Me neither, I thought. But acting with mercy was part of my business. I looked at her again, noticing how her face was softened by a few extra pounds. She looked settled. The armload of greens couldn’t be just for her. She was taking care of someone else: not Gloria.
“She should have told you what was going on,” Sophie said. “I’m sorry. I can’t apologize for her, but I can say it for me.”
“She tried,” I said.
“She does that.” She left my table. I watched her disappear into the crush of people that always packed the market. In a moment, I couldn’t tell her apart from any of the others. She was a stranger again, in dull earth tones, taking organic vegetables home in her bike panniers to cook with care from scratch because one small, thoughtful act might avert an apocalypse, if you did it with kindness; it’s true, you could prevent the worst. That’s where my money came from: reminding people of their power, the best thing inside themselves. In every tragedy might be a grain of love and in every love, disaster.
Pas de Deux
“And then he said, you know you’re the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really. And we were standing like this.” She moved close to me, really close. I could feel her breath. “Here, you be me, and I’ll be him.” She put my back against the wall, just to one side of the framed Degas print we’d gotten at a thrift store.
“And then he started, like, this.” She touched my shoulder, slowly pushing it against the wall with her body.
This is Amanda, who is just my roommate, I thought. She pushed against my other shoulder. “And then he did this,” she said. She didn’t check my face for a reaction.
Over my shoulder, next to my ear, the Degas ballerina held her foot in a perfectly balanced arabesque. The foot was pointed at my head, and I felt it like a loaded gun.
This is Amanda, and I only got to say her name once before she stepped into me, rose up onto her tiptoes, and bit my face, soft then hard so I could feel her incisors making impressions in the soft tissue over my cheekbone.
“He did this to me.” She held me behind the neck.
“What else did he do?” I asked, but my voice was getting sticky and her face was so close that I couldn’t see if she was smiling or not.
“Let me show you,” she said. We slid down the wall in a grand plié and she showed me, slowly, what he did to her.
Shine of the Ever
Mating
The year before the year I quit drinking was one of the last, best years of my life.
The drinking wasn’t great, obviously. But everything else was. It was 2006 but it felt like 1998, just before everyone discovered my hometown and Portland became a “destination.” That year is special to me because it was the last time the city and I were really together, in the way that couples and families and best friends are together.
Every moment from that year is like a pin on the map in my heart. It’s a red thumbtack on the corner of 19th and Jefferson, for example, marking a place where I once had a sandwich with someone who left for Istanbul the next day.
Like Portland, he was someone I loved and will probably never see again.
The patio where we drank syrupy root beers and teased each other about being young and dumb is gone now. It’s condos. Future condos, anyway. The sign out front says each unit starts at a very affordable half-million—each.
The sandwich was a Reuben, for the record. We split the pickle.
Since I got sober, Portland has done nothing but break my heart. I stay. It’s where everything that ever mattered happened to me. The last year of my drinking, I was twenty-three, but still not ready to grow up. Neither was Portland. The city and I were flexing, testing our limits. We were both at the end of what felt like very long and sheltered childhoods.
In retrospect, everything I said and felt and did at twenty-three was not unique, except in that it happened to me. Who wasn’t a mess in 2006? I believed I’d never get any older, back then. I didn’t believe that Portland or I would ever change. Every time another vacant lot filled up with high-rise apartments or another historic building was razed and replaced by a parking garage, I felt as if the world was ending.
I mean, it was. It kind of still is.
* * *
In 2006, I only ever met girls in bars. I’d just gotten dumped by my first real girlfriend: a straight girl, go figure, but those were easy to find. The Egyptian Room was the only lesbian bar left in Portland, and I didn’t go there. I was too young to know what I was missing. The E-Room closed in 2010 and was replaced by another, less awesome bar called Weird Bar. That’s when Division Street was still someplace where you could stumble along for blocks without seeing someone my age. There were a couple minimarts and a reptile and insect pet store which we hypothesized was probably a front for the mafia. (Which mafia was never clear, because we were too chicken to go inside and snoop around.) The E-Room is a fucking collage gallery now. It’s called Collage. They have monthly “clip-ins.” They sell framed pieces for hundreds of dollars—scraps of leather and expensive paper—and magazines about collaging. Curated art and craft supplies. Unbelievable. I have no idea how the fuck they’re still in business and the entire lesbian population of Portland couldn’t keep a fucking bar open.
Anyway, Division wasn’t where I did my hunting. When I was ready to get over Alison, I went to North Portland to find girls of my type.
I was still smoking then. Unfiltered Luckies. I locked my bike up in front of the Crow Bar. A girl worked there sometimes, and she was pretty, and she’d smiled at me once or twice. I ground out my cigarette under my shoe, exhaled the last breath of smoke, and stepped inside. I’d had my eye on this girl for weeks now, and it was time to make things happen.
In the empty bar, I’d have the red-felted pool table to myself. I had nothing to hide behind, no noise or people. I considered backing out. As much as I liked day drinking, it was easier to sneak in during busy hours, when she would be distracted, when she might not notice me watching, checking to see if she was straight or not. I heard a clink of glasses below the bar.
