Buffy Shutt
Disaster Fucking with Bette Davis
Disaster fucking.
Now, stupid! Then what is keeping us alive?
Now hands on my nipples—did he wash his hands?—
and his breath on my neck once a good thing now
wish he had a mask.
The virus is here. Close by. Possibly in this room,
possibly on the tip of his penis,
now ramming inside of me.
The TV is on, now a Bette Davis movie, black-&-white,
I know it by heart. We usually turn off the TV
but maybe he thought I would break in two if it goes dark.
I wriggle under him getting comfortable with the idea
the virus is inside of me
now. That’s okay.
I’ll contain it, I’ll flatten its curve, isolate it. I leave that
and put the slide under the microscope. My daughter
upside-down. I smell citrus. Tangerines. She likes the ones called cuties.
Think of my daughter, our daughter, no my daughter he isn’t thinking about her.
He goes long stretches without thinking about her, he isn’t thinking about her
now as he metes out some rhythmic present I don’t want and if she gets sick
what will I do? I can’t go there. I won’t go there.
I’m not Bette Davis. I’m not in Jezebel, the movie she made
because she wasn’t cast as Scarlett. Margaret Lindsay plays Amy,
saccharine, pretty, mewley. What is wrong with me? I look at the screen.
He doesn’t notice. Bette is brave. I mouth the dialogue, Bette’s southern accent
on my tongue as former lover-Bette fights with wife-Amy over Henry Fonda.
Bette Davis (Julie): But are you fit to go? Lovin’ him isn’t enough….
Margaret Lindsay (Amy Bradford): I’ll make him live or die.
Julie: It’s not a question of provin’ your love by layin’ down your life. Nothin’ so easy.
Amy: What do you mean?
Julie: I’ll make him live… Whatever you might do, I can do more,
I know how to fight better than you. Amy, if you knew the horror… It isn’t a hospital. It’s a desolate island…. You must….. be there with your body between him and Death.
The bed now a bulletin board and I am pinned to it.
He gets imaginative, replacing the absent televised sports
with a new still-in-Olympic-trials position. I go along.
Gives me time to consider what a bad mother I am. And
a bad lover. Now I am on my stomach, half-off the bed.
The virus stealthy & fast moved the bed upside-down. I don’t give a shit
that I am a bad lover—that I can hide. I am flattened, squeezed
into a grain of rice. I am a bad-mother-grain-of-rice.
A tiny nothing.
Now he’s keeping at it. I hate his focus, his enjoyment, his long
minutes away from the virus. Another inequity, gender-discord
runs through me like a fever. I’ve wound up inside those small distorted
profile pictures on Instagram of doctors-strangers-brave nobodies.
Pleading. My brain a firefly. I am on top, now. Not so out of it
as I want. I give a little back to him.
I take him in my mouth. Nancy Reagan pops into my mind.
They say she gave great head in the back of limos
when she was Nancy Davis, B actress and thin. Always thin.
Just say no Nancy. She behind the scenes, the husband out front.
They are responsible
for this. When the air traffic controllers’ union was busted,
we didn’t realize
that was the dam, and when it broke, the virus oozed.
Oozing became what? Dripping. And dripping became streaming
and streaming rushing and rushing flooding and that is when the virus took hold.
Am I insane fucking while Mommy—our President called FLOTUS Mommy—
floats around my head? Get out.
Now fucking is still free—if you believe that, which I don’t.
I’m paying the price right now. The sides of my insides bruised ice cubes.
I want to stuff my crazy scared mind up my ass and let him try to coax it out
with professional fingers.
But I can only think if my daughter calls me,
if she calls me, if she calls me, what if I have to stand up to the virus?
Will I do it? Am I Amy Bradford? Now? I want to be Bette. Goddamn it.
I hear our whole conversation, what she says, what I say, what she says, what I say.
She is soft, lets the phone slip from her mouth, refuses facetime, won’t write down what I am telling her to write down, remember this password, she coughs or clearing her throat calls me Mommy. Each time we fly close . . . the virus interrupts now the white rabbit
with his fucking ticking pocket watch. The virus—he-she-they tarted up in graphs
and maps and concentric circles of pulsing
pink and red. Less and less blue.
I don’t know how long we fuck. A long time—no time.
He comes.
I’m out. Now disaster sleeping.
For two hours,
I am nobody’s
Mommy.
—Submitted on 04/22/2020
Buffy Shutt‘s work has appeared in Lumina, Whatever Keeps The Lights On, Rise Up Review, Dodging the Rain, Split Lip Magazine, and other journals. A former movie producer, she lives near Los Angeles.
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