by Alison Tyler
Van slid one on, while Dori watched, embarrassed at how hungry she was for his cock. He saw her looking, and then said proudly, ‘I’m eight keys long, you know.’
‘What?’
He blushed, which she found almost irresistible. But she wanted to know what he meant.
‘We measured once,’ he continued, and the blush to his cheeks deepened considerably.
Oh, God, she thought. The way boys do. She only knew that concept from Porky’s movies, but that was with a ruler. What did he mean by keys?
‘On the piano,’ he said next, then gathered Dori up in his arms.
She sighed hard when he used his thumb and forefinger to part her nether lips, opening her up. She felt the cool rush of air from the fan above them, striking against her wet pussy lips. Van gazed at her for a moment, seeming awed by her nakedness before bringing her down on him. Now the query she’d made moments before was a reality: they were fucking. And he still hadn’t answered, so Dori tried again.
‘Really, Van, will Bette mind?’ Her voice was a whisper. She could hardly think, let alone speak. And it seemed bizarre to have this conversation during intercourse, but nothing was normal in her world any more, was it? She was fucking a delivery boy in the stockroom of a beauty store where she’d worked as a teenager. And if that wasn’t odd enough, she was back in time twenty years, with all of her teenage insecurities along with her thirty-eight-year-old body. Trapped in the 80s. Jesus, she might as well have a little fun, right?
And that’s what Van seemed to offer: a little fun. The way he held her, the way he moved his body on hers. It had been years since making love had felt this good. Why? She didn’t have any answers. All she knew was that the way Van felt inside of her made her want nothing more than to wrap her legs around his waist and pump her body up and down.
For several moments, they were silent together. The music was loud, yet they could still hear people in the shop down below. Nothing mattered to Dori right now. Nothing but the fact that she and Van were locked onto one another, moving. Dori’s hands on his shoulders, his palms under her ass, lifting her up, and bringing her back down. Letting her ride him. Letting her press against him to get the contact that she craved. They moved to the rhythm of the music. How could they not? But Bette had taken pity on them, changing the soundtrack of their sexual encounter, no longer cranking the hard rock music, but Sliding on Roxy Music’s ‘Love is the Drug.’
Bryan Ferry’s voice slowed them down, while the rich, haunting melody wrapped them up. Dori stared at Van. He had the most beautiful eyes. Clear blue right now, like a bit of frozen sky. Or like one of the colors that Nina would choose for her talon-like nails. Dori could lose herself in his eyes, focused now, not off in some drug-fueled land of X, but in an actual place of ecstasy. A pleasure that was better to her than any drug. Didn’t Bryan Ferry know the truth?
He set her down and turned her around, so that she was facing the large oval mirror on the wall, looking into her own dark, chocolate-brown eyes. There was no escape from herself, no matter what decade she was in. But as Van rocked forward, as she watched her cheeks turn pink with pleasure, she realized that maybe she didn’t want to escape.
Maybe it had taken her falling back twenty years in order to understand that she’d found the perfect time.
Chapter Twelve
Running always cleared Rowan’s head. His feet pounded the pavement as he tried to make sense of what had happened.
Dori had hooked up with someone. Rowan had never thought of that possibility. And now, she was working, had actually gotten a job, gotten a man, had managed to create her own mini life in less than a week.
What was he going to do now?
He had created his plans so carefully. Down to the precise moment of arrival, and then she’d gone and messed everything up. Getting drunk with her friends at the bar, and then waking up far earlier than he’d expected. Or perhaps Violet had given him the wrong departure time. He could beat himself up for hours, but he wouldn’t. He’d just rethink the concepts that he’d taken for granted before. If nothing else, Rowan was a master at problem-solving.
But the biggest problem he faced at the moment was his own conscience.
He had sent her back on her own as a form of punishment. That was true. He didn’t want to look too hard at himself for that, or at the reasons why Dori had wound up in the 80s without him. Rowan liked to think of himself as a fairly nice guy, and that concept was challenged when he thought about the photo of her, emailed to him by Chelsea, that had prompted him to mess with her.
