Kat and I noticed each other almost simultaneously, recognized one another a moment later. She existed. Her dyed hair concealed secret ex-hairstyles. Her eyes looked punched-in with eyeliner. She locked on my gaze hard, then looked away. Our personalities were no longer circumscribed by text, they were here in the physical world amid smoke and misshapen humans. We closed the space between us, meeting at a table with a guttering candle.
"You came," she said.
"Hi, Kat."
"And to the east coast, too."
"Yeah, weird. Meeting old, you know, people," I said.
"You're finally a real person again." She seemed to be making herself smile. "Once I got past the listings for retirement communities in Idaho, I was able to track down the real Cedar Rivers. But I never asked you where you were living."
"Silicon Valley. That sounds pretentious. Palo Alto or thereabouts. I work for this medical tech company. You already know that. From my email. You got it off the site. What about you? You moved, right? I got that postcard you sent from New Mexico years ago."
"Arizona. Yeah, after the southwest I got into school back east here. So I've moved around."
"Your mom?"
"Still in Arizona. She married a guy. Her third marriage."
"And George?"
"He died about eight, nine years ago. One of those random highway snipers. He wasn't the guy who was hit, though. He was driving behind the guy who was hit. So he hit the guy who was hit. It was in the news for a day. There's no pleasant way to spin it."
"Wow. I'm sorry to hear that. You never think of that kind of thing happening to an actual person," I said.
"You have no wedding ring. I thought you'd be married."
"Engaged."
"Congratulations."
"Thanks. Why are you in Albany I meant to ask. You traveling for business?" I said.
"Sort of. I was up here at an artist colony."
"Really. I don't know what that is."
"It's a place where artists go to get work done."
Kat traced fake wood grains on the Formica with an index finger. I was pleased to see she still wore black fingernail polish.
"You had a book of short stories published," I said.
"You've never heard of it. It came and went. Got a couple reviews."
"You're famous now, though, right?"
Kat laughed. "Name one other person who had a debut collection of short stories come out last year."
"I'd like to read it."
"You can get it online. Don't pay attention to the onestar reviews. Fuck, Cedar. I must be on drugs is what it feels like here. So, your job. I read a little about your company. Medical technology? I didn't really understand most of it."
I cleared my throat. "We develop web-based medicalimaging technology. You've seen the ads probably. Like when you see an actor playing a surgeon looking at a monitor, performing surgery on a patient thousands of miles away. That's a crude way of showing what we do. So far it's mostly sci-fi. I visit hospitals, give presentations. My title is chief medical officer, if you can believe it. I was just in Iceland. They're interested in hosting telemedicine sessions with clients from Europe and the States. Like I said in my email, boring. Or maybe it's exciting, I don't know. The company is taking a beating on the Street, looking for another round of financing. I travel a lot. But enough of that. A book! The one you're writing. I always assumed you'd be a painter."
"I started writing fiction as an undergrad, wrote a novel that's absolute shit. Went to grad school out here, got my MFA."
"That's Masters in ..."
"Fucking and Alcoholism. Fine arts. It's where unpublished writers study under published writers, hoping to figure out how to get published. If they're really lucky they get jobs teaching other unpublished writers."
"Oh yeah? Who'd you study With."
"Some great people. Rick Moody."
"Never heard of him."
"Ever see The Ice Storm?"
"Vaguely rings a bell."
"That Frodo guy was in it."
"I guess I missed it."
"Sigourney Weaver?"
"I don't know. Jesus, now I have to read your stuff. This new book of yours."
"I came out here to write about what happened that summer."
"That's a vague way to put it."
"I'm not nearly as vague in the book."
"I guess that would make for a good story. I need another drink. I'm speaking for myself here. How're you doing, drinkwise?"
"This is just one in a series of cocktails."
