Lone Star (37 page)

Would he come back? Would he come alone, or bring the whole brood back with him? Would he not come back? He'd left his guitar. She knew he would have to return eventually. The guitar was his heart. And one always returned for one's heart, didn't one?

After her shower, she tried to wait but, spent and ruined, fell into a troubled sleep, full of vivid, ludicrous dreams of gates and churches and fields and bombed-out buildings; things she'd never seen and never dreamed of, and yet there they all were hovering behind her eyes. In the dreams she had lost her friends and was wandering around the cathedrals of destruction,
praying to find them, alarmed at the geography of the new city that made up the immense reality of her visions.

Now she woke up, came to, remembered things. Like snowflakes in fire, the dreams melted away. She jumped up out of bed, wearing tiny silk shorts, an even tinier tank top, loose everywhere, and sheer. But at least she was wearing something. She wasn't naked. Because in the armchair by the window sat Blake, staring at her with cold and accusing eyes. For a minute she thought (or prayed?) she was still dreaming. Because at the altar in one of the ancient towns, she had found Blake, and he had carried the same scowl in his formerly happy eyes he was carrying now. Chloe even looked back at the bed, half expecting to find herself still in it, peacefully slumbering, but no, the bed was empty, and Blake really was in the chair.

“Why are you sitting up?” was all she could think to ask. Her arms drew up to her breasts to cover herself. Too late, probably. Too late. She might as well have been naked. That's how she felt.

“
That's
your question? Because I have a few of my own.”

“Blake, what . . . I don't . . . what time is it?”

“Time to tell me what the hell is happening here.”

“I don't know. What's happening with you?” She stood awkwardly by the side of her untidy bed, five feet from Blake's stretched-out feet, in a room lit up by morning. Quickly and, she hoped, furtively, she threw a glance at the two beds. Oh, thank God. The other bed was unmade too, rumpled up last night by Johnny. But when she turned her gaze back to Blake, she saw that he was thinking the same thing. Both beds were unmade, Blake was thinking. This shamed Chloe. She wanted to ask him if he was pleased that the new room she got for them had private facilities instead of a communal narcotics toilet, but he didn't look pleased by much this morning.

“Do you have any idea how worried we were?” he said.

“I know. I'm sorry. That's why I sent him when I realized I forgot.” She couldn't even speak his name aloud in the daylight.

“How could you forget to let us know?”

“I don't know, Blake. I just forgot.”

“And he was in the room with you until four in the morning?”

She blinked. “Where else was he going to go?”

“How is that your business?”

“We traveled together. What was I going to do, throw him out?”

Blake glared at her incredulously. “Um, yes, Chloe,” he said. “That is exactly what you would do. Throw him out.”

She rubbed her eyes, her repentance yielding to annoyance. As usual, Blake always managed in seconds to animate her from relative peace to irritation. “I don't know what you're upset about. I said I was sorry for not leaving the new address. I fell asleep and forgot.”

“Oh, well, if you
said
you were sorry. What, did you fall asleep for an entire day? The day, the evening, the night, all the way down to four in the morning?”

Chloe swallowed. She didn't want to keep secrets, other than the mammoth ones she was already keeping. She didn't even want to confess that Johnny had gotten her stoned, way back in Kaunas, although what a minuscule infraction that had been.

“I wasn't feeling well,” she said slowly. Lies should be spoken extra deliberately. “I think it was the sandwich at Sestokai. I never felt good after I had it. Perhaps a touch of food poisoning. I was bad yesterday. I couldn't go on tour with him.”

“Yes, he told me.” Blake wouldn't say Johnny's name either. “But you didn't answer my question.”

“That's because I don't owe you an answer, Blake,” said Chloe.

“Don't you?”

“No. I may owe it to Mason, but not you.”

“So there's an answer you owe Mason that you can't tell me?”

“No! I stayed in the room. I slept. I went out for a little while.”

“Alone?”

“I was alone all day, so yes.”

“He wasn't gone all day on his little tour, was he?”

That was true. He had come back around nine and said to her, come on, let's go out, we'll go have some food, walk around. I didn't get a chance to show you Vilnius, but I'll show you beautiful Warsaw. She had put on a soft coral dress she had bought that day. She put gold clips in her brushed-out hair and red gloss on her lips. Jovan Musk was behind her ears and in the swell between her breasts. They went out. They had some food. They walked around. He told her things. He showed her things.

“Where's Mason?” asked Chloe. “Why didn't he come?” Mason would be so chill right now. That's what she needed. Mason to ask her no questions.

“Back at the hostel with Hannah, I assume. Sleeping.”

She nodded. She wanted to ask where Johnny was, but didn't dare. Blake didn't look quite up to answering that one. For a few silent moments he sat, and she continued to stand, braless in front of him, in a barely there tank, barely there shorts. She wasn't a warm, peach-colored nude, although the way Blake was staring at her, half-full of condemnation, half-full of other things, she might as well have been. She tried not to move, fearing her breasts were trembling with her every breath, as though she were on the floor trembling from pleasure. She sighed a deep and overflowing sigh. And then, before she could figure out how to control her inappropriately animate breasts or her even more inappropriately erect nipples, the lock in the door turned, the door opened, and Mason and Hannah walked in, rolling their suitcases behind them. They were followed by Johnny. Suddenly the indecorousness of her nipples a few feet away from Blake's face became incidental to the impropriety of her entire barely clothed body scrutinized by Mason and by Hannah. And by Johnny. Though his wordless scrutiny was the least of her problems at the moment.

No one said anything while they thought of something to say.

