mother’s voice sounded distant and tinny, like music projected through bad speakers. It sounded like a dream. She wondered for a moment if this were a dream, if everything had been a dream. The last few weeks were fuzzy, difficult to remember. This thing about prostitution, Skipper in his flamingo shorts. And further back, Bradley’s new girlfriend, her marriage ending. It all would make more sense as a dream, she thought.

“Jenny, did you hear me?” said her mother. Jen had forgotten that her mother had asked her a question. Now she remembered but she couldn’t remember what the question was exactly.

Luckily, her mother repeated it. “Why haven’t you been answering your phone?” she said, enunciating clearly and putting heavy emphasis on each syllable.

Jen realized that she hadn’t seen her cell phone in quite a while. That seemed odd; she usually carried it with her when she left the house. Where was it, she asked herself, beginning to panic, not because she cared about where the phone had gone but because it was scary to have lost track of something that used to be important to her.

Then, from amid the swirl of images and events from the last few weeks, the memory sharpened into focus. “Becky has it,” said Jen. She remembered Becky taking the phone, telling her not to take any calls or talk to anybody. Jen hadn’t spoken on the phone since then. Her mother must have really laid into Becky to have gotten through, Jen thought, suppressing an urge to laugh, which she thought might be rude.

“Hmm, Becky,” said her mother, with mild disdain. For reasons that Jen couldn’t remember right now, Jen’s mother and Becky did not get along. Jen didn’t have any reply, so she waited silently for her mother to say something else.

“Are you okay?” her mother blurted out.

“Of course I’m okay,” said Jen. “I’m fine.”

“I mean, whatever you want to do with your life is all right with me,” said her mother. “I’ve always supported you, right?”

Jen suddenly remembered why her mother must have called. “Mom,” she said, trying to interrupt.

“It’s just, I know I’m not supposed to read the tabloids, but sometimes they say things on the cover and I just can’t help it.”

“You shouldn’t believe everything you read, ma,” said Jen. Her accent was sounding New Yorky, like her mother’s. It sounded strange and remote to Jen, as though her voice had joined her mother’s at the other end of the bad microphone.

“I know you don’t want to talk to me about this, but I’m your mother, and besides, I know what you’re going through.”

Oh no, Jen thought. She had a good idea what her mother was going to say, or what kind of thing, and she didn’t want to hear it. She felt flushed and grumpy and too impatient for this. “Listen, ma,” she said, in a final, half-hearted attempt to stop the speech.

“Don’t let them call you bad names, Jenny. Hold your head high,” her mother said. “You know, when I first joined the Order of the Beckoning Lily, people said horrible things about me. They called me a slut and whore and all the chauvinistic, vanilla bullshit you can imagine.”

Jen hated when her mom used this kind of language. Now there was going to be a long speech, Jen felt sure. She didn’t want to hear it, but she felt too vague and unfocused to try to stop it. She remembered to use the same strategy she used when Becky started on a long rant: breathe and wait for it to be over.

“People just don’t want to confront the mystical aspect of sexuality,” her mother continued, sanctimoniously. “People like your grandmother. It frightens them, Jenny. I know you used to really react against it.”

Yes, Jen, thought, bitterly, her mind sharpening again as a rush of unpleasant memories appeared in clear focus. She remembered high school, and her mother’s twenty-four-year-old boyfriend, and her grandmother coming to stay for two-and-a-half months because her mother had run away. Run away to be initiated into a sex cult. “It’s not a sex cult,” her mother would say. “It’s an erotic occult society.” Whatever you called it, it was completely humiliating. She’d gotten used to hearing about it now, nodding politely at stories of nude mud wrestling rituals and religious ceremonies held in giant, inflatable kiddy pools foaming with sacred oils and bath bubbles.

“Honey, I’m just so proud of you. It’s like you really are my daughter. I had no idea…” Her mother’s voice trailed off, constricting as though she were trying to stop herself from crying. “I’m just really proud.”

Jen was startled. She had never seen her mother so emotional about something she had done. She didn’t know what she should do. She had been planning to tell her mother that the whole story was a lie, but now she felt unable to disappoint her.

“Mom,” she said, noncommittally.

“Some of the younger people in my chapter know about this guy, Skipper,” her mother went on. “They said him and his friends are doing some really radical stuff out there, with the big parties. It’s just another kind of ritual. I mean, it’s not my generation’s type of thing, but I know you have to do things in your own way. This is path of the future, and I think it’s wonderful that you’re embracing it.”

“Um,” said Jen, hoping her mother had finished now. “Thanks.”

“Jenny, just tell me a little about it,” said her mother, eagerly. “Are you up in San Francisco all the time? Are there any other famous people?”

“Ma,” said Jen, plaintively. “Can we talk about something else?”

“Oh, I know, you’re embarrassed to talk to me,” her mother said. “Fine, we can talk about something else.” Her voice took on a haughty, confrontational edge, and Jen knew immediately what the new topic would be.

“Have you spoken to your father?” her mother asked.

“Mom,” said Jen, “you know I don’t talk to him.” Jen’s father lived in Europe with his third wife. Since he had moved abroad, they had spoken only once a year or so. It wasn’t that Jen couldn’t afford the phone charges; she just didn’t feel motivated to call.

“Well, I’ve been trying to reach him,” said her mother. “I can never get him on the phone. That woman is even worse than Becky!” Jen’s mother still called Elsa “that woman,” even though she had been married to Jen’s father for six years.

For the remainder of their conversation, Jen’s mother launched into a lengthy invective about Jen’s father that, according to the clock, which Jen watched fastidiously as her mother talked, breathing in for five seconds, then out for five seconds, and inserting an “uh-huh” every time her mother’s speech paused, lasted exactly nine minutes and forty-five seconds.

Chapter 10:
http://kickoutofyou.blogspot.com/2008/07/10-consciousness-makes-such-noise.html