I Will Be Complete

by Glen David Gold

  We went for sushi. I was ready to speak Japanese in front of her, and when we sat down at the counter, I said the ceremonial greeting/grunt that a customer gives, and I started ordering.

  The chef was holding an enormous cutting knife about ten inches long. He interrupted me. He shushed everyone around us. “HE—SPEAKS—JAPANESE!” he cried, and punched the butt end of his knife into his chest, and under his thick glasses rolled his eyes back, wincing as if I’d murdered him. “OH—MY—GOD! Hey, everyone, this guy speaks Japanese!”

  This was the last time I spoke Japanese publicly.

  There is something about getting caught showing off that goes to revealing your character. I said something to Mel about learning to cede control sometimes.

  Mel said she hated people who knew how to control conversations.

  “Like who?”

  She shrugged. She wasn’t going to tell me yet. The word “control” reminded me of something Clint Eastwood had said in an interview, and me quoting him made her laugh before I even said it: his only interest in power was how it related to his own autonomy. She stopped laughing. That struck her as wise. She liked the idea of being fully autonomous. “Melville,” I said, “Population 1.”

  We went to Santa Monica to see Koyaanisqatsi. Afterward we said it should be required viewing. It made her want to make dances. It made me want to write things, even if I was wondering a little how much of that was me, how much my mom. I pointed out how people didn’t really want to have experiences, just buy the jacket or the faded jeans to suggest they were deeper than they were. She said that she’d stopped wearing leg warmers outside of class. Flashdance meant women who’d never even bloodied a toe in dance class were wearing them in line at the Häagen-Dazs store.

  It was after midnight and we were in my house. My dad and Ann were asleep. Mel and I were downstairs. While she was talking to me about something, I was envisioning taking her upstairs. What would we find in my room? A fold-out couch.

  “Do you want to see the pool?”

  I took her outside. It was a huge backyard, the house on a double lot. The pool was behind a gate, the pool sweep skimming along.

  “We should go swimming sometime,” she said. “Are there jets? A friend has a Jacuzzi with jets,” and I swore to myself that when I finished my beer I would kiss her. I am a slow drinker, however, and quite a bit of conversation would have to pass before then.

  I put my beer down. I grabbed the belt loops on her jeans and pulled her toward me hard enough that she bent backward, almost spilling her drink. I grabbed it.

  “May I see some ID?”

  “I left it at home,” she said.

  “I suppose you’re going to claim you’re twenty-six or something.”

  “Something.”

  I kissed her, and she kissed back, and I wondered how do you make a perfect kiss? How do you be fully aware and maybe disappear into it? Is it just turn off the mind and keep breathing? I was thinking, There is no past and no future but this one moment, under the moon, feeling how my fingertips press against the points of your hip bones. A little overpacked for haiku, but a similar vibe.

  I said, “Until five seconds ago I wasn’t sure if I annoyed you.”

  “Oh, the evening at Rick’s? Disaster. Ten feet from your house, I thought, ‘Why did I say, “Get out of my car”?’ That was so stupid. But I’ve never done this before. Given in to lust.”

  Lust? It was like confessing to loving bacon, or the patriarchy. Because in the back of my head, I was thinking, “You mean that’s okay?” And then: “Does she mean lust for, wait, me?”

  “Goddamn Rick,” she was saying. “He is such a queen sometimes. Do you remember that game he’d played where he’d pretended to tell you my secret? What I told him was that I wanted to suck you off. It meant so much to me to say that aloud, because until now I’ve always been someone else’s fantasy.” She continued, rapidly: to have her own desire first, to be reborn at age twenty-six as a woman enacting her desire rather than just being acted upon. To say it aloud had been liberating, and then he’d been the worst kind of asshole to embarrass her for admitting that.

  I nodded. In a reversal of the world as I understood it, Melanie was looking to me to tell her it was all right to say she wanted to suck me off. But it took a moment to get there, because I was having trouble snapping all the pieces of that sentence together. No one had ever said anything like this about me before, so I was mentally double-checking that I hadn’t misheard it.

