It was late at night, so we drove to the nearest emergency room, at UCLA, where Owen and I had come the evening of the Dead Kennedys concert. The pain in my head was so exquisite I couldn’t block it out. It was a weekend, so the room was crowded. I was thinking, I am a pure clear-running stream, I am a pure clear-running stream, which didn’t work. It didn’t matter who I’d been, because now all I was was a vehicle for pain that flowed through me and wiped out everything that mattered before. I tried screaming but it came out in a voiceless croak, because, to accompany the ear infection, I now had laryngitis.
Every time I heard the nurses walk by, I manufactured lies like that they were getting me medicine.
A doctor was standing in my room with a chart. He looked at me. “Mr. Webber?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Oops.” He left.
I started crying. This made me convulse, and each time I inhaled, new pain shook through me.
I thought of Lindsay in the waiting room. She loved me now and she would love me tomorrow. This did nothing for the pain, but it made me stop crying. Instead, I was angry. Something had shifted so I felt safe to feel angry at the world now. I washed my face and I dried it, looking at the completely angry person in the mirror whom I recognized. He’d been gone a long time. It makes no difference whether you fight pain or whether you let it flow through you. My face was dead to the world.
By the time a doctor came in, I owed no one anything. He looked in my ear and my throat. He actually gasped. He said he’d never seen a worse ear infection. “Anywhere,” he added. “Ever.” He wanted to show my ear canal to the other doctors. As he was about to put drops in my ear, a nurse called him and he leaned in her direction, but I grabbed his arm, not gently, and physically kept him from leaving until he treated me. Two drops into each ear, pharmaceutical-grade cocaine. I got to take the bottle with me.
* * *
—
I was sick for months. They had me on ampicillin, amoxicillin, Zovirax, codeine, and erythromycin at different times. I tested positive for, or had antibodies to, cytomegalovirus, Epstein-Barr, herpes, and mononucleosis. But I knew what was actually going on. My body was doing all it could to protect me from actually falling in love.
POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL
LINDSAY WAS GOING TO SAN DIEGO to visit her mother. I drove her to the airport and parked and walked her to the gate. It was 1986, so you could still take your girlfriend right to the breezeway next to the airplane, hugging goodbye with the awareness that in minutes you’d feel the emotional thud when you saw the door closing shut. You could see the plane taxi away.
That immediacy and that possibility is gone now but then it was a ritual, the departure at the gate. And this trip with Lindsay was in a way an elegy for all the other things that were about to vanish, because while we kissed, I said, “I love you,” and she said it back, because we’d been saying it and neither of us had regrets.
“I wish I could come with you.”
“Me too.”
Impulse. We were in love and so far anything had been possible. I bought a ticket at the counter. I recognized the precedent.
I got on the plane with her. She was delighted. This was crazy. But we were able to do crazy things if we wanted to. What about parking? It would be expensive, but the hourly and daily lots weren’t that different in price.
We were in the plane, and then flying for the first time together, remarking on that, holding hands and kissing. Every once in a while, her eyes refocused on my face, and she squeezed my hand. She was trying to figure something out.
She had told me about her mother, Louise, who was tough, smart, vain, and inflexible. She was a social climber. She liked important people, and by important, she meant they’d gone to Harvard or had titles before their name like Doctor or Colonel. She wanted to visit Egypt because she thought she was a reincarnated princess. She didn’t tend to admit when she was wrong.
Louise would hate me the moment I came off the plane. “She doesn’t like a change in plans,” Lindsay explained.
I joked about that. She didn’t joke back.
We had different relationships with our mothers, but that wasn’t something I’d thought much about. I couldn’t read how seriously she was taking this. She had spent most of her life evicting her emotions from their former home on her face.
“If things don’t work with your mom,” I said, “I can go visit mine.” Maybe we talked about how ironic it was that both our moms lived in San Diego.
When we landed, Louise had the presence of a senator in the crowd, and when she realized I was walking off the plane with Lindsay, her smile went beautifully suspended. There was no outward evidence of anything having changed for her. And then when Lindsay explained who I was, Louise greeted me warmly and with a smile so genuine I understood she loathed me mildly, backhandedly, in a way that was never going to change, no matter what I did, for the rest of my life. I’d made a real enemy.
There was conversation in the car. I was trying to establish myself as smart, caring, successful, artistic, not a flake, curious, eager to know more about her and her undoubtedly fantastic life, but also not too grasping or too unseemly, too faux ingratiating. I had rarely been so aware of being Jewish.
Louise was a litigator. She was good at asking questions when she wanted to be. Facts came out in the car. I was a writer. No, of course, by that definition, true, I wanted to be a writer. And it was a lovely coincidence that my mother lived in San Diego, too. My mother was cosmopolitan, I said. She was from England. She led a gypsy’s life.
Ah, then did my mother know I was coming to stay here?
Well, her job, managing business services, was a busy one, so I hadn’t called her before I came. Yes, I was from one of those families where you can show up without calling.
