And then in walked Aaron. When Aaron's band left Toledo the next morning that was exactly what I did. I climbed into the bus with them. And when I say that pretty can get you a thing or two, that's what I mean. I mean it can get you a bus ride to the West Coast with a jazz musician who hardly knows you but might already be suspecting that he loves you. We were headed to San Francisco at the end of it all, Aaron had promised me. He told me there was even a church in San Francisco that had canonized John Coltrane. Clearly the place for us. So L.A. was never really the plan, but when we got stranded here and Billy's ex-girlfriend offered to help me get a job at the club where she worked, Aaron and I both thought it was a good idea. Here's another thing pretty can get youâit can get you a job. Me being a stripper seemed real jazz to Aaron, kind of picturesque and romantic. That's how it was in our minds before I started.
Aaron and I strolled with our fingers intertwined down Hollywood Boulevard to pick out the shoes, while I wondered where the hell San Francisco had gone. Wondered what the hell Pastor Dan would say if he could see me now. Wondered how we had wound up in this desert buying a pair of heels to go hit the airport clubs for work. Wondered how many other girls had thought the very same thing walking into the very same store. I opted for the black shiny ones with the platforms and the long, thin, tapered heels. They're remarkably durable. You can get most of the scuffs out with alcohol. Dancing was another one of those choices I made that I didn't know until way later what it really meant.
By that night at Raji's a year and some change ago, dancing had shifted from an emergency measure to just being my deal. It was what I did, and I couldn't remember anymore what I had started out wanting to do. Had I wanted to be a singer? A jazz wife? A California bohemian? I don't think I wanted to be a drunken stripper. Not that it was so bad, but it wasn't so good. I mean, what it does to how you look at your real boyfriend. How all that lying all night long and all the laps of all the men can make you kind of angry and how being angry and smiling is a bad habit to get into. You can blow up and do something cruel one night. You can do something stupid that maybe you'll regret forever and that will ruin the rest of your whole life.
So “You Shook Me All Night Long” came on the jukebox just as Chas looked at me all starry-eyed, like the dork he was, and said, “Yes. You won.”
“You're saying I'm a winner?”
“You are.”
“Well, we should celebrate, don't you think?”
I held his gaze, got up on the pool table, recently cleared of balls by the game I had won, and handed him my pink heels. He held them away from his body like they were either worth two billion dollars or they were on fire and he couldn't decide which.
“Now, don't get all crazy and go drinking champagne out of those, 'cause I might need to walk home in them if Aaron keeps acting like an ass.”
I gave him a wink. He was so easy. All Aaron's friends were jazzmen and phony intellectuals and chatty college girls. I would never fit in with them so I settled for the next best thing and acted the wild one. Sometimes it was true.
I danced there, my bare feet on the green felt, flipping my hair back, swaying my hips, and leaning with one hand onto the low, swinging lamp. The glowing green platform was the only gash of color floating in a brown bar full of gray smoke. Glasses of one amber liquid or another reflected people's faces all distorted on their curved surfaces. Wafts of a bad smell you just ignored blew over from the direction of the crowded bathroom.
Aaron finally walked over and stood in front of me, looking concerned or annoyed or something. Chas left my shoes on the edge of the table and melted into the crowd. Aaron's forehead creased in the uneven way that it did when he was disturbed. He held his arms out to me like you would to a kid on a high wall, in that way that means jump and I'll catch you. I kept dancing and he stood there and I see him now like that, his arms extended to me, but he is moving backward away from me, getting smaller and smaller, and I am high above him, higher than the pool table even, and he is falling down a dark well. He held his arms out to me and it stopped me in mid dance move.
I ended my little performance, put my hands on his shoulders, and jumped off the table into his arms. He lifted me gently down by the waist like I was a ballerina, toes pointed, riding gracefully through the air. When I touched down I clasped my hands behind his neck and stood on his boots with my bare feet. Then, with his edges hugging mine, we danced slow like in an old movie. I don't know when he learned to dance like that or when I did. I understood that it meant we were starting over.
