We drank and talked. They tried to think of people for me to date. It reminded me of high school, scouring the rolls of the Technically Eligible, the surest way to kill any interest. I was not about to mention Ryan, especially not in front of Marcy, our elder statesman. I’m lapsing? No way. Not after all I’d gone through to get here.
Marcy’s hand dropped to her lap, I saw her arm shift slightly, and Summer smiled. Summer’s hair swished against Marcy’s arm as she leaned over to grab the ketchup, and Marcy, though she was nodding at something Meena was saying, gave a little twitch of pleasure.
And I felt jealous. It wasn’t that I wanted Marcy, although suddenly she seemed newly viable—why hadn’t I thought of her before?—but that desire would have been brief, a cul-de-sac, and I knew it. I just wanted the feeling. I wanted the longing, the promise. That feeling of imminence. A very near future.
I could feel the postcard tucked in my jacket, flattening the pocket. The flying saucer, a glimpsed anomaly, like Ryan’s bedroom. I ran my fingers along the lower edge of the card. Then I panicked and returned to earth.
They were talking about the Gold Stars. Marcy was releasing their new record on her label, Queue Up. Meena wanted us all to be in the photo shoot they’d conceived for the cover.
“Who’s taking the pictures,” I warned.
Meena put up her hands. “It wasn’t me,” she said. “Dana had already asked Flynn.”
“Oh man.” I slumped back. “There’s no escape.”
“You guys friends?” Marcy asked.
“That’s the official line. Doesn’t feel like it, though.”
Meena squeezed my shoulder. “You will be.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Why does it always have to go like this, that the one who cheated or lied ends up fine, even a girl magnet, and the other, the one who did nothing wrong, is scrap?”
“Another whiskey ginger here,” Meena called to the waitress. It materialized on the table with a cool soothing clunk. I grasped the plastic straw like a lifeline.
“Baby,” Marcy said, “if no one ever slept with any of their friends’ exes, we would all have to be nuns.”
“So put me in a convent,” I said.
“Those places are full of lesbians,” Meena said.
“No escape,” Summer said happily.
“Whee.”
“In two days it’s Pride, and there are seven zillion lesbians in Portland,” Meena said.
“You’ll be fine,” Marcy said.
It sure would be easier if one of them would show up soon before I did another stupid thing with a man, I thought. This was what the brink looked like. “Of course I’ll be fine.” I straightened up. “I am fine.”
My method had always been to put on a good face. I had gone to house parties and queer nights the way I’d once gone to church, with neither faith nor hope. I’d shown my face, smiled, chatted a little, and escaped home.
“You can tell us how you really feel, Andy. We’re your friends.”
“I know,” I said. “You’re the best. I do tell you. I will.” I looked down into my drink, the ice cubes softening, disappearing. Fine was the loneliest place a person could be.
Pride weekend arrived, metastasizing rainbows, as commercialized, tacky, and fraught as any holiday. The gay Christmas. We all claimed to hate it and we all went anyway. Clearly there were gays out there who had no ambivalence about Pride or it wouldn’t exist, but we didn’t know any. Pride was a reminder that our numbers were greater than we knew, and of the strength therein, etc.; also, that queer people could be as unoriginal and exasperating as any people. We fought for our humanity to be recognized, and indeed, there it was, unflattering shorts and all.
Saturday evening I biked downtown to the Dyke March with a posse of friends, a girl gang in fingerless gloves and cut-off jeans, shouting and laughing over our shoulders to each other as we pedaled. I still had not told any of them about my man-dalliance, but the attention and tension had charged me up like a battery and I felt a nervy glow. Holes of blue opened in the gray sky, and up ahead of us the South Park Blocks were teeming with hundreds of lesbians and all the satellite categories thereof.
The march itself was a jostling stroll to the waterfront. I was never a sign-waver, and chanting embarrassed me, but to be in an apparent, if illusory, majority, even for just ten blocks—every time I did it, I felt a concurrent hunger and sating of the hunger.
