The Girl Under The Stairs Ch. 01

But then I got up the next morning and nothing was ever normal again.

*

She was up before me, sitting (how's this for irony?) at the kitchen table drinking coffee.

Smoking.

Therefore, nervous.

Boy's full size pajamas.

"Work?" I asked.

"Not till eleven. I'm just doing lunch next three weeks till the show's over."

"Cool. Why you smoking?"

No answer.

Not right away.

Looking out across the living room to the windows and the morning sun.

Away from me.

Another long puff, long exhale. Streams of smoke from her lips and nose, grey turned ivory by the sunlight, surrounded by dust motes, golden, dancing.

A scene I would have loved to paint.

"I want to talk to you, Jimmy."

"What about?"

"Last night."

"I thought we'd decided that was all normal and healthy. Like nudists."

That made her smile.

"Not so sure," she said.

I took my coffee, sat with her.

"Not so sure what?"

"About normal. About not nervous."

"With me?"

"Actually no. It's everybody else."

I waited on her.

"I was nervous yesterday," she said. "On stage. First time. I had a hard time. Harder than I said last night. Harder than I thought it would be. I had real trouble concentrating, trouble playing the part, y'know? God, I fluffed lines and everything."

"You didn't look nervous to me. Oh, shit, kinda wrong thing to say, huh?"

Smile. Hand on my arm. Another puff. More smoke in golden air.

She was looking at me now.

"I mean, I got through it okay. And everybody was nice. But this is an equity show, you know? And I just feel like, if I can't get it together, they'll all think I'm not a pro."

"Of course you're a pro. You've been on Law & Order."

"Everybody's been on Law & Order."

"What about E-Z Go?. Regularity made simple."

"Easy. It was regularity made easy."

"Whatever. Whatchya gonna do?"

"Okay. Look. Here's the thing. If I were here alone, I figure I'd just do it, you know? I'd just take my clothes off and do stuff. Normal stuff. Like, opening the refrigerator, you know? Stuff I have to do onstage. I'd just do stuff until I get used to it, y'know? Get used to doing all kinds of normal stuff naked. That's what I'd do."

"Okay, you want me to leave for a while?"

"No, that's it. I don't want you to."

She breathed deeply, forgot to smoke.

"That's the other thing, Jimmy. I have to get used to getting looked at. I mean seriously, that freaked me out way more than I ever thought it would. I like wanted to cover myself up. And the character doesn't give a shit. And I've got two weeks to get used to that. So it might kinda help if you were here."

"Okay. That's what you want?"

"Is that like really weird, Jimmy? Is that a really weird thing to ask?"

"Well, actually, yeah."

Which made her laugh again.

And this time, it was my hand over hers. Comfort. Nerves.

"It's OK, babe. I love you. If it helps you, I'm cool with it."

*

Which is how, a few minutes later, my sister's bedroom door opened and she came out, dressed approximately the same as she had been on stage the day before.

"Okay, don't look," she said.

We laughed.

I stood aside between her and the kitchen.

"You, uh, wanna open the refrigerator?"

"No," she said. "I think I'll just finish my coffee."

*

Here's what my sister looked like to me for the hour she hung around the apartment before taking a shower and heading out to wait tables.

Pale skinned girl, the tops of her breasts and the thin flesh above her breastbones sprayed with freckles. One of those thin girls with surprisingly ample hips and a pear shaped backside, prettily bisected. Keira Knightly's breasts with slightly larger nipples. Her stomach flat and lightly muscled. Long thin colt-girl legs that, on that July morning hadn't been shaved for a few days and so, were hazed blonde and downy. I remember that our floor hadn't been swept in a few days and how the bottom of her feet got dirty as she walked. And, of course, in the middle of her (where I tried - and failed -- not to look) a prominent triangle of flesh bottomed by two folds, all shaven except for a thin, rusty landing strip running from the top of her lips halfway toward the perfect ellipse of her navel. When she caught me looking, her hands fluttered down to cover, then moved away. She looked down at the remnant of her pubic hair.

"Red's kind of a thing," she said. "Some guys ... "

"Like that .. " I finished for her.

"Well, definitely," Mo said," So I kept some." And did a little pirouette on bare, dirty feet, her shoulders gleaming in the sunlight.

My sister.

Asleep in my arms beneath the stairs of the crazy house.

