Submit (Songs of Submission #3)(26)

—You ok?—

Jonathan’s text came in just as I was considering locking Gabby’s door for good.

—Feet hurt. Fine otherwise. I’m going to bed—

—Good night, goddess—

—We still need to talk—

—When you can talk, we will. Now get to bed. No touching. I’ll know…—

I was sure he would, somehow. The same way I was sure he knew about the diamond sitting in a baggie downtown.

CHAPTER 18

I wanted to stay in bed for days after Gabby’s wake, but I couldn’t skip work. I hustled in for the lunch shift dry-eyed and made up. I put on my stage smile for Debbie, who pursed her red lips and seemed generally unimpressed.

“Can you talk?”

I shook my head.

“So what do you think you’re going to do?”

My face must have been a complete blank because I had no answer. Debbie sighed and called Robert over from the other side of the bar where he was flirting with two women who looked like cover models. She took my pad from my hands and said to him, “Monica’s at the service bar tonight.”

“Why? It’s lunch.”

“Question me again.”

Robert was immediately cowed. The tone in Debbie’s voice triggered something in me as well. A recognition. A wakefulness. When she glanced over at me and indicated I should go around to the other side of the bar, I knew what it was because I’d heard it from Jonathan’s lips. Debbie was a dominant.

The fact that I recognized that told me more about myself than I wanted to know. I’d spent the morning and afternoon in busy sequester, puttering around the house, picking up Gabby’s things, and putting them in boxes. The copies of Variety on top of the piano. The shoes by the door. The metronome she left by the TV. Music sheets. I’d separated them into Keep and Toss and then kept everything for Darren anyway. All that time, I heard not her voice in my head, but her music. I sat at the piano and played one of her compositions, the one she played when she was feeling threatened and powerless, the bombastic thing she’d been at just the other night, and I stopped mid-way. I didn’t sound as good as she had. Some keys were off, but she never wrote down her own stuff. She only did notations on pieces she heard and was trying to figure out. I’d snapped up a few sheets of the notepaper abandoned in the Toss bin and played again, writing down the notes as I went. And then, as if the notes could not be contained as simple sounds, words flowed through them. I had run for the legal pad by my bed.

What if he collars me? Slaps me? Spanks me? Bites me? Fucks me in the ass? Whips me? Hurts me? Displays me? Gags me? Blindfolds me? Shares me? Humiliates me? Ties me down? Makes me bleed? Fucks me up?

That f**king list. I could have added another hundred things.

Chocks my mouth open. Pulls my hair. Fucks my face. Calls me whore. Tells me to lick the floor. Destroys me. Makes me hate myself. Turns me into an animal.

And that was it, wasn’t it? I was afraid of turning into something subhuman, not just to him or to the people around me, but to myself.

I’d remembered the tone in Jonathan’s voice when he demanded something of me. The calmness, the surety, the note itself. A chord. I played it, toying with the sounds until I came up with something in D, and I checked the notations I’d made of Gabby’s piece. I could do it. I could keep her alive. I could figure out how to continue with him, if at all.

Hearing that tone in Debbie’s voice threw me for a second, and I stood silent. She raised her eyebrow and made a motion with her hand, indicating that it was time for me to go under the service bar and do my new job. As I passed her she said, “You need to get to the doctor.”

I smiled, not because I agreed, but because I knew it wasn’t something a doctor could fix. I didn’t know if I’d be able to sing in time to record with Jerry on Thursday, but at least I had the beginnings of a song.

I poured for the girls, dancing around Robert to get to the bottles, refilling the ice when necessary, and replenishing the beer. I was definitely stepping on his territory and his tip total for the shift, so I tried to be nice to him.

I was having a fun time just smiling and nodding as forms of communication, until I saw Darren at the bar, looking sullen.

“Hey,” he said. “You’re back there?”

I indicated the service part of the bar just as Tanya came up with a ticket. I filled glasses with ice, then the liquor, and stuck her ticket at six o’clock. It was still slow, so I leaned over the bar, wiping the space in front of Darren.

“Can you get me a beer?” he asked.

I shook my head. Robert was already giving me the devil eye. I pointed at the beers. Robert slipped it out of the case, poured it, and opened the ticket.

“I got your thing,” Darren said. “Pretty big f**king rock.”

I held out my hand.

“I left it on the piano.”

I nodded and glanced at Debbie, who was on the phone and watching me.

“I’m not sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have called you a whore, but that doesn’t change anything.”

I had so much to say, starting with the fact that I had no use for his non-apology and ending with the fact that I didn’t need his judgmental attitude. But I’d also evened it all out by slapping him good and hard, so it wasn’t resentment I held as much as impatience. He needed to get over it so we could work on the Vancouver piece, whatever that would be.