“I don't want to be unfaithful anymore,” she said. “I want to stay with Yasmin. I want to take care of her.”
I smiled and said, “You're like a man. You've always been that way.” Her smile in return was like a blush of pleasure. “Yeah, I guess it's true,” she said.
In San Francisco, I wandered into a maze that was sometimes peopled and sometimes empty sometimes brightly lit and sometimes so dark that I had to grope my way along it with my hands, heart pounding with fear that I would never find my way out. I quickly became lost, and it seemed like almost everyone I met was lost, too. Sometimes it seemed to me an empty life, but that wasn't really true. It wasn't empty; it was more that the people and events in it were difficult to put together in any way that felt whole.
Before she met Yasmin, Dani said, she did not court or date or screw any girls for over a year. She was thirty-six and she felt very old. She did not want to be the “older lesbian” going after young girls. She did not have the heart for it. But she was very lonely more lonely than she had ever been. She felt she didn't belong anywhere. She thought she would die. I didn't ask her why she hadn't called me, because I already knew. Instead, I glanced down at my watch, saw that I needed to go, and ordered another drink.
At the end of the show, the magician goes home. And so does the girl who was sawed in half. She changes out of her costume into her jeans and sneakers and leaves by the back door, crushing a cigarette under her foot as she goes.
It is a low form of performance, and a tawdry metaphor for any kind of affair. And yet shows are wonderful. Even for jaded performers, they have a sheen of glamour, no matter if the sheen is threadbare and collecting dust. And in that sheen, there may be hidden, in the sparkle of some stray rhinestone or store-bought glitter, the true magic that will, as the synthetic curtain opens, reveal a glimpse of something more real than one's strange and unreal life.
The curtain opened again at a boring book event in LA.; I walked in, and there was Dani, lying eel-like on a leather love seat, nodding at someone I couldn't see. She must've felt my gaze, because she turned, saw me, and said, “Of all people—,” her voice loud enough for me to hear her across the room. I knocked down a lamp as we stumbled into her room, a funky little box that my fun-house memory has given three walls instead of four. To steady me, she took my hair in her fist. “We really don't know each other now,” she said. The next day, I woke alone in my room, where a lustily roaring hotel shower brightly stippled my bruised flesh. The curtain opened again that evening; silently she offered me her smartly clad arm, and silently I accepted.
Halfway through her second martini, Dani asked, “Does David take care of you?”
“Yes,” I said. “We take care of each other.”
“Good,” she said. “I'm glad.”
In the back of the restaurant, the elderly couple slowly rose from their seats, the man taking the woman's arm at the elbow. We paused to watch them. Ceiling fans with large wooden blades solemnly turned over our heads.
Each scene covers and is covered and shows through the others, fractured, shifting, and shaded, like bits of color in a kaleidoscope. I moved to Houston to teach; she moved to New York to work for a former jazz singer who wanted to write a memoir. She traveled often to L.A. to visit a woman she was courting there; I traveled often to New York to visit no one in particular. We were nothing to each other, really. I rarely thought of her, and although she said otherwise, I doubt she thought of me except when she saw me. And yet from time to time, in a little pit with a shimmering curtain, we would discover a room with a false back, and through the trapdoor we would willingly tumble, into a place where we were not a mere addendum to another, more genuine life—a place where we were the life, in this fervid red rectangle or this blue one. Slowly, the elderly couple moved past our table, the man still holding the woman's arm, the woman's small silver handbag dangling a little rakishly from her gentle, wrinkled hand. Dani watched them, her eyes softening even in profile.
Her strength, her social identity had been stripped from her as time had stripped her youth. But her private world had moved forward to fill the empty space. I thought, This is why I always trusted her. Because my private identity was my strength, I could sense hers even when I couldn't see it, and I knew it could be trusted.
