As I reached down to flip the Polaroid over, my phone chimed back in the kitchen. “Late nite pickup?” it said, and I drank my glass down and watched the foam lace my empty chalice. For a moment in the garage I considered my sobriety, but as Calyph once assured me, only black men got pulled over in Jaguars.
Twenty minutes later I hit the chalk in Dunthorpe, and there under the floodlights Antonia stood on her steps, shivering in a party dress. She got her own door before I could, and I could see the gooseflesh coming down her shoulder.
“Why didn’t you wait inside?”
“I wanted to wake myself up.” She spoke fast, and her breath seemed short from the chill. “I walked around the house. You ever walk around outside your own house at night? And look up at the walls, and there’s so much out there you never really looked at? It’s like how could it be your house really, until you knew about it all?”
“No,” I said. “Never.”
“There’s all this wood out there,” she said. “There’s all this stone. Come and look.”
I looked at her there, dolled up, lined around the eyes like I’d never seen her, shivering through some unknowable mood. A woman puts on eyeliner and suddenly she’s nocturnal and difficult. She looks like she could be a fatal problem. “The climate’s controlled in here,” I said.
“Come and look,” she said again. “It’s the wilderness out there.”
I left the car running and let myself be led upon the lawn, around the side of the house, to where the chimney rose up. It didn’t seem remarkable. They just looked like some white-bread quarry rocks to me. She strode toward the chimney and put her little slipper-shoe up on one of the stones of the corner and hoisted herself. I remember her little knee flashing, and the unexpected freckles of her leg as it bent in the moon.
She stepped into a little hop and slapped a rock at the apex of her jump, damn near seven feet in the air. “I own you,” she cried at the rock as she hit it.
She landed in a crouch and still her eyes were on the chimney’s tower of moon-white stone. “I own that,” she said, in a puzzled voice.
When we came back to the car, I saw movement in the dark. Looking back at the house I saw the front door ajar, and a thin figure standing shrouded in the aperture. She stepped forward and I saw a woman with her arms crossed. She too was dressed and made up as if for a night on the town. Her face gleamed down on us petulantly, and I could see a tattoo on her calf.
Antonia must have followed my gaze, because she stopped in the drive. “What?” she asked the girl harshly. “What do you want? There’s nothing to say.”
Some kind of complicated rebuke passed over the girl’s face, and she took another step toward the car. Antonia motioned abruptly for me to get her door, as if to forestall her. “Don’t wait up,” she said, and the girl melted back into the dark.
Out on the road we blew the heat and I edged around Antonia’s wild mood.
“She was at the party,” I began, but Antonia waved her hand disgustedly through the air.
“Anything but her,” she said.
“Okay. How is he?”
“He’s well enough—there wasn’t anything for me to do. The family’s all there.”
“I didn’t expect you so soon.”
“It’s not that long of a surgery, really. For what it is. For where they break your knee on purpose.”
“Is he definitely out for the year?”
“He is. I think they’re still going to pay him, though.”
She said it like she actually thought that was what mattered to him. I glanced over, and the look of her dark painted eyes pained me. I wished she hadn’t done that to herself. It made all the strange wildness, which otherwise might seem like a reckless opening of herself I was privileged to see, into trouble. I had a premonition that she was gathering all the trouble we could ever have into this night and loosing it, to have it out and behind her.
“Where are we going?” I asked. I’d just been driving toward everything not in her house that we could care about at that hour.
“Let’s go to a strip club,” she said instantly.
“Excuse me?”
“I am a girl who just wants to have fun,” she said in a strange, wry voice, as if quoting someone else’s assessment of her.
Clubs were not a totally foreign subject between us. The first time I’d ever been to a strip club had been delivering food, and she’d once trapped me in a painfully elaborate story about bringing Cobb salads to cabarets and lingerie modeling houses. She liked to tease me about going to this one place, Sassy’s—I think she thought I had a habit. But I didn’t want to go to a club. They were the only places in the city where I found it impossible to desire anything. I tried to imagine what kind of man it was who could get pleasure from laying dollar bills in front of a naked girl. Who could make a healthy, honest transaction out of that? I tried to imagine what type of man it took, what his face would look like, as he lorded over his little table with his roll of bills, laughing to his friends, taking a girl’s sass and throwing it back to her, comfortable, enlivened, and unwithered.
“Which one?” I asked.
“You know which,” she said, and we flew on toward the rain-washed, incalculable city.
As we came over the bridge, I decided I’d just drive on. So many times I’d been poised at the edge of something like this, a real break. I’d just drive on, past the club and into the teeth of the night, and wait for my nerves to tell me what I should do.
“Can I make a rule?” I asked.
“What?”
“No texting in the club. I don’t want you there just passing the time. If you’re in, you’re in.”
She laughed. “All right.”
“Why don’t I hold on to it.”
“You’re confiscating me?”
“That’s right.”
“I can just turn it off.”
