It lay in its case, now a coffin, under the living room couch. Ryan had left me a spare key when he toured last summer and it still jostled on my overstuffed key chain. I thought I could arrange a trade with a guy I knew at The 12th Fret, either for printing jobs for his band or use of my employee discount at Artifacts.
Late December. Ryan’s thirtieth birthday approached. My chance. I took it.
He came down to the basement for my lesson that day. The small high windows were dim with grime and the gray afternoon, but I’d hung a paper shade over the ceiling bulb and stapled a string of Christmas lights along the bare beams, and the soft light transformed the junk around us into homey clutter. I sat him down on the drum stool. “I have something for you,” I said. I handed him a Polaroid I’d taken of the broken guitar before I had turned it over to the luthier. It leaned against the backdrop of a black-painted wall at the shop, the splintered neck gleaming like bone at the break.
“What’s this?” He turned over the Polaroid as if the black back would explain something.
“You’ll see.”
“It might have to be the cover of the next Cold Shoulder record,” Ryan said. “Can we use it?”
“Of course. It’s yours. But that’s just part one. Wait here.”
I ran up to my room and came back down with my angular sheet-wrapped bundle. “Close your eyes,” I called from the steps. He obeyed. I set it on his lap. “Open.”
Ryan unwrapped the sheet and there was his beautiful blue Telecaster, restored, back from the dead, all the well-earned old scratches and scuffs still visible but the neck sleek and glossy and intact. “Holy fuck.” He ran his fingers down the length of it, turned it over. “What have you done?”
“Is it okay?” I said.
He looked like a kid whose lost dog had been found. “Yeah, it’s okay. How’d you do this?”
I told him I’d sneaked in while he was at practice and stolen it out of the case.
“You criminal.” He grabbed my shoulders.
“That’s right.” Criminal: it flushed me hot. We locked eyes. I shrugged out of his grip and pushed him down to the floor. The guitar slid onto the carpet remnant. He flipped me onto my back and held my wrists above my head, pinned them there against the cool concrete with one hand, and with a single swift twist of the other my jeans opened.
“You went into my house,” he said.
“Yeah, I did.”
“You still want in?”
“Only if I need to.” I tried to steady my breath.
“Anything you need right now?”
“Maybe.”
“It’s always maybe with you.”
I pulled one hand free and pushed his head down to my zipper.
The Christmas lights blurred.
End Times
THE YEAR FLIPPED INTO 1999: THE LAST YEAR OF TIME AS WE knew it. We all joked about Y2K and the bunker-hoarder people, but even we skeptics couldn’t help but think it might be a good idea to spend the next New Year’s Eve in a remote cabin with a well-stocked woodpile. It was the end of the century and time no longer seemed the reliable forever it used to. It had taken on a finite quality. A twilight fever set in.
Ryan time had always been liminal time. Now, when all time was liminal, how easy it was to slip into his again. Everything was temporary.
The Cold Shoulder played a word-of-mouth show at Satyricon before they headed down to Austin to record their second album. They had to crowd-test the new songs before they rendered them permanent. Ryan put me on the list and I brought Lawrence for company.
Lawrence and I huddled outside under an awning with droopy, steaming slices of pizza from Dante’s. On one side of us, Old Town slunk low, all seedy and bejunkied. On the other, the construction cranes stood sleeping above the warehouses.
“What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever done?” I asked.
Lawrence chewed on a piece of crust. “Strange how?”
“In bed. Like, something I wouldn’t have guessed.”
She looked at me askance. “That’s between me and—I’m not telling.”
“And who?” I rammed her shoulder with mine, but I was relieved. “Never mind, you can keep your dirty secret.”
“Why, what about you? What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever done?”
I flushed. “Not telling.”
“Well, you brought it up.”
“And I realized there are some things no one really needs to know.”
“Was it with Flynn?”
“Sex with Flynn happened so long ago I barely remember it.” It wasn’t true. There had been a self-harming regret period when I’d made myself an expert in conjuring the voracious thrill of our early days. Now that I’d rather forget it, I couldn’t—I’d made it a historic event. Sex with Ryan had never measured up.