Time and again, the curtain parted: Served by stylish hostesses, we sat in ornate chairs, drinking martinis and eating caviar on toast. A lurid dream of music surged around us, mixed with the globule voices of strangers bent double, triple with personality We held hands and kissed across the table; Dani said, “If we have sex again, I don't want us to be drunk.” Drunk already, I took a ring out of my pocket, a flat amethyst I had bought that day. I had not bought it for her, but I gave it to her. “I love you,” I said. “We can't be together, and maybe we'll never even have sex again. But I love you.” Rosy young heterosexuals burst into laughter, gobbling olives and peanuts and beautiful colored drinks in shimmering glasses. Another time, we sat side by side in a modest music hall, my arm around her low back, feeling the knobs of her fiery spine. We were there because Dani knew the singer in the band, a sexy blonde no longer in her first youth. She sang “Today I'm Yours” and the music made shapes for her words: a flower, a rainy street in spring, an open hand, a wet, thumping heart. Each shape was crude and colored maybe a little too vividly with feeling. But we wanted those shapes and that feeling. My father was dead, and the writer Dani had once left me for was dead, too. We were not young anymore. “Today I'm Yours.” It was a crude and romantic song. But human feeling is crude and romantic. Sometimes, it is more vivid than anyone could color it. In some faraway badly smudged mirror, Dani's striking arm flashes again and again; her face is in an almost featureless trance, and my twisted mouth is the only thing I can see of myself.
“Here,” she said, handing the taxi driver a bill. “Wait until she gets in the door, okay?” The cab bucked forward, and her hard, dear face disappeared in a rush of starless darkness and cold city lights. I woke sprawled half-naked in a room with all the lights on, the phone in one hand, my address book in the other, open to the page with Dani's number on it.
“I'm sorry about something,” she said. “I've always wanted to tell you.” We were waiting for the check. Playfully laughing waitpeople lingered at the warmly lit kitchen door; for them, the evening was about to begin. “I wish I'd been a better friend to you,” she said. “In San Francisco, I mean. I knew you were lonely. But I couldn't. I was too young and I just couldn't.”
“It's all right,” I said. “It would've been difficult.” I looked down at the table; it was gleaming and hard, and there was a shining drop of water or alcohol graying the tip of Dani's spotless napkin. Soon my husband and I would be making chicken for five people. There would be little bowls of snacks and flowers and drinks. But how private the knobs of Dani's spine had been when she was next to me and my arm was around her low back. How good it was to sit across from her and see the changes in her face. How heartless and foolish we had been together, how obscene. How strange if ten years from this moment, David and Yasmin were gone and instead Dani and I were living together. The image of this, our life together, winked like a piece of glitter with a whole atomic globe whirring inside it, then vanished like the speck it was. The check came. We counted out the money I paid the tab; Dani left a generous tip.
We came out onto the street and saw it had rained. The pavement was steamy and darkly patched, and traffic moved with a shadowy hiss. The sky was pale, but gold light rimmed the rumpled horizon of old brick apartments, restaurants, and shops that had changed their names a dozen times in ten years. Dani said she'd walk me home. We walked past the wall layered with movie posters, and I saw that the circus tiger leaping through the rubbed-away eye of an actress had itself been rubbed away by the rain, leaving the image of a pale blue eye staring through rippling black stripes. I remembered the song “Today I'm Yours,” and I asked Dani if she knew what the blond singer was doing now. “I don't,” she sa
id. “We lost touch somehow.” We walked in silence for a while. Another piece of glitter winked; in it I saw my parents, smiling at each other, kissing and embracing. Like an afterimage, I saw Dani's parents embracing, too. Tonight, David and I would make food for people; we would talk and there would be music. We would smile, kiss, embrace. Before we lost touch, or turned into something else, another person or a spirit or ashes or bones in the dirt with a stone on it.
Forgetting to look at the light, I stepped off the curb into traffic. A car swerved and braked as Dani yanked me back against her. The driver, remarkably dressed as a clown but without the red nose, shook his clown-gloved fist out the window as he sped past. We laughed. We let go. She said, “It's great to see you;” she said it like she always had. Then she walked away to be with Yasmin, and I walked away to be with David, hurrying now because I was late.
