The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods Read online

  I wondered about my mothers. I wondered about Mr. Loury's wife. I wondered if there was a hole in the floor of the observatory, and if through it you might be able to see things beneath. I didn't want to wonder, but I wondered.

  Later, I snuck out the window, and into the night. Did I even need to sneak? No one was in charge. No one saw me walking to Mr. Loury's house. I used my sneaker to open a hole in the top of Mr. Loury's volcano. After a minute, I used my hands. I was a Krakatoan. I stamped on Mr. Loury's volcano again, and then put my ear to the ground.

  For a long time, I didn't hear anything.

  But then, from far below me, I heard something stamping back, a pounding from the other side of the earth. Then a murmuring. I scratched harder with my hands, shoveling dirt away from the top of the volcano.

  A light went on in Mr. Loury's kitchen, and his screen door opened.

  “Hey!” he shouted, but I was gone, sprinting up Palomar, because whatever was in that volcano, I'd heard a sound, a ragged gasp of welcome as I moved the dirt away. And something else had happened too.

  I had a piggy bank with thirteen dollars in it. I had three missing mothers. I dodged into the trees, and ran uphill, off the side of the road where he couldn't follow me. This was my territory. I knew how to run in the woods. He didn't even try, because he was a grown-up, and he had a car. I heard it start.

  Trees leaning in, a no-stars, no-moon night and I thought maybe the sky had been swallowed by the observatory draining the stars into its mouth, sucking the darkness dry. There it was, in front of me, its glowing white snow cone looming against the horizon.

  I scraped my hands on my jeans, once, twice, three times, until my palms stung, because from inside Mr. Loury's volcano, someone's fingers had reached up and touched mine.

  I wasn't sure about breathing. I could hardly see. One of my knees was skinned. Maybe I was crying. I wanted my dad and I didn't. I wanted my mothers, even the one I never knew.

  There was a set of headlights speeding up the spiral road and the observatory was full of astronomers without wives. Funerals, sometimes. Car crashes and cancer. Other times the wives just went away and no one ever saw them again. This was the way the world worked, I'd imagined, but now I wondered if it really was.

  My third mother, I thought and my brain got stuck on it. Katharine, called Kit, who sometimes called me Kit too, and sometimes called me Tool, for toolkit, as in a smaller, more equipped version of herself. But my real name was something else entirely. My dad called me Aulax, after a star. “The Furrow,” that star name meant, and he'd stuck a Mary in as my middle name to make me more human.

  The door was unlocked. I skidded in on my heels, and felt along the edge of the room. I knew my way around Palomar. The inside was like nothing, no sky on view, just the telescope stabbing through the sphere, but as I stood there, not hidden, uncertain, the shutters began to open to let the telescope look at the sky.

  Mr. Loury's story was horrible all over my brain. Look down, he said in my head, look underground, and as I thought it, I felt those cold fingers again, touching my own, gripping my own, and I heard a car stop outside.

  No one was visible inside the observatory. I wanted to look toward the center of the earth. I wanted to find my mothers. I didn't want to think about Alaska. I didn't want to think about Pele. I didn't want to think about who was underneath that dirt in Mr. Loury's backyard, nor about how far down the dirt went.

  I ran to the telescope and slung myself up into its workings. The shutters were open and the sky was there, black. I held my breath and climbed.

  Mr. Loury was in the building. I could feel him, making his way around the edge of the circle. The telescope was moving, and I was slipping.

  “Kid,” he called. “Hey, Buddy. Where're you at?”

  I twisted my knees over the beam at the base of the telescope. I'd always wanted to climb the Hale. It was the biggest telescope in the world. Not in the dark.

  “This isn't a place for little girls,” he said, and his voice was closer than I'd thought he was. “They're going to look at the roots of the world tonight.”

  Where were the rest of the astronomers? Where was my dad, for that matter? He was supposed to be here. Nobody was in charge, I reminded myself.

  I tied my shirtsleeves to the beam, because I felt the telescope moving. There was a sound, a squealing shudder, which I took for the roof shutters opening further, but when I arched my neck to try to look around the side of the telescope, I couldn't see anything.