“Chloe, when will you be ready to go?” That was Johnny, after a prolonged throat clearing. “Because Emil is meeting us downstairs at eight-thirty.”

“What about your group?” She was having a terrible time forcing her arms to remain at her sides and not fly up and hide the self-conscious confession that was splayed across her breast. Covering up would be an admission to every person in the room, the ones who were looking at her and the ones who weren't, that there was something dissolute and unrestrained in every single thing she had done since Mason ran back to Varda's house to find his passport.

Ah. That was something to say.

“Mason, did you find your passport?”

“Yes, yes,” he said quickly. He opened his mouth to say something else, then paused.

Blake came out of his trance. His eyes drifted from Chloe to his brother, still standing holding the long handle of his suitcase.

“Mase,” Blake said, frowning and confused. “What is she talking about? You didn't leave your passport. I did a final check. There was nothing in that room after I left it. It was passportless, dude.”

Do you know why my grandmother sent me to Latvia? Chloe says to Johnny over pierogi and vodka at a dimly lit café after he comes back from Majdanek. Because it's not hot there. She doesn't think I can get into too much trouble in a country where the temperature doesn't usually rise above 60
^º
F. There's never been a
Girls Gone Wild
in Riga.

Has there been a
Girls Gone Wild
in Warsaw? Johnny asks.

Inaudibly, Chloe says no.

Johnny shakes his head. Grandmothers know very well you can get into trouble anywhere. My own lived somewhere colder than Poland and she managed to get into a lifetime of trouble.

Really?

Really.

Chloe drinks and thinks. My father says that he and my mother were able to form a lasting marriage only because they both came from the same climate.

Johnny laughs. I love them. I love your parents. Why are they so funny?

He is not so funny, my father, Chloe says. He says people who live in cold climates are physiologically and psychically different from people who live in warm climates.

Johnny smiles. Do you want him to be wrong, Chloe, or do you want him to be right?

I don't know, Chloe wants to say. It all depends where
you're
from, Johnny Rainbow. They drink some more. She asks him to order wine not vodka because she is a lightweight and light-headed. She giggles when he speaks. He keeps telling her things to make her laugh, to make her smile. And when she laughs, he sits and watches her. She drinks some more because otherwise she can't withstand the ebony gaze, the caramel scrutiny, the parted mouth. It feels so grown-up to sit like this, to drink, to talk, to be alive.

It wasn't an accident, you know, that I sat by your side on the Liepaja train, he says to her after they've been ambling and meandering down the noisy Warsaw streets. He has offered her his arm, and she has taken it.

She says nothing. She can't breathe and listen to his low intoxicated voice all at once.

I was looking for a place to perch, he says, and all the cars were full. There was a seat by a man, a seat by a woman, a seat by a child. And a seat by you.

I walked by once. I glimpsed you through the dusty glass. I kept on walking. Three cars down, I finally found a compartment with three seats empty. I opened the door halfway. But I was thinking of you. You had been glancing up from your book and staring out the window. He smiles, remembering her. You had a sweet spellbound face and hippie hair. You were staring at a field like you'd never seen a field before. And you were hiding your
body. He nods approvingly at her colored face, at her coral dress. I couldn't see what you were hiding, but I knew you were hiding it. Chloe stumbles over the cobblestones and grabs tighter onto his arm. She is not hiding anything now in her Polish-bought halter sundress that swings as she walks, that reveals soft skin illuminated by city lights.

He continues to tell her things she is desperate to hear. It wasn't ideal, he says. Your compartment was packed. The woman sitting one away from you, I could tell was drowning in cloying cheap perfume.

How right you were.

Unlike you.

She doesn't look up at him when he says this.

I didn't even know if you spoke English. But I closed the door I had opened, the one that didn't lead to you, and I walked back three cars, and opened another door.

I glimpsed you through the dusty glass, Chloe.

The drinking, the wandering in the warm evening air of an exotic foreign city, the leaning down and smelling her perfumed neck, the murmuring, you smell so musky, so delicious, the shoulder bumping against hers, her arm in the crook of his arm, it's all elegant seduction leading to wanton frenzy. And he hasn't even begun to sing. He's just
talking
her out of her slinky Polish dress and onto her arching back. He's gazing at her, but not kissing her, or circling the soles of her feet with his thumbs, or rubbing the center of her bare spine with the knuckles of his hands. Not yet. They're just walking, full of raspberry wine, full of chocolate wine. He offers her a cold beer on a street corner, and she says no, and he laughs, and she watches him. Do you know, he says, that a girl is fifty percent more likely to love you if she likes the taste of beer and drinks it with you on your first-ever night out?

Chloe laughs too and says, is love a euphemism there? That's when he stops walking, and turns to her. No, he whispers. It's not.

He kisses her under a Warsaw streetlamp in a cobblestoned alley, not far from squares and singers and art and cafés open late, and yet a plunging world away from it all. He raises her face to his great black eyes, and presses her woozy-with-wine body in soft spun cotton against his chest.

He tastes of beer and vodka and wine and smoke and strawberry-rhubarb pie. He whispers into her mouth wild things, mad things. He hasn't even begun to sing.

She almost needs to be carried back to the inn by the castle, up the stairs to their room, to their high bed by the window.

He throws off his shirt and falls sprawled on the bed. She wobbles in front of him and unzips her summer dress. You look so pretty, he whispers, opening his arms, beckoning her to come near. The dress falls to the floor.

There's no light except for the lit-up Royal Castle by the River Vistula outside their tall windows. Naked she climbs on top of him, her bare breasts, her bare nipples skimming, grazing against his chest. They kiss.