“There’s no accounting for taste, I guess.”
I think that came out so quickly because I was feeling bitter at the moment, and wished Rick were around to say something awful. She laughed again, and took her book and left.
When I turned around, my co-workers were staring at me, and I said, “What?” and then it dawned on me what I’d just done. Insult a supermodel to her face and have it amuse her, because neither of us had the slightest clue what the other was actually saying. This felt like insight. The world was stupid and I was cannon fodder.
* * *
—
I had some kind of miserable burrito for lunch. When I came back to the store, I went to the counter to help out two guys who’d been waiting there a while. One was Timothy Hutton. The other was Sean Penn.
Hutton looked at me for a second, during which I at least was noticing the intensity of someone else’s eye color, then he asked if we had a book he said no one else had heard of, Sideshow by—
“William Shawcross,” I said, way too quickly.
The intercom at my counter was already buzzing. I looked up to the mezzanine, where Mike was jammed between his desk and the railing. He was waving at me. He had his phone in his hand, and he pointed at the receiver. I ignored him.
I led the customers to the history section. Penn asked if we had anything by Bukowski. I pointed toward fiction. They both thanked me. I left them there.
When I got back to the counter, Barbara handed me the phone. Mike was on the other end. It came out like this, “WhatdidTimothyHuttonandSeanPennwant?”
“They were looking for Sideshow by—”
“WE HAVE THAT. Did you show it to them? Do you think they’re going to buy anything?”
A moment later, they were back at the register with Sideshow and Bukowski’s Post Office, one I’d actually read. I thought about saying something to that effect, but that felt like the desperation of fictive kinship, so I just rang it up. Penn still didn’t make eye contact, but Hutton gave me another brief glance that I told myself meant that, yes, he’d noticed he and I had the same color eyes.
Then they were gone, and Mike was bouncing up and down beside the counter, asking me to recount what had happened, which was more or less that they’d asked for some books, we had them, and then they bought them, using money. In other words, we had provided the service that the bookstore was designed for. His excitement about this was boundless.
I felt embarrassed for trying to, by the compelling force of my will, force my having roughly the same color eyes as Timothy Hutton into meaning that he and I were, by inference, basically the same person.
I had an ego on me and I was looking to take up space somehow. I wanted to have an aura of accomplishment and wonder. The problem was that I hadn’t done anything yet.
* * *
—
That night, as I was walking to the bus through the crowds, I saw Penn and Hutton sitting on the curb, at least one of them smoking. A girl was walking past, and Hutton said, “Hey, Betty! Betty!” and he was ignored, so he tried again. “Norma! Norma!”
The pedicab driver I liked eased up to the intersection. Penn waved at her. “Betty! Hey, Betty! Norma! NORMA?” She ignored him, and when the light changed, she pedaled away.
He looked after her, sighing. “Whatever.”
No one else was looking but me, as they’d made themselves invisible by behaving like dicks. Strange games the young gods played on a Saturday in Westwood. I was curious what it meant when gravity warped around you so much that it was fun to think of new ways for girls to shoot you down.
Pretending to be losers was a weird cutting-edge art form. It was almost punk, almost Taoist, in its stripping away of their egos. They seemed so comfortable in being themselves that they could be entirely different people.
Neither of those guys would sweat Jeremy. I decided I didn’t care about him either. Watch me not care. Watch me shine while not caring.
HEALTH & EXERCISE
A FEW DAYS LATER, Melanie invited me to the beach. We had brunch at the Yellow House, a café walking distance from the part of Santa Monica Bay she liked best, north of the lifeguard tower, where the crowds thinned out. It was relaxing up there, she said, which was good. I wasn’t calm. I kept imagining Mel relaxing into domesticity with her actual boyfriend.
But once Jeremy had unpacked, he told Mel that he was in love with another woman. I was still young enough that this amazed me. The woman he loved was married, and Mel said this was typical of Jeremy, chasing the thing he couldn’t have. He slept in the same bed as Mel, then went to Karen’s to fuck her.
I wanted to ask something, but didn’t know how to without sounding weak. Mel volunteered it: she wasn’t fucking Jeremy. He was involved with someone else, so she wouldn’t touch him.
“Why is he sleeping there if—”
“He said to tell you that you’re intruding on him so he’s intruding on you.”
“Me?” I said.
“Yep.”
“But it’s your—”
“Yep.” She added that ever since I said I would fight Jeremy, Jeremy had been talking about it.
“Wait, you told him that I said—”
“He’s fantasizing that he’d come into the store, you’d provoke him, and he’d kill you.”
“He’s fantasizing that?”
“He keeps telling me about it,” Mel said, shaking her head. The biggest problem for her was how this was challenging her own autonomy. He was finding ways to siphon off whatever power she had over her own life. I commiserated with her about that, even if I maybe should have been more worried that a guy who was stronger and meaner than I was wanted to kill me.
She said she was thinking about a boxer she’d seen interviewed before a fight, and the announcer had asked, “How will you win?” The boxer said, “I will,” glaring at the world as if that was an answer. How do you deal with your boyfriend loving another woman? “I will,” she said.
