by Poppy Brite
It had begun to rain, and the street was deserted. This was cold, grimy rain, rain that drifted down from the sky like broken spiderwebs and danced on the hood of Christian’s car as if possessed by some mindless elemental joy. The golden cones of brightness beneath the streetlamps shimmered like spirits. Rain misted up from the sidewalks and rose back toward the sky. The clouds hung low and leaden, reflecting back the light of the French Quarter dull purple, like light seen through thick dirty glass.
Christian turned onto Bourbon Street. The rain hadn’t stopped tonight’s carnival. Crowds huddled on the sidewalks and made occasional mad dashes across the street, like fish darting between brightly lit riverbanks. The street was a riot of lights. Glittering gold ribbons, pink and green martini glasses, a giant red neon crawfish. He drove past Jean Lafitte’s Old Absinthe House and remembered when it had first begun serving that bitter liqueur. The sign proclaimed Since 1807, and Christian had to trust it. His memory was good, but he had been in and out of the city in those years, more restless then. He had seen Lafitte, though, a handsome, sensual man who could hold forth on any subject and draw an audience whether he knew what he spoke of or not. Christian’s eyes had met Lafitte’s across a crowded barroom one night, and Lafitte had pulled a face at him, toothy and menacing, then winked.
The pirate had been drunk on absinthe, which produces visions. Molochai, Twig, and Zillah would have loved absinthe in its true form, before the poisonous wormwood was taken out of the recipe. But they had been mewling babes when it was banned in the United States in 1912.
Inside the strip clubs, spangles gyrated and flashed. Christian stopped his car for a crowd of people milling across the street. Soldiers, tourists, street-corner musicians—and the omnipresent children in black. He had seen those pale smudged faces before, in the clubs, in his arms … but no, those had been different faces.
Most of the crowd was drunk. Some turned and waved at Christian, and he lifted a gloved hand in return, half-smiling. Surely those could not be tears on his face. He had not cried in too many years. He could not remember what crying felt like. This was only leftover rain, dripping from his hair, pooling in his eyes.
Christian waved goodbye to the Bourbon Street crowd and wiped the rain from his cheeks. Then he turned north and drove out of town.
12
As early afternoon light touched her eyelids, the sleeping girl moaned and buried her face in soft black oblivion.
Her sheets and pillowcases had been plain white cotton until last week, when she had run them all through the washing machine with six packages of black Rit dye. Now they were a flat bluish-ebony color that stained her skin on hot nights. She nestled deeper into her inky bedclothes and flung an arm across the mattress. Empty space. No warmth or scent except her own, no reassuringly live flesh to press herself close to. The empty bed brought her awake with a jolt, and for a moment she panicked. Waking up alone robbed her of her frame of reference; she could barely remember who she was.
Then she saw the room around her, the posters on the walls, the paint-smeared easel, the clothes heaped on the floor of the big walk-in closet. Across the room she saw herself in the mirror of her vanity, eyes round and startled, pale face framed by tangles of long red-gold hair. She settled back with a sigh. She was Ann Bransby-Smith, and she was in her own room, safe in her own bed, and never mind the sick feeling it still gave her to wake up alone.
Not until she rolled over and hugged her pillow close to her did she realize that she had been thinking of waking up not with Eliot—even though she had spent most of last night with him—but with Steve.
Even the thought of his name made her heart twist. After all that had happened between them, Ann still sometimes wished she could wake up with him, see his dark hair straggling across the pillow and his intense face softened in sleep, reach over and glide her fingers along the muscles of his back. God, but he had always felt good beside her, on top of her, inside her.
Well, almost always.
Well, except when he made her hurt like hell.
That was how she had started cheating on him in the first place: she’d wanted to have sex with someone who didn’t leave her sore the next morning. Once she had loved the sureness and strength of Steve’s touch, but drinking turned him rough and seemed to make his bones sharper. Ann woke with gnawed nipples, bruised hipbones, a throbbing ache in her crotch that turned to raw agony when she pissed. It was only good for an argument if she mentioned it, and she still desired him, so after a while she shut up.