I held out my hand and she gave it over with a big sigh. As I brought the phone down into the door cavity, I bounced it off the child locks to set them.
Turning off Grand, an Escalade pulled up alongside us at the light. It was the universal model, black with chrome rims of restrained ostentation. I didn’t recognize the car from the players’ garage, but in our whitewashed city every driver of an Escalade seems a baller, and I tried to make out who was inside through the tint.
The car stayed with us to the red on Seventh, and then the passenger door popped for a second and someone spat out onto the roadbed. I got a glimpse of tan work boots. Until then, it might have just been some housewife on an ice cream run. I had a sudden sure feeling of where they were headed. Though they’d cleaned up their public image, the team still went to the club. It was the lifestyle league wide, you couldn’t buck it any more than you could drive a Camry or work at an electronics store in the off-season. “Only people don’t go to the club are the serious Christians and Doug Christie types,” Calyph had said once. “And me, if A ask you.”
I tried to think of who might be driving. Oden could only be in the backseat, slouched, unsure, coming along for the camaraderie. Roy was too much the face of the team, sitting his firstborn on his lap during press conferences. He could be shotgun. They could be his tan boots, so bright and clean they could move through any room without taint. It was probably some modest old veteran leading the expedition. Maybe it was just Steve Blake, skinny and white as me. I wondered what Antonia would do, seeing someone who knew her. We’d have to duck out or join them.
I supposed they’d be the sort to know how to carry themselves. I could see their faces, sure and easy, demonstrating how to be supreme club clientele. I could see them being offered a private room, and waving it off—it wasn’t that kind of night. They would turn away the Cristal and the status cognac and order all manner of odd drinks, and I could see us among them, in a palatable sort of experience. There might even be a brotherhood to it, as with Calyph on those rare times. “You don’t need to tip fives,” I saw Greg saying, like a guy in an instruc
tional video that helps the beginners. “Just be consistent!”
“It’s there on the left,” she said, as we went by the club. I’d slowed a little, but only just. I saw the road in front of us, empty and wide, and then I saw the Escalade turn into the club lot behind us.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and let the life of wild possibilities leak away yet again, and turned to park in the tree-shaded dark.
By the time we got in line, whoever was in the Cadillac was already inside. Antonia had brought a thin hoodie and slipped it over her shoulders. As soon as she had it on, she put up a tough face to go with it. It wasn’t such a bad look—with her gleaming knees and the thin crepe of her dress’s fringe beneath, she looked like one of those mythical halfsy-halfsy creatures. I wished I could pull her hood up, so the image would be complete.
When we got to the bouncer, the atmosphere of the place came at us in its smoke and din. These were the years before the smoking ban, and the air was so thick it was like a community effort. The only element of the place not stained by smoke was the liquor itself, and everyone was diving down after that purity. I watched the bouncer run a thick finger around inside Antonia’s tiny bag.
I saw her to a table and excused myself—for the bathroom, I said. I headed for the back stage, hoping to see familiar figures towering over the rail, their jewelry aglitz in the black light. Coming around the corner I could see there wasn’t any flash like that. The stage was empty, and beneath it I saw a guy in a leather jacket and tan boots at a table with his friends. Something had gone wrong with them. I could see the dull skin of their crew-cut scalps. Their heads were square and null as new erasers. I watched them shining the dull, unforgivable shine of my own people. I turned away with the bitterest feeling.
At our little table, beneath a plastic banner that proclaimed “It’s the Water,” Antonia was pushing up her sleeves and letting down her zipper. Two pints had appeared. I went through the smoke, past the hungry faces of men pretending to be fed. The club was full and disordered, and I had to pass near the stage to get by. A dancer smiled a terrible smile. Her nipples were hard, like objects all their own. Of course I felt naked.
I got to my seat and Antonia took a long drink from her pint. It looked any color but gold.
“I’m driving, you know,” I said.
“This is NA beer.”
On the near stage, a girl with purple hair had focused her energies on a man at the rail. His face was young but his hair was prematurely gray. It was the first dance, she was still clothed, but she was locked in, staring down at him with electric contempt. She slapped herself on the thighs, the sounds puncturing the music. She squeezed her breasts together like she wanted to mistreat them. The man was cringing and bent and dropping bills over the rail all the time.
“I’ll get some cash,” I said.
She pulled out a wad of singles and patted it. “I’m paying for this,” she said.
“Madame appears seasoned.”
She shrugged a little, and you could see she was proud. “I used to go in college. Just me and the ladies.”
I lifted my pint. “To temperance,” I said.
“To an understanding.” I took a sip of the beer, and it was pretty well Pabst, and I knew I had no understanding of anything. Of course, there was a certain line of thought—the girl in the door, whoever she was and whatever they’d had, and then this, Antonia watching, relaxed and intent, as the first dance ended and the tops came off. The girl with purple hair slung herself out there indifferently. But in tracing this line, I felt the leap of it, the stupid male paranoia it required, the belief that a woman’s unhappiness was an abandonment waiting to happen, that always, at any moment, we could be betrayed in favor of anyone of either gender.
