I Will Be Complete

by Glen David Gold

  I was lying on the concrete floor, looking at the ceiling, where they were now projecting a movie called Greaser’s Palace, a surreal retelling of Christ’s life set in the Old West. I was thinking, “Lindsay, you won’t even deal with your life,” and she felt like a coward to me. I would have to deal with my mom, whatever that meant, because I wasn’t a coward, to show her how adults behaved. The whole time, I was shivering and spasming with the onset of the flu. I was feeling righteous self-pity.

  Jean was there. She was still associated with the Berkeley Psychic Institute. She was still leading people through past lives. She crouched down and asked how I was.

  I whispered: terrible. Lindsay was in Boulder. She’d been there less than a week before she broke it to me. She was seeing someone else. She was already in love. She promised to write me a letter explaining why she’d ended it, but weeks had gone by. She was throwing herself into a relationship, and was that what I’d been to her, too? It hadn’t been fate that made her leave Paul for me—it had been convenience. My emotions were on the outside of my body. Plus, I added, I was taking a mushroom trip I didn’t want.

  Jean had experience with bad trips, and she gave me some advice about surviving the next few hours. Find some ascorbic acid, like I was treating a cold. Actually, that worked better for acid, but at least I should know it would be over eventually. Tomorrow would be better.

  “Sorry about Lindsay,” she said.

  Sharply, because I couldn’t help myself, like it was something Jean had done, I said, “I thought she and I had a contract.”

  She shrugged. “Yeah, those things never work.”

  SCORPIO

  IT WAS SIX MONTHS LATER. I was going through a phase where I was especially mean. This was in my motorcycle days, when I had a blue BMW R100/7. I spent two hours a day at the gym rowing with my Walkman on, playing the Pixies at an unhealthy volume. My form was excellent, I was relentless and I was eager to find women to be awful to. As soon as I could stop crying. I was pale, my hair was long, and the light in my eyes was gone. People tended to advise women they knew to stay away. There should have been police tape around me.

  My friend Kirsten was getting married, and there was a wedding reception. She had known me for too long, and thought I was harmless. She had introduced me to a few girls. The reception was friendly, the June Berkeley light made everyone seem like they were dressed in white, and I’d planned to just come and go, but Darcy was there. Apparently I’d seen her before.

  She was small, like Audrey Hepburn, and hazel-eyed, and she wore strangely tailored clothing made from bizarre combinations of fabrics—though I know I’m remembering it wrong, I think of her wearing nylon and feathers, cotton and latex, wool batting fringed with cake frosting.

  Darcy held a glass of champagne, and another, and another. A great deal of the conversation was about whether we’d met before. She insisted we had, and during the party, she kept coming up to me, listing dates and places I thought she was making up, then leaving me in annoyance, which I found charming. Right before Halloween 1988, she’d passed me on Shattuck Avenue but I hadn’t said hi. Rose Street, August 1986, she’d been talking to Vincent, and I’d come up and said something to him about soccer players. Things like that, which as they piled up seemed like a funny ploy to keep talking.

  As I was leaving, she came with me to my motorcycle, and stood on her toes to be kissed goodbye. She kissed me again, and again, and again, pushing her jaw against my stubble. “That feels good,” she said. “Don’t leave yet. Wow, I feel that.”

  She had gotten a wisdom tooth pulled a month before, and the dentist had sliced a nerve, leaving her unable to talk at first. Sensation had started to return, but she still slurred her words and people always thought she was drunk.

  “Oh. Are you drunk now?”

  “No.”

  She was.

  She didn’t want to let me go, and eventually I left on my own, while she stood on the sidewalk, touching her fingers to her face as if pressing against me might have given it definition.

  * * *

  —

  Single friends are, to married people, like fantasy football leagues, and Kirsten thought Darcy would be interesting for me. “But be careful.”

  “She should be careful of me,” I said.

  “No,” Kirsten said, “I’m pretty sure you should be careful of her.” Darcy was bright and funny and a confidante, easy to tell secrets with, but she had angles to her. Years before, Kirsten used to have a nemesis named Inga. Inga was the thorn in her side. Inga was her Moriarty. She was German and she always wore black and she never smiled. For a year, Inga had been at parties, flirting with the men, saying rude things to the women, and—thankfully—leaving early. Sometimes with someone else’s boyfriend. Kirsten had never even seen her, and yet Inga had been spreading lies, some of them about her.

  Kirsten told me this, and then looked at me expectantly. “You don’t know where this is going?” She said she’d complained to Darcy about Inga, and Darcy said, “Oops. That’s me.”

  Kirsten had laughed. No way. Inga was German. She spoke fluent German at parties, sometimes to other German people, sometimes just to exclude clueless frat boys who addressed her in English. Darcy confessed that she was fluent in German, and spoke with a Ripuarian accent. When she was Inga, she wore a wig. She said that sometimes she was Paisley, and she was Irish, but Kirsten wouldn’t have seen her then, because Paisley only hit on girls.

  The women I have fallen for have little in common except high-functioning rationality. I like women who have been through dark alleys, but who have survived because of their backbone. Always, when it comes to paying bills or recounting how they got a speeding ticket just once, they are reliable.

