Companionship

I wake up in the dark. The alarm clock says three something. Closing time. I close my eyes but I can't sleep again. Upstairs, my neighbor's dog is crying. Sometimes it sounds like a woman or a child, but mostly it sounds like a dog. The range of its expression is astonishing—indignant, hysterical, fearful, pleading. It whines and screams and sometimes it sounds like it's going to dig itself right down through the floor. It seems to go through phases. Sometimes I don't hear it at all, or just its toenails as it walks from room to room. Last summer it started crying like this, all the time, and then one night it threw itself out the window, landing in the yard in a hail of broken glass and ran down the street towards the highway. I'm not sure how the dog ended up back in the apartment. Somehow it always does.

The dog is quiet, I guess, when my neighbor is home. She goes through her own phases. Sometimes she stays home a lot, like if she's just lost a job. Then she'll knock on the door. “Hey, neighbor,” she always says. She'll ask me if I have any baking powder because she's about to make a cake. I'll say yes, I have some and I won't say anything about the fact that it's 11 o'clock at night. And why should I say anything? I keep odd hours myself. Sometimes I come home from work at 4 a.m. I know she hears me. She doesn't sleep well, either, she told me once. Maybe I wake her up. I always forget how loud that mysterious squeal and rattle when I make a sharp turn, like the turn I make up the alley. From inside with the windows rolled up you can barely hear it.

One time she was outside smoking when I got home, at the top of her rusty fire-escape steps. Her voice has a funny waver in it, like it wants to bounce up, but it's pulled down. There is a heaviness to her. She sinks down into whatever surface is beneath her. She braids her hair in pigtails like a little girl, which she is not. She says her name is Daisy, but the mail in the box we share comes addressed to Kim. “Hey, neighbor,” she said. “Whatcha doing?”

“Work.”

“Oh,” she said. “Where do you work?”

“Paradise Club.”

“Oh,” she says. “Are you a waitress or do you--”

“I'm a dancer.”

“Oh. Well. That's cool,” she says. “I used to be a waitress at the Landing Strip.”

“Oh. Cool. Yeah.”

My neighbor is a bit...I like the word my old room-mate would have used, pegara. In Spanish it means, sticky, gluey. It's hard to end a conversation with her. Not that I don't want to talk to her or anything like that. Just, sometimes it seems like she's waiting for me to say something and I can't think of anything to say.

“OK. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight,” she calls down. That funny lilt of hers.

Sometimes she has jobs, boyfriends. Sometimes she seems to be gone all the time. Like, really, all the time. Sometimes I wonder if she still lives up there, or if she somehow moved all her stuff out and disappeared one afternoon without me noticing . Sometimes the dog isn't there at all, either. Sometimes I forget about the dog, or I think she must have gotten rid of it, or I think it must have run away finally for good, and then it's up there again, and she's gone every night and every day. Then the dog cries and cries.

I keep earlier hours now that I'm not at Paradise, which is nice. Getting back on what feels like a normal schedule is a big reason I quit. The club closes at three, but then there is still getting dressed in the dressing room and the long wait back there while the managers sweep the main floor for the last drunk customers, shooing them out the door and calling cabs for the drunkest of them, the ones who can't find their keys, can't walk to the car. If it's a weekend night then there is always some kind of crisis, some half-dressed girl screaming this guy owes her money while the guy is slumped over his table drunk and slack like a bear that's been worked over by dogs. He's saying that he doesn't owe her shit, this is all bullshit and maybe he's lying or maybe she's lying, or maybe she kept asking him if wanted just one more, just one more dance baby and I'll make this one really good, and she knew he was too drunk to nod yes or no, let alone count the number of dances and multiply by twenty bucks, and now she's saying he owes her four hundred dollars. Or maybe they were both too fucking drunk to have any idea what's been happening for the last two hours, and the manager has to sort all this out. Meanwhile the rest of us sit at the front bar in sweats and ponytails and elaborate eye make-up, waiting to go home, and can't even drink anything, not even a glass of water, because as per the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission all glassware has to be off the bar by exactly 3:15 AM. And that doesn’t even count the drive home and taking the make-up off and the long, hot shower. Most of the time I'd be still too jazzed from adrenaline and Red Bull to sleep right away. I'd put something on TV that I'd seen a million times before, old episodes of Samurai Jack or South Park, and by the time I'd fall asleep it would be nearly. 4:30. Then I’d wake up sometime after noon still smelling like cigarettes, thinking Jesus, I must have smoked half a pack last night. Fuck me, I'm going to get cancer and I won't be one of those people who where it's so tragic and unexpected. I will deserve my cancer, every mutating cell of it. I will be lying in that hospital bed telling myself, you stupid bitch.

I tried to quit a million times. It was easy on the outside, but I never made it more than one night at the club, not even once. It was hardest in the down-time, when there's twenty girls in the club and two customers and you start making up things for yourself to do. You go back in the dressing room and re-do your make-up brushstroke by brushstroke and you re-curl your hair. You go to the bar and ask the bartender for a glass of ice water and then you start a conversation with the bored girl next to you. If it's someone you know you make a joke about how bad the night is – Did you make a million dollars yet? And if it's someone you don't know you say where you from? If they say somewhere out of town you ask about the clubs where they usually work – Is it better out there? And usually they say no, Denver hasn't been good lately, but sometimes they say yes, New Orleans was great a few months ago. I'd file away facts like that: which clubs were good, who hires out of town girls. I used to think I was going to strip my way from coast to coast. Every new dancer has some idea like that, that this is going to open up some world of opportunity and experience you've only ever dreamed about. And it can. I'd never try to scare a new girl off by saying, this is not going to end up like you think. I'd only say, the opportunities are not always just what you expect.

