I drink my shot fast enough that he must feel confident in the fact that I have already been corrupted, because a few minutes later when he’s finished with some customers at the other end of the bar, he comes back and, without a word, refills my glass.
He leans over the counter and scans the crowd.
“You guys know Sophie?” he asks.
“What?”
He points and I turn to see the girl from the record shop talking to Meg. They are both beaming, and then Meg starts jumping up and down.
“We met her earlier,” I say. “We invited her to the show.”
Soon Meg has pried Bev from her redhead and rescued Alexa from a group of college guys, and she’s up at the bar telling me that we have places to go.
“And by places,” she says, “I mean Sophie’s apartment. We are going to have a dance party.”
“A dance party? Are you joking?”
“I wouldn’t joke about something like this,” Meg says, so excited that she looks almost deranged. She grabs me around the waist and pulls me off the bar stool. When I unfold my wallet the bartender shakes his head.
“I don’t take money from children,” he says.
“Do you mind taking your shoes off?” Sophie says at the door. “My baby just started crawling, so I want to keep the carpet clean for her.”
The carpet is bright red shag. It matches the pattern of her dress so perfectly that I wonder if it came that way or if she chose the color. The girls all kick off their sandals, and I bend over to untie my laces. Blood rushes to my head; I almost stumble over. I catch myself, though, and soon I’m following the rest of them into Sophie’s living room, which is decorated all retro with a yellow sofa and a beanbag chair, and tin signs decorating the walls, and a small, banged-up, but still cool, dinette set in the corner with red-and-white striped vinyl chairs.
A woman turns off the television and gets up from the couch. She smiles a simultaneous hello and good-bye, and slips out.
Meg is already across the room, gazing at the framed Supremes album cover. I make my way over to her.
Scrawled in black pen over the olive-green background is, Dear Steve. With love, Diana.
“Who’s Steve?” Meg asks.
“I have no idea,” Sophie answers.
Meg reaches out and traces Diana with her finger, and Sophie crosses the carpet to the record player. She finds a record, puts it on.
“This is the album I sold you earlier,” she says. The record crackles and then the simple guitar chords and piano begin, and a woman sings, honestly, plainly, giving someone permission to break her heart.
“This is so good,” I say.
But old songs are so short, and it’s over almost immediately. When Meg manages to part from the framed record, Sophie asks us, “Do you want to see my baby?”
We all nod, even Bev, and Sophie makes us promise to be silent as the five of us tiptoe, barefoot, down the carpeted hallway. Sophie twists the knob and pushes open the door. We follow her in.
The crib is in the center of the room, with padding on the sides so we can’t see through the wooden bars. We gather around it.
There she is.
One foot sticks out of the blanket, covered by little pink footie pajamas. Sophie covers the foot with the lightweight yellow blanket and the baby breathes in and then sighs. Sophie smiles and rests her hand on the baby’s belly and we stand for a moment like this, together, watching her hand rise and fall with each breath.
“Sometimes,” Sophie whispers, “I wake her up just to hold her. I can’t help myself.”
I look up at Sophie’s face and watch as she watches the baby. Sophie’s so young, it’s crazy. I can’t even fathom it—being responsible for a tiny person’s life in just a couple of years. Paying rent not just for a room in a shared apartment, but for the entire apartment. In a way, though, it might ease the burden of decision making. The future wouldn’t be so open; the list of possibilities would shorten. All the vast and terrifying questions—Where should I go? Who should I be?—would be replaced with absolutes. Rent an apartment. Find a job. Be a parent. Soon I’m seeing it. Bev and me back in the city, moving into a tiny two-bedroom. I’m working in an art supply store and she’s waitressing at some cool new neighborhood restaurant, and we’re tied to each other not only by love but also by this baby who we have to feed and dress and rock to sleep. And okay, maybe the whiskey is fucking with my head, but thinking about it fills me with longing for Bev again. Not anger, not even confusion. Just love. And hope. That one day we might have something like that.
“She’s so tiny,” Alexa whispers.
“Can I draw her?” I ask, before even thinking about asking.
Sophie cocks her head, looks at me curiously, but says, “Sure,” and I’m relieved because I have to do something with this feeling.
So I go back out to the living room and grab my stetchbook and pencil, and then I return to the side of the crib and start to lay it out on the page. Soon Bev leaves, followed by Alexa. Then it’s just Sophie and Meg and the baby and me.
“What happened with her dad?” Meg asks.
“We were never that serious.”
“So he left?”
“Not exactly,” Sophie says. “He offered to stay. I decided that I’d rather do it on my own. It’s difficult, but it’s better this way. To be just two.”
“Was he a crappy guy?”
“No,” she says. “But I didn’t love him.”
They stand with me for a while longer. I’m working on the folds of the blanket, the shape of the baby’s body beneath it. Soon I get to her face. Her eyelashes, her full cheeks, her tiny, pouty lips, and her little chin, and Meg declares it time to get back to the records and Sophie tells me to take my time. She leaves the door open and light floods in from the hall. I sketch the baby’s delicate fingers, her thin curls. Then her eyelids flicker and she sighs and moves a little bit, and I’m afraid that she’s going to wake up. I put my hand down on her belly, the way Sophie did, and she breathes deep again and then quiets. She is so small and so warm.
