The final band left the stage and the audience stomped and hollered for an encore. I saw Vivian raise her hands above her head to applaud triumphantly. “I’m out of here,” I said.
“Me too.” Ryan tipped back the last of his beer and set the glass down with a decisive thunk.
We pushed through the double doors and swooned into the damp drizzly night.
Stubble. I didn’t know about stubble. I never knew a kiss could abrade—that a man’s mouth scrapes and sands, rubs yours raw. I’d kissed plenty of girls, and even the ones who kissed rough, their mouths were soft and smooth as anything I’d ever known.
I jerked back.
“I’m sorry,” Ryan said, so close the words went right into my mouth. “You’re just—I thought . . .”
I was still holding my glasses in one hand and the corner of my T-shirt in the other. My myopia magnified his face while everything else dissolved into a haze of shadows and shifting shapes, streetlights as huge and soft and glimmery as wet moons, and a faint drone shimmered in my ears from standing too near the speakers at the show.
“The stubble,” I said, wiping my glasses fiercely with my shirt, which was the original reason I had stopped by the shrubbery. I should have seen it coming, That Look he was giving me when I glanced up, but I had forgotten to expect it and in the moment it took me to process it, he read assent and moved in for the kiss. “I’m not used to that.”
“I shaved this morning,” he said.
“I guess this morning was a very long time ago.”
His eyes crinkled, and he leaned in and touched his mouth to mine again. Alcohol on his breath, and mine: a comforting smell, tart and warm. I gave in for a moment, partly curious, partly titillated by how exotic and defiant it was to kiss a man.
There, I thought, the person after Flynn has happened. The seal is broken. I closed off the kiss and stepped back. “I shouldn’t be doing this. Especially not out here.” The wet rush of traffic on Burnside was only two blocks away.
“My apartment is right down the street.” He slipped a finger into my belt loop.
“I’m not that drunk.” I unlooped his finger. “Everyone’s going to be leaving the show in a minute. I gotta move on.”
“Wait, don’t go yet.” Ryan raised his head and periscoped around. “How about back there?” he said.
The doorway was on the back side of a low L-shaped office building, with a dim little parking lot behind it, ragged evergreen shrubs that had outgrown their last trim. It was dark and dry and filled with a deep shadow. I followed him and for a moment felt strange and shy. “This is messed up,” I said. “I’m kind of messed up.”
“But you want to, right?”
I thought about it. I didn’t not want to. “Sure,” I said, “what the fuck.”
I couldn’t remember the last time I had kissed a boy. Back in high school in Nebraska? My first few weeks at Reed? Maybe a gay friend at a party, or in a photo booth? I liked men fine, I did not hate them by default, as some of my separatist friends did; as long as they weren’t catcalling or stalking me, I felt mostly neutral about them. They were other animals walking around with us, members of the same species, though outside of work I almost never interacted with them. I found it hard to understand the nature of the relationship between men and women—the millennia of baggage each carried seemed exhausting to me. Gay narratives were the ones that traditionally ended in death and tragedy, but for me, heterosexual love seemed far more doomed.
But this was neither love nor sex; it didn’t even strike me as heterosexual, just sexual. It was the good kind of drunken make-out, laughing, loose but not sloppy, bumping up against the wall for support. At first I tried to dodge the stubble, angling to minimize contact, but then I thought, Fuck it. And the rasp of it felt good, like scratching an itch harder than you know you should. I wanted it to hurt, and it started to. Tears welled in my eyes. I kept them closed and sank my grip into the shoulders of this person, this boy. I didn’t know if the ache down below was for him or simply for touch itself, but I bit down lightly on his lip and he bit back and for the first time in a year I knew I was wanted, and that was all I needed.
When his mouth moved to my neck I tipped my head back and opened my eyes. I took in the rough brick of the doorway, the blurry night beyond, the damp glinting surface of everything, the speakers’ tunnel of hum in my ears, the hiss of cars on the wet street, the blue scent of rain, the smokiness and sweet human smell of his hair. He slid a hand up my inner thigh and I dropped my head abruptly and grabbed his arm. “Okay, that’s enough for me.”
