Hart & Boot & Other Stories Read online

  “Oh, Nikki,” she said, and felt the night air tremble. “You fucked up, sister. It’s my show, now.”

  As Zara walked out of the alley, a light, unseasonable rain began to fall. Once she was gone, the Greek Chorus emerged from behind garbage cans and piled boxes, to stand around Doug, who lay curled on the wet pavement.

  “And so night fell,” the Chorus said, “and the sky above the mountain of the gods was rent by a great light, and those above who penned the destiny of Earth and Heaven felt their hands tremble, and watched as blotted ink spread across the parchment in their hands, and wept to see their work undone.” Then the Chorus stood, mouths half-open, as if unsure what to say next.

  Their white make-up began to smear and run in the falling rain.

  Romanticore

  Fucked half a hundred times by love, and still I look for more. I don’t know why, but since I was fifteen I’m not happy—or don’t even call it happy, I’m not functional, I’m not awake—if I’m not pursuing, or being pursued, or in the midst of an affair.

  So this thing I’m going to tell you about, remember it’s a love story, despite the lions and the murder and the jazz music; all that’s important, but it doesn’t detract from the essence of the thing. A love story. It’s very important to me that I have one good love story, one where love conquers something, or saves someone, and I think this is it. Everything else, all the other times, might have been bullshit and wilting flowers, but this was real.

  And while it’s probably not the bloodiest love story you’ve ever heard, what with Shakespeare and all, I bet it ranks up there.

  ***

  It all started two days after things finally disintegrated totally with Susie. (Even her name makes me curl my lip in disgust now; so infantile, so cutesy, such a conscious oxymoron sort of name for a woman with four silver rings in her face, slash-dyed black-and-henna hair, combat boots, eyeliner so heavy it almost makes a domino mask.) We broke up because she was cheating on me, which is pretty hilarious, really, since we had an open relationship. She could fuck anybody she wanted, date other people, I didn’t care, I’ve never been the jealous type (unlike Martin, but we’ll get to him, oh, boy, will we ever get to him). We only had two rules: have safe sex, and if you’re fucking somebody else, tell me about it. That’s all; precautions and disclosure.

  So she starts sleeping with my best friend, and they don’t tell me about it, because they think I’ll be mad. Jesus. I would’ve been happy to hear she was screwing Nick. At least I like him, he’s a definite cut above the usual buzz-cut muscle-shirt troglodytes she hooks up with, god knows why those guys want to sleep with her, when the closest she’s ever come to a gym is standing outside of one smoking a cigarette while waiting for a bus. But Nick and Susie thought I’d fly into a rage, that they’d be stepping on some weird territorial taboo, so they snuck around behind my back until one day I came home early because the coffee shop where I usually work was being fumigated and I found them in my bed. And at first I was like, “Whoops, guys, I’ll go grab a bagel and come back in a little bit,” but they totally freaked out and then it was true confessions time, they’d been doing this for two months now, every chance they get, and they’re so sorry and the secrecy is driving them crazy. Oh, and we’re like totally in love, Susie says; and we’re gonna make a go of it; and I’m moving in with Nick; and we’re gonna be monogamous, because this open-relationship thing is just too stressful; and we’re really sorry, Ray.

  I don’t know if they had safe sex or not, but it’s not like I’ve never been in bed with Nick (I’ve been in like ten threesomes and one out-and-out orgy with the guy, we go way back) so it doesn’t worry me too much.

  After they said their piece I told them to fuck off, and they had enough respect for me to do so with a minimum of fuss, and fifteen minutes later I was sitting in my little apartment over the scary convenience store, smoking a cigarette and ashing into a beer can, wondering what happened. That morning I had a girlfriend, admittedly one who sulked a lot and borrowed money all the time, but still, a girlfriend, and I had a best friend to shoot pool and walk around downtown with and pick up chicks with, and now maybe I didn’t have either one. So I put on some bitter emo-indie-punk music—Agent Ink, this band from down south somewhere, I think it was—and lay back on my futon staring at the ceiling with its totally appropriate nasty waterspots. Hello, squalor, my old friend.

