We had a television when I was too young to understand what numbers were. It was a black-and-white television. When I turned off a cartoon, the image galloped away, like a gust of wind had taken it down to just a dot. The dot got smaller, and smaller, a dead dim gray image I could put my finger on but not really touch. Dimmer and dimmer, over a period of time unimaginably long to me, and yet I was always patient, needing to watch until it had finally, softly, left the set. That was the cartoon’s soul, and that was how it went away. That’s where Rick had gone.
I thought of the stacks of journals Rick kept, and how they vanished. His dreams of publishing the story of his life as a man had come to nothing. The three letters he wrote were the time that writing saved him, briefly. Is it ridiculous to say that when I was lying on my bed on a rainy evening in Berkeley, trying to explain to my friends that Rick was dead, that I realized the power and the limits of fiction?
I had until then written as if I had an invisible audience. Rick was writing from the depth of a man who understands that there is no reception from the world, none whatsoever. And yet, the power of fiction was stronger with him than anyone else I knew. Mike, my boss, had told himself he was running a real business. My father told himself stories about having landed where he belonged, and that lasted until his next divorce. I felt new compassion for my mother, as she was telling herself stories that were just about to fail her, again.
Fiction is a pathology. Even though it’s not enough, even though nothing else, like love, or knowing yourself, is enough either, fiction was pretty much all that I had right then. Like my father, my mother, Melanie, Rick, all of us, everyone, I did almost everything because I was afraid of death and because I wanted love. I faced Kirsten, Sophie, and Rachel with a declining feeling, an elevator going down.
I needed to tell you about the person I was before I told you about the person I became. And here I was, finally. It was so familiar, how as I stood up, I felt dim, and welcomed back by an old feeling. I recognized myself: stooped slightly, my ability to make sentences slowed down, ideas bowing at the halfway point from a sense that finishing them didn’t matter.
A voice whispered to me. The voice loved me. It was horrible, too. I am yours, it said. No one could take it from me. It was mystery, it was heavy and it was an old friend. I recognized it in the throb of my forehead, where my cast had been at Wesleyan. It was the feeling I’d had lying on my dorm room bed in Connecticut, unable to move as my mother left the room to go back home. I was already beginning to find new ways to think of the word “gray.” Depression wasn’t just one mood, but a whole spectrum that I needed to describe to myself.
I could not be swayed. I would keep writing and it would keep not mattering. I was helpless. This was a relief, in a way.
I got ready to go out. Nineteen was almost over. Twenty was on its way. I didn’t feel better. I was a mess, but I was also myself for the first time, in a way that was going to be helpful to me. My own life no longer made sense. I no longer feared that.
We danced that night, as badly as any straight white Berkeley students ever did, at a gay nightclub that was emptier than it had been a year before.
3
* * *
THE BOOK OF REVELATION
* * *
for Owen Bly
JOURNAL ENTRY, 1987
My mother called me to ask if she could borrow two dollars. I told her no.
CHRISTMAS
IF I’M A WRITER, you’d think I might know what it means that my mother is an unreliable narrator. But I really don’t. I believe every story she tells me, every version of it.
* * *
—
My mother once told me she met Daniel just before dawn on the morning she was to be evicted from her apartment across from the El Cortez in downtown San Diego. She was loading her van with her belongings, hurrying to be on the road before the seven a.m. visit from the sheriff. Trying to be discreet, she worked in the dark, and since her apartment was up a flight of stairs, she had trouble handling the heavy furniture by herself. Something awkward, a bookcase or an easy chair, slipped from her hands and crashed down to the street just as Daniel and a friend of his, a sailor, happened to be walking by.
Daniel would never pass up a person who needed help, especially a pretty woman like my mother. He and his friend decided to give her a hand. They quietly loaded the rest of her furniture, save one mattress, into the van, and in exchange for their help, my mother, who of course had no money to give them, concluded with a sinking feeling that she had run out of options. Everything in her life had been reduced to this primal transaction. There were the two men. There was the mattress. She did, as she would tell me later, what she had to.
Afterward, Daniel and the sailor argued. The sailor wanted to leave; Daniel wanted him to give a hand carrying the mattress to the van. The sailor relented, and the two of them took it away while my mother sat on the toilet and cried.
When she came out of her apartment for the last time, she taped a little note on the door for the landlord, put the key back through the mail slot, and found her way down the stairs. Daniel was waiting for her by the van, alone.
I can’t imagine what they said to each other. She told me she was embarrassed to be so desperate, and she was grateful that her circumstances didn’t faze him. The sun was rising by now, and Daniel asked her where she was going. That they both had nowhere to go at dawn seemed romantic to her. She felt like they were gypsies.
They drove the van just a block to a Denny’s, where my mother ordered tea. Daniel however told the waitress they’d both have full breakfasts, sausages and hash browns, the works. My mother worried, but Daniel just laughed and for the first time told her, Baby, with me, every day is Christmas. He pulled out a twenty. It was his last twenty, but Daniel explained that in his life, he’d been down to his last twenty a number of times, and every time, God had provided for him.