The Little Boy
Mrs. Bea Davis walked through an enormous light-fluxing corridor of the Detroit airport, whispering to no one visible: “I love you. I love you so much.” The walls of the corridor were made of glowing translucent oblongs electronically lit with color that, oblong by oblong, ignited in a forward-rolling pattern: red, purple, blue, green, and pale green. “I love you, dear,” whispered Mrs. Davis. “I love you so.” You didn't love him, said the voice of her daughter Megan. You had nothing but contempt. Even when he was dying you— Canned ocean waves rolled through the corridor, swelling the colors with sound. “You don't understand,” whispered Bea. The ocean retreated, taking the colors solemnly and slowly back the other way: pale green, green, blue, purple, red. Red, thought Bea. The color of anger and accident. Green: serenity and life. She stepped onto a moving rubber walkway behind a man slumping in his rumpled suit. “I love you like I loved him,” she whispered. Very slightly, the rumpled man turned his head. “Unconditionally.” The man sighed and turned back. A woman with a small boy passing on the left peered at Bea curiously Does she know me? thought Bea. “What a wonderful idea,” she said out loud. “These lights, the ocean—like walking through eternity”
The woman smiled uncertainly and continued past; her little boy turned his entire torso to stare at Bea as his mother pulled him on. Maybe she did know me, thought Bea. We lived here long enough. She smiled at the little boy until he turned away a calf tethered at his mother's hips.
They had not lived in Detroit, but in the suburb of Livonia, in a neat brick house with a crab-apple tree in front of it. The tree had spreading branches that grew in luxuriant twists; in the spring it exploded with pink blossoms, and in the summer the lawn was covered with the flesh of its flowers. Megan and Susan ran through the yard with Kyle, the neighbor boy. Megan, seven, climbed the crab-apple tree, wrapping her legs around a branch and crowing for her mother to take a picture. Green, blue, purple. Red. It had not been a happy time for the family, and yet her memories of it were loaded with small pleasures. Dancing to the “Mexican Hat Dance” in the living room, the girls prancing around, and Mac swinging her in his arms, yelling, “A hundred pounds! A hundred pounds!” The willow trees on 8 Mile Road, the library with the model of Never Land, the papier-mâché volcano at the Mai Kai Theater, glowing with rich colors. Kyle and Megan putting on Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado in a neighbor's garage with the little girls down the block—she had a picture of it in one of the photo albums: Kyle was very dashing in slippers and his mother's silk robe with black dragons on it. The little neighbor girls wore gowns with silk scarves tied around their waists. Megan, the director, wore a top hat and a mustache. Susan sat in the driveway with the other siblings and parents, her thin arms wrapped around her body, staring off into the sky.
At the end of the corridor was an escalator with people pouring onto it from all directions. Bea mounted it and stood still, while on her left people rushed facelessly past her. Going up, she felt as if she were falling, but falling where?
She had just come from a visit to Megan in upstate New York. Megan was a forty-two-year-old lawyer married to a travel writer— no children yet, but Bea hadn't given up hope entirely They had driven to Manhattan to see a play the windows down and country music on the CD. She was at first disappointed to see that they were seated in the mezzanine, but it was all right—the actors’ limbs were as subtly expressive as eyebrows or lips or the muscles of the neck. Afterward, they had dinner in a big open-faced restaurant on a cobbled street with tables spilling out, women sitting with their legs comfortably open under the tables, their bra straps showing a little and their chests shining slightly in the heat. There was a huge bar with the artful names of drinks written on a board above it, and a mirror behind it, and a great languidly stirring fan on the ceiling. Young men courted girls at the bar; a small girl with one knee on a tall stool leaned across the bar to order a round of drinks, and her silvery voice carried all the way to their table. They started with french fries served in a tin cone, with mayonnaise on the side. Bea wondered aloud what it would be like to have a glass of sherry, and Jonathan called the waiter, a grave-faced young man with an entire arm tattooed. “I like the casual air of this place,” she'd said. “I like the rough napkins instead of linen.”