The chain-link fence, our end point, appeared before us. Behind it was the official Pride Zone: rainbow vinyl banners, tents, merchandise, a bad band, a cover charge. The gay cage. Our crew turned tail and headed to our bikes to cross back to the east side.
If anything felt like liberation, it was dancing all night together in a makeshift club all our own. Someone had taken over an old brick boathouse by the river and decked it out with Christmas lights and old couches, a plywood bar that served only beer and wobbly vegan Jell-O shots. No license, no name, illegal and perfect. We drank up, loosened up, and got down to the music, the more people the better—when everyone dances no one looks stupid. We shed our self-consciousness and our layers as the temperature rose. Summer tried to keep her work and her life separate but in the dance circle she broke into moves that impressed and alarmed me. I didn’t know someone’s legs could bend that way. As the crowd grew denser and even Lawrence wriggled into the dancing mass, I unhooked my sweat-soaked bra under my T-shirt and tugged it out my sleeve like a magic trick to the whoops of my friends. Our hair stuck to our cheeks, our lungs expanded, we made funny moves to entertain each other, the dance circle expanded and closed again, a pulse like a heart. Everyone gleamed, cinematically gorgeous to me under the strings of lights, and a lump rose in my throat. I had no safety net, no savings, no insurance, no future, but I did have this: this room, this feeling, these people. The world’s best secret.
Summer threw her arm around my neck and shouted over the music about how she hadn’t been so sure about me when I moved in, this friend of a friend laden with boxes and breakup shell shock, but now I was the best housemate she’d ever had. “I love you, Andy!”
“I love you too!” I shouted back. “We’re in, like, an arranged marriage!”
“And it totally works!”
“I’m going to buy my wife a drink!” I yelled. “What do you want?” And I danced my way out of the teeming crowd.
At the bar stood a girl I vaguely knew in a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, motorcycle boots, and a tattoo of her grandmother’s face on her bicep. Her hair was cropped short but a soft dark comma curled into her nape. She offered me a sip from her flask, a smoky scotch that softened my mouth, and emboldened, I leaned into her and cupped my hand around her ear and said I thought we needed to make out now.
Up against the wall, my wrists bound with one strong hand behind my back while her other traced my waistband, I tasted the scotch in her mouth, felt her belt buckle press into me, and was giddy with relief. Here was the life I knew. The me I knew.
A second old postcard arrived at the studio mailbox that Monday. For once I was relieved that my studio-mates never bothered to sort the mail.
This one was a color photo from the late sixties or early seventies. On a road through deep dark redwoods, three bears stood upright with their paws resting on the hood of a plump baby-blue convertible. A handsome man in a sweater stood in the front seat, elbows resting on the windshield’s rim, scratching his beard, while a young windblown woman perched on the rim of the trunk, leaning back, smiling uncertainly.
JUNE 11
Hello again,
Back in the state where I spent seven weird years of my youth. It was sort of like this picture: perilous or hilarious? Could never tell. Both and neither.
Hope these notes are OK. Tour is nothing but time. Endless transit with momentary touchdowns. (Like a UFO?) Our SF show was awesome—and now I feel lame for writing that. I’m not trying to impress you. Not that way. I would scrap this and start over but the picture’s too good to let go.
Just look at that side. Over & out,
—R.C.
I did miss getting mail like this: handwritten, real. The zines and pen pals that filled my box through the nineties had tapered off, and what arrived now was mostly bills and the occasional dutiful holiday missive from Nebraska. A birthday card with a twenty-dollar bill in it; a Christmas card about the real reason for the season and a folded form letter in which Andrea continues to live and work in Portland, Oregon.
The postcard went into my top desk drawer, next to the UFO one. They were tucked out of sight, but I liked knowing they were there.
Emboldened now, I grew determined to shake both the curse of Flynn and any lingering hetero residue from Ryan. I called the girl in the motorcycle boots.
