The Shining Girls A Novel

Dan

24 JULY 1992

It’s absurdly hot inside Dreamerz. And loud. Dan hates the music before the band has even started. What kind of a name is Naked Raygun? And when did looking dirty on purpose become a thing? Scruffy guys with weird facial hair and black T-shirts mill around the stage endlessly before the actual band comes on, ironically more neatly dressed, fiddling with guitars and plugs and pedals. Also endlessly.

His shoes keep sticking. It’s a spilled-drink-cigarette-stump type of floor. Better than the upstairs balcony, which is paved with actual headstones like the bathroom is wallpapered with photocopied flyers. The weirdest one is for a play, featuring a woman in a gas mask and heels. The boys on the stage look positively mainstream in comparison.

He has no idea what he’s doing here. He only came because Kirby asked him, because she thought it might be awkward seeing Fred. And, boy, is it ever. First love, she told him. Which made him sound even less like someone Dan would want to meet.

Fred is so very, very young. And stupid. Childhood sweethearts should not come back, especially from film school. Especially if that’s all they’re going to talk about. Movies he’s never heard of. He’s not an uncultured lunk, whatever his ex-wife might think. But the kids have moved on from talking art-house to totally obscure experimental shit. It’s worse because Fred keeps trying to involve him in the conversation, like the good guy he is, which still, please note, does not make him worthy of her.

‘Do you know Rémy Belvaux’s work, Dan?’ Fred says. His hair is shaved so short it’s not much more than dark fuzz over his skull. The look is finished with a goatee and one of those annoying piercings under his lip that looks like a giant metal zit. Dan has to restrain himself from leaning forward to try and pop it. ‘No budget, he’s stuck in Belgium. But his work is so self-aware. It’s so real. He really lives it.’

Dan thinks about living his work by applying a baseball bat to someone’s face, just for example.

It’s a blessing when the band starts up, rendering conversation, and the momentum towards him murdering Fred, impossible. Mr First Love whoops in demented enthusiasm and hands off his beer to Dan, shoving through the crowd towards the front of the stage.

Kirby leans in and shouts in his ear. Something-something-venge, he hears.

‘WHAT?’ he yells back. He’s holding his lemonade like a crucifix. (Of course, the bar doesn’t sell low-alcohol.)

Kirby presses her thumb down over the little knob of cartilage above Dan’s ear canal and shouts again: ‘Think of it as revenge for all the games you’ve dragged me to.’

‘THAT’S WORK!’

‘So’s this.’ Kirby grins happily, because somehow she has managed to convince Jim in the lifestyle section of the Sun-Times to try her out on a gig review. Dan glowers. He should be happy for her that she’s getting to write about something she’s actually interested in. The reality is that he’s jealous. Not that way, that would be ridiculous. But he’s got used to having her around. If she starts writing for lifestyle, she won’t be on the other end of the phone line when he’s halfway across the country at an away game, giving him the scoop on a rumored injury or a batting record, never mind sitting on his couch with her feet curled under her, watching old videotapes of classic games and throwing in basketball or ice hockey terms just to annoy him.

His buddy Kevin was teasing him about her the other day. ‘You gotta thing for this girl?’

‘Nah,’ he said. ‘I feel sorry for her. It’s more protective, you know. Paternal.’

‘Ah. You want to rescue her.’

Dan snorted into his drink. ‘You wouldn’t say that if you met her.’

But that doesn’t explain why her face flashes through his head when he is taking out his frustrations in his lonely double bed, imagining a consortium of naked women, which makes him feel so guilty and confused that he has to stop. And then resume, feeling shifty and awful, but thinking about what it would be like to kiss her and hold her tucked against his chest with his arm around her and her breasts against him and stick his tongue … Jesus.

‘You should probably just f*ck her and get it out of your system,’ Kevin said, philosophically.

‘It’s not like that,’ Dan replied.

But this is work. She’s on assignment, which means it’s not a date with Fred. It just so happens that the smug little prick is in town, and this is the most convenient night for her to see him. And he can take comfort in that. Assuming he survives the aural assault of the band.

Dan eyes a plate of nachos being carried over to a table by an adorable red-headed waitress with tattoos up both arms and a lot of piercings.

‘I wouldn’t,’ Kirby says, doing the ear trick again. Tragus, it suddenly comes to him, like a crossword clue, that’s what that little bit of cartilage is called. ‘They’re not known for their food.’

‘How do you know I wasn’t checking out the waitress?’ He shouts back.

‘I know. She has more piercings than a stapler convention.’

‘You’re right, that doesn’t do it for me!’ He realizes he hasn’t had sex in – he does the arithmetic – fourteen months. A blind date with a restaurant manager called Abby that went well. At least, he thought so, but she didn’t return his calls afterwards. He’s done a post-mortem on the experience a thousand times, trying to figure out what he did wrong. Analyzing every word because the sex was good. He may have talked too much about Beatriz. Maybe it was too soon after his divorce. Wishful thinking to put himself out there. You’d think all the travelling would give him plenty of opportunity, but it turns out women like to be wooed, and being single is harder than he remembers.

He still drives past Bea’s house sometimes. She’s in the phonebook, it’s not exactly a crime to have looked her up, even if he can’t bring himself to press dial after tapping the numbers into his cordless phone he can’t even count how many times.

He’s been trying, he really has. And maybe she’d be proud of him, out, at a club, listening to a band, drinking lemonade with a twenty-threeyear-old attempted murder victim and her childhood sweetheart.