These days I don't smoke and I try to go to bed by midnight. I grew up in the country and I've got an almost superstitious belief in the power of early rising. I try counting my breath or I listen to the white noise sound of the highway. Tonight, trying to fall asleep again, trying to tugs the shreds of my dream back around me, the dog barking upstairs drowning out everything.

As a last resort, I get out up and fished my shoes from under the bed. It's cold outside. I go back for a coat before I climb the rusty to steps to Daisy’s apartment. I knock on the door first, as if someone is really going to open it. Then I try to doorknob. “Daisy? Hello?”

The dog is going nuts. I can't tell if it's trying to scare me off or just yelling for help. I give the door a pat with the flat of my palm. “Hey, dog. Settle down.” The dog is right on the other side of the door now, I hear it's fur brush against the wood. I hear it breathing, a little whine, then another torrent of yips.

“Settle down, baby.” I pat the door again, reassuringly. I try to put comfort into the sound of my hand on the wood, into the tone of my voice. “It's OK, little dog. Don't worry. Everything's cool.”

The barking quiets into whimpering. I keep patting the door and murmuring. I slide down until I'm sitting on the stoop. I turn and press my back into the door. “It's OK, dog.” It's a cold night. I see my breath. From here, the highway noise is crisp and clear, the doppler zoom of each car individually heard. The sky is stained with mercury vapor lights, the orangey violet of a bruise.

“She'll come back, buddy. She'll be back soon. You're OK. Just hang on.” The dog is almost quiet now. I like to think it can feel my body heat through the door, giving it something to lean into. I'm kidding myself. The door is cold as fuck.

After a while I get up, of course. The dog starts making high, anxious noises as I start down the stairs. It is quiet for a little longer after I get into bed. Later I seem to hear it starting up again, but I am already asleep.

***

Tom is about fifty. Like a lot of odd couples, we met online. He got divorced two years ago. According to him, his marriage was over a long time before it ended. Now he lives in an apartment and sees his kids on the weekends. After he moved out on his own he tried dating, but says it made him “sad.” He pays me to come over and dance for him at his apartment. I don't always dance that much. Sometimes we just smoke weed and watch The Office. He rests his head on my shoulder and I put my arms around him.

“I'll never make you feel cheap,” he told me, the first time we met. We were sitting outside a coffee shop on a busy corner downtown. It was late morning. The lemony winter sun came under the awning into our eyes, making us squint. “I love women,” Tom said. “I absolutely love and respect women. I'll never make you feel like --” He doesn't say, like a whore. But of course, which is, of course, exactly what he means.

“Some of my buddies say, ‘just get an escort,’ ” he says, lifting his arm to shade his eyes from the sun. “I don't know why, I just don't want that. I have friends who are really into all of it. You know, they go to these girls and pay thousands and thousands of dollars, famous girls and all of that, and that isn't for me. What I really need, what I really want, is just connection.”

As a dancer, you learn how to be attracted to people. That's what makes you real money and it's hard to fake. That morning I looked at Tom and tried to think who reminded me of. I decided he made me think a little of my friend Rhoda's dad, Steve. Steve was Norwegian; he had the same white-blond hair, the same delicate skin that turns ruddy over too much time in the sun. Steve raised bees and built the cabin his family lived in. It was a big cabin with lots of rooms and finished on the inside so the white pine looked like brass. Steve chopped wood and could carry Rhoda on one shoulder and me on the other, all the way across the yard.

I looked at Tom and thought of Steve and thought, connection. After a while, I won't need Steve, of course; I'll feel the connection on its own. With practice, you can will yourself to imprint, like a child to its parent, like a dog to its master. The trick is not to let the imprint go too deep.

Except that the rent is probably five times as much, Tom's apartment is not so different from the apartments of boys I knew in college. Sparsely furnished, nothing on the walls. It feels temporary, almost like a hotel room. When I am there, I try to bring with me whatever is the opposite of loneliness.

***

Daisy's car pulls into the alley and past my window. I know it's her when I hear the door slam and the two beeps of the automatic lock. I go out to mailbox so I can bump into her. “Hey, neighbor,” she says. “Whatcha doing?”

“Not much. Your dog was going crazy last night.”

She looks at me and looks away. “Oh, no,” she says. “She hates it up there. I'm sorry.”

I feel bad. I didn't mean it like that. “How've you been?” I ask. “I haven't seen you in forever.”

“I've just been out. Out and about.”

You never really know what your neighbors are doing, even if you think you do. Daisy and I went for a walk once, around the cemetery at the end of the street. It was the closest we've ever been to friendly. I don't really remember what we talked about. She told me something about a divorce, and some new medication she was taking for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I guess I could ask questions. I could try to get closer. I could care. I could be a real neighbor to poor little Daisy. But then what?