Honey is Sweeter than Blood Read online

  “You are, huh? I’m glad you’re sure. I’ve been trying to reach her for hours. I think I’m going to go to Boston tonight to find her…”

  “Um, I could come with you,” I offered. “To help.”

  She snorted an unpleasant little laugh. “Thanks, but I’ll look for her myself. Call me tomorrow.”

  “Okay. So…”

  But she hung up before I could stammer anything else.

  * * *

  For five excruciating, long dull days—days in which I wondered how I had ever made it through eight hours of mind-numbing work without Damask in my life—from home at night and even from work during the afternoon, I tried to reach Damask on the phone, but she didn’t pick up or return the messages I left on her machine. I knew she wasn’t away; when I left a new message on her answering machine, there were no beeps of previously recorded messages by me which she hadn’t got to yet. She had listened to them. She was blowing me off; it was as simple as that. She had had her fun, and maybe I wasn’t fun enough, and now I was discarded. Angry, hurt, fragile and ashamed, I was tempted to drive over there after work unannounced, but when I sent her an email from the coffin of my cubicle—from which I was liberated each night like a vampire reborn—she at last gave me a response. We sent a flurry of messages back and forth, practically in real time.

  Me: I was worried. Where were you? In Boston with Simone?

  Damask: Phetsamone is dead. She died in childbirth. I’ve been bringing her stuff to her family. Haven’t exactly been in the mood for socializing. Sorry.

  Me: Oh my God, Dam, I’m so sorry. That’s terrible! I didn’t know women still died in childbirth. Is there anything I can do for you?

  Her: Like what? I’ll see you on the weekend. Come over Saturday around one. I have an art project to finish up this week, and I’m feeling under the weather.

  Me: I understand. You must really miss her. Oh God, I’m so sorry. I wish I could have met her. :-(

  Her: You’d have liked Fat-simone. I called her that sometimes, cause she had that cute round Laotian face. She was too sweet for this world. By the way, if you ever use an emoticon again I’ll stomp on your throat.

  Me: Sorry. Jeez…I didn’t know Simone was pregnant, too. Funny that you both were.

  Her: Now neither of us are. I had an abortion yesterday. See you on Saturday.

  I sat dumbly staring into my monitor, as if hypnotized by the flashy banner ad at the top of the screen advertising a hair treatment for balding men …inanely, I thought of Dwayne. I didn’t know what to write back to her. Ultimately, I didn’t write anything. I couldn’t say, “I’m sorry”—could I? It wasn’t a miscarriage. I couldn’t say, “Congratulations.” Or even, “Oh. An abortion. So how do you feel?” She’d already said she felt under the weather. The word “abortion” has such impact in our culture. It’s a word that makes you want to lower your voice when you utter it, lest one or another of its advocates or detractors prick their ears and clench their fists. The fact was that no matter how common abortion obviously was, I had never known a person before, personally, at least to my knowledge, who had had one. The fact was that I knew very little about it at all.

  Damask had said the word so matter-of-factly. As if she’d told me she’d had her teeth cleaned. I knew it was her way. Hipper than hip, cooler than cool, unfazed by life, seen it all. Still, I pictured that mobile with its doll-like parts hovering, slowly rotating, like the thoughts in my head. I was nearly able to smell that miniature, mysteriously unopened refrigerator in one corner of her large bedroom. And that was when I suspected that I was beginning to understand Damask and her art—which again were one and the same thing—a little bit better.

  * * *

  Saturday at one o’clock promptly, not a minute too early or too late, afraid to stir her into ill temper, I knocked and immediately the door opened like a theater curtain parting to reveal Damask standing in the threshold like an insane twelve-year-old dressed or undressed for Halloween. Had anyone else been walking along the hallway at that moment, one of her Asian neighbors, they would have seen Damask boldly framed in that threshold wearing nothing but black stockings, black garter belt, black high heels that didn’t add much to her height, black pubic hair, long black gloves up past her elbows, and a black plastic mask like Zorro’s that obscured only the area above her nose and mouth. These scant black strokes against her white flesh, calligraphy on paper, only made it seem to luminesce in contrast, to glow through the translucent membranes of her stockings. Behind her, I saw and smelled patchouli scented candles, the apartment otherwise dark.