  I took a nap. Didn’t get any work done, but none of my deadlines were exactly looming. I’m a writer, and I actually make a living that way (if you call this living, ha ha), with a lot of hustle. I do music reviews for one of the local papers, and anything else I can scrounge up, textbook articles, advertising copy, the occasional feature article. I fill in with proofreading and when things get really rough I work the door at a club a friend of mine owns, or run sound or lights somewhere. It’s a pretty hand-to-mouth living, but I went to college on a scholarship and I’ve never even had a credit card, so I don’t have the sort of debt most of my friends do. Don’t own a car. I ghost along.

  So that night I mostly moped and slept, tried to decide if I’d really miss Susie, knowing I’d really miss Nick, because he’s the kind of guy who wouldn’t be cool with hanging out with me after this. Slept badly, but slept. The next day I went to the coffee shop (which still smelled like bug spray) with my laptop and snagged a table in the one corner that the sun never hits all day long, and I drank cup after cup of black coffee and typed my fingers to the bone, like I do most every day. An article about the discovery of radium for a high school science book. Another about the battle of the Thames for a different book. Proofreading some boring-ass article about mixing boards for a music magazine. All of it good for keeping me from thinking about Susie and Nick, from wondering what they were doing that morning, probably having sex at Nick’s place, which wouldn’t bother me except I’ll never be in bed with either of them again.

  After work I went home, plugged in the laptop, and sent off the work I did to the interested parties. With luck checks would appear in my mailbox soon. Writing can be a bitch like that; the checks come whenever, usually about two days after you absolutely positively must have the money. When I think about how much my rent costs, I automatically tack on the extra $25 I get charged for paying late, since I can’t remember the last time I managed to pay it on time. Then I puttered around online a little, looking for writing jobs, didn’t find anything, looked at some porn, didn’t get turned on, checked my e-mail, didn’t have anything interesting. I decided to go out and get drunk because I’ve just been jilted by my girl for my best friend, and damn, that’s a reason to get drunk, innit?

  I went to Black Glass, which is dim and smoky and has Bikini Kill and Sparklehorse on the jukebox and live music lots of nights. I sat at one of the discus-sized tables and ordered a pint of Guinness, because I hadn’t had dinner, and I’d heard you could live off Guinness if you didn’t mind getting scurvy in the process. I figured I’d soften myself up with a few pints, then start ordering hi-test vodka to finish myself off. I could stagger home from Black Glass no matter how drunk I got; it was only three and a half blocks.

  Halfway through my second pint, with Neutral Milk Hotel wailing on the jukebox, a bunch of college kids came in, dressed in full faux-punk regalia, clothes bought from expensive stores in the mall, meant to look like clothes scrounged out of the bin at the Salvation Army. They took the table next to mine and started babbling and braying and drowning out the music, bumping into my chair, generally being shits—and this was before they’d even started drinking. I gave them as baleful a stare as I could manage, glaring hard enough you’d think they’d turn to stone, but they didn’t even notice me. So I slumped, defeated, and picked up my glass and relocated to the bar, where there were three empty stools. I sat on the middle one and felt pleasantly insulated from the cruel world. I drained my beer and looked at the smudged-up mirror behind the bar. (No, I’m not gonna take this staring-in-the-mirror-moment opportunity to describe my face. It’
s just a fucking ordinary guy’s face.)

  I looked in the mirror and saw her, down at the other end of the bar. Ash-blonde, probably in her late thirties but looking good, a face that was both pretty and comfortable, if you know what I mean; she wasn’t caked up with make-up or hiding behind her hair or anything, just a nice pleasant face, looked like somebody you could talk to, and maybe more than talk to. She had her eyes closed, but not like she was sleeping; like she was listening. Her dress was loose and black, satiny-reflective. I must’ve been looking at her for two minutes at least before she opened her eyes, not blinking sleepily but snap, right open, and she looked right at me, my face in the mirror, my eyes.

  Her eyes were as black and reflective as her dress, a solid dark gleam, without white or iris.

