Further Out Than You Thought (2 page)

Eat, her father had said. Eat.

Down to the bones, yet hidden, an eel in its hole, she stayed put. Her mother was gone, and no bait he offered could lure her from the safety of her resolve. Her life was up to her now. She was dancing ballet, eating a hard-boiled egg and a Saltine cracker a day, maybe a grapefruit, or an orange. If she chose to vanish, that was what she would do. She didn't need food. She didn't need people. Not even her father, who had begun to notice her again. When he held her in his arms like a child and set her on the bathroom scale, she pushed up on the underside of the countertop, adding false weight. Victorious trickster, she held her head high—queen of a world not entered, but overcome.

Around the pole she spun, and the tiny lights whirled like planets as she hurled herself through the universe. She tried to feel them whirl inside her like chakras. Red at the tailbone, her connection to home, to mother. And lilac at the top of her head, open to the stars, to the poetry of her thoughts.

Be in your body, not in your head, Brett had told her the night she'd auditioned. It was when the stripping felt best, like dancing with your eyes closed, feeling the music move you—a breeze across a field of wheat.

She had been new then. Hair short, spit curls at her cheeks, she was trying herself on, her new self—Stevie. Like Stevie Smith, Stevie the dancer would dress like a little girl: white church socks with turned-down ruffles, short white cotton gloves, Mary Janes with heels, the blue-and-white dress straight out of
Alice in Wonderland,
pearls. That first night, she'd worn real pearls, the last gift her mother and father had given her together, her present when she'd turned fifteen. She never wore them here again. Her costume, she realized, had to be just that—clothes and accessories that made her into someone else. As Stevie, she was innocence willing to go the distance, never tainted by any one thing she did, because she was only playing. This was a game of hopscotch, of jump rope, skipped to a nursery-rhyme beat. One, two, buckle my shoe.

Three, four, shut the door.

She was late this month. She knew that much. But how late?

Stop it, she thought. Stop thinking. She felt her feet, how they ached from being all night in her secondhand Halstons with the four-inch heels. She felt the muscles in her thighs and back and waist as her hips rocked from side to side. She felt the heat of the lights, felt a drop of sweat slide down her neck. Only how could she be just a body, if that body might be changing, already beyond her control?

The empty sidewalks of my block are not the same
, Rickie Lee sang.
You're not to blame
.

Stevie walked the rim of the stage, bending here and there to gather the green. She bent at her waist, her legs straight. She'd learned that from Brett, too. Every move a chance to exhibit her sexuality. No waste, no shame. To the men behind the dollars, to their late-night TV gaze, she smiled, saying, “Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.” A distant echolalia.

One boy clapped in appreciation and smiled back. Korean possibly. Spiked black hair and white teeth.

“The Way We Were” was playing, and here was Joe's voice over the loudspeaker. “Next on the main stage it's the luscious Miss Love.”

Stevie stood up, walked quick to the curtain. She brushed past Love, her cheek against Love's breast, and the world went white. She turned an ankle and grabbed Love's arm. “Hey, darlin',” said Love in her southern drawl, holding her up. She guided her backstage, helped her sit on the carpeted step. “Y'all right?”

Stevie focused her eyes.

Long legs and hair, her dark skin showing through the pink gauze of her costume, Love was stately and steamy, like an orchid.

“Honey?”

“I'm fine,” Stevie said, and smiled to assure her.

Alone, Stevie lay on the carpet, caught her breath. Love's pink veils would be moving in circles as she pirouetted from one corner of the stage to another.
She moved in circles, and those circles moved
. Roethke said that. Like Brett's Ouroboros. No escape from ourselves.

Stevie sat up, brushed the filaments of carpet from her sticky back. She opened the bottle of water she'd stashed in a corner, put it to her lips and felt the liquid slip down her throat and fill her. She drank the entire bottle, as if to purify herself from the inside out.
Water cleans the soul
was what her mother had liked to say. She'd never leave the house without bringing a mason jar of water with her, and she'd dubbed the pool in their backyard her “reservoir of sanity.” Stevie was born in Phoenix in late August and her mother had spent the last three months of her pregnancy in the water. She'd even slept on a raft some nights, floating under the stars. It was no wonder Stevie required water, needed it like air. If she didn't have a bottle nearby she couldn't relax, and this bottle was gone. But she was almost off. She could last, and she could always get a glass from the bar.