But even with the missteps of the evening forgiven, even with a fresh start, I was hungry and falling apart. When I was with Aaron, my molecules vibrated so fast that they flew off their gravitational path. I split into a thousand humming pieces. I closed my eyes and swam in a black velvet galaxy with no floor beneath me while I braced for my impact with the bottom. I remember thinking: I don't know if I can live with this.
We held on to each other for a minute like that, swaying dreamlike in a bubble. The rest of the room went quiet and it was just us. And if I could rewind it, I would rewind it to there.
I broke the mood and put one leg up around him, grinding on him like he was a customer. I was laughing; I was joking around, but he didn't think it was funny and he pushed me off.
“What's the matter? You want to fuck her?” I asked, meaning Madison.
“What are you talking about? Why do you always have to ruin shit?”
We were making a scene, but it was a bar where scenes happened pretty regular. He acted superior, pretending like he was holding it together, but I could tell he was all tilted and too high and too drunk, same as me.
Aaron was into the drugs but he wasn't starving hungry need more all the time like I was. He usually kept it a little more in control, but that night he didn't. That night he was gone.
“Don't tell me how to talk, asshole. Maybe you want to talk to your fancy friend over there instead. I'm sure there's some French fucking film she's dying to discuss with you. I'm out of here,” I said, fumbling for the keys in my purse, hopping and putting on my shoes as I left. I was always testing him, wanting him to stop me.
He followed me out the door and we stood on the trashstrewn sidewalk, illuminated by the headlights whizzing by.
“Give me the keys,” he said. “You can't drive.”
“You know who I'm talking about. You want to fuck her, you should do it. I fuck other people. Whoever I want. You don't own me. You're not my father. So go ahead.”
It was a lie. I never touched anyone else if you don't count work. And you don't count work. I don't know why I said it. Maybe to see if I could make him really lose it. Maybe to measure how much he cared by how bad it could get. I was going to tell him later that I had been kidding.
Aaron grabbed my wrist hard and twisted until I dropped the keys. He leaned down to snatch them and when he stood back up I swung my arm to try to knock them out of his hand but I cuffed him square on the side of the head instead, throwing him sideways off balance. He was so calm when he righted himself that I could have sworn I knocked him sober. He turned and walked down the street and I trotted after him, trying to keep up with his long steps. I didn't want to be left behind.
“Don't say another word,” he said, flat and mean. “Just get in the car.”
I already regretted what I'd said, but I was still high with self-righteous fury so I wasn't about to retract it yet. I practically believed my own lie. And why shouldn't I, anyway? Why shouldn't I fuck other people? It might even the score a little bit. It might make him feel that private humiliation of knowing that you're not quite loved enough, not quite wanted enough, not quite important enough. It might make him hurt for a heartbeat like I hurt for him all the time.
There were no more words. I pulled my cheap Melrose Ave. dress out of the way of the heavy car door on Aaron's beat-up '68 Cadillac and slammed it closed. I settled down into silence, laying the bricks of a wall of indignation between us. I was convinced he was fucking that girl Madison. And if he wasn't already, then he wanted to. And even if it wasn't Madison, it had been hundreds of others and would probably be hundreds more. That's how I saw it. That's what happens to your eyes when you spend your nights in the laps of everyone else's husbands.
He gripped the wheel with both hands and glared straight ahead, teeth clenched so tight that I saw his jaw muscles twitch. I could tell he was livid, but he was also wasted. He held on to make the world stop spinning. I stubbornly sewed my mouth closed as he peeled out and headed too fast toward Sunset. I wasn't going to be the one to show weakness and tell him to slow down.
Then there was the red light and the momentum of the car, how he didn't stop. I think he simply didn't see it. He was concentrating so intensely on not weaving that he didn't even look up to see that the light was red.
I saw it coming and tried to yell for him to stop but I'm not sure the sound ever came out. It happened fast and hard. Not slow like some people say. Not slow enough to see my life pass before my eyes, whatever that means, and anyway I'm glad I didn't have to see that slide show.
