"Carlo's Girl"

Carlo and his girl were at it again. She was in the backyard, making her terrible animal sounds, directing them at the second floor where Carlo was. She yelled things while he banged things. I was in awe of their unique talent to sustain a heated argument without ever uttering an actual word.

“Why won’t she just knock on the damn door?” Darla said. She was adding more chopped chilies to the pot while I concentrated on stacking beer cans into a perfect pyramid.

“I dunno. I think she’s retarded.”

“I told you. I talked to her. She isn’t retarded.”

“How can you be sure? She seems retarded to me.”

"She's not retarded, Mark." Darla said. "Stop saying that, damn it."

More yelling. More banging. "You think we should call 911?"

"Are you serious? That’s not a good idea. Make yourself useful. Chop up this tomato.” She wasn’t smiling when she said it.

Last time we’d called, the police insisted on taking down complaints from us which meant coming inside our apartment which meant Darla running to the bathroom and flushing our stash down the toilet and searched all the ashtrays for stray tattle-tale seeds while I kissed porcine ass and offered coffee that I didn’t even have. Besides, there was Carlo and his girl. They glared at us hatefully while the cops waxed condescendingly out on the steps. Every day for the next week, they left sweet little gifts on our welcome mat. A moldy peach. A mayonnaise jar half full of dead flies. A dried cat turd.

I told Darla I wanted to confront Carlo, but she begged me not to. Thank god. Carlo was a tattooed, pockmarked, brooding flavor of man. Apparently prison hadn’t agreed with him. Darla said he made the hair on the back of her neck stand up when he was near. Frankly, he made me distrust my bladder, but I’d never tell her that.

Carlo’s girl was so pale her skin looked clear like a guppy. Her hair was white blonde and her eyes pale blue and unblinking. She smelled sickeningly sweet, like overripe fruit. She reminded me of Mia Farrow if Mia Farrow were a crackhead. Not that Carlo’s girl was a crackhead. She just seemed that fragile. Broken.

When we first moved in, we’d pretended we found them fascinating. Just part of the local color. It proved how culturally accepting we were. We considered ourselves artistes, children of the millennium. We speculated on how they could have ended up together. They seemed comfortable with each other, if silence meant comfort. They seemed somewhat normal. It was only her noises that set them apart, those strange, guttural, almost comic wails of grief. At night when we shared a cigarette in the dark, skin still damp and us still panting from sex, I’d lie there and translate.

Listen. She’s telling him he never buys her flowers.

She’s nagging him to stop leaving his dirty socks in a ball on the coffee table.

Now she’s telling him to smack that ass.

I can see now that we should have left the house on Eberle, moved on to a place where Darla and I could have run our natural course. But I think at the time we just wanted to feel solidity. And living beneath Carlo and his girl, withstanding their terrible fights, was sort of a shortcut. Plus, the place was ghetto cheap. Darla loved the crown molding and the glass doorknobs original to the house. She liked how the large windows let in the morning light; she said it helped her paint. I enjoyed the neighborhood for the clientele opportunities as well as the proximity to my suppliers. We always spoke of the arrangement as temporary. Soon, one day soon, we’d have our own place, one without hordes of roaches or crazy neighbors.

“I’m so sick of listening to this!” Darla announced. I half expected her to tear her hair out melodramatically.

“A'ight. Let’s go someplace. The park? The library? Kelly’s?”

“Why can’t we do something else? Like go out to eat somewhere nice.”

Without saying anything, I removed my wallet from my back pocket, turned it upside down, and let the bills, both of them, flutter to ground.

"Fine. The library it is."

“But I kinda wanted a beer..”

She glared at me. "Fine! Kelly’s it is!”

On our way out, I locked the new deadbolt. It had cost thirty-five bucks, but it was worth it, just for the feeling of security. We both suspected Carlo was breaking in while we were out.

*****

Kelly’s was a crappy little bar and grill next door to the museum where Darla volunteered. Kelly’s was a popular place. This was a college town, and this was the one place no one ever bothered to ask for ID. The food, unfortunately, was an afterthought. Cheese sticks. Nachos with electric orange cheese. Greasy fries. Being there, amongst the pseudo-intellectuals and the drunken frat boys, I felt superior. And jaded. Oh and another thing: it was easy to make connections at Kelly’s bar and grill, easy to cut the small-time pot deals that served as our primary income.

Not five minutes after we sat down at our regular sticky table in the corner, my friend Doug showed up. I wasn’t shocked; he was a regular there. We were undergrads together at State, blood brothers and all that jazz, and we’d both received perfectly useless degrees in anthropology. He ruffled my hair, drained Darla’s glass of beer, and dragged up a chair. I said “Hey, dude!” while Darla just rolled her eyes in our general direction.

“Um, well, I’m not going to lie. Things aren’t so dandy, man. I fucking saw Ellen this morning.”

“Nuh uh. Where?”

“Well, in front of her place.”

“What were you doing over there? That’s clear across town?” Darla interjected.

Doug ignored her question. He said confidentially,“She looked so beautiful, man. Absolute perfection.”