She took me to the nickel arcade on Belmont. We shot down sea monsters and played air hockey and pinball, and though the talk between games was stilted, I secretly hoped people would spot us, and take note: Andrea’s back.
After we’d converted an armful of Skee-Ball prize tickets into candy and matching skull key chains, we made out in the front seat of her pickup. She had cheekbones that could spread butter, and a lush chest subdued by two sports bras and a tight white undershirt. Her kissing was assertive and slow paced, like it knew where it was going and would get there when it felt like it, and I was feeling pretty optimistic about the whole thing, getting melty and hot, until she rested her hand on my jaw and said, “So. Here’s my deal.”
For the next forty minutes we had to talk about nonmonogamy. Nonmonogamists are like evangelicals, or new vegetarians, convinced they’re onto a truth that everyone needs to know. I sighed. “Did you read The Ethical Slut?”
She said, “Isn’t it great?”
I didn’t care if I was her one and only, but I realized that if we kept going, it would always be like this, a 4:1 ratio of processing to action. I pocketed my skull key chain and left the candy in her truck.
Three days later I was printing proofs of the barn wedding invitation for the third time—miss Gemini bride wanted to try blue, no, silver, no, purple text—when the mail landed in the box with a promising muffled thunk. “I got it,” I said quickly, wiping my hands on my apron.
And there was a third postcard, wedged between a font catalog and the utility bill.
One of my coworkers, Tiger, looked up from the studio’s computer screen. “What are you laughing at over there?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on, let me see.”
“It’s just this,” I said. She came over to look. The picture presented a formal side view of a suited, mustachioed gentleman seated astride an ostrich. His back was upright, his legs stuck straight forward, and he clutched tightly at the feathers at the base of the bird’s long neck. On the dusty ground nearby lay a melon-sized egg. A line of pink type slanted woozily across the top: At the Cawston Ostrich Farm, Southern California. The ostrich’s pale, muscular thigh looked human.
“That’s rad,” Tiger said. “Who’s it from?” She flipped it over.
I pulled it out of her fingers. “Just a friend. From out of town. Here.” I handed her a catalog. “This has your name on it.” I walked out of range and turned over the card. The handwriting shrank as it went, until it was so tiny it looked like embroidery.
6/14
Hello A.M.,
How are you? I wonder what you’re printing over there. If you have ink on your fingers. In LA a B-list celebrity came to our show, a TV actor I never heard of and already forgot. That was called failed name-dropping. San Diego: moderate, in every way. I like CA but it makes me sad. It feels ruined. Like bad plastic surgery where you can still tell what used to look good. It’s a state full of promises it can never keep, but it can’t stop making them—a pathological liar that believes everything it says. All those backyard pools in the desert.
On a brighter note: picked lemons right off the tree. And we passed a street called Morales. It looked nice. —R
The next one, already the following day, had a photograph of a desert motel with a splendid atomic sign that read SKY RANCH MOTEL, replete with moon and stars.
6.15.98
&rea—
Hello and how are you? I wonder if you’re getting these. Maybe you’re shaking your head every time one arrives. I’m going with the principle that everyone likes to get a postcard. Now we’re in Arizona. I lived here too as a kid. Our apt. was whatever but I loved the desert behind the complex. The lizards learned to run when they saw me coming. Once I saw javelinas. For some reason I want to tell you these things. I wonder what you had in Nebraska? Make me a list, I want to know it all. —Ry&
I thought of the sound of the chicken coop. I’d sit out there and listen to their cooing and burbling in the evening as I closed it up. No javelinas, but deer all over, and foxes and pheasants. Maybe ghost bison. I tacked this one up above my workspace—I wanted to pilfer that font—and waited for the next one to arrive.
But no more postcards came, only invoices and catalogs and paper samples. I found myself disappointed. Why had he stopped? Had he tired of sending one-way correspondence? Had he met someone on the road? I deflated a little. Then I grew annoyed—at Ryan for his doggedness, then for his disappearance, then at myself for caring at all.
