by CD Reiss
I dropped my bag on the floor and plopped onto a kitchen chair. “Well, we won’t have to worry about that. It was the single worst performance of my life.”
“Come on.”
“Really.”
“Because of my sister?”
I leaned on the table, lacing my fingers in my hair. “No.”
“Do you want some tea?”
“Yes, please.” I stood. “I’ll make it. You don’t even live here.”
He pushed me back into the chair. “I can boil water.” He pulled the teabags down. “I’m sure it wasn’t that bad, Mon. Think about it. Are you just fighting the fraud men?”
The fraud men were the creatures that lived inside every artist’s brain, rearing their ugly heads any time something good happened and telling them that they were useless, talentless hacks who had only gotten lucky. “No, I really blew it. Couldn’t hold a note. I was… distracted.”
“By?” He plopped the teapot on the stove and turned to me, leaning on the counter with his arms crossed.
Could I tell him? And if I didn’t who would I tell? I took a deep breath and got ready for the red heat to rise in my face. “Jonathan’s a little kinky.”
Darren raised an eyebrow. “Oh, dear.”
“Please don’t embarrass me.”
He yanked a chair out from the table, sat, and put his elbows on the table. “Kinky billionaire meets hot waitress. It’s a cliché of a cliché. I love it. Does he make you spank him?”
The prickly heat finally hit my cheeks. “It’s the other way around.”
“No.”
I nodded while scratching a nonexistent piece of crud from the tabletop. “I mean, we haven’t got that far yet, but basically, that’s the nature of us in bed. He tells me to do stuff, and I do it. And he’s rough. Really rough. He wants a more, I guess, intense version of what’s been happening, and I’m freaked out.”
“Does he have a dungeon?”
I buried my face in my hands and gave a muffled “No” from behind my palms. I opened them. “I don’t think so.”
He paused, rubbing his chin, then leaned even farther across the table. “And he wants you to be his official fuck toy?”
“Oh God, Darren!”
“I haven’t heard you say that in years.”
I got up so fast the chair dropped behind me. “I’m really upset, Darren, and all you want to do is make jokes.” I turned off the burner and set about making tea. “He thinks I’m a natural submissive, which is code for like, doormat and beneath him, and yeah, it’s code for Jonathan’s little fucking fuck toy. And I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say I’m no man’s whore. And you’re right. I’m not. I’m not some submissive little kitten or his god damn punching bag. What the fuck is he thinking? And you know what I’m thinking.”
“I have no idea what you’re thinking.”
I held up the teapot. “Do you want some?”
“Sure.”
“Sugar?”
“Monica?”
“What?”
“You were saying something about what you were thinking.”
I poured the tea. Darren didn’t take sugar and neither did I, but I’d needed a second to avoid saying something stupid. “I can’t say it.”
“You’re no man’s whore.”
I stared at the tea as it steeped. “I know.”
“But you’re falling for him.”
The strength went out of my spine. I hated Darren for bringing it up and for seeing through me, yet I was grateful he’d said what I couldn’t. “He’s witty,” I said. “And confident and affectionate. And he looks at me like I’m the only woman in the world. And you can make fun but… the sex is…” I searched for the right word and came up with nothing adequate. “I’m a fuck toy whore, aren’t I?”
Darren got up for his tea, since I was falling down on the job. “I’ll tell you the truth. I don’t like hearing someone is treating you like that. It upsets me. I’d actually like to punch him in the face a little.” He poured the hot water. “You’ve been alone too long. You’re vulnerable. You’re doing things you wouldn’t normally do.”
“Yeah.”
“If you want to date again, you should have tried dating, you know?”
“I want to rib you for not dating forever, then turning up gay. But I can’t. It’s right for you. This… I don’t think this is right for me.” I pulled the bag out of my cup and pressed it until it was a sack of damp leaves. “Too bad.”
“Gabby was triangulating him against every other person in Los Angeles, and she said she came up with something she wanted to show you. It didn’t sound good.”
“Great. Secrets. Love those.”
