It doesn’t work like that. This is what I want to say so it’s as familiar as the stars and sunrise: your love is not enough.
MAPS AND LEGENDS
IN 1984, when I was twenty, I worked in Berkeley’s worst bookstore. Our selection was thin, and we were two minutes’ walk from the world-class bookstores of Telegraph Avenue. Cody’s had ten times our inventory, and Moe’s sold what we did, only cheaper. Though we were on campus, we didn’t sell textbooks, which baffled almost everyone who tried to shop with us. The customers who came into our store had hoped to shop somewhere else.
This bookstore was far worse than Hunter’s, which had a tattered, bumbling elegance. If Hunter’s was like a stuffy French restaurant that had lost its Michelin star, General Books (that was as much of a name as it had) wasn’t even Shakey’s Pizza. It was more of a cafeteria.
A pea-soup fog of despondency enveloped the place. I remember Kevin, gangly and shy, always on the verge of coming out, and always, instead, choking back tears as he wheeled books in from the loading dock. Ryan, age seventy, a drunk, sat behind a typewriter, pecking out inventory cards so botched that after the end of his day, when he patted his chest and said, “Well, I’m going to go get loaded,” they had to be retyped by Paola, whose husband had died.
It’s not like I was fun to hang out with. I was in a slump, going through a phase peculiar to certain sensitive men, proving that I could not just date but live with a woman I didn’t actually like. Noelle was French, which was very cool, and for some reason I thought that meant there was no way we would ever argue. And yet she and I argued a lot in an involuted style that meant an hour into it we were arguing about what the argument was about. Neither one of us knew what the other was thinking, but our apartment had beamed ceilings, a Batchelder tile fireplace, and hardwood floors, so neither of us was going to be the first to move out.
In the mornings, I would see Noelle’s sleeping face on the pillow next to mine, and the apartment would be quiet, with shafts of light hitting the onyx wood framing of the exquisite floors, and I would think, “I should break up with her.” It was bad enough that I looked forward to work.
Once, the bookstore had been a fun place, or so I kept hearing. The cool kids had worked there. On weekends, someone used to play guitar at the checkout counter. People would make out in the break room. There was a suggestions book from back then, a season’s worth of hand-drawn cartoons, mock diatribes, and gossip, abruptly ending in June, when everyone who was good graduated. I was hired in July. Now the suggestions book was filled with suggestions.
The haunted atmosphere at the store was like Troy fifty years after the war ended. What must those Trojans have told visitors? “It’s not much to look at now, but once there was this Achilles fellow who was really swift-footed, and there was this horse, but it was a trick. You should have been here.”
Laura was one of the few holdovers. She was witty, but you could tell she had better things to do than talk to me. I would say something I was fairly sure was funny, and she would nod, directing her gaze somewhere just past me. I felt certain that when she left work she was swept into a limousine and taken to underground nightclubs where men snorted cocaine off her chest until it was time for her to come back to work the next morning.
There was a photo over a desk in the back office. Two former co-workers sitting on a bench. One of them was a slim man in mod clothes, paisley shirt, sunglasses, handsome but really not the focus of the photo. He and the camera are both more involved with the woman, whom I couldn’t quite get a fix on. She was both mocking him and daring him to come closer. She had a vintage look, but I couldn’t place the era. 1930s? 1960s? I couldn’t even tell if she was pretty.
They were part of the legendary group that had left. “That’s Vincent and that’s Lindsay,” Laura told me one day. “Lindsay was trouble. She was the resident femme fatale.”
I considered the photograph. “I could have handled her.”
Laura threw some books on her cart. “You would have fallen like all the rest.”
That made me laugh. These people thought highly of themselves. Which reminded me of me.
* * *
—
I was fairly sure I was filled with untapped potential. I did not walk up the avenue when I approached campus—I loped, a determined, shoulders-forward movement that looked like I was fighting unseen enemies to get wherever I was going a little faster than humanly possible. I looked like Monsieur Hulot on his way to a tennis match.
The walk was part of my impatience. Every day, I wanted to crack open the things I didn’t understand so I could write about them. I looked at every object like I was measuring how I could take it apart and describe it to people in case I had to. I treated conversations with strangers like seductions, and it was important to me who came out on top. I wished someone would describe me as un homme fatal.
I was writing drafts of my now-seven-thousand-page boarding school novel that was every bit as tiresome as it sounds. Occasionally however I would write short stories that were different and better, one of which was a finalist in the annual Cosmopolitan fiction contest. This meant it was one of twenty manuscripts that Helen Gurley Brown herself read, but when I talked about this, I shaved it to ten or to five. If I met new people, I mentioned it exactly once. When you walked past me at a party, the conversation you’d overhear would go like this:
“A writer.”
“Oh, have you published anything?”
“Not yet. But Cosmopolitan just—”
You would keep walking.
The Cosmopolitan contest happened and then I accumulated only rejection slips. The early ones had handwritten encouragements, but as I tried to be a better writer, the slips came back clean. I felt cursed. I wanted company.
