He wanted to celebrate the purchase and buy me a drink. “I bet this old Betsy has some stories to tell.” He winked at me. He could not believe his good luck, and he was flirting. The cold spring air seemed to take the shape of a promise, but then there was still the problem of the envelope under the front seat. In five years, I had removed it several times. I had thought of bureau drawers and safe-deposit boxes. I had even thought of getting Dixon’s address and sending it back. Again and again, I slid it under the seat once more unopened.
“Come on,” the boy said. “Let’s have a drink and tell some stories.”
“Really, I can’t,” I said. “I have to go somewhere.” I didn’t want to get to know him. I had meant to retrieve the envelope before I turned over the car, but, standing on the curb, signing the pink slip, I discovered it would be easier just to leave it there.
“Hey,” the boy said. “Look what you did. You made a sheep.”
“What?” I said.
“You made a sheep with your breath. Hey—there, you did it again.” Now I tried to see what he had seen in the frosty air, but it was gone. He gave me the money, we shook hands, and he got in the car. “Not many people can make a whole sheep,” he said. He turned the key. “Most folks just puff out a part of a sheep.”
“Wait,” I said.
He put the car back in neutral and leaned out the window. “You change your mind? You hop in and I’ll take you to Mr. Mike’s Rock-and-Roll Heaven.”
“No,” I said. “I have to tell you something. There’s something I didn’t tell you about the car.”
He stopped smiling, because he must have thought I hadn’t given him a good price after all—that there was a crack in the engine block or a dogleg in the frame. “Well, what the heck is it? Just lay me out then. The last car I had broke down on me in three weeks.” He was remorseful now and disappointed in both of us.
I paused a long time. “I just think I should tell you that this car takes premium gas.”
He was happy again. “Shoot, I knew that,” he said. He put the car back into gear.
“You be careful,” I said. “You have a good trip.”
He gave me the thumbs-up sign and edged away from the curb, looking both ways, in case there was traffic.
I liked that boy. I wanted him to get safely to California and find a good life and fall in love and father a large brood of cheerful people who would try to give you too much for a used car and would always wear their shirtsleeves too short. I watched him drive away and around the corner. I started back to the house but then turned to look at the cloud of exhaust that hung in the air. I wanted to see what figure it made. I wanted to see if it would be a sheep or a part of a sheep or a person or something else, and what I saw instead, before it unfurled into the maple trees, was a thin banner of pale smoke.
The Architecture of California
This is it: life lived in a holding pattern because the landing gear won’t go down, and Megan sips wine trying to think of jokes to crack; brave, witty exit lines. She has a husband, George, who has lost the art of conversation and never comes to their bedroom until she is asleep and talking in strange languages. This morning he told her that last night she said three times, quite distinctly, “The mummy orders enchiladas.” She has a good friend named Vera, running on hormones and Valium and a fear of all natural phenomena (the two minor earthquake tremors in the last five weeks, for example), who called her at work this morning with a luncheon invitation, saying, “There’s something I have to talk to you about,” to which Megan replied, “I have a business lunch,” lying, because words are like eggs—they can hatch into creatures with lives of their own, the dove, the partridge, the yellow-winged oriole, singing sweet songs, but also the hawk, the eagle, the condor, tearing flesh away from the bones.
Instead at noon she left the industrial park where she works and drove west until she found a fast-food place selling overtenderized steaks—DES, BHT, and monosodium glutamate. The truth is: it tastes good and life is short. Megan has lost twelve pounds in the last month on George’s fish-and-vegetable diet. A few moments ago, passing herself in the plate-glass window, she agreed with herself that she was a person made too thin by good advice.
She ignores the salad, eats the steak, and sips the wine, and thinks about the embattled brain cells, how at this moment a thousand of them are turning over on their backs and sticking their little feet in the air. She smiles (always her own best audience) and now an old woman in a stylish hat, mistaking the smile for an invitation, takes the seat opposite. She says that she lives two blocks away in the Sunset Tower Senior Home and can never get a decent meal there.
