The book I was working on was deeply weird. I’d been having vivid dreams that took up several pages at a time in my journal. I was rarely in them; instead, they were the plots of impossible movies or novels. The dreams were lengthy, ornate, ugly, and three acts in structure. I generally woke up sweating and confused, and I would lie awake for a few moments wondering why I had dreamed about an existing novel—until it dawned on me that I’d created it myself. Astronauts struggled on the banks of rivers while flowers tried to strangle them. The court of a fairy-tale king backstabbed each other and conspired to insert needles under their skin in order to feel life more intensely. An older couple erotically punished a younger one in infinite gardens behind ornate brick mansions. The dreams made no sense either as narrative or as emotional artifacts someone could follow in a surrealist sense.
In the spirit of following art wherever it goes, I began my mornings transcribing that night’s dream, then bending my novel-in-progress in some direction that the dream suggested. I’d say it was like Calvino working with Tarot cards, only his book was good and mine, so far, was just strange.
In the afternoons I would read or go on long runs by myself, and in the evenings I would work on depositions, then return to my book. I read somewhere that you should name books that have no obvious title after something you love, so I called this Bondage and Discipline. The joke was that I was bound to the work, I was showing discipline by doing it. It wasn’t a joke anyone asked the meaning of, because my friends had stopped reading my work.
I was walking in the hills of Oakland, past rich people’s houses, and I was starting to sing a song to myself:
A lack of grace
How fucked the cost
I once was found
And now I’m lost
A familiar numbness was seeping into my day. It didn’t feel like my perceptions had altered so much as they’d deepened, and I saw the lies the world was built on. It was like I’d uncovered a rock, which was an anchor for me, and it was no one else’s rock but mine. No one could take this depression from me. It was an old friend without the warmth of friendship.
Oregon hadn’t worked out for my mom. When she took her first paycheck to the bank, it turned out to be drawn on a dead man’s account. She applied for Displaced Persons Emergency Relief for access to their job listings, then learned she would have to take a state-mandated six-week course in résumé writing and self-promotion before she could see them.
She moved into a trailer park owned by a one-eyed man with a Doberman so vicious the mailman refused to deliver letters there, so any mail coming to my mother was probably lost, she said. She thought people who owed her money might have chosen that moment to send it. A few weeks later, I heard she’d moved back in with Daniel.
I felt like an unseemly uncle discovered living in an attic. I wished I could see the future. I wanted to see a big X stamped where I was now, and a bigger one showing me that there was success ahead if only I kept plowing forward through what might have otherwise been insane. “For so long, I thought this project was crazy,” I imagined saying to some interviewer, eventually, “but that was before this book succeeded so wildly.” And then I wanted to punch myself in the face for thinking that.
At parties, when people asked me if I’d published anything, I said, “I’m not good enough yet,” which I thought was at least self-loving. I collected rejection slips. I submitted to contests; Mademoiselle didn’t reject me immediately.
I’d read about how, when silent film came to Japan, the Western editing techniques made no sense to audiences raised on Noh and Kabuki dramas. Neither did Western emotional expressions. So cinemas hired men to stand at the side of the screen and narrate what was going on. “Now there are Indians attacking the cabin. The father loves his daughter, and he is exclaiming to her with love”—because the emotions weren’t apparent and had to be explained—“that he will defend her.” Ironically the best benshi weren’t the most accurate, but the ones who told the stories that seemed most resonant.
When I read this, my heart fell. At some point, Lindsay had stopped telling me how she felt. Instead, I would say to her, “Are you doing this because you feel that?” And she would say, “I don’t know,” so I would get more detailed about it. “I think you resent cooking for both of us and you’re angry at me, but it’s hard for you to say that,” and she might say that sounded right to her, and I would feel like we’d made progress or that we were still close. But I’d become the relationship’s benshi.
“Do you think you don’t want sex because of what maybe happened when you were a kid? Do you think you should get therapy because of it?”
I’d become clingy. Lindsay wasn’t used to seeing that side of me.
“Is it weak for me to need you?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said.
It’s not that we argued. We didn’t know how.
One evening, after her shower, applying lotion, she asked quietly, tentatively, if maybe I’d thought of sometime, you know, shoving her on the floor and just raping her. Being violent, ignoring whatever she said or did, just to shut her the hell up. But we were so far apart I couldn’t imagine doing that without it coming from pure anger, and that frightened me.
I had a very dark thought. What if—and I could barely say this aloud—I hadn’t been a soul mate dropped into her path by the forces of destiny and reincarnation and Tarot and all the supernatural realms, but a distraction?
And then I did another accounting: Heidi to Melanie to Cindy to Jess to Noelle to Lindsay, mostly overlapping, hardly a breath between them. That seemed like a problem.
Once Lindsay asked, in a question so well formed that I understood she’d been trying to phrase it for a while, “What if you end up being thirty and you’re working in a café? Seriously, thirty?”
* * *
—
In February, she decided to accompany her mother to Egypt on a trip for a few weeks. This seemed like a great idea for both of us. “You’ll get to miss me,” she said.
