by Lynn Crosbie
On the next page, in violet ink, “She saved the long red wig for after. When I came out of the studio, she was reclining in the back of the town car, and the orange curls rolled over her birch-white hips and moon-white belly.”
Later, “The dreams that are not dreams? It is always the same perfect baby, in a leopard singlet, and her blue-robed mother, holding a star-shaped wand.”
Larger: “These dreams or not-dreams enter my mouth like cold steel and are blasted away in a single, barbaric second.”
And, WHEN THE BAD BLEED — blue pastel encircles a pencil drawing of Cyril Tourneur in large oval sunglasses.
I gingerly retrieved the bloody napkin from this bag, the broken glasses, and the number 27 — a sticky, peeled-off address.
HOW COULD I have let Page touch me? I wondered, even though I knew the answer.
I had never been beautiful. It changed me.
I could see inside myself, where I was not beautiful. And knew that he would see it too, my fury, my jealousy, and my need.
He would leave me.
I made sure of it. I found the plug to the whole universe and tore it out, then got high as everything, very slowly, collapsed.
THIRTEEN
I GET MISTY / CELINE
Mercury found a map to the cottage on some kid’s Tumblr, and came looking for me. We drove to a place called the Black Snake that I think Evelyn used to like.
I told him I was writing new songs, and the Unplugged show would have to wait.
“Take all the time you need,” he said.
He was so easygoing, I wondered if it was the white lightning or if he was in love.
“A bit of both,” he said.
“How is she?” he said, and I waved the question off.
“What do you care?” I said, and he sighed.
“I don’t,” he said.
When two skinny girls in short dresses walked by, I pulled them over.
“Take care of my friend,” I said, and walked home, so drunk that the trees were spinning like tops and I forgot why I felt angry and just laughed.
“You crazy fucking trees,” I said.
MISTY WAS SITTING on the steps, waiting for me as the sun rose.
He didn’t mention the crown of leaves or my shredded clothes.
I took a shower, and came outside with coffee, and the gun.
“I thought you tossed that,” he said.
“I don’t want you to worry anymore,” I said, and he told me not to look.
I heard him moving tins around the cupboard as I stabbed out a number.
A man answered, and barked.
“What?”
“It’s me,” I said, my hand patting Misty’s. “Sleep with her all you want. I’m out.”
“Who is this?” Page said.
I had already turned off the phone.
“We’re going out!” I said, and did the little dance that he liked, with the pharaoh walking and bits of peppermint twist.
EVELYN LEFT HER grape-purple Kelly bag in the green room the night she left me.
She obviously didn’t know where she had left it, and had Luscious put notices everywhere of a forlorn purse, crying Tic Tacs.
Later, she would tell me that only one person called, who said, “That is my chicken, yes.”
She remembered, eventually, and asked me for it, panic-stricken and sheepish: “I know you’re mad, but it is my purse, and I need it.”
“It’s not yours,” I said.
“I want it,” she said, over and over.
I hung up. She could cry all she liked.
AFTER PACKING MY syringe like a musket, I withdrew every item, and studied them.
There were answers inside its goatskin belly: I snapped the lock, then pocketed the clochette.
I pulled out lace kerchiefs, a crocodile wallet filled with credit cards and a few dollar bills; Chanel makeup in a drawstring silk pouch, a gold lighter with her initials, six bottles of pills, two Baggies of veneer-white and brownish powder, a mangy mink-covered kit, business cards with intimate messages scrawled on their backs, a USB drive with a lizard head, a five-colour pen, iPod, pink Karen Walker sunglasses, and her notebook.
That was painted KEEP OUT. THIS MEANS YOU.
I only had to read a page before I knew she meant me, specifically.
But here’s the thing. There was only the one page.
It said, “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”
“Oh, Jesus,” I said.
When did she get so fucking obvious?
As I turned the empty pages, an envelope filled with pictures and a folded piece of paper fell out, titled “Cherchez la Femme.”
“MISTY, LET’S GO!”
I had read Evelyn’s list, and while it made some sense to me, I refused to consider the “last days”: once, when a cab driver had started talking about the mysterious death of Kurt Cobain to me, I smacked him on the head with a rolled-up magazine.
I had, however, become curious about the woman I may have followed right out of my life.
Still more curious were pictures of her and her mother, which rang little bells.
She looked terrible, with long frizzy hair, bad skin, and a butterball body.
But the pictures of her mother —
I followed the ribbons of her stockings to the hem of her torn lace dress, to the sliver of Peeps-pink panties between her dark, fleshy thighs, and all I could remember was lust, leading me like a donkey into soft, perfumed arms and handfuls of waving scarlet hair.
MISTY RAN INSIDE to wash up and I put on my coat and tied my dirty hair back with red string.
He had found a number for me. I called, and when I heard her voice, I knew I had found her.
Because she made a sound that was part excited and part drowning.
She and I set a time to meet at the tavern.
“I can’t believe I’m seeing her again,” I said as we hit the highway.