  “Welcome,” she said softly, murkily, “to my performance of Cupid’s Caress.”

  “Cupid’s…”

  “Every one of my performance pieces are named, sir. Each is its own entity, like a painting, or a sculpture. How fortunate you are, sir, to be experiencing this artwork tonight. Many people have paid large sums to do the same.”

  “I…appreciate it,” I said, trying not to smile smugly, crudely, or be too obvious as I took in her nipples, which she had painted black with the same lipstick she wore on her small haughty sneer of a pout. I wanted her to see me as a connoisseur. Patron of the arts.

  “Come in, sir.”

  “Of course…”

  As we went through the darkened livingroom I couldn’t tell how much of its decor was missing now that Simone was gone. We went straight to the bedroom, where undulating candlelight across the folds of the satin sheets made the bed look like a rippling pond of blood. Damask instructed me to undress, and to lie back on the bed. I did so, uncritical of her artist’s technique thus far. My cock felt heavy across my belly, but at the same time eerily vulnerable in the flickering gloom.

  And then she began to lightly caress me, beginning with the sole of one foot. The caress was a bit rough, however, raspy. When her touch made its way slowly up my leg, I could see why. Even in the dusk of the room. In her gloved right hand, Damask held the disembodied arm of a fetus, dried to a mummy-like rubbery hardness. The tiny limb was raking me more than caressing me, despite its undeveloped nails, as Damask drew it up the inside of my thigh…

  I flinched when she traced the limb across my balls, then up the shaft of my penis, as if to map its veins. Those veins seemed to grow even more full with blood, if that were possible. The little hand, dark as a monkey’s, like a shaman’s totem, a paintbrush, the touch of her psyche, now traced the rim of my glans. One finger teased into the hole at its tip, drawing out a single sugar-water tear of pre-ejaculate.

  Cupid’s caresses ventured through my pubic hair, briefly snagging in it. Into and out of my navel. Across my nipples. Into the thatches of my underarms, slowly, agonizingly, up my throat. Around my lips, circling, circling. And then, at last, between them…where I sucked on the thing, gladly, while Damask’s other black hand, invisible in the nearly black room, as if it had been severed, the touch of a ghost, closed around my member and brought me to shuddering climax.

  * * *

  In a Chinese robe, black with a colorful dragon raging across the back, that back turned to me, Damask began brewing us some coffee in the kitchen by candlelight. I was toweling off from a shower.

  “You’ve done this with many other people, you said,” I dared to state, rather than ask.

  “Tim. Don’t cheapen my art with jealousy.”

  “I just…”

  “I told you. They pay. I gave you a private exhibition. That should mean something to you.”

  “It does. I told you…I appreciate it.”

  “Then don’t get childish about it.”

  She got milk from the little fridge, too quickly for me to see anything much inside there. Just a glimpse of stacks of airtight plastic containers, with cheerily colored lids.

  Again, I summoned up my courage, and managed to say, “I want to see more.”

  “You do, huh?” She turned to face me, the black lipstick now only a smudged shadow staining her mouth. The mask was gone. “Are you sure?”
<
br />   “Yes.”

  She directed her gaze in a profile toward a candle guttering atop the stove beside her. Seemed to lose herself in its tiny hot core. Moments melted away, then she said distantly, “I don’t like being alive. But I don’t have the courage to be dead. I wouldn’t want to hurt my foster parents that way, I guess. Even if they have more or less disowned me these days. Like Dwayne did. Everybody but Simone.”

  “I won’t disown you,” I breathed.

  She chuckled lightly, as if bitterly amused. “We’ll see.” She faced me again. “Simone loved me. She died for me. She died for my art.”

  This didn’t shock me as much as either of us seemed to think it would, though I did feel a cold trickling like ice cream down the inside of my sternum. I knew that to betray horror at this revelation, this confirmation, would only put her on the defensive. And then I might lose her, this rare nocturnal butterfly, midnight black and torn like rags or clouds. But it wasn’t just that I didn’t want to betray horror. In a way, I didn’t feel horror so much as I felt touched by Simone’s love, her dedication to her friend’s—her lover’s—vision. This admiration was mixed with more jealousy, however. I tried not to let that show, either.