  I looked down. There was light below me, and the telescope rotated toward it, my fingers slipping on the metal as we tilted backward. I was not inside the telescope, could not see whatever it was they were seeing there in the cage, but whatever they were looking at, whatever it was they were trying to see, it was in the wrong direction.

  “You aren't here,” Mr. Loury said, from directly below me, and I could tell he was looking up at me, trying to reach me, but I couldn't do anything about it.

  “I belong here. My dad works here, and you're trespassing. You got fired,” I told him, clinging to the beam. I didn't care about quiet any more. I wanted someone to hear me, and yet, somehow, I didn't scream for help.

  “I tried to tell you,” Mr. Loury said. “The stars are gone and all of them are gone with them. They want boys, and that's all. She doesn't want me anymore.”

  The telescope completed its tilt, flipping me so that I faced down, and I saw what the open shutters looked into, what I was dangling over.

  There was lava below us, a crater full of it, glowing orange and red, and in the lava there were women, stretching their fingers to touch the metal of the telescope, pressing their nails into it.

  I saw the incandescent roots of the world, and the way the women were tangled in them, their mouths open, a deafening murmur like wind tearing trees. I saw Mr. Loury's wife, the Kodachrome version of her, her white skin and bright hair, her eyes big and black-rimmed with fake lashes. The sunglasses she always wore were missing. She was naked, her long arms savaged and blistered, her ribs skinny and her hipbones sticking out. Come here, she mouthed, and her lipstick was perfect. Other mothers were there too, and I knew them.

  I'd been to their funerals and gone to school with their abandoned children. I'd seen the X's where they weren't. I saw all the dead women in the center of the earth, and then I saw them reach up toward where I dangled.

  I saw my third mother, and she saw me.

  Somewhere I heard a door slam, a shout, and Mr. Loury, just for an instant, was silhouetted against all that light and fire.

  Then, like the Krakatoans, the astronomer's wives were gone, and my mother was gone, and all that was left were black skeletons, ashes floating on rafts of darkness, lists of dead stars. I heard myself screaming.

  The asbestos-tiled floor of the observatory appeared beneath my cheek, and my head appeared on top of my body, sharp pain and dull ache at once, and there was my dad, kneeling beside me, his eyes still bloodshot.

  “Can you move?” he asked me. “Is anything broken?”

  I could move. Nothing was broken. The roof rotated and where the sky had been dark, it was now all stars and Milky Way. I stood up, bruised, and tried to figure out where my feet were. My dad had me by the arm, and he was moving me out of there, faster than I wanted to move. I looked back at the telescope, and I could feel everything getting taken away from me, forever, and all at once.

  My dad carried me to the car, fastened my seatbelt, and drove me down the spiral road, and to the hospital. He told the nurses I'd fallen from something high, and they looked into my eyes and agreed that I was looking out at the world through a concussion. They showed me my pupils in a hand mirror, one big, one tiny, Martian moons in an eclipse, or the sun trying to shine through a sky full of ash.

  I put my face into a crisp white shoulder and cried there, but when I lifted my head, I was done, and no one asked.

 
Mr. Loury's abandoned house and its volcano got paved over when they redid the spiral road in the late 70s.

  My dad drowned in 1984, on a trip to the South Pacific, diving into an underwater cave and failing to equalize his pressure, but he was an old man by then and hadn't been in touch with me in a long time. There were no more mothers.

  The astronomers at Palomar kept finding supernovae and charting galaxies, but the largest telescope in the world was surpassed in size in the early 90s. The last time I drove there, up the spiral road and to the tourist center, it was daylight, and the only person I saw was not an astronomer, but a painter pulleying himself around the walls, rolling white paint slowly over the dome.

  When I tried to ask him a question, he shrugged and turned back to his job, pulling himself along the dome, hand over hand.

  I stood there a while, watching him spackling the fine cracks all over the surface, the ones that stretched up from the gravel and all the way to the top of the dome itself. The observatory was getting old. I bent down, and put my ear to the ground, but there was nothing to hear. When I stood up, the painter was looking at me.

  He reached into the pocket of his overalls, and tossed me a small white rock. Later that night, in my hotel room, I soaked it in alcohol. Underneath the paint, the rock was black and porous, but that was all.

