Further Out Than You Thought Read online

  He peered into the eyehole at the end of their shadow box. She pressed her cheek to his smooth cheek. “Can you see it?” he said, letting her eye have the whole eyehole.

  “What should I be seeing?”

  “Here.” He lifted her hair and the sun shone through the pinhole beside the eyehole. “Can you see the crescent at the end of the box?”

  She could see it. It was like a tiny moon; only it wasn’t the moon but the sun, partially blocked by the moon and captured in this shoe box like an insect. Fragile, so easily extinguishable.

  As the sun regained its strength, in his dusky living room, windows open, curtains drawn and flapping in the breeze, they threw clothing to the carpet—their shirts, her bra.

  Her torso on the arm of the sofa, her nipples between his teeth, her body had warmed and woken. He kissed his way down her skin as if to learn every inch of her, as if she were a text to which he would return, as if she were scripture. He opened her cutoffs with his teeth, buttonhole by hole. He slid them off. Her white underwear was next, and halfway down her legs before she said, “We shouldn’t. Not yet.”

  “We won’t,” he said, leaving her underwear at her knees as he unlaced her sneakers and slid them off with her socks. He held her foot and licked between her toes. He sucked them whole like hard candy. He licked a line up her leg and stopped, his upper lip so near her sex it touched that brown tuft of hair as he spoke. “You’re exquisite,” he said. There were tears in his eyes, in hers.

  Sliding a finger inside her, he moved the way she imagined his cock might, its rhythm slow and even. His tongue touched where the tuft gave way to flesh and, finding its right place, began to flicker, as if smoothing some roughness. She closed her eyes, becoming the heat of his persistence.

  She could feel the pillowy center of his upper lip where it puckered and pursed, could feel his saliva drip from her sex, over that silky barrier reef and down the other side. Its tickle made her self-conscious. He removed his finger and, seizing the slick opportunity, did what no one had ever done, what even she had never dared. The muscles of that other orifice tightened in defense. Yet, as he slid just a fingertip out and slowly in, she succumbed to the sensation and became simultaneously the bull’s-eye and the arrow that pierces it.

  Her first time—first orgasm with a boy anyway. Coming. It came down to trust.

  He kissed her lips and she tasted Christmas—orange spice and pine.

  Sweet white corn sustained their play for days, their private harvest.

  Midnight. Leo’s candlelit bedroom, French windows open to the courtyard, curtains drawn. Between his paisley-patterned sheets they were naked. Should they or shouldn’t they? She’d hovered, with the question, over him.

  They’d waited a week. It had seemed forever given the lust they felt, or was it love? They’d said as much. At least he had, on the sofa, her ear to his heart.

  “I know it’s crazy, so soon and all, but it’s true and I have to say it or I’d be a liar.”

  “Do you? I think I—” The words had stuck. “Love—” She’d never said it, except to family. And looking into those hazel eyes that looked so unflinchingly back, she couldn’t think of a single good reason not to say the words “you too.”

  But between the cool sheets, she couldn’t trust herself. On top of him, naked, she was seeing ghosts. The ghosts of past lovers like vultures circled, their caws raucous, insidious. Here, where she ached to be filled not once, but again and again by the same man, they attacked, marked her with what she was: undeserving of more than a night, a week at most. Loved and left. Had there been one or two—but ten? Twenty? Who knew how many: men she’d been desperate to surrender to—her willing body like a white flag long raised before the battle had begun.

  His voice was sweet as the strokes of his fingertips, brushing her hair from her forehead. “We don’t have to.”

  “I want,” she said. “I need you.” And she sat on him further, all the way. A good fit. They stayed like that, swaying, like an anchored boat in a bay.

  Still, the ghosts wouldn’t leave.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  “All the others,” she said. He stiffened. “I’m afraid you won’t want me in the morning.”

  “I want you for a hundred mornings, for a thousand, for as long as you want me.”

  Their boat capsized and he was on her. On a chain around his neck, the charm his grandmother had given him when he was baptized grazed Gwen’s lips, rhythmically. The image was an angel, a gold boy with wings. She took it between her teeth, onto her tongue like communion.

