Nightlife

by Brian Hodge

  Justin had seen enough. He turned to leave the nose-picker to his own fantasies over the Marilyn Chambers box he clenched in one plump fist.

  And stopped. Frozen.

  the shelf by the doorway

  It was one of those moments where the relevant leaps out of a clutter of stimuli to seize your attention. Immediately finding your own image in a group picture. Your own name on a page full of names.

  picture

  He reached for the box.

  please no please don’t let it be

  The other pair of movie boxes fell to the floor, and he never heard them hit.

  no

  But no matter how many times he tried to tell himself the similarity was just an astonishing coincidence, his heart, his gut — newly heaving things that they were — told him it was far more.

  Corporate Head, read the title. Hot Career Women Climb The Ladder of Suck-sess!!! With No Job Too BIG!!!

  He shut his eyes, felt them burn. He was due for another meltdown, wasn’t he? Sure. It had been all of one day since he’d let go in a cemetery in Ohio.

  When he reopened, the cover shot was still the same. A setting that looked to be some cheesy mock-up of a high-powered office in an ultramodern building. A close shot of male legs, smartly tailored dark gray dress slacks.

  And the woman he probably loved, hanging out of a disheveled skirt and blouse, getting ready to bury her face where the sun didn’t normally shine. Her tongue serpentine.

  Justin, hands shaking, turned the box over to scan the cast credits listed on the back. Not that it made any difference. Her name could only confirm the misery. Its absence only meant she was going unlisted.

  Names, two lines’ worth, mostly female. And toward the end of the list, a compromise of sorts: April Rose.

  He wanted to be ill. To burn this whole place to the ground. To take her car and leave his belongings behind and hit the open road and find someplace to begin anew, all over again.

  Until that dream, too, would end up bleeding and dying by the roadside like a puppy competing with speeding Goodyear rubber. Something was always waiting around the corner to squash dreams.

  Always.

  Justin left the first two boxes on the floor, forgotten. He flattened the porno box and slipped it inside his shirt and left Mind’s Eye Video. Forever. No coming back.

  He fished inside his pocket for the yellow card symbolizing Erik’s ties to the place. Folded and ripped it, folded and ripped.

  And halfway across the lot to her car, he opened his hand and let the tiny ragged squares sift to the asphalt. Wind caught them, scattered them.

  Like confetti to celebrate a wake.

  He drove blindly for a while, unable to leave, unable to return to the loft. Caught within a limbo of the city’s borders. He traveled streets he’d never driven before, new sights passing in front of his eyes but he never truly saw them.

  It was before she knew me, he repeatedly told himself. His head was adamant, but his heart would have none of it. His heart felt as if it had met the business end of a medieval lance.

  He’d had no silly illusions that he was her first. April was twenty-eight. She’d been engaged. He’d seen the Ortho-Novum prescription in the medicine cabinet. It would be the height of naïveté to think her sexuality had first blossomed last Saturday evening. But that was okay, that was expected. No problems there.

  But this? This?

  before she met me

  Knowing that still didn’t lessen the impact of having it so rudely slap him in the face. He liked to think it would have been more tolerable learning it from her own lips rather than this way. Anything to rationalize the pain.

  Justin drove until he dared keep the car no longer. Running out on this was no defense. April had appointments, needed her car. He could not deny her that. She was obviously trying her best to keep the past distant.

  But it still didn’t soothe the hurt.

  She was performing cosmetic ablutions in the bathroom when he got back to the loft. He shuffled in, feeling stunned, a punch-drunk fighter who’d lost too many rounds with life lately. He tossed her keys onto the kitchen table with a clatter and aimed himself for the couch.

  “I was getting worried,” she called out from the bathroom. Over his shoulder, he caught a sliced glimpse of her leaning into the mirror to apply mascara. “I was about ready to call out Crockett and Tubbs to hunt you down.”

  “Sorry.” It was all he could think to say. Two seconds later he was on his side on the couch, facing the back.

