Perfect Lightning

Today you take a trip, your mouth still tasting like backwash, and dirty martinis, and the carpet you laid the flat side of your face on, absolutely too drunk to move. Someone out there is very proud of you for leaving. Your boyfriend, tall as mountains, leads you out of the apartment with the party still a cacophony behind him.

“Can you get home?”

You are already calling the cab. You wave, two fingers, like an infant, and wrap your dirty fur jacket closer around your shoulders.

“I’ll see you.” He shuts the door.

Outside the night drops fat rain on the backs of your legs, runs under the soles of your tall stilt boots. The street smells like a wet dog. The cab driver pulls up and you give him your card without thinking. He drives you away. You lean against the window, your hair wisping across the cold glass.

The inside of the cab is slick black, and you slide forward in your seat on the velvet of your dress. Something low and soothing plays over the radio. You pop a Tylenol, drink from a bottle. You take something for motion sickness. You’ve done this before. The cab veers left on your street, right on your driveway. You pick up your purse and leave the car. On the way up you spill over the sidewalk, skinning knees, your hands on the pavement, dirt in your system, blood on the gravel.

San Francisco can be precarious. Your skinny town house stands at a tilt, the bottom floor sheared in half by the slope of the street, and this is the lean you trip on. The streets are damp and when the fog rolls the cold bites at your wet hair. This was not your idea. Your boyfriend led you here, by the hand to the moving truck. In the back with the breakables safely folded in your lap, you didn’t know how far away you’d go.

“Surprise, honey,” he said to you when you stepped out.

His teeth glinted blue by the mothlight, his smile wide like the savannah. Your house looked regal in the night time: Doric columns, turrets and a bay window. Powder blue like a Tiffany box. On the inside it was all leaky faucets, hardwood that left teeth in your slippers. There were six people living there, two to a floor. The floor beneath you, Mrs. Glasgow in a converted office with her infant son. On the first floor, two men and a black dog. You and your boyfriend lived in the slanty attic apartment, up three sets of stairs, a bed and a sink, an unfinished room where the air tickled of fiberglass.

“We could make a life here.”

Now you climb the long steps up, hands on the railings, rubbing them red. You hunt for a bandaid, find one masquerading as a bookmark. You slice it in half with toenail clippers, stick two sides on two palms. The raw on your knees is too big to cover. Lying down on the bed, the room whirls around you like a wipeout.

He was your high school sweetheart, an art-freak band-geek kind of pairing. Your mom always said you had such a pretty brain. Back then his eyes were the only ones looking out of your little rural town, and he promised he’d take you with him. Everyone else looked to the sky, checking weather, fingers in the air, feeling for wind. Their mind on the harvest. In the fall, on the winter-wheat sheared to grass in the farmlands, he’d serenade you, pale hands on his black guitar. For years those hands held yours, guided you down the stairs of the bus, shifted your hair against the wind. They were steady, those hands. He needed steady hands to play good guitar. Your hands used to shake.

They shake no longer. You work 9 to 5 as a model, the nude kind, arms poised over your head in an art studio with the floodlights on. With your legs crossed, you suggest a pirouette. With your knees bent you are tai-chi freeze-framed. You are paid twenty an hour, not bad for excessive stillness. When you are home you practice the art you went to school for. Two silhouettes liplocked in a wire sculpture. The text of Beowulf embroidered on dinner napkins. You leave your projects half done on your nightstand, you do this for fun. He is the one with art as an occupation, recording in a cork room, plugged into his guitar, his cymbals on the side.

The wind picks up and the cymbals sway next to the open window. You get up, sit them flat on the floor.

Last time they fell, they clattered and bounced. Mrs. Glasgow from the floor under crashed through your door with her bathrobe on, tomato sauce dripping from the spoon in her hand.

“Shut the hell up, my baby’s sleeping.”

He froze. Your fingers wrapped around his hands. His steady hands around your neck. You were sitting on the bed in a dress made out of oil slick. He was leaning over you, curved like a C, bloody where you scratched.

Crickets. Then, a mumble: “That dress coulda been our rent.” He loosened.

Mrs. Glasgow backed out without turning around.

Louder: “An eight-hundred dollar dress.”

She closed the door.

