Marianne Kidder liked to play Ginger. Not just Ginger, she liked to play other women, too, but Ginger was one of the recurring ones. So was Dorcas, the seamstress of purple. She'd dance around, swirling her sheer lavender veil so it hid nothing of her perfect body, her perfect breasts, her delicate shoulders and regal neck, her collarbones and trim back.
Dorcas was Carl's favorite. Ginger was Marianne's favorite. But Marianne got bored easily. She couldn't be any of them for long. At first, you see, at first it was exotic and intriguing and Carl loved it. She was a damned good actress, could have been the biggest star Hollywood ever saw if only she could be somebody fresh, somebody everybody didn't already know.
Carl didn't waste too much time in his decision. He snatched her up before anybody else could get her, and he thought he'd found the perfect woman. He never knew who he'd come home to at night, and he didn't care, because all of them were beautiful, and all of them had their little quirks, their little eccentricities, all of them teased and taunted him, all of them ended in sex, and no two of them made love exactly the same.
Carl couldn't begin to remember them all. He could barely even place himself back in that time when it was still exciting, when he thought all day long about who would appear when he'd open the door. Madonna kept her bra on—the pointy one—and wanted him to lick it like it was her naked titties. Lady Chatterley made him go out and mow the lawn first, so he'd be sweaty and earthy smelling. Elvira bit him, and not delicately, either, and she laughed when he said it hurt. Lorena Bobbitt wanted to tie him up, but he tied her up instead, for safe keeping. Bebe Neuwirth lay back on the bed and told him she was tired and made him do all the work. Victoria Jackson bounced and bounced and bounced and flounced and trounced and giggled. Brittney was just a child back then, which Carl found disconcerting. She wore a Catholic school girl's outfit, with above the knee white stockings and she kept all her clothes on, even her clunky shoes. She just unbuttoned and unzipped and opened and moved things aside.
Within a year, Carl started to understand that something was wrong.
In the second year, he got fired. "I got fired," he told her.
She was Ginger that night. "Did his widdle boss fire him?" Ginger said in her annoying baby talk voice as she pressed her breasts up tight against his back and ran her finger along his brow.
"Stop," he told her. He turned around and took her wrists and repeated, "I was fired."
She puckered her lips, and swayed her hips, and said, "You poor, poor boy," in a sultry, whispery voice.
"Marianne, I need to talk to you."
"Marianne? Where?" she said.
"You," he said. "Come on, really. I need you to be a real person tonight."
She didn't, couldn't, wouldn't—whatever.
He tried to change her, tried to change himself, but it was grueling. He had to come home to Dorcas, with her purple veil, and her dance where she'd twirl and swirl, aloof and unreachable, and what could he do? Ignore her? Turn his back to her? Resist ending her dance, drawing her close, closing his hand around that veil covered breast?
He suffered. Nobody knew how he suffered. He'd kiss Morticia's arm, her willowy, white arm. He'd start at her hand, her wrist, her inner arm where blue veins ran like rivers connecting a thousand lakes, and she'd say, "Later, darling, later," and he'd try to focus, try to stay on task, remind himself that he was on a quest for the real Marianne, but then she'd make her way into the bedroom with those mini-steps inside that constricting dress that followed her form all the way down to her slim little ankles, and later was now, and Marianne remained a mystery.