Artifacts
ON THE FIRST DAY OF REAL SUMMER, I DID NOT EVEN BOTHER to detour to check the mail at the studio before pedaling over the river to Artifacts.
Ted found most of his stuff at estate sales and auctions, though his official statement—people always asked—was that the midcentury elves had left it at the door. Still, people came in all the time trying to sell us their stuff. They’d been watching Antiques Roadshow. They’d found something in the Dumpster or garage, in their mother’s basement, or in someone’s jewelry box. They needed cash and were certain, or hopeful, that what they held was worth something. Usually it wasn’t. People, Ted said, always overvalue their own stuff. On gray days I was prone to a sense of doom that this was true of ninety-nine percent of the things in this world—in the end, nobody really wanted them.
The customer who jangled into the shop this afternoon was in her early forties, a little grizzled, testy. I was used to her type: they tried appealing to me woman to woman, but when I said it wasn’t my call and they’d have to talk to the owner, I became just another female obstacle between them and a man who could do something.
I glanced into her box of marbles and milk glass and told her it wasn’t the kind of thing we sold. When she feigned offense, I reminded her gently, “You didn’t want them either.”
“It’s not that I didn’t want them.”
“Then why are you selling them?”
She said that she wanted them to find a good home. I suggested Goodwill.
The door jingled and in the corner of my eye I saw the customer stop to take in the space. In the moment before his eyes met mine and I realized who he was, I automatically indexed him: Man, young, thinks he’s cool, will drop knowledge but no cash. Brace self. But then I saw it was Ryan. He paused with one hand in his jacket pocket and the other resting on the doorknob, a stance like his handwriting, upright yet at ease.
“Hi,” I said, and broke into a grin I couldn’t suppress. “You’re real.”
He pulled back his jacket sleeve and touched his wrist. “Apparently.”
“Thanks for the postcards.” The customer cleared her throat. “Hang on,” I said to Ryan, “I’m almost done here.”
“Is that so,” said the woman.
I advised her that speaking to Ted was possible but likely futile. “Try Antique Row in Sellwood. One of those guys might be more into it.” Her sour frown indicated that she had, and they weren’t. She threatened to speak to my manager.
“Okay,” I said. “He’ll be here tomorrow.”
Ryan stepped aside for her at the door.
“Charming lady,” he said.
“Happens all the time,” I said. “I’m due for a break.” I taped the BACK IN 10 MINUTES sign to the door and grabbed
the keys. “Want to step out with me? I mean, unless you came in looking for something.”
“Just you.”
I knew I shouldn’t enjoy that, and this could only flag trouble, this guy showing up for me, but after a year of being the yearning one, it felt good to be sought. We pushed through into the sunny afternoon.
“So how are you?” he said.
“Good. How are you?”
“Good.”
“Good,” I said. It was like we were in an ESL class.
We walked down the alley and over to First Avenue, where tram tracks sliced through the cobblestones and the buildings were old and rococo with arched windows. Across a strip of trampled grass, the river sauntered along.
“So how was tour?” I nudged him with my elbow, went for the buddy approach. “Did you get any action on the road?” This was how many of my friendships had begun, with what my friend Molly called the Sexual Handshake. If there was sexual tension at the outset, you hooked up a couple times to release it, and once that was cleared out of the way you could get right to being straight-up friends. It might be a viable option here.
“What kind of a question is that?”
“You’re in a band. And you’re cute. I can say that objectively.”
“Objectively, huh?”
“Sure. You have symmetrical features, and you’re tall. Good smile.”
“Is this a dog show? Are you going to measure my tail next?”
“Nice tail too.”
“Yeah? You like?”
“Objectively,” I said.
He tugged the back of his shirt down and I laughed. He said, “I wasn’t really on the prowl.”
“Not on my account, I hope.”
“You’re not going to make this easy for me, are you?”
“I’m not trying to make it anything for you.” I knew I was being glib to the point of cutting, but I couldn’t stop. My hand had shaken when I’d turned the key in the lock at Artifacts. I had to overcorrect.
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