Louise said it was so tricky of my mother to get ahead of the curve and find a place on 8th and Ash, so far beyond where the gentrification ended. In fact, we passed the exit that made my heart trip whenever I saw it, but I didn’t point it out. I could see my mother’s building in context of the skyline, where it now seemed like a dead tooth among many on a septic jawbone.
Louise lived in a community that was not just gated, but on the other side of the gate had an archway bridge that was designed to look as much as possible like the one that takes you into Heaven. We hadn’t worked out where I was staying. Louise took me and Lindsay in through the attached garage, and she introduced me to her husband, who was a good and defeated man. Here was Lindsay’s room. Here was mine. Oh.
The next morning, I woke up. Lindsay was in a nightgown that was as thick as burlap. She gave me coffee. I remember her as if she’d brought a bundling board to place between us.
“I think you need to stay with your mom this weekend.” It was nothing personal, though Lindsay allowed maybe it was, but mainly Louise had plans and I wasn’t part of them. No matter how charming I was I wouldn’t win.
“But—”
“It’s not worth it.”
She had a dazed expression, and she looked younger, her hair weirdly regressed to high school style, her slouch that of a teenager.
“Not worth it,” I said. This was a phrase we used all the time, along with “I’ll make it okay.”
She kissed me. “I know the day I’ll stand up to her. The day I marry you.”
As I got dressed, I was thinking that Lindsay and I would marry, which excited me. We had it planned out. We would get married after I sold a piece of fiction somewhere. That would be a sign I could be established as a writer.
My lifelong enemy excited me, too. I wanted to put a novel I’d written on her bookshelf. “This is my son-in-law’s book. It’s a New York Times bestseller,” she would have to say to every guest at every dinner, with a grimace, because as much as it would pain her to bring me up, it would hurt worse for her to skip the chance to brag.
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After I dressed, I got in the back of the car. Lindsay and Louise were going shopping at the Horton Plaza mall. They were dropping me at my mother’s place.
I had churning thoughts then, most of them revenge-shaped. I didn’t like how small Lindsay was. Charles Blank made sense to me in a way he hadn’t before. If I had a mother like Louise, I would want someone to obliterate me sometimes. We drove over the arch and onto the mainland. I had them drop me a half-block away because I didn’t want Louise to see exactly where my mother lived.
I stood on the porch outside my mother’s apartment. I still thought anything was possible. I had come to San Diego on those particular wings. There was no reason for me to have called ahead. Until I was this age, twenty-three, I thought I could go home. I’d thought all the way until I was twenty-three years old that I could walk up to a house in which a parent lived and surprise them.
When I knocked, there was no answer at first. I knocked again and my mother appeared.
She had an expression on her face that I didn’t recognize. Later, I would realize it was the exhaustion of having been frightened for a very long time. She was holding a kitchen knife in one hand and a white paper towel around her fingers, which she had just accidentally cut. Her eyes were searching my face. She didn’t recognize me.
Abruptly she hugged me in a burst of relief. She pulled away. She looked ashamed.
The front room was mostly carpet, with wide empty spaces where there used to be chairs and tables. She didn’t want me there. The room was filled with sailors. My mother didn’t refer to them. It was as if they were furniture. A couple of cots and air mattresses were pushed to the walls, which were bare. In the kitchen there was a huge pot of water boiling on the stove next to economy-sized bags of buns. I had walked in just as my mother had cut herself making hot dogs for sailors.
I don’t know how long I was in the apartment; it was probably only a few seconds. I recall a young black man in sailor bell-bottoms, with ginger hair and blotches of pink skin eating away his natural coloring. He was standing by a window, smoking a cigarette. He watched me.
My mother guided me out the back door. I tried to explain why I was there—Lindsay, her mother—but she couldn’t absorb it. Her hearing problem grew acute under stress. It was a good thing, she said, that I’d come. She took me to the garage and tried to unlock it, fumbling with keys and pressing on paper towels to keep her fingers from bleeding. She said over and over she was glad I was here, she had things to give me.
I wanted to tell her Louise was a snob. My mother hated snobs. When she had money, she hated people who condescended to those less fortunate. Now she was shuffling through the garage. She pulled out boxes, filled-up shopping bags with old letters. Photographs. My baby clothes. I talked to her, but she was also talking to herself and she could only hear one of us.
When I was still working at Hunter’s, I’d sent her a book, a rare first edition of Barbara Hutton’s biography, which had been withdrawn from circulation, something I’d found by accident. The book was called Poor Little Rich Girl, but my mother couldn’t remember the title correctly. She thought it was called Little Gloria…Happy at Last.
“No, Mom, it’s called Poor Little Rich Girl,” I said, which was ridiculous and unimportant. I didn’t need the book back. I didn’t care about it. “It’s called Poor Little— Mom? Mom—it’s called Poor Little—” which I didn’t need to say. She continued to sort through the boxes, looking for the book, unable to find it, whispering, “Happy at Last, Happy at Last, Happy at Last.”
She ferried me to the sidewalk, looking behind her, toward the house, and hugged me goodbye quickly. She was clearly still terrified of something. “You have somewhere to go? Did you say you were with your girlfriend? You’re meeting her, right?”