  I said, “Aren’t you hot in that sweater?”

  “Yes.” Off it came.

  * * *

  —

  She promised not to love me. That was part of the deal. I was fine with that, and I didn’t ask questions. Watch me be fine with that.

  * * *

  —

  We had to wait a couple of nights until her roommate was gone. In her house there were candles everywhere, no lights. Melanie made me dinner, organic chicken and vegetables. She put on Tom Waits and then Joan Armatrading. Joan was a tease, her lyrics were usually gender nonspecific, but everyone knew she had to love ladies.

  A beer each. No need for dessert. I didn’t recognize a single cleaning product in her house. The soap looked like someone had made it in his garage. The toothpaste, which I was sure would have to be something I’d heard of, turned out to be Tom’s of Maine, which I’m not sure anyone else in Los Angeles had in 1983.

  Dinner was over. I was standing in her bedroom. She’d gone into the bathroom for a moment. When she came out, she was nude. Seeing my expression, something like a doll’s button eyes, she asked if she’d done something wrong.

  “No, it’s just that I usually spend most of the night trying to talk girls into taking their clothes off.”

  “I can put them back on if that makes you feel better.”

  The answer was no. I caught up.

  Two people together on cotton sheets on a futon in a room in a bungalow in the flats of Hollywood. Those small, squared piles of books with a single lip balm or hairpin or ballpoint pen atop them. Mel had hair down to her waist and each strand had a point like the bristle on a brush. Dim lights in the other room, candles trembling in the breeze by the window, and outside of us there was another house and another and another, and in places all across the city there were other people going to bed together for the first time.

  I knew Melanie had a boyfriend. He lived in Arizona. His name was Jeremy. He’d seen other women sometimes, and she’d made herself okay with that. I, she explained, was an experiment. I was part of her Saturn Return.

  I was so okay with Jeremy, so quick to assure her that of course this is just bodies, not hearts, of course, you’ll be going back to him, I know, I know, look, if you think about it, I’m a stream you can walk through, and I’ll be in your footprints for a while, and that will fade. This sounded so mature it was a relief to her, which was a relief to both of us. She traced the weird curves on my nose, asking about their origins, looking at my face with pleasure.

  About Melville, Pop. 1: because she was a dancer, I could see muscle groups under her skin, and she knew all their names. In the morning, she pulled back the sheets. There was an anatomy lesson: these are traps, these are lats, here are the quads. She was especially proud of her abductors, which lived in wonderful display on the outside of her thighs, and she told me how you kept them separate, in your mind, from another group, adductors: abductors are the muscles that you flex when you want to pull away.

  MYTHOLOGY

  AT THE COUNTER, Rick was doing a dramatic reading from Christie Brinkley’s Outdoor Beauty and Fitness Book. It was an in-joke between him and Mel, in that the women who bought the book were either already gorgeous or, as he said, “beyond all measures of help.” He approved of putting lemon in your hair and cucumbers over your eyes, and maybe we would all go to the beach to let the sun work its magic,
as Brinkley suggested. On the other side of being human salads we would be glamorous. It was a weird kind of campy appreciation—despite the author being, you know, Christie Brinkley, there was valuable information inside. Rick, Mel, Glen, Nicolas et in Arcadia Ego, Dana, if she has enough sunscreen, we’ll all go to the beach. We knew this wouldn’t happen. Mel had asked that I say nothing to him about sleeping together, which made sense to me.

  A couple of days later, he was gone. Apparently one of Mel’s guesses was right—he’d been kiting checks against the register drawer, and when they bounced, Mary, the bookkeeper who looked like Betty White, told Mike.

  This isn’t exactly the end of Rick’s story, but I would never see him again. Though I was disappointed—he was entertaining—I didn’t think much about him at the time. I was busy not being in love.

