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Title: Glamour
Category: VRA When women like Scully die, they have this glamour around them, this bright fever quality that lingers and scalds to the touch yet leaves you no warmer in the end than in the beginning. The way they talk, the way they lift their head, smile, as if they were sure, oh-so-sure that this is the very last time they are going to do this, the very, very last time. This aura about them, this sensation of captivity, a desperation; every movement--slow, quiet, possessed of a gritty sensuality. They are intimately aware of the way their rotting flesh sticks to greasy tables, the way air burns into their lungs, the dull ache between their eyes and the way their fingers must feel on a living man's flesh--cold, like melting ice. They're all knowledge and no life. And Scully's got these eyes like flat as plate glass and -- well, vivid isn't exactly the right word. They're blue as blue as blue and very bright against her pale skin, and her pupils have almost gone grey. She's started smoking again. She had a little bout with it in college, she tells me, and she's picked it up again now because it minutely hastens the inevitable and makes her smile as she rolls the white tube between tired fingers. She tears the cellophane off the packages with quick flicking movements of bony fingers, and she cracks open the cardboard with a pruned up mouth that drops into a sensuous little oh as the lid is removed. The immaculate cigarettes can be seen within, perfectly stacked. The tube is drawn out, expertly flicked into position and lit with the brief flare of light underneath her chin. Movement between cracked lips, her chest expands and she freezes for a moment, allowing the drug to circulate properly within her bloodstream and then exhales, sending jets of dusty smoke curling around my fingers, bringing a smile to her mouth and marring the curious quality of her skin. Marble: really, it's like she's made of marble, little chips and shards of it glued together by Pygmalion's hand. The surface holds steady, but I can feel the crumbling inside her, as low-quality stone degrades into dust, leaving her a vessel made of immaculate alabaster. Alabaster held together with coffee and nicotine, morphine and painkillers and angry force of will. Her eyes are glitter in her skinny little face. Broken cornflowers, drifting down a fjord. Pristine, lacking in emotion, ever so cold, and she catches everything through them, filtering with the little wire glasses at the edge of her nose. "How is Boston?" she says, very quiet, nails clicking against plastic. Casually, she throws out this question, but her eyes--they. . . "Cold," I say. "Wet. Miserable." I want to say because you're not there, but I don't have the guts, and it's not true anyway. "Meet anyone?" she asks. I lie: I shake my head and say no. She knows I'm lying. Her smile's quick and sharp and lances through my boils. . . . . We go for a walk, afterwards: I offer her my coat, and she glares, offended at my presumption on her frality. She chooses to walk in the raw October winds with her hands dug into the pockets of her jean, showing the sharp edges of her shoulders, the pale mess of her face and the crackly hair snipped into a pageboy and yanked back by the cruel rubber band. Everytime she stops to fix it, great snarls of the faded strands come out and she picks them out with an impassive annoyance. We are the only ones out today: not many in Washington at this time of the day, not in this part of town. Too cold for tourists, too early for suits--even the squirrels are asleep. A few pigeons, perhaps, but, mainly, it's the earth and the sky and her. I guess she chose these colors intentionally, these faded denims and the crimson. A lot like her, and she seems curiously at ease in them, the way they droop about her body, falling away to reveal thin shoulders and hollow body in the wind. Even the shoes, ragged cloth Nike's that are the color of mud--long easy stride. I wonder how long it's taken for her to get used to them, but I never get the chance to ask, because she yanks me hard by the lapels of my coat and she pulls me to a stop within the embrace of granite. "Look," she says, pointing to the naked trees. "That's the color of your eyes." . . . . We go back to my hotel room, because she says she doesn't like the way her apartment smells. She says there's too much time, too much remembrance there, lost chances. Me--I'm afraid. So it's my room: the flat, sterile Sheraton furnishings with the pile carpeting and neutral coloring, the complete absence of memory, the disinfected sheets. She seems curiously distracted: off, somewhere, attention drifting once the goal has been achieved, now that my hands are running down her bare flash and She feels. . . . She feels like an icicle, I suppose. One of those long, silver spikes that you break off your windowsill and you kiss. If you bring it in, you can