Ryan sighed and slung himself down on a bench. “All right,” he said. “Well, when I was in Tucson I found something for you.” He reached into his jacket pocket. “It’s not wrapped, so close your eyes.”
I did, and held out my hand.
Smooth wood, warm from his pocket, touched my palm. I closed my fingers around a solid edge and opened my eyes.
It was a wood-type A for letterpress, the size of a small candy bar. I ran my fingers over it. The wood was nut-brown with age, and traces of red and black ink burrowed in its nooks. The A was raised and hard, clean, with a skateably smooth surface.
“Two of my nerdy favorite things in one,” I said. “A piece of type and an A.”
“Do you have an A already? You probably have a lot of A’s. You probably have a whole alphabet.”
“I have many alphabets. But I don’t have one like this. I love it. Thank you.” I sat down next to him. A small hard knot tied up my throat. I slipped the wood-block A into the pocket of my jacket and kept my hand on it, on the hard edges worn smooth.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can be flippant.”
“I know,” he said.
“I just don’t want to lead you on.”
He laughed in disbelief. “Oh, is that what you think you’re doing?”
“I hope not. Look, I don’t want to mislead you or hurt you.”
Ryan physically recoiled. The force in his voice surprised me. “That is not going to happen. I don’t get hurt like that. I’m not a commitment guy.”
“Good, because I’m not a commitment guy either,” I said.
“Great.” Our eyes were locked now, a game of chicken. We held our ground, radiating I mean it, each waiting for the other to look away, to acquiesce, You mean it. But the longer I looked the weirder it got. To look into someone’s eyes, even in the spirit of combat, is to hold their gaze, an act of holding, beholding. I worked to keep my breath even, my face nonchalant. I would not relent.
Ryan narrowed his eyes and glanced ever so slightly to the side for a second, just a flicker, but I took that as a win for me. “Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I’m glad to see your face.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m glad to see yours too.”
“Okay.”
Our smiles both cracked and we looked away.
He asked me what I was up to that night. My pulse quickened uncomfortably and I invented a plan with Lawrence. I stood. My break was over. “Anyway, don’t you need to unpack?” I said. We started walking.
No, he traveled light. He liked to come home with less than he’d left with. “By the end of a month you’ve worn those clothes so much you never want to see them again. I just leave them.”
This astonished me. I had lain awake many nights cataloging everything I’d ever lost or failed to save. “Don’t you miss any of it later?”
“No.”
“I can’t do that at all. I save everything.”
“You’re a pack rat.”
“An archivist. I have a system. It’s all filed and in order.”
“Why do you keep all that?”
I said I liked having evidence. Evidence of what, he asked. “My life, I guess.”
“Aren’t you evidence enough? You’ve got a memory.”
“But that’s so ephemeral. The artifacts are proof.”
“Who are you proving it to?”
I thought of the box of Nebraska photos, the volumes of albums of Portland, the library of zines, the drawers of band T-shirts from shows, the files of letters and ticket stubs and drafts of everything I had drawn or written over the last seven years. I wondered if my parents had kept anything of mine, if they’d boxed it up or tossed it. If they ever spoke of me, or if I had become that unfortunate event no one ever brings up, out of courtesy. “I don’t know what I’m going to remember and what I’m going to forget. I don’t know who will remember me and who will forget me,” I said. “What if you died tomorrow and you left, like, no trace of your life? It would be like you never existed.”
“Sounds good to me,” he said. “Less trouble for whoever has to clean out my place.”
“I want to make lots of trouble,” I said. “I want them to be overwhelmed by it. Especially if it’s my parents.”
“Impressive,” he said. “Hopefully you survive your parents.”
“I have so far.”
We arrived at the door. “Have a good time tonight,” he said, and then sneaked a quick kiss to my cheek before I knew what was happening.
“Thank you for the A,” I said, flustered. I let the glass door sigh shut behind me, and touched my cheek.
I rifled through the box of stuff on the counter. I couldn’t tell what any of it was worth.
