Further Out Than You Thought Page 13

  “Valiant,” she said. “I’m pregnant.”

  At this, he relaxed and lay back down. She thought she saw a smile cross his lips. Not the happy-for-her sort of smile, but more of a smirk that said, Ah, yes, so this is how it will end. Of course. I should have known.

  “You’ve told Leo?”

  “No. A few girls at the club know. And you.”

  He lit another cigarette, sucked on it and aimed the noxious plume at the ceiling, waved the stray fumes from her face. “You’re going to tell him. I mean, you have to. It’s his kid, right?”

  She looked at him. The question didn’t deserve an answer. She pushed herself out of the chair. “He’s been stoned nonstop since I found out. Today of all days. He’d get all grandiose on me.”

  “Okay, here’s the deal. It’s perfect. You’ll tell him in Tijuana. He won’t be able to bring any weed there. We’ll make sure he doesn’t try. And then you’ll tell him. You’ve got to give him a chance, Gwen.”

  “Do I? Why?” She wanted her clothes on. She felt exposed, with her breasts that were too big already and would only grow bigger. She felt messy and too female. She crossed her arms against her chest.

  “This is different. Don’t you see?” He sipped his drink. “There’s someone else now. It’s not about you and me and Leo. It’s about him, or her. The person who is going to be here, here on this planet, after I’m gone.”

  She cringed. Her gut tightened and turned. She felt a tingling move down her arms, felt her hands ball into fists. It wasn’t about the baby at all. It wasn’t about what was best for the girl inside her. This was about Valiant.

  She took her robe from the back of the chair and put it on.

  “Gwendolyn, darling,” he said, rising from the fainting couch. “You’re overreacting. It’s your hormones.”

  She picked up her full vodka tonic. She wanted to douse him with it. Or drink it all down just to spite him. Instead, she brought it to the kitchen and poured it down the sink—the clean, empty sink. The dirty dishes that had filled it the night before were washed and stacked on the counter. Leo must have stayed up for hours doing them. Even the counters and the cupboards were shiny white.

  She could hear fresh ice clink into Valiant’s glass. He was making himself another.

  “I’m going to find rope,” she said. She took her grapefruit and walked to the door. “I’ll be back.”

  “Darling,” he said. She turned, waiting in the open door for his apology. She would accept it, graciously, or at least she would try. “You have to stop thinking of just yourself. You’ve been really, well, absorbed lately.”

  “I’m going,” she said, and let the door slam shut behind her.

  She’d been absorbed? Unbelievable. Even for him. She walked fast down the hall. Behind one door, a TV blasted the news, behind another there was laughter, a whole gaggle of voices. Four in the morning, and people were up. She slowed, listening. At the end of the hall a guitar rang out through an amp—C, F, G, D minor, C. The blond boy got his Les Paul. Maybe it was Christmas.

  Ash had settled over the city like snow and made them all one family. They were children, too excited to sleep. After all, the world was watching. And they were here, alive now. April 30, 1992, the day they’d all seen to its end, was a day that would go down in history. It was a day they’d talk about for decades.

  She could sense the energy, the awakened camaraderie. The walls were thinning, softening. She could knock on the boy’s door and he’d open it and invite her in, give her a tall glass of something cool, play her a song. The apartment house had become a home, but socializing was the last thing she wanted.

  She walked to the stairwell, where a bare bulb buzzed and dimmed.

  She thought she’d never felt so alone. And then she laughed. She knew it was a lie. She’d felt alone most of her life. And it wasn’t a bad thing. An only child, she’d entertained herself for hours in her room, sitting at her desk with the wide window in front of it, looking out at the cactus and the swimming pool and writing stories into the books she’d bind herself, or making trinkets out of drawings coated with layers of glue for shine and heft. The one time her mother had thrown her a birthday party, she’d lost all the games—pin the tail on the donkey, musical chairs—and she’d known that none of the kids were really her friends, they were just her kindergarten classmates. They were acquaintances. So she ran from the party. She’d climbed one of those grapefruit trees in her grandparents’ backyard and she’d hid. She’d not come out until the kids had gone home.

