Three minutes and a few seconds into the song, the phone rang. It was Lindsay. I started laughing. “That took a while.”
“I know,” she said. “I got a wrong number first.”
* * *
—
It kept happening. If Lindsay was out of the house and I wanted her to call me, I put the album on. But we understood it wasn’t something we should use as a party trick. We wouldn’t lean on it or try to make it mean more than it did. Which was hard because we weren’t sure what it meant, except that we felt like four arms, four legs, one brain. Which is how the summer started to lose its edges. Everything applied. Horoscopes and fortune cookies and comic strips and quotations from books seemed to tell us how we were meant to be together. I was new to the feeling of when you literally can’t fuck someone enough, your body wearing out before your need to continue does. Each orgasm wasn’t exhaustive—it didn’t even touch the surface.
Empirically, it was important to express doubt. But doubt is of course how magic is stamped out. There is more to the world than you can explain. Could I just enjoy it and not have to understand?
When I was eight, I bodysurfed. A six-foot wave, the largest I’d ridden, broke perfectly on my board so that I was propelled forward with a force faster than the wave itself, as if two fingers had pinched down on a watermelon seed. It was my first experience of being shot toward the shore by a gravitational bully with its own color and smell and texture, an unquestioning, uncaring force that took me past my limits. It didn’t destroy me. I saw that wave every day now.
I took photos of myself to show how happy I looked. I bleached my hair, then hennaed it, then wrapped my hair in a silk scarf with the ends askew, posing shirtless and tuff as an intellectual Rambo. If there was one message the photos shared, it was “I am so self-contained I want you to notice me.”
I rarely got more than a few of myself on a given roll because Lindsay kept borrowing my camera to take photos of herself in the mirror. She liked how the flash made the results hard to see, like her looks had to be handicapped to be appreciated. We hoped there was more to us than we’d known before. We hoped that made us look good. We were getting caught up in a language that by definition no one else could understand.
* * *
—
She came downstairs wearing a full-length blue dress.
“When have I seen you wearing that?”
“You haven’t.”
“No, I have,” I said, carelessly, because I wasn’t paying attention.
“When?”
I said, “I don’t know.” She kept looking at me. It seemed important to her that I think about this. I could see her wearing it in a fancy courtyard, with well-trimmed hedges. “I see—fountains?”
She nodded. “And gardens, but we rarely walked there.” She paused. “Because I was married,” she said.
“To an older, wealthy man,” I said. It came from an unknown place, perhaps adjacent to the unknown place from which I can sometimes retrieve fiction. It felt the same as when it comes the most freely, like I’m taking dictation. But this time we were doing it together, exquisite corpse-style.
She said she was poor before marriage, peasant poor, but happy. She loved to run, and she fell down a lot, and liked being among her brothers. An old man came to the house to say a rich man would marry her. Her mother gave her a box as a gift when she left home. Lindsay said the first time she saw me I was in the audience for a string quartet.
Someone eavesdropping would smile. Yes, this was like writing a story, and now it was like having ESP and calling out to a loved one to see if, in spite of the void we live in, we can be overheard. If you look at psychology or rational thought, it’s the kind of thing that should die on the vine. It’s not real. “You were late,” I said.
“I was. The first movement was playing and I had to wait outside until they finished.”
“It was Vivaldi’s Concerto for Two Lutes in D Minor,” I said. I’d been obsessed with that music for most of my life, but only the second movement. The first time I heard it, in high school, I was convinced I’d heard it before.
We agreed: she made me leave because she didn’t think it was fair she was married and couldn’t be with me. I never saw her again. She later had a girl by her husband. When I left I lived by the sea. I often sat by the ocean and thought of suicide but knew that was the wrong gesture. I tried to compose music but wasn’t skilled with it.
It wasn’t like a conversation. It came and left rapidly in the sense that neither of us brought up specifics again, but when we looked at each other there was now a different dimension of our relationship. It had survived time.
I had a friend from Thacher, Jean, who worked with the Berkeley Psychic Institute. When I ran into Jean at a party, I said maybe it was unrealistic to think that people actually reincarnated, and that two of them managed to find each other two hundred years later.
“Oh, no,” Jean laughed. “It’s real. You had a contract.”
She explained that when people couldn’t be together in life, they sometimes made a deal with each other to return after death. I asked if that meant Lindsay and I were destined for each other.
“If that helps you out, sure.”
I didn’t know what this meant. I asked if Jean ever felt like there was a large wave out there, something much larger than herself, and it wasn’t really up to her—she could resist or submit and it didn’t matter—the wave didn’t care?
“Oh yes,” she said. “When Bob Weir stops acting like a rock star, when Rhythm Devils is over and done, and Jerry is deep into a solo, there are times the whole stadium is pushed by a giant wave.” She added, not for the first time, that if I played guitar, I would probably sound a lot like Jerry.
I mention this because Jean had convinced me both that Lindsay and I were part of a phenomenon that existed, and that it mostly existed for people on drugs.
