The Juliette Society(68)

I guess Anna’s influence must be rubbing off on me too, because I’ve found myself starting to dress more like her. Not just like her, but in her actual clothes. I’m wearing this semi-sheer white tank top with a scoop neck that shows off my bra. I asked Anna if I could borrow it, even though I wasn’t sure it really suited me at all. And I’m wearing her leopard print Lycra leggings and stiletto sandals; the kind of look that tells a man, I am ready to eat you. Even Jack looked at me strangely this morning when I came out of the bedroom dressed and ready to leave, because he’s never seen me wearing things like this. And when he looked at me, I wondered if my crush on Marcus had gone too far.

Now I’m here it just seems like a lot of wasted effort for nothing because Marcus is ignoring me as usual. He’s talking about Scottie’s insistence that Judy dress in exactly the same manner as her deceased doppelgänger, Madeleine; the same clothes, the same hairstyle and hair color. I’m dressing like Anna for Marcus, but whatever I’m doing clearly isn’t working, clearly doesn’t make him hard. Now I know Marcus has a thing for blondes, I’m wondering if I should just go the whole hog and bleach my hair, so that I’m as close to Anna as I can be without actually being her. I can see that Marcus isn’t hard for me because he’s wearing his brown suit pants again.

Marcus is telling us that everything we need to know about Hitchcock, the man, is contained in the films he directed and I figure it’s kind of like the way they say that clothes make the man. I’m deconstructing the meaning of Marcus’ brown suit pants – the pants he always wears – to try to get to the bottom of who he really is. And I wonder if they’re the only pair he owns or whether his closet, when he’s not standing in it waiting for Anna to arrive, is like Mickey Rourke’s closet in Nine and a Half Weeks; filled with multiple pairs of the same set of clothes. The same white cotton shirt with the band collar that he always wears too, and those trousers, tight around the crotch and ass, slightly flared at the legs. The kind of trousers that went out of style at the end of the seventies.

I wonder if he trawls through thrift stores looking for exactly that style, with those exact measurements. The ones that hold his package firm and show it off at the same time. Then I decide that if Marcus has kept his mother’s clothes in pristine condition all this time, it’s probably more likely he bought them new, or almost new.

Marcus must be in his mid- to late forties, and when I do the math, it seems like he would have started dressing like that around the time that puberty hit, at twelve or thirteen. Or maybe a few years later, if he was a late starter.

Those trousers had probably already gone out of style by then. So I decide he must have some emotional attachment to them. That maybe they’re the trousers his father used to wear and, when he first put them on, they made him feel like a man, they made him feel like his dad, and he knew he didn’t want to dress any other way.

I don’t know any of this for sure but I figure that anyone who has a mommy complex as all-enveloping as Marcus must have issues with a father figure who was absent from their childhood emotionally or physically or both. And it makes me feel kind of sorry for him and I wish I could go right up and hug him tight and gently whisper in his ear that it’s going to be alright. But that’s never going to happen because Marcus always seems so serious and unapproachable in class.



Sitting in class, listening to Marcus, I have one eye on the clock because I’m waiting for Anna to arrive. Anna’s late to class, as always. I’m waiting for the door to open so I can start to make a log of the times that Anna makes her big entrance and see if some pattern emerges. Marcus is forty-three minutes and thirty-two seconds into his hour-long lecture, which he somehow manages to time so that they end almost the very second the bell goes. He’s covered all the relevant paraphilias and now he’s onto the fetishes.

I glance again at the clock on the wall above the door. It’s five minutes from the end of the lecture and Anna still hasn’t arrived. She must be trying to push the envelope this time, leaving it till the last possible moment. She really wants to piss Marcus off.

My attention is fixed on the hands of the clock as it ticks its way to the top of the hour, on the crack of the door that I’m waiting to see open. I can hear Marcus’s voice but, for once, I’m not really listening. The seconds tick away. The tension is unbearable. I’m sitting on the edge of my seat, the way I figure people did when Vertigo was first released and people in movie theaters up and down the country watched Scottie chase Judy up the steps of that bell tower to her death.