There was a dusky man sitting next to me who laughed with an approximation of the élan my mother had courted when she was younger. I felt like I was betraying the evening—was I being judgmental or was I just noticing things? His hair was just a little too thin, his collar too yellow, for his life to actually be this easy.
When my mother took her utensils to the lobster, he said, “No, no, you must use your hands. It is like…making love,” as if he were naughty.
“When I make love, I always use a knife and fork,” I said, in that way I have always said things to men whose innuendo is supposed to be sophisticated.
“He’s being a sullen teen,” my mother said, and everyone laughed, and I felt like I’d never left the dinner table at Peter Charming’s house. Then she reminded me I was turning twenty soon. Which horrified me from exactly the opposite direction. I had wasted a year.
* * *
—
My mother had set up her company here, too. Her slogan was still “When You Wish One Call Would Do It All.” Once again, she’d leased a copier, some computers, printers, and this time opened a storefront several long blocks from where any other offices were.
We stood in her window, looking outward. She was one of the few storefront businesses in the El Cortez hotel, a massive, old, boarded-up former resort that had been in a difficult escrow for many months. The corporation that owned it had gone bankrupt. The city now owned it for tax purposes, but didn’t actually know there were any tenants still there, so it was a blessing to my mother that no one had cashed her rent checks for several months.
There was a crack in her window, because a local vandal stood on rooftops and used a baseball bat to drive golf balls into abandoned buildings. She had no insurance, as premiums were ridiculous, and she had once had to hide under her desk when she saw a man urinating in the bushes outside her office door. She explained that the location wasn’t as bad as it seemed, as it was at the freeway exit. Thousands of cars a day passed her office. Sometimes, since she had many quiet hours to pass, she counted how many cars were going by. If only every tenth person needed a résumé and if only one in ten of those people actually came in, she’d have a thriving business in no time. The only drawback was that after dark there were bums and she had to lock the doors quickly and run to her apartment with the points of her keys poking between her fingers in case she met a robber.
She had learned her neighbor made silk flowers, and so she’d put a sign she’d made using her machines in her window: Enter Our Contest to Win a Silk Flower by Lee.
My mother was looking at me, anticipating a reaction. If I thought the sign was good, I would be agreeing with her that her life was going rather well. If I thought it was bad, I would be condemning her. I swallowed my response. I was reacting exactly as I had almost a year ago, spring break, the awful dinner with Jen. I had learned nothing. But I had lost one thing: my reaction now was different from tranquility or acceptance. There was nothing Zen or Tao or Buddhist in me. That philosophy, such as it was, had been stomped flat sometime before.
* * *
* * *
—
I was in bed with the most beautiful woman from my drama class. This sounds better than it was. I could tell she was stone-cold awake. Her name was Jess. She was tall and Nordic, with unblinking green eyes and intimidatingly ripe red lips. She’d been a model until something had snapped. It was impossible to look at her and think anything had ever snapped; her expression was exquisitely deadpan. This was part of what we talked about. People were unsettled when they looked at her. She said I had something similar in my gaze, and the difference between us was that this was new for me. People had once seen tranquility in my eyes.
“Are you awake?” she asked. She continued, “What do you think that redheaded girl in class is like?”
Jess was unhappy and wanted to change. She wasn’t sure of further details. She strongly suspected she wanted to kiss a woman. Also she was thinking of moving to Japan, where she could teach English or even model again. Her asking about the redheaded girl made me irritated, because it wasn’t the first time she’d mentioned her. I said the girl wasn’t going to solve any of Jess’s problems, and what were her problems, anyway? She wouldn’t tell me anything.
The darkness was a net of little colorful flashes, same as I’d seen in the middle of the night ever since I was a kid. “I thought nothing bothered you,” she finally said.
“I’m not bothered.”
“Don’t you always make things okay?”
“Yeah, I’m okay now,” I said, very loudly. “You?”
Jess told me a story. It began with how many different guys she was dating, which I already knew, as I’d hidden in her bedroom once when a larger guy had shown up unexpectedly. She’d never explained that and I, so cool, had never asked.
I wanted to tell her she needn’t explain anything now, only I was aware as her story began to sound like a confession that this was an exit for her. She’d made a decision. Her relief was obvious. I was being shown the door. In the way of a Victorian thriller, she was explaining all mysteries to me.
She hated herself. When she was hungry, she imagined the woman who hired lingerie models at Nordstrom’s watching her, and that kept her from eating. Did I ever wonder what happened to those perfect, complex desserts she kept buying and showing to me? She ate them in the middle of the night and vomited them back up. She’d been doing this so long the enamel on her teeth was dying. She was damaged. Sometimes she sat on her bed and screamed.
She was fanning before me a catalogue of her inadequacies. I was supposed to hear it as a list of reasons I was lucky to be getting out. I heard it as ticking off the things I was not good enough to fix.
She’d gone slam-dancing recently and that was the first time she’d been able to let her anger out. She loved slam-dancing. Maybe she wanted more punk rock in her life.