  The grapefruit in her hand filled the stairwell with its smell. She breathed it in. The lightbulb flickered and brightened. One more flight of stairs and she’d be up on the roof with the night sky and the cool air.

  Soon Valiant would be drunk. But when had she ever been able to stop him? What were a few more drinks once he’d set his course? By morning, he’d polish off the vodka. She’d find some rope. They had the handcuffs. They’d tie Leo up, let him have some water, a token bong rip or two, and maybe an apple, and then they’d walk him to her car. Escort it was called in the movies, as though the promise of sex were part and parcel of captivity. They’d snap some photos of Leo tied up in the car, and Gwen would drive the three of them south, into the new day.

  But now it was night. It was night and somewhere there were stars.

  Sixteen

  NOT HERE, SHE thought climbing the stairs. Even without the moon and the smoke there wouldn’t be stars. There were never stars in L.A. Not those sort of stars. Here the stars were people on billboards for movies, they were people you might glimpse at a deli with a baseball cap pulled low over their foreheads, hiding their eyes. The stars were the ones who most wanted to not be noticed. They were the ones trying to blend into the ambient light.

  She stepped onto the roof, walking across the torch-down to the edge, to the brick wall that came to her knees.

  Something was strange, unsettling. The smoke-smell on the air, and the city too quiet for its own good, as if it were up to something. She took a breath, and another, to sink into the stillness, to get to the bottom of things. Not one car zoomed down Sixth Street. Not one helicopter circled. Not one car alarm screamed. The city was spread out below her like a beast sated by a kill, sleeping off its stupor, dreaming of more meat.

  This was the hungriest city she could imagine. There was New York City, of course, but there one expected hardship. What it looked like was what it was. There were no palm trees in New York City. There wasn’t any ocean you’d want to swim in. Los Angeles, on the other hand, was breezy and warm, and you forgot it was really a beast until its stomach growled and the whole city shook—the people like fleas on its trembling skin. Its mouth salivated and drooled and the streets ran like rivers taking cars and homes and whole hillsides with them down to the sea. And when it was especially famished, Los Angeles became a dragon, the Santa Ana winds breathing fire into the canyons.

  The city ate them up, and yet they flocked here, the boys and the girls. Though not for sacrifice. Not so they’d be whittled down to gristle, down to bone. They came here for the same reason she’d come—because they, too, were hungry, hungry to step into the light and to shine. They came here to rise beyond mortality. They came to trick death itself. One’s face on celluloid is forever young, forever alive.

  A breeze came from behind her, nudging her forward. She teetered on her heels, looking down at the sidewalk. So far down. The cement would catch her like a slap from God, a fly on his swift palm. How easy it would be, she thought, to let gravity have its way with her. She could feel it, gravity, as though it were desire, or love. She could hear it calling.

  Gravity made matter possible. She knew this. And the urge to be done with both? To leap into the unknown and let go of this thing—this body, this mind, this person with memories—she thought of as herself. It wasn’t the same as being brave. Anyone could tell you that. But the breeze persisted, pulling at her silk robe and her hair, toying with her.

  I
t was like her dream tonight. The dance with her mother in the world made of petals and pastels had felt like a kind of communion and confirmation all in one. The twirling world, Brett’s tongue in her mouth, the heat of her own flushed face. She remembered that part. It was the part she didn’t remember, translated, now, to a sudden awareness in her body, a shape moving just below the surface of her consciousness, it was this shadow that intrigued her, and to which she stopped to listen.

  To the east, a few blocks away, neon flashed alien green. The sign was new—at least she didn’t remember it. Kool, it said, its o’s overlapping. Her mother had smoked Kool, the menthols. And the o’s reminded Gwen of the snake around Brett’s arm, the Ouroboros doubled and linked, a chain of creation and transformation. Or was it two tongues touching? Or else a single eye, the oval where the o’s met its pupil? And now she read the sign backward, the way she’d see it in the mirror-world.

  Look, it told her. Look.

  At what? What was right in front of her that she wasn’t seeing?

  “Gwendo-line,” a voice said. “Gwendo-line, lookin’ fine.”

