Lindsay nodded. “Huh. Did they say what the characters would be called over there?”
I said, “Manwinkle.”
I could see this information parachuting into her mind. For someone so deadpan she had a remarkably readable face when she was surprised. She collapsed forward, folding at the waist, laughing. She straightened after a second, looked at me with happiness, and then burst out laughing again. I hadn’t thought it was that funny. And it wasn’t, but she had her reasons.
I said “Huckleberry Man,” which got the same reaction. She looked at me impatiently like she was waiting for the roulette wheel to slow down enough to see what she’d won this time. And I riffed a little, with diminishing returns. Daffy Man. Mickey Man. Not so funny anymore. I was losing her. It took me until then to register that she actually was sort of pretty.
She stayed near me, and then when I felt secure in that, she ignored me for an hour, and I felt insecure, and I asked myself why I cared whether a girl I’d met at a party thought I was funny. I could see the blue of her veins through the skin on her neck, and her snaggletooth was interesting, and she and I were on a certain conveyor belt but only one of us knew it.
* * *
—
Vincent pulled me aside that night, and gravely said, “We’ve decided you’re costarring on a TV show now.” He told me the plot: Crowned Heads, about broke California boys abroad in England, trying to extend their visas by marrying into royalty. I was the one writing everything down. You’d see me at a typewriter, wearing a Beefeater’s uniform due to some adventure, pushing my glasses back up on my nose and nodding to myself at how good my work was.
“Are you on the show?” I asked.
He said, solemnly, “When you finish your novel, my review, which will massacre it, establishes my career.”
* * *
—
Around this time, the lease on my apartment with Noelle was up. I had asked the landlady if she would renew, and she shook her head emphatically, “No,” and walked to her unit before I could ask if she heard me and Noelle when we fought.
Soon after, there was a room opening at Rose Street. Hannah was leaving for New York. I could move in.
SECOND GLANCE
FROM THE SIDEWALK, the cracked front stairs of 1811 Rose Street led to a dilapidated front porch sheltered under an overhang. There was a dark living room to the left and a parlor to the right, with ceilings that were at once closed in and looming. The kitchen was bright and spacious, and there was a 1910 O’Keefe and Merritt stove that Lindsay always had a kettle or a pot or a frying pan on. Her day job was bookkeeper at a French-American school, but her passion was cooking. If she could, she spent a couple hours a day shopping for dinner.
Her room was right off the kitchen, by the back porch, where the freezer was. It was one of the smaller rooms in the house. Fables of the Reconstruction by R.E.M. was on the turntable at all times, even though no one really liked it.
The first few songs on that album sounded like four guys trapped in a sewer drain in a foreign country during a storm. I thought the album could have been called We Don’t Want to Listen to This Either, but Lindsay played it anyway. When Hannah left, Lindsay took a room upstairs, and I took Lindsay’s room. For the first week, I kept finding hairpins and rubber bands she’d left behind.
I was a housemate in name only for the first few months, as Noelle didn’t want to let me out of her sight. I stayed with her most nights in her new apartment. She was offended by the idea of Rose Street to the extent that neither one of us wanted to admit I lived there. She didn’t like the narcissistic bullshit. Their stupid fucking TV shows! Where was her TV show?
I tried to hide how much I liked it. As Hannah said, Rose Street was the place where you could have any conversation you wanted just by going into the living room. There was always new music playing on someone’s stereo, and someone was always tangling with relationship issues weird enough they deserved attention. One night, there was a tsunami warning on the coast and I sat at the dining room table while one housemate, a physics student, went through his address book, looking for a date to watch the wave with from high ground. (We circulated the insult, “He couldn’t even get a date for a tsunami,” for a few weeks.)
I was broke. I was transcribing lecture notes every day, but I never managed to actually make the rates the company had promised. I worked as long as I could, standing in my room as I typed, as it was too small to have both a chair and a bed in it.
The boarding school novel was starting to seem antique to me. I was reading books I’d bought at Hunter’s—Cheever, DeLillo, Zora Neale Hurston, Ross Thomas, Duras, Borges—and I noticed how they each came from a deep personal confidence that I tried to emulate. My current phase was a lot of beginnings and isolated metaphors aspiring to an authority I hadn’t yet earned. Write something that matters. Escape my cultural conditioning. For instance learn the difference between Laos and Cambodia (Vincent had harrumphed over that mistake in one of my less clever stories).
I tried to get into Ishmael Reed’s writing class, but was rejected. The same with Alice Adams’s class. Noelle got into both. She wrote a story about a nameless man whom she described as looking exactly like me, down to the S-shaped nose, who ties up a girl who looks exactly like her with a leather belt and screws her as a way to end an argument. A copy of the story found its way out of class and into general circulation. I think she distributed it herself. People gave me looks that I didn’t mind, but this was not panther cool.
As close to verbatim as I could, I wrote out stories people told me, no matter how ordinary they were, as I was learning what listening meant. I wrote a story about an old co-worker who was determined not to swear, and I sent it to Grand Street. It came back rejected, but with a nice note from a reader named Susan Minot, whom I looked up in the library. I found a couple of short stories she’d written and decided she was a writer who’d learned to listen to people years before I had.