I watched her moving through the morning sunshine, surrounded by dust mote angels.

When, after an hour, she disappeared for that shower and left for work, I started to breathe again. Then fell down on the couch in the living room and didn't do something that I almost wanted to do, but that, if I had, I would have been ashamed of.

*

Things I thought but did not say out loud over the next two weeks:

That we really ought to stop doing this.

That I couldn't figure out a way to tell her that we ought to stop.

Because then I'd have to admit that when she left, ...

That normal people don't want to beat off over their sister.

That I had become the kind of person who wanted to beat off over his sister.

And what kind of person beats off over his sister anyways?

That I could tell myself that it was okay because it kept me from touching her.

So I could do it after all.

And it wouldn't be perverted, because I wouldn't be touching her.

So I was doing what she wanted and I wasn't touching her and so it really wasn't what people would call it if they knew about it.

Because she was my sister.

My girl under the stairs.

And I loved her.

Ch. 5 Drawing Maura

It was late when I got home, Maura was already there, curled on the couch, in a t-shirt and jeans, eating Ben & Jerry's out of a container, reading.

She was pretty, my sister.

Pretty, clothed or naked.

Which was a thought I shouldn't have.

Which was a thought I couldn't help but have.

She looked up at me.

I hadn't realized that I was standing in the doorway, staring at her, neither fully in nor fully out of the apartment.

"Ice cream," she said redundantly, holding out the container and spoon. "Want some?"

"Sure," I said.

I came in, tossed my keys on the table and ambled over to sit beside her.

The couch sagged. Our hips touched. She dug out some ice cream, offered me the spoon.

Cherry Garcia.

Her Kindle lay on the low coffee table in front of us.

"What'chya reading?" I asked her.

Handed back the spoon.

"Something good. Anäis Nin, you ever read her?"

"French. Spanish. Hung around with Henry Miller. She wrote diaries. There was a movie I saw once."

"Pretty good for the unlettered." She polished off another spoon, scooped another for me. I watched her. From when she was a little kid, she never chewed ice cream. She like to swish it around in her mouth until it melted, then swallow it like a milkshake. The process made her cheeks dance. "This is from later," she said. It's called Incest."

Swish.

"What's it about? Or do I already know?"

Wondering: How does she liquefy the cherries?

"Well, yeah. With her father. She hadn't seen him in like, twenty years since she was little. The he shows up back in her life. And she fucks him."

"Gross."

"Yeah. She's really into it. She hadn't seen him in so long that he was like a stranger. But, I mean, her father. Doesn't you're body like, tell you no or something?"

"I guess hers didn't."

"Yeah," Maura mused. It was her turn with the ice cream. Swish.

This time, she didn't hand the spoon back to me.

Pointed to me with it instead.

"Jimmy, you sure you're not uncomfortable with what we're doing?"

"What meaning what exactly of all the weird shit we doing, kid?"

She laughs, answers by pulling one side of her shirt up, flashing me her boob, then pulling it back down.

"Ah, that weird shit." I thought for a moment, then told her the truth. "You know, it'd be a lot weirder for me if I just showed up at the show and had to deal with it. So in a weird kind of way, you're really kinda doing me a favor, y'know?"

She chewed on that thought.

"Okay," she said after a minute. "You want more Cherry?"

*

Okay, not the truth. Not totally.

The truth has got a lot of sides to it.

*

Another truth, two nights later.

This time, I'm home, killing time on Instagram. Love lives of the Kardashians. Miracles of modern tech. Maura comes in late from rehearsal. Opening is less than two weeks away.

"Goddamn, Jimmy," she says by way of greeting. "Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn."

"I love you too," I tell her. Kylie Jenner and Matthew McConnaghey will just have to wait. "What's wrong, babe?"

