Blackbird

by Averil Dean

  Julian moved up beside her and hooked his hand inside her elbow.

  “How do you feel about older men?” he said.

  Her expression held a trace of embarrassment: she knew she’d been caught looking. But she recovered gamely, accepting the drink for a second time.

  “I take it on a case-by-case basis,” she said.

  * * *

  She never asked where he was staying—which was, as it happened, right here on the third floor of her parents’ hotel. He could have taken her to his room. For that matter, she could presumably have taken him to any vacant bed in the place. A closet, even, or a supply room. Instead she’d led him down the stairwell to the freezing basement parking lot and, after a few perfunctory kisses, had dug a condom from her purse and handed it over. Easy as that.

  And that was good, Julian told himself. She would have been one of those popular girls he remembered from high school, grinning at the kids in the hall, self-possessed and shadowless. She knew what she wanted.

  He pulled her to the outside of the lowest flight of stairs, where the metal handrail formed a corner with the cement wall of the garage, and there he turned her around. He slid one hand up her sweater, unzipped her jeans, his fingers curling upward as hers gripped the metal tubing.

  “Hurry,” she said in a bossy voice that sent a grunt of laughter up his throat.

  “You hurry,” he said. “You come for me and then I’ll fuck you.”

  With his free hand he pushed down her jeans. An easy, easy girl. Ass-up in a filthy garage, bejeweled fingers wrapped around the bottom of the steel railing.

  Treat a lady like a whore, his brother used to say.

  From the hotel above came a muffled cheer. It must be midnight. He gave her a celebratory slap on the ass as he fucked her. Then he let himself go, the orgasm unraveling from the base of his groin. He lifted her by the hips and banged against her, a dozen times or more, until with a bone-jarring shudder he was coming, hard enough to smack her head against the handrail. He pressed a hand over her forehead in apology, to rub away the sting, and slipped the other over her stomach and around her breast. She squealed at the cold and started, adorably, to laugh.

  “Like being fucked by the abominable snowman,” she said.

  * * *

  He went to the bathroom afterward, shut himself into a stall so he could flush the condom. The music thumped from a speaker inside the men’s room, rattling the latch on the door.

  The sex had left him faintly dissatisfied. He had asked Kate to stay with him for the night. He liked her, and he liked her friends. But a strange lassitude had sunk in, having nothing to do with sexual gratification and everything to do with the fact that he was here again in Telluride on New Year’s Eve. Alone—or nearly alone. Another year stretched ahead of him, featureless, every option so available that not one of them had the power to beckon him.

  He might stay in town for a while. There was no place else to be, no one waiting for him, no home to return to. He could maybe find a house to rent in the area. Or, even better, a B&B where he could get a hot meal every morning and someone to clean up after him. Anyway, it was nice to come back to an inhabited home at the end of a cold day on the slopes. Made the time there seem to go faster.

  Threads of conversation floated in from the men at the sinks and urinal:

  “...Revelation was wicked fast today...tore up my board on the bumps at five...champagne tastes like donkey piss, man, give me a beer every time...they’re gone, I think...some crusty-looking old hound with his tongue out for Celia...”

  Julian left the stall and went to the sink. He met the eye of the younger man who had been speaking. The kid’s face, reflected in the mirror, reddened beneath his tan, and he stifled a laugh as he headed for the door.

  “Aw, shit,” he whispered to his friend. “Oops.”

  Julian turned off the taps and gripped the edge of the sink. The creases of his face were marked with shadow from the overhead lights, two lines running down from his mouth like the jaws of a marionette. For an instant he felt a congested sort of panic, clotting in the pit of his stomach.

  He turned away quickly. His hand strayed up to smooth the wrinkles flat with his fingers.

  July 2007

  ERIC STEPPED OUT of the real estate office and into the clear summer light, an unstoppable grin spreading across his face. How his father would have hated the way Eric had spent his inheritance.