“The dietician is shocking,” she says. “Some people get hors d’oeuvres before the meals and others of us do not.” The woman is an immigrant. She says she has no family except for a son in Sacramento who visits only every other month. Her roommate is a thief. She, the old woman, has written a note to the counselor, listing her grievances. She pulls the note from her purse and hands it to Megan, who reads as she chews: “My roommate disrupts my things. I am suspect her of losing some of them, especially my toothpaste. I am frightened of her because she also interferes with my other things. In doing this she undermines my very poor health condition.”
Megan shakes her head sympathetically. What can she do?
“When I show this note to the counselor, the counselor says, ‘I think you get upset over a minor thing. Try to work it out.’ ”
Megan shakes her head again.
“There’s no protection. She stole my perfume, too. She doesn’t use it. I can only think she can throw it away.”
“How terrible,” Megan says.
“If I live there for longer I will die.”
Neither of them is eating now. The old woman stares at Megan with sudden indignation, as if Megan were the counselor who doesn’t understand, and then she picks up her tray and moves to another table.
The mummy orders enchiladas.
Everybody has problems.
Megan stands at the window with a cup of coffee and a cigarette while George does sit-ups on the carpet. He jerks three times before he reclines again on the floor. Ah-pouf-pouf-pouf. George has got a sort of dance rhythm going with his breathing. George, Megan wants to say, I know what you’re doing. You’re making yourself into a person who has nothing to do with me.
For the last three months George has been remodeling himself along lines suggested by certain consumer bulletins and TV shows. He gave up beer and started sucking on licorice roots. He gave up meat and started lifting weights. He shaved his armpits in the manner of championship lifters on “Wide World of Sports.” Pouf-ah. Pouf-ah. George snatched and heaved on the exhale, contemplating his own mortality.
“George,” Megan said. “I do not want to go to the beach this summer with a man in naked armpits.”
His stomach flattened out. His arms and legs, once lanky and limber, took on the stiff glistening promise of a new topography. “George,” she said, amusing only herself, “you think Arnold Schwarzenegger is sexy? Arnold Schwarzenegger gets a rash where his big legs rub together.”
Tonight for supper they had fish sticks, which had been out of the ocean too long and tasted like small punishments. Now she looks at the view that is the standard view that comes with all apartments-with-a view south of San Francisco: telephone pole, four lanes of commuter traffic, some rooftops, more poles, and finally in the distance a glimpse of the mountains hiding the sea. On the telephone pole, only a few feet from the window, someone has nailed a sign that says that a cat is lost and his name is Le Max. (Here Le Max? Here Le Max?) This morning before she went to work Megan went down to the pole and read the fine print: two-time Santa Clara County champion, long hair, black Persian, very rare. Now she notices on the far side of the street, near the curb, a flat, treaded shape.
“George,” she says. “Did you notice anything dead on the street when you came home from work?”
She turns to look at him. He is
straining from the floor to touch his toes with his elbows, and he gives her a wild-eyed look to indicate that he can’t talk until he gets to number five hundred. “Three ninety-six,” he whispers. “Three ninety-seven.”
Recently she inventoried the contents of the kitchen: eleven knives, nine forks, seven spoons, three bread pans, three cake pans. Somehow they have contrived to own only odd numbers of things, which will be difficult to divide down the middle.
George and Megan are seated on the sofa watching TV. His arm is draped fraternally over her shoulder. She snuggles against his side and tries to think of neutral topics. His job, her job, how much they have put away toward a down payment on a house. The Vista View complex is that kind of place—one where all the residents are waiting until they can touch down in a neighboring suburb and begin their real lives, planting geraniums and coaxing the grass green in the summer.
