Lullaby for the Rain Girl (21 page)

“Rachel, you have to send this out. To a literary journal or a magazine or someplace.
The New Yorker,
maybe.”

She took the paper back from me and studied it. “Maybe when I revise it.”

“It doesn’t need to be revised. You just need to type it.”

She smirked. “I can’t type.”

“Well, Peter can.
I’ll
type it if you want me to.”

She looked at me carefully, quizzically. “You really think it’s good?”

“I really think it’s good.”

“Maybe I’ve just read too many Holocaust books.”

“You should read more, if they make you write like that. God. I’m really impressed, Rachel. Seriously.” I ground out my cigarette. “Will you let me read some more?”

“Hm.” She looked at me skeptically, playing with a silver ring embedded in her eyebrow. “Yeah, I guess. Okay.”

But as she began sifting through her papers Sherry and Peter burst in again, laughing uproariously. Sherry had a videocassette in her hand.

“What’s so funny?” I wanted to know.

“Peter’s been telling me stories about the women in Dallas,” Sherry said, dropping down next to me on the sofa and still giggling. “He says they have some—um,
special techniques
there.”

“They’ve got this thing,” Peter said, “called the panhandle—”

“Peter,” Sherry cried, “that’s not real! You made that up!”

“Go to any brothel in Texas,” Peter said assuredly, dropping onto a chair, “and they’ll know what it is.”

“It’s physically impossible!”

Peter looked at me dolefully. “I would have thought,” he said, “that a manly man like yourself would have taught your girlfriend better.”

We all laughed, though in truth, I never did learn what, in his context, a “panhandle” was. The subject quickly changed as the Chinese food arrived and as the videocassette was plugged into the machine—“
The Blob,”
Peter announced, “in honor of the late Steve McQueen.”

It was a fun night, the four of us together, but I had an odd feeling about it. As I sat with Sherry, my arm firmly around her after we were done with the food, the Blob merrily chasing Mr. McQueen and the other teenagers, I found myself, for the first time, wanting to talk with Rachel Blackburn. I felt no sexual attraction to her—she was average looking, if that, and I don’t know if I’ve communicated how poor her personal hygiene really was. Her underarm odor sometimes permeated the apartment. Her skin and hair made me want to dunk her in a sink full of hot, soapy water. Her fingernails were broken and chewed. Her clothes were dirty. Yet I was fascinated by the fact that she’d written the poem I’d just read. I didn’t know writers, then. I sometimes attended author readings—literary writers appeared at the Earthling Bookshop downtown, science fiction and horror people at Andromeda a few blocks away—but I knew no one. I didn’t take the creative writing classes in college. I knew I was talented—well, somewhat talented—but I felt very alone in my scribblings. The occasional scratched note from an editor did little to assuage a need I didn’t realize, until I read Rachel’s work, I’d even had: to talk to other writers, to be in their company. I’d dismissed Rachel from the beginning as a mere punk-rock screamer, but I’d been wrong. It fascinated me that I’d been wrong. As a result I was a little impatient with the movie, slightly annoyed at Peter’s running commentary about it; and for the first time I rather wished he and Sherry had been out somewhere.

It was a frightening realization. I’d never wanted Sherry O’Shea to be anywhere other than with me—well, mostly. There were times, studying the pretty beach girls sitting around me in class, that I imagined things that certainly wouldn’t have involved her. But that was straightforward sexual fantasy, nothing more. Every male human being on the planet, I knew, thought about the same kind of things. What I was feeling was more a desire to bond with Rachel as a fellow writer, an artist—someone who knew what it was to stare at a blank page and try to make something come alive on it. This was a level on which Sherry and I couldn’t communicate. It wasn’t that Rachel was female, I insisted to myself. It wasn’t that she was a girl who, because she lived here, was in close proximity—a closeness that I’d never shared with any other girl besides Sherry and my sister. Besides, I thought, Rachel Blackburn was no prize, really. But she
wrote,
wrote seriously, wrote powerfully. I was nineteen. I’d never known anybody else who did that.

Thanks to Peter’s thoughtfully-supplied Heineken we were all half drunk by the end of the movie
.
That too was fun; that too was strange. Sherry and I weren’t heavy drinkers. I had the model of my father to consider, and the grim knowledge that children of alcoholics tend to either become alcoholics themselves or else teetotalers. I was wary of booze, but I did like beer. Yet I’d never really been drunk. Sherry and I used to sneak a Coors or Budweiser out of her parents’ refrigerator on occasion, sharing it furtively somewhere that we wouldn’t be discovered; we’d tried pot, too, a few times, purchased from the friendly neighborhood dealer at our high school. But these were childish experiments that led nowhere. Our image as two clean-living kids was, for the most part, perfectly accurate.

I was aware, though, that since Peter and Rachel had arrived, our alcohol consumption had jumped considerably. On the night I’m describing I was shocked to see, when we stood to go to bed, Sherry actually stumble—she righted herself well enough, but I realized from her movements and an unfamiliar slow slur in her voice that she was well on her way to being downright intoxicated. I wondered how well I was doing. When I looked at the dozen or so empty green bottles on the milk crate and floor, and calculated how many of them I’d drained myself, I was thankful I didn’t have to drive us home. But I wasn’t overly happy to realize that I had to get up early to go to classes tomorrow.

Sometime in the middle of the night I had to use the toilet, so I stood to step out to the bathroom. The apartment was dark and silent, so I didn’t bother to put on anything—the door to the bathroom was only three steps from our bedroom. Nude, I slipped in, closed the door behind me (I did have some sense of modesty), urinated in the dark, flushed, ran some water over my hands, and then opened the door again.

