Further Out Than You Thought

by Michaela Carter

  But then, a club is a weapon. It’s all about function. A heavy stick with a thick end. One good whack on the head will do the trick. Boom, down.

  Men came to the club to feel the beat of the music in their blood, in their bones. To sit in the dark and watch.

  Sometimes, dancing, she’d gaze at the field of men’s faces and wonder. How many had planned to go there? How many had tried to drive home? How many had girlfriends, wives? Did they tell them where they’d been? Or did they lie?

  These men came to the club to be someone else for an hour, to feel their heart beat in their chest as if they were nameless. To glow with anonymity in a place where anything could happen.

  And then there were those men who were single, or at least interested in more than a mere glimpse of flesh. There were the ones who gave her their cards: coffeehouse kid, artist, real-estate agent, M.D., executive loan officer, V.P. of a film company, attorney. What did these men want? Sex? Or love—a pill for their loneliness. Or were they mining, driven by the desire to bring something found in the dark (as if by feel) into the daylight, to see it sparkle in the sun?

  It can’t be done.

  To make a fantasy real is to lose the fantasy.

  “STEVIE,” JOE SAID. “You’re late.”

  “I know.” She gave him her music—Tom Waits and Louis Armstrong. “Who’s managing?”

  “I am.” He grinned. “You can make it up to me later.”

  She laughed. He said this to all the girls. Nothing ever came of it.

  “You’re up next set,” he said, “if you can make it.”

  Brett was onstage—not naked—nude. Like the sign outside said. Stevie paused. To be naked was to be exposed, caught with your pants down. Nude implied awareness and intention. The ownership of one’s own body that meant power.

  Her legs just parting, her hand rising, she was indrawn, like the tide when it recedes, taking everything with it. Context and content, she asked nothing of anyone. Stevie tried to move, to move on, she had to change, she had to . . . But Brett stole her eyes and gave back beauty, reflected light and shadow—that line beneath her breast described just so when her hand reached high and her head turned toward her shoulder, as if to inhale the smell of powder, perfume, and sweat.

  Her smell.

  The club no more than the space around her, the scattered customers, the smoke, a border for her exquisite sex, for her song, Brett looked down at herself, then up, to Stevie. Her eyes held hers, asking, Do you see?

  Her labia. That smooth, soft cleft.

  If labia are lips, then the cunt is a mouth, and a mouth shapes one’s voice into words. In the beginning was the word—the word made flesh, in the cave where we each were formed. Even closed, labia sing the mystery of the source.

  More than meets the eye. So much more.

  The song was fading. Brett closed her legs.

  In the dressing room, Stevie threw on the simplest costume she had—a dress, if you could call it that, with a stretchy black lace bodice and a skirt of gauze. Black satin G-string. She buckled her black heels. Pulled on her long black gloves.

  Brett was off; Stevie was on.

  They passed each other, Brett’s hand brushing Stevie’s thigh. She caught her breath, looked at Brett, her strong brown back.

  There, on her backstage stoop, Devotion was blowing smoke rings in which circle of hell? Limbo, lust, gluttony? “Want some?” she said, angel of the haze.

  “Not today,” Stevie said, and she walked onto the stage straight.

  It was just another dayshift. She could take it. She’d jazz things up with Louis.

  She shook her hips and shoulders. She took the pole in hand and spun, the club a blur. Moving in circles, she felt like a kid. Moving to move, to whirl the brain and fall on the grass under the loopy stars.

  Slowing, she could see Mr. Cooper in the gloaming, alone at a table, the coal of his cigarette a distant planet. So far off.

  How we live and die alone. Vast reaches of lightlessness between us.

  Her palms sliding down her thighs as if turning them out, she descended to a squat. Maybe she did need a little something. Just a puff. To fill the void with a bit of fire, of lift, a hot-air balloon to climb inside and ride out, over the sea. To catch the waning morning moon in a net of gauze and bring it back, before it was too late.

  “Devotion,” she said between songs, “I was wrong.” She took the joint and sipped the smoke. She stepped out of her costume. Watching the fumes dance under the bare bulb, she could feel the dream returning. The poetry.