“I think you really need to get laid,” Lawrence said with concern that verged on alarm.
She had no idea, I remembered. I said, “I think you’re right.”
Satyricon was packed. The club’s layout was frustrating, narrow and pillared, and the air was cottony with smoke, but I loved it. The sour-warm smell of old beer and cigarettes was always a strange comfort to me. The walls were thick with show flyers and staples, the palimpsest of a life lived at night, the place’s history ineradicably attached to it in traces and staples and the stubborn tissuey residue of skinned posters. Years accumulated—and stayed. I moved so frequently that I’d started keeping things crated, learned to file and live out of the boxes. Would I ever be able to just live in a place? To stay, indefinitely?
An ache in my chest was interrupted by the thud of a kick drum. The opening band was a quartet of early-twenties boys who vamped and windmilled to songs that were the equivalent of clip art, as if the crowd were studded with A & R reps. Which it may have been—you couldn’t tell anymore because the major labels hired people who looked like us. Or who were us, our peers who were half apologetic, half desperately optimistic they could do good within the system. Thrilled to get a paycheck, and trying not to think too hard about where it came from.
When the Cold Shoulder finally came out, Lawrence and I worked our way to the side of the stage, where the sound mix would be off but the sightline was good.
I’d imagined I was getting somewhere on the drums but to see Ryan really play, freed from the elementary school of our practice sessions, exposed how little I knew. How patient he was with me. Jesse and Mateo were showmen; they held their guitars in that low-slung effortless born-with-it way that boys so often did, like Oh, this thing?, and knew how to unleash with immaculate control. This was my third time watching the band and you could see the professionalism wearing down their interesting edges. Something a little calculated about the new choruses and bridges, a self-consciousness to a hook, certain stage moves I’d seen them do in exactly the same spot before. To my relief, Ryan drummed with dignity—focused, sharp, no drummer face.
“Your friend’s good,” Lawrence hollered over the clamor.
A thrilled horror rose in my chest that I could just say it, right now, like running down a diving board and leaping without pause; before I changed my mind, with my eyes still fixed on the stage, I said, “What if I told you I’d been sleeping with him?”
Lawrence leaned in, cupped her ear. “Huh? You’re leaving when?”
“What? No.” I clutched her arm. Her mishearing suddenly seemed prophetic. “I’m not leaving.”
“They just started,” she hollered. Only twenty and her hearing was already half-wrecked from years of loud shows and improvised toilet-paper earplugs.
“Never mind.” I shook my head. “Later.”
But when the band stopped and the sound system came on and the crowd began to shuffle out I couldn’t bring it up, not without the noise to cushion it, and Lawrence had forgotten anyway; it was just another throwaway shout. We waited for the room to clear and then made our way backstage to say hello.
A different kind of energy filled the air, the energy
of a room full of men. Because I was used to a backstage of girls—that’s how skewed my world was, how fortunate I was—the aberration was my norm. I seldom even thought of myself as woman or girl, just person. Just human. I only became girl or woman when men walked into the room or I walked into theirs, when that gaze hit me like a hot breath. As a woman you walked in and were assessed, ignored, or both. These guys—decent guys, cool guys, not even fratty dudes—filled more space, physically; the room felt smaller, the air thicker. The smell of damp jackets and band sweat and smoke. Making my way through them was like weaving through trees.
An arrowhead of sweat darkened Ryan’s gray T-shirt. We kissed cheeks, like friends or Europeans. I felt the eye-flick of assessment from two girls perched on the end of a couch. Don’t worry, citizens, I wanted to say, I’m just a tourist.
“I want to introduce you to Lawrence,” I said. I turned to pull her in, but she was nowhere to be seen. I had lost her on the way. “Except she seems to have vanished.”
“Really! How convenient.”
I knocked his arm. “It’s not like that.”
“Whatever.” He looked genuinely irritated.
