I Will Be Complete

by Glen David Gold

  Lindsay understood olive oils and how to make pizza dough with cornmeal. She could pick out a ripe pineapple. Sometimes she still woke up in the middle of the night, fretting about something, and the next morning I would find Linzer Tortes or crème brûlée on the butcher block.

  She worked accounting and at the Rockridge Cafe as their pastry chef, which meant some mornings she was up at five. I would sleep in, but get occasional flashes of her alone in a commercial kitchen, crimping pie dough. The cooks came in at six or seven, and they were polite and shy with her even as she ate a solo breakfast at the counter before coming home.

  I put a work desk in Fifi’s room. On one wall I had a poster of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy and on another a picture of David Leavitt, whom the photographer had tricked into posing with his fist grasping a pencil on top of his head. Leavitt had published his first book of short stories, well-received, so my fictive, one-sided feud with him continued. Onto my wall he went, to watch over me while I scrambled up the rocks, knife between my teeth, eyeing the castle ahead, cunningly, I hoped.

  I worked the day care job, and I took tickets at rock concerts, but I was still in school for one last semester. I was trying to be craftier about my writing. The most exclusive fiction class at UC Berkeley was limited to something like twelve students, and about forty people applied every year. I was rejected the first time I applied, but not the second. Leonard Michaels, the teacher, wasn’t just hangdog, New York style—he looked like he’d eaten a bowl of cigarettes for breakfast. He had a voice that probably sounded natural in its natural setting, a shared bathroom at the Chelsea Hotel, but in Berkeley he seemed like one of those migratory birds that was blown three thousand miles off course and ended up where the weather was nice at least, but he seemed miserably out of place.

  His method was to have the students read work aloud in class, the whole story, beginning to end, which as a teacher I now recognize as a beautifully cynical way to get through an hour twenty with less effort. Once, during a read-through, his head began to drop, until he actually had his forehead on the desk. “Stop,” he said. “Stop. This is a bad story. This is deeply, deeply bad.”

  It was my story. I’d written it and I was reading it aloud. As a teacher I now recognize something else. There are two types of fiction-writing students—the type that need to know there’s room for them at the table, who need to be encouraged and inculcated with self-confidence. Then there are the other kind of students, ones who need to have the self-confidence beaten out of them. Michaels was making an accurate judgment call about me.

  He didn’t count on the class’s response, however. They wanted me to keep reading. The story was about a bunch of friends whose vacation is ruined when dead clowns start washing up on the beach. There wasn’t any sort of reason for the clown infestation—I just liked the image of a beach dotted with dead clowns, a grunion run gone wrong. I read aloud to the finish, which didn’t change Michaels’s mind about its awfulness.

  At the end of the last class of the semester, Michaels went around the room to ask what writing people still remembered. He went last. “Dead clowns washing up on the beach. I still hate that goddamn story, but for some goddamn reason…”

  So I decided to turn it into a novel. Part of it was that writing about friends on an island was fun, and part was understanding that any reaction, even repulsion, requires an emotional engagement that my other stories hadn’t quite earned.

  Orwell wrote that he had to write four bad novels before he published his first. I told myself I was fine if The Clown Joke would go unpublished. The better my friends knew me, the more they disbelieved that I would be fine if my manuscript was a learning experience. I think many people prepared to console me when I finished in three to five years. But I had courage based on how stranger things had already happened to me.

  Lindsay and I had been together a year. I was now twenty-three years old and I was deeply in love in a way that wasn’t cautious, but all-consuming and burning brightly.

  Once, my mother showed up with Daniel. She gave us little notice, as if I might tell her no, they couldn’t stay with us. I think they were driving a great distance to bring housewares from seller to buyer, and Oakland was a good resting point.

  There was no explanation of what I’d seen in San Diego. I pretended it hadn’t happened. My mother seemed happy, but Daniel talked incessantly, sweated, and she kept stroking his arms and rubbing his neck to soothe him. There was clearly something wrong with him. She said it was the flu, but his symptoms didn’t match up with that.

