“Better not stop dancing,” I whispered to her, and she nodded. But she tasted like cider and cigarettes and sweat, so I kissed her again and ran my hand down the side of her breast.
“I know another dance,” she whispered back, and slid her hands into the back pockets of my jeans.
We had ended up in a heap at the foot of the wall, and I held her half-on, half-off my lap. I didn’t care if we had to start the 101 nights over, honestly, it had been that good, and I leaned over and kissed her hair.
“I love you,” I told her.
“You need me,” she corrected me, pretty bleakly.
“No,” I said. “I love you.”
“You barely know me,” she replied.
* * *
So we danced and screwed our way through one hundred nights. My brothers and I never knew where the girls went during the days, we never found out where they lived. At night they lived with us, amid the smoky, alcoholic squalor of the bar. My T-shirt and her fishnets were in shreds and tatters but my and my brothers’ boots miraculously healed each day while we slept, curled up in the dark corners. Sometimes I would have sworn that I could still smell her hair in my sleep.
The hundredth night, Isabel was in one of her poison moods. She wouldn’t look at me, wouldn’t talk to me no matter what I did or said. By the end of the night my nerves were spitting wires. I never knew what to do with her when she was like this. Nothing worked, nothing felt right, and I was tense, straining for that 101st night like a dog at the end of a leash. It was all I could see. I tried to talk to her, but her averted eyes and monosyllabic answers reduced me to silence as well. At the end of the night I stared moodily into space while she knocked back shots of Irish whiskey. My tension and mounting excitement curdled into frustration and I began to seethe. Why was she being like this when we were so close? When she paid for her fifth shot, I finally spoke.
“You can’t handle that much whiskey and you know it,” I said.
She shrugged half-heartedly. “Fuck you, Jake,” she said, but without any real malice behind it. No feeling at all, really, not love or anger.
“Seriously, Isabel. Stop drinking. You’ll just wind up puking it back up.”
“So? Who are you, my mother?”
“Not your mother,” I said. “I’m the person who cleans you up afterward, remember.” My voice turned ugly and I knew it would be a mistake to keep talking. But I was so aching with tension for the next night and her mood had turned that tension sour. I guess I thought a fight might be the next best thing to fucking, which she certainly wasn’t in the mood for. “Me, not your sisters.” I kept going, trying to goad her into paying attention to me. “Your sisters, they don’t give a shit. They leave you here as soon as the dancing’s done.”
It worked. Her head snapped around. “Don’t you say one word about my sisters. You’re sick of cleaning me up? What have I been doing since I got here but cleaning up after your mess? You think it’s easy getting my sisters here every night? They practically hate your brothers. You think I want to be here when I feel like this?”
I’d actually … never thought about what Isabel’s black moods would be like from the inside. I guess I’d just thought about them as part of her mystique—Where did she come from? How did she feel? She was here for me, and that had been enough. For me, anyway.
“Then why do you bother to come?” I snarled at her, to cover up the shame beginning to slink through my guts.
She stared at me for a minute and turned back to her drink. “You’re an asshole.” She drank down the fifth shot of whiskey and blinked a little in the low light. For the first time I noticed the dark circles under her eyes. “I come here,” she began, and then stopped. “I come here,” she said again, with some difficulty. “Because it’s the only time I really feel alive. It’s the only time I feel like I want to be alive. I can’t stop sleeping, Jake. I sleep twelve or fifteen hours a day. Most days showering is too hard and my arms and legs feel like they’re filled with lead. I—I feel like I’m not really there most of the time, just looking through the cut-out eyes of a portrait, like in a bad movie. Everything hurts, all the time, even when there’s nothing wrong with me. I cry every day. I can’t keep my mind together, my thoughts bounce and clatter like a bag of marbles emptied out onto the floor. And everything looks gray to me, like there’s a screen of smoke in front of my eyes. And I hate myself for being like this, so weak. Weak and useless.
“And when I come here, Jake, I’m not useless. I come here because sometimes when I’m here, the music and the smoke and the drink drives that away, and I feel okay. Just okay, and that’s a fucking miracle. And sometimes I feel better than that. Sometimes I feel bubbles like champagne in my blood and I can see neon light trails in the air and everything just—just sparks, like burning metal and fireworks. But most of the time, most of the time, Jake, I feel like crap.”
I didn’t know what to say to her. I drank her sixth shot of whiskey. “I didn’t know,” I said. “I never knew. You always seemed so … alive.”
She looked at me bitterly until I heard exactly how stupid I sounded. “Yeah. I’m good at that. And I’m good at calculus, so nothing really bad could be happening, could it? You never noticed, you never took it seriously because you needed me to be the girl who would save you. You don’t love me and you don’t know me. You need me. And you never once thought about what I needed, or even noticed me counting ceiling tiles while you were fucking me.”
“That’s mean,” I breathed. “That’s mean, and it’s not true. I did think about what you needed, why you were here, I asked—”
“Oh, shut up, Jake,” she said, and slid off the barstool. “I’m going to go throw up, and I’ll hold my own fucking hair back, and then I am leaving.”
