The window was open, the sill dusty with ash and a teetering cocktail glass,
and my neighbor's Spanish opera was wafting up to me. It was August, the
fan whining and hot as hell. I slammed down the book I was reading and slouched
into heels.
***
The Moroccan gate slipped closed, and I strode head-down through the sprawled
men, cups hanging limp with dimes, up to the corner where a crowd had gathered.
Outside of the HA-RA, a young girl was lying, bleeding from the forehead. A
man in a white shirt was holding a paper towel to her head and muttering, rocking
her back and forth to the curious-impassive stares. She was absolutely still.
I stabbed both hands into my pockets and turned back. Tip-tapped past piss-stained
doorways, Asian markets, kiosks hawking bright cable car chocolate molds, to
a woman kneeling on the curb, sticking a needle into her purple-veined thigh.
***
In the lobby, under red arches vestigial from the 20s, I ran into the boy
across the hall.
"Paul, there's someone, like, DEAD out there."
"Well, if that's what's happening, then, honey, I don't
NEED to see it. Come on, let's have a drink."
"That's sweetie to you. Okay." I followed him into the elevator,
a brass cage edged with marbled mirrors, and watched the grated concrete slide
past under the bars. "Are you sure we shouldn't...?"
"Shouldn't what? Claire, look, you know how it is, the last thing
you need in your life is 'getting involved' with someone else's
sordid drama... do you really want the police to know your phone number?"
"Tr-ue. Right." The bell shrilled and we clattered through the
hall to #608. The cage slithered down with an admirable whir. There were sirens
outside.
***
A poster from Evita hung in the small room, next to
an array of ruffled shirts. Paul poured a long drone of champagne into glasses,
topped them with a flourish of orange juice, and sighed as he passed one over.
I tasted the acid under the fruit before the sip went down. I curled up, kicking
off the Goodwill heels and trying not to watch the long sweep of a seam down
his leg, his large hands quartering a lime and dropping a piece into my glass.
I looked down and my hands were still shaking.
A long siren wail belled through the window.
Paul sat down next to me, crossed his pointed boots just so at the ankle, and
folded an arm around my shoulder. "It's okay, Claire, remember,
these things happen everyday, and whether or not they happen to us is pure chance
that we'll never be able to understand."
"Oh, you're so comforting. Do you practice how to give your patients
that extra-delicious sense of no hope and total despair? Oh desespoir!"
"Claire."
I leaned my head back into his shoulder, knowing I shouldn't
hope. His hand came around and stroked my collarbone, effervescence of the cheap
champagne, the pinpricks. I reached for the condensation, letting him run his
hand along my bare arm, trying not to fall into him and beg. I always tried.
The fan swished through ten years of Madonna records and postcards from Buenos
Aires. A thin wail came through the window. I dug my nails into his chest and
rolled into a kiss.
***
From the glossy wood sequin-dotted, from my prone body, Paul lifted his head
and said, "I can't do it, Claire."
"You can't..." My shirt was halfway under the fainting
couch.
"I can't give you what you want as a man." He wiped a soft
fragment of hair behind an ear, sheepish. I reached up to wrench him in, but
I could feel the lack of tension that said limp, said no, said not now.
"Just. Not. Cute. Enough."
"No. no, it's not you."
"It's not you, it's me? Oh come on."
"Claire, I'm gay, you know that."
"Somehow I'd been tacitly ignoring it. Funny how that happens.
No, not funny." I turned my face away and began scrambling around for
my clothes. Turned into a dim spider trying to fade flesh-tone into blond-wood
into no, not a girl, not naked on his floor at all. Paul was leaning back on
his haunches, watching guiltily as I slunk into my shoes, leaned over to place
a small hand on his, and crept out the door.
I looked back, saw him place a hand palm down where my face had been, saw him
trace a finger along the woodgrain and shadow.
***
Arm up, hailing a cab, vicious-tense alone on Geary St., I chanted,
"come-on-come-on, come-on" and like a dream a checker cab veered out of nowhere
and pulled up, flashing bright. I fell into the faux-leather grey, and it wasn't
until we were careening down Van Ness that I started to cry. Diner neon and
worn bars, warehouses and the screech of ambulances fell through the dark. I
watched the colors stream past like a glaze, wiping tears off my face.
The taxi pulled up to a dark storefront with a trickle of cigarette-tossers.
There was no sign. I paid the old man and clenched my teeth as I set foot on
the asphalt.
***
Here and Now You Will Do This, I thought, resolutely pushing
through the leather curtains into the bass and synth-dicing. Spangles and shadows,
pale shoulders under strobe. I slid in, lurking, I was dead already and hung
on the wall like the gilt mirrors reflecting just more faces, more twitching
noses and fluttering eyes.
A hand swiped my shoulder and I turned around, to Spencer passing me a drink
I didn't need and saying, "Claire, are you alright, you're
pulling deer-in-the-headlights again." A glow-sticked cigarette girl leered
at us, vulgar, waving her green neon roses, as I grabbed him by the hand and
said, "Come on, let's go." Pummeled by elbows and sloshes
of gin, I dragged him through red velour to slam us both on a couch. Smoke-machine
drift hid the cigarette burns, but I could feel them as I picked nervously,
the adrenaline, the spear of blood I saw as I dropped through the checker door
and swept off the street, Paul quartering a lime and dropping it like toxic
alka-seltzer through a plume of champagne, fizzing and running over. A pool
of dark water was inching from the bathroom door, along the chipped black-painted
floor, beneath the rapid questions Spencer was throwing at me.
"No, it's not that, no, I'm not high, no, I just feel a little
bit, well, rather an extra-lot..." And then I trailed off to the dim haze, watching
the shoulders and hands of the sweaty, giddy, helpless people dancing. The tense
beat lulled me, and I leaned back into the leather, running my hands through
the dim animal pile of it, and said, "It's nothing... it's nothing..."
Andrea Lambert lives in San Francisco. She recently
finished her first novel, Jet Set Desolate, "a chronicle of damned
glitterati in the thrall of drugs and desire." This is her first story
for Lime Tea.
