He saw her distorted reflection on the bottle as she walked into the club, and he made it a point not to turn his head until her body had covered the entire surface of the glass, looking oddly oblique, oddly thin. He hardly had time to meet her eyes and mumble his hello before she bent down and kissed him on the lips. It was a warm kiss. Soft. It fit his lips in a way that made his entire body warm with nostalgia, and by the time he blinked that away she was sitting across from him pouring some vodka into the styrofoam cup Jonathan had left. She swirled it around and splashed it out onto the floor before she filled it again and put the bottle back on the table without a sound. "You don't mind, do you?" she said.
"Not at all, Sophie. I'm happy to see you."
"You always had an odd way of showing it. Is this what you normally do these days?" She nodded at him in a way that made it feel like she had just passed a judgment.
"Oh, no," he said. "Usually I'm not up early enough to get morning drunk."
"Mourning drunk?" she said.
He gave her a weak smile. "I've been away for a while, but no one's passed away in my life. Not recently. You're smoking again?"
"I always hated that about you. A nose like a wolf. A little kiss and you tell me everything I've had in my mouth all day. Why didn't you read tea leaves or something more common like that?"
"How did you know this was my club? That I'd be here now?"
"How did you know I'd be coming to say hello?" She didn't have to mention Jonathan by name. Instead she told him she had met a boy through an old college friend of hers, how she had taken a quick liking to him because he had reminded her of the kind of men she used to like as a girl. She took her vodka alternately in the tiniest of sips and then in gulps, chewing nervously on the rim of the cup, leaving deep tooth marks in the styrofoam. Richard watched how the spotlight caught specks of glitter on her face, on the tops of her breasts, how her eye make-up contoured itself to shadows already there, how her crimson lipstick was thicker on one side. She had never worn make-up in college except on Halloween or when she impersonated a figure from The Rocky Horror Picture Show on rare Friday nights; she'd always had bruise-like circles around her eyes and a purplish cast to her lips all accented by the crow-black color she dyed her hair.
"Aren't you going to ask me how I became a musician?" she said.
"I thought you'd probably tell me about it," said Richard. "I always knew you'd be better at art than at surgery, with all those rats you killed. But then you didn't exactly dream about cutting open people who were still alive."
"That passed. I was busted for possession and I couldn't go to med school. Bummed around doing this and that until Keri quit her band and they needed a new singer."
"Your friend Keri?" said Richard. "The one I was afraid would freeze to death in the mountains every winter? The insane skier?"
"Come on, Keri is sane. She's always been sane. She was only a little clumsy."
"In a manner of speaking."
"I think it calms you when you settle down to sire sane kin with someone you love."
"She got married?"
"She had kids, which is why she left the band. She had twin girls with Erik."
"Eric?"
"You knew him. Erik with the K."
"It's a bad idea to marry someone whose name is an anagram of yours," said Richard. He realized he had changed the topic and she had followed along out of inattention or boredom — he was never certain with her; and he wasn't particularly interested in her music — he had never heard of Scarlett Mott until the previous week. He had taken them for another small-time band with just the right mix of luridness and obscurity to their name, their music just as lurid and as obscure until they fractured like nearly every other band and became truly obscure. He ruminated a bit too long, and she surprised him with a quiet look that changed the topic again. "How long has it been, Sophie?" he said, and his meaning was absolutely clear though he had tried to disguise the tone of his voice.
"For me? As long as never," she said.
"It could have been just yesterday for me. You left me twisting in the wind so to speak."
"You would never have understood. You never did understand."
"I was sharper than you think, Sophie."
"Sharp as a stake through the heart is what I remember."
"I was never as bad as that."
"Sharper than a serpent's tooth."
"I got the first one. I was only slow on social things like partying and dancing. That's where it went bad, isn't it? I couldn't dance."
"Oh, come on. Don't tell me that's why you own this club now."
"No. I used to be a minor partner. I ran the place for my friend Gabriel because I hadn't invested all that much. He died of AIDS. This was his present to me."
"I'm sorry."
"Bad present, huh?"
"No, I mean — "
"Wasn't your fault, Sophie."
"You're still a bastard about these things."
"I don't like conventional expressions."
"So fucking stiff about social amenities. Maybe you're right about the dancing after all, but then even Bela Lugosis can dance."
"I thought there was only one Bela Lugosi. Was I as stiff as that?"
"You never got my jokes, either."
"Don't I?"
"You were always just a little behind."
"A small-minded ass, you mean?"
