s far as Jim was concerned, it was my pity party and I could cater it as I liked. It was 10:00 a.m. when they pulled in and he called me, as promised, from the Econolodge across the parking lot from the renovated theater. I arrived by 11:00 with a go-cup of Beam in the cup holder of my car. We sat together on side-by-side folding chairs watching the busy-bee workers drag equipment around the stage. We smoked cigarettes. Godsmack was cranking through the PA. It was my second day without food. My head was light. He wasn't talking to me. Occasionally he would touch me like he was looking for me. My hair. My cheek. My thigh. It was driving me crazy. I was not leaving.

I pretended he wasn't there. I sat still and isolated the liquor in my blood. I felt it petting every inch of me. Softly. Propitiously. There was nothing blocking its way.

He cringed at my loud voice, but was somewhat amused by my voracious physical attention to him. He'd been letting me keep my hand between his legs; the hand that wasn't holding a Beam Coke. Without a word, he reached for my wrist and led me upstairs to one of the private boxes overlooking the stage. It was furnished with overstuffed leather chairs and a long polished oak table with seating enough for six. An empty caterer's cart stood in front of the wet bar. He sat toward the back of the small room and unfastened his jeans. I took him in my mouth like I didn't know him. After a while he sighed. I stood and looked down at him, "You don't honestly think I'm the one with the problem here?"

He found me on the bus, dipping into his unmarked stash of whiskey. I added some Coke and sat down. He sat across with a cigarette burning in his mouth. We said nothing. He breathed; the Kool never even quivered. Someone opened the door and the stagnant air swept across our faces. "Hey, Jim, there's someone out here who says she knows you."

"Bring her on in," he invited. From where I was sitting, I was the first to see her. She looked vaguely like someone I was friends with in Junior High. Someone who wanted to be a DJ when she grew up, and for a moment I got excited that I might see her again. This girl's long dark hair preceded her "Hi!"

"Hi!" Jim equaled her enthusiasm. She looked at him. At me. And back to him. "Do I know you?" he prompted.

"No. You're not who I thought," she giggled, covering her mouth with a hand. "That's not him," she said looking behind her to someone I couldn't see.

Jim laughed standing to use the bathroom. "Ok. See ya. Wouldn't want to be ya."

Who was this person? I thought watching him walk by.

"Shall we go back inside?" Jim stood beside me, nudging my shoulder.

I lay on my back in front of the stage while he helped his technician set up his kit. He didn't have to. He'd play for a minute and then stop. And then do it again. I could feel him through the floor. Dick joined him and together they made disjointed melodies. I was a raft on a sea of polished hardwood. I backstroked. I swung my cowboy boots in the air. To many, I belonged to no one. And I accepted Dick's lewd gesticulations hoping to tempt Jim into claiming our past. He looked over once with a mixture of surprise and loathing. I broke into tinier pieces. It felt unlikely I would ever again be one whole.

"I know them."

"Who are they?"

"They're from the radio station where you're doing your interview," I told him.

"Go say hello."

"I don't know them like that." He paused to consider this, "Go say hello. They see you."

"I told you. It's not like that."

"I don't get you."

"I know. By the way, I'm warning you. They're huge fans."

My driving was fine, but at the station the girlfriends were left on the other side of soundproof glass. I had to make conversation with the woman from Kansas City who Harry had flown in that morning. She was composed, careful and crisp—and looked like everyone else who had come before, though there was no way she could have known this. It was clear that I'd lost the fine tuning of some of my more important motor skills. I felt made entirely of rubber. My arms and legs seemed longer and my head heavier, less rigid than I needed it to be. I answered some of her more simple questions well enough, but they took all of my energy. Jim kept glancing at me through the double glass with a worried expression. I gave him a crooked smile. This only made him look more anxious. I had never seen this response from him before. It made him seem all the more gone from my reach.

"How long have you known him," she asked.

"Forever," I manage. "Since I'm 22." This shocked her. I watched her try to calculate my age in correlation to their discography. I watched her dissect my whiskey-forged appearance. She looked through the glass at Jim and then began nodding her head a little with the slightest expression of pity.

"I only met Harry a few nights ago," she told me. "I went to the show with a friend. I had no idea who they were."

Uh huh. Something in my gut twisted. It was beginning for her and ending for me. I was at the end. I embodied the one moment in which history carries less weight than discovery.