  “What did you rent?”

  “Nothing. I’ve seen them all.”

  “Now there’s a cynic.”

  Cynics are made, not born, he thought. Kept it to himself.

  Justin lay there, as if reality could intrude no further if he didn’t move, didn’t open his eyes. As if there were an outside chance it might prove to be a bad dream when he did open them. The movie box he’d slipped inside his shirt wouldn’t be there then.

  He could still feel it, one crisp corner digging into his stomach. Finally he could tolerate the feel of the thing no longer and yanked it out. Hurriedly shoved it beneath the couch.

  Moments later April came in, ready to leave. He’d cut it very close with her car. He rolled over to face her, and it wasn’t as difficult as he feared. It was easier to segregate the past when he could see her in the present, know that those eyes, those lips, were focused on him now. Try as he might, though, he couldn’t entirely dissociate them from the picture. Wondering what they had been doing ten seconds later. Imagination was torture.

  April looked lovely. Business and femininity, she managed to exude both. Her hair was side parted and gathered back to hang down in loose curls between her shoulder blades. Her skirt was navy, her shoes of moderate heel.

  She asked if he was all right, and he said not really but that it would pass. Denial would only make things worse. Bringing up the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but, could only ruin her evening. Let her think it was due to Erik, to Mendoza, and that would be best. He could hold it in that long, for her sake.

  But it would not keep forever.

  After she told him goodbye, collected her keys and portfolio, kissed him with tender lingering lips, she was out the door. While he sat up on the edge of the couch, feeling the weight of the past months bearing down again. Some people seemed duty bound to attract a screwed-up life. They were magnets.

  Justin wondered if Erik had ever stumbled across the video box. Probably so — no reason to think he wouldn’t continue checking smut titles, and Corporate Head was a title over which he would heartily guffaw. Ordinarily. He probably knew. Just had the good grace to mentally bury it. But as her friend, platonically so, Erik could have afforded the distance. Love was not so wealthy.

  Justin retrieved the movie box from its temporary stash. Carried it into the kitchen. Paused beside the table, the chairs. The chair, site of their first coupling. He rummaged through several drawers before he found a roll of what he was looking for.

  Scotch Brand, magic transparent.

  And like a parent proud of a child’s art class masterpiece, he taped the box to the refrigerator door.

  She returned home somewhere after nine. Justin had accomplished nothing in the interim, hadn’t eaten, had thought of little. Time had passed quickly, and he’d spent most of it rambling about the loft. Upon her arrival, he was leaning back against one of the brick pillars, near her office.

  He heard the outer door open and shut, then the inner. Her footsteps. He could not see her; he was facing the wrong way.

  “Are you home?” she called out.

  “Yeah. Back here.”

  “How come you’re sitting in the dark?”

  “Just sitting.”

  Nothing but moonlight, citylight. There were more footsteps, and then she switched on the light in the kitchen, one in the living room. He was on its fringes, an outsider.

  “It went sooo great tonight.” April’s voice was childlike
with enthusiasm. “They loved what I’ve worked up for them. I’ll hardly have to make any changes at all. That’s a rarity.”

  He lowered his forehead atop crossed arms. Confrontational asshole, that’s what he was. So unfair to do this to her mood.

  Justin still didn’t look her way, could only hear sporadic movements. Her heels on the floor, rustles of fabric. He didn’t know the precise moment she saw the refrigerator. There was no cry of surprise, of horror at the past boomeranging back to haunt her. Justin only realized, eventually, that it had been a long time since he had heard anything at all.

  Dead silence within. From outside, traffic and urban ambience.

  He waited. That stubborn idiocy of expecting the other person to make the first overtures toward explanations, reconciliation. Fear or pride, he always wondered which was stronger.

  Twenty minutes later he finally looked back toward the other end of the loft, and he didn’t see her. He got up, walking on stocking feet, silent but for the occasional groan of a board. Not in the bedroom, not in the living room, not in the kitchen. The movie box still clung to the fridge door. He heard a faint sniffle. The bathroom.

