Excerpt from My Sister’s Continent by Gina Frangello, Chiasmus Press, 2006

The Artful Dodger was a corner bar in a recently gentrified neighborhood where people not being kept in their fathers’ love shacks lived. In an area of the city where Kendra, given her usual penchant for struggling-artist boys, would probably have chosen to live too, blending in among the vestiges of thrift-store clad, Wicker Park hipsters with a comfortable anonymity. During her brief hiatuses from NYCB, the Dodger had always been her Chicago bar. Guitarist lived only a few blocks away, in the attic of one of the sole unrenovated houses remaining, belonging to a Mexican family with four loud children and a very loud dog and many loud friends who hung out on the back porch wearing cowboy hats and drinking beer even in the winter. Kendra always suspected that Guitarist viewed living above such a rowdy family—like painting houses despite his college degree—as the pre-condition of calling himself a Marxist. Not that he said as much; part of his home-grown Marxism entailed that he was not supposed to notice when they played music at 2:00 am or littered the yard with cans. Still, he acted subtly as though any compliment he paid them reflected more upon himself. Kendra, on the other hand, since leaving the Russian-tinted, Czar-inspired and communist-perpetuated world of ballet, felt like a veritable poster child for the moral perils of capitalism. Crap income, yet living on the Gold Coast courtesy of her father, dining out four nights a week courtesy of her lover. What would Guitarist make of joining the ranks of men who supported her? Once an artist, the most dedicated of workers, a symbol of all he admired, her current lifestyle seemed by comparison silly and gauche.

Kendra had not had a period in eight weeks. She had been vomiting up the vestiges of dry bagels (the entirety of her diet when not with Michael Kelsey) prior to becoming afraid to eat at all. No cash cushioned her checking account. Now how silly and gauche was that?

She went to the Dodger with every intention of borrowing money for an abortion. That is why she went: to ask. It is important to stipulate such things. To ask, and because she needed a drink. Because she needed to drink, to be around people who were drinking too, not Michael Kelsey who always had one glass of wine, or one scotch, and then watched with benign curiosity while she exceeded his intake five times over. Guitarist, at the bar as always, talking to the Southern bartender and two obvious regulars, could always be counted on to consume his share.

            Guitarist rose when she entered. Embraced her in front of the jaded-looking bartender and two chain smoking fat chicks, all of whom stared not out of interest but because there was nothing else to look at, the bar being otherwise empty on a weeknight. He led her to a far corner and sat on the same side of a booth as she, holding her hand like somebody who had lost his best friend. It was not a romantic gesture. He had, in fact, lost his best friend. She looked at him for a long time, straight on, until he had to look away, which was easier than looking away herself would have been. He said, “K-hole. Long time no, you know. What’s going on?”

            Kendra appreciated the question. She wanted to talk. She wanted to talk the way they always had during the past eight years, though she was now irritatingly conscious of the fact that she’d known Michael Kelsey two years longer than that. She wanted to tell her best friend about what she’d been doing. About whom she’d been doing. Kendra had not spoken truly openly about her affair with anyone. Three long sips into a vodka martini, she found she could not stop.

She said: “I don’t know how to explain exactly—Michael likes things his way. He’s always very polite about it, of course, but there it is just the same.”

She said: “Like the very first week we were fucking, I brought my own coffee to his apartment since no way could I face mornings without caffeine. But when he brewed a pot the next day, he still served decaf, and when I reminded him again, he said he’d run out of filters entirely. Ever since he’s made only tea.”

She said: “He has this fucked-up knee from a car crash when he was seventeen—I think it was maybe a quasi suicide attempt after his mother died—and sometimes his joints still swell up when he’s playing racquetball and he gets desperate and sees his doctor. There’s this entire stash of painkillers in the medicine cabinet, but he only takes a few and the rest sit there rotting because he doesn’t like how they make him feel—control freak—so there are, like, three bottles of Vicodin in there, two are expired but I mean who gives a shit, I just keep putting them in my Advil bottle five at a time, I don’t even think he’s noticed yet.”