  After they left, Lindsay discovered someone had eaten the entire box of chocolate Cadbury Eggs I’d gotten her for Valentine’s day. Cadbury Eggs were dense, confection-filled bombs of corn syrup and milk chocolate. Lindsay, who loved chocolate, could eat one egg every couple of days. During the evening, Daniel had secretly eaten about a dozen. When I discovered this, I got angry—who eats an entire box of chocolates out of someone else’s heart-shaped presentation box? I felt petty about this, because also, who cares that someone eats a bunch of candy? It’s the rebellion of a child, and getting angry about it is also childish. I almost felt like he’d done it deliberately, knowing I wouldn’t stoop to actually be angry for long.

  But Lindsay stared at the foil wrappers in a more appraising way.

  “Your mom is dating a junkie,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I think so,” she said. Junkies worked through sugar in a way no one sober could. This made sense. It explained the sweating and the rambling, disjointed things he said. My mother rubbing his back. I thought it was a little badass that Lindsay knew about junkies but also this gave me a better basis to be angry instead of saying, “Well, Daniel ate some of my girlfriend’s candy.”

  I said, “Wow, I had no idea.”

  “Didn’t you say he asked you for speed the first time you met?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  And then we just looked at each other. So it wasn’t that she was so insightful. It’s just that we had both been trained to ignore the obvious, especially when it was family.

  * * *

  —

  Lindsay had discovered vintage ceramics, like Bauerware. She went to garage sales in her VW Bug, and knew how to vintage clothes shop, and her understanding of makeup was deep and complex. We went to concerts and had other couples over for dinner, which was always magnificently cooked. If I am capturing her activities rather than her character, that is approximately right, as Lindsay was heading toward that time as a woman in her twenties when she was undergoing a shift.

  It was similar to what had caused Melanie to question everything she knew. In Lindsay’s case, the questions had to do with desire. There is a transition from being the object of someone else’s desire—a kid who obeys her parents, or a girlfriend who is hot to men—to understanding what her own desires were.

  Lindsay didn’t know what she wanted to do. She wrestled with depression. Once I asked why, and she said, “I feel like a chintz flower.” I didn’t know what that meant. “Useless. Pretty and not useful.” She said she needed therapy to figure it out. I said that made sense. She should probably work through what had happened when she was a kid. She agreed.

  I was about to graduate, I’d taken a semester off between Wesleyan and Berkeley, and another semester off at Berkeley, and I was taking the minimum requirements to be a full-time student. I’d spent a fairly lazy six years in college. There was a feeling of diminuendo about it. I didn’t want to go to the ceremony. The secretary at the English Department told me to reconsider. They were changing the valedictorian’s role.

  “The smartest people don’t give the best speeches,” she said. So they were having a contest to write a speech—anyone graduating, like myself, could enter. I pondered this halfheartedly while waiting in line at a taquería. I jotted down some ideas on the receipt, and I typed them up when I got home. The speech stru
ck me as funny, at least, and as I continued it, I tried to say something about the ways English majors disappoint themselves. While the business majors all are getting their résumés offset so they can field offers, people like me would be running the copy machines and trying to explain to their parents that their ability to articulate their shame in careful prose made it worth all the money college had cost.

  My speech won. Berkeley graduating classes are so massive they go by department, over the course of a few days. About twenty-five hundred people were at the 1987 English Department graduation.

  A couple of sentences into my speech, the microphone went out. I vamped. I told jokes. I tried to get the crowd to do a wave. I leaned into the microphone to test it, and it was now on, pumping out feedback, as I pointed at my bow tie and said, “I tied this myself,” which got a standing ovation, weirdly.