* * *
—
In autumn, a few straggling people from that extended group of friends returned to Berkeley, landing in an 1870s brown shingle house at 1811 Rose Street. It was a dark five-bedroom over-timbered place built atop an ancient underground stream that made the basement cold and the bedrooms feel haunted.
I lived miles away, with Noelle, on the Oakland border, but I kept track of the Rose Street crew. Housemates were returning from their travels to New York and England and Africa. Bands were re-forming. People were getting day jobs waiting tables so they could write their novels at night. I thought this was incredible luck, but they were just following the normal boomerang path of liberal arts graduates who find out what the world is like. Berkeley was playing the same role as it had for generations, a comfortable town for college graduates who needed a place to be kind to them.
The femme fatale didn’t come back.
* * *
—
The first Rose Street person I knew was Hannah. She tended to speak in complete sentences that had dependent clauses you had to listen to for some kind of excellent Homeric simile that usually was self-deprecating. She had a boyfriend named Vincent and her best friend was the absent Lindsay—the two people in the photograph I’d seen. Hannah often stopped at my bookstore on her lunch hour, where she would say hello to me and keep me updated on the old group reassembling. In exchange she seemed to be auditioning me for a place with them.
Hannah invited me and Noelle to their parties, which seemed to happen every month or so, polite yet crowded affairs where people I recognized from around town smoked in the street outside, while deep James Brown cuts played in the living room. The kitchen jammed with young assistant professors agreeing with each other about Ibo reaction to colonialism, and arrogant clerks that I recognized from Tower Records were made momentarily shy by being here. The conversations were bashful, because we each wanted to know what the other person had done to be invited. “I have the ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ 12-inch.” Or, “I’m loaning Vincent In the Castle of My Skin.”
At one point Hannah couldn’t explain to me h
ow two people dancing in the living room knew each other, and so, with appropriate music—the Bangles? the Smiths? something paisley?—playing so loudly we had to huddle together to talk, she showed me the chart.
It was a thing of beauty, a handwritten astrological map in a way, with names in place of the stars. I think there was pencil and pen and colored crayon involved. The legend: dotted lines connecting two names meant those people had lived together. A solid line meant they’d dated. There were symbols that meant they’d worked together, stars meaning they’d been in the same band, or worked at General Books, or at the Pelican magazine, or they’d been, ironically or otherwise, in the same sorority. Here was one band, the Mr T Experience, that some friends were in, and Dallas, who worked at General Books, had started another one called Sweet Baby Jesus that they would have to add soon.
I remember it having three dimensions and yarn, as if it were a high school science fair DNA molecule, but it was just a flat thing contained in the back pages of someone’s journal, modified as new people came into their web.
Lindsay’s name was at the heart of it. She’d lived with everyone, worked with everyone, dated almost everyone, and kissed all the rest.
The Rose Street crew had decided everyone who lived there should have a TV show. In Lindsay’s television show, Hannah said, the opening credits would show her boyfriend putting her on a train, and as it pulled out of the station, she would run back through the cars, waving at him on the platform, but also, when he couldn’t see her, accepting kisses and flowers and chocolates from all the men on the train. When one kissed her particularly well, she would hand him the flowers another suitor had given her, then turn to the window to wave to her boyfriend outside.
When she got to the caboose, she would blow them all kisses, and jump off alone, admiring her new gifts and trinkets. A redcap looking at his railway watch would shake his head like he’d seen it all before.
Oh, but the show had been canceled. Lindsay was an ex–femme fatale. Engaged to a wonderful man, Paul, she lived in England while he was finishing up his degree at Cambridge. He had tamed her. On the chart, the line from Lindsay to her fiancé, Paul, was maybe the thickest line on the whole page because it seemed so unlikely and such a turning point in the group’s dynamic. Or I remember it as thickest.
One album after another playing in the parlor, respectable in retrospect, or just catchy: Controversy, Deep Sea Skiving, Secrets of the I Ching, Rum Sodomy & the Lash, and was that really Neil Diamond, only now, in this context, newly discovered cool? There was so much music I’d never heard before, or I’d heard it once and not known what it was, or I’d heard it when I was eight years old. On their first date, Hannah had sealed the deal with Vincent by knowing all the lyrics to “Itchycoo Park.”
I didn’t want to leave the party. I wanted the night to end with me having a room in this house. I wanted to be good enough to have my own TV show.
I haven’t mentioned what Noelle thought. When she and I got home, she said one party was enough. She wasn’t going back. What kind of assholes mythologized themselves like that?
“Right,” I said.
“You aren’t actually agreeing with me,” she said.
I was thinking about her hair. It had never been its natural auburn since I’d met her. Noelle changed her hair color from purple to blue to violet every few weeks. I was trying to assess whether she might try blond next, and that now seemed more important, in the sense that it fully filled my brain, than having an argument.
I was bad at this part of relationships. I proposed arguments with her in my head, had them, and then resolved them, without even opening my mouth. I thought that was efficient.