  The morning after, she woke to cool red rose petals falling in handfuls over her body, her face. He kissed her and left her to bask, returning with a bowl of deep reds and blues, berries. “Open your mouth,” he said, kneeling next to her. And he placed the fruit on her tongue—raspberries, blueberries, their sour and sweet mingling as she swallowed.

  Five

  SHE PULLED HER heavy body from the tub, dried it with a thin towel. She took her toothbrush out of the Ziploc bag that protected it from the roaches and brushed.

  She, too, could feel something coming. She turned up the lamp in the living room so she could see the note cards—read the writing on the wall. Zero for President, one said. Around it were cards on which Leo had drawn himself in his minuteman costume—from the front and the side. One in pencil, and one in ink—red and black. Another card read, Agency of the Resident President’s Program You. Join us and have the job of your dreams. Amazing. How, exactly, was he planning on employing others when he wasn’t employed himself? THE JOB OF YOUR DREAMS was in capitals.

  His job—the one he’d hired himself for, the one he worked at incessantly, without any pay—was dreaming. All night. All day. Pipe dreams.

  It had begun one Saturday morning when, polishing off the last of the week’s quarter ounce, he decided he’d walk across America barefoot, without a penny in his pocket, to see if he could make it by depending solely on the kindness of strangers—a test for the Blanche DuBois theory of survival. As a trial walk, he headed to Venice Beach where, with blistered feet, he called for her to pick him up.

  Or perhaps it’d started after he quit his job as set sitter on a sitcom, because he wanted to do more with his life. He’d been driving the youngest boy on Growing Pains to and from the set, and then hanging out in the dressing room, smoking pot and writing songs as they filmed. It wasn’t much of a job, but it was a job. After months of not working, he went to the Catholic church around the corner from the Cornell and laid his past-due credit-card bills on the altar, asking the priest to forgive him his debts, like Jesus said. I can’t do that, the priest had told him. Leo had turned and walked up the aisle, leaving the bills behind him. The priest had yelled for him to come back, but Leo had kept walking.

  And now he was Zero, full-time. Zero is nothing, so it includes the all. When you give up possessions, said Leo, everything becomes yours. Zero is the Fool in the tarot deck, pictured as a young man holding a white rose, walking the cliff’s edge, a little white dog yipping at his ankles, perhaps to keep him from stepping off the cliff, from falling. Gwen had told him this, and he’d thought the image perfect.

  She dimmed the lamp, blew out the candles. It was a matter-of-fact action, blowing out the candles, an action not full of magic, as it had been when she was a kid and a grown-up let her blow the candles out after dinner, or before bed. She’d always made a wish first, in case it counted. She wondered what it was she’d wished for.

  She put on a black silk slip that had belonged to her mother, the straps of which she’d stitched back on more times than she knew.

  The Count’s apartment was three flights up, on the top floor. She walked the dingy gray-carpeted halls in her slip and socks. It was after three in the morning. No one would be up but them. She rang his bell and yawned. Fifteen minutes, she told herself, a half hour at most.

  After a glamorous wait, he unlatched the little barred window and stooped to look at her through
the crisscrossed metal. His dark eyes looked larger than when last she’d seen him, and he wore a black turban on his head. He unlocked the door. “If it isn’t the lovely Miss Gwendolyn. Glad you could come, kid.” His speech was slow, methodical. Was it his body giving out, or was it alcohol? The smell of vodka clung to him like an atmosphere, medicinal, and so potent it made her eyes sting.

  His aqua satin robe gleamed in the blue light of his hallway. He was walking with a cane. A curtain of red plastic beads from Chinatown made a cheap nostalgic music as he walked through it and she followed him into his bedroom.

  Sinatra crooned from a radio made in the fifties. Candles lit the room. In his black silk pajamas and his robe, the Count lay back on his leopard bedspread and propped black satin pillows behind his back and head. An overflowing ashtray and pill bottles crowded the bedside table. Once her eyes adjusted to the low light, she saw that his room, formerly decorated like an old Hollywood-style screening room, was, indeed, transformed. The eye of Ra, big as a headboard, was painted in gold behind his bed. Protection in the afterlife. Beside it he had tacked a poster of Liz Taylor in a gold headdress.