After she left, I put my head down on the bar. It was aching already. I could tell Cynthia was standing over me, tapping her foot. After a long silence, I heard her say, “You get one chance, Jake. You know that, right? Just one.”
“I figured,” I said, pressing my fingers against my eyelids.
“You haven’t learned anything, have you?” she said. “You’re an idiot.”
“I know,” I said. I sat there and waited to fall asleep, waited to wake up in misery.
The next night, the 101st night, we were waiting from the moment the sun went down, but the girls didn’t come. And the time ticked by.
“Where are they?” asked my youngest brother.
I shrugged.
“They’re not coming, are they?” he whimpered.
“They’re coming,” I said.
And we waited, not even tapping our feet to the music. I could hear the sound of each second falling to the floor.
“They’re not coming,” said my youngest brother again a few minutes before midnight.
“And it’s your fault,” snarled my third brother. “All your bullshit threats to me, and you go and fuck everything up at the end. What’s wrong with you, anyway? Too many fucking blow jobs scramble your brains?”
“Shut up, Max,” I said quietly. “I swear to God if you don’t shut up, I’ll break your fucking jaw.”
My other brothers slowly cleared away while Max stepped up close. I could hear him breathing. “You couldn’t take me when were kids, Jake, and you can’t take me now.”
“Not in my bar, boys.” Cynthia’s warning voice seemed to come from miles away.
The door slammed open and the girls staggered in. She wasn’t wearing much makeup and she wasn’t dressed up. She was wearing a pair of hot-pink jeans and a black cotton tank top.
Her eyes were swollen, like she’d been crying.
She grabbed my hand.
That night my feet felt like lead and the music sounded like so much static. Each beat felt like a hammer blow to the head and every step was like pulling teeth. But we ground it out, nothing if not determined, and by the end of the night there were holes in the soles of my boots as big as nickels.
There was a silent pause for a
minute while my brothers and I stared at each other. Then my youngest brother walked tentatively toward the door, licked his lips, and stepped outside. More silence, and then we could hear his scream of joy, sharp as an arrow in my heart. Nine of my brothers stampeded for the door.
Max waited uncertainly and then came over and put his hand on my shoulder. “Come on, Jake.” His voice sounded almost affectionate.
I shook him off me and he shrugged, cast one last look at me, and left. He closed the door gently behind him.
“You’re free,” Isabel said.
I didn’t feel it.
“So go on,” she said. “Get out of here.”
“I didn’t think you were coming back,” I said.
She shrugged. “We were so close.” Her voice sounded dull, and I didn’t know if she meant that she and I were close or that we had been so close to the end of the 101 nights when we fought.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have said that, about your sisters. And you know I don’t care how much you drink, not really.”
“I know,” she said. “But it’s not about that, is it? All this time, and you never really noticed anything wrong with me, did you?”
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” I said.
“I can’t feel anything when we have sex,” she said. “I don’t feel anything but bad anymore.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
“I used to feel things, here, with you. I used to feel good. And then … it kind of fell away, and I was just coming to help you. Maybe I used myself up.”
“I’ll help you,” I said. “I can do that, for you. Like you’ve done for me.”
“I don’t think you can. You only ever thought about yourself and your brothers, really, like you’re the only ones under a curse. You only ever thought about what I could do for you—bring you cigarettes, get you off, set you free. Even tonight—you just worried about yourself, didn’t you? Did it ever cross your mind that I wasn’t here because … I had … because something had happened to me? You wouldn’t know how to help me.”
I tasted salt and realized that tears were running down my face. “Don’t leave me. I’ll learn.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think I get to have that.” She was crying, too. “I’ve got to go.”
“Give me your phone number,” I said.
She shook her head. “It’s better, because you won’t get bored trying to help me, when you can’t.”
“Did you get bored trying to help me?”
“You aren’t like me,” she said impatiently. “There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re kind of a jerk sometimes, but so’s everybody. I’m broken.”
“I don’t believe that,” I said.
But she left anyway.
I stared out into space for a few minutes after she left. There didn’t seem to be anywhere worth going.
After a little while Cynthia came over and stood in front of me with her arms folded. “Time to go, Jake,” she said quietly.
I shrugged.
“You can’t stay here any longer,” she told me. Then she poured me a glass of brandy. “On the house,” she told me. “To celebrate. Drink it and get out of here.”
I sipped the brandy. “Can I come back, some evenings?”
“Sure,” she said. “Any time, if you’ve got the money. And you behave yourself.”
* * *
My brothers made good. They have good jobs, nice places to live. I stayed with them sometimes, one after another. I made myself enough money to drink.
“Plenty more pussy out there,” my third brother said to me, right before I decked him.
It wasn’t true anyway, not for me. It was like when she went away, something broke inside me. I saw other girls, girls who weren’t her walking by, and I felt nothing. I only got hard if I was remembering her, and I felt that slipping away as well.
My fourth brother got me a job at his wife’s father’s office. The soles of my Docs had never healed after that last night, so I bought new shoes and threw the boots into the back of my closet. I cleaned myself up and damned if I didn’t look respectable. And older. I looked older.