It would be something they could talk about. God knows they ran out of things to talk about. His fault, he knows. It was an exorcism for him, compulsively sharing the stuff that Harrison wouldn’t let him print. The grisliest details – and worse, the saddest. The lost causes, the cases that never got solved or went nowhere, the kids with drug-addict single moms who tried to stay in school but ended up on the corners, because honestly, where else were they supposed to go? But how many horrible crimes can any one person stand to hear about? It was a mistake, he realizes now. All a terrible cliché. You don’t share that shit. Let alone drag your loved ones into it. He should never have told her that some of the threats were aimed at her. He shouldn’t have told her he’d bought a gun, just in case. That’s what really freaked her out.

He should have gone for proper therapy (yeah, right). He should have tried listening for once. Maybe he would have really heard her about Roger, the carpenter, who was making them a new TV cabinet. ‘You’d think he was Jesus, the way you go on about him,’ he’d said at the time. Well, he worked miracles all right. Made her disappear right out of Dan’s life. Got her pregnant at forty-six. Which means it was Dan’s problem all along. His swimmers didn’t have the mettle. But he thought she’d given up on the idea years ago.

Maybe it would have been different if they’d gone out more. He could have brought her here to Club Dreamerz. (God, that ‘z’ drives him crazy.) Or maybe not here, exactly, but somewhere nice. Blues at the Green Mill. Or walks along the lakefront, picnics in the park, hell, they should have taken the Orient Express across Russia. Something romantic and adventurous instead of getting stuck in the everyday.

‘What do you think?’ Kirby yells into his ear. She’s bouncing on the spot, like a demented bunny on a pogo stick, in time to the beat, if the noise emanating from the stage could be said to have a beat.

‘Yeah!’ he shouts back. In front of them, a group of people are literally pinballing off each other.

‘Is that a good yeah or a bad yeah?’

‘I’ll let you know when I can make out the lyrics!’ Which is not likely to be anytime soon.

She gives him a thumbs-up and throws herself into the mosh. Occasionally her crazy hair or Fred’s zero buzzcut surfaces above the crowd.

He watches, sipping his lemonade, which had too much ice in it to start with, and is now a diluted, flat and only vaguely lemony water.

After the band has played forty-five minutes and an encore, the two emerge, sweaty and grinning, and – Dan’s heart sinks – holding hands.

‘Still want to eat?’ Kirby says, helping herself to what’s left in his glass, mostly melted ice.

They end up at El Taco Chino along with the last dregs from other clubs and bars, eating some of the best Mexican food he’s ever had.

‘Hey, you know what, Kirbs,’ Fred says, as if the thought just popped into his head. ‘You should make a documentary. About what happened to you. And you and your mom. I could help you with it. Borrow some of NYU’s equipment, maybe move back here for a couple of months. It’d be fun.’

‘Oof,’ Kirby says. ‘I don’t know—’

‘That’s a terrible f*cking idea,’ Dan jumps in.

‘Sorry – remind me what your qualifications on filmmaking were again?’ Fred says.

‘I know criminal justice. Kirby’s case is still open. If they ever catch the guy, the film could be prejudicial in court.’

‘Right, maybe I should do a film about baseball instead. Why it’s such a big deal. Maybe you can tell me, Dan?’

And because he’s tired and irritated and not interested in playing alpha male, Dan rolls out the glib answers. ‘Apple pie. Fireworks on the Fourth of July. Playing catch with your old man. It’s part of what makes this country.’

‘Nostalgia. The great American pastime,’ Fred sneers. ‘What about capitalism, greed and CIA assassination hit squads?’

‘That’s the other part,’ Dan agrees, refusing to let this boy with the dumb facial hair rile him. God, how could she have had sex with him?

But Fred is still spoiling for a fight, trying to prove something. ‘Sports is like religion. An opiate for the masses.’

‘Except you don’t have to pretend to be a good person to be a sports fanatic. Which makes it a lot more powerful. It’s the club anyone can join, the great unifier, and the only hell is when your team is losing.’

Fred is barely listening. ‘And so predictable. Don’t you get bored to death writing about the same thing over and over? Man hits ball. Man runs. Man gets caught out.’

‘Yeah, but it’s the same as movies or books,’ Kirby says. ‘There are only so many plots in the world. It’s how they unfold that makes them interesting.’

‘Exactly.’ Dan is unreasonably pleased that she’s come out on his side. ‘A game can play out any way. You’ve got heroes and villains. You’re living through the protagonists, loathing the enemy. People extend the stories to themselves. They live and die by their team, friends and strangers right there with them on this mass scale. You ever watch guys getting emotional about sports in public?’

‘It’s pathetic.’

‘It’s grown men having fun. Getting caught up in something. Like being a kid again.’

‘That’s a sad indictment of masculinity,’ Fred says.

Dan manages to restrain himself from saying, ‘Your face is a sad indictment,’ because he’s supposed to be the grown-up here. ‘All right. How about it’s because there’s a science and a music to it? The strike zone changes every game and you have to use every bit of intuition and experience to predict what’s coming at you. But what I really like? It’s that failure is built in. The greatest hitter in the world is only ever going to succeed, what, thirty-five per cent of the time?’

‘Lame,’ Fred complains. ‘Is that all? Best hitters of all time can’t even hit the ball?’

‘I appreciate that,’ Kirby says. ‘It means it’s okay to f*ck out.’

‘As long as you’re having fun.’ Dan toasts her with a forkful of refried beans.

Maybe it means he’s in with a chance. Maybe it means the least he can do is try.