“I think I’ll try to quit smoking again,” she says. Actually, she hasn’t given it much thought recently, but suddenly it seems an innovative idea, something she can do for herself and George. She waits for him to approve. He waves his hand to show that he wants to hear the program on TV, where a man is running across a rooftop. For some time now the spaces in their conversation have flourished. There is a parallel, in fact, between the diminution of their evening chitchat and the development of George’s new body, as if words are some kind of fiber diet George is using to pack the hollows of his triceps.
At the commercial break she says, “How do you think I should go about quitting?”
George shrugs, his eyes still on the screen.
“I mean, what do you think the first step should be?”
“Just throw the damn things away,” he says. “Use some discipline.”
“That’s a very good idea,” she says, enthusiastically, as if George has just outlined a complex strategy and offered to collaborate on the invention of the new Megan.
When the program resumes the man is still running across the rooftop. He is dressed in black. He is the celebrated Cat Burglar of Paris, who steals from the rich and gives to the poor. Megan thinks of Le lost Max, a fugitive from the Vista View complex. Height, six inches. Weight, twelve pounds. Hair, black. Eyes, green. Presumed dead, but who knows? Maybe Le Max has faked his own suicide, assumed a new identity, and is even now padding across El Camino Real, heading for a nice life in the mountains. Good-bye, Max. Good luck.
Megan has not smoked a cigarette for two days and has been sucking on lemon drops instead. She tried one of George’s licorice roots, but it was truly like eating a piece of a tree, too primeval. She has now eaten four bags of lemon drops, two bags a day, an extra four thousand calories of tooth rot, according to Vera’s calculations. “Your lungs will be fine, but your teeth will fall out,” Vera is saying. It is Saturday afternoon and they are walking along the shaded street of another suburb, looking for an empty lot Vera wants to photograph. “First the gums go soft and gray like dirty sponges, and then the teeth let go.”
“I know,” Megan says. “I can feel them right now hanging on to the bone with their little fingers and crying for help.”
Vera smiles but says, “It’s not a joke. You should try carrots.”
“You can’t smoke carrots.”
“I’m serious. Think of radishes. Think of celery.”
“What am I eating already? Every day two big salads and some smelly fish.” What she wants to say is, Vera, don’t make me into a trivial, inferior person whom you can take lightly. What she says instead is, “Don’t pick on me.”
“This isn’t picking. This is advice.”
“Believe me, it’s picking.”
Vera pauses on the walk near a cascade of bougainvillea. Her eyes in the warm light are deep violet, dilated, beautiful. She looks at the walk and when she looks back up she has that nervous face Megan has seen so often that says nothing is safe—tuna fish can give you brain damage, bacon can give you cancer, hair dryers shoot asbestos filaments into your lungs and nose. “I’m the one who needs advice,” she says. “I’m two weeks late.”
“Why?” Megan says. What she means is why you? A year ago Megan had an ectopic pregnancy, a child growing in the wrong place. Now she has only one tube and an erratic ovary—automatic birth control. Twice she has driven Vera to a clinic and sat in the waiting room while Vera lay on an operating table and a fetus was torn from the walls of her womb, sucked through a transparent tube, and dropped into a stainless-steel pan.
“I can’t help it,” Vera says. “I’m always lonely.”
“I don’t want to hear about it.”
“I can’t use the pill or the IUD and I always forget my diaphragm.”
“I really don’t want to hear about it.”
“It isn’t what you think.”
“I don’t care.”
They walk in silence until they find the empty lot, and Megan sits on the curb as Vera takes pictures with her Polaroid. Vera is an architectural renderer. She has vision. She can look at a few geometric shapes disposed around a scored sheet, and she can see an entire apartment complex, complete with trees, flowers, shrubs, people talking animatedly on the sidewalks, beach towels slung over their shoulders, tennis racquets in their hands, romance, marriage, and happy childhoods in their smiles. Vera’s pictures look nothing like the Vista View complex, where the unshaded asphalt soaks up the heat, and people merely nod to each other as they take out the trash.