Back out in the living room, the record louder now, an upbeat song playing, Sophie asks to see my drawing. I show her.
“This is incredible,” she says, and though that might be an overstatement, it did turn out pretty well.
“Look at her little earlobe,” she gasps. “It’s perfect. It’s exactly like her.”
“Here,” I say, tearing the page out of the book. “You keep it.”
“Really?” she asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “Of course.”
Her face brightens and she darts up from the couch and over to a chest which she opens and rummages through.
“I got this at a garage sale a few weeks ago.” She lifts out an old frame that’s tarnished in a cool way. “I think it’ll fit.”
She makes me sign the drawing and then she puts it in the frame, and places the frame on a shelf near the signed record.
“I love this,” she says. “Love it. How do you draw like that?”
I laugh. “I don’t know,” I say. “It’s what I do.”
I know that I’m good at drawing, but I’ve been doing it for so long that I don’t even think about it that much. But she’s standing here, surveying me like I’ve just performed magic. I start to get uncomfortable, so I laugh and say, “Hey, I thought this was a dance party,” and soon everyone is dancing. Everyone except for Bev, who takes a seat on the beanbag chair and gets out her sculpting tools.
Meg and Sophie take turns at the record player, changing the tracks from one upbeat song to the next. We dance by ourselves, all together, in pairs. I’m tired and the alcohol hits me in waves. One moment I don’t feel anything, and then the next I’m reeling.
A new song starts and Sophie grabs my hand.
“Most guys look so awkward when they dance,” she says. “Not you.”
“There’s a reason for that,” I tell her.
“Oh, yeah?” She arches an eyebrow.
“It’s because I don’t give a shit,” I say. And when I say it, I believe it. Because really, it doesn’t matter: Bev can make out with a girl in a bar, and I can go home and live with my dad, and my mom can live in Paris forever, and we might all still be okay. In just a little while we will forget all the things we used to want and adjust to the lives that we’re given.
But Sophie laughs. She reaches out, grabs me around the waist, pulls me close. I stumble into her soft arms and feel her body against my chest.
“That’s not why,” she says into my ear.
Bev watches me from across the room where she sits, carving a drum kit. When she catches me looking back, she turns to her piece of wood.
I close my eyes.
The room spins and Sophie and I spin with it. Her eyelashes brush my forehead every time she blinks.
“Why is it then?” I ask, my mouth close to her ear this time.
“It’s because you feel it so much,” she says. I smile wide without pulling away because, of course, she’s right. Before the song fades out, Meg starts a new one. Fast, showy piano, drums, and harmonizing women crackle through the speakers, and then a woman sings, One fine day . . . She sounds so happy even though she’s singing about being dumped, and I can’t tell if she actually believes that the guy she’s singing to will ever love her, but it hardly matters because Sophie and I are moving faster to keep up with the tempo, and Meg is jumping and spinning around the room, pink hair everywhere, and Alexa dances like a hippie, all blissed out with her arms snaking above her.
I spin Sophie and when she comes back to me, I say, “You’re right. I love this.”
“It’s The Chiffons,” she says. “You have to love it.”
But I don’t just mean the music. I mean all of this, everything, the desperation of the song and the imprints of our feet on the red shag rug, Sophie’s strawberry-print dress, the record player and every single record. The baby, sleeping through everything, sleeping through us. Meg and Alexa and Bev and Sophie. I’m in love with all of them.
The song ends before Meg has chosen another record, and as the room gets quiet I take a step away from Sophie. The floor tilts; I catch my breath.
“I’m in love with all of you,” I say.
Alexa beams and Meg says, “Love you back.” Sophie steps forward and rumples my hair, and Bev glares at me but the glare hardly matters because all I see are her gorgeous shoulders and her neck and her mouth that I’ve been wanting to kiss forever.
“Don’t look so mad,” I say to her. “Especially you.”
Meg’s slipping a new record out of its sleeve. “But Meg is the first girl I ever saw naked. See, Meg, I didn’t forget.”
“It happened approximately six hours ago. I hope you still remember.”
Another song begins and I walk over to Bev. She’s carving the crash cymbal. She doesn’t look up at me.
“That’s the cutest drum kit I’ve ever seen,” I say, softer, just to her.
I extend my arm toward her. She still doesn’t look.
“Dance with me.”
“I’m carving,” she says.
I don’t say anything; I just keep holding my hand out to her.
“I wouldn’t want to keep you from the unwed mother,” she mutters.
“The unwed mother?” I say. “You can’t be serious.”
She pretends to carve but I can see that she isn’t really doing anything. Finally, she puts the drum kit and the knife down on the chair and looks up at me. She’s trying not to smile.
She grabs my hand and I hoist her up, and then she’s here, I’m holding her close, and we’re dancing to The Supremes singing “Come See About Me.” Diana Ross croons, “No matter what you do or say/I’m gonna love you anyway.”
“Do you think Meg chose this song for me?”
Bev manages to dance and shrug at the same time.
I sing louder over the next verse: “You make out with a girl in a bar/But to me you’re still a superstar.”