  That broken-down hotel? What the hell are you thinking? No goddamn common sense, boy, that’s what’s the matter with you.

  “I can’t hear you,” Eric sang as he crossed the parking lot.

  The world was full of people just like his old man, who thought that because an idea was unusual it was impossibly fucked up. As if the way he had lived was better. He’d spent his money on himself when he spent it at all. Always tense, always wound up. Finally popped an aneurysm in his head from the pressure of being pissed off all the time.

  Eric could have told him: the point of money was to make people happy. To give them things, if you could.

  There wasn’t much left now, but that didn’t matter. They had the Blackbird and just enough left over to fix it up.

  He climbed into his truck and called Rory. In the background, he could hear the noise from Rory’s team, working to clear the debris from a trail near Wild Boy Lake: the ear-shattering drone of a chain saw, a male voice nearby calling over the din, “Dude, you got that upside down...”

  “Hey,” Rory shouted.

  Eric held the phone away from his ear.

  “Done deal,” he said. “I’ve got the keys in my hand.”

  “Sweet. How’s it feel to be the owner of the most craptastic hotel in Colorado?”

  “Like it’s time to celebrate.”

  He could hear the smile in Rory’s voice. “What’s the plan?”

  * * *

  Even in the summer, it was hard to get a reservation at Tango on short notice, but Rory had done some side work on the restaurant owner’s home the summer before. There would always be a table for them.

  They sat on the terrace beneath a flowering crab apple tree. Its blossoms drifted to the table, into their champagne, a pink confetti over a parade of small plates: rolled-up slips of eggplant filled with buttery ricotta; an oval dish of exotic mushrooms drenched in butter and wine; spiced chickpeas and warm hachapuri; honey-drizzled Brie, topped with roasted pears and candied hazelnuts; spheres of fresh goat cheese in olive oil; herbed chutneys and seared red grapes served with loaves of crusty bread; quails’ eggs like tiny suns, running onto the plate. They ordered and kept ordering, filling the candlelit table with bite-size morsels they fed each other with their hands.

  The luxury of the expensive meal released them. As they ate, they watched each other, unconcerned with how it might look to anyone seated nearby: the slow consumption, sticky squares of bread pudding dripping dulce de leche between their fingers, tipping their heads back with their lashes lowered in a trance of desire. Their table seemed enveloped in a haze of golden light, as if for the night the three of them were utterly alone and each existed for no other purpose than to bask in the pleasure of seeing each other—all, equally—in love.

  * * *

  At the feet of the Blackbird Hotel, Celia swayed a little, squinting up through the darkness. Eric offered his arm and she took it, a light weight but with her fingers gripping hard, like a bird alighting.

  “You took the boards off the door,” she said. “I’m glad. I hated seeing the Blackbird with its mouth stapled shut.”

  Rory produced a flashlight, and together they crossed the weed-choked gravel lot, their footsteps crunching on the pebbles, thumping in unison up the front porch steps.

  Eric handed Celia the key. It should have been a gothic-style brass key, to go with the place, but in
stead it was small and round and ordinary, still marked with a handwritten paper tag on a string from the Realtor’s office: 213 Ridge Road.

  “You should do it,” Celia said. “It belongs to you.”

  Eric looked down at her with a frisson of unease. She did understand about the Blackbird, didn’t she? He’d always thought of the three of them as almost psychically connected, but sometimes, as now, a tiny crack of misunderstanding would appear, and he’d feel the earth beneath him thin as a sheet of ice: one wrong move and they’d all be in the water, with no one left on land to save them.

  “It belongs to us,” he said. “Open the door, Cee.”

  Rory propped the flashlight under his arm and slapped a drumroll on his thighs as Celia slipped the key in the lock and pushed open the door.

  The stone fireplace stood agape at the end of the room, and the sheet-covered furniture loomed around them like tombstones in the murky dark. But for a second, Eric thought he could see the place the way Celia always had: crooked, unloved, but begging for company.