“What? Come on.” He was sleepy-eyed and ducked in for another kiss.
“I have to get home,” I said. “Work tomorrow morning.”
“Don’t go home. You’re so cute.”
“You’re so drunk.”
“So are you.”
“I’m so gay.”
“Oh really?”
I slid out from between him and the wall. “Really.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know, I know. I just got lucky.”
“Lucky?” For some reason my throat tightened at that. I tried to clear it with a wry laugh. I rested my hand on his flat flanneled chest for a moment, then let it drop. “Right.” I slipped my glasses on and the world came back into focus. “Let’s go.”
We emerged from the doorway as if we’d just woken up.
“Well, that was a surprise ending,” I said, rubbing my eyes.
“Or a surprise beginning.”
I looked at him askance. Was he kidding?
“What?” he said.
I shook my head. We both knew better. Surely. “Don’t give me that crazy talk. Later.”
I walked all the way home to Northeast. It took thirty minutes but I was charged up and drunk and the mist haloing the streetlights cleared my lungs and head. I pressed my fingers into my stubble-scraped chin and the sting’s burn was a kind of warmth. I couldn’t believe I’d done it. But for this one night, at least, someone new was into me. Someone felt lucky.
The house was a little sage-green two-bedroom bungalow on Failing Street, with a roof that slouched over the porch like a baseball cap pulled low, boxy columns, and ragged wooden steps. The paint was peeling on the trim. Moss grew on the foundation. The neighbor’s orange cat was on the front porch again, sprawled on the top step with a surly gaze. I half expected her to demand a fee to pass. But she hopped up and tried to slip inside behind me. “Sorry, girl.” I nudged her back with my foot. “Go on home.”
The house was dark except for the light over the stove. My roommate, Summer, was still at work at one of the strip clubs.
Bullet sauntered into the kitchen, stretched in a deep bow, and yawned loudly, a surprised creak. She was a runty pit bull, big-headed and velvet-coated, slate gray with a crooked white stripe down her nose. She was Summer’s dog, but more and more she turned to me for love and food. I stroked her soft crumpled ears, gave her rump a scratch and a pat. She watched me pour myself a jar of water and followed me into my dark bedroom.
I stripped off my smoky clothes and sat on my bed, a futon I’d bought off a friend for twenty bucks. It had been used as a couch for too long and retained a permanent taco fold down the middle, into which you inevitably slid. The platform I’d built for it with two-by-fours and a sheet of plywood squeaked whenever I moved. In a fit of superstition and pride, I had told Flynn to keep our store-bought adult bed, even though I was still paying off the queen mattress on my one maxed-out credit card. It was too haunted.
The back door opened with a creak and Bullet’s ears went all bat. She whuffed, nosed the door open, and trotted into the light. Summer greeted her with a coo and said, “Andy? You home?”
Normally I’d come out, flick on the lamp on the kitchen table, and we’d share a snack. I’d sling myself into a chair and say, You’ll never guess what I did tonight. Seriously, never. Summer would love it. What a transgression! What a deliciously vengeful move. Or was it? Men were easy, cheap,
everywhere. They loved lesbians, or “lesbians.” Some prize.
The person I most wanted to confess to was Vivian, the friend I had trusted most. But the telephone number where I could find her now used to be my own. So did the bed. I thought of both of their bodies in it—Vivian’s soft stomach and slim neck, Flynn’s broad rib cage and long hands. My grief burned with the nauseous heat of humiliation.
I lay carefully back on the futon and breathed slow and deep. Summer’s bag hit the floor with a soft thump and a moment later the shower whooshed on. I’d tell her. Just not yet. I feigned sleep until I slept. Dissembling has always come easily to me.