I went to the bar and ordered another round. There was the exit, beckoning. Just walk toward the men's john and keep going out the back door. Thumb a cab to the airport. Sleep on a bench with airport CNN blaring overhead. I observed myself ordering another drink against my better judgment. Apparently, instead of catching the next flight to the Bay Area I was going to keep talking to this woman who possessed my most painful memories. When I returned to the table, I set my drink down, already half-finished.
Kat said, "So, your wife."
"My fiancee."
"That's what I meant."
"Her name is L. She has a website written from the point of view of our cat."
"You own a cat together?"
"I meant her cat."
Kat changed the subject again. "So, I asked you to come here because my editor says I need you to sign some legal bullshit promising you won't sue me when the memoir comes out."
"You're afraid there's material in your book that's slanderous."
"It's more complicated than that," Kat said. "Parts of it I wrote from your point of view."
In Kat's hotel room, I stepped over a case of wine and cleared a half-finished Sunday Times crossword from a chair. She offered an insincere apology for the mess. On the desk were the contents of a sack lunch: a cellophanewrapped sandwich, an apple, carrot sticks. Some books In Cold Blood, something by Philip Roth. Her clothes all over the place. On the table sat a PowerBook. Toiletries and coffee supplies, a printer, a sleeping bag, CDs in sleeves, masking tape. Loose change. A lone tampon clawing its way out of its applicator. A pack of spearmint gum.
"I have to set up the printer," she said, digging through her laptop bag for a USB. "You want some vino? I don't think they're going to let me on the plane with that whole case unless I check it."
"Corkscrew?"
"Night stand."
I uncorked a bottle of red and got a couple of hermetically sealed glasses from the bathroom, where some hosiery hung from the shower-curtain rod. There was me looking like shit in the mirror, a big dandruff chunk suspended in my ruffled bangs. Nice one. I picked it out and flicked it into the sink. In the next room the laptop loudly announced the end of its hibernation.
"Kat, listen, I'm one quarter drunk. I take no responsibility for the shit that comes out of my mouth."
Kat said, "I've been talking to you for years in my head. I've even said precisely this to you before, except to myself."
"Look, I don't know why I lied, but I don't really have a fiancee. Well, she was at one point."
"Did you lie about the website? With the cat?"
"No, the cat's real. If you have wireless here I can show you."
Kat's compact and stylish printer began turning blank pages into remembrance. When three or four pages had gathered in the tray, she handed them to me and said, "This is the beginning."
It didn't take me long to get through them. There was the microscope incident, little embellishments like the Popsicle mold and Mr. Warner's ridiculous scolding. Kat reclined on the bed watching the Weather Channel's swirling Doppler orb of digitized blizzard. I read in the chair, my chest aching. I scanned the room quickly for a receptacle into which I could vomit if it came to that. On this thing she called a memoir were hung pieces of my recollections like little skinned animals. I wondered if I should cut through the niceties and just threaten the lawsuit right now. I never mowed the lawn of a guy named Mr. Dickman. My parents never caugh
t me smoking, much less staged some kind of intervention with pictures of blackened lungs. She'd gotten some things right, like the mood at the end of the school year and those two wettened words she had spoken into my ear at the locker. The gentle roll of I'm ovulating, the potential it implied.
"You're a good writer," I said.
"I don't want to sound like a dick, but I don't need your critique. I just need to know if you're going to sic a lawyer on me."
"I don't read a lot of fiction."
"It's a memoir," Kat said.
"I meant I don't read much that reads like fiction. I read XML guides, medical journals. The Wall Street Journal."
My phone vibrated in my pocket. I extracted it and saw it was L.
"I've got to take this," I said. "Are you going to be up for awhile?"
"Is it your fake fiancee?"
"I'll be right back." I waited until the fifth ring, the last before voicemail, when I was in the hall, to press the talk button. "Gorgeous," I said, "how are you?"
"So who are you fucking in Albany?"
"I told you in my message. It's the snow. It's coming down thick and I'm stranded at some hotel by the airport. I'll try to get the first flight I can tomorrow." I rounded a corner, passing an ice machine processing cubes.
