Further Out Than You Thought

by Michaela Carter

  She froze. Holding the stick, she was hovering, behind her own shoulder, watching herself hold the stick, watching herself absorb its meaning. She was more, more than herself. According to this stick, she was plus one.

  Or was she? These tests weren’t infallible. She still had a one percent chance. Maybe her chemistry was funky. She’d try the next stick tomorrow. First thing in the morning.

  Who was she kidding?

  She pulled the second stick from the box.

  Nine

  ACROSS FROM TONY her tart red juice and soda was waiting for her. She sipped it through the straw and didn’t stop until, at the bottom of the ice, she reached air. She sat back. “I’m pregnant.”

  He stared at her, set his drink down. “You’re sure?” He leaned back in his chair, as if to view her at full length, to take her into consideration holistically, as one might assess the value of a house. Location, lot size, roof, flooring, square footage, plumbing, it all mattered. It all added up.

  She sucked an ice cube, chewed it.

  She knew when it had happened—the sowing of the seed. Leo had been asleep on the couch in his long red coat, in his vest and white shirt and knickers, his buckle shoes and tricornered hat on the carpet. She’d come home from dancing and found him like that. So she’d played the succubus, unbuttoning his knickers and taking him in his sleep—something she hadn’t done in more than a year. Asleep, he was hers. Whispering in his ear, pulling her fingertips over his body, she entered his dream. “Who am I?” she had said, sitting down on him. He laughed. “Don’t you know?” In his dreams, she had another face, another body. She was clothed in his fantasies. In that moment, she had loved him without reserve. Inside her and asleep, he was vulnerable and transparent. He was beautiful. And she got carried away. When he tried to lift her from his hips—their routine so ingrained he did it even in his sleep—she stayed on him, one second too long as he came.

  Tony’s blue eyes were on her. He was waiting for her answer.

  “I’m sure,” she told him.

  “So. What will you do?”

  She shrugged. She shouldn’t have told him. She wasn’t ready to field questions. She had no idea what she’d do.

  “You could have whoever you want right now. Think about it. Leo’s a musician. How will he support a family? Besides, you’re getting your master’s and he—does he even have a college degree? You’re going up and up and where is he going?”

  “You sound like my father.”

  His eyes narrowed, pinning her down. “Do you even want a family? How will you write with a baby?”

  He had a point. And here, he differed from her father, who had never understood her desire to write. When she was a child of five, it was her mother she’d dictated her poems to, and, later, when she could read, her mother had been the one to buy her books. Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elizabeth Browning and Elizabeth Bishop and Stevie Smith—all of them, it occurred to her now, women who hadn’t had children.

  She put a hand on her navel. “An abortion seems too awful.”

  “It’s nothing. You do it. It’s over. You move on.”

  Brett was dancing again.

  The song was Leonard Cohen. His growl speaking just to Stevie. If you want a father for your child, or only want to walk with me a while across the sand, I’m your man. She knew Leo wouldn’t leave her, not ever. But what sort of father would he make? The opposite of her own father, married, for his whole life, to his law practice. Gone early, home late. His best friend his bottle of Glenlivet.

  She watched Brett strut the rim of the stage, watched the five men scoot their chairs in and sit at attention, staring up at her—Lady Brett Ashley—this Aphrodite for the nineties. Her tight curves androgynous. She moved in esses, slow as that hidden snake around her arm might move through hot sand. Brett bent at the waist, hooked her black G-string with her thumbs as if to slide it over her hips and down.

  G-string—the lowest string on a violin, which, when struck, would make the whole body of the instrument hum.

  One of the men reached into his pocket, put more money on the stage. She strolled his way, let him be the one to take her in. Her G-string over her thighs, over her straight knees, her head between her legs, she watched him stare.

  Posing, pausing, she possessed. She stopped time, luminous. And the man with his drum of a heart—in her, the man was caught, his desire the measure of her power, the wall of air and space between them palpable. She was the goddess incarnate, right here in the Century Lounge, more mysterious because he could not touch. Her salt-smell so close, Stevie could feel him lick his lips.