Rules of the Lesbian Mafia
All lesbians are in the Lesbian Mafia
There is no boss of the Lesbian Mafia
Always unite against white supremacist heteropatriarchy
Always have each other’s backs
Power in numbers
Jesus Had a Twin
MY CHIN WAS STILL RAW THE NEXT MORNING, ROSY AND TENDER as if I’d come in from the bitter cold. At the bathroom mirror I wiped away the shower’s blur and leaned in to close the vision gap. My black hair—naturally dark brown, but I dyed it black when I thought to—was toweled into floppy spikes, my brown eyes bleary, my skin winter-pale, and then here on my chin, this red badge of false courage. What had I been thinking? I hadn’t been. Not-thinking had seemed like a good idea at the time. I sneaked into Summer’s makeup and managed to powder over the scraped patch enough to mute the lurid glow, but it still stung to the touch.
The dog and I took a round through the neighborhood while Summer slept late. Bullet had started seeking me out first in the morning. I loved watching her ears bob, her broad muscled haunches ripple, as she trotted out in front of me. She was gentle as a kitten but people still crossed the street when they saw her anvil head coming. Queers and pit bulls have a certain species affinity: both feared and misunderstood, discarded by families, used for bait. Bullet was a rescue and she had her issues, but didn’t we all.
Summer was still asleep when I mounted my bike to head to work. The June sky was gray with patches of blue hope. The Broadway Bridge took me up and over the river and coasted me into downtown, where gutter punks and junkies fringed the nineteenth-century buildings of Old Town. Outside Artifacts I locked my bike to a telephone pole studded with staples and wet layers of flyers. I was late, but the store was still dark. I unlocked the front door and flipped on the lights. Paintings hung all the way to the ceiling in a tall, boxy space full of vintage furniture. Living rooms and dining rooms and bedrooms with no walls. Former lives arranged to sell. I wound through the store, turning on every lamp.
“Hey, kid.”
My surprise sent me fumbling into a gaunt Swedish vase that I barely caught in time. “Ted! You’re here,” I said stupidly.
My boss stood in the doorway to the back room, tall and rumpled in his zip-up fleece and Levi’s. He popped a tablet of nicotine gum out of its foil backing. “I had to get the van. Early estate sale.” He tapped the top of his head. “Forget something?”
I peered at his close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. “Did you get a haircut?”
“Jesus. Maybe you should keep that thing on for your own safety.”
“Oh.” I lifted off my bike helmet and ran a hand through my smashed hair. “Whoops. Not enough coffee. I was up late.”
He raised a predatory eyebrow. “Oh, really.” Ted loved vicarious thrills. Especially lesbian ones. I had learned to uphold a solid firewall and mete out just enough personal information to allow for both collegial bond and professional distance. “And what were you up to?” he asked hopefully.
“Can’t tell you.” My standard fallback: “Gay secret.” And how, I thought.
He cackled. “Go get us coffee,” he said, slapping two dollars down on the counter. “And watch the breakables on the way out.”
At seven bucks an hour, I couldn’t afford the stuff I helped sell, even with the employee discount. Even with the record-store job on weekdays and the letterpress gigs. But it was steady work, the part-time stability all of us sought or settled for. The Artifacts job paid for my house rent and my share of the letterpress studio. The record-store job covered utilities and first crack at the incoming used CDs—we all considered music a necessary expense then. The letterpress gigs varied month to month and determined the quality of my groceries and whether I could order PBR or well whiskey. One cracked plate on the job could wipe six hours out of my paycheck, as I knew all too well.
At the coffee shop around the corner, I ordered two coffees from the girl with the deer eyes and cropped hair and Joan of Arc tattoo. As usual, she paid me little notice. Meena had intel that the coffee girl was straight—one of those girls who affects andro queer chic and looks heartbreakingly good in it but actually only dates men. We resented this kind of girl. It was hard enough as it was without these decoys jacking up false hope, jamming the gaydar.
Back at work I moved slowly, tried not to break things. I busied myself dusting everything like a hungover housewife. A couple of customers came in, stroked the arms of Eames chairs, expressed desire without conviction, imagined their lives with this sofa or that table, and left. I couldn’t fault them—I did it too. I would love a credenza, a painting, a lamp, and watch it for weeks and plan where it could go in my house, a luminous beautiful thing among the battered street finds and left-behind furniture, until a real person with real money came and took it home.