Biking home, I crossed the river with the setting sun at my back. The sky was streaked with pink and purple clouds behind me, and deepened to blue ahead. Yellow streetlights lit the leaves a luminous emerald.
I cycled up Sandy Boulevard, glanced furtively down the intersection toward Ryan’s apartment only a few blocks away, lowered my head, and pushed up the hill, forward. But then I stopped and changed course. I turned off Sandy and glided down toward Ash, letting gravity carry me to his front door.
The buzzer, the wait, the wondering, and then footsteps coming downstairs, and Ryan turns the corner on the landing, leans forward to see the door, a quicker trot down the last few steps, a hand on the doorknob, in the entry I mount the first step and turn, take his rough face in both hands, and close my eyes.
Cutting Off
I WOKE JUST BEFORE SEVEN. MY HEARTBEAT PICKED UP AT the sight of the dark sheets, the white walls, the thin unfamiliar light. Ryan slept soundly beside me, hair rumpled and dark gold on the pillow. When I touched his arm he made a contented mm, sprawled, and yawned, like a lion who’d gotten the whole antelope.
He barely moved when I slipped out of bed. “Bye,” I whispered. He tried to wake. I said, “No, sleep. It’s early. I’ll talk to you later.”
The contact lenses I’d slept in were foggy and sticky. I yawned and yawned to bring tears to my eyes, trying to clear them. I jammed the springy crest of my cowlick under my helmet and on the ride home recited my way through the whole situation. I told myself all about it so I wouldn’t need to tell anyone else. I asked myself, What was it like? and I answered, Like sex. Some structural adjustments, textural differences. A brief stripe of unexpected pain and then I un-tensed and let it happen, my body and this other body slamming gently into one another. Have you done this before? he murmured, and I said, Shh. I closed my eyes and imagined a harness and a girl behind it, but this patch of fur around his navel kept rubbing against me, animal-like. I opened my eyes and turned into a person performing the act of being a woman having sex. A sense of observing even as I was doing. I did what women did in movies. I claimed pleasures and made moves as if I were deftly working my own control panel: try this, say this, good, it’s working. And just as I was thinking, This is so . . . simple, unsure if that was a nice thing or a boring thing, it was over.
I asked myself, Would you do it again? And I answered, No, definitely not, that was a one-time thing, and I asked myself, Really? and answered, I doubt it. I don’t know. Who knows. And I asked myself, Do I have to call him later? Well, you’d have to be an asshole not to at least call. But, I said, isn’t it this notorious thing about men that they don’t call? That they just do it and forget it? So why can’t I? And I answered, Since when did you get all essentialist?
The more pressing question was, What the hell are you going to tell Summer when she asks where you were?
Extraordinary luck. There was no one home to answer to, except the dog, who was frantic with happiness and hunger. Summer too must have spent the night elsewhere and assumed I was home. I fed Bullet and trudged to my bedroom to strip off my Ryan-smelling clothes. My room was a mess. Yesterday in a fit of archival fever I had emptied the box of photos from Flynn’s, along with another one of letters and end-of-move miscellany, but I had managed to
organize and shelve only a fraction of it before I left for Artifacts. The bed, the floor, the stereo, the chair: every outside was covered with insides.
The volume overwhelmed me, in this bedroom now and the one I had left at dawn. I had no more answers for myself. What did he want with me? And why had I succumbed? Was I now a head he could mount on his wall? What a trophy, a Real Lesbian; what evidence of virility; what a terrible straight-male misconception come true. What I had done was a disservice to all lesbians.
I pulled off my clothes and took a good look at my body in the mirror behind the door: Did it look different? Could you tell? It didn’t, from what I could see—it was its usual skinny-limbed, soft-bellied self. No new marks or scratches; the sex had been tame. My hair had gone wildly awry, though, sideways and up, plastered to one side and fleeing the other. Somewhere since my last haircut, whenever that was, it had crossed the line from artfully disheveled to shaggy bordering on mommish.