Folding the money into her purse—a beaded half-moon evening bag, the one token from her real life she allowed herself here—she thought, again, of her mother. The purse had been hers, and she'd given it to Stevie when she was twelve. It had seemed magical at the time, when Stevie had placed it over her shoulder and imagined who she might be at twenty-five, imagined all she'd know then. She'd pictured dinners and conversation. A whole other kind of dancing—not for, but
with
. What she'd pictured was elegant, easy, streamlined. As if wisdom could arrive cleanly as mail, or the newspaper on one's doorstep. As if wisdom didn't come from getting dirt under one's nails.

SHE MET TONY at the private dance booth, their booth, the one on the side—the corner pocket, he called it. Behind the red curtains, in the dark, she put her moon purse on the high shelf, fed the token into the slot. It made a lighthearted clink when it hit bottom, like a quarter fed to a pinball game at a rusty boardwalk arcade. Now there was the heat of the red light, like a warming oven, and she sat still as a mannequin on the ledge the size of a child's desk that separated her from Tony. He was supposed to sit with his hands folded in his lap like a good boy. This to adhere to the club's
No Touching
rule: he wasn't to touch her, and she wasn't to touch
anything pink.
And there was the lurker behind the curtain, peeking through the cracks, making sure the dancers and their patrons followed the rules.

Since her first night, Tony had what the man behind the curtain called wandering hands. Though Stevie had denied it. When confronted, she had told the man he hadn't touched her. She'd kept their secret. Tony had paid for ten private dances in a row that first time, and that made two hundred dollars he'd spent. Of course, there were the tokens she had to buy at the bar at eight bucks each, the club's take of each dance, so she'd only brought home one hundred twenty. Cash she wouldn't have had otherwise. The money didn't hurt—car insurance had been due, rent and tuition—but she'd turned down cash before. The truth was she liked Tony, liked his Spanish accent, his thin body and bald head, liked the fact that, at sixty-five, he was exactly forty years her elder. And she liked how his eyes shone with life—their flash of sun on ice.

They had chosen the corner booth because here the lurker couldn't see quite so well. Here, on her knees, she could lean toward Tony, letting his knuckles brush her nipples. Standing, facing Tony's image in the back mirror, she could lower herself, quickly, letting her labia graze his hands. With her back against the mirror, she could open her legs and touch herself.

She was shaved completely. It had been a gradual thing—the removal of hair. That first time, before her audition, she'd shaved just her labia, or rather her boyfriend, Leo, had. On a towel on the coffee table she'd lain back, her head on a pillow, and let him shave her. There was the warm soapy water, the blades of the virgin razor, Leo, cautious and precise, taking his time. Cool air on her labia, she'd felt that part of her come to life. After a few months, the triangle narrowed to a landing strip. And then, to be seen, to be that much more vulnerable, that much more seductive (and because it went with her Alice dress), she shaved it all off, the whole brown tuft. Utterly bare, she knew in that very lack of defense there was power—the trust that comes of ownership. And she knew her little-girl act was one reason Tony had taken so strong a liking to her.

Tonight, she let his pinky trace the lips on her face as if he were glossing them. His pinky stopped and her lips opened, taking it in. Tony's little finger in her mouth sent through her body a new thrill of contact. She nibbled the tip and let it go, reveling in the ease of her actions, her mouth parted, ready. And then she thought of Leo, home alone, waiting for her, and wondered if her guilt amplified the thrill. The thought frightened her, and the blood quickened in her veins.

She moved to the back of the booth, sat with her shoulder blades pressed to the cool mirror, legs spread, and watched him look. Her availability vast as the sea drew him in. His face glowed.

“Baby. You're wet,” he said. “Really wet, like in the beginning.”

At his table, in her plaid dress again, she sat across from him. They drank cranberry juice and club soda. It was Stevie's drink at the club, where all choices were nonalcoholic, and Tony had decided it was his now, too.

