Further Out Than You Thought Read online

  She laughed her high-pitched, nervous laugh, but clamped her mouth shut as soon as she realized. She hated this titter and how it flew from her mouth before she could stop it. It was the same laugh that had come out the time her mother ran over her cat, Mouse, in the driveway. The cat was flapping and splashing in a puddle of its own blood and she, Gwen, was laughing this awful laugh. She’d just won a modeling contest, from a photo her mother had taken. She was going to be in Teen magazine, and they were on their way to tell her grandmother the news when they’d backed over the cat. Her mother’s tears dripped from her chin, and all Gwen could do was laugh. They’d buried Mouse in the vegetable garden and grown carrots over him the next summer.

  The room was too quiet. She could hear the clock on the wall ticking. The antique clock with the brass rim and the big numbers. It said a quarter to three.

  “These cheekbones,” Valiant said and sighed. “You should have been a movie star, darling.”

  “You think?”

  He turned her face to the mirror. “I know.” Valiant ran his fingers through her hair, taking his time, unknotting strands. He’d never done this before, and she found herself holding her breath. “You know,” he said, looking at her mirror-world eyes, holding them with his. “When I met you, I hated you immediately.” He tugged at a knot in her hair until it gave.

  Gwen winced. “I know,” she said, “I—” And she wasn’t sure how to finish her sentence. She’d known he was jealous, but that was then. They’d been friends for years.

  “All this blond hair, how in love with you he was. I thought you’d take him away.”

  “I wouldn’t have dreamed of it.”

  “No, I know that now. And here you are. One of my very, very best friends,” he said, pulling through another knot. “I was scared of nothing.” He lifted her hair, took the whole of it in his hand and drew it back, tight.

  Gwen looked at her face in the mirror and saw—not herself—but Carlotta. (She refused to think of her as Carla.) Yes, it was her grandmother, young, in her red dress with the ruffles along the hem, castanets in her hands. Staring back at her, she saw Carlotta’s eyes, their shock of green. This was the Carlotta who would eat a man alive. She recognized her fire—destruction, creation. A world of possibility.

  She knew what she’d do. She’d take the risk. After all, the Count was someone she could talk to. He was her friend. She could confide in him.

  “I want to tell you something,” she said. “You have to promise me you won’t tell anyone.”

  “Oooh. A secret. I promise, if . . . if you promise me you’ll never leave me. What would I do without you and Leo?” he said, smiling a hopeful smile and twisting her hair until she felt her roots tug on her scalp.

  What would he do? It was a good question. If she kept the baby and she stayed with Leo, that would mean they’d leave him. Because she wouldn’t raise a child in Los Angeles. She wouldn’t.

  “What is it?” he said. “You’re so serious.”

  “Oh.” She was stalling, losing her gumption, thinking of something else she could say. “In the mirror. Have you ever thought about it? How you can’t see yourself, ever, the way others see you? It’s opposite, in the mirror. It’s all reversed.”

  “You’ve been smoking, haven’t you, kid.” With a laugh, he let her hair go, so that it hung bedroom-messy over one of her eyes. “Look at you. A young Ann-Margret—before the car crash and the reconstructive surgery. Ann-Margret in Kitten with a Whip. Anyone ever tell you that?”

  “Just you.”

  “Oh, I’ve been saving something,” he said. He put an LP on the turntable and crooned along with Sinatra. Fly me to the moon, and let me play among the stars. “One moment, dear,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

  Gwen stayed in the chair, looking at herself. She loosened the scarf, took the pageboy wig from its mannequin head and put it on. She tucked her own blond hair up under the wig’s mesh cap until she was all brunette. Now she resembled her mother. Her image flickered in the flickering room. Here and gone.

  It was déjà vu, a dream she was just remembering. On the bed at dusk, she had closed her eyes. She’d slept deep and long and now the dream she’d had was coming back to her in detail.