Summer shouldered through the door with a jingle at three that afternoon. Her cherry-red hair was pulled into a high knot and she wore a gray jacket with a huge fluffy faux-fur collar, like a giant squirrel tail pillowing her neck. She threw her sacklike purse down on a couch and curled up next to it. “What’d I miss?” Summer had grown up in Tennessee and Boston and her speech was curiously inflected by both accents—part drawl, part bark.
“No feet on the couch,” I said. “It’s a Knoll.”
She moved her boots to the Conant Ball coffee table. I started to chide and she said, “Just kidding!” and put them on the floor.
“If Ted sees you he’ll kill you,” I said. “I take it back, he’ll kill me. Actually, you’re in a different kind of trouble if Ted sees you. I’m afraid you’re his type.”
She waved it away. “I dance for Ted every night.”
I pictured the money Ted wasn’t paying me landing at Summer’s feet. “Seriously?”
“No. Maybe. I don’t know. Close enough. How was the show? I am so mad I missed it.”
“Loud,” I said. “Good turnout.” I felt my chin throb.
“You have a funny look on your face.”
My pulse sped up. I couldn’t tell her, not here. “I’m sort of breaking out on my chin?”
“I meant you’ve got this weird expression.”
I picked up a spray bottle and started to wipe at an invisible spot on the counter, chin tilted as far into my neck as it could go. “Oh. Well. Flynn was there.”
“Ah. Did you talk to her?”
“I only saw her from afar.” I rolled my eyes. “Leather pants? Really?”
Summer laughed agreeably and studied my face, which I instantly lowered. “Seriously, are you okay?” she said. “You look kind of flushed.”
“Hangover,” I mumbled.
Summer excavated a vial of ibuprofen and half a bottle of Diet Coke from the depths of her bag and graciously set them before me. “Buck up before family dinner. You look like hell.”
I froze. “Family dinner!”
“You forgot.”
“I didn’t forget. I just forgot it was tonight.”
“Uh-huh. I’m headed to Nature’s. Need anything?”
“No, I’m on it.”
I was totally not.
Family dinner happened once a month and rotated from house to house. A half dozen of us pulled together a big meal and cleared a whole evening for it. Flynn used to come, but in the breakup, I got to keep family dinner. Clearly I needed it more. Or may
be Flynn had started a new family dinner crew. There was a lot I didn’t know.
Like what, and how, I was going to pull together for tonight.
When Ted came back an hour before closing, I told him I wasn’t feeling well. He looked at my face and believed me. “Get on home, kid,” he said, and with guilty relief, I did.
On the way home, I stopped by the record store. I’d forgotten to sign my time sheet and I couldn’t afford to delay my two-figure paycheck. It was a minor shop, a modest closet compared to Jackpot or Music Millennium or Crocodile, but it was a solid little neighborhood joint with an equal mix of vinyl and CDs, and where a clerk didn’t have to be an encyclopedia, just an enthusiast.
The new guy in his black knit beanie was slitting open long boxes of new CDs and paid me no attention at all—off duty, I was a girl in a record store, the ignorable class—until I said hello. Still, I glanced over at him twice before I surreptitiously pulled the Cold Shoulder record out of the C section.
On the back cover was a snapshot of the band’s practice space, some basement walled with a grid of mattresses, cluttered with gear. The singer-guitarist stood in the foreground, of course, looking directly at the lens even as he played; the bassist slouched behind him. Ryan sat at his drum kit, on whose bass head he had traced a two-headed calf, with one stick raised, the other a pale blur. His hair was shorter in this picture, falling forward over his eyes, and his head was turned slightly to the side. He had a good mouth. I drew the cover closer to peer at the grainy shadow of his jaw. The skin looked rougher there.
My fingers were sweating, slippery on the shrink-wrap. I rang myself up and slid the record into a flat brown paper bag, plain and anonymous as an envelope addressed to no one.
The house was quiet and dim, the last of the afternoon light slanting low across the dusty floor. I made myself a tahini and banana sandwich and took it to my bedroom, where the record player squatted atop a scratched teak dresser. The dog followed me in and sat down unprompted, tail wagging, ears perked. When I reached to pet her she ducked.
Stray City Page 2