Lulu stood in the adjoining kitchen clutching a freezer bag of valerian tea as she watched the kettle, which had uttered its first groans of expansion atop the glowing burner.
“It kind of stinks like poop,” she said, unsealing the ziplock and taking a whiff of its contents. “But it’s incredibly relaxing.”
Indeed, the stink was inescapable, as though a Great Dane had parked his Alpo on the coffee table. While Lulu fidgeted with the tea preparations, I began to notice something else about her apartment. For all its straw-mat simplicity, the space could not belie a certain clutter. Papers were wedged beneath the Blob in stacks, candlesticks and umbrellas were stuffed inside baskets along with magazines and books. Everything was tucked away, compartmentalized, hidden from view, but if a big enough wind were to blow through the apartment, it might look like her old room.
A white cat emerged from the bedroom, unfurling its tail and licking its chops. It had green eyes and spots of brown and orange on its face, and one spot of brown at the end of its tail.
“That’s Esmeralda,” Lulu said. “Esmeralda’s my absolute darling, the answer to all of my prayers.”
The cat vaulted onto the kitchen counter and sniffed around a bit before it began the business of circling and circling, finally settling into the shape of a cinnamon roll upon the countertop, where it closed its eyes.
“Since when did you start praying?” I said.
“Since a long time ago,” she said. “Anyway, I just adore Esmeralda. I aspire to be like her. She teaches me absolutely everything.”
“How long before you’re shitting in a box?” I said.
“Very funny,” she said, but she wasn’t laughing, she wasn’t anything, really. “Go ahead, you guys can tease me all you want.”
“I’m not teasing,” said Troy.
“I’m not teasing,” I mimicked in a whiny falsetto.
“Well, it’s true,” said Lulu. “Esmeralda is my best friend. She’s patient, she’s sweet, and most of all, she never lies. I know what to expect from her. She’s straightforward and true.”
“Animals can’t lie,” said Troy. “That’s what the Garden of Eden was all about. The forbidden fruit was self-knowledge, you know, like self-consciousness. That’s the original sin.”
“Thank you, Joseph Campbell,” I said. “And what the hell’s a snake? A fucking vegetable?”
“It’s a myth,” said Troy. “I’m just saying—”
“You’re just talking,” I said.
He stopped talking. He shifted slightly away from me atop the Blob.
“Oh, let’s not talk about religion,” said Lulu. “I’ve tried just about all of them, and they’re none of them worth arguing over.”
“I’m not arguing,” said Troy.
When the tea was finished, Lulu brought it steaming on a tray and set it on the coffee table. It stunk like a bedpan. Lulu sat on her knees on the wood floor across from Troy and me. As the tea steeped, Lulu spoke at length on the subject of Esmeralda and her many charms and fascinating idiosyncrasies. Troy and I listened and listened. We watched Esmeralda, though there was really nothing to see—she was conked out on the counter, inert as a paving stone, probably dreaming of tuna fish or a clean litter box.
Lulu stood up at one point and put on some New Agey music that I didn’t recognize: a potpourri of cellos and chimes and didgeridoos, the musical equivalent of frankincense. Then she sat back down on her knees across from us, and she poured the tea into three cups.
Lulu raised her cup to her lips and blew softly upon it, so that a ghostly curl of steam crawled upward over her face, and when she sipped, she looked at Esmeralda on the counter, and her eyes smiled lovingly over the rim of her cup. I used to know that smile, and what it was to have those crinkly eyes bestow their unreserved approval upon me.
“Here kittykittykitty,” I said.
Esmeralda opened her eyes and unfurled her tail. I encouraged her further with little smooching sounds, and the cat waved her tail about playfully by way of reply. I held out my fingers as though I were dangling a herring, and Esmeralda hopped off the counter and padded toward me across the wooden floor. But before she got to me, Troy scooped her up and set her in his lap, whereupon she circled, circled, and settled to rest.
“She likes you,” said Lulu.
“Troy always had a knack for pussy,” I said.