  She is huge, her belly and her breasts, seven months pregnant at least, and onstage as if by some mistake, unshaven, unprepared. Teetering on her heels, she tries to spin. The men stare at her in horror. They had not come to see this monster of a woman. Her mother sits among them. And then she stands up, a pistol in her hand. She aims the gun at Gwen’s womb, fires and misses. And Gwen, in all her bloated glory, flies through an open window. And she is safe. With the baby inside her—the girl—she flies over hills, and can see the moon, and stars. And then the scene shifts.

  Her mother is a model, on a sofa beside another model, in a green room, backstage, behind the runway, sipping tea, laughing and holding the woman’s hands. It is her mother before she was a mother, her hair spilling like dark wine.

  Seeing her like that, in the dream, Gwen is lit. She is filled. Her heart is a tended hearth.

  And now, at the vanity, Gwen took from Valiant’s wooden box a container of eye shadow. Shades of shimmering blue. She touched her finger to the lightest of the blues and ran it over her upper eyelid, just under her brow. Right, then left. And the darker blue lower, above her lashes. Like the wings of a butterfly. One of Nabokov’s blues.

  Her mother’s eyelids are gold-white in the dream. Opalescent. Her eyelids glint, as if reflecting some other world in which the colors have a smell, a taste. Semen and citrus blossom, creosote after a summer rain.

  “Angel dust,” her mother says of her glimmering eyelids. “You want some?”

  “I’m all right. I’m doing fine,” Gwen says, and as she speaks the words, she knows it is a lie.

  “No,” her mother says, looking through her. “You need this.” She flutters her lashes, and the angel dust fills the air with glints of light that settle in Gwen’s open eyes. The world is changed. The world is made of petals. Of pastel-colored petals. Everything. The coffee table, the sofa, the teacups and the saucers. Her mother and her mother’s friends, the chandeliers and the walls. And when Gwen sees her own reflection in the dream she is made of petals, too—green and yellow and blue and pink—as if she were looking through the facets of a crystal.

  The world is magic. The world is just-born and full-blown—honeysuckle, sunflowers, roses and bees. And her mother takes her in her arms and they waltz. She kisses Gwen—on her eyelids, on her nose—the way she did when Gwen was little. Time is gone. It is a watchful silence, an iridescence, like a soap bubble in sunlight, a soap bubble they are inside, floating and waltzing, and when Gwen looks at her mother again she is Brett.

  They stop dancing and the room swirls around them. Brett leans close. Their lips touch and open, and their tongues are fruit flesh, peeled apricots and peaches. Plums.

  Gwen pulls back, comes up for a breath. The bubble pops.

  The air is clear, but Brett lingers a second longer. Exquisite, untouchable Brett. An enigmatic smile on her lips.

  Thinking of the kiss, Gwen felt her face warm. She was here, in Valiant’s living room, with the Christmas lights and the candles and Sinatra singing fly me to the moon. The clock on the wall said ten to three. The wooden seat of the chair was beneath her and Valiant’s rectangle of a mirror was watching her with his eyes.

  Valiant was standing behind her. How long had he been standing there? He wore only a tiara, and held in one hand a grapefruit and in the other a vase of flowers. Without his clothes on, he looked so thin, so sallow. Gwen smiled to hide her shock and her sudden tears. His collarbones and his ribs caught the candlelight so that he looked, really, like a live skeleton. Like more of a ghost than a person—as if, were she to try to hug him, he’d turn out to be made of smoke. His cock hung soft and a bit shrunken, nothing like the majestic stamen of his painting, more like the clapper of a small bronze bell. And there was another lesion, this on
e a little larger, on the side of his shrunken waist.

  “For you, my dear,” he said, handing her the grapefruit. “I picked it a few nights ago.”

  “You’re still midnight gardening?”

  “Only when I can’t sleep and the sun is coming up.”

  It made her happy to think of him stealing through the neighborhood gardens by moonlight, clad all in black, clippers in hand, snipping instances of beauty where he found them—a rose here, birds of paradise there—gathering them in his arms and bringing them home to fill his living room, his kitchen, and his bedroom with life.

  He set the vase on the vanity and the room swam in the smell of the roses.

  God, the smells. She was high on them. She put the grapefruit to her nose and she was back in her grandparents’ garden, her mother and her aunts in their bare feet and their white dresses, and she slipped off her heels and Valiant took her hand in his and they danced—Valiant, the yellow, fragrant orb, Gwen and the new life inside her.