  I’d invited my father to graduation but hadn’t told him I’d be speaking. There were two reasons for that. One was that I wanted to surprise him. He wasn’t just surprised—he wept. “You had them in the palm of your hand!” he said afterward. “When the mike went out, some kid next to me said, ‘Wow, he’s going to panic,’ and another kid said, ‘Not Glen Gold, he doesn’t panic.’ How do they even know that about you?” My father called my stepmother, and my grandmother, and his brothers, and I think if he could, he would call everyone he’d ever met to tell them how good I’d been.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were going to do this?”

  “I wanted to surprise you,” I said. I didn’t say the rest of it.

  “There’s only one thing that could have made it better,” he said. “If your mother had been here.” And then, immediately, he stumbled, Not really, right? Not my mother as she was. If only she was the same person he’d married, the woman who had raised me, until the divorce. If that woman was still around, he would love to have shared that with her.

  This was the other reason I hadn’t mentioned it to him. I hadn’t told my mother about graduation. As soon as I knew I was going to perform, I had to ask Lindsay what I should do. My mother would bring Daniel. I couldn’t let that happen.

  It’s not like Lindsay had an answer. She knew that in one way I wouldn’t feel like a good son, but the other way, it could be an uncontainable disaster. Who knew what Daniel would say or do in a crowd?

  At the ceremony, I took what pleasure I could. In the back of my mind was an uncomfortable restraint, a nervousness that this wouldn’t be contained, that my mother would find out I’d excluded her. I wanted to say to everyone, “Thank you. Please be quiet about this.”

  HOPE AND GLORY

  I WAS WRITING The Clown Joke. Lindsay and I were both summarizing depositions to pay the rent. If you were determined, you made good money, but if you were lazy, you could just skate by. Lindsay made more than I did because she was focused and had a good work ethic. A year went by after graduation like this.

  Mom called every couple of weeks. Once, she said she and Daniel were moving into a converted school bus. She said I wouldn’t be able to contact her, because she had no phone. Also, no kitchen, no bathroom, and no shower. “There’s a good chance you won’t hear from us for a while, but maybe we’ll just drive up there and surprise you,” she said heartily, and I didn’t know what to say about that.

  But I forced myself. Haltingly, I said that Daniel worried me. She didn’t know what I meant, so I continued, he didn’t seem—well, I didn’t know whether he was on drugs or not, but he seemed like he was on drugs.

  “Oh, no, no, no, no,” she said. “Not anymore. No, he’s cleaned up.”

  I was firm, though. “I’m not comfortable with him around. I don’t feel safe having him here with Lindsay.”

  “I don’t know why you’d say that.” Her back was up.

  “He ate something like a dozen Cadbury eggs,” I said. “First, he stole them, but only a junkie could even do that.”

  “You’re being unfair to him. He really does mean well.” When we hung up, nothing was resolved.

  A few weeks later, she called again, sunny and cheerful. They’d found a house. They had a kitten named Misty now. “She’s just like a baby,” Mom said. At 4:30 in the morning, Misty woke them up by hopping on the bed and playing. She brought them trophies—her hunting instinct—only there were no mice in the bus, so she bought them broccoli spears instead. I should come visit, she said, and she paused.

  I didn’t know what to say. There was no way I was visiting, so I was noncommittal.

  Also, the house was infested with crickets, Mom said. She only said this to explain how cute it was that Misty now brought them crickets. She ate pizza and toast with jam, like she was a person. Daniel loved Misty and Misty loved Daniel, she said. I should come visit.

  I understood what was going on. Misty was the evidence Daniel wasn’t a monster. He had a kitten. Surely I’d like to see that.

  * * *

  —

  My aunt Susie called. The specifics are hazy to me now, but my mother was in trouble again. I think she was in Las Vegas, which I am seeing now through coils of smoke, marquee lights flashing to make a strobe effect illuminating something threatening her safety. A scheme had gone wrong. Daniel’s drug use had spun out of control. Mom might not have had a phone to tell me herself. I remember it as if my mom were trapped under falling debris, there were flames approaching, some terrible force had catapulted Daniel away across several states, and Mom was shrieking instructions: wire her $107 for train fare.

