"Toto," he said, "I don't think we're in Kansas anymore."
"I'm more used to coffeehouses at home." An idiot confession. A college town, surely Tempe had someplace like this, but she had no idea where to find it.
Three others sat at the table, eyes neither welcoming nor rejecting her, more curious than anything. They would surely know what she was, if not every detail as to why she was here. She guessed that she was older than most by eight or ten years, maybe more in the case of the thin blonde to Clay's left, but it did nothing to alleviate the sense of intimidation. The world often aged people by pain rather than by years, and if their families had been anything like Clay's, she could well have walked in upon a conclave of ancients with deceptively young faces.
She sat, and Clay made cursory introductions. The thin blonde to his left was Erin. At the end of the table was Graham, another stick figure lost inside a T-shirt — didn't these people eat? — who met her eyes briefly, then averted as he took a draw from a cigarette pluming with some rank herbal smell.
"Clay's mentioned your paintings," Adrienne said. "I'd like to see your work sometime."
Graham nodded, and with one bony, large-knuckled hand waved out toward the dance floor, the ceiling.
"The dolls?" she guessed.
He nodded again. "They aren't supposed to be anything, I was just bored one night."
"But the material just happened to be sitting around," this from the chunky young woman across the table, with thick, red, wavy hair, an obvious dye job, gathered to one side in a kind of gypsy scarf. Clay introduced her as Nina.
"Look close now, she'll probably look completely different next week," he added as a caveat.
"Piss off," Nina told him, not unkindly.
"I'm just letting her know you keep a frequent metamorphosis schedule, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it." Turning to Adrienne, "Uncle Twitch works in the sound booth, maybe he'll be out later." Clay pointed across the dance floor, where brutal silhouettes collided under blue-purple lighting. A small structure appeared to cower in the far corner, behind another barricade of chain link fence, beneath lights and speakers.
"Would you tell me if you did think there was something wrong with it?" Nina asked.
"Yes," Clay said without hesitation.
She leaned forward to seize Adrienne's complete attention, as if it were suddenly very important to explain herself. She seemed to crave intimacy and there was no way intimacy could be achieved with the volume of the music, with the exaggerated gestures required to compete.
"I just don't think anyone should limit herself to only one incarnation, that's all," she said, nail-bitten hands flailing in tight circles. "What if I like myself even better another way? How can I know unless I try it?"
"I understand." Adrienne tried to nod with reassurance. Poor thing, she knows what I am and she's afraid I'm going to pick her apart right here at this table. "I live with someone who's the same way about a lot of things. She has trouble making up her mind if it means excluding some other option."
Nina began to nod right along with her, wide pleasant face radiant with proxy kinship to a nameless stranger — yes, that's it, exactly.
"A few weeks ago she asked if it was her fault that everything looked so interesting. It stumped me."
"And by living with her, you mean…"
"We sleep in the same bed, if that's what you're getting at."
"That's cool," said Nina. "I tried sleeping with other women but it just didn't work for me. Hetero and hopeless, I guess."
Graham, his face high-cheekboned and oddly aristocratic, blew a dour gust of smoke. "I'm sure you can find a support group somewhere."
"Piss off," she told him.
Graham pushed black, tumbledown bangs from his eyes, flashed a look of impish mockery at Clay, then back to Nina. "I'm just letting her know you're a neurotic flake, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it."
Nina drew back in indignation. "Graham, I hate to tell you this, but you're an asshole tonight."
Erin propped her chin on a fist, looking down at the table, and said, "A lot of that going around lately."
Nina had recovered quickly, leaning toward Graham with forces marshaled. "Some people think change is healthy. Some people" — a glance toward the sound booth — "find change sexually arousing. Every few weeks or so, Twitch gets to ravage a new woman and we don't have to worry about disease entering the picture."
Erin looked up, interest renewed. "This is a good time to ask something I've always wondered. What if Twitch likes ravaging one of the earlier women better?"
"Well you can just piss off too," said Nina, and now she really was beginning to get agitated.
"What, what did I say?" Erin cried. "It's a valid question."
"Well, it doesn't deserve an answer."
Graham nudged Erin's shoulder. "It's already happened," he declared, very sure of himself, and did not give Nina a chance to respond. "Which one was it, let me guess: the dominatrix? Or was it the post-Woodstock earth-mother with the Birkenstocks?" A shrewd smile, a carnivore's smile. "Which one moaned louder?"
"Graham — "
"And does he ever breathe a sigh of relief when one's gone?"
Nina drew back in her chair, seeming to shield herself behind the scattering of empty bottles, bleeding from unseen slices. Eyes that moments ago had shone brightly were now dismal and frantic, without grounding. She looked to Clay but got nothing. To Adrienne it was like watching someone being poked with a stick, seeking support from an older brother, and finding only a turned back.
Save for Clay, she did not know these people, but could she sit there and let this happen? Say nothing? Would they even listen to her? She had stiffened in her chair, and before she could say a word, it was as if Clay knew precisely when to nudge her arm.
"Come on," he said, "let's go introduce you to Twitch."
Staring, torn, I'm needed here —
More insistent: "Come on," voice low and compelling even through the ratcheting music. She followed him out of the cage into greater light, denser sound, a disorienting assault. She pulled in closer to Clay, her mouth at his ear.
"You could have stopped that, couldn't you?"
"Probably," he shouted back.
"But you didn't."
"It'll stop anyway."
Why, you cold prick — it crossed her mind before she was able to filter it out. Objectivity had died without a whimper. What a plunge this was, ripped from the four safe walls that comprised her zone of efficiency in Tempe, set down where she wasn't even sure which rules had flipped. The dynamics of exchange were completely different here.
I am a fraud and I'm totally unqualified to be doing this. The sudden need for Sarah swept over her. Sarah would lead by example. Sarah would thrive here, would have immersed herself upon arrival. Sarah would take to them naturally because that's what Sarah did, and in that moment the only thing that terrified her more than Sarah deciding she should stay home after all, was if she came, and the rest of them, Clay especially, decided they had no use for Adrienne at all.
Clay in the lead, they weaved through the throng of long hair and shaved heads, leather and flannel, T-shirts and dark wraiths, all of them like members of allied tribes who had come together for noisy ritual, drawn by a summons they may not even have comprehended. They were in here, they were not out there, and it was enough.
He first led her to the bar, where she got a gin, and he some red-orange concoction in a plastic glass. A smart drink, he told her: quantum punch.