I pulled it back into a stubby ponytail at my nape. Several strands sprang immediately loose, and one insistently caught in my eyelashes. I snatched a pair of scissors from my desk and snipped the offending tip. The hair recoiled. I gave up and pulled out the ponytail.
Now my hair looked lopsided, so I snipped at the other side. Then the other. This is when you should really wet your hair before proceeding, I thought, but I couldn’t resist making one more tiny cut, and then another. I neatened one side, then the other, then the bangs; then I took to the back and cut it close, sliding my fingers in and cutting it knuckle-short. The weight started to lift away, thick tufts falling to the floor.
Suddenly there was not much more hair to cut. The thrill abated. I set down the scissors.
This haircut was either bold and badass or plain bad. In the shower, I held out hope for a sort of andro/punk thing and the chance that once washed, it would assume its true shape.
Its true shape: the deforested landscape of a clear-cut, littered with stumps and brush. I did not look tough or cool. I did not look like a boy, or even a butch. I looked like a womyn who had earnestly forsaken hotness for political reasons. I looked like a brand-new baby dyke with no aesthetic resources. I looked like a cliché, poorly rendered.
The scissors went back into the desk—best to step away before I made things any worse. I flattened the miserable haircut under my bike helmet and headed down to the studio.
I was the only one there at that hour and the room felt cold and pale and serene. I set about dismantling a full page of lead type and returning the letters to their tray, a blessedly mindless and meticulous process. Thinking could be my worst enemy. I needed not to think, just to do.
Then again, I could hear the voice of the Lesbian Mafia in my head: Doing without thinking is exactly your problem.
I tied up the type of a show poster I’d been working on and brought it over to a Vandercook to run a proof. As I turned the quoin key and tightened the type into an impenetrable block on the press bed, the poster in reverse looked up at me, unreadable. In the mirror I too was always backward: the most familiar image of myself was an inverted one.
With the music turned up loud I didn’t even hear the mail arrive. But when I took a break to wash ink off my hands there it was, lying quiet in the box.
The postcard was vintage and printed on creamy linen-textured stock. This is the way we swim in GREAT SALT LAKE, it read in festive cursive and big cartoonish block type; around the letters, cheerful cartoon white people in modest bikinis and trunks lounged and reclined on the surface of the water.
JUNE 18/98
Dear Andrea,
I’m writing from the past to the future. I’ll get home before this postcard does. I’m a little jealous of the me three days from now who just might have already seen your face. I’m also a little worried about this future me. The one thing postcard-me has that future-me might not is hope. I admit it! I have a little. Just a trace. Nonlethal amount. But there it is.
Why do I like you so much? I don’t know. But really I do know. Maybe I’ll tell you sometime. Your call. —R.
I sat down on a metal stool and read it one more time. Then another. I picked up the phone.
He didn’t ask questions. He just said, “Of course,” and arrived at my house an hour later with his neat black kit: scissors, combs, a glossy electric shaver. I sat in a chair in the backyard and Ryan draped a soft towel around my shoulders. I closed my eyes. No professional had cut my hair since I was a teenager. The tiny snips and tugs, the low hum of the razor at my nape, his fingers lifting and smoothing, my head in his hands—I wanted to trust him.
“There,” he said after several minutes. “I think that’ll do it.”
“How does it look?”
“Sort of dark Jean Seberg.” He lifted away the towel and with a soft brush dusted the last bits of hair from my nape. “Hot.”
He set his hands lightly on my shoulders and kissed the top of my head for a long, still second.
That line by Isaac Babel sprang to mind: No iron can pierce the heart like a period put exactly in the right place. My shoulders dropped.
Ryan said, “Go take a look and tell me what you think.”
In my room I closed the door and faced the mirror. Ryan had turned the shorn rug into a sleek, shapely cut, with the dark brown of my roots and the remains of black at the tips creating an unexpected depth. It looked intentional and brave. It looked like an Andrea I had not seen before. But who was still unmistakably me.
Before I went back outside to tell Ryan thank you, you’ve rescued me, I stood for a moment among all the artifacts of my self. The music. The clothes. The photos. The letters. The commas of black hair. All these things that came and went, or stayed, some forever and some for now, lay scattered at my feet. I got the broom.
