He explained my mother’s life story to me. She had been unhappy when she was married. She’d been a fancy lady trapped with a Rolls and a Mercedes and I’d been a rich boy who’d grown up with comic books and a coin collection. My mom had told him I was broke, and trying to be a writer, and who knew where I would be in ten years? Did I know where to get any speed?
He was driving when he asked, and his eyes flicked toward mine, and he didn’t pause for an answer. More talking.
There were no incidents on that trip. A few hours later, I had boxes of my childhood things in the basement of Rose Street, and Daniel and his friend were in the driveway by the truck now filled with my mother’s furniture. Daniel knew where he could sell it. He told me about some great deals he’d made recently, looking for me to nod as he recited them. I remember quick, repeated handshakes, then him asking again if I knew where to get any speed, then him getting on the road. I didn’t think much more about him.
I had boxes of comics that I didn’t look at. I threw away some 1960s artifacts from my high-design room, like a 7UP bottle with a twisted, looped neck that was now broken. Statues of the Marx Brothers wrapped in the electric paisley poly-blend sheets off my old bed. Lindsay watched me. She was charmed by seeing my childhood suddenly appear, an array of op art and Danish modern side tables hilariously out of date.
She found some Playboy centerfolds I’d stuck between the pages of a book about the Marx Brothers. She asked which one I’d liked the best, and then answered before I could: the cowgirl wearing only sheepskin chaps, right? Right.
She pulled out items to make fun of (my black light, my stuffed lion cubs). When I was five years old, my cousin Christina and I had made a pretend art gallery in my closet, with posters that would light up in the dark. We towed my mother in, and made her close her eyes. We shut the door to the closet, and we turned on a strobe light so we could dance in front of it and cast what we thought were very boss shadows.
Mom didn’t make it—the moment she opened her eyes to see the first flashes of light, she panicked and threw open the door and ran out. I hadn’t remembered that until just now. I tried to tell Lindsay about it in whatever way made me seem most dispassionate and careless. “Mom didn’t like closets, I guess.”
She had a way of saying almost nothing, just the word “huh,” so it weighed a great deal.
“Do you ever wonder,” I said, “if the stuff that happened to you as a kid isn’t just a story, but maybe it affects you?”
A bowling bag and a heavy canvas sack contained, for some reason, my coin collection. My father had been fond of do-it-yourself displays that relied on his engineering skills. He had chosen nonarchival materials for the sleeves which housed some once exquisite silver dollars, now tarnished where their edges touched the folders. Some of the smaller gold pieces had dropped out and were stuck in the crevices of the bowling bag, where they had absorbed the grease from crumbs of food for a decade, and were now pockmarked and stained.
I had a fresh pang of conscience about the $186 I’d spent on comics. It had been ten years but I never admitted to Dad what I’d done. The damage to the coins felt like payback.
I called my dad to ask him for advice. He asked me to ship him the coins so a dealer friend of his could appraise them.
A few days later, I received a thin envelope from my father. There was a check for the coins, less than a thousand dollars, nothing compared to what they would have been worth if properly stored. He also sent a complete set of 1969 banknotes.
There was a letter. Dad explained that when he and I had been collecting, he’d assembled two sets of 1969 currency and given me one. He’d kept the other, which he’d never told me about. Here it was. I should use it to help pay my rent.
“What’s up?” Lindsay was home from the French-American school for lunch. The mail had just arrived. She read over my shoulder, because that’s the level of involved she had gotten.
For half my life I’d felt a dull shame for having stripped the bills of their collecting value by using them for their face value—a term meant to distinguish the obvious from its deeper value. Now my father sanctioned exactly that behavior. I had permission. I felt I could move my shoulders, that they’d locked into place a decade before.
So Lindsay was saying to me, “What’s up?” as I was thinking I’m not that guilty person anymore, and it occurred to me I was going to spend that money, and I was going to sleep with Lindsay.
THE SOLE AND SINGULAR JOY
I HAD JUST KISSED LINDSAY. It was late morning in spring, and we were on the porch. There was music coming from the distance. A neighbor played an instrument none of us could identify, at odd times of day, and though we’d tried to locate the house it came from, it was a Bermuda Triangle level mystery to us. It was percussive and yet it seemed to play melodies, too, non-Western, and the breeze brought it closer or farther away, an audio mirage.
That day had the kind of transcendent spring weather that happened rarely in North Berkeley, the air heavy with honeysuckle and the sweet peas in neighbors’ yards trembling with breezes, and it was hard to think in a straight line for more than a few minutes at a time.
It was a slow, friendly kiss, throughout which I thought I am kissing Lindsay. She didn’t kiss like anyone else. There was something eternal and quiet in its intensity, like all the time in the world had melted, and we were going slow and fast.
She said, “We can do this, but only once. We can get it out of our systems before Paul comes back. Just once.”
Here was a tightrope of rational thought. Let’s not be idiots, let’s try to think this through, let’s look at all the evidence. There is a monstrous cloud of animal lust drifting in, and being horny never made anyone smarter. Neither of us would get needy—we might not have even said that aloud, as need was an unforgivable crime.
