collected stories

"What do you think people are looking at when they're watching a band?" She glanced over at him. He wasn't looking at her. When she put her head down, she caught his movement out of the corner of her eye. She pulled out her ponytail and balled her hand up, rewrapping it. A few brownish-gold strands still stuck to the back of her neck. The city had, after all, been built over a swamp in the eighteenth century.

They were sitting on the concrete in back of the club, close but not touching. The bands were just beginning to load in. She was studiously ignoring the clunking and thumping and scuffling of feet, arms, and equipment. One of the drummers lit a cigarette. In the western sky, pallid orange light spread -- a viral culture. She stretched her legs out under the carriage of one of the vans. Cars hissed by.

"Probably just thinking about their own bullshit," he said.

"You're probably right. I know I am. Sometimes I'm watching the band communicate, watching music being made, but most of the time I'm thinking about whether I left the flat iron on or what's wrong with this or that relationship, or ... "

"Yeah," he interrupted. "Me too."

"Are we just more selfish than everyone else?" When she said 'we,' she meant 'I.'

He shrugged. "Could be. Does it matter?"

Her mouth flattened. She held out her hands, momentarily helpless, giving the words she didn't have over to him, to the early evening, or to the band members who might be eavesdropping. One of them, the floppy blond guitarist with the crooked nose and beady eyes, tapped her shoulder. She jerked upright.

"Y'all know any good places to eat around here?" The guitarist was standing over her, his shadow cast long, blending into the concrete.

She gestured, sighting along her left arm. "There's food a couple of blocks down if you walk straight that-a-way." She cringed as soon as she said it. Corny.

Crooked Nose nodded, blinked, stared in that direction, and then started off. She noticed he didn't pick his feet up when he walked. She wondered what made him so heavy.

Keith leaned over and bumped her with his shoulder. His hands were still in his well-worn pockets. She could hear him jingling a couple of coins together. "Ange, I think you and I find meaning where it isn't."

"You mean if we didn't chew on everything constantly, we'd be content?"

"Maybe. I just think we need to let go a little. We do this because we still love it."

"And because we feel obligated," she added.

"Yeah, that too. Have to keep the engine running."

"Or idling, at least."

"Till the battery runs out."

"Bad joke." He grinned. "Everyone's fault."

She smirked. What was the system they orbited in if not self-referential? "Nah, just yours. Or mine." She stretched, leaning back on her hands. A piece of gravel cut into her palm, and she winced. "I guess we might still have something to prove. Sometimes I feel like I do."

He made a sweeping but vague gesture. "What else is hardcore but a home for the weird and wounded?"

She coughed up a laugh; a little bit forced, not because it was too close to home but because she'd heard him use that exact line so many times. The bands hadn't returned. Doors would be opening soon. She lifted herself slowly, dusting her hands off on her thighs. She didn't own a piece of clothing that wasn't permanently stained.

"We're in our late twenties and having this conversation, by the way," she said, looking down at him.

They'd first met about eight years ago, in the basement of a church. They had mutual friends. He'd come for the headliner; she'd come for one of the locals. They'd argued, but it had been playful. Their verbal sparring always was. Seven months later, they'd ended up at the same half-assed show collective meeting. She wasn't even sure now what the collective had been trying to accomplish, as it had rapidly collapsed under the weight of various egos.

She'd been outside the house where the meeting was held, somewhere in the suburbs, smoking a cigarette. The screen door banged, and she glanced up.

"What'd you think about that shit?" he'd said, waving an arm at the bay window. Silhouettes were visible within, perched on top of dumpstered couches or moving to and fro. "They're still talking," he said, without her prompting, "about who's going to decide the agenda."

She'd snorted. "Fucking ridiculous. If we're going to change the world, I don't give a shit how we do it as long as we're not stepping on the people we're trying to help. We have to get moving, though."

He'd smiled. His eyes made half-moons. She'd found herself curving upward, too. "That," he said to her, "is the first reasonable thing I've heard all evening."

She'd exhaled smoke through her teeth, careful to turn her head away from him as she did. He wore his shirts a size too large, and his hair obviously hadn't been cut in months. There was a hardness to his features that was distinctly unappealing to her. Still, she'd found herself preening in front of him, wondering whether he was interested in the curve between her hip and shoulder. She'd stubbed out her cigarette, suddenly embarrassed of a habit left over from the days when she'd been trying desperately to be seen as tougher than she was.

"You want to just do this on our own?" she'd offered.

Girls -- his girls -- had come and gone, some bright and willing, helping them cart in the PA. Others had regarded Ange from under low lids. No matter their reactions, she'd always felt awkward. No matter how much makeup she wore, whether she was in a skirt or not, she never felt as womanly as they were. She was work. They were pleasure. She felt as if she'd swallowed something wrong, something she hadn't been meant to touch, and it had changed her indelibly. She'd been caught in a space she wasn't supposed to occupy. She hadn't lacked an ebb and flow of her own, of boys who'd tracked her down, but their waxing and waning desires did little to reassure her.

"Why don't you talk to him about it?" her friend Melanie had asked. They'd been sitting in a coffee shop together, and they had to raise their voices above the self-involvement of the other patrons, making them just as guilty. Melanie, who worked at a boutique, was lounging in jeans, her legs crossed at the knee. Ange hadn't had time to change out of the stiff slacks and ruffled button-up shirt from her desk job. ("You look gorgeous," Melanie had said, holding her at arm's length. "So grown up.")

"Are you fucking kidding me?" The hot porcelain of Ange's cup burnt her thumb. She put it down on the end table, frowning. She tried to distract herself by peering at the silvery laptop screen of the stranger next to her on the couch whose legs had been jostling hers. No interesting details. Student or executive? Real work or preoccupation?

"You can't go around," said Melanie, her brow furrowing with worry and her grey eyes darkening, "with knots in your chest like that."

"It's been seven years, Mel. It's not like I'm in love with him or anything. It'd be weird if we even fucked. It'd be even weirder if I tried to justify things. I don't even know what I'd say, you know? Um, sorry I'm not what I should be? He wouldn't even understand. Things are fine the way they are."

Melanie had reached over and grabbed Ange's hand, and they'd just sat there, squeezing wrists and palms in pulses, in Morse Code, until one or both of them decided to change the subject.

Ange's hair had changed about a hundred times since that first basement show -- color and cut, long to short, bangs or no. Keith's looked exactly the same.

"We're lifers," Keith said. She offered him a hand up, and he accepted, gathering the cash box under one arm.

"You know, a lot of people our age are popping out their second kids by now."

His expression deflated. The bottoms of the western clouds had gone from bacterial orange to ash. The shadows closed even the outdoors in; they dimmed his features, scratched them with charcoal, made her feel as if she was missing some subtlety in the way he held himself. Her own shoulders gathered together, humming with tension.

"That kind of stuff doesn't appeal to me," he said, flatly.

"Me neither." She wasn't lying. "Do you think," she asked, "people like that are envious of us?"

"I bet," he said, "they don't give a shit."

They each bobbed their heads in concord -- not so much in sync as like two pendulums of different weights. In the distance, the bands, plus hangers-on, appeared -- a clot of worn-out tshirts on the horizon. Process as usual. The scenery wasn't exotic; the grooves were all worn out. The shelves hadn't been dusted, so to speak, in a long time. Same as any marriage. Same as any job.