Among the purple blossoms of the tree, a swatch of white made her stop. Was it a piece of clothing, maybe a T-shirt or a sweater? She pulled back a branch. It was a rope, weathered and soft, tied in a loop knot over a low branch, as though this tree were once lakeside and a child had tied the rope for a swing, to launch off from the bank, swing out into the middle of the lake and let go.
She loosened the slip knot, pulled the rope through it and brought it back with her, into the quiet Cornell. The rope was made of cotton, and it was a few yards long. She looped it around her wrist, then the other, and pulled it taut. It would do.
Walking the halls she found she was singing his freedom song.
I’ll be your new book of matches,
I’ll be your full bucket of rain,
I’ll be your home, darlin’,
Come back again.
She opened the door, careful to close it without a sound.
Was this home? Was Leo?
He let out a loud, openmouthed snore, woke up a little, and, turning on his side, murmured something she couldn’t make out and then laughed at himself. He was deep in his dream, and as much as she’d wanted, before, to curl up with him and seduce him in his sleep, she found she couldn’t. She needed distance, she needed to think. She sat on the piano bench and looked at him.
If she’d met him today, there wouldn’t be a chance she’d fall for him. The realization lodged in her throat like a too-big bite of something she hadn’t chewed and now couldn’t swallow. She tried to breathe. She looked closer. He slept without a shirt on, in just his knickers, and his arms and chest and stomach were lean and tan. The loose curls, the pink cheeks, the long, dark eyelashes, the beard, all that was fine—lovely, actually. So what was it?
His left hand hung off the sofa. There was something about his hand. Soft and rather small, it was the size of hers. The fingers had a tender roundness to them, as though his hand were the hand of a big child. She’d once felt happy to have this hand hold hers. It had meant they were setting out on an adventure—free day at the museum or a walk along a beach. It hadn’t mattered where they went, so long as he was at her side. She tried to imagine this hand building a house, a tree house or even a fort, or hammering up a safety gate. Her own hands were sinuous and rough. They were strong. She’d be the one to put hammer to nail.
What would a life with Leo be—really? She tried to see them in Italy, but found she couldn’t see past this apartment. This apartment or another apartment in another town—they’d all end up the same. Cluttered with books he didn’t read, stinking of old bong water. But now she was just being mean. The truth was that none of it mattered when they were creating, smoking pot and creating, when he was writing a song and she was writing a poem. At those times, the apartment became a wonderland of wealth, treasures around every corner.
She fit the DustBuster back in its charger and poured the bong water down the drain. The smell made her gag, and she ran to the toilet and dry heaved. She wasn’t being fair, watching him while he slept. Judging. She’d been sober for less than twenty-four hours and she was judging. She should give him a chance. After all, she told herself, people change.
In the hall—the hall of fame, as Leo called it—she paused. On the wall hung the cover of Valiant’s 1989 LP, Strange, featuring his song that had become a kind of cult classic, “I Want Me.” In his black leather jacket, his face in profile, his hand in his thick black hair, he leaned on a crumbling brick wall. “A modern Sinatra with teeth,” said Jason Jones of Spin magazine. “A stunning debut,” said another reviewer, but no other albums had followed.
And here were their head shots, signed and framed, Valiant’s, Leo’s, hers. Leo had insisted she sign hers, to act as if. Act as if and it will happen, he’d said. You’ll see. That was nearly three years ago. In all her time living here she hadn’t acted. Not unless stripping was acting. The acting she’d done was before Leo. She’d played a few bit parts on TV, and Slut #2 in a Coke commercial, applying lipstick and whispering to Slut #1 in the pretend college lecture hall. At the time she’d thought the parts would lead to something more, a movie maybe, something with substance and depth that would mean she was a true actress. And then she met Leo and they went to Europe and her agent dropped her and she didn’t care. But here the head shot hung, acting as if. And here she was still, living in the tomb of a dream she knew had never really been hers.
She put the rope on the bed and lay down.
Her mind buzzed, her body hovered. There was no way she was going to sleep. She might as well get ready.
She pulled Stevie Smith’s Collected Poems out of her bookcase. It was where she kept her cash until she deposited or spent it, and here was a week’s worth. She’d stuck it in at the poem “Not Waving but Drowning,” which, being all of three quatrains, she read in a whisper to the empty room, to the still night, to the wan courtyard light through the curtains.
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.
The lines were somehow soothing. Weren’t we all dead men? Weren’t we all drowning? The question was how to spend the time that remained.
She counted the Franklins, the Grants, and the Jacksons—all the faces upright, facing front, the bills smallest to largest, the way she’d learned to stack her cash at the club. The order suited her. It gave her a small thrill and made her feel her life was in fact hers to arrange as she pleased. There was a little more than a thousand. Too much for Mexico. She took just the Franklins—founding father with his long hair and his pursed smile, wild Franklin of the naked baths in the wind and the kite flying to catch the lightning—and tucked the wad of five bills into the front pocket of a pair of jeans. She’d wear the jeans to Mexico and keep the money on her. The rest she closed in the book she slid back in the shelf.
