by Samuel Ligon
I follow him to Garden City and it’s like I’m already gone from here, every threat buried behind me. But Alina’s behind me, of course. It’s just a tease is all it is. Just a moment to rest in.
Burke
We went to a fancy Italian place with oysters and wine and salad and some kind of pastry dessert and brandy and coffee, close to 400 bucks with the tip. It was all rich people there, but Cinnamon didn’t look whorish, and I had on a shirt and tie and pleated pants I picked up at the mall. It felt like I was settling in to a new life—money and fancy dinners, a beautiful girl, all of it, just like Nikki and Cash. We went back to the Royalty, drunk and mellow and settled into each other, knowing what was going to happen next. I wondered what I could make her do with just my mind, how much of herself she’d surrender. I wondered if she was a pure, true victim.
I had no interest in hurting her. It was more a matter of getting my money’s worth and playacting, thinking about the times Nikki and Cash had while I was rotting. I told her stories about me and Nikki so young and in love before they killed her. I asked what she thought I ought to do to the killers that took everything from me, what kind of justice I ought to lay down.
She looked at me a long time, sitting on my lap like she was. She held my face in her hands and fed me a bump of coke. “I think the only way to get over her,” she said, “is to somehow set her free.” She kissed my forehead, ran her hand through my hair. “I don’t mean forget her,” she said. “I’m not saying that at all. What I’m saying is to let it go, her and whoever hurt her.”
“After everything they done?” I said.
“I know it’s not easy,” she said.
I kissed her, hating her for trying to poison me with weakness like she was, like Jesus and the whore of Babylon. She kissed me back, all sweet and whorish, and I realized she was falling in love with me—the reason she wanted me to forget Nikki in the first place, so she could have me for herself, wanting me to forget everything and make myself the victim. But that wasn’t going to happen. Not now and not ever.
21
Mark
I put her on the patio and brought out beer and tequila and shot glasses and salt and a bowl of limes. “What about music?” she said.
I brought that out too, poured us shots.
“It’s nice out here,” she said, nodding toward my aunt’s backyard enclosed by trees and shrubs and other plants. “I’ve never had a good yard for Alina.”
I didn’t know who Alina was, then remembered she was Nikki’s daughter.
“She looks so much like you,” I said, and Nikki told me about getting pregnant in Austin during high school, her boyfriend a bassist in some band I didn’t know, and how he didn’t care about the baby one way or the other. “I was living with my cousin,” Nikki said, “my mom up in New Hampshire all crazy on the phone once I told her I was pregnant. And when I say crazy, I mean certifiably. I didn’t really have anyone in the world, except my cousin, and I was like, I just want to know who this baby is. I was too young to be a mother maybe, but I was also like a thousand years old.”
She told me about her dad dying in Vietnam before she was born and her mother’s cancer and mental illness, her mother making Nikki do all kinds of crazy shit around the house. “I’m twelve years old,” she said, “setting off roach bombs in the kitchen. My mom’s in the next room, saying the insecticide can’t hurt her after all the drugs they’ve pumped into her. But she’d make me leave while the poison sprayed, and that became my escape time.”
She took a drink and pointed at the cigarettes on the table. “Can I have one of those?” I handed her one and lit it. “Everything was so weird back then,” she said. “I had this friend, Crystal, who loved music as much as I did. We developed this elaborate fantasy—I don’t know how it evolved, exactly, but it was hilarious. I would pose as Chrissie Hynde from the Pretenders, and she would be Debbie Harry from Blondie, and on Saturdays, when the roach bomb was going off, we’d shop in the thrift stores for jewelry and dresses and jeans and tee shirts, all the stuff that would transform us into these women we idolized. We’d only answer to their names with each other, like we were trying to burn away everything in us that wasn’t them. When I look back now, the weird part is how my memories of that time—me at home with my sick mother versus me with Crystal as a pretend woman out in the world—how those memories don’t align at all, how they never overlap, like there are two lives back there for two different people, the girl at home and the fantasy girl. My mom was disintegrating and I’d leave and pretend to be so tough, those two girls never meeting even once.”
She told me about running to Providence when she was 17, the tough girl finally taking over completely, and how she had to get even tougher, so poor and trying to survive, but how music saved her or fed some softer part of herself. I told her I’d lived in Providence around that time, too, just after she left, and we uncovered all the ways our paths crossed outside of time in Providence, the places we had in common, Babes and the Living Room and Lupo’s, and the music, Sebadoh, Throwing Muses, the Pixies, places we ate and drank, and the bands we almost saw together. We leaned toward each other as we remembered the clubs and record stores, everything in Providence when we were so young, and it seemed like the world was shrinking, that we’d just missed each other and were finally finding each other. It seemed pointless to tell her about Cynthia and Kyle. They’d become irrelevant. She talked about washing dishes at La Chatte du Maison, the panhandlers she’d known on Thayer Street before she settled in. I couldn’t stop looking at her, breathing the air around her.