  I’d recently slept with as many women as I could, which was made difficult because I still tended to collapse into fits of weeping three nights out of five. By the time I met Darcy, I was dating a woman named Colleen, who in turn was dating someone else, who was married. Colleen had made it clear that she would drop her man if and only if I was interested in commitment. It was an arms race of a relationship. Colleen was clever and rode a better motorcycle than mine, but there was something vulnerable and sexy in Darcy I wanted to touch.

  A week or so after the wedding, thinking about that lisp and the kiss against my chin, I took Darcy out. She hadn’t been on too many motorcycles before, which made me seem more exotic than I was. We rode through the hills of North Beach. Occasionally she would point toward an apartment and tell me who lived there, and what terrible things they’d done.

  We went to a bar. She’d had a bad break-up with a German guy named Hans. “I’m trying not to drink,” she said.

  I bought her a Guinness, which she drank through a straw, eyes on me the whole time.

  She said, “You bought me a drink.”

  “Yes.”

  “After I just told you I’m not drinking.”

  I nodded.

  “How sad.” She thought for a moment. “What’s your sign?”

  “Aries.”

  “All the Aries I know are rapists.” She drained the rest of her beer, then stared at me expectantly, like: “So, what are you going to do about that?”

  An hour later, we were back at her house, trying to be quiet in the way people with roommates are always failing to be quiet, and she said she didn’t fuck on a first date while I undressed her.

  She whispered, “Oops.”

  Nude, Darcy’s body seemed to glow, not brightly, but from sorrow. Her slumped posture, the way she could hardly meet my eye, was an aphrodisiac for me. She was tiny and fragile and seemed relieved to know what was about to happen, and at the same time disappointed that this was happening again.

  “Boys are awful,” she said. A moment later she said, “Because they never know how to make me come.”

  That was a challenge. I
held her arms behind her back. Both wrists fit in one of my hands. She responded by relaxing into full relief at a stranger having understood her.

  * * *

  —

  We had another date, which consisted of her showing up at my place. I was poor, and couldn’t take her out to dinner. She was unemployed and she had time on her hands. She drove a rust-colored diesel Peugeot the size of a fishing boat. She carried in her chaotic rice-sack-and-sisal purse a videotape which she demanded we watch, Betty Blue. It was her favorite movie, she said, and she tried to watch some of it every day. It was a French film about a crazy woman who needed to fuck a lot. After we walked back downstairs, she shoved me against my garage, bit me, said, “I hate you,” and drove off.

  She kept insisting we’d met at Rose Street. But when she described the place, it felt like a perversion of what I’d thought of it. To her, it was just another group of people who thought highly of themselves and their relationships. After I tried to insist that no, it was a place where people actually were a little larger-than-life, she said, “I kissed Vincent.” And this was before Hannah had even left, she said. While Vincent was insisting he had some kind of moral backbone, she continued, he was making out secretly with girls. She said it triumphantly, like she was pointing out roaches in a diner I’d loved. Also: maybe it was a lie.

  She was dating a few other people now, but she’d—well, she hadn’t really broken up with them so much as started to ignore their phone calls. The last was a man named Erik. “He tries to keep up but he’s not on my level.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He believes everything I tell him.”

  On the third date, she and I were grinding, clothed, on my futon, and she said, “I have to tell you my rule. If you fuck me three times you have to marry me.”

  I found this amusing.

  Afterward, she said, “Oops.”

  * * *

  —

  Darcy said, “You realize I’m bad, don’t you?”

  “You’re not bad.”

  She smiled patiently. “I’m pretty bad. I’m really mean sometimes but I’m lucky, and at least I always have people to talk to in airports.”

  When she was on the phone, she sometimes opened the dictionary and tried to use words from that page in conversation to see if the person noticed she kept using words beginning with “ro—”.

  She asked to read my stories while I made dinner. I walked back into the bedroom to ask her something. Her jeans were undone, and she was masturbating while reading. As if waking up from a daydream, she said, “Oh, hi.” She explained, “When I look at art I get excited erotically. It’s like making a new friend. That’s how I feel when I’m reading your stories.” As we ate dinner, she kept coming back to the stories, with approval. But she warned I had a big ego. “Not that you think you’re great. It has to do with taking up space. You take up a lot of space. You need help with that.”

  She wanted to see old pictures of me. I did that unveiling of my life, without actually feeling much. Here’s when we were rich. Here’s me in San Francisco. Here’s me at Thacher. Here’s my mother, who has become someone I don’t know how to deal with. This is Lindsay, whom I’d loved.

  “Tell me about Hans,” I said, and she ignored me.

  She went back to an old photo taken in my childhood bedroom. Me, my mother, and an infant whom I didn’t recognize.

  “That’s me,” Darcy said. I laughed, but she was shaking her head at me like I’d just let her down. “No, seriously, that’s me.” She wasn’t talking about the baby. Instead, she pointed at the wall of my bedroom, the collage of posters from the Balboa Island hippie emporium.

