Further Out Than You Thought (33 page)

The wave spat her out in the shallows, in a foot of water on the hard sand. The red-brown foam hissed its last and subsided. Beside her, in a patch of clear ocean, he sat, coughing up water and gasping the air. There was a brief moment of sun. It reflected off the rippling water and danced over his body like cool fire. He shivered. His arms shook and he pulled his trembling knees in the wet black knickers to his chest and held them. The tide went out, leaving them on wet sand, and then it rushed back in, rushed past them. His skin was pale and his hair hung in limp clumps over half his face and down his back. A strand of kelp was caught in a tangle. She crawled to him. On her knees, she took her time loosening the hairs around the kelp enough to tease it out.

This is the last time I'll touch his hair, she said to herself, as if to give the subsequent act of her leaving weight, as if to make it real. The tide moved out, then in again. A lone sandpiper wading in the shallows jabbed his long beak into the sand. She pulled the kelp from Leo's hair, popped a bladder between her thumb and finger and hurled the foot-long strand behind her into the ocean.

He seemed not to notice the gesture. His eyes were wide, staring into the fog. “Fucking amazing, Gwen. The light. I saw it and it was beautiful, like they say, only it wasn't just white, it was a goddamn kaleidoscope. Made of every possible color. Jesus. I could die just to go there, just to see it again.”

“Be my guest,” she said, and she stood and walked from the ocean to their camp. She was numb. She couldn't feel her fingers or her toes, and she couldn't feel emotion, either. Not sadness, nor anger, nor fear. She changed into her dress, took off her wet bikini under it. She pulled on her sweater and wrapped it tightly around her. Warming her hands in the pockets, she felt the shell and closed it in her fist.

She saw a single jogger, a woman in a dark sweat suit, emerge from the fog and disappear back into it. We get these glimpses, she thought. Brief openings in the curtain. For just a moment things are clear. Things are themselves and we see them for what they are.

She watched Leo stumble toward her and collapse at her feet. Still breathing hard, he was on his back, his head on a pillow of sand. “I'm just going to nap here. For just a minute,” he said, and shut his eyes.

From where she stood, she memorized his face—the curve of his dark eyelashes, the Roman nose, the soft pink lips with the center dimple that inscribed them with a pout. In his exhaustion, his body held a dreamy and exquisite languor, but she no longer desired him. Rather, she found herself assessing the lines of his limbs and face as if to draw them—his smooth uncomplicated forehead, the round, ruddy cheeks, the thick black beard she now saw had a handful of whiskers the color of tinsel, and the locks of his hair like the ribbons on a gift, the kind you take between your thumb and a single blade of scissors in order to curl the ends, to make the present pretty.

The end was different from what she could have imagined, which made the beginning another thing, too. The night they met, when she remembered it, had an antique yellow hue, as if the scene had been lit by candles. It hadn't, of course. They'd met under a streetlamp in front of the movie theater. She'd been alone, waiting, and Leo had come with their mutual friend, the actor who had set them up. A blind date. The movie was Spike Lee's
Do the Right Thing,
and she'd sat between them. She remembered how uncomfortable the movie had made her feel, the actors hurling their names for each other's races straight at the camera. For Gwen their anger had felt like a slap across her face. After the sting had subsided, she had looked at Leo in the movie light. In that hesitation, before returning to the screen, they had drunk deeply, and the silence of their drinking, Gwen had thought, was the song of a lifetime, an eyelid wide, between blinks. Now she saw it wasn't a lifetime, but a lovely youth, one slow morning hour of dappled light and remembered dreams. The kind of hour that burns off like fog in the sunlight.

“Dream of flying,” she whispered.

She watched his lips curl to a smile. He looked up at her, and what she saw in his eyes was a gleeful satisfaction. “God,” he said. “Maybe I did die. You're glowing. You have a halo, Gwen. You're an angel.” His smile widened. “I'd be dead if it weren't for you,” he said. And she understood what had held her for all these years wasn't her fear of being alone. Or it wasn't just that. It was his helplessness. So long as he couldn't get by in the world without her, she couldn't leave, because leaving meant abandoning him. The truth, though, was that she was not his mother. She had never been his mother. And now that she was going to be an actual mother, she could no longer pretend to be his.