  “She wasn’t the only one making the…the…” I began. But I faltered, trailed off.

  “The clay for my art. No. We both did.”

  “Are all these…” I gestured in the direction of the bedroom.

  “No, they aren’t all from me, or from her. Some of them I got through my connections. From schools. From clinics. Just trash that no one misses.”

  “But…aren’t you afraid of what you might do to your body? Of ending up like Simone? You can’t be going to a legitimate abortion clinic. Not if…not if they’re letting you keep them…”

  “Childbirth is even riskier, isn’t it? Going full term? Even more destructive to the body. This abortion I had last week was only a menstrual extraction, as they call it. The tissue is very soft. When they suck it out it’s like a puree.” She poured and handed me a mug of coffee, after first adding some milk to it. “I’ve had every kind, except for a partial birth abortion. That’s what Simone was having, this last time.”

  “How many…” I started wispily.

  “How many have I had? Or how many kinds of abortion are there? Let’s see, in the first trimester—that’s ten weeks—they suck it out with a hollow tube with a sharp edge. This doo-hickey is like thirty times more powerful than a vacuum cleaner. It sucks the thing out, then the sharp edge is used to cut the placenta out of the uterus wall…

  “At four months, I’ve had a prostaglandin injection to stimulate premature labor, with contractions so violent they crush the fetus, though sometimes they’re still born alive. They come out whole. This one can be dangerous to the mom. I’m not sure if legit abortionists use it anymore…

  “I’ve also had saline amniocentesis. That’s salt poisoning, to you. The fetus breathes and swallows this shit and dies in about an hour from vasodilatation, edema, (she was counting off on her small fingers with their black painted nails) congestion, hemorrhage, and shock. Premature labor delivers an intact but extinguished fetus the next day. Abortionists call them ‘candy apple babies’ ‘cause they can come out all red from being burnt…”

  “How do they kill them the way Simone had it done?” I regretted using the word “kill”, but Damask seemed to overlook it.

  “Partial birth. They like to call it ‘Intact D&E’, which sounds nice and benign. What happens is the abortionist pulls the baby entirely out feet first, but leaves the head inside. Then he punctures the base of the skull with scissors, puts a catheter in the wound, sucks out the brain which collapses the skull like a balloon and voila—out pops the immaculate misconception.”

  “How far into the pregnancy do they do that one?”

  “Up to four weeks short of birth.”

  I had all I could do to keep from gasping. A coworker of mine had given birth to a premature baby much younger than that. One pound at birth, but he was a solid little kid of six now that she’d brought into the office one time. “Is that legal?” I asked, hopefully in a perfectly calm voice.

  “Yeah. I read recently about a woman who used a partial birth abortion to terminate a pregnancy because her baby was having seizures. It seemed to her to be the more humane fate for the thing. And who else can judge that, huh? She’s the one who had to carry the thing, would have to care for it, watch it suffer this physical condition…”

  I nodded, not willing to voice an opinion. Not willing to even take on an opinion. It seemed beyond my grasp, my abilities, to do so. No wonder those men I often thought of as brown-nosers would rather leave it to the women to decide such matters alone.

  “It sounds gross, huh? But so does a mastectomy, if you read about it. Open heart surgery. But that stuff can save your life, as violent as it seems, right? You want to see something ghastly? Watch someone getting a face lift some time. And you know what’s also ugly to hear the details of? A six-year-old kid beaten to death by a father who never really wanted him. A teenage girl knocked up by her stinking drunken step-dad. A woman getting impregnated by some worthless waste of DNA rapist who should have been aborted himself. That stuff is unpleasant when you get the gory details of it, too, isn’t it?”

  She was getting worked up. Defensive. Maybe she had seen the surprise in my expression. I tried to gently steer her back to her friend. “So Simone…Simone was that far along.”

  “Yeah. Farther than I ever took it.” She blew the steam off her black coffee. “Guess I didn’t want the stretch marks.”