  Such & Such Said to So & So

  It was late July, a dark green mood-ring of a night, and the drinks from Bee's Jesus had finally killed a man.

  The cocktails there had always been dangerous, but now they were poison. We got the call in at the precinct, and none of us were surprised. We all knew the place was no good, never mind that we'd also all spent some time there. These days we stayed away, or not, depending on how our marriages were going, and how much cash we had in the glovebox. There were no trains nearby, and if you ended up out too long, you were staying out. The suburbs were a dream, and you weren't sleeping.

  There was nothing harder to get out of your clothes than Bee's Jesus. We all knew that too. Dry cleaner around the corner. You'd go there, shame-faced and stubbled at dawn, late for your beat.

  “Ah, it's the Emperor of Regret,” the guy behind the counter would say to you. No matter which Emperor you were. All us boys from the precinct had the same title.

  “Yeah,” you'd say, “Emperor of Regret.”

  The guy could launder anything. Hand him your dirty shirt, and he'd hand you back a better life, no traces, no strings, no self-righteous speech.

  I was trying to get clean, though, real clean, and the martinizer couldn't do it. I knew better than to go anywhere near the Jesus, but I could hear the music from a mile away. Nobody wanted to let me in anymore. People doubted my integrity after what'd happened the last time. The last several times.

  The cat at the door was notorious, and had strict guidelines, though lately he'd begun to slip. Things weren't right at Bee's. Hadn't been for a while. They had to let me in tonight. This was legit police business.

  “C'mon, Jimmy, you can afford to look sideways tonight,” yelled one of the girls on the block, the real girls, not the other kind.

  “I'm here on the up and up,” I said, because if I came in on the down and down, the place wouldn't show. But I'd seen it as I rolled past, lights spinning. Gutter full of glitter, and that was how you knew. Door was just beyond the edge of the streetlight, back of the shut-down bodega, and most people would've walked right on by.

  But I knew what was going down. Somebody in that bar had called the police, and reported a body, male, mid-thirties, goner. I was here to find out the whohowwhy.

  “You the police?” the caller had said. “It was an emergency three hours ago, sugarlump, but now it's just a dead guy. They dumped him in the alley outside where Bee's was, but Bee's took a walk, every piece of fancy in there up working their getaway sticks like the sidewalk was a treadmill. So you gotta come get him, sweets. He's a health hazard. Dead of drink if you know what I mean.”

  We did know what she meant, most of us, and we crossed our hearts and needle-eyed, cause we weren't the dead guy, but we could have been, easy. We were fleas and Bee's Jesus was a dog's ear.

  Me and the boys duked it out for who was taking statements and who was caution-taping, and now it was me and my partner Gene, but Gene didn't care about Bee's like I did. The place was a problem I couldn't stay away from. I kept trying to get out of town, but I ran out of gas every time.

  “What're you doing, Jimmy?” Gene said. “You're trying to sail a cardboard catamaran to Cuba. Not in a million years, you're not gonna get that broad back. Cease and desist. Boys are getting embarrassed for you.”

  I was embarrassed for me, too. I wasn't kidding myself, she was what I was looking to see. I was trying to put a nail in it.

  Gloria was in that place somewhere, Gloria and the drink she'd taken to like a fish gill-wetting. Bee's Jesus was Gloria's bar now.

  §

  Ten years had passed since the night she sat on the sink, laughing as she straight-razored my stubble, and lipsticked my mouth.

  “Poor boy,” she said, watching the way I twitched. “Good thing you're pretty.”

  Gloria was a skinny girl with bobbed black hair, acid green eyes, and a tiny apartment full of ripped-up party dresses. In her cold-water bathroom, she melted a cake of kohl with a match and drew me eyes better than my own. She'd told me she wouldn't take me to her favorite bar until she'd dressed me in her clothes, top to tail, and I wanted to go to that bar, wanted to go there bad.

  I woulda done anything back then to get her, even though my Londoner buddy Philip (he called himself K. Dick, straight-faced) kept looking at her glories and shaking his head.

  “I don't know what you see in her, bruv. She's just a discount Venus with a nose ring.”

