Further Out Than You Thought (3 page)

“Hey, Stevie, walk out with me?” Brett grinned, Marlboro Red between her teeth, and struck a match.

“Sure,” Stevie said. She was alone with Brett, she could say anything, and all she said was “Sure.”

Brett turned, opened her locker. Her coccyx, Stevie saw, was worse than she'd remembered. The perpetual bruise, from her being so often on her back, was the size and color of a small plum. Stevie wanted to kiss it, to make it better, and at the thought, her heart began to race. Pulling on jeans and a small, thin, men's white T-shirt, she could feel her cheeks flush, though the mirror showed only a white mask. Under the cover of the makeup and powder, she found her voice.

“Mind if I bum a smoke?” she said.

“Go for it.”

Stevie lit the cigarette. She'd been with women before, but they'd been the ones to make the first move. Brett had a boyfriend, one to whom she was engaged. He was young, a writer. And that was fine. After all, didn't she have Leo? No, she didn't want anything real with Brett. Just contact—taste and touch. She'd watched her for six months now, minus those months she'd been gone. Watched her bend at the waist and inch her G-string down her thighs, watched her spank her right cheek until it was crimson.

It wasn't so much what she did as how she did it. She moved like a cat, sprung, the tension of contraction in the taut muscles of her abdomen. On her knees she arched her back, her hair skimming her feet, her rib cage an altar for her open heart.

But it was her detachment that had fascinated Stevie from the first night she saw her dance, an aloofness Stevie aimed for, but could never quite achieve.

That night she had come to the club with Leo, as a customer, to see if she might work there. And she had worshipped Brett from their table at the back of the room. She had taken her last five dollars from her pocket and placed it on her stage. A token. And Brett had smiled down at her. Aphrodite, sending with her eyes a blessing—benevolence, light. Brett was above the club, beyond it—beyond the money and the men. And the bruises, on her knees and her tailbone, those places where she had touched the wooden stage floor—where gravity had pressed her body against it again and again—were proof of her night of work, proof that her body had, in fact, been here at the Century Lounge. The bruises made her human, and all the more beautiful.

Brett put on a Derby hat, jodhpurs, and boots, buttoned a vest over her black bra. Stevie noticed the pendant hanging from her black velvet choker between her collarbones—a silver crescent inlaid with stones. Before she could think, she took it in her hand.

“I made it,” Brett said. “I'm starting a company.”

Some of the stones were the blue of deep ocean and some were milky, mysterious.

“Lapis lazuli,” she explained, “to help you remember your dreams. And moonstone, for intuition and new beginnings.”

“It's beautiful,” said Stevie, letting it go.

Brett slung her bag over her shoulder, gave her hair a small flip. She shone, as if with her own light, Stevie thought, as if she were a star and paparazzi were waiting in the parking lot to catch her in their flash.

Stevie unlatched the thick back door and together they pushed it wide. She felt the night move through her in one clean gust. The air seemed warmer than usual, and the moon surprised her with its brightness. She'd missed the moon without knowing it. Low cloud cover must have kept it from her. And now it was full, and it made of the parking lot a lake. Walking on water, on air, she felt giddy, and a little witchy.

They stopped midlake, between their two cars. It was perfect. She should kiss her right here, right now, while they were wading in moonlight. Quick. She should catch her off guard. Before Brett kissed her cheek and squeezed her arm, before she turned. She felt her heart lurch, and she couldn't move, couldn't cross the distance between them, between friendship and something else.

The moment was gone. She'd missed her chance. They were moving again; they were back in time. They kissed cheek to cheek. Brett squeezed her arm and disappeared into her old black Mercedes.

Stevie's own car, a silver Nissan—more of a dull gray, really, with its coating of dirt and city grime—was under the sign big as a billboard whose red letters read
XXX LIVE NUDES
!!!
Live
with a long
i,
as in live bait, in which you aren't rooting for the bait to outlive the predator fishes; no, you're appealing to the fishermen who want to catch a goddamn fish already. On Century Boulevard, the main drag to and from LAX, the sign attracted plenty of those hungry men with their empty lives.