Of course he apologized. Rubbed tiger balm where his fingers had been, tucked you to bed. Promised he’d never do it again. Of course. You were rolled in the sheets with the dress bunched against your spine. With his blood on the hem they wouldn’t take it back.

That dress lies in your closet now, and you reach for it. It still gleams, even wrapped in crepe paper with the insides out, even with the black-red stains, drops like jewels on the neck. It’s sickening to look at it. You wear it. Spin in the mirror.

That night he left the house with his good suit on.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going busking. I’ll make up the money. Consider the dress a present.”

He didn’t. That’s the way it goes with a city so big. Everyone there to capitalize on their talent. Hard to tell his hopeful blaze the world is chock full of people with acoustic guitars. You bit your tongue when he came back quarters. You softened your mouth.

“I can work overtime. It was my fault.”

Overtime meant the stillness settled, and when you got back to your house it was hard to shake out. You spent long nights shifting against the jumbles of your body, the kinks in your bones. He was out with his guitar on his knee, with buskers and barmen. He was always out.

Before San Francisco, you lived on a cul-de-sac, everyone since grade school only a few streets over. You had more, then. Your town was the kind to center on a strip mall. A Safeway and a Dairy Queen surrounded by miles of grass.

“Don’t you get sick of it?” he used to ask you.

“Don’t you get sick of him?” Betty and Polly used to ask you, too, first in the shake shack over Neapolitan ice-cream, now over Skype, both faces crammed on one screen.

“He’s not so bad.”

“He’s a deadbeat.”

“He’s my deadbeat.”

He always spoke like he held something brighter than your little town could afford. Hard not to moth over to his light. And he was always so hopeful. Almost naïve. To him, San Francisco would be like sailing in a skiff among the stars, weightless and free and beautiful. He thought it would be easy.

The hope never tore, just sat alongside fear when he came back from a show with a six person audience. When he couldn’t sell his CDs he gave them out at cafes, hoping for recognition. Your dollars ran short, and when they did, he bit. You grew to watch for a shake in his steady hand.

When he hit you again, you were not prepared. And he did not apologize.

“You made me look bad.”

You were sprawled sideways, on the floor with your eyes on his shoes. The tall mountain wearing them, hands as red as your cheek.

“That was my chance. You blew it.”

Your face rubbed against the carpet as you picked yourself up. It was plush, the colour of eggshells. Who puts a carpet in a bathroom? You were one door away from the stacked pile of champagne, tequila shots topped with orange and lime, the kind of vodka that comes in a skull.

“You’re a disgrace.”

This was a classy party. Black tie optional. You were going to wear that oil slick dress. You bought it to impress. You stood at the cash counter at Nordstrom with all your nickels and dimes, saved tips, the cut ends of paychecks, your dress tucked in a box in a paper bag. Even with her eyebrows raised, incredulous, the cashier commended your good taste.

“That was Jackson James. He could have jump-started my career.”

This was at a friend of a friend’s apartment. She finally made it big. She had a big production lined up in Oakland, Shakespeare on Ice. Jackson James got her there.

“I’ll never find him again. He’ll never hear me play.”

You threw up on a black suit. With so many bowties in one room how were you to know which one belonged to who?

The room was packed tight with the art world. You, a figure, not an artist, could drink more easily than speak. All you needed was a jostle. A kick. Another martini, extra dirty, please. Jackson James took it kindly.

“Dry cleaners exist for a reason, my dear. Do take care of yourself. I was looking to make my exit soon, anyways.”

When Jackson James left, no one noticed but your tall mountain. He was standing by the kitchen, his guitar strung over his shoulder, his hand crunched around a tumbler. There was iron in his grip on your shoulder. He took you to a lockable room. Raised his fist in the air.

You trace the line of his hand on the side of your face, still steaming. This is not what you were promised. In the moonlight the oil slick glows. You fold up your velvet dress with the throwup on the front, leave it on the bed. Alone, the tangle in your spine drops. There is safety in an empty room. The rain beats so hard it mists on your windowsill, leaks through your celling. It clangs on the surface of his cymbals. You reach over to dry them, automatically. Your hands hold dinner napkins, the thin text of Beowulf embroidered on its edges, rubbed wet. Was this what you wanted? The clock reads, fuzzy, 1:30 am, and outside it breaks into perfect lightning. This is your cue. You pack your bags. There’s much to do. Credit cards to cancel. Buses to find. One of them must take you home.