  My mother had cut them up so that, for instance, the bassist from the Banana Splits, all Day-Glo cartoon, was superimposed over a Denison’s Chili advertisement. And right behind my bed, there was Dennis Hopper on his motorcycle, with balloons now behind him. Very small, and actually impossible to see in the photograph, was a child’s hand reaching for the balloons. And yet Darcy had seen it.

  “There,” Darcy said. “That’s my hand.”

  Her parents had a poster company back when she was a kid. One of the posters was her and her brother and a huge array of balloons. And there it was, behind me in the photograph. As a child I’d unknowingly fallen asleep every night with a little piece of Darcy in my room.

  It could be magic. I wasn’t sure about things like that.

  I was waiting for her to calm down. She was capable of having long, complicated, normal conversations with strangers, but the things she said to me were becoming like a series of tests with multiple choice answers, any of which could suddenly be wrong, and it was like the testing agency was run by magpies.

  “What do you think?” she asked once.

  “About?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “About what?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “No, about what?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What do I think about what?”

  She nodded. Not only did she want an answer, but she wouldn’t answer my question or tell me what her question was.

  Finally, she said, as if this answered anything, “It depends.”

  “On?”

  “It depends.”

  “In the sense of what? Sometimes but not other times?”

  “Is that what ‘it depends’ means?”

  I stared at her with a sickly feeling of antagonism. The charm of her forty-five-degree answers had worn off and I’d woken up in the middle of a game I didn’t particularly like. “One day you’re not going to answer me and it’ll be over.”

  “I guess it’s over,” she said, and was up and out of bed. She was out the door with a slam that made the air in the room pucker. I heard her car drive away.

  Maybe five minutes later, I heard her car driving back. She ran up the stairs, threw her bag on the floor, and said, “You don’t love me.” She stripped off her clothes, and while she was on top of me, with each downstroke of her hips, she chanted, “He doesn’t even love me, he doesn’t even love me,” until she came.

  * * *

  —

  It’s hard for me to account for what my response was to any of this. “Two parts Holly Golightly, one part strychnine,” I said, often, like that explained anything. I felt pretty much nothing at any given time, except in rare moments where it penetrated through the layers of bark that had grown over me.

  Once, my mother called while Darcy was there, studying me quietly. After I hung up, Darcy said it was like I’d left the room. It made her sad to think I was doing something that flattened me out. She herself had a great relationship with her parents. She seemed to talk to everyone in her family at least once a day. She asked her mother for advice, she and her sister called to triangulate the advice they’d gotten from their mother. Her father was hilarious and loving and a bully whose approval I could see her embracing.

  She wondered why we never visited my mother. I started explaining by asking Darcy how her childhood was. All I got at first was a slow shake of her head. Her mouth was like a line segment.

  “Sharing stories isn’t something you trade back and forth,” she said. “Most people do, but not you,” she said. “You bleed people for information, analyzing them until there’s nothing left.”

  “That’s not what I do.”

  “It’s exactly what you do.”

  Did she know something I didn’t? I didn’t trust my mother, but this was a new person to recount evidence to, and perhaps come up with a new conclusion. I told her about the bonds I’d signed over to my mother that she’d never repaid. I knew the money wasn’t important, but at least I knew how to count it.

  I told Darcy about Daniel eating Lindsay’s Valentine candy. She said, “Of course he was a junkie. Junkies love candy. Everyone knows that. It’s not like Lindsay w
as an oracle or something. You still love her.”

  “The story’s not about Lindsay.”

  “Every story is about Lindsay.”

  My fingertips were like plastic when I touched Darcy. I never read her mind. For a brief period I’d thought I knew how my life was going to go, and now I didn’t. When Darcy said something awful, I took it as a challenge to actually feel. My depression was now a part of me as much as my crooked nose and my urge to write. It was a part that Darcy couldn’t touch. I read a line in a book about Picasso at eighty, “His face had lost the capacity for joy,” and I felt that described me, like a medal pinned to my chest.

  I wondered what it was like to be angry. I tentatively tried yelling at Darcy now, as it seemed to me that even a reasonable person would get angry at her sometimes. As I yelled whatever it was, I was thinking, “This is what yelling is like and it’s awful.”

  The effect on her was immediate. She apologized. She became docile. There was a hot, simmering silence between us, just as unfinished and sickly as the yelling had been. What was it like to feel a revelation? Did anger lead anywhere?

  I told her how Daniel and my mother had met. The eviction, the scummy part of town, the mattress. Her letting him smoke crack while they drove. And then I waited.

  “Oh, come on,” Darcy said. “Lindsay would have done the same thing.”

  “What?”

  “That ‘Oh, I’m so psychic, we have a connection, we’re so mysterious’ bitch would have sucked their dicks, too, and you know it.” The look that came with this was angry and dry-eyed.

  After a few seconds ticked by, I said something. I said, “I love you.”

  She said, “Why?”

  It was actually a great question. I don’t think anyone had ever said anything so mean to me. What she’d said was from a place in the spectrum so far past “bitchy” and into the ultraviolet of nihilism that I don’t think we have a word for it. But I felt something. It was like a signal from a galaxy so far away it was only theorized about, but it was an actual feeling, and so I loved her.