“Don’t count on it. I see her as perfectly capable of presuming to run this Barry guy’s show and yours as well.”
I didn’t say anything, but the thought hung heavily on my heart.
EIGHT
It was four-fifteen in the morning, and I awoke with an urgent fear. My small apartment near the university was in a shady neighborhood, and I was regularly alert to the possibility of a break-in. Not that I had much to steal, but a desperate person on the prowl might not know that.
I heard something I was sure: a creaking, or maybe a window sliding open. To compound my worry, I had just had a most disturbing dream, which was fresh on my mind. I reached for a flashlight, and though I had no weapons, a baseball bat was in my closet and I dug it out. Slowly, I inched my way along in the total darkness. The classic wisdom, that it is darkest right before dawn, certainly seemed true right then, and that would be, if there was an intruder, to my advantage, because I knew the territory.
My compulsive behavior kicked in, and aware that stealth was critical, I began to chew on my tongue instead of anything noisy. Odd, how such obsessions are not conscious but triggered by urges that command compliance.
I stopped in the kitchen, where a tiny night-bulb in an outlet above the counter threw a meager glow into the room, let myself down slowly and silently onto a stool by the sink, and strained to listen. Nothing. Then a scratching sound and I stared at the window to the patio. The outside lampposts, there precisely for the purpose of safety, illuminated the paths and yards, and I could see shadows undulating, tree branches shivering in a steady breeze. Against my kitchen window, an overgrown bush was intermittently scratching its wild twigs on the glass pane.
A powerful surge of relief fused through me, and I dropped my flashlight onto the floor, simultaneously leaning my chin on the baseball bat, my fingers around its handle as if I were in a choosing-up game.
The damned dream! That’s what caused all the fright. There had always been wind, but my mood was brittle this time, my nerves like raw electrical circuits.
What did it mean? Why in hell did I have to suffer from such opulent nocturnal scripts, librettos that insidiously disturbed my sleep, when others were able to use the night for rest and replenishment? This latest was particularly menacing, and worst of all, incomprehensible.
I was alone on a skiff—which, by itself, was curious since I was not a seaman and had rarely been on water, though I once took a ferry with my mother when we visited Victoria in Canada—the waves were high, and I was obviously supposed to steer the boat toward a barely visible shore. A radio was blaring warnings: “Gale approaching, turbulent seas, caution to all small crafts. Head to land. Repeat: dangerous seas, head to land.”
I didn’t know how to steer the small vessel, and could feel the pitch of the deck beneath my feet while the surge of the ocean inundated the buffed parquet surface and soaked my clothes. I hung onto a rope that traversed the masthead and a rail mooring. The noise was thunderous, wind and water combining to create an eerie wail.
Most terrifying was a ghostly voice that suddenly boomed above everything: “The end! This is the end! Prepare yourself. You have trespassed. There is no safe harbor. You have nowhere to go. Prepare yourself!”
A mammoth flash of lightning careened from the clouds, and the world lit up like Times Square. I felt a searing heat, tried to scream, but no sound came—and suddenly I was awake; the house was inky black; there were curious sounds; I was being invaded….
I sat in my kitchen pondering the bizarre events, the false alarm intruder, the nightmare. Something in my past was unsettled, rattling its chains, desperate to break free, a dastardly insult I simply did not remember, but which would not lie dormant. What in hell could it be?
I told Abby my dream, and she said, simply and directly, “Go see a shrink. You have unfinished crap clogging your mind. A good psych person can work you through your unconscious pain, which comes to life in your dreams.”
Her judgment was impeccable, but I knew she was plagued by night invaders as well, and wondered if she explored them with her therapist.
Though I suffered at night, having Abby around illuminated my days. It was not that she was so constantly upbeat, burnishing disappointments to make them palatable; au contraire, she had her ups and downs as well, but did bring an excitement to our relationship, a novel creativity that spiced up each encounter.
