I Will Be Complete

by Glen David Gold

  It continued like this until Seth was crying again, which set Marc off into that desolate land of childhood where you’re crying but don’t really know why, and those two wails were the only noise as, otherwise, Ann continued to prepare dinner.

  My father said to Ann, “Let’s get out of this shit.”

  She continued attending to the chicken she was cooking. “But where would we go?”

  It wasn’t a solicitation; it was rhetorical. It was, “We have nowhere to go.” She wasn’t happy either, she seemed to be saying. I wasn’t sure what she would have changed, though.

  I knew what my dad was thinking. I should be going to that new house, the cool house, where this wouldn’t be happening. Even if, of course, it would be happening exactly like this because the rest of them would ruin it by moving there with him.

  After dinner, I went upstairs and closed the door, but the weird tension outside seemed to seep in. I imagined bringing Melanie over, passing by one weeping brother being punched by one cheerful brother, my amoral father, me showing her the swimming pool that symbolized the lies my mother engendered, and taking her up here for the big finish, a room that didn’t even have a bed in it but a fold-up couch that I now noticed had been duct-taped where I’d let a reading light singe the fabric. Not an iota of this fit my self-image.

  When I tried to go to sleep that night, I keep feeling earthquakes. But that was just me, shaking.

  HISTORY

  I WAS IN MY ROOM when Ann walked by. “Melanie’s here,” she said, and I immediately knew what that meant to Ann: she’d left Melanie standing on the porch.

  I let her in. From the patient yet confused look on Mel’s face, I could see her factoring in all the ways I was nineteen years old. My father came to the foyer to say hello. I could see him making a silent but sympathetic judgment of some sort. He wasn’t creepy or inappropriate with women—but curious? Always.

  They talked for maybe a minute: yes, she was at UCLA, yes, dance—modern dance—from Arizona, originally. Lived in New York once, lived on falafel and yogurt, dancing eight hours a day. He smiled as she described this, and I realized how much I missed the part of him that was at ease. He enjoyed hearing from intelligent strangers. Also: I wanted to be a writer, but Melanie actually was a dancer.

  She was describing trends toward androgyny in dance, which he knew about, he’d read something in the L.A. Times about it, and then with an appraising nod, he wished us a good night.

  I got into the passenger’s seat of Mel’s old VW Bug. While she drove, I asked questions, a lot of them. She liked to answer questions. Mel was intrigued by my summer of transformation because she felt her own coming on. She was self-sufficient, defensively so, the type of woman who paid her way for every meal, who had no credit card debt, and though that meant she was thin and went without any luxuries, there was something about her spartan lifestyle as she described it that was incredibly attractive to me. I could picture her room clearly though I hadn’t seen it: the frameless futon right on the floor, bordered by all those novels borrowed from the bookstore, the Dr. Bronner’s peppermint soap that doubled as detergent and tripled as dish soap. It was the life of right angles and wire-rimmed glasses, an unscented candle on a dustless milk crate, two pairs of faded jeans, three white starched shirts, and a single, tight body that fit in them without effort.

  She was beautiful but I didn’t know how to tell her that, so I talked about art in a cowardly, precocious way. Sharaku, who was all about Kabuki artifice, and Yoshitoshi, whose woodcuts were so steeped in blood that they’d been banned. I only mentioned them so I could ask if she knew Hashiguchi Goyo’s Woman Combing Her Hair, a 1920s woodcut. She didn’t, so I talked about how finely drawn it was, how you could tell the artist loved not just details but the woman herself. To me, that image was the peak of sensitive aesthetics, creating a kind of longing that you had to be evolved to appreciate. I said he drew it so you wanted to touch her long, straight, thick hair.

  She loved art. Independent women like Georgia O’Keeffe. She liked how O’Keeffe and Stieglitz were only together six months a year, and how she was his muse but she had her own art. Or Diego and Frida, how they lived in houses that connected but they got to invite each other over. It seemed so ideal. I had only the faintest clue about maybe one of those names, but at least I owned up to wanting to read about them. That excited her, recommending books, she liked to be helpful.

