Girl in Pieces (28 page)

In my dark room I wait for him, cleaned off, skin still hot from the bath, but he doesn't come. I listen to the men drinking on the porch, to the far-off, hazy sound of a band finishing a set at Club Congress down the street, but there's no knock at my door. I wait until it feels like my insides will explode, until I feel like a mass of fire, heat trickling from my pores, and then I get dressed, get on my lemon-yellow bicycle and ride to his house.

When he opens the door and sees me, he tucks the crook of his elbow in his hand, the smoke from his cigarette lifting dreamily into the air. “Where have you been?” he asks. Throaty voice, amused eyes. Then he takes my hand, leads me inside.

Of
course
it starts again. It stopped for a little bit and I thought, now that we are
together,
I won't have to do this anymore, because he wouldn't ask me
now,
would he? All of it is
wrong.
I
see
it. I
understand
it. I've seen
movies.
I know boys should come to your house in a
car,
and take you to
dinner,
and buy you
flowers,
or some shit like that, and
not
make you wait, wait, wait, in your dingy apartment until your body can't stand it anymore, and you get on your bicycle and ride to his house, instead, so
grateful
that he even opens the door and
smiles.
“I lost track of time.” “Hey, you, I was just thinking about you.” But he does ask. “Would you, could you, think you could go on a little run for candy for me? Then we can watch TV, or
you know.
” He calls me “my nighttime visitor.” He's like the desert itself: it's so
beautiful,
it's so
warm,
but there are
sharp edges
everywhere that you have to watch out for. You just have to know where they are. SO: I know this is all wrong. But maybe, me being me, this is as good as it's going to get. It's too late, anyway, you see: I've already fallen in.

I lean back on my bike seat, listening, the bag from Wendy in my hand. Every night I've stopped at the same cross street, the same stop sign with the dented pole, and listened to the sound of Riley's guitar drifting down the street. I know that later, when he opens the door for me, I'll find the four-deck on the floor with a loose-leaf notebook open, Riley's messy, scrawled notes all over the pages, an ashtray mounded with crushed butts. On some nights, it's just the tender, warm sound of the Gibson Hummingbird hanging in the close air; Riley doesn't sing all the time. Once, at the library, I looked up Long Home on the computer. Tiger Dean still maintained the band's website. I clicked on songs like “Stitcher” and “Charity Case,” Riley's big solo number. It was Tiger's voice that was initially captivating, a powerful blend of personality and tone, but it was the lyrics that kept everything together, that kept me listening closer, instinctively seeking out certain phrases and words. There was one other song that Riley sang solo, a ballad called “Cannon,” about a man so heartbroken his heart tears from his chest and rolls away and he follows it (
And my heart burst from me / like a cannon / And it rolled to the bottom of the canyon / And here I will stay / Emptied in these empty days / Until you come back / And marry me, baby
), and I think it worked precisely because he wasn't a natural singer. It made the song all the more sad that his voice broke in some parts, wavered in others, and disappeared altogether at the end.

On Riley's street, people sit on porches, beer or wine in hand, listening to him, too, their faces open to the sound of him. When he gets it right, when there aren't any mistakes, when he can sail through a song completely from start to finish, it's thrilling, it pierces right through me. The faces of his neighbors light up. When he's done, they mime applause, because nobody wants him to know they're listening, nobody wants him to stop playing. Everyone is careful around him, like he's an egg they have to cradle.

But he does stop playing when he hears me clatter up onto the porch. He settles the Gibson on the couch, rustles his papers, takes a long drink of his beer, lights a new cigarette, takes the bag from me, and disappears into the bathroom.

When we're in his house, together, with all the signs of Riley-ness, his well-thumbed old books in the sturdy bookshelf, his records alphabetized on shelves all around the room, the comfortable, elegant, and crumpled velvet couch, the carelessly full ashtrays, I think it's somewhere I could stay: inside a life already lived and firmly in place.

At first, they laugh a little too much, nervous, and I have to wait until they calm down, let them drink a bit more, before I start.

The sunlight is fading, but I have enough light on the porch to draw them. It's Hector, who lives in 1D, and Manny and his mother, Karen. I think they're used to people staring at them, not
looking
at them. She shifts in the rusty metal chair, playing with her fingernails. Manny is on the steps, leaning back against the railing. “Yeah,” he finally says. “You can do it, right, Ma?”

On the porch, I study the folds and lines in their faces and work quickly, smudging, blowing away the gray dust of charcoal. “Your big romance,” Karen says to me. “I need to know.”

I just say, “Mmmm. Not much to tell.”

Karen shakes her head, says, “The mens can be so
difficult.
” Manny is edgy, his dark brown eyes steady on my face. He squirts beer through his gritted teeth and tells me that his job consists mainly of other people not showing up for their jobs.

Each day he and Hector and some others from the building wait on a sweltering street corner downtown with dozens of men as trucks crawl by looking for day laborers to water the gardens of those who live high in the hills on the North side, clip their hedges, help gouge the dirt for new pools, for elaborately tiled Jacuzzis. “This one place,” Hector says, slurring, leaning forward, out of the pose he held so well just a moment ago. “The pool tile was like his woman's face, you know? Like her picture, under the water. She's going to have to swim on her own
face.
” He spits on the porch, glancing at Karen, who frowns.

Manny says, “We make this fucking city run and they want to run us out. Build some stupid wall.”

When I'm done, they hold my pad reverently in their hands. They're pleased they can finally see themselves, just like Evan was when he saw himself in my comic. Their happiness fills me up.