She wanted to go to a lecture by iconoclast writer, Saul Bellow, by then elderly, and a Nobel Prize winner for literature in the 1980s. Of course I was delighted to join her. Sitting next to her, I was fascinated by her body gyrations; obviously she was aware that she could not constantly interrupt the famous man, but her internal critic was railing at some of the comments, and her energy was raw with what she saw and heard as offensive, or at least questionable. Bellow was an incisive critic of American city life, and he extended his rhetoric to include the body politic. I think Abby agreed with his politics, but could not tolerate his sarcasm about people; she was a true humanist, while Bellow was a true cynic.
“See,” she told me afterwards, “he has an enormous audience and commands the attention of the world, but he tends to have scorn for people, and sometimes his sarcasm is spread on with too large a brush. Not that all people are wonderful, but I believe we must ponder the human condition with hope, not derision.”
“You champion hope,” I said, “which is admirable, yet you are a hopeless romantic. What do you think of that?”
“Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. If I have to be hopeless about something, let it be romance.”
When she said it, her green-black eyes flashed with pride, and I could only hope, I told myself, that she was not implying that romance, and particularly our romance, was hopeless. I began to blink rapidly, another expression of my compulsivity when feeling stressed.
As was her strength, she read my concern: “It’s said with irony, and is momentous when both people in a relationship are hopelessly romantic.”
“Romance, by definition, always falls short,” I said, as if I were in on some eternal truth. “It’s a steady pursuit of something which is unattainable, like perfection, as in the ‘perfect’ orgasm.”
“I agree,” she told me. “It is what keeps us in the hunt. But, then, don’t you see, that is exactly what hope is: the unrelenting pursuit.”
“Then it isn’t really hopeless at all.”
She smiled, a mysterious, ineffable smile, and stuck her finger in my rib.
NINE
The modern novelist, Cormac McCarthy, flouts the rules of writing, sentences without verbs, gerunds by themselves, no quotes, no credits for dialogue. Yet, somehow, for him, it works. Gripping. Terrifying. Beautiful. A running narrative. Haunting. Laced with love. A tribute to survival.
Most of us could not get away with such iconoclasm. I was afraid to write that way, afraid the reader would revolt in frustration.
Abby was a bit more adventurous, sometimes writing like Dos Passos, with Whitmanesque list-making and run-on, nonpunctuated monologues.
Foolish for me to identify myself, or even Abby, with these highly regarded heroes of American literature! I cite them—and make a loose comparison—only because both Abby and I were beginning to progress in our skills, and it felt good to think of us in the same breath as the famous. She had a short story accepted in Story magazine, a publication which three years later went defunct. It was a tale of two women, lured by the monetary payoff, wanting to go into prostitution, but finding their emotional and moral makeup a deterrent. Their dialogue was the highlight of the tale.
I entered a contest in Hollywood for all kinds of writing, the winner to receive a thousand dollars and exposure to publishers. My submission was a novel I was working on, and though I didn’t win, I did get a call from one agent saying he would like to see the entire manuscript. Alas, I told him, it was not yet finished.
My bane: lots of starts, few finishes.
It was yet another com
pulsion—that I write, but in most cases having no idea where I wanted to go with my tales.
Since I was about to graduate from college and, since Mother, old school that she was, would want to cut off my monetary support, some source of income had to be found. She always made it quite clear that when an offspring turned eighteen, he needed to earn his own way, except while in some kind of formal education. Well, my formal education was almost over, so I needed a job.
I asked Abby about her research for her short story: perhaps I could go into prostitution. She scrunched up her nose at the thought.
“Not that I would care that much about you sharing your body with other women, but you have to stay up late every night; it could be dangerous, you could get caught, and it interferes with your internal rhythms.”
“Other women don’t bother you?” I asked, my feelings hurt.
“If they don’t bother you, they don’t bother me.”
“It wouldn’t be love.”
“Oh, do you think what we have is love?”
“I’m not sure. What do you think?”
“Don’t pass the buck.”