“Oh, stop it,” she said. “Why do you always have to be so disgusting?”
“It was a compliment,” I said.
“You’re just jealous,” she said.
I could feel my face color.
“She’s soft,” said Troy, petting her.
Lulu leaned over and they both pet her. “She’s the softest. The softest and the sweetest and the wisest.”
Oh brother, I thought.
“Isn’t this tea nice?” she said.
“I really like it,” I lied.
“Me too,” said Troy. “It makes you feel . . . in the moment.”
I nearly choked. In the moment. Please. Ha! The tea tasted like boiled shit, which of course I would eagerly have partaken of, had Lulu set it in front of me. “I see what you mean about the calming effect,” I said.
“Yeah, it’s really nice,” she said. “It’s one of my simple pleasures. I’m finally starting to enjoy the little things. I’m tired of thinking big. It gives me a headache. I’m tired of being smart.” Then she turned her attention back to Esmeralda. “Ith wittow kitty gittin watts of wuv from mummy and Twoy? Duth wittow kitty wike wuv? Mummy wuvs wittow kitty thooo much. Wittow kitty make mummy thooo happy.”
I never thought I’d want to kill a cat. I love animals. Or maybe it was Troy I wanted to kill. I wanted to kill something, or stop something, or communicate something, before Lulu lost her mind completely. But maybe Lulu was right. Maybe I was just jealous. Maybe Lulu was truly content in her little daily things, maybe normalcy was the answer: cats and nowhere jobs and sparsely furnished apartments. Maybe valerian tea was the doorway to enlightenment. Maybe stable, reliable Troy was the man to carry her across that threshold, but I doubted it. It seemed to me that Lulu was even, too even. Like she didn’t even know she was in despair. I longed for that strong wind to blow through the room and scatter Lulu everywhere in all her swirling, eddying complexity, and though I knew that it was within my power to stir those winds, the very rules of engagement had changed. To win Lulu, I had to disarm her. And the best way to do that, I reasoned, was to stop talking. And so I did.
We spent the remainder of the evening sipping tea and engaging in normal conversation, a ritual of mediocrity at which Troy proved proficient and quite eloquent. He talked about job markets and IPOs and 401(k)s and wouldn’t stop talking about the World Wide Web.
Now and again the phone rang, but Lulu never answered it. She kept listening to Troy paint a picture of a world that could be quite easily finessed and persuaded and in most cases predicted (I wished Hume were there to set him straight on that account), a world where morality and fiscal responsibility could coexist, a world where every fruit you ever wished for was ripe for the picking, where free will was its own kind of destiny. Opportunity and capital were the tools to achieve whatever end you could possibly wish for. It was really quite simple: Ask for little, and little you shall receive; expect opulence, and the universe would surrender its bounty. By this measure, gratitude seemed like a dangerous proposition.
As Troy painted this picture of reality, I realized for the first time that I was raised by peasants. I recognized that the world in which Troy lived was the world into which wealthy people brought their children—a world that engendered possibilities and was easily navigable given a philosophy that instilled confidence, a mythology in which destiny was a ladder and all you had to do was climb it, a world where morality was simply a matter of good taste. I, however, was taught (and so, mind you, was Lulu) that the world
was made of meat, that everything had a short ending, that without pain, one could not possibly expect gain. All the opportunity and capital in the world didn’t matter, damnit, it had to hurt! And I was supposed to be well-adjusted?
Not only was I raised by peasants, but I was a peasant, too, because Troy’s ideal seemed colorless to me—safe, predictable, virtually without struggle. And that’s why Lulu nodded and nodded and smiled occasionally, but not like she smiled for Esmeralda, not like she smiled for me in the pampas grass, when we spoke in blinks and squints and lovely incantations. When Lulu smiled at Troy, she smiled like a straw mat, or a paper lantern, or a black scarf draped over a yellow footlocker.