“She’s pretty old now,” Misty said.
“She’s still the same person,” I said.
I felt good: I shuffled songs and found Shonen Knife, spun the volume up, and blew happy-looking smoke rings.
WE DROVE TO Pine Street, and I went to Linda’s Tavern, leaving Misty to roam around until I called him.
I sat at the long polished bar beneath the gigantic buffalo head and ordered a ginger ale.
Looked around and there she was.
Taking up a whole booth with bags spilling dragon fruit, a bunch of black dahlias, and stacks of vintage-looking fabric.
I leaned back, watching her.
Her light red hair was combed away from her face, and pinned with a pale pink camellia.
She wore a 1950s blue velvet cocktail dress, matching pumps, and a spiked leather cuff.
“Are you looking for her?” the waitress asked, sticking her finger between bee-stung lips.
I headed to the table and she looked up at me, tears coursing from the big gypsy eyes that I hadn’t forgotten.
“I’m sorry,” I said, patting her back.
SHE WAS CLEARLY drunk, and kept polishing her glasses: “It’s weird, like I can’t get you into focus.”
The shaggy dress she had stuffed herself into was splitting its seams; her pale red hair was shot through with white.
Her face was raw and scored with deep lines, and her hands shook, relentlessly.
I ordered tea from a pretty waitress who left her phone number on the packets of Splenda.
She drank vodka on ice and called it water; moved over to sit beside me, resting her head on my shoulder.
She smelled like White Diamonds and mildew.
“You look so good,” she said sadly. “What happened to us?”
She started crying, then opened a compact and inspected her leaky mas
cara.
“All along, I knew you loved her more,” she said.
“I loved who more?”
She dismissed my question with a toss of her hair, and went to the washroom.
Her eyes were red but she was composed when she returned, as was I, having stealthily shot up with my back to the room.
She sat back in the opposite bench, and we made the worst small talk of my life.
I lit a cigarette as she talked about the weather’s mercurial nature and the manager rushed over, nervously stroking his moustache.
“It’s a five-thousand-dollar fine,” he said.
“I have a Diners Club card,” I said.
“Do you even remember me?” she said, frowning at her blue, chipped fingernails.
“I remember that I liked you.”
“Liked me,” she repeated, sadly.
“That you may have tried to save me.”
She stared at me, with her hand raised.
Her image wavered and for a second I saw how she felt; I saw a girl’s hand, bound with ribbon and loose in a big borrowed sweater, reaching for a girlish heart.
That was filled with me.
“But I don’t care anymore,” I said, looking down.
I looked again and she was gone.
Gouged into the table where she had been sitting: a half-circle. Beside it: a sheet of paper.
“YOU WERE WITH me. It rained all day and night, and I told you I would stay with you, after you left her, even if you failed —”
I crushed the note, and stood up.
I was burning with disgust and hatred.
Who says things like that?
I DIDN’T CARE anymore. Who was with me, what happened, so long ago.
I only had the vaguest sense of then, at any rate.
It was Evelyn who told me about the mystery around some girl I thought for a while might be her mother.
Maybe it was that sad woman, or maybe the sad woman is her mother.
It didn’t seem important anymore.
There was always a woman, on the sidelines, there were so many — like shrewd birds on a wire, watching me like I was their hatchling.
Dying to chunder love and nourishment into my open, needy mouth.
Anyways, whoever insisted that I cheer up, whoever I was shacked up with that day, is long gone.
Misty bought a Kurt Cobain sticker book: one is a half-skin, half-skeleton face.
I put the sticker on my guitar case.
That’s how it is, not one thing or another.
How young the woman felt when she saw me, how young we were.
Then — It is something like a horse kicking down a burning barn, this feeling.
It is so little, it only speaks in mews.
In the dark room, in a frond of warm moonlight, it lies beneath a moving circle of felt dragons.
We settle it on its back, I see in a whoosh, and stand on either side of the crib, patting its sweet, fat belly and the fine aurora of red and gold hair that rises straight from its head, like hundreds of rocket trails.
The room is damp with the smell of soap and milk: we stand quietly, holding hands.
Then the room splits open and devours us all.
I SLAPPED MYSELF out of the nod.
No more talk of last days, I thought.
New days, and everything sweet and sickening that they promise.
And the past where it belonged — buried.
I looked around and every girl in the place was staring at me. A few guys as well.
I left a few hundred dollars over the half moon, and snapped my fingers at the girl who looked the most like Ev.
Who sashayed over, hooked her arm through mine, and walked me to the ladies’ room, where she locked us in a stall, took off her Freelance Whales T-shirt, and got on her knees.
WHEN I ZIPPED up, and pushed the door open, she called out, “Don’t you want my number?” and I laughed, and headed for Misty, who was sitting on the curb, absorbed in an idiotically numbered Sudoku.
“You just wrote zeros,” I said, snatching the booklet from him and smacking his head.
“Oh,” he said. “How was she?” he asked as we walked along Pine in the shade and sunshine.