“No, really. Do we have something that could be called love?”
She hesitated then said in her whimsical way, which left me confused, “I treasure you, Clare. I love being around you. But maybe neither of us knows what love is.”
I shrugged. “Attraction, compatibility, a feeling of safety. I suppose it reaches a place where each person says, ‘I don’t want to live without you.’”
She grew serious and said, her voice completely different, as if coming from a mountaintop, “We are both wounded. Until some of that old stuff is exorcised, I don’t think either of us is free enough to devote energy to another person full time. Dating like we do is fine, but then we go home to our own private demons, suffer through our separate nighttime onslaughts. I don’t know how it would work if we melded, how one could tolerate the other.”
She was almost in tears.
Her pain saddened me, and I said, “You’re too smart. I know you’re right, but I don’t want to believe it.”
She suddenly laughed, so facile how she changed moods, and said, “Believing something is your choice. When George Gershwin died young, on July 11, 1937, novelist John O’Hara was quoted as saying, ‘George Gershwin died today, but I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to.’”
“I believe the part about each of us having histories that plague us, but I’m not sure that two heads—and hearts—aren’t better than one in confronting them.”
“Could be,” she said off-handedly, “but then, we could drag each other down as well.”
“Why does the past have so much power over the present?”
“Because we let it. We don’t defeat it. We hold onto the memories hoping they’ll change. But they won’t without a lot of hard work.”
“Getting back to that hopeless thing we talked about,” I said, “for me, if I can’t cast off my old hurts, it’s a condemnation of my future, and probably the same for you. Some of my debris is beyond memory. We end up dragging around a millstone wherever we go, and after years we become deformed by the weight, defeated by our ancient burdens. Doesn’t seem fair.”
“I’m not known for my psychology skills, but someplace it was written that old pain can be discarded through making oneself aware. Awareness gives us choice.”
“That’s what therapy is all about, helping us to become aware.” I paused, and added, “I wonder if that awareness applies to the unconscious as well?”
Abby smiled her beautiful perfect-teeth smile (yes, her parents certainly monitored her dental care), and said, “Both of us would kill to be free of our nightly anguish.”
“Awareness,” I mused. “How can we make ourselves aware of the secrets imbedded in our dreams?”
“That’s a secret in itself.”
“But one that clamors to be revealed. Or else we live our whole lives in pain.”
She said, shoving me lightly in the chest, “I’ll help you if you help me.”
I loved that, but in my typical obsessive style, her words caused me to start gnashing on my tongue with my left-side molars.
TEN
Now, in my thirty-first year, I look back on my early twenties with amusement and wonder. Things have changed, and I want to reconstruct the serpentine path that brought me to where I am—a path that I hope to show will be disturbing, exhilarating, eerie, uncanny in some respects, and ultimately extraordinary.
Another person intruded into Abby’s and my life at about that time. He was also a writer wannabe. His name itself ought to have given us pause, but, for a reason that will become clear, we were more focused on his mannerisms.
“Ken Prism” is how he introduced himself, “Ken, short for Kentucky.”
He had a tic on the left side of his face that pulled his mouth up toward his ear every several seconds, so radically that it tended to camouflage his words. He was not shy, did not presume we wouldn’t notice, and said bluntly, “I have this facial tic. Hope you won’t be put off by it.”
Abby, more forward than I, said, “If you know it, why do you do it?”
“Can’t help it,” he said with a little laugh, the kind one might presume was to cover embarrassment, but with him seemed defiant.
“I know about that,” I said. “I have can’t-help-its too, plenty of them.”
“Yes,” Abby said, less conciliatory than I, “but yours disturb you, and his seems to be his signature.” She turned to Ken and said, “Odd that you would want to broadcast your affliction with pride.”
We had just finished another of our Writers’ Guild meetings, and were standing on the sidewalk in front of the mammoth sweep of steel that framed the entrance. It was chilly and breezy, but none of us seemed to notice.