“Come on,” Darren rubbed my shoulders. “Let’s go watch a stupid movie and talk about Kevin’s thing. I’m bored, and I’ve decided I’d love to make that guy crazy.”
We never did speak about Kevin’s thing. We never even watched a movie. We lay on the couch and watched a string of shows about rock stars with debilitating drug addictions who redeemed themselves in their fifties. I fell asleep on Darren’s chest, where I felt as safe and comfortable as when I was with Jonathan.
I dreamed of some nether desert where the sky spoke in narrators, laugh tracks, and commercials, and I kneeled in the sand and put my hands in my pants to relieve the ache that had become water to me.
I woke up to the sound of Darren on the phone. Morning Stretch was muted. Darren’s voice squeaked, but I thought nothing of it. The fullness of my bladder pushed against some sexual part of my insides, making me feel engorged and ready. I wanted to fuck.
I went to my room, crawled into bed, and pulled the legal pad I used for middle-of-the-night ideas from the nightstand. I wrote:
What if he collars me? Slaps me? Spanks me? Bites me? Fucks me in the ass? Whips me? Hurts me? Displays me? Gags me? Blindfolds me? Shares me? Humiliates me? Ties me down? Makes me bleed? Fucks me up?
I couldn’t write any more. My imagination kept coming up with new things to do, and they got more and more horrible as I dug deeper.
I went to the bathroom and sat on the bowl, in the dark, trying not to wake up too much. I’d defined something about Jonathan during my conversation with Darren, and though I was comforted at having come to a conclusion, I was saddened at the decision.
There was a tap on the door.
“Mon?” Darren whispered.
“Use the other bathroom.”
“They found Gabrielle.” He sounded so calm I thought he meant something innocuous. “I have to identify the body.”
I stood up, my pants around my knees. “What?”
He asked softly, “Can you come with me?”
ten
In my life, I’d experienced grief like I experienced love. Deeply and with very few people.
My father had been taken from me when I was nineteen. I didn’t see much of him, even when he wasn’t deployed. My mother owned him, up in buttfuck Castaic, two hours north of the den of sin and temptation I called home. The news came through her, icily framed as a happier existence with a benevolent God. I didn’t want to talk to her about how it happened. I ended up on the phone with his supervisor at Tomrock, who told me he’d taken mortar fire while escorting a Saudi prince to the central mosque in Kabul. I had told Dad he should have stayed in the military, that privatizing himself would leave him unprotected, but he was tired of listening to politically motivated orders dressed up as patriotism. If he was walking into death, he wanted it called that, and he wanted to be paid to take those risks. No fanfare. No dressing up in the flag. Dad was real. He wanted life so real it hurt. He’d been shot twice, stabbed once, and had his bell rung more than a few times in neighborhood brawls. He still held the door open for my mother after twenty years of marriage and loved her like a queen, even though she didn’t deserve it.
When he was killed, I thought I’d go insane. I felt unmoored, unsafe, orphaned. I found myself pulling the car over and checking directions t
o places I’d been to a hundred times. I called Darren twice as often, just to hear the voice of someone who loved me. I didn’t want to go outside if I could avoid it. The only thing that saved me, besides Darren and Gabby, was music. Dad had taught me piano. He approved of my pursuits. So when I played, especially when I played in front of people, I felt safe again. As the years passed, I found other ways to feel secure and loved, and grief slipped away so slowly I didn’t notice when it became a dull ache of memory brought on by some corner of the house or Dad’s mandarin tree in the backyard.
Grief had been hiding, ready for the next time. So when Darren and I listened to the lady cop tell us that Gabby had been found, drowned, two miles north of the Santa Monica Pier, I listened, but I was too busy trying to keep the bucket of grief from tipping. Darren needed me, and if I fell into a cacophony of emotion, I wasn’t going to be there for him.
We stood by a plexi-glass window, watching a sheet-covered gurney get wheeled into the adjacent room. I felt that bucket of sorrow tip and empty, dropping its contents from my throat to my heart. It sloshed around when I moved, and I thought I would be emptying it with a teaspoon.