Fifi’s shock collar was on the dresser. She’d need it, too, in case they had to leave her in a hotel room. It resembled a medieval torture device, with its two metal prongs strapped against her throat, but it worked. It kept her quiet and calm. The double-A batteries were old and most likely dead, but so long as the collar was on her, she wouldn’t dare bark. Gwen put it on the bed.
What else would she need? It was warm in Mexico, wasn’t it? She found a bathing suit, a sundress, a clean towel, flip-flops, her notebook and her pens—if there was a beach nearby she would be ready. And water, as always she would need plenty of water. Baja was a desert. The thought of the dust and the crowded streets of Tijuana made her thirsty already.
There was one more thing she wanted with her, in case the place got torched.
She searched under clothes in the closet. She looked under her bed, in her dresser and bedside table, between her sweaters. The cigar box, the one that had been her grandfather’s and then her mother’s—it had to be here, here in this room. She glanced at the desk. The piles of rejection slips, of poems returned, the drafts she’d abandoned. She didn’t care if they went up in flames. In fact, she had an urge to burn them herself, all the pages. Even the poems that had come to her quick, like small gifts, the poems she almost liked. She wanted to start fresh. A clean desk, a clean mind. She swept off the papers, sending Leo’s arrangement of old stuff tumbling. The tennis racket and the violin case clattered to the floor, where she let them lie beside the empty suitcases.
There was the cigar box, tucked into a corner of the desk, behind the Underwood typewriter that had been her grandfather’s, too, had come from his warehouse—the oldest in Phoenix—come home with him when he sold the business. It was hers
because she’d asked for it when her grandfather died, because, at eighteen, she knew she wanted to write, knew a writer needed a cool-looking typewriter. When she was small, at her grandparents’ house, so small the Underwood on the kitchen table was at eye level, the smooth, round black keys with the faded letters, up so close to her face, seemed big, big and mysterious, and she’d run her fingers over them when no one else was in the room. It had sent a ripple of excitement through her, as though she were stealing something.
She blew the dust from the keys, moved the typewriter over, and picked up the cigar box, blowing the dust from it, too, brushing off the final layer with her fingertips.
Partagas, the wooden box said. 1845, Regale. She unsnapped the little gold latch. Inside were the tokens her mother, and later she, had saved, remnants that meant Gwen had been a child once. There was a clipping of her soft blond baby hair, tied with a pink satin ribbon. A pastille tin holding her baby teeth, which rattled when she shook it. There was that ring her father had given her, the gold one with the butterfly missing its wing. There was the strand of real pearls. And there were the photographs. The photos of the years.
She took out the stack and flipped through them. It’d been a long time since she’d looked. There was the one of just her head from the day she was born. Plump and rubbery as a beach ball, damp black hair, a double chin, and her eyes swollen shut like the eyes of a boxer. There was one of her mother holding her just after she was born, her mother, looking weak, puffy, and splotchy, but with love in her eyes, so much love, gazing down at her baby girl, at Gwen, as if she weren’t a mistake at all, but a marvel, an answer to a forgotten prayer. There was her dad, with all his hair still, squeezing her mother to his side. Both of them flushed and smiling, holding Gwen high, up to the white backdrop of sky.
And there was the photo that was after, maybe a year after her mother had gone. The one she’d taken on her own, setting the timer, waiting for the click. The girl here doesn’t smile. Her eyes are the gray eyes of Athena. I’ll take you on, she says. Go ahead and look. See these cheekbones? These collarbones? The darkness under my eyes? I don’t need food. I don’t need sleep. Why, then, should I need you? You or anyone.
She’d made the photo on her own, in the dark room her father hadn’t touched, the one room he’d let be. She’d developed the film herself by the glow of the red light and used the enlarger the way her mother had taught her, dodging the edges of the photo to lighten them, for contrast. After she’d developed the paper, dipping it in the baths of chemicals, timing it to the second, she’d hung it on the line to dry beside her mother’s last prints, black-and-whites of a prepubescent Gwen and their old French bulldog, Winston, in a pile of fallen pecan leaves. It was the photo that came next in her stack—Winston licking her cheek, a fat smile on her face.
Think of peanut butter, think of whales.
That was the moment, there in her dark room, that she’d known her mother was gone—gone and not coming back. She’d been waiting, she saw now, to walk into their backyard and find her mother clipping the gardenias to float in bowls of cool water to fill the house with fragrance. She’d been waiting to come home late and find her curled into the stuffed leather chair by the lamp in the study, reading and drinking her good red wine and smoking into the night.
She put the stack of photographs on the desk, facedown.
What was left in the cigar box was the old black velvet pouch. Her heartbeat quickened. She loosened the drawstring. The smell of vanilla hung in the open mouth of the pouch, or maybe she was imagining it. She pulled out Carlotta’s Guadalupe pendant, drew back the curtain and held it to the light. The Virgin’s face was darker than she’d remembered, as were her robes of green and red, as if, during those black velvet years of isolation, the colors had intensified, becoming truer, more themselves. She opened the clasp of the silver chain and fastened it around her neck. The pendant was cold and she pressed it to her chest to warm it.