  “Cleopatra,” he said, following her gaze. “Most expensive film of all time.” He was breaking a bud into flakes in the open Zig-Zag. “You know how she died.”

  “Liz?”

  “Liz? Heavens, no. Darling, don’t give me a heart attack. Liz can’t go before me. Cleopatra. She held a cobra to her breast and let it bite her. How gorgeous is that?”

  The windows facing the alley, which he’d long ago painted black, had figures on them now, outlines in gold paint. One, Gwen knew, was Anubis, guard dog to the afterworld. The other was a man in a tunic holding a scepter.

  “Anubis and . . .”

  “Anhur. God of the sky. He led the way to heaven.” The Count rolled the joint, licking the edge of the paper and twisting it closed. He rolled the tightest joints of anyone she knew.

  “Behind you,” he said. “I made those, too. Out of clay.”

  Pell-mell, across the top of a bookshelf, scarabs shone in the candlelight among other Egyptian trinkets—a tin sarcophagus, a pyramid of blue glass with Luxor Hotel, Las Vegas engraved on one side, a rubber sphinx key chain. Gwen picked up a scarab and held it to a candle. He’d shaped and etched the gray clay and painted it black. It was detailed. You could see the wings and the carapace. She closed it in her fist. Scarab beetles lay their eggs in dung—life from excrement, life everlasting.

  “Take it,” Valiant said, his face flickering. Even by the candlelight, she could see he’d grown thinner, and his dark skin was tighter, more—somehow—transparent. On his neck, just above his collarbone, a purple-black, dime-sized lesion had appeared. It was shaped like a kidney bean. When had that happened? How long had it been since she’d seen him? One week? Two? She looked away. She didn’t want him to see her tears.

  “Where’s Leo?” she asked.

  “Jin’s Joint. For cigarettes and a little vodka. Will you do the honors?” he said, handing her the joint and the lighter.

  What the hell. Maybe it would help her sleep.

  Count Valiant wasn’t really a count. And yet the title fit him. He had been, since Gwen had known him, self-proclaimed, self-explanatory.

  He’d adopted the title in high school. He was tall and dark, dramatic, Leo said, the only black guy in a school of blond surfers. That was when Leo got to know him, doing the play Guys and Dolls. Playing the gambler Nathan Detroit, Valiant brought the house down. And when, by happenstance, Leo moved into the Cornell, Valiant took him under his wing, making him his driver and assistant and, in exchange, introducing him to what industry people he knew.

  He’d worked then, Valiant had. Then, or before then, worked as a grip on music videos, which made him eligible for a small monthly supplement from the Actor’s Fund, for industry people who were sick. She wasn’t sure how he managed, but it was what he lived off of. That and a small allowance from his parents.

  She’d known him as long as she’d known Leo, or almost. Leo had introduced them at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, just up the street, in their permanent, contemporary collection, in front of a painting by Rothko called White Center. It was the Count’s favorite painting. “Like a journey,” he had said.

  They’d stood across the room from the painting, she and Leo and Valiant. The bands of red—above and below the thick white line at the center of the canvas—reached out, like two arms, and pulled them toward it. The painting had a visceral effect on her. An unexpected heat wave, it had pressed on her skin from the inside out, like desire. At the end of the journey, close enough to touch the canvas, she, they were engulfed in the white center: a tunnel of absolution that swallowed them whole. Light without memory.

  And then, because the Count wanted to, because he’d been looking forward to it all month, they’d gone to the museum’s theater for a double feature of seventies disaster flicks—Earthquake and The Towering Inferno. She endured Earthquake, endured the ridiculous plot, thanks to Charlton Heston’s growl and grit and throbbing muscles. But when The Towering Inferno came on and the walls closed in and sweat beaded under her bangs, she knew another three hours was out of the question. She left the theater and Leo followed her, and the Count stayed for the movie and stewed.

