Permission

Saskia Vogel, Saskia Vogel

• Publisher: Coach House Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781770565814
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Women in Fiction
• Index: Literature

A grieving young woman learns something new about love from a dominatrix in this haunting and erotic debut.

Echo is a failing actress who prefers to lose herself in the lives of others rather than examine her own. When her father disappears in a seaside misstep, she and her mother are left grief-stricken, unsure of how to piece back together their family that, it turns out, had never been whole. But then Orly -- a dominatrix -- moves in across the street. And through her, Echo begins to find the pieces that will allow her to carry on. Set among the bright colours and harshly glittering lights of Los Angeles, this is a love story about people addled with dreams and expectations who turn to the erotic for answers.

T H E L O V E R S

IDROVE AWAY FROM the art centre, as if I could leave it all behind. I drove and drove. So many miles. I drove up the 110. I texted the musician; he told me to come on over. I took the exit for the 405.

The further away from the peninsula I was, the better I felt. Hurtling along the city shallows, night in neon, the twinkling towers, I exited and took the street that led through the gates and wound up the hills, past a pink hotel hidden by palm trees where the musician kept saying he wanted to take me to try the lavender crème brûlée but never did. It was the thought that counted to him; he was thoughtless, but I didn’t mind. Counting the streets past the hotel. I missed the turn almost every time. Counting. I could never remember the street name. Miravista. Loma Linda. Altamira. But I found it. A narrow street with smaller houses, modest family homes, wood siding and shingles, houses left over from a time when wealth meant something else, but my lover was further on. You’d miss it if you didn’t know it was there. Mistake it for a fire road. The long driveway unfurled, a cat’s tongue along a wall holding the land in place. Freshly waxed cars, curves and chrome in the moonlight. Los Angeles cascaded from the edge, a pitch-black shore, a sea of lights, the entire city, stretching out and out, bright, bright and far. Where I was from was only a shadow interrupting the horizon line. He had left the door open for me. I took off my shoes in the entryway and sank into the thick white carpet.

The air in his room was stale. He never opened the window, and every surface was heavy with items displaced from a house he no longer had in the ‘arty’ part of town he still called home – vintage vases, velvet paintings, piles of beads and fabric swatches. Since we’d left the basement bar where we first met last spring, he’d been saying that he was only staying at his parents’ house for a little while. We’d danced until they turned on the lights, and as we walked through the alley to his four-wheel drive, he made it clear he wasn’t looking for anything serious. Perfect, I said. Neither am I.

He didn’t look up when I walked in. He lay on the bed, concentrating on the glow of his laptop. Something, maybe a bat, tripped the security light outside his window and he winced.

He stopped typing and took off his headphones. ‘I’ve been working with a new drummer. He toured with Iggy Pop. Listen.’

I was happy to be here with him, where I knew how to be and no one else knew where I was. Where men like Moradi would never find me.

I put on his headphones.

‘The hook. It’s like…’ I pumped my fists, arms close to my chest, the music reminded me of that new song on the radio. The one everyone knew the moves to. I found the footwork, the swish of my hips. I curled my hands into claws. ‘…this song, you know? But with piano instead of a synth,’ I said, swinging my claw-hands to the left and right.

He glared at me and turned off the music.

‘What?’

‘She stole my hook.’

I didn’t know who he was talking about.

‘Yeah. We used to play together. On that piano.’ He pointed toward his parents’ living room, which seemed to be forever expecting company. ‘And this.’ With a sweeping gesture that took in his entire body. ‘Latex outfits. The “Sirocco Rococo” look. That’s me. Those are my words.’ He turned his hands into claws and shook his head. I hadn’t ever bothered googling him, so I only knew what he told me and that no one I knew had heard of him or his band.

He shut his laptop and rubbed his slim face. He groaned into his hands and jumped to his feet. ‘But fuck it.’ He paced around the room, managing not to trip on the clothing and trinkets scattered on the mauve carpet.

I leaned against a sliver of bare wall and listened.

‘My attorney says I have a case, but this isn’t about winning the battle. She may have – ’ He did the claws again. ‘But she doesn’t have this.’ He pointed to his head. ‘I’ve got a new drummer. I’m talking with an investor about my clothing line. I’m gonna blow up.’

He grabbed me by the waist. ‘You see my world, Echo.’ He pressed his palms together, still, finally. ‘I’m going bring beauty to the people. I’m going to show them what the internet is for.’ He stared into my eyes. His vision of the future was all that ever really got him hard. It was baroque. He needed to picture it, and then he needed a witness. He smiled, baring his goofy teeth. They never failed to charm me.

‘I want you,’ he said.

He fell to his knees and pushed up my T-shirt dress. His tongue, his fingers slipped in. He threw me on the bed. ‘I’ve been taking these steroids for my allergies,’ he said. ‘I did weights last week and boom.’