Bev blushes and laughs, and I stop dancing and say, “What’s up with that anyway? Why do you always do that in front of me?”
But she shakes her head and grabs my hand and says, “Let’s just not think about anything.”
“That sounds like a good trick,” I say.
“Shh,” she says.
“Sounds like a good trick!” I whisper, and she laughs and covers my mouth with her hand.
Her palm is soft and smells like lotion and wood. I breathe her in. Try to think about nothing but right now.
Back at the hotel, after only an hour of sleep, I wake up with a start. Then I can’t fall back. A crack runs from one corner of the ceiling to the other, where it is joined by two other cracks.
I shut my eyes and try counting.
Maybe I should go to art school. Maybe I should drive, alone, across the country. Maybe I should get a job at a restaurant and move into a room in the Mission.
I can hear Meg breathing. Bev has kicked the blanket off; light from a passing car casts over her.
I stop checking the time.
Dust and cobwebs coat the chandelier.
Maybe I should work on a series of drawings and try to get a café show. Maybe my mother will come back home.
Later, the squeak of bedsprings: movement. I sit up and look. Alexa is easing off her bed, stepping carefully across the room, still night-blind.
“Lex,” I say.
She jumps a little.
“Oh, sorry,” she says. “I was trying to be quiet.”
“No, it’s fine, I was up. I was thinking—Do you really think you can find a job in your notebook for me?”
I move to the edge of the couch, closer to her.
She nods. “I have over seven hundred jobs listed.”
“That’s great,” I say. “So what do you think? Do any of them stand out?”
“Yeah, we can find something.”
“Want to go out in the hall and look?”
She doesn’t answer.
“Now?” she finally whispers.
“Yeah.”
“I’m actually really tired right now. I was just getting up to pee.”
“But it could be super fun. There’s tea and hot water down in the lobby. I could go grab us some and we could sit out in the hall and look.”
“I don’t know. I’m really tired,” she says. “I think I need to sleep.”
I check my phone. It’s 5:00 A.M. Of course she’s tired.
“Okay, yeah, no problem,” I say.
“We can look in the morning,” she says. “You should sleep, too.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I know.”
When she shuts the door to the bathroom, I slip off the couch and go out into the hall. I head toward a window but what I see only makes me feel worse: a few skinny, jumpy people, hunched over together in the park. I lower myself onto the worn carpet, look down the hall at the long rows of doors, and wonder how many of the rooms are occupied, and who is sleeping, and if anyone else is awake.
After a little while, when the first hints of the sun appear in the window, I walk the three flights of stairs down to the lobby. I say good morning to the woman at the hotel desk. I make myself tea.
Tuesday
“Okay, this question is for me,” Meg says. “‘Meg, do you believe that people can stay in love?’ Ooh, good one.”
“Colby?” Bev calls. It’s startling to hear my name following the question I wrote. At first I was going to avoid real questions again, but then I gave in. If we’re going to spend the car ride doing this, I might as well ask about things I want to know.
“Yeah?” I call up to Bev.
Bev is taking her first driving shift of the trip. She drives more smoothly than Meg, who tends to accelerate every time she gets excited about something and slow down every time she spaces out.
“Can I wear these?” She points to my aviator sunglasses, hanging over the curtains on the window. “Mine are buried in my stuff somewhere.”
When
we first got on 101 this morning, we were surrounded by bright mist that wove around the trees and the bus, but now the fog is dispersing and the sunlight is so intense it’s almost painful.
“Sure,” I say, knowing that usually she wouldn’t ask for permission, she would just put them on. She’s been acting polite and careful around me all morning.
“You bought them for me,” I add. “So I think that means you get to wear them whenever you want to.”
“Thanks.”
“Sure.”
Meg gives me an Oh, please look before resuming the game.
“My answer is yes,” she says. “Completely. I so think that people can stay in love.”
“Our parents are in love,” Alexa says.
“Exactly,” Meg agrees. “And Aunt Reese and Uncle Theo.”
“Oh my gosh, I can’t wait to see them tomorrow night!”
“Me too. You guys are gonna love them. And Colby, your parents are in love, and Bev, yours, too.”
“Staying married is not the same thing as being in love,” Bev says to Meg.
“I never said it was.”
“Yeah, but you just assumed that my parents were in love because they’re married.”
“No. I said they were in love because they always seem happy when I see them together. For a long time, my parents couldn’t even get married. Marriage has nothing to do with it.”
Bev doesn’t respond, just watches the road. I search for her reflection in the windshield but my glasses cover half her face. It’s never crossed my mind that Mary and Gordon might not be happy together, and suddenly, even after Meg’s emphatic yes, doubt creeps in. Maybe Mary and Gordon aren’t in love; maybe my mother isn’t coming home; maybe Bev will never change her mind.
After a few miles, Bev pulls over to a parking lot on the side of the highway so that we can hike down to the river. We wade in the cold water, and I stay a little longer, wander off from the rest of them. I call back all of these memories of my parents and me, taking day trips, cooking dinners, watching movies, making music. Ma laughing, Dad putting his arm around her. We were happy, all three of us.
I am almost sure.