Pretty (24 page)

I apply about four gallons of liquid eyeliner and a bucket of shiny pink lip gloss, while kneeling on the floor in front of the full-length mirror we have wedged up against the side of the dresser.

Violet lies on the bed behind me reading
Lithium for Medea.
She looks up when I stand and straighten myself out. She has already expressed her disapproval of my seeing Billy, but she's through with scolding me, I guess.

“Wow, Bebes. You look really pretty.”

She's right. I do look pretty. I don't know what I'm expecting out of tonight—a confrontation, an apology maybe. Or maybe just to see the face of someone who knew Aaron like I did. But I do know one thing. I want to remember what it was like to be pretty.

Billy is seated
at an outside table underneath the heating lamps. The gated patio is covered with low-slung vines and glowing lanterns, like a tiny paradise off a seedy stretch of Sunset and Normandie. I see him and my heel immediately catches on an irregularity in the pavement. I stumble and then try to smooth out my step, to smooth out my skirt. His hair is the same. He has the same profile. He sees me and stands.

For a moment I feel an intense relief flood me, as if I've suddenly been given back everything I lost. Then just as quickly I remember, no. No. Billy wasn't what was lost. But he was so close by, you could almost confuse the two in the low light, in the late, late winter.

“Baby.”

“You can call me Bebe now.”

“Didn't I?”

Billy kisses me on the cheek and holds me against him for a beat longer than is comfortable.

“You look beautiful.”

He pulls out my chair for me.

“Yeah, well, you look exactly the same.”

“But I'm not the same,” he says, resuming his seat.

“So I read.”

“Press is press. You know that. It's not the whole story. You should learn the whole story. That's why I called. But first, I'm starving.”

As he says it, a shy-looking waitress appears and puts a Kingfisher beer down in front of him. There's a glimmer of impish mischief in his expression when he turns toward her and then a shadow of that drug addict sad damage when he turns the other way. His face has always been alive like that. He's one of those people who look like a totally different person in every photograph.

“Would you like a drink?” he asks. The waitress looks at me with her pen poised above her notebook. The colored lights strung across the patio give Billy's wild, white boy afro a red halo around the edges. I look at the beer.

“No, thank you, water is fine.”

“Come back in a few minutes,” says Billy.

“You said you were sober.”

“I am sober. Six months now. This is just a beer.”

“You can't be sober and have a beer.”

“Yes, I can. I'm sober from all illegal narcotics. My problem is with drugs. Beer isn't my problem, so I can have all the beer I want.”

“Okay, Billy. I'm gonna go now,” I say.

“Wait, Bebe. Don't go. Please. I need to talk to you. You're not the only one who loved him, you know. If it makes you uncomfortable, I won't drink. Okay? Just sit down.”

I surrender. I sit. I don't want to leave anyway.

“Good. Let's order,” he says. “Shall we?”

Billy shifts gears and explains to me the difference between northern Indian food and southern Indian food. He tells me that he once went to India with an ex who was into Sai Baba.

“Long before I met you. When there were different times for all of us,” he says.

Billy is a jazzman at heart but how he made himself a star is by collaborating with rock musicians and also by writing a song that was covered by a pop star in the early nineties. He gets me laughing with stories about Bono and some rap producer who doesn't have a stick of furniture in his house and a guitarist who eats nothing but enchiladas with ketchup. We're most of the way through dinner before I realize that he hasn't told me why he called and also that he's nearly made it through three beers.

“It's getting late,” I say. “I have an important day tomorrow. I'm graduating.”

“From cosmetology school?” He doesn't bother to hide the derision in his voice.

“It's a good gig. It's my ticket out of town.”

“You and your tickets out of town,” he says. “We haven't even talked yet. Okay, I'll tell you what. I have something I want to show you. I live right across the street here. Come over for a quick minute and then I'll let you go and I'll never bother you again. That or you can come to my show at the end of the week. Your choice.”

I agree to go with him, not because I believe anymore that he has something to show me or even something to tell me, but because I can't bring myself to say good-bye.

He offers his arm as we cross the street. I take it just above the elbow, but don't lean on him. Billy is only a couple of inches shorter than me in my heels, which still makes him about six feet tall. Usually I tower over men when I wear heels.

He lives in an old, five-story brick building, which has somehow weathered the many earthquakes without crumbling.

“When did you move?” I ask.

“I moved when I quit dope. Got to change up the feng shui when you do that kind of thing, you know?”

We walk up three flights to a clean, one-bedroom apartment with a wall of exposed brick. Brick walls always remind me of Toledo. Strewn around are a few pieces of midcentury furniture and some expensive vintage music equipment. I don't see the old organ anywhere.

I follow him to the kitchen, where he immediately opens the fridge and grabs another beer. An urge to drink washes over me, as powerful as any I've felt since I quit. Some sharpfingered demon hand reaches through my back just underneath my shoulder blades, grabs my heart, and squeezes. The only thing that will relieve the terrible pressure is a drink. I can smell the yeasty sweetness from across the table like it is the most natural thing in the world. Part of your sweat and your blood. Don't you need it like water to survive?

If I drank a beer it would be the final stone out from under my tenuous foothold and I would go sliding down the mountain. It would be the end of trying to hang on. My muscles ache from clinging to the last stone all day long every day. I'm sick of gripping so hard. I'd almost rather fall.