I also made my first imaginary enemy. Esquire had printed an article by a writer my age, David Leavitt, declaring him the first voice of a new, as-yet-unnamed generation, which meant I had no choice but to hate him.
It turned out there were writers my age who’d published already. Part of my routine was to stand in the new release section of Cody’s and look at the jacket photographs of authors and make dark judgments about their abilities without actually buying the book. That people were establishing careers seemed unfair to me. At Rose Street I was surrounded by creative, smart, worthwhile people, and none of them were publishing anything yet. In reaction to this (it made sense to me at the time), I wrote a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle book review announcing, without explaining who we were, that the residents of 1811 Rose Street were no longer giving interviews. That was a prank, but no one else in the house understood it, so I didn’t bring it up again.
* * *
—
I was in a film class that followed the auteur theory closely, and so we had a couple of weeks of noir: Double Indemnity, Ossessione (with a few chaste minutes of the 1946 American version), Gilda, all of which had something in common with the earlier films Professor Nestrick had shown, Der Blaue Engel, Morocco, The Scarlet Empress, La Bête Humaine—every female lead was a femme fatale.
This made me anxious. The idea of being manipulated was a particular hell for me. After one class, I asked Nestrick what the films he’d chosen were saying about women. He said, coyly, “Well, what does being a woman say about being a woman?”
A classmate, less than happy with Nestrick, told me there was a feminist critique about femme fatales: they didn’t fucking exist. The term was a projection of men’s anxieties about women having any sort of sexual parity. I liked this theory. It was a relief. It turned out to be a little simple.
* * *
—
For someone not conventionally pretty, Lindsay was arrogant.
She said, “If we were walking down the street, and you walked past me, you wouldn’t look twice. But if I were doing something, even sitting and reading a book, you’d look again.”
True. She knew she was a type. Hers was the fatal beauty of the second glance. If a man looked at a woman like her once, he wouldn’t see her. But a second time? He would see the A-line skirt, how the blouse which looked so academic was in fact slightly translucent, slightly tight. He would think: “Does she know that or have I discovered an island country known only to me?” And then answer it himself: “Only I am poet enough to have discovered this girl’s unexpected, swanlike neck.”
But men are dopes. Lindsay didn’t just know that country’s geography, but every baccarat game in the casinos of the land of the Second Glance was gimmicked in her favor. If you happen to be a person who sees relationships as expressions of power, you could say knowing Lindsay made me want not to be a sucker. I figured the best thing was never to actually hit on her.
Once I asked if she needed anything from the market, and she asked if she could join me. We walked together. Then it was more than one trip, and then it became a habit.
Her fiancé was coming back in a couple of months. She’d always had a boyfriend, and they always overlapped. I used to know the list by heart, with the dates of the relationships, like tombstones. Lindsay had always known how to attract men. It might have been the only thing she knew for certain at twenty-three, that with a precise flick of her wrist, she could tailor specific interest from a specific man. For instance, here was a would-be writer looking hard at the subtext of everything. Here was Lindsay revealing the underpinnings of how attraction was made. Here we were being insiders together.
I asked friendly questions, the type you’d ask to know the secrets beneath someone’s emotional landscape. She said she floated over things, and I asked her if she knew the word tharn. When I explained it, she was happy to know both the word and that she’d met someone who also went tharn sometimes. She was the one who ended relationships. Some boys had begged her to stay, which was disappointing. She didn’t really feel things like remorse, and to desire someone so much was a kind of supplication that made no sense to her.
She asked if Noelle was the end of the line for me. Did I see her being enough for the rest of my life?
This was in the spring, when Berkeley had come awake from a gloomy winter. When I walked across campus, it was through those Hey Nonny Nonny days when girls passing me on the paths glanced backward over their shoulders, and when I sat in class I was hypnotized by the view one row below me of a girl’s skin interrupted by the tension of a bra strap. But I was with Noelle and I felt like a dog tied to a parked car.
Lindsay had read my stories, somehow (I’d never given her one), and she said she saw beauty in the world when she thought about them. I liked the compliment.
“You look like somebody,” she said.
“Timothy Hutton.”
“Huh. No.”
“You look like—” I started.
“I don’t look like anyone. I look like those portraits of French ladies in the seventeenth century.” She was fluent in French. She read La Princesse de Clèves when she was bored. She felt like she was born in the wrong time.
Her favorite book growing up was A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. It was about a girl whose parents die and she has to suck it up. The other girls in the orphanage act bratty and emotional and the heroine of the book just holds on to her doll and does not cry. Lindsay, too, never cried. It seemed needy to her.
These things were all true and said carefully. But it got less careful, because I did something she hadn’t thought through—I kept asking questions.
She’d started cooking for her family when she was six or seven. That’s also when she started ironing her father’s shirts. He was an impenetrable one. He drank hard, he cheated on every relationship, and even his smile was fused with a darkness that led somewhere people didn’t want to look.
