Further Out Than You Thought

For Kurt Valore, and for Hannah, my dearest palindrome

Dedication

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

IT HAD HAPPENED. She'd crossed the finish line.

The transformation was complete. She was no longer her body. Her body was not her. The separation was palpable.

Had you been there, she'd have told you to come closer.

Closer, she'd have said. I'll demonstrate.

Can you feel my nipple, the taut nub against your lip, your tongue, your teeth?

I don't know you?

No, I don't.

Is that a problem? It feels wonderful; it means nothing—nothing more than the fact of itself. It just is, this meeting of flesh.

Is there anywhere else you care to touch?

THE CENTURY LOUNGE was warm and red, like a womb. The walls were red, and the curtains—everywhere there were curtains; between the main stage and the backstage, between the private dance booths and the showroom—red velvet curtains. Day and night were a constant gloaming, and always the room smelled of perfume, of sweat, of pussy and cigarettes. The red and lilac lights lining the main stage sent rays through the smoke as the dancers walked the room with their lit cigarettes, as they leaned toward the ears of the men, also smoking, or eating a burger and fries, but watching, all eyes, as the girls, in passing, whispered, “Wanna peek, up close, twenty bucks,” the chiffon and black lace like forgotten wings waving behind them.

It was a late night in late April, but it could have been any time, any day, any season.

“Mr. Cooper,” she said, standing, pushing in her chair, “I'm up.”

Already Joe the DJ was pitching her dance over the loudspeaker: “And next it's Stevie. Girl next door like you've never seen her before.”

Looking up from his Coke, Mr. Cooper pushed his spectacles up the bridge of his nose. “She's been gone since last night. Didn't even leave a note.” Lost in his personal drama, he'd been repeating himself. Stevie had stayed to listen, but now Devotion was gathering her cash and Stevie was onstage next. He reached into his pocket for the flask of rum and poured. “White girls,” he said, shaking his head. “They just do what they want. Not you, but . . . Think she'll come back?”

“I hope so,” she said.

He opened his wallet, handed her a twenty. “You here tomorrow?”

“Ten in the morning.”

Backstage, she saw Devotion through the smoke, sitting cross-legged on the carpet, flushed and out of breath, the wad of bills in her pink silk slip. Sweat trickled down her hairline and between her breasts, and she pulled her long blond hair off her neck to let it cool. “My mother's out there,” Devotion said. “Came all the way from Wisconsin.”

“To watch you?”

Devotion shrugged, lit a joint. “She doesn't like it,” she said. “But I just gave her a grand.”

In the chair before the mirror sat Brett. Brett had been gone for what seemed to Stevie like months, and now she was back. Stevie watched her lick a fingertip and slick the thin dark arches of her brows.

“Lady Brett,” Stevie said.

“Ms. Smith,” Brett said, and she held her eyes in the mirror, Stevie thought, a second longer than her usual quick glance, before she returned to her reflection, lifting her chin and assessing. Her smooth, black hair framed her dark eyes, her cheekbones, softening the angles. In only her black bra and G-string—what she always wore—her long brown body was easy. Satisfied, she leaned back. “Damn slow night,” she said, talking to herself.

“It's been slow. The recession and all,” said Devotion. “How were things in Portland?”

“The place was crawling with strippers. We thought we might move there, but I couldn't get work.”

Stevie had a hard time believing her. If Brett, with her high curves, couldn't get work, then the men in Portland had to be blind, or else society really was on the verge of collapse. But she was here. She was back. That was all that mattered.

At the club, there were those girls who chose beneficent abstractions for their pseudonyms—Devotion and Mercy, Charity and Love. There were the girls who named themselves after sky-nouns—Heaven, Angel, Star, and Rain. And then there was the small faction of those with literary pseudonyms, consisting of Brett—Lady Brett Ashley out of Hemingway—and Stevie, after the London poet Stevie Smith. They were the minority, and for too long Stevie had been holding the torch on her own.

Devotion put the joint to Stevie's mouth. “Indica,” she said. “Not Sativa. From Mendo.” It was spicy sweet, Turkish, Stevie thought, and smelled like ripe apricots.

Exhaling the smoke, Stevie slipped between the curtains and floated onto the stage. Richie Havens was singing “Lady Madonna,” and the room was a dark and hazy abyss, but something was different. Let go, she told herself, drift, forget yourself in the music. But something had changed. Lights in her eyes. And, closing them, there was the quivering ghost—what a flash does when you get your picture taken.

The photographer was her mother. Always. Smile, she'd say before the flash. Think of peanut butter. Think of whales.

Whales don't eat peanut butter, she'd tell her now.

Through the ghost, she could see, at a front table, the woman who had to be Devotion's mother, with her big hair, a floral-patterned dress, and a cigarette.

