Some nights she can feel the buzz in the club before she’s raised from the platform below the stage. She can feel it from the girls who trot back into the dressing room with an added bounce as they count damp bills and roll them into tight wads. She can feel the pole spark with a current as her hair cascades over her face and the DJ above introduces her set like she is the star.
Some nights she’s a nymph at a sixties music festival, a girl dancing alone and free in the corner of some bar, and every kick, split, slide and slither is born of the rhythm. Every move and removal in sync with the guitar. Her hair swings loose in thick waves, her lips the sole carrier of expression: full, parted, glossy.
Some nights she has them in a trance. Low, reverent whistles waft across the black room as she slips off her bra and crawls across the stage. Her eyes are mirrors. Her gaze cannot be caught. They throw bills at her and tuck twenties into her G-string. She watches them watching her, their eyes, their lust, more naked than her body as they lean closer, whistling and clapping. They think they can see all of her.
And some nights she feels nothing at all. Eyes all around her fixed up at the game or down at a phone. She spins around the pole, kicks and crawls, and watches girls lead guys to VIP, guessing who will cross the line.
The ones who did said it wasn’t much different from what they were doing already. They tucked thick folds of money into their purses at the end of the night. They said it was barely a line to cross at all. She wasn’t so sure, she swore she’d never do it, but on a night when she’d drunk and snorted enough and needed the cash, a VIP customer unzipped his pants and the barely there line bled into the carpet with the rest of the stains. He’d caressed her ears the whole time, murmuring over and over that she was such a special thing, such a special, dirty thing, and the barely there line slit open beneath her and she had nothing to reach for as she fell. Afterwards, when he’d opened his wallet and she lit a smoke for something to hold on to, she saw pictures of two young girls who looked just like him, smiling in a portrait studio, light shining in their eyes. He’d snapped the wallet shut when he saw her looking, tossed two fifties on the ground and glared at her with such disgust that she’d cowered, waiting to be struck. Wanting to be struck.
—
“Scooooores!” Kian cries, releasing his controller and shooting his arms in the air. He runs circles around the couch, nearly smashing into Carly as she leaves the bedroom dressed and perfumed.
“Shit, dude,” he says to Luke, plopping back down beside him. “Your girl is smokin’.”
Luke looks at her, then back at the screen. Hockey now. He drops his head side to side, cracking his neck as the teams prepare to face off. “It’s five–one, numbnuts. I’m still beating your ass.”
“Can’t believe you let her work as a peeler, man.” Kian lights up a freshly rolled joint. “She were my girl, I’d fuckin’ never let her leave the house. Lock that shit up.”
Luke picks up his friend’s controller and holds it out to him, waiting to unpause the game. Unfazed.
“And here I was wondering why you’re still single,” Carly says into the gap that was Luke’s to fill. She looks at his cast as they start the third period, their thumbs bouncing wildly. He’d never told her what the fight was about. She no longer thinks it was over her.
“What time’s your shift done?” Luke asks when she opens the door to go.
“Uh, one. I think.”
“Taking a cab?” His eyes still on the game.
“Yeah.”
“Cool.”
The goal horn blares.
“Fuck!” Kian yells.
Luke takes a pull off the joint as the players regroup on the screen. “Call if you need a ride.” He gives her a nod. She nods back. She closes the door behind her, stepping lighter down the stairs.
—
Luke walked in on a dead night in January. A quiet month already, the unrelenting snow kept even the hard cores at home. Bars across town were closing early, including the one nearby where his band had been playing, the four of them shuffling in to Dreams with their gear and sinking down into plush chairs at a table by the stage.
The remaining girls ended their sets with glazed eyes and empty hands, slipping back into their robes and flopping on the dressing room couch without bothering to check their makeup in the mirror. Carly took her position, felt the dull rumble as she ascended, closed her eyes and began to move. When she looked out to gauge the room, she saw him watching her. Short black hair, arms sleeved with tattoos, stunned blue eyes refracting the stage light like shattered windshields.
He mouthed something, urgent, as if they shared a secret. She looked away, spun around, tried to blur his face into the rest of the dark. He stood up. She dropped to all fours. She saw a regular at the door stamping snow off his boots. She crawled toward him. She caught her breath. But before she got far she felt a hand slip a bill in her thong. She felt a face by her face, a mouth by her ear, whispering, Look at me.
—
“Look at me,” her mother said again.
“I don’t want to.”
“I want you to see what they did.”
“No, Ma, I don’t want to.”
“All right, all right. I’m not going to torture you, little bugger.” Linda pulled her sweater back down again. “You can open your eyes. I’m all covered up.”
Carly held their dinner plates. Fried hamburgers on the stove. At fourteen years old, it was the best thing she knew how to make.
“Welcome home, Ma.” She put the plates down on the TV trays in front of the couch, squirted an extra dollop of ketchup for each of them.
“Mag-ni-fi-co! Home cooked. Beats the hell out of hospital gruel.” Linda clapped her hands but sounded beaten, her voice low and shaky. “Now, tell me about Cinderella. I wanna know all about your solo.”