This was the first time one of us said to the other that we didn’t want to look back at this and wish we’d behaved better. Each of us hated that idea: “Oh, we were so young, so naive, how could we have been that stupid.”
* * *
—
I’ve noticed that adulterers are visited by perverse angels who clear the way for them. Trains that are never off schedule run early or late that day, bringing them into contact and leaving mates unaware. Noelle vanished for a few days and I learned she was at an old boyfriend’s house at roughly the same moment Lindsay whispered to me she was ready. Strange how the trail can suddenly glow like that.
At midnight, Lindsay opened my door without knocking. She knew she would be welcome. She and I stood on my futon, staring at each other. She wore a white cotton union suit that was cut above her knee. It had tears in it and big buttons up the front. She knew she didn’t have to try to package herself.
I took off her clothes without touching her. Touch is a way of reassuring. What if I don’t reassure you, I was thinking. As each bit of clothing came off, Lindsay seemed to move more slowly. She relaxed. When she was fully nude, she stood still, not posing, but tranquil. She settled down on a pillow, with her snaggletooth giving her a crooked little smile. Her chilly blue eyes stared at me. Here’s what you’ve won.
When I touched her skin, I could feel what she felt. I wasn’t just sensing her muscles beginning to clench, it was like I was eavesdropping on her whole nervous system, and I could feel what she felt as if she were an extension of me. How odd, and how addictive.
I could feel something else happening. Her body was starting to tell me stories. All the boys wanted to make her come. No one would even think of making it difficult for her, she was spoiled, and always had been. I wondered if I was just making that up. Men think we have inside information; we think we don’t just know what we’re doing, but that we are empathic and attentive and no doubt better than the last guy. I decided that whatever else I did for the next few hours, it wouldn’t involve letting her come.
Eventua
lly she grabbed my hair and pulled my face up to hers. She whispered, “Do you know what you’re doing to me?”
I said, “Yes,” because it was true, I did know. It was also a lie, because I hadn’t quite known. “You want,” I said. I’d meant to finish the sentence, but just saying “You want” was enough for her.
She studied me. She nodded. “I want.”
When I turned off the verbal part of my brain that tries to direct traffic, I could sense something heavy and simple going on. It doesn’t sound like a revolution to say “Lindsay wanted,” but I wasn’t sure a man had ever heard what she wanted.
Later, it was getting light outside. There were birds. An attractive pile of clothes on my floor. We were sweaty and confused. Neither of us could move. It felt like there was steam rising off of us. We stared at each other as if we’d bobbed to the surface, Oh, we’re still alive. This had been the best sex of my life. I knew saying that was a trap. I had never felt so intensely close to someone, also a trap.
“That was five and a half hours,” she said, and then, maybe realizing how that sounded, she added, in a mock heroic voice, “You certainly planted your flag, mister.”
Every second she stayed was stolen time. I was thinking about how the Pillow Book, an eleventh-century Japanese treatise on court manners, said it was important for your lover to linger even if she didn’t want to. Lindsay wasn’t moving and yet I envisioned her halfway up to her room. Lindsay, courtly and appropriate.
I said, “A little piece of you already left.”
“I’m a girl who leaves first,” she said.
What do you do after something like that? Shake hands? We said goodbye, she went on her way, back upstairs, one perfect heist later, and we were done, never to touch, forever, until the next day, when it started up all over again.
When Paul came back, she, laconic and sleepy-eyed, pissed him off so much he threw her engagement ring down Rose Street. Then she and I continued, and it felt like a miracle to me every day for the next four years, and then it didn’t.
FABLES OF THE IMPERVIOUS LOVER
I WAS SITTING ON NOELLE’S BED while she was crying. I’d broken up with her, but she was the type of person who thought if she protested enough we wouldn’t be broken up anymore. “I refuse to accept this,” she said.
I was looking at the covers of Mademoiselle and Vogue she had on her floor, and I was reading to myself the makeup tips, the promises of new collections for summer.
It occurred to me she was never going to let me go, so I stood. She burst into fresh tears. I took a step toward the door. It was peculiar to just walk out on her, but it was what I seemed to be doing. When I made it to her living room, she threw herself in front of the door and blocked it with her body. This was not very French. Or it was very very French. It was so dramatic I had trouble believing it was real. It felt like how she only argued at the top of her lungs if we had company around.
“Move,” I said, quietly.
“I can’t.”
I looked at her. I was barely there.
“How can you be so cold?”
I moved her out of the way, opened the door, and shut it behind me. Then I started to run, because it was possible she would try to follow.
I should say this was the fourth or fifth time I’d told her it was over, and there would be more times where I hung up or shut a door on her. But this time was unusual. When I got to the end of her block, I saw a group of eight people holding hands as they walked in pairs. I’d seen them before. They had a handler. They had lopsided heads, misshapen trunks, and they all smiled in the same complete and delighted way. I thought they looked like they didn’t know what was going on except that they were being taken care of. They made me uncomfortable because of the way they trusted. It was like a low pressure system of vulnerability drifting across Berkeley.