  She would know how to bring it to life. She had a touch. When they were teenagers, he’d once left her for half an hour in his room while he went to get a textbook he’d left at a friend’s house, and when he came back, the place was transformed. She’d moved none of the furniture but had rearranged everything else around it. His books were stacked by the bed to form a small table, his posters hung a little lower on the walls, in a more interesting arrangement, like a story, interrelated, that he could look at from the bed. She’d taken every small object and found its purpose and relocated it accordingly. Subtle changes, but for weeks afterward he’d felt a swoop of pleasure every time he walked through the door. The room made him happy in a way it hadn’t before.

  He never told her how his father came home that night and knew, without asking, that she had been there. His dad thought she’d gotten rid of things—things that Sam Dillon had bought “with his own good money, good as anybody else’s.” It was pointless to explain otherwise, and Eric had broken the rules anyway by having a girl in the house when his father wasn’t home. The lacrosse stick had come out that night to punctuate the lesson, but none of that had diminished the pleasure Eric felt at going into the room after Celia had fixed it up.

  He wondered now whether the magic worked on people. If he lived in her space, would it seep into him somehow? Would it make him the kind of person other people loved, the way she was?

  “Wait here,” Rory said.

  He crossed the room and went upstairs, the bobbing flashlight marking his progress until he reached the upstairs hallway and disappeared. They heard his footsteps thudding overhead.

  In the darkness, Eric pulled Celia into his arms. Her kiss was sweet and tangy as a summer peach.

  “Promise me something,” he said.

  She looked up at him. He still could see the remnants of little girl in her freckled nose, the huge limpid eyes, lashes gone silver in the moonlight.

  “Promise me I won’t ever have to live without you,” he said.

  “I can’t promise that. You might want to someday.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “People change,” she said. “My dad changed. I never thought he’d leave, that he’d stop loving us. And then he did, and one day he was just gone, and even now it doesn’t make sense to me. Everyone is stuck inside a doorless room. No one gets into anyone else’s head. Nobody can ever really get out of their own.”

  “That’s not true. You and me and Rory, we’re all in the same room.”

  “Really? Do I know everything about you?”

  “You know enough,” he said. “You know as much about me as I do.”

  “And how much is that?”

  He smiled. “Touché.”

  “You could be like him, you know. Someday you might decide to go, and then what will I do? Hunt you down? Drag you back at gunpoint, going, ‘Hey, you promised...’”

  “Be serious.”

  “I’m trying to be. But you’re making me nervous. You’re supposed to want to be here.”

  “I do.”

  “Then just stay. Why make promises?”

  To her it was simple. How could he explain the feeling that had been gnawing at him, that they were all going into this with a different idea of what it meant. He had to be sure they understood each other. He had to lock it in.

  He spread his arms wide. “There’s nothing worth anything, after this. You and me and Rory. This is the big love, baby. This is the love of our lives. What would I do afterward? What would there even be? Permanent anticlimax.”

  Her gaze drifted around the room and returned to his. Celia took her promises seriously, and he’d never known her to break one.

  “I can’t do it,” he said. “Promise I won’t have to.”

  Shaking her head, she bent and pressed a kiss into his palm, curled his fingers over the top, and she reached up to kiss him again on the lips. Quick and firm, as if to seal the envelope of a wartime love letter.

  “All right,” she said. “I promise.”

  Rory’s footsteps sounded in the hallway. He came back to them behind a flaring light, turning the beam up to his face to turn the shadows upside down.

  “Come with me, my pretties,” he said in a crone’s voice as he turned to light the way. And to Eric, in his regular voice, “Good job, man.”

  They followed Rory across the room and up the stairs. Deep inside the hotel, the silence murmured like the inside of a shell, echoing back on itself. The light jumped around the walls.

  At the end of the hall, Rory fell back a step to let Celia open the door.

  “Oh!” Her hand flew up to cover her mouth.

