Further Out Than You Thought (18 page)

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.

Among the purple blossoms of the tree, a swatch of white made her stop. Was it a piece of clothing, maybe a T-shirt or a sweater? She pulled back a branch. It was a rope, weathered and soft, tied in a loop knot over a low branch, as though this tree were once lakeside and a child had tied the rope for a swing, to launch off from the bank, swing out into the middle of the lake and let go.

She loosened the slip knot, pulled the rope through it and brought it back with her, into the quiet Cornell. The rope was made of cotton, and it was a few yards long. She looped it around her wrist, then the other, and pulled it taut. It would do.

Walking the halls she found she was singing his freedom song.

She opened the door, careful to close it without a sound.

Was this home? Was Leo?

He let out a loud, openmouthed snore, woke up a little, and, turning on his side, murmured something she couldn't make out and then laughed at himself. He was deep in his dream, and as much as she'd wanted, before, to curl up with him and seduce him in his sleep, she found she couldn't. She needed distance, she needed to think. She sat on the piano bench and looked at him.

If she'd met him today, there wouldn't be a chance she'd fall for him. The realization lodged in her throat like a too-big bite of something she hadn't chewed and now couldn't swallow. She tried to breathe. She looked closer. He slept without a shirt on, in just his knickers, and his arms and chest and stomach were lean and tan. The loose curls, the pink cheeks, the long, dark eyelashes, the beard, all that was fine—lovely, actually. So what was it?

His left hand hung off the sofa. There was something about his hand. Soft and rather small, it was the size of hers. The fingers had a tender roundness to them, as though his hand were the hand of a big child. She'd once felt happy to have this hand hold hers. It had meant they were setting out on an adventure—free day at the museum or a walk along a beach. It hadn't mattered where they went, so long as he was at her side. She tried to imagine this hand building a house, a tree house or even a fort, or hammering up a safety gate. Her own hands were sinuous and rough. They were strong. She'd be the one to put hammer to nail.

What would a life with Leo be—really? She tried to see them in Italy, but found she couldn't see past this apartment. This apartment or another apartment in another town—they'd all end up the same. Cluttered with books he didn't read, stinking of old bong water. But now she was just being mean. The truth was that none of it mattered when they were creating, smoking pot and creating, when he was writing a song and she was writing a poem. At those times, the apartment became a wonderland of wealth, treasures around every corner.

She fit the DustBuster back in its charger and poured the bong water down the drain. The smell made her gag, and she ran to the toilet and dry heaved. She wasn't being fair, watching him while he slept. Judging. She'd been sober for less than twenty-four hours and she was judging. She should give him a chance. After all, she told herself, people change.

In the hall—the hall of fame, as Leo called it—she paused. On the wall hung the cover of Valiant's 1989 LP,
Strange,
featuring his song that had become a kind of cult classic, “I Want Me.” In his black leather jacket, his face in profile, his hand in his thick black hair, he leaned on a crumbling brick wall. “A modern Sinatra with teeth,” said Jason Jones of
Spin
magazine. “A stunning debut,” said another reviewer, but no other albums had followed.

And here were their head shots, signed and framed, Valiant's, Leo's, hers. Leo had insisted she sign hers, to act as if.
Act as if and it will happen,
he'd said.
You'll see.
That was nearly three years ago. In all her time living here she hadn't acted. Not unless stripping was acting. The acting she'd done was before Leo. She'd played a few bit parts on TV, and Slut #2 in a Coke commercial, applying lipstick and whispering to Slut #1 in the pretend college lecture hall. At the time she'd thought the parts would lead to something more, a movie maybe, something with substance and depth that would mean she was a true actress. And then she met Leo and they went to Europe and her agent dropped her and she didn't care. But here the head shot hung, acting as if. And here she was still, living in the tomb of a dream she knew had never really been hers.

She put the rope on the bed and lay down.

Her mind buzzed, her body hovered. There was no way she was going to sleep. She might as well get ready.

She pulled Stevie Smith's
Collected Poems
out of her bookcase. It was where she kept her cash until she deposited or spent it, and here was a week's worth. She'd stuck it in at the poem “Not Waving but Drowning,” which, being all of three quatrains, she read in a whisper to the empty room, to the still night, to the wan courtyard light through the curtains.

The lines were somehow soothing. Weren't we all dead men? Weren't we all drowning? The question was how to spend the time that remained.

She counted the Franklins, the Grants, and the Jacksons—all the faces upright, facing front, the bills smallest to largest, the way she'd learned to stack her cash at the club. The order suited her. It gave her a small thrill and made her feel her life was in fact hers to arrange as she pleased. There was a little more than a thousand. Too much for Mexico. She took just the Franklins—founding father with his long hair and his pursed smile, wild Franklin of the naked baths in the wind and the kite flying to catch the lightning—and tucked the wad of five bills into the front pocket of a pair of jeans. She'd wear the jeans to Mexico and keep the money on her. The rest she closed in the book she slid back in the shelf.