“No pride,” he said, suddenly subdued. “I am up front about it because it is obvious. Can’t be hidden, can’t be ignored, so why not address it right off?”
“I appreciate that,” I said.
“Maybe,” Abby said with cool detachment, “if you didn’t announce it, you might decide to curtail it. Nobody else is making your face twitch. One way or another it is in you, your decision, conscious or not, your choice.”
“In therapy my shrink has told me that many times. Guess I haven’t reached the place where I can absorb it.”
I was beginning to wonder what was with Abby. She was on the edge of hostile to this man, her language challenging, quarrelsome. I knew her to be volatile, but not so clearly critical. On his part, he was not so much contentious as he was self-effacing, his explanations humble, even apologetic.
“You may want to leave this topic,” I offered, “but I am curious about one thing: do you have any clue about the basis for your tic? I mean I have all kinds of lingering afflictions whose sources I keep trying to excavate.”
His eyes seemed to wander for a moment, travel distances, cross great prairies, soaring peaks, flowing waters—he seemed, all at once, eons away, in a land of private pain.
“My father comes to mind,” he said softly. “An uncompromising man. Mother, who was ultrapleasant and rarely opposed her husband, took me to an optometrist for what seemed a fatigue issue. I blinked a lot, and the doc said I had an astigmatism. He gave me exercises to strengthen the eye muscles, told me I had to consciously stop myself from blinking. I remember my father slapping me if he saw me indulge in my ‘habit,’ so I labored to erase it. My memory is sparse, but I seem to recall that I beat the eye-blink habit by replacing it with my lovely eye-catching tic.”
“Ah,” I said. “Another parental casualty. Abby and I know about that.”
Kentucky Prism was a tall man, well over six feet, slim as cardboard; he could have been anorexic, though that compulsion afflicted women more than men. He was gaunt, pale and rather anemic looking, and compounded by his facial spasm, it made him a creepy spectacle at best. Paradoxically, when he shook hands, a muscular strength was apparent.
Wh
en he spoke, he leaned over and looked down at us, seemed curved like one of those rubber Gumby dolls. “I haven’t seen my father in five years, which is just as well. I think he may be in prison—embezzlement or something like that.”
“What do you write?” Abby asked, abruptly changing the subject.
“Nothing yet. I’m just getting started. Well, I’m in a class through UCLA Extension and the writing instructor has us do exercises. Essays, character studies, short—really short—fiction, even poetry if we want.”
“I took a couple of those,” I said.
We were walking toward our cars in the parking lot across the street. The wind had picked up and I was consciously aware of the cold. As we reached our car, Abby closed out the conversation.
“Maybe we’ll see you at the next meeting.” She turned away from our new colleague and stood by the passenger door. It sounded like a dismissal to me.
He smiled wanly, looked at me, and said, “Thanks. Glad to walk and talk with you.”
“Likewise,” I said.
In our auto, I turned to Abby and asked, “What was that all about?”
At first she simply stared out the side window, then, after a moment, looked at me and said, “My cousin, my father’s dear nephew, the rapist, had a tic. Guess I was being triggered. Wasn’t the same, but enough to set off old alarms.”
“Does he look like your cousin?”
“Uh-uh. Just the tic. His was the nose, always crinkling it up, as if he had just smelled shit. When he attacked me, hovered over me, he kept doing his Bugs Bunny bit, as if…,” she stopped for an instant, overcome by what seemed a crushing swell of grief, then added softly, acridly, “as if I smelled like shit.”
“Ah,” I said, fully aware that rape was considered an act of aggression rather than sex, and appreciating the sting in her memory. I was quiet for a time, respectful of her mood.
Finally, when it seemed appropriate, I said, “I’m curious: where is that cousin now?”
“Dead, for all I care. No, he lives somewhere on the west side. He’s a freak. I mean he doesn’t hang out much with anyone. In abject poverty. I guess in that sense he’s paying for his trespasses.”
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