Normal conversation lasted until about midnight, at which point Lulu decided it was time for bed. She gathered up Esmeralda, and they retreated to the bedroom. She reemerged moments later in a nightgown with blankets and pillows for Troy and me, which she set in a big pile next to the Blob.
“Goodnight,” she cooed.
“Goodnight,” said Troy.
Lulu pulled the string for the overhead light, and the room went dark, but you could still see the Chinese lantern bobbing in the darkness as she disappeared into the bedroom. Lulu shut the door behind her, and when she did, most of the universe went dark, leaving only a puddle of bleak light, which filtered through the hedges and into the window from the street. In this bleak light, Troy and I groped and wrestled the Blob until it was almost flat. In silence, we kicked our shoes off and lay down side by side on our backs, and dispersed the blankets and pillows equitably. We stared at the ceiling for a few minutes without comment before turning our backs to one another.
As I lay there with my best friend, I looked out the window and over the hedges and tried to forget him completely, and hoped that the sun would not rise on one of us—preferably him.
The Biggest Reason
When I awoke, I was alone on the Blob, and daylight spilled dull gray over the hedges into the living room. It was spitting rain and the windows were fogged up around the edges. It could’ve been 5:30 AM, or it could’ve been noon. It could have been fall, it could have been winter. The clock on the stove read 10:09. At some point during the night Troy had found his way to Lulu’s bedroom, for that’s where I discovered him, on his back, under the covers, gazing out the window.
“Morning,” he said.
“Hadn’t noticed,” I said, looking around. “Where’s Lulu?”
“Work, until five-thirty. Then she’s got something downtown.”
The inner sanctum of Lulu’s bedroom was more chaotic than the rest of the apartment. Keys and bracelets and pocket change gathered on flat surfaces everywhere. The dresser top was littered with miscellany. Panties lay strewn about. A wicker chair in the corner lay buried beneath an avalanche of sweaters and coats and jeans. Photographs were affixed willy-nilly to the edges of her vanity. I noted with satisfaction that no less than three of the pictures featured myself, and only one featured Troy, and even in that one his face was partially obscured by somebody’s shoulder.
Troy climbed out from under the covers, naked from the waist up. He scratched his ass and ambled across the hallway to the bathroom. The shower nozzle sputtered to life. I continued my appraisal of Lulu’s room, particularly the chaos atop her dresser, where I found ticket stubs and bus transfers and an old paycheck and a pack of American Spirits and two books of matches and some Nag Champa incense, and I’m guessing about eight bucks in change.
I sat on the edge of the bed, on the opposite side where Troy had lain. I picked up Lulu’s pillow and buried my face in it and smelled it, I mean really smelled it, like I’d been under water for eleven minutes and it was my first breath of air, and it smelled like that song “Back Home in Indiana,” like hay and candles and the Wabash River, and something else, maybe Lulu’s scalp, or my mother’s bathrobe, or sweaty feet soaked in rose water. Whatever it was, it was good.
In a Mexican cigar box on the nightstand, among the aspirin bottles and Carmex and hair clips, I discovered the cause of Lulu’s evenness, or at least one of its harbingers, in the form of a prescription bottle of Prozac. I pocketed the Prozac so swiftly and without reservation that I can’t honestly say what impulse prompted me. But in my heart I felt that Lulu’s wilderness must never be tamed.
The shower nozzle stopped sputtering, and I heard the little rings clink together as Troy drew back the shower curtain. I retreated to the living room and began folding blankets and wrestling the Blob back into its alternate state of formlessness.