  Justin turned on its light from the doorway and found her in the far corner formed by the wall and the shower stall. April was huddled up very small, arms wrapped around drawn-up legs. A mess of mascara runoff peeked above her knees.

  “Don’t hit me,” she whispered with a cracking voice.

  He shook his head. Did he look that upset? “Of course I won’t hit you.”

  Her head rose a few degrees. Red eyes, blotchy cheeks. Her hair had come loose and bedraggled. She must have gone to a lot of effort to cry so silently in here.

  “Two nights before the wedding, Brad did. That’s when he found out.”

  Justin sighed heavily, wandered into the bathroom. Its air was warmer, heavier, weighted with the steam of past showers, smelling of deodorant and toothpaste. The air clung like tears. He took a seat atop the toilet lid.

  “Were you ever going to tell me?”

  “No,” she said without hesitation.

  “You didn’t think I’d stick around?” He was careful to keep a soft voice. A few too many decibels, and she looked as if she could shatter like crystal.

  “I was afraid.” April gulped and blew her nose into a smudged wad of tissue. “I thought you’d run too.”

  “You accepted me after everything I told you I’d done. And you still couldn’t trust me to do the same?” His eyes slid shut. “That hurts worse.”

  April dissolved. He watched it happen. She was facedown on the floor, shoulders wracked with sobs that she would not let escape into sound. She looked as if, were he to pick her up, she would turn to liquid that would stream and puddle out of her skirt, blouse, pantyhose. Finally he reached down to lay a hand upon her shoulder, rubbing gently, and she homed in on it. Crawled miserably across the floor until she could hoist herself up onto one of his legs. And there she clung, wetting it with tears, and he leaned forward to hold her. Stray hairs and bits of lint from the floor adhered to her clothing.

  “Do you love me?” he whispered down to her. “Or could you?”

  Into his leg, she nodded. Desperately so.

  “Then trust me.”

  Justin was astounding himself. He’d been all set to take a hardline stance. Hadn’t rehearsed it, hadn’t planned anything to say, but had thought he’d play it cold as ice. Let her suffer the consequences of her actions.

  How pathetic on his part. How devoid of forgiveness, of understanding. One look at her had destroyed that stance in an instant. The realization that she’d forgiven him his own past had buried it.

  She looked up, the delicate contours of her face seemingly blurred by loathing that had imploded. Eyes were wet, and nose, and mouth. He pulled fresh tissue from the roll and helped dry her.

  “It was just the one movie,” she said. The possibility of others hadn’t even entered his mind. “Please don’t think it was something I wanted to do. I didn’t.”

  “What happened?”

  April squeezed him briefly, then pulled away to sit against the wall. Staring into the floor while she told him a story.

  Of a talented artist who, a couple of years ago, left her job in the advertising department of the Tampa Tribune in favor of her own freelance studio. She, like him, did coke in those days. That was before she’d curtailed all use of powders and liquids except for the occasional social drink. Unlike his own continual flirtation with ruin.

  In the early days of self-employment, she’d had to hustle and work to obtain clients. Large, small, it made no difference. Any business needing ad art was fair game. Even a relative giant like a small chain of area department stores who had no in-house agency and broke ties with the full-service agency it had been dealing with. Who planned on getting future adwork on an à la carte basis. And who had lots of income potential that would last for years. April had targeted them like a heat-seeking missile.

  Wining and dining helps win clients. April had a friend in purchasing within the store’s hierarchy who had provided her with inside information. That her work was favorably regarded, that they liked her attitudes, her enthusiasm, her specs, and how finally it had come down to her and another artist.

  Wining and dining. It was time to invest in herself. April gave a small party for the store’s bigwigs, relying on her source that matters might be swayed if she were to ensure their good time by powdering things along for the evening. Just between friends, of course.