  She’d be up next.

  “I have to go,” she said to Tony.

  “Say you’re sick. Have lunch with me.”

  So that was why he had come to the club so early.

  He stood when she did. Avuncular Tony. Quiet and kind and solitary. He looked bewildered, as if, with her being pregnant, he’d lost what had defined him.

  She kissed him on the cheek. “I’ll think about it.”

  Behind the red curtain, waiting for her song, Stevie sat in one of the folding metal chairs in front of the mirror, watching Devotion dot cover-up on Love’s ass. Love held the back of a chair, her long black hair spilling over it and onto the seat. “We got tired of the L.A. club scene,” she was saying in her throaty southern drawl. “There’s the Roxy. So fucking pretentious. Or the Whisky with the rockers. It never was my thing, but Linda likes to go out. So we tried Club Fuck. No one makes you do what you don’t want to.”

  Stevie reapplied her lipstick. Wine-dark. Like Homer’s sea. She blotted her lips on her hand. The scene in the mirror—Love and Devotion—felt far away. It felt two-dimensional, like a film she was watching—as though this time in her life were already a memory.

  “Last night was a body piercing,” said Love. “They shaved this girl’s head and stuck needles in it.”

  Devotion took a few steps back, eyeing Love’s ass as a makeup artist would. “Were they sterilized?”

  “Lord, you’d hope so. Then Linda—she’s my husband—she whipped me with a knobby whip. She’s the only one I would trust to do that.”

  “Your husband?” said Devotion, backing up still further to better assess Love’s ass.

  “When her name was Dan we used to fuck. Now we’re just girlfriends. She’s on hormones, had her boobs done, but she has to wait a year before they’ll lop it off. Lord, she was handsome.”

  Love arched her back as Devotion brushed her ass with powder—that final layer, to set the makeup, to catch the light and, thereby, to define the line, the shadow trailing the curve. She dusted off the excess, and the cloud that filled the room was the essence of theater.

  Theater, what Stevie had thought she’d wanted. The reason she’d come to this city. To act. To break into the cruelest profession—break into, as if it were glassed in, like a jewel case she wanted to live inside—to be seen, to be valued, to know her worth, to become what her mother had been—a success.

  “What do you think, Stevie?” Devotion asked. Love’s bruises were the color and size of blackberries, sugared for baking.

  “They look all right, but do they hurt?”

  Love tossed her head back, filling the room with its just-washed smell. She checked her ass in the mirror. “They look worse than they feel,” she said.

  Watching her step into the red glow of the showroom, Stevie wished she could, like Love, feel something, anything. She wanted a bruise she could push on, some tender spot to know she was alive. She’d have slapped her own face if Devotion weren’t in the room.

  Devotion took her Altoids tin from a crack in the wall and rolled a joint. “What’s that guy’s name? The bald guy you dance for?”

  “Tony?” Stevie slipped her shoes off and stretched her feet. She drank from her bottle of water.

  “Yeah. Don’t you think he’s sexy? I love bald men. Do you think they shave or use Nair? You know, to get that smooth, shiny look?”
She lit her joint, puffed and contemplated. “Unless Nair would give them brain damage,” she said on her exhale.

  Stevie laughed, choking and spitting up the water.

  “You look like shit,” Devotion said.

  “Yeah?” Stevie said. “I’m pregnant.”

  It helped to say it out loud. Pregnant. With one word, the reality of her situation took on a vibration. It resonated in her chest, her throat. Pregnant, pregnant. Its rhythm trochaic. Approaching footfall. The long a sound—pray—what she would have to do. And then the g and the n smack in the middle. The g was sexy, as in G-spot, or G-string. G, a grand. What Tony would pay her to have lunch with him. And n for negative. What she wasn’t. She was not not pregnant. At the tail end of the word came the ant—how small she wished she could become. So she could hide from even herself.

  Devotion took a hit. “Pregnant? I didn’t know you had a guy.”

  “I do. Sort of.”

  “I guess you don’t want this.” She stubbed out the joint, closed it in the Altoids tin and stashed the tin in the wall.