  Too bad Leo was at home, three floors below, passed out on the sofa.

  “Tomorrow morning, do we let him?” she said.

  “Go through with it?” He laughed. “You know Leo.”

  “I do. It just seems like this time he really might, with all the riot energy goading him on.”

  “You want to know what I say? I say we take him seriously. I say we have a little fun.”

  “Tell me,” she said. “What do you have in mind?”

  Fifteen

  THE HANDCUFFS WERE easy to find. They were just where Valiant said they’d be, in the top left drawer of his bureau, under the Super Shaper Briefs with the snap-on endowment and the butt-enhancer pads, the briefs that were black and silky and spongy, like a padded bra, and which Gwen couldn’t help but give a little pinch before pulling the handcuffs and the key from the drawer.

  “Now where to find rope?” she said, walking into the living room.

  Valiant straightened his black rocker wig and fitted the tiara over it. He poured himself a tall vodka tonic, lit a cigarette, and lay back on his gold velvet fainting couch. He inhaled, breathing the smoke, drawing it deep into his cells. Exhaling, he seemed to relax as the nicotine hit. “Three left,” he said, closing the box. “I don’t know if our escapade can wait till morning.”

  Gwen stood away from the smoke at the open window. Fiddling with the handcuffs, she closed one cuff around her wrist. At its last notch, it was just small enough to hold her hand. She felt the cold metal around her wrist and wondered whom Valiant had used these on or, as seemed more likely the case, who had used them on him. He hadn’t had a lover since she’d known him. Before that, she knew, there had been both women and men.

  The handcuffs made her think of the video the three of them had watched once—Leo, the Count, and her. One the Count owned—a gay prison porno. The jailor and the jailed, the guard and his prisoner—the one with no choice but to submit. She turned the cuff around her wrist. She had found the video fascinating. She could only half look and yet it had turned her on. It was ridiculous, blatant and corny, but she’d never seen men with men. There had been no pretense of tenderness. It was all about ass-fucking.

  Right now Leo was sleeping on the sofa and she wanted to go home and rouse him. She wanted him to wake up strong and hungry, alive. She wanted him to handcuff her to the bedposts and take her in every way he wanted. She wanted him to want. To speak to her in Italian and order her into position. She wanted to be made to open, to let go, to submit. It had been years since he’d taken her in this way. They’d played their parts, and she’d turned off her mind and been wild about him. But why did she need him to pretend to be someone else in order for her to desire him?

  “Anything happening out there?” the Count said.

  “Oh,” she said. She felt her cheeks burning, and had to remind herself that he didn’t know what she was thinking. She put the key in the lock of the cuff and let herself out. She laid the handcuffs on the windowsill. From his window she could see the alley with the trash bin and the tree that hung over it, a jacaranda, with its canopy of purple blossoms. She could also see the sky and in it the orange glow of what had to be the moon behind the brownish blanket of smoke and cloud. “Just the moon,” she said, and turned to him.

  Valiant—bony and pallid, tapping his cigarette ash into the black art deco ashtray—flickered with the candlelight. It was as if she were seeing him projected. Like an old film at the end of a reel.

  “You can see it, can’t you? Leo doesn’t, but you do.”

  She watched him bring the cigarette to his lips in one slow, fluid gesture. “See what?” she said, pretending.

  “That I’m going. Any day now.”

  She wanted to play dumb and ask him where, or to disagree, as though that could hold him here, with them. But she said nothing.

  His cigarette lay in the ashtray, turning to ash without his help, and its smoke blossoming in the air between them. “I have to tell you,” he said. He seemed to be reclining on the chemical cloud, at once remote and closer than ever. He could tell her anything. So she leaned on the wall to hear what she had always known.

  “It’s been since high school, since Guys and Dolls, a million years ago. He was just a freshman, so young, and he played this Cuban nightclub singer. It was his voice, even then. His voice and his face. I couldn’t help myself, I . . . When he first moved here, I told him what I—felt—but it was too much, maybe. He stayed away for a while. And then, well, I found out I was sick, and that was that.”