We'd known Ellen since college; she was a fellow anthro major. That was about a year before I met Darla that night at her art show. Ellen was an odd, quiet girl; she was shy and yet arrogant, obviously intelligent and yet seemingly vapid. In those days, Doug always acted embarrassed when asked about his relationship with Ellen. He insisted they were just fuck buddies. Even after it was obvious they were a couple, he refused to acknowledge they were going out. Hell, even after he had moved in her apartment, we’d never really heard him refer to her as his girlfriend. Darla noticed he never took her home to mother. Then one day Ellen grew tired of his act and dumped him. She did that as oddly and quietly as she did everything else. One day he came home from a night out with the boys and everything he possessed was stacked neatly on their stoop along with a note that said only, “the need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind”. That was six months ago. He'd spoken about her incessantly ever since---long, indignant tributes to his own wounded vanity.

"Creepy much?" Darla muttered.

"Buy you a beer?" I said. "How 'bout a pitcher," I said. "For the three of us."

"Absolute perfection," Darla murmured.

We drank one pitcher and then another and were contemplating a third when Doug began to silently weep. And then not so silently.

“Dude. Shut up, man.” I said in the gentlest voice two pitchers of beer and male pride would allow me.

"I'm 26 years old, Mark," Doug said. "I'm so damned 26 it hurts."

"You gotta get out there. Meet someone." I said. "Someone new."

Doug swung his head drunkenly toward Darla. "What do you think?"

Darla looked at Doug for a long time. A complicated glance passed between them, a glance that said a number of things at once. It said, "Self-pity will get you nowhere." It said, "You don't miss your water till your well runs dry." It said, "You should have loved her as a person, not a possession." It was as if she were regarding the part of him too wounded to love anyone, or to love them sufficiently, and I might have seen, from the depth of the sorrow in her dark blue eyes, that her concerns were broader than this; that she didn't want to be here, in this shitty college dive, with a boyfriend she constantly had to defend to her parents as "a wounded genius" and "artistic and tempermental" but who was, in fact, unemployed and dealing pot out of her apartment.

"What do I think? I think you need to learn how to live with yourself before you can expect to live with anyone else. That, my friend, is what I think." Darla told Doug. I realized with surprise that she was blinking back tears.

But I was clueless. I looked at Darla and saw only her beauty and her sadness, which made her more beautiful to me, because it suggested compassion and empathy, and the possibility that I might comfort her. That she might need me.

"Easy for you to say," Doug said. "The happiest couple on earth."

Darla finished her beer, a final dainty swallow, and excused herself. We both watched her ass sway deliciously from side to side as she made her way across the crowded bar to the restrooms.

"Don't let that one get away," Doug said suddenly. "She's the real deal, man. That one is a keeper."

"Yeah. I'm one lucky bastard."

When Darla returned, Doug and I drained our beer glasses and he offered to walk us the few blocks home.

"Nah, man. That's alright," I said. "Really."

Doug shook his head. "Dude, this neighborhood you live in, Mark. It's fucking scary."

Darla leaned towards me. "I told you I wanted to talk to you when we got home," she whispered to me.

Oh yeah. We were supposed to have that talk about "our future", which meant my plans, which meant whether I was going to apply to grad school this year or let another goddamned deadline slip past. It was a talk aspiring to a greater, more final talk. I figured it could wait.

Doug looked at his shoes. "Hey, no big deal. If you guys want alone time. I know all about alone time. Shit, that's all I got these days."

He was my best friend. What was I supposed to say.

"Okay, man. But you can't stay too late. I think Darla wants to talk or something. "

Doug and I took off down the sidewalk towards our neighborhood, arguing the merits of lager vs ale.

Darla walked behind us, singing an old jazz tune to herself. It may have been Billie Holiday.

*****

Carlo's girl was in the front yard, hunched on the damp grass in white panties and a Rancid tee shirt. Her face was swollen and tear-stained. This was often how her fights with Carlo ended. It wasn't that he hit her. He didn't need to hit her. She did most of the damage just with her own diseased heart.

"What the hell is wrong with her?" Doug said.

Darla tugged at my sleeve. "Come on," she said. "Can we just go in the house?"

Carlo's girl glared at us with her white eyes.

"Can I come in for a bit and drink a beer with you?" Doug asked.

I felt Darla let go of my sleeve. She hurried across the porch and slipped into our apartment.

Doug stood on the bottom step, his face lit by the security light.

Carlo's girl stood and stared at us, swaying in the dark. She took her shirt off and held it in her hand. Swaying.

"Okay," I said to Doug. "Just for a little bit. Darla's tired.."

I found Darla in the alcove where she painted. She was tracing the lines of paint on a canvas languidly. It seemed to sensual that I found myself getting an erection. I wanted to do her right there on the floor of her make-shift studio. Do her among the brushes and stretchers and tubes of paint.

That's when she turned and look at me. "One beer. Please. That's all."

I found Doug sitting on the floor in the living room, back against the layers and layers of dried paint on the wall. I wondered how many people had lived in this old house. How many fights had taken place here. How many times had people fucked.

"Hey, I think you should take off," I said. "Seriously."

"Come on, now. Don't turn your back on a friend in need."