  Brett stepped in from the stage, cash in her fist. She wiped the sweat from her forehead with her wrist.

  “Stevie’s pregnant,” said Devotion, moving for the door, as if her condition were contagious.

  She felt her chest constrict. No, she thought. Gwen is the one who’s pregnant.

  Stevie? Gwen? Who was she? She could feel the walls crumbling, feel her mask slip. She thought she might cry. She hadn’t wanted Brett to know, as if her being pregnant would disappoint her somehow.

  Brett didn’t look at her. Gwen thought she saw her jaw tighten. “No shit,” Brett said, and put her feet on the counter and counted her take—ones, a few fives. She added it to the wad of twenties in her purse.

  Louis Armstrong was playing and the stage was empty, but Stevie took her time strapping her shoes on. They were alone, and Brett was going to say something. Stevie could tell.

  Brett looked at her in the mirror. It was safer that way.

  “I was pregnant. A few years ago. It was my boyfriend’s baby.”

  Brett glossed her lips with her finger. Her look hardened.

  “You can’t write with a baby. And he’s a writer. A good one.” She swallowed. “You have to starve for a while.”

  Ten

  CENTER STAGE, STEVIE closed her eyes, moved by feel. With Brett’s income, they weren’t starving, even if he was a full-time writer. Did that mean Brett was supporting him? Waiting for him to sell a novel, a screenplay before she quit? The thought angered her. It was what she’d been doing—supporting Leo. Waiting for something to change. She was used to compromise, she reasoned. But Brett? Brett was too beautiful for that.

  Stevie could feel the warmth of the lights on her shoulders, on her face and her chest. The lights were the sun. She was dancing on a beach somewhere. Mexico. Brazil. She could smell the ocean, feel a slow breeze in her hair.

  Her eyes opened, and beyond the lights, there was nothing. There was smoke and shadow. She was the show and where she wanted to be was anywhere but here. The four-inch heels, the black lace and gauze didn’t fit this dance. She pulled off the costume, pulled her G-string off Brett-style, slow and easy. Holding on to the pole, she slid off her shoes.

  She wore nothing, not pearls, not shoes. There was a new thrill in this, a new edge. Her heart in her ears became the rhythm, the pulse of the showroom.

  Showrooms are used to sell new cars and boats, new sofas and entertainment systems. What it is we’re supposed to want. The lot of us. To go zoom-zoom. To lie about in comfort, all we could desire within the reach of our fingertips. Here, it was girl flesh on display—rosy, ripe. Not to take home and call your own, but to watch and to want, so long as the music played. Here, desire itself was for sale.

  The stage, she knew, dancing in her bare feet, was just that—a stage one passes through. How long did she have, even without this baby? How long could she play the girl? The breezy, unattainable object of desire.

  She watched Tony follow Love to a private dance booth—the corner booth. Their booth, Stevie’s and his.

  So, Stevie thought, now that she was spoiled goods, he was done with her. She took her breasts in her hands. Her swollen breasts that would continue to swell, that would feed if she let her body have its way, if she let it take her like a tide to some far shore.

  Around and around the pole. Such quick revolutions.

  In another year, in two, would she still be here? Dancing with abandon? Abandon—that pasty, diaphanous partner who would always leave her ample room to give herself to whichever song happened to be on and to whichever eyes happened to be watching, that partner who would never lay claim.

  Don’t forget our Monday date that you promised me last Tuesday, Armstrong sang. And then there was silence. The room was silent and dark.

  “Power’s out,” she heard Joe say through the open window of his booth.

  And Love’s voice from behind the curtain of the dance booth where she and Tony were having their time, her southern drawl never so appropriate. “My pussy got so hot it must have blown a fuse.”

  She could hear Tony’s dry laugh. Tony, whose money she didn’t need.

  Alone in the dark, she laughed at herself. What right did she have to be jealous? He was her customer, her regular. That was the extent of their relationship. She danced for other men, and he was free to watch other girls.

