Pretty

by Jillian Lauren

  Jesus is in the slick of my lip gloss. Jesus is in the bones of my wrist. Jesus is in the lines of my forehead.

  Then my outsides and my insides sync up again and the sound clicks on and I’m back in the mix, but I don’t reach for a drink. I want one but I’m not going to have one. The moment of reaching has passed.

  “The reason I called you was that I wanted to play this new song for you. I wrote it just after he died but I only finished it a few weeks ago.”

  The scenario is so familiar. He picks up an acoustic guitar from where it leans against the wall. I sit with my back against the opposite end of the couch and slip my shoes off, putting my feet on the cushion next to him.

  He lays out some salty, smoky, whiskey soul magic, words slurred but chords impeccably precise. This drunken asshole. He has the songs in him that I’ve longed for all my life. That I haven’t been close to touching since Aaron died. Aaron could play anything—trumpet, guitar, piano, percussion. When Aaron played, I used to wish I were him instead of me.

  But I don’t wish I were Billy right now. I can see the tragedy flames licking at his hems. I’ve learned to spot them by now. You might even call me an expert. And I can see clearly that Billy may have gotten away with murder for this long but he won’t survive much longer. He’ll be lucky if he lasts the year. There’s already a road map of waste all over him.

  He stops the song abruptly before it’s over and he runs his hands over my shins. I pull my legs into my chest as if he burned me.

  “Poor legs,” he says. He looks like he’s about to start crying. “Poor legs.”

  He leans in to kiss my legs and I hop off the couch.

  “Stop it.”

  “You remember him all wrong. You always had it all wrong about him. Guess what? It’s not my fault. It’s not yours, either.”

  He puts the guitar aside, stands, and reaches for my face. I don’t say no when he kisses me. I never have been able to stick by a no with him. No one really can, so I don’t feel too bad about it. He must have brushed his teeth a beer ago because spearmint chalkiness takes the edge off the alcohol taste of his mouth. But I can still taste the beer. I breathe it in and try to imagine I am growing drunk on his fumes. I could catch a buzz rubbing on his skin.

  He’s starting to sweat the beer out his pores and it smells sour but not yet sick. I know how it’ll smell later. I know how it’ll smell in the morning because it’s one of the things I remember about my pop from just before he died. I remember how their bedroom used to smell in the morning after his night sweats. I feel like I’m cheating. I’m not sure on who.

  “I can’t do this. I have to go.”

  “I understand.” He pulls away and slips his hands into his pockets, quickly contrite. “I’m sorry. This isn’t why I called you. Come have a quick smoke with me on the roof before you leave.”

  I love rooftops. I love a view from anywhere. Any vantage point from which you can see further than the immediate ground in front of you.

  I climb the three flights wearing the beat-up overcoat Billy has given me from the back of his door, the kind of coat you could wear in Ohio. Too many hours awake and I really want a cigarette and I can feel my life straight through to my bones. But even so, when the dark sky opens up over us, from just five floors up I could almost love L.A. My heart spills over the edge of the rooftop and streams out through the grid of the city and I feel how many big dreams are floating around out there. This town where the dreams are long, broad strokes and the execution is delegated in impossible details to a million grunts. The weight of the wealth in one small corner of L.A. should tip the scale so badly that the whole thing turns over and slides off into the Pacific. But still, from here I could almost love it. In front of me, the lit-up switchboard fades until it dissolves in the dense haze.

  Billy walks unsteadily around to the side of the building that pretty much just faces the brick wall of the building next to it. On that wall is a fifteen-foot-long painting in shades of gray, as if it was a black-and-white photograph. A woman with long black hair and giant dark eyes floats with wings and a halo in front of a marshmallow cloud. She has no feet, only a long, white, flowing dress.

  “Julio did that. He lives in the pad downstairs from mine. His lady died of an overdose last year and he painted that for her.”

  “It’s cool,” I say. “We should all have someone to paint us like that.”

  “When we die?”

  “Whenever.”