It was a red minivan that T-boned us. Aaron's side completely caved in, crumpled like it was made of paper. I've seen the pictures. The impact was so massive that the van pushed the car forty feet and into a streetlight, which was what stopped us. My window was open is how my head didn't go through the glass but just got banged around pretty hard. The crash tossed me sideways and I collided with the door, then the dash. It was one of those old cars with only a bottom seat belt.
Aaron's door crushed in so far that he was practically in my lap and when I turned to see him there wasn't enough of him. Strings of blood hung off his face and off the ends of his hair and my first thought was his glassesâhe lost his glasses. I grasped around for them but they were nowhere and anyway everything was turned inside out and I couldn't tell where I was reaching, what I was touching. He breathed gurgly sounds and I couldn't see his eyes through the wet, through the red. He wouldn't look at me. There was no world outside to see, only the diamond-studded spiderweb of the windshield.
I pushed open my side of the door as far as it would open, which was barely enough for me to slide out. I crawled away from the wreck over the glass on the pavement, which made a sound like ice dropped into warm water and seemed to crumble into dust under my weight. It didn't hurt at all. I was fine. I reached the wall of the storefront and propped myself against it, arranging my skirt modestly over my knees, and then I saw the blood streaked across my legs, the blood smeared across my lap. I wondered whose blood it was, where it came from. I looked at the shattered glass all around me, tiny triangles of it glinting in the streetlights. It was almost pretty. I clawed at my legs because they were suddenly unbearably itchy, and that was when I noticed all the shards that were ground into the skin along my shins, my knees, my palms.
By that time a crowd of people had gathered around. Concerned faces pushed in at me amid a sea of legs and an unintelligible chorus of low, freaked-out voices. When I saw that Aaron was still in the car, when I realized that I had left him alone in there, I stood to run back to him but I was too dizzy. I tried to crawl but the amoeba of people held me back. The sirens and the blue red blue red washed over me like forgetting and I couldn't see clear; the scene shifted in and out of focus like I was twisting the ring on a camera lens.
They had to open the top of the car up with one of those huge mechanical can openers to get him out. It made a sound like ripping the sky in half. It was then that I remembered to pray but my brain was all wrong. I couldn't remember my prayers. I could only mouth, “Please, Jesus,” over and over and even that got fumbled up. My mouth was full of something that tasted like pennies.
The paramedics took Aaron away on a gurney and he was still slick and purple and streaming in blood like he had just been born. They cut his shirt open with scissors as they rolled him away.
They took me next to a hospital so fancy it was practically a hotel. The emergency room wasn't some decrepit free clinic like the ones I'd seen before, but instead it was nice and clean with warm colors and framed prints of the desert. Attractive nurses floated by in pink scrubs and clogs with clever patterned socks peeking out. It was near Easter. I remember little bunny socks. And I was all right, a concussion and two broken ribs and lacerations, a lot of lacerations. Pain stabbed at my side but I hovered somewhere far away from it in an opiate haze.
They told me I couldn't see Aaron yet. He was still in surgery. There was no way of knowing. It would be hours. I went over everything I wanted to say to him when he woke up. I'd apologize for everything and make it right. We would do better. We would start over. I succumbed to the brain rattle and to the morphine fuzz and faded away wondering how we would ever pay for it all.
I don't know how long it was before I woke up. Before I could slog through the heavy waters behind my eyes and find my way to a desk to ask where he was. Every breath I took felt like shards of glass had lodged themselves in between my ribs on my right side. The feeling was so convincing that I actually lifted my gown to check. And when I looked at my stomach, fish belly pale and mottled with strange bruises, I remembered a dream I'd had. I dreamed of the accident, except that when the paramedics came I was still in the car. I was entirely bisected by a pane of glass, straight through the stomach, straight through the seat belt. I knew they could never remove it because if they did I'd split in two like a magician's assistant after a trick gone horribly wrong.