A month before, Carly had come home from rehearsal to find her mother sitting on the couch with the television off. Linda sat still for a moment before stubbing out her cigarette in the glass ashtray and ironing out the folds in her robe with the palms of her hands. She looked directly at her daughter and opened her mouth as if to say something then closed it again. After a minute she lit another cigarette, pulled up her feet and reached for the remote.
When Carly brought in the plates later that evening, she had to wait longer than usual for her mother to put out her smoke and sit up. In fact, her mother didn’t move at all and kept staring at the television even though Carly was blocking her view.
“Mom? Dinner.”
“Cancer.”
“What?”
“I’ve got cancer.”
“What are you talking about?”
“They said they have to take one, then do chemo.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“They’re going to take my right breast and then I’m going to get chemotherapy.”
Carly tried hard not to drop the plates. She tried to focus on a hole in the wall where a picture of their family had hung, all three of them dressed up for Halloween. Superheroes. She’d been Wonder Woman.
“Don’t worry, kiddo,” her mother had said, sitting straight and tapping out her cigarette. “They said they’ll make me a new one, nicer than the one I have now.” Her laugh rattled with phlegm and turned into a cough. She saw the shock in her daughter’s face. She held up a hand until her hacking subsided, then said, finally, softly, “I’m not going anywhere, babydoll. Nowhere. You’re stuck with me. Okay?”
In the end, they took both, but it didn’t matter. She was gone in nine months.
—
Look at me.
It was a plea. Carly balked, yanked her head away and slid back up the pole, his smell of smoke, Irish Spring, mint, whisky lingering in her nostrils. She looked at him, through him, spent the remainder of her set staring away from his eyes, trying to control the rhythm of her breathing, her heartbeat.
—
“Look. At. Me,” Ms. Richard repeated, tapping her hand on top of
the piano in time to the music. “Look! At! Me!”
Carly pirouetted across the studio, sweat stinging her eyes as she forced herself to look at her teacher. She lost her balance and slipped for the fourth time.
“Again.” Ms. Richard twirled her finger in the air. “Focus. Let me see your eyes. Let me see you. Let me see what is happening inside.”
The piano accompanist started again. Carly shook her head to regroup, tried to steady her ankles as she stepped back into position.
“You once swallowed this whole,” Ms. Richard said.
“I’m sorry.” Carly awaited her cue, chin high and tilted, quivering on her toes, arms raised in an arc. “I’ll try again.”
“Listen to me. You made this your own, you reinterpreted something I thought I knew inside and out. Take me back there. Let us back in.”
Carly swept her long arms down, her feet left the ground, she was in flight. A mechanical bird.
“Look at me!” Ms. Richard bellowed over the piano and clapped her hands to get Carly’s attention. “Let us feel your anger.”
Carly missed a step. Her right leg gave way as if turned to water. The pianist halted with a cacophonic tinkle.
“Again.”
But Carly did not get up. Her breath heaving, she stared at a scratch on the studio floor.
“Up. Again!” Ms. Richard cried, louder than before, amplifying the tremor of doubt she’d managed to quiet all afternoon. “You are on the cusp.”
She went to her, grabbed hold of her arm to lift her up. Carly wouldn’t stand. Her arm flopped down.
“Carly—”
“I’m tired.” She stared at the scratch, her teacher’s shoes in the periphery. She could dam the tears as long as she didn’t move, as long as she stared at the scratch. She could not bear what would break through. She knew it would sweep her away.
“Carly.”
It was not like Ms. Richard to relent. Her shoes stayed in view, scuffed, old leather worn where the knots on her feet threatened to bust through. They stayed long after she had excused the pianist with a curt nod, long after she’d considered and rejected all possible phrases of encouragement, long after her protégé had lain down on the floor.
It was dark when Carly awoke. A sweater folded beneath her head, a jacket blanketing her curled body. The studio door left open just enough to let in light from the hallway. No one was there, though, when she went to it, when she let herself out into the night.
—
Jerry, the manager, poked his head around the corner and met her eyes in the mirror.
“Shift’s almost over,” she said before he could say anything.
“Well, they want you. Place is dead. Get up there.”
He was at the table alone. Arms crossed against his chest, he watched her walk slow, sparkling with body dust under the violet lights, to where he sat.
She leaned over him, grasping the arms of his chair. The performance had begun. “Did you want a dance, baby?”
He nodded. His eyes wouldn’t drop from her face.
“Come,” she said, breathier this time, and started toward a room in the corner, shifting her weight slowly from one hip to the other so he would be distracted by her body. His hand brushed hers and her left knee buckled and she felt like a fawn just learning to walk.
Inside the red room she closed the door behind him and crawled up on the table. He slid onto the black vinyl couch. She turned so her ass was in his face. She straightened her legs and rolled her body up.
“I think you’re remarkable,” he said as she stepped onto the couch and stood over him like an Amazon.
“Mmm.” She sunk to her knees, straddling his lap.
“I want to take you out.”