“It's a nice place,” said Megan. “Though I've been noticing there's an awful lot of really ugly people here right now.”
“You think?” asked Jonathan. “You think it's changed over already?”
“Just look,” said Megan. Her voice was strangely hot, the way it would get as a little girl when she was overtired and about to get hissy “That guy is like an anteater in leisure wear. That girl, she can't wear that dress; look at her stomach.”
“You sound like Tomasina and Livia,” said Bea, “at Woolworth's and the Greyhound bus terminal. ‘Look at her, look at her.’ “
“What?” said Jonathan.
“Mom's talking about her sisters,” said Megan. “They would go on purpose to places where ugly poor people would be and comment on them. We didn't come here to do that; it's not the same thing.”
Not far off, thought Bea. Megan hated her aunt Livia, but here she was, saying, “Look at her.” Except without Livia's lightness. It was dead serious to Megan. At some other point during dinner, she'd said to her daughter, “You've always been so beautiful,” and Megan had said, “I certainly never thought that was your opinion.”
“How could you say that?” said Bea. And Megan was silent. A woman at the table next to them turned to look at Megan, then at her. Was this woman ugly, badly dressed? Bea had no idea. The waiter came back and informed them that they were out of sherry.
She looked up and saw the woman with the little boy halfway up the escalator; the boy was gazing intently down into the corridor of light. He was six or seven years old, heavyset, with dark, glowing skin, possibly Hispanic or part black. His mouth was full and gentle, and his eyes were long-lashed and deep, with a complicated expression that was murky and fiery at the same time. The child disappeared with the movement of the escalator; a moment later, Bea stepped off the clanking stair, unknowingly buoyed by his bright face. She looked at her watch; she had a layover of an hour and a half before her flight to Chicago. In front of her was a snack shop, a bookstore, and a store that sold knickknacks, decorative scarves, hats, and perfume. Decorative scarves and hats, thought Bea. The most gallant members of the accessory family.
Inside, the shop gleamed with glass and halogen light and dozens of little bottles. Shallow cardboard boxes of scarves were displayed under a glass countertop with neat shelving; whimsical hats sat atop Styrofoam dummy heads. She tried on hats before a mirror in a plastic frame, and the finale from act 2 of The Mikado played in her head—she knew it from the recording Mac used to have, which had somehow disappeared after the funeral.
“That looks good,” said the woman behind the counter.
“Thank you,” said Bea, and good feeling rose through her. Characters were threatened with boiling in oil and beheading and forced marriage—and in between, the full cast was onstage, singing with urgent joy. “As I drew my snick
ersnee!” sang Livia. “My snickersnee!” Ten-year-old Beatrice pretended to cower on her knees before her sister's snickersnee. Pitty-Sing, the cat, tore through the room. Tomasina whooped and forgot about the play; their mother was coming up the walk, stripping off her clothes because it was hot and she was too imperious and impatient to wait till she got through the door. Her daughters ran to the window, bursting with admiration for the long, slender limbs that were as strong and beautiful as the flowering dogwood she walked past. Thirty years later, Megan, chin up and arms outstretched, presented the little neighbor girls, who were bowing and tittering in their gowns and silk scarves. And she was strong and beautiful, too.
“Here,” said the saleswoman. “This scarf has a Brazilian flavor that really works with the hat.” Brazilian was a ridiculous word for the scarf, but it was arresting, with bold wavy stripes of gold and brown, and the saleswoman's brown eyes were warm and golden when Bea met them with her “Thank you.”
That weird snapshot of Susan—what had she been looking at anyway? You couldn't tell from the picture. Her big glasses had caught the glare of the sun, so that in the camera's eye she was intently blind; her small body, tensile and flexible as wire, expressed buzzing inner focus. She certainly didn't seem to be looking at the play.
“You're right,” said Bea to the lady behind the counter; “this scarf does do something for this hat.”
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