But honestly, he’d meant to catch up right away. To meet her at the B&B and explain what was going on. He had no idea she would get an early start, that he wouldn’t find her still in bed, where he’d be able to explain, to soothe her worries, to calm her fears. And then for the past few days, he’d been consistently one beat behind her.
Fuck.
As he ran through the neighborhoods where he’d played as a kid, he found himself on a familiar route, the one he’d had as a paperboy. He passed the candy-colored pastel houses where he knew the kids and where he’d played after school.
You could trust numbers. That was all. People were the variables. Emotions were unpredictable. Even his own.
He sprinted past one house where a man was out front mowing the lawn, then he backtracked, and ran past from the other direction, stopped across the street, and tied his shoe. Or pretended to tie his shoe.
God, he hadn’t thought of them in years. The Hugheses.
They’d been known as the swingers in the neighborhood. With a hot tub in their backyard, and a steady stream of couples parading through their home on the weekends. The man had practically served his wife up for Rowan’s own consumption. He watched the husband move over to the small side lawn, and he saw the wife coming out with a glass of lemonade.
She was wearing a floral sundress with tiny straps that barely held her breasts in place. Rowan had to admit to himself that she looked good. Delicious on this hot day. He saw her gaze in his direction, saw her tilt her sunglasses down on her nose and stare at him, playing Lolita at age forty. He remembered seeing that look when he was fifteen and didn’t know how to respond.
But he wasn’t fifteen, was he?
No, he wasn’t. Not any more.
She’d been putting off this moment, almost as if she knew it had to happen, but hadn’t wanted to confront herself with the truth.
And the truth was her diary.
She’d found the slim burgundy leather volume tucked under her mattress on her first day back. She reached for it again now, knowing it would be there, knowing with the sick feeling in her stomach that she would have to read it. She’d destroyed the book while in college, hating the sappy melodramatic way she felt when she reread the words she’d written so earnestly, so hopefully.
But now, she felt different. She was an adult. She could look at those dreams and know that many of them had come true. She was in a different place, right? A better place.
Perhaps.
The book was small and slim. Not a real diary, just a blank leather-bound notebook. She’d started writing in it at the beginning of her senior year, when she’d begun dating Rowan. The passages were filled with descriptions of him, with the desire for him, as if she were the first person in the world to have sexual longing.
There were bits and pieces, fragments of kisses they’d shared, and where they’d been. She found movie ticket stubs taped next to dates, found a dried-up four-leaf clover pressed between two pages. And then she found a story she’d forgotten, walking in on Gael and Bette in the bathroom, the two of them doing coke from a hand mirror, both looking up in shock as she’d barged in, and then barged right back out.
The 80s looked innocent on the surface, didn’t they? But when you scratched that shiny candy-colored exterior you found something else entirely. Like the English Breakfast tea tin that held her mother’s secret stash of pot. Like the box in the liquor cabinet that held her father�
��s porn. Like the fact that she and Rowan had had sex …
Oh, God, was that why she’d destroyed the book? She’d been pretending that she’d kept her virginity until college for so many years that she’d actually believed the lie herself. But here. Look. There was a passage, recorded in that cramped, tiny writing of hers. A date. The movies. She closed her eyes.
She tried to remember.
They’d been dating for nearly the whole year. But she had waited until after her birthday to say yes. She’d wanted the night to be special. God, Luke had been right about her, hadn’t he? She needed the first time to be for love. She read the passage, and then stopped, feeling as if she were reading about someone else, some stranger’s secrets. The girl in the book wasn’t her.
Not any more. Not by a long shot.
Now, she was seeking only pleasure. She’d given up what she’d had once with Rowan. She’d given up the concept of true love always.
Dori stopped reading when she got to the heart of it, embarrassed for herself – not then, but now. A voyeur of her own life. Instead, she flicked through the pages, trying to find something else, anything else.