“Give me a call?” I said.
“Maybe.”
“Hey, that’s my line.”
“I’m borrowing it for a while.”
Impulsively, I leaned in and whispered something in his ear. His eyes went heavy.
“What was that?” he said.
“An idea.”
“Fuck you.”
“I’m going now.”
“Get out of here,” he said, but he was smiling.
What are you doing, Andrea? I asked myself all down the hallway back to the main room. But I knew what I was doing. I knew he would succumb to me. This must be what it felt like to be Flynn.
The club was nearly empty, the house lights on. My sneakers stuck to the floor with every step. A man pushed a wide dry mop, sweeping empty cups into a clattering herd.
Lawrence stood outside. “I couldn’t take the sausage party,” she apologized. “There was a competitive conversation about Pavement bootlegs.”
I could have told her then, as we walked down Northwest Fifth toward the car. Or on the ride home. But what was the point? There were things even your closest friends didn’t need or want to know.
This time around, Ryan was different with me. Underneath his movements was a new tautness. His hand tracing my ribs and side was not the new lover’s hand, discovering the landscape of the body, but the hand that has returned and is defining the limits—the surveyor’s hand. He knew what I liked and he was ruthlessly determined to give it to me. When I slipped into performance mode, the mannered pleasure I found hard to shake during heterosexual sex, he placed a hand over my mouth and looked me in the eye, slowed way down. “No. Tell me when you really like it,” he said, voice low. And he doggedly worked his way there, generous with his mouth. Until I did something that I’d never done before: I faked coming. This wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. The sounds and the moves were no problem, a common script, but the pretense of bliss was exhausting. I was all too present in my head, my body a mere attachment. After my last simulated whimper, I flipped over to my stomach so I could turn my face away and offered myself to him, eager to be done with it all; he took me up on it and came mercifully quickly inside me. I slid away from him, got up, and took a cigarette from his jacket pocket, overcompensating with a cliché.
“A cigarette! Really?” he said, skeptical but satisfied. I smiled, shrugged, and lit up. The only part I enjoyed of smoking was lighting the cigarette and taking the first drag, when the burning paper smells briefly sweet. I sat on the bed and handed it to him.
“Did you ever end up telling anyone about us?” he said.
“Not a soul,” I said. “It’s all ours.”
“Not even your best friends?”
“Especially not my best friends.”
He took a careful drag. “Why not? What would happen if you did?”
“A gossip bloodbath. Not fun.”
He raised an eyebrow but kept his gaze on the ceiling. “Right.”
“I mean it. I’m protecting you,” I said.
“You’re lying.” The voice that came out of him was low, dark, extruded through his teeth. His whole body had become tight and still. I tasted the bitter root where I’d thought there was only sweet. I had lied, but not in the way he thought.
“I’m not lying,” I said. “I guess I should go home now.”
He looked at me and his eyes went soft again. “No. I wish you wouldn’t.”
For his sake, I wished I could say, Me too. I wished I could say he was good enough to bend my nature toward his. But he couldn’t. And for my sake, for reality’s sake, I wouldn’t fake anything again.
I slid my legs off the side of the bed and stood. “You’re a good one,” I said, and I leaned over to kiss him apologetically.
He sat up and stamped the rest of the cigarette out in an empty mug. “I’m not sure I like the sound of that.”
“I meant it.”
“As you pull on your sweater.”
There were no more drum lessons after that, no more anything with Ryan; the Cold Shoulder was practicing their new songs for the studio, and then it was February and they loaded up and drove to Austin to record. The long-anticipated Gold Stars record finally came out, my face among the crowd of lesbians on the back cover, and Meena and Lawrence headed down the West Coast to tour. It was a dim, rainy time of year and we all bunkered down, hiding from the gloom, wallowing in our own. Summer was always at Marcy’s. Family dinner had been postponed two months running, and still no one knew what I’d done. Including me.