My head, my body, my soul demands a beer. And I'm not being dramatic here. Within the course of a minute, my logical faculties have reasoned it out. My deep nihilism has put in its vote. My exhaustion has echoed a resounding yes. I don't want to sit here sober and always apart from it all and aware of every little thing. How my nose is stuffed up and how the world is at war and how Billy laughs with a bitter edge and how the polar ice caps are melting and how it is hard to sit like a lady in my too-slutty dress and how Jake is locked in the VA hospital and how Aaron is nowhere at all and he never will be. Oh, yeah. And how I'm pregnant. And that, too.

I decide to ask for a beer. Better yet, to reach out and just grab Billy's and take a sip. It'll be cute. No one will care because no one will know. One beer. One beer won't hurt a baby. Maybe enough beers and I'll find the courage not to have this baby after all. Billy will grab another beer. I'll finish his, and then drink another and then another until I pass out and wake up here as if it's happened a million times before. I'll quietly take care of my little problem and then I'll slip seamlessly into his life. Be the drunk hairstylist girlfriend of a drunk legend. I'll move straight from Serenity House into this pad with the brick wall and the fancy guitars in the corner. I like his face, I think. I always liked his face.

Drink now, I tell myself. Just fuck it. But my body doesn't move. I will my arm toward the half-drunk bottle in his hand. Now. Now before it's all gone. But some neural connection is severed and my hand stays by my side. It even moves for a second to readjust my skirt, but it doesn't reach for a beer. Outside of my skin and in the air of the room, things are moving like they have been all night but on the inside, the soft dark of my brain goes still. And I can only think some supernatural force holds me back that's more powerful than all the will in me pushing me forward. At a different time I might have called it Jesus, believed that Jesus is here holding me.

Then my outsides and my insides sync up again and the sound clicks on and I'm back in the mix, but I don't reach for a drink. I want one but I'm not going to have one. The moment of reaching has passed.

“The reason I called you was that I wanted to play this new song for you. I wrote it just after he died but I only finished it a few weeks ago.”

The scenario is so familiar. He picks up an acoustic guitar from where it leans against the wall. I sit with my back against the opposite end of the couch and slip my shoes off, putting my feet on the cushion next to him.

He lays out some salty, smoky, whiskey soul magic, words slurred but chords impeccably precise. This drunken asshole. He has the songs in him that I've longed for all my life. That I haven't been close to touching since Aaron died. Aaron could play anything—trumpet, guitar, piano, percussion. When Aaron played, I used to wish I were him instead of me.

But I don't wish I were Billy right now. I can see the tragedy flames licking at his hems. I've learned to spot them by now. You might even call me an expert. And I can see clearly that Billy may have gotten away with murder for this long but he won't survive much longer. He'll be lucky if he lasts the year. There's already a road map of waste all over him.

He stops the song abruptly before it's over and he runs his hands over my shins. I pull my legs into my chest as if he burned me.

“Poor legs,” he says. He looks like he's about to start crying. “Poor legs.”

He leans in to kiss my legs and I hop off the couch.

“Stop it.”

“You remember him all wrong. You always had it all wrong about him. Guess what? It's not my fault. It's not yours, either.”

He puts the guitar aside, stands, and reaches for my face. I don't say no when he kisses me. I never have been able to stick by a no with him. No one really can, so I don't feel too bad about it. He must have brushed his teeth a beer ago because spearmint chalkiness takes the edge off the alcohol taste of his mouth. But I can still taste the beer. I breathe it in and try to imagine I am growing drunk on his fumes. I could catch a buzz rubbing on his skin.

He's starting to sweat the beer out his pores and it smells sour but not yet sick. I know how it'll smell later. I know how it'll smell in the morning because it's one of the things I remember about my pop from just before he died. I remember how their bedroom used to smell in the morning after his night sweats. I feel like I'm cheating. I'm not sure on who.

“I can't do this. I have to go.”

“I understand.” He pulls away and slips his hands into his pockets, quickly contrite. “I'm sorry. This isn't why I called you. Come have a quick smoke with me on the roof before you leave.”

I love rooftops. I love a view from anywhere. Any vantage point from which you can see further than the immediate ground in front of you.

I climb the three flights wearing the beat-up overcoat Billy has given me from the back of his door, the kind of coat you could wear in Ohio. Too many hours awake and I really want a cigarette and I can feel my life straight through to my bones. But even so, when the dark sky opens up over us, from just five floors up I could almost love L.A. My heart spills over the edge of the rooftop and streams out through the grid of the city and I feel how many big dreams are floating around out there. This town where the dreams are long, broad strokes and the execution is delegated in impossible details to a million grunts. The weight of the wealth in one small corner of L.A. should tip the scale so badly that the whole thing turns over and slides off into the Pacific. But still, from here I could almost love it. In front of me, the lit-up switchboard fades until it dissolves in the dense haze.

Billy walks unsteadily around to the side of the building that pretty much just faces the brick wall of the building next to it. On that wall is a fifteen-foot-long painting in shades of gray, as if it was a black-and-white photograph. A woman with long black hair and giant dark eyes floats with wings and a halo in front of a marshmallow cloud. She has no feet, only a long, white, flowing dress.

“Julio did that. He lives in the pad downstairs from mine. His lady died of an overdose last year and he painted that for her.”

“It's cool,” I say. “We should all have someone to paint us like that.”