We looked at his arms. They did look bigger. How hard he fought to be fey, his body conspiring against him, building muscle and bulk as soon he was anything but idle, pronouncing itself a man, masculine, male, in spite of his objections. He put my hand on his biceps.

‘You feel that? I gotta watch what I eat or I won’t fit into my vortex suit.’

He lubed me up in silence. He took his time, as one should. Relaxing the muscle, as one should. I focused on the sweet stretch and ache and let go, emptied my head, and he fucked me with devotion, stroking my hair and mumbling. I kept my body angled so he wouldn’t put his weight on my tender side, the reminder of that pain. I think I was still in shock, carrying on as though everything were normal. When we found our rhythm, I reached between my legs. He finished too quickly for me to come, and I wasn’t prepared for the disappointment, but it didn’t last long because he didn’t stop. He made a show of flipping me over with his big new muscles, which we both found funny. I remembered why I kept coming back. His touch was curious and sincere, intuitive in ways his narrative self was not.

He started to work his fingers inside me. One, two, three. The sensation was not of hand and cunt, but of diving in the dark. Unbearable, wonderful tension. Four, five. Until he could make a fist. Large and slippery inside. I ached, and he put his mouth to me and rested one hand on my chest. Tender. The waves of pleasure were warm swells at first. My mind let go and, through my half-shut eyes, his hand became Orly’s. It was a different kind of ache, and I didn’t fight it. I wanted to know where it would go, and there was no safer place to dream than here. As my heart sped up, racing, racing like when it had last raced, racing against Dr. Moradi’s forearm, it whipped up a storm.

The musician read this as pleasure. In a way it was. I was also remembering her. He ground into me, moved his tongue faster. My heart, my breath, took me back to the panic, the mouth and the fist. Alongside my orgasm, sorrow and fear coursed through me. Slammed me against a car. Left. Everyone always leaving. Leaving me alone. I nudged him away from me, like I did when even the softest touch was too much.

He pulled his hand slowly out from me and flexed his arm. He grinned at his biceps, his hair in ropes, and he stretched out his hand for me to see and said, ‘Everyone needs to be fucked like a lesbian once in a while.’ Only then did he notice I was crying.

‘Are you OK? Was it OK to do that?’ He wiped the tears from my face with his dry hand and cradled my head. ‘Babe, it’s OK.’

I nodded and I let him pull me into his arms and told him that there was something with my heart. Its beating had felt more like danger than desire…it wanted out. I sobbed into his chest, comforted by his green scent, the way his hair tangled in my hands when I grabbed at his back. ‘I just want you to hold me,’ I said, thinking of how rested I felt waking up on Orly’s sofa. Falling asleep without waves crashing inside my skull. I breathed him in until my breath was even again.

‘You can always turn to me. I got you,’ he said, wrapping his arms around me.

I didn’t want to talk, so I kept quiet.

‘You can’t do this for as long as we have…as intensely as we have…’ He was squeezing me too tight. ‘…And not start feeling things.’

I wrung myself out of his grip. ‘That’s not what we agreed,’ I said.

He shook his head at me, like I was a child mispronouncing ‘spaghetti.’

‘You don’t want to be tied down right now. I get it. I can be patient for you. You’ve been AWOL for weeks, and I didn’t even text you. That has to count for something. And, I mean, I wasn’t reading you my lyrics for nothing, right? I don’t just tell people my plans.’

His grand plans involved big names and expensive people like attorneys, but never seemed to be moving forward because he was still at his parents’. But my silence had apparently been speaking volumes to him. I had liked our clean deal. I had liked that everything was on his terms. That he never offered to come to my place, that he only ever talked about us going out and then showed me all the places he’d had his picture taken. This was good. I could relax into our time together by letting him lead and letting our bodies talk, our wordless intimacy. We couldn’t start talking now. This was a person who didn’t know I no longer had a dad. It would have been reasonable to tell him, but maybe I’d wanted to come here because I thought of this space as autonomous, a fantasy, not a place where I could be visited by death. I thought of the calipers and dug my nails into my palms to keep the tears at bay. I said: ‘I didn’t even notice you hadn’t texted.’

With that, he took his hands off me. ‘You’re un-fucking-believable,’ he said. He adjusted his pillows, pulled the duvet over himself. He grabbed his computer, illuminating his bed with its glow. I hadn’t meant to be so cruel. I wanted to apologize, but before I had a chance, he said, ‘You can let yourself out.’

I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT I was doing. I hadn’t thought it through. As I took my usual route from his house to my apartment, it settled in. The last time I’d driven down these streets, my dad had been alive and well. And the idea of my apartment frightened me. I hadn’t been back there. It would reek of ‘before,’ of a time when I knew that, if things went wrong, he’d be there to protect me. Dad was a safety net. I could still be a child with him. I could always say that the life I was living was just pretend.