  Eric had done up the room with dozens of paper lanterns and hung them from the ceiling like beads. Each one was lit inside with a candle, so that the peeling walls and bare floorboards gleamed with an amber light. In the center of the floor was a makeshift bed of quilts and cushions, a borrowed futon pad from Rory’s place and the feather pillows from Celia’s. The room looked like the inside of a gypsy’s caravan, tattered and mysterious.

  Eric pulled her into the room. He ducked to see her face, grinning at the shine in her eyes.

  “Twenty bucks,” he said to Rory, holding out his hand.

  “What’s all this?” she said.

  “A celebration.”

  She shook her head, wiped her cheeks. Eric turned on the radio, and Celia walked around the room, spinning gently to the music, touching the walls and windows.

  They kicked off their shoes and sprawled out on the cushions. Eric had remembered the bottles of champagne, a corkscrew and a cooler of ice, but hadn’t thought to bring a single glass. Celia laughed and sat down next to him, told him to open the champagne and hand it over. So they passed the bottle between them, the bubbles tickling down their throats, laughter racing back up. Everyone started talking at once.

  “Is it really ours?”

  “Hell yes, it is.”

  “We’ve got a million things to do.”

  “That roof...”

  “Plumbing.”

  “Walls, oh my God, miles of walls.”

  “And floors.”

  “That staircase...”

  “It doesn’t matter—it’ll be fun.”

  Fun. Their inside joke. They dissolved in laughter.

  “Fun! For about one nanosecond, and then we’ll be wishing we’d spent that money on a trip to Hawaii.”

  “Fuck Hawaii, I can’t be still on a beach that long.”

  “And you can’t surf—”

  “The hell I can’t. Just like snowboarding, only the mountains are moving.”

  “Well, it’s too late now.”

  “I’ll buy you a beach ball, and you can pretend the snow is sand...”


  “Is it really ours?”

  “It really is, baby. It really, really is.”

  Eric reached into his pocket. “I almost forgot. Joss gave me this.”

  He pulled out a glass pipe and a bag of weed.

  Rory’s eyes lit up; he was reaching already for the bag. But Celia frowned.

  “Just for tonight,” Eric said. “I want to celebrate with you. It’ll be fine.”

  Rory packed the bowl and handed it to Celia.

  Eric drank champagne and watched the smoke drift around their heads. His heart ached as though pierced straight through.

  “Cupid’s arrow,” he said, one hand on his chest.

  * * *

  Smoke poured into their lungs and out, lifting like fog to the lanterns overhead. The lights receded for a moment, then returned, with sharper edges and newly defined detail in the paper. Celia settled back on the cushions with Eric’s shoulder for a pillow. She tipped her gaze over Rory’s head, toward the velvety sky.

  From her childhood bedroom, if you sat against the wall and pressed your cheek to the window, you could see the outline of the Blackbird Hotel, its filthy eaves draped with cobwebs that made it seem like a drawing from a child’s book about Halloween. On summer afternoons, when she was supposed to be studying, she used to sneak out her window to visit the Blackbird, thread her legs through the limbs of the aspen at the foot of the house. The tree branches felt cool and frail in her hands, like the arms of a small but helpful friend. All around were the whispers of leaves in the wind, a tickle of leaf-tips against her bare legs as she shimmied down the trunk and pulled herself around the side of the house to solid ground.

  She remembered the way the town of Jawbone Ridge slipped past as her feet patted the road; the post office, barely wider than its faded blue door; the scarred facade of Patsy’s Café, leaking the scent of pancakes into the crisp mountain air; the Ruby Saloon, a Tinkertoy explosion of wood and brick, holding itself gamely upright against the downward tug of the mountain. Beyond the vacant miners’ shacks and the pincushion of two-by-fours that kept them more or less in place, the road switched back and curved sharply uphill, but one summer day Celia kept walking straight, up the steep forbidden driveway that widened into a weed-choked parking area near the edge of the ridge. She crossed this and stopped at the front steps of the Blackbird Hotel, the farthest she’d ever been until then.