Whatever she said next, whatever the words were, what she meant was, “I can tell you don’t actually love me.” And whatever I said in response came with the bluster of a cat inflating his tail, “How can you say that?” et cetera, but she was right, and trying to convince her otherwise led to another Möbius strip of an argument. She was loud at arguments, louder still if someone was in the next room. I kept getting distracted by wondering if she was performing her anger. I still didn’t know how to be angry.
What I said was filtered through the numb brain-wipe that happened when someone was yelling at me, what Watership Down called tharn. This is the mental state of a rabbit in headlights. Instead of anything useful happening, like a response, all I could think of was how pleasant it would be to not be arguing. I heard music in my head and sometimes it was Top 40, and sometimes it was a melody I’d made up but couldn’t quite hold on to. Now it was “Itchycoo Park,” a song that had once united a couple of very nice people. I wished I could get Noelle to agree that the fight wasn’t as important as this lovely music.
* * *
—
Vincent was the group’s oracle. He was handsome, skinny in a severe and tidy way, his gestures precise and measured, talking quietly, as if taking up more space than necessary was inelegant. He studied literature, and was focused on how narrative became propaganda. He and I went running in the Berkeley Hills a few times while he adumbrated his thesis in cool, measured, reasonable tones and he didn’t lose his breath no matter how steeply the street bent upward.
Vincent wrote a letter to Noam Chomsky, who wrote him back. I recall Vincent was coy and didn’t want to bring the letter out at first. Then he and I and some equally impressed folks all leaned over it to hear him read it aloud, with proper respect. Chomsky both agreed that Vincent was right—all information is propaganda—but also suggested somehow he was not right enough and also his foundational question wasn’t rooted correctly, but good for him for thinking on this, and the rest I didn’t understand. It was Vincent’s equivalent of the Cosmopolitan contest, a message from the larger world that he had some merit, and I felt proud of him. He started applying to grad schools.
There’s a kind of friendship among men that starts when two people compare the things they’ve figured out. Vincent interrogated me about everything I’d done so far, an evaluation of how bourgeois my experiences had been.
He asked to see my high school yearbooks. He did that to everyone he liked, which I found endearing. His dream was to find a random high school yearbook and to make up stories about the students who went there. He flipped through my Thacher El Archivero. Oh, the fashions! Who had a crush on whom? Oh, the sports! My God, the team mascot was the Toad? Wait—you bought someone’s soul once? Did you keep it? What did you listen to then?
Music was crucial. What we listened to had to mean something, perhaps because we were English majors. Liking something without subtext struck him as witless. Vincent had been the lead actor in a video, “Jet Fighter,” for The Three O’Clock. He made mock-provocative statements about my record collection. Did I have any R.E.M., he asked?
Sure—their second album, I said carefully. I had the same fear as when I was a child heading to school, afraid of having purchased the wrong lunchbox.
No, Vincent explained, it was just that Lindsay loved them. When she got their first album, she played it incessantly. Then their second album, incessantly. When the terrible third album came out, the house expected a break, but no.
“R.E.M.: Repeat Every Minute,” he said. Lindsay was stubborn, and she kept discovering insupportable things to do with her hair that got dye or bleach or perm solution everywhere. She dressed up in weird costumes then changed them almost hourly. She never dressed the same way twice. She wore 1950s lingerie and gave the undergarments names like The Diplomat.
And, by the way, news: Lindsay was coming back from England. She’d been deported. She’d lost her passport, of course, because Lindsay lost everything. Lindsay was the type of girl who got deported.
* * *
—
For Vincent’s birthday I found a late 1970s high school yearbook for Alameda High School. He was genuinely touched to the point of being silent, turning the pages in awe a
t having been understood. The next party at Rose Street had a theme. The yearbook was in the foyer, and there were name tags already filled out with the identities of that school’s graduating senior class. There was a banner that said GO HORNETS! We were having a high school reunion of the people we had never been. As a critical theorist, it was a fever dream of a party for Vincent, and I was happy I’d helped spark it.
Everyone at the party had a blue and white name tag from the yearbook. There was one exception. Lindsay was there and she wore a name tag that read “Wet Doghouse.”
I’d seen her a couple of times already. Once she was riding her bicycle from a chocolatier that had just fired her for piercing her nose. I didn’t linger or ask many questions, because Noelle was with me then, performing the couple’s semaphore of pulsing her grip on my hand, leave leave leave.
I asked Lindsay why “Wet Doghouse.” She’d done something wrong, she said. Was it the pierced nose? Was that why she was in the doghouse? She looked at me kindly. She found it cute I thought that could be her worst transgression. She wasn’t what I’d call pretty, but she had blue eyes that were hard to look directly at, and a face that was unnaturally calm. She seemed to move more slowly than anyone else at the party, too languid to follow the same beat as the rest of us.
We made party conversation of the sort in which the words weren’t important. My mouth moved, and I kept thinking, “I don’t think she’s actually dangerous.”
She said something that made me think we’d read the same newspaper article, only we hadn’t, so I had to explain that China’s TV stations were for the first time showing American cartoons. But there was a proclamation against putting animals on the same level as humans, and animals weren’t supposed to talk. The Chinese government was getting around it by claiming all the talking dogs and horses and lions were actually people.
I Will Be Complete Page 36