"I don't understand why you didn't go through LaGuardia or JFK."
"We got a killer deal from our travel agent. You know we're being hard-assed about keeping expenses down before profitability. Ridiculous, though, I know. I probably saved the company two hundred bucks coming this way."
"Are you in your room?" L said. I pictured her voice as a seismic green line, a sequence of pitches mapped on a monitor. In my head a team of scientists assembled around the printed output and pointed at the various peaks and valleys demarcating the tone of her voice. She's disappointed in you for leaving your message on her land line, which you both know she never picks up, they noted.
"I was getting some ice when you called. Now I'm in my room. Did you get the package I DHL'ed from Reykjavik?"
"Yes, I tried it on. It's scratchy."
"A hundred percent Icelandic wool. It's all fish and sheep there, as far as industries go. Some aluminum, which is a controversy. Environmental whatever. The sheep have done a number on the ecosystem, overgrazed the place. There's this island off the coast with these sheer cliffs, and grass growing on top of it. The farmers take their sheep out there and hoist them to the top with rope and pulleys to graze."
"I like how it looks. It's just scratchy."
"Wear it over something. It'll come in handy at Tahoe," I said, standing in my room in front of a suitcase as messy as a crime scene.
"We're still going to Tahoe?" she said.
"I guess I can cancel the reservations for that one."
"Your presentations went okay?" she said.
"You care?"
"I own ten thousand shares in your little company, remember."
"Right, well as a shareholder you'll be happy to know it went as well as could be expected."
"Do you want to jack off?" she said.
«I_,,
"You'll jack off when I tell you to jack off."
"Okay, hold on." I removed my jacket, took the phone with me to the bathroom, and leaned against the counter. "All right."
L said, "I'm in a hotel and the front desk gives me the wrong key. When I get to the room, it's already occupied. There are three black guys inside watching sports on TV, drinking beer."
I yanked my belt loose and wrestled my genitals out of my pants, lying my balls against the cool tile sink counter. My dick tried to decide whether it wanted to be hard. There were three little complimentary bottles lined up next to the mini soaps-shampoo, conditioner, moisturizing lotion-each bearing the name of a natural ingredient that likely provided no pharmacologic benefit. I noticed that the Kleenex dispenser had a sticker on it that stated it had been manufactured in Troy, New York. Well that's great. People should be proud to supply the world with easy ways to grab a tissue. I had no idea why sex was still part of what I did with L. I looked at my dick. It wasn't responding to the sexual fantasy she was breathing into the phone. I peeled the sticker off the tissue dispenser and affixed it to the head of my cock. Made proudly in Troy, New York. I faked my orgasm.
"Whoa," I said.
"Icelandair doesn't even fly through Albany," L said.
"Huh?"
"I thought you said you flew in to Albany from Reykjavik."
"I did," I said. "I flew in to JFK, then took this little twin-engine thing up to Albany. I know it's a messed up itinerary. That's what my admin was able to book for me."
"You're such a fucking liar," she said, her voice catching me with that intern in my office again.
"Well, I didn't even jerk off."
"Fuck you, Cedar."
"Fuck you, too, L."
Kat knocked. I hung up, got my penis back in my pants, and opened the door. Kat handed me a new stack of pages. "This is the next chapter. You'll probably not find anything libelous in here. It's all about me."
I took the pages and stared at them for a moment, three black dudes still nailing my ex-fiancee in my head.
"Am I allowed to come in?" Kat said.
"Okay." Y.
Kat landed in the wheeled desk chair and rolled over to the window. She parted the vertical blinds and checked the snowfall. "How'd your conversation with your fiancee go?"
"Fine. I just lied to her about why I'm in Albany of all places. And I haven't even done anything wrong."
"That part will come," Kat said.
Oh, about twenty-two
years prior, on the other
side of the country, this
time with Kat narrating.