  Billy reaches for me again and this time I see it coming and try to dodge him. I’ve imagined a thousand times Billy showing up at my door and putting his arms around me. And in my mind it felt like being rescued from how alone I was. It felt like such a relief. But on this rooftop with his beer breath and his foggy eyes it’s not like coming home at all. Unless home is somewhere confused and pathetic. He grabs my arm as if to stop me from pulling away, then reconsiders and drops it.

  “I was just a junkie,” he says evenly.

  “What?”

  “You can be angry at me forever if you want but I was just a junkie. I wasn’t your boyfriend. I wasn’t the one who pimped you out to an airport strip club and then sat around getting high all day and hating you for it and fucking every other idiot he could get his hands on. He played a mean trick on you when he died, Baby. If he had lived you would have figured out quick that he wasn’t perfect. He wasn’t a saint. He wasn’t even very nice to you, frankly.”

  “Is that what you wanted to tell me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Great. You said I could never see you again or come to your show Friday, right? I choose never.”

  “I’m trying to save you from staying married to him. You loved him. He treated you lousy. He’s dead. That’s all. It doesn’t help to be delusional about it.”

  I turn to leave. I look up one last time. Dark sky swirling with darker clouds lit with golden shorelines. I guess it is maybe a three-quarter moon tonight. Not as bright as a full moon.

  He’s wrong. The last stone gives way from under my heel and I start to fall. It did help to be delusional about it. It helped me not to feel ashamed on top of everything. Don’t go, I think. But it’s me who’s leaving. I wish I could rewind to the part where Billy was playing the song.

  I drop his overcoat on the tar ground before I walk into the stairwell, down the five flights, and out to the street. I don’t bother running. They never follow.

  Twenty-one

  I look at the dashboard clock and note that it’s two A.M.

  I’m out way past curfew. I’m high from the rooftop adrenaline, rushing too fast, my brain clicking forward. If I don’t get away with this curfew violation, if I can’t lie my way out of it, if someone sees me come in this late, Susan might really terminate my contract. How could I be so stupid? What did I think I wanted anyway, seeing Billy again? What was I doing? I imagine I can still smell beer in my hair. And there it is again. My intestines seize and I want a drink with a desire akin to wanting a chair to sit in after a twelve-thousand-mile walk.

  So how this works is, there are things you’re supposed to do when you want a drink this bad. I have a list of people I’m meant to call if something like this happens. I’m supposed to breathe. And foremost, I’m supposed to pray. Now, I’m not opposed to praying. I do it when I’m meant to do it. You know, God grant me the serenity blah blah. I don’t think there’s anyone on the other end of the line but I figure maybe I’m the one on the other end of the line. That I’m the prayer and the prayee. And I need to hear that stuff. I need to hear it way more than the bullshit I make up on my own. So pray. Pray, you idiot. But I don’t pray and I can only explain why by saying that for some reason I’d rather chew tacks. I’d rather gnaw off my own toe. I’m sick of the words and I’m sick of making shit up about God so I can say them and not feel like a total hypocrite. And I hate God for making it so hard. And I miss God. I miss him every day.

  I drive and drive with nowhere to land. There is nowhere to go but Serenity, a
nd I’m not prepared for that just yet. Now or an hour from now makes no difference. I’ll get away with missing curfew or I won’t.

  I drive and drive and wonder where the people in the other cars are going. So many people out driving in the middle of the night. I drive and drive in circles on the looping ribbons of the freeways, remembering choices I made—a whole string of them that felt barely even like choices. Ending with this moment and this choice. It’s real simple. You drink or you don’t. Ending here and starting where? Starting with the drink my father gave me when I was five, somewhere at Grandpa Ralph’s house with that stuffed wahoo fish on the wall. Starting when my pop married my mother. Starting when she didn’t take me to the funeral. Starting with I miss my pop every day still. Every day.

  No. My life as it is now started with the choice I made to leave Toledo with Aaron. I was born again when Pastor Dan lifted me out of that water and I was born yet again when Aaron walked through the door of Rusty’s. And it shouldn’t happen that way. It’s not supposed to. Once is supposed to be enough. But I know that I was born the day I met him. I was convinced it was my destiny to follow him. God had sent me a ticket out of Toledo. Hit the road with a traveling jazzman and head west toward the coast. I wasn’t even scared. I believed in signs, in road markers from the Holy Ghost. I was sure it was only the first of many.

