Free Pretty Dead by Francesca Lia Block Page A

candles. Black marble floors. City shining down below us, looking immune, but it isn’t. Six years ago John Lennon was shot. We were here then, at the eye of the storm again. Lennon was only forty years old and as in love as a man can be. I remember how one Halloween Billy and I dressed in white and flowers, and I wore a long black wig, pretending to be Yoko. I suppose Billy thought this costume, like the crosses he wears, was ironic. I didn’t tell him that it was my fantasy, the way I believed love was supposed to manifest itself.
    But very little looks the way it really is. People aredying fast and it is blood-related, but it has nothing to do with us.
    Billy walks in—dark eye makeup smudged, a long chain in his ear with a cross dangling at the end. His hair is short and bleached, with dark roots, not the teased pompadour I would have expected based on his decadent style from the last decades; he’s a little more dignified now. He doesn’t like how I am dressed—I can tell by his expression—but I am no longer quite as subservient anymore. I’ll wear what I like; it’s about the only way I have to express myself.
    Billy lies down on the couch and turns on the TV. There aren’t any sexy girls or boys lying around on the floor. AIDS has made everyone more cautious, more monogamous. Even though it can’t affect us, it’s hard to watch these lovely men becoming all eyes and cheekbones, then hooked up in a hospital, driven through streets in hearses, in coffins that will never open.
    Once Billy said, “There’s something so beautifulabout all these young people becoming aware of their mortality. It’s a shame it took this disease to do it, though. But it’s still beautiful.”
    I close my eyes and keep dancing, trying to forget that those words came from the lips of the man who has become my whole life.
    Seattle, 1994
    Kurt Cobain has just died. And here we are. Eight years later and we’re in an entirely new era, but our faces are just as youthful. I am wearing a white satin slip dress, a plaid flannel shirt, torn black leggings and black Converse sneakers, and am sitting curled up in front of the TV, drinking wine. I can’t believe Kurt’s dead. He looked like me and Charles. He could have been our brother.
    They say he shot himself in the head.
    Part of me is jealous, although I feel guilty for thinking this.
    Outside it is raining. The relentless rain. Why dowe live here? Our apartment is large and sprawling, with bookshelves everywhere, a fireplace and a wall of windows looking out over the wet courtyard garden. Sometimes I walk around the lake and look at the flowering trees. I go to the outdoor market and buy oysters and wine. Sometimes I spend whole days in a bookstore. Mostly I wait and wait for Billy to come home.
    He’s not back until late that night. I’m still in the chair with the television on. I can’t cry, but I want to more than anything. Without tears the pain turns to rage. I want to smash the TV. Why did you kill yourself? You had everything. Even mortality to save you eventually. What have you left me with? Nothing.
    Manbattan, 2001
    Finally the city is quiet. Too quiet. Hardly any sirens anymore. The silence of defeat. And the air still toxic. Photographs of missing family members paper the walls. I am alone in the apartment again, waiting forWilliam. He’s been gone since it happened. I know he is safe, but I’m not sure I am. I’ve been sitting like this for days with William’s black cat, Ezra, on my lap. I haven’t eaten, showered, or changed my clothes. I have on the same pair of ripped jeans, the same black cashmere sweater. The television is always on, showing the footage of those planes and the towers over and over again.
    At last there is the sound of his key in the door.
    The man I share my life with sits beside me. He has started referring to himself as William again, thinks it’s more “twenty-first century.”
    “What’s wrong with you?” he asks. “You look