It seems unrealistic to think I would see someone further on the same day I broke up with Noelle, but this was Berkeley, part cabaret, part sideshow. There was an elderly, spidery, and thin homeless woman who had all her belongings on a bicycle. She pushed it to collect glass and cans from recycling bins. I’d seen her often enough to feel like I was looking at a familiar ghost when I spotted her from a great distance. Today, she was at the edge of campus, where Bancroft hit Telegraph. Her bike had been flattened by a car.
The woman shuffled in circles around her bicycle, holding the loose fender in her hand over her head, and she was mourning at the top of her lungs. I kept walking.
I’d seen someone’s children. I’d seen someone’s mother. One day, I thought, I’ll know how I feel about that.
* * *
—
Rose Street started to fall apart. One of Lindsay’s friends started dating Paul. Hannah kept calling from New York to talk to Vincent about when he was coming. But he was frequently out rock climbing with a pretty girl, and he didn’t always call Hannah back. Some of the old crowd moved out; the folks who replaced them were friends but something was different and a little diminished now. Maybe I just wasn’t paying close attention to anyone except Lindsay.
She didn’t really care about Rose Street, it turned out. Nothing mattered enough to affect her. She said, “People tell me I’m cold because I’m afraid of being abandoned, but that’s not right. I just don’t feel the things other people do.”
I now felt quiet contempt for the type of person who was affected by things. I kept coming into my room and finding records on the turntable, with directions about what I should play. “Temptation” by New Order. “Thick as Thieves” by The Jam. “I’m a Man You Don’t Meet Everyday” by the Pogues. “Happy Song” by the Nips. “Backwards and Forwards” by Aztec Camera. “Your Silent Face” by New Order, again. Every song was supposed to be a clue to explain who she was, without her having to say another word herself.
She left me a card with her translation of a Baudelaire phrase: “The sole and singular joy of falling in love is the certainty of doing evil.”
She wanted to know my astrological chart. I’d wanted a girlfriend with whom I had a psychic connection, as that seemed, for some reason, like an argument for compatibility. I did Tarot readings for her, which I’d learned to do by candlelight at Thacher, and I had her do mine, and we marveled at how the results were so unambiguously powerful.
I had lunch with Owen. But I hadn’t talked to him in a while, and it was as if I’d taken a trip to a foreign country and was trying to explain life in a commune whose rules had evolved from observations of shadows and the green-capped fairies possibly seen among them.
“We did our Tarot last night,” I said, because Owen and I had messed around with Tarot cards. He knew what they meant.
“And?”
“Do you know what the final outcome card was?” I asked. It had been the Lovers, a card I had never seen in an outcome before.
“Was it…the Ball Player?” Owen asked. “The Cad? Tell me it was the Cad. The Rock Star?” He cracked himself up.
Clearly, Owen didn’t understand how powerful this was.
* * *
—
“Jesus,” Lindsay said. “Is this really your mother?” She’d been reading a letter I’d dropped on my bed. “The voice is so Pollyanna.”
It was an IBM Selectric font with handwritten amendments on a slick sheen of onionskin. Lindsay saw the dead-eyed way I read it, recognizing when a normal person would have a reaction.
I asked, “Doesn’t she sound like a mom?”
“No.”
I liked hearing straight talk. We talked to each other honestly. It felt like we were shining daylight on our more hidden impulses: picking up with anyone so quickly after her engagement wasn’t smart; her heart wasn’t her own again yet; she wanted to be ambushed, tied up, and used for sex; getting involved would be confusing. My friend Bill, a confessor of mine, had told me to beware—leaving a relationship was like swin
ging out on a trapeze, and was made easier by having someone to catch you.
We knew. We wouldn’t mistake the person who caught us for our soul mate. We could handle this. I was seeing past a horizon line that had previously limited me. So was she. She said she’d once been a woman engaged, but now she was outside of that, looking at herself, and not making the mistakes she had before. Here’s what you thought your life was, she said, now let the camera pull back and see a fuller frame. There was a way of refocusing so that the more obscure truths were visible.
I told her about my dad and myself on the porch with our telescope. Look at the dimmest stars by looking away. Later, I walked into my room and found an R.E.M. album on my bed with a note, one word, in her handwriting. Kohoutek.
Of course R.E.M. had a song called “Kohoutek.” Michael Stipe sang about the comet, and maybe a girl who vanished like the comet. It was hard to tell what else. I listened as hard as I could to know what subtext Lindsay understood that I didn’t yet.
R.E.M. songs reminded me of abstract paintings. The mind wanted to find a narrative, but maybe Michael Stipe was singing phrases that were meaningless. It was kind of maddening. Then there was the way the music felt, which was also hard to nail down. What did “Pretty Persuasion” feel like? Sort of joyous? With moments of caution?
This meant that, feeling joyous and cautious, I sang along to words I couldn’t quite hear, which describes most R.E.M. fans in 1986. “Oil…has been dried?” I sang, which might or might not have been a lyric, and then, I sang, with authority, “Goddamn your confusion,” because that one was at least clear. I felt that persistent inarticulate yearning that came through all the music Lindsay loved. What got reflected with every memory she told me about, every song she wanted me to hear, was her sense of loneliness. I have felt this way, I thought, even if I don’t exactly know what this way is.
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