  Rick had given her Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child and she’d recognized herself. She told me I had to read it. I would probably recognize myself in it, too. It was about responsibility takers. Only now was she realizing she hadn’t had much of a childhood. She’d had to take care of her mom when her father disappeared into the desert. He’d had dementia, and had vanished after clearing out the bank accounts. Mel had supported herself since she was sixteen. It was why she had clear boundaries.

  I enjoy long interviews. This was like hearing a novelist in Writers at Work describe the life of an artist. Mel seemed as deep as any poet describing travels across sand-blasted lands, and I wondered about kissing her.

  She asked: What music did I listen to, besides punk? I might have stalled, but ended up telling her, sheepishly, owning up to it, “Philip Glass.”

  She exclaimed aloud, thrilled. “You like him? Have you heard The Photographer, his album about Muybridge?” She had to explain Muybridge, as he was an inspiration to how she wanted to make dances. The calibration of motions made in everyday life, the infinitesimal study of time, turning what seemed like thoughtless motion into art, that’s what got her brain into making dances.

  She was about to turn twenty-seven. Did I know what a Saturn Return was, she asked. Saturn took about twenty-seven years to orbit the sun, she said, and so when you were twenty-seven you tended to transform into a new person. She hoped it was happening to her. It sounded corny, but it was true, she said, listing off friends of hers who had gotten married or divorced or had massively changed circumstance at twenty-seven. So everything was up in the air, in a way. Except this: First Person Singular. It was a kind of Rosary she brought out every so often. It was like “be here now.”

  Did I say it aloud at some point? Maybe I only thought it: twenty-seven was Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix. Maybe I would have said it as an observation in the spirit of “Right, twenty-seven is a milestone,” but not meaning anything more, just because Melanie worrying about death would never occur to me. It was another way I at nineteen was different from her. I didn’t know how worried she was about twenty-seven.

  If I haven’t captured exactly what made Melanie so attractive, it was that she had set up her boundaries precisely so she could make art. If I could have articulated it, I would have said I wanted her to be First Person Singular, with me there, too.

  Maybe I was already in love by the time we got to Rick’s. I just know that a combination of circumstances was putting me on track to know more about Mel than she intended. When we pulled up at Rick’s apartment, it was 8:15. We wouldn’t leave till 4:15, and we wouldn’t sleep at all.

  * * *

  —

  Rick’s apartment, in the Greene & Greene style, was so nice that in summer 1983 it cost $1,100 a month. How he managed this on $3.85 an hour from the bookstore was suspicious to Melanie. Sugar daddy? Kiting checks? It wasn’t secret family money. His family didn’t speak to him.

  “Right,” I said, “and there are all those expenses for Lolly.”

  I’m not sure how she looked at me when I said that, because the door was thrown open with force, as if the party within was too big to be contained. Rick pulled us in, apologizing for his “breath out to here.” It was a nice place, beamed ceilings and original tile and hardwood and Moorish touches.

  Rick pointed out a tall, curly-haired man who was slouching shyly against the stove in the kitchen. He wore, badly, a Greek fisherman’s cap. “That’s Philippe,” Ric
k hissed to me. “He used to be Catherine Deneuve’s lover. He was in Valley of the Dolls. He’s only been gay for a few months so forgive the hat. He doesn’t know anything yet, but he’s really really really gay, like a thirteen-year-old boy is really really really Jewish after being bar mitzvahed.”

  Melanie went into the kitchen to get something to drink while Rick showed me the rest of the place. There was a stack of Moleskine journals in the hallway, by the phone alcove. They came up to my thighs. Rick said, “Those are my thoughts. I’m transcribing them now for a book.”

  “What’s it about?”

  He thought about it, as if this was the first time someone had asked. “About being a man. In this culture.”

