I told myself again the story of waiting at the bus stop and this time I got confused about the moment where I turned them down. I imagined telling Owen this and how he would say, “Wait—you didn’t get into the car?” and I would say, “Of course not, because—” and it started to fall apart.
I didn’t want to get into the car because I thought they would murder me? I knew they weren’t going to murder me. They were going to take me to a hotel room, smoke weed, do blow, and fuck the living daylights out of me. And then they were going to give me money. I’d turned them down because I was scared. I could not define “of what” except fear of disappointing women who wanted me. It was that, the ignorance about myself, that made me catch a downward drifting breeze.
I’d said, “No” in the same spirit I’d refused to tell the joke at Shakey’s Pizza a year before. I hadn’t changed a bit—I was exactly the same person. I was auténtica. This was horrible. It sat with me like the onset of the flu.
When I got home, I only wrote, of all things: I want to save you from making a bad decision. I want to save you.
I meant saving Melanie from Jeremy. That was the most important part of the day to me, apparently. What an old feeling. Those two sentences together are as disappointing as anything I’ve written.
TEST PREP
ANOTHER BUS RIDE, another day, this time on the way to work. The bus driver startled when he saw me. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” he said as I paid, “but you have an identical twin. Just got off the bus, seriously, man.”
I was a little abrupt with him, but that was because he was confirming something I was starting to feel, that whatever arrogance I’d managed to build up about myself was unfounded. There were copies of me everywhere.
The band X was signing copies of their new album More Fun in the New World at Tower Records. The clerks at our store had an arrangement with Tower—their people would get things signed for us so we didn’t have to stand in line.
The line to meet X wound around the block. I realized the woman from Tower taking my details was both pretty and talking too much to me. I let her talk, which she did without really making eye contact. She said it was great having X here now, instead of trying to meet them in a couple of years, when they’d probably be playing stadiums. She said her name was Cindy, and when she let me into the head of the line, I meant to thank her, but got distracted, and then wondered if not thanking her was actually a good strategy.
I had two copies of the album, and I asked John Doe to draw the Flipper fish—a punk rock parody of the Christian loaves-and-fishes symbol—on Owen’s copy, which Doe savaged nicely with a Sharpie.
Cindy rang me up. She had the suntanned skin and dark, curly hair of a Tuscan olive-harvesting farm girl. If she didn’t work in a record store I could imagine her with a handkerchief in her hair, threshing a feudal lord’s wheat fields with a flail. I noticed she gave me her employee discount. Could I be mean, as mean as possible? I told Cindy she was coming to the movies with me Saturday night. She said okay.
Saturday was uncomfortable. Early on, I started talking about the Tao, and how I wanted to be fully self-aware. I sneered at the dough heads who didn’t ask questions but just wondered what was for dinner. Had Cindy seen Koyaanisqatsi? I started to explain it, and she stared at me as if through a thickening fog. And when I was done, she laughed. She paused and then laughed again.
She wanted to be an interior decorator. She said her sister had made her wear the jeans she had on because they made her ass look better than it actually was. She said her sister didn’t like her glasses, and I agreed—her glasses were terrible. So I took them off. Bare-faced, she looked both lovely and a little confused. She was the prettiest girl I’d taken on a date and yet it was a technical kind of beauty, as if a stadium would vote her “most beautiful” but no one would fall in love with her. Thinking this made me hate myself, but here I was.
On the way to the theater, we passed a guy in a leather coat leaning against a wall, sneering at passersby. When he saw me, he nodded.
“Hey, Timothy,” I said. He jutted his chin out, and I thought I saw a positive appraisal of Cindy in that motion.
Cindy whispered, “How do you know Timothy Hutton?” but I refused to answer, because I had already turned into that kind of person with her.
* * *
—
She took me to her apartment. It was one of those aggressively ugly 1960s buildings seemingly thrown up as an act of contempt for the future tenants. Cindy’s bookshelves were rows of romance novels. She saw me seeing them and quickly said, “I hate gothic novels. Life isn’t like that. They make you believe some handsome, arrogant guy will come up and shit on you, and he’ll still fall in love with you.”
Her problem wasn’t that you were supposed to fall in love with an asshole—that part she understood—but that he would ever respond. As she talked, I wanted to ask, “Don’t you understand you have a choice in this?” but she was already telling me about her last boyfriend, a screenwriter, who had taken her virginity and who hadn’t called her back, even when she left him a ton of messages. The whole time, he was pining after another girl, but if he called Cindy again, I should understand she would have to see where things were between them.
She showed me her sketches of rooms she had designed. Wallpaper, furniture, carpets, chandeliers, and tiny people with cocktail glasses on couches she’d drawn with crayon. I read her handwritten notes indicating what rare fabrics she’d never seen in person that she wanted for the drapes. Were they good? I wasn’t really sure what to say. My silence made her nervous. Maybe she was thinking I would say something terrible. But I wouldn’t do that. I wanted Cindy to have an artistic process. I asked her questions about what her work meant. This was a mistake, as it made her feel vulnerable, and worse than that, me asking about subtext made me seem not only like a man, but for the first time cruel.
