Rainey Royal

by Dylan Landis

  “Wait,” says Rainey, touching her wrist.

  She watches Leah circle the table, studying the three-story confection as if looking for an angle of attack. Saliva pools in the hollow of Rainey’s tongue. The thing is flawless, extravagant. Maybe, for Leah, it’s too perfect. Maybe she’s afraid her appetites might tarnish it.

  “Wait for what?” says Tina coolly. “This is the kind of thing I’m good at, remember?” She looks at Leah and sets the edge of the blade on the top tier.

  Back off, thinks Rainey. You don’t have anything to prove.

  “Sugar causes adhesions,” says Tina. “That’s when tissue sticks to tissue. You’re going to be a wreck.”

  HOW IT SAVED HER

  Rainey enters the dark tidal pool between streetlights on a side street. He steps out of a doorway, grabs her jacket at the back of the neck, and twists.

  “I have a knife,” he says. Rainey feels a point of pressure above her hip and a prickle of sweat in the April night. “Wallet and rings. That ring.”

  He must be an actor, rehearsing, right? Her feet seem to lift from the sidewalk. Does everyone float when they’re being mugged? She feels in her bag, finds her wallet, and reaches back with it. The wallet contains three dollars, a library card, tokens. But the diamond ring—that was her grandmother’s. She considers the pressure of the knife through her denim jacket. It could be a pen.

  “The ring’s stuck,” she says. This is theoretically true: it’s barely come off since her mother put it there: not even when her father hoped to sell it.

  The mugger jabs. It hurts. It could still be a pen. “Want me to cut it off?” he says.

  From a great distance she hears herself say, Yeah, I think you should slice my finger off, dumbfuck, and then a man says, “Lucy?”

  He comes out of nowhere from behind and circles around to face them. “Lucy, I thought it was you,” he says. But they have never met. She makes out black-rimmed glasses, the kind of bland leather jacket worn by the good guys, an expression both cautious and expectant. “Is this a friend?”

  Half behind her, the mugger drapes a proprietary arm around her shoulders and pokes her with the sharp object. So it would not be safe to say no. Instead, she makes a tiny, deliberate noise of distress. “I don’t feel so good,” she says. Then she collapses with some force to the sidewalk and grabs the stranger’s white-socked ankle.

  “Help me,” she says, closing her eyes partway and twitching as she imagines epilepsy might look. “I’m having a seizure. Don’t leave me.” From the sidewalk she considers her mugger’s chinos. Didn’t men with knives wear jeans? So graceless to lie twitching on the ground, but she does, gripping the stranger’s ankle and pleading, “Don’t leave me, I’m having a seizure.” She hears her mugger say, “I’ll go for help.” She feels a hand on her arm. She smells lemon verbena.

  “Tell me you’re faking.”

  She opens one eye fully. Jerks her right leg just in case.

  “He’s gone.” The man extends a hand. He wears a school ring. Who loves school that much? “You had to be faking—no one talks in a seizure,” he says.

  She pulls herself up by his hand and stands, trembling in every limb though she tries to stop. “He wanted to saw my finger off.”

  “I knew something was wrong,” the man says. “The way he was standing behind you, and you handing him something. Are you okay?” She is not okay; her wrists and knees feel like they’re vibrating. “I’m not done rescuing you,” he says. “You get another wish.”

  She touches his hand, lightly. “Who are you? My guardian angel?” She likes having to stretch to kiss him on the cheek. The lemon verbena must be his soap.

  “Yes,” he says. “I’m Clayton, and you are my goddess.”

  She flinches. “I’m a starving artist,” she says. “If you’re granting wishes, I’ll take a cheap apartment.” She laughs, though she is shaking worse. She has had it with Damien and Gordy and Radmila worshipping her father and living in her house, though she’ll never leave. “Actually,” she says, “just walk me to the subway and give me a token.”

  “Actually,” he says.

  She needs him to put his arm around her, and suddenly he does. They walk slowly toward the neon promise of a Broadway RESTAURANT sign. “Actually what?”

  “My brother-in-law manages rent-controlled apartments. You could look at a studio tomorrow.”

  She leans into this man. She considers his ankle, how it saved her, how it looked both sturdy and wrong in its scruffy white sock, as if he were receiving flawed signals about how to be in the world and did not care. It makes her feel tender, this ankle. It makes her feel safe.