“Let’s do another shot,” she said, “but a small one.” She told me about moving to Austin, then Portland, on the run it seemed like. But when I asked her what from, she said it hadn’t been a matter of running away, necessarily, more a matter of what she was moving toward. “And what was that?” I said, and she said, “I don’t know. You probably,” and she was smiling and sort of glowing, looking at me like whatever it was we were talking about, past, present, future, we were in it together, just like we’d almost been together all those years ago in Providence.
Nikki
I tell him stories from my life, most of them true or mainly true, and it all feels so natural on this patio hidden from the world. When he goes in for more beer, I follow him and ask to see his music, which is a much better collection than I would have guessed. I pick out some discs and go back to the patio, putting on that Breeders EP, Safari, the second song, “Don’t Call Home,” playing when he comes back out.
“Come on,” I say, standing and holding out a hand to him. “Let’s dance.”
I’m expecting resistance, but he takes my hand and we dance like a couple idiots, working up a sweat on his patio as the light fades.
Then he wants to pick a song. Then I do.
We do a spastic robot dance to Bowie’s “Fashion,” an underwater arm flapping dance to Beck’s “Beercan,” both of us laughing, taking each other’s hands, letting go, and grabbing again. We dance and dance, pausing only for shots, and then he puts on “Summertime Rolls” and pulls me close and we’re kissing, everything more blurry than I thought it would be. We sway to the music and keep kissing and then it’s more than swaying, this hunger feeding itself, pushing and pulling, and we’re down on the prickly grass in all this humidity, sweating against each other in the wet air like we’re melting. We stop and rest and talk and start again. I catch myself looking at him looking at me, just the two of us here, like we’re out in space, and I feel so close to him, his eyes on my eyes looking at me looking at him, and my eyes closing as he falls away and I fall away, and then later, when I start to surface from this emptiness, I’m surprised it happened this way, almost naturally, as though I hadn’t planned it at all. As though I never wanted anything more.
We breathe for a minute on his lawn, the sky dull from the haze and light pollution. I run my hands up and down his back. It
never gets dark enough here. I can hear a stream of traffic somewhere far away.
“And then you left Portland,” he says, picking up our earlier conversation, as if nothing has happened.
I laugh.
“What?” he says.
“You were going to tell me a story,” I say. “Remember? How it’s about me too?”
We lie on our backs, our arms and shoulders stuck against each other. I put a leg over his leg.
“The whole thing’s so crazy,” he finally says, and he tells me about Kyle’s pants, which he wants to show me, and I say, “I don’t need to see them; I believe you,” but he insists, bringing out a bag from which he takes a sheet to spread on the grass beneath us, and the leather pants, which he holds out to me, then stuffs back into the bag.
“I know they don’t mean anything,” he says.
He walks to the patio and grabs our beer, the cigarettes.
“That’s not the story,” he says. “Or maybe it is, kind of. I don’t know. I’m not saying I’m happy she’s dead.” He offers me a cigarette.
“Of course not,” I say.
“But I’m not exactly unhappy she’s gone either. I mean—just from my life, which I know sounds horrible. It’s just—all this unfinished business, all this crazy shit she set in motion. The money she came from and what that would have done, and how she never really understood what being rich meant. Not that I know what it means.”
My antennae quiver at the mention of money, and I feel so cheap and hideous, as though I ever forgot what this was all about, except that when we were talking and dancing and then on the lawn all of that seemed far away, like I could just be with someone without some greedy, selfish motive driving everything. Like I could lose myself, which seems like the most selfish thing of all when I think of Alina.
“I discovered this stuff at her apartment,” he says. “Kyle’s pants and his voice on her machine setting up that night, but also, and this is the main thing: all this baby stuff, prenatal vitamins and a list of names and other stuff, and it just stopped me cold, freaked me out and sent me into this spiral. And I was like, There’s no way this is true. But I called her sister, who confirmed that Cynthia was pregnant, and I’m sort of putting it together, but also—this is the weird part—I’m like, There’s no way that baby’s mine, somehow knowing it’s Kyle’s—”
And before I can stop myself, I say, “That’s wrong. I’m sorry. But it wasn’t his baby.”
“I know you might want to believe that,” he says. “None of this really matters.”
“Listen,” I say, knowing I shouldn’t be telling him this, wanting to protect him, for Christ’s sake, but also wanting to tell him the truth, thinking maybe he deserves that much. “Kyle had a vasectomy,” I say. “Around ten years ago.”
Mark hits his cigarette, looks away.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“It doesn’t matter,” he says.
“Maybe it does matter,” I say. “I’m not saying it’s for the best. But maybe that part does matter.”
“I don’t know why it would.”