And when she was honest with herself, she knew the rough sex wasn’t the only thing that had driven her away. It was the music as well. Steve had already started playing guitar when she met him, and at the time she had liked the idea of having a musician for a boyfriend. She was happy for him when he started getting good and excited when he, Ghost, and R.J. decided to form a band. R.J. had never wanted it as badly as the other two—he’d always been a serious kid, and Ann thought music was just too frivolous a calling for him—and had dropped out early, but he still sat in with them sometimes.
All that had been fine. But when it got too heavy, when it started to appear that Steve and Ghost wanted to make Lost Souls? their life’s work, Ann balked. She didn’t want to be a musician’s wife, spending months alone in Missing Mile while he toured, worrying about money during the lean years and groupies during the good ones. When they had started recording their tape, the final wedge was driven in. The all-night sessions, the hours upon hours Steve spent in Terry’s home studio talking about levels, tracks, spillage, and other incomprehensible things he never bothered to explain to his lowly girlfriend. He had never felt so intensely about her, Ann was sure.
At any rate, she had known Eliot would make a gentler lover from the first time she met him.
At first Eliot had seemed exotic: twenty-nine to Ann’s twenty-one, divorced, with a real job as a junior-college English teacher and half a novel sitting on his desk. He was a regular customer at the Spanish restaurant where she waited tables. He always sat in Ann’s section and started leaving her giant tips. Eventually he asked her out. “You disturb me,” he had told her, “but you intrigue me.”
The line sounded stupid when Ann thought about it later, but by then she had already slept with him and had mistaken his tentativeness for tenderness. At least when Eliot went down on her, her clitoris didn’t feel as if it were about to be sucked out by its roots. At least when Eliot’s penis (she could not help noticing it was thinner and much pointier than she was used to) was inside her, it didn’t feel like an angry fist battering her cervix. At least Eliot waited until she was wet. These days, such things were luxuries.
Also, Eliot had had a vasectomy. He was very proud of it and sometimes wore a bright orange button that said I Got Mine! If you asked him about it, he would launch into a speech about how None of Us Have the Right to Bring More Children into This Cruel, Overpopulated World. Ann didn’t care for the button or the speech, but it was nice being able to go off the pill. Her sleep patterns and her depression patterns were so erratic that she had been forgetting as many as she remembered.
So it didn’t matter when she read the half a novel and couldn’t think of anything to say about it. It was a study of a rural family in Virginia. It was Tough and Gritty, but Sensitive. The hero turned out to be the youngest son, Edward, who went to the University and became a teacher of English. Edward was also the only character who didn’t talk in dialect—Eliot had written his doctoral thesis on William Faulkner, and had never really gotten over it. It didn’t matter that Eliot talked sneeringly of her “redneck boyfriend”—whom he had never met and never would—and derived a perverse glee from hearing that Steve was a college dropout. It didn’t even matter that underneath all her self-righteousness she felt like the lowest kind of lying, betraying bitch. None of these things mattered to her in the slightest.
Until Steve found out.
Ghost knew about it first, of course. He had always been able to see inside
her head, the way he could see inside Steve’s head and almost anyone else’s if he chose to. Ann had seen Ghost looking at her strangely, then looking away when she stared back at him. He would not question her or accuse her, but she knew he knew.
She had let herself into their house one day while Steve was at work. She stood in the doorway of Ghost’s room, watching him write something in a spiral notebook. When he finally looked up, he didn’t seem surprised to see her. His pale blue eyes had been calm but guarded.
“Are you going to tell him?” she said.
For a long moment Ghost only looked at her, and she didn’t think he would answer at all. Then he lifted one shoulder in a tiny shrug and shook his head no—but in those small movements Ann saw what pain it was causing him to keep such an ugly secret from Steve. All the guilt and the sorrow washed over her then, and she fell on Ghost’s bed, buried her face in his musty-rose-scented heap of blankets, and sobbed out the whole sordid tale. Ghost patted her back and stroked her sweaty hair, and all the time she knew she was telling him things he didn’t want to hear. But he listened anyway, because he was Ghost. Because he was good.