A couple of days after she left, a thick envelope from the University of Colorado arrived—she’d been accepted. I left it on the kitchen butcher-block table, walking past it like it was a spring-loaded trap. That afternoon and evening, I became more uncomfortable, and when I woke up the next morning, I had a fever. Is this me missing Lindsay? I wondered. I pissed blood. I had a kidney stone.
The doctor suggested I piss through a strainer (I rather enjoyed doing that), because it was small enough to come out on its own. Until then, I would be in pain. One afternoon I was writhing on the couch when the phone rang. It was my mother. She started to talk. “The real estate thing fell through,” she said, and I didn’t know what she meant. Daniel had pawned her VCR. She’d tried to get a restraining order against him but the judge refused. Her current boss had paid himself a bonus and had stiffed her. “I don’t think he intended to rip anyone off,” she said quickly, “but he does have diabetes and I wonder if that can impair your judgment, but still it’s so unfair, just when I’m getting my act together.”
It was all one sentence, and it was hard for me to concentrate through the pain enough to hear her voice. I told her I was fine, I was fine, everything was fine, and after we hung up, I realized I was gushing sweat.
There was no one to check in on me. That felt normal.
What would I write if I had no time left? In pain, sweating, clutching at my side, drinking water to eventually flush the stone out, I wrote a scene in a living room in Corona del Mar in 1974. A slick con man meets a mother and son and begins tempting them to move to San Francisco.
Twelve hours of work straight. The mother takes on some bad boyfriends. The son, who is snide and ill-kempt, is abandoned when she moves to New York without him. It is cliché to say something is written in a fever, but courtesy of my kidney stone this novel really was written that way. The fever
broke, and the kidney stone passed a few days before I finished the book. I wrote about seventy thousand words in eight days. It was raw, and I knew it needed a little rewriting, but there was something vital in it. I called it The Man Behind the Curtain.
When it was done, I carried it with me. I put it in front of me at the Thai place where I had lunch. I took it into Moe’s Books, as if introducing it to family it would meet more lingeringly at a reunion to come. I felt like I was walking on railroad tracks, and the tracks had begun to sing a little. Lindsay couldn’t come back soon enough—I’d rescued myself. This hadn’t been a waste of time, it had been incubation.
One of those nights, I dreamed it was twenty years in the future. I was in an open contemporary kitchen with barstools and on one side a dining room and the other side a living room. Lindsay was making breakfast. She looked much the same, still hennaing her hair red, but she was dressed in a business suit and her face was fuller, and she had wrinkles under her eyes. A girl, thirteen, got a yogurt from the refrigerator. She looked almost exactly like a young version of Lindsay, but more awkward, all knees and elbows. She was talking. I couldn’t concentrate on what she was saying. I blurted out “Suzannah” and as she looked at me comically, about to say something she’d said a thousand times before to me, I was awake.
I couldn’t tell if this dream was cruel. I said to myself, even before I was fully conscious, “Don’t give up.”
* * *
—
When Lindsay came back from her trip, I gave her the manuscript. I explained that unlike whatever involuted dream story I’d been writing, this was urgent. I’d tapped into something new. She put it on her desk. Every day, I noticed that it was still there. Finally, I saw it in a manila folder on my work chair.
I asked her what she thought. With discomfort, she said she hadn’t read it. She’d thought about it, but she couldn’t bring herself to open it. “The thing is,” she said slowly, “when you talk about your writing, you’re starting to sound like your mom talking about her business opportunities.”
It was a remarkably targeted kind of strike. I was livid. When I’m livid, my temperature drops. I almost whispered, “How dare you judge me.”
She nodded. “Yeah. I wish I didn’t. But I do.”
* * *
—
It was already late August and Lindsay was moving to Boulder in September. The plan had been for us to go up at the same time, but that changed. It would take many maps and diagrams to find the source of the decision, because we were both very good at figuring out what the other person needed, then trying to bend ourselves to fit that, but the actual words came out of my mouth: she should go up first and I would stay in Oakland for a couple of months. I told her she needed to work on having compassion for the person she loved. She agreed.
We took down the watercolors and the music posters. She started saying goodbye to friends. I dismantled my shrine to writers my age who were published. She was changing how she did her makeup. I didn’t understand how to talk with her or touch her. And then Charles Blank called.
He was going to be in the neighborhood. I was that day at my ebb. I was still sickly and pasty from the kidney stone, and confused about everything else. I was a mess.
What, I asked, did Lindsay plan on doing with him? She said they would go to a café for lunch, probably. Be gone an hour or two. I faced this impassively. It seemed like such irony, I decided my only course was to meet him and try to find flaws in him that Lindsay never would, because after he left, she probably would have fucked him and I would never know.
“When you move to Boulder,” I said, “will you—”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“You’re about to ask me about therapy.”
This was true. She was putting on that new makeup. She stopped, and looked from the mirror to me.
“The problem is, I’ve been thinking about it, and I don’t think it happened.”