She thought she should step back, she said. Just step back from everything. She was going to retreat a bit, and she hoped I could be patient about that.
“I’ll be flexible,” I said. “Or malleable.”
She laughed, but maybe she shouldn’t have. I was looking at her, hard, for clues. Was she manipulating me? I wondered if her taking a rain check to spend time alone would really be that. Maybe she was sleeping with Jeremy, maybe she was pushing me back just to feel the power of it? What if her autonomy was based on kneecapping my autonomy? I said some of this aloud, swallowing the rest, in that involuted way I do when I’m not confident.
There were not many moments where it was obvious that one of us was a whole third of a life younger than the other, but this was one of them. Mel considered me before continuing. She said, with kindness, “You’ll feel stronger when you resolve your mom in your head.”
I had no idea what she meant. I certainly didn’t realize that with that comment, Mel knew me in a certain way, meaning young, meaning not ready, meaning there was a limit to me. I didn’t quite hear that. I heard an invitation to be strong.
I tried to emulate that stance. I said, “If I don’t see you, that’ll be a drag. But that’s lust. Tomorrow it won’t matter.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Says the cannon fodder.”
“Yeah, well, at least I’m not poor.”
The part of my brain that knows how to hurt the people I love moves faster than the part that knows whether I should. Ask anyone who loves me, especially those who don’t anymore.
Mel kept her eyes on her coffee, but her face was reddish, and the smile she had went fixed. She stirred her spoon around and the table was silent because I didn’t know how to both apologize and sound strong.
“We should go to the beach,” she said.
It could have incinerated us. Does a relationship get anneale
d in the weeks after the first waves of heat? Every moment is a choice about whether to stick together or to leave someone at the curb. Mel was walking with me out of the restaurant, onto the sidewalk, not looking my way, and we walked together toward the Pacific Coast Highway, into the shock of wind coming from the broad slope of the beach.
We stopped at the corner. A line of scooters was turning up the highway, one, two, three, ten, twenty mods on Vespas and Lambrettas, riders bundled up in parkas, ridiculous and fashionable in August. When it was safe to go, Mel hesitated, and I took her hand, which seemed like too much, so I went to her belt loop instead.
I’d belittled her and I wasn’t apologizing. Accidentally, I was being like Jeremy. Which would be a horror to me, but for this: after a second, Melanie took my belt loop also, as if realizing it solved a problem. As if I were Jeremy, then, we walked, fingers-in-belt-loops, to the beach.
It was one of those wind-blasted days where it’s more fun to have gone to the beach than to be there, but neither of us wanted to leave quickly. A little girl asked me for help with her kite, and as I unwound the string and the kite blew into the sky, she introduced herself (“My name is Jessie Frances Olvine. Pleased to meet you.”) and told me a complicated story about having gone to see E.T. and not crying, because she was actually very brave. “Then E.T. died and I cried and we had to leave. The end.”
I don’t remember Mel interacting with the girl. In my mind, she was standing to the side, in her sunglasses, gazing through her. When a woman I liked fussed over a child, I always felt disappointed, as if it meant she was living an unexamined life. Mel was so much an artist—she had to be too evolved to want to be a mother, right? I had never thought about motherhood, except having a mild suspicion that it was never any woman’s actual choice. Of course, any suggestion that I hadn’t exactly thought this through would have startled me.
And as my talk with Jessie Frances continued, and my fumbling with the kite made it take not one minute but maybe three, Mel was looking instead at the ocean, where shifting light on the waves made the whole day start to feel like a benevolent hallucination. She seemed so strong to me, as if her appearing to be unaffected meant she really was unaffected.
“Goodbye,” I told Jessie.
“No.”
“We’ll be back.”
“When?”
Mel and I started to walk away with stiff gusts against our backs. She said, “You’re good with kids.”
Her Volkswagen was parked on a residential street, against a curb that jutted out of a hillside so I had to struggle into the passenger seat. Mel had been oddly quiet the last few minutes, and I was thinking about how I wanted to reassure her. I wanted to say the thing that would make her feel good, and that would also perhaps lead to getting to keep her. But something had started to shut down in her, throwing up asymmetrical corners around which I didn’t know how to see. I was obviously in love with her and I knew in this moment that the most loving thing I could do was to say otherwise. I am so in love I will not be in love.
She was behind the wheel of the car now. She hadn’t started it.
“You know,” I said, “I don’t love you, but—”
“I can’t love you. I don’t have time.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about. She had something to add.
She said, “I don’t have time,” again, but that’s not what she meant. It seemed important that I stay quiet. “God-fucking-damn-it,” she said. “Glen, I have cancer.”
She looked resolutely away from me. It was like she’d failed to make a clean getaway. With that one word she’d had to reveal that everything else I knew hadn’t been the whole story. She had cervical cancer, rare for a twenty-six-year-old woman. The prognosis was mixed, but mostly not good. There wasn’t a great treatment, but there were some new hopes. The student health insurance was excellent. The thing was, the cancer had to do with sex, but they weren’t sure why. Recently doctors had put it together that nuns and lesbians didn’t get much cervical cancer. So she was thinking of how when she’d been sixteen, seventeen, maybe she’d slept around too much? She didn’t think so, but it was like nature was telling her otherwise. She was going to have experimental surgery in a week or two. It involved freezing the cells around her cervix. But even if it succeeded, it might leave her unable to have children. “I have cancer. I have four dollars to my name and I have cancer.” She announced this calmly, and then she cried for no more than fifteen seconds. Then the crying stopped.