  There was more to the house tour, but I was watching Mel, still in the kitchen. She was in deep conversation with a woman whose posture was described by her hips pointing toward Mel in aggressive slouching.

  Rick had a roommate. His roommate was depressed because he’d just learned he had HIV and he was worried it might become AIDS. “He slept with this flight attendant who gave it to, like, everyone.”

  Recently, a young gay friend who hadn’t even been born in 1983 reacted with awe when I started telling him this story. He wanted me to explain every detail of what it was like to be at a dinner party in Hollywood then with gay men discussing AIDS. But I would be a disappointing witness. It’s hard to account for how Rick was talking. He wasn’t really worried. It seemed to me that night that the men in the room, who were smart and funny and who had learned how to ask the right questions, would be genuinely shocked that they were supposed to be more concerned. Also I wasn’t paying close attention. I was a straight nineteen-year-old with a little bit of empathy, but with a deeper curiosity about what Melanie was doing in the kitchen.

  I decided I should go there to get a beer or something, leaving the men behind, and Mel showed visible joy when she saw me. The woman she was talking to had fixed her with an unbreakable Rasputin-like gaze, as if she was waiting to be found overwhelming. That’s a look that couldn’t go well, I thought. That might have been what I looked like when I was looking at Heidi in my dorm room. I swore I would never look that way at anyone again.

  When we were alone, Mel said she was in frequent trouble because she was the only straight woman in the dance department. Her best friend was disappointed that Mel didn’t even want to experiment. “ ‘You aren’t even a little bi?’ ”

  I asked, “Have you always known?”

  She nodded. “You?”

  I was reminded of being in eighth grade, being asked if I did drugs, and knowing that “No” was boring and it gave off the tiniest whiff of being narrow-minded. “Yes” was the truth here. Was I…boring?

  A few hours later, most of the crowd had gone home. It was down to maybe a half-dozen of us sitting on the floor in front of the fireplace. Of course we hadn’t had a fire that summer night, but the effect was like listening to crackling embers, the evening on its way to history.

  Someone asked about Lolly and Rick said Lolly was a slut. He’d just learned she’d given a flight attendant a handjob so she could ride on the Concorde for free. Fausta however was excelling at her riding lessons, and he was hoping she would be going en point soon, though not too soon.

  Somehow, I jumped to this: “Is Lolly short for ‘Lolita’?”

  “Yes.”

  I said, “You have a kid named Lolita Savilla?”

  “I do. And one named Clayton and one named Fausta.”

  This was getting confusing. Melanie’s last name was Clayton. “Have you ever been married?”

  “Not that I know of—have you?” Rick had this crafty smile that let me know he was enjoying being cross-examined.

  “Who’s Lolly’s mother?”

  “Her mother, and Clay’s mother for that matter, is a wonderful, very special woman. A fine, educated, clean woman. Their mother is Miss Bette Midler.”

  “Rick!”

  “I’m serious. You don’t believe me?” People were laughing, and his face lit up like he was challenging gossip. “What kind of world is this anyway? It’s unfair. If I want to have Bette Midler’s children, I should be allowed to have Bette Midler’s children.”

  And then he explained that for years he had told his friends he wanted to adopt a little girl. He would give her a classical education. She would learn to play the cello and write poetry and ride English equitation. She would learn about the finest literature, not that Dick and Jane garbage.

  His friends laughed, because no one would ever let him adopt anything. Not a box turtle. And if he did somehow get his hands on a little girl, when she hit the age of eleven or so she would rebel and become all the things he hated. There was no Lolly. None of the children were real.

  “Clayton, well, I realized I shouldn’t push my son so hard, and that’s why Clay still loves me and he’s still at Exeter.”

  I said, “What’s he doing at Exeter, still? It’s summer break.”

  “I mean, generally,” Rick said as if explaining the obvious. “He’s vacationing in Montauk now. With the Kennedys.” He didn’t dwell on it. A few minutes later, he was telling me he’d been dating Sal Mineo when he was murdered, which I was impressed by only for the amount of time it took me to realize there was no reason I should believe that, either.