And of course Steve found out anyway. Whether he sneaked into her room and found her carefully hidden journal, or whether the unspoken communication between him and Ghost was so strong that he picked it up without Ghost having to say anything, Ann never found out. Everything happened so fast. Steve came over one night when her father was out, and he knew. He didn’t come right out with it, though. He talked around the edges of it; he was manic, almost raving, then sullen. She could see in his eyes that he hated her.
“All right!” she shrieked finally. “All right! I fucked somebody else and I liked it! He’s a better lover than you. He’s smarter than you. He’s not a goddamn drunk—”
She was just getting warmed up when his hand flashed out and slapped her hard across the face.
The blow had enough force behind it to throw her backward onto her bed. She lay there for a moment, her heart and mind stunned. Steve had never hit her. No one but her father had ever hit her. Her cheek and jaw went numb, then began to tingle. Steve would beg her forgiveness, surely. But he stood over her, his dark eyes blazing, and when she tried to struggle up he planted the sole of his boot square in her crotch and shoved hard. A lick of pain shot through her.
“You cunt,” Steve said. His voice was quiet, inflectionless. “I know how to make sure you won’t do any more fucking around for a while.”
And Steve’s hands went to his belt buckle.
Ann threw herself back against the wall. Suddenly Steve was on the bed with her, pinning her there, trapping her. She thrashed against him and felt him getting hard. Seeing him excited by her terror scared her worse, made her limp. She kept trying to push him away, but she was weak now, and he was so strong.
He yanked her skirt up, thrust two guitar-callused fingers into her vagina. They were dry and felt as if they would tear her open. Now he had her hips pinned beneath his. His jeans were down around his knees. His cock was shoving at her, battering into her. She felt it thrusting through her dryness up into the unwilling heart of her womb, and most of her did not want it there—but it was Steve, and he had always fit inside her so damn well, and almost before she realized it she was coming. Coming against her will, coming in pain and humiliation, but coming hard nonetheless.
Steve mistook the throes of her orgasm for struggles and thrust her arms back against the mattress. His big hands were like vises around her wrists. Ann felt delicate bones grinding together; in a moment she thought they might snap. She threw her head to the side and sank her teeth into the ball of his thumb until she tasted blood. Now he was pounding into her so hard that he didn’t seem to notice the pain—but his grip loosened a little, and then he was shuddering to his own violent orgasm, and the rape was over.
“There,” he breathed, lifting his head to stare into her stricken face. “There. See how you like fucking your new boyfriend now.”
After he had stormed out and roared away in his car, she wondered why she felt so dirty.
That had happened more than a month ago, and it was the last time she had seen Steve. She knew he had tried to call a couple of times—or someone had called at 3:00 A.M. and hung up when she answered—but she did not care, could not care. She made Eliot her refuge, her sanctuary. He was so good to her that she grew impatient with him, then completely sick of him. But she could not let go. She was afraid of that empty space in her life. She was afraid she might let Steve fill it again, and that would kill her shaky self-respect forever.
She nestled deeper into her pillows and contemplated going back to sleep. These days it was not unusual for her to sleep fourteen or fifteen hours at a stretch. She was just drifting off again when the doorbell rang. She tried to ignore it. The sound lingered in her ears, made her heart pound. “Go away,” she whispered.
The bell rang again. Ann swore, and as if in response it rang a third time. She swung her legs over the side of the bed, fought off a headrush that made the room spin giddily around her, and went with great reluctance to see who was at her door.
The boards of the old wooden porch shifted uneasily under Ghost’s feet. The Bransby house was a Victorian monstrosity gone to seed, its paint peeling, its edges softening. He had not called before riding his bike over here because he was afraid Ann might refuse to see him, but he knew by her beat-up little car in the driveway that she was home. He also knew that her father was gone, probably to an AA meeting or to the library over in Corinth, the only places he ever went that anyone knew about. That was good. Ghost had always been a little scared of Simon Bransby.