She laughed. "It took you a little too long, like you had to process it through a logic chip or something. Like you were listening to a wit prompter offstage somewhere."
"You mean like now?"
"Yeah."
"The living Dead Can Dance — right?"
"See my point?"
"Yeah," said Richard. "Sharp as a poke in the eye."
"I missed all this about you, you know. When I was gone for all that time without talking to you, it was for reasons I couldn't explain to you then. And then when I came back, when I could tell you those things, you were already mortally injured and it didn't make any difference."
"You could at least have written me a note, Sophie. Telling me something like that. I'm a patient man."
"Not back then. You were too eager to hurt, if I remember correctly."
"To injure?"
"No, to be in your own pain. You craved that."
"I craved a lot of things," he said.
"You shouldn't have given in so easy."
"And you, Sophie? The rumor was that you vanished like that to spend some time dusting off. Why couldn't you just say so?"
"Not saying so was part of my problem."
"Like I didn't know you were a junkie?"
"Your knowing it wasn't the point, Cardio."
That stopped him cold. The last time she had called him Cardio it had been a phone message from Yugoslavia, the hiss of international static on the line and her usually melodious voice all dead and flat, saying the name she had whittled from Richard to "Ricardo" to "Cardio" — her heart. At that moment he felt like one of the clay jesters' heads he'd seen in her room that first night — small, no larger than a chicken's egg, but when he'd picked one up, plucking it from the top of the pencil upon which it had been skewered, the acuity of detail had frightened him. A tiny mouth, still cavernous, a contorted tongue, each tooth detailed so precisely he was sure he could run a piece of floss between them. It would have taken a very fine floss, as fine as spider silk, he'd thought, and he'd looked up at the ceiling to see the black five-legged shadow of her bony hand lurking in the corner, and on her wall her painting of "The Screaming Man," falling, spread-eagle, into an abyss with his scream so black it seemed his mouth was a hole through his head.
She was bored now. Or uncomfortable. She glanced over her shoulder into the dark parts of the club, worried a knuckle where she had torn at the flesh of a wart and left a scab of blood, laced and unlaced her slender fingers. Richard thought there was something odd about her fingertips until he remembered she was a musician now, left-handed — the nails of her right hand were shorter, chipped, the fingertips rough and abraded by sliding along the steel of guitar strings. She would never have talked to him like this — not in a lifetime — without having spent the entire night awake, worrying, imagining scenario after scenario until she could pretend the real encounter was entirely casual. Richard wanted to cut through to her, to touch her in some vulnerable place; but he had forgotten how to play this game with her; he was playing now entirely by rote, like a chess master running through a memorized game. He was tired, and all he could think to do was to concede. "I dreamed about you, Sophie," he said, "all the time. Did you ever dream about me?"
She read his face before she answered. "Yeah," she said; and there was a certain relief in her voice. "There was this one dream I remember about you. I had it while I was in Yugoslavia, and I never could figure it out. It was weird."
"Tell it to me. Please."
"In the dream I had just graduated. Or maybe I was a couple years out of school, and I went back to visit some friends and ended up going to some public event in the Green and Gray Room. A concert or a dance or something like that. When I walked upstairs in the College Center you were on the walkway over the north courtyard, leaning against the railing and looking down to where the mailboxes are. I stood next to you, leaning my chin on my elbow. I reminded you that you had left a shirt in my room."
"A shirt?"
"Well, not really a shirt. It was a gi top. One of those things you used to wear for martial arts. It was white and had a black yin-yang symbol silkscreened on the back. You said you hadn't left any shirt in my room, but as I was escribing it, the thing appeared in my hands and I put it on you. I draped it on you the way the guys at ringside put the robes over a boxer. You had your arms crossed in front of your chest, and when you had the shirt on you looked down at it. There were specks of blood all over the front, like you'd been hit in the nose at a tournament or something. You unconsciously checked your nose for blood, sniffing the way you do. You know, the way you sniff when you're nervous or thinking of what to say. Just as you did that the specks of blood floated right off the white fabric and went back into your nose. Slow motion and everything. It was like cigarette smoke going back into someone's lungs. Pretty vivid. That's why I still remember it."
"What do you suppose it means, Sophie?"
"I don't do dreams."
"Where were the bloodstains?"
"Over your heart, mostly. The symbolism is pretty obvious, don't you think? It left me feeling like you had recovered somehow. That's one of the reasons I called you that last time."
"It's been fifteen years since that call. A lot of faith to put in a dream, don't you think?"
"Oh, fuck you, Richard."
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