Read Online Further Out Than You Thought by Michaela Carter - Free Book Online Page B

loan officer, V.P. of a film company, attorney. What did these men want? Sex? Or love—a pill for their loneliness. Or were they mining, driven by the desire to bring something found in the dark (as if by feel) into the daylight, to see it sparkle in the sun?
    It can’t be done.
    To make a fantasy real is to lose the fantasy.
    â€œSTEVIE,” JOE SAID. “You’re late.”
    â€œI know.” She gave him her music—Tom Waits and Louis Armstrong. “Who’s managing?”
    â€œI am.” He grinned. “You can make it up to me later.”
    She laughed. He said this to all the girls. Nothing ever came of it.
    â€œYou’re up next set,” he said, “if you can make it.”
    Brett was onstage—not naked—nude. Like the sign outside said. Stevie paused. To be naked was to be exposed, caught with your pants down. Nude implied awareness and intention. The ownership of one’s own body that meant power.
    Her legs just parting, her hand rising, she was indrawn, like the tide when it recedes, taking everything with it. Context and content, she asked nothing of anyone. Stevie tried to move, to move on, she had to change, she had to . . . But Brett stole her eyes and gave back beauty, reflected light and shadow—that line beneath her breast described just so when her hand reached high and her head turned toward her shoulder, as if to inhale the smell of powder, perfume, and sweat.
    Her smell.
    The club no more than the space around her, the scattered customers, the smoke, a border for her exquisite sex, for her song, Brett looked down at herself, then up, to Stevie. Her eyes held hers, asking, Do you see?
    Her labia. That smooth, soft cleft.
    If labia are lips, then the cunt is a mouth, and a mouth shapes one’s voice into words. In the beginning was the word—the word made flesh, in the cave where we each were formed. Even closed, labia sing the mystery of the source.
    More than meets the eye. So much more.
    The song was fading. Brett closed her legs.
    In the dressing room, Stevie threw on the simplest costume she had—a dress, if you could call it that, with a stretchy black lace bodice and a skirt of gauze. Black satin G-string. She buckled her black heels. Pulled on her long black gloves.
    Brett was off; Stevie was on.
    They passed each other, Brett’s hand brushing Stevie’s thigh. She caught her breath, looked at Brett, her strong brown back.
    There, on her backstage stoop, Devotion was blowing smoke rings in which circle of hell? Limbo, lust, gluttony? “Want some?” she said, angel of the haze.
    â€œNot today,” Stevie said, and she walked onto the stage straight.
    It was just another dayshift. She could take it. She’d jazz things up with Louis.
    She shook her hips and shoulders. She took the pole in hand and spun, the club a blur. Moving in circles, she felt like a kid. Moving to move, to whirl the brain and fall on the grass under the loopy stars.
    Slowing, she could see Mr. Cooper in the gloaming, alone at a table, the coal of his cigarette a distant planet. So far off.
    How we live and die alone. Vast reaches of lightlessness between us.
    Her palms sliding down her thighs as if turning them out, she descended to a squat. Maybe she did need a little something. Just a puff. To fill the void with a bit of fire, of lift, a hot-air balloon to climb inside and ride out, over the sea. To catch the waning morning moon in a net of gauze and bring it back, before it was too late.
    â€œDevotion,” she said between songs, “I was wrong.” She took the joint and sipped the smoke. She stepped out of her costume. Watching the fumes dance under the bare bulb, she could feel the dream returning. The poetry.
    In the light again, she was Matilda waltzing to Waits’s scratch and scrape, the song he wrote, so the story went, after drinking a bottle of rye on skid row, on a street corner, with men who were put there,