  The voice was below her, turning a corner. The voice was Barry’s. “Hey, Barry,” she called. He was walking down the sidewalk with something in his hand. A sign, it looked like. Was he picketing? “Barry,” she called again.

  He didn’t look up. Instead, he waved the sign in front of him as though it were a flag and he were leading a parade. She thought of Leo and his flag. Maybe he’d start a peace parade. Naked people playing tubas and clarinets and drums, playing Lennon’s “Imagine.” She could see him, leading them down the streets, singing. It was the type of thing that would make the evening news, a side note, an oddity.

  Barry rounded another corner and Gwen followed him from the edge of the roof. He was wearing an old pair of trousers. No shirt, no shoes. He was shaking his head, deep in conversation. “A castle is a home. A man’s castle. Home of the man. The man. Instrument of the machine,” he said. “Of nothing. The hole. Black, black hole. The whole thing. Your life. Your whole life.”

  Your whole life. He’d said it. The words from her dream, the part she’d forgotten. Her mother’s words. Your whole life, she had said. In the dream, before she pulled the trigger, her gun pointed at Gwen’s belly. How could she not have remembered? They were her mother’s words, their last conversation, what she’d said in the car that day driving Gwen home from her acting class. Gwen had wanted to quit. And what her mother had said was Not now. You can’t quit now. You have your whole life ahead of you. Don’t you want something more? More than this?

  It was dusk. Some cars had their headlights on and some didn’t. They were passing a Christmas tree lot and she wanted to stop, because they hadn’t bought a tree yet. She wanted to go home and decorate the house and forget about becoming anyone. She wanted to be herself, fifteen, on the cusp of everything, the world bursting with possibility. She wanted her mother to love her for who she was.

  Gwendolyn. She remembered her mother’s choked voice and her too-quick tears from which Gwen had turned, determined to not be moved. Not by her tears and not by the silence that filled the car like Jell-O, red Jell-O, cloying, artificial cherry, in which they were both wedged and sealed. They were at a stoplight, waiting to turn left.

  No, Gwen had said, her voice sharper than she’d meant, I don’t want anything. Of course it was a lie. She had known then that she wanted to dance—ballet. She wanted to pursue it seriously. But she knew what her mother had to say about that. A dancer’s career is short-lived. You’ll be finished by the time you’re twenty-five. Do you want to spend your life teaching dance class, or choreographing? I mean really, Gwen, think about it. You have so much potential.

  Potential. She hated that word. It meant she wasn’t enough.

  At the edge of the roof, she closed her eyes and felt herself lean forward, into the nothingness she’d pretended to want. The wind was gone, the night still. Offering itself up. Like a prayer. And then, inside the silence, she heard it—the thumping, the pounding. She could hear them beating, the hearts in the Cornell, in the Miracle Mile; they were the pulse in her head, the hearts of Los Angeles. Thumping. It was just a song and a dance, but she was part of it. She was on this earth. She was here, in this place of gravity and matter and hearts that could feel so damn much.

  She set the grapefruit on the torch-down, lay back, and closed her eyes.

  She saw Jin, keeping watch over his family, his wife and his two small kids, his parents and his brothers and sisters as they dreamed of green, of forests dripping with rain. She saw Brett, snoring a little, asleep on her back, her arms by her sides, flying in her dream over the empty freeways, through the smoke. She saw Brett’s fiancé at his desk, accompanied by his own reflection in the window as he wrote into the night. She could hear the clicking of his typewriter’s keys. She saw Love and her husband who was more of a girlfriend now; they were spooning, dreaming of whips and piercings, of dark welts and fissures of pleasure. She saw Devotion and her mother sharing a double bed, their heads cradled in their nests of blond hair. They were dreaming of Wisconsin, a field of moonlit, sleeping cows. She saw Mr. Cooper holding his wife tight, forgiving her her wanderings, inhaling the musk of her armpit, of the nape of her neck as she slept in his arms. And all those men who were alone, alone and awake, drinking away the night—she saw them, too. There was Tony on the porch of his condo, looking out at the dark ocean, smoking and sipping his Cuba Libre. And Valiant, on his fifth vodka tonic and his last cigarette, looking out the window at the orange blur of moon. She saw her father, drinking his Glenlivet in the sparse, dim living room, staring at the flame in the fireplace, no matter that it was gas and a fake log. She’d call him in the morning, tell him she was fine. She saw Leo sleeping on the sofa with Fifi curled up at his feet, and she wanted to climb into his arms. She wanted him to hold her and to never let her go.