* * *
—
One night there was a thunderstorm and I couldn’t enjoy it because I’d finally gotten into Ishmael Reed’s fiction writing class. I’d learned that when a thunderstorm comes, writing classes will be filled with stories set in bed, listening to thunderstorms, because every boy writing in Berkeley thinks it came only for him and his girlfriend. It’s their thunderstorm.
Reed taught a deliberately unfair assignment: write a story first person from the opposite sex’s point of view. It was efficient in its lesson, which was that it’s hard for a twenty-year-old to capture how someone from a different gender thinks.
Because I hate losing, I cheated. I read my mother’s letters and typed them up until I got a sense of her voice. I created a story based around events she’d told me about. A woman offers copying services from a location no one wants to visit, but she’s convinced things are just about to turn around. A condescending old businessman gives her advice, annoyingly good advice, that she can’t take in, because he’s also hitting on her at the same time, and she reaffirms how everyone is against her at this critical juncture. It felt unlike anything I’d done before, not good, not bad, just a strange feeling of mimicry.
The workshop was, to use a word I don’t reach for lightly, bizarre. After someone else went first (a couple’s relationship was on the rocks, but renewed by a thunderstorm), Ishmael presented “Six Cents a Copy” to the group. There is usually in a beginners workshop a silence when a story hits the table. It’s the intake of breath before the room tone kicks in. This time, it broke when a woman said the story was offensive.
Clearly, she said, I had a problem with women. The room relaxed. Other students were relieved, because they agreed. No woman actually thought like this. She was a caricature, her thoughts a man’s parody of a woman’s thoughts. My narrator was incompetent in a way that no businesswoman would ever be, and she made fibs about what she was doing, as if I believed women lied to themselves all the
time.
I have an ego on me that tells me I’m right even when it shouldn’t. So I was okay with them being wrong until Ishmael agreed with them. This character was phony. He said it was interesting I’d tried to write an older person, but that was it.
I think I have never in my life said, “But it really happened.” Writing fiction means you’re trying to get readers to believe things that haven’t happened. If you can’t get them to believe what has happened, you’ve failed doubly.
Ishmael was a force of nature when it came to social issues like race, and he used satire so effectively that I wanted never to be a white guy deserving his scorn. I wanted to learn the lessons he taught. That I’d failed so miserably, with such conviction in my talents, made me feel awful.
One of the women in class concluded, as comments were winding down, that the work was in fact antifeminist, which was like a final baseball bat to the back of my knees.
Reed stopped her. “Antifeminist? How so?”
She explained. Clearly, by doing such a deep read on a woman who was incapable, someone who so failed even the most commonsense tasks she set out to perform, and still claiming that she wasn’t mentally ill but just, well, a woman, I was insulting the cause of feminism.
“Hold on,” Reed said. He looked at my story again. This wasn’t a brief thing. Over a minute of silence. “This is an antifeminist story,” he said again. He looked at me. “Okay, I didn’t get that at first. That’s interesting.”
A few people knew what was up, but I didn’t. Reed distrusted feminism. It was a secondary crusade for him, of almost equal importance to race issues. Feminists were the enemy behind many shadowy academic conspiracies, he thought. He explained this briefly, and the class thought he was kidding.
When I got my story back, his initial comments were crossed out, as was the original grade. Instead, there was just one line. “Excellent indictment of feminism. A−.”
This was so confusing I kept taking the story out and looking at the grade and wondering why I felt flustered by it. Apparently my mother only made sense if her life was satire.
WHEN TOMORROW COMES
ONE LAST ECSTASY TRIP. It was obvious that the visions came at the cost of borrowing against vitality. Every recovery period was a challenge. My jaw ached for days. Lindsay and I took one and a half tabs each for a finale.
It was too much. The wave was too intense. The trip lasted for six hours, and it was at times like involuntarily bobsledding down a glacier.
She had to tell me something. “In a few years, after we get married, we’re going to have a kid,” she said. She waited for me to catch up with that. She continued: She’s going to have long, wavy, brownish blond hair. She’ll be a quiet one. She’ll observe everything, and she’s going to be smart and funny. Kids are supposed to look more like their fathers, but this one would look more like her mother.
What she was saying sounded exactly true, as if it had already happened, and she was reminding me. We said things to each other in wonder like, You’re going to be a father. You’re going to be a mother. Ha! There is still a drug in our systems, this is the drug talking. The drug is whispering these things.
After a long silence, she teared up. “Her name is Suzannah.”
That name had lain dormant in me, genetic code waiting to be fired, and now I could see Suzannah as if she were a friend who had left the room but was about to come back. She whistled to herself, she favored sweatshirts, she was kind to animals. She was clumsy.
“No middle name,” I said. Lindsay nodded.
Everything was happening at once. We were talking into and out of conversations, hands moving, picking up throughlines an hour later, doubling back to fallen topics.
It was deep into the evening. I was standing. Lindsay was on her knees. The space heater was glowing behind her. One of those wavelike rushes broke against me.