  “Actually,” she says, “I’m okay where I am,” but she lays her head on his shoulder as he signals for a cab.

  SHE WONDERS IF THE birds can smell orchids and bromeliads from the wholesaler downstairs, and if it reminds them of some distant home. The birds are African gray parrots Clayton breeds in his loft. They are the hue of expensive menswear, with a shot of red at the tail like a bright tie, and they climb up and down the outsides of their cages muttering to themselves. One periodically bursts into the ring of a telephone.

  A powdery dust sifts from under the birds’ wings; it shortens Rainey’s breath. Clayton mists them with a plant sprayer, but it barely helps.

  He lives in the loft, though it isn’t legal. He makes his own pasta and chocolate truffles in the makeshift kitchen and deals coke from a locked metal cabinet. Rainey wonders how the parrots feel about this life—the cooking smells, especially when small fowl are involved; the coke dust she imagines must hang in the air; the clipped wings.

  A few weeks after the mugging Clayton serves her quail wrapped in bacon. The quail are not much bigger than her fists. A parrot could grip one in a chalky claw. Rainey thinks she might faint with pleasure at the stuffing. She has stopped seeing friends, even Tina or Leah; when she isn’t working on a tapestry in her pink room, she’s at the loft, wheezing, chirring at the birds. She goes home, though, every night: a cat returning to its lair.

  They eat in silence. Clayton serves sautéed spinach and roasted carrots. “I had to isolate three birds today,” he finally says. “They started feather plucking. They look half naked. It’s so sad.” He names a disease that sounds to Rainey like citizen. Citizen feather-and-death disease? Citizen hoof-and-mouth disease? “Or they could just be miserable about something,” he says.

  Yeah, she thinks, like smelling quail in the oven. She lifts a miniature drumstick, and meat drops from the bone; she catches it with her tongue. “God, you’re amazing.”

  “You’re right,” says Clayton. “I am amazing. It could be the foie gras in the stuffing, though.” He leans forward. “Move in with me.”

  But then she’d be like one of the birds. She wants him to desire her, and she wants him to slink away. She gives him a long, sorrowful look.

  He reaches for his wine and pushes his chair back. Rainey feels the thrill of something imminent, the air electrically charged. He stands and moves in to kiss her, still holding his wineglass. She pulls away. Clayton sighs. A sprig of dark hair flops over his forehead.

  “Would it help to know that I’m working on a parrot surprise for you?” Clayton looks right at her. Most men look at her chest.

  “It sounds like dinner. Parrot Surprise.” Sometimes when Rainey is in Clayton’s loft, she feels like nibbling her own feathers out.

  “I’m teaching Perdita to say ‘Come live with me and be my love.’ ”

  “I have a home, Clayton.”

  “It’s from the sonnet,” he says. “ ‘And we will all the pleasures prove.’ ”

  Her father quotes Shakespeare at her, too. She has waited for Howard to notice the hours she spends at Clayton’s loft, but lately he’s been gone by the time she wakes, spending days in some recording studio instead of sleeping. Ridiculously, she stumbles down in her nightgown some mornings and looks for a note. Howard’s attention is like the sun. Too much burns the edges of her
leaves, yet the atmosphere is thin without it.

  Clayton smooths her long hair behind her ear and touches her cheekbone. He puts his free hand on her breast and leaves it. She smells lemon verbena. She likes it.

  “And he can cook, too,” says Clayton.

  “If you’re waiting for me to say yes,” says Rainey, more drily than she intends, “stop.” She means: Stop asking, because I’m not moving in. She means: Stop being a gentleman and for Chrissake ravish me.

  But she realizes, as he pulls away, that all he registers is stop. It’s a big misunderstanding. It makes Rainey itch. She wonders if he was ever wild enough for that intense ex-wife of his. “Okay,” says Clayton. He takes his seat and goes to work on another quail. “You win, Rainey. Go figure out what you want.”

  She takes an enormous swallow of wine. “Wait,” she says, but he shakes his head.

  He’ll forgive her. Right? He’s her guardian angel. And he can cook, too.

  She blurts the first lie she can think of and is shocked to feel it expand in her heart, spreading wings, becoming truth. “I can’t move in,” she says. “My father needs me.”

  FLY OR DIE

  Order to self: Go to a normal party and be normal about it. Leave in thirty minutes. Go.