My hands still shook, so I bought an electric razor.
My youngest brother approved. “Put it behind you,” he said. “Start over.”
But I remember. I remember nights when we danced on tongues of flame and angels, when the world opened up and was ours for the taking, when sparks shot through the air, when drumbeats were gasoline and I had a book of matches.
One night, Max was waiting for me at my sixth brother’s apartment when I came home from work, and the two of them were glowering at each other.
“Zach doesn’t think I should tell you,” said Max. “But fuck him. I found your girl.”
I went into the kitchen, took a beer out of the fridge, came back, and sat down in between my brothers. “I don’t believe you, Max.”
He looked vaguely hurt. “It’s true.”
“How could you find her when I couldn’t?”
“Because you looked like a fucking nightmare when you were searching for her, pal. Seriously. Unshaven, you reeked of alcohol, you think any girl would tell you where her friend was? Now me”—he gestured to himself—“I wear a suit. I’m well-spoken. Who wouldn’t talk to me?”
I glared at him.
“My girlfriend’s a senior at Barnard,” he said. “Her younger sister was at school with an Isabel, Isabel Goldman. Oldest of twelve, counting stepsisters and half sisters. The rumor around school was that she tried to kill herself and her parents sent her to a mental hospital in Connecticut to get her away from her friends here—to get her away from you, I bet, even if they don’t know who you are. They have a country house up there. So I looked into it for you. ’Cause I’m a stand-up guy, no matter what you think of me. And it’s true. She’s there, no visitors, no correspondence except her parents. Pills and electroshock therapy.”
I didn’t feel anything I had expected to feel. I didn’t feel anything. “Tried to kill herself?” I repeated mechanically.
“Tried,” said Max, drinking my beer. I guessed Zach hadn’t offered him one. “One of her sisters called an ambulance, they pumped her stomach.”
“Look,” he continued. “You ask me, I think you should stay away from her and vice versa. I don’t think you’re good for each other. But do what you want. One piece of advice—if you come for her, get yourself together. Clean yourself the fuck up. Get your own place. Be a goddamn man already. She didn’t get you out so you could spend the rest of your life crashing on somebody’s couch.”
He tossed me a brochure, the kind of thing aimed at parents of troubled teens, soft focus and fake understanding, no edge to it. Not what someone like Isabel needed. Not what someone like me needed.
He finished my beer. “So don’t say I never did anything for you, Jake.” And then he left.
* * *
I thought about what someone like Isabel needed, what someone like me needed, and then I quit my job. I’d never liked it and I don’t think I was any good at it; I was never entirely sure what it was. Max had said to get my own place. There was only one place I thought of as my own.
Cynthia didn’t look very surprised to see me. “What took you so long?” she asked.
I sat down and asked her for a shot of bourbon. When she brought it to me I sipped it. “I’m going to find her,” I said.
“She’s not here,” said Cynthia. “So you’re not off to a good start.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not good at starts.”
“This is not my problem,” she said.
“Come on,” I coaxed her. “Don’t you ever want to get out of here? Look at the sunlight? Go to the beach?”
“Are you asking me out?” she said. “Long walks on the beach?”
“I’m asking you for a job.”
She was silent for a full minute, and then she went down the bar to take care of other customers. When she came back, she drummed her fingers on
the bar. “I miss going to the ballet.”
“Are you serious?”
She glared at me. She drummed her fingers on the bar again and then went away to wash some glasses. She came back and poured two more shots of bourbon. “You’ve got a decent ear. You can book the bands and take over a few nights.”
I gaped at her.
“What you want to say, Jake, is ‘thank you.’”
“Thank you.”
She rummaged behind the bar for a few minutes and came up with a set of keys. “You can start tomorrow night. I don’t need to train you, do I?”
“I think you’ve already done that.”
“Yes.” She slid the keys across the bar to me. “There’s an apartment above the bar. I don’t live there.”
For a minute I wondered where she lived—what that even meant to someone like her. Then I said “thank you” again, just to make sure.
She nodded. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I got up to go. “Oh,” she said. “Jake? Don’t drink all my fucking profits.”
* * *
I took Max’s car out to Connecticut.
“Don’t blow out my speakers. And don’t stain my seats when you fuck your girlfriend,” he said before he tossed me the keys.
“She probably won’t want to come back with me anyway,” I said.
He grinned at me. “What’re you talking about? She’s never been able to keep her hands off you, man.”
* * *
I saw Isabel in the center’s common room and realized it was the first time I’d seen her without any trace of makeup. She didn’t look older or younger, just different. Maybe more tired than before.
When I took her hand it felt like the future had finally started, like everything in my life had been stalled, just waiting for her.
“They’ve fucked up my memory,” she said, and laughed a little, but not in a good way.
“Memory’s overrated,” I told her. “I’ve come to get you out.”
She looked at me like I was an idiot. “I can get myself out. I’m over eighteen now. I can sign myself out any time I want.”
Burning Girls and Other Stories Page 10