It was quiet. We’d dated for a month. We were already a couple that suffered uncomfortable silences. She was someone who had actually slam-danced. She had done it the way you should, as a tunnel into bottomless hostility. She’d touched something in herself I hadn’t touched in either one of us.
When it was obvious I should talk again, I said, “I’m bad at getting angry. I always pick the wrong time to do it.”
“It’s okay be angry with me,” she said.
“I don’t know how to be angry. I wish someone would do something so I could have justifiable anger. I don’t know what that’s like.”
“Don’t you?”
“What?”
“What about the person who gave birth to you?”
Jess was smarter about me than I was about her.
I was getting dressed. Even though the time of night was ridiculous, I was going home. As she said goodbye at the door, Jess added, “At least you’ll get a story out of this.”
“I don’t know about that. I’m not sure I’m a writer anymore.”
“The education of Glen Gold,” she said. I looked at her beautiful, impassive, chalk-white, unreadable face. Another dead silence. She extended her hand, to shake. “Thanks for coming. And thanks for leaving.”
“Yeah.”
“Good night.”
“I hope you get…” I had no idea how to finish that.
“Me too.” She closed the door.
ASTROLOGY
I VISITED LOS ANGELES one weekend, staying at my dad and Ann’s house the first night. The atmosphere had changed, even though I hadn’t been gone that long. They’d met with the architect who’d designed the Bel Air house, in hopes of having him build them a house of their own. But it had fallen through, too, so they were going to stay here.
I was at the dinner table with them when my father said, “There’s been a development.”
Ann said she was pregnant.
I hadn’t been expecting that. “Were you
guys planning this?” I asked.
“I was lied to,” my father said, growling but not with actual anger. I unfairly remember him saying it while burying his face in a turkey leg.
Ann shrugged, with a faint upturn to her mouth. I could tell having another kid was going to be an adventure for her. It occurred to me I didn’t know anyone else who was so emotionally compensated by having a child. My attitude about that had been condescending, as if wanting to be a mom meant you had to be a little bit blind. But here was contentment and worry and struggle that would be difficult and have joys to it. This was what the word “maternal” looked like. Now, I’d add that I was jealous. It was a relationship I would not be able to participate in.
I looked at my dad and I saw that his reaction was almost the same as Ann’s: a kind of lusty delight in the whole making-a-family thing. “Here I am,” he was saying, “redoubling, recommitting, and with humor and ease.”
It wouldn’t be that simple.
He had already started buying clocks and watches, and it was going to become more of an obsession. By the time my brother Andrew was born, my father would have one of the finest collections of British horological literature in the world, and a safety deposit box full of American pocket watches, many of them the finest known examples. When I visited him over the next couple of years, he told me amazing and hilarious stories about the jewelers, the designers, the auction houses, the means of acquisition. He knew some forgers and con men and thugs who loved watches. But collecting, of course, is a sign of sadness. My father knew this as well as he knew the serial numbers of the watches in their velvet casings. If the pile is high enough, though, you can’t see how the rest of your world is going. Which is partially the point.
How this played out for him was at least poetic. They decided to stay in this house, but to make it a showpiece, remodeling it brilliantly and extensively. My father was pleased with that compromise, but alas he never spent a night in the new rebuild. Any contractor could tell you a marriage is most vulnerable during renovations, and this one—the marriage—had more structural problems than most.
When the place was finished, my father walked me through and pointed out all the architectural gestures and technological upgrades with melancholy. “Don’t you wish you lived here? Me too.” He made that joke (he delivered the words as if they were a joke) several times to me. He was living in a rental in Santa Monica not far from Shakey’s Pizza. No showpiece for him. He had to sell his best clock to pay for his divorce lawyer.
There is likely a Buddhist or Taoist message there about the insubstantial ways that we buttress our lives against fear and impermanence. But that outcome was still a few years away as we sat in the as-yet-untransformed kitchen.
When my father was looking back across the table, news of an imminent kid still fresh to me, I sensed assessment in his eyes. Here was a son who was not yet crushed by this stuff. I was crushed by something else, but not that. I’d agreed to switch schools, which should have felt like a win for him, and yet I seemed to have separated myself from his worldview. He asked if I was staying the next night. I could tell he hoped the answer was “Yes.” I told him, “Probably not.”
* * *
—
That day Melanie and I went to the Yellow House for brunch. We didn’t go to the beach; it might have been warm, but it was February and people just didn’t do that in Los Angeles. She was more tense than I’d seen her. I was thinking about cats, and how they were wild. You couldn’t influence them. That made me light up when I was a kid, because the moment Leo collapsed near me, it meant I was accepted. That wasn’t happening now. I didn’t even brush elbows with Mel. She was in her own miserable place.
Thanksgiving had caved in on her. “We had dinner with all our friends and it was full of laughter and it was warm and I had a premonition—I knew after everyone left, Jeremy was going to ask me to move in with him. So when it was late, he sat down with me and he looked me right in the eye and he said, ‘Mel, I’ve got the clap.’ ”
It was over between them, over in a way it couldn’t be undone. She’d learned her lesson, she said.