The Good Part
YOUR HAIR! PEOPLE LIKED IT. I LIKED IT TOO. I FELT LIGHTER, closer to myself. Wet, I was a seal. It stuck up in new and better forms of bedhead. I had new cowlicks.
“I have to get a picture of this one,” Ryan said. It was morning. I had just sat up in bed, my tank top all stretched out from sleep.
I had never meant to sleep with him again. But there was the Scrabble rematch where we drank too many Moscow mules, and he tried to kiss me in the back of the bar but I said, Not here, and went upstairs with him intending to only make out a little, but once it started, the momentum picked up and it was as good as done. It was easier to do it than to push him away and have to discuss it. Then there was the Queer Night at La Luna where I saw Flynn and Vivian entwined on the dance floor and immediately ducked out, and Ryan’s place, right down the block, offered the nearest refuge, and I turned off every light and pushed him down onto the hard living room floor. There was also the Monday afternoon he called the letterpress studio and said into the phone, quietly but matter-of-factly, “I can’t get anything done because there’s only one thing I want to do, and it’s to you,” and a warm shock rose from the arches of my feet to my loins. It was flattering. It was that easy. I told no one else. I took what I wanted when I wanted it, and we both benefited.
“No fair,” I said now, trying to conceal my alarm. “It’s too early.” Flynn had always taken pictures of me like this and I had never stopped her. I liked waking up to her gaze. But this photo would be evidence. I covered every track.
“But the formation is incredible,” Ryan said. He had already picked up a disposable camera and was winding the film, a crickety sound.
I buried my face in my knees as he snapped the shutter. Before he could wind it again, I was up and out of the bed.
When the photos came back from the developer, two months and a tour later, they were grainy and brownish, backlit: one of me as a small mountain with a tangled crest on top; the next, the slant and tumble of my back and legs, blurred, as I escaped the sheets.
But that wouldn’t be until he finished the camera. First the Cold Shoulder was touring Europe for a month, where they would be in tiny print on many festival posters.
Do
you want to come along? he asked. Come to the New York shows before we fly out. It’ll be fun.
I thought about it—I could go to New York for the first time, maybe take a bus to visit Annabel at Boston College. But I had no money. And I had no explanation to my people for why I’d suddenly go to New York. And even if I did, to be outed to his bandmates, to anyone who came to the shows—it might follow me back to Portland. I told him, and it was true, that I couldn’t afford to take the time off work. You can sell merch, he said, we’ll pay you. I’ve got to work on my own stuff, I said. I have so much going on here.
July in Portland. The rain had cleared town for the season, and the colors went from gray and evergreen and black to blue, bright green, gold, with long hot-pink sunsets. The studio was filled with warm daylight well into the evening; when I locked up Artifacts at six there still seemed to be endless hours ahead. The light was like food—I slept little and ate less.
I was also charged with the nervous energy of my secret affair. Ryan and I sneaked off on field trips: a taco joint in Hillsboro, a pawnshop in Scappoose, a diner in the tucked-away Lair Hill neighborhood, karaoke over the river in Vancouver. My adrenaline rose each time. For me it was the secrecy, not the sex, that radiated this contained heat. If you think it’s no big deal for a lesbian to fool around with a guy on the sly, you’re right, sort of, but you are also not living in Portland, Oregon, at the end of the twentieth century as a card-carrying member of the Lesbian Mafia. It was as good as treason.
It shouldn’t have been so easy to get away with it. But no one was paying attention. There were a million things to do and people were caught up in their own lives, following more flagrant dramas, setting up tours, traveling. I’d been off the radar for a while and I stayed that way. I moved among them with my private knowledge like an illicit gold coin in my pocket.
Double life was my specialty, honed during my teen years, my formative mode. I picked it right back up. I remembered how alert a secret makes you, how the fear becomes sharpness and widens your eyes. When you’re always watching out, you see more.
Stray City Page 9