She could hear Brett one table over, introducing herself. “No. Not Brat, Brett.”

Tony was saying he'd had dinner with some literary friends and pulled out Stevie's poems, told them some escrow agent had written them. They'd gone on about how sensual the poems were, and asked if the author was a sensual person. Tony insisted she was bookish, shy.

“I am, you know,” Stevie said.

Tony laughed. “And then they began to analyze the poems,” he said, “and I got bored. But listen. I want to patronize the arts. So here's the deal. A thousand dollars. But no dancing, we'll just go out to dinner. Bring anyone you like. Bring Leo.”

He'd offered her a grand before, for a private dance at his house in the marina. Said she could bring a chaperone. And so she'd told him about Leo. How he was dressing up as an American revolutionary and selling tapes of his album on a street corner in Century City. Tony had bought one. It was the only tape Leo had ever sold.

She mulled over this new offer. Should she break her rule and take the club outside, into the real world? When she'd first started dancing, Brett had warned her about that. The rule was a good way to keep things safe, lives separate. But this was Tony. She'd known him for months.

He leaned back, crossed his legs. “I listened to Leo's tape,” he said, and pulled it from his pocket. “
Fourth of July Address,
huh? Who's the girl on the front?”

“Liberty,” said Stevie. It was a pencil sketch of a woman's face. Leo had drawn it.

“She looks like you,” Tony said. He turned the case over to the list of songs. “That ‘Freedom Song' is as good as any I've heard. Ever. But why does he do all that talking? Who wants to listen to that?”

She tucked her hair behind her ear. She blushed. Why explain Leo's discourse on liberty, or his refusal to pay taxes because they were unconstitutional?

Maybe she would go to dinner with Tony. Maybe she'd go alone.

The Asian boy with the white teeth and spiked hair tapped her on the shoulder.

“Go ahead,” said Tony. “I'm calling it a night.”

The boy followed her past a few occupied dance booths to one that was open. Passing Brett, she lingered, watched hot jazz spread from her like the sweet reek of night-blooming jasmine, watched it spread from that blur of fold and soft black fuzz. Hands on her thighs, knees open, torso trembling, her neck long, her lips grazing her shoulder, she inhaled her own heat, held it.

Stevie forced herself to stop looking.

She stepped into the next booth, put her purse on the ledge, the token in the slot. Brett dancing on in her imagination, she thought of all she wanted to say. Or maybe it wasn't really talk she wanted.

Six private dances later, the twenty-one-year-old Korean named Danny bought her a club sandwich for a late-night dinner. Mild eyes, refined voice and hands, he talked of Rumi, and the role of the beloved in Persian poetry, the beloved being a metaphor for God. God as immanent and transcendent, within all and outside all. “God,” he said, “is the Self in everyone, in spirit and in matter. These bodies”—he patted his smooth arm—“they're made of God.”

“And what I shall assume, you shall assume. For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” said Stevie.

“Whitman,” the boy said, surprised. “One of my favorites.”

ONE LAST PRIVATE dance before the club closed. This time, her crotch was close enough to tantalize. Her pelvis tilted like a plate, her sex near his nose, his mouth.

His lips brushed hers. No tongue. Just a closed-mouth peck of a kiss.

She pulled away, caught her breath. This had never happened, and for a moment she was stunned. She hadn't seen it coming. The lurker was there. She glimpsed him between the flaps of curtain, but she didn't holler for him to throw Danny out. After all, it was God kissing God, lips to lips, immaculate. And she had offered her sex. Like an ice cream cone on a summer day, she thought. As if she were the ice cream and the sun. It wasn't his fault. In his position, were Brett dancing for
her,
who was to say she wouldn't have done the same?

Still, she didn't offer herself to him again.

IN THE DRESSING room, Brett was the only dancer left. Stevie could smell the musk of her sweat mixed with the sandalwood oil she wore. She was naked, her legs crossed at the ankles, her bare feet on the countertop as she counted her cash. Her breasts, small enough to fit in her hands, were as brown as the rest of her. Leaning back in the wooden chair, she seemed as comfortable topless as any man. Maybe she was part Egyptian, or Native American, thought Stevie, with her straight dark hair and her almond eyes.