  I drive east down Sunset from where it turns Mexican to where it turns Chinese, then snake onto the side streets where it turns downtown—tall canyons of buildings and seedy streets lined with residential hotels and gated storefronts. And I pass by a legion of the forgotten. A night army of shuffling souls clad in rags. I know a corner near here with a doughnut shop that you can park at and some kid will pop up at your window with a mouthful of heroin balloons. You don’t even have to get out of your car. Everybody is in such a rush, but come back ten years later and nothing has changed. They were in a big hurry to leave and come right back. Though I’m a block away, I still feel the black hole of it behind me. Pulling at me.

  The last stop on the tour was L.A. We rolled through the country in a state of suspended grace with no real destination but California. We wouldn’t stop in L.A., Aaron said. Never L.A. We’d get right on the train headed for San Francisco. San Francisco with fog-shrouded hills and music echoing through the streets.

  I’m not making it up when I say I was happy right then. I wouldn’t have traded my now for any kind of future. It was my only time. Sharing the motel rooms and lying around after shows on synthetic bedspreads, passing around the bottle and smoking rolled cigarettes while we talked aimlessly about music or home or our families or our fantasies or whatever. I washed our shirts and underwear out in the sink and hung them on shower rods and across the tops of the doors to dry. The whole band called me Baby instead of Bebe. It was a jazz thing. I was a part of something.

  I drive past downtown to where the warehouses and the artful graffiti make me think of Jake, then over the bridges that cross the railroad tracks that make me think of leaving or make me think of Europe or somewhere I imagine there are pretty bridges.

  Driving with Billy and the band, moments for Aaron and me alone were rare and precious. My thighs sliding under his long fingers. The creases where the pink of his palms bled into the caramel brown spanning the tops of his hands. I watched him touch me. Him next to me. How pale I looked.

  We lay across the seats of the bus and smoked pot and he told me about how we were going to make a family of gypsies. How we were going to be famous and it was going to be life on the road but not in a crap bus like that one. In a beautiful bus that was just like the nicest hotel room you could ever imagine, but on wheels. He would play and I would sing and our little babies would be a caravan of prodigies. And when we went home, we’d go home to California in the sun, where our den walls would be plastered with gold records.

  Half-dark bus lit milky blue with streetlights rolling by us, on a highway somewhere near Pittsburgh. Eagles on the radio singing I’m already gone. Wake up in the Indiana morning. Wichita. Omaha. Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Cow towns. Deep blue sky and road signs. Hangnails and dirty hair and Dorito dinners and walls of exhaustion.

  When we drove through the night I slept holding tight to Aaron and tight to what was left of me, but I felt something new growing. A new possibility—hazy, so I couldn’t quite picture it. Who I truly was inside, or at least who I was going to be. I believed that I would land in California and it would feel like home. I miss my Aaron so much that it hurts like I swallowed glass. All the time still.

  I drive into East L.A.—the Mexican groceries and upholstery shops and churches and schools and the rows of small houses with illegal additions that back right up to the houses next door. Asphalt lit yellow by the streetlights. No one around anywhere, just cars. Red Dodge minivan, green grandma Chrysler, white piece-of-shit Toyota truck stacked with cardboard.

  Some days during sound check I would walk around the front of the stage with my back to it, pretending like I was going somewhere. I moved as slow as possible and tried to feel it. How it is to have that wall of music behind you, traveling through you. You can get drunk on it, like how you can get drunk on a choir. I tried to imagine what Aaron felt or what my pop had felt up there, weaving in and out of the blanket of sound with their own. I could catch a handful of it, but it slipped through my fingers like water. Then I would turn and watch like every other dumb audience member and know that was all I’d ever be. At best I might be a muse and hope that it was enough.

  I drive with the White Stripes blasting from my shitty, distorted radio. Her driving kick drum and the desperate warble of his voice. A seven nation army couldn’t hold me back.