"It's over for me. For us, I mean," I twisted the cap off a bottle of water and swallowed everything back. She asked me where the bathroom was. I gave her a long look. "Don't worry, it's not contagious. But I'll go." She didn't argue. I closed myself into the music library. It was climate controlled and well ordered. Twenty minutes later Jim came to get me.

"What are you doing?"

"Waiting."

"I'm ready to leave." He was coming home with me. To do laundry. To fuck and to shower. Maybe if there was time we'd fix something to eat. He had never been there before and I knew that he would hate it. I lived in a 100-year-old east coast colonial with no vista and steam heat. The rooms are tight and dark. He was going to hate it. He knew it too. Jim describes how he imagines it. I pretend he's wrong in his choice of stereotype, thinking I could categorize him too. I don't think he would like his pigeonhole any more than I.

"How dare you define me? You don't know me." It is the most outrageous thing I have ever said to him. An accusation that might indeed be true. An accusation which spoken tells him I'm tired of pretending I'm not right.

"I know enough. I know how you've been shaped," he is busy adjusting the balance on my stereo. Traffic on the LIE had slowed as we approached the intersection of the Cross Island. "Unless you've been holding back on me."

"You know I have."

"Yes, I do. And that's part of it, Nina. You see."

There's this thing that I love about him the most. He is the free-est person I've ever met. This man lives the exact life he wants. He's comfortable in his faults and happy with his attributes. He never explains. How does he resist? He's also an addict and a drunk and recently a petty thief.

The irony was that he was not quite as articulate or clever as I—louder, much more obvious; as unmistakable as the sharp edge of a knife. I'd been all the time curbing my cunning around him, but my steady diet of whiskey had made me reactive. He'd been flinching and I'd been bracing all day long.

"I had a guy raise a hand to me once," I tell him. "I was sixteen, and this should not surprise you, he was significantly older. When I cowered, he accused me by my response, of having been regularly threatened with violence. I think," I continue matter-of-factly, "the idea that he wouldn't be the first, took the wind out of his swing." I looked away from the road and saw Jim looking at me for longer than a glance for the first time since he got here. "I remember being really pissed to think that he felt he could positively read me by just a reflex. That now he thought he knew all my secrets because I had the fucking sense to duck."

I unlock my front door and he scrunches his nose. "Just what I thought."

"What did you thought?"

"Nothing," Jim barely wants to follow me farther inside.

"What? You have to say it."

"It smells like an old lady's house, OK, Nina! It's just not you. Where's the washing machine?"

"It's in the basement."

"Oh, you have basements here."

"Give me the clothes. You don't have to go down."

"No, show me. I'll go."

Mine was a labyrinth of exposed pipes, flaking asbestos. Mounds of dirty sheets and towels sat on cracked concrete. The grout in the butter yellow tile surround was dotted with mildew. This was my life. He tried hard not to touch anything he didn't have to.

"Close your eyes. I'll lead you carefully to the bedroom. You won't have to see anything on the way," I tell him.

He took off his clothes and got on my bed. He lay on his side, propped on his elbow, ankles crossed and looked around. "I like those," he said. I'd picked up salmon pate and water crackers the same place I'd found the obscene-looking flowers he was pointing to. Despite the fact they were tropical, they reminded him of home, of the four stalks from the desert yucca that an interior designer billed him cost two hundred dollars for and arranged in a formidable piece of Navaho pottery in a corner of his living room. "This sleigh bed is too big for this room."

I pulled off my shirt, "I know." We didn't kiss. I didn't compliment him. I didn't answer back when he asked me over and over if I liked his cock. I was at the bottom of the Z entry in the dictionary and anyway we were about to run out of fucks. I drank Jim Beam from the bottle while he showered. I changed my clothes. Tried three outfits, less and less happy each time. Jim reached into my closet and pulled out a pair of boot cut jeans and a little black top. He picked through a collection of belts I'd forgotten I had and came up with an old pony skin cowboy one. When I started to put on slick black suede boots he shook his head and pointed with my foamy toothbrush to my worn out Justins.

I posed. "This is what you want me to wear?"

"Bare shoulders are important. So's being comfortable. You look like you're comfortable. It's a turn-on."

"I don't get it."

"I know." He spit into the sink. "It's just a damn rock and roll show. Don't make so much out of it."

© RoseMarie London