We ended up at her lovely homestead, a nestlike retreat in a canyon that she was house sitting in. I thought that if I was good enough, I might stay over. This wasn’t an insane possibility. Mel knew why I was there. We sat down on a couch together, I took her hand, and she rested her head on my chest, and touched my biceps with a confusing pressure. I remembered how she had once touched me in her car, at the end of a very good night a long time ago, a combination of “please stay” and “please go,” and how we had ended up kissing. I was trying to figure out what was different now.
Abruptly, she recalled she wanted to give me Lilly on Dolphins, and she went to the bookshelf so quickly I could still feel the touch of her fingers on me.
Right to the end, Mel tried to teach me things. We had wine. After a glass she mentioned how Jeremy had once told her I would only like her until she started repeating her stories. I knew he was a villain for not wanting to hear her stories, and she told me, again, how her father had driven into the desert and disappeared. He had some kind of dementia, but since he was a physician, his colleagues had covered it up. When it became apparent he wasn’t coming back, Mel’s family realized he’d emptied the bank accounts and there was nothing to support them.
There are those Ancient Mariner–type stories you tell because something in their residue both forms and confuses you. Mel’s were like that. But she was also compelled to tell them because she wanted me to hear something: she’d left home at sixteen and become a waitress because sometimes you have to just declare that you’re enough, your family isn’t a part of you anymore. She had choices. I had choices, she explained.
I needed to do some accounting, she suggested, of how my family life wasn’t just a set of stories, but how I’d been affected.
“I haven’t,” I said. Other people let themselves be affected. I was a roving eye, untethered and, I thought, because I saw no connection, I can be whatever you want me to be.
Mel was patient. She said her surgery had been a success. It was possible she could have children, just maybe. She talked about this for an unexpected length of time, until it dawned on me that having children was important to her. To me it had been like hearing that maybe in the future she could go to the moon or learn to play the guitar. I had no idea that someone I knew would actually want children. Ann had had a child, and then she realized she liked it, and she wanted more. But to embrace that destiny? Why would you want that? Why would that be important to someone like Melanie, who had so clearly stated her desire for autonomy?
I have told my story of that year, but if the spotlight went her way, you might say that when 1983 began, Mel hadn’t known what her future would be, and all the decisions she’d made until then were questionable. We live our lives in themes and counter-themes and in the latter she’d been exploring lust, in the same way a body during wartime might dance with nihilism or drink absinthe. And now, the war was over, Saturn had returned, cancer and Jeremy were gone, and her body was hers again, only this time with the suggestion that it was okay to feel safe, a little bit safe, finally, to explore what she actually wanted beyond lust, beyond me, beyond Jeremy: attachment to someone who deserved it. She was becoming comfortable with her desires.
After the second glass of wine, she told me about the work of Mike Kelley, a conceptual artist she knew. I wrote the name down, ready to get a monograph or to look for a gallery opening. Her tone brightened by the moment. She knew him well. He was a genius. He was handsome, but he was also a genius. Once, the two of them were drinking wine together on the floor of his studio, and he genuinely leapt across the room, on top of her, and she said to me, laughing, “I mean, what was that? Was that foreplay?”
She laughed. I laughed. I was trying to make the story, which was about Melanie telling me she was sleeping with someone
she liked, into Mel being open to all kinds of sex including with me, here, now. In fact she was telling me to go home.
Anyone would know that. I begged to stay. Mel let me. We slept nude in the same bed. I was awake, touching her back and telling myself how it was making her excited. But it wasn’t.
* * *
—
I want to tell you more about Melville, Pop. 1: she ended up doing well. She married, and became pregnant, and spent nine months nervous. She had a girl, healthy and a bit of a miracle. She then tempted fate by trying to have a second kid. But fate never pays you back in the ways you expect: two weeks before she was about to deliver, her husband left her for the drummer of an all-girl rock band. Melanie told me she was having trouble driving, that she kept eyeing the guardrails and imagining flooring it, taking the Volvo and her pregnant body in it at full speed over the embankment.
But she didn’t. She didn’t romance the idea of her own doom. She had her second child, a boy, and then, a couple of years after that, as a single woman with two young kids, found a good man. They married, happily. What are the odds? And then, at the impossible age of forty-three, she had a third child.
Life, it turns out, is most often a series of mundane, unlikely events. Melanie is now the nonexotic age of sixty-one. She doesn’t seek out drama. She’s a librarian. She sews. When she shares photographs online, I see the huge distance she has traveled from one futon, one candle—there are dogs and cats, and mess, and a kid in college, a kid in the Marines, and her husband looks like a terrific catch. She goes to church and drinks red wine and rages about living in Arizona as someone who is not a dough head. When she texts me photos, she hopes I’ll ignore the woman to the side of the kids, the woman she says has a double chin. I don’t see a double chin.
But I find it ironic that her anatomy lesson has changed over the years. Though she never points it out, I’d say the adductors, those muscles which bring her limbs inward and toward this life, are flexing themselves. I laughed when I realized her email address was “Melvillepop5.”
I Will Be Complete Page 33