  I was a stupid Toledo girl. I had no idea about the dope until it was there in front of me. I thought Billy was just drunk, crazy, depressed.

  As a rule, Billy was the only one who got his own motel room. One night Aaron was in Billy’s room talking band business, but he took way too long. I felt jealous and went to knock on the door in case it wasn’t business and they were partying without me.

  Billy said, “Who is it?”

  “It’s Bebe.”

  “Come on in, Baby.”

  I opened the door just wide enough to peek my head in.

  Billy lay on top of the flowered bedspread on one of the double beds, real happy and sleepy with a devious half smile. Aaron was half sitting up on the other bed.

  I want to call Mom but it’s too late. I want to call her and not tell her anything’s wrong but just hear her voice be happy that I called. I don’t tell my mom the real things because they just hover in the two thousand miles of air between us and dissolve. They never reach her. But I think about how she used to sing me the song about the taxis, how she’d lie there with me until I was asleep every night. I don’t remember a night without her when I was little. At least not after my pop died. She’d lie next to me and sometimes I’d feel her shake like she was crying without any noise. And that memory wars with the memory of the phone call I made to her when Aaron died. I wanted her to cry for me. Not just shake silently. I wanted her to cry. Because she lost my pop so young I wanted her to have some wisdom for me. A magic trick for how you live anyway. What she had was nothing.

  “Oh, honey. Sometimes things are so terrible in life, but they get better. Sometimes they get terrible again but then they get better again. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. I always say, when life hands you lemons . . . ,” she’d said.

  “Lemons?”

  She didn’t come to the funeral. No money for a plane ticket. No time off from work. I don’t miss her. Hardly ever.

  Billy wasn’t wearing his usual sunglasses and his eyes were glassy and glittery. He patted the bed next to him, but I went and sat where Aaron was, instead. Billy looked so thin without his coat on, in just his T-shirt and his suit pants. His pants were hiked up by how he was lying, exposing his bony ankles and white feet lined with thick blue veins. I felt a pang of affection for him. How could you not half fall i
n love with Billy? He was so arrogant, so charmed, so lost. We followed him wherever he went. I missed him only sometimes before tonight. I don’t think I will again.

  I drive past Payless ShoeSource, DaVita Dialysis, 99¢ Only, Lavanderia, Chinese Food Bowl, Pizza We Deliver, Kragen Auto Parts. Something about the driving has sort of settled me, at least enough that I don’t even want a drink anymore. I just want a fucking doughnut but there are none to be found. I just want to find the fucking freeway entrance, but I can’t find that, either.

  Aaron called Billy’s hair a Jew-fro. Billy wore it long and wild like Noel Redding, the bass player for Jimi Hendrix. Aaron told me that Noel Redding hadn’t even been a bass player, he was a guitar player, but he got the job because of his hair.

  I drive over an overpass, a flimsy railing between the Honda and the air, a long-enough drop between the upper deck and the cars crossing beneath. One move—brain impulse to muscle twitch. One fat, courageous, impulsive move and I would cross that invisible, ever-present line. Sometimes I see the line out of the corner of my eye like a shadow, the line you could cross between Here and Not Here, Alive or Dead. But when I turn to look at it straight on, it disappears. If I turned not just my head to see it, but the steering wheel, too, I know I’d see that line clear as day. I’d see it clear when I crossed it.

  A few small lines of coke were laid out on the fake maple nightstand next to the base of the fake brass lamp. Billy saw me spot it.

  “Help yourself,” he said, gesturing toward the drugs.

  “Thanks,” I said and leaned toward it, holding my hair back. But as I bent over, Aaron put his palm flat to my chest and stopped me.

  “Careful,” he said. “It’s not coke. Do just a little, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said. And I did. Just a little that night.

  I turn and head back because you can drive and drive but where is there to go really? I’m empty hungry, my whole body a ravenous void to feed. My mind is like a carnival ride gone wild off the rails. I still want liquor and pills. I want a warehouse stacked with heroin. I want an ocean liner full of cocaine. But there’s the baby, and even if there wasn’t the baby there are the shadows. I’m also fucking starving, so I turn toward where I know there’s a Ralph’s.