  I said, “When did you know you were gay?”

  “I’d say getting a blowjob when I was twelve was an eye-opener. Oh, this is good, I’ve never been able to ask this: When did you know you were straight?”

  “That’s a good question. Maybe I’m repressing something.”

  “Oh, stop that. You aren’t that interesting. Guys just don’t make your dick hard. It’s not a mystery. But,” he said, lowering his voice, “why are you a writer?”

  I liked the question. It wasn’t, “Why do you want to be a writer?” I had a good story I already knew to tell, about my mother writing her memoirs from my point of view. I told it now, and it went over well, and as the laughter died down, Rick continued.

  “So you’re a writer because your mother wanted to be one?”

  “She’s still writing.”

  “Sure,” he said carefully. “But are you doing it because she wanted to?”

  There was probably something funny to say in response, but I couldn’t think of it. I didn’t have an answer. It threw me.

  * * *

  —

  It was hours later. Not quite dawn. Mel and I were sitting at the curb in front of my house. The car’s engine was off. We were saying things that made little sense. It was so late my head was beginning to hurt.

  “Do you mind if I kiss you good night?” I asked.

  “Okay.”

  We kissed, but it didn’t explain anything. A dry, tight little kiss. It might well have been politeness on her part, except for the small part of me that suspected I just had to be irresistible. I wished I had the ability to let things take a natural pace, but there was thunder in my ears. I said, “You’re good-looking.”

  We kissed a few more excruciatingly vague kisses, lip on lip and no more. She didn’t pull back but she didn’t encourage me. I had no idea what was going on. When I opened my eyes, she was smiling at me.

  “Get out of my car,” she said.

  I let out the word “Jeez!”

  She put her face against my neck. Her hand cupped my lap, a maddening gesture somewhere between careless and intimate, and then she drew a deep sigh, her breath crossing my throat. “Now get out,” she said, not unkindly.

  I’d thought I was familiar with the signals given in the adult world, but I had no idea what the hell was going on. I got out, holding on to her hand, which clutched at me until we finally parted.

  ANATOMY

  THE NEXT NIGHT, Mel met me after work. She’d come from dance class. It turns out you can read the bruising on dancers�
� legs. Ballet dancers have a different map than contemporary, Mel explained. She unzipped her bag to throw her glasses in, and a smell came out like a mushroom farm under a summer subway platform.

  We went to the Hungry Tiger, the lounge across the street, for beers. While we were walking in, she was discussing a performance she’d seen, and she illustrated it while moving, which made me want to kiss her again, but I didn’t know if I was allowed. Also: I was walking into the place illegally, of course, which she seemed to have forgotten. I didn’t want to bring it up.

  She introduced me to the bartender, who was a Hunter’s customer. There was a kind of arrangement between the employees at the establishments, it was said with a wink.

  The bartender was friendly, and shuffled through the things necessary for getting a beer. “You look familiar,” he said to me.

  “I look like a lot of people.”

  “Where’d you go to high school?”

  “Thacher.”

  “That boarding school? Fancy. When’d you graduate?”

  “Nineteen,” I swallowed, “seventy-nine.”

  “Damn,” Mel said under her breath.

  His smile didn’t even change. Neither did his eyes—they were still on me while he disengaged the beer from his hand and passed it to me. “Pretty good math classes at Thacher,” he said, and left us alone.

  Mel was poor. She drank at the Tiger because of the discount they gave us. She’d pawned her jewelry to stay in graduate school, and not even for the classes. I didn’t know enough to ask her what else graduate school provided, but I now know the answer was health insurance.

  There were no nicknames for Glen, I said at one point. You can’t shorten it. There’s no extension for it really. Melanie got one on the first try: Glendale. It was the town for evolved people, like us.

  This was not a date, because only dough heads dated. We kept talking.