Was it then that they got their first lingering looks at each other? Daniel, my mother would later say, could walk with kings or paupers with equal ease. He looked to her very much like the actor Richard Gere, only a bit plumper and with blackened teeth. My mother, blond, fair, blue-eyed, with a lovely and faint British accent worn down by thirty years in California, still said she looked like Linda Evans. Maybe my mother and Daniel talked about what famous people they looked like. At that point, she was sure he was just a character she would later wonder what had happened to.
After breakfast, however, they went to the van in the parking lot and climbed in, together.
It was 1986. My mother was fifty-one. Daniel was twenty-seven. Daniel said he’d heard there were jobs in Las Vegas. My mother was shocked. Could people just leave one city for another like that? Daniel laughed. How else, he asked, do you expect to have an adventure?
On their way out of town, they made one stop by an old building near the Gaslamp Quarter. My mother sat in the driver’s seat, double-parked and idling, while Daniel, somewhere inside, bought a bag of crystal meth. He said it would help him stay awake while they were driving. My mother said it was okay with her, as long as he was careful. And so they drove out of the city together, my mother feeling safe and free and Daniel whistling happy songs, and I imagine both of them knew, even though they’d only been together for hours, that they would never be apart.
* * *
* * *
—
It took me twenty minutes to write the paragraphs above. It was winter 1995, nine years or so after those events had happened. I was in graduate school for creative writing. I was in my girlfriend’s apartment and in the time it took her to shower, I wrote it, and then I printed it, read it, and threw the pages into her wastebasket. I didn’t save the computer file. I closed the laptop and it was like the writing had never happened.
A few minutes later, my girlfriend spotted the pages in the garbage. She asked if she could read them. When she was finish
ed, she asked if the story was true. I said it was. She asked how I knew, and I said my mother had told it to me, among other, more pleasant versions. She asked why I’d thrown it away. I tried to explain that the writing had come with no feeling whatsoever. Normally when I write, I feel triumphant or cocky or embarrassed or twisting in the wind and anxious to try and rewrite it. With the story of my mother, it was like looking through water. And this suggested in a way I didn’t question that there was no reason to save it.
My girlfriend, still in her robe, towel turbaned around her damp hair, was looking my way with a forensic surgeon’s eye. Some women can track down, analyze, and react to color and smell more intensely than men can. So it was with Alice and emotion.
“Your mother had sex with two strange men on a mattress,” she said, looking at me. “How does that make you feel?”
I wanted to please her with my insight. I also wanted to be honest. “Nothing.”
I had a vision of myself having donned the cape of a superhero with the word NOTHING emblazoned on it, bullets bouncing off, and in the tiny space my mask would leave for my eyes, you could see them a little panicked, wide and blinking at Alice.
She looked at me sympathetically. She told me the piece was good. I should write more. The paper was a little wet from her fingers, and the ink had run indigo, and I wondered if I were to put a coffee cup down on it whether it would make interesting ring designs, old words evolving into patterns or chaos, depending on how you looked at it.
She asked, “Are you going to be in this memoir?”
“Sure.” A lie even as I said it. Normal people wrote about themselves, but I knew I had a higher calling: floating eye. State the facts and let the readers feel the emotions rather than put my thumb on the scale. To say, “My mother had terrible things happen, and I felt sad,” seemed insipid to me.
My mother told me more than once how she met Daniel. When she was feeling angry, she stalled upon approaching the most awful parts (“I had no money to pay, so…” and gazing down to the floor for me to fill in the rest). Other times, there was no eviction, no sailor friend, an entirely different daytime hello. When she loved Daniel the most, there were only good parts, the rescue, the buoyancy, the soul mate, and I, hearing this, wondered if that mattress was a figment of my imagination.
Or hers. Maybe it was something she had created in order to feel the worst possible shame.
When she first told me, I did not write it down. I whispered it to my girlfriend in the dark, holding her, and hoping that exposing the words would lead to them making sense, or dissolve them into nonsense, like when you believe a story and only realize you’re gullible when you repeat it. Neither of those things happened. It wasn’t just that I was horrified but I think my mother wanted to be horrified in telling it, and this is why I never wrote it down: by recording it I felt I would catch a familiar contagion that settles in on children like myself.
When I was seventeen, long before any of that, I was visiting relatives on my father’s side of the family, self-contained and prosperous people for whom family is a tribe—problematic, loud, annoying as hell, but also magnetic north. They lived in suburbs and their children were of the generation who made their parents happy by becoming doctors or attorneys. They didn’t know my mother that well, but she was a converted shiksa from London, which made her exotic and interesting. Given that my father had married her, she was considered de facto one of them, despite the exoticness, and the divorce.
At dinner, my aunt asked me about my mother’s then-current situation, which involved a bad boyfriend and some stolen money, but I didn’t get far in explaining it. My aunt interjected the following: my mother’s only problem was that I didn’t love her enough. I was thoughtless, she said. I had to try harder, and if I showed her enough love, the rest would work itself out.