  I nodded again, which seemed to be the best response, and sipped at my coffee thoughtfully or thoughtlessly. “Did Dwayne…did he ever know about you doing this, for your art?”

  “No. I never told him. But I was pregnant from him, the first time I did it.” She smiled widely, so that I could see her teeth. Usually her smiles barely stretched her sealed lips. “He was seeing Tamsin then, too. Bet she wouldn’t be happy about that, his perfect little Princess Die. So…little Corey wasn’t his first.”

  I nodded. I said nothing. I sipped my coffee. I was horrified. I was fascinated. I wanted her again.

  * * *

  Over the passing weeks I tormented myself with cinematic images of Damask inching that mummified, magical monkey’s paw along the quivering, sweaty body of some fat, wealthy, balding patron of the arts. I tortured myself by imagining Damask and the now inadvertently aborted Phetsamone erotically entwined, whispering the secret language of women into each other’s hot kiln. But the sweeter tortures kept me enthralled. Damask was a walking museum of wonders, the whole of the Smithsonian’s attics and basements locked up in her head, every thought and dream, fantasy and fear labeled in a jar of cloudy formaldehyde.

  I was a lucky man, you see; a privileged soul. Because Damask treated me to more of the performances that I knew other patrons were paying thousands of dollars for.

  In the piece called Ultrasound, Damask had taken a rubbery toy-like figure out of a large jar filled with alcohol, worm out of the tequila bottle, kept in a closet I was not allowed to open. She had placed this creature against her belly, and then held it in place by tightly twining clear plastic cling wrap around her middle. Shiny, like a window of glass letting me view the mystery inside her. Her skin through this plastic felt hard and smooth like plastic itself. And I palpated the fetus through this membrane, with my hands, and then with my lips. Damask had recovered enough from her most recent abortion that I could penetrate her again, and when I lay atop her, the fetus was snugly sandwiched between us as if we were both pregnant with it.

  For the piece entitled Dressing Up in Mommy’s Clothes, Damask stood motionless in one corner of the room, a scalpel in her right hand, nude except for one black stocking. The other stocking had been filled almost to the brim with all of the contents of the plastic containers from her miniature fridge. Like an Xmas stocking, lumpen with exciting, unknown treasures. Then the open end of
the stocking had been tightly bunched and sealed like the end of a huge sausage.

  The smell was terrible, with my nose pressed right against the coarse translucent black and my tongue traveling along its length, so awful that several times I actually retched. My cock was engorged with gore as the stocking was engorged with soft, near-boneless flesh. I sucked on the end that would have been toes. And at last, Damask came forward wordlessly with her sharp blade and made a small incision in the stocking. I knew what I was to do. I slipped my tongue into this hole, holding my breath, exploring the moist heart of the fruit beneath its bruised skin. And then I inserted my aching penis into this rough-lipped orifice, and lay atop the stocking, though not with all my weight for fear of bursting it (as it was there was a trickle of fluid that seeped and wept out), and I pumped myself into this icon, staring at Damask in her corner one minute, then down at the shapes that shifted inside the nylon skin, imagining (or not) that I saw small faces and limbs pressing against the material, then sinking again like water nymphs to be replaced by other forms as my cock stirred the half-liquid interior, interior of a womb, interior of a mind as if I fucked Damask in her brain, interior of a dream, of a conch whistling the song of amniotic seas, and my live sperm was disseminated throughout, blended within, and I don’t know if it were part of the performance or if Damask had given herself over to her own passion, but I saw her right hand working at her vagina, and for a moment I was alarmed that she had inserted the scalpel inside herself, but then I noticed it glittering near the candle on the work bench beside her.

  Lying back on the bed, spent, I watched her return the contents of the stocking to the various brightly-lidded containers, wondering how much sperm had swum and died in those stews before mine had been added. I saw Damask hold up a few large morsels, older and gamier, sniff them, even gag once herself, then drop them into a trash bag. She would need more clay for her art soon, I knew, and I didn’t doubt that without Phetsamone it would be harder to harvest it in quantities. I imagined she would need to get in touch with her contacts at the abortion factories and medical schools again.