  Jeremy, I learned from Mel, was handsome and tall and his body was so hard it didn’t seem to be made of skin and bone but lightly buffed, polished wood. He was funny and charming and he wasn’t in Los Angeles. And he knew about me now. Mel had told him she would be seeing other people, and Jeremy was as evolved as we were, so he wasn’t bothered by it.

  The second time I came over to Mel’s house, it was midafternoon. We went into her bedroom and shut the door. A few seconds later, her roommate, Nancy, knocked gently. In response, Mel said something that didn’t make much sense, so through the door, Nancy asked, “Are you…taking a nap?”

  “…yes,” Mel said.

  The phone rang. You couldn’t tell who was on the other end of a ringing phone, but I looked at Mel, who knew as well as I did that it was Jeremy calling.

  She smiled. “Let it ring,” she whispered. “I always manage to turn the answering machine on unless I’m fucking someone.”

  I liked this—it suggested a general reliability, something I found sexy—trumped by a passion that I’d ignited.

  We continued kissing as if I’d won a midway prize, and Jeremy left a message with Mel’s roommate that turned out to be that he was moving to Los Angeles immediately.

  * * *

  —

  Mel’s house was on a side street off of Santa Monica Boulevard in the middle of Hollywood. I volunteered to take the bus back, and she was grateful for that. Driving across L.A. was a drag. So I stood in the dusk among a half-dozen men who were mostly my age, and I waited for the bus—obliviously—while thinking about Jeremy.

  It’s hard to say exactly why Jeremy was coming. I’d like to say I irritated him and he was coming to reclaim Melanie, as this appeals to the part of me that likes making men who are said to be hard as wood feel insecure. But the reason he gave was that he’d gotten a job writing a television show, and this was the first real pang that defied my ability to make everything okay. Jeremy was being paid to be a writer.

  Mel didn’t see any reason she and I should stop seeing each other. I agreed. This would be easy, I said. I asked the questions adults would ask until I could ask: What was the show?

  She was proud of him, as it was a big deal. He would be writing scripts for the most anticipated show of the season, the follow-up to the most successful comedy of all time, M*A*S*H. The working title was AfterMASH. I hoped it would be canceled before it even got on the air, but I agreed with Mel aloud: wow, great, that’s great.

  I say I’m not competitive, but that’s because I tend to immediately lose any contest of strength, speed, or agility. However I still automatically rank men standing near me by how I’m better than they are. Even while waiting for the bus on Santa Monica Boulevard. The other guys were all what you might call tuff, not actually tough but dressed in fatigues or cowboy denim that only made their open, vulnerable faces that much softer. They were like New Wave models who were all about to cry. I didn’t talk to them, but scowled the way they did, hoping no one would talk to me. They might be looking sullen because they felt blue, or because it looked good, but I looked sullen because I was jealous a guy had gotten a job on a TV show.

  There was only one bus that stopped there. If you didn’t get on it, it meant you were waiting for something else. When the bus arrived, I got on. I was the only one. I turned around while putting in my quarters. The other guys ignored the bus entirely. As we pulled away, I looked back at them posing and looking at each other like they wanted to be rescued from how good they looked being sad. It dawned on me that they were all whores.

  * * *

  —

  At work the next day, I asked: did Mel know there were male prostitutes about fifty feet from her front door? Yes, she did. There was about a mile of Santa Monica Boulevard where you could find them. She said it so casually I realized this was another thing I should just absorb as part of the adulthood quiz.

  Later there was a phone call for Mel. Jeremy. I was ringing up a customer while, perhaps three feet over my shoulder, I heard Mel laugh for the first time at something the man she actually loved was saying. It was a full-body laugh.

  I went to shelve some books. It had been a week since we’d first kissed. I had no rights, I said a few times to myself.

  She suggested she and I have lunch. We went to the Falafel King that dancers tended to eat at, if they ate at all. Jeremy would be moving into her house until he found his own place. I hadn’t thought about that. I didn’t know if this meant we were no longer sleeping together, but asking that seemed like confessing I didn’t know the rules of a game I might have been winning.