  Eventually my mother did call me herself, numbed and supine, like the fires were out but she was hoarse from yelling. I told her I’d paid for her train fare to Oakland, anticipating her feeling a sense of rescue. I heard in her reply a shift into formality as she added me to her list of creditors.

  There’s an alphabet known to people with parents whose needs flatten their own. We recite it to ourselves in times of stress, which means we know it by heart. There’s an emotional progression from confusion to guilt to commitment to strength to anger, a rhythm that after a while feels sing-songy, as ritualized as our ABCs.

  She’s only my mom, I wrote while this was happening. The “only” weighed exactly what the entire world weighs. I was trying on a new perspective. There is allegedly an unpayable debt of having been born, but I was wondering how that worked. What were my real responsibilities to someone who was my mother?

  If my mother were free of Daniel, she could live with me and Lindsay for a month. I would drive her to job interviews. We were minutes from Berkeley, the one city in the country so socialist that it actually thought about the needs of women returning to the workplace. There were support groups and job boards. I wasn’t naive about the search. It would not be easy. I also wasn’t naive about my mom. She might not want this to work.

  There was another reason I invited her. I wanted her to see how I’d changed. For years, she had been what I’d call broadcasting rather than having conversations. She didn’t understand how being with Lindsay had changed my landscape into one of stability. My vision was simple, her in our guest room, slowing down, nothing nipping at her heels, her unwinding until she could see the life we’d made. The feeling of wonder might rub off on her.

  I also was trying not to be an idiot. I called my dad to tell him what I’d planned and he said, “Your mother is a black widow. She’ll drain you. To her, it’s her survival or yours.”

  I was thinking: Here is a warning from a man who divorced this woman. And every time she returns to my life, my father has to divorce her again.

  I promised myself I would set limits. This was the last time I would help her out.

  As I drove to the train station I was blasting a cassette of X, music that bypassed my conscious mind and made me feel older, taller, surfing an angry sea with other members of my tribe. My thoughts, circular, were like this: There is no way to fail, no way to sneer at this even if in the future this a
ttempt looks naive, because right now, loving Lindsay is getting me to the train station without fear.

  I was a few minutes late because I suspected that if my mother was on the train, it wouldn’t be on time. I had this image set in my mind of a small British blond woman standing among boxes, and I was thinking about how when she was a child she was sent away from London to a farm during the war, and here she would be, a refugee, again.

  There were no passengers on the platform and there was no train. The Amtrak crew were trying to figure out what had happened. The train was missing. After I waited for a few minutes, they told me the train was going to be delayed. Not by a few minutes, but ten hours. They didn’t know why. Did this happen all the time? No, they said, this was a first.

  I drove back home, chastened a bit. Lindsay was summarizing depositions halfheartedly, about as anxious as I was. It’s hard to say for certain what she thought of my mother living with us. She knew what I hoped would happen and she was in love with me, so she would give it a chance. I sat on the couch and looked at her. I said we should get married soon.

  “How soon?”

  I thought about it. “Before the end of the year.”

  “Huh.”

  “Or maybe…” I expected our marriage to be preceded by signs, fortune cookies broken open on the sidewalk with Yes! as their only message, three-masted ships spotted floating over Oakland, panthers running on the beach. But what if that was wrong and there were no obvious miracles? Would that mean we should get married immediately and make our own magic? Or maybe I wasn’t getting published because we weren’t supposed to be married.

  Lindsay said, “What if you never get published?”

  I didn’t know what to say about that.

  * * *

  —

  It was late at night when I returned to the station at Sixteenth and Wood, which I should mention was a dead neighborhood in West Oakland that was much more troubling after dark. I had to drive past blocks of corrugated tin structures that were blackened by soot, as if they’d been set on fire by bored children. The train station was just a platform in the street. There were SRO hotels surrounding it that looked frightening. If you stepped into their lobbies you would become diseased.