“What didn’t?”
“Anything.”
I nodded.
* * *
—
When I laid eyes on Charles Blank, it was remarkable, because he showed up as advertised. Six foot five and cold and muscular and smooth, like a boa constrictor. He dressed the way I would have, if I looked like him and had money. He had a dead unblinking stare that was uncanny, in that it was like an ultraviolet, deep-space version of Lindsay’s icy-blue eyes. He and Lindsay looked alike, which delivered a stab of jealousy that was strangely worse than the possibility of them sleeping together.
Then he started talking. “I know Julien Temple” was the first thing he said to me. He hadn’t even said hello.
“Julien—”
“He directed Absolute Beginners.” I didn’t understand why he was telling me this. He pointed—I had the novel on a shelf. Charles had something to do with music video production and while Lindsay got ready to go, he named more people that he knew. I’d heard of some of them, and the ones I didn’t know, he explained their importance. He mentioned how much he got paid, and how he didn’t clean his own house or maintain the garden he had, but he paid people to do it. He told me how much he paid them, more than minimum wage, because he had money. He told me what kind of car he drove.
I’m not sure how I seemed to him. I remembered vaguely that long ago people had been intimidated by me. I wondered: Was he feeling insecure? Was I to him the man who had, even if only for a bit, won Lindsay? I wasn’t feeling insecure at all; in fact, I was past that, as insecurity suggests you’re afraid you can’t hold on to something. I was already resigned to Lindsay giving herself to him.
There she was, in the hallway, purse in hand, between her boyfriend and the man who disrupted the love of all boyfriends, and she was unreadable to me. Fables of the impervious lover.
I saw them off, closed the door, watched from our living room window as they walked down the alley to the car. For a moment, I thought about putting “Cuyahoga” on, but there were multiple reasons I didn’t, beyond how sad it would be for someone probably about to be cuckolded to try and ignite some remotely controlled sense of purpose or guilt or love in a woman who would never be swayed by sentimentality.
When she came back she didn’t have much to say about their time out. It’s quite possible nothing happened. I knew not to ask questions, because I didn’t want to hear “I don’t know.”
* * *
—
There’s only one moment left to mention before the move to Boulder. It might have been two or three in the morning. I was working late, having returned to the weird dream novel, because I didn’t know what else to do.
Our loft bed meant you had to climb up a rough-hewn ladder before you’d see the books and ChapSticks and face lotions by Lindsay’s side of the bed. I’d had a good work night, and my head was big with that momentary belief in myself when I peeled back the netting and put my hand on her hip. It was a gesture I made almost nightly, and she had in the last year taken to brushing it away in her sleep. Trying to seduce her had become like stealing apples off a tree.
She turned, opened herself a little. My palm seemed to dissolve as I brushed it across her skin. She was asleep still, but wherever I touched, her skin woke up with Yes. Every motion I made caused some need for more touching ignite in her. We were fucking, and she was now fully awake. I could feel her coming back into consciousness. She was weeping.
There were deep sobs like I’d never heard from her, sounds that were dark, animal keening, and yet her body kept encouraging me to go on. I’m sorry it all happened so fast. In a few moments, she came, but then she recoiled from me and pulled her hips away so I was no longer inside her and then she broke down into full, trembling, sloppy tears.
She wiped them off with her knuckles. I’d never seen her cry like this. She had promised me when we met that she never cried, and she’d kept her word until
now. I hovered over us, a young couple uniting one last time, and a small mercy had been them sharing this last supernatural coupling that was part of their secret vocabulary, and it is now extinct. So sorry, so so sorry. It’s over. We were sharing a story finally, but it was the story of our end, Camelot gone. I was telling it to myself now and she was, too, and that we agreed so silently made it worse.
Lindsay was making noises that weren’t words yet, but she was trying. Finally, she said, “Sea turtles.”
“What?”
“Sea turtles.” She choked back more tears. “They see a plastic bag in the ocean and they think it’s a jellyfish, and they eat it. And it kills them.”
I’d heard about that. But I was confused.
“That’s why I was crying,” she said. “I started to feel sad when you touched me and I needed to think of something that would send me over the edge.”
I kissed her eyes. I knew that her saying “sea turtles” was something I would repeat to myself. It would take a couple of drinks, but I would tell Owen, and eventually other friends I knew well enough, and they would know a fundamental sadness that didn’t belong to me. After a month knowing me and maybe a long country drive, women who had never met Lindsay would hear me say “sea turtles,” and they would understand the way things had fallen apart without need for further explanation.
* * *
—
A month later, I was at a party very late at night in San Francisco. I didn’t want to be there, but my ride had on the spur of the moment decided to drop acid, and all the buses had stopped running, so there was no way for me to get home. They were showing Jane’s Addiction videos on the ceiling. My voice was wrecked from the beginnings of laryngitis, again, and I’d had four cups of tea to soothe my throat. The tea turned out to be mushroom tea, so I was about to have an involuntary four to six hours of hallucinating.
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