Gael’s Creamery looked very different at four in the morning. She’d always had a midnight curfew, extended until twenty minutes after the credits rolled for Rocky Horror excursions – because the picture show started at midnight – but the latest she’d ever been at the Creamery was around one.
Now that she was a grown-up, she could go any time she wanted. How freeing was that? She could drink espresso – except they didn’t serve espresso – black coffee, then, at four in the morning, and nobody would say a damn thing.
The café was nearly empty at this hour, as she might have expected, but that’s not what made the place feel different. Sitting in the front window, looking out at the empty street, Dori wondered whether the café would have felt like this had she been eighteen again. The quiet. The stillness. The traffic lights blinking red and yellow. The waitress had nothing to do when she wasn’t refilling Dori’s cup, and she sat behind the counter and read a fashion magazine.
Dori had moved first to LA and then to NY for the sole reason of being in a city that always stayed awake. Here, the creamery might be open, but her town was shut down, rolled up at nine p.m.
And then the door swung in, and she saw a man enter the café. He moved by her quickly, so that if she wanted a good look, she would have had to turn her head. And she wasn’t prepared to do that. She did her best to check out his appearance in the reflection in the window, but all she could see was that he’d taken a spot in the rear of the café, that he was faced away from her and that he’d brought a book to read.
She looked up at the print of Nighthawks. That Hopper picture had always depressed the hell out of her. But now she found the image soothing. She was a nighthawk herself.
She wondered why she’d wanted to come out after all. She hadn’t figured that the loneliness would follow her, no matter where she was, no matter who she was with, no matter what date was printed on the newspaper discarded on the wood chair at her side.
She put a few dollars down on the table and left the building, heading back to her car and to a house she no longer considered home.
He’d lost his nerve.
Jesus.
He’d followed her to the café, as he’d followed her so many times the past few weeks, and then backed out. Right when he thought he might be able to approach her, she’d left. He couldn’t see himself banging on her door at four in the morning.
She’d think he was a crazy person.
But, damn, she was bound to think that anyway.
Chapter Thirteen
If The Majestic theater had been a woman, she would have been a silent screen star past her prime. Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. Beauty remaining, the glory within, but the surface giving in to age. Fading, wrinkling, warping. Yet The Majestic lived up to Dori’s reminiscences. The theater fit her memory to perfection, so like that fading film star trying her best to spruce up for a big event. Graffiti all over the back wall, the concrete chipped, the façade timeworn. Inside, it was different. The dramatic dimness of the lobby hid the fact that the multihued carpet was threadbare, that the fabric on the walls was scuffed and dirty.
The owners knew how to dress the place. Attractive bartenders, both male and female, with a cooler-than-thou attitude, manned the bar. They wore crisp white shirts, sleek black vests, cobalt blue bowties. The women often gelled their hair back, just like the men did, creating a sexy androgyny that added to their allure: a look that reminded Dori of the women in that Robert Palmer video, ‘Addicted to Love.’
Dori and her friends had often tried to peel one of the bartenders off the pack, but none had ever succeeded. There were enough college kids and young Silicone Valley upstarts to provide fuel for the bartenders’ erotic appetites. For a moment, Dori stared at the bar, the blue-tinted mirror behind the row of bottles, the highly polished surface of the bar itself, then she turned her head to take in the tiny round tables that cluttered the lobby, each one with a candle flickering in a red glass holder.
Patrons were seated at blue director-style chairs emblazoned with names of famous actors on the back: Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Clark Gable. Choosing a chair was always a game here. You hoped you sat on someone good. She heard that familiar query as she took another step forward.
‘Who’d you get?’
‘Humphrey Bogart!’
‘I’m on Montgomery Clift.’
Framed movie posters adorned the faded silk on the walls. Posters from the classics: The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, and Goldfinger, as well as newer masterpieces, Mad Max, Repo Man. A tiny concession stand for popcorn and candy was tucked into one corner. Dori was surprised mostly by the sizes – smalls were small. Nothing jumbo or turbo or mongo. No double-talls or grandes. Just normal human sizes.