She left me at the corner. She trotted back inside her apartment, holding her intact hand around the paper towel protecting the wound. I heard the door open, I saw her go inside, I heard the door close softly.
It was hotter than I’d thought. Horton Plaza was just a few blocks away. At a bus bench I looked at what I had with me, five full shopping bags. She had given me every photograph she had of me, every photo of her own life, all the letters and cards she’d kept from her family. I knew my mother was in such danger she had to make sure someone else had the things she treasured.
Horton Plaza was huge, something like four stories of outdoor mall, with passageways linked at odd angles. It was mirthful or witty in design, childish colors, clashing, to make people feel that spending money was fun. I stood in the middle of a department store, maybe Macy’s, with mannequins dressed in Trevor Blake–like fashions, with all of my shopping bags half-bursting with bent, crumpled, knotted, hand-annotated, historic, mysterious, magical belongings that were packed by someone who would never walk through this comfortable space as if she belonged here. My mother had once shopped in stores better than this. I bet that if I looked through the bag I could find notes on Crane stationery and photos with edges marked by having been removed from silver frames later sold at garage sales.
I looked through the crowd, sorting it for someone to recognize. This was one of dozens of stores in the mall. How would I ever find Lindsay?
It didn’t take three minutes before I saw Lindsay and her mother. They were both surprised, both in the same way, in this order: What’s he doing here? Is he okay? Is his mother okay? He has all these bags. I now imagine both of them showing the same level of recoil, which is unfair.
There was some kind of conversation. I was smart enough that in the time between when my mother put me on the street corner and when I met Louise’s eye, I had a pretty good story. My mom had given me a hundred bucks to get back to the airport and catch a flight.
Louise took me to the airport. The five bags were in the trunk. Lindsay held my hand. Louise asked me some sympathetic questions about my mom. She seemed genuinely sorry for me. Later, Lindsay said, “Of course she did—she’d won. You were leaving.”
I paid for the flight in cash at the gate, and got onto the plane, holding all five bags, which the attendant helpfully put up in the bin compartment overhead. I see her face now as if she were the same stewardess who rode with me from the airport to my home in San Francisco when I was eleven and my mother forgot to pick me up. She wasn’t.
When I was back in Berkeley, I started looking through my mother’s things. I felt like someone who’d been in front of the stack of speakers at a concert for too long. Mom had given me hundreds of photographs, some of them as old as World War I. Here was Admiral Gercke in his U-boat commander’s uniform, weeks before he died under the sea. Here she was, a child in a series of photographs in which an increasing number of siblings were scattered around her. A few chaste modeling shots when she was seventeen or eighteen.
Then photos of my mother at the entrance to the emergency room, then in labor, then me, GOLD BABY BOY, a fresh raisin in the crib. The drafts of the telegram my father sent out calling me a slayer of dragons and successor to 007. I found a clear plastic tub and inside it several impossibly small sweaters someone had knitted in 1964. Here was a bone teething ring with a silver rabbit to hold on to.
There are many tricks that photographs can do, most of them melancholy, such as when I saw how hopeful and in love my parents were. My mother loved me then totally and completely. She still did. That was the most devastating thing to know, that these things were the love she had to give.
I didn’t have a home with my mother anymore. I felt stupid for having thought I could just show up where she lived. That kind of trip was over, forever.
It might not be obvious, but this was the end of something, too, that feeling that Lindsay and myself loving each other would be enough. The magic we shared didn’t seem to cross the threshold of my mother’s house. Nor hers.
3930 ROBLEY TERRACE
OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA
94611
1811 ROSE STREET had a landlady who’d automatically renewed the lease for a few years, but she was going to move back in, and so the group of us dispersed, with a whimper. Lindsay and I decided to live together. She had a specific vision of a large one bedroom on a tree-lined street in Oakland, far from campus, a first nod to adulthood. It would need to be an older building, with high ceilings and morning sun. If it had a loft bed, even better.
She found the apartment for us immediately, first phone call to the classified ads, and why shouldn’t she have? It was on a secluded, heavily wooded side street near a nice shopping district. The building had an odd history—it was constructed in England in 1911, then taken to pieces and reassembled for the Pan-Pacific Exposition of 1915, where it was billed as the first prefabricated apartment building. Arts and Crafts style, heavily timbered, with narrow slats that made it seem even taller than it was. Only five units, each of them simple, with high ceilings and large windows that looked over the steep hillside, which was mostly trees and shrubs. The owners, a pair of artists, lived upstairs in the largest flat. Our place was a very large one bedroom—the living room was so large in fact that it was sectioned into two rooms by pillars, and there was a loft bed in the far half that made Lindsay say, “We’ll take it.”
She treated the loft like a pillow fort, setting it up for reading and lounging and drinking tea. She decorated it with vintage photographs found at the Ashby flea market, and draped mosquito netting around it. The actual bedroom we set up with a mattress for guests. I started calling it Fifi’s room, where the spoiled, clumsy French maid lived, whom Lindsay had to punish every morning.
I Will Be Complete Page 41