  They used to come up here, she and Leo. They’d come with a bottle of sambuca, the Italian licorice liquor that he loved. You couldn’t drink much, but a few sips numbed your tongue and made everything a little looser, a little more flexible. Summer nights, they’d sit up here and look out at the city and talk and laugh into the early morning. They had been different then. They’d been friends, confidants, lovers. She’d let herself dream with him—a villa in Tuscany with a vineyard and olive trees and white peacocks. The children they’d have. They’d name the boy Pane, meaning bread. And the girl they’d call Sophia.

  She sat up, took the grapefruit in her hands and tore into it with her thumbs. It sprayed her face with its juice, its smell clean and new, and sour-sweet—as if the two tastes had been born from this one source. She peeled the grapefruit in a single corkscrew, like she’d done as a kid, up in a tree—all the hours she’d spent, safe among the fruit and the leaves. Disappearing was something she’d been good at all her life. But it was harder now. Under a spotlight, where could she hide, except inside her own body?

  She pulled off a section and juice dripped down her arms and onto her robe. She licked her arms, put the fruit in her mouth. Its bright yellow-green taste filled her. She swallowed, and thought she could feel it in her cells, waking her up, bringing her to life. Eating made her hungry, famished.

  She could hear Barry singing. If I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the mornin’, I’d hammer in the evenin’. Thank God he only had a sign. She walked to the edge of the roof. He was under a streetlight, and now she recognized his sign. It said NO LOITERING and had been stuck in the grass in front of their living room window for as long as she could remember. Barry was not only a protector, but a liberator.

  Let the loitering begin.

  She fastened her robe. She’d go home to Leo. She’d curl up with him and dream again.

  She ran down the stairs, the clicking of her heels on the cement steps echoing in the stairwell. She’d play La Bohème. She’d resurrect the old Leo, the old Gwen. They’d fall back in love. And she’d tell him.

  Seventeen
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br />   THEIR APARTMENT SMELLED of old bong water and dog shit. Fifi had pooped on the living room carpet and was now just where Gwen had known she’d be, curled up at Leo’s feet on the sofa, their snores harmonizing. Gwen choked on the stale air. In these small, crowded, stinking rooms she couldn’t breathe. All the windows were closed, and she opened them latch by latch. In the kitchen, the roaches crawled on the wall from the cupboard to where they clustered around scraps of wet, moldy bread in the sink. Gwen picked up the DustBuster and vacuumed what roaches she could while the others ran for cover.

  The DustBuster stank, too, its smell musty and strangely sweet. She held it up to the kitchen light. The roaches were crawling over and over each other, sticky with their own shit. She couldn’t take it any longer. For once she, rather than Leo, would be their savior. She tightened and knotted the sash of her robe, picked up the dog poop with an old newspaper, and carried the DustBuster and the poop down the hall and out the back of the building to the trash bin. Poor dog, thought Gwen, she hadn’t been walked since the morning. And if they couldn’t leave the building, what was she supposed to do?

  She pushed open the lid of the big black bin and tossed the poop in. The smell of the trash was pungent, and nearly knocked her over. She held her breath and unhooked the DustBuster’s plastic container from the holster, smacked it against the edge of the bin and watched the roaches fall in clumps into the garbage. She watched them scurry over the meat bones writhing with maggots, over the empty plastic water bottles and into the tin cans with their remnants of beans and tomatoes, into the jars lined with peanut butter and mayonnaise and pasteurized cheese spread.

  They were joyous. They were thriving. She closed the lid of the trash bin, closed the lid on the fetid underbelly of life, the promised land, as Leo had called it. She snapped the DustBuster back together.