I kiss the side of his face, around his ear. He turns to me and we wrap ourselves around each other, as though we’re regular people. As though anything like this could happen between us. As though I can help him. Because, the thing of it is, I want to.
He looks at me, runs his hand through my hair, and I’m wondering who the hell I am. I look at him but don’t say anything. I reach up for another kiss and another, this hunger in me I can hardly remember feeling, except in my mind from way back, but not in my mouth like this, not in my throat, not in my stomach or legs or chest. I hold onto him because I want to look at him like before, I want him to look at me, just him and me floating in space, looking, and then I close my eyes because I want the blackness one more time, that complete surrender. But I can only have it a minute before I’m thinking I can’t fall asleep when this is over. There’s still so much to do, to say, not wanting to say it but knowing I have to, not knowing exactly what to say or how to say it, and then letting it slide for a minute, just a minute, just a few more minutes.
Mark
All I wanted was to touch her and listen to her and look at her. Everything seemed perfect with her—talking and saying stupid things in these moments of rest, her saying, in a faraway voice, as if we’d been having this conversation for weeks or months or years, “But who do you think’s the most disappointing solo artist—you know, really disappointing—after being in a great band?”
She looked down at me, her hair brushing my face, hanging around us.
“Of all time?” I said, and she said, “Yes, of all time,” and I said, “Sting?” and she said, “Maybe,” and I said, “But you have a better answer.”
“Stevie Winwood,” she said, and I said, “Oh, God. Right. What about Ringo?”
“But that’s different,” she said. “Because we expect so little from him.”
“What about Mick?”
“I don’t think his solo stuff really counts. I mean, the Stones are always still there. Whereas, with Traffic, Blind Faith. . . .”
“Okay, okay. Say something else.”
“Like what.”
“Anything.”
She started moving again.
“What about Frank Black?” I said.
“No,” she said. “Because he’s good, even though the Pixies were better.”
“Who was best then? In a great band, and even better as a solo artist?”
I pushed my fingertips against the pulse buttons in her neck.
“That might be harder,” she said. “I don’t think you can say Bob Marley. Because those first two Wailers albums are as good as anything he ever did.”
“What about Elliott Smith?”
“But all his real stuff’s solo.”
“Ryan Adams?”
“Maybe. . . .”
“What about. . . ?”
“Yeah. . . .”
We stayed in the backyard for hours, and after all that time talking and not talking I felt like an idiot for bringing out Kyle’s pants, but then it didn’t matter. She told me about his vasectomy, which took me a minute to understand, because I’d been so sure of the story I’d constructed, Cynthia and Kyle’s dead baby, my dead baby.
That news jolted me, the kid sort of rising, but then I felt relief that Cynthia was gone and the baby, too; because even if we hadn’t stayed together, we would have been joined by that baby, and I could just imagine the arguments, especially with the trust fund money Cynthia would have smeared all over the kid, the snotty kindergarten and prep schools she’d have insisted upon, horseback riding lessons and country clubs. I felt liberated from all that horror, as if I’d just woken from a bad dream, and then guilty at my selfish relief, but feeling this creeping loss, too, making me wonder when I’d developed what must have been some kind of compassion or respect for life or whatever it was that felt like the loss of something I’d never had in the first place, this feeling like touching something beyond me or so much bigger than me, and Nikki there, pulling me back, something else that seemed impossible. Nikki.
I had to stop being so tiny and selfish and just be grateful for any time I could have with her. Not so petty and small and jealous and possessive of a dead person I didn’t even want to be with, or a living person in the future—Nikki—already fearing what we’d do to each other, when we didn’t even have each other and never would, whatever having someone could mean, but already afraid of what we’d turn each other into.
“She should have told you,” Nikki said. “And I’m sure she would have.”
“Maybe,” I said. I couldn’t shake or quite identify this hollowness, as though something had been taken from me, unable to tell if this loss could possibly be related to a dead baby I’d never even known about, then feeling like I had something to confess, s
ome melodramatic role to fall into, wondering if Nikki herself might be pregnant already and hoping she was, sort of astonished by this person—myself—who suddenly seemed to want a kid and not trusting that at all . . . because it was nothing more than a romantic abstraction, an attempt to address an alien loss, or to fill something lacking, and wondering just where that came from, all these thoughts like an electrical storm flashing in my mind that I needed to put away somewhere.
We lay on a sheet in my aunt’s backyard, Nikki against me breathing as the minutes unwound. We were quiet a long time, and I felt myself becoming entirely empty or full. Then she said, quietly, almost as if she didn’t want to say it or didn’t want me to listen, “Hey,” and propped herself on an elbow looking at me.
“I don’t know quite how to say this,” she said. “But I need a little help with something.”
“Okay,” I said, sort of half asleep and waiting for whatever she was going to say.