Further Out Than You Thought Read online

  Since her first night, Tony had what the man behind the curtain called wandering hands. Though Stevie had denied it. When confronted, she had told the man he hadn’t touched her. She’d kept their secret. Tony had paid for ten private dances in a row that first time, and that made two hundred dollars he’d spent. Of course, there were the tokens she had to buy at the bar at eight bucks each, the club’s take of each dance, so she’d only brought home one hundred twenty. Cash she wouldn’t have had otherwise. The money didn’t hurt—car insurance had been due, rent and tuition—but she’d turned down cash before. The truth was she liked Tony, liked his Spanish accent, his thin body and bald head, liked the fact that, at sixty-five, he was exactly forty years her elder. And she liked how his eyes shone with life—their flash of sun on ice.

  They had chosen the corner booth because here the lurker couldn’t see quite so well. Here, on her knees, she could lean toward Tony, letting his knuckles brush her nipples. Standing, facing Tony’s image in the back mirror, she could lower herself, quickly, letting her labia graze his hands. With her back against the mirror, she could open her legs and touch herself.

  She was shaved completely. It had been a gradual thing—the removal of hair. That first time, before her audition, she’d shaved just her labia, or rather her boyfriend, Leo, had. On a towel on the coffee table she’d lain back, her head on a pillow, and let him shave her. There was the warm soapy water, the blades of the virgin razor, Leo, cautious and precise, taking his time. Cool air on her labia, she’d felt that part of her come to life. After a few months, the triangle narrowed to a landing strip. And then, to be seen, to be that much more vulnerable, that much more seductive (and because it went with her Alice dress), she shaved it all off, the whole brown tuft. Utterly bare, she knew in that very lack of defense there was power—the trust that comes of ownership. And she knew her little-girl act was one reason Tony had taken so strong a liking to her.

  Tonight, she let his pinky trace the lips on her face as if he were glossing them. His pinky stopped and her lips opened, taking it in. Tony’s little finger in her mouth sent through her body a new thrill of contact. She nibbled the tip and let it go, reveling in the ease of her actions, her mouth parted, ready. And then she thought of Leo, home alone, waiting for her, and wondered if her guilt amplified the thrill. The thought frightened her, and the blood quickened in her veins.

  She moved to the back of the booth, sat with her shoulder blades pressed to the cool mirror, legs spread, and watched him look. Her availability vast as the sea drew him in. His face glowed.

  “Baby. You’re wet,” he said. “Really wet, like in the beginning.”

  At his table, in her plaid dress again, she sat across from him. They drank cranberry juice and club soda. It was Stevie’s drink at the club, where all choices were nonalcoholic, and Tony had decided it was his now, too.

  She could hear Brett one table over, introducing herself. “No. Not Brat, Brett.”

  Tony was saying he’d had dinner with some literary friends and pulled out Stevie’s poems, told them some escrow agent had written them. They’d gone on about how sensual the poems were, and asked if the author was a sensual person. Tony insisted she was bookish, shy.

  “I am, you know,” Stevie said.

  Tony laughed. “And then they began to analyze the poems,” he said, “and I got bored. But listen. I want to patronize the arts. So here’s the deal. A thousand dollars. But no dancing, we’ll just go out to dinner. Bring anyone you like. Bring Leo.”

  He’d offered her a grand before, for a private dance at his house in the marina. Said she could bring a chaperone. And so she’d told him about Leo. How he was dressing up as an American revolutionary and selling tapes of his album on a street corner in Century City. Tony had bought one. It was the only tape Leo had ever sold.

  She mulled over this new offer. Should she break her rule and take the club outside, into the real world? When she’d first started dancing, Brett had warned her about that. The rule was a good way to keep things safe, lives separate. But this was Tony. She’d known him for months.

  He leaned back, crossed his legs. “I listened to Leo’s tape,” he said, and pulled it from his pocket. “Fourth of July Address, huh? Who’s the girl on the front?”

  “Liberty,” said Stevie. It was a pencil sketch of a woman’s face. Leo had drawn it.

  “She looks like you,” Tony said. He turned the case over to the list of songs. “That ‘Freedom Song’ is as good as any I’ve heard. Ever. But why does he do all that talking? Who wants to listen to that?”

  She tucked her hair behind her ear. She blushed. Why explain Leo’s discourse on liberty, or his refusal to pay taxes because they were unconstitutional?

  Maybe she would go to dinner with Tony. Maybe she’d go alone.

  The Asian boy with the white teeth and spiked hair tapped her on the shoulder.

  “Go ahead,” said Tony. “I’m calling it a night.”

  The boy followed her past a few occupied dance booths to one that was open. Passing Brett, she lingered, watched hot jazz spread from her like the sweet reek of night-blooming jasmine, watched it spread from that blur of fold and soft black fuzz. Hands on her thighs, knees open, torso trembling, her neck long, her lips grazing her shoulder, she inhaled her own heat, held it.

  Stevie forced herself to stop looking.

  She stepped into the next booth, put her purse on the ledge, the token in the slot. Brett dancing on in her imagination, she thought of all she wanted to say. Or maybe it wasn’t really talk she wanted.

  Six private dances later, the twenty-one-year-old Korean named Danny bought her a club sandwich for a late-night dinner. Mild eyes, refined voice and hands, he talked of Rumi, and the role of the beloved in Persian poetry, the beloved being a metaphor for God. God as immanent and transcendent, within all and outside all. “God,” he said, “is the Self in everyone, in spirit and in matter. These bodies”—he patted his smooth arm—“they’re made of God.”

  “And what I shall assume, you shall assume. For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” said Stevie.

  “Whitman,” the boy said, surprised. “One of my favorites.”

  ONE LAST PRIVATE dance before the club closed. This time, her crotch was close enough to tantalize. Her pelvis tilted like a plate, her sex near his nose, his mouth.

  His lips brushed hers. No tongue. Just a closed-mouth peck of a kiss.

  She pulled away, caught her breath. This had never happened, and for a moment she was stunned. She hadn’t seen it coming. The lurker was there. She glimpsed him between the flaps of curtain, but she didn’t holler for him to throw Danny out. After all, it was God kissing God, lips to lips, immaculate. And she had offered her sex. Like an ice cream cone on a summer day, she thought. As if she were the ice cream and the sun. It wasn’t his fault. In his position, were Brett dancing for her, who was to say she wouldn’t have done the same?

  Still, she didn’t offer herself to him again.

  Three

  IN THE DRESSING room, Brett was the only dancer left. Stevie could smell the musk of her sweat mixed with the sandalwood oil she wore. She was naked, her legs crossed at the ankles, her bare feet on the countertop as she counted her cash. Her breasts, small enough to fit in her hands, were as brown as the rest of her. Leaning back in the wooden chair, she seemed as comfortable topless as any man. Maybe she was part Egyptian, or Native American, thought Stevie, with her straight dark hair and her almond eyes.

  “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 beyo
nd 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.