  Murphy’s Law prevailed, however. The account went to the other studio, and April suddenly found herself cast adrift and in debt to the tune of nearly ten grand for party favors. To a young enterprising entrepreneur named Tony Mendoza.

  Seems that he’d had his eye on her for some time, and she had continually spurned his advances. The man was, of course, scum. But he’d seemed happy enough to front her the coke when she didn’t have the money to pay for it, and she’d been proud of manipulating him with feminine wiles.

  Only now the bottom had dropped out of everything, and Tony had become a very impatient debt-holder. Business was business, nothing personal. He laughed at her offer to set up some sort of time payment schedule. How terrible it would be, he intimated, if something were to tragically befall her new business. Its location, perhaps.

  April spent a week in hell.

  Then Tony showed up again, knight in shining armor that he was, and offered her a way out of this mess. She pounced on it — anything.

  So he told her how he was investing in movie production. The direct-to-video route. Mail order sales, rental outlets. She could take on a costarring role in his next one and wipe the slate clean. He would even costar with her in one of the scenes. Just so she would feel more comfortable working with someone she knew.

  Justin listened. Listened. And as soon as Tony entered the picture — figuratively and literally — it took on new dimensions of turmoil. His hold on their lives just did not quit. And it seemed to have come so easily, so seductively. Almost as if by invitation.

  He’d met the man but once, and now hated him more than he had hated anyone on the face of the earth. He would hate this man until the day he died.

  “So I did it,” April said, voice cracking some more. “And he … he didn’t care about the money anymore. This was so personal to him. A conquest. Probably the longest he’d ever had to wait for anything.”

  Justin didn’t want to know this, was sorry he’d asked, sorry he’d ever walked into Mind’s Eye Video to begin with. He hadn’t known how blissful ignorance could really be.

  April was trembling, locked into the auto-da-fé of memory, of reliving her self-betrayal. He could see every tortured fiber within her.

  “And goddamn him, he made sure he enjoyed it. He must have had some deal going with the director. Because that son of a bitch made us do our scene … he made us do it five days in a row.” Only now did her voice rise to a wail. “I was lying on this desk after the last time
, under those lights. With his … his stuff all over my face. And I swear, it felt worse than acid. I wanted to die. I came home and I sat in that bathtub for an hour, like some pathetic ritual that might help me feel clean again. But it didn’t. The last half of it, I had a razor blade at my wrist. Just trying to work up nerve to do it.” She swallowed hard. “And then Erik called. Out of the blue, no reason. I had my machine on and heard his message come in. He just said he missed seeing me at work.

  “He may have saved my life. And he never even knew it.”

  “You never told him?”

  April shook her head, pushed hair back from her mouth. “I wanted to. But I couldn’t. I would’ve had to tell him why.”

  She looked up, their first eye contact since she’d begun the story. “Oh, Jus, I wish I could’ve told him. I started so many times.”

  He nodded. Erik, saving another life just by being himself. The irony was painfully poetic.

  “Do you know what it’s like,” she said slowly, “living with that in the past? Not that I can’t deal with that, the actual doing it. But never knowing if I’m going to run into someone who might have seen it? Who might recognize me?” Her voice strained, tightened. “That when a stranger looks at me twice, I never know if it’s just because of me … or if he thinks maybe I look familiar. And then maybe he remembers, and that’s what he thinks about me. Do you know what that’s like?”

  He gently shook his head. “No. I don’t.”

  “It means I’m never — never — far from the worst week of my life. That I probably never will be. Because even if every copy of that video burned up tonight, someone might still remember.”

  “Do very many people know already?”

  She laughed bitterly, wetly. “How many people does it take before it starts to matter?” She blew her nose again. “Enough do. I told you Brad found out two nights before the wedding. You know how he found out?”

  Justin shook his head.

  “At the bachelor party. One of the guys rented Corporate Head and didn’t recognize me from the cover shot. They were having a great time until my part started. Doesn’t that sound like something out of a trashy comedy?”