  She was the kind of girl you can't not attempt, already my ex-wife before I kissed her, but I knew I had to go forward or die in a ditch of longing. It was our first date.

  I saw her rumpled bed and hoped I'd end up in it, but Gloria dragged me out the door without even a kiss, me stumbling because I was wearing her stockings with my own shoes.

  Downtown, backroom of a bodega, through the boxes and rattraps, past the cat that glanced at me, laughed at the guy in the too tight, and asked if I could look more wrong.

  Actual cat. I tried not to notice that it was. It seemed impolite. Black with a tuxedo. Cat was smoking a cigarette and stubbed it out on my shoe. It groomed itself as it checked me out and found me wanting.

  “Come on, man, go easy,” Gloria said. “Jimmy's with me.”

  She was wearing a skin-tight yellow rubber dress and I was wearing a t-shirt made of eyelashes, rolling plastic eyeballs and fishnet. It didn't work on me. It wanted her body beneath. She was a mermaid. I was trawled.

  “You expect me to blind eye that kind of sadsack?” the cat said, and lifted its lip to show me some tooth. Its tail twisted and informed me of a couple of letters. NO, written in fur.

  “Better than the last boy,” Gloria said, and laughed. The cat laughed too, an agreeing laugh that said he'd seen some things. I felt jealous. “I'll give you a big tip,” she said to him.

  I was a nineteen year old virgin. I'd never gotten this close to getting this close before.

  Gloria picked the cat up, holding him to her latex and he sighed a long-suffering sigh as she tipped him backward into the air and stretched his spine.

  “Don't tell anyone I let the furball in. They'll think I'm getting soft.”

  “I owe you for this,” she said to the cat.

  To me, she said “Time to get you three-sheeted.”

  I was pretty deep at this point in clueless. Underworld, nightlife, and Gloria knew things I had no hope of knowing. She was the kind of girl who'd go into the subway tunnels for a party, and come out a week later, covered in mud and still wearing her lipstick. I'd been in love with her for a year or so. As far as I was concerned, the fact that she knew my name was a victory. She kept calling me Mister Nice Guy.
Years later, after we'd been married and divorced, after Gloria had too much gin, and I had too many questions, I learned this was because she'd forgotten my name.

  She tugged me around the corner, through a metal chute in the wall. For a second I smelled rotting vegetables and restaurant trash, cockroach spray, toilet brush, hairshirt, and then we were through, and that was over, and we were at the door that led to Bee's.

  Gloria looked at me. “You want a drink,” she said.

  “Do they have beer?” I asked. I was nervous. “Could I have a Corona?”

  The shirt was itchy, and she'd smeared something tarry into my hair. I felt like a newly paved road had melted into my skull and gumstuck my brain.

  Gloria laughed. Her eyelids glittered like planetariums.

  “Not really,” she said. “It's a cocktail bar. You ever had a cocktail, Mister Nice Guy?”

  “I've had Guinness,” I said.

  She looked at me, pityingly. “Guinness is beer, and it's Irish, and if we scared any of that up, it'd be interested in you, but I'm not sure you'd want it. It's heavy and gloomy. You don't want the Corona either. You don't want what Corona brings you. It makes you really fucking noticeable at night.”

  I liked Guinness. I liked Corona. I liked wine coolers. I wasn't picky, and I knew nothing about drinking. Whatever anyone poured me, I was willing. I had never had a cocktail. I didn't know what Gloria meant.

  She opened a door, and we were in Bee's. Bright lights, big city, speakeasy, oh my God. My face went into a trombone to the teeth, and the player looked out from behind the instrument and barked.

  “Get your mug outta my bone,” he said. He was a dog. A bullhound. But I was cool with that. Dogs, cats, and us, and it was all completely normal and fine, because I was with Gloria, and I trusted her.

  I didn't trust her. I didn't know her. She was a broad. She was a broad broader than the universe, and I wished, momentarily, for K. Dick and his encyclopedic wingman knowledge of bitters, bourbons, and cheap things with umbrellas. I wished for his accent which lady slayed, and which made the awful forgivable. Or so he swore. K. Dick was more talk than walk.