I started to say how making art separated us from the dough heads of life, and she asked what a dough head was again. I was explaining again, but I wasn’t feeling strong about it, because as I talked I was looking at her drying rack. She had a Ziggy mug. Oh, I thought. No, there were two Ziggy mugs, so the first one wasn’t an accident. Cindy is a dough head. I’m talking to a dough head. Oh.
I took her into her bedroom. There was a line of stuffed animals on her bed. I took Cindy’s clothing off of her, and placed her on her bed and I stared at her. She was the most stunning woman I’d ever seen naked. I made her turn over—her sister had not been generous, as her ass, bare, was flawless. So was the rest of her. Her body was a puzzle, in that every anatomical detail was perfect, and yet she didn’t have a spark of sexuality.
She was twenty. She was years away from the possibility of transforming from being an object to knowing her own desires. It might not even happen. She might never ask questions. I was thinking, You are a blank slate and you are letting me do this because I’m being an asshole and because it’s all that you know. You don’t even know what your own pleasures are yet.
I thought that if I made her feel something, it might mean I was slightly less terrible as a human being. My fingers teased her skin in all the places that seemed like they might wake her up. None of this had an effect.
“Show me how you do it,” I said. She didn’t want to, but I placed her hand between her legs, and because I’d asked her to, she started to masturbate, looking at the wall. After I took her hand away, I imitated what she’d done. I tried to clear my mind and to imagine her breathing changing, her skin bracing with goose bumps, her hips beginning to rock. But none of that happened. Her eyes were closed, less in abandon than simply being clenched. It was like picking up a phone receiver and hearing no dial tone.
I thought: Maybe this is what life is. Maybe Melanie was an aberration, or maybe she and I had never connected the way I thought we had. Instead, I was part of this world, and in uncomfortable, depressing apar
tments from here to Moscow, men who weren’t as talented as they thought were fumbling with women they didn’t even like. And women were putting up with them in hopes that they would fall in love. Maybe this was where I was supposed to be. There was a downward curve in my life, and it had not started here, but I was now aware of it.
* * *
—
Melanie invited me to a dance performance. I’d never seen her dance. It was a brief piece in a longer program. Set to minimalist strings that played every note for what felt like twelve measures, each chord change seemed as dramatic as a fire curtain dropping. I recall the dance consisting of a woman standing in turn-of-the-century undergarments, caught in the middle of fastening a restrictive corset. Melanie, dressed more like an apparition in white robes, approached slowly from across the floor and over the course of five minutes extended her hand toward the other woman’s soft jawline. They reacted to seeing each other, and as the tips of Melanie’s fingers reached the other woman’s face, the lights went down and the music stopped. We applauded.
Afterward, I congratulated Mel. There was no way I understood what I’d seen, but I said something about the Sistine Chapel, the reach between God and Adam. Something about Muybridge. I was talking too much because Cindy was standing next to me, and Mel’s eyes, still bright from performing, flicked Cindy’s way. Cindy began to talk, and Mel nodded a lot. Then Cindy had to go use the bathroom, and Mel looked at me.
“She’s pretty,” Mel said. “I bet she’s fun.”
“She’s an interior decorator.”
“Oh.”
“She sketches rooms, it’s an art form.”
“Sure.”
* * *
—
My time in town was winding down. I reminded my father he owed me twenty-five hundred dollars. I needed housing in Berkeley. I needed a used car, so I started reading Consumer Reports. Somehow, things weren’t as colorful as they’d been before. But I was still trying to pay attention.
One afternoon, Seth had a girl from his class over to play. I was leaving my room and I saw Ann standing in the hallway outside Seth’s door, which was drawn shut. She had a hamper of clothes against her arm, and one hand was on the doorknob.
There was an intercom in the hallway, and it was broadcasting the conversation between Seth and his friend. Obviously, they didn’t know that. It had just gotten to the part where the girl was saying, “Is that your penis?”
Ann was hesitating. She looked at me. “Do I just go in and ruin their lives?”
I shrugged.
She thought about it a moment longer, then turned around and left, which I thought was a good idea.
Around this time it was clear that the Bel Air house, the showpiece, wasn’t going to work out. I think no matter how well my dad could envision living there, Ann could not. So he was stuck here in this place. Ann was definitely not stuck, and this intrigued me. This house suited her, and the life within did, too. She had found a calling.
Ann was a good mom. When Marc said, “Mommy?” and Ann said, “Yessee?” she did it distractedly, thumbing through coupons or washing dishes, but she was unreservedly interested. “You are a nutcase,” she would say to Seth, fondly.
My father had a nickname for him, too, taken from the Asterix comic strip. He claimed it had once featured a boxer named Ropus Dopus, and he tended to call his kids “Dopus,” which only made each of them pause to wonder what exactly he was saying. When Ann told me one day that Marc’s long periods of quiet had inspired her to call him “Harpo Marc,” I realized she was better at nicknames because she was flat-out delighted by him, in her own hard-to-read way. She caved to her children too often, they had learned to maneuver around her like bankers and the SEC, but being a mother lit Ann up on a cellular level. I could tell there was nothing she loved better than that.