  She’d had the feeling he’d been jealous of her, of her abrupt appearance in their lives. Before she’d come on the scene, Leo had been his. When she’d asked Leo about the extent of their friendship, he’d been quiet. He’d blushed. “Well,” he’d said, “it wasn’t for the Count’s lack of trying.” But when she pressed the question, he insisted that nothing had happened between them, ever. They were friends. It was just—well, he’d said, the Count could be possessive.

  After the movie episode, the Count had stayed away for a few weeks. When he’d come down to their apartment, he’d given her flowers he’d picked “midnight gardening” in the neighborhood, and since then, they’d been friends.

  She handed him the lit joint.

  “I hoped he’d be gone when you came,” said the Count. “I’ve been worried.”

  “The whole Zero thing,” she said, pulling a chair up to his bed.

  “He thinks he can heal me. Like he’s Jesus or something.”

  “Christ.”

  “Exactly.” He laughed and his laugh turned to a hacking cough. His whole body shook with it. He reached for an empty glass.

  Gwen took it and hurried for water. His kitchen sink was filled to the brim with dishes stuck with grease and remnants of God knows what. A few weeks’ worth, it looked like. And they were crawling with roaches. The Cornell was riddled with them. She held her breath and filled the glass with tap water—all he had—and returned to his bedside. She handed it to him, made certain he had it. He drank it down.

  “You look like the Virgin Mary,” he said.

  “Olivia Hussey?”

  “Those cheekbones. Lord.”

  She held his hand, warmed it in hers.

  “I have a favor to ask you,” he said.

  “Anything.”

  He brought his other hand out from under the covers and touched her slip. Took the silk between his fingers and rubbed it as though assessing its worth. “Tell me how your mother died,” he said. She felt her body tense. “You’ve told me, I know, but it was so, so lovely how you described her last moment, how you held her. Will you tell me, just one more time?”

  “I may need one more hit.”

  “You don’t have to if it’s too hard,” he said, passing her the joint.

  “A bedtime story, huh?”

  He nodded, pulled the covers up to his neck and closed his eyes.

  He looked peaceful now. The lines in his thin face had smoothed and his body was spent and quiet. Like a child on the verge of sleep, she thought, not looking at the lesion, not thinking about it.

  “Okay,” she said. She took a deep drag off the joint, held it in and let it go. She would tell him something beautiful. “We were in the c
ar. It was afternoon, a few days before Christmas.”

  “I love Christmas,” he said.

  “So did I.” She gave him back the joint and said nothing.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, interrupting the silence.

  “You want me to go on?”

  “Please.”

  He’d broken the flow of her story, the one she told people if they asked, but she picked up where she’d left off. “It was a few days before Christmas,” she said, and the rest came out in a seamless, practiced rush—this monologue she’d written for herself.

  “We were at a stoplight, and we were laughing about something, and I looked up and saw this truck coming for us, fast, down the hill. It swerved around the cars on the other side of the light and veered and it nearly toppled sideways but didn’t. Everything was slow motion. The truck was coming through the red light, the huge white truck was barreling toward us, but so slow we should have been able to move. I tried to speak. Time was folding, the world was swallowing itself, it was inside out, slow, and the cement truck with its big headlights was swerving, but not enough. My mother looked up and screamed and her scream made everything white. I reached for her. I pulled her to me, and we held each other. She was mine and I was hers and we wouldn’t let go. Not ever. Her eyes were what I saw last.”

  “Your eyes were what she saw last.”

  “It was like some part of her entered me, for safety, and then there was the slow motion shattering of glass. And I put my hands up to block it. That was the only part of me that was hurt. That and my memory. I couldn’t remember anything. Not for a very long time.”

  “God. To be taken like that, in one clean break. The fates snipping your thread without any warning. To go in the arms of your daughter.” The Count opened his eyes. They were full of tears. “She knew you’d live, that you’d survive her. And if someone loves you that much, and misses you, it’s like you don’t really die, not all of you.”

  The bell rang. Leo had made it back. Valiant wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his robe. “Kid,” he said. He gripped her hand and pulled her toward him, whispered in her ear. “You and Leo, you’re lucky you have each other.”