The light in the carport was flickering. When I shut off the engine, I locked the doors and leaned back in my seat, staring out the windshield at the stucco wall and listening to the cars pass by on the road behind me. I held on to the feeling of being on my way somewhere, travelling with purpose even if travelling was the purpose. When I was in transit, I didn’t need to do anything but focus on the road, the car, the mirrors, brakes, and turn signals, how and when traffic slowed. The other lives on the road.

My apartment would be as I left it, but everything had changed. Maybe I should leave that space uncontaminated and drive back to my mother’s, where these emotions already had a home. But this would mean another forty minutes in the car, forty minutes hurtling at top speed, catching shadows out of the corner of my eye. I pictured the geometry of the freeway, how light skates across its shapes in the dark. Wheels vibrating on tined concrete, racing toward a vanishing point. It wasn’t human. I couldn’t do it without falling apart. Maybe, I thought, I could sleep right here.

I ran my hands over the edges of the instrument panels, the assist grip and the puffy fabric around the vanity mirror, feeling its plastics and leathers and rubbers, all the bits drivers shouldn’t touch while driving. I let the windows fog. I drifted off but jumped when something dropped onto my roof from the jacaranda growing on the sidewalk. It took a minute for the world to stop swimming, for me to make sense of the shadow and light. I thought about the noise of the outdoor coin-operated washing machines at the back of the building being used at night. The things I’d found discarded there.

I hurried through the front gate, keys in hand. I unlocked my front door. My studio apartment was airless and hot, a shoebox space that let all the noise in. The stale old-carpet smell. The venetian blinds were closed, the curtains I’d hung were drawn. I got into bed without turning the lights on. My sheets did not yet smell like sorrow. I feel asleep inside that dream.

When I woke, there was seaweed stuck in the outboard motor, pillow wet, tangled sheets. I kicked myself free. I pushed my face into my pillow like I wanted to press my nose into the groove of Orly’s collarbone, imagining she would let me, and all I had to do was ask. I cupped my hands between my legs, and then my phone rang. I let it. They left a message.

I only realized what I’d been hoping to hear when I heard who it was on the other end. Then the dread set in, the pain of habits breaking, the sound of life skipping to the next track.

‘Surprise, surprise,’ my mother said. A fog had rolled in over her vowels. I wondered how long she’d been keeping herself hazy. If I had driven her to it, like him, to her cigarettes. ‘You left.’

The wash of guilt left me sticky with resentment. How dare she. I couldn’t get angry; she was too good at turning my anger around, making me out to be the one who needed fixing. I swallowed it down.

I heard the flick of a lighter. The storm when she exhaled. In a sing-song voice, she said: ‘I’m smoking.’ I listened to her take another drag. ‘No more hiding it from your fahder.’

I couldn’t remember the last time her tongue had stumbled. I had all but forgotten it could. Fahder. Her pronunciation made me nostalgic – the easy plenty contained in the word ‘home.’ I reached for the feeling, eager to touch it, but it was beyond my grasp and then gone.

‘He liked to play high and mighty but he was worse than me! He said that if I thought of you, it would make me quit. But look at us now.’ She cackled.

My hand was sweating against the phone. I wedged it between my ear and shoulder and wiped my palm on the sheet. It was just like her to pry open my heart only to shiv me through the crack.

English was my mother’s third language, after German – her family’s tongue – and the Dutch she learned in Rotterdam. Three, that is, if you’re not counting the snatches of Italian she still remembered from the summer boyfriend she had at sixteen. Piero. I liked listening to her say his name, the warm rumble of her r’s, a sound I could never quite master. I liked hearing their story, even with the way she pressed her past into tokens.

Piero was a student from Genoa working on the ferry to Capri for the summer, she’d say. (The implication: Only industrious men are worthy of your attention.) They held hands and never kissed. (Chastity is a thrill in itself. There is power in restraint.) And were discreetly escorted by her father, who walked ahead of them on the esplanade, generously offering them the privacy needed for romance to bloom. (I was raised with an easy love. Any difficulty between us is not my fault.) Her father was a saint, and it was really so sad I’d never had a chance to know my grandfather before he died. (There’s something missing that you can’t have.)

At the end of the summer, she left with only the memory of Piero. They didn’t exchange addresses. They made no promises to keep in touch. This detail scandalized me; the idea that love could be temporary. To which she’d respond: ‘Only death is eternal.’

Then she’d say that’s how Vesuvio got his name. Vesuvio then Vivo then Herr Vampirzahn and Mr. Bitey then Vee for short. Vee was the tomcat she brought with her from Rotterdam. He was offish with everyone but her and painfully effective at catching birds. She doted on the cat, making special trips to a Croatian butcher near the harbour to buy offal, railing against ‘America’ for trying to gloss over the role death played in the omnivore’s diet; she called the gutless grocery store chickens in Styrofoam trays wrapped in plastic foil ‘perverse.’ I thought of Vee as Pi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Echo
• Piggy
• The Lovers
• Mother
• Acknowledgements