"I sucked," she says. Comes in, plops onto the floor in front of my chair, cross-legged. "I totally sucked tonight. I, like, had a full blown panic attack. We're doing Act 1, scene 3, where I'm supposed to walk out into the kitchen, first time I'm naked, y'know? And I'm standing offstage and I just get this wave of panic, washes over me, like, I dunno, like, water, y'know? Like a really cold shower, and I'm like, what the fuck am I doing, and I can't go out there, and it's like I'm twelve years old and I don't wanna go into the girl's locker room 'coz my boobs are two different sizes and everybody'll see them and know. And I'm just like, oh shit, and I'm standing there in the wings, I already took my robe off, I'm already naked and I'm late for my cue and Randy is out there waiting for me. So I take a deep breath and I make myself go out there, but, like, my concentration is shot and I'm just going through the motions, I'm outside of myself, watching myself, and I cannot get calm, cannot find a center and I just totally, royally sucked. And afterward, everybody's like, it's okay, you just had a bad night, it happens to everybody, and I'm thinking, everybody doesn't have to spend an hour and a half naked in front of people and I'm not ready and I'm not professional and I'll just be this naked girl out there, and everybody will just be looking at my tits and my pussy, because it's my job to distract them from that, it's my job to act past that, and I can't do that, I mean, I just can't do my fucking job, Jimmy, y'know what I mean?"

"Jesus, sis, you know they let breathe between sentences right? They made a law about that, so it's alright if you do. Really."

"Fuck you, Jimmy, this is not funny. I'm gonna fuck up in front of everybody. In New York, for Chrissake. I'm never gonna work again."

I looked at her. She looked like she was going to cry. And then she did cry: two slow silent tears leaking out of the corners of her eyes and tracing wavering lines across her cheeks and lips. And in that moment, she transformed for me into the little girl who would hide in my room when the screaming got too bad downstairs. I wanted to love her. To hug her.

I settled on helping her.

If I could.

"I've got an idea," I told her.

I got up out of my chair and, as I did, I thought I saw her flinch away from me. Like when I'd open the closet door, all those years ago, and she would shy away from me, hands moving in the air like she was building an invisible wall between herself and the world. The world which, inevitably, and for a long time, included me.

So I didn't hug her. Instead, I bounded past her into my temporary bedroom.

"Get undressed," I called to her behind my back.

In my room, I dug out a large pad of drawing paper, my pencils and a case of pastel chalks.

From the other room: "Huh?"

"You heard me, get undressed, like the other day. We're gonna do something."

"Do what?"

"I'm gonna draw you, you'll see. It'll work."

*

When I came back, Maura was standing in the center of the knotted rag rug in the middle of the living room. She had kicked off her shoes and her jeans were folded neatly on the coffee table. She still had her bra and panties on and she was holding her t-shirt in her left hand, arm angled outward from her body, as if she had frozen in the act of dropping it onto the small pile of her jeans.

It was, I thought, a pose of sorts.

Not moving. Eyeing my drawing supplies.

"So, what exactly are you gonna do, bro?"

"Trust me," I asked her. "You ever been in a life class?"

"That's one way I have not made money, no."

"Then you don't know. It's a really Buddhist, really Zen experience, Maura. You're the model. You just stand there, or sit or whatever, and let everybody look at you, and you breathe and hold yourself really still, and all you do is look out at one point in space and listen to this really soft sound of pencils moving against paper. And it's peaceful, babe, it's like the most peaceful communion in the world. Artist and model. Maybe that's a way for you to find some stillness, okay? Get centered. Maybe it'll help."

A moment's consideration, then a smile, small and furtive as a mouse when the kitchen lights go on. "you really think so?"

"Yeah. I dunno. Maybe. Yeah, I do."

"Okay," she said. Brightening. "I mean, how much can I suck just sitting? Shit, that I can probably do."

*

For a long time, we were silent and there was only the sound of my pencil on paper.

She sat on a stool dragged in from the kitchen. My eyes flicked from her to the lines and soft blurs By which I was forming her on my drawing pad and slowly, she became something other than my sister, the girl I knew and loved: like any model, she transformed slowly, by the alchemy of drawing and observing, into a sweet construction of planes and curves, light and shadow.

Then, after I don't know how long, she broke pose, stretched, became my sister again.

"God, Jimmy, that's harder than it looks. Sitting that still's a bitch. Throw me a cig willya?"

"That's why models get paid the big buck, little sis," I tapped a cigarette out of my pack, tossed it and a lighter to her. She caught them deftly with one hand, lit and relaxed, letting smoke flow out of her mouth and nose..

"It's working though, I think. I'm at least calming down. You wanna do some more? Can I keep smoking?"

"Sure," I told her. "Just don't move too much. We can talk. You tell me some stuff."

She settled her butt back on the stool, folding her hands demurely in her lap, the cigarette dangling rakishly from one side of her mouth, like she was some b-movie actress: the moll in Gun Crazy.