“She’s the same,” I said, and he looked skeptical.
“Okay, she’s the same after twenty years in battery acid.”
It was August: over a year had passed since I first saw her, curled up in a burrow of blankets.
2014: the number was confusing in its futuristic way.
“It’s my half-birthday,” I told Misty, indifferently. It was Evelyn’s actual birthday, it turned out; some time later, I sent her a bowl of goldfish.
“I’m almost twenty-seven.” I am always twenty-seven. It never changes.
“I’ve got this,” he said, and when we reached the car it was stuffed with Mylar balloons, wrapped presents, and two nasty hookers dressed, horribly, as cheerleaders, waving pom-poms.
“Hello gorgeous,” I said to the one in the black wig, who smiled, baring sharp veneers.
I CAME DOWN hard just out of Carnation, and crawled into the back seat.
“I’m sorry,” I wrote, in a card from the box that Misty had wrapped as a present for me.
I wrote to one to one of the hookers, and apologized for leaving bruises.
To Misty, to the blowjob girl, to the bar manager, to Evelyn.
They would never be mailed, but Misty demanded his, and said, after throwing it on the dashboard, “I will treasure this.”
He was so trashed, the car was idling in a pasture and he was playing “Do It Good.”
He sang his own version where a sax-playing Jesus leads a funk band, then got out and started waving at a bull, who looked at him, and charged.
FOURTEEN
SO LONG, MARIANNE / CELINE
As I sat in the emergency room, watching pain and anger and fear scroll across the lowered eyes of everyone else waiting, I patted my tidy stack of mail, and wrote,
Dear Marianne,
I am sitting in the ER, squished between a guy in handcuffs with a sucking chest wound and a dead woman with an arrow through her forehead.
In front of me, a blond girl is watching documentary footage on her laptop. On it, another blond girl is talking about Kurt Cobain.
She says that the last time she saw him he was going into Linda’s and she said, “Hey Kurt! Are you coming to my birthday party?” but he just said no.
She looks like this still embarrasses her.
I said, “What a dick” and the girl snapped her computer shut, looked at me, and fell to the floor.
When everyone stared I put on my sunglasses and hat, and bent over this letter. The girl, ashen, just got up and left, even though she was bleeding pretty badly.
I wanted to write you to say I remembered something else.
I was miserable and you helped me. You were [I scratched this out and wrote are] beautiful, but I love someone else.
I did then and I do now. But you knew that, and you still know it.
In fact, if it weren’t for you, I never would have met her.
I wonder if, as she was creating herself inside of you, she heard the song in your heart.
The song I sang to you, that ruinous night that you managed to fill with sunlight.
She is like you that way, your daughter.
I’m sorry it couldn’t be you.
I sang “So Long Marianne,” of course. And that’s the last of what I remember except you pretending to be irritated by my lack of imagination, and the feel of your barbed tongue, rasping something about being almost young, against mine.
Love,
I signed my name and kissed the card, another that I would never send, sheathed it with an envelope, placed it on th
e top of the stack and left them on my chair when a nurse said, “You can come and see your friend now,” and swayed her hips like a metronome as I followed her to the back.
THE GORED AND medicated Misty had been released and was sleeping peacefully on one of the deck chairs as I made his favourite dinner, corn pone, polk salad, and deep-fried grits.
I was listening to Tosca as my phone leaped around the counter. “27 missed calls,” it said.
“— e diedi il canto agli astri, al ciel,” I sang, carelessly, and listened to messages from girls.
I pressed Stop during the fourth. “I love giving head,” some girl was saying. What a sweet and boring lie.
I looked out the window and Evelyn was standing beside Misty, who had woken up and was waving his arms at her, furiously.
I watched her for a while, so pretty in her calico dress and the sun striking the blues in her black hair.
I WOKE UP and hid my tears of rage and happiness in her sun-sweet hair.
After a couple of hours, I reached over and she was gone.
“She took off,” Misty said, when I found him splitting wood outside.
“She said she’d call you later. And Mercury was here.”
Mercury came back and we rehearsed all night. I kept the phone beside me, but she didn’t call.
When Mercury asked after her, I said I never saw her anymore.
Except in dreams.
FIFTEEN
I WANT LOVE TO —
I was using more than usual.
One day, I rented a car and drove to the cottage. I saw Misty, waving, and frowned.
“Where is he?” I said.
Misty didn’t answer, and I shoved past, and found him in bed.
He was sleeping, and rustling: I took him in my mouth, and listened, gratefully, to the susurration of his breathing, of the shifting sheets.
When he opened his eyes, they widened, then narrowed.
He pounded me flat.
When I saw, later, that I had bled on the mattress, I gathered my clothes, kissed his head, and tiptoed away.
Passing a hammered piece of tin by the door, I saw that my face was livid; I saw a pink spot of scalp, where my hair had been pulled out.
I went home and fell asleep with a needle caught in the crook of my elbow, and, dry-eyed, I dreamed.