  In the light again, she was Matilda waltzing to Waits’s scratch and scrape, the song he wrote, so the story went, after drinking a bottle of rye on skid row, on a street corner, with men who were put there, all of them, by women, heartless women—men drinking their bottles of booze in brown paper bags. She liked the story, Waits on the street corner with the down-and-out rabble, and she liked the song—about what couldn’t be. Not anymore.

  Dancing, she moved as slowly as her body would move. In just her black satin gloves and her heels, she faced Mr. Cooper. She brought her arms up, over her head—her whole body stretching, reaching for what is always just beyond. And there, her hands clasped each other, clasped and pulled, hand from hand, her head back, her back arched—a tensed bow preparing to release. She looked at him, watched him watch her. He was her captive so long as she was lit, so long as the music played.

  She wanted to burn herself into his future, wanted his memory of this moment to last him his lifetime—this and the next. She could feel the space between them measured in what time it would take to cross it, and she could feel the instant slipping like a stream, even as it happened, down the mountain.

  And where was the camera? To seize the instant, to free it from the slipstream of time? The lens and the eye on the other side, the eye that wants only to hold. To keep. Each photograph a shrine to the past.

  It was how her mother saw things, wanting always to capture.

  And her photos from the years before she’d had Gwen, when she’d lived in L.A. and worked in the movies, her photos of Steve McQueen and Jane Fonda, of Warren Beatty and Angie Dickinson, had been for Gwen’s whole life boxed in the attic. When Gwen would ask her about it, she’d shrug. It was another life, she’d say. Pouring herself a glass of wine, lighting a cigarette, she’d return to her book, or just stare out the kitchen window at the prickly pear and the creosote, at the sagging power lines and the cool deck and the swimming pool—the prison paradise of her suburban life, what she’d settled for. But once, when Gwen had stayed home sick from school, they’d curled up on the couch and watched old movies together. Rear Window, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. And her mother had brought down the big black box and dusted off its lid.

  The main door of the Century Lounge opened and a flash of the L.A. glare entered the dim showroom along with another customer. It’s a battered old suitcase to a hotel someplace and a wound that will never heal, Waits croaked. And she watched Mr. Cooper stub out his cigarette.

  In the dressing room, Stevie took the test from her locker and tucked it into her moon purse. A few lockers down, in the back corner, Angel and Star whispered and laughed, passing a bottle of Jack between them. Stevie had tried to talk to them once. Hey, she’d said, and smiled. Hey, they’d said back, giggling and turning their backs to her. Since then, she’d held her distance. She figured they were, like her, in their midtwenties, and yet they were all edges, black eyeliner and leather, as if life were a fight. They danced to metal and kept to themselves.

  In the opposite corner, near the mirror, Love swiveled on a stool, eating an apple and reading a paperback with the title You Too, Can Be Prosperous. Brett was applying lipstick with her fingertip. She cocked her head and assessed its effect. And Devotion was looking at her milkmaid body, brushing her pale Wisconsin hair. It was the golden hair of fairy tales. She could have been Rapunzel or Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty, thought Stevie. All those stories we were raised on, wherein the pluckl
ess maiden is trapped, stuck in her station, until the prince comes along to save her. “I’m twenty-one. I can change,” she was saying. “I want to move up north, raise my own crop of Indica, make some real money.”

  “I love it up north. It’s so wild, and clean,” Brett said, rubbing lipstick into her cheeks for color. “Santa Cruz is where I’m from. But my fiancé wants to stay here, for the industry. He wants to write movies.”

  “Santa Cruz? My aunt lives there,” Stevie said. “It’s beautiful.”

  Brett looked at her, but Love was talking, about the book she was reading. “Rereading,” she said. “It’s amazing. You can have anything. Anything you want enough. You have to focus, train your mind. I want to buy a condo, something in Malibu.”

  Joe poked his head in. “One of you might want to get out there.”