  I jumped or something, I think. She glanced down, sort of secretly smiling at her drink, then looked back up at me, kind of coyly, but not in a bullshit way. I don’t think I’d ever met a girl before who could look coy without also looking manipulative. Her eyes weren’t black anymore, just normal eyes, though I couldn’t tell what color in the dimness. That glimpse of blackness was just the bad light, I figured, or her face reflecting on a dirty part of the mirror, or just me being drunk. I didn’t think about her black eyes again until much, much later.

  We kept looking at each other in the mirror, her sort of smiling, me—I don’t know what. Thinking she looked even better with her eyes open, probably. I wanted to go over and talk to her, sure, but more than that I wanted her to come talk to me. Then there’d be no chance that I was misinterpreting her look; I mean, maybe she wasn’t looking at me at all. Hard to tell what’s what, in a mirror.

  Then she gave me a bigger smile, shrugged a little, put some money on the bar, and stood up, pulling her purse strap over her shoulder.

  I looked down into my beer. Just a swallow left. I could stay here and get bombed out of my skull, to make a match for my bombed-out heart... or I could do something else.

  I was just drunk enough to do something else. If I hadn’t... but hell. That’s an idiot’s game, playing what-might’ve-been. You always lose that game. So I’ll just tell you what was.

  I followed her. She went out the door, and I came after her and said, “Hey.”

  She stopped by the curb and looked at me. “Hey yourself,” she said, and her voice was sibilant, smoky, a voice you could listen to for hours, a voice that would go down like good whiskey goes down, smooth and warm.

  I held out my hand. “I’m Ray.”

  She shook my hand, briefly. “Lily.”

  And then we were looking at each other again, just like before, and I had no idea what to say, still, so I said, “Um, I wondered, I wanted to buy you a drink, but you left, so...” I shrugged. “What can I do instead?”

  “Do you like jazz?”

  “That depends. New Orleans, Traditional, Bop, Chicago style, Dixieland, ragtime, fusion...? I don’t get into fusion much.”

  She cocked her head. I had the feeling I’d passed a test. “Pretty traditional. Five piece. Sax, drums, clarinet, trumpet, and upright bass. Called the Blue Rock Quintet. They’re playing at a little place downtown, the Spiral Down club.”

  I waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. “Is that an invitation?” I said.

  “It’s information. That’s where I’m going, though.”

  I smiled. “Want to share a cab?”

  ***

  Before two hours were gone, I knew I was in it again, that I wanted to know this woman. The Blue Rock Quintet was an all-female jazz group, a pretty rare thing, and they were good, really well-balanced, though the sax player was the best of them, a tall woman with short black hair, wearing a tux with tails. She was hot, and the music she played made her even hotter, but there was no one but Lily for me then, it was all about the way she lost herself in the music, the way she looked at me, the way she leaned in close to talk between songs.

  Was Lily just a rebound? Shit, in my vocabulary, the only thing “rebound” means is the bounce off a backboard in basketball. I’ve been going from woman to woman my whole life, it’s less a rebound and more like a skipped stone, or chain-smoking. Lily was there, and she was it, and she made me wonder why I’d spent so much time with Susie, that bundle of eye make-up and neuroses; when there was someone like Lily, so comfortable in her skin, making me so comfortable, too.

  The Spiral Down was tiny, the tables right up against the stage, but the effect was cozy rather than claustrophobic. After listening to two sets, Lily leaned in close to my ear and said, “Let’s go someplace we can talk.” I nodded, and followed her out. We walked down the block, chatting about the music, until we got to a mostly deserted café, nobody inside but a guy with a shaved head scribbling furiously in a black notebook, and a yuppie wearing headphones working at a laptop. We ordered drinks (she got coffee, just coffee, and I did likewise; a match made in heaven) and sat down in a corner, beneath a dangling mobile, crescents of steel, only shiny on the edges, hanging on wires.

  “So,” she said, looking at me appraisingly, half a smile hanging around her lips.

  “So?” My left foot was tapping on the floor, seemingly of its own volition, and with an effort I stopped it. I felt jittery, really keyed up, and wondered if ordering coffee was such a good idea.

  “Having fun?”