Walking the rest of the way into the lobby, she was immediately surrounded by the cast of Rocky Horror, multiplied. There were six Frank-N-Furters seated along one side of the bar. Two Columbias argued over possession of a gold-sequined top hat. Dori didn’t see Bette right away, but Nina came forward immediately. Her hair was sprayed hard into the Magenta-as-Bride-of-Frankenstein ’do sported at the dramatic finale of the movie.
Dori spotted Violet and a few other high school kids trying to get up the nerve to hit the bar. She quickly turned her back when she saw her old friends. That was one of the most difficult parts of this whole fucked-up experience, seeing the people she knew – knew now in the present day – as kids. But when she turned around, she came face to face with Jacqueline, the girl who had been voted Most Changed at the reunion. The girl who was now a boy. Dori was delighted to see that Jacqueline was dressed convincingly as Riff Raff, a more handsome Riff Raff, without a hunch back, but in the tuxedo with tails, long blond hair. Had there been signs the girl had wanted to be a boy from the start?
Well, look at Dori. She was in drag, too. Dressed from head to toe as Brad because she hadn’t been able to stomach putting on her old Rocky Horror costume. Had there been signs about her?
She slid by Jacqueline, on her way to the other end of the bar. As soon as she ordered her drink, she felt a man’s arms around her. She looked down, saw the glint of the silver skull ring on the middle finger, and knew the hands belonged to Van.
‘You look luscious,’ he said, ‘I knew you’d make a beautiful Brad.’
‘I’m not supposed to be beautiful,’ she told him, turning around into his embrace. ‘I’m supposed to be geeky.’ He, on the other hand, looked amazing, his hair done to perfection, make-up exactly like his idol in the movie. And, God, why had she never realized that men in black corsets were hot? Of course, in a way, she’d understood that fact back in high school, when she’d spent every weekend drooling over Tim Curry in drag. But she hadn’t understood that the sex appeal could translate to real live men.
‘But you are beautiful,’ he countered, pulling her to a corner where they
could have a tiny bit of privacy. ‘Where did you get the suit?’
She didn’t want to admit that the suit was her father’s. She’d found it at the back of his closet, and she hoped like hell it wouldn’t show any wear by the end of the evening. She’d managed to make the slacks fit by cinching the waist tight, and she had pegged the hem and worn high heels to compensate for the length. Bette had the glasses for her, nerdy black frames with clear lenses. She’d slicked her hair back, tucked her ponytail into a collar, and forgone all but the most basic make-up.
Van kissed her and there were instant catcalls. Even off in the corner, they didn’t have any privacy at all.
‘The movie’s starting any minute,’ he said. ‘We’ll finish that thought later on.’
He led her to the top row of the balcony, and her legs felt weak as she took her spot next to Van. She loved this theater. So many important scenes in her life had taken place here. Hook-ups. Break-ups. Rites of passage.
The smell was the same – hot buttered popcorn, sticky soda pop from a thousand long-ago spills, and red licorice whips – all mingled together. And then there were the seats. She hadn’t realized one could feel nostalgic for creaky old movie theater seats. The well-worn cornflower-blue velvet seats had squeaky hinges that sang out every time you moved. The seats actually rocked. She’d forgotten that.
Van sat at her side, and when Magenta – oh, she meant Nina – followed up the stairs, he waved her over. ‘Where’s Bette?’
‘Smoking in the alley. She’ll be up in a minute.’
Nina looked at Dori when she spoke, and Van said, ‘She’s not smoking a cigarette. But Nina’s too much of a friend to tell you that she’s out there in the dark getting high.’
‘You never know,’ Nina said, settling herself on Van’s left. ‘Some people have a problem with that sort of thing.’
‘But not our Emma,’ Van grinned, his hand on her thigh. She shivered at his touch, still feeling warmth from the kiss they’d shared in the lobby. Yet when she saw Violet and the gang make their way to the front row down below, she instinctively ducked. Part of her still felt eighteen, no matter what she looked like on the outside. She was thirty-eight now. Would she still feel this way when she was eighty-eight?