Shalimar the Clown Read Free Page B

someone else, across unknown dimensions of sad memory and lost event. As if she were just a representative, a sign. She wanted to be the kind of woman who could ask a driver, who do you want to touch when you want to touch me. Who, when you abstain from touching me, is not being touched by you? Touch me, she wanted to say to his uncomprehending smile, I’ll be your conduit, your crystal ball. We can have sex in elevators and never mention it. Sex in transit zones, in places like elevators that are between one place and the next. Sex in
cars.
The transit zones traditionally associated with sex. When you fuck me you’ll be fucking her, whoever she is or was, I don’t want to know. I won’t even be here I’ll be the channel, the medium. And the rest of the time, forget it, you’re my father’s employee. It’ll be a
Last Tango
kind of thing without obviously butter. She said nothing to the aching man, who would not have understood anyway unless of course he would, she really had no knowledge of the level of his language skills, why was she making assumptions, why was she making this stuff up, she sounded ridiculous. She exited the elevator and let her hair down and went outside.
    This was the last day she and her father would ever spend together. The next time she saw him it would be different. This was the last time.
    “It’s for you,” he said, “the car, you can’t be such a puritan that you don’t want it.” Space-time was like butter, she thought, driving fast, and this car the warm knife slicing through it. She didn’t want it. She wanted to feel more than she felt. She wanted somebody to shake her, scream in her face, strike her. She was already numb, as if Troy had fallen. Yet things were good. She was twenty-four years old. There was a man who wanted to marry her and other men who did not, who wanted less. She had her first subject for a documentary film and there was money, enough to begin work. And her father was right beside her in the passenger seat as the DeLorean flew up the canyon. It was the first day of something. It was the last day of something else.
    They ate hungrily in a high canyon lodge watched over by rows of antlered heads. Father and daughter, alike in their appetites, their high metabolic rates, their love of meat, their slender high-toned bodies. She chose venison to defy the watching heads of dead stags.
    “O beast, I eat your ass.”
    This invocation she offered up aloud, to make him smile. He chose venison also but as an act of respect, he said, to give their absent bodies meaning. “This flesh whereof we eat is not their true flesh but the flesh of others like them, through whom their own lost forms may be conjured up and honored.” More proxies, she thought. My body in the elevator and now this meat on my plate.
    “I’m a little freaked out by your driver,” she said. “He looks at me as if I’m someone else. Are you sure about him? He checked out okay? What sort of name is that, Shalimar. Sounds like a club on La Brea with exotic dancers. Sounds like a cheap beach resort, or a trapeze artist in a circus. Oh, please,” she raised an impatient hand before he condescendingly attempted to tell her the obvious, “spare me the horticultural explanation.” She pictured the other Shalimar, the great Mughal garden of Kashmir, descending in verdant liquid terraces to a shining lake that she had never seen. The name meant “abode of joy.” She set her jaw. “It still sounds like a candy bar to me. Also, by the way, speaking of names, I wanted to finally tell you, mine is pretty much a burden. This foreign country you made me carry around on my shoulders. I want to be some other name and smell as sweet. Maybe I’ll use yours,” she decided before he could reply. “Max, Maxine, Maxie. Perfect. Call me Maxie from now on.”
    He shook his head dismissively and ate his meat, not understanding that it was her way of begging him to stop mourning the male child he’d never had, to