She wouldn't make him choose. He'd be free to grow up when he was ready, even if that time was never.

“Good-bye, Leo,” she said.

“You going for coffee?” he asked, rising to an elbow and looking at her. His eyes red from the salt water were green and shining. “I'd have a cup. A large. One sugar, one cream.”

She thought of the horses on those boats in the doldrums, the horse latitudes. How did the sailors do it, she wondered. Throw a horse overboard and watch its hooves hit water, pound and tire, and not just one horse, but a team of horses? It came down to survival. Die of thirst or else lighten the load to catch the wind and move.

Her purse over her shoulder, her bikini and her flip-flops in her hand, she bent down and kissed Fifi on the head. Leo sat cross-legged, like a swami, staring into the mist as if he were seeing visions. He opened his mouth and a chant filled the air between them.
Aaahhh,
he sang. The first vowel, born in the depths and rising. She knew he wouldn't hear, but she said again, “Good-bye.” The gold angel over his heart caught the sun sifting down now, warming her back, and she turned and was walking before the tears ran onto her cheeks and dripped from her nose and chin. Walking away, her feet and legs, her whole body was heavy. She could still turn back—but even as she thought it she knew it was part of a fiction, a story she'd told herself for so long she'd begun to believe it. The fact was that the two of them together in the world had never worked. Leo belonged to his own world. His was an island, where he leaned his back against a palm tree, played his pan flute and sang and the fairies circled and danced.

She heard again what he'd said that night in Tijuana—no one will love you as much as I love you. Perhaps it was true. But her steps were quickening now. They were finding their rhythm. She was moving through the fog or the fog was moving through her and the moving was the thing. Moving accrued momentum, sloughed off inertia. Walking fast on the hard wet sand, she dropped everything and turned a cartwheel, another and another, gaining speed. She stopped, dizzy, and faced the ocean, the spinning motes of mist. She walked into the water. It lapped the hem of her dress and she stood in one spot as the tide covered her feet in sand. She looked up and down the beach. No one was around. Facing the waves and the endless ocean, she opened her hands and stretched her fingers and her arms wide and she opened her mouth and screamed, and the fear and the anger awakened from their slumber rose up inside her molten and seething, and she screamed again, screamed until she had nothing but emptiness—emptiness and a child—inside her.

She grabbed her things, crossed the sand and the street, and passed Frank's and Pizza By the Slice. Smelling espresso, she ducked into the café, and the girl with the glasses and the pretty eyes pulled her a double shot, and Gwen downed it and paid her, tipping double again for karma and luck.

She climbed the stairs from the beach and stopped at the top to feel the holiness of the place. She gripped the metal rail and closed her eyes. As if the world were a ship and she were on its prow, she leaned into the wind, feeling her body, her miraculous body with two hearts inside it—one loud in her ears and the other quiet as a birthday wish you close your eyes to make before blowing out the tiny wax torches of the years.

There, in front of the little Spanish-style church, stood a phone booth she hadn't remembered seeing. Inside it a black phone dangled from its cord. She hung it up and then took it in her hand again, slid two quarters into the silver slot and dialed the familiar number. He picked up after two rings.

“Dad? I just wanted you to know I'm fine. And there's something else,” she said, and she told him everything.

“Ah,” her father said. “Now isn't that wonderful news.”

GWEN HUNG UP the phone.

Outside the church an old woman was sweeping. She wore a long black dress. Her silver hair was pulled back in a bun. The church had one door, arched, wooden, painted a dark red. It was ajar, and Gwen found herself drawn to the simple building. She asked the woman if she could go inside.
“Sí, niña,”
the woman said. She smiled and Gwen noticed that she had a gold front tooth, just like the psychic. The detail gave the moment a holographic, synchronistic feel—a stone skipping over the smooth water of time.