  Devotion bent over; ass to the mirror, she spread herself, checking for the string of her tampon. No green or white in sight, she pulled on a red thong, hooked on a red bra, and hustled out.

  Stevie followed her into the showroom, wondering what it was she wanted. She knew what she didn’t want. She didn’t want to be here, at least not today. She didn’t want to be pregnant. She didn’t want to get old. And like Stevie Smith, she didn’t want to marry. Not ever.

  She sat down at Mr. Cooper’s table.

  “You were beautiful,” he said, handing her a twenty. “Can I buy you a—?”

  “Coffee,” she said. “I need to wake up.”

  He looked as if he hadn’t slept. He had deep circles under his eyes and his hands were shaking. “She didn’t come home. And with the news last night. It isn’t safe out there.”

  Was it ever? Stevie wondered, but kept the thought to herself. “You must be worried,” she said.

  The waitress stopped at the table and Mr. Cooper ordered the coffee.

  Older, hair in a bun, dressed in a button-down shirt with an apron, she made a note on her pad. “Cream and sugar?” She was looking at Mr. Cooper. She’d worked here at least as long as Stevie, and they didn’t know each other’s names. That was how it was. The waitresses waited, the dancers danced, and the two didn’t mix.

  “Black is good. Thanks,” Stevie said.

  Why had she never bothered to learn her name? The waitress must have been in her fifties. Working in a strip joint by the airport. In her fifties. Stevie hadn’t once seen her smile.

  She shifted in her seat. She’d stay for the coffee. One cup. And then she’d excuse herself and head for the bathroom, where she’d pee on a stick and wait for her future to appear as if in a crystal ball.

  “I wish she’d call,” Mr. Cooper said. “Just to say where she is.”

  She looked toward the bar. The waitress was coming with her coffee.

  And there he was. Tony. What was he doing here in the morning? He was a night customer. She’d never seen him before dark.

  She blew on her coffee to cool it. Mr. Cooper had his eyes closed, his chin resting in his hand. He jerked, falling awake.

  “Tell me,” he said, his dark eyes burning.

  “You should go home. I bet she’s called by now.”

  “You think?”

  “Not if I can help it,” she said and grinned.

  He didn’t laugh. Didn’t even smile.

  “The whole Zen thing, you know? Non-thought?” she said. But he was staring at Devotion. Stevie could see her tiny reflection in his glasses. In just her red thong she whipped around the pole, squeezing it with her thighs, her head back, her spill of hair red and lilac in the lights. Here we are now, entertain us. She writhed to the beat, her hips making a figure eight, tracing out eternity as she descended to a squat. A purist, she danced exclusively to Nirvana.

  Stevie finished the coffee. “Mr. Cooper, good luck.” She pushed in her chair.

  He squinted at her, as if she were too close, too bright. “Hey. You too. It’s not safe out there,” he said and turned back to Devotion.

  Tony was at his table, drinking his cranberry juice and club soda, waiting.

  “I have to pee,” she told him without stopping. “I’ll be back.”

  “Good morning to you, too.”

  Eight

  IN THE RESTROOM she ripped the box of the pregnancy test open. Her heart pounded on her rib cage as if trying to escape. She latched the metal door to the stall. Stick in hand, she hovered over the toilet and peed on it.

  Three minutes. She had to wait three minutes. The clock on the wall had a second hand—handy at last.

  She dried herself with the toilet paper, careful to make a clean swipe. Here at the club, you didn’t want to leave even the smallest shred stuck to you. You had to be meticulous.

  With her free hand, she pulled up her black G-string and unlatched the stall.

  In the mirror, in the white fluorescent light, she was frightful. She frightened herself. She stared at the mask that passed, here, as her face. Under the pancake and the powder, under the wine-red lips and the mascara, was she there? Still?

  She looked. Looked for Gwendolyn, the one from so long ago. She could just make her out, the ghost of her, of the girl with the freckles on her nose and the budding breasts, the girl who had searched her own pupils—those endless black pools—for clues, wondering what the future might bring.

  Never had this come to mind.

  And if her mother could see her now?