She put the car into gear, and then drove me to my house.
* * *
—
I invited her in. There wasn’t talk of the surgery, as she’d said all she wanted to. It was going to happen soon. She wasn’t interested in telling me when.
She came upstairs with me. I’m not sure she’d been in my room before. The carpet we lay down on was all synthetic nylon and the pillows I grabbed for us were polyester blends that smelled of the Tide that Ann used to wash them. The hollow-core door of the room was closed and outside my brothers were yelling at each other and beating plastic toys with little brightly colored hammers. My life wasn’t curated and it wasn’t really under my control. And yet Mel needed something badly enough to be here, now. She was enjoying, as hard as she could, how I really was nineteen years old.
She rolled on top of me. She whispered, “I’ve decided you shouldn’t go out with someone whose life is so complicated. You need a girl your age who you can call and she’ll say, ‘Sure, Glen, come on over.’ ” She made it sound more like the sum of difficult circumstances than her own desires. But she said it in the local, embarrassing air, in the surroundings that spoke of my temporary storage here as a stepson.
She was saying words, but it was hard to think about them, because I was ready to burst. She was kind. I remember shamefully little else, except that even then I understood this was her way of apologizing to me one last time for not loving me.
* * *
—
When she drove off I knew it was over between us. I kept walking down the sidewalk. It was warm against my feet. I wasn’t wearing shoes. This was dangerous and stupid, I suppose, but I wasn’t interested in putting on shoes and thus feeling less under my feet.
I felt calm. This was confusing because I had lost Mel. Worse, she had cancer. It didn’t sound like it would be fatal, but there could be permanent damage. And the word “cancer” led to thinking of how none of us can avoid our unknowable end. All of us might die, I thought. No, all of us will die. Instead of this being depressing, the anticipation of death siphoned out, soggy air wheezing from a hapless balloon. We aren’t dead now. Worry was about the future, and if you skated a little further, worry was about death. If you were really experiencing a moment, there was no future to consume you.
I said aloud, “But I want—”
Then, “No, not really. I don’t want more.”
I wanted Mel to be okay, but that was more of a prayer. I didn’t want more for myself. Jeremy flashed through my mind and so did a solution: If he hated me, I would be his best friend. If he wanted to fight, I would hand him a bouquet of flowers, and if I had more time to prepare, I’d get him a little tiara and sash that said “Winner” on it.
It was a good walk in the last moments of the lingering sun. Some days are like that in Los Angeles, when there’s only the mildest breeze, and the warmth is friendly, the occasional people walking past me nodding in silent agreement: We, too, have noticed the city is pretty benign right now.
I finished the walk around the block. I was happy. I’d been happy for a full fifteen minutes, the longest time in my life. I wasn’t sure if this was a perversion of all my studies, but I suspected I’d landed on exactly their point, that considering the nature of suffering could lead to a contented emptiness. It turned out I could carry this with me if I wanted. I didn’t have to pep talk myself—this is what being here
now felt like, without effort, the wayless way that can be traveled, everything made sense.
The concept of semesters struck me now as small. There were larger stories in the world that I wanted to follow out. When I came back to the house, I told my dad I accepted his offer. I wouldn’t go back to Wesleyan—I would stay here and work at Hunter’s through the fall. Berkeley in January.
TRAVEL GUIDES
MELANIE WAS SCHEDULED for surgery at UCLA on a Friday. Her friend Mary would drive her back home when she was released from the hospital. Mel said Mary was only coming because they forced her to sign something that said a friend would pick her up, but she was sure she could drive herself afterward. Thanks for asking.
“I’ll come by anyway.”
“Why?”
“Hold your hand.”
“Only if you want to.”
I asked if she was scared. She said no. The next day she told me she put on a Pep Boys T-shirt I’d bought for her and she’d burst into tears, and she couldn’t figure out why.
I didn’t want to crowd her. The last thing to do is chip away at a woman’s autonomy. But Mary told me Melanie was terrified, and didn’t want to seem needy. Asking for something was more terrifying than the surgery itself. Mary said I should come to the hospital.
I asked Mel when she would be going in, and true to form, she told me a time in the afternoon, hoping she’d be on her way home when I arrived. I found her just as she was leaving the recovery room.
For her, it was one struggle after another, beginning with getting her perfectly faded jeans on over the layers and layers of surgical bandages. The doctors wanted her to ride in a wheelchair, which she got out of when the orderly turned his back. Then there was a trip to the pharmacy for some kind of vaginal cream, the necessity of which made her roll her eyes, and then Mary drove her home, me in the back, as Mel realized there was no possible way she could make her body work well enough to do it herself.
I Will Be Complete Page 29