It was a memory, the gold tooth in the mouth of her great-grandmother, Maria, and Gwen three or four, the last time she saw her before she died. She was sitting on her lap as she sang in Spanish, her voice low and craggy, and the song sweet. She'd looked old as the earth—the branching wrinkles in her face, her clouded eyes, and how her mouth as she sang was like a mine, full of darkness where her teeth were missing, and full of treasure.

And in this instant of the stranger's smile, Gwen knew it was right—the fact that she was on this morning standing in front of this church talking to this woman. It was just a flash and then it was gone, but the realization cast a new light on those other moments out of which her life was made. With the slightest adjustment—this shift in view—it all lined up. Not in a straight start-to-finish sort of way, but more like a circle. By walking ahead she was sure to reach the beginning soon enough. It would look different because she would be different, and it would wait for her with the patience of an old friend.

Gwen closed the door behind her. The church was cool, damp, and dark. A chill ran through her. It took her eyes a minute to see. The room was tiny. There were five rows of wooden pews. And on the wall there was a fresco of Mary. With her red and gold and green veils, her brown skin, she was the Virgin of Guadalupe. In front of her a table held white candles in red glass jars. A few flames swayed, and red light danced across the Virgin's downturned face, across her hands parted over her heart. A sign said
DONATIONS, ONE DOLLAR
, beside the matchsticks and the metal collection box.

She folded a dollar into the slot, lit a candle. This was for Lotta. She sat on the pew and felt the stillness of the room and the stillness inside her. “Hail Mary, full of grace. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb,” she said. And although she was praying to Mary, she was praying to Lotta, too. Blessed was the fruit of her womb, which meant her mother was blessed. Even if Lotta had been afraid to touch her, afraid she'd somehow kill her, she was blessed.

She fed a second dollar to the box and lit a candle for her mother. Looking into the face of the Virgin she thought she could see her mother's face, that slight smile on her lips. “I miss you, Mama,” she said, and she felt the abyss inside her yawn, felt the tears come, but this time, she could also feel the love. Something in her chest lightened, and she found she was listening to a song in her head.
I'll be loving you, always. With a love that's true, always.
It was her mother's voice, singing her to sleep, and it was the song she would sing to her daughter.

THE CENTURY LOUNGE was warm and red, like a womb. It was a dream of a palace of curtains, the girls appearing and disappearing in the shadows, flitting like moths toward those smaller chambers furnished only with light, chambers that could hold two people like a confidence, where girls danced for just one pair of eyes, for a song. Through the showroom, she moved among whispers.
Hey, mister? Wanna see? Follow me.
She moved, only she didn't flit. She was slow and deliberate, like a snake, winding among them—the girls and the strangers—feeling the ground under her heels, the ground under the carpet, under the wood and the cement, feeling the pull, the ache of gravity, and happy to linger in the twilight, watching, one last time, Brett, flushed and trembling, on her knees as she arched her back, and her breasts, the curve of her neck held the red light, and glowed.

Tony tapped her on the shoulder. “One last?”

He had found her, found her out.

Blushing, she took his hand and led him to the private dance booth, the one on the side, their booth, where he sat with his hands clasped atop the desk-like ledge, where she fed the token into the slot and the light hummed to life. Between them, there was a vague, remembered heat—her bare, hothouse orchid (now crowned with its new leaf of short brown hair) and his itch to touch. Only now she embodied mystery,
the
mystery. She felt it as a kind of power. She was electric, charged, having claimed the direction her life would take. She arched and twisted, contracted and splayed, but he didn't dare risk—didn't even consider—contact, now this aura of impenetrability shielded her like invisible armor.

Nirvana was playing, which meant Devotion was dancing. And she was up next. Her final set.

She looked at Tony, wan and sad. He was smaller, older, with deeper wrinkles than she'd realized.

Their song was over and the light clicked off. She pulled on her G-string and her black slip and stepped out of the dark booth. They stood beside their table, arms hanging at their sides—the moment, their silence, too long and hard to break. She said nothing. She leaned toward him and kissed his cheek, and he pulled her in for a hug.

“What'll I do without you?”