My Ailment
TED SUGGESTED I HAD MONO. FOR A WEEK I’D BEEN DRAGGING my feet around the shop, slumping at the counter, yawning through the customer small talk. I’d never been so tired in my life, even though I was sleeping nine, ten hours a night. “Who’ve you been kissing?” he said.
“Shut up,” I said. “No one.”
“Get it checked out,” he warned. “Don’t go wiping out my customer base.”
I was too tired to bike, so I drove to work and back clutching the wheel like a senior citizen. The insurance had run out on my poor Dodge Colt, and for the last few months the car had sounded like it was dragging a metal ladder from the undercarriage.
At home, a cloudy bubbling pot of rice was threatening to spill over on the stove while Summer stirred another steaming pan. The scent of garlic and chilies was nearly unbearable. “I made you dinner,” she said. “Extra spicy.”
I slung myself into a chair and said I wasn’t feeling well.
“Even better. A little heat clears out the system.”
“Seriously, Summer.” I covered my face with my hands. “Don’t get too close. I might have mono.”
“Oh my god, who could have given it to you?”
“No one. I just . . . got it.” I wondered if I should try to call Ryan in Austin. I was ready to be pissed if he’d given it to me.
“Does your throat hurt?”
“No.”
“It will. Here, eat while you can.”
While we ate, she said there was something she needed to tell me before she told everyone else at family dinner. “You should hear it from me first.”
“I won’t tell anyone.” I leaned in. “I’m so good with secrets.”
“I’m moving in with Marcy.”
I slumped back. “Seriously?”
Marcy had a notorious pattern: instantly in love, and instantly out, on a precise one-year cycle. Always the girlfriend moved in with her too soon, and always it ended in explosion or collapse.
“Yes.” Summer was crestfallen. “Aren’t you happy for me? I’m in love.”
“Of course,” I said, and apologized. “It’s wonderful.” What else could I say? I thought of how I’d felt when I first moved in with Flynn, the thrill of certainty sweeping away all pessimism, only the supremest optimism. Lucky
Summer. That feeling was worth the pain of losing it. And there was no warning a person away from someone they wanted, even if they knew better. See also: self.
“But she’s allergic to dogs,” I remembered. “What about Bullet?”
Summer was ruefully, stubbornly in love; she looked at Bullet as if the dog were a favorite Goodwill sweater she had outgrown. “I have to find her a new home. A really good one.”
“Can I stay in the house?”
“I’m sure you can.”
“Then I’ll keep Bullet.” I was already feeding the neighbor’s abandoned orange cat. I’d started calling her Edith Head, after the gown designer in old movies, and she had moved more or less permanently to our front porch, sneaking inside through a tear in the screen door on warm days. I wasn’t sure how to afford feeding the dog on top of it, but I couldn’t let a pit bull loose into the wilderness of noncommittal punks whose housing situations changed quarterly. Especially not Bullet.
“Really? You would be the best parent.” Summer stroked Bullet’s big hard head and tears filled her eyes, but they were fond tears of life change, not remorse. She had already moved on as if the dog were just another roommate. “You be a good girl for Andy.”
“You’re not gone yet,” I said.
“Right,” she said. “But I have to go to work now.”
Before she headed out, strapping on her bike gloves, Summer said, “Go to the doctor.”
“Okay.”
“Tomorrow.”
I handed her the helmet hanging by the door. “Be safe,” I said, as I always did.
“Be good,” she croaked, E.T.-style, and held out her index finger. I pressed mine to it.
“Always am.”
Her blinking red bike light weaved down the block and around a dark corner.
I had come to love this stupid little bungalow with its narrow kitchen and the walls we’d painted peacock blue and pumpkin orange and pool-table green, the overstuffed bookshelves, the fig and pear trees in the yard, the slanting porch, my Christmas-lit basement with its carpet-scrap corner and drum kit. I loved Summer, even with her unorthodox hours and her long red hairs trailing across the bathroom floor. That feeling of being left behind crept darkly into my peripheral vision, and I tried to blink it away. After all, I got to keep the house. I could stay. I just had to find someone to live with me.
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