Inside her car, she locked the doors and started the engine. Two quick lefts and she was heading north on the 405, windows down so she could feel the night. She loved driving the L.A. freeways late at night. It felt like flying. Past Arbor, Hillcrest, Manchester. She could take South La Cienega, a straight shot to Fairfax; but since it had streetlights, it was only worth taking when the freeway was slow. On the stereo, Bing was singing,
Would you like to swing on a star, carry moonbeams home in a jar, and be better off than you are, or would you rather be a—

She turned it off. It was Leo's cassette. He'd left it in when he'd borrowed her car last.

And anyhow, she'd heard music all night long; now she wanted to listen to the wind. She wanted it to erase things, especially tonight. Tony's finger in her mouth, the boy's lips on her labia. She'd let things go too far. And it had been easy somehow, far too easy. She was slipping. She didn't recognize herself.

Come June it would be one year that she'd worked at the Century Lounge, and at the start she'd sworn she'd strip for a year, no more. To put herself through graduate school, to not yawn her life away in an eight-to-five desk job—filing—which was what she had been doing, to enter this world that had intrigued her, this other side of life, the underbelly. To fear nothing, to walk right up to the edge and peer into the depths. To know what she couldn't know without going there. She'd hoped this world would fuel her creativity, wake her up with its strange terrain, give her something compelling to write poems about and the time in which to write them. She'd had reasons and purpose and entered this life of a stripper with her head on straight, or so she'd thought.

But now the lines that marked what she would and would not do, the lines she'd drawn to keep herself safe in—and separate from—this other world were vanishing. It was like stepping into a dark room. After your eyes adjust, it's just a room. The shadows lighten and what had seemed to lurk there becomes familiar. And if the Century Lounge had become familiar, where would she then need to venture to find herself? How much further would she need to go to draw that exacting line and keep well enough behind it?

She exhaled her fears, let the wind take them. She imagined the night air combing the smoke from her hair, rinsing the salt from her skin. With each passing mile, she left further behind her the cave of eyes and music and the red light that cast the scene in unreality, made it all a dream she could wake up from. By the time she got home, to their apartment in the Miracle Mile, to Leo, she would be herself. She would be Gwen.

Gwen was quiet. She spent her time reading, filling notebooks with her inky scrawl. Gwen was faithful.

Stevie was an invention, sprung from Gwen's imagination. She was shameless, free as the sky, or death—those curtains that enclose us and that we cannot touch. Stevie did things that would make Gwen blush to watch, things that would mortify her, were she to dwell on them.

Stevie could turn her back on a man, and with a quick arch she had him. There. Turning around to stare him down, Stevie would cross her legs. He'd reach into his pocket, pull out his bulge of a wallet, float her a ten. She'd lean close, let her tits graze the metal bar between them, catching her breath as if he had been the one to touch her. She'd uncross her legs, and with a hand she'd open them. Tension. The leg resisting the hand. And her mouth open. Breathing in, she'd toss her head back. Another ten and she'd be on her back, arching, her knees up and spread.

The mound of Venus.

Stevie would do this for anyone who had cash. Gwen had created her for this very act. Before the man left the club, he'd scribble his number on a book of matches. Stevie would thank him, and Gwen would toss it in the nearest trash can.

But now there was Tony and his offer. A grand for dinner. Jesus.

She felt her breasts. Devotion was right—they were bigger. And they hurt. Her nipples felt sensitive, tingly.

Different.

Her heart quivered, and her mind was a dark expanse—as if she were beyond the earth and its draw, beyond oxygen. Floating, frozen. She'd never had a scare. Not like this.

What if she was pregnant?

Her face and hands were hot. They were burning.

But this sort of thing happened to people all the time. Didn't it? How many girls at the club had been worried when it was nothing?

She took a breath, let it go.

The sooner she bought the test, the sooner she'd know. The sooner she'd be free. Yes. On her way home she'd stop at Jin's. Buy a goddamn test.

The 405 to the 10 East and off at Fairfax. The streets seemed quieter than usual, even for the middle of the night. The air was charged. As if, with a single match, it would explode.