The invocation of guilt was second nature to her. I’m sure it was supposed to be like applying a Band-Aid and a kiss on an injured knee. I folded my napkin and said, “Please take me to the train station.”
She thought I was joking. I followed through. For reasons my aunt couldn’t comprehend, I demanded to leave. I’m not sure she’d ever met a kid who would do such a thing.
On the way to the station, my aunt was trying to understand, sort of, in the sense that she asked me to explain, then batted away everything I said as nonsensical. This was not entirely her fault—I was terrible at explaining. I said, “If you told your son the sky was green, how long would he believe you for?”
“The sky isn’t green.”
“But what if you said it was? What if you knew it was green, and you had a good explanation for why everyone else said it was blue? You know they’re wrong and you need him to know it, too?”
“He’d look up and see the sky wasn’t green.”
“But what if you thought he was betraying you unless he said the sky was green, too?”
“That’s ridiculous. I would never do that.”
“Do you think he’d see the sky was green sometimes but not other times?”
“Glen, the sky is blue.”
I was frustrated and I shut up. I did love my mother. It made no difference in how she behaved. I had learned already that people who believed in the healing powers of love were idiots. I couldn’t explain that everyone is just one relative away from the world unloading its lessons, in the process making what they thought they knew about the words “always” and “love” and “mother” seem trivial and naive.
I have more sympathy for my aunt now. There is alienation in having a mother like mine, in that people who can say the word “maternal” without needing to add “in a positive sense” cannot grasp what it means that I no longer love my mother. They think I’m kidding myself, or angry, or petulant, or selfish—mostly that I’m lost. For years these opinions made me angry because they felt condescending.
But it’s closer to the truth to say that, as with any situation where science and psychology have failed to provide comfort, people fall back on faith. You love your mother. It’s an axiom, you just do it. Until you start to ask questions about why.
While Mom was with Daniel, I still loved her because I had grown up with that faith, not even knowing it was faith, but mistaking it for biology. My love was a knot of safety mechanisms, reflexive withdrawal and emptiness. For ten years, I waited for the middle-of-the-night phone call from a sheriff’s department in San Diego or Placer County or Nevada or Oregon telling me that Daniel had finally beaten her to death.
I used to imagine that phone call, imagining my relief because then I would know how I felt about her. I daydreamed about looking into that clear-running stream I’d told myself I’d become to see it cloud up with anger, hopelessness, grief. I looked forward to writing a eulogy because, in part, it would be her funeral and there would be no more shocks or surprises. I could begin a sentence with “my mother” without bracing for whatever was coming next. I wanted to call my aunt in the middle of the night and say, “You were right, I didn’t love her enough and so her boyfriend finally beat her to death,” because I wanted her to know how hopelessly naive she was.
But it didn’t work out like that. Mom’s time with Daniel ended in 1995, and I wrote about it for my memoir class a few months later. I kept myself out of it. I was as hidden as the weather, a fixed eye suspended in the blank sky over a cold industrial town. Feel free to feel bad, I thought. I’m not even here. Just as my mother had tried to tell her life story once by writing it from my point of view, I had made a complement to that by writing a memoir from which I was absent.
If you’re restless, however, your brain never stops trying to pick certain locks. It turns out that what I was feeling was too horrific to take in, a loneliness I’d never heard described before. I want to explain how I stopped loving my mother, a condition no sadder than loving her in the first place.
* * *
—
&
nbsp; When I was twenty and enrolled at Berkeley, I felt a Byronic distance from the weakness of falling in love. I can hear myself saying things about my heart over coffee at Café Roma or Sufficient Grounds or standing on the stone steps outside the English Department. Berkeley was to me a series of conversations, separated by some classroom activity. Mostly I was trying to build a case for myself. “I didn’t have a broken home,” I tended to explain, “it was more of a scorched-earth policy.”
This was me, then: 1960s narrow lapel sport coats from thrift stores, skinny batik ties, jeans with holes in them, high-tops, complicated book bags, and, I must apologize but it’s true: earrings that were of the dangly sort, sometimes skeletons. I had a lot of gel in my hair. I was pretty, but mishandled that by leaning forward at the table to make sure everyone noticed the whole “pretty” thing.
I had stopped feeling happy or relaxed, and instead had adapted to the consistent background filter of depression by trying to turn it into seeming mysterious. I can see the women I talked to—I tended to say things about my heart to women—falling into those claims like I was opening up a storybook with castles and treasure. And then, bang, massive distance on my part, just when I had seemed so nice.
But then something unexpected happened. When my mother was meeting her soul mate—the very week in fact—I was meeting mine. Regardless of the pride I took in the empty place in my chest, I still had a contrary faith I believed in so deeply that I’d mistaken it for an axiom. If I love you hard enough I can fix you.
I Will Be Complete Page 35