I could hear Darla stirring paint and I imagined her angrily slapping paint on a canvas with her beautiful bare fingers. Outside, Carlo's girl began to howl.

"What the fuck?," Doug said. "What's wrong with her?" He walked to the window and stuck his head out into the warm night. "Shut the fuck up, will ya?!" he shouted.

Darla ran out of her room, paintbrush in hand. I noticed she had a smudge of blue paint by her left temple.

"Don't," she said.

But Doug was drunk. And maybe saw too much of himself in that pale waif of a girl. "Nobody wants you around," he told her. "You've overstayed your welcome. Get out of here, freak."

"Don't."

"I'm going to make him leave now."

She nodded, staring down at the brush in her hand. She never looked up at me. I wished I could see her eyes.

*****

I shut the door behind Doug. I wish he'd just go on home and sleep it off. I had a tickling feeling on the back of my neck that that wouldn't be the case.

On the table by the door I saw the classified section of the newspaper staring at me. Darla had circled a bunch of ads with purple ink. I knew instinctively they were intended for me. I put on her favorite Ella Fitzgerald cd. I wondered if we had to have that talk tonight. Maybe I could distract her with sex.

I could hear Doug's voice through the open window. He was still here. I couldn't make out the words, but I could tell from the tone that nothing pleasant was occurring out on the lawn.

Darla called out my name. Mark.

I knew what she wanted: she wanted me to forget about Doug and his self-destructive woe. She wanted me to lock the door to our place. She wanted to have that talk about graduate school. It was a perfectly reasonable desire. But I wasn't ready to have that talk.

Overhead, we could hear Carlo taking the stairs a couple at a time.

Darla shouted, "Don't go out there." At least, I think that's what she said.

I was already heading for the porch, down the stairs, onto the front lawn. Carlo was a few paces in front of me. For a tall man, he moved slowly, which implied deliberation. His girl and Doug were no more than a few inches apart. Their bellies were touching. And then -- and this happened with an abruptness no one quite expected -- Doug pushed Carlo's girl down. It wasn't much, just a light shove. It caught her off guard and she toppled onto the damp grass and landed on her ass.

Doug looked proud of himself, that same dumb, half-embarrassed grin he used to wear on those mornings after he'd first starting sleeping with Ellen. But then he saw Carlo and his grin disappeared. He began to back up immediately, out into the street, and then he simply turned and ran. I was surprised when Carlo just stood there and didn't pursue him. His girl lay on the grass weeping.

I walked toward her, hoping to apologize, help her up, something. But Carlo turned on me. "You," he said. "You." And then, quite suddenly, I was on the ground and Carlo was stepping over me and seating himself on my chest and he weighed a thousand pounds.

I kept whining things like, "Be cool. I didn't do anything. Be cool, man." But he wasn't hearing any of that. He had a strange look of concentration on his face, of needing to complete a task. He pinned my arms beneath his knees.

"Be cool," I said. "Come on, man. Let me up."

Then I turned my head and closed my eyes preparing for the inevitable punch.

But the punch never came. Carlo turned to his girl. She was still laying on the ground, but her howls had subsided. I watched her get to her knees and crawl towards me, small breasts looking straight at me. I felt her hot breath on my cheek as I stared, terrified of those wicked white eyes. Then she sat back on her haunches, took in a deep breath, and spat on my face.

Carlo leaned close. His breath smelled like rotten oranges. Or maybe it was tequila. "Do not," he said, "fuck with my girl." Then he lifted himself off me more gracefully than expected and walked slowly back to the steps with his almost naked girl on his arm, perched there almost primly, as if he were escorting her to a winter formal. I looked up and saw Darla staring through the window. Her big dark blue eyes were sad and unsurprised.

*****

For years afterwards, when I recalled these events, I told myself things would have gone differently if I'd been hurt, if Carlo had actually hit me; that Darla would have been given reason, by my injury, to see that I had been, in some misguided male way, defending her, defending us. This is the sort of shit I said to myself. I suppose it is human nature to say shit.

What Darla said was this, "You should have locked the door, Mark."

We were lying on our mattress beneath the ceiling fan, trying to settle in for sleep. The bright buzzing light from the street light streamed in and lit our bellies.

"We'll laugh about this someday," I said.

"No," she sighed. "We won't."

I could feel that something had been broken between us, some bond of trust, though I was still young enough then to suppose that such breaks, with the proper attention, can be mended. Yeah, I was a fool.

Upstairs, through the ceiling, Carlo's girl began to wail again. Was it ecstasy or grief? I couldn't tell.

And so I made a joke, just to demonstrate my poise. "She's saying that she wants to spit on me again, that it turns her on."

Darla, who felt good beside me, who felt like every good intention I might have had. Darla, whose skin glowed with the absurdity of our evanescent joy, who never failed to giggle at my stupid jokes, now sat up in bed and looked at me for long time, with her hair shining in the light from the streetlamp and those sad dark blue eyes.

"That's not what's she saying," Darla said. "She's saying, 'Listen to me, you asshole. I have a name. Listen to me. If you don't say my name, right now, this minute, you'll never see my face again.'"