Yes.
I put a few quarters in the jukebox and got the triangle. That was one of the things I did in those days: I played a lot of pool and I always had a roll of quarters in my messenger bag. Most of the pool tables in town were garbage, because drunks leaned on them or stupidly burned them with cigarettes. They were uneven, out of true. You could only get good on a table if you got to know its quirks: the invisible hills and valleys in its felt, the way the center pocket couldn’t hold a ball with English on it, and the way the rails were quick or slow to move the cue to its return. I spent a lot of time playing with bent cues in dive bars all over town. I wasn’t great, but I knew which way each table’s bed was made.
The Crow Bar had a nice setup: free to play during off-peak hours. I could pace myself, make her come to me. I set the rack, cracked it. I lined up my first shot, pretending I wasn’t the only customer, and knocked around a game of nine-ball.
“Mind if I play winner?” she asked.
She had materialized at my elbow and offered me a pint of beer. Surprised me. I took it and handed her the pool cue. She bent across the table: three ball in the corner pocket. I looked her over. She was exactly what I wanted. I gulped half the beer and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. I felt loose, good-looking. There’s a reason they call it liquid courage.
“You’re going to whoop me, aren’t you,” I said.
“Absolutely,” she said. “I’m a real shark.”
Her name was Ada. She looked so much like Alison—the narrow nose, dark lashes, freckles—that I let myself forget she was a stranger. She was both familiar and fresh. I just needed to get the taste of Alison out of my mouth, clear my system. Ada would do.
That should have been it: a one-night stand with yet another pretty bartender I wouldn’
t call and didn’t mind never seeing again. I had a notebook of phone numbers that I “lost” or “found” depending on how lonely I felt. Something about Ada stuck with me, though. I liked her. She was sweet.
Our first time was amazing, and the second one was even better. That’s how hooking up is, and also why it never works: Sex is always better when the other girl’s in love with you.
Bed
On Ada’s birthday, her phone started ringing at like eight in the morning. We didn’t get out of bed to silence it until the fifth or sixth call. Around noon, it rang again, and she picked it up, held the power button until the screen went gray, and dropped it into the pile of her clothes by the foot of the bed. I rolled over; my head was on her pillow. I was trying to write a poem, but it was turning out to be more of a letter. I was bad at poems, anyway.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“My friend. Arthur.”
“How come you didn’t answer it?”
She sighed and pulled the covers up to her shoulders. A magazine, spread open at a Gucci ad, rested on her knees. The model’s pubic hair was waxed into the house’s logo. “He just wants to have coffee or take me out for birthday brunch.”
“You should go.” I sat up on one elbow. “We spend all our time at my place. You should hang out with your friends. Don’t you want to celebrate with them?”
She flipped the page of her magazine. Her phone beeped: a voicemail. She ignored it and kissed me on the shoulder. It was as if she was deaf to anything that wasn’t me. She started doing this every time we got together.
Her birthday was her personal new year, and Ada had made it clear she wasn’t interested in changing anything.
“You gonna call him back?”
“If I feel like it.”
I lay back, laced my fingers behind my neck. The bare dogwood branch outside my window shivered with starlings. “I just don’t want you to feel like I’m keeping you here. Plus, I didn’t know it was your birthday until yesterday. I didn’t get you anything.”
She flipped again. A whiff of perfume sample. “I want to be here. I want to be kept.”
I smiled at her, caught her eye. “I’m your present,” I said.
“We belong together,” she replied, smiling back. “I don’t want any distractions.”
The starlings lifted off together, a flapping, screeching net.
I asked, “What was your last partner like? Before me?”
She put her hands flat on the magazine, started to tear out one of the pages. “That was before I lived in Portland. His name was Greg, and we dated when I was going to Oberlin. We were in studio art class together.”
“You dated a guy?”
“Well, he wasn’t perfect,” she said. “He was from a nice family. Canadian. He spoke fluent French.”
I pictured Ada carefully sketching a reclining nude. I’d only ever seen people do that in the movies, always as foreplay. I tried to imagine Greg’s face. I tried not to feel weird about her attraction to men. Her identity was a red flag and it made me super nervous. Alison left me for her best friend, Stanley. She never even kissed a guy before Stanley. The whole two years we dated, she’d sworn that she was completely gay and not even curious about switching teams. She told me I was stupid to be jealous. Well, I was stupid, because I let her shame me into believing her. Look where that got me.
I was not interested in going through that, ever again.
“How long did you date Greg?” I asked.
“Just until I dropped out. It wasn’t a good time for me. I wasn’t a talented enough artist. Very depressing.”
“So, you moved to Portland, where it rains almost every day.”
She laughed. “I like the rain. And besides, now there’s you.”
I kissed her arm as she started to rip a second piece of paper. The glossy paper quivered, rippling as she tugged.
“Your turn,” she said. “Full disclosure.”
“Oh, it’s pretty boring. There’s not much to tell. Actually, that’s not completely true. The last girl I dated decided that she didn’t love me anymore. Left me for a friend of hers.”