As Stevie began her dance—her hands clasped behind her back, her chest out, her lips in a schoolgirl pout—she thought of her own mother, who would be wearing a black T-shirt and jeans, her hair in a ponytail, camera around her neck. Yes. Simone Griffin would be in the far back, taking the scene in a frame at a time—the slant of light made visible by the smoke, the value of the perfect shot, chiaroscuro, the light like spoken words against the dark, wherein lay the silence, the mystery she had liked to say was necessary for art.

Only Simone Griffin wouldn't be here. Were she alive, she'd have no idea how her daughter earned money these days. Stevie would make sure of that.

Devotion's sense of flagrant continuity seemed so simple. Her real name was Justine, she'd told her once. But if her mother was here, it meant she had no need to hide this world from the other one, the real one. The concept baffled Stevie, who couldn't imagine working here without its being a secret from her family.

She twirled her plaid gingham dress up and smiled, but the room was vast and barren. A toothless mouth, it swallowed her whole. Night after night, it digested her slowly. This red room without any escape, this stomach with its lining of eyes. She unbuttoned the dress, let it fall.

There he was, at his usual table. The little wave. Tony. He was late. This was her last set. She hadn't thought she'd see him tonight.

She unhooked her bra, looking his way. Ran her hands around the curve of her breasts, over her stomach and hips. The move had become mechanical, but she watched his blue eyes flicker, his lips curl to a puckish smile. And when he raised his glass to her, she felt, for that instant, the power she'd possessed when she first started stripping. That rush of gratification. Like standing at the edge of a cliff and feeling the wind off the ocean. Knowing you could jump. She returned his smile and slipped back through the red curtain.

Backstage, Devotion was talking. About the army, how they'd whip her into shape. “Three years of stripping and where am I going? Too many drugs. And the men.” So the army was her newest savior. Stevie laughed. She hadn't heard this one before.

At the mirror, Brett toked what was now a roach. Stevie could see the ring of tattoo around Brett's upper right arm showing through the makeup and powder. One of the rules at the Century Lounge was no tattoos, and she had to cover it when she danced. Stevie could just make out the head of the snake eating its own tail. Ouroboros, Brett had told her once, what the ancient Egyptians had seen in the Milky Way—a great serpent encircling the universe, the eternity of time in constant re-creation.

Brett leaned over Stevie, handing the roach to Devotion. Stevie could feel her nipple graze her shoulder, and she caught her breath.

Devotion laughed and took the roach, held it between her long red nails. “I read the encyclopedia. I crave knowledge. After the army I'll go to college,” she said, and took a hit.

Stevie envied her easy certainty, even if it was just the pot talking. She had never been able to think, much less to talk, like that. She questioned every decision, weighed the positives, the negatives. The world was too full of possibilities, the choices were too many and each choice had its repercussions. You could go crazy thinking this way, she knew, but how could one be sure of any future? If conviction was a kind of blind stupidity, maybe it was the good kind, in which you rule out alternatives and the world conforms to your thought. You choose the life you want and then you create it. Simple.

Stevie pulled off her white G-string. Each girl danced two songs—one with clothes and one without. The songs were back-to-back, but she wanted to linger here a second longer, with the women who had become her sisters. She reached for the roach. She didn't have long nails—her nails were bitten and bare, like Brett's—so the roach burned her thumb and finger and, before she could smoke any, she dropped it in the ashtray.

“Christ,” said Devotion, looking up at her. “Your tits.”

“What?”

“They're huge.”

Devotion picked up the roach with her nails and held it to Stevie's lips. She breathed the smoke and her throat burned.

Brett looked her over in the mirror. And Stevie, too, assessed her own reflection. With her green eyes and her pale skin, her shoulder-length hair dirty blond and messy, she was almost Brett's opposite. Brett was staring at her breasts. “Do they hurt?”

“Well,” Stevie said, and held them up, deciding. Her breasts seemed heavier, but then, she'd filled out since she'd started stripping. Her body had more muscle, but a little more softness as well.

“Probably just that time of month,” said Devotion. She picked up her white boa from the carpet and put it around Stevie's neck.

Her next track was playing, and the stage was empty, waiting for her to animate it with her sad sway, with her silent siren song. In only feathers and fake pearls and heels, Stevie moved past the curtain, feeling it skim her thigh, her tender nipple. What time of the month was it? She wasn't exactly sure. Nights and days ran like watercolors, one into the next, so fast, months bleeding into months.

She entered the light, her hips swinging as she walked. Taking the boa in her hands, she ran it along the edges of her breasts. Rickie Lee Jones sang,
Just walk away, Renee. You won't see me follow you back home
. Her favorite song. Cold pole in her hand, she twirled, as if she could become white whirling smoke, could dissolve into air.

Like her teenage anorexia, that longing she'd had to be without hunger, to defy even gravity. She was fifteen, her scapulae protruding like incipient wings, her body going backward, her boy-girl body intent on not becoming a woman.