Marian Palaia - Given World

I rarely had many customers before three or four, so when we were all bashed out, we’d move to the pool table. Lu kicked my ass on a regular basis, but she taught me how to sink one or two on the break, how to leave the cue ball where I could make the next shot.

“Hit it low, Cook. Get under it but keep it on the table. Soft now, you’re not trying to kill anything.”

We never snookered each other, since that would have been cheating. When folks started filtering in, Lu faded out. I hardly ever saw her go.

I had surprised myself by making it to and past twenty-five, and thinking that made me a grown-up making a grown-up decision, fell for a guy who knew how to keep a girl on her toes: a freebasing Cajun bricklayer who wasn’t about to let me bring Lu home, or else I probably would have. As it was, I was on call. About the fourth time, I got the hang of it.

“Hey, Cookie. I need a ride.”

“Not going to the projects, Lu.”

“Cookie.”

“No.”

I picked her up and drove her across town, our destination the projects at Hayes and Buchanan — the same ones, as it turned out, the boyfriend frequented, though I never saw him there. Maybe they had a different entrance for the high that would fix whatever sickness ailed him.

“You worry too much,” Lu told me. “I’m not going to get you into anything I can’t get you out of.”

“That’s comforting.”

She opened the door and leaned out to puke. I pulled over, and she cussed me. “Goddamn it, Cook.” She dragged her sleeve across her mouth and pulled the door closed. “Drive like I taught you.”

Once she’d copped and eased back into herself, there was no one I’d rather have been around. When the ghosts were asleep or off somewhere playing poker, or even the rare weeks or months she was actually, comparatively, clean, she’d bust open the front door of the bar, light streaming in behind her, and wrap her arms around me. Hold me in a full body clench, drenched in Marlboro and brandy fumes, and just a tolerable touch of panic. She said she’d been born with that panic, spent a lifetime stuffing it. Slept with a.357 under the pillow, when there was a pillow.

Some days — the steadiest ones — she’d go to the zoo, draw the animals, capture their essence in a few stark lines. Wildflowers were another favorite, sprouting crazy-legged from stumpy, misshapen vases, the colors startling and otherworldly. Later on she did a series of her cat in various poses, on an assortment of perches around the only room she had in years she could call her own, and in each one he looked shocked to see her there, as if they’d never met or maybe only in a dream.

The Cajun also had some charming tendencies, and a peculiar schedule only he could fathom. Day one of the mystery rotation: beat me up, steal my money, disappear. Day two: stay gone. Day three: run out of drugs and money and come home. Expect soup. Homemade. Vegetarian.

In that town in those days, the odds of choosing a loser were pretty good if you were drawn to edgy like I’d turned out to be. I have no idea what I wanted that edge for. Maybe it’s just the way I was. Or maybe I thought it would give me a chance to fix something that had only the remotest chance of coming unbroken. Whatever it was, every time I showed up with a fat lip or a black eye or fingertip-shaped bruises on the backs of my arms, Lu would offer to shoot him for me. I always turned her down, out of some sense of irrevocability, or not wanting to have to drive all that way to visit her in San Quentin. “One of these days, Cookie, I’m just going to do it. I don’t need your fucking permission.” She’d stare me down, waiting for a sign of weakness, a sign I’d had enough, but I wouldn’t give it to her, not yet. Thought I could save him, is what I thought. Repair him, damaged as he was.

He was full of ceaseless surprises, but Lu wasn’t. She was my stand-up guy, and all her secrets were already out. She wasn’t going to come up with some new dark episode or previously disguised, dreadful personality trait; that shit was pretty much already on the table. And we wouldn’t be lovers. She just wanted to hold me and look after me, chase the other girls off. After my tour with the bricklaying cokehead, that was good enough. And even though our hearts worked in tandem, I never expected anything resembling consistency, flat knowing I wasn’t going to get it. By the time Lu infiltrated my life, I’d done enough time with the shell-shocked and war-wounded, the alcoholics and the drug addicts to count her showing up clinically alive a bonus.

“Hey, you. Looking good.”

“Don’t lie to me, Cookie.”

“Really?”

“No. Lie to me. Buy me a drink.”

I lent her money and everyone told me I was crazy. Well, of course I was. The years since I’d left Montana had fallen well short of a pure, unadulterated, youthful-type trajectory, and my soul was every iota as snakebit as some of the worst ones. Climbing out of the ditch was a hit-or-miss proposition, and even though I was working on it, down was still a hell of a lot easier way to go than up. Lu was my reflection some of those days, and sometimes it scared me half to death.

• • •

We get through the weeklong autumn heat wave in Sid’s flat, and whatever atmospheric front brought it in disappears back out to sea. Everyone goes a little crazy when it gets steamy like that, and Lu’s even crazier than normal with the early arrival of hot flashes, brought on by the weather — she likes to believe — but more probably by the whiskey and the drugs. The hot flashes prove she’s a girl too, but she adamantly denies it. That’s something she left in the rearview in Indiana, back there with the gropey uncles, the cousins she says stank like sour milk and lighter fluid.

A little fresh fog cat-foots east from the City. Lu hugs herself and shivers when I say the part about the cat’s feet. I tell her about the poem Carl Sandburg wrote and she says, “You’re so smart, Cookie. How’d you get to be so smart?”

“I’m not,” I tell her. “I just read a lot. I have a lot of books.”

“Books,” she says, the tone of her voice signaling something irrefutable, as if she’s just realized a few things are that simple and no one is going to talk her out of it now. I don’t tell her that even in my life nothing is that simple; that when we lost Mick I inherited those books, and only barely had the good sense not to throw them into the ocean when I first got to California, when I realized no god had any intention of answering my questions — here, or in a horizon-to-horizon wheat field under the three-hundred-sixty-degree Montana sky, or anywhere else, from what I’d been able to determine.

The end of the week I have to go back to work, but Lu says she’s okay, and she has been keeping it together pretty well. Her eyes are clear, and the shakes have subsided to barely noticeable. She’s back to dressing like a gentleman. When she’s on, Lu is remarkably fastidious about what she wears, mostly tailored men’s britches and pressed white shirts. Sometimes a French racing cap, sometimes a derby. She’s pretty cute, but that is something I am not allowed to say with my actual voice.

She watches me dress, does a quick pen-and-ink of me standing by the bathtub in my slip, pulling my Friday-night-only stockings on, grimacing at the torture of them, but she doesn’t draw that part. The sketch is all black and white, until she colors the windows in red and orange, with crayons gripped in her fist like she’s wielding an ice pick. She makes it look like the world outside is burning, and then finds a small strip of brown velvet somewhere and ties it into my hair.

Since I close at two and the subway stops running at twelve, Lu has to come get me after work. We’re both driving one car these days, a car I bought but that somehow we both own and she has christened Alice. Alice is a 1969 baby-blue, four-barrel 383 Plymouth Fury that Lu just had to have, and if nothing major goes wrong, I can usually keep her running myself.