feel it's essence melting away and dribbling off in your hands, dissolving away. But I suppose I must be fever hot to her, because, as I lay her down carefully, carefully ever so carefully on the bed, she sudden smiles and puts both of her hands on my forehead, palm down, leaching, and she whispers, sadly, once, just once: "Warm." And then she's silent again, lapsing into whatever reverie consumes her. Silent. The soft little fluttering noise of her breath, or the sigh of her body as she shifts her position to better accommodate me, but, it's always her eyes, wide, silent, curiously mute behind their drab exteriors. Little droplets of a flat sky, industrial pre-fab slabs of grey-blue that are smooth, dull to the touch. Faded dusty paintpots, cracked around the edges. I touch my mouth to her shoulder, her neck, her ear, the smooth hollow between collarbones, and I bring my fingers across her breast, into her waist, over those hips that are bones jutting through vellum. . . I. . . Her mouth is a cold, collected marvel. Very methodical, rather neat with the regular apertures between teeth, tidy little gums and a faintly bony palate with the flat plateau running down the middle, dribbling off into the darkness, the easy, taut walls of her mouth. They feel silk over beads, with this one rough patch, turning outwards to her lips. And there was no taste. No subsuming brandy burning in my veins, no pulse, no vortex, no overall force that sends me reeling, her wine singing in my veins. She was dying, dying, fading away, so I wanted some everlasting stamp of her, some flavor that would be hers, only hers. Some tiny little remembrance that would cause me to jolt up twenty years from now, start from sleep and think with a soul-hungry pang, this is what she tasted like. None. A flat little exercise in blandness. The indescribable greyness of cigarettes. Stale hotel air. A faded breathmint. A little vein twitching in the fold of her cheek, lazily moving underneath my tongue. I've dreamed about this so much and my mind casually wanders, lapping at the edges and scuttling off into the dusty corners. I'm not even sure if she's watching me, if she even knows I'm here. And when I touch her, she is dry, completely and utterly dry. Something empty falls out of me, and I can hear it clinking on the marble floors. And as if waking from a deep, embalming sleep, she props herself upon her elbows and she blinks down at me, rather puzzled by the predicament, until remembering, with a start, the contents of her purse, from which, slowly, carefully, she extracts a tube and hands to me. Lubricant. And a square, a chip of plastic containing a loop of plastic, and I take this last with a soft, sharp ruefulness for the part of us that keeps up old, empty rituals. . . This makes her to shrug, smile, sadly, trying to make me understand, to impart some sort of understanding with that little twitch of the lips, quiet, sad little smile. The smile of a dying woman, the smile of a dead woman. . . . It was a while later that I remember putting down the phone and having Rodriguez just sort of stare at me, the blood beating in my ears and the memory of Maggie's voice, sibilant and cracked over the phone. I was the next of kin, but she never told me. And she had suppressed the hospital papers, forbade her mother from telling me and prevented me from attending her funeral. I found out because I called her house and her mother answered. And now, Maggie can't say the word. Dead. Maggie, she wouldn't say the word. Skirt around the issue with polite little phrases--deceased, passed away, gone on. Gone on to what? To what? I remember the hurried drive home as one long blur, voices jumping together, startstopstartstop, and the sights streaking together as a failed watercolor run. Faces turned long, pale, startling, and the colors impressing themselves vividly on my brain. Then, there was the slow langorous detail of the swirls on the stucco in my bedroom. Me, lying on the bed and looking up and listening to the rain on the patio outside, water pushing at obdurate brick. And I lay there, and I stared up and I tried to cry. I looked for that long empty pain inside me, the flatness inside, that little ache pushing at the walls of my throat. But it wasn't there. There was this blank sensation, a little hum in my ears and grey covering my gut, and lying on the inside of my eyelids. Nothing -- I wasn't even glad for her. And it wasn't until then I realized just what had fallen out of me that day, what had tumbled out that day. .end '. . . It is sometimes said that the sword wears out the scabbard. That is my history. My passions have made me live, and my passions have killed me. What passions? will be asked. Trifles, the most childish things in the world, which, however, excited me as much as if the possesion of Helen or the throne of the universe had been at stake.' --Rosseau, 'Confessions: Book V'
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