She said: “When he does figure it out, I’ll be subjected to some kind of arduous torture he’ll pretend is punishment for my crime, but the truth is he’ll totally get off on knowing I’ve been stealing from him like a common whore. I mean, I don’t mind or anything, I want the pills, I’m more than willing to oblige.”

“Arduous torture,” no joke, that is a direct quote. What was she thinking, you may wonder, divulging such details to an ex? Well, probably something like, If I told Bee the whole story, that little goody-goody would run crying to Mom in two seconds flat. Everyone needs somebody to confide in. On the other hand, what did her former paramour make of being the recipient of this little soliloquy? Probably something like this:

            Guitarist sat beside the girl in the booth and thought he would like to slap her in the face. It was not the first time he had entertained such a thought where she was concerned, but the first time the thought made him miserable rather than aroused, because it suddenly struck him that if he had smacked her face every time he wanted to do so, she might be sitting in a bar somewhere talking to some other poor sucker about him instead of subjecting him to this bullshit about a fortysomething asshole who worked with her father and was probably bald and fat and wore Hawaiian shirts to kick back or some other terrible thing. (He had in fact met Michael Kelsey on two occasions, both of which times Michael was, coincidentally, wearing the same gray Armani suit, but he remembered nothing of it, having been only eighteen at the time and anyone past college being invisible to him.) He looked at Kendra and, although it was impossible that she weighed even one hundred pounds, although what little she had once had in the way of tits had diminished entirely so that there were merely two pubescent buds poking forth beneath her halter top, although her hair looked in need of a wash and was stuck like an enormous ball of yellow twine atop her head by a mangled-looking chopstick (how did it stay in there?), he found her the most lovely, horrible creature he had ever seen. His mind filled with images that frightened him: twisting one of her fragile stick arms behind her back until she wept open-mouthed while he fucked her; leaving bruises around those huge hollow eyes so that she looked a piece of damaged meat, not fit for consumption. Clearly it was her fault that he would think these things, sitting there admitting that her new sugar daddy liked to spank her with the soles of the shoes he wore to work, that he had left bite-marks down her back and then taken her out to dinner in a backless dress bought for the occasion. Did she think he, Guitarist, was inhuman? Didn’t she think stories like that would make him sick, would make him want to do it too?

While Kendra rambled, four different people came to their table in the back to buy weed from Guitarist, who sometimes sold in early evenings when it was dark and quiet, but although he pocketed fifty dollars a shot, he found the presence of these barfly potheads a serious imposition. He found the fact that he, instead of being a successful attorney with a Lake Shore Drive apartment, was a barfly pothead, a serious imposition. Kendra had her hand on his knee. He was sure she hadn’t noticed, so intent was she on analyzing this man, this friend of Mr. Braun’s, with the sort of zeal she usually reserved for remaining enigmatic when one of her lovers was trying to analyze her. This turn-around was too much. Guitarist moved his leg away; her hand dropped to the vinyl booth with a weak smack. Then he pulled her by the hair and kissed her hard enough to smear her lipstick all over his mouth.

He said, “I want to fuck you. Now. However I want. You can’t sit here and tell me this shit like I’m a eunuch. I was there first. Why should this guy get more of you than I ever got?”

            Kendra looked more confused than contemplating going to bed with him could possibly merit. He yanked her hair again with an attempt at savagery, and hissed, “What? Are you in love with this prick?”

            “Of course not.” Then, with a bottomless weariness, “God, I hope not.”

            “So what difference does one more fuck make between friends?”

            “None I can think of.”

            “Then let’s go. You can tell me any stories you want once you’re naked.”

            “Yeah, whatever. Just let me finish my martini first.”

            “I’ve got vodka at my apartment, baby.”

            She shrugged. “I can’t taste any vermouth in here anyway. That’s good enough for me.”