My father is holding my face under water in the bathtub. My cars remain above the surface, exposed to his slurred reprimand. I have stolen a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet and this is what I get for being a thieving cunt. My nose is pressed to the bottom of the tub, along the gray streak where the enamel has been rubbed away by years of shuffling feet. The faucet infuses the warm water with a countervailing system of cold. I know I'm going to die like this and to temper the panic I repeat the word Houdini, over and over in my head. My mother is screaming and the hand on the back of my neck loosens enough for me to struggle up for air. My mother smashes a perfume bottle on my father's head and the room is overtaken by the smell of cheap, astringent jasmine. As I rise from the bath fully clothed and soaked, he pulls himself into the corner by the toilet, into which he vomits, passing out with one arm draped over the bowl as though confiding an intimate secret to the fixture.
My mother. Her tall willowy body is worked over by cigarette smoke that susses the premature wrinkles from her glazed Californian skin. She was a backup singer in a band from the sixties whose songs are no longer heard on the radio. The Rose Petals. There she is shimmying onstage in a couple of archival videos. She is wearing a yellow sleeveless dress and white go-go boots. Her arms pivot at the elbows like human windmills and her hair, by her account, took two hours to prepare. Now she works as a secretary at an escrow-and-title company. She was once reprimanded for wearing white lipstick to work.
We live in the eastern part of Washington state. At the back of my classroom I rub the ridge of mountains on the three-dimensional map of the United States that divides my state into brown and green, hoping that someday I'll live on the green side. The ridge reminds me of the time my mother's friend Gail let me put my finger in her baby boy's mouth. He smiled and cooed, biting down with a pair of pink, toothless, grinding mountain ranges.
And in an instant, and gradually, and inevitably, and sadly, and full of fury, and accompanied by a storm of airborne silver ware, and beating the steering wheel and ciying, and saying out loud she could really fucking use some dope right about now, and after checking the balance on the savings account, and wearing her nicest dress purchased from the sale rack at JCPenney's, and swearing that if she had a gun things would end in a much
messier fashion, and stopping at a rest area to pee and looking again at the mesmerizing photos in her battered copy of Vincent Bugliosi's Helter Skelter, and singing along to Dolly Parton on the radio, and striking him in the face with a phone book, of all possible projectiles, and knowing she could really kick his ass right now because he could barely stand up you wasted fuck, and telling me to hurry get all my things don't bring anything stupid just what you need, and showing me the few bills in her wallet, and taking the even fewer bills from his wallet, and parking the car outside the club where she said women were paid to dance, and telling me to sit tight for a few hours with my Nancy Drew mystery, and after coming home from AA, and after coming out of the dancing place three hours later and three hundred dollars richer, and after eleven years of living with the cheap bastard whose secondary monthly expense was pull-tabs, and with her key in the ignition, my mother finally leaves my father and takes me across the mountains to the green side.
My mother gets two jobs, one as a maid at a hotel downtown, another as a waitress at a restaurant. I flatten her dollar-bill tips with a Vietnamese-English dictionary that came with our apartment, and line them up on her dresser.
My mother is a failure as a cook. When she asks me what my favorite thing is that she makes, I am being honest when I say, "TV dinners." She is a tragic baker whose cookies must be pried from the baking sheet with a butter knife. Making a marble cake is far too challenging; she simply mixes the white and chocolate powdered mixes together to avoid the trouble. Her Ore-Ida French fries have grainy, diy interiors and a freezer burned aftertaste. She makes one thing exceptionally well-asparagus quiche. When she invites men to stay over, men from AA usually, this is the dish she prepares. My understanding of asparagus is that it is only ever eaten in an eggy pie. I come to associate that funky smell of my urine with my mother's headboard banging into the wall separating our rooms. The men stay long enough for dinner, but I rarely see them at breakfast. I am an annoyance to them, something to be placated with coffee-flavored hard candies and quarters drawn magically from behind an ear. On some level I understand that the activity my mother is engaging in is sex, but I resist making a connection between the noises in the next room and the mashing together of genitals. To me it sounds like some heroic battle, like lion taming or bull fighting.
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