Only naked.

"Like what?" she asked. The cigarette danced precariously in front of her like it was glued to her lips.

"I dunno. Something. Anything. Something I don't know about you."

"There's a lot you don't know about me."

"So pick something." I shaded the side of her far leg, where the light from the lamp at the side of the bed was painting her skin almost yellow.

She looked at me for a long time, then reached up and took the cigarette from her mouth, held it in her lap, a thin tendril of smoke rising from the middle of her body like a tiny Vesuvius.

"Okay," my sister said. "Get ready."

*

She smiled, inhaled, exhaled, blew smoke in my direction.

My naked gun moll.

My girl beneath the stairs.

"I fucked somebody for money,." she said.

Voice, thick and smoky.

For a moment, I stopped drawing.

My girl under the stairs.

"No shit," I whispered at her.

Started drawing again. Soft curve of hip, rib lines, curve of small breast.

"So tell me," I told Maura.

And she did.

*

She is naked now.

Lifting her cigarette to her mouth, smoking, then lowering it so that it glows against her hip, her thighs.

Her other hand lying in her lap, a touch of modesty.

I fill the thin dark line between her knuckles and her navel with the side of a pencil, smudge it with a gum eraser until it is indistinct.

"It was in Aspen, four years ago. I spent the winter there. Waiting tables in this lounge named Albertine's. Buncha rich clients, great tippers -- the guys, if you flirted with them a lot. So I flirted. Full on feminine wiles, you know? But mostly, I kept my distance, y'know? I'd just broke up with Joey out in San Fran that summer. I wasn't ready to start anything with anybody.

But there's this one night, big party, ten, eleven people at a couple tables, they were running me ragged. And there was this one guy, old -- like, fifty old -- but in shape, rich guy, lotsa time in the gym, skier shape. And he pays a lot of attention to me all night, y'know, kinda treating me like a girl, not like some waitress, y'know?

And sometime that night, he asks me, how old are you, and I lie and tell him, twenty two, which is what I'd told the Albertine people when they hired me. And he just looks at me, like he knows I'm lying, and he kinda likes that, admires it, y'know? And that was it, y'know? I went back to being a waitress and he left a little while later with the people he was with. And then the night was over and I was outa there, walking back along Galena -- that's like the main drag there. And this car pulls over, a black Merc, real sweet. And the window rolls down and there he is.

He says, Hey. I say, hey yourself.

And then he just comes out and says it:

How much?

And I say, How much what?

And he gives me this smile and says, I think you now.

And it's right about then that I think I do know.

So I bust him. I tell him, What, you can't get one of your friends go home with you?

And he says, Don't wanna. Wanna go home with you. So what's it take?

I'm thinking, Wow, isn't he one bold asshole?

So I figure I'll bust him some more, I am not doing this, so I give him this outrageous number. Five thousand bucks, I tell him.

There's wind snow swirling all around us.

You worth five grand? he asks.

I'm worth more, I tell him. I'm giving you then discount rate.

Then, get in, he says. He, like presses something inside and the passenger door pops open.

And I'm thinking, oh shit.

And I'm thinking, Five thousand dollars.

*

I had stopped drawing while she told her story. Not a stroke.

"So what happened?" I asked.

She shrugged.

"I fucked him. Left at 4:00 in the morning with five thousand dollars in my pocket."

She was looking at me, almost challenging me to say something, to make some kind of judgment on her.

I looked at her. In her lap, the middle finger of her hand had disappeared.

She looked down at herself: down to where her finger was.

"Yeah," she said. "I kinda liked it."

"I guess I still do."

Slowly, almost regretfully, she took her hand away from herself.

Her smile was embarrassed; her eyes preternaturally calm.

"God, Jim," she said. "I really didn't mean to do that."

"It's all right, babe," I told her. Even though I wasn't sure it was.

"Maybe it is," she said. "If I can do that, I guess I can do anything out there."

She looked at her fingers, damp and gleaming in the lamp light.

And that's exactly how I drew her.

My sister: naked, calm, centered, telling me what a whore she could be.

Just after touching herself.

Chapter 6: Opening Night

For a long time, I stood outside the theater, smoking as the crowd thinned around me.

When I was almost alone on the sidewalk, a head poked out of the front door.