He was trying to decide whether to leave or ring the bell again when he heard steps inside the house—slow, dragging steps, in no hurry to reach the door. Eventually Ghost heard Ann fumbling with the chain. Then the tumblers of the lock slid back, and she stood in the doorway, leaning against the jamb, her face half obscured in the gloom of the foyer.
At first Ghost thought Ann had two black eyes. But as she blinked at him, he realized it was only her makeup, smeared around her eyes as if she had slept in it. In fact, though it was two in the afternoon, she looked as if she might have just woken up. Her long autumn-colored hair was tangled. Her black dress was rumpled and hastily buttoned.
For a long moment Ann stared at Ghost, his rainbow-painted bicycle beside him on the porch, the colored streamers tied to the brim of his old straw hat. She looked as if she might burst out crying or slam the door in his face. But at last she moved aside and said, “Come on in.”
Without another word, she turned and walked back down the hall, away from him. Ghost shut the door behind him and followed. To the left was the dusty parlor, where several weeks’ worth of newspapers were strewn about the floor and heavy draperies were closed against the day. Ghost wondered who had drawn them—Simon? Or had it been Ann, who used to keep the house sunny and clean?
To the right was the half-open door of Simon’s laboratory. Ghost tried not to look, but the dull gleam of sunlight on glass caught his eye—the test tubes, the aquariums, the vials of weird fluid. He’d been in there a couple of times with Steve, though Ann’s friends were not supposed to go in the room. The contents of the aquariums were innocuous enough—toads and mice—but the laboratory felt like a place of pain. And there was a big refrigerator with a chain and padlock on it. Even Ann didn’t know what was in there.
Ann reached the kitchen table and propped herself against it for a moment, then collapsed into a chair. “Make some coffee, would you,” she said. Ann’s voice was hoarser than usual, nearly toneless. She curled her bare toes around the rung of her chair. Her red toenail polish was chipped and faded, as though she had not redone it for weeks.
Ghost found the coffee in the freezer and started making it. He used only his grandmother’s old Corningware drip pot at home, and he had already put water on to boil before he realized that the Bransby kitchen had an automatic coffee maker. It took him several minutes
to figure out where the coffee went and where to pour the cold water in.
“You’re not a part of the machine age, Ghost,” said Ann. She lit a Camel and narrowed her eyes at him through the smoke. At last she asked, “Why did you come over?”
“I just wanted to see how you were doing.”
“Oh? And how am I doing?”
“You look bad.”
Ann gazed levelly at him. “Thanks. You look a little spooky yourself.”
“You know that’s not what I mean.” Ghost pulled the coffeepot out from under the drip-spout too soon. Hot coffee hissed against the burner, and he hurriedly put the pot back. “You’re beautiful, Ann. But you look sad. Twitchy. You look like those kids you used to make fun of at the Sacred Yew—black clothes, black eyes, dead white skin. What are you doing?”
“I’m in mourning,” she said. “I’m mourning the death of a relationship.” She got up and pushed him away from the coffee maker, expertly slid the pot out, and poured them each a cup. Ghost put lots of milk and sugar in his. Ann left hers black, which meant she was doing some kind of penance. Ghost knew she hated black coffee.
“Steve told me he hadn’t seen you for over a month,” he said. She flinched at the name, but he made himself go on. “Things must not be too good with your new guy if you’re still in mourning.” It was out: he had crossed over into territory that was officially None of His Business.
“Look, Ghost.” Ann swung around in her chair, faced him. “I worked last night, okay? I was at that shitty restaurant until midnight. Then I drove out to Corinth to see Eliot—more precisely, to fuck Eliot We fucked until four in the morning because that’s about all we can do together anymore. Then I had to drive back here because Simon usually wakes up around six, and he gets crazy if I’m not home. So I’ve spent the last twenty-four hours doing two things you don’t know much about—working and fucking. I’m tired. Now lay off me.”