  No, she wouldn’t go there. She was too tired. She’d give in to tremors, fissures. She’d lose her grip and fall. Dissolve into that ocean that was always below, always inside her. Waiting.

  Two minutes left.

  She checked the stick. It was dry, but white. Like sand, or sky, vast with possibility. She could travel the world. She’d save her money. She’d finish her degree. And then she’d take a year. Go to Paris, Rome, Lisbon. She’d sit in cafés and write. Maybe she’d even dance. Why not? What on earth did she have to lose?

  She thought of Leo. Out on Pico Boulevard with his tricornered hat and his sign.

  It might have been different.

  There had been Valiant’s contact at Capitol—Frank Phillips—who’d heard Leo sing one of his songs during Valiant’s show, who’d suggested he record on Valiant’s leftover studio time, who’d thought Capitol might bite. When it didn’t, when his album was shelved, when he waited for months, for years, for something and for someone, waited like a dry gorge for rain, his mind changed. They were full of shit. The whole industry—the suited executives with their BMWs and their twenty-thousand-dollar paintings on their office walls. Why should he send them demos for free? Why grovel at their heels? He’d make them come to him. Those Century City executives. They’d notice him on their way to work. If he was consistent, he reasoned, eventually they’d get curious; they’d stop.

  One more minute.

  The stick was still white. Like that bird. Like its belly and the undersides of its long wings. White with dark tips. What was it called? It was that seabird, the huge one, the one that was so rare—off the coast of California at least.

  Albatross. That was it. Albatross. The word was soothing.

  She thought of the barge she’d ridden once, the time she saw the albatross. Her father beside her, and her mother snapping the photo from behind. Her father wore a black leather jacket and jeans; his lit pipe held latakia, a spicy tobacco. She remembered the white cable-knit sweater she’d worn, how mysterious she felt, the hood over her head. They were on their way to Sausalito. She must have been eight or nine, because her father had his arm around her shoulders. He was leaning over her as they watched Sausalito take shape in the gray morning mist like some huge mammal coming up for air. And the albatross that had hovered over them for miles, hardly flapping its wings at all, impossibly light, turned and vanished into the fog.

  That day her father had bought her a gold ring, her first. Fourteen karat. The thin band fit her ring finger and had at its center the skeleton of a butterfly. He’d slid it onto her finger in the shop and she’d felt grown up.

&n
bsp; She liked the feel of it on her tongue, and, holding the butterfly between her teeth, she’d move the ring over her knuckle and back down. It became a habit. Watching Gilligan’s Island, reading The Secret Garden, tucked into a corner of her bedroom writing a poem, she’d move the ring up, then down her finger. As if it would help her to disappear further. By the time she was twelve, she’d bitten off one of the wings.

  Twenty seconds.

  What do you get when you cross a griffin with an albatross? Since that day she’d seen it, she, Gwendolyn Griffin, had felt a kinship with the big white marine bird, with its ability to glide and to roam. It was the loner she sometimes felt take her over, the desire to lose herself to the wind. But how did the two fit inside her, and where did they meet—griffin and albatross—her namesake and her urges?

  A griffin—killer of horses, guardian of gold—is fierce. With its head and wings of an eagle, with its body of a lion, it is king of air and land. An albatross, on the other hand, is a wanderer, feeding far out at sea. To the ships over which it might hover, it is, according to legend, the harbinger of bad weather, continuous bad weather so long as it stays. Kill an albatross, however, and the bad luck is yours to keep. Her father had told her this, that day the bird had appeared out of the mist and floated like a guardian above them, but Gwen couldn’t think of the bird as a dark omen. To her it meant freedom, solitude, beauty.

  Still, if there was a moral to the story—the one that was her life and what it had become—it would have to be weather the storm and don’t cross a griffin with an albatross. You can’t both guard and wander.

  Gwendolyn Griffin, in the wide, wide blue, where is your gold?

  It was time she looked.

  The stick was no longer white. The stick was blushing. There was the pink bar, the test bar, and then, above it, there it was. The second pink line.