Pierrot had so little money. Naturally, he didn’t like to waste it. He didn’t even want to part with a penny. But he was enticed and frightened by the machine. He instinctively knew that it was more than it seemed. You could look through a keyhole and have everything you knew about people transformed by what you saw on the other side. It reminded him of Sister Elo?se having him peek under her habit.
And he wasn’t quite sure what he felt: terror or desire. He was unused to desire because he was a junkie. And when he felt it, he got it confused with all kinds of other things. Nonetheless, he dropped his penny in. He had the feeling that he had dropped it down a well. It was irretrievable now. He lowered his head. He pressed his eyes against the telescope that looked down and not up.
There was a girl with a black mask flittering on the screen. She had on a black corset and black panties. She had leather high-heeled boots that went up to her thighs. She was carrying a long riding whip in her hand. She tiptoed quietly and cautiously around the room. She seemed to dance about on her toes as she looked about, searching for a victim who was apparently eluding her.
He didn’t have any trouble recognizing her with a blindfold. They had often played hide-and-seek when they were at the orphanage. In so many of his memories of Rose, she happened to have a blindfold on. Because children who couldn’t hold in their laughter were usually discovered, Rose was often it.
In the film, she was tiptoeing back from the closet when she noticed a pair of men’s shoes sticking out from beneath the bed.
You might think he was upset by what he saw. But Pierrot felt the opposite. He didn’t judge Rose for this. He had also had sex with people he hadn’t loved. Rose was silent up on the screen. He thought she was like a fairy trapped inside a bottle. He had never wanted to make love to someone so badly in his life.
This meant that she wasn’t married. It was a lie. Elo?se had lied. She was by no means leading a conventional life. By no means! And Poppy had been incorrect. She was no protected gangster’s moll. She was free to do as she pleased. She belonged to no man. He could find her. Rose lifted up the bedspread and bent down to peek under the bed.
“Oh, come catch me! Catch me!” Pierrot found himself saying. The screen went black, as if a guillotine blade had dropped.
? ? ?
PIERROT DECIDED to go through withdrawal. For the first time since he had become an addict, he had a reason to get clean. He wanted to have an enormous hard-on when he found his Rose again.
He was sweaty all night. He reached for a teacup. The teacup shivered and shook as though it were a tiny boat on a terribly tempestuous sea. Everything he touched he seemed to electrocute. It was as if his finger were a lightning bolt. He picked up his jacket and it shook like a man being hanged and jerking around trying to stay alive.
He was too cold and too hot all at once. He didn’t know whether or not he was suffering. His body was restless no matter what he was doing. When he was sitting down, he wanted to be standing, and when he got up, he wanted to be lying down. He sat on a chair as he crossed and uncrossed his legs. There were bugs all over him. There were ants in his pockets. He had ants going up his sleeves. They were all around his neck. They were stuck to the sweat.
He puked into a bucket. There was nothing but a little bit of bile. But he knew he had exorcised the demon inside him. How mundane demons were, he thought as he flushed it down the toilet and then washed out the bucket. Our trials always seemed so tiny and insignificant in retrospect, once they faded away into the distance.
He thought of the enormous erection he would have when it was all over. He thought of the look that would be on Rose’s face when he penetrated her the way no man had ever penetrated her before. But most of all, he wanted to do something he had never done before.
He wanted to have sex with someone he was in love with.
35
ROSE IS A ROSE IS A ROSE IS A ROSE
One night Rose went out drinking with the other girls after a long day of shooting. They sat on the row of stools at the bar together.
“Isn’t it an obvious fact that the pursuit of happiness always makes a person miserable?” Rose said ponderously after two beers. “So do you think that if we went out of our way to look for things that made us miserable, we would find ourselves perfectly content in the end?”
“Oh, ne commence pas avec tes idées folles, Rose,” said a girl named Georgette. “Anytime you start thinking and drinking at the same time, you end up going a little bit cuckoo.”
“Don’t worry, my pretty darling. All of you are worried about me steering the night into melancholic waters, but don’t be! I’m in a fantastic mood tonight.”
A man asked her to dance, but she waved him off. She didn’t like following the same steps that everybody else was following. She took a flower from the vase on the bar, stuck it behind her ear and stood.