I didn’t know what Darren was feeling, initially. He identified his sister, who looked bloated and blue, then turned to leave. He collapsed into my arms, weeping. I did my best to hold him up, but the lady cop with the inky curly hair had to help me get him to her desk.
Lady Cop brought us water and a box of tissues. “Was she on any medication?”
“Marplan,” Darren whispered.
“Did she mix it with alcohol?”
He grabbed my hand. “We should have gotten her. We shouldn’t have trusted Theo. Fuck. Of all people.”
I wasn’t buying it. “She was drinking, sure, but I thought she drowned,” I said to Lady Cop.
“Technically, yes. But what happens is people overdo, and because their judgment is compromised, they go for a swim. Their breath is shallower, and their coordination is poor, so they succumb.” She paused in a way that felt practiced and professional. “I’m sorry.”
We signed some papers. They wanted to know where to send the body. I gave the name of the funeral home my dad went to because I had no room in my brain for anything else, and Darren was too emotionally brutalized to make any kind of decision. I didn’t know how we were going to walk out of there, but we did, slowly, because the farther away we got from the police station, the farther behind we left Gabby. We stopped dead in the parking lot, holding hands, immovable.
“I don’t think I can go home,” he said.
“You can stay with me.”
“No.”
“What about Adam?”
Darren just stared into the distance, his face a blank. I didn’t know what to do next. He had no family except Gabby. I was it, and I had no idea how to help him. His gaze fixed on something, and I followed it. Theo closed the door on his Impala and came toward us, his gait a little crooked. I squeezed Darren’s hand tighter.
“Let’s just go,” I said. “Don’t try and deal with anything today.” I pulled him toward the Honda. “Please.”
He looked down at me, big blue eyes lined with webs of red.
“We have so much to do,” I said. “I need you. Please.”
He blinked as if some of what I said got through.
Theo was getting closer, waving and trotting as if he thought he might miss us. I pulled Darren away and tried to shoot Theo a warning look. I wasn’t a praying person, but I prayed there would be no fights. No accusatory words. No defenses. No excuses. I shoved Darren into the passenger side just as Theo reached us.
“Lassie...” he said.
“Back up, Theo.” I strode to my side of the car.
“I have feelings about it too. I stopped her from jumping off the Ferris wheel.”
“I’ll let you know when we have the funeral if you have the balls to come,” I said as I opened the door.
“You’re the one who betrayed her. You did that scratch track without her.”
I slammed the door before Darren could hear another word.
“I’m going to kill him,” Darren said.
“Not today.”
I knew that I had a limited time to figure it all out. I felt the thoughts I didn’t want to have push against the defensive wall that kept me functioning. I needed that wall. It was the percussion section, keeping the beat, organizing the symphony of reactions and decisions that needed to happen. Without it, the whole piece was going to shit.
I pulled out of the parking lot. Theo got small in my rearview. “We need to make arrangements,” I said. “Are you up for it, or am I driving you home?”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“Do you have money?”
He shook his head. “There was a life insurance policy. For both of us. In case. I checked it when she tried the last time.”
“Okay. Let’s take care of it. Then, I don’t know.” I took his hand at the red light. “Let’s just keep our shit together until the sun goes down.”
“Then what?”
“We fall apart.”
We made it home before sunset. The funeral home had dealt with worse, and we did what the grieved often did. We dumped everything in their lap and let them tell us what we had to do. Darren signed the forms to allow them to retrieve the body. We let them arrange a cremation. There would be no big funeral, no open casket, just a thing at my house. I didn’t know what you called such a thing, but the funeral director seemed to know and nodded, letting it slide.
Then we ran back to my house and made phone calls, sprawled on the couch together. I’d called three people I knew weren’t around, leaving messages and moving on, when I heard Darren weeping Adam’s name into his phone. I felt glad enough to leave him alone. He needed someone besides me. He’d lost his sister, his only family. He deserved to have someone else to love him.