But inside the charge, floating right through it, a sweetness laced the Los Angeles air. At first she couldn't place it. It was heavy, heady, as if from a dream. And then she knew. It was the smell of citrus blossoms—orange, grapefruit, lemon. The smell brought back her childhood in Phoenix, and an affection she'd stuffed in some dark chamber of her heart when she'd left town for good. The feeling evoked images—the long white Easter dresses of her young aunts, still in their teens, the dresses trailing the Bermuda grass in her grandparents' backyard, as her aunts walked barefoot past the white Victorian iron bench and chairs, past the swimming pool, past the grapefruit trees with their trunks painted white, their branches bent with fruit, and her own white dress a miniature of her mother's. Her mother with her long dark hair and her bare feet seemed breezy in this memory, happy holding Gwen's hand. Even her green eyes were laughing. The image had the feel of Super 8 film—jumpy, too quick, then slow, fuzzy, and without words. Perhaps it had been filmed—by her grandfather—and that was why she remembered it . . . this feeling of belonging, of being adored.

A block from their home, Gwen searched the street lined with cars for a parking spot. Nothing. Passing their apartment, she saw the light still on. One thirty in the morning, and Leo was awake, as usual. She should get him, so as not to walk home alone. He would want her to. But she had to buy the test—something he didn't need to know about. Not yet, at least.

Yes. She would find out on her own.

Three blocks away, she parked her car in the nice, predominantly Jewish neighborhood with houses and carports and no parking problem. Still, she didn't dare lock her car, didn't leave a single thing in it that could be stolen. She'd learned the hard way, found her car in the morning with its windows smashed and the lock on its trunk drilled out—her cassettes and her Walkman, her books of poetry and her Rollerblades gone. They'd even taken her journal.

The sidewalks were quiet. It was called the Miracle Mile, this section of town. Brand new in the thirties, the buildings were eclectic, each one different from the next. She passed a castle with turrets and stained-glass windows, a hacienda with wood beams and stucco and a red tile roof, an Italian villa—all of them tiny, fit to the size of their small lot, and all of them with barred windows, dark at this time of night.

She turned the corner and a loud bass of a voice rattled the night and made her stop.
Leave Earth, Leave Earth, Leave Earth, Leave Earth, Leave Earth
.

She crept in her sneakers toward the source of the booming, insistent chant—a man black as space at the street corner, directly in front of Jin's 24-Hour Mini-Mart and Donut. Jin's Joint, they called it. She could smell the just-fried old-fashioneds, their vanilla heat thickening the air.

Leave Earth, Leave Earth
.

The man was dressed in layers—a T-shirt, a long-sleeved button-down shirt, a jacket, a knit cap. His bottom half was thick, too, as though his pants were doubled, and she wondered if he was wearing all he owned. His clothes were blackened. His skin was obsidian dulled by soot. His hair was matted black wool. His eyes did not seek her out, although she was all that moved, apart from the occasional car, in the world to which they seemed to be open.

Leave Earth, Leave Earth
—his mantra, the mantra he shouted to no one in particular, to bird and to dog alike—
Leave Earth, Leave Earth.

She would buy the test tomorrow. Along with an old-fashioned. Her feet moved in time to his beat as she passed, her gaze fixed further on, down the street.

A half block past him and she found herself chiming in as she jogged home.
Leave Earth, Leave Earth.

Their brick Gothic building was just across Sixth Street, which was always empty at this hour, and yet she stopped at the red light, looked both ways for cops, before she dashed to the other side. She'd been frisked before, written a ticket for jaywalking at two in the morning, on an empty street.

She listened. The night was still again. Or was it? She heard the rhythm, the words, but she was unsure if the voice was his or hers—that incessant voice in her head now tuned to his channel.

THEIR BUILDING WAS called the Cornell. The apartment had been Leo's until she'd let her own studio go a month after they'd met to move in with him and save money. In the thirties, when the area was posh, Mae West had owned the Cornell, and the third floor had housed a brothel that serviced the Brooklyn Dodgers when they'd come to town.