  I asked other questions. They’d had years of experience together while both of them were poor and struggling with art. Mel slowly told me that it was hard sometimes because Jeremy couldn’t be faithful. I immediately said I couldn’t stand that. Monogamy was more important to me than anything. Two-timing was selfish and—she sort of nodded, staring into her cappuccino—I realized I was being a fucking moron, because of course Mel had trashed her own monogamy with a certain idiot teenager.

  She said Jeremy wasn’t just coming soon—he’d called because he was on his way out now. He would be here the next day.

  “Does he know about me?”

  “Oh yes. He made me tell him everything.”

  “Everything—”

  “Everything. All the things you and I did, he wanted to know all of it. He asked which of you had a bigger dick.”

  “And you told him?”

  She nodded.

  There was an obvious question to ask. I felt that not asking it was wise. She started talking about her past like she was reporting a crime she’d witnessed. Her voice sounded dreamy. Jeremy had a control over her that she couldn’t explain. He’d started hanging around the restaurant she waitressed at, then at a party he’d taken her drink away, ripped off her clothes, and fucked her right there. She was engaged to another guy, but not after that happened. Once Jeremy had touched her, she felt only as fondly toward her fiancé as a stuffed animal that had fallen behind a shelf. She didn’t sound happy about this, but amazed, as if she were under a hex.

  “He wants to fight you,” she added.

  “What?”

  “I told him not to.”

  “I’d fight him.”

  She smiled sadly. “I wouldn’t want you to lose your beautiful face.”

  I felt a deep, uncomfortable tug, a feeling of unfairness that went beyond not wanting to get punched. Why was someone as strong as Mel so helpless when it came to this asshole? This—substituting different names over a course of years—was a defining question in my life.

  * * *

  —

  That night, my father asked me how my day went. He was sitting on the living room couch under the portrait of himself and Ann sitting on the same couch. I told him about my conversation with Mel. As he asked questions, I explained the dinner party, then Rick, Lolly, and Clayton, then Jeremy wanting to kill me. I concluded with something about how this was all fine, I was just fine with it.

  He nodded. “Yo
u’re cannon fodder,” he said, and went back to The Wall Street Journal.

  BESTSELLERS

  THE DAY AFTER JEREMY CAME TO TOWN, I showed up at Hunter’s to open the store. Mel was coming in at noon, and I was happy that she’d be spending the day here, at the store, instead of at home, with him. But she called in sick. This was the first time she’d called in sick.

  I should call to see if she’s okay, I told myself. I didn’t call for the entire first hour I was there. Finally, I dialed her number, and I rehearsed what I would say if the answering machine picked up.

  With every ring of the phone, a little piece of my calm peeled away, revealing something at once hot and sick inside. I felt like the bookstore floors had warped under me. The answering machine had to be on. I didn’t like what it would mean if it weren’t. If ten rings wasn’t enough—

  It picked up. It was her roommate.

  “Hey, Nancy, it’s Glen—is Mel there?”

  “She’s,” a micro-catch in her voice, “taking a nap.”

  “Right.” I thanked her. I had a customer. Christie Brinkley was at the counter.

  “Do you have the Christie Brinkley beauty book?” she asked.

  We did—I directed her to it, and she came back to the counter with a copy.

  I didn’t recognize her. I was distracted, but also she was blond and pretty, and without a photo shoot going on, she looked almost interchangeably like one of the many gorgeous women who didn’t need the book. So I gave her a dry chuckle.

  She heard it. Handing over some cash, she said, “Yeah, I know, it’s embarrassing to be buying this.”

  I said, to reassure her, “Oh don’t worry, I hear that in spite of the author, it’s got good tips in it.”

  This made her laugh especially hard. When I handed over her change, she said, “Christie Brinkley is my favorite model.”