But my gladness was shouted down by something darker, more insidious, more selfish. A deep, evil stab of loneliness that I would have done best to ignore. I should have stayed in the living room to have Darren’s warm body next to me, but he needed to be alone. He wouldn’t want to go to Gabby’s room, and I didn’t feel right forcing him onto the porch. So I slipped into my room, crawled under the covers and hugged my pillow, wondering who was going to braid my hair tomorrow.
eleven
I texted Debbie, asking for a few days off and explaining that my best friend had died. She called, but I rejected it. I got dinged and blooped and buzzed a hundred times over by everyone we had ever known. I answered some, thanking people for their condolences, but I just wanted to be left alone, so I shut off the phone and cocooned myself under the covers.
I got out of bed the next night. The house was empty. I showered, ate a few crackers, and went back to bed.
I turned my phone back on, under the covers, and scrolled through all the kind words and long messages. I resented them. I was grateful for them. I wanted to be around people and eviscerate the longing lonely hole in my body. I earned the isolation and wanted nothing to do with another living soul. Fuck everybody. I needed them. I hated them.
I tried to remember things about my friend, nice stories to cheer me under the dark, damp covers, but my brain wouldn’t jog anything loose. I could only remember our most hackneyed scenes. Graduation day. The last time I had seen her, the last time I spoke to her. Everything else was scorched earth, as if it had never happened, or like some mature, godly part of me was protecting the weak, repellent part of me from more hurt by refusing to release painful data.
Someone knocked on the door at some point, maybe just some delivery person, but it woke me up. I scrolled through my messages. So sorry/That’s terrible/Can I bring you something to eat? Et cetera, et cetera. Everyone was so sweet, but I didn’t know how to accept their kindness. The phone vibrated in my hand, and though I’d been ignoring it for however many hours, I looked at this message.
—Debbie told me—
I didn’t know how to r
espond to Jonathan. We weren’t in a place in our relationship where I could ask him for anything or expect him to intuit what I needed. His text made me feel lonelier than any other. I answered, feeling as if I were shouting down an empty alley.
—Tell her I’m going to work day after tomorrow—
—What are you doing now?—
—I’m under my covers—
—Alone?—
—y—
—A crime—
I smiled, and the feeling of levity cracked the brittle shell of sorrow, if only for a second, and tears streamed down my face.
—Don’t make me laugh, fuckhead—
—May I join you under those lucky covers?—
When I read the message, I didn’t feel his request in my loins, but on my skin. I wanted him to touch me. Kiss me. Breathe on me. Talk to me. Hold me for hours. The desire wasn’t just between my legs, but in my rib cage, my marrow, my fingertips. Could I give up the consuming protection of loneliness and indulge in a few hours with Jonathan? Was I worthy of a little comfort? Probably not. And I hadn’t forgotten the submissive thing. No. He was going to drag me into a pit of defilement and humiliation. Seeing him would only draw him closer to me than he should be, ever.
I texted:
—I need you—
I hit send. I shouldn’t have. I should have made a much cooler, distant statement. At the very least, I should have been witty in admitting I was a filthy, repugnant mess of need. But I didn’t. Three words and I’d debased myself.
I felt hopeful for the first time in days. I got out of bed and crawled into the shower, setting it for hotter than it needed to be. I had no idea how long I’d been in bed, but it was seven in the morning according to my clock. I hadn’t seen or heard from Darren, and I assumed he was with Adam. I should have called him, but the idea of reaching out, even to the only person in the world who would understand my sense of failure, made me flinch as if my face would get slapped.
My skin was raw and pink from heat and friction when I stepped out of the shower. I dried my hair and pulled out my brush. A twisted black hair tie was wrapped around the handle. Gabby had put it there when she worked on my hair for the Eclipse show. I put my palm on my wet hair and stroked downward, curling my fingers to gather a strand, just enough to string a bow. The sensation was nothing like when Gabby did it with her care and artistry. And all that was gone. All that talent went into the nothing and nowhere. All the music she would have made would never exist.
