Further Out Than You Thought Read Online Free PDF Page A

jaywalking at two in the morning, on an empty street.
    She listened. The night was still again. Or was it? She heard the rhythm, the words, but she was unsure if the voice was his or hers—that incessant voice in her head now tuned to his channel.

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Four
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    THEIR BUILDING WAS called the Cornell. The apartment had been Leo’s until she’d let her own studio go a month after they’d met to move in with him and save money. In the thirties, when the area was posh, Mae West had owned the Cornell, and the third floor had housed a brothel that serviced the Brooklyn Dodgers when they’d come to town.
    Gwen pushed open the heavy iron gate. The courtyard fountain dribbled past stone angels into the rectangular stone pool, flickering with koi fish. She adored the courtyard. It was what she’d first fallen in love with when she’d come to Leo’s apartment.
    In the brick walls were windows open to the night. And between the windows in horizontal rows were faces of white stone. There was the row of young sailors, schoolboys dressed in sailor hats. Then, further up, the row of maidens presided, braids framing each oval face. And way up at the top, the row of homunculi rubbed their potbellies like African fertility gods. Over the lobby’s glass doors at the center of an archway was a man’s face—the face of a Viking, bearded, gaunt from his travels, a poet Viking, purged of his lust for the world and with his heart pure as the heart of a saint, looking for land from the prow of his ship and seeing an island shaped like a woman.
    From one of the windows, a man peered down at her. “Lookin’ fine, Gwendolyn,” he called, mispronouncing her name, so it rhymed with fine. Gwendo-line . It was Barry sitting at his window, naked—at least from the waist up—and smoking. He was the son of the owner of the Cornell and he lived there for free. Leo had dubbed him Psycho Barry, since most nights he spent naked and alone, chain-smoking and talking to himself. Tonight, though, he was quiet. He must have taken his lithium.
    â€œHey, Barry,” Gwen called up. “Get some sleep, you hear?”
    â€œYeah, yeah. Sleep is good. You like sleep? You like sleep, Gwendolyn?”
    â€œI love sleep, Barry. Good night.”
    â€œSleep tight, sleep tight, Gwendolyn. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
    Unlocking the door, she could hear the news on the TV coming from their ground-floor apartment, echoing off the high brick walls, as if Leo had just cranked the volume. Today in East Los Angeles, at the corner of Florence and Normandie, thirty-three-year-old Reginald Denny was pulled from his truck and beaten.
    She wasn’t sure she could take it. Another night of news and ranting.
    With a small key she opened their mailbox, along the wall with all the others. A few collection notices for Leo’s long-ago maxed-out credit cards. And for her, a bill from her master’s program. The second half of this semester’s tuition, twenty-five hundred dollars, due in a couple of weeks. One more semester and she’d graduate. All without loans or money from her father. There was— hallelujah —a check for Leo, a residual check from some voice-over gig or other. And at the bottom of the stack was an invite to the AA meeting Greg, the manager of the Cornell, held in the lobby every day at noon. Even after Leo had told him to mind his own business, he still slipped an invite into their box on a weekly basis. Whenever Greg saw Leo, he’d tell him he was praying for him, to which Leo would retort that he was an atheist. These days, however, since they were late with their rent, Leo avoided him completely, exiting the building through the back door.
    Walking down the hall, she flipped through the mail again. Nothing from the literary journals to which she’d sent her poems—three, four months ago.
    She opened the door to the cloud of their apartment. It smelled