Later, Troy and I walked down the hill through the rain and ate breakfast at Stella’s. We agreed it was overpriced, and Troy insisted on paying. Then we saw a matinee, a celluloid disaster called Problem Child 2. We walked out midway, and poked around record stores on the Ave for a few hours, all the while scrupulously avoiding the subject of Lulu. Troy bought a CD, a T-shirt, and a smoked-glass Jimi Hendrix mirror. He also bought a hat that said Loser, which I thought suited him perfectly. I bought Lulu a record for a buck called Take Another Lap for Jesus, with an old guy on the cover in the most vivid yellow poly-fiber sweat suit I’d ever laid eyes on. He looked just like Jimmy Johnson, the Dallas Cowboys coach, and he was jogging down the street, presumably for Jesus, with a smile on his face like something Big Bill might’ve crafted midway through a front double bicep. The artist’s name was Norman something, and not only could he croon, according to the liner notes, like David, the sweet singer of Israel, he was also an evangelist for something called the Overseas Crusade Ministry, whose stated endeavor was something to the effect of stimulating and mobilizing the Body of Christ to continuous, effective evangelism and church multiplication on a nationwide basis, so millions will be transformed into victorious Christians.
Troy wanted to walk around campus, so we walked around campus. The place was deserted. As we crossed Red Square past Meany Hall, Troy finally broached the subject of Lulu.
“I wasn’t trying to be sneaky, you know. I mean, by not telling you.”
“Weren’t you?”
“No. That’s what I’m trying to explain. I would’ve told you, I wanted to tell you, it’s just Lulu was worried that—”
“It’s none of my business,” I said. “You don’t owe me an explanation. And I don’t want one. What happens between you and Lulu is between you and Lulu. What do I care? I’m her brother.”
“Stepbrother,” he said.
“Whatever.”
“There’s a big difference.”
“Not to her way of thinking,” I said.
“Maybe not,” he conceded. “But . . .” He waved it off.
“But what?”
“Well . . . sometimes it seems like, I don’t know, like . . . do you remember when Lulu and I were going out, and she wasn’t always very nice to me?”
“You mean, like always?”
“Okay, sure, like always. I always felt like that was because of you, because I wasn’t you. I wasn’t funny like you, I didn’t make weird analogies like you, I didn’t describe things the way you described them.”
“Whatever gave you that idea?”
“Because all those nights in Ventura, we ended up talking about you.”
“Don’t blame me.”
“I’m not blaming. I just don’t know what I am to Lulu, that’s all. I never did know.”
“So welcome to the club.”
“You used to tell me that I was nothing to her, and I believed you.”
“That was wrong of me. I was just jealous.”
“But now I think maybe I am something to her, but I don’t know what. It’s different now, a lot different, except really, when it comes down to it, maybe it’s the same. Maybe it will always be the same.”
“I wouldn’t bank on it.”
“All I know is, is that she genuinely cares about me now. She begged me to come, Will. And believe me, after that night at Cabaz
on, I needed some convincing. She made me feel like I was never born that night.”
“That one was my fault,” I said. “I’m sorry. It was a dirty trick. I should’ve never—”
“Forget it. She was crazy that night, and we were drunk.” Troy stopped at the ledge in front of a sculpture that looked something like a rusty pencil poised vertically atop a rusty pyramid. He turned his back to it and leaned against the ledge, and I did the same. Together we gazed out across the empty square, which wasn’t square.
“But then the first night I got here, Will, she almost convinced me. She said things about the future, and I’ve never known Lulu to be a forward thinker, at least not where she and I are concerned. I’m telling you, she was different, Will. She was calm, and focused, and she seemed to know who she was, or who she wanted to be. Then yesterday you got here, and . . . I wasn’t convinced anymore. This morning, she tried to convince me again. She apologized over and over, but she never said for what.” He threw his arms up. “I don’t even know what I’m trying to say. Convince me of what? That I’m what ?”
“Ask her.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“Because even if she does have an answer, I’m afraid I won’t like it.”
The statement had the ring of truth. The kind you don’t want to ponder. “Well,” I said. “Then just ask her again in five minutes.”
Somehow this truth was less unsettling, I suppose because it afforded us both a degree of hope. Troy and I shared a little grin. Troy pushed off from the ledge and started slowly back across the square. After about five steps, he broke into a sprint toward the center of the square, then slammed on the brakes and skated across the wet bricks in his tennis shoes for about ten feet, and waved me on.
All About Lulu Page 20