She had hidden angles that way. That summer was the first one I spent with a mother who loved her kids in the way that is complex, imperfect, frustrating, and also what I’d guess “normal” means. This hit me like fresh melancholy. It was a strange thing, on my way out the door, to finally think of my brothers, Oh, you have a different mother than I do.
* * *
—
Tick tock. It was a couple of days before Thanksgiving. I would be done at Hunter’s at Christmas. Mel invited me to Chinese food for lunch. She told me she wanted get her own apartment with Jeremy. She used the words “and be with him forever.”
I nodded. Hadn’t she said she wanted autonomy? Hadn’t she railed against Jeremy before? I didn’t say those things, but instead I just listened.
She said AfterMASH hadn’t panned out that well. As she described his purpose on the set, I realized that he hadn’t actually been hired as a writer, but as a writer’s assistant, with the aspiration that they would eventually take one of his scripts. So Jeremy wasn’t as successful as I’d thought. But Mel had described him that way, because she shared his hopes.
I handed Mel the fortune cookie I’d gotten, and said I thought it was hers. It read, “New best friends and old acquaintances will affect you this week.”
Her reaction was strange—she laughed for a second, but not after that. With care she put it into her wallet and sized me up in some kind of final way, wistfully, perhaps.
* * *
—
I was with Owen sometime after midnight. We were at Ships, an all-night diner a few blocks from Hunter’s. They had toasters at every table. There were mods everywhere for some reason, and the parking lot was full of scooters. We weren’t talking about our screenplay much, except to agree we should keep working on it. That wasn’t going to happen.
As Owen and I left the restaurant, a woman looked up in mid-conversation with a friend. “Guy!” she said.
She was talking to me. Then she goggled in surprise.
She said, “Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you were someone else.”
“That’s been happening.”
“I thought you were my boyfriend.”
This made me laugh. If it was a line, it was a funny one. But it wasn’t a line. “No, really.” She pulled out her wallet and opened it. She held out the plastic sleeve of photographs. The first was, obviously, me. It looked just like me, except shirtless and playing backgammon. Guy had the same haircut, the same divots in his cheeks, the same chin, and even the same weird backwards S of a nose.
He was from France, and she thought he was back in France, so seeing me had shocked her, and she and her friends speculated about what it would mean to see Guy out of nowhere—was he more likely to be surprising her or cheating on her?
I asked if Guy rode the bus. If someone on the bus looked like me, she said, that wasn’t him. Guy drove. There had to be another lookalike out there, part of a secret army.
The conversation wrapped quickly. What more could either of us say, really?
Though I’d already lost my eidetic imagery, if I ever had it, it turns out I took a photograph of that photograph as effectively as if I’d triggered the shutter and heard its rasp. It’ll be there as long as I have a memory; I’m looking at it now. I would say I was mostly distressed that Guy had a better torso than I did. Then I tried to see all the ways I was better than he was, which wasn’t quite possible, since we looked so clearly alike.
I wanted to look at that photograph and tell Guy I was more self-aware than he was, but even now, the snapshot in my memory gazes back with surprising self-assurance: he is clueless and self-obsessed, and that rather than the broken nose is why his girlfriend mistook me for him.
* * *
—
I was leaving Mel’s orbit. Writing a love letter was the wrong way to go, but a letter from one adult, evolved, non–dough head to another struck me as the right tone to take.
It was heartfelt and thorough and sincere in a way I can no longer imagine, except for one thing: I was nineteen
and I wanted to, among other things, thank Mel for having been so good at sex. I know there were other parts of the letter, and that the mention of how well she fucked was one sentence at most. In fact, the way I didn’t lean on the sex, but just put in as an aside, as if sex were just one passing thing in a relationship rich with other charms, felt like the highest indication of my evolution. So not a humiliating letter, perhaps, at least not for me. I’d sent it to her house not knowing that on that particular day, she’d be away at work, and Jeremy would be there, opening her mail, as was his habit.
When she came home, the pages of my letter were scattered on the living room floor and Jeremy was in the bedroom, in the dark, smoking. There is more to that story—accusations, a fight, something like that—but my best Christmas present of 1983 was getting to imagine the sculpture Jeremy made, coiled up in bed, unmoving, angry, and to my mind utterly outfought by my scrawls of handwriting on a curated greeting card, the Goyo print of a woman combing her hair.
* * *
—
In my last days at Hunter’s, Christmastime, I learned how to give book recommendations the moment a customer asked for one. I sized people up. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler was for people who liked books so much they also liked books about books. Waiting for the Barbarians was for people who had a social conscience and whose checks had Santa Monica addresses. The Color Purple was almost always a gift from one woman to another, in hopes that the latter would become more sensitive. Ironweed was for people who’d read all the John Irving they wanted to and were looking to pretend they were familiar with another guy’s career by reading his current book. Suder was for people who wanted first novels before anyone else had heard of them.
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