“What?” Her pupils were like moons.
“When you were little, did somebody touch you?”
It was a ridiculous question. It should have been mood-shattering. She considered it, though, and she started to say no, but didn’t get much further before her eyes lit up. Her eyes were such pale blue. They started to water. I felt the way I did when looking at a page from one of her antique French novels. I could recognize some hints about what was going on, and make sense of a little of it, but also I understood that the meaning was years away from me.
She didn’t have an answer yet. She said she didn’t quite understand it, but this had to do with how she felt death’s cold breath on her shoulder. It was why I was so important. She was weeping: “You’re so positive, it’s so positive between us.”
We kept looking at each other as the drug faded out, and we kept saying, aloud or otherwise, how for the first times in our lives we felt completely known.
* * *
—
I had to work day care the next afternoon at Ecole Bilingue, hungover. Two hours of playing with children was weirdly peaceful, about what my mind could handle. Suzannah, I kept thinking. Suzannah Suzannah Suzannah Suzannah.
I was in the art classroom. Tall white ceilings, rafters painted white, kids’ egg tempera paintings tacked to the wall. Lindsay rushed in. There was a phone call for me. I could take it on an extension.
It was my aunt Susie. She’d called Rose Street and someone had given her the school’s number. She said my mother was about to be killed.
I immediately thought: the walls of this classroom are Swiss Coffee, and the loops of the telephone cord are dotted with paint flecks from years of service, and there are white buttons on the top of the phone’s body, one for each line you could access, one red button to hang up. One white button is depressed, and that is the line Susie is saying something to me on, and I don’t remember exactly what she said. Daniel owed money to some bad men. He couldn’t pay them back. He’d had multiple chances. So men were on their way to murder my mother.
Something something something, Susie was going to something something, the police were something, we’d know more in a few hours, she would call me back later. No, there was nothing I could do. Goodbye. The phone went back on the hook and I thought it was strange how multiple times in my life I have been faced with impossible news of my mother delivered through the industrial, flammable plastic of telephones on school grounds.
Something was in my hand. Lindsay had handed me a note.
I’ll be there when tomorrow comes.
Lindsay wrote notes rarely, and when she did they weren’t extensive. This was a lyric from a Eurythmics song, and I wanted to argue with her about how lyrics weren’t the best way to express yourself, not bothering to put the sentiment into her own words was cheating, like buying a preprinted condolence card, and from a literary standpoint it was like donning the skin of a lion. That was the stupid, smart, snide, terrified side of me that couldn’t comprehend the rest of what she meant. She wasn’t going to leave me as long as there was a tomorrow to stick around for.
There was a taboo word between us, the word “forever.” What Lindsay was saying, even by quoting something else that only tingled with meaning when sung over a beat, was dangerously close to “forever.”
Later, still waiting for a follow-up phone call, I told her the note was sweet. “But you didn’t have to say that.”
“I meant it.”
“But you don’t know it. You don’t know how you’ll feel tomorrow. You can leave me, that’s all right.”
“I’m not going to leave you.”
I thought about this. “Okay, that’s right now. Right now, you’re thinking ‘forever,’ but it’s just ‘forever’ for this moment. And that’s okay. I know that in this moment, you want to be with me forever.”
She shook her head. “No, I know how I’m going to feel tomorrow, too.”
I didn’t want to be unclear about this. It had been a terribl
e thing to hear about my mother, I said, and emotions were running high. At a time like that, people said things they might not mean.
“No,” she said, patiently, “I mean it.”
“Okay. So—” Because I was warming up, I said, “You might say things and also feel like you mean them because you think I might need to hear them, which was kind of you, but I don’t need anything.” I added that she shouldn’t mistake the way a normal person might react to news of his mother’s impending murder for me needing to hear “forever” because, as I’d said, I didn’t need anything and I was making this okay now. “We could end this now, and we’d both be okay,” I finished.
“But if we kept going together, we’d be amazing.”
I couldn’t think of any more ways to turn what she’d said into language that I understood. She denied all attempts to contain it. She meant it. She didn’t overemphasize it, and she stopped trying to reassure me. Eventually I just nodded, taking it in with my brain but nowhere else. Because it was obvious that anyone I loved would leave me. Who even questions that?
* * *
—
You’d think there would be some resolution to my mother’s situation, but there wasn’t. One day she called, and I asked if she was okay, and she said she was. She referred to a story of how things worked out without actually telling the story. She said she was safe. She didn’t say it with relief. She was still with Daniel. That word, “resolution,” didn’t really apply to her life.
* * *
—
A few weeks later, Lindsay and I went to Los Angeles. We saw Caravaggio, a low-budget, mannerist movie based on the artist’s life that got increasingly surreal. Halfway through a familiar, very old pressure was descending on me. I used to get ear infections as a kid. This was unmistakably a gathering of sickness in my left, scarred eardrum. I had to leave the theater. The pain was starting to rise the way it always had, a balloonlike airplane cabin pressure that tricks you into feeling it can be yawned away. It can’t.
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