“Someone paid a lot of money to get this nice neighborhood rezoned for apartment buildings,” Megan says as they walk back to the car.
“It’s not that nice,” Vera says. “Look at these stucco places, the architecture of the middle class.” The architectural details, she says, are borrowed and phony and pretending to be too many things at once. There is a pointed arch taken from a Gothic cathedral and trivialized into a small front door. Here are some red Spanish tiles sitting on top of some fake half-timbering. There are two Greek columns attached to a Pueblo-style façade. What a joke, she says, what a laugh—buildings constructed out of fantasy and misinformation.
“They don’t look so bad to me,” Megan says and has a momentary vision of herself and George living in one of these places with a red wagon and plastic balls cluttering the front walk.
Vera drives badly as they return to the Vista View complex, braking at the on-ramp, then accelerating just as a truck bears down upon them. “You know how many men I’ve slept with in the last six weeks?” she says.
“I don’t want to know.”
“Six.”
They ride in silence until they arrive at Megan’s apartment, when Vera says, “I was thinking that maybe I should have this one. I was thinking that maybe I should give it to someone who would like it.”
“That sounds like a dumb idea to me.”
Seven o’clock on Monday morning and Megan drives George to the airport as small lies fly out of his mouth like hummingbirds.
“I wish I didn’t have to go,” he says. “I’d rather stay here.”
George is afraid of planes. The prospect of falling wingless to the earth always makes him sentimental.
“I wish you didn’t have to go, too. Sometimes I think thieves will break into the apartment.” This is not true—she is just keeping the conversation circuits open, and now George reaches across the front seat and puts a hand on her thigh.
“It happens every day. They could tie you up and load everything into a truck. People would just think we were moving,” he says. Megan nods. The Vista View complex is not a community but merely a collection of people who incidentally happen to share the geography of a parking lot and three identical buildings. “Los Angeles makes me tired,” he says. “The smog makes me tired. I never get any exercise and I eat lousy food.”
“It’s only two days.” George works for a computer company that is developing a new traffic-light system for a suburb of Los Angeles, one that will measure the flow of traffic every fifteen minutes, at four thousand intersections, and alter the rhy
thm of the signals accordingly. He makes these trips every two months and is buoyant when he returns—a man of intellect and power who manipulates an entire town.
“You’ll probably be glad to have me out of the apartment for a while.”
“No, I won’t.”
“You’ll probably go out and eat tacos and smoke cigarettes.”
“No, I won’t.” She smiles. “I’ll wait until you get back.”
“You know, I never actually said you had to eat what I eat.”
“George, I was just joking.”
“If you want to eat empty calories, that’s fine with me. If you want to smoke and drink and sprinkle carcinogens on your breakfast cereal, okay.”
“For heaven’s sake. It was a joke.”
The traffic is moving fast and easily—six lanes of commuters who know where they’re going and drive to work on automatic pilot. George settles against his seat as if he’s relaxing but says, “I have a knot in my stomach. There hasn’t been a crash in a long time.”
She wonders whether he’s just computing odds with his engineer’s mind and concluding that somewhere there is a plane with its number coming up, or whether he’s afraid there’s such a thing as a vengeful fury. She decides to launch a small weather balloon. “Vera,” she says—using the word to test the air—“Vera,” she says again, “wants to come over and cook us supper when you get back.”
For a living Megan writes sentences. She works at a place called Comp Currics, Inc., which sells computerized educational programs to large school systems. The sentences she writes do not add up to little communities of paragraphs. They are fed randomly into a computer, which, through telephone hookups, feeds them to terminals in New York, St. Louis, Dallas, and Detroit, where students with low grades practice reading the English language. It is hard to write thousands of sentences that have nothing to do with each other and that must be very short, use a limited vocabulary, and make no references to forests, farms, streams, wildflowers, nuclear families, or anything else associated with country life or middle-class values. Megan is good at her job. The old man sat down on the park bench. The milk sat on the table too long. The woman sat up in bed.
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