To my surprise, Rachel was standing there in a tattered nightshirt.

A quick little smile crossed her lips, but she made no remark. Instead she simply held out a sheet of paper to me and murmured, “You can read this one.”

I took the paper in my hand and she padded back to their room, shutting the door softly.

I returned to our room, dropped down next to Sherry. I listened to her breathe in the darkness. The poem earlier, all the beer, my encounter with Rachel just now—all of it was combining to roil me inside. Unfamiliar sensations were washing through me. I wasn’t horny. Somehow, looking at Sherry’s soft form in the darkness, she felt far away from me.

Don’t leave me,
I heard her saying again, in my mind.
Please don’t leave me.

4

The next day was warm and cloudless. Classes done, I’d driven back home, picked up a paperback—it was Styron’s
Lie Down in Darkness,
I was on a Southern kick—and wandered into town, finally dropping down on the lawn in front of the historic courthouse, not far from its old Spanish-style entry arch.  The El Mirador clock tower loomed behind me, stately and majestic. A huge palm tree offered comfortable shade. I’d been sitting there for a few minutes, sprawled my stomach and reading, when I sensed someone standing behind me.

As I turned Rachel said, “Hey.”

“Hey,” I said, shielding my eyes from the sun that was directly behind her. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“I could say the same.” She sat cross-legged beside me. She was in her usual getup—jeans, torn black T-shirt, sandals—and had a white plastic shopping bag in her hands. “Where’s Sherry?”

“She has a class. Peter?”

“Class.”

“What about you, though?” I asked. “Jeez, what is it, three-thirty? You’re not usually up at this hour.” She and Peter often stayed out late at rehearsals; Peter got up the next morning for school, but Rachel would sleep into the mid-afternoon.  I often came home at the end of a day of classes to find she wasn’t up yet.

“Went to bed early last night,” she said. “I actually saw some of the morning, you know? I don’t do that much.”

“No band rehearsal last night?”

“Aw, fuck.” She reclined onto her back and stared up the sky. I studied the bloody rose-stem tattoos on her feet. “You know what? I think the band is fucked. Brad—that’s the bass player—quit. We haven’t been able to find a replacement.
You
don’t happen to play bass, do you?”

I chuckled. “Sorry.”

“You don’t look right anyway. We’re not a hippie band. But, shit. Now the drummer is talking about leaving. The whole thing is falling apart.”

“Damn.”

“I haven’t told Peter, but I think I’m giving it up. Like I told you, it was all his idea anyway. I was dating the guitar player, John, the guy in the band, who was a friend of Peter’s. Peter came in—you know how he is—and decided he was going to manage them. I don’t know, it seemed like a good idea. I was writing some lyrics for them. Sometimes I’d just play around at a microphone, you know? Sing a little? While they were playing? Peter decided that I should be
in
the band. I don’t know. I tried. I don’t think I’m very good. Peter says I am, but I think I suck.”

“You don’t suck as a poet.”

She sat up again and rustled cigarettes out of her bag, silently offering me one. She lit them both and handed one to me.

“Did you read it?” she asked. “The one I gave you?”

“I read it. It’s great.”

“C’mon. You’re just being nice to the roommate.”

“I almost remember it,” I said. “It opens like, ‘My mother came to see me one night’...”

“ ‘Visited.’ ‘My mother visited me one night.’ I, um...I have it here.” She reached into the bag again and brought out her black writing notebook. She placed a copy of the poem on the grass between us. I was surprised at how vulnerable she looked just then: her eyes, generally hard as agates, had softened as she glanced tentatively at me, then at the poem again.

“Perfume, and Silence”

by Rachel Lynn Blackburn

My mother visited me one night.

She sat on my bed, like she used to

when I was twelve, and touched

my forehead with featherlike fingers.

Why aren’t you home?
she asked me,

her voice hollow as wind.

She had been dead seven years.

But I had no words to answer,

no words to ask how she had found

me here, in the Mojave, or where

she thought “home” was. Her body

was air. Even the odors of whiskey

and decay, present always on her,

were only faint perfumes.

It was the dry season, and still.

Night birds passed my open window.

I would not speak to the dead.

So she faded then, after a while,

slowly, to dim sparkles suspended

in the dusty silence. She vanished.

I didn’t forgive her.

And outside, the moon turned black

in the sky.

“You wrote it...in the Mojave Desert?” I asked.

“Yeah. I lived there for a few months, in the middle of nowhere. After I left home. I ran out of money and had to stop. I bussed tables in a truck-stop place and lived out back of the restaurant, in this little shack that was really just a storage unit. That’s where I wrote it.”

“Wow. Left home...from where? I don’t know where you’re from.”

“North Dakota,” she said. “The High Plains. If you can believe it. I’m not sure I can.”

“What brought you out here? To Santa Barbara?”

She shrugged, took a drag on the cigarette. “I was on my way to Hollywood. Never quite got there.”

“Well, it’s not that far down the road, you know.”

“I know. Maybe I’ll go eventually. But I came here, I got a little job for a while—waitressing—met a few people. Pretty soon, like I say, I was dating John, the guitar player. Then Peter came into it.”

“Were you planning to be a movie star?”

“Ha! With my face? I’m not
that
dumb, Ben. No, I wanted to write. Write movies. I tried writing screenplays. Well, not really screenplays. More like little stories that could be turned into movies. I sent them to studios back when I was still at home. Most of the time nobody answered, but a couple of times I got nice letters. I thought maybe if I was there— ” She shrugged. “I don’t know. Stupid idea.”

“If you’re as good at movies as you are at poetry, though...”

“I’m not. My movie stories were weird. They didn’t have that ‘story arc’ they say that movie people want. They weren’t commercial.”