  The bird-boyfriend’s party hemorrhages music. It’s in the Flower District, all dirty-windowed lofts. Leah feels an internal coiling—that’s twenty-three feet of small intestine, telling her to go home.

  Stupid girl. She will look stupid; she will say stupid things. But she only has to look stupid till she finds Rainey or the boyfriend.

  Up five flights, joins a semisolid volume of humans. Whirling molecules, all of them, wedging through a doorway into the bird-boyfriend’s enormous loft. Grace Slick sings in a slow, throbbing Spanish. Para escapar, Leah hears—to escape.

  Loft is packed. From the hall she sees people inside dancing to Grace. Young man tacks ahead of her, pocking the air with invisible drumsticks and jostling her into the wall. His movement opens a slender channel. She steps into it and is subsumed. Where are the bird-boyfriend’s parrots? Stashed in bedroom? Impossible to spot Rainey or the boyfriend, Clayton, or Tina Dial. Needing purpose, Leah squeezes upstream and locates the rum punch. There’s no ladle, just take a baby Dixie and dunk.

  She dips and drinks, and drinks again. Libations flow straight through the blood-brain barrier. Lacing self through crowd, she tries to keep the third punch from sloshing. Cigarettes bob and jab in inattentive hands. Reaches a wall, finally. Plasters self to it. Posture is her cloak. My friend just went for drinks, her eyes say. Why don’t you drop dead?

  Miss L looks hot, though. Leah admits it. Strappy pink leotard, deliberate clash with red hair. Black Genny skirt, fifteen amazing dollars in the Irvington thrift shop. Also men’s black Tony Lama boots, size eight and a half. They cost even less than the skirt. When she wears them to work, they collect a dun-colored dust from the ankles down—particulate traces of Purina mouse chow, which she parcels out in the lab.

  Notice me, she thinks. Stay away.

  Someone changes the record, and Jefferson Airplane comes on loud: rabbits, dormice, pills. Now Leah sees them, deep in the crowd. Together, they are dancing together, Rainey, Tina, Clayton. Leah, riveted, can’t tell who is the third, the odd one out.

  What would happen if she squeezed through the crowd and tried to become the fourth? Rainey would turn to dance with Clayton. That would leave Tina, who should first do no harm. But Tina would turn away.

  Then Leah would be dancing alone. So forget it.

  She manages a good five minutes this way, partying by proxy, when a woman comes and stands nearby.

  Her body language is far more fluent than Leah’s. I’ve never been nervous a moment in my life. Her hair is a fountain of ringlets, and her feet are bare, in red stilettos.

  Leah looks at her from the white of her eye, and the woman turns to her.

  “There is a smaller party,” she says, “in the last room down the hall.” Then she pushes off from the wall.

  Leah knows a rabbit hole when she sees one.

  Touch base, says her brain. But she pushes off, too, and heads for the hall. Passes the bathroom, so noted by the line, and comes to the final door, posted with a sign that reads OFF LIMITS.

  Surely not to Those Who Are Following a Sylph?

  The bedroom is empty of people, crowded at the far end with large, covered birdcages on wheeled stands. The birds under their cloths are silent. Stunned by darkness or rock and roll? A high, open window gapes onto the night.

  No sylph. Either she has chosen the wrong room or the wrong party, where she has made the narcissistic, puppyish mistake of following a woman with a Laeliocattleya mouth.

  Outside the open window, a match ignites. The woman is floating out there in the night. No: she is sitting on the fire-escape stairs. “What took you so long?” she says.

  She probably got out there with a neat little hop. Leah folds herself through and squats, facing her, trembling, fishing for a cigarette. “I’m Leah.”

  The woman reaches out. Leah’s right hand obediently goes to hers. Instead of shaking it the woman turns it over, examines the small print on her palm.

  “I’m a skeptic,” says Leah, and pulls it back.

  “Most intelligent people are,” says the woman. She reaches for Leah’s hand again. “May I? You have a powerful head line. Deeply incised.” She looks up. “It correlates nicely to the phalange of logic.” She strokes the base of Leah’s thumb. “You do your own taxes. Numbers don’t intimidate.”

  “Ha,” says Leah, trying to be neutral. She pulls her hand back again, but the woman holds it firm.