  He was quiet and still, as faint as an apparition. “You know,” she said. “I think I knew. And it was okay, so long as you were okay with me. And you have been, right?”

  “If it can’t be me in his arms, you’re the next best thing.” He coughed, too hard, and the smoke churned and lifted. She stayed by the open window, where the air was clearest.

  “So,” she said, looking to change the subject, “where should we take him?” She wanted to get as far from this city as possible. She wanted to go where the sky would be blue.

  He gazed into a cloud of cobwebs in a corner of the room. She looked at it, too, but couldn’t see their destination, just a fly buzzing, straining against the sticky net.

  “Tijuana,” Valiant said at last. “We’ll go to Tijuana.”

  Mexico sounded good. But Tijuana? “Talk about seedy,” she said.

  “Yes-sir-ee. Just what the doctor ordered. We’ll stay in some cheap motel and drink ourselves some margaritas. Sit down, dear.” He gestured to the chair beside him. “Grab your drink. You haven’t touched it.”

  Gwen took the drink in her hand. The ice had melted and the glass was sweating. She put it to her neck. She was hot, she realized, and the cool glass felt good. She pressed it to her eyelids. It was like her mother’s kisses from her dream, damp. And for a second, standing there in the middle of his living room, naked and sleepy, Gwen forgot herself.

  She came to, came back and sat beside the Count in his green upholstered Venetian chair. She let it hold her, let her body feel heavy as she rested her arms on its worn silk arms, as she sat back, crossing her ankles. Why was it so hard to let go? She wanted to relax every single muscle, to let the chair absorb and absolve her. She wanted to become the chair.

  Because if she were a chair, she’d have no decisions to make. If she were a chair, she’d hold anyone who sat upon her three feet off the floor. If she were a chair, she’d give herself to the purpose for which she was fashioned until she snapped beneath the weight she had held. If she were a chair, she’d be a chair until she became firewood. And then she would provide heat and light. A chair didn’t long to be a fainting couch or a lampshade or a rolling bar; a chair was happy, she thought, being a chair. Like Prufrock, a chair was glad to be of use.

  But what of the French la chair, meaning flesh? She was that right now. And was she glad to be of use? On the one hand, yes. On the other, no. Where the exchange was tit for tat, it was easy being flesh. But where flesh met myste
ry, where flesh doubled and split, with an action all its own . . .

  She sipped her vodka tonic, kept the drink in her mouth and, bringing the glass again to her lips, spit the drink back into it. She looked at Valiant. He hadn’t noticed. She took another sip, spit it into the glass.

  This was ridiculous. How long could she pretend?

  Valiant draped a throw over his crotch and thighs. His calves were showing, and Gwen saw they were covered with scabs. Big, oval scabs, the size of the scarabs he’d made. He moved the throw so it covered the length of his legs and she turned her eyes.

  She blushed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know.”

  “No one does. Just my doctor, and Leo. Leo knows. It was what he was doing last night. Putting his hands on me. Like he was Jesus or something.”

  “Did it help?”

  He looked away. “Suppose I felt like less of a leper.”

  She touched his arm. She couldn’t wait any longer. She needed his help thinking things through. “Listen—”

  “Why?” He jerked his arm from her and sat up, jabbed his cigarette into the ashtray. “You want to tell me I’m made of light? That I can heal myself if I think the right things? That we don’t ever die, really, so why do I need the AZT and the ddl and the steroids and God knows what else I take every day? And these,” he said, touching the dark, raised spot above his collarbone and the one on his waist. “Kaposi’s sarcoma, fucking death star.”

  She froze. She didn’t know what to say.

  He was softer when he spoke again. “I thought you were on my side. I thought we both thought Leo was out of his mind.”

  “Yes,” she said, and knew she should dive in, tell him now. Yet she hesitated. She was outside herself, looking on. As if she’d need it for a scene she’d act in someday. The woman telling the man—the man who was her best friend and in love with her lover and dying—that she had a life inside her, a person who would come between them, who would change things. She took her time. She put her glass down and looked at him. She wanted him to hear her when she spoke.