“Where’s it lead?”
No one had asked that. When she spoke, it came from a different place than when she was trying to be charming for me.
“Death, maybe?” she finally said.
Death was something her father was attracted to. So was she. Death always won. Certain men had death in their eyes. I didn’t, though, she said. I had an intense stare, and she didn’t know where it came from, but it wasn’t death.
She seemed uncomfortable as she said this. Then we were back on track. “Is that story Noelle wrote true?”
“I’ve never used a belt. Have you ever been tied up?”
“I don’t think they did it right. Guys always overestimate their Cary Grant index.” Men thought they were suave. The one-handed bra flick, which never worked with a three-hook bra like she had to wear. Had I ever kissed a guy, she asked? Had I ever been with two girls? She’d have to try kissing a girl sometime. “I like giving blowjobs while a guy is driving. It makes him think he owns you.”
“Happy Paul.”
“He doesn’t like that.” There was a list of things Paul didn’t like. When he came back from England she would have to swap out her good lingerie for the boring things he wanted her to wear. What a waste. Someone should see it. Hah. I know.
We locked eyes and I could swear she wanted to say, You’re the person who really sees me.
Lindsay wasn’t exactly telling the truth about Paul. It was a relationship with dents in it, not a prison. She knew how to phrase things. She sounded like she was saying she was in a terrible place and didn’t want to be rescued. Only a man who saw her twice would wonder whether he should rescue her anyway.
Here was where that feminist theory fell down, in that Lindsay was a real femme fatale. But the mistake was to think of that as nefarious. She wasn’t so much manipulative as she was twisting under the hard mercy of questions that begin when you’re twenty-two, twenty-three: Who am I? What made me? Why am I here? Where does this ache come from?
Getting answers always involved pain. Some people, like my dad, collected things to keep that away. That’s what Lindsay did. She collected men, and why not? Men were interesting, and they were interested in her. If you asked her who she was, she would say she was a woman who ate men like air. For now she had decided to become a person I would be attracted to.
This was flattering. Also it was a little sad. But you had to notice that, and I didn’t. I was too busy trying to become a person she would be attracted to.
FACE VALUE
AROUND THEN, my mother called. I hadn’t heard from her in a while. She said she had moved from her apartment in San Diego, and in the process had met the most remarkable man. He looked like Richard Gere. He was twenty-nine, she said. He’d grown up in terrible circumstances on the streets of San Diego—quite literally on the streets, some nights. She explained how they met. She’d been having a yard sale and was about to throw away some beads and trinkets when he asked if he could have them. He disappeared and an hour later came back with forty dollars, which he gave her. His name was Daniel, and he told her that every day with him was Christmas.
She still had things in storage from when we’d lived in San Francisco in the 1970s. Daniel was coming up with a friend and a truck, and could I help them? I could separate out my own childhood things. My coin collection, for instance.
I hadn’t thought about my coins in years. I was no longer attached to them. If I sold them I might be able to pay rent.
In passing, my mother looped back to the story of how Daniel had started living on the streets. His mother had thrown him out of the house when he was nine years old because he was a compulsive thief. She wasn’t sure he’d ever curbed that impulse, but he had a good heart, so I should trust him, she said. I knew immediately to do otherwise.
In person, Daniel didn’t look like any twenty-nine-year-old I’d seen. Among other things she’d lied to me about, she
’d aged him. He was twenty-seven, to my twenty-three. He’d clearly spent many of those years outside, meaning both that he seemed older and that there was something indestructible about his body, which seemed thick, like the flesh had been cured by processes that should have destroyed him. He wore Ben Davis–style industrial clothing. He seemed like he anticipated sleeping outside again.
I didn’t know yet that he was dangerous. He did nothing that was alarming, unless I count him looking at me. His irises seemed matte black, neither emitting nor taking in light. When we talked in the Rose Street dining room, he seemed to be looking around me, and toward the dishware, the furniture, my housemates’ backpacks, and calculating how much everything might sell for versus how hard it would be to carry.
But he didn’t take anything. He smiled often and talked quickly. As we drove from Berkeley to the storage unit, he told me how much my mother loved me. He repeated stories of my youth. He told me my IQ. I’d had a Siamese cat, he said, he’d seen pictures. He and my mother had been talking to each other in the way of new lovers.
He had in common with her previous boyfriends a desire to explain how the world worked, but unlike Anton or Trevor or Peter, he had never succeeded in anything. He had observed rich people for his entire life, long enough that he looked down on them. I tried to say one or two things, but it wasn’t necessary. Daniel had already learned what he was going to learn, and nothing like me was going to affect him.
Much of what he recounted on our drive over the Bay Bridge was an inventory of the house I’d grown up in, how it had been filled with endless art and treasure. This was his own house tour, fueled by imagination. I thought he was leading up to rubbing his hands together with anticipation, but instead he was telling me how none of that stuff mattered, how nothing lasted, you only really owned what you could carry on your back, right?
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