“Names?”
“Whose?”
“Theirs,” Ada said. She aligned the pages, straightening the corners.
“Her name was Alison and his was Stanley. I guess they’re happy together, as happy as you can be, dating a guy.” I tried to laugh, but my throat was suddenly dry. The poem in my lap looked as if it was written in tally marks instead of language: just garbage.
Ada closed her magazine and settled against my chest. “Not happier than we are, though.” It was a statement, not a question.
“No, not happier than us.” Her curls tickled my neck. She pulled the quilt over our heads; the gray, warm dark covered us like a tent.
I Love You
We spent most of the winter in and around my apartment, which overlooked a boring section of southeast Belmont, before the cafes and PNW-inspired restaurants moved in. My rent back then was five hundred and fifty dollars a month. It had hardwood floors, a bedroom, pocket doors, and a view of Mount Tabor. My neighbors were older people who had been there since the 1980s. I was the youngest person in the building, young enough that I was the only one who didn’t have a player for the tapes the other tenants swapped in the laundry room “library.” I only had a binder of CDs. I didn’t buy a lot of music, because at the time the rent I paid was considered kind of high. Since then, it has more than tripled. I’m pretty sure my old neighbors are all out in the Numbers now. I’m just saying. I don’t live there anymore. Nobody I know does, but there’s never a vacancy. Explain how that works. Where the hell do all these new people come from?
At least the weather hasn’t changed. That winter with Ada, it mostly rained, but one day snow piled like popcorn in the gutters, and on another morning a white fog muffled the neighborhood so that we couldn’t even see the mattress company storefront across the street.
We were a we, an actual couple. We did relationship things. Ada went to her classes at Portland State, and I went to my library job, but we always met up at the end of the day. She didn’t want to spend time with anyone else, and I wasn’t bored yet, so it worked. She served me free beers when she picked up shifts at the Crow Bar. When school got too busy, she quit, and started bringing over a bottle of whiskey a couple times a month.
She didn’t want me to ever feel deprived or like I was missing out, she said. She didn’t want me to have a reason to go anywhere but home.
We went to places that are other places now. We shared beers at Blue Monk, which was a bar and music venue where you could hear actual good hip-hop and jazz musicians who didn’t play that gooey, elevator shit. The Blue Monk is called something else now, and there’s a line out front with a doorman and a velvet rope. The people waiting are all dressed up. Lines were never a thing, back then. I associate never waiting with that time of my life, because the timing was always just magically perfect. Anything you wanted, you could have right then: brunch, beer, a turn in the horseshoe pit. Delayed gratification didn’t exist, when I was twenty-three.
Ada and I kissed in bars that are too clean for me now and too expensive. It’s bizarre, when I go back now and try to approximate the proportions of the places I used to know so well. I went to one of my old dives a few years after it closed, and only the ceiling was the same. Pipes and drywall, peeling paint, that was all. Everything else, from the lighting to the tinted mirrors over each booth, was styled. The weird thing was, the place was styled to look like Old Portland. My Portland. They spent a fortune trying to do it too. The matching frosted globes that hung from the exposed rafters would run at least four hundred apiece. A matched set in such good condition must have cost a mint. The tables were tropical salvage. I had that feeling I was in a movie set of my own living room, where every object looked exactly like my personal possession but ni
cer, cleaner, and more appealing. I hate it. These designers put in a lot of effort to make things seem natural, but I think the only people who believe it are the ones who never saw the original. They don’t understand that this isn’t Portland anymore: it’s Portlandia. A theme park of the places we used to love.
If you have no point of reference, you are very easy to fool.
Ada had her own corner in my apartment now, but not her own key. We never went to her place. She transferred clean clothes into the bottom dresser drawer. Her sketchpads cluttered the foot of the bed. Her toothbrush leaned against mine in the glass. I let her get closer, telling myself that it meant something, that I could approximate the thing I’d already had and lost.
“Tell me about Alison,” she asked over coffee before work.
Stumptown was busy that morning; the stools around us crowded too close. The brassy-haired woman next to me stepped on my coat, tugging it off my chair to the slushy linoleum. I wasn’t prepared to have this conversation.
“I’d rather not.”
“It’s a simple question.”
“It’s private. Another time.”
She seemed to be more comfortable in loud places, though she herself was quiet. She’d first said I Love You at a Sleater-Kinney show, while we were squeezed together against the front edge of the stage. I didn’t believe it until she repeated it later into my ringing ears. She seemed to seek invisibility but then asked me awkward questions in public, cornering me. As though, if other people were listening, I was more likely to be honest.
“Was she pretty?”
I sighed. “In a cheerleader kind of way, I guess.”
“Blonde?”
“Not as pretty as you.” I stuck my finger into the foam of my latte, disturbing the heart-shaped leaf. “I’d really rather not.”
She pouted. In profile, she resembled a young Liz Taylor, her freckles the color of mud.
I said, “We can talk about something else.”
“Why? What’s so sacred about it? You said I could ask you anything.”
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