  It was a line she’d walked with Leo when she’d first started dancing. Then he’d played her dresser, washing her costumes, her makeup artist, applying the thick white base, the eyeliner at the outer edges of her eyes to make them look big. He’d been her chauffeur, driving her to and from the club, and her cook, with a meal on the table when she was off work, even at two in the morning. For this, she had paid for him to get into the club, and she’d given him money to tip her. It was when he tipped other girls with her money that he crossed the line. Would it have made a difference, she still wondered, if the money had been his rather than hers? His point had been that if she could dance for other men, he could tip other girls. Yes, but not with my money, she had insisted. He hadn’t seen how, were the money his own, it would have changed anything. Now you know how it feels, he had said on their way home that night, giving the words time to sink in, time to sting.

  After that, she told him she could drive herself to the club.

  She picked her shoes and costume off the floor and slipped through the curtain. No point in being onstage without music and lights.

  In the dark hall, Devotion was on the pay phone. “Okay. Okay,” she said, and hung up.

  She turned to Stevie, her face close and pale. “Riots. There are riots all over the city. We have to get out of here. I promised my mom.”

  “Riots?” Stevie said, thinking she misheard.

  “Riots.”

  What, exactly, did she mean? Stevie wondered. Riots? What were riots? There had been the Watts Riots. She’d seen photos of them—burning buildings and cars and people flooding the streets, throwing bricks through store windows, looting, and the military with their rifles. But that was so long ago. That was the sixties, when people were fighting for what mattered, for civil rights and getting out of Vietnam. That was before the eighties, before the glam rock bands with their flowing hair and vapid lyrics, before shoulder pads and thick gold chains, before the world turned apathetic and shallow.

  No. She couldn’t mean riots. Not those kinds of riots.

  She saw Devotion throwing her clothes from her locker into her bag.

  “You’re leaving?” Stevie said.

  “Fuck yeah. Aren’t you?”

  “I guess. Should we tell Joe?”

  “Tell him if you want to; I’m splitting this dump.”

  Stevie opened her locker and put on her jeans, her T-shirt, and her flip-flops. If there really were riots, she’d have to find Leo. He’d be on the streets; he’d need a ride home.

  Joe was in his office, messing with the switches, loo
king for power. “What the hell,” he said, making out her street clothes in the dark.

  “Devotion’s leaving, too. She says there are riots. It isn’t safe.”

  On her way to the dressing room, Tony caught her arm. “Hey,” he said. “What’s going on?”

  “Riots. They’re everywhere, I guess. I’m going home.”

  “You should come with me,” said Tony, holding her arm, not letting her go. “It’ll be safer in the marina.”

  “I have to pick up Leo. He’s out there without a car.”

  “Be safe,” he said. In the dark, he pulled her close and, before she could turn her head, he pressed his thin lips to hers. She felt a surge, warmth, wetness between her legs. How long since she’d been kissed on the lips by anyone? She and Leo hadn’t touched in weeks. Even close-lipped, the kiss felt intimate. And she didn’t mind.

  “See ya, Tony,” she said, turning, feeling his eyes on her as she walked.

  Backstage, she grabbed her purse and her almost empty bottle of water.

  Brett was dressed. She wore her Derby hat, had her bag over her shoulder. “You coming?” she said. Her arm was akimbo, her head cocked.

  In the cool, dim room it was the two of them. Stevie wanted to grab her arm, the way Tony had grabbed hers. She wanted to pull her in and kiss her on her lips. Lightly. Barely. The way girls kiss. If she were a guy, she’d do it. Do it now. She wouldn’t just think it. She’d act. But they were walking, too fast. They were almost at the door.

  “Brett,” she said.

  Brett stopped and faced her. “Yes?”

  “I’m glad you’re back.”

  Brett smiled at her. A sly smile. Her eyes danced. Stevie felt a wave of heat move through her; she felt her face burn.

  They pushed the back door open to greenish, smoke-filled skies. At the gas station across the street, cars were lined up down the block. And the cars that weren’t in line were speeding down Century Boulevard. She had, she thought, a fourth of a tank of gas, certainly enough to get her home.