Fifi's shock collar was on the dresser. She'd need it, too, in case they had to leave her in a hotel room. It resembled a medieval torture device, with its two metal prongs strapped against her throat, but it worked. It kept her quiet and calm. The double-A batteries were old and most likely dead, but so long as the collar was on her, she wouldn't dare bark. Gwen put it on the bed.

What else would she need? It was warm in Mexico, wasn't it? She found a bathing suit, a sundress, a clean towel, flip-flops, her notebook and her pens—if there was a beach nearby she would be ready. And water, as always she would need plenty of water. Baja was a desert. The thought of the dust and the crowded streets of Tijuana made her thirsty already.

There was one more thing she wanted with her, in case the place got torched.

She searched under clothes in the closet. She looked under her bed, in her dresser and bedside table, between her sweaters. The cigar box, the one that had been her grandfather's and then her mother's—it had to be here, here in this room. She glanced at the desk. The piles of rejection slips, of poems returned, the drafts she'd abandoned. She didn't care if they went up in flames. In fact, she had an urge to burn them herself, all the pages. Even the poems that had come to her quick, like small gifts, the poems she almost liked. She wanted to start fresh. A clean desk, a clean mind. She swept off the papers, sending Leo's arrangement of old stuff tumbling. The tennis racket and the violin case clattered to the floor, where she let them lie beside the empty suitcases.

There was the cigar box, tucked into a corner of the desk, behind the Underwood typewriter that had been her grandfather's, too, had come from his warehouse—the oldest in Phoenix—come home with him when he sold the business. It was hers because she'd asked for it when her grandfather died, because, at eighteen, she knew she wanted to write, knew a writer needed a cool-looking typewriter. When she was small, at her grandparents' house, so small the Underwood on the kitchen table was at eye level, the smooth, round black keys with the faded letters, up so close to her face, seemed big, big and mysterious, and she'd run her fingers over them when no one else was in the room. It had sent a ripple of excitement through her, as though she were stealing something.

She blew the dust from the keys, moved the typewriter over, and picked up the cigar box, blowing the dust from it, too, brushing off the final layer with her fingertips.

Partagas,
the wooden box said.
1845, Regale.
She unsnapped the little gold latch. Inside were the tokens her mother, and later she, had saved, remnants that meant Gwen had been a child once. There was a clipping of her soft blond baby hair, tied with a pink satin ribbon. A pastille tin holding her baby teeth, which rattled when she shook it. There was that ring her father had given her, the gold one with the butterfly missing its wing. There was the strand of real pearls. And there were the photographs. The photos of the years.

She took out the stack and flipped through them. It'd been a long time since she'd looked. There was the one of just her head from the day she was born. Plump and rubbery as a beach ball, damp black hair, a double chin, and her eyes swollen shut like the eyes of a boxer. There was one of her mother holding her just after she was born, her mother, looking weak, puffy, and splotchy, but with love in her eyes, so much love, gazing down at her baby girl, at Gwen, as if she weren't a mistake at all, but a marvel, an answer to a forgotten prayer. There was her dad, with all his hair still, squeezing her mother to his side. Both of them flushed and smiling, holding Gwen high, up to the white backdrop of sky.

And there was the photo that was after, maybe a year after her mother had gone. The one she'd taken on her own, setting the timer, waiting for the click. The girl here doesn't smile. Her eyes are the gray eyes of Athena. I'll take you on, she says. Go ahead and look. See these cheekbones? These collarbones? The darkness under my eyes? I don't need food. I don't need sleep. Why, then, should I need you? You or anyone.

She'd made the photo on her own, in the dark room her father hadn't touched, the one room he'd let be. She'd developed the film herself by the glow of the red light and used the enlarger the way her mother had taught her, dodging the edges of the photo to lighten them, for contrast. After she'd developed the paper, dipping it in the baths of chemicals, timing it to the second, she'd hung it on the line to dry beside her mother's last prints, black-and-whites of a prepubescent Gwen and their old French bulldog, Winston, in a pile of fallen pecan leaves. It was the photo that came next in her stack—Winston licking her cheek, a fat smile on her face.

Think of peanut butter, think of whales
.

That was the moment, there in her dark room, that she'd known her mother was gone—gone and not coming back. She'd been waiting, she saw now, to walk into their backyard and find her mother clipping the gardenias to float in bowls of cool water to fill the house with fragrance. She'd been waiting to come home late and find her curled into the stuffed leather chair by the lamp in the study, reading and drinking her good red wine and smoking into the night.

She put the stack of photographs on the desk, facedown.

What was left in the cigar box was the old black velvet pouch. Her heartbeat quickened. She loosened the drawstring. The smell of vanilla hung in the open mouth of the pouch, or maybe she was imagining it. She pulled out Carlotta's Guadalupe pendant, drew back the curtain and held it to the light. The Virgin's face was darker than she'd remembered, as were her robes of green and red, as if, during those black velvet years of isolation, the colors had intensified, becoming truer, more themselves. She opened the clasp of the silver chain and fastened it around her neck. The pendant was cold and she pressed it to her chest to warm it.