It occurred to her, as she set the photos back in the box, that she’d show these to her daughter, someday. And her daughter would see them as impossibly old. The thought struck in her a chord at once wistful and shrill. Who would this girl be? What sort of baby, toddler, first grader? Someday she’d be a teenager. This thought, in particular, was terrifying to Gwen, given the recklessness with which she’d lived her own teenage years—the sneaking out her window at night, the pot smoking, the drinking, the raging desert parties. And then there had been the anorexia, the bulimia. It sucked to be a teenager. She’d need her mother. Even if she didn’t think she did, she’d need her. And Gwen would be there. She wouldn’t check out early. She’d see her through. And this girl someday would be a woman, maybe even a mother.
Dizzy, she sat on the bed.
World without end, Amen. Wasn’t that the prayer? Glory to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit? Well, she wasn’t so sure about those three, but she knew the answer to the prayer was inside her. She was the world without end, here, on the edge of this bed, unsure of her next move, alone, in a city still smoking, waiting to explode all over again.
She lifted one of the old dusty wicker suitcases onto the bed and flipped the latches. Its hinges creaked in protest, but the suitcase opened all right, and seemed as if it would hold. She tucked her things inside, pulled on the jeans and slipped into her heels. She’d head back up to Valiant’s, get him off the booze and get some water and maybe some food in him before morning. She fastened the suitcase shut and heard screeching—high-pitched, like an owl’s screech.
And then there were two—two screams echoing in the courtyard.
Eighteen
THROUGH THE WINDOW screen she saw Valiant on the ground, his head wrapped in a black bandanna, his aqua robe splayed and his body dull, skeletal under the yellow light. Barry stood above him, holding the sign high, ready to strike him. They weren’t ten feet away, separated from her by just the screen.
“Barry, stop!” she yelled. Barry didn’t move.
“Barry, goddamn it, it’s me. What the fuck?” she heard Valiant say. She opened the French window wide, pressed the side of the screen until the metal bent and threw the screen into the courtyard, stepping with care around it, between a lanky rosebush and a hydrangea.
Valiant held his hand to his jaw. “Crazy motherfucker.” Blood ran down his hand and he brought it into the light to see.
Gwen stood back, frozen, like a dream when you can’t move. Can’t scramble up the wall, can’t run fast enough. Can’t call out for help. Barry still held the sign aloft. He was frozen, too, staring at Valiant. Transfixed.
“For God’s sake, Barry.” She said it under her breath, but he dropped the sign.
“Count?” he said, bending over him.
“Who the fuck did you think?” The Count was slurring his words and his motions were slow and broad. “Fuck,” he said, touching his hand to his chin again, looking at the blood.
“Barry.” Gwen approached so that he could see her. “Give me a hand?”
They each took an arm and pulled Valiant to his feet. She folded his robe closed and cinched the sash. His feet were bare. She searched the courtyard and found his black velvet slippers—one on the edge of the fountain and one under the rosebush—and helped him into them. His blood was still wet on his hand and she was careful not to touch it, not to let it touch her. His arms around their necks, steadying himself with their shoulders, he took a few sloppy steps down the sidewalk, toward Jin’s. Gwen spun him around, back toward the Cornell. “You need to go home,” she said.
“What are you,” Valiant said, “my mother?” He laughed as though he’d said something funny and swung back around. “Not my mother. Not mine, but someone’s.” He giggled. And then he was serious, angry. “I’m going,” he said, lifting his arms off them and lurching forward. “I’m not a fucking invalid. I’m going for cigarettes.”
Barry picked up his sign and resumed his route. “I’m gonna keep on, then. Keep on keeping on.” He was walking away from t
hem, rounding the corner. “You never know. You just don’t know.”
“I’m going for cigarettes,” Valiant said again, stumbling toward the street.
“No one’s open,” she said. Holding his elbow, she steadied him. Blood from a gash on his chin dripped down his neck. “Come on. We got to clean you up,” she said, walking him toward the door.
“Oh, this?” He smeared the blood across his face with the palm of his hand. He looked tribal, like a warrior off to battle, ready to trade his life for the good of his people, or like a modern survivalist, just come from the wilderness, where he’d killed deer and elk with arrows and lived off raw meat.
She let him go and he wobbled, but fixed his gaze on her. “My blood freak you out? My contaminated blood?”
“Stop it.”
He laughed. “You’re just pregnant. I guess. Pregnant.” He was talking at full volume, his words bouncing off the brick walls. “Hear that, Leo, you fucking lazy-ass wop! Your girlfriend is—” Gwen would have put her hand over his mouth if he hadn’t been bleeding, but as it happened all she could do was watch him say the word, and hear it echoing. “Pregnant-nant-ant.”
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go see Jin.”
He grinned and she held his arm and together they entered the empty neighborhood, crossing Sixth Street against the red light. There was a slight breeze and the residue of smoke. Her shoes pinched her toes and she stopped midstreet and took them off and held them as she walked beside Valiant, who shuffled in his slippers, as if down a hospital corridor.
“Hey,” she said. “That was a secret, you know. I’d told you in confidence. Because I thought you could keep it to yourself.”
“What are you talking about,” he said. “I’m dying, and you’re accusing me?”
Further Out Than You Thought Page 14