  “Your heart line is less pronounced,” she says. “Put it this way. Your head line is a river. Your heart line is a drip from the kitchen faucet.”

  This woman has looked in Leah’s mirror. She has seen the flaw. “Remind me to call the super,” says Leah, and then, “Oh, shit,” because how will she find Rainey in an off-limits room?

  The woman looks up as if Leah has finally revealed something of interest. “Someone needs to teach you how to have fun,” she says, and drops Leah’s hand.

  Leah jams the hand in her jacket pocket. “I should go in. Have some fun,” she adds.

  The woman stands, nearly losing a heel to the gaps in the fire escape. “Maybe it’s not your kind of party. There’s a secret way out.” The alley, five stories below, is an abyss with trash cans. “Not down,” says the woman. “Up.”

  One flight to the roof. The woman removes her right shoe, kisses it, and throws. It sails over the parapet. She hands Leah the other shoe. “Here,” she says. “Throw.”

  “I can’t.” The shoe seems to pulse in her hand like a heart. Leah backs away. “I’m meeting someone. You want me to go fetch that?” Fetch. Like a puppy.

  “Someone?” says the woman musically.

  “It’s her party,” says Leah. “I mean it’s her boyfriend’s loft—”

  “Spare me,” says the woman, “I was married to the boyfriend.”

  Across the lit room, the door opens. Rainey peers in. “Leah?”

  Leah cups her cigarette and freezes. Rainey sniffs. She smells their smoke, Leah thinks. “Hey,” she says. It comes out half croak. “Out here.”

  “Levinson, I’ve been looking for you for an hour.” Rainey sticks her head out the open window. “Zola,” she says.

  Zola exhales a rope of smoke toward Rainey while Leah falls in love with her name.

  “I was looking for you for an hour, too,” says Leah. “I got claustrophobic.”

  “Hello, Rainey.” Zola laughs, a raspy, private sort of chuckle.

  “You guys know each other?” says Rainey.

  “We just met,” says Leah.

  “We’re old friends,” says Zola. “We were just leaving.” A sash of her smoke dissolves between them.

  Rainey looks at Leah hard. “We’re not going anywhere,” Leah says.

  “If you leave with her,”
says Rainey, “you’re going somewhere.”

  Leah would like to go somewhere, actually. She would go somewhere with Rainey—but Rainey has sealed herself unto Tina Dial since something like sixth grade. Tina shadows Rainey like a twin, and Leah wants to taste that kind of dangerous alliance, something deeper even than friendship, a collusion that sucks up the oxygen in its sphere and thrives on tiny cruelties.

  Zola looks at the two women. “Leah, darlin’, is there glue on that shoe?”

  Leah kisses the shoe quickly and hurls it. Rainey says, “Big mistake,” but Leah gives her what she hopes is a mysterious smile and turns away. Zola starts up the ladder. Her bare feet flash on the dark rungs. Leah follows her to the roof. Zola waits barefoot at the top while Leah crunches across the tar paper and trots back wearing a shoe on each hand, flapping them in triumph.

  In the stairwell they shoulder into a chain of people, thread their way outside, meet up in the silvery bath of a streetlight.

  “Well,” says Leah, fear setting in. “That was fun.”

  “Climbing a fire escape? That’s not fun, my heart,” says Zola. “Spending my alimony, that would be fun. Champagne at the Brasserie, that would be fun.”

  Leah can’t talk.

  “I think we must get you a cab,” says Zola. She looks down the empty block. “Let’s try Eighth,” she says. Then, her voice low: “Drop me?”

  Not a normal person, warns Leah’s brain. Her heart bangs against the bars, the molecules flying apart. Mysterious stranger might move in too close, breathe her air. Leah is a person who requires much space, even in her fantasy life.

  But she wraps arms around self in lucky leather jacket and murmurs: “Drop you where?”

  RAINEY TELEPHONES EVERY FOUR or five days. Leah is never free.

  “I’m gonna sic Tina on you,” says Rainey. “You used to be almost fun. What’s happening?”

  “I’m just busy.” Leah lowers her voice. She’s in the lab office, where she has no privacy and is not supposed to take personal calls. She works, when she is not handling mice, under a greenish bank of lights. The lab manager, Lawrence, makes notes in a data book; the other lab tech, Marina, waters leggy plants. “Work is happening,” says Leah.