  “Hell, yes. I didn’t expect to have fun tonight.”

  She nodded. “Think you’ll keep having fun if you keep seeing me?”

  I tried to keep my big goofy grin under wraps, and only partly succeeded. “The current evidence seems to suggest that I will.”

  “Me, too. I’d like to go out with you again.”

  “I’m pretty sure I can free up my schedule.”

  She leaned forward, close to me, and for the first time I saw the little lines around her eyes, and the word that came to mind was careworn. I thought her face was beautiful, just touched by laugh lines, crying lines, life lines. “But there’s something you should know. My relationship situation is a little unusual.”

  How many times had I started this conversation, mostly with girls who were maybe sophomores in college, explaining to them that I hadn’t been in a monogamous relationship since I was seventeen, and had no intention of ever going back to the Land of Jealous Possession? I wondered if she was one of those hard-core polyamorous types, and if she’d start in about her co-primaries and her nested secondaries in an N-structure, and how we could at best have a tertiary relationship with bimonthly sex privileges. The jargon can get pretty extreme, though I don’t have much use for it, myself, preferring to say, “Yeah, we’re friends, and we sleep together sometimes,” rather than “I’m her tertiary with secondary tendencies” or some shit like that.

  But Lily didn’t get into any of that. She said, “I have a boyfriend, named Martin, and we’ve been together for over ten years. He’s a musician, though, and he spends about six months a year traveling, playing with different groups. I went with him a couple of times, and it was fun, roaming all over Europe—he gets a lot of gigs in Europe—but it’s not the kind of life I’m built for. I’m too much of a homebody. So for the past eight years or so we’ve had a different arrangement. While he’s here in town, for four months, six months, whatever, we’re together, and it’s great. And when he leaves, I see whoever I want, until he gets back.” She shrugged. “It works pretty well. I don’t get bothered about the women he sleeps with on the road, and he doesn’t get bothered about the people I see when he’s gone.”

  I mulled that over. “So he’s on the road now?”

  “Yep. In Greece, last I heard.”

  “When’s he going to be back?”

  “It’s a little uncertain, but probably in October.”

  It was early May. Five months sounded like... forever. How many dates had I been on that turned into relationships that lasted longer than five months, anyway? Not many. And I knew about this Martin guy, so I could keep that in my head, not get too attached even if things did go well w
ith Lily. “Sounds good to me,” I said.

  “And even if you and I really hit it off, that doesn’t mean I won’t see other—”

  I held up my hand. “Say no more. It’s cool.” And I told her about Susie and Nick and the brief history of my love life, and we knew we understood each other.

  That night was the beginning of something beautiful. In the short term, anyway. In the longer term, it was just a small part of something pretty monstrous.

  ***

  The next five months were great. I could go on about it, tell you in detail about my summer of love with Lily. She was a freelance graphic designer, so her schedule was nearly as flexible as mine (though she got more work, and made more money, than I did). We did all-night film festivals, where we’d each pick out two movies and watch them on the DVD at her place. So she saw The Brood and It Came from Outer Space and The Masque of the Red Death for the first time, and I saw The Lady Eve and Sullivan’s Travels and Queen of the Nile. We had picnics in the park, fried chicken and big roast beef sandwiches—I’ve never known a more joyfully carnivorous woman—and went roller-skating, which I hadn’t done since junior high. We took a couple of weekend trips (her treat) to the country, which we spent in bed and on hiking trails in roughly equal proportion. And we went to dozens and dozens of shows, plays and concerts and poetry slams, and at every one she seemed to know a performer, or the guy working the door, or the woman working the lights, and half the time she got us in free, which is pretty much the epitome of cool in my book. She was so good for me, too. I mean, you know guys like me; I wear black, I smoke too much, I like obscure music, I talk shit, I’m the master of irony and sarcasm, I sleep all day and stay up all night, I’m cooler-than-thou; it’s been my thing for years. But with Lily, I loosened up, laughed more, and the world didn’t seem so painfully tedious and tawdry and stupid anymore. I was, to be as cliché as possible, stopping to smell the roses, and they smelled good.