She took off her bra and let her head fall back so he couldn’t see her eyes as he touched her. His fingertips grazed her nipples. For a flash, she let herself pretend they’d been to a show, to dinner, that they were now back at his apartment. Then she turned it off and pressed her crotch into him. Two minutes left in the song. She could count it down. When he reached up to touch her face she rose higher so his hand landed on her breast instead.
When it was over he got up and took out his wallet. He pulled out two more twenties and a business card and dropped them on the table. “My number’s on here. My name is Luke. And I’m pretty sure you’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.”
He looked at her once more before walking out, the door clicking shut behind him.
—
She heard Lindsey singing in the hallway and shoved the card under her makeup bag just as the dressing room door swung open.
“If you get caught doing blow in here, Jerry’ll kill you.” Lindsey flopped into a chair as she twirled her long hair into a topknot and whistled into the mirror. “Got a warning last week.”
“I don’t do that shit anymore.”
“I saw you hide something under your kit. I’ll take it if you don’t want it.”
“Jesus—I don’t have any blow.”
“Well, let me know if you find someone who does. I could use a bump tonight.” She took a swig from a lipstick-smeared wineglass, lit a smoke, smudged her already smudged black eyeliner with an expert pinky finger. “That guy you danced for? Holy Mary. He was fucken hot. Did you suck his dick?”
“Yeah, Linds. I did. And all his friends too.”
“Did you see how he was looking at you? Like, looking looking.” She whistled low and less musically this time. “I’d be all over that ass—”
“Trix,” Jerry said from the door. “You’re wanted.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.” She stubbed out her smoke in the overflowing ashtray, reapplied her sparkling red lip gloss and squeezed Carly’s boob on her way out. “You’re pretty hot yourself, love.” She sang from the hallway, “I’d fuck you too if you’d let me.”
The squeeze of her hand lingered for minutes after she was gone. Bass from the music upstairs rattled the mirrors rhythmically like a giant pumping heart was going to bust through from behind. Blood and shards of glass everywhere. April and Lisa, the only other girls in there, sat side by side on the couch in the corner, heads moving to a slower beat as they listened to a track off shared earphones. It was midnight. Carly’s shift was over. She pulled on her leggings, her boots, her coat and jammed the card in her pocket.
In the hall, she motioned to Jerry that she’d be leaving out the back. He tucked his magazine under his arm and followed her to the dented steel door. She kicked it near the bottom where it always got stuck, and slammed her hip into the bar.
“Got it?” he asked, leaning behind her to hold it open.
A gust of snow whirled in.
“Yeah. See ya tomorrow, Jer.”
He looked down the alley in both directions. She trudged through the snow and heard the door slam shut when she reached the safety of the empty street.
“Hey.”
She looked up, eyes wide, ready to bolt. A silhouette flicked its cigarette and stepped toward her, into the light.
“Hey,” she said, bracing herself.
“I’m not crazy,” Luke said.
“Okay,” she said, still bracing herself.
“I was just thinking, nights like this, they’re, like, once a year? When you can walk down the middle of Bloor Street and not see a car for, like, miles. Snow everywhere.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Okay, well…” He stepped toward her, gingerly, with one hand out, as he would to a wounded wild animal. “I just. I thought you might want to walk, for a bit.”
—
It’s still raining when she gets out of the cab after her shift. A laughing couple under an umbrella bump into her as they scurry past, the apology in the girl’s eyes curdling to scorn when she gets a good look at Carly.
“She’s totally a ripper,” the guy says, sneering over his shoulder. She slides the key into her lock. He eyes her, proprietary. She kicks the door with her boot.
At the top
of the stairs, the sporadic strum of a guitar. One chord disconnected from the next, hands, fingers blindly searching for some never-heard melody. Luke’s on the edge of the couch when she steps inside, leaning over the coffee table, trying to write notes with his left hand. He sits up again, strumming with a pick, singing quietly about a bird with a broken wing.
“Ah yes,” she says, pulling off her rain boots. “Those broken-winged birds are always the most beautiful, aren’t they? Nothing like a broken bird to heal, a flightless bird to make your very own. Forever obliged.”
She pours a glass of wine from the open bottle on the kitchen counter. He takes a cigarette out of the pack in front of him, taps down the tobacco and lights it, staring at the wall.
She sips her wine. She waits for his retort. There is always a retort.
He looks at the table.
Her pulse quickens.
He stands, cigarette between his lips as he lays his guitar in its case, the notepad in his beaten leather satchel.
Before she can double-down he says, “Your father died. Your brother called, to tell you.”
He slings his guitar case on his back, the satchel over his other shoulder and goes to the bedroom. Drawers opening and closing. “I’ve been thinking of how to tell you for the past few hours.”
He comes out again, stuffing clothes into his bag. “But I’m not sure why I bothered. Nothing gets to you, right? Hard as a fucking rock.”
He’s at the door before she can form a word. He says the number is on the table. His shoes clapping down the stairs before she can move.
When the door to the street slams she runs, barefoot, after him. Down the stairs, onto the sidewalk. She dives back for the doorknob before it locks behind her. She doesn’t have her key.
The Dead Husband Project Page 14