“So, is this your last bit of fun?” I asked.
She laughed. “I hope not. Is it yours?”
“Not yet.”
She took a long but somehow elegant drink, like a thirsty person in a commercial. “I suppose I am,” she said, “rededicating myself.”
“You like men after all,” I said helpfully.
She looked at me with pity.
“And women, too, of course. But. Except . . .”
When she spoke it was like she only wanted to stop my floundering.
“I was going to leave him,” she said, in a plain, clear voice. “And now I’m not.” When she said it she was even looking at the dancers, not casually, but as though they absorbed her as much as anything.
“Oh,” I said.
“Yes. That house? Forget that house. I don’t want it. I’m letting it fall through.” She took another long drink. “Do you like them to be real?” she asked abruptly.
“What?”
Only then did she look at me, and the look was direct, almost severe in its scrutiny. “On your dancer. Do you like them to be real, or not?”
“Yes,” I said. “Real.”
“Really? I like the fakes,” she said. “If she were my wife I’d want them to be real. Otherwise, so what.”
I looked over at her, at the tough cross of her arms and the jaunty angle of her head. Her hardened poses sat oddly atop her real blend of sensitivity and indifference. When I was hardly less than her age and delivering my food, I truly did not want to look. It was almost a pleasure to deny myself, to ensure that the body of the woman I might have been about to meet would never be lessened by overfamiliarity.
“The fakes used to scare me, I remember,” she went on. “Like I was looking at these bags. There were four of us, we were just nineteen. Me and Sally and Ginger and . . .” Her voice fumbled a moment. “I don’t know if we liked it. The men our parents might’ve known eating steak. The thought that they’d come over, napkins tucked into their collars, and try to talk to us. But it felt daring. I thought, I’m going to be a new woman, this is the first step.”
As she talked I saw the pose slip, and the callousness I could never quite believe in replaced by the look of someone lit from within, reliving something, as if a new wind were blowing across her eyes the old yellow-cornered pictures of gone seasons.
On the near stage, the purple was preparing for her last dance. A bonanza of dollars lay scattered on the rail in front of the gray-haired man. His face was cracked into a parched smile.
“You want this?” she said, slamming her heel on the rail. I imagined my fingers twisting beneath. “You want this?” she shouted over the music. Under the rail’s shelf I could see one of his legs, shaking uncontrollably.
She circled the stage until the pole was between her and the man. Grabbing it underhand, she turned away and set her terrifying shoes in place. She pulled herself backward into the pole with a violent collision, as if the pole was having its way with her from behind. She did it again and the pole shook.
“Like this?” she cried, slamming herself backward. “Baby? Where are you, baby? Talk to me when you fuck me. Why are you so quiet?” There was some laughter, and I thought how common something had to be, to bring this crowd together. We were all so happy it wasn’t us, this shaking man, that it wasn’t our eyes that watched the ceiling of the stage as the pole shook, knowing in a second it would cave in on us for all we had come here to want.
Antonia looked delighted.
“But why would you leave him?” I asked finally. I felt weakened by bringing him up; it made me feel my subservience. But I saw his stern face and his crumpled legs, as though they were projected into the smoke-thick air, pressing down over us.
“I won’t,” she said.
“Now that he’s injured you can’t,” I said softly.
“No,” she said. “But that’s not why.”
“He won’t be down forever.”
“We’ll be different people when he’s well. We’ll have come through something. And I want to. I want to nurse him. I’m going to order the best sheets. Fifteen-hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton. In the mornings we’ll lie there and eat omelets and watch documentaries. At night I’ll sleep in a cot by his side. I�
��ll never leave the house. I’ll be his wife and nurse him. I want to nurse him until it seals us off and makes another world.”
As she said it, I could see their future together—warmer, wiser, less young. The glamour would have fallen off them a little, but they’d be the better for it, more knit-up. There was no place for me in that world. They might as well be driven by a mute fugee in a cream suit.
“Don’t you see?” she asked. “You can’t tell him. Won’t you keep that house and all between us?”
I gave her a shrug. “What can you offer?”
She brushed her hair back from her face with a slow finger, looking away, like it was a task that took the greatest care. “You’re a funny one.”
“You’d probably do anything,” I said. “Anything I asked.”
“I won’t,” she said quickly. “But there’s a lot you’d never think to ask for.”
Before I could think of asking what, she ran her hand abruptly through the poisoned air, forestalling me, gesturing at everything. Suddenly I could think of nothing to say, nothing to push our talk further into the explicit.
“You’ll have no need for me,” I said instead. “Lying in bed all day.”
“I’m sure we’ll find something for you to do.”
“I could take you to get your own car. I’ll drive you to the DMV for your exam, and that’ll be it.”
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